When The Devil Drives (24 page)

‘God love Julian. For a man who prefers working behind the scenes he’s always been the biggest drama queen of the lot. Give him his due, he’s the most gentle-natured fellow, but with it the most sensitive and therefore the most inclined to take everything too seriously. But yes, you’re right: it was a little more than professional embarrassment, especially between Hamish and me.’

‘You had a falling out?’

‘Oh, everybody had a falling out. We were a theatre company on the road! Well, not on the road yet, but certainly at close quarters. Rehearsals were often a battleground. Hamish and Julian hired us and promptly forgot that we might have minds of our own. Being a fledgling company, and everybody having comparable levels of experience, we all felt we had our own ideas to contribute, but in truth the last thing we needed was a democracy. We needed a dictator, and that should have been Hamish. He wasn’t strong enough though: neither in himself nor in his conviction. He could have said, quite literally, “my house, my rules”, but I don’t think he was comfortable with that. Hamish liked to be liked. He needed a bad cop, and that certainly wasn’t Julian.’

There was a strong breeze picking up now that they were well away from the shelter of the trees: not exactly an icy wind, but cool enough to remind Jasmine that June in Perthshire didn’t always mean shorts and T-shirts.

‘Looking back,’ Weir went on, ‘it’s easier to see how Hamish was torn between his natural instincts and some high-minded ideals that he thought he ought to be observing. Inside, at gut level, I think Hamish always wanted to put on glossy spectaculars, but at that time he still thought there was something vulgar about it, almost something too easy. He maybe hadn’t learned by then that what comes easiest often does so because it’s what you’re best at.’

‘Were there aides de camp in this conflict? I mean, was Julian the advocate for the more elitist aesthetic?’

‘I strongly suspect so, but not in any confrontational way. He would have been influencing Hamish subtly, privately,
behind the scenes
, where Julian was most comfortable. The stand-up rammies and blazing arguments were all between Hamish and Darius. He was the production designer. I mean, he had parts too – we all did, even Julian – but he designed the set, the costumes and the props.’

Jasmine wondered a little at Weir’s reference to Russell Darius by surname. It had been Hamish this, Julian that, then Darius. There was something of the public school about it, but he sounded less like a headmaster and more like a pupil referring to his peer. Was there something in that? Did it suggest camaraderie or distance?

She noticed the word ‘rammies’ get special emphasis too. Weir spoke in an almost neutral accent, identifiably Scottish but shorn of regionally specific pronunciations. He had chosen the word and spoken it with remembered relish as though it required something more colloquially Glaswegian to convey the ferocity of the arguments.

‘Darius would remind us all that Shakespeare was competing for audiences with public executions, so you could say that he was the one trying to appeal to Hamish’s instinct for spectacle. I remember he devised these fantastic spring-loaded arrows that fitted into a tunic. The archer would twang a bow and the actor in the costume pushed a button to suddenly pop these things up. It looked for all the world like you’d really been shot. One day Hamish decided that such visual effects were a sideshow detracting from the text and off we went, fifteen rounds.’

Weir smiled again at the memory, though she could tell that it was only the distance of time that made it amusing.

‘Lilliput and Blefuscu,’ she suggested.

Weir nodded.

‘Arguing over which end to slice an egg, quite. But it seemed so terribly important at the time. God, we argued over everything. Fortunately, outside of rehearsals, the social side of it was going well. Too well, some would say.’

‘Julian Sanquhar certainly intimated as much. He wouldn’t elaborate, but he made it sound like the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah.’

Weir rolled his eyes.

‘Julian, bless him, has a brain the size of Perthshire and a heart to match, but he was never the most worldly. He was twenty-five and a strange mixture of prudish old fuddy-duddy and immature adolescent. I suspect he shed the latter part eventually and more fully grew into the former. At the time it wouldn’t have surprised me if he was still a virgin. That was one thing that didn’t run in his family, right enough.’

‘I don’t think virginity runs beyond one generation in any family.’

Weir gave a dry laugh and continued.

