Merely Players (3 page)

‘Domesticity will scald you, and me too, if you aren't careful,' she said with a grin. ‘Why don't you go up and see the children? You might just have time to read them their story, if you go straight up.'

‘I don't think I will. Not tonight, darling. I've had a very tiring day.' He sighed an elaborate fatigue, then added a happy afterthought. ‘And Ingrid won't want me getting them excited and disturbing their routine.'

‘Nannies are employees, not dictators, Adam. And I'm sure she'd be happy to see you reading to them. They don't see enough of you, you know.'

‘One of the crosses of fame, dear. And they'll be tired themselves, after a full day at school. It wouldn't do to get them excited at the end of their day.'

‘I know you're busy, but you'll regret it if they grow up without you. It's a precious time, this, you know.'

She was beginning to nag. Adam didn't like that and he wasn't used to it. No one nagged him about anything, now that his mother was dead. He sat in his leather chair in the dining room and read his mail until the dinner was ready. He told her a little about his day and his trials whilst they ate, and added some of the theatrical gossip which had passed around during the group whilst they drank coffee and waited for new sets to be mounted. ‘And how was your day?' he said dutifully when they were on the cheesecake.

‘Much as any other,' she said acidly. She didn't know whether he didn't notice her tone or simply chose to ignore it. This house and this life weren't proving as desirable as she had expected them to be, when she had been making her suggestions about the design of the kitchen and the various en suites and dressing rooms. She hadn't thought she would miss her fellow actors and the gossip of the theatre and the studios anything like as much as she now did. She had the children, of course, and she was delighted to watch the changes in them as they moved from infancy into childhood. But they limited her; they held back her own development; sometimes she thought she would scream her frustration, after another day of childish language and childish concerns.

Some of the other mothers she met at the village school said they felt the same: the favourite phrase was that they felt themselves ‘becoming cabbages'. But most of them were country women, born and brought up round here, with families and friends about them. Jane Cassidy (she kept her professional name of Jane Webster in correspondence, but the school had insisted it was better for the children to register her married name there) was a city girl, who found herself at times desperately lonely in her magnificent, isolated home.

The women at the school gates were aware of her husband, of course; she was treated with a certain awe, and cultivated by those who sought to use her and the children to strike up some sort of friendship with the great man. But even that made her not a person in her own right but an appendage of her more celebrated partner. Fewer and fewer of her acquaintances seemed to remember her as Jane Webster, the actress.

She'd tried to talk about these things to Adam, but he listened for a few minutes and then switched to his own and greater concerns. It was the way of the actor, of course; egotism came with the profession and sometimes it seemed a necessary tool for success in it. Every theatre actor knew that if he collapsed with a heart attack they would be discussing the recasting of his role before the ambulance reached the hospital. But television stardom was something different: they couldn't stick a new face into a role overnight and hope for the same success. But Jane felt Adam should at least find the time to listen to her.

But Adam was Adam. She'd known that when she married him and she shouldn't expect something different. She lived in luxury on the back of his efforts, with a nanny now giving her the freedom she scarcely knew how to use. She couldn't expect sympathy or understanding from her husband for what seemed to him her petty problems. He would probably think she was a silly cow, or worse still an ungrateful cow. ‘Jane Webster, you're pathetic!' she told herself sternly. She would need to find her own solutions.

When they went upstairs, Adam went into the two rooms at the end of the landing to look at his sleeping children. Jane, listening to the distant throb of the dishwasher beneath her as she undressed in the bedroom, wondered whether he had gone in there to please himself or to please her.

She might have been reassured if she had been able to see the change in Adam as he moved towards his children. The stillness of the scene in the first of the rooms, the slow, rhythmic breathing of the tiny figure in the big bed seemed to still also the thoughts and the pulse of the man who had fathered him. Damon was six now, a dynamo who seemed by day to have discovered the secret of perpetual motion. Yet, at this moment, you had to look hard to detect the tiny rise and fall of the blanket which meant that all was well with him. He had the blond curls that were so prominent in the pictures of his mother as a child, and skin ‘as smooth as monumental alabaster'. Adam wondered where that phrase had come from, then realized that it was from
Othello.
Not really appropriate for the skin of a child, maybe, but it always pleased him when a phrase from the past came to him. He wasn't sure why.

