Tickled to Death and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense (32 page)

The agent told Charles that his client was not currently working, thinking at that stage the inquiry came from a potential employer. But when Charles said it was a personal matter and asked for Dick Lythgoe's address, he got no further information. Though it was annoying, Charles couldn't object to this. He hoped his own agent would show similar discretion in the same circumstances (though he didn't feel total confidence that his would).

However, a few calls to friends in the business soon elicited an address for Dick Lythgoe in Kilburn, which was within walking distance of Charles's bedsitter.

It was a house divided into flats. Blue paint had flaked off the frontage, leaving a mottled effect. There was a tangle of wires and doorbells by the front door, but none of the stained cards offered the name “Lythgoe”. Charles stepped back and looked through the rusted railings to the separate basement entrance. He walked down the worn steps, picking his way over polythene bags of rubbish which had been dumped there.

Dick Lythgoe's surroundings suggested that he could certainly use an inheritance.

The fourth ring at the doorbell brought him to the door. His face looked crumpled, as if he had just woken up. It also showed that Dick Lythgoe's
Spotlight
photograph had been taken some years before. And those years had not been kind to its subject. His hairline had retreated, leaving only a couple of ineffectual tufts on top, and the skin around the eyes had pouched up. Dick Lythgoe was no longer going to impress Casting Directors as a Juvenile Lead.

“What do you want?” he asked truculently.

“I want to talk about Mariana.”

A spasm of anger twisted the face. “Oh God, story of my bloody life! It's all anyone ever wants to talk about. My bloody aunt. I should have changed my name before I went into the bloody theatre!”

“Then why didn't you?” asked Charles.

The lower lip trembled, then decided not to answer. The silence was quite as expressive as words. Dick Lythgoe had clung to his famous name for shrewd business reasons; without it he might have had even less success.

“Anyway, what do you want? Are you another bloody journalist? Because let me tell you before you start, I don't talk about my dear auntie for free. If you want more heart-warming insights into the private life of the First Lady of Yesterday's Theatre, you're going to have to find fifty quid. At least.”

“I'm not a journalist,” said Charles. “I am just a friend of your aunt's.”

Dick Lythgoe looked him up and down with an insolent smile. “Have to admire the old girl's resilience, don't you?”

Charles ignored the innuendo. Like Boy Trubshawe, the actor was making him uncharacteristically angry. “Someone is conducting a campaign of persecution against Mariana and I'm going to find out who it is.”

“Campaign of persecution?”

“Yes. And I have some pretty strong evidence of who's doing it. I think you'd better let me come inside.”

Dick Lythgoe gaped at this sudden assertiveness, but drew aside to admit the older man.

The flat inside was a tip. Dirty plates, glasses and encrusted coffee-cups perched on every available surface. There was a smell of damp from the house, compounded by a human staleness. Charles wanted to throw open every window in the place.

“Sorry about the mess,” Dick Lythgoe mumbled. “My girlfriend walked out a few weeks back.” He slumped on top of a pile of grubby shirts draped over an armchair. “Now what is this?”

“Your aunt has received a series of threatening phone-calls and anonymous letters. An unpleasant practical joke has been played on her. Today she received this tape.”

Charles had the portable recorder set up in readiness and pressed the start button.

Dick Lythgoe sat in silence while the message ran through.

“Now,” demanded Charles as it ended, “do you deny that that is your voice?”

“No,” the actor replied, again with his insolent smile. “I don't deny it.”

Charles poured another slug of Bell's whisky into Mark Lear's glass and, topping up his own, went across to sit on his bed. “And there's no doubt that's where the speech came from?”

“None at all. As Dick said, it was part
of a Saturday Night Theatre
he recorded for me last year. I was about to tell you that when you rang off this morning.”

“Oh, damn. When was the play broadcast?”

“January of this year.”

“So somebody must have got hold of the tape and—”

“They wouldn't need to do that. Just record it off air.”

“Yes. If they did, it implies a degree of long-distance planning.”

“Mm. And, I would have thought, rules Dick out of your suspicions.”

“I suppose so.”

“Come on, he's not going to send a threat like that that's so easily identifiable. It took you less than a day to find out where it came from.”

Charles nodded ruefully. “Mind you, he wasn't to know Mariana had talked to anyone about what was happening. He may have thought that she would keep it to herself, then listen to the tape when it arrived and drop dead of a heart-attack on the spot . . .?”

Mark Lear gave his friend a pitying look. “And then the body is discovered with the tape still in the tape recorder just beside it. No criminal would leave such a huge signpost pointing straight at him, would he?”

“No. So I'm really back to Square One. Trouble with this case is a dearth of suspects.”

“Who else have you got?”

“No one, really. Well, I had one other, but he's ruled out by sheer logistics.”

“Who was he?”

“Boy Trubshawe.”

“Oh, him. Malicious old queen, isn't he?”

“You can say that again. Do you know him well?”

The producer shook his head. “No, met him for the first time this week. Sort of cocktail party at Lucinda's. He'd just come in from a trip to the States, which he was very full of.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Not a single reputation on Broadway was unsullied by the end of the evening.”

“That's my Boy,” said Charles wryly. “When was this?”

“What, Lucinda's party?”

“Uhuh.”

“Monday night.”

“Can't have been.”

“What do you mean?”

“Monday night Boy was still in New York. I know that. I saw him Wednesday and he said he'd come back in the small hours of Tuesday morning.”

Mark Lear shook his head. “Charles, I know I drink too much in the BBC Club, but I can tell the days apart. I have good reason to remember Monday night. After Lucinda's I had dinner with that actress with the purple hair and let me tell you—”

Charles cut short this sexual reminiscence. “Good God! You swear that Boy Trubshawe was here on the Monday?”

