Murder in Waiting (Augustus Maltravers Mystery Book 5)

by Robert Richardson

  “All right, you’ve talked me into it,” he said. “What is it?”

  “An interview with Jenni Hilton. Remember her?”

  “Not only do I remember her, Tess and I were talking about her only this morning. Have you seen the piece in the Express?”

  “Glanced at it.” Fraser sounded dismissive. “Snatch picture outside the theatre and a caption story cobbled together at the office. We’ve got something better than that lined up. Are you free?”

  It was a ludicrous question. At one period of his life, Maltravers would have fought dragons for the chance of simply being in Jenni Hilton’s presence; while such idiotic passions had now mellowed, the possibility still excited him. He would have been prepared to do it for nothing, but was not going to let Mike Fraser know that.

  “When does it have to be done?” he asked.

  “Soon as you can. She’s expecting to hear from you.”

  “Me specifically?”

  “You specifically.”

  “But I’ve never met the woman.”

  “Ah, but she … hang on a minute.” Fraser broke off and Maltravers could hear him talking to someone else. “Gus, the boss wants me. Come to the office at lunchtime and I’ll fill in the details over a beer. OK?”

  “Fine. About twelve thirty?”

  “Look forward to it. Cheers.”

  Fraser rang off and Maltravers replaced his own phone thoughtfully. The coincidence of Jenni Hilton reappearing in his life twice in one morning was irrelevant; the fact that he was being offered the chance to interview her — and that she apparently wanted him to do it — was much more interesting. There was no question of their having met, even fleetingly, at some theatrical party with Tess — he would never have forgotten that — so how did she know about him? Perhaps she had seen one of his plays or read one of his books? Could it be that after all these years she was now a fan of his? He tried to return to his work, but was deflected by a ridiculous sense of anticipation, feelings which he had dismissed as the embarrassing excesses of youth more potent than he would ever have expected after so many years. He eventually gave up, leaning back in his chair and remembering.

  Jenni Hilton had been an icon of the Sixties. Gazelle-thin, height exaggerated by long slender legs in mini-skirts and chestnut hair falling water-straight to her waist. Those wide lips would have been a disaster on another face, but in her case only accentuated disturbing beauty. Locked in solid rings of mascara, the eyes seemed never to blink, dark pools of brown flecked with shreds of gold. She had started as a pop singer, smoky voice adding depth to lonely ballads, before emerging as a different animal from the endless parade of discoveries with a half life of about a month. For Jenni Hilton had revealed an intelligence and level of articulateness which set her apart. Chancing to see her in conversation with a distinguished philosopher on some television programme had first caught Maltravers’s attention; his musical taste committed at the time to the MJQ, Dave Brubeck and Brahms, the Top Ten hardly interested him, so he had been only half aware of Jenni Hilton from hearing records played by his friends. Suddenly there was this girl, lovely beyond description, discussing Voltaire and John Stuart Mill; as this occurred at a time when Maltravers was becoming aware that there might possibly be more to women than mothers who complained about the state of his room and a younger sister who slammed doors a lot, he was vulnerable and was captivated. The picture of England’s opening batsman on his bedroom wall was replaced with a large coloured poster of Jenni Hilton and he dreamed dreams.

  Already beyond his reach, she had risen further, dazzling as Viola in Twelfth Night on television, and shattering in a film of the life of Mary Tudor. There had been more films, including Madam Bovary, a commercial failure, but still remembered by many as a portrayal of Flaubert’s tragic heroine which tore a human soul bare. As he thought about it, Maltravers was caught again by the agonising death scene, the screaming woman on the bed intercut with flashbacks to writhings with her lovers. And after that … nothing. Half-way through the filming of something called Tiger Lily, Jenni Hilton had vanished. Agitated producers threatened to sue her — if they could find her — close friends were evasive, less close ones baffled. Sensing all manner of sensation, Fleet Street’s finest were set loose, coming back with stories each designed to top the fevered imaginations of their rivals. She had gone mad (Daily Sketch); she had contracted leprosy (Daily Mail); she had entered a convent (The People); her body had been dragged from the Thames (Evening Standard) or found strangled in a lesbian lover’s flat (News of the World); she had been kidnapped (for some extraordinary reason, The Sunday Times). Out-of-focus pictures put her in Stockholm, an Indian village in Brazil, even — the unforgivable sin in a Cold War climate — standing next to Fidel Castro in Cuba.

