Best Served Cold

by Sally Spencer

‘We’ve just been talking to Jerry Talbot, and we’d be grateful if you’d either confirm or deny what he told us,’ Paniatowski said.

  She repeated what Talbot had said about the conversation in the dressing room.

  ‘Yes, things happened pretty much as Talbot described them to you,’ Quirk said, when she’d finished, ‘although dear old Jerry seems to have edited out the more humiliating bits.’

  ‘So put them back in,’ Paniatowski suggested.

  ‘Cotton came into the dressing room, already half made up, and told Talbot he wouldn’t be going on that night. At first, Talbot pleaded with him. Then – when it became plain Cotton wasn’t going to change his mind – he got angry. At least, that’s what appeared to be happening.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Talbot’s an actor, and though I hate to admit it, a rather good one. So what I saw could have been real, or it could merely have been a performance.’

  ‘Have you any reason to assume it was a performance, Mr Quirk?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘No,’ Quirk said, perhaps a little too quickly.

  ‘You won’t believe how nasty we can get when we think we’re being lied to,’ Meadows growled.

  Quirk laughed uneasily. ‘She’s a bit of a Rottweiler, this sergeant of yours, isn’t she, Chief Inspector?’ he said.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ Meadows said, with added menace.

  Quirk’s bravado crumbled. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘what I have to tell you is tenuous – at best.’

  ‘Tell us anyway,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘A few years ago, Talbot and I were working together in rep somewhere in the dark north, and one of the plays we put on was called The Real Target. It was a very bad play – I think it was written by the idiot daughter of the man who owned the theatre – and though we put it on because we were ordered to, no other theatres followed our example, and it sank without trace. But I think you’ll find the plot interesting.’

  Now that he was holding the centre stage, he was getting his confidence back, Meadows thought – and they couldn’t have that.

  ‘Get on with it,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t remember what the central character’s name was – bad playwrights rarely manage to create characters with memorable names, in much the same way as they never—’

  ‘You are really starting to get right up my nose now, Brad,’ Kate Meadows snarled.

  ‘Let’s call him Fred Bloggs,’ Quirk said hurriedly. ‘Anyway, at the start of the first act, he’s walking through the park and someone hidden in the bushes takes a pot shot at him. He reports it to the police, and they decide that the shooter was a lunatic, and the only reason he was a target was because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Act two opens with Bloggs and his business partner – we’ll call him Joe Soap – coming out of a restaurant. There’s the sound of a shot, and Soap falls dead. Now the police realize they’ve been thinking along the wrong lines and Bloggs has been the real target all along, which means, of course, that Soap was killed by mistake. Except …’

  ‘Except he wasn’t,’ Paniatowski supplied. ‘It was Bloggs who hired the gunman in the first place, because he’d worked out that if the police thought he was the real target, they’d never suspect him of plotting to kill his partner.’

  ‘Quite right, Chief Inspector,’ Quirk said. ‘You should be a detective.’ He glanced quickly at Meadows to see if he’d gone too far, and decided he was safe for the moment. ‘You get the point, don’t you? Talbot claims he can’t be the murderer because someone had been trying to kill him. But maybe nobody was – maybe he got the whole idea from The Real Target.’

  ‘But how could he be so sure that Cotton would insist on taking the role off him at the last moment?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Quirk admitted. ‘Perhaps he was just banking on Cotton acting like the greedy egomaniac we all know him to be.’

  ‘You do appreciate, don’t you, that since you were in the same play, what could have been a blueprint for Talbot’s murder plan could also have been a blueprint for yours?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘Mine!’ Quirk exclaimed.

  He sounded genuinely surprised – but then he was an actor.

  ‘Yours,’ Meadows repeated.

  ‘But why should I want to kill Mark Cotton?’

  ‘You didn’t like him – that much is obvious.’

  ‘True, but if I murdered everyone who I didn’t like, there’d be many fewer people walking around. In fact, I’d probably be the only surviving member of the Whitebridge Players.’

  ‘And you were jealous of him, weren’t you?’

  ‘Well, of course I was jealous of him – but not in the same way that Jerry Talbot was.’

  ‘How are you different?’

  ‘Jerry thinks that he could have been Mark Cotton – that he should have been Mark Cotton. And he’s got a point. He’s at least as good an actor as Cotton, yet Cotton is a towering presence and he’s nothing but a small dog yapping from within the great man’s shadow.’

  ‘And you don’t think you’re as good as Mark Cotton?’

  ‘I know I’m not,’ Quirk said, and his eyes were starting to water. ‘I’m very good at acting the part of an actor when I’m off the stage, but once I’m on it, I’m only a little better than adequate. I’ve always known that – deep down – and in the last few years I’ve even come to accept it.’

  But it still hurts, Paniatowski thought – it still hurts a lot.

  ‘If you really believe that you’re not that good, why do you carry on acting?’ Meadows asked.

  Quirk shrugged. ‘What else could I do? What else am I qualified for? Besides, it’s not a bad life. It supplies me with a constant stream of new people to dislike, and at least the sex is varied and plentiful.’

