Death on the High C's Read online

  ‘Not at all,’ said Nichols. ‘I get your point. And I suppose Miss Ffrench wasn’t interested in this sort of approach.’

  ‘Miss Ffrench was only interested in waggling her tits in the audience’s face. She was interested in sex and herself, and that was absolutely all. Other considerations simply didn’t get through to her. Bellow out the music in any old style at all, and throw your body around so that everyone spends their time mentally undressing you and ignoring anything else that might be happening on stage—that was the sum total of her ideas on how to present opera.’

  ‘So you felt she didn’t fit in to the production as it was developing?’ asked Nichols.

  ‘That’s putting it mildly. But she was sleeping with Owen, or had been. And he wanted her back. So he more or less went along with anything she did—he wasn’t managing to get much style into the production anyway, so you couldn’t say she went against any of his notions.’

  ‘You say he wanted her back?’

  Calvin’s face said: ‘Sorry I said that. Ignore it.’

  ‘Well, that’s what we thought,’ he said. ‘We might have been wrong.’

  ‘Were you and Miss Ffrench completely hostile from the beginning,’ asked Nichols, ‘Or did she display some . . . interest early on?’

  ‘Well, I’d say she cast the appraising eye over me,’ said Calvin ruefully. ‘But there’s hardly a man in the company she didn’t do that to, except perhaps Mr. Pettifer. She made the odd tentative advance in my direction—no, not tentative: blatant. But in fact we didn’t hit it off right from the beginning, so there was nothing doing.’

  ‘Considerations like that don’t seem to have inhibited some of the others,’ murmured Nichols.

  ‘Well, no. But we passed from distant politeness to sniping in a matter of twenty-four hours. And Bridget had just arrived too, and she and I were already getting interested in each other, even then. So I escaped her much-patronized bed.’

  ‘You don’t think your . . . colour would have prevented it, if you’d been inclined?’

  ‘If I’d been bright purple and a hunch-back cripple I’d have made it. There were rights of unlimited access there.’

  ‘But what about Miss Ffrench’s reaction when you got engaged?’ asked Nichols. ‘I understand that this was based on the fact that Miss Lander was white and you were black.’

  Calvin paused before answering, looking at his hands. ‘I think I understand that better now,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t honestly think that had much to do with—with colour prejudice or whatever you like to call it. Frankly, as I suppose you realize, she had just the nastiest goddam mind of anyone I’ve ever known. She just loved being unpleasant, and she’d grab any weapon to hand. I mean, if I had been a cripple, she’d have called me that. If I’d had a squint, she’d have called me “cross-eyes”. It was just a case of the nearest and bluntest instrument.’

  ‘But you didn’t think along these lines at the time, sir?’

  Calvin, caught up short, gave his engaging grin. ‘Well, no, I didn’t. I was pretty mad. As I expect you’ve heard. But you know you can’t stay like that for very long. If you let that sort of feeling get a hold of you, you start going in for Black Muslimism, Afro hair-cuts and natty robes. And I can do without cold legs. I wouldn’t want to stop being a human being and start up as a professional Black. I’ll save that till I lose my voice and need to pick up a bit of money giving television interviews.’

  Nichols looked at this rather sophisticated young man, and wondered if his blackness hadn’t left a larger residue of resentment and hurt pride than he pretended.

  ‘And there’s another thing,’ said Calvin.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, she just loved publicity. Of course we all do, anyone on stage, and don’t believe anyone who tells you different. But to her it was a drug, an absolute mania. It gets some people that way: they think it can do all sorts of things for you, a sort of wonder drug that changes you from the second to the first-rate. Gaylene not only wanted as much as she could get herself, but she hated other people getting it. I think part of her reaction to Bridget and me getting engaged was just that: she didn’t want us getting our picture in the papers.’

  ‘Could she have known you would?’ asked Nichols sceptically.

  ‘Oh yes. She knew the reporters would go liberal soft-centred over us—she knew all the ins and outs of the publicity game. I expect she was planning to make a big splash when Hurtle pitched up, and then we scooped the pool in advance—trumped her ace, so to speak.’

