More Deaths Than One (11 page)

“As long as she doesn't take too long,” Mayo said shortly, making a mental note to see that she didn't. “Meanwhile, I'd like to talk to Lindsay, see what her impressions were.”

“I'm afraid she's on leave until Monday. I think she's in Crete. No, it was Rhodes.”

“Doesn't matter if it's Timbuctoo if she isn't here. We'll have to go down to the Gaiety without the benefit of seeing her, then. This isn't the first time we've had that place mentioned in connection with Fleming.”

Georgina Fleming entered the garden in Folgate Street through a pair of tall, wrought-iron gates set in a wall of ancient brick, part of the original fabric of a long-demolished Cistercian foundation.

Inside the gates, it was like being in church, an enclosed oasis of peace in the busy town, the traffic noise muted by the high walls. They would be entirely private here. Walkers of dogs weren't allowed in the garden and mothers with prams and children preferred the Rec with its swings and slides, thank God. It was too cold and too early in the year as yet for the elderly to sit and doze on the seats in the sun and enjoy the aromatic scents breathed out into the air; the wrought-iron gates, kept shut to deter stray animals, also intimidated the casual passer-by, though in fact they were only locked at sundown. It suited her purpose that the garden and its botanical treasures, though open and free to all, wasn't better used. But the charm of its rare plants and box-edged parterres was elusive; most people didn't care for a garden where there were no bedding-out schemes or herbaceous borders.

It hadn't been Rupert's scene either. She'd brought him here at that early point in their acquaintance when she had wanted them to know everything about each other, to share delights. But he'd rushed her through the garden like the Red Queen. Faster, faster.

Don't think of it. Don't.

Georgina would've liked to have had a garden, was knowledgeable about the theory of it, as she was about so much. She picked up knowledge as a magnet picks up iron filings, and she had a keen eye for the rightness of things. She would've loved to dig and mow and energetically rake up leaves in autumn, and plan grandiose schemes ... but it was no good, she'd never make a true gardener. She knew only too well that she lacked any kind of patience. Inactivity she couldn't bear at any time. And just now it was insupportable.

Pigeons lumbered away from her rapid impatient strides ringing on the stone-flagged paths as she increased her pace, though the starlings, bold as ever, continued to strut around in an opportunist way, hoping for crumbs. The old bricks of the walls were a tapestry of purple and cream and rose, the length of one making a setting for half a dozen seventeenth-century bee-boles, set into it at intervals. And here in the middle of the wall was the bronze plaque, green with age, that her father had first shown her, announcing that the garden was dedicated to William Corbyn who had begun and endowed it, he who had scoured the world to bring back the strangeness and beauty of exotic plants from remote places.

How that would be frowned upon nowadays, plundering other nations' stores of riches – all the same, she was on the side of William Corbyn and all the others of his ilk. Think of it, no Kew, no Chelsea Physic Garden, no azaleas, or even crocus ...

“Hello, George.”

No one, but no one, had ever been allowed to call her that except Tim. And he'd long since forfeited that right. She turned and stared at him, tweed-capped and Barbour-jacketed, coldly.

“What is it you want?” she asked shortly, looking at her watch. She would give him ten minutes, no more. She'd already lost more than enough time recently. She was very much afraid Tim Salisbury might be going to turn into a nuisance, and his first words confirmed the fear.

“Well,” he said, “he's gone, now.”

She wondered how she could ever have thought she loved him, or even liked him, this pompous, self-satisfied
dull
man, how she could have contemplated marrying him and becoming a county farmer's wife. There would have been compensations, of course. It would have pleased her father, for one thing, because there would have been plenty of money. And position, if that was what mattered to you. Time on one's hands, all the time in the world, which was never a thing Georgina wanted. She would have found occupations, of course she would. But there would have been nothing for her mind to do. No excitement for her body.

Salisbury watched her face, palely made-up and with the sort of bright, deep-coloured lipstick he associated with his mother and other women when he was a child, her nails painted to match – even that frightful hair-do. It was the in thing, he supposed vaguely, and awful as he thought it, it somehow looked right on her, part of the whole. She'd always had style, it was in everything about her – her fashionable clothes, the boots, the slim, boyish, almost breastless figure ... he felt a sudden surge of long-buried desire, as strong as any he had ever felt for her. He reached out for her hand.

