“‘Frederick Arbuthnot?’
“‘No, no, no. James Boswell. What d’you think of that?’
“‘Not very much. Where does Frederick Arbuthnot come in?’
“‘Arbuthnot was the name of the woman he lived with down here in Lewisham. He never married her. She seemed quite a respectable type, and never got into trouble herself; but of course she couldn’t put on the high-society act that he used when he was working. In between jobs, as you might say, he lived quietly at Inkerman Terrace, calling himself Fred Arbuthnot. He never sullied Samuel Johnson’s name with that rather sordid suburban establishment. Still, he stayed faithful to the woman all his life, which is more than you can say for most of them. That’s what I mean by principles. She’s still living here, in the same house.’
“‘With her daughter?’
“‘Daughter? I never heard anything about a daughter. There were no children, as far as I know.’
“After I’d spoken to the Superintendent,” Henry went on, “I called the people who were dealing with the girl’s death. They told me that she had left no will, but that her only apparent possessions were her personal clothes and trinkets and twenty pounds in the bank. It was then that I telephoned you.”
I glanced at my watch. It was after eight o’clock. Emmy had disappeared into the kitchen, thus removing the only inducement I might have had to stay longer.
“My dear Tibbett,” I said, “I can’t help feeling that we’re both wasting our time. Of course, it’s fascinating to hear about the girl’s background, but it obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with…”
He interrupted me. “Margery Phipps’s real father,” he said, “was an expert blackmailer and confidence man. Margery wrote to her mother that she was on to something big, and that she wished Dad were there to see her in action. That very same afternoon she died, leaving only twenty pounds. Doesn’t that suggest anything to you?”
“Nothing,” I said firmly. My voice sounded rather louder than I had intended. “And now, if you’ll forgive me, Tibbett, I have an appointment. It’s been so nice seeing you again…”
Tibbett saw me to the door. “I hope you won’t take it amiss, Croombe-Peters,” he said, in that annoyingly diffident way of his, “if I get in touch with you again. There may be more developments in this matter. Perhaps you’d also turn over in your mind the possibility that Margery Phipps might have been blackmailing somebody in your unit, and, if so, who? That’s the way our cases build up, you know, little by little.”
“I’ll certainly consider what you’ve said,” I replied. One has to be polite after all. “But I somehow don’t think—ah, taxi! Good-bye, Tibbett. Hope we’ll meet again one of these days…”
With which blatantly untrue statement, I climbed thankfully into the cab and told the driver to take me to the Orangery. I was surprised to find that I was sweating, even though the evening had turned chilly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I decided to go up to Hampstead Heath and see how shooting was progressing. I should perhaps explain that I had been keeping away from the location quite deliberately for a day or so, as a result of a stupid and unpleasant incident with Sam Potman.
It had happened on our first day on the Heath, the day after Margery’s death. I suppose it was natural that we should all be a little upset, and I more than suspected that it was the fact of a second death on our doorstep, so to speak, which was making Keith Pardoe behave like a prima donna.
When I arrived, there was a blazing row going on between Keith on the one hand, and the entire make-up and hairdressing departments on the other. Keith was shouting at Anton, the chief hairdresser, calling him a miserable frog and an officious little pansy, and a lot of equally unsavory names. There was no sign of either Sam or Biddy, and Gervase Mountjoy was, as usual, evading his responsibility by pretending not to notice that anything was going on. I had no option but to intervene.
When I had managed to calm Keith and Anton sufficiently to get a coherent story out of them, I found out the cause of the trouble. Apparently, Keith had spent a part of his free afternoon the day before in visiting a barber, and had had his hair cut. Now, this may not sound like a deadly sin to an outsider, but to a film-maker it is inexcusable behavior. It was the job of Anton and his department to insure that Keith’s hair remained precisely the same length throughout the film; as I have explained, scenes are inevitably shot out of chronological order, and you cannot have a man going out through a door with long hair and emerging on the other side with a crew cut. I am not saying that Keith’s case was as bad as that but his hair was noticeably shorter than it had been the day before, and rather differently shaped. I was entirely on Anton’s side, and I was saying so in no uncertain terms when Sam’s car drove up and he and Biddy got out of it and came over to us.