  ‘And I suppose when the attempts on her life began—’

  ‘Yes—I assumed she’d overtrumped our trump. But of course one always had to take into account the possibility of the attacks being genuine. As I said to Bridget: this is one murder one doesn’t have to look for a motive for, Gaylene being what she was.’

  It was a potentially damaging admission, given out with the utmost frankness. Nichols wondered whether anyone so sophisticated could be quite so ingenuous and open as Calvin was trying to seem. His experience told him not.

  ‘I’m not at all sure about it being unnecessary to look for a motive,’ said Nichols, ‘though I take your point about how generally unpleasant she made herself. But, you know, people who murder other people don’t do it for dislike, not if they’re sane. There are plenty of pretty repellent people walking the streets, whom lots of people would enjoy sticking the bread-knife in to. But they don’t do it. Either we’ve got a madman on our hands—and so far it doesn’t look that way to me—or we need something in the way of motive much stronger than I’ve heard of so far.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right as a general rule, Superintendent,’ said Calvin. ‘But of course you never met Gaylene.’

  ‘Were you performing on the night before Miss Ffrench died?’ asked Nichols, with one of the abrupt changes of subject he enjoyed springing on people.

  ‘No—but I was in the theatre.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Bridget was having her big triumph in Così. That’s Così Fan Tutte—Mozart, you know. I watched her from the gallery, then I went backstage afterwards.’

  ‘And after that?’ asked Nichols. ‘Did you stay with Miss Lander for some time?’

  ‘About half an hour or so. She had to go off for drinks with Mike Turner and a local money-bags. I went on to her flat and waited for her.’

  ‘About what time would that mean you left the theatre?’

  ‘About eleven-twenty or eleven-thirty I imagine. You could check with Serg—oh no. Christ, that was nasty. That really made me sick.’

  ‘It’s the murder of Harrison,’ said Nichols, ‘that makes us think this isn’t just a matter of theatrical rivalries and jealousies. Where were you last night?’

  ‘Last night? I did a bit of work on Rigoletto with Bridget and Giulia Contini. Helping her to get her words, trying to get her to do a bit of acting—though frankly that’s beyond me, and everyone else. I went back to my flat about nine or so.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nichols. ‘When you left the theatre on Wednesday night, did you talk to Harrison about the Così performance?’

  ‘Nothing much. Just “wasn’t it great?” or something like that.’

  ‘But you did talk to him.’

  ‘Yes, but only the odd word,’ said Calvin. ‘I always rather thought wogs were there to be ruled with rod and gun in Sergeant Harrison’s opinion. But he was a nice chap. And he didn’t do much more than pass the time of day with most of the other members of the company.’

  ‘So I gathered,’ said Nichols. ‘You think if he’d seen something on Wednesday night, he would have kept quiet about it.’

  ‘I’m sure he would. If he noticed anything at all, he’d either have chewed it over to himself, which is most likely, because he was a slow sort of chap, and then had it out with whoever it was. Or else he would have gone to his commanding officer.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Mike Turner.’

  ‘I did ask him af
ter Harrison’s murder, but he says not. It would more or less have to have been by phone, because Harrison didn’t come in on Thursday.’

  ‘True,’ said Calvin. ‘Well, I’d have thought that unless it was the sort of thing he felt he ought to go to the police with, the only other person he’d talk it over with would be Mike. He believed in a chain of command—a real old Kipling character was Harrison.’

  That was my impression over the phone,’ said Nichols. ‘Well, I don’t think I need keep you any longer, sir. I presume you’ll be around if you’re wanted?’

  ‘There’s only about a week to first night,’ said Calvin. ‘You bet I’ll be around.’

  He got up from his chair, gave one of his engaging grins, and left the stage-door office.

  ‘Nice enough lad,’ said Sergeant Chappell.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Nichols. ‘Rather a contrast to Mr. Caulfield, I thought.’

  ‘But he was acting,’ said Sergeant Chappell.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Nichols. ‘He was acting.’

  Outside in the corridor Calvin, having shut the door behind him, leaned for a moment his forehead against the doorpost. He felt exhausted. Completely done in. It’s all that acting, he said to himself. I’m tired to death of acting.