But the movement turned into an ungainly grab and she managed to outmanoeuvre him, disconcerting him as she'd always done, even when they'd been children and, later, lovers, by asking, “How is Susan?”

The last person he wanted to be reminded of at this moment was Susan. Susan was something apart, rarefied, different from other women, nothing at all to do with this old remembered longing he felt just now for Georgina. It was a desecration to talk of her in such a context. “Let's leave her out of this, shall we?”

“Isn't it too late for that – a long way too late?” She found him, after all.

He knew she was right, and this and the small mocking smile with which she said it made him brutal. “Don't start pretending at this stage that you were happy with him,” he said, and had his small revenge when he saw how he'd succeeded in needling her, but it didn't last long. Her eyes, those curious tigress eyes, were like a liquid-gold fire that reduced him to jelly, and he knew with a sick feeling that Fleming was still part of her dream, in that secret place where he, Tim, never had been and never would be admitted.

“What do you know about my happiness?” she demanded, the last syllable drawn out so that it was nearly a hiss.

“Enough to have risked what I did for you,” he reminded her, stung.

Suddenly she sounded weary, unlike Georgina. “I'm grateful for that, Tim, I really am. I won't ever forget it but” – and her voice grew cold again – “it was as much for your sake as mine, so don't let's get too sentimental.”

The March morning was clear and cold and bright and the naked branches of a Kanzan cherry were black against a sky like stretched blue silk. The buds were fat on an ancient magnolia that leaned against the wall. A blackbird regarded them with head on one side, then flew away in sudden panic, low above the ground, chattering.

He began to speak again and she wondered with despair how she was going to be able to live with herself.

“That key will lead thee to a pretty secret.”

THE GAIETY THEATRE was situated in Stockwell Lane, being part of a larger building, itself squashed into a narrow strip of land between the river and the road, with very little room either side. Officially this building was the Lavenstock Community Centre, because as well as housing the small theatre, it contained a large hall where dances and rock concerts, the occasional symphony concert and wedding receptions could be held, and smaller rooms where various local clubs such as the Camera Club and the local Writers' Circle held their meetings. Bingo was played there every Wednesday afternoon, and the premises were used for a toddlers' playgroup each Tuesday and Thursday morning. But its official name had never caught on; it would always be known locally as the Gaiety simply because the old theatre had been called that – the Gaiety, the one that had been pulled down to make way for the new shopping precinct, and still loudly mourned as a lost architectural gem by the Victorian Society who'd faded to save it. The inherited name of the present one bore no relation to its appearance, which was stark and modern and always reminded Mayo of nothing so much as an aircraft hangar.

Boards outside the box office informed the public that the next performance by the Thespians would be
The Changeling,
a Jacobean tragedy by Middleton and Rowley, a billing which caused Mayo to raise his eyebrows. They were only an amateur company, after all. But ambitious, seemingly.

“Oh, I don't know, they're supposed to have been going great guns since the Community Arts Director was appointed,” Kite replied when he said as much.

“So that's why Doc Ison's been pressing me so hard to subscribe to a season ticket.”

“He's been on at me too. Fat chance we'd have of getting here regularly! Anyway, it's not much in my line.”

“This Cockayne's supposed to have been a professional actor, I gather?”

“Sort of. You know you've heard his name somewhere, you feel sure you've seen him on the telly, only you can't just remember in what ...”

Kite went to try the door, while Mayo studied the prominently placed photograph of the Arts Director ... Cockayne in typically flamboyant actorish stance, studied and self-aware, a comma of dark hair over his forehead, dark expressive eyes, his mouth slightly petulant. Handsome features, but basically unremarkable, the face of a thousand juvenile leads. Mayo wondered how long ago it had been taken, how much it resembled the present Ashleigh Cockayne. Well, he was about to find out.

“It's locked,” Kite said. “Let's try the stage door.”