  By the time she did reappear — alive, sane, healthy and not a terrorist — living in California, nearly ten years had elapsed and she was almost passé. Polite but firm refusals to be interviewed damped down any spluttering flickers of renewed interest and Jenni Hilton, while not quite as hermit-like as Garbo, was definitely no longer public property. And now she was back in London and prepared to talk to a national newspaper. Prepared, more to the point, to talk to Augustus Maltravers.

  “But what did you run away from?” he murmured aloud. Once acquired, a reporter’s instincts to smell an angle and pursue it are never lost. He picked up the telephone again and rang The Chronicle’s cuttings library, explained what he had been commissioned to do and arranged to call in for some background information before he met Mike Fraser. There had been something connected with Jenni Hilton’s sudden disappearance which he could not drag out of his memory banks, and he wanted to find out what it was.

  Chapter Two

  Between two and three million readers saw the Express Diary piece about Jenni Hilton. Many ignored it completely, some glanced at it briefly, others for varying reasons responded to it. Members of a generation now middle-aged found the picture conjured up memories of back-combed hair piled in beehive domes, adolescent rows with their parents, tacky first flats away from home, gauche experiences of sex beyond the frisson of stocking tops. They remembered the daring spurious sophistication of rum and Coke and steamy coffee bars with gushing stainless steel Espresso machines where they had sat for ever, solving all the problems of the world except their own confusions. Faded stars who had vaguely known her felt again yesterday’s glamour, the dazzle of flashbulbs, excited fans, the lights and chaos of television studios which they had not been in for a very long time. Approximately thirty men, married more than fifty times over the years, recalled going to bed with her; several others felt they might have done, but could not be sure. A number of women bitterly resented the fact that nature had been kinder to Jenni Hilton than to them and one had vivid memories of screaming obscenities at her then husband in a hotel bedroom where he was not spending the night alone; it did not seem very important now.

  And one woman was obsessed, reading the report over and over until she could have quoted it word for word, staring intently at the picture, noting the natural elegance that even a hastily snatched photograph could not miss, the grace of a woman who had gone from dazzling youth to mature loveliness and who would never be less than beautiful. And a hatred that had never stopped smouldering began to inflame. London was not as big a city as many people imagined, the original villages it had swallowed up over centuries close neighbours. Jenni Hilton would not be living out in the suburbs which sprawled for miles, but within a limited area: say Notting Hill to the west, Hampstead to the north, possibly Docklands to the east, although that part of London had been slums in her time; probably not south of the river, which had only been fashionable in the Sixties once you reached stockbroker Surrey. The likely area was limited, but dense with terraces, courts, squares, mews, cul-de-sacs, streets hidden off main roads unknown except to their residents, studio and basement flats, penthouses and luxury apartments, hotels, secret houses hidden behind high walls. But she would find her. If Jenni
Hilton went to the theatre once, she would do so again; her reappearance would excite attention. However private she wanted to be, there would be more paragraphs in the papers. It was only a question of time, and she could wait a little longer.

  *

  The features department of The Chronicle appeared to have been furnished through an office supplies firm offering a discount on anything in red. Scraps of paper bearing illegible scribblings littered the surfaces of interlocking plastic units; books sent in by optimistic publishers waited to be either thrown out or taken home by somebody; stacked filing trays overflowed with press releases which had achieved a permanent condition of pending; notes scrawled on yellow labels clung from their adhesive strips to computer screens waiting for their users to arrive. Standard works of reference — The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, Who’s Who — lay alongside a couple of disintegrating dictionaries and Roget’s Thesaurus.