The first thing I noticed was how ill Biddy looked. There were black circles under her eyes, and her little heart-shaped face was positively haggard. I felt sorry for her. She was not having an easy time with Keith these days, and I am sure that she frequently regretted having suggested that he should take part in the television audition. He had changed fundamentally since he started his new career, and the change had not been for the better.
Any sympathy that I felt for her evaporated at once, however, when I heard her say to Sam, “Oh, God, Pudge is upsetting the bloody apple cart again.”
I turned on her. “I heard that,” I said, “and I consider it not only unjust but typical that you should leap to conclusions and put the blame on me when you haven’t even heard what the trouble is.”
“Well, what is it?” she said unpleasantly. “I suppose somebody’s spent six sodding unauthorized pence on something.”
“It’s nothing of the sort,” I said. “Anton is very angry with Keith, and he’s entirely justified. I’m the person who is constantly being accused of being an amateur, but for Keith to go to an outside barber and have his hair messed about and cut is just about as unprofessional as…”
“If you say another word, Pudge, I shall walk out. Here and now. I’m not going to be spoken to like that.” Keith’s voice was rising hysterically.
“I was not speaking to you,” I replied. To Biddy, I added, “And you’re as much to blame. You must have known what he was up to. Why didn’t you stop him?”
To my surprise, Biddy looked confused. Then she said, shortly, “I wasn’t with him.”
“Oh, weren’t you? I understood that Keith was feeling ill and that Sam had packed you both off to the country for…”
Before I could finish, Sam intervened. He spoke quietly, in that dangerous tone of voice that I was getting to know only too well. “This nonsense will now stop,” he said. “We are starting a new sequence and it doesn’t matter a damn about Keith’s hair. I suppose Professor Masterman visited a barber occasionally, like everybody else. As a matter of fact, Keith asked for my permission to have it done, and I gave it.”
At this, Anton broke into a protesting stream of mixed English and French, and I said, “I consider that to be irresponsible and unprofessional behavior on your part, Sam.”
Sam turned on me. He was absolutely furious. “I would be grateful, Pudge,” he said, “if you would go away and stay away. We don’t need you on location, and every time you come you stir up trouble of some sort.”
The monstrous injustice of this took my breath away. Perhaps the worst thing of all was that Anton, whose cause I had been championing, did not come to my rescue, but merely sniggered and turned away. I considered several replies, but none of them seemed as devastatingly crushing as I would have wished, so I decided to stick to dignified silence. I simply turned on my heel and walked away to my car without a word, and for the next couple of days I did not go near the scene of the shooting. However, Sam had evidently repented to a certain extent, for he made a point of sitting next to me and chatting in a friendly way during rushes the next evening, and actually suggested that I might enjoy watching the filming of the fun
fair sequence the following day. And so it was that on the morning after my talk with Henry Tibbett, I decided to bury the hatchet and go out to the location. Besides, I had a strong suspicion that Sam was being wasteful in the matter of extras and overtime. He was like a child in many ways; I could never trust him not to be up to some mischief the moment my back was turned.
I arrived at the location at ten o’clock. As I had feared, the place was crawling with unauthorized pearly kings and queens, fairground men, spivs, beatniks, onlookers and dogs—all of whom were being paid at the exorbitant rate now demanded as the minimum for film extras. However, the sun was shining, and the whole scene was so colorful and alive and full of fun that I decided to postpone my remonstrations until later. In any case, it was by then too late to send any of the extras away unpaid, and—to be frank—our insurance claim had put us into the happy position of not being compelled to watch every halfpenny. Not, mind you, that I would have admitted this to Sam to save my life.
The camera was set up for the first shot of the day—Keith and Fiametta trying their luck at the coconut shies. I was in time to see the final rehearsal, and then Sam nodded and Gervase called, “Quiet, everyone, please! We’re turning!”
