Death in Disguise

by Caroline Graham

  He and Cully were capping each other’s remarks, laughing at everything and nothing. Every now and then, Cully would throw back her cloud of dark hair which was strewn with flowers. She was wearing a long scarlet cotton skirt banded with multicoloured ribbon and a white frilled Mexican blouse with sleeves so wide that several other blouses could have sprung fully formed from each one.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Nicholas was telling everyone, as the eggs tarragon were being relished, ‘how utterly appalling it was working with Phoebe Catchpole.’

  ‘She wasn’t too bad,’ said Cully graciously.

  ‘Actually,’ said Joyce, ‘I thought she was quite good.’

  ‘But the size of her, darling,’ continued Nicholas. ‘It was like squaring up to a rhino. On “Oh—lost and damned”—you know, her final exit—she leaned on me. I thought I was going straight through the boards. The only mature student in my year and they give her Jocasta. She was old enough to be my mother.’

  Everyone cracked up and this time Nicholas tossed back his hair, which was long and chestnut gold. They fizzed and bloomed and radiated at each other across the table. All youth, beauty and mettlesome talent. No doubt seeing themselves, Joyce reflected tartly, as the Viv and Larry de nos jours. Ah well—life would soon knock the edges off. Life, the theatre, other people. Joyce felt sad, irritated and envious all at the same time. She started to collect the plates, saying, ‘I can never understand why psychiatrists call lusting after your mother an Oedipus complex. Surely the whole point of the play is that he didn’t know she was his mother.’

  ‘Didn’t you think Tiresias was moving?’ Cully scraped up a last morsel of jelly. ‘Specially in that last speech.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ returned Nicholas quickly. ‘He’s got a voice like a corncrake.’

  But the greatest of these is charity. Joyce bore the dishes away thinking Nicholas was going to have to guard his tongue if he wanted to get on. She could still hear them in the kitchen, projecting like mad.

  ‘It’s great there was a female messenger,’ Cully was saying. ‘They’re always terrific parts what with all the gory stuff happening off stage.’

  ‘If they brought bad news,’ called out Joyce, ‘they were taken out and executed.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Nicholas. ‘How d’you get stuck with a job like that?’

  ‘The usual way,’ said Cully. ‘Hanging round Groucho’s.’

  More laughter: Cully’s artfully shaped, pure and poised perfectly in the throat. A chime of silver bells. Nicholas’, warm, brown, shaving ad, masculine.

  Joyce dished up Sainsbury’s enchiladas and Basmati rice and tossed a large salad of escarole. There were two bottles already opened of some chewy Portuguese red. And Chocolate Butter Pecan ice cream to follow. She shouted, ‘I could do with a hand.’

  ‘I’m still not sure what option to take up,’ said Nicholas, harking back to his future. He had been offered play as cast at Stratford or parts at the Octogon. ‘I suppose parts is the best bet.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ Cully was incredulous. ‘What do you want to be? An actor—or some buskined groupie goggling at Ian McKellan’s tights.’

  ‘I thought he was at the National?’

  ‘And you might be in a production that doesn’t transfer.’

  Nicholas was horrified. ‘Don’t they all transfer?’

  Putting plates of steaming food on a tray, Joyce found Tom at her side and handed it over. ‘Do try and contribute, darling.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Say something.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘They wouldn’t notice if we stayed in here and ate.’

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ said Joyce, knowing he was mistaken. Actors always notice when an audience disappears. She took in the wine and Cully poured it out, telling Nicholas the while how lucky Bolton was to have him. Nicholas said, ‘Please, no idolatry.’

  ‘Right, you two.’ Barnaby’s voice was loud and firm. The rebuke went unnoticed by Nicholas. Cully pulled a penitent face and smiled. Glasses were raised. ‘To your future success. On and off the boards. Be happy, darling.’

  They all drank. Then Cully came around the table, kissed the top of her mother’s head, her father’s cheek. Briefly the curtain of fragrant hair blotted out his view and he felt the loss of her, to which he had been long resigned, brutally raw and sweet.

  ‘Thanks, Dad. Ma.’ She was already back in her place.