‘I meant the opposite. His father was quite the swordsman, reputedly. In fact, I think it was around about that time that Julian’s parents got divorced. It upset him a great deal. He was very close to his mother but he thought the world of his father. A painful business for anyone, but as I said, Julian was more sensitive than most. I think starting out on this theatre venture was a response to that, taking himself away to the Highlands and building something new.’

They had reached the end of the last pitch. Weir gestured to his left with a querying look, checking Jasmine was happy to leave the path and continue along the grass at the touchline. She acquiesced, grateful for the recent dry spell and the resultant absence of mud. As they turned she saw a group of girls trot down from the school building in hockey gear, one struggling with her arms full of white protective pads.

‘So you and Hamish,’ she said. ‘What did you fall out about?’

‘Tessa Garrion,’ he replied, fixing Jasmine with a neutral but intense stare, as though warning her they were on sensitive ground.

‘I was captivated by her. Let me be clear: I don’t mean she was some cute young thing I developed a crush on. She was wonderful to work with, by far the best thing about those rehearsals. I admired her professionalism as well as her natural talent, and she was great company. She lit up the room, brought the best out in me too, I felt. We got on so well, and I hoped it would turn into something more, but it became clear she wasn’t interested in me that way.

‘I was all right with it. I could take being “put in the friend zone”, as they say these days, because she was the kind of woman – the
kind of person – I was thrilled to have as a friend. But then, a couple of weeks into rehearsals, she was sleeping with Hamish and I wasn’t best pleased.’

‘You couldn’t stand back and wish the other guy good luck?’ Jasmine said drily.

‘The other guy was married.’

‘Ah.’

‘It’s been another recurring theme with Hamish: he can’t keep his hands off the cast. That’s why he’s on to his third divorce.’

‘They do say he has an eye for talent.’

‘I cared about Tessa. She knew he was married, she wasn’t misled, but I couldn’t help thinking she didn’t really know what she was getting into either. It must have dawned on her soon enough. We were all in the same house so we could hear the arguments.

‘She broke down in tears a couple of times during rehearsals. She became rather short-tempered too: less tolerant of all the aggro and of the lack of professionalism being exhibited in certain quarters.’

Weir stopped and looked across the pitches, over the heads of the girls now practising passing and dribbling.

‘Tessa and Hamish had a blazing row on the night she left. There were a lot of things coming to a head around then, not just between the two of them.’

He took a breath and sighed through his nostrils, biting his lower lip.

‘You ever been in a situation where, deep down, you all know something’s over but it takes somebody to point it out or something to happen to make you all see it? For us, that was it: Tessa leaving. I think we all recognised it when it came; we just didn’t realise it was going to be so messy.’

‘Messy how?’

‘I remember I got up quite late. The house was strangely quiet, a real morning-after feel to the place. None of us was ever up with the lark, but someone normally went around the rooms waking people, getting everyone roused so that we could commence rehearsing. It was usually Hamish, Julian or Tessa: the first two
because they were paying the wages and Tessa because she simply lived to work.

‘I wasn’t the first awake: I found Hamish in the kitchen, looking very overwrought. He told me Tessa was gone. They’d had a big argument, as we knew, and she had walked out. I asked where she had gone and he told me she didn’t say: just packed her things and left. The last bus passed through Balnavon just after eleven, and he reckoned she must have taken it. It went to Inverness, where you could get the midnight sleeper train south, all the way to London.’

‘Where she’d been planning to go all along,’ Jasmine stated.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Hamish said she’d gone down for some auditions and then come back north to consider her options. He likened it to a gifted footballer playing out the season with Elgin City when there were offers from Man United and Barcelona waiting for his signature.’

‘Well, in this case, Elgin City were buggered without their star player and we all knew it. We had a crisis meeting, where it was suggested that we could ask Saffron to take over.’

‘Saffron? Who’s that?’

