When The Devil Drives (13 page)

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, sounding like he would if he could, and scrutinising her in a way that suggested he knew her face but couldn’t quite place her.

‘My name is Jasmine Sharp,’ she replied, handing him a business card. She still found it easier to do that than to actually say ‘I’m a private investigator’, because it still didn’t sound right coming out of her mouth, and the card at least looked in some way official.

He looked at it with surprise, but at least it was a surprise that indicated this was a more interesting visit than he was expecting, rather than surprise at the mismatch between what was stated on the card and the person who had handed it to him.

‘Robert Newsome, assistant manager,’ he said.

‘I was wondering if you would be able to give me a number or an address where I could reach Dorothy Prowis.’

His eyes widened and a smile began to form. He seemed both relieved and amused, like a problem had presented itself and then instantly been resolved.

‘I can do better than that. She’s through there, up on the stage, but she’s got a group of students with her. I’m sure she’ll be able to spare a moment when she’s finished. I take it she’s not in any kind of trouble?’ he added as an afterthought, his expression indicating how unlikely he considered this.

‘Dot?’ Jasmine responded. Her incredulous tone was intended to communicate not only that her answer was in the negative, but that she knew more than he might assume about the subject of her inquiry.

She made her way into the stalls, where she could hear the familiar sound of Dot Prowis’s voice, but the woman herself was obscured by a raggle-taggle gathering of drama students standing on the apron. Even more than the foyer, the stalls and the circle looked so much smaller when there was no one sitting in them. She remembered being taken here by her mum’s friend Judith to see a production of
Peter Pan
, and from her position near the back downstairs it had seemed every bit as big and grand as the King’s in Edinburgh, or the Lyceum or the Festival Theatre. Standing behind the last row now, it seemed so neat and compact, such a short distance to the stage. And as she knew, the view from the stage looking out at an empty house made it seem smaller still.

She had stood on that same apron, listening to the same talk, just a few years previously. Dot Prowis was retired from theatre now, but she still taught SATD students about theatrical design, and when possible preferred to do so not in a lecture hall or rehearsal studio but on the very stage where she had done most of her work. Dot had been Francis Winter’s protégée, assisting him since the early seventies and eventually taking over from him in 1986 as the Pantechnicon’s designer, a post she held until her own retirement in 2005. Jasmine knew that she would have worked with Tessa Garrion and, given Dot’s memory for detail, was hoping that thirty years wasn’t too long a stretch for her recall.

The Winter brothers were born in Durham, where their father owned and managed a theatre, so they had grown up helping with everything from repairing ripped seats to painting scenery. They renovated the Pantechnicon – largely with their own hands – and rapidly built up a successful repertory theatre established upon aesthetic principles that Dot still evangelised. Frustrated by what Peter Winter described as ‘the tyrannous geometry’ of the proscenium arch, Francis frequently designed sets that brought the action into the auditorium, appropriating the boxes and constructing catwalks, all at the nightly expense of seats that could not therefore be sold.

Dot had taken this concept of ‘exploding the space’ to its apotheosis in 1988 with her design for
Ubu Roi
. She built two gangways from the stage to either side of the dress circle, allowing the actors to run in a great Escher-esque loop during the play’s chase and battle scenes. She strung a flying-fox zip line from the highest of the stage’s many platforms all the way down the aisle to the back of the stalls, and she had a trampoline in the orchestra pit. Jasmine had studied this production in depth, staring longingly at photographs and wishing she’d been around to see it. Even now she felt a pang of
regret amid the fascination as Dot talked the students through how it was done.

‘Of course, health and safety would never allow it nowadays, but it was magnificent. The audiences adored it … almost as much as the cast.’

Jasmine let go a little sigh even as the students laughed. That was when she knew the pang wasn’t about never having had the chance to see the Pantechnicon’s famous
Ubu
. It was about the chance she still did have, the last time she was standing in this room listening to the same lecture, the first week of June only a short few years ago. The students were next year’s intake, participating in the annual induction course designed to prime their summer reading before they started in earnest in the autumn.

