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‘Thank you, Colin.’ When we’d moved yet again, I knew that the commander would come with us; he’d be unable to resist having an office with a prestigious Belgravia address.

‘Ah, Mr Brock.’ The commander was seated behind a desk covered with tidy piles of files. He loves paper and despises computers, claiming that he prefers to see everything written down; no doubt the pen and paper industry loves people like him. Nevertheless, he somewhat reluctantly pushed a file to one side and peered at me over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Tell me about this sudden death you’re dealing with.’ The commander is a pedant and refuses to describe unexplained deaths as murder, manslaughter or suicide until a jury has said as much and the Supreme Court has confirmed that verdict.

I explained, as succinctly as possible, the circumstances surrounding the death of Lancelot Foley, but resisted the temptation to tell him that I already suspected Debra Foley might somehow be involved. That would be unwise because the commander would immediately suggest a course of action, and he’s not qualified to do so. The truth of the matter is that some genius in Human Resources – what was once called personnel branch – arbitrarily transferred him to the CID after a lifetime of Uniform Branch duty where, doubtless, he interfered with traffic and football hooligans. Regrettably for me, and I suspect for the Metropolitan Police in general, he now thinks he really is a detective.

‘The death of such a well-known actor as Lancelot Foley will undoubtedly attract a lot of publicity, Mr Brock,’ said the commander, after giving the matter due consideration. ‘In the circumstances, we must be circumspect in our dealings with the media.’

‘I don’t intend to have any dealings with the media at all, if I can possibly help it, sir,’ I said.

‘Not altogether wise.’ The commander pursed his lips and shook his head so that his cheeks and double chin wobbled. ‘We should always tell them as much as we can, not as little as we can get away with. That was an edict laid down by the late Sir Robert Mark when he was Commissioner, and I have to say that I agree with him wholeheartedly.’ He opened his abandoned file and adjusted his spectacles; I’m convinced they contain plain glass and are only worn to lend gravitas to his otherwise lacklustre personality. ‘Keep me informed,’ he said, waving a podgy hand of dismissal.

Back in the incident room, I found Dave sitting beside Wilberforce and his computer. ‘Just putting the last of the statements on file, guv. The workmen who found the body, the first PC on scene, the local DCI and all the other bit-part actors.’

‘Anything from the house-to-house, Dave?’

‘Nothing. As usual no one saw anything or heard anything. In view of the fact that the Foleys have a house in Farnham, I’ve been on to the Surrey Constabulary and they’re doing the usual search of local records. But I doubt if anything useful will turn up.’

It was time for a briefing. I told the team what Kate and I had learned from our interviews with the theatre manager and with Debra Foley and Jane Lawless.

‘This evening,’ I continued, ‘Dave and I will go back to the theatre and interview the cast members of the play the Foleys were appearing in. And tomorrow we’ll be attending the post-mortem and speaking to Gerald Andrews.’ I glanced around. ‘Liz, where are you?’

‘Over here, sir,’ said Detective Sergeant Liz Carpenter, raising a hand.

‘Liz, I want you and Nicola Chance to put yourselves about in Chorley Street and see what you can find out about Debra Foley; with discretion, of course. Where she goes, who she sees … you know the sort of thing. But wrap it up as though you’re enquiring about Lancelot Foley. OK?’ I looked across at Dave. ‘I think we’ll get going now, Dave. The performance starts at seven thirty, so we should be able to catch most of the cast before it begins. DI Ebdon and I have already seen Debra Foley, but there are still the rest of the players to interview.’

T
he Clarence Theatre looked much better now that it was night time and the lights were on. Despite his apparent languor, the manager had succeeded in having the billboards replaced. Or someone had. They now showed Charles Digby playing the lead opposite Vanessa Drummond.

Dave brushed aside a job’s-worth decked out in a commissionaire’s flashy uniform who demanded to see our tickets, and we made our way to the manager’s office.

‘Here you are again, Chief Inspector.’ Sebastian Weaver was seated behind his desk, wearing his customary harassed expression. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I need to interview the members of the cast, Mr Weaver.’

