Falling Star

by Patricia Moyes

  “Yes.” Henry lit a cigarette. “Have you any idea what she and her husband were fighting about in that pub in Henley the day Margery was killed?”

  “My dear Tibbett, I’m not psychic.”

  “I just thought you might have some suggestions to offer. You are in such a good position for observing all these people. Has there been any friction lately?”

  “If you want the truth,” I said, “there has; but it has no possible bearing on anything else. The fact is that Keith has become intolerably swollen-headed since he took on this part, and Biddy doesn’t like it, quite understandably. After all, a few months ago she was the celebrity of the family. If you ask me,” I went on, warming to my theme, “that marriage won’t last much longer. Not that it’s ever been a real marriage, as far as I can see. It’s not my idea of…”

  “Don’t you think so?” Henry was looking at me in that curious, quizzical, amused way again. “I think that Biddy Brennan would cheerfully perjure her soul for…”

  “If you’re implying that she lied to you,” I began. Ever since Biddy’s interview with Henry in my office, I had had a sneaking suspicion that Henry had disbelieved her, and I thought it only right to try to put in a good word for her. I went on. “I had a feeling at the time that you didn’t believe her evidence. Well, I can assure you that Biddy is as straight as a die. If anybody lied, it was Keith. He’s shifty and devious and ambitious and…”

  Henry was smiling again. “No need to get so worked up, Pudge,” he said. “I have no doubt that Biddy was telling the truth. None whatsoever. In fact, I’ve checked with the cinema, and the projector did break down at that performance. Her evidence was completely accurate.”

  “Then why…?”

  “Sometimes,” said Henry slowly, “truth can be misleading.”

  And before I could work out what he meant by this, Henry got up and said, “Well, let’s go along to the set and talk to these people to their faces instead of behind their backs.”

  We went out into the cheerless concrete corridor and along to the heavy, soundproof double doors of Stage 2.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  STAGE 2 WAS a dark, lofty cavern of a place, the size of a smallish aircraft hangar. A lot of people seemed to be hanging about doing nothing in particular, and miscellaneous pieces of electrical equipment, furniture, sections of sets, rostrums, camera trucks, and so forth gave one the feeling of having strayed into a disorganized warehouse of some sort. Over at the far side of the stage, activity was centered on a small, tight-knit group of people, and here, too, was a focus of brilliant lights, a small, dazzling island in a sea of shadows.

  “This way,” I said to Henry, and took his arm to pilot him across the stage.

  We had only just reached the outskirts of the group when it became clear that things were about to happen. I motioned to Henry to stand still, and we waited quietly, watching from the ringside, as it were, while the familiar routine of film-making unfolded in front of us.

  The small, brightly lit area represented a corner of a big popular café. From the many painted flats and extra tables and chairs piled up around the place, it was obvious that the set, in its entirety, represented the whole restaurant; but for this shot, the camera was concentrating on the particular corner table occupied by the two stars of the film, so that the rest of the set had been roughly dismantled and pushed aside, accounting for much of the confusion on the stage. The lighting set-up consisted of batteries of arcs and spots clustered around the little table, in its angle of walls, where Keith’s and Fiametta’s stand-ins were sitting, languidly, looking as bored as only stand-ins can look.

  As Henry and I approached, Gervase Mountjoy shrilled his whistle, and comparative silence ensued. “Miss Fettini and Mr. Pardoe, please!” called Mountjoy officiously. “Quiet, everybody! We’re rehearsing!”

  Two figures detached themselves from the shadows, and as they came forward into the light I saw that they were Keith and Fiametta, who had evidently been having a tête-à-tête behind one of the discarded bits of scenery. They seemed in high spirits, both of them; in fact, Fiametta was giggling immoderately, and the two of them kept up some sort of bantering conversation in undertones as they sat down in the seats vacated by their stand-ins. Murder or no murder, Murray or no Murray, there was a splendid atmosphere on the set that day. I could sense it at once.

