Ancient Images (17 page)

    "Tommy says he was never the same after making that film, and it wasn't even released."

    "Does he know why?" Sandy asked.

    "If he does, he isn't telling. He did say to us that once the director died, everyone Tommy knew who'd worked on it was quite glad to see it quietly buried."

    "In Tommy's case that may have been because he hoped it would help Billy sort himself out," Hattie said. "They stayed together for the sake of their act, but offstage Billy nearly drove him crazy, Tommy says. Billy didn't just not leave him on his own, he kept on at him to put on more weight, can you imagine? When Billy had drunk too much he would always start to sing some kind of a song. 'Bony and thin, bony and thin,' he'd sing. And drunk or sober, he would nearly have a fit if Tommy ever stood behind him. Whenever they were walking he'd step back to make sure Tommy stayed in front, especially if they were casting shadows. Tommy got so desperate he suggested they should build it into their act, but Billy wouldn't admit he was doing it. Tommy thought he mightn't even have realized he was."

    "How did he die?" Sandy said, though she wasn't sure that she wanted to hear.

    "They were going out to entertain the troops during the war," Stephen said. "Tommy decided he absolutely had to get away on his own for half an hour before they left-told Billy he'd bring him a bottle of Scotch. So Tommy came back in half an hour and there was Billy at the dressing table, with the doily he'd pulled off it draped over his knee and all the jars of cream smashed around him on the carpet, and him dead and staring back over his shoulder with his eyes nearly springing out of his head."

    "Tommy went out with the troops anyway. At least he had that to keep him going."

    "Nothing like hard work to take your mind off things."

    "Until tonight, in his case," Sandy said.

    "He'll be back. You can't keep an old dog down in this business," Stephen assured her. "Young lady, we must be going before our landlady locks up, but don't you let your sleep be troubled by anything we've said. I've heard stranger tales in a lifetime of treading the boards."

    Sandy didn't quite see why that should be reassuring. When they'd left, Hattie favoring her with a regal wave, she stared out at the wakeful night and then sent herself up to her room. To her surprise, she drifted off to sleep almost as soon as she crawled into bed.

    

    

    The dawn roused her, spreading golden furrows across the sea. She made herself coffee with the kit provided in her room and went out on the balcony to taste the last of the mist. She wouldn't trouble Tommy Hoddle, she promised herself, though perhaps she might call him
on
her way back south. She put down her cup and leaned over the balcony, and saw that one name on the poster for the show at the end of the pier had been pasted over.

    She showered and dressed hurriedly, and headed for the pavilion. Only a cleaner was there so early, but she told Sandy all that she needed to know, in a booming monotonous voice. The police had found Tommy Hoddle late last night. He couldn't have been looking where he was going. He'd run off the edge of the cliff and was dead of a broken neck.

    

    

    All she could do was drive to Birmingham. She drove southwest across the flat land, past King's Lynn where the market was served by the sea, past the orchards of Wisbech, where apples were glazed with a lingering dew. Soon the sky grew smudged, first with the burning of peat on the Fens and then with the smoke of factories that had ganged up on the cathedral at Peterborough. Further on, amid pastures and spires that gleamed through trees, the steel town of Corby was rusting, as though the ancient landscape were reclaiming its elements. The road began to flourish old names-Marston Trussell, Husbands Bosworth-until it reached the motorway, where the race of cars sent her speeding past Coventry toward Birmingham.

    Her drive had been prolix, but at least it wasn't confusing until she reached Birmingham. She followed the ring road in search of the hotel she'd called from Cromer, until she felt as if she would never stop driving: the road was like a racetrack, with her playing the mechanical hare. At last she checked into a hotel opposite the railway station, and canceled her other reservation as soon as she was in her room; then she went out for a stroll before lunch.

    It proved to be almost as easy to lose one's way on foot as it had been while driving. Pedestrian underpasses led under the pavements outside department stores and emerged in front of gloomy offices or at the edge of razed ground where yellow excavators gnawed the earth, When she'd had enough of the snarling of machinery she made for the nearest underpass, which seemed bound to lead back toward the shops she could see but was unable to reach because of the traffic.

