Cast For Death (21 page)

‘You have done murder most foul,’ he said, and his mind raced. If he could strike a chord in Ruxton, would he falter? As Macbeth he had recently met retribution on the stage; might not the reflex still have power? Actors were superstitious, and many were vain; these weaknesses might linger even if papered over with other creeds. Well, now was the time to screw his courage to the sticking-place with a test.

‘”Turn, hellhound, turn,”’ Patrick declaimed in a loud voice, and rushed on, amending Macduff’s original speech. ‘I have but words, my sword is in my words; thou bloodier villain than terms can give thee out—’

As he launched into the lines, uttering them fiercely, Ruxton’s hand holding the gun wavered and his expression changed for an instant into bewilderment. In that moment, chancing everything, Patrick went for the gun hand, knocking it upwards with his fist, at the same time ducking sideways. Then he aimed at Ruxton’s ankles in a rugger tackle.

The fight that followed was like none he had seen in films or on the stage. It contained grunts, and oaths, but it was over very quickly. Ruxton was used to stage fights with light, athletic men who moved with the throws, not heavy rowing men who pitched their whole weight against him. He went down quickly, dropping the gun at once; Patrick seized his arms and twisted them behind his back. Then he thumped his head hard on the floor.

‘That’s for Sam,’ he said, thickly. ‘And that’s for poor Tina,’ and he gave the actor’s head another bang. But he did not want to kill him, so he stopped at that and pinned him on the floor, pressing his arms apart and wondering what to do next.

With rolling eyes, Joss Ruxton glared at him, hissing obscenities as he struggled to break free. Patrick thought that if they stayed like this for long enough, eventually someone would come looking for Cardinal Wolsey to take his curtain call; Ruxton would then escape, for Patrick would be thought an intruder. He gave the tonsured head another thump on the floor for luck, and at that point the door opened.

Sergeant Bruce stood there, and with him were two other men who came on into the dressing-room. One had a gun; the other produced a pair of handcuffs. Bruce followed them in and closed the door.

‘I’m delighted to see you,’ said Patrick, getting up.

By the time Special Branch had finished their questioning, there was not much left of the night. Patrick felt as if he had been put through a mincer. Bruce took him back to his own small flat in Notting Hill, where he slept uneasily for a couple of hours on the sergeant’s convertible settee. In the morning, when Bruce had to go on duty, Patrick went round to Bolton Gardens, for Manolakis was due to return to Crete that day.

He was eating yet another large helping of bacon and eggs, with Liz hovering fondly over him.

‘I shall miss the English breakfast,’ said Manolakis. He looked happy enough at the prospect of going home, and Liz, Patrick decided, trying not to peer too curiously at her, seemed calm even though solicitous.

‘How was the concert?’ she asked.

Patrick had totally forgotten about the music.

‘Oh—very good,’ he said.

‘I wonder if he’ll go back? Sasha, I mean. There’s his family to think of, if he stays here with his father.’

Patrick was sure that the young man would stay, and that his wife and baby would be allowed to join him. In return, Joss Ruxton would vanish inexplicably; his appearance in Moscow after some lapse of time would cause a stir, but was the obvious solution to the equation, to avoid a diplomatic incident if he was brought to trial.

Joss, he had learned during the night, had in youth trained as a dancer and had spent two years in Russia as a young man; an ankle injury forced him to stop dancing and he took up acting. He spoke fluent Russian; he might take up his career later in the Russian theatre, or, because his mission had failed, he might never be heard of again.

It was probably the best solution, Patrick reflected. It would be difficult to prove that he had killed Tina and Leila; in the long run less harm might come from the whole incident if it were concluded in a low key. But the real Senator Dawson had yet to be written out of the play, and Special Branch was working on that now.

‘Pity about that man having a heart attack,’ said Liz. ‘It was all too emotional for him, I suppose.’

‘Heart attack?’ said Patrick cautiously.