  ‘But even there, you’ve had to settle for Mark Cotton’s rejects,’ Meadows guessed.

  Quirk seemed genuinely amused by the suggestion – but then how could you tell with actors, even those who claimed to be bad at it.

  ‘You’ve got me all wrong,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have to compete with Mark Cotton in that particular sphere at all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m as bent as Dickie’s hatband.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘I’m an old stage queen – just like my heroes, Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde.’

  THIRTEEN

  Crane sat in what had been the cast dressing room, facing two monitors and video playback machines, and surrounded by a mountain of tapes.

  ‘I like to combine the conventional documentary style with fly-on-the-wall filming,’ Bill Sikes said. ‘What that means, in effect, is that sometimes the subjects are very conscious that they’re being filmed, and sometimes they’re not.’

  ‘Are you saying they actually forget the cameras are there?’ Crane asked sceptically.

  ‘No, they know the cameras are there, but they’ve forgotten what they’re there for,’ Sikes said. ‘I’ll show you what I mean.’

  He leant forward, and clicked two switches.

  Both monitors came to life. On the first, the dead man was talking into the camera.

  ‘Thomas Kyd was born in 1558, which made him six years older than William Shakespeare …’

  On the second, Bradley Quirk and Jerry Talbot stood watching the interview from the back of the stage. Their mouths were opening and closing, but no sound was coming out of them.

  ‘See what I’m saying?’ Sikes asked. ‘That pair are paying no more attention to the camera than they would to an armchair.’

  ‘Why can’t I hear what they’re saying,’ Crane wondered.

  Sikes grinned. ‘You’re a bright lad – can’t you work that out for yourself?’

  ‘Because there are no microphones close to them?’

  ‘That’s right. I’ve learned from experience that it takes people a lot longer to forget about a mike than it takes to forget about a camera, and when they see a mike, they automatically s
witch to their best-behaviour mode. They’re worried that their words will betray them, but they never think their bodies will. And that’s true of everybody – even actors, who should know better.’

  ‘But surely, without sound the tapes are of no use,’ Crane said.

  Sikes chuckled. ‘You couldn’t be more wrong. What this silent film is providing me with is excellent material to go with the commentary.’

  He reached out and turned down the volume, so that Mark Cotton fell silent.

  ‘Watch Quirk and Talbot, and listen to me,’ he said.

  Quirk made a savage waving gesture with his hand, and Talbot nodded. Neither of them looked happy.

  ‘There is obvious discontent amongst some of the cast members even at this early stage of the production,’ the director said in his authoritative commentary voice. ‘This may well be because they feel that Mark Cotton is grabbing too much of the limelight for himself, but only time will tell whether this leads to further problems.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Get the idea?’ he asked in his normal voice.

  ‘You’re doing a hatchet job on him,’ Crane said.

  ‘No, I’m making a documentary,’ the director countered, sounding slightly offended. ‘My original intention was to give it a strong artistic bias, like the one I did on John Gielgud’s one-man show.’

  ‘That was you, was it?’ asked Crane, impressed. ‘It was very good.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Sikes replied. ‘But I’d only been here for five minutes when I realized this whole production wasn’t about art at all – it was about Mark Cotton. So I needed another focus for the documentary, and the only one open to me was an examination of what happens when a complete arsehole tries to run a theatre company solely for his own ends.’

  ‘You would have ruined him if you’d produced a documentary like that,’ Crane said.

  ‘If he had been ruined, then he would have ruined himself, and I would merely have recorded it. But I don’t think he would have been ruined. He wouldn’t have been able to play characters like the noble DCI Vic Prince again, but he’d have become an anti-hero – the man the public loves to hate – and anti-heroes are never short of work.’

  On the monitor, Quirk mimed opening a book, and then peered into the imaginary book as if he were having trouble reading it.

  Talbot shook his head in what may have been disbelief.

  Quirk mimed closing the book, and then pretended to throw it over his shoulder.

  ‘Actors, eh?’ the director said. ‘They can’t stop showing off, even if they’ve only got an audience of one – and that audience also happens to be an actor, so is very unlikely to be impressed.’

  Bradley Quirk held up six fingers, and, a moment later, Jerry Talbot held up two.

  ‘I don’t know whether Talbot’s answering the question, or just telling Quirk to sod off,’ the director said.

  ‘Six could be the number of nights the play was meant to run,’ Crane suggested, ‘and two could indicate the number of nights on which something was supposed to happen.’

  ‘The number of nights that Talbot would be allowed to play Hieronimo,’ Sikes said. ‘I’d stake my granny’s old age pension on that.’

  On screen, Bradley Quirk drew a finger across his throat.

  The director stood up.

  ‘Well, happy viewing,’ he said. ‘By the way, I will get all this video tape back, won’t I?’

  ‘I imagine so, unless we need it as evidence,’ Crane replied. ‘But why would you want it? You can’t possibly show your “Mark Cotton is an arsehole” documentary now.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ the director said. ‘It’ll need a bit of rejigging and some additional material, but once it’s retitled as “Who killed Mark Cotton?” it’ll be a real winner.’

