Merely Players (20 page)

If Percy Peach was given to such esoteric musings, he gave no sign of it on the steps of the big late-Victorian house. ‘Dean Morley? I'm Detective Chief Inspector Peach and this is Detective Sergeant Northcott.'

Morley glanced at his watch. ‘You come most carefully upon your hour.'

‘Even a minute or two early, I suspect,' said Peach affably. ‘We don't often get greeted with the opening of
Hamlet
.'

‘You must forgive me. My first few lines in the theatre were as a sentry in
Hamlet
.'
If Morley was surprised by a policeman who recognized his quotation, he gave no sign of it. He led them through a shabby hall with a strip of worn carpet down the middle and opened a wide oak door. The room beyond it was a surprise to the CID men. It was beautifully decorated, in a combination of very pale green and cream which not many people would have selected but which seemed to fit perfectly with the high walls and spacious dimensions. With its wide Yorkshire stone bay window, the room now recalled the Victorian heyday of this house. A large white glass light-fitting was adorned with delicate pink flowers. There was a print of Monet's garden over the big fireplace. The other paintings in the room looked like originals; there were three oil paintings and five smaller watercolours.

Peach surveyed the room automatically, looking as always for anything it might say about its occupants. He said conventionally, ‘Nice room, this,' and meant it.

‘You can compliment Keith on that,' said Morley. ‘The paintings are his, apart from the print, and he decorated the place a fortnight ago.'

He had spoken with genuine pride. As if entering on cue, a man emerged from a door on the other side of the room and stood awkwardly, like a child accepting praise but not sure how to react to it. His diffidence seemed more ridiculous as he was six feet tall, with rapidly receding hair and shiny black leather jacket. He said, ‘They were good houses, these, when they were built. They've gone downhill since they were split up into flats. I'm Keith Arnold, by the way; I live here with Dean.' He looked from Peach to Northcott, and actually recoiled a few inches as he confronted the big man. Then he said to Morley, ‘I must be off to the gallery, Dean. I'm on duty at ten.' He nodded briefly to Peach, ignored Northcott completely, and disappeared into the hall. They heard the front door close behind him and watched him march quickly past the police Mondeo outside.

‘Doesn't like cops,' said Peach thoughtfully. ‘I wonder what he has to hide.'

‘Cops don't like us,' said Morley in prompt defence of his partner. ‘They don't have much time for puffs. Some of them are not averse to the odd kicking to declare it.' He glanced speculatively at the formidable figure who towered above him and Peach.

‘A prejudice from the past, Mr Morley. And you shouldn't use that word, you know. Leastways, I suppose you can call yourselves whatever you like, but we mustn't use it. If it's of any interest to you, the only time I've seen DS Northcott use violence recently was in making the arrest of four yobboes who were beating up three men outside a gay club. He's a hard bastard – don't make any mistake about that. But he's generally on the right side, nowadays.'

Clyde, who thought it was high time he was allowed to speak for himself, said briskly, ‘We're here because we're investigating the death of Adam Cassidy.'

‘Yes. And I'm anxious to answer your questions and be done with it,' said Dean firmly.

‘Friend of yours, was he, Mr Cassidy?' said Peach.

Dean didn't hurry into his reply. Anyone of his sexual persuasion had brushed often with the police over the last thirty years; one of the things he had taught himself was not to rush into hasty statements. ‘Yes. I suppose you could say he was, until quite recently. I helped him to get his first part in the theatre and recommended him for others. Took what you might call a fatherly interest in him, until his looks and his luck took him out of my sphere.'

Not his talent, Peach noticed: Morley hadn't mentioned that. ‘You must have been gratified to watch his progress?'

Dean smiled, recognizing the guarded nature of the question as a response to his own caution. ‘I was. It's always good to see people you've known as youngsters doing well. Ours is a precarious business, but we all know that and accept it, I suppose. More fool us for staying in it, as Keith tells me when I go on about it.'

Peach glanced round at the paintings. ‘Your partner is an artist. Another overcrowded profession.'

