“It was Timmy’s.” She gave a shake of her head. “I told you, I thought we might need it. I never meant to use it. Really, I didn’t. But I knew that man, Michael. I knew exactly how cruel he was, how dangerous. I had to be able to protect myself.”
“Dangerous? Diana, he was just about to walk back to his trailer and get drunk. That’s how dangerous he was!”
I couldn’t look at his cadaver any more, but Diana seemingly couldn’t stop staring. Wilder had fallen with one hand draped across his chest and the other thrown back over his head, as if in a stage death pose. The way he might have fallen when he was Banquo back in his Old Vic days.
Tentatively I reached out to her, to try and get her to turn away, get her to drop the gun. But even though she was shredding tears, her expression remained stern and unyielding.
“Diana,” I whispered gently.
Filled with tears, her eyes turned to mine. And for a second or two we stood in tableau: a man, a woman and a corpse, all framed by flashing neon.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked.
“I think we need to call the police, don’t you? I don’t see what else we really can do.”
“No.” Her head gave a small but adamant shake. “We can deal with this all by ourselves. We don’t need the police.”
“A man is dead, Diana, you killed him! Two men are dead! What really happened with Carlisle, Diana? Did it happen the way you said it did?”
She flashed me a glare and then turned away disgusted. “Do you consider me a liar, Michael? Is that what you really think of me? That I’m some kind of stinking liar?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know what to think of you right now, Diana. I really don’t.”
With a small screech of anger, she slapped away my outstretched hand.
“I’m used to men letting me down, Michael, I’ve had it my whole life. Even Timmy used to have his dalliances away from home. He thought I didn’t know. Timmy was many things, he was open and lovely, but he didn’t have the wit to deceive me. He was so sure I didn’t know, but I knew almost immediately. And it was another disappointment added to the list. I don’t know why I thought you’d be different. Maybe it was because you looked at me so adoringly when you said you loved me, without calculation. Maybe it was because you’re young and don’t know how mean the world needs you to be just to survive. But you’re another man who’s going to let me down, aren’t you, Michael? Another bastard who’s just going to crush away my hope.”
“I’m not going to let you down. I’ll do everything I can for you, but really there’s no other way – we have to call the police!”
I stayed rooted to the spot, but she took a couple of slow, languid, deliberate steps forward, staring down at Wilder’s corpse as if it was a puzzle she needed to solve.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because there’s a dead body lying there! Someone is going to call the police eventually, and when they get here it’s going to look miles better for us if we’re the ones who actually did the calling.”
“If we did call them,” she sniffed, “what do you think they’d do to me?”
“I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. I guess they could make a case for temporary insanity or something like that. We can get someone good who can convince the jury. Then it will only be a couple of years and you’ll be out.” I tried not to sound too desperate, too flustered. “I promise I’ll visit you all the time. I’ll be waiting for you when you’re released.”
Diana Christmas stared down at the corpse of her former co-star, her former lover. Her face was calm again, eerily beautiful and serene. A face so pacific, no one but me would have picked her out as a woman who’d just killed a man, a woman who’d killed two men in a long weekend.
“No!”
“What?”
“No police, no trial and certainly no prison. This is not what gets my name back into the newspapers.”
“But what else can we do, Diana? My name is in the visitors’ book, and the police are going to know I was the last person to see Wilder alive. What do you suggest? That I just tell them a mystery woman showed up and killed him? That I have amnesia? We’ve got to tell them the truth.”
“Maybe you don’t have to tell them anything.”
In the noise and the flashing lights, I didn’t pick up on it immediately, but her tears had dried. Her voice was an icy monotone again.
“What do you suggest? We go on the run?”
“No.” Slowly she turned away from Wilder’s corpse, her gun hand rising as she did. Both movements seemed stiff and robotic: her body turning towards me on her heels, the slow straightening of her arm. Her whole being flashing red, blue, green, red, blue, green. It was tortuous progress, and even though I cried out, there was no real shock when she pointed the barrel directly at my chest.
