Exit Stage Left

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Recent Titles by Graham Ison From Severn House

Title Page

Copyright

The Hardcastle Series

HARDCASTLE’S SPY

HARDCASTLE’S ARMISTICE

HARDCASTLE’S CONSPIRACY

HARDCASTLE’S AIRMEN

HARDCASTLE’S ACTRESS

HARDCASTLE’S BURGLAR

HARDCASTLE’S MANDARIN

HARDCASTLE’S SOLDIERS

HARDCASTLE’S OBSESSION

HARDCASTLE’S FRUSTRATION

HARDCASTLE’S TRAITORS

HARDCASTLE’S QUARTET

Contemporary Police Procedurals

ALL QUIET ON ARRIVAL

BREACH OF PRIVILEGE

DIVISION

DRUMFIRE

EXIT STAGE LEFT

GUNRUNNER

JACK IN THE BOX

KICKING THE AIR

LIGHT FANTASTIC

LOST OR FOUND

MAKE THEM PAY

RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT

WHIPLASH

WHISPERING GRASS

WORKING GIRL

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

This first world edition published 2015

in Great Britain and the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

Trade paperback edition first published

in Great Britain and the USA 2015 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2015 by Graham Ison.

The right of Graham Ison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ison, Graham author.

Exit Stage Left.

1. Brock, Harry (Fictitious character : Ison)–Fiction.

2. Poole, Dave (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

3. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 4. Actors–Death–

Fiction. 5. Police–England–London–Fiction.

6. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title

823.9’14-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8484-8 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-587-2 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-636-6 (e-book)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

Stirlingshire, Scotland.

I
t was half-past midnight on a Tuesday morning in February as Lancelot Foley strolled along a deserted Freshbrook Street in London’s Chelsea.

Freshbrook Street was a one-way street, and every night Foley would dismiss the taxi at the end of the road and walk the short distance to the door of the house where he was now living. To be taken round the one-way system, so that he could be set down at the front door, would cost an extra one pound and fifty pence – and although he was very well off, thanks to the legacy of a wealthy father, he was parsimonious.

On this particular night, taking the short walk would prove to be an extremely unwise decision.

Lancelot Foley, elegantly attired in a brown fedora and a brown single-breasted Ulster overcoat complete with cape, swung a silver-topped walking stick in his right kid-gloved hand as he walked. His apparel, more in keeping with the Victorian age, was a misconceived affectation that he believed enhanced his image as a West End stage actor of some renown. He was widely regarded as raffish and egotistical, even by his circle of friends – which, unsurprisingly, was rather small. Now in his late thirties, regular visits to his personal trainer at the gym in Fulham ensured that he kept his tall slim figure in good shape.

Currently appearing in a revival of Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
at the Clarence Theatre, Foley played the languid poseur Algernon Moncrieff, a part that closely mirrored his own character. The role required him to have a moustache, but disinclined to wear a false one – and being put to the chore of applying it for each performance and removing it afterwards – he had grown one.

Foley could easily have afforded a Rolls Royce and employed a chauffeur to take him home each night. His father had made a fortune buying goods in quantity and selling them at a minimal profit. His view was that it was better to sell a hundred items at a penny profit than to sell forty-nine at two pence profit. He began his trading career with a market stall in Huddersfield and would buy anything that was saleable. By the end of his life, he owned a chain of shops which, when they were sold, realized some ten million pounds, which he bequeathed to his son.

Young Lancelot had invested wisely, and that meant that together with his earnings as an actor he was now worth something in the region of fifteen million pounds. Those who knew him, though, often said that he was the sort of man who would enjoy Charles Dickens’s
A
Christmas Carol
but would be disappointed in the ending.

It had started to snow nearly two hours earlier, at about the time Lancelot Foley was leaving the theatre, but he was impervious to the weather; in fact, he was in the best of spirits and was actually whistling as he approached the roadworks. He had almost reached the apartment of his current mistress Jane Lawless, a few yards further along the road, when the shadowy figure of a man emerged from a darkened doorway.

The man was aged about forty, perhaps just a shade less than six-foot tall, and was well-built, strong and fit. He had piercing blue eyes, which gazed out at the world with deep cynicism, and a strong cleft-chin, upon the right side of which was a two-inch-long scar. He wore a knee-length dark coat with a hood that effectively shielded his identity from any casual passer-by and rubber-soled shoes that muffled any sound. But at that hour the street was empty, apart from the man and Foley and the snow, and the cars parked nose to tail.

Moving stealthily, unseen and unheard, the man approached Foley from behind just as the two of them drew parallel with the roadworks. With a skill and speed that came only from intensive training, he gripped Foley’s head, twisted it sharply and broke his neck. Catching the body of his lifeless victim as it was falling to the ground, the assailant effortlessly threw it over the barrier and into the excavation. With a similarly casual indifference to the crime he had just committed, he picked up Foley’s fedora and walking stick, tossed them after him, and disappeared into the night. He had not uttered a single word. One moment Foley was alive; seconds later he was dead.

His mission accomplished, the mysterious killer made his way to his house in Romford. In order that his movements, if anyone were interested, would be more difficult to trace, he used several different modes of transport to reach the street where he had parked his car. He arrived at Romford at a little after three that same morning and was admitted by one of his trusted employees, who had waited up for his boss’s return.

