Hard Going (28 page)

‘Was he a regular?’ Slider asked.

Knuckles shrugged. ‘Coupla times, last week. Never seen him before that. What’s he done?’

‘Nothing,’ Slider said reassuringly. ‘Just trying to find people who knew him. It’s a matter of an inheritance. Did he come to see anyone in particular?’ The eyes, grey and flat as smoothing-irons, regarded Slider with faint amusement at this suggestion that he would answer questions to which Slider did not already know the answer. So Slider added, ‘We think perhaps he was interested in Danielle LaMartine.’

‘What our acts do in their spare time is their own business,’ he said, which again was his equivalent of a ‘yes’.

‘We’d like to talk to her,’ Slider said firmly, to let him know this was not a request but an order. ‘Can you give us her address?’

Knuckles shrugged. ‘She’ll be back here later for her act. You can wait till then.’ Routine stalling.

‘I’d sooner talk to her somewhere quiet.’ Which meant: ‘Do it – now!’

Knuckles looked away indifferently down the street and seemed to speak without moving his lips. ‘Flat in Old Compton Street, over the coffee store. Red door.’

‘Thanks,’ said Slider, with a feeling of relief that it was somewhere close by. Travelling out to a suburb only to find their quarry had been travelling in at the same time was an all too frequent annoyance. He started away, to be halted by a slight clearing of the throat from behind him. He looked back, to see Knuckles sporting a faint air of unease, which must have been pretty damn’ surprised to find itself there. Slider raised his eyebrows in enquiry.

‘He’s all right, Danny,’ Knuckles said, profoundly embarrassed to be professing such a soft emotion.

‘I don’t mean him any harm,’ Slider said kindly. When they were out of sight down the street, he said to Atherton, ‘Interesting that he reverted to “he” instead of “she”. I wonder what that means.’

‘That he likes him, perhaps,’ said Atherton.

‘I think saying, “He’s all right,” suggested that. But likes him how? Why?’

‘I thought you were giving up rhetorical questions. The important thing is that he obviously expects Mademoiselle LaMartine to be at home. Which means less wasted time for us.’

Old Compton Street was literally round the corner, and they were there in front of the coffee merchant’s in no time. The terrace here had three storeys above the shops. The proportions and the original sash windows were eighteenth century, but the beautiful grey-brown brick had been painted white, alas, to make it uniform with the concrete new-build further down. While Slider mourned, Atherton was examining the red door and its buttons. The top one was labelled simply ‘Danny’.

‘Here goes,’ he said.

After a long wait, the intercom crackled. Atherton leaned in and enunciated clearly. ‘Danny LaMartine? It’s the police. We’d like to talk to you about something. It’s not trouble for you. Just a routine enquiry.’

There was another crackle, which might or might not have been a human voice answering. They waited, and Atherton was just preparing to ring again when the door opened cautiously, and a face peered out. They both held up their warrant cards.

‘Sorry,’ said the face. ‘The buzzer’s not working and it’s a long way down. What’s it about?’

‘We’d like a chat with you,’ Slider said. ‘Nothing to be alarmed about.’

Eyes scanned his face and were apparently reassured. ‘D’you want to come up? It’s a bit of a climb.’

‘Yes, please,’ Slider said firmly.

The door opened fully and revealed a tall, skinny man in his thirties, wearing black sweat pants and a baggy blue T-shirt decorated with the Pasche ‘Tongue and Lip’ icon in scarlet, framed by the words ‘Stones’ and ‘Fifty Years’. His feet were bare and his toenails were painted with cherry gloss. He had the slight stoop of the shy, tall man, and looked at them with victim’s blue eyes, around which there were traces of last night’s make-up. His hair was toffee-fair, short, thick and tousled; his thin face had high cheekbones and a distinguished nose, with rather full, soft lips. There was nothing particularly effeminate about it, but Slider could see how he could transform quite successfully into a woman.

He let them in to a narrow hall with stairs going steeply up. Slider laid his hand on the banister and felt the glorious patina of the old Georgian wood, thinking it was probably all that was left of the original building except for some of the walls. Alas again.

‘Sorry, it’s quite a climb,’ the young man said again. ‘You might need oxygen at the top.’ It sounded like a routine pleasantry: he moved easily, lithe as a dancer, but Slider felt the pull of gravity and his unexercised lungs.