  Ruth Audley was the older of the sisters but she had none of Sarah’s confidence or glamour. It would have been totally unfair to describe her as dowdy, but it would certainly have been easier to imagine her running a quiet village post office than it was to picture her dominating a stage.

  ‘We like to start by asking you to give me an account of your movements yesterday,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘We had the full rehearsal in the morning.’

  ‘A dress rehearsal?’

  ‘No, we did that on Friday. Most of the cast didn’t think the Monday rehearsal was necessary at all. Some even worried it would take the edge off their performance. But Mark wanted it – and it was Mark who was calling the shots.’

  ‘What happened after the rehearsal?’

  ‘I had lunch and went back to the boarding house for a rest. I took a half an hour walk before the performance – it’s something I always did in the old days – and arrived back at the theatre in time to dress and apply my make-up.’

  ‘Did you go up to the fly loft between the dress rehearsal and the performance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see anyone else go up to the fly loft?’

  Ruth Audley smiled. ‘If I had, do you think I’d have waited to be asked before mentioning it?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  Ruth Audley took a deep breath.

  ‘What I think I should tell you now is that I had an affair with Mark Cotton back in 1957,’ she said.

  ‘You think that’s important?’

  ‘No, not to me.’

  ‘Then why are you telling us?’

  ‘I’m telling you because it will save you some time when you start taking a closer look at the company as it was in 1957.’

  ‘And you think we’ll do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’ll reach the conclusion that however obnoxious Mark has been over the last week, it probably wasn’t enough – on its own – to drive someone to kill him, so the roots for the hatred must lie back in the fifties.’

  ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that the real intended victim might have been Jerry Talbot?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘Good God, no!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Jerry isn’t the sort of person you would want to kill.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I mean, I don’t think he’d be anybody’s choice as the ideal companion on a desert island, but neither can I see anyone lying awake at night planning ways to kill him.’

  ‘But you can see people lying awake and having those thoughts about Mark Cotton?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘I couldn’t see myself doing it, nor, really, any of the others. But if one of them was plotting a murder, it would be Mark’s, not Jerry’s.’

  ‘How did your affair with Mark Cotton end?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘I broke it off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If you’d known him yourself back then, you wouldn’t need to even ask that question.’

  They are putting on George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man the following week, and have just finished their last rehearsal. Ruth is playing Raina, the beautiful-if-deluded aristocratic heroine, and Cotton has the role of Sergius, the dashing-but-pompous hero.

  As they walk off the stage and back towards the dressing rooms, Cotton says, ‘So what’s it to be? Shall we go out and have a meal, or should we go straight back to the lodgings and jump into bed?’

  ‘Neither,’ Ruth says.

  ‘Then what will we do?’

  ‘We won’t be doing anything. I’m breaking up with you.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Cotton says incredulously. ‘Women never break up with me.’

  ‘I just have.’

  ‘Tell me why?’

  ‘Because all we have in common is sex – and even that isn’t as much fun as it used to be.’

  ‘How did he take it?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘At first, he took it very badly. Not because he had any real affection for me, you understand, but because, as he’d said, he just wasn’t used to being jilted. But then, Mark being Mark, he moved on – and unfortunately, his next conquest was my sister, who was only sevente
en and had just joined the company.’

  ‘Only seventeen,’ Meadows repeated musingly. ‘She didn’t go to drama school, then?

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘I thought that going to drama school was pretty much a requirement for the job.’

  ‘It is the commonest route into the theatre, but it’s by no means the only one. Michael Caine, who’s one of the most successful actors this country’s ever produced, never went to drama school, for example.’

  ‘Did you use your influence to get your sister Sarah into the Whitebridge Players?

  Ruth smiled again. ‘I suppose so, though I never thought of it like that. Sarah needed to get away from home …’

  ‘Needed to?’

  ‘Felt the need to. She was young and restless. My mother asked me if I could get Sarah a job in the company, and –’ another smile – ‘my mother was not someone you said no to. So I asked Geoff if he’d take her in, and he said he would. That’s how it worked in those days. It was a really nice company – which is probably why it went broke.’

  ‘Given your opinion of Mark Cotton, did you try to talk Sarah out of having an affair with him?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Of course I did, but it had no effect – when you’re seventeen, nobody can tell you anything.’

  ‘And how did their affair end?’

  ‘I think it would be better if you asked Sarah about that,’ Ruth said, suddenly cagey.

  ‘Apart from your sister, have you seen any members of the cast since the theatre closed?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘For the first few years, I would occasionally run into one or other of them at auditions, but then my mother became seriously ill, and I gave up the theatre to nurse her.’

  ‘That was a big sacrifice, wasn’t it?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m sure if either of you ever found yourselves in my situation, you’d gladly have done the same.’

  Paniatowski found herself thinking of her own mother, who must have known that she was being abused by her stepfather, but who had said nothing. But she couldn’t really blame the woman for that, she supposed – her mother had had a very difficult life, and simply hadn’t been able to summon up the strength to abandon the security and comfort that Arthur Jones could offer her.