  Sam, who had been talking earnestly to Fred Harborough, now strolled across to the table and squatted down on his haunches between Fiametta and Keith. In defiance of all the studio regulations, he was smoking another of his horrible little cigars, and of course nobody raised a finger to stop him. It made me very angry. Sam knew as well as I did that we would get no compensation in case of fire if there had been people smoking on the set, and if the director persistently breaks the rules, it is difficult for his First Assistant to enforce them with other members of the unit. Not, of course, that Gervase Mountjoy could have enforced a hot knife onto a pat of butter.

  I became aware of Tibbett’s hand on my arm. “What’s happening now?” he whispered.

  “Sam’s giving them an idea of how he wants the scene played,” I answered in a normal voice. “No need for whispering yet. We’re not shooting.”

  “Quiet over there! Rehearsing!” yelled Mountjoy, looking most pointedly in my direction.

  I ignored him.

  Meanwhile, Sam was talking quietly to his two actors, and all three of them were laughing and looking as relaxed as one could wish. This was the sort of day when everything goes right and the picture gets ahead of schedule. After a minute or two, Sam stood up and said, “O.K. Let’s have a run-through.”

  After an unnecessary delay, caused by Gervase blowing his whistle and shouting at people who were making no noise anyhow, silence finally prevailed. Fred Harborough and his camera operator signified that they were ready for a tryout, and Sam said, “Right. Let’s have it.”

  This was to be a “tracking shot,” that is, it started as a double shot of Keith and Fiametta, taken from some feet away; but during the dialogue the camera crept in on rubber wheels toward the table, until it ended up as a big close-up of Keith. This maneuver, of course, involved adjusting the focus and moving the microphone as well; in fact, quite a crowd of people accompanied the camera on its journey; but the whole thing was accomplished in such dead silence that nothing registered on the sensitive recording apparatus except the voices of the actors.

  At a signal from Sam, they started.

  Fiametta glanced at her watch. “I must go, Tony,” she said.

  The camera crept in toward Keith. “But Rosa,” he said. “I—I’ve got tickets for the zoo…”

  “I have to go.”

  The camera was closer now. “Where? Where do you have to go?” By now, we were on a big close-up of Keith. He leant forward and snatched off his spectacles. “Rosa! You must tell me…”

  “O.K.” said Sam. “How was it, Fred?”

  “O.K. by me,” said Fred.

  “O.K. for sound,” came another voice from the shadows.

  “Right, let’s shoot it,” said Sam.

  Mountjoy’s whistle shrilled. “Quiet, please! We’re rolling! Red light on! Quiet everyone! We’re turning this time!”

  A big red light glowed above the door and an almost uncanny silence descended on the set. Steve stepped forward, with his usual grin, carrying the clapper board.

  “Street Scene, Seven-Six-Eight, Take One,” he called. The clapper fell with a thud.

  Fiametta looked at her watch. “I must go, Tony,” she said.

  An hour later Steve was saying, “Street Scene, Seven-Six-Eight, Take Eleven.”

  For the eleventh time Fiametta looked at her watch. “I must go, Tony,” she said for the eleventh time.

  For the eleventh time the camera crept silently toward Keith.

  “But Rosa,” said Keith. “I’ve got tickets for the zoo…”

  “Cut it!” said a voice from the camera truck. “Boom shadow.”

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nbsp; Keith jumped up. “Goddamn it!” he shouted.

  I must say I sympathized with him. Take One had been spoilt because the sound recorder accused the camera truck of squeaking. This had been remedied, only to have Take Two wrecked by an arc lamp fusing in the middle of the shot. Take Three had come to grief because the camera jammed, and Take Four because a property man knocked over a chair. By Take Five, Fiametta was growing restless and nervous, and she exaggerated the gesture of looking at her watch to the extent of upsetting a wine glass on the table. During Take Six another lamp had fused, and Take Seven was ruined by a low-flying aircraft passing overhead and drowning the dialogue. Take Eight was possible, but Sam naturally wanted to cover himself and asked for another, and the camera had run out of film in the middle of it. Take Ten came to grief because the focus puller sneezed, and now Take Eleven was invalidated by the shadow of the moving microphone intruding into the picture, one of the commonest of pitfalls but one which had so far been avoided. All this time Keith had continued to give an impeccable and unchanging performance of his scrap of dialogue, and that takes some doing eleven times in succession. It was no wonder he lost his temper.