‘Mm—didn’t you know? It was on the news and in the paper. Some Russians and East Germans were in the audience – members of a trade delegation over for a conference. One of them felt ill and had to leave the hall. He died before he could be got to hospital,’ said Liz. ‘I suppose you were too engrossed to notice.’

‘There was some shooting, too, near your Festival Hall,’ said Manolakis. ‘It is in the paper.’

Patrick picked up Liz’s
Guardian.
At the foot of an inner page there was a brief report of the incident Liz had just described; beside it, another small paragraph said that police were investigating a shooting incident on Hungerford Bridge the night before.

‘Hm,’ said Patrick, noting how both items were placed on the page so that their connection could be inferred.

‘Did you solve the identity problem?’ Manolakis asked.

‘Yes,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m grateful, Dimitri. You put me on to it. I thought how easy it would be to impersonate Ivan with that very distinctive white hair. And he’d had his arm in a sling, to account for not playing. Then Sam was very knowledgeable about music – he could probably talk about it very intelligently.’

‘Why was it necessary?’ Liz asked.

‘If the real Ivan were dead, even ill, Sasha might not have been allowed to leave Russia,’ said Patrick.

‘But he isn’t dead – he played last night. That wasn’t Sam.’

‘Yes, he did,’ said Patrick. ‘But remember that bad arm – some sort of infection, wasn’t it? Blood poisoning can be serious.’

‘So it was Sam whom we saw at Stratford,’ said Liz.

‘We saw Sam,’ Patrick said.

He had not lied to Liz. They had all seen Sam at Woburn. She had made assumptions which he had not contradicted; that was Jill. For Sam to succeed in the biggest part he had ever played, his secret must be kept to the end, and the last act involving the real senator had not been played.

Manolakis was watching Patrick. There was a glint in his eye. He knows, thought Patrick; he’s known all the time.

‘You mustn’t miss your plane, Dimitri,’ he said. ‘Are you coming too, Liz?’

‘No,’ said Liz. ‘I’m not. I hate goodbyes.’

‘You will come to Crete again soon,’ said Manolakis, when he had checked in his luggage and stood poised for departure outside the doors that marked the point of no return for travellers.

‘Oh yes,’ said Patrick.

‘And Liz. You will bring her.’

How could Manolakis even suggest such a thing, with his wife and his children impossible to ignore in their own setting? What would Liz feel? But then, he was leaping to conclusions based solely on circumstantial evidence, Patrick reminded himself.

‘I don’t know her plans,’ he said stiffly.

‘You are a pair of—what do you call it—silly duffers,’ said Manolakis affectionately. ‘You are quite suited to each other, you know. But life is pleasant for you, is it not – in your college, with your friends for good talk and your beautiful surroundings.’

He was right. It was safe at Mark’s. One knew what to expect, within those ancient walls.

‘I’ll come, one day,’ Patrick promised.

When the Greek had gone, he walked back through the busy terminal building to his car. The first editions of the evening papers were on sale, and he bought one. There might be a fuller report of the previous night’s incidents, which must only just have caught the morning papers.

There was no mention of the death of the stout man from his alleged heart attack, nor of the shooting; a paragraph, however, mentioned that Senator Dawson, prominent in the fight against pollution of the atmosphere, had been taken ill in the night and whisked to a private clinic for an emergency operation, the nature of which was not disclosed. His condition was critical.

Ten minutes later, instead of returning to Oxford, Patrick was driving back to London. He found out the name of the clinic by ringing up the paper, and was soon inside its polished, disinfected premises.

Senator Dawson had come round from the operation but was gravely ill; he was allowed no visitors.

While Patrick was being told this, he became aware of a burly man sitting nearby and watching him. It was one of the two who had come with Sergeant Bruce to Ruxton’s dressing-room the night before.

Patrick looked him in the eye.

‘I am an old friend of the senator’s,’ he said, turning again to the starched lady who was denying him access. ‘As his family is not in this country, he might like to see me.’

