Murder Takes the Stage (14 page)

‘Quite right, dear.' Mavis nodded vigorously. ‘Let's all be posh and pretend it didn't happen.'

Pamela was so white Georgia thought she might be about to faint. ‘Let's think of Ken, shall we?' she said, with the only intervention she could think of.

Mavis took a caustic look at her. ‘Pardon me for asking, but who the hell are you?'

‘Georgia Marsh.'

This met with Mavis's favour, surprisingly. ‘Oh yeah. Ken told me. You and the chap in the wheelchair are writing that book. Well, well, what a brave couple to walk into the lions' den. And you're quite right, of course. Frightfully bad form to chat about adultery at a funeral.'

‘Mavis  . . .' Cath tried to help, but was faced down as Mavis simply handed her the empty glass that Matthew had not rushed to refill.

‘Kindly look after this, my dear. I want a few words with Sherlock and Watson here.'

Pamela was trembling with what seemed genuine shock as Mavis planted herself firmly in their path. ‘You just come to see me, ducky,' she crooned to Pamela. ‘I'll tell you all about your daddy.'

‘More lies?' Matthew shouted at her.

‘And more truth about darling Joan, of course. Pamela's lovely mummy, who drove my husband to his death.'

After that it was a race between Cath and Georgia as to who would distract Mavis first, and Georgia won. ‘Why don't we get another drink, Mavis?' she suggested, slipping an arm round her. ‘Then you can chat to Cherry.'

Mavis beamed at her. ‘Lovely idea, darling. Do I know you?'

‘You will, Mavis,' Georgia assured her, acquiring an orange juice for her at the bar. Mavis looked at it, turned it upside down, flooding herself and Georgia with juice, then handed the empty glass back with great aplomb. The ploy – if it was – worked, Georgia thought ruefully, as when she'd finished mopping herself down, she saw Mavis chatting to Cherry. They looked as if they were the best of friends – perhaps because Joan had been the bête noire of both ladies.

‘Ring a ring o'roses, all fall down,' Peter mused on the way home. Georgia had offered to drive Mavis home too, and she was now sound asleep on the rear seat, together with a box of Micky's diaries, a treasure trove from the pile that Christine had just shown them. Georgia had made her apologies for not staying longer and explained about Peter and Mavis awaiting her outside. Christine had seemed relieved, in fact, which was hardly surprising. ‘Which of the ladies falls down?' Peter finished. ‘No contest. The one on our back seat.'

A voice from behind startled her. Trust Mavis to wake up at that moment.

‘I shouldn't have done that,' Mavis observed. ‘I can't help pushing it when I see that lot together. But they can't keep me away from a funeral, can they?'

‘Why would anyone want to keep you away?' Peter asked, tongue very obviously firmly in cheek.

‘They're scared of what I'll say.'

‘With reason it seems,' Peter commented. ‘Got any more fireworks like that one?'

‘About time the old trout knew,' Mavis muttered sullenly. ‘Her mum seduced more men than that woman who sat on an island.'

‘Circe?' Georgia asked, amused.

‘Maybe. There's lots more about that crowd waiting to be spat out.'

‘Such as?' Georgia asked lightly.

‘I don't know. That's the trouble,' Mavis wailed unexpectedly. ‘But my David always said don't get mixed up with that lot, Mave. Funny things going on there.'

‘I don't know. That's the trouble,' Mavis wailed unexpectedly. ‘But my David always said don't get mixed up with that lot, Mave. Funny things going on there.'

SEVEN

‘
N
othing heading nowhere,' Peter declared, waving a hand round the office.

Georgia did look and was forced to agree, although Peter seemed remarkably sanguine about it. The office was not shouting a triumphant progress towards success but presenting a dismal picture of loose ends. Copies of photos were posted on the walls and the contents of the box she had brought back from Christine's home were piled on the desk. So far the expected treasure trove from Micky's diaries had not materialized.

