‘He’s quite right about that,’ said Charlie. He had not meant to imply that he was wrong about much else, but the little wife – what was her name? – seemed to take it in that way. She leant forward.
‘He is a very good man, Reginald. You notice I call him by his big and proper name. So beautiful a name, so let others call him Reggie. In his work he has to be the big dictator, the man who takes all the important decisions. That is how it should be, otherwise chaos! But in his private life he is such a good person, so caring, so so-lic-i-tous about us. Because he loves little Ian so much. We think hard about the name, and we call him Ian so that I can think of him as Ion – a good Romanian name! He takes such good care of us, and is always so loving. Ian is so lucky, and so am I.’
‘I’m glad to hear—’
But Charlie was interrupted by the front door being thrown open. Reggie Friedman strode in, obviously blazing with anger, but keeping a strong control over it because he knew to let it loose on a policeman would be the height of unwisdom.
‘Oh – Inspector Peace. I was told you were coming to my home. It was quite unnecessary. We could have talked in the studio.’
‘Quite. Or at the police station,’ said Charlie. ‘That is usually the best place if you want to avoid interruptions. But I thought that my purposes could best be served by talking to you at home.’
‘Oh,’ said Reggie, nonplussed. Then he pulled himself together. ‘You’ve had tea, I see. Perhaps you would leave us, Livia?’
‘Of course.’ She got up. Charlie saw for the first time that one shoulder on her thin body was twisted, as if she had been slightly abnormal since birth, and had learnt to live with it, to conceal its severity from casual gaze. She nimbly packed up the tea things on the tray and, with a shy smile at Charlie, disappeared from the room.
‘I expect you’ll want to get down to this as quickly as possible,’ said Charlie.
‘Please. I have to get back to the studio.’
‘I apologise for inconveniencing you, and for not getting round to talking to you earlier. Naturally with three possible intended victims of the fire, and three corpses, two of them certainly, one of them possibly, murdered, our investigation is a complex one. Who was hated so much that the murderer could adopt such a horrific and wholesale method to kill him or her?’
‘And you’re going on to say that only Hamish Fawley fills the bill, aren’t you?’ There was always something of the smart alec about Reggie Friedman in conversation, even with a policeman.
‘Yes, I was. I can’t see Sylvia Cardew as anything other than unfortunate, a bit player who’s been unlucky enough to fall into a major role. Bet Garrett was more generally hated, but Hamish Fawley was almost universally hated, mostly because he went out of his way to be.’
‘And what about Vernon Watts?’
‘Also generally hated, but surely much less poisonous than Fawley, and put up with for so many years that it is difficult to see what motive there could be for getting rid of him now, so late in the day.’
‘So we’ll settle on Hamish. Universally hated, as you said.’
‘No, I said almost. So far as I can tell the exception was yourself.’
Reggie had seen this coming.
‘There are limitations on the person who leads a team,’ he said, with just a slight access of pomposity. ‘Which is what the cast of a soap opera is. You have to exercise restraint on what you say and do, for the sake of the show.’
‘And did you exercise such restraints with Vernon Watts?’
‘Yes… Oh well, not so many, perhaps. He was less poisonous as you said, and the last thing that he’d do was endanger his job on the programme. He’d push me so far, and I’d flash a danger signal, and he’d draw back.’
‘But Hamish would not?’
‘Hmmm…a difficult question. But not usually he wouldn’t. I could imagine him pulling out of the show without filming his dying scene. That would have been just like Hamish, but not like Vernon, who would have milked a death scene for all it was worth, just to satisfy his abnormally large ego.’
‘Why did you have Hamish back?’
Reggie sighed.
‘Haven’t we been over this? The cast had been sinking into a rut. It happens in all soaps. They all hated Hamish, and they snapped out of it to league up against him. By having him dying of TB I assured them that the torment wouldn’t last long.’
‘Right. Now let me put an alternative theory. Hamish had something on you, and was pressurising you to bring him back on the show.’
