Murder Takes the Stage (19 page)

As Margaret brought coffee in, Georgia was still hard at it. ‘There's a nice bunch together,' Margaret casually commented.

Surprised, Georgia sat back and looked with some surprise to where Margaret's finger was pointing; she had been too close to it to notice how they were accumulating. On the London map there were four reds in the Edgware Road area and three in Soho. ‘Thanks,' she said gratefully.

‘I know that bit of the world,' Margaret told her. ‘Dave had an auntie and uncle up the Edgware Road somewhere. We used to see them once a year or so and do a show in town.'

‘When would that have been?'

She pondered. ‘Late seventies maybe? We hadn't been married long. They were just beginning to smarten up the area.'

‘It's more likely Tom Watson lived there than in Soho then,' Peter said.

‘I'd have thought so,' Margaret replied. ‘A good place to disappear. Mind you, so was Soho. You could bury yourself for good there and no one would notice.'

‘Now that,' Peter commented, ‘is what I call a good omen.
Two
good places to disappear, if Tom wanted to be anonymous. Let's try Edgware Road first.'

With coffee and renewed hope, Georgia tackled the job again and prepared to face ordeal by telephone. More decisions to be made. ‘We don't know that the red sightings are necessarily correct,' she pointed out. ‘Witnesses are going to know where
they
are but could be less sure about where they think they saw Tom.'

‘Unwillingly accepted,' Peter groused. ‘Those living in, say, the Soho area may have sighted Tom in the Edgware Road area.'

‘Sometimes,' Georgia said viciously, ‘I wish life would just be straightforward.'

‘Nonsense. Think how dull that would be.'

‘Think how much easier,' she retaliated, picking up the receiver. One was a mobile number – no reply, no voicemail. One was a landline with no reply, but the third struck gold. A nervous-sounding man by the name of Ron Eastley thought the photo on the website looked rather like his parents' long-term lodger. He couldn't be sure but it did look very like him. And yes, Ron Eastley still lived near the Edgware Road.

The area between Edgware Road and Lisson Grove was a new one to Georgia, although she knew London reasonably well. That was the nice thing about London; you turned a corner and there was a surprise: something new, something old, but seldom anything to make you blue. Massive roads ran overhead, vast new office blocks adorned the road that had once led to Tyburn gallows in one direction and the open countryside in the other. Off the main streets, it was still surprisingly quiet, however. Beech Road, where Ron Eastley lived, had individual houses rather than large blocks of flats. It had clearly come up in the world since Tom Watson's day, so the fact that Ron lived in the family home suggested he might still be a bachelor. Number thirty-six must have been worth a fortune now, but to Georgia it had the forlorn air of being a bastion to the past in the midst of a new generation. It wasn't neglected, but its steps and windows indicated that nothing had much changed for fifty years, whereas neighbouring houses sported porches, bay windows, a little balcony or two and a general air of going places. Nevertheless, number thirty-six looked comfortable in its skin, as the French say, and the kind of house she liked.

The man who opened the door was about sixty, she guessed, a gentle giant in a pullover and casual shirt and with an anxious expression. ‘Are you Miss Marsh? Come in.'

He led the way along a hallway to a room at the rear of the house overlooking the small garden – which was perfectly kept. ‘You're a gardener, I see,' she said. Always a good opener, for her as much as for the person she was visiting.

Ron looked pleased at this icebreaker. ‘It keeps me occupied. I'll be retiring one of these days. Got to have something nice to look at.' He explained that he worked at a local electrical shop.

He went into the kitchen to get the ritual coffee, which tasted amazingly good, together with some apparently home-made biscuits. ‘A cook too, I see,' Georgia murmured, although her eye was already on the pile of photograph albums lying on the table.

‘Have to keep body and soul together.' He grinned as he saw what she was looking at. ‘I've dug these out. There are quite a few that might interest you.'

‘Your family took all these, although he was just the lodger?' She purposely kept the ‘he' anonymous, waiting for him to take the lead.

‘Part of the family,' Ron said promptly. ‘Those were different days. I was only a kid when he first came. Coronation year, Mum always remembered it by. I was five then.'

‘The man we're looking for is called Tom.'

‘No. Bert. He was Bert Holmes.'