  Nicholas took her hand, curling the slender fingers within his own, raising it to his lips and saying, ‘I don’t want to be out of London too long.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Nicholas,’ Joyce sounded really irritated. ‘You’ve only left drama school five minutes. You need some experience.’

  ‘What I’d really like,’ said Nicholas, ‘what would really stretch me I think is to get right away from verbal theatre altogether for a bit. Get some experience in mime. Maybe in a circus. That’d be fantastic.’

  ‘You need to go to Spain for mime,’ said Cully. ‘Or France.’

  ‘One of my current suspects worked in a Spanish circus,’ said Barnaby. ‘As a lion tamer.’

  ‘Was he a roaring success?’ asked Nicholas.

  ‘We went to see a mime the night we got engaged.’ said Joyce. ‘Do you remember, Tom? At the Saville?’

  ‘Course I do.’ He welcomed the vivid recollection which banished all thought of work, if only for a moment. ‘Had dinner first at Mon Plaisir.’

  ‘Were they any good?’ asked Nicholas. ‘The company.’

  ‘It was just one man. Marcel Marceau.’

  ‘He’s supposed to be brilliant,’ said Cully.

  ‘He was,’ said Barnaby. ‘Filled the stage with people. Talking to them, dancing with them. You’d swear they were actually present. There was one bit when he walked against the wind and you could see it practically knocking him over.’

  ‘Coo,’ said Cully. She and Nicholas had stopped eating.

  ‘The best of all I thought,’ said Joyce, ‘was the one he finished with. The mask-maker. He had this pile of masks—imaginary of course—and he tried them on one at a time. His own face is very handsome and amazingly flexible, like rubber. All the masks were different. He held them up quickly and each time his expression was totally transformed. The last had a terrible tragic expression. And he couldn’t get it off. He tugged and pulled and finally tore at the edges, getting more and more frantic. It simply wouldn’t budge. But—and this is what was so incredible—although the mask didn’t move you could still see what lay behind it. See his terror when he realised he was going to look like that for the rest of his life.’

  Absolute silence followed this dramatic narration. Cully and Nicholas sat entranced. Barnaby drew lines on the tablecloth with his fork. Finally Nicholas spoke. ‘God—I wish I’d seen that.’

  ‘He comes back here every so often. We talk about going again but never get round to it. Isn’t that right. Tom?’

  There was a lengthy silence. Cully made several elegant eloquent passes before her father’s eyes. Nicholas giggled and she said, ‘Don’t do that. It’s a capital offence in this house, laughing at the police.’

  ‘Seriously, Tom,’ said Joyce, ‘are you OK?’ He looked so pale, so tightly folded in on himself, staring as if not knowing who she was. All three of them began to feel genuinely alarmed.

  ‘Yes.’ He took them in at last, noting their concern. ‘I’m…sorry. Sorry. All right. Of course. Yes. I’m all right.’ He smiled at them all. ‘Sorry. I’m fine. Yes.’

  ‘You’re not fine,’ said Joyce. ‘You’re burbling.’

  ‘We should go back to Mon Plaisir, darling. For our silver wedding. Let’s all go.’

  ‘I’ll get the ice cream.’ Joyce disappeared to the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, ‘It’ll calm you down.’

  She was looking through the hatch when the phone went. One harsh vibration and his chair was empty.

  As the car sped through
the thick night, the two men talked, getting it straight. Getting it right. Barnaby had immediately seen the truth of the matter when Troy rang his home with the new item of information. The insight that had come upon the chief inspector at the dinner table merely served to reinforce his theory.

  Now, Troy said, ‘Peculiar.’ He signalled and slowed down, or at least accelerated less fiercely.

  The Manor gates stood wide open and, apart from a single light on the ground floor, the place was dark. The Morris van was missing. As the police car entered the drive, the halogen warning lamp transformed the house into a moonlit dark-socketed shell.

  They got out of the car and Barnaby knocked loudly at the front door, also ringing the bell. Receiving no reply to either summons, he tried the knob and went inside. Troy, raising an eyebrow at this casual reworking of the police rule book, was close behind.

  Barnaby called, ‘Hullo?’ and the word was swallowed up in the silence. The house appeared quite empty.