  Sam was at his elbow in an instant. He said something to Keith, and then called Mountjoy over, and the next moment Mountjoy’s whistle was shrilling, and he was announcing a tea break, some ten minutes early. This was obviously a sound move. Sam had one take in the can, and the best possible thing at this stage was to give everyone a chance to relax and get a second wind before starting again. Mentally, I took a gloomy look at our schedule. We were by no means keeping up to the amount of work planned for the day; however, things could have been worse. I have heard Alfred Hitchcock describe how it once took him eleven days to get forty-five seconds of screen time into the can.

  Henry’s voice at my elbow said, “This might be a good opportunity for me to have a word with some of your people.”

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “leave them alone. Sam’s only called a tea break because everyone’s getting wrought up. Once you pass Take Ten, you can always expect trouble.”

  “Well,” said Henry pacifically, “we can perhaps start with somebody who isn’t actually on the set. Like Miss Brennan.”

  “What in hell do you mean, not on the set?”

  Biddy’s dusky voice came mockingly from the shadows, and as she stood up I saw that she had been sitting within a few feet of us, huddled into a basketwork chair. She is, of course, a small person, but even so she has a capacity for melting into a background when she wants to which is, in my experience, unrivaled. She stood up now, five-foot-one of compact nervous energy, and grinned at Henry.

  “What’s the master sleuth up to now?” she asked.

  “Did you see a paper this morning?” asked Henry.

  “No.”

  “Then you haven’t heard about Murray’s death?”

  Biddy seldom makes a mistake, but she did so now. She hesitated palpably, and her eyes strayed for a moment to the lighted area of the set where Sam and Keith were talking. It was plain that she would have liked to deny any knowledge of anything, but since Sam must obviously have mentioned his bizarre experience of the previous night, she could hardly fail to admit knowledge of the event.

  “Sam said something,” she began, and then stopped.

  “Mr. Potman had a very nasty experience, I’m afraid,” said Henry easily. “It’s not a nice thing to find a corpse on your doorstep.”

  Biddy said nothing.

  Henry went on, “You knew Murray, of course?”

  “By sight. We all did.”

  “Have you any idea why somebody should want to kill him?”

  “None at all. He always seemed an inoffensive little chap. Couldn’t it have been an accident? I mean, supposing he’d been hit by a car which didn’t stop, and that he just managed to crawl into the doorway before…”

  “There might be a chance of that,” said Henry, “except for one thing. The front door was shut and locked when we got there. Mr. Potman says he left it open…”

  “It’s always open,” Biddy said. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Henry. “Somebody shut it and released the Yale lock. Murray could hardly have done that himself, if he’d crawled in there dying.”

  Inwardly, I cursed Sam. It had suddenly occurred to me that Biddy’s explanation might well be the correct one. Sam, as I knew, had actually found Murray outside the front door, and had been idiotic enough to lug him in and lock the door on him, instead of informing the police straight away. Then I remembered the piece of lead piping and the fact that somebody had twice rung Sam’s doorbell, at a time when Murray was, presumably, already dead. It was chilling to consider the degree of vindictiveness behind that person’s actions. In fairness, I tried to keep an open mind about the murderer’s identity; but, in my heart, I acknowledged that it could only be one person—Sonia Meakin. Only she had had both motive and opportunity. Only she would have been prepared to jeopardize the film—perhaps she had some twisted idea of avenging poor Bob’s death. And, to clinch the matter, she had admitted calling the police to Sam’s house. Presumably, she had been lurking somewhere nearby to watch Sam’s reactions and was afraid, when he left the house, that he might indeed be able to dispose of the damning evidence of a body on his doorstep. I knew all this, and the frightful thing was that I could not as much as hint it to Henry without giving away Sam’s criminally foolish actions and my own condoning of them.

  I became aware of Biddy’s voice, answering a question of Henry’s.

  “Last night? Yes, of course I can. Keith and I spent the evening at the Belgrave Towers with Miss Fettini and her husband.”