He was beset with a sudden fear for the innocence he saw beneath him, for the damage which must surely be done to this tiny figure by the harsh world which awaited him. How could this sleeping cherub possibly become a grown man, with the weapons and the will to resist the hostility which must surely be turned upon him by that aggressive, dog-eat-dog world which awaited him beyond the walls of this luxurious citadel?

The room next door was identical, save for the pink walls which its imperious four-year-old mistress had demanded. Kate was not as deeply asleep as Damon had been. Her brow wrinkled for a moment as he watched her. The lips, small and delicate as the petals of a flower, mouthed words for a moment, but no sound came from them. Then a smile, tiny, mysterious, confident, settled on the small and perfect mouth. The sigh was as silent as the words had been. Then her breathing settled into a regular, quiet rhythm and you had to be close to her to detect any movement at all. He stooped and set his lips softly as the wings of a moth upon the infant forehead, then caressed with the back of his fingers the face which was so active and demanding when it was animated during the day.

Adam Cassidy stood for a moment at the door, looking back at his sleeping child, relishing this moment of real life, which seemed at present to be increasingly elusive for him.

Jane was already in bed when he went into the master bedroom. She lay as still as the child he had just left, but with her eyes steadily upon him. He was suddenly self-conscious, for a reason he could not explain, and turned abruptly into the luxurious bathroom beyond the bed. He had intended to say things to Jane about the children, about the way she cared for them and the way he appreciated it, but the words would not come, even when he slid beneath the duvet beside her five minutes later. He put out the light and stared for a moment at the invisible ceiling. Then he said, ‘I love you, Jane.' It emerged not as he wanted it, but as if it were somehow a statement which surprised him. He said after another few seconds, ‘But you know that, don't you?'

‘It doesn't do any harm for you to say it occasionally, does it? Or for me to hear it, for that matter.' She turned on her side and slid her arms round him, feeling the muscles on his back, moving her hands down from the shoulder blades she knew so well to the bottom of his back and the top of the cleft there.

Both of them knew that they were going to make love, but there was no need to hurry things on. He held her tightly for a moment, then leaned her back and stroked her breasts, in the foreplay they both knew she enjoyed. Then passion took over and he rejoiced in the sudden urgency of her movements, of her nails digging into his shoulders as he brought her to a climax and she urged him on with the familiar blunt commands.

Then they relaxed, unclasping their limbs as unhurriedly as they had begun, and lay on their backs with hands entwined as a prelude to sleep. It was good to have the experience, to know what would excite a woman and give her sexual pleasure. That was his last, consoling thought before he turned on to his side and lost consciousness in the big warm bed.

Actors are more self-centred than ordinary men. It did not occur to Adam Cassidy that the pleasure they had just enjoyed might also owe something to Jane Webster's experience in other places.

THREE

E
ight hours later and twenty miles south of Adam and Jane Cassidy, in a house which would have fitted comfortably into the four-car garage at Broad Oaks, a very different couple were preparing themselves for the challenge of a new day.

Detective Chief Inspector ‘Percy' Peach surveyed his breakfast table and Mrs Peach with a satisfaction that his enemies might have called smug. He wasn't short of enemies among the criminal fraternity of North Lancashire, and he even counted one or two among the police service on the other side of the great divide. He set his hands on the shoulders of his wife's dressing gown and said with conviction, ‘I've decided I like being married.'

‘I'm not sure I do,' said Lucy Peach ‘Not at work, anyway. I'm getting tired of all the stale jokes about having sex on tap.'

‘But you know how to turn the tap on full flow,' he said with a smile, allowing his right hand to run for a moment through her luxuriant chestnut hair.

