Falling Star

by Patricia Moyes

  “Haven’t you really?”

  “None at all.”

  She lit a cigarette and looked at me, speculatively. I could see that she did not believe me. After a long pause, she said, “Very well. You must have known that Bob was not as young as he liked to make out. You must have known that he wore a toupee, and that most of his teeth were false, and that he’d had his face lifted.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “that you are working around to telling me that he also had to wear glasses. That is something that I didn’t know until…” I checked myself. I had been about to say, “Until last night.” Instead, I finished lamely, “Until recently.”

  “Yes.” Her voice was slightly unsteady. “Don’t you understand? Don’t you see what it means?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. People have been hinting…” Once again I stopped. I was determined not to say too much.

  Sonia Meakin sighed impatiently. “It means,” she said, “that Bob’s death was not an accident. It was deliberately contrived.”

  “But…”

  “Bob,” said Sonia Meakin, “hated anybody to know that he had to wear glasses. Normally, he wore contact lenses. When he found that he had to wear spectacles anyway for this part, he had a pair made up to his own prescription, as well as the pair with clear glass lenses that you, in your innocence, provided for him. Murray was the only person who knew about the two pairs and who substituted the real spectacles for the clear glass ones whenever there was a long or medium shot. Bob didn’t dare use his own for close shots, because the lenses were magnifying and might have shown on the screen. Murray also looked after Bob’s contact lenses.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “The day he was killed,” said Sonia slowly, “somebody had deliberately switched the glasses. Bob wasn’t wearing his contact lenses…”

  “How do you know that?” I demanded.

  “I’ll come to that in a minute. Anyhow, for that last shot he had to run down a flight of steps to the platform, ramming his spectacles on his nose. He took them from Murray, believing them to be the pair made to his own prescription—and they weren’t. He was virtually blind. Of course, he stumbled and fell, and with the train coming in…”

  “I really don’t see the point of all this, Mrs. Meakin,” I said.

  “Well, you see,” she said, “Margery Phipps was blackmailing me.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “She telephoned me the day before she died, and asked me to go and see her at her flat in Chelsea. She said she had some things which had belonged to my husband. Not only did she show me the draft note of Bob’s resignation, and demand money from me, but she also hinted about Bob’s eyesight and the two pairs of spectacles.”

  “Did she produce the second pair?”

  “No. She just talked. She said that if it could be proved that Bob’s death was due to negligence on behalf of an employee of the company, the insurance claims would be null and void.”

  “If she said that,” I said, “she was mistaken. The truth is…” And I stopped abruptly. The truth was that if negligence—or worse, design—could be proved against a member of the unit, it would not affect Sonia Meakin’s life insurance policy at all. But it would invalidate ours. I became aware that Sonia Meakin was talking again.

  “…just laughed it off,” she said. “Nevertheless, you can understand why I came around the next day to collect the things from Bob’s dressing room. I wanted to know the truth. What I found was the clear glass spectacles, smashed; obviously he’d been wearing them when he died. There was no sign of the other pair. Still I was not too worried. I assumed that he’d been wearing his contact lenses at the time. And then, yesterday, Murray telephoned me.”

  “Did he really?” I liked the sound of this less and less.

  “He said,” went on Mrs. Meakin, “that he found he still had Bob’s contact lenses and imagined that I’d like them back.”

  “More blackmail?”

  “I suppose so. It’s hard to believe that Murray—but there it is. He said he was very hard up. He gave me the address of his lodgings, and I said I’d go there last night. And so I did, after I left Inspector Tibbett’s house, but I was later than I had promised and Murray was out. It was then that I decided I ought to warn Mr. Potman.”

  “How very charitable of you. Why?”

  She looked at me out of those limpid innocent eyes. “Well, he is in charge of the film, isn’t he? I thought he ought to know, and be on his guard in case Murray started blackmailing him. You had been so unsympathetic…”

  “I still am,” I assured her.

