Star Trap

by Simon Brett

  ‘And that’s why he always has his call at ten-thirty?’

  ‘Exactly. The hour between nine and ten is our session.’

  ‘I see. And so you travel round wherever he goes?’

  ‘He doesn’t leave London much. Under normal circumstances he comes to me. This tour is exceptional.’

  ‘And what happens to your other patients or subjects or whatever they’re called?’

  ‘It was only the week in Leeds when I had to he away. I commuted to Bristol and Brighton. Mr Milton is a wealthy man.’

  ‘I see.’ Money could buy anything. Even a portable psychiatrist. ‘Needless to say, the fact that Mr Milton is undergoing treatment is a closely-guarded secret. He believes that if it got out it would ruin his career. I’ve argued with him on this point, because I feel this need for secrecy doubles the pressure on him. But at the moment he doesn’t see it that way and is desperately afraid of anyone knowing. I only tell you because of the outrageousness of your accusations, which suggest that you have completely – and I may say – dangerously misinterpreted the situation.’

  ‘I see.’ Charles let the information sink in. It made sense. It explained many things. Not only the late morning calls, but also the obsessive privacy which surrounded the star. Even little things like Christopher Milton’s non-drinking and unwillingness to eat cheese would be explained if he were on some form of tranquillisers as part of his treatment.

  ‘I take it, Mr Paris, from what you said, that you overheard part of our session this morning and leapt to a grotesquely wrong conclusion?’

  ‘Yes. I may as well put my cards on the table. I was brought into the show by the management to investigate this sabotage business.’

  ‘If that’s the case then I apologise for suggesting that you were responsible for the trouble. It seems that both of us have been victims of delusions. But, Mr Paris, why did your investigations lead you to eavesdrop on our session this morning?’

  ‘The fact is, Mr Martin, that my investigations so far have led me to the unfortunate conclusion that Christopher Milton is himself responsible, either directly or indirectly, for all of these incidents.’

  The psychotherapist did not reject the suggestion out of hand. ‘I can understand what you mean – that all of the . . . accidents have in fact benefited him, that they disposed of people he wanted out of the way.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Yes. The same thought had crossed my mind.’ He spoke the words sadly.

  ‘You know his mental condition better than anyone. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Having heard the violence of what he said about me this morning.’

  ‘Yes, but that is a feature of the analysis situation. You mustn’t take it literally. The idea of analysis is – in part – that he should purge his emotions. He says the most extreme things, but I don’t think they should be taken as expressions of actual intent.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, at the time of his first breakdown he attacked people with a knife.’

  ‘I see you’ve done your homework, Mr Paris. Yes, there is violence in him. He’s obsessed by his career and he is slightly paranoid about it. He does turn against anyone who seems to threaten him in even the tiniest way. I mean, I gather that the crime which provoked this morning’s outburst was your falling over and getting a laugh during one of his songs.’

  ‘An accident.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure, but he’s not very logical about that sort of thing.’

  ‘But he has expressed antagonism to most of the other people who’ve been hurt.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. And a strange bewildered relief after they’ve disappeared from the scene. I suppose it is just possible that he could have done the crimes. You say you have evidence?’

  ‘Some. Nothing absolutely conclusive, but it seems to point towards him.’

  ‘Hmm. I hope you’re wrong. It would be tragic if it were true.’

  ‘Tragic because it would ruin his career?’

  ‘No, tragic because it would mean the ruin of a human being.’

  ‘But you do think it’s possible?’

  ‘Mr Paris, I think it’s extremely unlikely. Behaviour of that sort would be totally inconsistent with what I know of him from the past and with all that I have ever encountered in other cases. But I suppose, if you force me to say yea or nay, it is just possible.’

  Charles Paris looked at his watch. It was a quarter to one. In two and a quarter hours Christopher Milton had a meeting arranged on the stage of Queen’s Theatre, Brighton, with the girl who had stolen the show from him the night before.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THERE IS no stillness like the stillness of an empty theatre. As Charles stepped on to the stage, he could almost touch the silence. And the fact that the building wasn’t completely empty seemed to intensify the loneliness. Somewhere behind the circle people were busy in the general manager’s office. In a distant workshop someone was using an electric drill. Traffic noise was filtered and reduced by the ventilation system. But onstage there was a deep pool of silence.

  Len the stage doorman had not been in his little room, though he had left his radio on and was presumably somewhere around in the silent building. But he didn’t see Charles enter.

  It was ten to three. The stage had been preset for the evening performance after the morning’s rehearsal. One light in the prompt corner alleviated the gloom. Charles stood behind a flat down right in a position from which he could see the entire stage. He looked up to the fly gallery. If sabotage were planned, the easiest way would be to drop a piece of scenery or a bar loaded with lights from above. But the shadows closed over and it was impossible to distinguish anything in the gloom.