‘Speaking of taps, it was bloody cold in that bathroom of yours this morning!'

‘Language, our Lucy!'

‘Our Lucy's language will get a lot worse, if you don't do something about the heating in there before the winter sets in.'

‘You were warm enough last night,' said Percy dreamily. ‘If I could have plugged in to that, I could have heated the house for a week.'

‘If you're going to comment on my bedroom performance every morning, I shall become inhibited. You'll be giving marks out of ten next.'

‘Nine point five for technique, ten for artistic impression,' said Percy promptly. He looked sadly at the bowl of muesli in front of his new wife, then slid a slice of white bread provocatively on to the pan in which his bacon and egg was frying.

Lucy tried to convey the correct distaste when he banged the cholesterol-laden plate down opposite her two minutes later, but feared that she had managed only envy. ‘This is how sausages should be, nearly black all round but not burnt,' said Percy. The sausage disappeared down the chief inspectorial throat with a rapidity that was matched only by the consumer's relish. ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of cereal, lass, but you need a fry-up to follow before you meet the rigours of the day.' He dipped a piece of his fried bread in the yoke of his egg and downed it with a predictable sigh of satisfaction.

‘If I breakfasted like that, my bottom would look big even in a kaftan,' Lucy informed him.

‘Tha's got a gradely backside, lass. If tha'd been a cricketer, tha'd have needed a gradely backside. One of the requisites for a fast bowler, John Arlott always said.'

‘And who was John Arlott?' said his wife innocently. She was ten years younger than Peach's thirty-nine, and she liked to remind him of that occasionally.

‘Wash thi mouth out this instant, lass!' Percy shook his head sadly. ‘If tha doesn't behave thisen, I shall have to tell thi mother that tha didn't know who John Arlott was. And then tha'll get thi arse tanned. Delectable though it undoubtedly is,' he reassured her, dropping his Lancashire dialect for the purpose. Unlike most newly married men, Percy found his recently acquired mother-in-law a pearl amongst women.

Lucy thought it wisest to divert his thoughts to the subject of work. ‘I've got to go into the Muslim community again today. We're still following up the associates of this terrorist suspect they arrested in London last week.'

Lucy had been Percy's detective sergeant until their marriage, learning much from his maverick style and his aggressive interviewing techniques. But police practice demands that couples with a close relationship do not work closely together. Only the fact that the head of CID, Chief Superintendent Tucker, was completely out of touch with the staff whom he nominally controlled had permitted them to work together for so long. Everyone else in the station except the man in control of CID had known for the last three years that Percy Peach and Lucy Blake were an item. But even Tucker could not miss marriage. DS Lucy Blake was now employed in different detective teams and on cases which were not the concern of her new husband.

Percy missed her presence at his side more than he cared to admit, even to himself. She had counterbalanced his direct, confrontational style, often gaining cooperation from witnesses he would have challenged head-on, bringing a different sort of insight from his own to complex cases. ‘Have you found anything significant about this Akmal bloke?'

‘He was militant Muslim all right. And he was planning some sort of attack. But we knew that when we started. We need to find out who his associates were and how far the cell extended. They've got to be plotting more mischief. Probably suicide bombings, which we all know are such a sod to detect and prevent. I need to know more of the Muslim culture – more about how they think and feel. Most of the Asians we speak to are only too anxious to help us – they realize that the reputation of their whole community is in danger of being wrecked by this lunatic fringe.'

‘Then what's the problem?'

‘They don't really trust us, because we're police. We need more Asian officers. We've got just three in Brunton, and two of them are new constables still wet behind the ears. None of them are women, of course. The only one with any service is a DS who's working beside me. We're supposed to be getting a couple of Asian DCs on temporary assignment from Manchester, but there's a national shortage of Asian officers. The people I interview tell me just as much as they want to. I'm not able to sense if they're holding anything back. I felt I could do that when I was working with you and dealing with people of a similar background to myself.'