Steve, the clapper boy, stepped forward with his blackboard.
“Street Scene, two-eighty-five, take one!” he chanted, and let the clapper fall.
I should explain that Sam had insisted on shooting all the sound “live,” rather than dubbing it afterward in the studio. He maintained that it was more immediate and lifelike in its effect. As far as I was concerned, it was much cheaper, so everyone was happy. Consequently, an open-air scene like the one we were shooting today was not being filmed silent, but with all the paraphernalia of the sound camera, booms, and microphones. It remained to be seen whether the results would be usable.
At a signal from Gervase, the background noise began—the hurdy-gurdies, the shouts of the stallkeepers, the babble of the crowd.
Keith turned to face Fiametta. “What about trying your luck?” he said.
She gave him a smoldering look as the camera tracked in to a close shot of her face. “When I hit a coconut,” she said, “I always think—suppose it was a head that was falling off and rolling in the sand, a man’s head…”
“Cut,” called Sam. He walked over to Fiametta and began talking to her quietly. If Sam disapproved of his actors’ performances, he did not, like some directors, pillory the wretched creatures in front of a circle of smirking technicians.
When he had finished talking to Fiametta, Sam said, “Right. Once again.”
“Street Scene, two-eighty-five, take two.” The clapper fell again.
This time Fiametta spoke lightly, throwing out the remark as a toss-away pleasantry, quite devoid of any sinister meaning. Sam grinned at her.
“Fine,” he said. “That’s it. Once again for luck.”
I glanced at Biddy. She generally showed a partiality for the more purple patches in her script, and resented the way in which Sam insisted on playing them down. Today, however, she did not appear to notice what was going on. She was sitting hunched up in the canvas chair marked “Sam Potman”—it’s a curious sort of tradition among film people that they never use their own carefully labeled seats—and gazing at nothing with a brooding intensity in which worry and anger seemed to be about equally divided. Keith, I thought, looked more relaxed than he had for some time; Sam, as usual when on the set, was utterly absorbed in his work.
For the third time the tiny scene was played through.
“Cut,” said Sam. “O.K. Print two and three.”
At once, bustle and babble broke out. Keith put his arm around Fiametta’s shoulders and said something that made her laugh immoderately. Sam and Fred Harborough were already conferring about the next shot. The Continuity Girl’s typewriter began to chatter. The extras lit cigarettes and brought out newspapers, ready for another long wait. Electricians switched out lamps and began to trundle them on their heavy bases to new positions. And a voice at my elbow said, “Mr. Croombe-Peters, can you spare a moment?”
I turned and saw, to my surprise and annoyance, that Henry Tibbett was standing just behind me. Heaven knew how long he had been there. When one is filming in a public place on location, a crowd invariably collects, and Gervase and his assistants had put up rope barricades to keep the over-inquisitive at bay; Henry had presumably invoked my name in order to get past the barriers.
“What on earth are you doing here?” I asked.
“Sightseeing,” Henry replied, with an unconvincing smirk. “I wanted to see you, and your secretary told me on the telephone that you were here. It seemed an ideal opportunity for taking a look at how a film is made, and a perfect excuse for getting out of the office for a bit.”
“I’m afraid we don’t encourage visitors,” I said. I suppose it sounded very rude, but, frankly, I was only concerned with getting rid of the man as soon as possible. Any moment, Keith or Sam or Fiametta might come up and start talking to me, and if they discovered who Henry was, and blamed me for introducing him to the set, there would be hell to pay. “You must remember that we are working. We’re not here as a peepshow for the public.”
“I am not exactly the public,” said Henry, in a spuriously pleasant voice that reminded me of Sam in his more dangerous moods. “And I, too, am working.”
“I think it would be better,” I said, “if we went to my office.”
And then the very thing that I had feared happened. Sam came up and said, “Ah, there you are, Pudge. What did you think of that, eh? Just three takes and printing two. I hope you’re pleased.”