“Maybe there can be two bodies instead of one,” she said, with no emotion at all. “No one knows I’m here, do they? You had an ‘assistant’ but that could be anyone. So maybe I just leave two bodies here and there’s nobody about to tell the police anything.”
My hands didn’t go up this time. I was too paralysed with fear to do more than shake my head helplessly.
“You can’t mean this, Diana. You really can’t do this!”
“What I can’t do, Michael, is go to prison. That’s what I can’t do. No way. I haven’t come this far to have a cage door slam shut on me.”
“But you can’t kill me!” My feet shuffled me back involuntarily a couple of steps. “I love you!”
Her eyes were so malicious and cool. “And I love you too, Michael, you know that. But I don’t love you enough to go to prison for you. I’m sorry about that. I don’t love you enough to stop all of this.”
“All of what?”
Maybe a sly smile rose to her cheeks then, one half flashing in red and the other blinding white. “You love old films, and you love my old films. You might know more about my films than I do.” She chuckled, light and airy. “Well, just think of my name in lights again. Think about your part in my journey to getting my name back to where it belongs.”
The gun was pushed out in front of her, her expression without doubt or remorse, and I think she would have pulled the trigger at that moment. She’d have shot me in the belly and then shot me again in the face to finish off the job, if a voice hadn’t boomed out from the darkness: “And… cut!”
Both of us whipped around, startled, as Grayson Gilbert strolled casually out of the darkness with an old 16mm camera.
Chapter Eighteen
I remember how relaxed he looked, how utterly in his element. As if witnessing murders and startling the perpetrator was an average evening’s occupation for him.
Gilbert wore a crumpled grey suit and a white shirt unbuttoned almost to his navel. There was a big grin and a pair of Peter Sellers spectacles on his face, and in his hands – whirring as he focused on us – was a small Eastman camera. He was every inch the eccentric, maverick auteur.
His lens moved intently in on my startled, disorientated face, before turning away and giving a lingering close-up to Diana. The full array of emotions crossed her face, from shock to fear to anger and then, finally – as he stepped forward and focused solely on her – a flick of her hair that emanated pure flirtation.
The body of Raymond Wilder was soaking the floor with its spilled blood behind her, but she’d already moved on to seducing the camera.
“Diana Christmas,” Gilbert drawled. “My, my, don’t you look ravishing? Quite ravishing. How long has it been now? Twenty years?”
Her eyelids fluttered down, coyly. “Don’t remind me.”
It was Gilbert who’d kept the set open, who’d arranged for Wilder to give his interview there. He’d been waiting for us, clearly he’d been expecting us, but that didn’t matter to Diana right then. All that mattered was that she was the actress, Diana Christmas, and a world famous director was filming her on a sound stage.
“What are you doing here?” I blu
rted out.
Despite how distracted she was, the gun was still pointed in my direction. I’d stepped a yard out of the way, but I’d be an easy kill if she wanted to shoot me. She was going to have to pay attention to me again first though.
“I could ask you the same question, Mr Mallory.” His affability was unassailable. “I know I encouraged you to interview poor Ray, but generally, when my actors are interviewed, I like them to still be breathing at the conclusion of it. It helps the filming process no end. But you come along and a couple of questions later we have a corpse. It’s really a poor show, my young friend, a poor show indeed.”
“You saw what happened, didn’t you? You filmed it?”
He didn’t glance at me at all. His eyes never left her. The great director was moving around her, crouching down, stretching up on his toes, finding new, beautiful angles from which to film her. She tossed her head around and laughed, a pink glow of pleasure rising into her cheeks. A white light flashed amongst the neon against her skin, like a thousand powerful flashbulbs exploding at once.
“I may have done.” The bored edge to Gilbert’s voice suggested I was at least his fifth or sixth thought. “I may have done, indeed. But who knows what might happen to this film? It might end up in my private collection, or it could turn out to be overexposed. Well, the least beautiful bits might. The ugly bits. That can happen, you know, that can so easily happen.”
