by Simon Brett
Detective-Sergeant McWhirter went through into Miss Menzies’ anteroom. ‘All sorted out now?’ she asked brightly.
‘Yes, thank you, Miss Menzies.’
‘Hmm. We’ve seen quite a lot of you lately.’
‘Yes,’ said the Detective-Sergeant casually, unprepared for what happened next.
Miss Menzies suddenly stood up, looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘Do you know it’s a very serious offence to impersonate a police officer?’
‘Yes,’ said Detective-Sergeant McWhirter slowly, waiting to see what came next.
‘I rang up Scotland Yard to tell you something this morning, and they’d never heard of you.’
‘Ah.’
‘And from the start I thought your accent was a bit phoney. I know a lot of people who come from Glasgow.’
‘Yes.’ There was a pause. Then Charles continued, still in his discredited Glaswegian. ‘Well, what was it you rang up the Yard to tell me?’
Joanne Menzies looked at him coolly. ‘You’ve got a nerve. But I think you’re probably doing something I’d sympathise with, so I’ll tell you. I checked with Morrison, the chauffeur at Orme Gardens, and he was suspicious that the Datsun may have been used on the Saturday night.’
‘Yes, I know. I’ve just got that from Mr Nigel Steen.’
‘Ah.’ She sounded disappointed that her information was redundant. ‘You’re suspicious of him too, aren’t you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘No maybe,’ she said, ‘you are. Incidentally, “Detective Sergeant”, what’s your real name?’
‘Charles Paris.’
‘Ah.’ Her eyes widened and she nodded slowly. ‘Very good.’ It was a warming compliment, from someone who knew about the theatre. ‘Well, Charles, if there’s anything else I can tell you, or I can find out for you, let me know.’
‘Thanks.’ As he was leaving, he turned and looked at her. ‘You hate Nigel Steen, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said simply.
Christmas intervened and the business of investigation was suspended. Charles told Jacqui the new information he’d gleaned, but met with little luck in following it up. When he rang Joanne to check Nigel’s movements in the week before Steen’s death, a strange female voice answered and informed him that Miss Menzies had already gone up to Scotland for her Christmas holidays. Gerald Venables was getting a very slow response from Cohn, Jarvis, Cohn and Stickley on the matter of the new will, and also seemed preoccupied with family arrangements and Christmas drink parties. His enthusiasm for the cloak-and-dagger business of detection seemed to have waned.
Charles felt his own sense of urgency ebbing too. Though he got excited at each new development in his investigations, he soon became disillusioned again. And Joanne’s seeing through his disguise made him a bit wary. He had no particular desire to break the law. Detection was a serious business, and perhaps he should leave it alone. The days of the gifted amateur investigator were over. It was better to leave everything to the police, who with superior training and equipment must stand a greater chance of uncovering crime.
And each time Charles looked at his progress it seemed more negative. Though he had enjoyed his little investigations and masquerades, his only real discovery was that Nigel Steen had tried to disguise the fact of driving down to Streatley on the night of Saturday 8th December. And though the visit could have given him an opportunity to kill his father, and then drive down the next day to discover the body, that was the one crime which every logical motive screamed against. By killing Marius then, Nigel would have been sacrificing a great deal of money. Duties at 80 per cent on an estate of a million, only reduced by 30 per cent, because of the donor’s death before the end of the sixth year (to borrow Gerald Venables’ terminology) would mean that Nigel would be paying more than half a million in estate duty. Whereas if he only waited till the seven years were up, all the given property would be his without any tax. It’s a rare character who commits murder in order to lose half a million pounds.
And the only other fact, hanging around in the background, was Bill Sweet’s death, which, by some fairly dubious reasoning and some circumstantial evidence, could be laid at Marius Steen’s door. But Marius Steen was dead. Why bother him now?
The Montrose was open over Christmas and so, along with a lot of other divorced and debauched actors, Charles Paris spent a week sublimely pissed.
He was feeling distinctly drink-sodden when the phone rang on the morning of the 3rd of January, 1974. He wanted to be picked up and wrung out like a floor cloth to get the stuff out of his system. He lay in bed, hoping the phone would go away or someone would answer it. But the Swedish girls were still in Sweden for the holidays and he was alone in the house. The phone went on ringing.
