Death on the High C's

by Robert Barnard

  Then of course,’ said Chappell, ‘if we’re going through possibilities, there’s also the one that the two murders have no connection at all.’

  ‘Granted. Though that would surely be stretching possibilities a bit far, wouldn’t it? The point about Harrison is that he’s the person most likely to have seen something suspicious on the night before Gaylene copped her packet—and the person most likely to register its significance, because there were no flies on Harrison by the sound of it: he’d been around and seen it all. If only Bob had been around that night one might have hoped to dredge something up from his memory about things he saw but didn’t really register.’

  ‘Sounds a forlorn hope.’

  ‘Forlorn’s the word for it. I’m afraid all we can do now is to dig—into everyone’s background, into Gaylene’s murky past, and so on. Sheer slog, but I don’t see any alternative. The only thing to be done now is to get confirmation of Ricci’s story. Then we’ll start the whole tedious process.’

  They left the office and Nichols turned to lock it up. From the direction of the stage came the sound of Giulia Contini finishing her account of ‘Caro nome’.

  ‘That girl can no more trill than a constipated owl,’ said Nichols, an expression of great disgust spreading over his face.

  Chappell kept quiet, because it sounded very nice to him.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Repetiteur

  When Nichols got round to the back-stage area, Giulia Contini was putting her hair in order after the token resistance she had put up, as Gilda, to her kidnapping by Jim McKaid and the male chorus. Signor Pratelli was fussing around her, like a bitch whose puppy has just taken its first steps outside the maternal basket. Nichols raised an eyebrow in her direction, and over Signor Pratelli’s head Giulia nodded. Nichols went over to Calvin and Bridget and engaged them in ostentatious conversation, which set the rest of the company whispering about ‘new developments’. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of Mike Turner hurrying by, looking tense and worried. Nichols took a bet with himself that a lot of telephone conversations were taking place between him and the Arts Council in London. After a few minutes he saw Giulia Contini getting rid of Signor Pratelli, dispatching him to the stalls to report on the effect made by her entrance in the second act—not, presumably, on the effectiveness of her acting, which was still a matter of left hand, right hand, but on that perennial matter of concern to singers, whether the placing of the others on stage made it possible for her to be seen properly by all sections of the audience. As the unlikely duenna bustled off, glad to be of use, Nichols went over and took Giulia aside.

  ‘Grazie,’ she said. ‘Is better we talks alone.’

  ‘This won’t take long,’ said Nichols. ‘But I’m afraid it’s a little . . . embarrassing, what I have to ask you about.’

  ‘Not is to me,’ said Giulia serenely.

  ‘Good,’ said Nichols, realizing that it was himself who was embarrassed. ‘Good. Yes, well, I gather that on the night before Miss Ffrench was killed, you and Mr Ricci were sleeping together at the Metropole Hotel, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, is right.’

  ‘And as far as you know, he was there with you all night?’

  ‘Yes, I sink so. I not sleep so good. Is dirty, noisy city. Is like Torino, but more dirtier. So I sleep—how you say?—on and off.’

  ‘And he left early in the morning?’

  ‘Yes. In case old Pratelli knock on my door. ’E think ’e protecta my virtue! Ha! Is big joke—but I promise my father, is very old-fashioned, votes for Christian Democrats, and it makes ’im ’appy, so I keep Pratelli with me for a little.’

  ‘I gather you and Mr Ricci will be getting married before very long,’ said Nichols. Giulia’s reaction was a wonderfully effective slow raising of the eyebrows, and then a twisting of the mouth into an expression of great contempt.

  ‘Ha! ’E think so? Is ’nother big joke.’

  ‘You’re not intending to?’

  ‘’E talk of marriage. I listens and smiles and says nothing. ’E think I not sleep with him else. ’E think Italian girls is behind the times, back in Middle Ages. ’E ’ears it from Mama and Papa, who left years and years ago. But we liberates ourselves, we Italian girls, not listens to priests and Popes no longer. We ’ave divorces and pills, and soon we all ’ave abortions. ’E not understand. ’E get a nasty surprise, that Ricci.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be very disappointed,’ said Nichols.

