‘Drop it!’ I said flatly, watching his eyes, which were suddenly frantic.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not going to drop it. All you can talk about is alibis, but I notice it was mine you were taking to pieces. But what about Rosie’s alibi? She left me, on the terrace. Walked away, into the dark, and the engine went on for a good three minutes. How about that, Rosie?’
Her lips were moving, but no words were formed. Eyes huge, fingers reaching towards her face.
We were both silent. It seemed to disconcert him. For a moment he reached out, as though to seize her shoulder and turn her to face him. That he couldn’t do it angered him.
‘It had to be somebody who knew the drinks were in the boot,’ he cried, literally nearly cried, the tears being in his eyes too. His voice softened. ‘It was your car, Rosie. You came to Lichfield to pick me up.’ Now he was appealing.
She moaned, shaking her head. With a visible effort she slowly turned to face him.
‘I came to Lichfield, Duncan, to get some time with you, alone. We hadn’t met like that for two years. Remember?’ Her voice held no emotion at all. ‘Since…since Glenda. I hoped that things could be forgotten, that you’d give me one hint…Oh Lord, but you’re so stupid. There was not a word from you…not one warm word. Can you believe I’d be buying crates of beer and planning Uncle Edwin’s death—with that on my mind?’
In that moment, Duncan could have transformed his life, and hers. He could have done what she was pleading for him to do, simply have taken her in his arms. And she’d have given him the world, if he’d only realised. She’d have shared everything she’d built up from that paltry inheritance, she’d even have put on his musical, as a wedding present. If only he’d seen that.
But he was a simpleton, unwise in the ways of women, unaware…and he ruined it.
‘You could have bought the stuff on the way to pick me up,’ he said simply.
‘Right!’ she screamed, her temper breaking abruptly. ‘If that’s your attitude, you can have your damned inheritance.’ Her arm came up, hand ready. I thought she was about to slap that ridiculous half-smile of stubborn hesitancy from his face. But no. She was merely thrusting him aside, heading for the big old safe in the corner.
It had an ordinary keyhole, an ordinary iron key, and was probably never locked. All she had to do was grip one hand on the top edge of the door, and with one emphatic heave fling it open. Inside, there was nothing but a pile of manuscript, foolscap size.
‘There’s your damned inheritance,’ she cried. ‘That’s all I ever had. His plays. See what you can get out of them. You can…I don’t…’
We were within a hair’s breadth of a torrent of tears. She was choking. He could still have rescued things. She was, to my mind, waiting for that one word…
‘You can’t deny the stuff was in your car,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know!’ she screamed. ‘Oh, get out of my way.’
This last was to me, and she caught at my arm, as though to thrust me aside. But for a second I could feel she needed the support. It took only that second, then she had the door open, and I heard her mumble, ‘Got things to do.’
Her step along the corridor was firm.
Duncan turned to me in appeal. ‘Well, you can’t deny it, can you?’
I couldn’t. That was the trouble. A vague idea had been hovering in my mind, but it kept coming against that one hurdle. The booze in the boot. Who had put it there, and who had known it was there? It was true that the area covered by the Burton Upon Trent breweries could be large, but so far I hadn’t come across a single hint that anyone except Duncan and Rosemary had had any business in the Midlands at that time. And any source of supply would have been satisfactory, for the purpose of creating that alibi. I felt that Rosemary was lying on that issue. I couldn’t understand why, and knew I would not know unless and until she admitted it, and told me.
Standing there, I realised with a pang that I could well have prevented their meeting from heading where it had. But I’d hoped to provoke Rosemary into an admission. I’d failed. Every damned thing I did seemed to be failing.
‘Well…’ he said, looking round distractedly, but not, I noticed, at the open safe.
‘You could run after her,’ I suggested, ‘and tell her she’s still wearing her apron.’
He stared at me. ‘I don’t think you’re right in the head.’