  On the walls were faded travel posters, a seventeenth-century map of Clerkenwell and a portrait of Elvis Presley circa 1960 advertising shoes. Banks of filing cabinets, crowned by piles of bound official reports, were accumulating into a serious fire hazard; above, a silent television tuned into the BBC’s Ceefax service hung suspended from steel arms. From stain-blotched grey carpet tiles to ceiling strip lights — several not working — there was an air of untidiness. Behind the disciplined order of how news is presented to the public lies a perpetual mild chaos. Sometimes the disorder erupts into panic when the usually repetitive pattern of newspaper life is disrupted by a major late-breaking story, but the rule is that if you can keep your head while all about are losing theirs, you have obviously not grasped the situation.

  Not that there was any air of panic as Maltravers walked in at twenty past twelve. The soft plopping of electronic keyboards as features were checked, cut and polished by sub-editors gave the room an atmosphere almost as restful as the ancient City of London graveyard the first-floor windows overlooked. Telephones which had once rung with strident urgency now uttered a discreet soprano bubbling tone, so much more easy to ignore if you were busy. Engrossed in the text filling his screen, Mike Fraser was sipping hot chocolate from a white plastic cup as Maltravers walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder.

  “Must be a good piece,” he commented.

  Fraser turned round and made a face of distaste. “It’s by someone we pay a fortune for a weekly funny column. I’ve had more laughs out of a Christmas cracker motto, but he’s a friend of somebody’s wife.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Good to see you, Gus. How do you keep looking so bloody young?”

  “Clean living.”

  There was less than three months’ difference in their ages, but Maltravers had once said that Mike Fraser had been thirty years old when he was born. His swarthy face looked as though it had been lived in carelessly, seamed with lines that suggested harrowing experiences; a broken nose, legacy of violent years as a rugby forward, added a touch of menace and dark tan hair was short and tough as a doormat. But the appearance was totally deceptive. Mike Fraser had been married for more than fifteen years to a delicate and outrageously pretty Japanese wife and was father to two daughters who had inherited their mother’s looks and their father’s warmth. Maltravers was one of the few people who knew that he was a volunteer with his local branch of the Samaritans. If Mike Fraser was tired when he arrived for work, it was probably because he had spent half the night on the telephone sympathetically listening to someone on the verge of suicide, and usually talking them out of it.

  “Find what you wanted in the library?” he asked as he put on his jacket.

  “It filled in some details,” Maltravers told him. “I certainly didn’t know she was living in Wales a couple of years ago. The most recent item was a par in The Guardian about some row over a nuclear power station. How long has she been back in London?”

  “Not sure. Only a few months though.”

  “And how did The Chronicle get on to her?”

  “The editor met her at a dinner party. She said she liked the paper and he talked her into an interview.”

  “And why me?”

  “Remember that piece you did for us about Richard Tomlinson? The playwright? He’s a friend of Jenni Hilton from way back and she was very impressed with the way you handled it.” Fraser grimaced cynically. “Said you were sympathetic.”

  “And is it a case that she’ll only do the interview if it’s with me?” Maltravers asked casually.

  “Oh, no,” Fraser told him firmly. “Don’t try that angle to jack up your fee. She’s quite prepared to talk to somebody else if you — ”

  “I’m sure we can sort something out,” Maltravers interrupted. “Over a drink. Offer me enough and I may even buy them. Where are we going?”

  “The Volunteer,” Fraser replied as he logged off from his screen. “I must introduce you to Dame Mary on the way.”

  “Who Dame Mary?” Maltravers asked.

  “You’ll see. It’s worth the detour.”

  They left the office and walked up the City Road to the gates of the neighbouring graveyard. A flagged path ran straight between tombstones decaying beneath beech, sycamore and plane trees. Just before they reached the opposite gates, Fraser turned right towards an imposing box tomb with the information that it contained Dame Mary Page, relict of Sir Gregory Page, Bart, carved on one side.

  “Now look at this,” Fraser said. “It’s one of the unknown delights of London.” Maltravers followed him to the other side and read the legend in silent amazement.

