I should explain. I am Alec Soames, a mere actor; Clive MacIver is—sorry, was—a television personality, an arts presenter, a regular participant in those programmes which review the week’s cultural highlights. He projected a personality of amused contempt, knowledgeable, not to say knowing, but detached. This appealed greatly to the British public, an essentially Philistine lot, which prefers expertise to enthusiasm. His languid voice had a slight Scottish accent which prevented him from appearing too snobbishly superior. I learned to do the voice very well, and amused my friends with a pastiche of his style:
‘I don’t understand why the English can’t play Brecht. What is Mother Courage after all but a lower class Lady Bracknell?’ And so on.
Well, I can’t do all that now because he is dead. Murdered in fact.
It all happened on a slightly sultry June night in London. At the time I was appearing at Wyndhams Theatre in a revival of The Clandestine Marriage, the eighteenth century comedy by Garrick and Colman. I was playing the not very large part of Traverse, a lawyer who appears at the start of the third act and then again in the last scene. It was a pleasant enough job, but I was not as busy as I would have liked or deserved to be. The production had received lukewarm reviews and was coming to the end of its shortish run.
The known facts about MacIver’s death, as far as I could gather from the newspapers, were these. On the night in question he was heard and seen leaving his flat in Ebury Street a little after seven. His movements after that were uncertain until he turned up at Harpo’s, a fashionable club in Dean Street, Soho at 9.05. He had some conversation with the barman, but seemed restless, had one drink and left. He must have gone straight back to his flat because at 9.40 the police received a frantic call from him on his mobile that he was being attacked in his home. When the police arrived they broke in to find him in his bedroom, stabbed. There were obvious signs of a struggle, but the knife which killed him had disappeared, as had the mobile phone with which he warned the police.
The obituaries and tributes spoke fulsomely of MacIver’s intellectual and presentational gifts. He was ‘a true populist and yet a brilliant academic who maintained his scholarly integrity in bringing culture to the masses.’ At the same time I detected a certain lack of personal warmth in these eulogies. One colleague described him as ‘a lively and entertaining companion’, but that was as far as it went. I gathered that there was a wife and child from whom he had been living apart, but that there had been no-one in particular in his life when he died. A rather irregular sexual lifestyle was hinted at.
A week after MacIver’s murder the notice went up at the theatre: we were to close in a fortnight. I was not looking forward to being out of work. When I rang up my agent she told me that things were ‘very quiet just at the moment’. It is a phrase which her profession uses all too often. The life of a theatrical agent, it seems, compares favourably with that of a Trappist monk for quietness.
Then I had a bit of luck; and it was all thanks to Clive MacIver, I suppose. A day before the last night at Wyndhams, Betty, my agent, rang me up to say that she had something for me. There is a television programme called Criminal Records on the BBC which is about real life crimes and which claims to help the police by performing reconstructions of these events. They had been desperately searching for a MacIver look-alike to appear in a programme on his murder. Could I see Jean Box tomorrow morning? Jean Box was one of the most successful of the new independent television producers, and one of her shows was Criminal Records.
It was quite funny really. Jean Box could hardly contain her excitement that she had found someone who was not only a dead ringer for MacIver, but was also an established actor. At the same time, she had to be terribly solemn about it all. A respected colleague, a TV presenter no less, had been murdered. It was the most appalling tragedy. The programme, which was to be entirely devoted to MacIver, would, she hoped, not only help to catch his killer, but also be a tribute to him. I went along with this and said that anything I could do to help I would. I gave Jean Box a little taster of my impression of MacIver’s voice and she was in raptures. As soon as I was out of the building I rang Betty and told her that we had Jean Box by the short hairs and we were to ask for silly money. An offer came through, we rejected it and finally we settled for a very respectable sum indeed. Filming was to begin the following Monday evening.
The most interesting thing about the filming for me was meeting the police. Detective Inspector Bentley was in charge of the case, and on the Monday afternoon I met him for what he called a ‘briefing’ at the local police station. He showed me the murder room, introduced me to the other officers on the case, then ushered me into his office. I liked him immediately, and I think he liked me. He is one of what the newspapers are always calling ‘the new breed of policemen’, neat, efficient, thorough, with a nice line in dry humour. Like Jean Box, he was amazed by the resemblance.
‘This actually could be very useful,’ he said. I told him that I would like to know as much as possible about MacIver, so that I could get inside him, so to speak. He looked at me curiously for a moment, then nodded. It was a gesture of respect, the acknowledgement of one professional by another.
‘Our real problem is the missing two hours,’ he said. ‘Between his leaving Ebury Street at about 7.05 and his turning up at Harpo’s just after nine we have no record of where he was and what he was doing. He seems to have vanished into thin air. I gather that he made some loose arrangement to meet some friends in a restaurant at eight. Yet he misses them, but turns up at this club, has one drink and then goes straight back to his flat where he is attacked, apparently by someone he knows because there’s no sign of a break-in. If we can solve the mystery of those two hours, we’ve cracked it. That’s where you come in; you just might be able to jog someone’s memory.’ I said I’d be only too glad to help.
