When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Hard to imagine we’re going to find a motive when nobody had anything bad to say about him,’ Zoe had observed wryly on the drive north. But it was always like that when the body was still warm. Once the victim was colder, so would be the opinions.

  View from the Stage

  Jasmine took a short drive from her office in Arden on the south side to Eglinton Street, still south of the river, on the edge of the Gorbals. The Civic was starting to make a slightly worrying noise, half gurgle, half rattle, and she had to really rev it a few times going round corners in low gear. She resorted to the standard technical remedy for such automotive issues, which was to turn up the stereo until she couldn’t hear it any more.

  She wasn’t sure this was going to cut it for much longer. Jimmy Eat World filled the air, covering the gurgle/rattle noise, but she could still feel the vibrations against the pedals and the occasional surge of complaint from the engine. At least it was her own choice of music that was covering the problem these days, since she’d purchased a cassette-shaped adapter for her mp3 player. Prior to that, she’d been reliant on the radio, the cassette deck having chewed up and spat out its last tape many years ago. She had been meaning to buy a CD player for it, but that had always been a low priority behind the constant replacement of parts that the car actually needed in order to keep running. In fact, she had sent it into the garage so often that, at this rate, she’d soon have assembled an entire new vehicle, but at far more expense than if she just went into a dealership and bought one.

  She knew that was the more economical option, as well as the more sensible one. She even had the money these days to be able to afford it. The problem was, she just couldn’t give up this car.

  It had been her mum’s car and as such a part of Jasmine’s life since she was seven. It was the car Jasmine sat in the back of while her mum drove her to school on rainy mornings, to the theatre on excitingly dark nights, or just to the supermarket at Canonmills a couple of times a week. It was the car Jasmine practised in while she was trying to get her licence. And it was the car in which she drove her mum to the hospital: for tests, for checks, for treatments and then for the last time.

  It still smelled of her; or at least the smell of the car still made Jasmine feel like her mum was near by.

  The little red Civic had meant so much to Mum, as it had been the first new car she’d ever owned; or nearly new, anyway. It was a special deal because although it had barely two hundred miles on the clock it was still second-hand. It had been owned by some well-off academic who normally treated himself to a new car each year with his book royalties, but who had decided to bring his purchase forward when Honda brought out a new model of the Civic.

  Jasmine couldn’t understand why he’d want the updated version, as it seemed plain and fuddy-duddy compared to its predecessor: sleek and low-slung like a sports car. But sporty and sleek as it was, as well as being pre-owned, the professor’s Civic was now officially last year’s model, which meant Beth Sharp got a bargain.

  Looking back, Jasmine wondered whether Mum felt able to splash the cash because Glen Fallan had been particularly generous with his guilt money that year.

  God, was this the start of him corrupting her happiest memories? She could hear his voice in her head right then, saying: ‘See? This is why your mum was adamant that you shouldn’t find out about these things.’

  She parked in front of a row of railway arches accommodating tiling and carpet showrooms, then got out and walked the short distance to her destination.

  The Pantechnicon Theatre was the smallest of four auditoria either side of a quarter-mile stretch around where Eglinton Street became Pollokshaws Road. None of the four were serving the purposes they were built for, but the Pantechnicon could claim to be closest. It had begun life as a music hall before being converted into a cinema in the 1920s, functioning as such for four decades until the spread of television led to its closure in 1962. Three years later, it was reopened by Peter and Francis Winter, two brothers with the vision – and crucially the finance – to start a small repertory theatre.

  Of its three near neighbours, one had been a Victorian theatre called The Colosseum, once notorious for being the first Scottish venue to stage Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. This came a full seven years after its London debut, the outraged response to which left many people under the mistaken impression that the play had in fact been banned. Jasmine considered it an unworthy fate that the walls once echoing to the ‘door-slam heard around the world’ now heard no more dramatic cry than ‘house!’

