Scene of Crime (2 page)

“I don’t suppose it’ll come to that.” Lloyd smiled. “When do you open?”

“Not until the end of January, thank God. We were going to open on New Year’s Day, but fortunately the Health and Safety people vetoed that because the decorating work isn’t finished. There’s scaffolding and things blocking the exits. We’ve got a month, but what with Christmas and the flu, it’s beginning to look desperate.” She turned as a small group of people arrived. “Oh, darlings, you’ve made it!” She frowned. “Well, some of you have.”

“The traffic’s impossible,” said one. “The lights have all failed in the town center. We managed to escape down Baxendale Avenue, but I expect some of the others are stuck. Ray’s here—he’s gone to the café to get sandwiches for everyone. I said you’d settle up with him later—is that all right?”

“Good, good,” said Marianne. “Can’t leave the house for five minutes without eating,” she muttered to Lloyd.

No need for him to go after all. Which was a shame; it might have helped get him back into favor with Judy. He wasn’t at all sure how he’d fallen out of favor, but he clearly had.

“Jenny said to tell you that she’ll be here,” someone said. “She’s just going to be a bit late.”

“But that means I don’t even have Cinderella’s
understudy
!” Marianne threw her arms up in the air. “We might as well go home.”

“She has to pick her parents up from the station, that’s all. She’ll be here as soon as she’s dropped them off.”

“Amateurs,” muttered Marianne. “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

Lloyd looked at the stage, which was bisected by a backdrop of Cinderella’s kitchen. From where he stood, he could see the almost-finished coach and horses behind it; just flat pieces of hardboard cut to shape and painted. And behind them was the exterior of the baron’s house, and up in the flies, the prince’s palace. With lighting and dry ice or whatever they used these days, he could see that the transforming of the mice and pumpkin into Cinderella’s coach and horses would be quite effective, even if it was all done on a shoestring. Providing they managed to fit in enough rehearsals with the actual actors before the curtain went up.

“Judy, darling …”

“Oh, no,” said Judy, literally backing away as she spoke. “No, Marianne, I can’t—”

“Just until Jenny gets here?” Marianne’s hands were clasped together in prayer. “Just read the words and
stand in the right places, darling, that’s all. It’s only to give the others their cues.”

“But I can’t …”

“Please, darling. Otherwise we can’t even
begin
until Jenny gets here. She’s in every scene. And I can’t do Cinderella, not with everything else—I’ll have to sort out the songs with the pianist when he gets here, and a million other things. Be an angel.”

Very reluctantly, Judy agreed, on the condition that she would not have to sing, and Lloyd smiled quietly to himself, until he caught Judy watching him and thought it politic to change the subject. “I’ve never even been to a pantomime,” he said, and suddenly everyone was staring at him. It had been an innocent enough remark. “What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“You’ve never been to a
pantomime
?” Judy repeated.

“No. Well, they didn’t go in much for pantomime where I come from, much less singing, dancing, and clowning.”

Marianne’s eyes widened. “Where do you come from, darling? Mars?”

“Wales.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding sympathetically as the awful truth about his heritage was revealed to her. “Wales.”

“They have panto in Wales,” said Judy.

“Well, maybe they do, but not in my village, they didn’t.”

“But you had two children,” said Judy. “And you lived in London. Didn’t you ever take them to a pantomime?”

No, indeed he had not. Amateurs throwing a few songs and dances into
Cinderella
was one thing; showbiz panto was quite another. The very idea of sitting through two and a half hours of B-list celebrities and over-the-hill
sportsmen assassinating a perfectly good fairy tale with bad jokes, pop songs, and innuendo, in the company of hundreds of screaming children, was enough to make Lloyd go pale.

“No—Barbara did all that sort of—” He was being scrutinized again. “—thing,” he finished.

“Did she?” Judy said, picking up a script and moving away.

Lloyd sighed. He wasn’t a new man. Far from it. Tonight, he had felt like an old man. A very old man indeed. But he was going to get to play Buttons, despite his advancing years. Well, read Buttons at any rate. It might be fun.