Georgia's heart sank. True, Tom could have changed his name – in fact, she cheered up, he probably did. In fact, Holmes – Watson? Coincidence? Maybe not, and she brought out her own photos of Tom in that period. ‘Let's lay them side by side,' she suggested.

She spread hers out on the table, and Ron opened the albums in which the photos had been carefully pasted in by loving hands.

‘That's Mum there – that's Dad – ' The black and white photo showed two men and a woman with their arms round each other on an open heathland – Hampstead, Georgia wondered, or Regent's Park? The wide skirt and the trilby hats spoke clearly of the fifties. ‘And that's Uncle Bert.' Ron pointed to the second man.

‘Uncle?'

‘That's what we did then,' Ron explained to her relief. ‘Couldn't call him Mr Holmes, too formal when you had your breakfast with him every day and he took you to school or to the playground, but then you couldn't call him Bert either. Disrespectful. So it was always Uncle.'

‘He really was considered part of the family then.' She studied the photos of Bert side by side with those of Tom, looking at the hands, the eyes, the angle of the head as he faced the camera, the slope of the shoulders if he was in side or back view. They were of the same man. This couldn't only be her eagerness to get a match.

‘Oh, yes, he was a proper entertainer, was Uncle Bert. Always doing tricks. I thought he was the cat's whiskers. Few conjuring tricks, lots of jokes. Said he'd been a clown for a short time, like at the circus.'

So that was surely proof. Although – Georgia had a sudden doubt. Could Ron have looked up Tom Watson's career? To her relief, she remembered that Marsh & Daughter hadn't used Tom's name on their website. ‘Did he still do stage work professionally?'

‘No. Surprising, really, because he was good. He did odd jobs, though Mum told me he settled down to a job as a washer-up at some club in Soho later on. I had my own life when I started working, so I didn't take too much notice.'

Soho? That was the site of the second cluster of reds on the location map. She thanked her lucky stars that she'd brought all the Soho details with her. It was time to plunge in the deep end, she decided. ‘Does the name Tom Watson mean anything to you?'

‘Don't think so. Should it?'

‘He went on trial for the murder of his wife in 1953 but was acquitted.'

‘And you think he's my Uncle Bert?' He couldn't be faking that look of astonishment.

‘Tom Watson was a clown. He had regular season slots in shows on the south coast.'

‘He talked about the war – he'd been in the army, he said, but never on the stage.'

‘Your parents never mentioned it?'

‘Not that I can remember, but they might have known and never thought to mention it. Mind you, they wouldn't want me going out with a murderer,' he added doubtfully.

‘Acquitted,' Georgia said firmly. Amazing how the word ‘murderer' was so emotive that it cancelled out all else.

‘There weren't so many murders then, and it would have been in the press. They never said anything, and Bert lived a quiet life here.'

‘When did he leave?'

‘He was here a good long time, a good twenty years.'

‘He left in the 1970s?' Was this coincidence? Not too fast, Georgia warned herself. Take it step by step.

He took his time thinking about this as she looked at more of the neatly captioned photographs, mentally thanking Ron's parents. How would researchers in the future fare now that photo albums were so often stored inside computers?

‘Yes,' Bert said at last. ‘I reckon I was in my mid twenties when he left. I was busy at work and so on, but I still lived here, and Bert and I were sort of mates.'

‘Sort of?'

‘Well, he was a lot older than me,' Ron said apologetically. ‘I thought of him as Mum's and Dad's friend by that time. Mind you, we went to a lot of opera together.'

Georgia must have looked as amazed as she felt, because he took her up on it, grinning. ‘We both liked it. It's so expensive today that it's more for the nobs and idle rich, but back in those days the galleries were stuffed full of East Enders and regular folk like me. Bert took me to my first one – must have been in the mid sixties, when London was supposed to be swinging. Didn't swing much round here though; life went on as normal. It was Leoncavallo's
Pagliacci
we saw. That makes sense, now you tell me Bert was a clown himself. I thought opera a bit daft first off; but it began to get hold of me, and we went to quite a few.'

