Merely Players

 

Recent Titles by J.M. Gregson from Severn House

Detective Inspector Peach Mysteries

DUSTY DEATH

TO KILL A WIFE

THE LANCASHIRE LEOPARD

A LITTLE LEARNING

MERELY PLAYERS

MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD

MURDER AT THE LODGE

ONLY A GAME

PASTURES NEW

REMAINS TO BE SEEN

A TURBULENT PRIEST

THE WAGES OF SIN

WHO SAW HIM DIE?

WITCH'S SABBATH

WILD JUSTICE

Lambert and Hook Mysteries

AN ACADEMIC DEATH

CLOSE CALL

DARKNESS VISIBLE

DEATH ON THE ELEVENTH HOLE

GIRL GONE MISSING

A GOOD WALK SPOILED

IN VINO VERITAS

JUST DESSERTS

MORTAL TASTE

SOMETHING IS ROTTEN

TOO MUCH OF WATER

AN UNSUITABLE DEATH

A DCI ‘Percy' Peach Mystery

First world edition published 2010

in Great Britain and in 2011 in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2010 by J.M. Gregson.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Gregson, J.M.

Merely players. – (DCI Percy Peach mystery)

1. Peach, Percy (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Blake,

Lucy (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 3. Police–

England–Lancashire–Fiction. 4. Television actors and

actresses–Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title II. Series

823.9'14-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-250-4 (ePub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6984-5 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-316-8 (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

To David Browne, who read thirty-two of my
books in eight weeks of a hard winter, and
retained his habitual optimistic and
good-humoured approach to life.

‘All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.'

Shakespeare,
As You Like It

ONE

T
here was just enough light from the single street lamp outside for him to get his bearings. No need for the torch.

He stood perfectly still for five seconds, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dimness, registering in turn the panels on the closed doors, their brass handles, the frames of pictures on the walls. The stairs climbed steeply away from him into the dimness above. He knew the layout of the place, knew which of the invisible doors to open when he had climbed those stairs. As his vision improved and more landmarks of this familiar place dropped into their slots, confidence seeped back into him, coursing with the adrenalin through his veins.

The silence was profound. It was what he needed, of course, what he had expected and prayed for when he had planned this. Silence meant that the world around him was asleep, unaware of what he was about, of what he had come here to do and was about to achieve.

Yet just for a second he wanted noise, some neutral, indeterminate, masking noise, which might cover the next movements he had to make. Stupid and irrational: noise would have meant some other presence here, other ears, which might pick up the sound of his movements and forestall what he had come here to do. What he must do, unless he was prepared to spend the rest of his life within prison walls, with an eye perpetually on the watch for what other men in a place like that might do to him.

It was the thought of prison which freed his limbs from the fear of discovery which had for a moment immobilized him. He stole to the bottom of the stairs and began to climb them. His limbs moved in slow motion, with the exaggerated caution which in other circumstances would have been ridiculous. His battered trainers were set with elaborate care on the extreme left and right of each tread, so as to minimize the creaking that was surely inevitable in stairs of this age. His feet inside the shoes were like the paws of a cat, feeling each foothold carefully before committing the weight of his body to it.

It seemed to take him several minutes to climb to the landing, but he knew it was no more than fifty seconds. He had practised this over the years, knew to within a second or two exactly how long it took him to creep up a straight flight such as this. He paused for a moment when he reached the landing, casting his eyes to left and right as one did automatically on reaching a new floor, checking that everything he could see was silent and unthreatening, even though he knew that was how it would be.

Every door was closed. His eyes had now adjusted so completely to the dimness that he could make out some of the details on the pictures which were hung here. He could see high trees beside the glimmer of a lake in a painting, the white teeth and open mouth of a smiling child in a close-up photograph. Irrelevant. Too much information. Potential distraction. Cut out all emotion. Emotion was an enemy, when you operated in this trade.

He knew which door he wanted, knew also that it wouldn't be locked. The certainty about that was a tiny reassurance. The second door on the left as he turned at the top of the stairs and moved along the landing. He paused for a moment with his hand on the handle, nerving himself for the crisis, for the final, climactic seconds of the role he was playing in this. Not long now, but he had to be perfect in every move and every reaction. He took a deep, silent breath and depressed the handle with infinite care. The door opened soundlessly, as he had always known it would.