The word diary, she thought crossly, implied long entries revealing not only the writer's exact state of mind but every detail of daily life in case it was of interest to someone coming across it in the year 4000. Micky's diaries were not in that class, at least if the volumes she had chosen from the stack Christine showed her were anything to go by. They were for the years 1948 to 1953 but chiefly contained only jotted notes of appointments to come or cryptic comments whose meanings would be clear only to the writer. There was little that expressed the thoughts and emotions of the happy-looking man in the photo stuck on the cork board in the Marsh & Daughter office. Sandy the leader, Micky the acrobat, Tom the stooge.

Even the entry for the sixteenth of August 1952 was disappointing, recording only, ‘The day it happened'. It was nevertheless possible to infer that Micky had been hit hard by the murder, as Ken had implied. He thought Joan was the cat's whiskers, even if others thought of her only as the cat. The ink looked heavier for these words, as though Micky's pent-up emotions had transferred themselves to his pen nib.

For the week that followed there were just a bitter ‘the show must go on' and a plain ‘her funeral'. His wife, Muriel, was often mentioned and also Ken, or as he appeared here, Kennie. The only later entry that displayed personal bias was ‘bloody show a sell-out'. Did that indicate Micky's bitterness that Joan was no longer in it, or that Tom was in prison awaiting trial for her murder?

‘Might be something here.' Peter was holding a few photos. ‘I kept these back. They were in a pocket pasted at the back of the 1952 diary.'

‘What are they?' Georgia asked hopefully, swivelling her chair round from her own desk as Peter spread them out on his. The most interesting showed Joan in the middle of a group. One of her arms was round Sandy, the other round Buck Dillon. There were two others in the photo, neither of whom she could identify with certainty, as their faces were fuzzy. ‘That one –' she pointed to one of the fuzzy-faced men – ‘looks as if he might be David Maclyn; the other is too blurred.'

‘Micky himself? It's captioned “The Crew”, but not in Micky's handwriting. Perhaps Joan was lining up all her lovers? Perhaps Micky drooled once too often over Joan Watson, and his wife objected.'

‘No, it's too tall for Micky, or for Tom,' Georgia countered.

‘Harold?' Peter suggested.

‘Could be. The height would fit, but not the theory about the lovers. No one's suggested Harold was one of Joan's circle.'

‘Anyway, if these were Joan's paramours, why doesn't jealousy come into the picture? Buck seemed happy to be one of several, David probably knew all about Joan's flings and so did Sandy.'

‘Joan was used to getting her own way, using sex as a magnet as well as a charm weapon,' Georgia pointed out. ‘If it amused her to get all her current extramaritals together, no one would say no. But it's a wobbly thesis.'

‘I'll stick it up on the wall. It might remind us that the focus of the case could be Joan, not Tom.'

‘It won't do any good,' she said despondently, swinging back to her own desk. ‘We're taking a suggestion here, an idea there, lurching forward and then falling back. Just like Rick. The real story seems to float further away whenever it seems just within reach.'

There was a silence that made her glance at Peter –
still
looking cheerful. ‘No luck on Mozart?' she asked.

‘Now you mention it,' he replied airily, ‘yes, there is. I was keeping it back to cheer you up. Mind you –' he must have seen her instant reaction ‘– don't pin too much on it.'

‘
What
?'

‘Forget Salzburg and Prague. Think Aix-en-Provence. They have a summer festival in July. There was one in 1994, of course, and it lasted three weeks. Operas are put on in the courtyard of the Archbishop's Palace. And guess what?'

She hardly dared breathe. ‘
The Magic Flute
?'

‘Got it in one. A fabulous performance, especially good because Natalie Dessay was singing the Queen of the Night. Worth Rick and Miss Blondie Pamina travelling all the way from Brittany for?'

‘Yes.' It came out as a croak. ‘There must be a drawback.'

‘Let's hope not. But the drawback could be that the French police sent details about Rick all round France.'

He was right. She remembered Inspector Décourt telling them so. And yet  . . . and yet  . . . Aix was the obvious place they might have gone to.

‘I'll get on to them,' Peter added.

Despite the warning, Georgia's hopes were racing ahead. Surely in this lead Rick had left some kind of fingerprints – just as Tom had?

There seemed an air of holiday in Broadstairs. It was only late June but the town – or perhaps more accurately the tourist face of the town – looked proudly ready for the main season, and the general spirit helped Georgia to feel better about facing the Watson flat again. Gary, when she accosted him in the fish bar, had been mournfully accepting of her quaint wish to revisit the scene of the crime.