‘Those two hours are the main difficulty,’ said Bentley, ‘but it isn’t the only one. In a real murder case, as opposed to a fictional one, there are plenty of loose ends, but usually they don’t add up to anything; they’re just odd coincidences, but this one is different. I’m sure they all mean something but we can’t think what. You understand this is all background for you and goes no further?’ I nodded.
‘First thing: MacIver was seen leaving the flat wearing a light fawn overcoat, known to be his. Odd to be wearing it on a warm night. He has it on at Harpo’s too, then it disappears. We can’t find this overcoat anywhere in the flat. Has the attacker or attackers taken it? If so, why? Second: MacIver is found stabbed, lying across his bed. It was a warm night, as I said, but the bedroom central heating had been full on and so was the electric blanket on which he was lying. All that’s made it very difficult to establish the time of death.’
‘But surely you know the time of death? Some time between when he made the call on his mobile and when the police found him.’
‘Yes. But there’s this other odd thing, the mobile. There’s a telephone in the bedroom; why didn’t he use that?’
‘Easier to use if he had it in his hand and was trying to fend off his attacker.’
‘Possibly, but then his mobile was missing from the flat. We found it in the street not far from the flat the next morning. It had been thrown under a car, presumably by his attacker the night before.’
‘The attacker stole it, then realised it could incriminate him, so he got rid of it. Any fingerprints?’
‘None. Then there’s the oddest thing of all. MacIver lets in his assailant, so presumably he knows something about them. Then the attacker or attackers get nasty, so he flees the room and rings the police on the mobile from his bedroom. He gives his name, part of the address, says he is being attacked, but—crucially—he doesn’t reveal who’s assaulting him.’
‘Panic. Runs out of time. Just wants to warn his attacker off.’
‘Or attackers. Maybe. Anyway, food for thought. We’d better get to the location, as I believe you call it. I think they’re going to start with a shot of you leavin
g the flat.’
The rest of the evening was less interesting. I was dressed up in a replica of the famous fawn overcoat and filmed repeatedly from various angles leaving the Ebury Street flat and walking along the road.
The following morning was more interesting as we were shooting at Harpo’s and I had lines to say, and it was then that the full weirdness of my position hit me. It was particularly odd because the other people I was filming with were not actors but the actual people who were there on the night of MacIver’s death.
MacIver had entered the club, flashed his membership card nonchalantly at the receptionist and entered the bar. There he had ordered a large neat scotch and talked briefly to the barman. On seeing an acquaintance he had waved at him, drained his scotch, and left muttering to the barman that he ‘had to get back’, presumably to meet his killer.
It was while I was enacting all this that an event occurred which seems, especially in the light of what followed, rather uncanny. The barman and I had reconstructed what he considered to be a fairly accurate version of the conversation he had with MacIver the night he was killed. The first time we rehearsed the scene, I took the glass of scotch from the barman and happened, for some reason, to tap the rim of the glass twice with the fingernail of my left index finger. The barman looked at me in blank amazement.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘That’s a habit of his. He did that with his glass that night!’
Everyone was silent. Cold sweat ran down my back. For the first time, I am ashamed to say, I became fully aware of the horror of what had happened. Until that moment the job of impersonating MacIver had been nothing more to me than a bizarrely interesting assignment. Now I felt an obligation to the victim, and an inexplicable identification with him. After a pause the Director said: ‘Right, Alec. Keep it in.’ It was a pity they had not been recording that rehearsal. We did several fairly successful takes of my little scene with the barman, but none had the spontaneous electricity of our first run-through.
We broke at midday and I had nothing to do until that night when I was filmed going in and out of Harpo’s. Jean Box came up to me after we had wrapped to say that she was terribly pleased with what I had done that morning. She wanted to retain me to do various other scenes of me as MacIver which she and the director proposed to blend in cunningly with actual footage of the man, thus making the programme a uniquely seamless drama documentary. She was going to make this edition of Criminal Records a specially extended one. It could be remarkable, she said; it could win BAFTA awards. She didn’t say that it could catch MacIver’s killer, but I am sure she meant to.
The experiences of the day had disturbed me. My identification with the dead man had been more complete than I had wanted it to be, and though this had probably enhanced my performance, it left me emotionally battered. When I want to unwind I have found that walking soothes me as nothing else can. People are funny about walking about London late at night, but I like it and, if you avoid the pockets of poverty, you are safe. Those leafy streets of modest Victorian terraced houses are the ones I enjoy walking the most. Their inhabitants are neither very rich nor very poor, and, because they often fail to draw blinds or curtains at night, one can often catch a glimpse through their front windows of the lives they lead. They are all very different, all subtly imperfect, like me. They fill me with a sense of the richness of life, and the need to struggle and succeed in a way that neither the squalor of poverty nor the airless perfection of wealth can.