‘And full of even more phoneys. Keith has a part-time job as curator at the art gallery, but he earns a pittance. He's a good painter, as far as I can tell. Other people who know a lot more than me about art tell me that he is. But getting established in art is even more difficult than in the theatre. You need to mount your own exhibition, and unless you have money or a rich patron, it's almost impossible to do that.'

He was eager to talk about his partner. Peach pulled him back to the reason why they were here. ‘But you're doing quite well in your own profession. That must be a help to you.'

Dean was immediately cautious. ‘I suppose I've done well enough, over the last ten or fifteen years. Television's been good for me. I've never had a star part, but I've had a series of small roles, which means that I've been able to keep working. But there's no guarantee those parts won't dry up. There's always another generation of young actors coming along. Always someone anxious to take the part you thought was yours. Dog-eat-dog is the nature of the business, now that the old repertory theatres have closed down. Not many of us can aspire to the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, where subsidy gives them a little more latitude.'

He was talking too much, trying to postpone the questions he must surely know were coming to him. Peach said bluntly, ‘But you thought you had a big role lined up in the next series of
Call Alec Dawson
, didn't you?'

Morley's face set itself into a cautious mask. ‘I thought I had the part nailed down, yes. But as I said, you learn to take nothing for granted in our game.'

There was a pause whilst DS Northcott made his first note. He looked up at Morley and said, ‘Tell us about your relationship with Adam Cassidy, please.'

Dean was more intimidated by the big black man than he cared to acknowledge, even to himself. Perhaps that made him give them more than he had intended. ‘As I say, I'd known Adam since he started in the business. I was only five years older than him, but I fancy it felt much more than that to both of us then. Once I'd got him his first part, I helped him through his first months in a theatre. They can be pretty hard when you're the new boy.'

‘Was Cassidy gay?'

‘No.' His face set again, but as the seconds stretched, it was he who had to speak. ‘All right, I sounded him out. He was quite a looker, and even more so when he was twenty-two.' For a moment, he pictured Adam's brusque late-night rejection of the pass he had made, when they were the last ones left in the green room after a performance. Such incidents seemed to him now that he had Keith in his life to belong to a different and more tawdry world. ‘It didn't upset Adam – there are lots of gays in the profession and I'm sure he'd choked off plenty of others before me.'

Peach came in again now; Dean was sure that they were working as a partnership against him, but he couldn't work out quite how. ‘You're telling us that you went on helping Adam Cassidy, despite finding he wasn't of your sexual persuasion.'

Dean forced a smile. ‘You work all the time with people who are not “of your sexual persuasion”, as you put it. Work is probably easier when you haven't got emotional attachments. It didn't stop me giving Adam all the help I could, in his early years.'

‘But only in those early years?'

Dean smiled ruefully. ‘Not at all, Mr Peach. It's no use trying to trip me up that way. We remained close friends, but after those first few years, Adam had little further need of my assistance. The work was there for him, the parts got bigger. I gave him advice when he asked for it, but he didn't need me to speak up for him to get work any more.'

‘I see. And by the time of his death, he was in a position to return a few favours, I believe.'

‘I didn't think of it like that. I knew I could do the part of this major villain who would oppose him throughout the next series. It was the director and the producer who wanted me for it, and they know their business. I knew I was right for the role, but it gives you confidence when hardened professionals like Joe Hartley and James Walton say they want you.'

‘It was a big break for you, wasn't it, this part?'

Dean, who had told Keith last night that he was going to give the CID as little as he could, found now that he wanted to explain himself. ‘It was a big part in a successful series. The one I needed. At forty-seven, I may not get another chance of something as big as this.'

‘Big money?'