  • • •

  The weekend was spent in routine of the most soul-destroying kind, of checking and counter-checking, interviewing and phoning, most of it in connection with the alibi cards handed in by every member of the company. Nichols also managed to pay a visit to the tall, dignified Victorian house which had housed Gaylene during her brief career in Manchester.

  While Nichols and a couple of constables examined the contents of Gaylene’s flat—the massive array of lotions, creams, moisturizers, powders, mascaras and scents, the wardrobe of scanty clothes for a hefty body, the dog-eared women’s magazines of the kind which assumes its readers to have neither mind nor taste—Sergeant Chappell was talking to the couple who lived downstairs. Their views, he thought, would have the advantage of being uncoloured by professional jealousy. Be that as it may, they found it something of a struggle to dredge up a single good word to say for her.

  ‘Of course, we wouldn’t want to speak ill of the dead,’ said Mrs Hogben, itching to and intending to, ‘and she may have been a very good-natured girl at heart for all we know, but, you see, Bert and I aren’t used to that sort of thing, are we Bert? And it gives the house a bad name. It’s not as though she was discreet about it.’

  ‘Discreet?’ put in Bert. ‘She wouldn’t know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘She broadcast it from the housetops, if you get my meaning,’ said Mrs Hogben.

  ‘Men?’ suggested Sergeant Chappell.

  ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t hamsters,’ said Bert Hogben.

  ‘A whole string of them, one after another,’ said Mrs Hogben. ‘You hardly ever saw the same face twice in a row. And the noise they made about it! D’you know, I don’t think I’ve once heard her go up those stairs with a chap but she’s bellowed something down to him, so everyone in the house could hear. But it wasn’t so much the noise, it was the sort of things she shouted . . . !’

  ‘Crude?’

  ‘I wouldn’t sully the air by repeating them. Well, once I couldn’t stand it any more, and I went out to the landing and I said: “Miss Ffrench,” I said (and where she got that second little f except out of thin air I’d like to know), “Miss Ffrench,” I said, “we’re not used to that sort of language in this house,” I said.’

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Sergeant Chappell.

  ‘Well, she just looked at me like I’d just crawled out of the woodwork and you know I really don’t think she knew what I was talking about. Anyway, she just turned and went up the stairs, and bellowed “some silly old git” to the chap that was with her. I complained to the landlord, naturally, but you just can’t get rid of people these days, not even these squatters, can you? so I might as well have spared my breath.’

  ‘And the noises from upstairs,’ put in Bert. ‘Well—you’ve heard about those dirty tape-recordings they sell, haven’t you? Well, we could have made a few down here in this flat—made a packet we could’ve. Made your hair curl sometimes, and I was in the Navy.’

  ‘What about the night she fell downstairs?’ asked Sergeant Chappell. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Well, of course we more or less picked her up,’ said Mrs Hogben. ‘We heard this terrible bumping, and we came out, and she was lying on the floor over there, bellowing and shouting and creating blue murder. But she wasn’t much hurt, and frankly we didn’t set too much store by it, not when we’d talked it over.’

  “Why not?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Hogben, lowering her voice as if about to reveal something yet more scandalous than hitherto. ‘She smelt, if you catch my meaning. She’d been drinking in her room. Then she tried to come down the stairs in the dark (which she needn’t have done, because she could have left her door open, then come and switched on the landing light down here)—anyway, as I was saying, she tripped up and went bottom over head, so to speak. We felt sure that’s what must have happened. It wasn’t till after she . . . passed away that we went up and found the drawing pins on the fifth step down.’

  They all looked up to where the police themselves had earlier noted the tell-tale pins, one of them with a little bit of knotted thread still attached.

  ‘But there had been another attempt before—and in this house, hadn’t there?’ asked Sergeant Chappell.

  ‘So we read,’ said Mrs Hogben.

  ‘It’s just her word, isn’t it?’ said Bert.

  ‘You don’t think anybody could have come into the house in the night and turned the gas on?’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Mrs Hogben. ‘Where there’s locks there’s ways of opening locks. All I say is, when people drink like that, secret-like, in their own homes, they do funny things. I mean, it’s not like a drink in a pub, is it?—though personally I’m temperance, always have been—but when you take it in your own home, a girl of that age, and drinking whisky . . . ’

  The sentence was left hanging in the musty air of the dim landing, but Mrs Hogben’s expression of pinched disapproval seemed to say that all was up with a girl who could do that.