It was a long walk to Willesden Green where my flat is, but I was in the mood for it. The first part of my walk, from Soho, via Oxford Street and up the Edgware Road, I enjoyed. It was when I got into Kilburn and Queens Park, those areas I usually like best, that I began to feel uneasy. I suppose I could attribute it all to strain and exhaustion, but it was more than that. I have been exhausted before and not felt the same. At first it was no more than a vague sense of not being free. Usually these walks are liberating experiences which detach me from my own life and put me in touch with the lives of others. This time it was as if I was carrying myself with me, like a snail with its shell. I could not shake off my own environment as I usually could. However fast I walked something always kept pace with me.
By the time I was past Queens Park and into Brondesbury the feeling was no longer so vague, but had acquired some sensory manifestations. I thought I heard footsteps which were almost in step with mine, but they stopped a beat or two after me when I paused to listen to them. If I turned to look behind me there always seemed to be part of the street where the shadows seemed unnaturally thick. Imagination? It is possible, but if these things were its product, then a part of me was observing them with extraordinary coolness and rationality. I was not afraid, you see, only intensely annoyed that my walk had not done its usual healing trick.
When I finally reached my flat, I was so worn out that I simply undressed and got into bed before immediately falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
In the course of the next week I did some more filming. I also became increasingly aware of being followed, not only at night, but during the day too. I was happily released from the idea that it was my own aberrant brain playing tricks on me when I actually saw my stalker, a man wearing an overcoat. He was too quick for me to see him for long, but I did get quite a good look on two occasions when I happened to glance out of the window of my flat. It was dark and I saw only his shape, but it was more than a shadow. He was standing under a plane tree talking into a mobile phone. In my experience imaginary beings do not carry mobile phones.
On my last day of filming for Criminal Records I was at the BBC. They wanted some shots of MacIver at a planning meeting and walking on and off the set of a discussion programme. By this time my performance as MacIver had become alarmingly accurate, and I had the pleasure of giving Germaine Greer a nasty shock. She and MacIver had recently crossed swords over Sylvia Plath.
I was surprised to see that Detective Inspector Bentley had turned up for my final outing. I was glad to see him, because I needed to satisfy myself that it was not the police who were following me for some mysterious reason. Bentley seemed genuinely surprised to hear what I told him. He said vaguely that he would look into it, but it was obvious he didn’t believe me. He even asked me directly if I was quite sure it wasn’t my imagination.
When the programme came out a week later it was highly praised, and my performance was commended. My agent became excited by the prospect of offers pouring in, but I pointed out to her that there was a limited market for impersonators of dead media personalities. My stalker was becoming increasingly assiduous, and occasionally I had the impression that there was more than one of them. Once I rang up Bentley, but he was dismissive, almost rude.
Then one morning the bell of my flat rang. It was the police. They wanted to take me in for questioning about the murder of Clive MacIver.
They took me to the Belgravia police station where the murder room for MacIver had been set up and I was made to wait for something like four hours. At last I was shown into an interview room. There was Bentley and a sergeant. The sergeant seemed familiar to me: had he been one of my stalkers?
Bentley sat down opposite me and introduced his assistant as Detective Sergeant Weyman. They asked if I wanted a solicitor present, but I declined the offer, so there were the usual formalities connected with switching on the tape machines, then the interrogation began.
‘Mr Soames, why did you never tell us you had recently met MacIver?’
‘Have I?’
‘While you have been waiting here at the station we had your flat searched. We found this on your shelves. It’s inscribed.’ Bentley threw down a book onto the table. It was a copy of MacIver’s last work: Goya’s Dream: The Origins of Contemporary Culture, based on his television series of that name. The cover featured a reproduction of Goya’s etching: The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters.
I was not rattled. I said: ‘I hardly call a few seconds in a crowded book shop a meeting. I happene
d to be in Waterstones when he was signing, that’s all.’
‘More than a few seconds. Look at the inscription: “For Alec, ‘. . . ere Babylon was dust . . .’ Astonished good wishes, Clive MacIver.” “. . . ere Babylon was dust . . .” What does that mean?’
‘Some sort of quotation. I can’t remember the significance.’
‘Rather incurious of you, Mr Soames. Well, Sergeant Weyman tracked it down for me. The internet’s a marvellous source of information. Apparently it’s from Percy Shelley’s poem Prometheus Unbound:
“. . . ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition sole of men he saw.”
‘MacIver had seen his double in other words, and was remarking on it in a rather cryptic way in his inscription.’
‘Ah.’
‘A little more than just “Ah”, I think, don’t you? Did you talk at all with Mr MacIver?’
‘No. I told you. It was a brief encounter in a book shop. There were crowds waiting for his signature. There wasn’t time.’
‘He didn’t ask you to have a drink with him or anything at his flat?’
‘No. Why should he? What are you getting at?’
‘Mr Soames, I believe you murdered MacIver.’
I was half expecting something like this after all the bluster. As a result, I didn’t explode with indignation or do anything that innocent people are supposed to do. I remained terribly calm; I almost frightened myself with my own calmness. The only physical reaction to the shock was that the extremities of my fingers went cold.
‘How d’you make that out?’ I asked. ‘In the first place I was in the theatre on the night in question. Hundreds of people saw me.’
‘I enquired about your role in The Clandestine Marriage. Not a very big one, was it?’
‘Traverse the lawyer. It’s an important part. And I was understudying Melvil.’
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