‘Put a quid or two in the charity box,' he suggested. ‘Can't guarantee a ghost though, so no money back.'

‘Thanks. I don't need a ghost.' Those fingerprints Tom had left were all too clear without the need for a phantom to come gliding through a wall. She passed the ordeal of the steps up to the Watson flat as quickly as possible, breathing a sigh of relief as she reached the top. Wasn't it odd, it occurred to her, that the fingerprints were at the foot of the steps, not up there inside the flat where the violence had taken place?

The key turned easily in the lock, naturally enough, as Gary had told her he kept stores there. It was clear, however, that the flat hadn't been lived in for some time. Although there were radiators in the rooms, the damp atmosphere and smell indicated they had not been operated regularly. It didn't help her instinctive reaction to the place. No fingerprints perhaps, but a general sense of waste and decay.

The walls were still covered in nineteen fifties wallpaper, and open, tiled fireplaces made it seem as though she had taken a step back in time. The living room was to the left and the kitchen to the right. A staircase went up to the bedrooms and presumably a bathroom. Georgia pictured Brian James running up it that night and finding Pamela peacefully sleeping through the nightmare of what lay below her.

The flat was still carpeted but no longer furnished. Boxes of cafe supplies were piled high in the living room, although to one side of the room was an old and very dusty sofa, which looked as if it might have been here in the Watsons' time. It must have been here that Joan's body had been found, and Tom had perhaps been sitting on that very sofa when the police arrived. It was easy, now that she was in the actual room, to conjure up the scene. Saying nothing, doing nothing, he was just looking at the corpse, all passion spent. Georgia shivered. Those three words were from Milton's
Samson Agonistes
. Joan had been a Delilah, but Tom was no Samson. Not physically anyway, although perhaps mentally he had been driven beyond his normal limits to kill the woman he loved. No, she corrected herself, it was Cherry he loved. That meant Joan could have been standing in his way. Even in those days, however, one could divorce wives for adultery, so why turn to murder? Georgia swallowed. Whichever way one looked at it, Tom Watson still retained his secrets.

How about Pamela Trent? she wondered as she went upstairs. Was she the key to the situation that had led to murder? Perhaps Tom only found out that night that she was David's child, not his? He had almost certainly been present at the row between Mavis and Joan that night, and yet if Tom had killed Joan for that reason, there would have been no unfinished business or injustice, as the fingerprints on time still suggested, when she had walked up the outside steps. Or, it occurred to her, were they Joan's fingerprints, not Tom's? Whatever Ken might have said, it was Joan who had been the major victim.

Slowly Georgia went back downstairs, aware that she now had to run the gauntlet of those fingerprints again. She forced herself to open the front door, lock it behind her and then face the steps again. The fingerprints met her in full force as she walked down to the yard. Worse, there was someone lounging against the back gate, who in that scaring instant seemed to reinforce the threat that the fingerprints were making. She had seen him before. It was Greg Dale.

‘Hello,' she made herself call out as normally as possible. ‘We've met, haven't we?' She tried to conquer the shakiness in her voice as he detached himself from the support of the gate and stood astride at the foot of the steps, hands in his pockets.

‘Yes,' he answered in a polite voice that did not fit his stance. ‘I believe we did.'

She forced herself into a normality she didn't feel. What was he doing here? Watching her?
Following
her? ‘Here for some fish and chips, are you?' she asked nonsensically.

‘Not really.' He was grinning now, as if he felt he had the upper hand. ‘Did you happen to find anything up there?' To pass him she would have to push past him. Was he really a threat, or was this just the fingerprints having their effect on her?

‘Only a couple of ghosts,' she replied lightly.

He stared at her, the grin vanished. ‘Nothing else?'

‘What would you expect?'

‘What did you go for?' he countered lazily. ‘The Trents don't like anyone poking around up there.'

‘The flat belongs to the fish bar, not the Trents.'

‘They still don't like people nosing around. Just thought I'd mention it.'

‘Nothing moves on in this world if no one is prepared to nose around.'