The curtains were thin at the single wide window, allowing the light from the lamp outside to show more than he would have expected of the room. He stood for a moment with his hands at his sides, checking that there was no one behind the door, that everything was as he had expected it to be. He knew that it had gone well so far. It must not be ruined now, in this last and simplest of its phases. Everything was as he expected: there were no chairs out of place, no stray shoes upon the floor which might trap him into a stumble and ruin everything.

He took in the glint of light upon the wardrobe, the whiteness of the door to the en suite, the clear definition of the slight figure beneath the blankets on the big bed. Then he moved across the room, stood for a moment beside the bed, and raised his arms to do what he had come here to do.

‘Hold it right there, Phillips!'

The command was like a gunshot, unnaturally loud after the long silence which had preceded it. He whirled to the doorway of the en suite, face aflame with sudden fear, eyes flashing with the knowledge that he could never achieve what he had climbed the stairs to do. Framed in the doorway was the figure he had known he would see, with the pistol pointed steadily at his heart. ‘What the hell—'

‘CUT!'

The director's voice, the one they had all known must come at this point. The collective releasing of breath. The collective nervous laughter, loudest of all from that inert mass upon the bed which had played no part in the scene. The woman sat up, flinging aside the blankets, fully clothed, flicking her long hair back over her shoulders in the relief of the movement which was now allowed to her. ‘I wanted to sneeze all the way through that! I thought I'd never last out!'

‘What a trooper!' said the man who had burst out from the en suite to save her.

It wasn't clear whether he was sincere or ironic in that, but the director stepped forward on to the set and became for the moment the centre of interest. ‘That was good, girls and boys! I'll need to run it through and check things out, but I think we have a take.'

‘Can we fall out, then?' said the actor who'd sprung out to arrest the intruder in his murderous actions. He was clearly pre-eminent among the actors who were now emerging from various places around the set.

The director glanced at his watch, attempting to preserve the fiction that he and not their star controlled events here. ‘I should think so, yes. It's too late to set anything else today. Good work, everyone! And I think you were right, Adam. That scene is more tense without any music at all. There's no need for us to gild the lily.'

‘You don't think Jim took too long to enter the house and climb the stairs? I was beginning to think something had gone wrong by the time he actually arrived.'

‘Always happy to build up an entrance for the star of our show,' said James Ellison, the actor who had played Phillips. This time there was no mistaking the sarcasm.

‘Always happy to build up an entrance for the star of our show,' said James Ellison, the actor who had played Phillips. This time there was no mistaking the sarcasm.

TWO

T
he villain who almost committed murder in the television drama was not the star of the series. That was the man who sprung out of the en suite bathroom to interrupt his fell designs, a character named Alec Dawson. The actor who played this role was Adam Cassidy. He had a face which would have been immediately recognized by three-quarters of the people in Britain and a fair number in each of the hundred and eighty-four countries of the world in which the series was shown.

That is the power and the dubious influence of television on the diverse cultures of an ever smaller planet.

For many of the leading figures involved, television brings the easiest sort of fame. Men and women who half a century earlier would have been jobbing actors in repertory theatres, with a frenzied weekly workload and the perpetual fear of unemployment in an overcrowded profession, are now translated by television soaps into not only national but world stardom. Indeed, their dialogue is often dubbed into the tongues of people who have no experience whatever of the places in which these sagas are so assiduously set and documented. ‘A mad world, my masters!' Nicholas Breton called our earth, and it is no less mad almost four centuries later.

It is a world in which vanity flourishes and has perforce to be indulged. It takes a remarkably detached and balanced man to withstand the pressures towards egotism, and Adam Cassidy was certainly not that man. His acting ability was not negligible, but it was limited. Like some of the stars of the great days of Hollywood before he was born, Adam had fallen by chance into a part and a persona which made the most of the attributes he had. The
Call Alec Dawson
series had brought him a success which meant that he could make millions of pounds without needing to step beyond his limited range.