Georgia had to get a grip on herself.
Pagliacci
– the story of a man who comes home and kills his wife because he fears she's unfaithful. ‘
Vesti la Giubba
' – ‘Put on the Costume' – was the famous aria; once the costume was on, no one thought of the man who wore it, that he had emotions and tragedies in his life like anyone else. But why should this suddenly seem so significant to her? Because, she acknowledged, it brought Tom to life for her so vividly, as a man who had lived and worked here, who had interests outside work and a home that he could return to. She almost knew what Ron Eastley was going to say next. And he did.

‘But Bert liked Mozart best though.
The Magic Flute
was his favourite.'

Forget Rick, this is Tom, Georgia tried to tell herself, but the two were merging even more strongly into one. Still no word from the French police about Aix-en-Provence.

‘He liked operas in English so he could understand,' Ron continued, ‘so we went to Sadler's Wells pretty often and then to the Coliseum when the Wells opera moved there. Sometimes we even went to Covent Garden. That was really something. Bert said he liked Papageno best of all.'

Of course, he would, Georgia thought jubilantly. It all fitted. Papageno the mirth maker, the clown. A step forward on Tom seemed to bring hope for the same progress on Rick.

‘I used to tease Bert by asking him if he didn't ever want a Papagena for himself.' Ron looked taken aback. ‘Pretty tactless of me, if you say he was accused of murdering his wife.'

‘You weren't to know.'

‘He used to joke I should find one for myself first, and if there were any left over, he might consider it. I never did find one, of course, but we can't have everything. You married?'

‘Newly wed,' Georgia told him. ‘At Easter.'

‘I thought about it. Still do  . . . but somehow –' his eye roved round the room ‘– this place is a bit like marriage. Know what I mean?'

‘It's home and memories. And they're part of marriage.'

He looked pleased. ‘I've got a lodger up above too. She's company. We go on holiday together sometimes, or I go with my mates, so I've got things sorted.'

She thought he had, and so, perhaps, had Tom, when he lived here. ‘Was Bert happy, do you think?'

He considered this. ‘You never ask yourself things like that at the time, do you? I never wonder if my upstairs' lodger's happy. We just potter on. Answering your question, I reckon Bert was. He looked comfortable just pottering on.'

There was a major question still burning in her mind. ‘So why do you think Bert left?'

‘I never knew. I asked Mum and Dad, and they were mystified too. Bert said he'd just seen an old friend and was going on a short trip; he packed a small bag, and off he went. I've been thinking it through. This would have been about 1974 or 1975.'

‘Did he say where he'd been when he returned?'

‘He didn't come back – that was the thing. They had a postcard saying he wouldn't be coming back, thank you very much, and someone would be coming for the rest of his things.'

Georgia went very cold. ‘And did someone call?'

‘Yes, his brother came round to collect his stuff. Not that there was much of it.'

His brother? In all their enquiries, nothing had turned up any information about a brother.

‘And the postcard was definitely from Bert? Did your parents hear from him after that?'
Please, please let the answer be yes.

‘I think there was a Christmas card for a year or two, no address. Mum and Dad never said anything about the postcard, so I wouldn't know. They were pretty upset.'

‘They didn't think it strange?'

‘They assumed he'd gone back to his old life and that was that. Course they had no idea he was a—' He caught her eye. ‘About the murder and all that.'

Georgia took herself to lunch at a local fish and chip shop, which seemed fitting. She wondered if it had been open in the nineteen fifties and tried to picture Tom eating here. Perhaps the connection to Broadstairs would have been too much for him. She tried to make sense of her thoughts. She had no doubt that Bert Holmes had been Tom Watson, but where did that leave Marsh & Daughter? It suggested that Pamela's story was true for a start, but where had Tom gone after that? And what about this brother? He must have known where Tom was. One thing was for sure. She felt more confident about asking Luke for a contract.

She decided a phone call to Peter was in order. Would it be worth checking the Soho connection while she was here? One of the three red-flag contacts had claimed she worked with Tom. On the other hand, Georgia had had an uneasy feeling on leaving Ron's house that she was being watched. Was it Ron peering through the window, Greg Dale even more dedicated to her trail than she had feared or was it just a prickling feeling in her spine that there were uncharted waters ahead? She reassured herself that it could be due to the memory of a former case where she had indeed been stalked on a London visit and that today she was merely imagining a silent watcher. It was ghosts from the past who were following her, not flesh and blood from today.