  ‘Si, si. ’E want to be manager mine a few years, get roles with big companies for ’imself. Then, after, ’e want mama for children, good Italian cook, ’ome-made pasta, everything! Dio mio! Is too pleased with ’imself, that one. I not wash ’is socks! Brutta sorte!’

  The interview with Giulia left Nichols feeling a lot better. He hoped he would be around to witness Ricci’s discomfiture. As he turned to go, he heard from the orchestral pit the beginning of the second act, and, drawn as by a magnet, he signalled to Chappell to go around front of stage. It was an act of pure self-indulgence. He had never seen a final dress rehearsal before, and during all the earlier rehearsals he had been distracted by the annoying business of having to ask people questions. Now he wanted to see properly the singers whose odd and sometimes unattractive personalities had been paraded before him in the last few days in his professional capacity.

  When he and Chappell got to the stalls Calvin was beginning his aria ‘Parmi veder le lagrime’, turning it, and its cabaletta, with a wonderful grace which won Nichols’s whole-hearted approval: not an international star in the making, perhaps, but a tenor to be reckoned with in a world that not long ago seemed to have stopped making them. Rigoletto’s distress at the loss of his daughter and his taunting by the courtiers he had seen before, but now Simon Mulley seemed to have gained in assurance, and beneath the venom and contempt one sensed a warmer, more sensitive heart: the two sides had come together, and had made a complete Rigoletto.

  Signor Pratelli, sitting in the middle of the stalls, had up to this point been immobile and, Nichols suspected, as near asleep as made no difference. As the moment for his protégée’s entrance approached, he automatically perked up, and began noting the placing of the various courtiers. When at last she bustled on stage, her dress minimally disarranged so as to suggest a genteel rape, her steps marginally speeded up from the usual girlish tripping to suggest her distress at this development, Signor Pratelli made several irritable gestures with his hands, called upon his God in all His three manifestations, and bustled back stage to be ready for Mike Turner at the end of the act and to make clear to him that there were certain changes in the positioning of the chorus which his Star would imperatively require.

  Watching for the second time Giulia Contini’s confident display of her tiny dramatic vocabulary, Nichols thought he had probably spent as much time as he could justify to himself. Turning out of his seat, and gesturing to Sergeant Chappell to follow he began tip-toeing out towards the back of the stalls. Only then did he notice the dim figure of Mr Pettifer the repetiteur, sitting in the back stalls and noting the results of his endeavours. As he approached him up the gangway Nichols, on an impulse, stopped and said: ‘She’ll never be an actress, that one.’

  Mr Pettifer shook his head sadly. ‘I think they save all their drama for life, the Italians,’ he said. ‘They seem to droop, emotionally, the moment they set foot on stage.’

  Something of intelligence and sharp observation in Mr Pettifer’s remark made Nichols linger with him. His name had come up now and again in the various conversations he had had with members of the cast, but he had not thought it worth while hitherto to interview him, because there had been no question of his crossing swords with Gaylene, certainly none of his having slept with her, and the general impression given—augmented by the appearance of the man, when he caught the occasional glimpse of him—was of someone notable only for utter inconspicuousness. It now occurred to him to wonder whether he might not be one of those whose very in
conspicuousness made them the ideal observer. He also wondered how many wearing years of singers’ tantrums and conductors’ whims had been needed to batter the man into near-total anonymity.

  ‘At least the acting is something you don’t have to feel responsible for yourself,’ Nichols said to him pleasantly.

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Mr Pettifer. He leant forward, his droopy little moustache seeming to twitch with amused irritation. ‘But listen to the words! Or rather the vowels. There one could do absolutely nothing. She might as well be singing in Swahili.’

  Nichols nodded sympathetic agreement. ‘But there are some good voices in the company proper,’ he said. ‘Really astonishing for a new company like this one. It must have been very stimulating to work with them.’

  ‘Yes, yes, very stimulating indeed,’ murmured Mr Pettifer. ‘Mr Turner has a very good ear for voices, and—’ he blinked modestly—‘I’ve suggested one or two names. But the credit is his. He rarely makes a mistake, at least not in voices.’

  ‘You think he makes other sorts of mistake?’

