“So tell me again. I only want confirmation. What day and so forth.”
Prosser assumed an air of resignation. “When was it, Noreen?”
Noreen said promptly, “Over the weekend when they took the ladder, Tuesday morning when you found the roofing felt and the gas bottle’d gone, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right, one after t’other. I reported me ladder missing Monday morning to that there Cockayne. Did he care? Not bleedin’ likely! There’s that gate round to the back as should be kept locked but never is, and when I told him so he said I should take me tackle home every night, silly sod. We had a big argument about it but I wasn’t having no Jessie like him telling me what to do, so I jacked it in for a day or two. Tell you the truth, I thought stuff it, if you’re not bothered about locking up, why should I sweat me guts out finishing your piddling little roof job? I’d somebody breathing down me neck to do a garridge job and we went on to that. Somebody what pays prompt, not like the bleedin’ Council, six months later.”
“That’s his problem, see,” Noreen intervened, when he stopped for breath. “Too blessed independent, always was.”
Prosser said, “One-man business like I am – well, one man and a lad, not forgetting the wife here, you might say – I can’t afford not to be. I have me expenses – you have to keep up with the times or you get left behind.” His wide gesture was appropriate for the brand-new word processor on the desk, but nothing else in the office that Kite could see.
“What size of gas bottle was it, Mr. Prosser?”
“Same size as them out there.”
“Pretty heavy to handle, by the looks of them.”
“One man can manage easy, if he goes about it the right way.”
“Let’s have a look at ’em more closely, d’you mind?”
They got to work and within half an hour Kite, having decided that he had time to make another call before lunch, was back in the town centre, walking down the street in the older, lower part of the town where T. H. Perryman’s, the gent’s outfitters, still plied their trade. It wasn’t a shop much patronised by Kite. To him a suit was a suit was a suit, to be picked up from a chain store when you had the time. His father, on the other hand, was a regular customer of Perryman’s, forever going on about how they’d supplied him with his first school blazer fifty years ago, and how he still went there to be measured for all his suits. It was that sort of place.
This was where Greg Foster, he who played de Flores in The Changeling, worked. More specifically, where he ran the business for his father-in-law, the present Thomas Perryman, in the confident expectation that it would in due season fall like a ripe plum into his ready and waiting hands.
He’d just finished a tasteful and cunning arrangement of goods in the window, whereby the male population of Lavenstock could, when reluctantly buying that new shirt the wife insisted they needed, see by happy chance the correctly matching tie, slacks and sweater displayed with it and be persuaded into buying the lot. Hey presto, no sweat! No disastrous colour combinations that would send the wife into giggles, and all good business for Perryman’s. Greg himself never had any trouble with his clothes, but a lot of his customers were clueless about that sort of thing. He always knew what to wear and when and how, that he must avoid pink shirts like the plague with his reddish brown hair, and how to hide that teeny-weeny tummy bulge which had just begun to appear. It was an instinct. Thoughtfully, he placed a pair of polished olivewood cufflinks in a box on top of the sweater and stood back to admire the effect.
It was then that he noticed the police sergeant who’d been down at the Gaiety on Saturday with his hand on the shop door and knew that Fleming was still haunting him.
“All right, Sandy,” he said to his young assistant, “you can get off for your lunch now. Take an extra hour. You did very well deputising for me on Saturday afternoon. Jacket? Of course, sir.”
As he showed Kite the rad where a selection of jackets hung Greg relaxed, realising he might have a genuine customer after all, whole Kite flicked through them, thinking they all looked very much the same, until he came to one which was very different from the rest. It appeared to him identical with that which Fleming had worn, only this one was in tan suede, not grey, as his had been. It gave him the opening he needed. “Nice quality,” he began.
“I can see you have very good taste,” Foster said, so Kite knew it would be expensive. But two hundred and forty-five quid! Even allowing for inflation. His last suit had cost just over a hundred and he’d thought that was going over the top.