  “So I went to Mr. Potman’s house. I rang the bell, but there was no reply. Then I looked in through the glass panels of the front door, and in the moonlight I saw something—a man, hunched up on the floor as though he were dead. It was horrible. I ran straight to the nearest telephone and rang Inspector Tibbett.”

  “You did, did you?” I said icily. It had been bothering me, how Henry Tibbett had found Murray before Sam and I got back. “Well, what do you expect me to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sonia, with another of those melting looks. “All I know is that the second pair of spectacles and the contact lenses are about somewhere, and I have an idea that Inspector Tibbett is looking for them.”

  “If he is,” I said grimly, “it’s because you told him.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” said Sonia, in a voice trembling with tears. “I had to tell the truth. It was my duty. But I thought I must come and warn you…”

  “It occurs to me, Mrs. Meakin,” I said, “that you have very cleverly succeeded in implicating Mr. Potman with the poor man, Murray. And of all the people who had both motive and opportunity for killing Margery Phipps and Murray, I can think of no more likely suspect than you.”

  She looked hard at me. Her eyes were dry now and her expression unfriendly. “Or you, Mr. Croombe-Peters,” she said.

  And before I could reply, she had gone.

  It was impossible to settle down to any work. The more I thought about the situation, the murkier it looked. The whole thing seemed to hinge on that miserable second pair of spectacles, and until I had located and destroyed them, the future of Northburn Films would hang in the balance. I made a great effort to think clearly.

  If Margery had found the spectacles and had realized their implications, then they must have been in her flat; in which case, they were now in the custody of the police or of Mrs. Arbuthnot or of the murderer, if indeed such a person existed. The fact that Henry Tibbett had telephoned me to ask about them made it unlikely that the police had them. If Mrs. Arbuthnot had found them, we would surely have had some sort of a blackmailing approach from her by now; but we had not. I remembered how I had heard her searching in the Chelsea Mansions flat; very likely she had been looking for them, unsuccessfully. On the other hand, it was even more likely that Murray had both the spectacles and the contact lenses. It seemed odd that he had waited so long to start his blackmailing activities, but that was no concern of mine.

  What was my concern was that Murray had been killed and left on Sam Potman’s doorstep. By whom? Sonia Meakin? She seemed the obvious person, and yet, she looked so frail. It was hard to imagine that she had the strength to commit two murders, let alone push bodies out of windows and lug corpses around London at night. Sonia with an accomplice then? This, also, seemed unlikely. In my dealings with her, she had been playing a lone hand.

  For a moment I toyed with the idea that Sam might have killed Murray himself, but that hypothesis, too, seemed absurd. For one thing, he could have disposed of the body quietly himself, instead of leaving it there and coming around to see me. For another, Sam was one of the few people who could not possibly have had a hand in Margery’s death, for he was watching rushes at the time when she was killed. To presuppose not one but two murderers within the unit was carrying things altogether too far. And then there was the case of Bob Meakin…

  I had got as far as this in
my very haphazard analysis of the facts when the telephone rang, and Sylvia informed me that Henry Tibbett was on the line. I was not surprised. I had not been taken in by his hearty friendliness the night before. I was well aware that we were in for another—and much more unpleasant—session with him in his official capacity. This time, there was no argument about it being a case of murder.

  I picked up the phone gingerly. “Croombe-Peters here.”

  “Oh, Pudge.” Henry sounded as chummy as ever. “I was wondering where your unit is shooting today?”

  “At the studio,” I said briefly. “The café scene.”

  “Were you thinking of going out there yourself?”

  “Not today, no. I have a lot of work in the office.” This was not true, but I didn’t intend to make things too easy for him. I could see exactly what was coming, and I was right.