  There were also two purpose-built picture houses: both huge, sprawling venues whose grandeur was testament to the popularity of cinema during its heyday. Neither had shown a film since the seventies, and both had served time as bingo halls. One was now enjoying a new lease of life as a music venue, while the other was a ‘development opportunity’.

  All four venues stood out like the last surviving teeth in an aged boxer’s mouth, their size emphasised by the absence of any construction around them. They were surrounded by waste ground, car parks and tree-dotted open space, like abandoned cathedrals to a religion with no remaining followers. It seemed strange that the landscape should be dominated by these places of popular entertainment when there was no evidence of a populace to be entertained. This was because all the tenements that used to stand in between them had been torn down in the sixties. It was, after all, the Gorbals.

  Jasmine had found that if you mentioned Glasgow to English people they would often respond by solemnly intoning the words ‘oh yes, the Gorbals’, even though that place didn’t exist any more. The area that carried the name was a strange mishmash of light industrial units, isolated high-rise blocks, the aforementioned open spaces and these grand remnants. It was almost apocalyptic the way they stood so massive against a flat and largely barren landscape. It made Jasmine think of the movie Delicatessen, a favourite of her mum’s.

  It was too early for the box office to be open, so she was surprised to see the lights on inside. She had thought she’d need to knock at the doors or even phone the office, but Jasmine found one of the sets of swing doors unlocked and entered the Pantechnicon’s modest little foyer. It seemed even smaller when it was empty, difficult to imagine how quite so many people could throng there just before a show. She heard the wheezy hum of a vacuum cleaner from upstairs, in the lobby to the rear of the dress circle, and was about to make her way up when a young guy in a shirt and tie emerged from the entrance to the stalls. Jasmine vaguely recognised him from previous visits: he was the front-of-house manager, she was sure.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked, sounding like he would if he could, and scrutinising her in a way that suggested he knew her face but couldn’t quite place her.

  ‘My name is Jasmine Sharp,’ she replied, handing him a business card. She still found it easier to do that than to actually say ‘I’m a private investigator’, because it still didn’t sound right coming out of her mouth, and the card at least looked in some way official.

  He looked at it with surprise, but at least it was a surprise that indicated this was a more interesting visit than he was expecting, rather than surprise at the mismatch between what was stated on the card and the person who had handed it to him.

  ‘Robert Newsome, assistant manager,’ he said.

  ‘I was wondering if you would be able to give me a number or an address where I could reach Dorothy Prowis.’

  His eyes widened and a smile began to form. He seemed both relieved and amused, like a problem had presented itself and then instantly been resolved.

  ‘I can do better than that. She’s through there, up on the stage, but she’s got a group of students with her. I’m sure she’ll be able to spare a moment when she’s finished. I take it she’s not in any kind of trouble?’ he added as an afterthought, his expression indicating how unlikely he considered this.

  ‘Dot?’ Jasmine responded. Her incredulous tone was intended to communicate not only that her answer was in
the negative, but that she knew more than he might assume about the subject of her inquiry.

  She made her way into the stalls, where she could hear the familiar sound of Dot Prowis’s voice, but the woman herself was obscured by a raggle-taggle gathering of drama students standing on the apron. Even more than the foyer, the stalls and the circle looked so much smaller when there was no one sitting in them. She remembered being taken here by her mum’s friend Judith to see a production of Peter Pan, and from her position near the back downstairs it had seemed every bit as big and grand as the King’s in Edinburgh, or the Lyceum or the Festival Theatre. Standing behind the last row now, it seemed so neat and compact, such a short distance to the stage. And as she knew, the view from the stage looking out at an empty house made it seem smaller still.