Ryan Chester, nineteen years old and a useful welterweight at school, was even better at stealing cars than he had been at boxing. He hadn’t wanted to box professionally; as a way of making a living, stealing cars was less painful. The one he was driving had been parked outside on the street, a front garden’s length from the house it probably belonged to, and inside that house there would almost certainly be kids, a television, people talking; he had taken the chance that no one would hear it start up, and within seconds he was out of sight of anyone in the house who may have heard it.

Now he was on the short stretch of divided highway that would take him toward the Malworth town center, but that wasn’t what he had been intending to do at all; this evening was not working out as planned. Still, he thought philosophically, there was no one following him, nothing else on the road, so he could relax a little. He reached into his back pocket, drawing out his cellular
phone, and awkwardly pressed the handset buttons with his thumb. Today had been a bitch so far, and the only good that could come of it would be if the stuff was worth something. He swung the car violently around a cyclist he hadn’t seen, mainly because the bike had no lights, and slowed down; he didn’t want to draw attention to himself like that, for God’s sake. He approached the roundabout, signaling as he went into the outside lane for the right turn, frowning as he saw the traffic on the road into the town.

He held the phone to his ear, to hear Baz saying hello over and over again. At least he was answering now.

“Where the hell were you?” Ryan demanded. “I called ten minutes ago.”

“Sorry, Ry. I was desperate for a pee.”

“Why didn’t you take the phone with you? That’s the whole bloody point of mobile phones!”

“Sorry, Ry.”

Ryan sighed, using both hands on the steering wheel as he negotiated the roundabout and joined the queue of traffic into Malworth, which was moving at half a mile an hour. Why did he feel responsible for Baz? Because blood was thicker than water, he supposed, though no blood had ever been as thick as Baz. He was in court on Wednesday morning because he had been too stupid to get rid of the cannabis he’d just bought when the police had raided the Starland. Ryan had lost count of the number of times Baz had been nabbed for possession. He might even go down for it this time.

He put the phone to his ear again. “It’s all right, Baz,” he said. “Forget it.”

“Where are you?” asked Baz. “Do you want me to meet you?”

“No. Just go home, Baz. I’ll see you at the Starland later on.”

Ryan terminated the call, and crawled toward the edge of town. One or two of the houses set back from the main road had Christmas lights strung through the trees in their front gardens; it looked nice, he thought. Festive. The town’s Christmas lights, lining the main shopping streets, were okay, too, he supposed, but he hadn’t really expected to have this much time to admire them.

Once he was approaching the one-way system, traffic ground to a stop. It was three days before Christmas, and Malworth was pretty busy, with the shops staying open for the late Christmas buyers and all manner of people entertaining the shoppers in the glistening streets, but this was a complete standstill. He frowned. Maybe there had been an accident or something. He sat motionless behind a bus and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

What was the holdup, for God’s sake? He wound down the window, admitting flecks of rain and the sounds of a children’s choir singing Christmas carols, craning his neck to see beyond the bus, to the traffic lights. But there
were
no traffic lights, and he swore to himself. The lights had failed, and the traffic on the crossroads had no idea who had the right of way. The intersection was a snarl of vehicles. Rain spattered the steering wheel, and he wound up the window again.

He’d heard that in-car entertainment was a huge industry in Japan, because the city streets had virtually reached gridlock, and he could see that it would be, if they had to do this every day. The owner of the vehicle he was sitting in was not, unfortunately, big on in-car entertainment, and he had only the children’s choir, closer to
him now and audible through the closed window, to entertain him. They had gotten through three carols by the time the people in silly costumes who were collecting for some charity, and were turning the traffic jam to advantage by soliciting the drivers for a contribution, got around to him. A large Pink Panther approached him and tapped on the window.

“What’s it for?” he asked as he rolled down the window once more.

“Jordan.”

For some reason he’d expected a man, but it was a woman’s voice, muffled, coming from the pink furry throat.

“Jordan?” He couldn’t remember seeing anything about Jordan. “Has something happened there, then?”

Her paw went to her lower jaw and pulled it down a little. “No!” she laughed, her voice clearer. “Little Jordan Taylor. The baby that needs the operation in America?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“It’s Ryan, isn’t it?” she said, as he dug in his pocket and pulled out some change, throwing it into her bucket. “Hello. I haven’t seen you for a while.”

