Cast For Death (13 page)

‘Yes. But I still think lions and tigers belong in Africa, not Bedfordshire. Dartmoor ponies would look wrong in the veldt, don’t you agree?’

‘It’s not a fair analogy,’ Liz said.

‘They’d be out of context,’ Patrick insisted. ‘Things aren’t right, when they’re misplaced.’

‘Like strawberries in November. They don’t taste as they should,’ Liz said.

‘And Brussels sprouts in June.’

‘I see what you mean, but I’m not sure I agree,’ she said. She turned to Jane. ‘Thank you for a lovely day, and for putting me up,’ she added.

Patrick and Manolakis, one on either side of her, shepherded Liz into her car. They both kissed her, then stood side by side waving her out sight.

‘Very salutary for Patrick, that,’ said Jane, watching.

‘He certainly does seem to be suffering,’ Michael admitted.

‘He takes her too much for granted – she’s handy, always there if he wants a companion for a night out in London. Do him good to realise she might not always be around,’ said Jane.

‘Why? Where might she go?’ demanded Andrew, who had been listening to this.

‘Oh – to Crete, to visit Dimitris,’ said Jane. ‘Now – into the car with you. We must go home.’

Patrick and Manolakis piled into the back of the Peugeot with the children.

‘I shall see Liz again tomorrow,’ Manolakis told them all. ‘I am going to London to visit her. We go to the theatre, and I take her to dinner. It will be very good,’ This news kept Patrick quiet all the way home.

‘You haven’t seen a cross-section of British life,’ Patrick told Manolakis over breakfast the next day. ‘We must put that right.’

‘You don’t know what I have done when I have been in London,’ said Manolakis, his large dark eyes glittering. ‘Nor do you know what I shall do with Elizabeth. She will take me about. Her friends will be other.’

They would, but in what way? Patrick realised he had not met many of them and knew little of what she did between their meetings.

‘Dimitri—’ he said, and paused. He had no right to warn Manolakis off. What Liz did was her own affair, literally; he had no business to interfere.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh—nothing.’

How long did he mean to stay in London? More than one night? Patrick hoped not. Soon the college would be working at full stretch; the kitchen staff would be back on duty; Manolakis could be feasted off the college plate emblazoned with the winged lion of St Mark, and given the full treatment before he went home. He would like that. Or would he? Were there other things he might prefer?

‘I have enjoyed it all so very much. It has been a privilege,’ said Manolakis, looking earnestly at Patrick.

Patrick felt ashamed of his thoughts. He looked at
The Times
crossword to avoid the penetrating eye of the Greek.

‘You might, perhaps, ask who made the identification of your friend Sam?’ Manolakis suggested. ‘There could be a way, through that person, to find out more of his life?’

Patrick sat up and threw down
The Times.

‘Good idea. Why didn’t I think of it?’ he exclaimed. ‘But the police will have done it.’

‘Yes, but you may have a new thought,’ said Manolakis.

It was possible.

‘I’ll do as you suggest,’ Patrick said. ‘And I’ll go back to Pear Tree Cottage for a look at those paintings. That will keep me busy while you’re in London.’

He put Manolakis on the eleven forty-eight train to Paddington, and watched till he had vanished, giving an occasional restrained wave of the hand to acknowledge the Greek’s less inhibited gestures from the window of his coach. Then he went back to St Mark’s and rang up the
Evening
Standard.
After that he set off for Stratford-upon-Avon, turning over in his mind what possible significance there could be in the fact that it was Leila Waters, the theatrical agent, who had officially identified Sam at the inquest, and that she had not told him this when they met.

Why should she? It was no secret. She probably thought that he knew.

Things were very different at Pear Tree Cottage. Curtains hung at the windows, there were tulips and lilac in vases, a line of washing, mostly faded, frayed jeans and drab-hued singlets, hung between two apple trees in the garden.

Tessa, in a long cheesecloth dress with the arms of a maroon sweater protruding from its loose sleeves, was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by piles of papers; they looked like bills.

‘Hullo,’ she greeted Patrick.

‘I’m back rather soon,’ he apologised. ‘You’ve accomplished a lot over the weekend.’