He stumped savagely downstairs and picked up the receiver. ‘Hello.’ His voice came out as a croak.
‘It’s Jacqui.’ Her voice was excited again, bubbling. ‘Charles, I’ve been to the police.’
‘What?’
‘About Nigel. I went to Scotland Yard this morning and saw an Inspector and told him all about our suspicions, and about how we knew Nigel had been down at Streatley that Saturday-’
‘I hope you didn’t tell him how we found out.’
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t mention you at all.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Anyway, the Inspector said it all sounded very suspicious and he’s going to authorise an aupopsy-’
‘Autopsy.’
‘Yes. Anyway, he’s getting an order to have Marius exhumed and check the cause of death. He took everything I said very seriously.’ The last sentence was pronounced with pride. There was a pause; she was waiting for him to react. ‘Well, what do you think, Charles?’
‘I don’t know. In a way, I think it’s asking for trouble…’
‘Oh, Charles, we’ve got to know whether or not Marius was murdered.’
‘Have we? It’s all sorted out. The baby’s being looked after …’
‘Charles, do you mean that?’
‘No.’
‘We’ve got to know.’
‘Yes. When’s the exhumation to be?’
‘Quite soon. Probably next Monday.’
‘And when will the results be known?’
‘End of next week. There should be an inquest on Friday.’
‘You realise that, by doing this, you have virtually made a public accusation of murder against Nigel?’
‘Yes. And that is exactly what I meant to do.’
Ten days passed. In America, with the tide of Watergate rising around him, President Nixon celebrated his sixty-first birthday. In England wild storms swept the country, and commuters were infuriated and inconvenienced by the ASLEF dispute. Housewives started panic buying of toilet rolls. And in a churchyard in Goring, the body of Marius Steen was moved from its grave after a stay of only four short weeks. Then it was opened up and samples of its organs were taken and analysed.
All of these events, international and domestic, seemed unreal to Charles. Since sobering up after Christmas he had degenerated into a deep depression. Inactivity and introspection left him lethargic and uninterested in anything. His usual solutions to the problem-drink and sex-were ineffectual. He drank heavily, but it gave him no elation, merely intensified his mood. And his self-despite was so strong that he knew reviving an old flame or chasing some young actress would only aggravate it. He tried to write, but couldn’t concentrate. Instead he sat in his room, his mind detached, looking down on his body and despising what it saw. Forty-seven years old, creatively and emotionally sterile. He thought of going to see Frances, but didn’t feel worthy of her warmth and eternal forgiveness. She had sent him four stout dependable Marks and Spencer shirts for Christmas, nursing him like a mother who respects her child’s independence. He’d sent her Iris Murdoch’s latest novel. In hardback, which he knew she’d think an unnecessary extravagance.
His only comfort was that the following Monday he was to
start filming The Zombie Walks. Though he didn’t view the prospect with any sort of enthusiasm (he’d been sent a script, but hadn’t bothered to read it) he knew that activity of some sort, something he had to do, was always better than nothing. Eventually, if enough kept happening, the mood would lift without his noticing its departure and he would hardly remember the self-destructive self that went with it.
But as he walked through the dim streets of London to Archer Street on the Friday evening, the mood was still with him. He felt remote, viewing himself as a third person. And he had a sense of gloom about the findings of the inquest.
When Jacqui opened the door of her flat, he knew from her face that his forebodings had been justified. She was silent until he’d sat down. Then she handed him a glass of Southern Comfort and said, ‘Well that’s that.’
‘What?’
‘According to the coroner, Marius died of natural causes.’
‘A heart attack?’
‘They had some fancy medical term for it, but yes, that’s what they said.’
‘Well.’ Charles sighed. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Jacqui looked on the verge of tears, and, as usual, converted her emotion into a violent outburst. ‘Little Arsehole’s been clever, the sod. He must have given Marius an electric shock, or injected air into his veins, or-’
‘Jacqui, you’ve been watching too much television. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen. I’m afraid we have to accept the fact that Marius did die from natural causes, and that all our suspicions of Nigel have been slander, just based on dislike and nothing else.’
