Star Trap (19 page)

‘I see. It figures. Do you remember him from that time?'

‘Difficult to forget.'

‘What – the star bit?'

‘Oh yes, give him his due, he never made any secret of what he wanted to be. He spent a good few years rehearsing for the big time.'

‘Was he good?'

‘Very good. But no better than any number of other young actors. Indeed there was another in the company at the time who was at least as good. He'd come from the same drama school, also done the child star bit – what was his name? Garry Warden, that was it. And who's heard of that name now? I don't know what happens to the products of the stage schools. They almost always vanish without trace . . .'

‘Perhaps most of them haven't got Christopher Milton's single-mindedness.'

‘Single-mindedness is a charitable word for it. God, he was terrible. Put everyone's backs up. Used to do charming things like ringing up other actors in the middle of the night to give them notes. And as you know it's very difficult to have that sort of person in a small company.'

‘Did he drive everyone mad?'

‘Funny you should say that.' Julian held his glass up to the light and looked through it pensively. ‘No, he drove himself mad.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He had a breakdown, complete crack-up. Couldn't live with an ego that size, maybe.'

‘What form did the breakdown take?'

‘Oh, the full bit None of this quiet sobbing in corners or sudden keeling over in the pub. It was the shouting and screaming that everyone was trying to murder him sort. He barricaded himself in the dressing-room with a carving knife. I tell you, it was the most exciting thing to happen in Cheltenham since the Ladies' College Open Night.'

‘Did he go for anyone with the knife?' Charles was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.

‘Went for everyone. One of the stage staff got a nasty gash on the forearm. It took three policemen to calm him down. Well no, not calm him down, hold him down. He was screaming blue murder, accusing us all of the most amazing things. Yes, it was a pretty ugly scene.'

‘And did he come back to the company when he'd recovered?'

‘No, he was taken off in a traditional little white van and that's the last time I saw him. Then suddenly four or five years ago I started reading all this publicity about the great new British star and there he was.'

‘And you've no idea what happened to him after Cheltenham?'

‘Not a clue. I suppose he went to some loony bin and got cured or whatever they do to people with homicidal tendencies.'

‘Yes. Strange, I've never heard about that incident before.'

‘Well, he's not going to go around advertising it. Lovable Lionel Wilkins, the well-known loony.'

‘No, but it's the sort of story that gets around in the business.'

‘Probably he's deliberately tried to keep it quiet. I suppose there aren't many people who would know about it. The Cheltenham company was pretty small – what was it the director used to call us? “A small integrated band.” A cheap integrated band, anyway. God, when I think of the money they used to give us, it's a wonder we didn't all die of malnutrition.'

‘You don't still see any of them?'

‘No, not for years. I should think a lot of them have died from natural causes – and one or two drunk themselves to death.'

‘Can you remember who was in that company?'

‘Yes. Let me think –' At that moment the telephone rang. Julian leapt on it as if it were trying to escape. ‘Hello. Yes, I am. What? When? But you said nothing would happen till the morning. Well, I know, but – what is it? Good Lord. Well, I . . . um . . . I mean . . . Good Lord. But I wanted to be there. Can I come down? Look, it's only five minutes. No, I'll be there straight away. Good God, having effectively stopped me being there, you can bloody well keep them up for five minutes for me to see them!' He slammed the receiver down and did a jaunty little walk over to the fireplace. He turned dramatically to Charles and threw away the line, ‘A boy. Just a little boy. Damian Walter Alexander Robertson Paddon.'

‘Congratulations. That's marvellous.'

‘Yes, it is rather good, isn't it? I must dash. The cow on the phone wanted me to wait till the morning. God, I should take her something.' He started frantically scanning the room. ‘I don't know what – grapes or . . . where would I get grapes at three in the morning? Oh, I'd better just –'

‘Julian, I'm sorry, but who was in that company?'

‘What?'

‘In Cheltenham.'

‘Oh look, Charles, I've got to rush. I –'

‘Please.'