‘Yes – I’d plenty of help. I’ve got three lodgers now. They’re all asleep,’ she said. ‘From the theatre – just walkers-on. So I’m financially solvent – or I thought I was.’ She indicated the pile of papers. ‘Tina’s bills are following me.’

‘You’re not paying them, are you? You must pass them on to the executors,’ said Patrick.

‘Oh, I’m doing that all right. But I’m sorting them out. She owed for clothes, and electricity, and a man who did the garden at Strangeways has sent in a bill for twenty pounds. How do I know if he earned it?’

It would take months for things to be sorted out, Patrick knew; even a year. But better not depress her by saying so. She looked quite cheerful in spite of it all. He agreed that it would be difficult to check up on the gardener but thought he should probably have the benefit of the doubt.

‘You’ve discovered no more about Sam Irwin?’ he asked.

‘Not a thing.’

‘May I look at the theatre programmes again?’

‘Of course. I found another great bundle of them.’

She settled him down with them, in a basket chair in the kitchen, and they sat there companionably, she totting up her aunt’s debts and Patrick looking through the programmes. They went back over nearly twenty years and covered many celebrated productions.

‘These might be quite valuable,’ he said. ‘Collections of almost anything are, you know.’

‘I suppose they might be.’

‘Don’t throw them away without looking into it,’ he advised.

‘No, I won’t.’

Many of the programmes included photographs of actors. Some were straight, without costume or make-up, but others showed them dressed for various roles and it was sometimes hard to recognise even well-known faces.

‘She must have been really keen on the theatre to keep all these,’ said Patrick.

He supposed that if the names on the programmes were fed into a computer, a pattern might show whose appeared most, possibly indicating any she followed particularly; but such an exercise might only prove that Tina had seen many of the great performances in recent years, as he had himself.

‘Did she know Joss Ruxton?’ he asked.

‘I’ve no idea. Couldn’t you ask him?’ said Tessa.

‘I expect so.’ Patrick got up. ‘Those pictures – have you hung them anywhere?’

‘I’ve got rid of them,’ said Tessa. ‘Isn’t it marvellous? I sold the lot for sixty pounds – wasn’t it a fantastic price to get for them? It’ll buy a mower for all this wild grass.’ She waved a hand in the direction of the open back door.

Patrick was taken aback at this.

‘Who bought them?’ he asked.

‘Some man called Gulliver – he’s got a gallery in Stratford. He came round touting. Yesterday morning, it was. He said the tourists would grab them. Fancy coming on Sunday,’ she marvelled.

Fancy indeed, thought Patrick, his suspicions growing.

‘I might have got more, by haggling a bit, but a bird in the hand, and all that, I thought,’ Tessa was saying.

‘Quite,’ said Patrick. There was no more to be learned here, it seemed. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ he added. He must find Gulliver quickly.

‘’Bye. Thanks for calling,’ said Tessa.

He left her still frowning over her aunt’s bills and as he made his way out through the front of the house, he encountered a youth at the foot of the staircase. He was short, pale, and had shoulder-length hair and a large moustache. Patrick knew that he must be a spear-carrier or a tribune.

‘Hi,’ said the youth as they passed.

‘Hi,’ said Patrick, feeling huge and healthy by contrast. He walked on.

‘Darling, I’ll die if I don’t have some coffee,’ he heard the youth say, and Tessa made some soothing response.

He went on down the path and got into his car. There, he opened the glove compartment and put into it two theatre programmes which, without Tessa seeing, he had filched from her pile. They contained photographs which he wished to study at leisure.

The gallery Tessa had mentioned was in a narrow alley behind a solidly restored brick building through whose leaded window panes Patrick could discern folk-weave caftans and peasant blouses hanging from the beams amid festoons of costume jewellery.

A sign beside the building pointed the way to Gulliver’s Gallery, and Patrick followed it along a cobbled path to a barn set in a yard behind the boutique. The walls inside the gallery were hung with new masters, and Gulliver himself, a small man with a pointed beard modelled on that of Shakespeare, stood at an easel in a corner busily turning out another. Scenes of Stratford-upon-Avon were ranged along one wall, facilely executed and easy on the eye, but commonplace. On another wall hung copies of Victorian illustrations to the plays, darkly painted and sombre: Macbeth loomed through thick Scottish mist, and the body of Ophelia drifted, flower-bedecked, in a river that seemed to flow through an underground cavern. Patrick could see nothing remotely like any of the paintings that had been at the cottage. If they were disguised stolen ones, perhaps they had already been passed on.