He turned again, and regarded the burly special branch man with a steady stare. The man rose.

‘I will go up and see,’ he said. ‘Write down your name and I will tell the senator. He may not, however, be well enough to understand.’

He handed Patrick a small notepad and watched while he wrote on it.

A few minutes later Patrick was being shown into a large room on an upper floor. A figure lay on the high bed, a drip connected to his arm. His face was grey; he seemed to be unconscious, but in one hand he held the piece of paper on which Patrick had written his name. A plain clothes man sat in one corner of the room, and a nurse placed a chair for Patrick beside the bed. He sat down.

After a long time the man on the bed opened his eyes.

‘I feel like Sydney Carton,’ he said, and smiled faintly.

Sam, shot in the neck, had not been killed the night before. He had to disappear, and Joss had heaved his body over Hungerford Bridge – a feat of strength, for although Sam was light, the rails were high. The shock of immersion had brought him briefly round, and he had kept afloat for the few seconds needed before a river patrol, standing by on orders from Special Branch, rescued him.

Special Branch had already picked up the real senator, who was waiting near the Fantasy Theatre to resume his part as the outraged victim of an attempted assassination.

‘You’ll get better,’ Patrick told Sam.

There were saline drips, blood, all the things needed to save life arranged round him.

Sam shook his head.

‘My wife’s on her way over,’ he said. ‘Mrs Dawson,’ he added, still speaking with a mid-west drawl. What a performance. ‘There’s only one ending to this scene.’

It was inevitable. By now the real senator would be dead, Mrs Dawson would see his body appropriately laid out; and the key witness would be gone.

Patrick said, ‘You’re a great man, senator.’

Sam smiled faintly and shook his head.

‘My epitaph must speak for me,’ he said.’”I wish no other herald, no other speaker of my living actions—”’

He could not finish the quotation. Patrick said it for him.

‘”To keep mine honour from corruption.”’

Sam had been used and abused in this last endeavour of his life. And not Sam alone: Leila Waters, deceived into thinking that she was acting for her own masters, had set him up. Tina’s fatal role had been ordained when her affair with Joss had begun; thereafter she would do anything to please her lover.

But Special Branch had somehow become suspicious. Patrick was not vain enough to think that his persistent interest in Sam had influenced them; much of his time had been spent pursuing stolen pictures which had nothing to do with Sam’s masquerade but which had, by a quirk of fate, been dumped for collection at an empty cottage connected with the case. Sam had been at Pear Tree Cottage briefly, Patrick knew now, hiding out while he rehearsed for his last role. There had been a moment when the official investigation into Sam’s alleged death had been halted, and when Patrick had been warned off. Special Branch’s involvement could have begun then, or even when the first body was buried, not cremated.

‘It was worth it,’ Sam said suddenly. ‘”All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”’

A historian and an actor, quoting Burke and Shakespeare as he died, understanding that though he had been tricked he could still emerge the victor: what valour, Patrick thought.

‘Senator, please, you must rest,’ said the nurse, and to Patrick, ‘You’ll have to leave.’

How would the authorities persuade the hospital staff to keep quiet about Senator Dawson’s gunshot wound, Patrick wondered. Perhaps the assassination story would be allowed to leak, later, when those concerned had all been dealt with. He rose to go, but Sam raised a hand.

‘Stay a while,’ he said, ‘and be my witness.’

Then he closed his eyes.

(in order of first publication)

These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

Published by House of Stratus

Published by House of Stratus

Cast For Death Sam Irwin, actor, is found dead in the River Thames. It appears to be suicide. But why should he have taken his own life shortly before opening in a new play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon? Dr. Patrick Grant, a friend of Irwin, manages to link the seemingly unconnected occurrences of the death of a dog, a further suicide, and a series of art robberies in coming to an conclusion. That, however, is not what is seems, being only the prelude to a massive deception. Grant himself is threatened, and unless he can escape unscathed from a concert at the Festival Hall, the secret of Irwin’s death will die with him.