‘You can use the word blackmail if you wish, Inspector. I’m not a sensitive flower.’
‘Right. The opportunity for you to give in to the blackmail without arousing too much comment came with Vernon Watts’s death. Lots of vacant space where his sentimental friendship with the paper girl had been. So Hamish comes back. But you trick him, because he’s doomed to a short life which will end any later chances of jobs with the soap.’
‘I didn’t trick him. I can prove that to be untrue. I have correspondence with him in which I tell him clearly it’s a short-term contract, because his character dies.’
Charlie nodded, inwardly registering that the letter could have failed to be posted.
‘Once he rejoined the cast,’ he said, ‘there was another possibility: that he then started blackmailing you again, to get his character reprieved. A new miracle cure, perhaps? Misdiagnosis by his American doctors? That’s a real possibility, because the medical profession in the US is over here regarded as one degree lower than used car salesmen.’
‘We’re shown in Canada, so we’d have to be careful,’ said Reggie, ever the professional.
‘I’m sure you would go just so far, and no further.’
Reggie shifted himself forward in his chair.
‘You’re forgetting one thing, Inspector. There is no way that Hamish saw his future as an actor in a soap. He didn’t, any more than Susan and James do. You know our love interest?’
‘I know them, and know of them.’
‘Good. Then you’d know they’ve set their sights on the RSC or the National, or alternatively on a high-class sort of film stardom. Soaps are a real comedown for their great expectations.’
‘But Hamish was rather different, surely? He was twenty years older, for a start.’
‘About seventeen years, actually. Oh, admittedly he wasn’t aiming at the young parts. But for a male actor the really meaty parts come to the older men. If James and Susan were aiming at Romeo and Juliet, Hamish would be aiming at Macbeth and Othello, with King Lear to follow twenty years on. No contest who would get the better parts. No, Hamish aimed at the stars, and he was a very good actor.’
‘Very good?’
‘Well, very competent, if you prefer that. But he made Cyril Wharton into a real man who happened to be homosexual, not one of your prancing parodies, spitting out every consonant.’
Charlie considered this for a moment.
‘You’re talking as if you thought he was a very fine actor who could well have ended up in one of the big national companies.’
‘He was. In the RSC fine actors play Banquo and Macduff. He could have done that. Great actors play Macbeth, and that he would never do.’
‘But if he had these ambitions, why was he so poisonous to everybody?’
Reggie shrugged.
‘Actors aren’t saints, and most of them have egos well above the national average. Hamish enjoyed being beastly to people, so he was beastly to people.’
‘Looking at his life since he came back to the Terrace,’ said Charlie, ‘the two people he had most to do with, on a personal level, were Bet Garrett and Sylvia Cardew. Both on the fringe of the prostitution trade. Sylvia most of the time well into it, but with strong ambitions to be an actress. Bet was sleeping around for a variety of reasons: as a way of getting what she wanted in the acting profession, because she enjoyed it, and probably from time to time simply for money and other favours.’
‘Let me
interrupt you. I’ve never heard that Bet was very successful at screwing – sorry! – money out of people. She was generally known to be available, and that lowers your market value something chronic. She never got what she wanted – a stable part in the Terrace. In the main, she went sleeping around because she enjoyed it.’
‘Fair enough. My point was to wonder whether Hamish made a habit of associating with people who had a stake in the sex trade.’
Reggie visibly tensed up.
‘That’s surely your job to find out, Inspector. My acquaintanceship with him was almost entirely confined to the set and the canteen.’
Charlie consumed a metaphorical pinch of salt.
‘But the fact that you got on fairly well with him means that, apart from Bet Garrett and Sylvia Cardew, you will have had the most open conversations with him, were most likely to be his confidant.’
‘Hamish didn’t need a confidant. He was too bloody self-confident to go around baring his heart. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember a single occasion on which he had the sort of man-to-man talk you seem to be hinting at.’
