Ghost Song (22 page)

After the first shock of Mary's death was over, Caley was horrified to find that his main emotion was relief because he could return to his beloved quest. He still had his job at the council, but his evenings, weekends and lunch hours were now entirely his own. The wonderful thing about dreams was they did not fade or fray with the years. When, a week after the funeral, he opened up the old shoe box, the scent of the old papers rose up to him and the dreams were waiting, as bright and as alluring as when he was eighteen. But as he turned the contents lovingly over, a question came from nowhere that had never before occurred to him.
Why
did someone squirrel all these things away in the first place? Were they just a miscellaneous collection—things no one bothered to throw away in case they might one day be valuable? Or was there some meaning to them: something someone wanted Caley—or someone like him—to know and understand? Hard on the heels of this thought came the knowledge that the Tarleton itself had always been regarded as a bit of a mystery. Dark and silent and sealed up for all these years, yet maintained and kept watertight by somebody.

From that day Caley's quest became part of his life. He read and searched and researched. Living so near to Burbage Street meant there were secondhand bookshops and libraries containing old books on the area. Early on he found the privately printed memoirs of the old actor called Prospero Garrick. The book was tucked at the very back of a library shelf and when Caley thought of how he had so nearly missed it, he felt sick. According to the date stamp it had not been borrowed for over thirty years and it was remarkable that it had not been put on the ‘For Sale' shelf (40p for fiction, 20p for non-fiction), or been sent for pulping, but somehow it been overlooked. Caley did not overlook it though; he had been scouring the shelves for anything to do with old theatres in the area generally, and when he skimmed down the index and saw the Tarleton's name, he had to prevent himself from stuffing the book greedily into his pocket there and then. The cover was faded and the paper was brown with age, but the minute he opened it, it was as if he had fallen backwards into the early years of the twentieth century.

He had not actually taken the book out on loan, because he never did anything connected with the Tarleton that might go on record and lead back to him. Even something as trivial as a library stamp might betray him sometime in the future, and he was constantly and almost obsessively afraid people would laugh at him. ‘You, connected in some way with the Tarleton?' they would say.
‘You?'
His adoptive family all those years ago would have seen it as a great joke; they would have taken to calling him Laurence Olivier or Henry Irving, and asking when he was going up to the Old Vic to play Hamlet. Mary would have stared at him and said, dear goodness, whatever could he be thinking of, they weren't the kind of people who had anything to do with theatres.

So Caley was very secretive about Prospero Garrick's book. He took it over to one of the tables the library provided for students, and, acting as casually as possible, copied the relevant sections into a notebook.

The memoir was called:
An Actor Remembers
, and Prospero Garrick was not chary of talking about his appearances at the Tarleton, or, indeed, his appearances anywhere. As well as his monologues, he had, it seemed, also been part of a series of recruiting concerts in the early years of the first world war at various theatres. ‘I generally gave them my Henry V St Crispin's Day speech,' he wrote. ‘ “Gentlemen in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here/And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon St Crispin's Day.” Ah, stirring stuff it was, and I fancy it was directly responsible for the volunteering of a number of brave young lads for the army! The ladies, too, were entranced with the rendering. It must be said I was not in my first youth by then, but the Voice was still as good as ever.'

The book had been published in 1929 by some small publishing house Caley had never heard of and was probably long since defunct. But finding it was an extraordinary experience. Caley spent the next few days preoccupied and wrapped in his own thoughts—Mary would have hated that: she would have tried to break in to his absorption, saying, someone's got the glumps today, and Caley would have had to repress his annoyance.

He made several subsequent visits to the library to make sure he had found all Prospero's references to the Tarleton. He was careful to allow himself just fifteen minutes each time, it was not very likely he was being watched, but he was taking no chances.

After she had taken the keys to Robert, Hilary went back to her office and spent the rest of the morning trying to work. She tried not to think too much about Robert, or to wonder whether he was actually in the theatre now, and if so, what he might have found.

She could hear the accounts people laughing about something upstairs, but her own office was quiet. Caley Merrick had finished his envelope addressing yesterday, and Shona, along with one of the freelancers, was sitting in on a presentation for a series of plays on Radio 4. The plays were set in an Edwardian spa town in 1900 and the commissioning editor had liked the writer's initial pitch but wanted an opinion on authenticity, which was why the Harlequin had been asked to provide a freelance. There would be a consultation fee, which was why Shona was accompanying the freelance.

All this meant Hilary had a free rein for an hour or so, and she was going to spend the time trying to trace the fruity old actor who had listened to the story of the Tarleton's ghost in a Bankside tavern called the Pickled Lobster Pot, and had set it down in his memoirs. She had not found out if the Lobster Pot still existed, or what it might these days be called, but if it was still a pub Hilary was going to suggest to Robert that they have a drink or a meal there. Purely for research purposes. She grinned at this last thought, because although she was calling it research, the truth was she was finding Robert, with his quiet, precise mind, very attractive. It was impossible to imagine him saying, as Gil had so often and so annoyingly said, that oh dear, it was too cold an evening to go out, or that he had been working so hard he was only fit for a hot bath and early bed on his own. Hilary was very glad indeed that the lukewarm relationship with Gil had petered out of its own accord.