That too proved to be locked, but there was still one more entrance at the back of the building they could try, where a terrace was cantilevered out over the river, with steps down to it and doors leading directly into the bar. Rounding the corner in order to try the other entrance, they came upon a builders' pick-up truck and a board propped against the wall announcing that Ron Prosser (Lavenstock) Ltd. was at work.

It seemed they had walked straight into an argument. Detectives both, they automatically came to a halt and listened to what was going on. The row appeared to be between Prosser – if he was the burly individual perched on a ladder and wearing a donkey jacket and woolly hat – and a small woman clad entirely in black. Her tiny, tapering figure, generous about the bust, slender on the hips, was wrapped in an outsize, hairy black poncho from which protruded two slender, elegant, black-stockinged legs finishing in high-heeled black suede shoes. “But it's too bad of you to disappear for a week, then choose to start again at the only time we have a daytime rehearsal!” she was declaring vehemently, perfectly colloquially, though with a slight accent which Mayo couldn't immediately place. “We can hardly hear ourselves speak ... are you listening to what I'm telling you?”

Her hair, densely and improbably black, since the lady must have been sixty if she was a day, was scraped back like a ballerina's from a face which heavy make-up and a bright crimson slash of lipstick had made into a clown's. The man on the ladder regarded it imperturbably.

“Yo' want this job finishing, missis, yo'll have to put up with us,” he returned, unmoved. “Think yersels lucky we'm working at all of a Saturday – which we shouldn't'a been only some clever dick's kept nicking me tackle. Fust one o' me ladders, next me gas bottle and a roll o' me roofing felt. Buggers round here'll tek anythink what isn't cemented down!”

“What's up, gaffer?” came a disembodied voice, followed by the face of a youth with a bleached, bristly head appearing over the parapet of the flat roof.

The man on the ladder and the woman ignored the interruption, the latter throwing out her hands widely and expressively at the incomprehensible chaos of builders' necessaries scattered around. Hosepipes. Wet cement. The ladders and a propane gas cylinder and a roll of roofing felt which presumably had been either retrieved or replaced.

“Perhaps if you didn't leave your things lying around to be tripped over they wouldn't
be
stolen,” she declared, “and then you wouldn't have to work at the weekend, causing so much disturbance.”

The builder put a foot on the ladder and gave her a long, considering look. “Sod off, missis,” he said without rancour and began to climb, slowly and without haste. “Now, Justin, what yo' doing up there, besides minding other folks' business?”

The woman below looked savage and quite capable of replying in similar vein but then, her outrageously overdone costume earrings practically threatening to overbalance her, she spun round on her heel and began to march off. Mayo, who had never before seen this action performed outside the pages of fiction, watched fascinated. Halfway to the stage door she stopped abruptly, apparently only just becoming aware of the presence of the two watchers. “Yes? Was there something you were wanting?”

Annoyance put aside, she smiled at them, a melon-slice smile, and was transformed. Beautiful she was not at first or even second sight, but one might never be sure. What the French call
jolie-laide,
Mayo thought, and recognized that was what her accent was, French. “Can I help you?”

Mayo explained that they were looking for Mr. Ashleigh Cockayne, but it seemed they were due for a disappointment. “I'm afraid he's had to go to London rather urgently. Perhaps I can be of assistance. I'm standing in for him while he's away. My name is Lili Anand.”

Mayo hesitated. He wasn't sure what this woman's position was and how much to tell her. She waited without speaking, watching him with bright, intelligent black eyes.

“We're police officers investigating the death of Mr. Rupert Fleming. I understand he was a friend of Mr. Cockayne's.”

“Ah. Yes, I thought that was why you were here. Poor Rupert. Yes, he and Ashleigh were acquainted.” The wind whipped round the corner, blowing the centrefold of last week's
Advertiser
into the river, flapping at the edges of the polythene under the builder's wet pile of cement. Lili Anand shivered suddenly and huddled herself deeper into her poncho. “Come inside where it's warmer. There's a rehearsal going on, but we shouldn't be long. We've nearly finished, and if you don't mind waiting, we can talk afterwards. I don't want to interrupt them. They've given up their Saturday afternoon after all, and they don't get paid for it.”