  ‘Well,’ said Chappell, ‘you could be right. But it’s a long staircase for someone to arrange to fall down.’

  They all looked up the dark Victorian expanse of stairs—narrow, steep, ill-lit, the last long trek of the nineteenth-century housemaid after a fifteen-hour day.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mrs Hogben defiantly. ‘But she only had a few bruises, as far as we could see.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Chappell, ‘but we’ve got to take it more seriously than that—seeing the jokester finally got her.’

  ‘ ’Ere,’ said Bert Hogben, his shaggy grey moustache bobbing with detective zeal, ‘how’s this for an idea? She sets this ’ere booby trap for someone else, then gets caught in it herself!’

  Sergeant Chappell explained how unlikely it was that Gaylene, having electrified the doorknob, would have put her own hand within a hundred yards of it before she was quite sure the connection had been broken.

  ‘Pity,’ said Mrs Hogben, shaking her head, ‘because it would have been so neat, and she did have it coming to her. And whoever did it, I’d hate to see him actually suffer for it.’

  It seemed to Sergeant Chappell that no murderer had enjoyed such universal public sympathy since the gentlemen who robbed the Russian Imperial family of the counsels of Gregory Rasputin.

  CHAPTER XII

  Tutti

  Giulia Contini had accepted her present engagement to improve her English. As she talked to Nichols at the back of the stalls, with the menacing, ambiguous opening chords of Rigoletto swelling around them, it didn’t seem to Nichols that she could have done so. On the other hand, it was clear that she had had to revise her opinions of the English.

  ‘Is said ze English is cold,’ she said, smiling
genially and waving her hands, ‘is correct, polite, all ziss ting. But I never see so emotion! Shoutings, rowings—and now ziss! Murder—two murder! Real nasty murderings!’

  Signor Pratelli, who was sitting beside her watching over her like a child prodigy’s mother, interposed with a florid sentence in which Nichols could detect the words ‘assassino’ and ‘uccide’ and a great many implied exclamation marks.

  ‘Quite,’ he said.

  ‘Zey say we ’Talians are emotion pipple,’ said Giulia seriously. ‘But we ’ave our bit crying, bit shouting, bit loving—then pouf! all gone! But ’ere is not like. ’Ere nobody forget, nobody kiss and good friend again. They goes on and on wid dair nasty tempers, and spiteness and quarrellings. Is not nice.’

  ‘You felt the atmosphere, did you, even before Miss Ffrench died?’ asked Nichols.

  ‘Si, si, was evidente,’ said Giulia. ‘I not complaining. Is nice pipple here too. Bridget and Calvin and lots more, is very nice to me, helps me, jolly kind. But that Guylene—she sets them all—what you say?—topsy turvey, wrong side up, she makes them not nice, she makes nasty atmosphere all round ’er, like a bad smell!’

  She wrinkled her nose expressively. Signor Pratelli, to justify his manager’s fees, put in a few words—‘squaldrina’, ‘abandonata’ and ‘stupida’— which convinced Nichols he was talking about Gaylene.

  ‘Si, si, capito,’ said Nichols, in some embarrassment. This feeble gesture released a flood of Italian emotion, which seemed to spring from a feeling that this murder was bad for his protégée’s career, and perhaps that association with murderers and criminals of that sort was something perilous for her soul.

  ‘Basta!’ said Giulia contemptuously. But it was not.

  Nichols let his attention wander towards the stage, where the curtain had risen to display an economical but handsome ducal court. Calvin and Bridget were playing out their brief scene together: the court band was playing in the background, and Calvin was establishing his character as the noble seducer by laying siege to the Countess Ceprano: ‘You leave us? How cruel . . . ’ His tones were honeyed and passionate, sometimes sinking to a near-whisper, and Bridget’s replies were reluctant and full of wistful regret. A sexual tension filled the theatre, and the courtiers around them on the stage, led by Jim McKaid as Marullo, looked on with ironic admiration. In McKaid’s case this seemed to embrace a barely concealed sneer.