  She had stood on that same apron, listening to the same talk, just a few years previously. Dot Prowis was retired from theatre now, but she still taught SATD students about theatrical design, and when possible preferred to do so not in a lecture hall or rehearsal studio but on the very stage where she had done most of her work. Dot had been Francis Winter’s protégée, assisting him since the early seventies and eventually taking over from him in 1986 as the Pantechnicon’s designer, a post she held until her own retirement in 2005. Jasmine knew that she would have worked with Tessa Garrion and, given Dot’s memory for detail, was hoping that thirty years wasn’t too long a stretch for her recall.

  The Winter brothers were born in Durham, where their father owned and managed a theatre, so they had grown up helping with everything from repairing ripped seats to painting scenery. They renovated the Pantechnicon – largely with their own hands – and rapidly built up a successful repertory theatre established upon aesthetic principles that Dot still evangelised. Frustrated by what Peter Winter described as ‘the tyrannous geometry’ of the proscenium arch, Francis frequently designed sets that brought the action into the auditorium, appropriating the boxes and constructing catwalks, all at the nightly expense of seats that could not therefore be sold.

  Dot had taken this concept of ‘exploding the space’ to its apotheosis in 1988 with her design for Ubu Roi. She built two gangways from the stage to either side of the dress circle, allowing the actors to run in a great Escher-esque loop during the play’s chase and battle scenes. She strung a flying-fox zip line from the highest of the stage’s many platforms all the way down the aisle to the back of the stalls, and she had a trampoline in the orchestra pit. Jasmine had studied this production in depth, staring longingly at photographs and wishing she’d been around to see it. Even now she felt a pang of regret amid the fascination as Dot talked the students through how it was done.

  ‘Of course, health and safety would never allow it nowadays, but it was magnificent. The audiences adored it … almost as much as the cast.’

  Jasmine let go a little sigh even as the students laughed. That was when she knew the pang wasn’t about never having had the chance to see the Pantechnicon’s famous Ubu. It was about the chance she still did have, the last time she was standing in this room listening to the same lecture, the first week of June only a short few years ago. The students were next year’s intake, participating in the annual induction course designed to prime their summer reading before they started in earnest in the autumn.

  Dorothy spoke for a few more minutes, still obscured by her audience, then she finally came into view as the students dispersed. Jasmine remembered the drill: the students would now be encouraged to physically explore the set, to do what the audience could not. She could hear Dorothy tell them not to just wander around like it was sculpture, but to ‘truly inhabit it, treat it like one of those … soft-play facilities for children’.

  In that respect it was a good set to have the run of, particularly considering it was the end of the theatre’s spring programme. The final play in each season tended to be the most minimalist in terms of production values due to the budget having largely been spent by that time, but the present designer, Keith Farrel, had made inventive use of stock equipment and made a cheap set look expensive. The stage was fitted with a panoply of scaffolds and platforms, bedecked in sweeping red and blue drapes, flags and banners. It looked both lush and kinetic, faintly reminding Jasmine of the cover of the last Biffy Clyro album.

  The play was Iphigénie by Racine, a quintessential example of seventeenth-century French neoclassicism. Directors of a naturalist bent were drawn to the psychological realism of Racine’s characters, often opting for modern dress or seventeenth-century costume to emphasise a timelessness to the characters. This being the Pantechnicon, however, and the director being Peter Winter’s son Daniel, they were most definitely back in ancient Greece, the banners and flags indicating a war footing in preparation for the assault on Troy.

  Jasmine made her way up on to the stage at the right-hand side of the apron by means of the short black steps that were all but invisible from just a few rows back in the stalls. As she climbed, a male student went flying past her, leaping from the stage with Dorothy’s encouragement.

  ‘That’s it,’ she was saying. ‘Explode the space.’

  Dorothy was facing stage left, her back to Jasmine. She was dressed in a black trouser suit, her silver hair swept back on to her collar.

  ‘Ms Prowis?’ Jasmine asked, prompting Dorothy to turn delicately on her heel.