‘No, I don’t believe it.’
‘Jacqui, you’ve got to believe it. There’s nothing else you can do.’
‘Well, why did he go down to Streatley on the Saturday night, and make such a bloody secret of it?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps for the reasons he said. He was worried about his father, so he went down, they had a few drinks, then he came back to London.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, that won’t wash.’
‘Why not?’
‘He and Marius didn’t get on at the time. We know that from the new will and the letter to me and-’
‘Perhaps they had another reconciliation.’
‘Piss off, Charles. There’s something fishy and Nigel’s behind it. Marius was murdered.’
‘Jacqui, the most sophisticated forensic tests have proved that he wasn’t.’
‘Well, they’re wrong. They’re all bloody wrong. Nigel paid them off. He bribed them.’
‘Now you’re getting childish.’
‘I am not getting bloody childish! ‘Jacqui stood up and looked as if she was about to hit him. Charles didn’t respond and after a frozen pause, she collapsed into a chair and burst out crying. When he had calmed her, she announced very coolly. ‘I’m not going to stop, Charles. I’ll get him. From now on there’s a war between Nigel and me.’
‘Well, you certainly nailed your colours to the mast by setting up the post-mortem.’
‘Yes. And I’m going to win.’ Thereafter she didn’t mention anything about either of the Steens for the rest of the evening. She cooked another of her frozen meals (country rissoles) and Charles drank moderately (a rather vinegary Spanish Rioja). Then they watched the television. She had just bought (in anticipation of her legacy) a new Sony portable (‘I’ll be sitting about a lot when I get very big’). There wasn’t much on the box, but that night it was preferable to conversation. At ten-thirty, by Government orders, came the close-down. Charles rose and after a few mumbled words about thanks, and keeping in touch, and being cheerful, and seeing himself out, he left.
Jacqui’s flat was on the top floor and the bulb in the light on her landing had long since gone and not been replaced. As Charles moved forward to the familiar step, he felt his ankle caught, and his body, overbalancing, hurtled forward down the flight of stairs.
The noise brought Jacqui to the door and light spilled out over the scene. ‘Charles, are you all right? Are you drunk, or what?’
He slowly picked himself up. The flight was only about ten steps down to the next landing, and though he felt bruised all over, and shocked, nothing seemed to be broken. ‘No, I’m not drunk. Look.’
And he pointed up to the top step. Muzzily outlined in the light was a wire, tied tightly between the banisters on either side. It was about four inches above the step. Jacqui turned pale, and let out a little gasp of horror. ‘Good God. Were they trying to kill me?’
‘No!’ said Charles, as he leant, aching, against the wall at the foot of the flight. Suddenly he realised the flaw in the will Marius Steen had so hastily improvised in the South of France. ‘I don’t think it was you they wanted to kill. Just your baby.’
XIV
Slapstick Scene
The zombie walks was one of the worst film scripts ever conceived. The Zombie (played by a well-known Horror Film Specialist) had walked for a thousand years in a subterranean cavern which was broken open by an earthquake in Lisbon. By means not specified, from Portugal he arrived in Victorian England, where he got the idea that Lady Laetitia Winthrop (played by a ‘discovery’ from the world of modelling, whose acting talent was 36-23-36) was his long-lost love from a world before the subterranean cavern. He therefore determined to seize her from Winthrop Grange where she lived with her father Lord Archibald Winthrop (played by a well-known character actor who did commercials for tea-bags). After the Zombie’s travels through Victorian London (where, incidentally, he committed the crimes attributed to Jack the Ripper) he arrived at the Grange and enlisted the help of Tick, a deformed coachman of evil character (played by Charles Paris). As the Zombie progressed, he committed murder after murder, and his victims, rather than dying and lying down, became zombies too, until at the end Winthrop Grange was besieged by a whole army of the walking dead. Had it not been for the activities of Lady Laetitia’s lover, bold Sir Rupert Cartland (played by an odious young actor who’d risen to prominence by playing a tough naval lieutenant in a television series) making with the garlic and the wooden stakes (a bit of vampire lore crept into the script), Lady Laetitia and her father would have been turned into zombies and carried back to the subterranean cave, where they would never be heard of again. Which, to Charles’ mind, wouldn’t have been a bad thing.