    She might have chosen a more appealing route. All the overhead lamps except one were smashed, their multicolored entrails dangling, and the one that still worked was buzzing and fluttering helplessly. Once she had walked beneath the lamp, the half of the passage ahead seemed much darker. The glimmering tiles of the walls were blackened with graffiti like tangles of exposed roots. She trod on scattered fish-and-chip papers and almost lost her footing. She wondered if an excavator was digging close to the underpass, for the smell of stale food was mixed with a smell of earth: indeed, she thought she heard a trickling of soil and a faint sound of clawing. She hurried to the end of the passage and glanced back out of the daylight. It must be litter which lay where the tunnel was darkest and which stirred as if it were about to leap from crouching. She made herself walk slowly up the ramp, into the sudden lunchtime crowd.

    She ate lunch in a bar in the basement of the hotel. A blind man sitting at a nearby table had draped his coat over his guide dog, whether for warmth or concealment she couldn't tell. Every so often the coat would rear up as the dog's head emerged, its gray tongue lolling. Sandy patted the animal as she headed for the multistory car park.

    She couldn't locate the muffled scraping that she heard among the ranks of empty vehicles until it was beside her, and a figure slithered out from beneath a parked car, his hands glistening with oil. She was so angry with herself for flinching that the poor man must have thought she was swearing at him, not herself. She gave him an apologetic grin and took refuge in her car.

    At least there were plenty of signs beside the tangled streets to guide her out to the route north. The retirement home where the stuntman lived was close to an exit from the motorway. Sandy thought the location might be inappropri ately noisy, but though she saw the sign for The Dell almost as soon as she left the motorway, the land had already cut off the rumble of traffic. She swung the car between the globed gateposts and coasted up the wide drive.

    The Dell was an extensive three-story house, sporting a weathercock on an ornamental tower. Nurses dressed in blue and white uniforms patrolled the gravel paths that wound about the lawns. Some were wheeling patients, one was shaking her finger at an old man in a wheelchair who had been surreptitiously feeding birds behind a tree. As Sandy parked on a rectangle of gravel she noticed a play area, swings and slides and a seesaw. They must be provided for visiting grandchildren, she thought, not for inmates who had entered their second childhoods.

    A receptionist was reading a hospital romance behind a desk in the hall, at the foot of a wide staircase. She placed the book open on the desk and broke its spine with the heel of her hand as she said, "May I help you?"

    "I called earlier this week about speaking to Leslie Tomlinson."

    "Oh yes. Would you like to wait a moment? I'll fetch nurse."

    Sandy sat on a leather couch with rolled arms opposite the desk, where the hospital romance was trying feebly to raise itself. Upstairs an old woman was crooning "Tooraloooraloora tuppence a bag,"
while
in the ground-floor lounge several old people were watching a war film; a man wearing a beret waved his stick every time the enemy were hit. Soon the receptionist came back with two nurses, whose blue and white uniforms had begun to make Sandy think of fast-food waitresses. "Just see to Mr. Hunter. We don't want him wearing his hat indoors, do we?" the older nurse said to her colleague, and sat by Sandy on the couch. "You wanted to visit Mr. Tomlinson?"

    "Please."

    "You're not a relative?"

    "Just a researcher," Sandy said, displaying her staff card. "I wanted to ask him about one of his films."

    "Have you come far?"

    "From London."

    "A fair way." The nurse brushed a speck, so minute Sandy couldn't see it, off her knee. "We certainly didn't anticipate problems when we discussed your visit with you. Mr. Tomlinson was most responsive. But shortly before our lunch period today he took a turn for the worse."

    "Because I was coming, you mean?"

    "No, I'm sure that's not the case. He wasn't just overexcited. Something upset him rather badly, and we haven't been able to persuade him to say what. To be frank with you, he won't open his mouth."

    "I'm sorry," Sandy said, and stood up. "I won't keep you any longer. I hope he gets better soon."

    "I was thinking you might be able to help."

    "If I can," Sandy asked, feeling as if she should first have asked how.