It was still dark at ten minutes to eight the following morning, and the red lights around the excavation in Freshbrook Street were still illuminated. It was freezing cold, and the falling snow that had not ceased all night was now about six inches deep in places. A bitter wind had drifted it against walls and the parked cars of residents and into the basement areas of the houses, but the footsteps of pedestrians on their way to catch a bus, a train or to find a cab had created a dirty, slippery slush on the pavement.

Two workmen, cursing the inclement weather, began to unload pickaxes and shovels from their truck. One of the men, cold despite his windproof high-visibility jacket, removed one of the barriers, seized a shovel in his calloused hands and carefully descended into the shallow excavation. ‘Better get on with it, then. With any luck we’ll finish today,’ he said, and began to shovel snow out of the ditch. But he hadn’t shifted more than two or three inches when he scrambled quickly out of the hole that he and his mate had dug the day before.

‘What’s up, Griff?’ asked his companion, noting the shocked expression on his colleague’s white face. ‘Seen a ghost?’

‘There’s a body down there, Frank, that’s what’s up.’ Griff retreated a few more paces.

‘It’s too early in the morning for your bloody wind-ups,’ said Frank, aware that his colleague had a penchant for practical jokes. ‘Who’d leave a body down a hole except a gravedigger?’ He stepped across and peered down into the excavation. ‘Bloody hell, you’re right.’

‘Get on your mobile, Frank, and call the bleedin’ law,’ said Griff. ‘I reckon someone’s done for this bloke.’

A passing pedestrian had heard Griff’s comment and stopped to stare into the hole. Within seconds a small crowd had gathered, gawping at the body and discussing the macabre scene with each other, but it was at least twenty minutes before a police car arrived in the street. Not wishing to endanger his vehicle or himself on the treacherous roads, the officer had driven cautiously from Chelsea police station. After all, he’d been told that it was a
dead
body, so there was no rush.

Leaving the vehicle’s blue-light bar switched on, the constable ambled across to the scene of what the police call an ‘incident’. He didn’t bother to don his cap because these days no one cared whether he was properly dressed or not. ‘Someone found a body, squire?’ he asked one of the two workmen, as if such an occurrence was an everyday happening.

‘Yeah, me, Officer,’ said Griff, and pointed down into the excavation.

The policeman stepped forward and gazed at the outline of a clothed body. It was just visible, but the continuing snow threatened to cover it again. ‘I reckon you’re right. Looks like a drunk who fell down there last night.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Griff. ‘There was barriers all round it, and we’d switched on the lamps like the law says we has to.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ The PC turned back to face the two men. ‘Have you guys got a tarpaulin on your truck?’

‘Yeah, should have,’ said Frank.

‘Good. Better chuck it over the body until the CID gets here.’ The PC knew all about preserving a crime scene, although he wasn’t certain that throwing a tarpaulin over a dead body was the right thing to do. Come to that, he wasn’t too sure it was a crime scene anyway. But, he thought, better to be on the safe side. He’d fallen foul of the local detective chief inspector before and had no desire to do so again.

‘Right,’ said Frank. ‘Here, Griff, bring that tarp over here and give us a hand to do what the copper says.’

‘What are you supposed to be doing here, anyway?’ The PC burrowed inside his voluminous jacket, eventually found an incident report book and began scribbling a few notes in it.

‘Sorting out a busted sewage pipe, guv,’ said Griff, ‘but I doubt if we’ll finish it today, not now. Not with all this. If your blokes can shut the M25 for a day because of an accident, Gawd knows how long this’ll take.’

‘Yeah, I reckon you’re right, mate. Better have your names and addresses, just for the record.’ The PC took the workmen’s details and returned to his car to make a call.

Fifteen minutes later the detective chief inspector from Chelsea police station arrived, together with a detective sergeant. After a brief conversation with the two workmen to determine where the barriers had been before they’d moved them, the DCI decided that the dead man could not have fallen down the hole accidentally; it was undoubtedly a suspicious death with which he was dealing. He put up a call for a pathologist and a scenes-of-crime unit. While he was awaiting their arrival, he summoned a traffic unit and directed the crew to close the road and put in diversions. The familiar blue and white tapes were strung around the excavation and across the footway while other officers erected a tent over the crime scene and the pavement.

‘Like I said, this is going to take all day,’ said Griff mournfully.

‘And the rest, squire,’ said the PC.

Linda Mitchell, a senior forensic practitioner, arrived thirty minutes later, together with her evidence recovery unit. Five minutes after that, Dr Henry Mortlock, a Home Office pathologist, arrived and spent a few minutes in the hole examining the corpse.

Four policemen then descended into the excavation, removed the tarpaulin and lifted the body on to a portable examination table that Linda Mitchell’s team had brought with them.

Dr Mortlock conducted a further examination of the corpse, took its temperature and dictated his findings into a pocket recorder. ‘This man’s been murdered, Chief Inspector. His neck has been broken,’ he announced to the local DCI. ‘At a rough guess, I’d say that he was the victim of someone familiar with martial arts.’

‘Bugger it!’ said the DCI, and radioed for a detective inspector from the Homicide Investigation Team that patrolled constantly for the sole purpose of assessing situations such as this one.

The HAT DI, as he was known, weighed up the situation very quickly and decided it was a case for the Homicide and Major Crime Command.