They were filming at Bloomwater, a stately home in Berkshire which had been built by Sir Henry Manceville, an eccentric nobleman, in 1780. Manceville had designed it himself as a great Gothic palace and even incorporated the specially-built ruins of an abbey into one wing. It was a monumental folly, which could have been made for horror films. In fact, had the cinema been invented at the time, it probably would have been. Sir Henry Manceville had been obsessed with ghosts and, in later life, when his eccentricity slid into madness, he used to terrify his servants by walking the Long Gallery, dressed in a sheet, dragging a length of chain and wailing piteously.
Bloomwater’s present owner was a more prosaic figure, Sir Lionel Newman, the paper magnate. He was a man who, like Marius Steen, had risen from humble origins to immense wealth and had surrounded himself with all the symbols of the established aristocracy. His association with Marius Steen had been the reason why Bloomwater was being used for the filming.
Charles found that, as ever, making a film involved much more hanging around than actual work. The director, a little Cockney who glorified in the name of Jean-Luc Roussel, generated an impression of enormous activity as he buzzed around checking camera angles, getting the lighting changed, demonstrating the special effects and bawling out the continuity girl. But very little actually seemed to get done.
Charles didn’t find many sympathetic characters among the cast. The Horror Film Specialist was surrounded by an admiring coterie of lesser horror film specialists and most of their conversation referred back to previous triumphs. (‘Do you remember that Dracula when your fang got stuck in the girl’s bra?’; or ‘I’ll never forget that girl who had hysterics during that human sacri
fice’; or ‘Do you remember that take as the Werewolf when you forgot your line and said “Bow-Wow”?’) They all sat around, reminding each other of things they all remembered, each waiting his cue for the next reminiscence to be slotted in.
So Charles went off on his own most of the time. He sat in the Library (later to be the scene of the appallingly-written quarrel between Lord Archibald and Sir Rupert) and did the crossword or played patience.
On the Wednesday morning of the first week of the schedule he was sitting with the cards spread before him and feeling fairly secure. The film world still has an outdated generosity in its dealings with actors. The big-spending Hollywood myth retains its influence and the Zombie cast were well looked after by Steenway Productions, with cars organised to get them to and from the set. The early starts were a disadvantage, but Charles had minimised that by staying with Miles and Juliet and having the car pick him up at six. Then he could sleep through the drive and the laborious business of make-up. Quite cosy. And the money was good.
He also felt as secure as he could about Jacqui. The shock of the trip-wire incident had worn off and she was fairly well hidden. He’d wanted to send her off to some relative in the country, but she didn’t seem to have any family. In fact, when they went into it, it was amazing how few people Jacqui had to call on. No family, or at least none she kept in touch with, no girl-friends. The centre of her life had always been men, either one at a time or many. A lot of girls end up promiscuous, when all they’re looking for is friendship. Jacqui’s lack of other resources explained both her desolation when Steen seemed to have dropped her and her reliance on Charles. (Even her leaping into bed with him again. She needed to keep up her continuity of male companionship, and humbly thought she had nothing to offer but sex.)
Charles had considered parking her on Frances in Muswell Hill, but the incongruity of the thought of the two women together was too great. So in the end he had given her his keys to the room in Hereford Road. He felt fairly confident that Nigel Steen, or whoever was mounting the campaign against her, did not know of any tie-up with Charles Paris. Hereford Road was dangerously near Orme Gardens, but it was only a short-term solution while the film lasted. Jacqui was likely to stay in most of the time with her portable television; her pregnancy made her quite content to do so. Obviously she’d have to go out to the shops from time to time, but she’d had her hair dyed black on the Saturday, bought a new winter coat and a large pair of dark glasses. That should keep her safe. Charles could imagine Jacqui quite happy in her enforced confinement. Hers was not a demanding character, and so long as she felt some evidence of a man’s care (which living in Charles’ room would give her) she would not need more. When the Zombie had finished his walk, a more permanent method of protecting her for the next four months would have to be found.