He stared at the large pink face as she looked down the line of cars, sizing up her next victim. “Hi,” he said, as casually as he could under the circumstances. Who was it, for God’s sake? He didn’t think he really wanted to know. He just wanted out of here. Now.

“Thanks a lot,” she said. “Have a nice Christmas.”

“Same to you,” said Ryan, his brain racing. The lights came back on, to an involuntary cheer from Ryan—and everyone else caught up in the jam, no doubt—and he moved forward on the clutch, his heart beating faster. He
was held up on red now, but at least could see the intersection beginning to clear.

He watched the bright pink, slightly bedraggled creature in his mirror as she made her way back to the safety of the pavement. He had no idea who she was; a friend of a friend maybe. Someone’s mother. He replayed her voice in his head, and knew that it was familiar. The way she’d said his name had been familiar, too. Someone who spoke his name—that ought to be a clue, because people didn’t, usually, not in conversation. So who had occasion to use your name a lot? People who told you what to do, he thought. Teachers. Was she a teacher? Could be. But whatever way you looked at it, he had been clocked driving a stolen car by someone who probably wouldn’t approve, and he didn’t like that. He hadn’t been driving the car for ten minutes, for God’s sake, and he’d been stationary for most of them.

Carl Bignall ducked down to check himself in the rearview mirror, and persuaded a lock of dark hair over his brow so that it seemed to have fallen there of its own accord. He was thirty-five minutes late; Marianne would not be pleased. The car blinked as he locked it, and he ran down the three flights of stairs from the rooftop car park, his step light for the well-built man that he was, sidestepping hoses and planks and tarpaulins as he made his way through the corridors, arriving in the wings to find some man he’d never seen in his life before reading Buttons. He frowned. It wasn’t like Dexter to miss rehearsal. But whoever his stand-in was, he was reading well, which was a refreshing change.

Maybe Marianne was trying him out, but if so, Carl thought, he was a late starter. He couldn’t be much
younger than Denis Leeward. Maybe he’d just moved here—he might have been the star of whatever amateur dramatic society he’d belonged to before. That could create problems, of course, but Marianne would try anyone out and worry about the politics later. The pool of talent wasn’t exactly deep.

And Judy Hill was reading Cinderella, for some reason. The idea of a middle-aged, pregnant Cinderella appealed to him; it could be the story in reverse. A last-chance Cinderella deserting the faithful Buttons for a one-night stand with a flashy prince. Searching for him when she finds she’s pregnant, only to find that he doesn’t want to know.

“Carl! You’ve come, you darling man! I’d given you up entirely!”

“I am so sorry, Marianne,” he said, his hands held up in a gesture of truce.

“Did you get caught in that frightful traffic jam the others were talking about?”

“No,” Carl admitted. “I heard about it on Radio Barton, though. It would have been a good excuse, but I cannot tell a lie—I was nowhere near the town center. I got held up at home. Estelle—you know. She wasn’t feeling too good.”

“Isn’t this her writer’s circle night?” said Marianne.

“Yes,” said Carl, and smiled. “Of course, maybe she’s just playing hookey.”

“Dexter’s got the flu or something, darling. This lovely man’s stepped into the breach.”

“Good for him,” said Carl.

“The thing is,” said Buttons, joining him in the wings, “did you bring the chimes?”

Carl smiled. “I did,” he said, pulling the tape from his
pocket. “And the ballroom sounds, and the horses’ hooves, and all the rest of it.”

Buttons shook his head. “On tape?” he said. “Whatever happened to two half coconuts?”

“It’s all state-of-the-art stuff now,” said Carl, and held out his hand. “Carl Bignall,” he said with a smile. “I cheat and copy what I need from CDs.”

“Lloyd. I came in with the ersatz Cinders and was commandeered.”

“Lloyd, of course! I’ve heard a lot about you. It’s nice to put a face to the name at last. Are you thinking of joining us?”

“No,” Lloyd said, shaking his head vehemently. “I’m just helping out.”

Carl held up the tape. “Judy? Can you read Cinderella and work the sound effects at the same time?”

“I expect so,” she said doubtfully. “If Marianne doesn’t need me on stage.”