They passed two landings with closed, panelled doors to other dwellings, but at the top there was barely any landing and only one door, propped open with a wooden doorstop in the shape of a cat. ‘Here we are. The eagle’s nest. Please come in.’

His voice was educated, soft and musical, but with just the faintest camp intonation that was probably part of the profession. They followed him into a cramped passage with, to the right, a door open on to a tiny bathroom, in front a doorless tiny kitchen, and to the left, at the end of the passage, daylight. He led them towards it, and they found themselves in a tiny bedroom/sitting room, with two sash windows on to the street, and a fireplace with an electric two-bar heater in it. It contained an iron bedstead, a cheap two-seater sofa, a coffee table and a television on a stand. There wasn’t room for anything else. Slider wondered where he kept his clothes. There were books along the mantelpiece, and on the walls were vintage movie posters –
Casablanca
,
Phaedra
,
The Maltese Falcon
.

‘Please, do sit down,’ the man said, gesturing to the sofa. He sat down on the edge of the bed, there being nowhere else. He hunched his shoulders and clasped his hands between his knees – a boyish pose, though it probably spoke more of unease.

‘I want to assure you first we’re not here to make trouble for you,’ Slider said.

The man nodded, the blue eyes remaining wary.

‘Your name – is it really Danny LaMartine?’

‘Danielle LaMartine’s my stage name,’ he said, ‘but I was Christened Daniel. You can call me Danny.’

‘And do you know this man?’ Slider handed over the picture. Danny looked at it for a long time, his head lowered to hide his face. ‘Did you have lunch with him last Tuesday,’ Slider went on gently, ‘at the La Florida?’

‘Yes,’ said Danny. He looked up, keeping hold of the picture rather than giving it back, which was unusual. He looked from Slider to Atherton and back again, his expression puzzled and a bit anxious. ‘But why are you here? What’s this about? Has something happened?’

‘I’m very sorry to have to tell you that he’s dead,’ said Slider.

The blue eyes filled with tears, the lips quivered, but he remained looking at them steadily, even straightened his shoulders a little, as if facing justice. He nodded. ‘I see,’ he said.

Atherton stirred. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’

‘He told me—’ Swallow. ‘He said it wouldn’t be long. I thought I’d see him again, though. I thought—’ Now he squeezed his eyes shut, and two tears, forced out, tracked slowly down his cheeks. ‘We wasted so much time,’ he said in a gaspy voice, trying not to cry. ‘If only – we’d met – sooner.’

‘How long have you known Lionel Bygod?’ Slider asked, through a suspicion that was working its way to the surface.

The eyes opened, swimming with tears, and a quavery smile quirked his lips. ‘All my life, I suppose,’ he said. ‘He’s my dad.’

Slider made the judgement, conveyed to Atherton by a look, not to tell him right then that the death was not due to natural causes. He seemed ready to talk, and here was the chance, he felt, to clear up a lot of puzzles, a chance which might be lost in the bewilderment and shock that would follow the revelation of murder. There was no guile in the face to suggest he knew anything about the death. In fact, it was a face of great sweetness. Slider remembered Diana Chambers using that epithet about Lionel – not a word generally applied to a man, and having the more force for that.

‘I didn’t know he had a son,’ Slider said.

‘For a long time, if you’d asked him, he probably would have said he didn’t.’ A look of bitterness. ‘I shouldn’t have left it so long. I wish I’d come back sooner. If I’d known then what I know now … It was my mum, really, more than Dad in the beginning, but he went along with it. I suppose – well, it was shock as much as anything. I can see that now, but at the time …’ He gave a quavery smile. ‘There were faults on both sides. I was as pig-headed as Mum in my own way. Everything had to be the way I wanted it.’

‘Tell me,’ Slider invited.

There had been tensions in the small family for a long time. June’s ambitions and desires were different from Lionel’s, as were her tastes, and as their divisions grew they each, perhaps unconsciously, tried to recruit Danny as an ally.

‘Mum wanted me to go into the law and make lots of money,’ Danny said, ‘and I suppose Dad did too at first, but I wasn’t brainy enough. After a bit he realized that and stopped pushing me, but Mum never did. And then when I said I wanted to be an actor, he was all right with it, because he loved the theatre, but Mum hated the whole idea, and blamed Dad for “infecting me” with the acting bug.’