Anyway, apart from Robert, the research was genuinely absorbing; Hilary would be doing it even if Robert looked like a bag of nails. The fact that he did not was just icing on the cake.

The actor's memoirs had been tentatively dated by somebody at Durham University as being from the early 1930s so it might be worth travelling up there to talk to that somebody. This would not be a problem, it was a journey that could easily be made at a weekend. The problem might be that he or she could have left Durham and be living somewhere inaccessible like Tibet or the Cayman Islands.

In the meantime, there was the British Library which was supposed to have a copy of every book ever printed. Hilary thought this was a legal requirement dating back to about 1910 or 1911, but it might not cover privately printed memoirs and even if it did she had not got a title or the author's name.

She was perfectly prepared to scour the entire British Library for which she had a reader's ticket, but she thought some items were still housed within the British Museum and she did not have a ticket for that. She knew several people who had—Judy Randall was one of them because she was a voracious reader of odd subjects and quirky corners of history—but a reader's ticket was not something people would be inclined to lend. Also, the British Museum might be very diligent about checking identities against tickets; Hilary at once conjured up an image of herself being ignominiously frog-marched out of the august ivory tower for misappropriation of a ticket, and dumped unceremoniously in Russell Square.

She had got as far as discovering that the British Library was currently putting a large proportion of its out of copyright books on-line which, in the current situation, might be useful, when a letter arrived by special delivery. Hilary signed for it and opened the envelope without thinking very much about it. All kinds of peculiar missives turned up here, from tattered plays people had found in attics and thought might be valuable, to sepia photographs of great-uncles who had toured obscure provincial repertory theatres in the 1920s, or playbills for things like
Getting Gertie's Garter
or the original run of
Charley's Aunt
.

The special delivery contained none of these. It was a letter which looked as if it had been typed on an old-fashioned manual typewriter. Although the envelope had not been addressed to anyone specifically, the letter itself began ‘Dear Miss Seymour'. It was dated the previous day.

Dear Miss Seymour

You will be aware that the restraint imposed on the Tarleton Music Hall by the terms of my father's will ended a year ago. I do apologize for not getting in touch with you before this: unfortunately, a period of ill-health precluded it.

However, I now feel strong enough to discuss plans for putting the theatre into use, and with that in mind, hope we can make arrangements to meet in order to discuss the possibilities.

I seldom travel far nowadays, so I wonder if you could visit me here as soon as possible? My house is some miles outside Glastonbury, but although the village is quite isolated I think the drive from London would not take much over three hours. If the journey is too far for you to make here and back in one day, I should be very happy for you to stay overnight. It is quite a large house, so it would not be a problem.

It is a strange feeling to know that the Tarleton is to be woken from its long sleep at last; I am unsure how much you know, but I expect you're aware that my father's will stipulated it should remain closed until fifty years after his death. He died in the mid-1950s, although the theatre has, of course, been closed for a total of almost a hundred years now.

By way of authorization, I enclose a letter from the bank with whom you have dealt all these years. The bank holds my father's will and the title deeds to the Tarleton, and I expect they could make these available for you if necessary.

I look forward to hearing from you and to meeting you.

With kind regards
Madeleine Ferrelyn

It was as if a hand—an elderly lady's hand, a little shaky but perfectly able to compose a clear, businesslike letter and add a firm signature on good-quality paper—had reached out of the past and clasped Hilary's own hand. For several moments the modern office with its computers and phones and faxes blurred and receded.

Madeleine Ferrelyn. The Tarleton's owner—its
owner
. The information for which Hilary had scoured filing cabinets and history books and back copies of stage magazines, to say nothing of contemplating an HM Land Registry search, had been presented to her out of the blue by the mundane medium of recorded post. The mysterious owner about whom she had spun so many fantasies was neither mysterious nor fantastic. She was alive and well and living just outside Glastonbury, and apparently planning to bring the theatre out of its long sleep because a restraint in her father's will had ended.

Hilary stared at the letter for a long time. It certainly answered part of the mystery because it provided the owner's name and address, but it also set up a whole new series of mysteries. Who had Madeleine Ferrelyn's father been and why had his will placed a restraint on the theatre for fifty years? Might it be some kind of entail? Hilary had only the vaguest knowledge of entails, but she did not think they included peculiar directives about keeping closed and sealed a valuable property which, handled correctly, might have earned the cost of its maintenance at the very least, and at best might have racked up some profit.

The address on the letter was Levels House, Fosse Leigh, Somerset, and there was a phone number. Hilary had never been to that part of England, but she associated it with Stonehenge, legends about King Arthur and pop festivals. It was disconcerting to discover that it might also hold the key to a mystery surrounding an old music hall.

According to Madeleine Ferrelyn (was she Miss or Mrs?), Levels House was just over three hours' drive from London. It was now twelve o'clock, which meant if Hilary left the office at once and borrowed or hired or stole a car she could be in Fosse Leigh, at Levels House, and talking to this link to the past by four or five o'clock. Or she could pick up the phone on her desk and dial a number and be speaking to Madeleine Ferrelyn in the next five minutes. This latter prospect was so remarkable she had to make a conscious effort not to reach for the phone there and then. Much as she wanted to know what lay at the heart of all this—much as she wanted to speak to this unknown lady—she could not bypass Shona, to whom the letter had been addressed.