    "He never talked much about his career, and none of us knew enough about it to get him talking. You may be able to remind him of something that will start him off."

    "I only really know about the film I'm researching, and I believe he injured himself making that one. Would it be wise to remind him of that just now?"

    "It doesn't have to be a pleasant memory," the nurse said as if Sandy were questioning her professional judgment, "so long as it brings him back to us." She clapped her hands at the old man in the television lounge, who was clutching his stick with one hand and pressing the beret to his scalp with the other. "Look, we've a visitor. What must she think of you? Behave yourself, now, or there'll be no outing for you tomorrow," she called, and marched upstairs.

    Sandy hesitated long enough to make it clear that she was choosing to follow. The nurse padded briskly to the end of a corridor on the middle floor, where a window overlooked the play area. "We think Mr. Tomlinson may have seen someone climbing on the children's frame. One of the staff thought she saw someone running away. You'd wonder what they've got between their ears, someone who won't even leave our old folk in peace." She pushed open the last door in the corridor and motioned Sandy forward. "Here's someone to see you, Mr. Tomlinson," she pronounced in a slow clear hearty voice.

    Sunlight was streaming into the room beyond the door, through pink curtains drawn back toward wallpaper printed with baskets of flowers. In the midst of the brightness, which all the white bedroom furniture appeared to be directing at him, an old man lay in bed, smiling at the sky. The flowered quilt was pulled up to his plump mottled chin. His hands lay slack on the quilt, and between them were several childish paintings of the sun above yellow fields. "Were his grandchildren here recently?" Sandy whispered.

    The nurse looked puzzled for a moment. "Oh, you mean the pictures? He painted those."

    Whatever made him happy, Sandy thought-but it didn't seem as if she had much chance of communicating with him. She was disconcerted to see that though he had performed stunts for both Karloff and Lugosi in the film, he didn't resemble either of them. Still, his face had puffed up with age, and the weight of it had dragged it and his vague smile slightly askew.

    The nurse strode over to the bed as if she meant to heave him out of it. "Now then, Mr. Tomlinson, aren't we going to say hallo to our visitor? We'll have her thinking we've forgotten our manners. She wants to talk about one of the films we made."

    Even her casting herself in the film didn't startle him into awareness. His hands moved on the quilt, but only as they might while he was asleep. His gaze seemed empty as the sky. The nurse gestured Sandy to step closer. "Look, here she is," the nurse wheedled, and directed Sandy to stand where he was gazing.

    As she moved into his gaze Sandy felt uncomfortable, tongue-tied, out of place. She felt compelled to speak, to counteract the absence in his eyes, the meaningless brightness of the room. "I'm Sandy Allan, Mr. Tomlinson. I'm a friend of Graham Nolan's."

    "You remember Mr. Nolan. Mr. Nolan," the nurse repeated as if he were deaf. "The nice gentleman who's seen all your films."

    The names, his own included, seemed to fall unrecognized past him. "You remember," the nurse said almost accusingly. "He was interested in the film Miss Allan wants to talk to you about, the one where you hurt your back."

    Though he appeared not to react, Sandy felt resentful that he should be reminded of his accident while he was gazing at her. She turned deliberately and followed his gaze. "It's a lovely view," she said, though the climbing frame out there made her unexpectedly nervous-she thought that if an adult stood on the top rung, their face would be level with Leslie Tomlinson's window. She had just realized that when a voice, composed as much of indrawn breaths as exhalations, bayed behind her. "Made me fall," it said.

    Sandy swung round. The stuntman was still gazing as if there were nothing between him and the sky, but his mouth had fallen open, its corners sagging. "Who made you fall, Mr. Tomlinson?" the nurse demanded. "When did they?"

    Sandy's impatience with the nurse overcame her determination not to trouble him. "While you were making the film, do you mean?" she said. "While you were standing in for Boris Karloff?"

    To her surprise and rather to her dismay, the name made his eyes gleam and then roll in their sockets. He glanced around him at the flowered walls and the flowered quilt, as if he were searching for somewhere he could bear to rest his gaze, then he looked beseechingly at her. "It looked through the window," he said, never closing his mouth.