‘What, now, this minute?’ Weaver was clearly appalled at my request. He pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket and stared at it for some seconds, as though a solution to this latest problem would be found there. ‘But they’re getting ready to go on.’

‘The play doesn’t start for another hour,’ said Dave.

‘They have to put on make-up, you know. It’s not just a case of turning up and walking on. And the dressers will get upset.’ Weaver tugged at one of his pendulous ear lobes and shot Dave a critical expression as though assessing his suitability to play the lead in
Othello
. ‘Oh, this is all so inconvenient.’

‘It won’t take long, Mr Weaver,’ I said. ‘It’s just a formal question as to how well they knew Lancelot Foley. If they knew him well or I think that they have something to add to our investigation, I’ll arrange to see them at a more convenient time. Probably at their digs.’

‘I suppose it’ll be all right,’ muttered Weaver, albeit reluctantly. ‘The play is actually in three acts,’ he explained. ‘Some of the cast don’t go on immediately, so it might be possible to interview them first, and those that go on straightaway you could perhaps talk to later. If you see what I mean.’ He shook his head. ‘Oh my God! I can see disaster looming, my dears.’

‘Where will we find them?’ I asked.

Weaver extracted a sheet of paper from a pile on his desk and handed it me. ‘That’s a list of their names, together with the numbers of their dressing rooms.’

Dave and I started with Charles Digby, Lancelot Foley’s understudy, who we’d found in the dressing room recently used by Foley. A small man with thinning hair, a pallid complexion and a pointed nose that lent him a hunted expression, Digby had the appearance of a man too old and physically unsuited to play the part of Algernon Moncrieff, who was supposed to be a dashing thirty-something, but greasepaint can work miracles. I noticed immediately that Digby had a nervous tic in his right eyelid, and throughout our short conversation he frequently touched it, as if to stem its involuntary twitching. At other times one of his hands played a tattoo, either on the top of his dressing table or on his knee. Overall he was an agitated individual, but perhaps he was prone to stage fright, a condition that I’d been led to believe was, paradoxically, not uncommon among actors.

I also wondered briefly if the murder of Foley had been committed by Digby, motivated by a desire to take over the lead role, but dismissed that theory as not only improbable, but fantasy. Although I’d learned from Gail that the theatre is a cut-throat, bitchy business, I doubted that it would extend to murder. And in any event, I thought it unlikely that Digby had the strength, the courage or the ability to snap a man’s neck in cold blood in a London street.

‘I couldn’t stand the man.’ Seated in front of a mirror, Digby was applying a false moustache. ‘He was full of himself. Full of himself.’ He touched his right eyelid.

‘How well did you know him, Mr Digby?’ asked Dave, glancing down at the list of prepared questions that he had on a clipboard.

‘Hardly at all, but that was enough to convince me that he had a good conceit of himself.’ Digby swung round on his stool so that he was facing us. ‘Whenever we met, which was rarely, we just confined ourselves to shaking each other warmly by the throat – metaphorically, of course – and left it at that.’

‘What about Mrs Foley?’

‘Debra’s a charming girl,’ said Digby, without hesitation. ‘Always pleasant to everyone, even down to the young tea boy. How on earth she ever hooked up with Lancelot is a mystery.’

By ten o’clock we had interviewed every member of the cast, but the results were inconclusive or, as Dave put it, bloody useless. There were nine cast members in all, and the eight we interviewed at the Clarence were equally divided in their views of Lancelot Foley. To some, he was an objectionable individual, and his wife charming. To others, the reverse was the case. And it couldn’t be accounted for by the sexes. As many women disliked Lancelot as liked him, and a similar divide existed in the case of Debra. The more people we spoke to, the more apparent became the conflicting views held by them. There seemed to be no happy medium.

We moved on to the stage staff: electricians, lighting operators, scene-shifters and the other behind-the-scenes general dogsbodies that make the whole thing work. Refreshingly, they were down to earth and unequivocal in their opinion.

As the assistant stage manager succinctly put it, ‘Foley was a toffee-nosed bastard full of his own piss and importance, guv’nor. And as for his missus, she was just a scrubber who couldn’t act.’ And he spoke for them all.