Before I could say a word, Henry said, “Mr. Potman, may I introduce myself? Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard, an old friend of Mr. Croombe-Peters, and a great admirer of yours.”
There was a tiny pause while Sam’s bright, calculating eyes flickered over Henry’s face, summing him up. Then Sam said, “Come to have a bit of a look round, have you? Well, that’s champion. I hope you’ll show Mr. Tibbett everything he wants to see, Pudge. Oh, Keith…”
As Keith and Fiametta walked past, Sam caught Keith’s arm. “Come and be introduced,” he went on. “Mr. Tibbett of Scotland Yard. Miss Fettini and Keith Pardoe, the local boy wonder. Mr. Tibbett wants to see genius at work. I hope you’ll both oblige.”
Keith looked taken aback, to say the least of it. “I hope it’s just a friendly visit, Inspector,” he said with a nervous little laugh.
Fiametta, to whom the words “Scotland Yard” meant nothing, apparently took Henry for a journalist, and immediately went into a big act. She grabbed Henry’s arm, and began to enthuse in the most nauseating way about the fun fair, claiming that she had never before seen anything like it, and that she was enraptured by everything—the simple pleasures of the British proletariat, the gaiety, the fun ! She insisted on climbing onto a hobby horse to prove her point, thus creating the opportunity of striking several fetching poses with her short skirt hitched higher still above her knees. It was nearly ten minutes before she suddenly asked, in a different and sharper tone, “But where are the photographers? You have no photographers with you?”
“Not today,” said Henry. He sounded amused.
“You wish photographs from my agent for your article?” Fiametta pursued, mystified.
“I think you’ve made a mistake, Miss Fettini,” said Henry. “I’m not a reporter. I’m a policeman.”
“Carabiniere?” There was absolutely no doubt about Fiametta’s reaction. The film-star veneer dropped away like old paint flaking off under a chisel, and left the white-faced, wide-eyed, frightened waif from the slums of Naples, the child brought up to steal and cheat in order to live, the child to whom every policeman was a deadly enemy. For a moment, it almost looked as though she would take to her heels and run in sheer, instinctive terror. Then she recovered herself and lifted her small head defiantly. “You can’t do anything to me,” she said in Italian.
To my surprise, Henry answered i
n the same language. “My dear child,” he said, “why should you imagine that I should want to?”
At the time, of course, I did not understand either remark. Keith translated them for me later on. All that was obvious to me, as a bystander, was that Fiametta underwent another of her abrupt changes of mood. She grinned and winked at Henry, and suddenly became what she really was—an impudent, fascinating guttersnipe. She held out both her hands to grasp one of Henry’s and one of Keith’s, and marched them both off to eat candy floss. The three of them were soon joined by Sam and Biddy, and then by Gervase. Henry appeared to be a great success, and I felt distinctly out of things. I also felt uneasy. Heaven knew what indiscretions Henry was wheedling out of these irresponsible young creatures. However, there was nothing I could do except wait until Henry Tibbett deigned to come back and tell me the real purpose of his visit.
It was some twenty minutes later that the others were called away for a preliminary run-through of the next shot, and Henry came over to where I was sitting chatting to Diana, the Continuity Girl. Once again, Henry insisted on being introduced, and showed considerable interest in Diana’s work. She was obviously pleased and flattered, and explained in some detail how she recorded everything in shorthand—even the tiniest deviations in dialogue or movement from one take to the next—and how she then typed the data on to her Continuity Sheets in sextuplicate, which were distributed to the production office, the cutting rooms, the property and art departments, and the hairdressing, make-up, and wardrobe sections. It seemed an age before I finally managed to detach Henry from her earnest explanations and get him to myself.
“Now,” I said, “what’s all this?”
“You sound like a policeman,” said Henry. “That’s what I’m supposed to say to people.”
“You know very well what I mean,” I said. “Don’t tell me that this is just a social call. You told me you were working. Well, what’s up? What do you want?”
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