  In 67 months she was tap’d 66 times. Had taken away 240 gallons of water without ever repining at her case or fearing the operation.

  A martyr to the dropsy, Dame Mary had spent the last five years of her life drowning from the inside but, despite endless discomfort and indignity, had endured it all with saintly fortitude and a stiff English upper lip.

  “Wonderful isn’t it?” Fraser commented.

  “One of the classics,” Maltravers agreed. “But have you ever wondered where they buried normal people? I’ll guarantee that everyone in this place was either a perfect wife and mother, upright and faithful husband or a child on temporary loan from the angels.”

  “Death cancels all debts.”

  “Maybe, but I want to find a gravestone with something like: ‘She was a constant embarrassment to her family, drank like a fish, beat the servants, made her husband’s life hell and God is welcome to her.’”

  “That the sort of thing you want?”

  “I shan’t be buried, but if I was I’d leave strict instructions for them to put something along the lines of … ” Maltravers paused. “‘He was no worse than many and at least some people liked him.’”

  “Very philosophical. Come on, let’s drink to it.”

  Dwarfed beneath modern office blocks, the Volunteer retained its dark Victorian splendours; polished mahogany square central bar, wooden partitions set with stained glass, immense framed mirrors bearing the names of past breweries in faded gilt. Wallpaper swirling with wine-dark vines ran nearly twenty feet up to a ceiling with an ornate plaster ornamentation in the middle, empty now of the massive chandelier which must once have hung from it. The pub was packed, full of the chatter of young City whizz kids who could earn more in a day than the original customers had made in a lifetime. Fraser waited to be served at the bar as Maltravers made his way round to the other side of the room, squeezing past a man with a portable phone telling his wife that something had come up and he would be delayed, possibly to the extent of having to stay in town overnight. As he spoke he kept smiling at a girl standing next to him. Maltravers noted sensuous mouth and body, and charitably concluded she must be his niece. Fraser appeared through the crush carrying the drinks, and they found themselves what passed for a quiet corner.

  “Let’s assume that you say two fifty, I want five hundred and we settle for three fifty,” Maltravers suggested amiably. “Cheers.”

  Fraser sniffed. “Twist my arm and
we’ll make it four hundred. It’s for the front of the Weekend section, so we’re looking for about two thousand words. We’ll decorate it with a new pic of her and perhaps some sort of Sixties montage.”

  “God bless you, sir, you have a lucky face,” Maltravers said. “An unlucky body, but a lucky face. Any particular line you want me to go on?”

  “No,” Fraser replied. “Just a profile piece as deep as you can make it, although I think you’ll find there are some no-go areas … She gets to read your copy before we publish, incidentally.”

  “You’re joking!” Maltravers protested. “I haven’t had to do that since I was a weekly reporter. What clown agreed to that?”

  “The editor — it was the only way he could persuade her to talk,” Fraser said. “But don’t worry. She can only correct any errors of fact. How you write it is up to you.”

  “I check my facts before I hand my pieces in.”

  “Like you check your manuscripts?” Fraser inquired mildly. “In your first novel you had someone driving around in a 3.7 litre Bentley. There’s no such thing.”

  “All right, so I’m not good on cars,” Maltravers admitted.

  “You’re bloody awful. Come on, Gus, any of us can make a mistake in copy. She won’t be able to change anything unless she can prove you’ve got it wrong. Of course, if you can’t accept that, we can always … ”

  “No, I’ll live with it,” Maltravers said. “Just don’t change anything without letting me know.”

  “No problem,” Fraser agreed. “So when are you going to see her? She’s in town for the next couple of weeks, but then she’ll be away for a few days.”

  “When do you want it by?”

  “Soon as you can.”

  “Well, I can start whenever you want,” Maltravers said. “All I need is the address.”

  “Twelve Cheyne Street. Do you know it?”

  “I know the area,” Maltravers confirmed. “Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in that slice of London between Hyde Park and the Thames. Very upmarket. Phone number?”