  “I’d be most awfully grateful,” he went on, in that almost boyish way he has, “if you’d change your plans and come down there with me. I have to interview one or two people, and I know they’re a temperamental bunch. You did ask me before to try not to upset them, and somehow you seem to make a very effective buffer between your own people and the rather austere approach of the law.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  There was a slight hesitation. “If you refuse,” said Henry, “I shall have to go anyway, and upset them. That’s all. I really think it would be in your own interest to come along.”

  “Oh, very well,” I said crossly. “I’ll see you at the studio in half an hour.”

  Henry was waiting for me in the production office when I arrived at Ash Grove Studios. Under the malevolent eye of Louise Cohen, he was studying a batch of continuity sheets, and he looked up with a friendly grin as I came in.

  “Ah, Pudge. Glad to see you. Can you tell me one or two things about these—whatever they are?”

  “Continuity sheets,” I said shortly.

  Louise had stood up. “Mr. Croombe-Peters,” she began, in her most dragonish manner, “I do think that I might be told beforehand if we’re going to have detectives rummaging around the office…”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “Chief Inspector Tibbett did not honor me with his confidence. I thought he wanted to go on the set.”

  “So I do, later on,” said Henry amiably.

  “He really is a Chief Inspector, is he?” said Louise suspiciously. “Coming in here, demanding to see…”

  “Yes,” I said, “he really is a Chief Inspector.”

  “Oh, well. If you say so, I suppose it’s all right. Mr. Potman will be furious, I can tell you that.” Louise flounced out of the office, banging the door.

  Henry grinned again. “You see?” he said. “One word from you, and I’m accepted.”

  “If you call that accepted,” I said.

  “Well, tolerated at least. Now, do explain these things to me.”

  “I thought Diana had already done that.”

  “She gave me an idea, but I’d like to check it with you. These,” Henry indicated the pile of colored papers on the desk, “these are the sheets made out by Margery Phipps on the day of Robert Meakin’s death.”

  “So I see.”

  “Now, each is marked with a number. I presume that’s the identifying number of the shot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And these numbers, taken consecutively, show the order in which the scenes were actually filmed, do they?”

  “Yes,” I said. “They have nothing to do with the sequence of the script itself.”

  “This one,” said Henry, “is unfinished. It appears to relate to the actual shot in which Meakin died.”

  “Let’s have a look,” I said. I took the pink paper from Henry’s hand. “Yes, that’s right. Margery had noted down the basics of the shot—the location, action, props, and so forth—beforehand. Afterward, if all had gone well, she’d have recorded any differences between one take and another; actors vary their movements slightly each time and maybe alter dialogue a little…”

  “I see,” said Henry, “that it’s marked ‘Retake One-Nine-Four.’ And further back, in the previous day’s sheets, there’s a shot called ‘One-Nine-Four,’ which sounds exactly the same.”

  “That’s right,” I explained patiently. “We took that shot the day before and we thought we had it in the can, but it was spoilt in processing. I never did find out,” I added, “whose fault it was—ours or the laboratory’s.” The old grievance returned, niggling. “Anyhow, we were all set up for the next shot, or nearly so, when this message came through and we had to retake.”

  “And what was the next scene, the one you should have been shooting?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “it was the one immediately before the other in the script—Masterman running down the staircase.”

  “I see,” said Henry. He studied the sheet again in silence. Then he looked up and said, “Now, tell me about these spectacles.”

  “What spectacles?” I hoped I did not sound nervous.

  “I’m just checking on everything,” he said. “You told me last night that Meakin had just one pair of spectacles that he wore in the film.”

  “That’s right. The same ones that Keith is using now—with very heavy horn rims. They’re a sort of signature of the character.”

  “Surely not the same ones?” said Henry, with a curious emphasis.

  “Not identical, of course,” I said. “Bob’s were broken when he—in the accident. Naturally we had a new pair made for Keith.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” said Henry. “I meant that Mr. Meakin’s were made up to his own prescription.”

  It seemed to be more of a statement than a question, so I said nothing.