‘She was this Kiwi hippy chick who kind of fell in with the company. She worked in the bar at the Balnavon Hotel. We rehearsed at the church hall across the road from the hotel; well, strictly speaking it was the community centre, but it was next door to the church and everybody called it the church hall. The local minister certainly liked to play on the ambiguity. He was a joyless, shrivelled little Wee Free, and was vociferous in his disapproval of our whole undertaking. The fact we were doing, you know,
that
play seemed to exercise him all the more.
Witchcraft and blasphemy
,’ Weir mimicked, wagging an angry finger and screwing up his face into a pinched expression.

‘I think the fact that it was for pleasure and entertainment was his principal objection. Hamish’s father had funded the construction of the community centre, so the minister couldn’t stop us: he just had to protest from the sidelines. Anyway, Saffron came to watch us work and just gradually insinuated herself into the group. She was a few years older than us, maybe in her mid-thirties, and a bit of a drifter. She’d lived all over the world, left New Zealand years back.
God knows how she ended up in Balnavon. She was a passable actress, though. We gave her Lady MacDuff.’

‘So she became part of the company?’

‘Not officially. She got some cash-in-hand payments, probably not Equity rates. She was “in”, though. She’d have dropped the bar job to come on tour if it had got that far, and she hung around with us at the house when she wasn’t working.’

‘But her name would never have appeared on any paperwork,’ Jasmine stated, thinking of Julian Sanquhar’s reluctance to name names. He hadn’t mentioned her, only the people he knew would have been listed on the payroll.

‘No. I couldn’t tell you her name, in fact. Her surname, I mean. I don’t think I ever heard her referred to as anything other than Saffron, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t her given name either. She was rather New Age. Very liberal-minded, easy to imagine dancing naked at Woodstock with flowers in her hair.’

Weir smiled quite warmly at this memory, like a break in the clouds.

‘I volunteered to ask her. I think I was the most desperate to keep things going, as I would be out of a job if the tour didn’t happen. I went to the little house she rented, a one-storey terraced place on the main road out of the village, but no dice.’

‘She said no?’

‘No, she didn’t say anything. I saw her through the window, but she refused to come to the door. She told me to go away. She sounded upset and rather apprehensive. When I went back and reported the situation, Darius came over a little sheepish and confessed that things had perhaps gone a bit too far the night before.’

‘What things?’

‘He didn’t say and frankly I didn’t want to know, but the whole time at Kildrachan, Darius was on this Aleister Crowley trip. He always had an interest in the occult, so living in some big spooky mansion in the Highlands – not to mention consuming a great volume of various proscribed substances – he was dabbling in all kinds of bizarre stuff. It didn’t bother me either way: he could sacrifice goats in the living room as far as I was concerned, if it kept him and
his drugs out of my way. It was a lot of arrant nonsense, though the mere discussion of it was usually enough to disturb Julian. Saffron shared Darius’s appetites, both for drugs and for ritualism. I don’t know what they got up to that evening, but clearly it had been a step too far for her.’

They had circumnavigated the playing fields and rejoined the system of gravel pathways. Jasmine was concerned that Weir was about to guide her back to the main building and draw their discussion to a close. Instead, he led her in the opposite direction, towards the dormitories. He wasn’t done.

‘Drugs and occult rituals? Is that what Hamish Queen was hoping to prevent me from finding out about?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘
This
is what Hamish doesn’t want anyone finding out about: the next day, the police turned up at the house. They took him in for questioning and he was there for the best part of two days.’

‘Questioning over what?’

‘Tessa Garrion’s disappearance, though we didn’t know that at the time. She’d only just left and nobody had reported her missing. All of a sudden the cops were hunting all over the house. It was very weird. They didn’t turn up asking if Tessa was there, they just took Hamish away and began rooting around the place. They wouldn’t tell anyone anything, but that’s the police for you. You never know what information they have or what their agenda is. They found bloodstains in the front hall and in one of the big drawing rooms, and they began questioning everybody about what they’d seen and heard.’

‘But for the police to have taken action, and so soon, they must have had reason to suspect something had happened.’

‘No doubt, but as I said, they weren’t telling us what they knew. Until they questioned us we didn’t even know it was Tessa they were concerned with. They questioned us separately, so it was only when we spoke to each other afterwards that we discovered nobody had actually seen Tessa leave. We only had Hamish’s account of her departure.