‘Well, I can't remember all of them.' He spoke as he was leaving the room. Charles followed him through the hall and out of the front door to the car. ‘There was Miriam Packer, and Freddie Wort . . . and Terry Hatton and . . . oh, what's the name of that terrible piss-artist?'

Charles knew the answer as he spoke. ‘Everard Austick?'

‘Yes.'

‘And was there a pianist called Frederick Wooland?'

‘Good Lord, yes. I'd never have remembered his name. How did you know? Look, I've got to dash.'

Julian's car roared off, leaving the road empty. And Charles feeling emptier.

It was with a feeling of nausea, but not surprise, that he heard next day that Mark Spelthorne had been found hanged in his digs.

PART IV

Brighton

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT SEEMED STRANGE to continue working with Christopher Milton after that. Or perhaps the strangeness lay in how easy it was, how much of the time it was possible to forget the grotesque suspicions which had now hardened in Charles' mind. And they were busy.
Lumpkin!
was scheduled to open at the King's Theatre on November 27th and the problems of re-rehearsing great chunks of the show were now exacerbated by extra rehearsals for Mark Spelthorne's understudy. (The management were dithering in London as to whether they should leave the part in the understudy's hands or bring someone else with a bit more name value. The boy who'd taken over wasn't bad . . . and he was cheaper than his predecessor . . . but was his name big enough . . .? Or with Christopher Milton above the title, did one perhaps not need any name value in the supports . . .? And after the cuts Young Marlow wasn't much of a part anyway . . . The usual impersonal management decisions continued to be made a long way from the people they concerned.)

There was not much fuss over the death. Police were round asking about Mark's state of mind before the incident and there were rumours that some representatives of the company might have to attend the inquest, but the assumption of suicide was general. The coincidence of the failure of the radio pilot, the demise of the
Fighter Pilots
and troubles over
Lumpkin!
were thought to be sufficient motive. To a character like Mark Spelthorne, whose life was driven by ambitions of stardom, this sequence of blows, with the implication that he was never going to make it in the way he visualised, could be enough to push him over the edge.

Even Charles found the explanation fairly convincing and tried to make himself find it very convincing. But other thoughts gatecrashed his mind.

An unwelcome logical sequence was forming there. What he had heard from Julian provided the thread which pulled all the wayward strands of the case together into a neat little bundle. Christopher Milton's history of mental illness was just the sort of thing that he would fight to keep from his adoring public. The mass audiences for popular entertainment are not the most liberal and broad-minded section of the population and they would not sympathise with anything ‘odd'.

Everard Austick and the pianist Frederick Wooland had passed unnoticed through Dickie Peck's Approval of Cast net and Christopher Milton must have recoiled in shock when he saw them at rehearsals. They were links with the one episode in his past he was determined to keep quiet and so far as he was concerned, they had to be removed. Not killed or even badly injured but kept out of
Lumpkin!
Hence the airgun pellet and the shove which sent poor, pissed Everard downstairs. Charles kicked himself for being so blinkered about the evidence he had found in the Corniche. He had been looking for something to incriminate the driver and had found what he wanted, without considering that its location could be equally damning to the car's owner.

Because now he had no doubt of Christopher Milton's personal involvement. Apart from anything else, at the time of Mark's death, Dickie Peck was in London and the driver was in hospital. And everything became quite logical if the star was considered as potentially unbalanced. In his morbid self-obsession he saw everyone who challenged him as a serious threat to his personality and as such someone who should be removed or punished. It wasn't a case of Dickie Peck or the driver being overprotective; it was a paranoid man protecting himself. And it meant that Charles was dealing with a madman.

Only a madman would believe that he could continue to behave like that without ultimate discovery and disgrace. Only someone totally locked in his own world, someone who had lost touch with everyday reality. Christopher Milton's unshakable belief in his talent was matched by a belief in his immunity from discovery.