  There was a moment of hesitancy. ‘Perhaps Mr Caulfield, as it turned out, was not the best choice as resident producer.’ Mr Pettifer hazarded timidly. ‘But still, opera producers are rare birds, a very small field indeed.’

  ‘And you don’t think Miss Ffrench was a mistake?’

  ‘No, no, not at all, not as far as the voice was concerned. He just heard her on stage, you see. You can’t pick a company on their personalities—what very odd results you would get.’ Mr Pettifer gave a wheezy laugh. ‘And it was a good rich voice—very penetrating. No artistic judgement, of course, but she’d only been singing a relatively short time, so there was every prospect of her learning, refining the sort of performance she gave, in time. So it seemed. He never met her off stage, you see.’

  ‘If he had, you think he would have realized there was no hope of her improving.’

  ‘Oh certainly. That was easy to see. Quite incapable of learning anything at all. I fear she would have been in for disappointments, poor girl, if she’d lived. I expect she would have finished up as one of the stars in one of the tiny German companies. They like things overdone in Germany, you know.’

  Mr Pettifer’s sharp little eyes twinkled. He seemed surprisingly confident in his summings-up of the inadequacies of the great nations of Europe.

  ‘But in fact,’ said Nichols, ‘as it turned out, Miss Ffrench’s engagement was a mistake?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Pettifer. ‘But Mr Turner would have got rid of her as soon as practical: she wasn’t contracted beyond Christmas, which was very sensible of him. And Mr Caulfield too: he’d had his doubts about him already, and there were rumours that he didn’t get along with Simon Mulley. If we can keep Mulley, we’ll be a company to reckon with, I believe.’ His eyes twinkled again. ‘Perhaps we might even get an adequate grant from the gentlemen in London. So they would both have gone, I’m quite sure. One has to be ruthless in a position like his. Mr Turner knows how to get rid of people.’

  Mr Pettifer said this in a matter-of-fact way, as if quite unconscious of its ambiguity.

  ‘You must have had a lot of unpleasantness during the early rehearsals,’ said Nichols.

  Mr Pettifer shrugged. ‘A fair bit, a fair bit.’

  ‘My problem is,’ said Nichols, ‘that while there seems to have been quite a lot of people who disliked Gaylene Ffrench and thought her a general menace, what I really need to find is someone with a quite specific motive for murdering her.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Mr Pettifer.

  Nichols caught the implied disagreement. ‘You think this sort of general dislike was good enough ground, do you?’ he asked sceptically. ‘You could be right. But she must have packed a real punch when it came to being objectionable.’

  ‘A fairly hefty one, yes,’ agreed Mr Pettifer. ‘But of course one knows the type. One has met it so often. Simply eaten up with egotism. Nothing exists outside themselves, their immediate satisfactions, their career prospects. They’re complete poison, wherever they go. But one does get used to that sort of type, in the theatre. And though she was a pretty good specimen, and would have had to go, still—’ the moustache bristled as in his mind he reviewed the theatrical Chamber of Horrors his memory could conjure up—‘still, there’ve been worse. And we all develop some form of protective covering.’

  Nichols frowned. ‘I thought from what you said that you thought the company’s dislike of her was sufficient motive?’

  ‘Oh no, no. I’ve known people like that in company after company. After a time they become a sort of joke. They’re so predictable. You almost get pleasure out of forecasting what they’ll do or say. Oh no, they’re not the type who get murdered, as a rule.’

  Nichols felt irritated, as always when people seemed to be contradicting themselves.

  ‘But the fact remains, whatever view we take of those first two rather feeble attempts, the fact remains that someone went to the lengths of rigging up an elaborate device of wires and doorknobs and metal doormats, simply in order to kill Gaylene Ffrench.’

  At that moment the music was swelling out, and from the stage Simon Mulley and Giulia Contini started bellowing to the farthest corners of the theatre about vengeance and forgiveness. In the exciting swell of the music Mr Pettifer’s reply got lost. It was not until the duet had drawn to a thunderous close that Nichols turned to him again.

  ‘I’m sorry, I missed that,’ he said.