‘You always get the truth at the coal face,’ said Dave.

Finally, we went to see the stage-door keeper, a wizened little man secreted in a glass-sided booth. He was reading a copy of the
Sun
, but looked up and stared at me through dirty spectacles as I tapped on the window.

‘Yus, guv’nor?’

‘We’re police officers, Mr …?’

‘Fred Higgins, guv’nor. You come about Mr Foley getting done in?’

‘Yes, we have. D’you happen to know what time he left the theatre last night, Fred?’

‘Course I do.’ Higgins referred to a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. ‘A quarter to eleven on the dot, like what he always does. Have to make a note of the comings and goings in case there’s a fire, see. Then we knows who’s inside and who ain’t.’

‘I don’t suppose you know where he went.’

‘Course I do,’ said Higgins again, a sly expression on his face. He tugged at his walrus moustache. ‘I called him a cab, like what I always does.’

‘D’you know where it was taking him?’ I was beginning to feel like a dentist attempting to extract a reluctant tooth.

‘Pimlott’s, guv’nor. It’s some fancy French caff in Covent Garden what calls itself a bistro. He often goes there. Probably gets a discount, seeing as how he’s a skinflint.’

‘Was he alone, Fred?’ asked Dave.

‘Nah, he had that bird wiv ’im what plays Miss Prism in the play.’

‘That’ll be Ruth Strickland,’ said Dave, glancing at his list.

‘That’s her, guv’nor. Quite a dish, she is. Mind you, she’s made up to look like a right battleaxe in the play, but when she’s tarted up, well, she’s something else, I can tell you.’

‘D’you want to see her again before we leave, guv?’ Dave asked me.

‘No, she’ll be on stage now, I expect. Anyway, he was probably just giving her lift, but we’ll find out soon enough if anything was going on between the two of them.’

Dave and I arrived at Henry Mortlock’s carvery on the stroke of nine the next morning, but it came as no surprise that he had already finished the post-mortem. I sometimes wondered why he bothered to give me a time that he would then ignore. On the one occasion I questioned it, he merely said that he was far too busy to worry about time.

‘As I said at the scene, Harry, someone broke his neck, approximately eight hours before he was found. I can give you all the medical mumbo-jumbo if you want it, but in layman’s terms and from my limited knowledge of the martial arts I would say that Foley was approached from behind, and his head was seized and twisted sharply.’ Mortlock peeled off his surgical gloves and tossed them towards a clinical waste bin. And missed. ‘I think it’s something they teach the Special Air Service, but whoever was responsible was clearly a strong man … or woman.’

‘Thanks for that, Henry,’ I said. ‘We’ll dash out and grab a passing commando.’

‘It may be of some help for you to know the contents of the victim’s stomach,’ responded Mortlock tartly, completely ignoring my lame attempt at humour. ‘Not long before his death he’d had a meal that consisted of steak tartare and chips, and red wine. Not a very good choice for a man whose cholesterol count was just above eight. If he’d kept on at that rate, he’d have had a heart attack or a stroke, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘That confirms he must’ve had a meal between leaving the theatre and when he was murdered, and we know he left the Clarence at a quarter to eleven.’ I was actually speaking my thoughts aloud.

‘I’ll let you have my report by late afternoon,’ said Mortlock.

According to Fred Higgins, the stage-door keeper, Lancelot Foley had taken a cab to Pimlott’s in the Covent Garden area. I decided that we’d go straight there from the mortuary.

The bistro was a dark and cavernous place, and as it was ten to eleven in the morning, I was not surprised to see only a few customers in there, and they seemed to be drinking coffee, while messing about with iPads or talking on their mobile phones. A sound system was playing Mozart softly.

Dave and I were approached by a languid, long-haired youth wearing an apron and ‘John Lennon’ spectacles. I suspected that he was a university graduate working to pay off his fees until he could get a job suited to his qualifications. By the look of him he’d have a long wait.

‘You’re a bit early for lunch,’ he drawled, in a somewhat condescending tone, as though he were doing us a great favour by deigning to talk to us at all. ‘But we could do you a coffee.’