  The old theatre had an almost human identity. The darkness was heavy with history, strange scenes both on- and offstage that those walls had witnessed. Charles would not have been surprised to see a ghost walk, a flamboyant Victorian actor stride across the stage and boom out lines of mannered blank verse. He had in his bed-sitter a souvenir photograph of Sir Herbert Tree as Macbeth from a 1911 Playgoer and Society Illustrated, which showed the great actor posed in dramatic chain mail, long wig and moustache beneath a winged helmet, fierce wide eyes burning. If that apparition had walked onstage at that moment, it would have seemed completely natural and right.

  There was a footfall from the far corner near the pass door. Charles peered into the shadows, trying to prise them apart and see who was approaching. Agonisingly slowly the gloom revealed Lizzie Dark. She came to the centre of the stage, looked around and then sat on a rostrum, one leg over the other swinging nervously. She looked flushed and expectant, but a little frightened.

  She hummed one of the tunes from the show, in fact the song with which Christopher Milton had promised to help her. It was five past three, but there was no sign of her mentor.

  As Charles watched, she stiffened and looked off into the shadows of the opposite wings. She must have heard something. He strained his ears and heard a slight creak. Wood or rope taking strain maybe.

  Lizzie apparently dismissed it as one of the unexplained sounds of the old building and looked round front again. Then she rose from her seat and started to move gently round the stage in the steps of the dance which accompanied the song she was humming. It was not a flamboyant performance, just a slow reminder of the steps, the physical counterpart to repeating lines in one’s head.

  Charles heard another creak and slight knocking of two pieces of wood from the far wings, but Lizzie was too absorbed in her memorising to notice. The creaks continued, almost in rhythm, as if something were being unwound. Lizzie Dark danced on.

  Charles looked anxiously across into the wings, but he could see nothing. His eye was caught by a slight movement of a curtain up above, but it was not repeated. Just a breeze.

  The noise, if noise there was, had come from the wi
ngs. He peered across at the large flat opposite him and wished for X-ray eyes to see behind it. There was another, more definite movement from above.

  He took in what was happening very slowly. He saw the massive scaffolding bar with its load of lights clear the curtains and come into view. It hung suspended for a moment as if taking aim at the oblivious dancing girl and then started its descent.

  With realisation, Charles shouted, ‘Lizzie!’

  She froze and turned towards him, exactly beneath the descending bar.

  ‘Lizzie! The lights!’

  Like a slow-motion film she looked up at the massive threatening shape. Charles leapt forward to grab her. But as he ran across the stage, his feet were suddenly jerked away from him. His last thought was of the inadvisability of taking laughs from Christopher Milton, as the Star Trap gave way and plummeted him down to the cellar.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE FIRST THING he was conscious of was pain, pain as if his body had been put in a bag of stones and shaken up with them. And, rising above all the others, a high, screaming pain of red-hot needles in his right ankle.

  He lay like an abandoned sack at the bottom of the Star Trap shaft. It was even darker in the cellar. He didn’t know whether or not he had passed out, but time, like everything else, seemed disjointed. He remembered crying out to Lizzie, then crying out as he fell and then he remembered being there swimming in pain. There was an interval between, but whether of seconds or hours he didn’t know.

  He was aware of some sort of commotion, but he couldn’t say exactly where. Onstage maybe, or in the auditorium. A door to the cellar opened and light flooded in.

  Len was the first to arrive. The old doorman came towards him nervously, as if afraid of what he would see. ‘It’s all right. I’m alive,’ Charles said helpfully, hoping he was speaking the truth.

  ‘Who is it? Mr Paris?’

  ‘That’s right. Is Lizzie all right?’

  ‘Lizzie?’

  ‘Lizzie Dark. Onstage. There was a bar of lights that –’

  ‘It missed her. She’s all right.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Can you move?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to make the experiment.’

  Other people came down to the cellar. Lizzie. She looked pale and on the verge of hysterics. Some of the staff from the general manager’s office who had heard the commotion arrived. So did Dickie Peck. Spike and a couple of his stage crew came from the workshop. Charles lay there in a daze of pain. He knew that he had been the victim of another of Christopher Milton’s insane jealousies, but there seemed nothing to say and talking was too much effort.

  They carried him upstairs. Spike and another of his men took an arm each. As the shock of the various pains subsided, it was the ankle that hurt most. It was agony when it dragged on the ground, so they lifted him up to sit on their joined hands. It still hurt like hell.

  Since the dressing-rooms were up more stairs they took him into Len’s little room by the stage door. There was a dilapidated sofa on which he was laid. The general manager’s staff went back to phone for an ambulance. Len went off to make some tea, which was his remedy for most conditions. Dickie Peck and Lizzie Dark vanished somewhere along the way. Spike stayed and felt Charles’ bones expertly. ‘Used to do a bit of first aid.’ His diagnosis was hopeful for everything except the ankle. Charles wouldn’t let him get near enough to manipulate it, but Spike insisted on removing his shoe. Charles nearly passed out with pain.

  ‘Spike,’ he said, when he was sufficiently recovered to speak again. ‘That Star Trap, it must have been tampered with.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The locking bar was right out of position.’

  ‘Yes, and someone had scored through the leather hinges with a razor blade. It was a booby-trap, meant for anyone who stepped on it.’