  ‘I said: “or in order to kill Sergeant Harrison”,’ said Mr Pettifer.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Un Colpo di Canone

  ‘The fact of the matter is,’ said Nichols, sinking into the desk chair of Sergeant Harrison’s little office, ‘that we’ve been fools, damned fools, complete and utter idiots.’ He thought it best not to involve Sergeant Chappell in his own sins of omission, so he added: ‘Or I have.’

  ‘But you can’t be sure he’s right, can you?’ said Sergeant Chappell. ‘After all, it’s no more than a guess.’

  ‘It’s a guess that has a ring of truth, to me at any rate,’ said Nichols. ‘Think it over: if the murderer was told by Sergeant Harrison that he felt ill and was unlikely to be there next day, or if he heard of it indirectly, then the most likely victim would be Gaylene Ffrench, and we’ve been along the right lines all along. But if he didn’t—and everyone we’ve spoken to has agreed he was no great talker—then it’s practically certain that it would be Harrison himself who would have got his packet, a few hours earlier than he actually did. When he was on duty he did a round of inspection of the dressing-rooms, and everyone in the company would have known that. And we were told it, and we absolutely ignored it.’

  ‘Yes, I can see we shouldn’t have done that,’ said Chappell.

  ‘And if it had happened as planned, what would we have thought when we came to investigate?’

  ‘That it was the third in the series of attempts on Gaylene Ffrench, and that it had misfired like the earlier ones.’

  ‘Exactly. Fools that we are. But in fact what misfired was the plan, due to Harrison’s malaria. At least, that’s the assumption I’m going to work on from now on. After all, we have two alternative scenarios. We’ve investigated the Gaylene angle till we’re blue in the face, and we’ve come up with nothing more concrete than that she was a poisonous piece of goods. It’s time to try the second angle, which so far we haven’t given five seconds to—that the thing was aimed at Sergeant Harrison.’

  ‘But Harrison was liked—within reason anyway—and we’ve no more solid motive for killing him than for Gaylene.’

  ‘Because we haven’t been looking,’ Nichols pointed out. ‘He was liked, that’s true, but he was also in the sort of position where he might well find out something he was not supposed to find out, and he had the sort of mind that liked to have everything ship-shape and properly ticketed, to know what was going on and why it was going on.’

  ‘And that was why he was killed?’ asked Se
rgeant Chappell sceptically.

  ‘Maybe, maybe,’ said Nichols. He paused for a moment, deep in thought. ‘I’m trying to think: that first night, when he rang us. What exactly did he say? “I’ve just remembered something”? No, that wasn’t it. “I’ve only just realized”—that was it. Then he said something like: “I could kick myself for not thinking of it earlier”.’

  ‘But what did he mean,’ asked Sergeant Chappell, ‘if he didn’t mean that he’d thought of something, or remembered something—some clue to Gaylene Ffrench’s murder?’

  ‘He meant: “I’ve just realized that it was me the thing was aimed at.” I wouldn’t mind betting that he also meant: “and I’ve got a pretty good idea why”.’

  ‘And that’s what he never lived to tell us,’ said Chappell.

  ‘Exactly. That’s what we’ve got to find out.’

  The two sat in silence, and both of them were remembering some of the things that Mr Pettifer had said to them, after he had made his stunningly simple suggestion.

  ‘He was a man who had to know things.’ he said, with a sort of certainty about other people’s characters which comes of years of keeping quiet and watching. ‘There wasn’t anything underhand or unpleasant about it: he was a very simple man—rigid, rather stupid, perhaps, but straight. But he had an orderly sort of mind, military I would imagine, wouldn’t you? And he was surrounded by the usual chaos of the theatre which is perhaps something more than you can really imagine, if you haven’t known it—physical chaos, emotional chaos. And he was trying to impose his own sort of order on to it, to find out exactly what people were doing, precisely what their motives were, or what their emotional state was. It wasn’t pure prying, but he needed total control over the things around him, if I might put it that way.’

  There had been a long pause, during which Mr Pettifer’s little moustache had twitched incessantly. Then he had said: ‘That sort of person is more likely to get murdered, don’t you think, than someone who makes themselves more obviously objectionable? And though theatrical people like to live on the surface, flaunt their private lives—even make a pageant of them, like poor Gaylene—still, we all have our little secrets, our other lives which we don’t want people to pry into, don’t we?’