So I did it, walked after her to tell her, and there she was, in the centre of the dining room floor and taking charge in a distracted way, her right elbow raised and her fingers to her brow, peering beneath her hand, and trying to control the pain behind her eyes. She wasn’t troubling about the apron, so why should I? I wandered over to the door on to the terrace.
Her eye caught my movement, and she turned. ‘Don’t go, Richard, please.’ I nodded, and walked on. All I wanted was air. Her voice had sounded distraught.
The clouds were heavy, but seemed to be retreating, leaving a crisp, washed blue behind them. My clouds were gathering. I walked round the terrace and out to the cars, wondering whether I had a spare tin of tobacco in the Stag. My pace broke. I halted.
Duncan was now sitting beside his friend in the car. They were talking together excitedly, Leigh gesticulating in emphasis. Probably he was telling Duncan not to allow her to get away with anything. This was how it would probably have appeared to him. He was giving support, as one would expect from a friend. I suppressed the cynical thought that he might consider there could be something in it for him.
Then Duncan got out of the car and slammed the door decisively. They made signs of friendship to each other, and Leigh drove away.
Duncan turned and saw me standing there, swept his hair from his eyes, and spoke defiantly.
‘I’ve decided to stay.’
‘Rosemary will be pleased.’
‘You know she must’ve bought the…’
I didn’t let him finish. ‘How far d’you intend to push her? You’d have no legal right to the blasted inheritance, even if you got her to put it in writing: “I killed my Uncle Edwin.” Get legal advice, why don’t you! Don’t jump in head first.’
He kicked a stone moodily into the shrubbery. ‘If only she’d say!’
‘Say what, you fool, that she still cares enough about you to want to go back to where you were before?’
‘Cares! She? How could she care, if she let me go to prison, and she knowing…’
‘You don’t know that,’ I said firmly.
I could perhaps have put more feeling into it if I had not been convinced, myself, that she’d bought the drinks and hidden them in the boot.
We rounded the corner on to the terrace. From the open window there rang out the resonant voice of Drew Pierson.
‘Now don’t you go breaking things up,’ I said warningly.
‘They’re rehearsing,’ he told me, making it sound sacred.
‘That seems to be so.’
We stood in the open doorway. Rosemary was six feet in front of us, script in her hand, watching Drew and Mildred in their important dialogue in act two.
She: You’d expect me to intervene?
He: Any lady would have broken it up.
She: This lady withdrew quietly.
He: But not too far.
She: I had no wish to be seen. Only to hear.
He: A lady would not lend her ears to private conversation.
She: I have always regretted my ears. They protrude. So unladylike.
‘Those are my words!’ Duncan whispered.
I glanced sideways at him. He was abruptly tense, poised. As I watched, his face relaxed into a smile.
‘But those are my words!’ he cried in delight. ‘He left them in.’
The two actors were silent. Rosemary turned. ‘Do you have to interrupt?’
He was waving his arms wildly. ‘My words. Uncle Edwin left them in.’
‘What did you say?’
Duncan was overcome by embarrassment. Nobody moved. Eyes we
re centred on him. ‘Sorry, Rosie. But Uncle Edwin gave me the impression he barely kept a thing in…and now, I walk in here, and every word I hear is mine. Do you know—can you possibly imagine—what it’s like to hear your own words spoken?’
‘All right, Duncan,’ she said heavily. ‘So those were your words. Now let’s get on with it. Drew? Can we go back to: “A lady would not lend her ears to private conversation”?’
They proceeded. The scene progressed, and Duncan, beside me, was gradually becoming close to bursting with tension. When he turned to me, plucking at my jacket sleeve, his eyes were shining wildly.
‘But…it’s still mine! Oh Lord…Rosie…it’s mine!’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ Rosemary cut it short by waving her script. Then she threw it at Duncan in pettish anger. ‘Read it, and be quiet. Let’s get on, for God’s sake!’
Duncan scooped it up and riffled through it. Nobody went on. Everybody watched him. Rosemary flapped her arms in exasperation, but there was a sudden, bright intensity about her. The room was so silent that the turning pages were a rage in themselves.