“Of course I do. What the hell should I—”

“So he lied to me! And he could easily have—”

The phone rang from the landing. Charles was silent.

“Aren't you going to answer it?”

“No. It'll be for one of the Swedish girls.”

But apparently none of the Swedish girls was in. The phone rang on.

Charles picked up the receiver.

“It's Mariana.”

“What's up? Has something happened?”

“Charles, I'm worried.”

“Why?”

“I thought I could hear some noise from the fire escape. Outside the kitchen.”

“What sort of noise?”

“Well, as if someone . . . I don't know . . . as if someone—”

There was a sudden sound of breaking glass from Mariana's end of the phone. She let out a little whimper. There was a heavy thud.

Then silence.

The caretaker was roused from his basement in the adjacent block and, responding to the urgency of Charles's demands, hurried up the stairs and unlocked the door to Mariana's flat.

She lay by the door between the sitting-room and the kitchen. The phone, receiver off, was on the floor at the full extent of its cable. When she rang Charles, she must have been trying to see what was happening in the kitchen. The glass of the door to the fire escape was shattered.

Mariana herself was moaning softly. As Charles gently raised her body to cradle it, she put her hand to her forehead where a marked swelling showed already.

“She all right?”

Charles looked up into the anxious face of the elderly caretaker. “I think so. Better get a doctor. Do you know who her doctor is?”

The old man shook his head.

Mariana's eyelids opened and the pupils swam into focus. “Charles,” she whispered gratefully.

“Mariana, who is your doctor?”

She spoke slowly, as if drunk. “Oh, he doesn't make house calls. If I'm ill, I have to go there.”

“I think he'll come this time. What's his name?”

She told him. “But it's not necessary. I'm all right.”

Charles told the caretaker to ring the doctor, as he picked Mariana up gently and moved towards the bedroom.

“Shall I ring the police as well, guv?”

Charles looked off into the kitchen. “No, hold fire on that for the moment.”

He stayed with Mariana until the doctor arrived. The latter's complaints about actually having to
visit
a patient
and
to have to do so late in the evening justified the old lady's comment on him. But at least he had arrived and Charles left him with the patient.

The actor went into the kitchen. He looked at the floor by the exit door, then turned the handle. It was not locked.

On the metal grille of the fire escape landing outside lay a brick, surrounded by a few larger pieces of glass.

“Mr Paris.”

The doctor was standing in the doorway from the sitting-room.

“Yes.”

“There's nothing wrong with her. Just a bruise on the forehead. I must say I resent being called out for something so minor.”

“She is an old lady, doctor.”

“If I came out on a call for every old lady who fell over, I would never get home at all.”

“She didn't fall over.”

The doctor shrugged. “That's not really important. The fact is that she has suffered a very minor injury and I have been called away from a dinner party.”

“It's not the minor injury that should worry you, doctor.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Mr Paris?”

“I am talking about the effect a shock like that might have on Miss Lythgoe's heart.”

Charles sat on the side of Mariana's bed. She smiled up at him. She looked weary, but peaceful. The soft bedside light washed years off the perfectly shaped face.

“Has the doctor gone?”

Charles nodded. “He doesn't seem too worried about you. Rest, he says, that's the answer.”

She grinned. “Not a lot else one can do at my age.”

“No.” There was a silence before he continued. “Mariana, you asked me last week to do some detective work for you.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I've done it.”

Her greying eyes sparkled. “You mean you know who it is who's been doing all these things?”

“Yes.” The word came out like a sigh.

“Who? Charles, tell me who.”

“Mariana, I've looked in the kitchen and on the fire escape. There is no glass on the kitchen floor. There is a brick and some broken glass on the fire escape.”

“Yes, well, that's how he must have got in. It means—”

Charles shook his head slowly as he interrupted. “It means that the window was broken from inside the flat, Mariana.”

“Oh.”

“I spoke to the doctor about your health. He was very complimentary about your general condition. Your heart, in particular, he said, would do credit to a woman twenty years your junior.”

“Ah.” She looked up at him. Frail, vulnerable, but still in control, still with a small twinkle of humour.

Charles grinned. “Why, Mariana?”

She spread her hands in a gesture of selfishness. “What I've always suffered from, Charles—innate sense of theatre. And, I suppose, the desire to be the centre of attention.”

“But to go to the lengths you did . . . Even to hit yourself on the forehead . . . I mean, why?”

“Sorry. Got carried away. Always like that on stage—really got into my parts. I never could play any character unless I believed, at least for a few moments, that I
was
that character.”

“Which is what made you a great actress.”

“Thank you.” Once again, by her usual blend of charm and cunning, Mariana had exacted her tribute of compliment.

“And what made you so convincing to me. I believed you were really frightened because, at the moment you told me all that nonsense, you believed it. You really were frightened.”

She nodded with a mixture of shame and impertinence, like a schoolgirl caught smoking.

“Have you done this sort of thing before, Mariana?”

“No. I promise. Really. When I retired ten years ago, I was determined to sink gracefully into anonymity. And I managed it. I was really good about it. I had friends, I spent time with them, and, for the first time in my life, I took a back seat. And, to my surprise, I found I didn't really mind.”

“What changed things?”

She smiled sadly. “My friends died. I was increasingly alone. Yes, I must use the word—increasingly
lonely.
But what really started it was the book. Writing it, thinking about all those performances . . . and then the ‘promotional tour'. I'm afraid once again I was centre stage—and I found I hadn't lost the taste for it.”

“I'm a small audience, Mariana,” said Charles gently.

“I know. I'm sorry it was you who got involved. Unfair. You didn't deserve it. It's just, when Mark said you were a bit of a detective . . . And then I got caught up in the drama of the situation—as I say, got carried away. I'm sorry. You were just the victim of another lonely old lady, craving attention.”