“They come from Italy,” Foster explained reverentially, sliding the jacket off the hanger and holding it out. “We’ve only had two. The other one –” He stopped in some confusion, remembering to whom the other one had been sold.
“That’s all right, sir, I know who bought the other one,” Kite said, producing his warrant card. “I’m here to ask you about him.”
Greg evidently thought that was a dirty trick. Huffily, he put the jacket back, but he wasn’t the sort to stay on his high horse for long. He was naturally friendly and loquacious and genuinely wanted to be helpful.
“Thought I’d seen you somewhere before. I suppose you want to talk to me about Rupert Fleming? It wasn’t him who bought the jacket, incidentally, it was his wife. A present, she said. I wonder if she’d have been quite so generous if she’d known about the others.”
“The others?”
“The other women ... or perhaps I shouldn’t have said that.” Greg shrugged. “Oh, why not, it’s no use pretending, because somebody’s been talking, haven’t they? Somebody’s told you I hated his guts? And so I did, along with a lot more people, for different reasons. It’d be hard to find anybody who liked him.”
“Everybody has somebody, somewhere, they say.”
“Not Fleming! Oh all right, I know he’s dead and all that blah ... well, be damned to that, I detested him.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Not one reason, dozens. I suppose it started when he gave me a bad notice in that crummy entertainment review column he wrote in the Advertiser – not a by-line, just his initials – and okay, I won’t deny there might have been some justification for what he wrote that first time. It wasn’t the right part for me, but I took it because it was the biggest role I’d been offered so far and I did the best I could with it. He wrote what he did to pay me back and I’m not about to bore you with the exact details – enough to say that he was always clever with words and he made me an absolute laughing-stock. I can take criticism as much as the next person, but that was annihilating! I realized my mistake afterwards. I should have ignored the whole thing, pretended I’d never even seen the notice, but it was bloody unfair and I taxed him with it. Which was playing into his hands, because I could guarantee after that he’d do his best to make some snide, adverse comment about me every time we put a play on. Though he couldn’t go too far, folks aren’t that simple. I may not be the world’s greatest actor, but I’m not bad, not for Lavenstock, anyway. And he was rubbish.”
Having got that off his chest, he paused to draw breath. Greg Foster on the face of it seemed harmless enough, but in Kite’s experience any man willing to think of another as rubbish was a man to be watched, so he asked, “What was that you said about paying you back?”
Foster reddened, with embarrassment it seemed. “Did I say that? Oh, pay me out for not taking what he said lying down, I suppose I meant.”
“Sure that’s what you meant?”
Foster sighed. “No. Not really. The thing is, it’s a bit embarrassing. He asked me if I wanted to make a bit of cash on the side – to be frank, he asked me if I’d ever done any modelling.”
“Modelling? Clothes and things, like in the adverts?” Kite asked innocently, thinking he could well understand why Fleming had approached Foster, with his smooth photogenic good looks, his perfect teeth and athletic body.
“No, Sergeant, not like in the adverts, and certainly not in clothes,” Foster replied shortly. �
��Like taking them off and being photographed. I told him what he could do with his photographs. I’m a married man with two children and another on the way. I’m not into that sort of thing.” He paused before adding carefully, “Not everybody feels like I do, of course.”
“Other members of the cast?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, no, I’m talking about the chap who came to the Gaiety last week, the week before last, I mean, the Wednesday before the murder.”
“What man was this?”
“I didn’t actually see him, but I overheard a conversation between Fleming and Ashleigh Cockayne, in the men’s room. Fleming was telling Cockayne there was someone asking to see him, Cockayne was saying he hadn’t time to be bothered. ‘He has a proposition to put to us, about you know what,’ Fleming said. That was what made me prick up my ears. ‘I think you’d be very interested when you hear what it is.’ And Cockayne said, ‘Who’s been letting the cat out of the bag?’ But he didn’t sound too put out, in fact he laughed, and off he went with Fleming, cutting the rehearsal short.”