‘We’re not here to dine. We’re police officers,’ I announced sharply. ‘Is the manager here?’

‘Oh, yah, hang on.’ The youth disappeared through a door.

A few moments later a woman of about thirty appeared. She had short blonde hair and wore jeans and a T-shirt upon which were emblazoned the words ‘Pimlott’s Bistro’. ‘Giles tells me you’re from the police.’

‘That’s correct,’ I said, and introduced myself and Dave. ‘Are you the manager?’

‘I’m Jo Pimlott, the owner. Well, half owner, really. My husband and I are joint proprietors. Giles is a nephew and is helping out waiting at table. He’s actually just left university. He graduated in the performing arts.’

‘Well, at least he can tell his friends he’s appearing at Covent Garden.’ Dave was scathingly dismissive of qualifications he described as ‘ersatz degrees’.

‘I understand that Lancelot Foley had a meal here last night, Mrs Pimlott,’ I said, guessing that she would know if she’d catered for a distinguished actor.

‘Yes, he did. In fact, he was one of our regular diners. But I saw on the television this morning that he’d been murdered. It must’ve been not long after he left here. What a terrible thing to have happened. He was such a nice man. That’s what you’re here about, I suppose.’

Once again I was surprised at yet another differing view of the late actor.

‘Did he dine alone?’

‘No, he had a young lady with him. I think she was an actor, too. Or actress, I suppose I should say, although Giles tells me that they all call themselves actors these days.’

‘What time did he leave?’ asked Dave.

Jo Pimlott pursed her lips in thought. ‘It must’ve been about a quarter to twelve, I suppose. They only had a main course. I got the impression that they were in a bit of a hurry. Well, Mr Foley was.’

‘And did the young lady leave with him?’ I assumed that the young lady Jo Pimlott was talking about was Ruth Strickland, who took the part of Miss Prism in the play.
And if that was the case
, I thought,
Lancelot Foley was playing the field.
I doubted Jane Lawless would be too happy about that.

‘It didn’t look like it. They hugged and kissed, and then Mr Foley left. The young lady gathered up her handbag and umbrella and put on her coat. Then she went to the ladies’ room and left about seven or eight minutes later. It was unusual for them to leave separately; normally, they left together.’

‘Did they often dine here together, Mrs Pimlott?’

‘Oh yes. I suppose about twice a week, sometimes three times.’

‘When did they first start coming as a couple?’ I asked.

‘I suppose it was not long after Christmas. I remember Mr Foley mentioning that he was just beginning a new run at the Clarence Theatre.’

‘Can you tell me what Mr Foley had to eat?’ asked Dave.

‘What they had to eat?’ Jo Pimlott glanced at me. ‘But what does Mr Foley’s meal have to do with his death, Chief Inspector?’

‘Possibly nothing, Mrs Pimlott, but we’re checking all his movements leading up to his death. My sergeant’s not suggesting that his meal had anything to do with his death.’

‘I see. Just a minute.’ Mrs Pimlott, still puzzled by Dave’s request, retreated to the bar and thumbed through a sheaf of order slips. ‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘Mr Foley had steak tartare and chips, and the young lady had a Spanish omelette. And they shared a bottle of the house red.’ She glanced up enquiringly.

‘Did he speak to anyone while he was in here? Apart from the staff, of course. Or did anyone talk to him?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Oh, just a minute, though. There was a young lady who asked him very politely if she could have his autograph.’

‘And did he give her his autograph?’

‘Yes, he did. As a matter of fact he gave her a signed photograph of himself. And he smiled and wished her good luck.’

‘D’you know who she was?’

‘No, I don’t, because it was the young man who paid, and I’m sure he paid by credit card.’ Jo Pimlott referred to her order slips once more. ‘Yes, here it is. She had a burger and chips, and so did the young man with her. Just bear with me for a moment.’ She took some credit card printouts from the cash register and riffled through them. ‘Yes, the man paid, but I can’t tell you who he was. I can give you the details of the transaction, though. I suppose that’ll be enough to tell you who he is if you need to find out.’

‘Thank you for your assistance, Mrs Pimlott,’ I said, once Dave had noted the details of the man’s credit card transaction. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’