Unhappily, he told of the other strains between his parents that he had hardly understood at the time. June had wanted more children, but none had been forthcoming, for which she had blamed Lionel. Gradually, the idea had sunk into her brain that he was lacking in sufficient manly force to quicken her; and perhaps some vague notion, garnered subliminally, that effeminacy was endemic in theatreland, made her equate his kindliness and his interest in theatre with latent homosexuality.

‘She had an old-fashioned hatred of “queers”, anyway,’ Danny said, his hands clasped between his knees again. Slider saw it was a defensive pose. ‘I mean, there are a lot of people like that, even now. The difference is, they won’t say it openly now, but they still think that way. Mum didn’t mind admitting it. And she used it as a stick to beat Dad with.’

‘Do you think she really believed he was that way inclined?’ Slider asked out of interest.

He frowned. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think she did at first. It was just something to shout at him. Later – well, I don’t know. I wasn’t around to see, but from what he told me, I think she probably believed the whole ball of wax.’

The crisis came when he was eighteen. ‘They were planning a big party for me, for my majority. Mum was in raptures about it – it was going to be huge. She loved that sort of thing. She was even willing to get Dad to ask some showbiz celebrities for the sake of the splash it would make. Well, anyway, as the date approached I thought—’ He paused. ‘I mean, at this distance it looks cruel, like the worst possible timing, but you see, I couldn’t bear to let them go on with the party without knowing. I
had
to tell them before they spent all that money. I mean, it would have been worse afterwards, wouldn’t it? They’d have felt – cheated.’ He looked an appeal, but got no answer from either man. He looked down. ‘So I told them. Two days before the party I came out to them.’

Slider was contemplating the impact that would have made, and the courage needed to face the music. Atherton asked, ‘How long had you known?’

‘I don’t know – a long time. Certainly since I was thirteen or fourteen. I’d had a lot of girl
friends
– I always got on with girls – but I was never interested in them in that way. And I suppose gradually I realized it was boys I wanted. I had one or two experiences – very minor, just fumblings, really – and when I got to eighteen I thought, I’m never going to find other people like me, never going to find love and a life on my own terms if I don’t tell them, come out into the open. And then this horrible party was looming and it was the spur I needed to get it done.’

‘And they didn’t take it well?’ Atherton asked.

He shuddered. ‘Understatement. Mum went raving mad.’

‘And your father?’

He frowned in thought. ‘Well, he didn’t rave – that wasn’t his way – but I could tell he was shocked. I suppose any father would be. He didn’t say anything, really. He went very quiet, but he couldn’t meet my eyes. I hated that. He tried to calm Mum down, but – well, he’d never quarrelled with her in front of me. He was very loyal. So he wouldn’t say much. What I mean is, he tried to keep the peace, but he didn’t defend me. And I felt he should have.’ He shrugged. ‘To be fair, I didn’t give him much of a chance to come round. I didn’t want to stay in a place where they were ashamed of me. So two days later, on my birthday, I left. I just took off, cut myself off from them, and never went back.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Liverpool first. As far as I knew they didn’t know anyone from there, and I thought it would be the last place they’d look for me – if they
did
look for me. And there was a young scene there. I had my savings, I got myself a job as a barman, and I hung around the Playhouse and the Everyman. Then I got a job waiting tables in the Everyman Bistro and got to know everybody and – well – finally I got a part. I took the stage name Danny Martin. Martin’s my second name. It was a great time for me. I was out, I was acting – I’d got everything I ever wanted.’

He had also got a lover, an older actor who took him under his wing, taught him, introduced him, set his feet on a career path. However, he was a lot older than Danny, and it didn’t last: the usual spats and jealousies soon led to a break-up. Danny by then felt confident enough to stand on his own, and a move seemed a good idea, so he went to Manchester, got some rep work there, and found a new lover.

‘It was hard to make a living, though, and eventually Steve and I decided to try Australia. I had nothing to stay in England for. I did think about contacting my parents before I left, but I thought they wouldn’t really care, so I just went.’

In Sydney the burlesque scene was really taking off. Drag acts, following the success of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
, were all the rage, and Danny discovered he had a talent for that sort of thing that would be likely to earn him a better living than straight theatre.