  Henry went on, “It was only last night that Mrs. Meakin explained to me about her husband’s bad eyesight. I can quite understand that he wanted to hush it up. According to Mrs. Meakin, he wore contact lenses as a rule, but for this film he had these spectacles made up with his own lenses. She says he had just the one pair, so he must have been wearing them when he died.”

  “I could hardly deny it. “By Jove, yes,” I said. “I am an idiot. I’d quite forgotten that old Bob had his own glasses.”

  “They were pretty powerful, weren’t they?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “When you told me last night,” said Henry, “that Meakin’s glasses had clear lenses, it occurred to me to wonder whether, by any chance, there might have been two pairs of spectacles. I understand that you had the unpleasant job of removing them from the body. Were they smashed?”

  “One lens was broken. The other had somehow escaped intact.”

  “So,” persisted Henry, “you’d have noticed if they’d been plain glass?”

  In a flash I realized how clever Sonia Meakin had been; I just wished that she had been a little more explicit in my office, for I nearly missed my cue. Just in time, however, I saw it. Sonia had mentioned one pair of glasses only, with magnifying lenses. The remains of the clear glass pair were in her possession, and must have been safely destroyed by now. If another pair of prescription lens glasses should turn up, they could be explained away as a spare pair, privately ordered by Bob. All that was needed now was a small and easy lie from me, and one of our worries would be over.

  “Why, of course,” I said. “I do remember quite clearly, now you come to mention it. I noticed how the one remaining lens distorted everything. No doubt about it. Sorry I misled you last night—I was rather wrought up, I’m afraid, what with Murray’s death and…”

  “You knew about Meakin’s disability?”

  “Of course,” I said easily.

  “Oh, well.” Henry stretched, and smiled at me. “Wrong again. Bang goes a perfectly lovely theory. I shall have to start all over again. By the way, you don’t happen to know what became of those broken spectacles?”

  “They were thrown away months ago,” I said, truthfully I hoped.

  “And Meakin’s contact lenses?�
��

  “I thought Murray,” I began, and then checked myself.

  Henry nodded. “Mrs. Meakin thought he might have them,” he said, “but they weren’t on him, and we couldn’t find them at his lodgings. Oh, well, I dare say he lost them.” He paused for a moment, in thought. Then he said, “Fiametta Fettini.”

  “What about her?”

  “Was she genuinely fond of Meakin, or was it just a stunt?”

  I shrugged. I was feeling much more at ease. “My dear Tibbett,” I said, “don’t ask me. La Fettini is publicity mad, as you know, and I’m fairly certain that’s how the whole thing started. Whether, later on, she grew genuinely attached to Meakin, God knows. I would doubt it myself, but it’s true that she made a ridiculous fuss about that lipstick case. I notice, however, that she’s now lost it again.”

  “You say she came, quite literally, from the slums of Naples?”

  “I should have thought that was obvious.”

  “Has she a lot of jewelry?”

  I laughed. “I can see you don’t study the gossip columns,” I said. “She adores it. Festoons herself with it. It’s rather pathetic in a way. I think it gives her a sense of security, not that she needs any such thing by now.”

  “You can never be sure,” said Henry, enigmatically. “What about her husband?”

  “Poor little Giulio? He’s more of a nonentity than her wretched monkey. For one thing, he’s never sober. Personally, I can’t understand why she bothers with him at all.”

  “Perhaps he has some sort of hold over her?”

  “Over Fiametta?” I laughed. “My dear Tibbett, what hold could a whipper-snapper like that have over a…?”

  “He is her husband,” said Henry.

  “I know, but…”

  “And they are both Italians. No question of a divorce. I should call that a pretty firm hold.”

  “Nonsense. Fiametta doesn’t obey any rules. She makes them up as she goes along.”

  “I wonder,” said Henry. “Well, never mind. Tell me about the fascinating Mrs. Pardoe—I’m sorry, Miss Brennan.”

  “You’ve met her,” I said.