‘OK – but let’s assume for a moment that he was active in the sex trade, on its grubbier edges. The likely thing is, surely, that it was there he did something for you, or gained knowledge of you, that he could use against you. He left the cast first time round, presumably he got a more prestigious job—’
‘He was in London revivals of The Second Mrs Tanqueray and School for Scandal. Both of them were very unhappy productions.’
‘I see. So the time came when it suited him to come back to the Terrace, and he began to use the knowledge he’d gained a couple of years before. He still had power to hurt you. Either he would damage you personally, or he’d damage you professionally – with the company that produced the soap. Or possibly the information he had would do both.’
The reply surprised him.
‘It was worse,’ Reggie said suddenly. ‘Much worse. I had got married.’
‘Of course. You’d been in Romania.’
‘I had three months’ leave to make a film about the Romanian orphans. That covered the time of Hamish’s leaving. Cyril Wharton left the Terrace to go to San Francisco. When I got back, with Livia my wife, the programme was a better, nicer, cleaner place to work on.’
‘And you had a good marriage?’
‘Exactly. So in addition to my career in the soap there was my private happiness to destroy. And believe me Hamish did enjoy destruction. He had a whole new thunderbolt he could threaten to unleash. And he would have liked nothing better.’
‘And yet Hamish did in the event film the death scene of Cyril Wharton.’
‘That was landed upon him as a complete surprise. There was really no way he could refuse, particularly when it was emphasised that this was no more than a filmed rehearsal.’
‘You’d planned that in advance?’
‘Of course.’
‘So that you had something in the can which could be used to cover Cyril’s death?’
‘Yes.’
‘Another way of putting it would be that you planned to murder Hamish, but wanted to have a death-scene filmed so that the soap could be broadcast as scheduled.’
‘I didn’t murder Hamish. I’m incapable of murdering anyone.’
It was said with all the spurious rectitude of schoolteachers and clergymen.
‘Yet you strike me as very determined, capable, decisive,’ said Charlie. ‘And I’d class such people as capable of murder, provided they were being threatened in an aspect of their lives that they hold very dear.’
‘That’s a bit waffly, Inspector, but I get your point. I can only repeat, I’m incapable of killing anybody.’
‘But you were being threatened. Tell me about that.’
Reggie let out a strange neigh of distress, turned in his chair away from Charlie, then took a minute or two to regain his composure, or some semblance of it. Suddenly, Charlie guessed, the fake front was falling.
‘I shall deny saying this if necessary,’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘I notice you have brought no colleague with you.’
‘I did that for a reason,’ said Charlie. Reggie looked at him, hoping for elaboration, but he got nothing. He thought, then went on.
‘Have you ever thought that people often sink into crime almost without knowing what they are doing? A paedophile by taste, who wouldn’t think of abusing a child, buys pretty harmless photographs of naked children, then gradually sinks into the sort of child pornography that could only be made during child abuse?’
‘I suppose that’s possible,’ said Charlie reluctantly. ‘With the amount of press coverage of that sort of pornography you’d think that realisation would come pretty speedily these days.’
‘But already the man has sunk… I don’t want to excuse myself, but just to tell you what happened and how. I have always, since I was a boy, felt a strong sympathy for all those people hideously deformed by drugs – Thalidomide and so on. When I was at college I worked with them, trying to see what could be done to bring them out, make them relate to other people…and to me. It could have become my life’s work, and it would have been good work. But I decided not to let that take me over, and to go in a more mainstream direction.’
He faded into silence.
‘But you found the interest was still part of you,’ said Charlie.
‘Yes.’
‘And it now had a definite sexual component?’
‘Yes. Why not? They were adults. Sex made them feel complete, part of the big world, belonging and participating. I felt I was doing good. Something worthwhile. I think I was right, but…it became – my sexual contacts with them – rather grubby. Something I was desperate to hide. Not grubby, that’s the wrong word. Something worse than that: sordid.’