‘It would have paid five times as much for each episode as I've ever been paid before. Plus repeat fees around the world.' He looked at the door through which his partner had disappeared, then at the two very different but equally attentive faces. ‘You pretend that money doesn't matter, when you're starting in the business. But that attitude gets worn down over the years. When you come here, you see a couple of ageing queers making the best of things in a rundown flat. But Keith Arnold is the love of my life, DCI Peach. I don't think either of us will want anyone else for the rest of our lives. But money is more important as you get older and Keith earns very little. I believe in him as an artist and I want him to go on trying to sell his paintings. This part would have made us secure. The role would have guaranteed us money and removed any uncertainties about our future together.'

He spoke defiantly, like a man proud to assert his allegiance to Keith Arnold. Probably he had not had many opportunities to proclaim it publicly before. It was left to Peach to say quietly, ‘You do realize that you are declaring a perfect motive for murder?'

Dean Morley forced a smile he could not feel. He had not intended to declare anything of the sort. He had intended to keep this interview low-key and unemotional, to behave as if the loss of this role was no more than par for the course, the sort of thing he had met many times before. Well, it was out now; at least he hadn't been mealy-mouthed or evasive with them. He felt a strange need to make everything clear, to tell them exactly how strongly this had affected him and how badly he felt about Cassidy's part in it. ‘The part was mine, you know. Not only was it right up my street, but I'd had it confirmed by Joe Hartley and James Walton, the people doing the casting, that the job was mine. It was Cassidy who changed everything, when he asserted his right of veto over casting.'

‘Have you any idea why he did that? Had you had some sort of row with him?'

‘No. We got on as well as we'd always done.' He paused for a moment, motivated again by the need to make the justice of his case clear to them. ‘Adam did say a week or two ago that I shouldn't take things for granted. Perhaps it was just a power thing. Actors can be very childish, you know. When they become stars – which Adam certainly had done – they sometimes want to stamp their feet and assert themselves, to see how far their new power extends. It's childish, but the effects on smaller people like me can be dire.'

Clyde Northcott cleared his throat, then said quietly, ‘Where were you overnight on Friday, Mr Morley?'

‘Was that when he was killed? I was here with Keith. Throughout the evening and through the night. We often go out on a Friday, but he wanted to finish a painting – he'd not been able to get on with it because he'd been busy decorating this room.'

Too much detail, perhaps. The answer had come very promptly, as if Morley had been anticipating the question. But perhaps he just wished to tell them about the deeds of his partner; people who supported partners financially were often anxious to convince you that they worked hard and earned their keep. Northcott made a note of these details: it would be necessary to check out the alibi with the absent Keith Arnold. This was going to be like a wife's corroboration of a suspect's whereabouts: not necessarily believed by the police, but very difficult to disprove.

Peach studied his man intently for a moment, digesting the fact that what had always seemed likely to be a puzzling case now had an extra layer of complexity added to it by the fact that many of the people involved were professional actors. ‘Did you kill Adam Cassidy, Mr Morley? If you did, it would be less harrowing for all of us if you admitted it this morning.'

Dean replied as calmly as the question had been put. ‘No. I hear what you're saying about motive, but I'm not the murdering type.'

Sitting in the middle of this unexpectedly elegant room, with the original art on the walls, this slight, oddly dignified figure certainly seemed an unlikely killer. But he had been frank about his passion for his partner and his determination to make that secure. And passion often drives men to murder. Peach gave his man a small smile, inviting him for a moment to be on his side in the puzzle. ‘Then who do you think did kill him?'

Morley did not give him the blank refusal which was the usual answer to this. ‘I don't know. I've thought about it, not just to preserve my own skin, but because I was still quite fond of Adam, despite what he was doing to me. I know his wife, because she's in the business, but I've scarcely seen her for years. As you would guess from his looks and his success, Adam had lots of offers from other women, and he didn't refuse all of them. I can't give you any recent details, because as you've seen heterosexual affairs are not an interest of mine.' He paused for a moment, as if savouring this phrasing. ‘How Jane would react to his playing away, you must decide for yourselves. Or how any women he used and discarded might react, for that matter. I'm afraid a man who rises as fast and as ruthlessly as Adam did in our profession makes many enemies, Mr Peach.'