Another figure loomed out of the dark: Romesh in a snug black suit. He held his hands in front of him, gripping his knuckles tight, protecting them should they be needed. He stared at his boss and the former actress with indifferent solemnity. As if he couldn’t see the dead body, or grasp how insane this all was.
“I couldn’t believe it when Carlisle called me out of the blue, Diana.” Gilbert smiled at her, encouraging more emotion on her face, more of a performance. “Or rather it was some cohort of Carlisle’s. Carlisle himself wasn’t on the phone, and apparently – towards the end – it was quite hard for him to even walk the few yards to the phone box. Anyway, he got a message to me, which surprised me, as it’s not like he and I were ever close. But perhaps he remembered the bond that always existed between us, Diana. That mad and unspeakable chemistry of intense friendship.”
She gave him a proper grin, just as the white light vanished to be replaced by bloody red. Her face no longer looked young and beautiful, but harsh and crazy. Her eyes shone dark in the flashing neon.
Gilbert continued: “He said you’d sent a boy around to see Carlisle. I knew instantly you’d taken a lover, even if my contact did describe this visitor as a ‘soft dick’. Well, it didn’t take much in the way of digging to realise that I was responsible for this turn of events, Diana. But in my defence, I couldn’t imagine they’d send a hormonal adolescent who’d fall so easily for your charms. How could I possibly have predicted that?”
“His name’s Michael,” Diana said, as she smiled sideways into the lens.
“Sorry?”
“You shouldn’t call him a boy. His name is Michael.”
He blinked and removed his eye from the viewfinder, and beamed at me. Simultaneously she passed me a smile of affection, while making sure the gun was aimed firmly at my navel again.
“Of course it is, of course it is. Anyway, this young lad of Carlisle’s said something about a blackmail demand and that old film you hated so much. It surprised Carlisle as he didn’t have the film any more, and hadn’t asked for anything. The last time he saw Timmy, apparently, Timmy had given him an extra large sum to secure the rights to it forever. That was Timmy getting wise at last, ay? If he’d thought to do that twenty years ago, imagine how different your life would be now, ay?”
The news clearly surprised Diana. Confusion moved from the tremble of her jaw to the creases of her forehead. “He never told me! He never said anything about that! Do you know what Timmy did with it?” she asked urgently. “Did he tell you?”
“No idea, my darling,” Gilbert said, moving in closer to capture the tumult on her face. “If he didn’t tell you, then he certainly didn’t tell me. Anyway, Carlisle feared it might be some kind of trap. You know, get him on tape talking about blackmail and use it against him. Do you remember Carlisle being so paranoid? I don’t. It must be all that horrible stuff he was taking. Or maybe, in a life full of shadows, you just have to learn to fear them.
“But something struck me,” he added, bending down to film the gun clasped in her hand, lingering on it like it was pornography. “Why would anyone want to blackmail you now, Diana? Timmy was the one with the money and any fool could tell he was squandering it. It’s not like he’d have left you a wealthy widow. Besides, how many people are going to care now? I mean this with no disrespect whatever, I mean it with the greatest of love and respect, but it is a while since you’ve been the subject of the ogling eye of the press, isn’t it?”
The lines on her face betrayed that she did take more than a little offence, and her fingers tightened around the gun. It stayed pointed in my direction though.
“But then it struck me that this wasn’t really blackmail, was it? You didn’t know Timmy had taken away the film and done whatever with it, did you? That’s the kind of chivalrous act he’d have carried out without fanfare. Not to worry you, because he didn’t need your thanks. Well, it occurred to me that most probably you wanted the film for yourself, didn’t you? You thought Carlisle still had it and you wanted it, so you sent Mr Mallory here down to get it.”