‘Can I help you?’ asked Gulliver, when he had prowled around for some time and finally come to rest in front of Shylock, knife raised, towering over a bare-chested, fainting Antonio with madly rolling eyes.

Patrick, the only customer in the gallery, put on his most urbane expression.

‘Do you do these yourself?’ he asked.

‘Most of them, yes,’ said Gulliver. ‘I can turn out Anne Hathaway’s cottage in less than an hour.’

Patrick inspected the work on his easel. It showed the young Shakespeare poaching at Charlecote.

‘They go quite fast when the season proper begins,’ said Gulliver. ‘It’s only just starting, you know.’

As if on cue, there came the sound of footsteps on the cobbles outside and the chirrup of feminine voices. In came a posse of some twenty or more American matrons; they flowed around the aisles and Patrick was swamped. Sure enough, they were eager purchasers, and soon Gulliver was busy exchanging his wares for travellers’ cheques. He wrapped the pictures in brown paper, fastening the corners with sticky tape. Patrick watched in fascination. Every tourist bought something – if not a painting, then a pottery medallion or a plaster bust of Shakespeare. Reinforcements arrived, in the shape of a female whom Patrick silently christened, however implausibly, Stella, to help with the parcelling. She was fifty-ish and plump, and wore a homespun dress, thereby adding to the cottage-industry atmosphere. Further copies of the church, and Clopton Bridge by moonlight, were obtained from the rear of the shop; there seemed to be an unending supply. Doubtless Gulliver spent the winter in his
atelier,
turning them out.

A blue-rinsed woman with the petite wrists and ankles common to so many Americans was enquiring for a picture of Othello suffocating Desdemona. Her schedule had not allowed her time to see the play, she said, so she wanted to take back a picture instead.

To fetch Othello, Stella had to visit her store behind the scenes; however, she reappeared quickly with the desired picture, ready wrapped. Patrick, ostensibly studying Lear depicted with leaves in his hair and wearing a goatskin, watched from the comer of his eye as the American woman shelled out dollars. The party, in twos and threes, began to drift off, declaring that their coach would be waiting. They were due at Shottery next.

Patrick, his eye taken by Miranda playing chess with Ferdinand, thought it would be an appropriate purchase because of the family link, so he bought it; when it had been wrapped he ambled out of the studio in the wake of the Americans.

They were piling out of their coach in the car-park when he arrived at Shottery soon afterwards. He watched them go up the road towards Anne Hathaway’s cottage; they carried their purses, but not their recent purchases, which were left in the coach. Patrick saw the driver lock the door.

The group would not be gone long, Patrick knew, for they must be due elsewhere – at Warwick Castle, perhaps, and to Blenheim for tea. He waited. Less than half an hour later they filtered back; heads were counted; they took their seats, and were off.

He followed them all the afternoon, until the coach finally stopped at a hotel near the West London Air Terminal where they were booked in for the night. Baggage was hauled from the luggage compartment and piled with handbags and carriers in the busy foyer as keys and rooms were allocated, and registrations made.

Patrick watched while the Othello painting was laid down on a leather seat beside a navy jersey coat and a clutch of tourist literature. There was room for him on the seat too, and he sat there reading the
Evening Standard
which he had bought from the kerbside vendor outside the hotel while he watched the coach disgorge. When he got up and sauntered out a few minutes later, Miranda and Ferdinand, indistinguishable in their brown paper wrappings from the picture of Othello, had taken his place, and Patrick bore off with him towards Oxford the image of the Moor.

The picture had been clamped into a mock-old plastic- moulded, gilt-painted frame. It lay on the table between Patrick and Humphrey Wilberforce. Othello, bow-legged, his toga rent, glowered at the shrinking Desdemona whose opulent bosom threatened to escape from her chiffon-like nightdress.

‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ said Patrick cheerfully.

‘And this fellow charges twenty-five pounds a time, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well—’ Words failed Humphrey. ‘What has this to do with me?’ he asked.