And he had been skilful. All of the crimes had the appearance of accidents or unrelated acts of violence. Charles felt certain that no one else in the company saw any pattern in them. And because
Lumpkin!
was on the move, it was unlikely that the different police forces involved would be aware of a sequence of crimes.

But now, with the death of Mark Spelthorne, the whole situation became more serious. Beating up people who get in your way is one thing; killing them puts you in a different league.

And Charles was still left with the dilemma of what he should do about it. Gerald's original instructions to him to protect the show and its star from sabotage now seemed grotesquely irrelevant. The situation had got beyond that. But he still did not have enough evidence to go to the police with a tale which must strain their credulity. The airgun pellets and the liquid paraffin were unsubstantiated evidence; he could have planted them, and anyway his own behaviour in snooping around the Holiday Inn car park could be liable to misinterpretation. He didn't have any proof that Christopher Milton was at the scene of most of the incidents.

He considered the possibility of talking directly to his suspect, but he couldn't imagine what he would say. A quiet word in the ear may stop a schoolboy from smoking behind the cycle sheds, but in a case of murder it's seriously inadequate. And if he was dealing with a potentially homicidal maniac, it was asking for trouble to draw attention to such suspicions. But the alternative was sitting and waiting for someone else to get hurt or even killed.

He wanted to discuss it with someone, but Gerald Venables, who was the only suitable confidant, was too involved in the situation and might panic.

So he would have to work it out on his own. He thought through the known facts and wished there were more of them. He made vague resolutions to find out as much as he could about Christopher Milton's past and current activities. One useful idea did come into his head. He recollected that the first two crimes had been committed between nine and ten in the morning and suddenly tied this up with the unusual ‘no calls before ten-thirty' clause in the star's contract. It would be interesting to find out what he did in the mornings. Was it just that he liked a lie-in? That did not tally with the voracious appetite for work he demonstrated the rest of the day. He was prepared to stay up all night getting a new number together and yet the day never began until half past ten. That was worth investigating.

But it was one stray positive thought in a scrambled mind. Everything else circled round uselessly, tangling with emotions and producing nothing.

The Queen's Theatre, Brighton, was one of the great old touring theatres of Britain. It had been built for more spacious times, in the 1870s, before the cinema had cheapened illusion by comparisons with the real thing. When the Queen's was put up, people went to the theatre for spectacle and they got it. Entertainments were built round special effects – shipwrecks, fires and falling buildings, magic, ghosts and live animals. And the theatres were designed to cope.

The original stage machinery had been built for the Rise and Sink method of set changing, whereby the stage was made up of separate narrow sections, which could be raised and lowered with different sets on them by an elaborate system of pulleys and counterweights. There was a cellar below the stage as deep as the proscenium was high and above the audience's sight lines there was equivalent space in the flying gallery. The complex of girders and hawsers in the cellar was a feat of engineering comparable to one of the great Victorian railway bridges.

When the stage was designed, it had been equipped with the full complement of trap doors which were written into many plays of the period. Downstage were the corner traps, small openings used for the appearance or disappearance of one actor. Often these would be used as Star Traps, so called because the aperture was covered with a circle made up of triangular wooden segments like cake slices, hinged with leather on the outside, which would open like a star to deliver the actor on to the stage and then fall back into place.

Then there was the Grave Trap centre stage, which was always used for the Gravediggers' scene in
Hamlet
. And originally the theatre had had the most elaborate trap of all, the Corsican Trap, or Ghost Glide. This had been developed for the 1852 play
The Corsican Brothers
and enabled a ghost to rise from the grave as he moved across the stage.

Charles found it fascinating. He had always been intrigued by the mechanics of theatre and just being in the old building gave him that pleasantly painful feeling of hopeless nostalgia which always comes from the knowledge that, however much one exercises the imagination, however much one researches, it is never possible to know what earlier times were really like. He picked the brains of Len, the stage doorman, about the theatre's history and tried to spend as much time as he could alone there, sensing the building's past, hearing echoes of old triumphs, tantrums and love affairs.