‘That sounds as if Hamish Fawley had a hand in it.’
‘Hamish was always hot on sexual tastes, always knew how to make himself useful to people of unusual sexuality. He’d made himself generally available at drama school – to members of the staff I mean.’
‘Had he – what? – procured for you? Pimped?’
Reggie paused, silent for a long time. Then: ‘Yes.’
‘When was this? And what kind of people?’
‘During his first stint on the Terrace. I was overwhelmed with work, harassed, unhappy, lonely. He found out what I wanted, and procured it for me. God help me, I was grateful.’
‘Who?’ insisted Charlie.
‘A woman brain-damaged in an accident…an amputee back from Iraq…a Down’s Syndrome girl.’
‘You say girl—’
‘A girl in everything except her age. She was twenty, but had a mental age of about five. But we kept within the letter of the law, wasn’t that great? I insisted to Hamish that I’d have nothing to do with minors, but that sticks in my gullet now: a minor is what she was.’
‘The law has protection for the mentally retarded,’ said Charlie. ‘As I’m sure Hamish realised, even if you didn’t. So what happened when Hamish came back?’
‘He used the blackmailing ploy of his “services” in the past to do the same all over again. With the added threat of going to Livia with his tale, and with the “evidence” – photographs I knew nothing about. Can you imagine how Livia would have felt about that?’ He made a gesture with his hands towards his own back. ‘With that?’
Charlie sat there thinking long and hard.
‘You’re only telling me this because you have an almost perfect alibi, aren’t you?’ he said finally.
‘And a feeling that you’re well-disposed towards me, if for nothing else than as a victim of blackmail. Would you like to talk to Livia about times and phone calls and so on? Your people have been over it, but I suppose you want to go over it yet once more.’
‘Yes, I do. And I’ll talk to the vicar, and to Sir Julian Hallowes, whom you called.’
The work on the alibis had all been done by junior detectives. Reggie’s had seemed about as impr
egnable as an alibi gets. When he had arrived back from filming in the Duke of York’s it had been half past nine or so. Livia had a visit from the vicar in progress. Reggie shouted that he had to ring the chairman of Northern TV, Julian Hallowes. He was on the phone for the next ten minutes, and when he came off it he had spoken to the vicar, also for about ten minutes. Charlie estimated that the petrol-soaked paper was stuffed through the letterbox of Fawley’s rented house at about the time Reggie was driving up the by-pass around Keighley, five minutes from home.
Not bad as alibis went.
When Livia came into the living room the bare outlines of the alibi were confirmed. Reggie had come into the house around nine thirty-five, had shouted greetings to the vicar and then gone through to his study to telephone. The door was open, so she could hear his voice, though she could not make out what he was talking about.
‘He didn’t pop his head round the door as he went past this room?’ Charlie pressed her.
‘He may have done, but I was sitting on the sofa, so I didn’t see him.’
‘But you saw him when the phone call was over?’
‘Oh yes. He came in and had a good chat with Wickham – that’s the vicar. It takes about forty minutes to drive from Leeds to Keighley, and another five minutes to get here – that is if you’re driving at night. I know because Reggie often rings at the end of evening filming so I can have his dinner ready. There is no way he could have done that dreadful thing in the centre of Leeds and been out here by twenty-five to ten.’
‘It does seem unlikely,’ said Charlie.
‘Ask the vicar. He saw him too.’
And so, acting on their instructions, he stopped on his way home at the old, over-large house by the church which was the Vicarage. He was met by Wickham Pedley, a middle-aged, self-deprecating man who obviously did not have it in him to push his way up the Anglican hierarchy.
‘Ah, Mr Peace.’
‘You’ve been warned of my approach,’ said Charlie, in friendly tones.
‘Just this minute. Don’t worry: I haven’t been primed on what I should say. I haven’t needed to be.’
Killings on Jubilee Terrace Page 17