‘Fair’s Fair,’ Duncan whispered. ‘Oh, I can’t believe it. It’s mine. My words. Look—this scene. Twenty years, and it’s all coming back.’
Rosemary moved in close. ‘Are you telling me that you wrote that dialogue, Duncan? All of it?’
He was dazed. When he looked up he could not have been seeing her. ‘As far as I’ve seen. Rosie…I…sorry.’
She took three more seconds to realise what that could mean, two to decide how to handle it. Then she turned away and called out: ‘Break, everybody. I’ll let you know.’
She turned back, reached out her right hand, and took his left one. ‘You just come with me, Duncan. Let me show you something.’ Dazed, elated, and yet with a simmering anger about him, he allowed himself to be led away.
14
Nobody said I shouldn’t follow so I did, though more slowly. In the corridor Rosemary broke into a run, galloping away with Duncan still attached and stumbling after her. I reached the door just as she released him in order to plunge both hands into the safe and produce play after play and slap them down on the working surface. Then she stood back, panting from a severely restrained excitement, and said:
‘Look at them. Go on. Take a look.’
Each script consisted of an inch-thick wad of very dog-eared foolscap-sized paper. From where I was standing the words on the pages were very nearly undecipherable, being handwritten in black ink, but with minor amendments in blue ball-point. The title Fair’s Fair was at the head of the first sheet of one of them.
Duncan spoke with awe. ‘But these are the originals. He kept them.’
‘Look at the writing,’ she said in a tiny voice, and whilst he did so she put her hands to her face, fingers spread, horribly distorting the shape of her eyes.
‘I don’t need to. This…these…were what I sent him.’
‘The black ink?’
‘My fountain pen…’
‘But Duncan…’ She whipped down her hands. ‘The black, that is the plays. The biggest part of them. Don’t you see what that means?’
He looked round at me in bewilderment. ‘I don’t…I mean…I can’t understand why he kept them.’
‘Duncan!’ she cried wildly, and she flung her arms round his neck, almost dancing him off his feet. ‘You idiot—they’re yours. Always have been. Still are.’ She set him back to the full stretch of her arms. ‘Oh…don’t you understand? You wrote the original words, so they’re your copyright. You own them. Yours. Duncan…you utter fool.’
She was laughing, half crying, and he could still not comprehend. But I did. She was happy and excited because this was something she could offer him, as his own, to have and to hold, if it were not to be herself…and maybe now he’d cease to pressure her.
The excitement was beginning to get to him, but behind it was the awareness that somehow he’d been cheated. When he turned to me the movement seemed to be a rejection of Rosemary’s pleasure, but he appealed to me as though I might be an authority on the subject.
‘What’s it all mean, Mr Patton?’
‘As far as I know,’ I said, ‘it means that when you wrote those words you established a copyright, and as the major part of the plays is still your work, then you still own the copyright. It means…oh, for example, you can go out there and tell those people that you’re putting a stop to the production.’
Rosemary slapped my arm. ‘Stop putting ideas into his head, Richard, please.’ Yet she was uneasy.
‘Or you can demand a fee for the use of Fair’s Fair. Or any of the plays, ad infinitum, wherever any of them is produced, anywhere. As far as I know.’
‘Rosie,’ he said, a hint of accusation in his voice, ‘it can’t be true.’
‘You two’, I said, ‘will have to get together and negotiate.’
‘Hah!’ he said.
‘But tell me something,’ I asked. ‘How can you possibly not have known?’
He glanced at Rosemary, who already had her arm linked in his in a proprietorial way, and was smiling with genuine happiness. ‘How could I know? I sent plays to Uncle Edwin. He said he could adapt them, and he paid me for them. I just assumed he’d…well, bought them. The rotten devil.’
‘You didn’t sign a contract, assigning the copyrights?’
‘There was nothing on paper.’
‘Only the plays.’ Rosemary giggled at that.
‘Yes, the plays,’ he agreed.
‘But,’ I said, ‘surely you went to see them performed.’