  ‘I don’t like this.’ He moved to the bottom of the staircase and called again. ‘There are eight people living here so where the hell are they?’

  ‘It’s like that ship, Chief. Found floating.’

  ‘They couldn’t have all got into the van. And the VW’s still here.’

  ‘Listen!’ Troy threw his head back, staring up into the lantern. Barnaby joined him.

  ‘What? I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘A sort of…scuffling…’

  Yes, he could hear it now. Directly overhead. As if something heavy was being dragged along. Then there was a bump and a loud cry.

  ‘On the roof!’ Troy ran out, Barnaby following more slowly. The two men retreated until they could get a good view of the top of the house. It seemed empty.

  ‘He must be on the other side. Behind the chimneys. I’ll get round—’

  ‘No—wait.’ Barnaby seized the sergeant’s arm. ‘Look—there…in the shadows.’

  A pair of dark forms locked together, wrestling, struggling, dangerously near the edge. One broke away and scrambled up a nearby sloping section, the other pursued. Barnaby saw an elongated gleam of reflected light.

  ‘Christ—he’s got a bloody iron bar—’

  ‘How do we get up?’

  ‘There’s a skylight so probably steps. You try the gallery. I’ll take downstairs.’

  ‘What about a ladder?’ Both men were running now.

  ‘Take too long… (Pant, pant.) Don’t even know…where to look…’ Barnaby hung on to the porch. ‘You…go on…’

  ‘Right.’

  Troy was half way across the hall when there was a strange sound above him. A gritty crackling and cracking as if a huge ball of cellophane was being violently scrunched. He glanced up and Barnaby saw his face change. Pinch into a concentration of shock and disbelief.

  The sergeant jumped back just in time. A cloud of opalescent dust and fragments of brilliant glass tumbled down and, in the heart of this glittering stream, twisting and turning and crying out, the slender golden-haired figure of a man.

  Everyone was in the kitchen. Heather had made some powerful tea in the twenty-cup brown enamel pot. Not all were drinking. Troy, leaning back against the draining board, shook his head as did the chief inspector. May, too, refused. Having bathed Andrew’s face, both her hands were now occupied in smearing comfrey ointment on his grazed cheekbones and bleeding lips. He was sipping tea and, between winces, gazing hard at Suhami as if willing her to show some concern for his condition.

  May, Suhami and Arno had arrived back within seconds of Tim’s fall. Seeing the Orion, Suhami had parked practically in the porch and hurried into the house.

  ‘Tim…’ she had cried out, flying across the hail, kneeling by his side, hands to her face in horror.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do, Miss,’ Troy had tried to raise her up. ‘The chief inspector’s ringing for an ambulance. Don’t touch that,’ he added sharply, as she reached out to the crowbar.

  ‘But—how did it happen?’ She looked at the gaping hole in the lantern. ‘Did he fall? What was he doing up there?’

  That was when Andrew appeared, dragging himself along by the gallery rail. He was bleeding and his shirt and jeans were torn. The rasp of his breath, expelled forcefully in the form of shudders, seemed to fill the hall. He was mumbling something, the words becoming clearer as he approached.

  ‘Kill me…tried to kill me…’

  Half an hour later Barnaby was repeating the phrase in the form of a question. He asked three times before getting any response.

  ‘Why? Because he’d discovered who I really was.’ The words, issuing through swollen lips, were not quite clear. There was a murmur of puzzled curiosity.

  May, wiping her hands on a muslin cloth, said, ‘What do you mean, Christopher?’

  ‘My name isn’t Christopher. It’s Andrew Carter. Jim Carter was my uncle.’ The curiosity became consternation. The others followed Barnaby’s example and started to ask questions, and it took a good few minutes to quieten them down. Ken was the last to hush after asking what the point was in pretending to be somebody else.

  Andrew explained about the letter, his uncle’s tablets, his own presence at the inquest, the whole thing. ‘I knew someone was on to me,’ he concluded, speaking to Barnaby. ‘I just didn’t know who it was. The photograph—the one I showed you—was hidden under some shirts. I found it had been moved. Shortly after this I was attacked. A lump of iron was pushed off the roof as I was leaving the house. I lied to the others about where the stone fell. It was not on the slab where May was standing at all, but the one behind.’