“Wednesday night, you said?” Foster nodded. Wednesday was the night Lili thought Cockayne had begun his row with Fleming. “You’ve no idea who this man was?”
Foster shook his head and Kite, closing his notebook, thanked him for his cooperation.
“I don’t know about cooperation, I’ve been giving you a pretty good motive for having murdered him myself, haven’t I?” Foster gave a short laugh. “I shouldn’t pursue that idea if I were you. I wouldn’t have risked messing my life up just to get even with a crumb like that. But one thing’s for sure, I wasn’t a bit surprised when I heard somebody had done for him. Frankly, Fleming was a disaster looking for somewhere to happen. He went about deliberately stirring it up. Well, he seemed to expect people not to like him. He went in head first, looking for trouble, even when it wasn’t there. Ever met people like that?”
“All the time,” Kite said. “And they nearly always end up finding it, one way or another.”
Mayo heard Kite out and sat so long staring down at his desk with a preoccupied air that Kite was at last moved to say, “What next?” in order to remind him that he was still there.
“Get Underwood up here to the station. I want another word with him.”
When the caretaker was sitting before him, supplied with tea, he said, “Cast your mind back to last Wednesday week, Mr. Underwood. Do you remember anyone calling at the Gaiety after the rehearsal, asking to see Mr. Cockayne?”
“No,” said Underwood with absolute conviction.
“Or Mr. Fleming?”
“No.”
Mayo wasn’t satisfied with this. It seemed unlikely that anybody enquiring for Cockayne would have got past Underwood without his knowing, and yet he had the impression the caretaker was telling the truth. Another possibility existed – that Underwood himself was the man Fleming had been referring to; in the oblique sort of way someone might say “a man about a dog” he’d said “a man with a proposition.” Cockayne may have laughed, getting the implication, but any proposition Underwood was likely to make would almost certainly have been blackmail.
But there was nothing he could do to shift Underwood from the stance he’d taken up, and for the moment he was obliged to accept his statement.
TWELVE
“There’s horror in my service, blood and danger. ”
DOWN BY THE RIVER, it was as cold as charity. The day which had started so brilliantly, in such clear sunshine, had become raw and grey, the wind blowing in fierce gusts. It seemed as if it might rain. In the face of the outright scepticism of most of those gathered there, Mayo’s convictions no longer seemed quite so clear-cut as last night. Paradoxically, this resolved his doubts.
Yes, he told himself, it could have been done that way. Cockayne could have lashed himself to the gas bottle and rolled himself into the river. It was quite conceivable. Far stranger and more macabre things had been known. To a mind bent on suicide, anything was possible.
And there was no turning back now in any case. The back entrance to the Gaiety had been sealed off to all but police vehicles and those belonging to the sub-aqua team. As a starting point, Mayo had pointed out the place where he had first noticed the marks where something heavy appeared to have been dragged fairly recently over the stone flags above the water-steps. There were two divers, who had adjusted their masks, slipped nonchalantly into the murky water at the edges and disappeared. Lifting gear was standing by. The team of detectives stamped their feet and waited.
They didn’t have long to wait. With a sense of half-restrained horror they stood by as the thing was hauled up and broke the surface of the water. A long cylindrical shape, black and obscene, sagging in the middle. And then there was a collective release of held breath when it was seen that what had been brought up was Prosser’s missing roll of roofing felt, bound around with wire. Perhaps it had been thrown into the river by vandals, maybe the ladder and the gas bottle too. The operation started again.
This time, the divers seemed to stay down below an unconscionable length of time. After a while Mayo went up the steps and onto the upper terrace, thinking he might see better what was going on from there, but no sooner had he put his foot on the top step than there was a shout from Kite.
Immediately the group below sprang into action again to get the lifting gear lowered to the men below the water. Mayo was about to descend and join them when a hand clutched his arm. “What’s happening?”
He turned to see the small, black-clad figure of Lili Anand. Behind her was the open door into the theatre bar, which he had ordered to be kept locked until the operation was over, though doubtless she had her own key. “Go back inside, Lili, please,” he told her sharply.