  Henry grinned. “That seems straightforward enough,” he said. “If you were all together all the time, it looks like killing four birds with one stone. Can you remember what time you arrived there?”

  “About half-past nine. We had dinner at home and went along afterward.”

  “And none of you left Miss Fettini’s suite all the evening?”

  “No. We were all there together. Her maid can confirm it, and so can the waiter who brought us drinks. We left at half-past twelve. I remember, because I suddenly noticed how late it was. Keith has to be up so early, you see, when he’s on call. We don’t usually go out in the evenings when he’s working.”

  “This was a long-standing engagement, was it?” Henry said casually.

  Biddy hesitated for a moment. “No,” she said. “Actually we went along on the spur of the moment. There was something Keith wanted to—to discuss with Miss Fettini.”

  “I see,” said Henry, in the slightly absent-minded voice which always means that his brain is ticking over with more-than-average energy. “Well, that seems to let all four of you out, doesn’t it?”

  Biddy raised her eyebrows. “Let us out?” She laughed. “Surely Inspector, you never seriously thought that any of us might have…?”

  “No, no,” said Henry. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “Half-past nine. According to Mr. Potman’s account, he was still at home then, and there was no sign of a corpse.”

  “I can confirm that,” I said quickly. It had suddenly occurred to me that I could help to bolster up Sam’s story. “That he was at home, I mean. You see, I telephoned Mr. Potman from the public call box near your house, just after I’d left you.”

  Henry looked interested. “Did you? That’s very helpful. You left us at ten past nine, I remember. So it must have been about a quarter-past when you spoke to Mr. Potman.”

  “Oh, I didn’t speak to him,” I said. “I couldn’t get him.”

  “You mean there was no reply? Then he must have been out already.”

  “No, no. I was expecting no reply, frankly, because I know he generally unplugs the telephone when he’s working in the evenings. But when I rang last night, I got the engaged tone. So I knew he must have been there. As a matter of fact, he must have been trying to ring me at my home at the time.”
r />   “I see,” Henry looked hard at me. “Why were you trying to contact Mr. Potman?”

  I laughed. “Some sort of telepathy, I suppose. Funnily enough, the very same problem that was bothering him had occurred to me. I thought we ought to discuss it…”

  “And what problem was that?”

  He had me there. Sam had not, in my hearing, specified what we were supposed to have discussed. Heaven knew whether he had gone into details with Henry on the subject. I felt cold with alarm. “Oh, just a technicality to do with the film. It wouldn’t interest you.”

  “But it does. Film-making fascinates me. It was something to do with today’s shooting, so I gathered from Mr. Potman.”

  I looked around wildly for Sam, but he was deep in discussion with Mountjoy and Fred Harborough. He had not even noticed Henry’s presence on the set, or, if he had, he gave no sign of it. There was nothing for it but to plunge, and hope for the best. Desperately, I tried to remember Sam’s words to Henry—something about a problem that only Pudge could solve. Well, the only problems I solved around the studios were financial ones, and Henry knew it.

  “It was—a question of—of more extras for the big café scene…” I sounded to myself to be babbling incoherently. “I had to authorize the payment, you see. Everything comes down to a question of filthy lucre in the end. I knew Sam wanted twenty or so other diners, to fill in the background, as it were, and I had only budgeted for six…”

  Henry was looking puzzled. “Surely it was a bit late to hire them? After nine o’clock in the evening? Did you succeed?”

  “Er—no. No, we didn’t.” I knew that if I said “Yes” Henry would demand to be shown the extras, who, of course, were not there. “It was too late. We rearranged the schedule of shooting so as to do all the close-ups today and leave the general establishing shots for tomorrow, when we can get the people.”

  This seemed pretty neat to me. We were, in fact, shooting the close-ups that day, as Henry could see for himself. However, it was now vitally important for me to have a quiet word with Sam before Henry started questioning him again. So I was much relieved when, instead of asking for Sam, Henry suggested that he might have a very quick word with Keith and Fiametta, just in order to confirm Biddy’s account of their movements during the evening.