  ‘You said nothing of this to me.’

  ‘But I did, Chief Inspector!’ cried May. ‘I told you when I was first interviewed.’

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘I remember it distinctly. My accident? When the meteor fell?’

  ‘Ahhh. Yes.’

  ‘You told me to stick to the matter in hand. I didn’t like to persist. Thought there might be some sort of etiquette in these matters. You brushed me aside in your office as well.’

  There’s no answer to that is there, my old darling? Troy took secret pleasure in his chief’s discomposure, whilst glossing over the fact that he would have done just the same himself.

  ‘So why did you keep quiet?’ The chief inspector emphasised the ‘you’ as he turned once more to Andrew.

  ‘I felt that if I appeared ignorant of the real reason for the attack, they’d think I wasn’t on to them and my position would be safer.’

  ‘Sounds like dangerously muddled thinking to me. And that needn’t have stopped you telling us.’

  ‘You’d have come round asking questions and given it all away.’

  ‘What evidence do you have that the whole thing wasn’t an accident?’

  ‘I went up on the roof directly afterwards. There was no way the metal chunk could have rolled off. It was a couple of feet from the edge. Also, wedged in between the chimneys, I found a crowbar.’

  ‘The one that was used tonight?’

  Andrew nodded. He looked weary, finished. ‘I took it away and hid it in Calypso’s stall. Yesterday it was still there. When I checked tonight it was gone. I realised that whoever took it was the one who attacked me. It turned out to be Tim.’

  The others exchanged looks of deep distress. May said, ‘You should never have attempted to conceal this. Christopher. It was very wrong.’

  ‘We’ll have to remember now to call him “Andrew”,’ said Heather.

  And Ken added, ‘Tomorrow I shall channel him a star name.’

  ‘It wasn’t even as if I was much of a threat. I’d been looking round, asking questions, checking Jim’s room for weeks and found nothing.’

  ‘Was that you then—in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry if I alarmed you, May. I heard your window open as I was running off.’

  ‘I’m glad to have the mystery explained. And my other mystery, Chief Inspector…the snat
ch of conversation I heard—surely Andrew’s suspicion of his uncle’s death renders that even more significant?’

  ‘What conversation’s this?’ Andrew’s tiredness seemed to fall away. ‘Who was it? What did they say?’

  ‘Who it was remains unclear, Mr Carter,’ said Barnaby. ‘But they seemed concerned about a possible post mortem.’

  ‘I knew it—’

  ‘I can’t imagine why anyone would wish to hurt Jim,’ said Suhami. ‘He was so harmless.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Andrew. ‘He discovered whatever was going on here.’

  ‘Nothing’s going on,’ said Ken, ‘but love, light and peace.’

  ‘And healing,’ added Heather.

  ‘Rather than go in for vague speculation at this stage,’ said Barnaby. ‘I’d like to try and get straight what happened tonight. How did the fight start? What were you doing on the roof?’

  ‘I was in my room. Ken and Heather had gone into the village—’

  ‘Just briefly,’ Heather broke in defensively, ‘to exercise his leg.’

  ‘And Suze had driven May and Arno to the hospital. He’d had an accident.’

  Good God, thought Troy. If this lot ever had a day without an accident, they’d think the world was coming to an end.

  ‘I’d taken a drink up and was reading on my bed. I hadn’t seen Tim. None of us had, except Arno. I’d been reading for half an hour, I suppose, and I heard someone cry out my name—’

  ‘Which name?’ asked the chief inspector.

  ‘My real name, Andrew. That’s what was so odd. Then I heard his door open and I went out on to the landing. It seems pretty stupid now but I wasn’t suspicious at all. It was just poor old Tim—you know? And he was coming towards me—his hair all tangled and his eyes staring—with this bar. He was…wielding it. Whirling it round his head. It was bloody terrifying. I backed away—my room’s at the very end of the gallery and I found myself up against the door that led to the roof. So it was either up there or over the gallery rail…’ Suhami gave a jerky little cry of fright.