“It’s Ashleigh, isn’t it? You’re looking for Ashleigh.” She had begun to shiver uncontrollably. She looked shrunken, and old underneath the mask of her heavy make-up. “I knew it. I saw it, a body in the water ...”
“This is no place for you at the moment.”
He thought she was going to break away from him and run down to the water’s edge, all the same. Cursing the inopportuneness of her arrival, he grasped her arm firmly and looked around for someone to deal with her, but everyone else seemed to be occupied. Keeping his grasp on her arm, he began to hurry her back into the theatre, in through the open door again. Rather to his surprise, she made no objection. “Do you have a key to the bar?” he asked as they stepped inside. “To get yourself a brandy or something?”
She sank onto one of the plastic chairs. “Please. Don’t bother about me. I’ll get myself a hot coffee or something. You go back to your duties, I’ll stay inside. Don’t worry, I’ve no wish to be there when they ... when ...”
“You’ll be all right?”
She nodded slowly, as if with a great effort. “You’re very kind.”
Although by no means satisfied, he was obliged to accept her word. However much he pitied her, he had more important things to occupy himself with than hysterical or distressed females. He nodded doubtfully and went back towards the landing stage, where he was met by Kite, walking towards him like a man who doesn’t believe what he’s just seen.
“What’ve they found this time?”
“I think you’d better come and take a look, sir.”
The unusual formality as he spoke, the stiff, frozen look on his normally mobile features made Mayo follow him immediately, without comment.
The divers, sleek as seals in their dripping wet-suits, were back on dry land, surrounded by a silent bevy of uniformed and plain-clothes men. What they had found had been brought to the surface and now lay on the ground.
This second body had been anchored down by the heavy gas bottle, all right. But there was no question of suicide. Rather than embracing the cylinder from the front as a man might do to tie himself to it, the body had its back to it, wrists and ankles pulled to the back and securely knotted together behind with a rope which had then been cut short. Another ligatur
e was around his waist, similarly tied. There was a nasty wound on his head.
And the body wasn’t that of Ashleigh Cockayne.
It had been in the water for over a week now and would hardly have been recognisable but for the thick mop of fair curly hair, now dark with water.
Never again would P.C. Andrew Mitchell be ribbed as a budding Einstein.
“The heat’s on,” said Superintendent Howard Cherry, winding up. “I want him found, the bugger who’s done this. Whatever the reason.”
The grim silence of his colleagues, foregathered in his office, told the superintendent his outrage had an echo in every heart, though nobody liked the implications of that “whatever.” He’d be found, all right. Found, and duffed up if some of Mitch’s mates had their way. They wouldn’t be allowed to, of course, that sort of thing never happened, did it? No senior officer would ever turn a blind eye to that sort of thing, would they? Of course not. But Cockayne would wish he’d never been born.
Cockayne? Mayo thought, all his macho instincts to the fore. An actor. A bloody actor, with big soft eyes and a lock of hair that fell over his forehead. To bash Mitch over the head with a blow that had killed him, then heave him into the river, lashed to a heavy gas cylinder? Not to mention blowing Rupert Fleming’s head off. He must have gone berserk.
“But what did Mitch think he was doing, for God’s sake?” Cherry went on. “He wasn’t C.I.D. – and even if he had been, he’d no business ... it was totally out with his responsibilities.”
Cherry was shrewd and capable and generally well respected, but he was a man ordained by nature to order and obedience, conditioned by training and advancement to cleave to establishment procedures, suits and haircuts. He ran a tight ship and it offended his strong sense of propriety that one of their number should have stepped out of line. So far out as to go and get himself killed, by being hit on the head with something sharp and heavy, before being thrown into the river, the doctors had said. He didn’t like that at all.
“He was a good lad.” This was Reader, a sober man who was Mayo’s opposite number in the uniformed branch. “Enthusiastic. But a bit impulsive. Had to tear him off a strip more than once for going off at half cock.”
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