This appeared to be a preposterous suggestion. ‘Me? Go to London? You don’t know how I hate that place. All those people…no thanks. I didn’t trouble, once he’d taken them over.’
Another facet of Edwin’s character was emerging. I was beginning to wonder whether I wanted his murderer to be discovered.
‘It’s a great pity,’ I said. ‘One trip to the West End, and the whole picture would’ve changed.’
‘And now it has,’ said Rosemary. ‘Duncan, you and I must get together. There’s so much to be decided. But for now…we’re opening in six weeks at Coventry. So come and watch your play being rehearsed.’
She was carrying him along with her mood, delighted that she had this to offer him. Perhaps my suspicions of her reasons for this had been false. Not the greatest actress could have flooded her eyes with genuine tears of delight as she seized his arm and took him away into his new world.
As they walked into the hall they were totally immersed in each other. Yet neither had fully absorbed the significance. The change for both was going to be tremendous.
Slowly I followed them. Rosemary was making a little speech to explain that Duncan was now going to become intimately involved. Nobody seemed unduly impressed. To them, the play was the thing.
I thought it time I left. No lunch had come my way, and if I hurried I might be in time to share Amelia’s. I moved across to Rosemary’s side and touched her elbow.
‘You’re leaving, Richard?’
‘There’s not much I can do now, and I’ve left my wife at the mill at Tyn-y-bont.’
‘But isn’t this really splendid!’
I grinned at her. ‘It’ll mean a lot to him.’
‘And to me.’
‘There’s the possible pardon, too, if I can only get my proof.’
‘Now you don’t think he’ll have time to worry about that!’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Oh…I nearly forgot. Clyde Greenslade phoned. He’d heard about what you’re trying to do. He’s coming tomorrow to see you.’
I hadn’t known when, or even whether, I’d return there. ‘He wants to see me?’
‘Yes. He’ll be here in the afternoon.’
‘Any idea…’
‘Now Richard, we must get on. Oh, isn’t this exciting?’
I agreed that it was exciting, and by the time I’d reached the door they were well into it again, with Duncan sitt
ing on a folding chair at the side, leaning forward intently with a blissful smile on his face.
Now that I knew the route to the mill I relaxed, and very nearly got lost again. It was a relief to top the rise and glimpse the farm below, the scattered cottages, the bridge.
The police van was parked in the farmyard immediately before I reached the bridge. Davies saw me coming, and signalled. I drew up. He came round to my window.
‘Everything all right?’ I asked.
‘At the mill, yes. But they’ve been trying to get me on the radio all morning.’
I got out of the car and we walked into the farmyard. ‘Don’t get yourself into trouble,’ I said.
He smiled, his face glowing. ‘We’ve got a lot of useful mountains around here, Mr Patton. They cut off the short-wave signals.’
‘Convenient.’ But I wasn’t happy about the way he was involving himself. ‘By the way, that petrol can in the shed—it isn’t there anymore.’
He considered that. The smile slowly died. ‘So it’s like that?’
‘Seems to be. Perhaps, at the inquest, you’d better not mention it. A constable’s word against a chief inspector’s! You wouldn’t stand a chance.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ His eyes were steady. ‘I took the precaution of photographing it, including part of the shed, the number plate of the car, and a copy of that day’s paper, which I just happened to have with me.’
‘Official camera?’ I asked.
‘My own. Several shots, including a close-up with the macro lens of Mr Hughes’ fingerprints—which I decided to develop—all over the can.’
He scratched the side of his nose thoughtfully.
I sighed. He looked so rosily pleased with himself. ‘You married, Mr Davies?’
‘No sir—Mr Patton.’
‘Living alone, in digs?’
‘Alone…in a police house.’
‘Then you don’t stand to lose much, I suppose.’
‘You’re not pleased?’ he asked anxiously, frowning in bafflement.
‘Oh son, you’re as bad as Duncan. Mr Grayson’s a determined man. It matters to him that the Edwin Carter case shouldn’t be disturbed. He’ll have you out, so fast your head’ll swim.’
An Alibi Too Soon Page 17