  ‘I think it was meant specifically for one person.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Never mind. You’ll all know soon enough.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Well, this sabotage to the show can’t go on, can it?’

  ‘You think it’s a connected sequence of sabotage?’

  ‘Sure of it. And after today I think a police investigation can be started. It’s sad.’

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘Sad because we’re dealing with a madman.’

  ‘Ah.’

  There was no point in hiding the facts now. It would all come out soon. ‘Christopher Milton. A good example of the penalties of stardom!’

  ‘So it was him all along. I wondered.’ There was suppressed excitement in Spike’s voice as if at the confirmation of a long-held suspicion.

  ‘Yes.’

  A pause ensued and in the silence they both became aware of Len’s radio, which was still on. ‘. . . so all I can say in answer to that question is – I beg yours?’

  It was Christopher Milton’s voice. An American female voice came back, ‘Well, on that note, thank you very much, Christopher Milton.’

  A hearty male voice took it up. ‘Well, there it was – an exclusive for us here in the studio on Radio Brighton – for the past half hour you’ve been listening to Christopher Milton live. And just a reminder that Lumpkin! is at the Queen’s Theatre until tomorrow and it opens in the West End at the King’s Theatre on November 27th. And incidentally the interviewer with Christopher Milton was Suzanne Horse.’

  ‘Horst,’ said Suzanne’s voice insistently.

  Spike went to turn off the radio. Too quickly. He turned back defensively to Charles. The light caught him from behind and only the shape of his face showed. The blurring marks of acne were erased and the outline of his features appeared as they must have done when he was a boy.

  Charles recognised him instantly and like the tumblers of a combination lock all the details of the case fell into place and the door swung open. ‘Gareth Warden,’ he said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gareth, if Christopher Milton has just been in the studio at Radio Brighton, he couldn’t have been here tampering with the Star Trap.’

  ‘He could have done it earlier and left it as a booby-trap.’

  ‘And released the bar of lights to fall on Lizzie Dark?’

  There was a silence. Spike, or Gareth Warden, seemed to be summoning up arguments to answer this irrefutable logic. The ambulance arrived before he had mustered any.

  Len fussed around as Charles was loaded on to a stretcher and taken to the ambulance. The doors were about to close when Charles heard Spike’s voice say, ‘I think I’ll come with him.’

  The realisation of the true identity of the criminal he had been seeking seeped slowly into Charles’ mind. Strangely he didn’t feel afraid to have the man beside him in the ambulance.

  They travelled in silence for some minutes. Then Charles asked softly. Why did you do it all?’

  Spike’s voice had lost its hard professional edge and now showed more signs of Ellen da Costa’s painstaking elocution lessons. ‘To show him up. To let people see what he was really like.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I just realised his ambitions. All he ever wanted to do was to get his own way and destroy anyone who challenged him. He was always totally selfish. And yet the public loved him. Look at the Press, everywhere – it always says ‘lovable’ Christopher Milton. I just wanted to show the public what a shit their idol really was. All I did was to put into action what he was thinking. It was wish-fulfilment for him. Everyone who got in his way just vanished. That’s what he wanted.’

  ‘But he never actually hurt anyone.’

  ‘But he wanted to, don’t you see? He was never lovable, just evil.’

  ‘And you hoped to bring public disgrace on him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But how? You must have realised that sooner or later you were going to make a mistake, commit some crime at a time when he had an alibi. Like this afternoon, for instance. He’d never have been convicted.’

&
nbsp; ‘He didn’t need to be convicted. The disgrace of the allegation would have been enough. Reports of the investigation would have brought up all the rows at rehearsals and showed the kind of person he really was.’

  ‘But what made you think that there would be an investigation? The management have done everything to keep the whole affair quiet.’

  ‘Au, but they put you in the cast.’

  ‘You knew I was there to investigate?’

  ‘I was suspicious early on and when I saw you with Winifred Tuke’s gin bottle, I was certain. That’s why I fed you so much information, why I planted the clues for you in his car, why I told you to ask Julian Paddon about him.’

  ‘I see.’ Charles’ detective achievements were suddenly less remarkable. Why did you hate him so much?’

  ‘I’ve known him a long times He’s always been like this.’

  ‘No, there’s more to it than that. Has it anything to do with Prudence Carr?’

  Spike/Gareth flinched at the name. ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Just that you were all three at stage school together, that she was very beautiful and talented, that nothing has been heard of her for some time, that you and he were both maybe in love with her.’

  ‘I was in love with her. He was never in love with anyone but himself. His marriage broke up, didn’t it?’

  ‘But he wasn’t married to Prudence,’ Charles probed gently.

  ‘No, he wasn’t. He didn’t marry her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He just took up with her, he unsettled her. He . . . I don’t know . . . changed her.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He destroyed her confidence. He crushed her with his ego. She could have been . . . so good, such a big star, and he just undermined her. She never stood a chance of making it after she met him.’

  ‘A lot of people don’t make it in the theatre for a lot of reasons.’

  ‘No, it was him. He destroyed her. Because he knew she was better and more talented than he was. She stood in his way.’ His words were repeated in the monotone of obsession.