Romesh stepped fully out of the darkness and for the first time Diana saw him too. The gun turned momentarily in her hand, but when she saw how calmly Gilbert accepted his presence, she swung it back to me. She tossed her head and gave a fake, mirthless laugh.
The lights seemed to be flashing faster around us, or maybe it was just my accelerated heart rate which made me think that. Romesh was so close I could smell his Brut. If I tried to run, tried to get away from this real-life horror movie, he’d pin me to the floor before I made it more than half a dozen paces.
Diana turned kittenish on her heels and gave her most come-hither glare. “I could never get anything past you, could I, Gray? You’ve seen the kinds of things they have in the newspapers these days. A few still images from that film, coupled with my story – all the terrible things Carlisle Collins did to me, Ray Wilder too – and my name would be up there again. People would recognise me. Some of the attention would be embarrassing, but I wouldn’t be forgotten, Gray. I’d be somebody again!”
There was a big crooked smile on his face, amusement in every line. “Ah, so you’re engineering the great comeback of 1980, are you?”
For a second I thought she was going to cry, but she sucked it back, held it together, concentrated instead on the camera and the shot Gilbert was currently going for. “It’s so unfair what happened to me, Gray. My life can’t have just stopped in 1959. I can’t be some forgotten relic.”
“But you weren’t completely forgotten, Diana. Mr Mallory there, he told me himself that he was a big fan of yours.”
She glanced at me, and – feeling bloodless now – I smiled meekly back.
“And I’m grateful, Michael, so grateful, But you’re a journalist, a movie journalist – you’re paid to know these things. I need the real people out there, those who buy tickets at the ABC on a wet Wednesday afternoon, to remember me too.”
Gilbert had dropped to his knees, framing her between two monstrous fruit machines, each of them crowned by a fake decapitated human head.
“Presumably, Diana,” he said, “it was you who went to see Carlisle the second time, wasn’t it? I can remember your temper, and having met Mr Mallory I can’t help thinking that he wouldn’t have what was needed to get the deed done. When the news was relayed my way, I thought instantly of you.”
She blinked a little shakily, unsure how to take that comment. “Did you?”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure nobody else made the connection. But when I heard I was almost glad. Happy, Diana. I thou
ght it might mean you finally had some of that old fire back. The indescribable spark. Nobody was sadder about what happened to you than I, Diana. The Diana Christmas I knew was a volcano, and the thought you might have been extinguished to ashes was heartbreaking.”
Suddenly her composure broke and the tears welled up. “I missed myself so much!” she cried.
“And I missed you too, Diana. So when I thought that spark had returned, I did all I could to encourage it. I tracked down Mr Mallory. I encouraged a couple of what charitably could be called Carlisle’s nearest and dearest to pay him a visit. Then I made sure I looked him in the eye myself. The dividend has been far greater than I could have imagined, Diana. Here you are, actually in the flesh, and as beautiful as ever.”
“Here I am!” she beamed, before her spare hand moved to her hips and she gave a pout straight down the lens.
“Your plan wouldn’t have worked, by the way.” He moved his camera up and down her, taking her all in. “I can see the logic of desperation in it, but it couldn’t have worked. That film would have been like raw meat to the Fleet Street press. You couldn’t have controlled what they did, you couldn’t have owned your story. They’d have ripped you to shreds.”
A sadness came full into her pout. “I don’t have the film, anyway.”
“Maybe I can help you there, Diana.” Gilbert grinned crookedly from behind the lens. “With the comeback and not that silly old home movie. Remember how we were always talking about working together again, conjured castles in the sky of all the films we were going to make. Well, now Raymond has taken his leave of us, there’s a part in this picture. It’s small, but it’s pivotal, and an older name suits it perfectly. Now your spark is back, there’s no reason why it can’t be rewritten for a lady.”
Her face lit up again. The neon shadows flashed across it, but didn’t hide the genuine happiness.
“Are you serious, Gilbert?” she practically screamed. “Do you mean it?”
Diana Christmas Page 10