  Jasmine couldn’t help but smile as she took in her gold earrings and red silk scarf. Black, red and gold. They were the Pantechnicon’s unofficial colours, emphasised in all of Francis Winter’s early sets. Dorothy wore them like a priest or disciple. They spoke of spectacle, opulence, grandeur and just a hint of the bawdy.

  Dorothy stared at her for a moment, as though trying to piece together why she didn’t quite fit the picture. Then a curious little smile told Jasmine she’d worked it out.

  ‘Goodness gracious. Jasmine Sharp. Goodness gracious.’

  Dorothy’s tone was always as precise as it was polite, almost accentless but with just a whisper of Welsh if you knew what to listen for. Jasmine reckoned you could write down much of what Dorothy said and insert it seamlessly into a play from just about any period since the eighteenth century. Conspicuously modern coinages, when she had no choice but to use them, seemed almost quarantined within her sentences, like she didn’t quite trust them or didn’t know what to do with them; hence her hesitation over the term soft-play.

  ‘How are you? I was most sorry to hear about your mother.’

  Jasmine never knew how to respond to such sentiments – should you say thank you? – so she simply nodded.

  ‘I saw her act, you know, back at the Tron. More than once, I’m sure, but I particularly remember her from a John Byrne play, the second of the Slab Boys trilogy, the name of which I can never recall. She had just the right quality of what the locals refer to as “gallusness”. I’m sorry I never said as much to you before, but I was unaware that you were her daughter until quite recently.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Jasmine managed, reeling somewhat from the clarity of this reminiscence. She was aware of secreting it away in her mind, a precious and most unexpected treasure to be unwrapped and appreciated later. She’d love to press Dorothy on what else she might tell her about Mum back in the eighties, but they both had business to attend.

  ‘I heard you had to drop out. What are you doing with yourself nowadays?’

  Jasmine knew that on this occasion she couldn’t just whip out a card, so she took a breath and gathered herself before answering.

  ‘I’m working as a private investigator.’

  Working as. That was the qualification that helped her say it without sounding foolish. It was like a disclaimer that stated she wasn’t laying claim to anything. You didn’t say you were ‘working as’ something you had trained for years to do, like a doctor or an archaeologist.

  Dorothy blinked and said nothing for just a little longer than was normal during small talk.

  ‘I quite don’t know what to say to that,’ s
he eventually replied.

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Jasmine with an apologetic laugh, as though she was responsible for Dorothy’s discomfiture.

  ‘No, sincerely. I’m seldom astonished by the answer when I make that inquiry of former students. I would ordinarily be able to respond with “well done” or “how interesting” or a usefully noncommittal “oh, yes?” but you’ve left me with no frame of reference whatsoever. Goodness gracious. And are you here … on business?’

  ‘I am indeed. I was hoping you might be able to offer some insight into a case I’m working on. Do you have a few minutes?’

  ‘Certainly, certainly.’

  Dorothy stepped off into the wings, while the students continued to wander, climb, jump and occasionally tumble from the platforms. The Pantechnicon’s stage had a surprisingly steep rake, so that moving downstage was also moving downhill, and this was going to do for someone’s ankle if they didn’t learn quickly.

  ‘I’m looking for information about an actress who worked here back in the early eighties. Her name was Tessa Garrion.’

  Dorothy looked down at the floor for a moment, searching her thoughts, then stared back at Jasmine with genuine surprise.

  ‘Tessa Garrion? My goodness, isn’t that extraordinary? I’d quite forgotten that name.’

  ‘Well, it has been a very long time.’

  ‘No, you misunderstand. I have total recall when it comes to actors, and she’s no different. I can see her right there, beneath the fly gallery, as Katherina to Morgan Spark’s Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. But it just struck me that I hadn’t heard her name in all this time. Theatre can be a small world, but people move on and you don’t hear what happened to them unless they become terribly famous, or perhaps you’re talking to someone and they happen to mention working with a person you used to know. Tessa Garrion. One moment she’s standing on that stage. Boom. Thirty years pass and you’re the first person to say her name.’