Dorothy spoke for a few more minutes, still obscured by her audience, then she finally came into view as the students dispersed. Jasmine remembered the drill: the students would now be encouraged to physically explore the set, to do what the audience could not. She could hear Dorothy tell them not to just wander around like it was sculpture, but to ‘truly inhabit it, treat it like one of those …
soft-play
facilities for children’.

In that respect it was a good set to have the run of, particularly considering it was the end of the theatre’s spring programme. The final play in each season tended to be the most minimalist in terms of production values due to the budget having largely been spent by that time, but the present designer, Keith Farrel, had made inventive use of stock equipment and made a cheap set look expensive. The stage was fitted with a panoply of scaffolds and platforms, bedecked in sweeping red and blue drapes, flags and banners. It looked both lush and kinetic, faintly reminding Jasmine of the cover of the last Biffy Clyro album.

The play was
Iphigénie
by Racine, a quintessential example of seventeenth-century French neoclassicism. Directors of a naturalist bent were drawn to the psychological realism of Racine’s characters, often opting for modern dress or seventeenth-century costume to emphasise a timelessness to the characters. This being the Pantechnicon, however, and the director being Peter Winter’s son Daniel, they were
most definitely back in ancient Greece, the banners and flags indicating a war footing in preparation for the assault on Troy.

Jasmine made her way up on to the stage at the right-hand side of the apron by means of the short black steps that were all but invisible from just a few rows back in the stalls. As she climbed, a male student went flying past her, leaping from the stage with Dorothy’s encouragement.

‘That’s it,’ she was saying. ‘Explode the space.’

Dorothy was facing stage left, her back to Jasmine. She was dressed in a black trouser suit, her silver hair swept back on to her collar.

‘Ms Prowis?’ Jasmine asked, prompting Dorothy to turn delicately on her heel.

Jasmine couldn’t help but smile as she took in her gold earrings and red silk scarf. Black, red and gold. They were the Pantechnicon’s unofficial colours, emphasised in all of Francis Winter’s early sets. Dorothy wore them like a priest or disciple. They spoke of spectacle, opulence, grandeur and just a hint of the bawdy.

Dorothy stared at her for a moment, as though trying to piece together why she didn’t quite fit the picture. Then a curious little smile told Jasmine she’d worked it out.

‘Goodness gracious. Jasmine Sharp. Goodness gracious.’

Dorothy’s tone was always as precise as it was polite, almost accentless but with just a whisper of Welsh if you knew what to listen for. Jasmine reckoned you could write down much of what Dorothy said and insert it seamlessly into a play from just about any period since the eighteenth century. Conspicuously modern coinages, when she had no choice but to use them, seemed almost quarantined within her sentences, like she didn’t quite trust them or didn’t know what to do with them; hence her hesitation over the term soft-play.

‘How are you? I was most sorry to hear about your mother.’

Jasmine never knew how to respond to such sentiments – should you say thank you? – so she simply nodded.

‘I saw her act, you know, back at the Tron. More than once, I’m sure, but I particularly remember her from a John Byrne play, the second of the
Slab Boys
trilogy, the name of which I can never recall. She had just the right quality of what the locals refer to as “gallusness”. I’m sorry
I never said as much to you before, but I was unaware that you were her daughter until quite recently.’

‘That’s okay,’ Jasmine managed, reeling somewhat from the clarity of this reminiscence. She was aware of secreting it away in her mind, a precious and most unexpected treasure to be unwrapped and appreciated later. She’d love to press Dorothy on what else she might tell her about Mum back in the eighties, but they both had business to attend.

‘I heard you had to drop out. What are you doing with yourself nowadays?’

Jasmine knew that on this occasion she couldn’t just whip out a card, so she took a breath and gathered herself before answering.

‘I’m working as a private investigator.’

Working as. That was the qualification that helped her say it without sounding foolish. It was like a disclaimer that stated she wasn’t laying claim to anything. You didn’t say you were ‘working as’ something you had trained for years to do, like a doctor or an archaeologist.

Dorothy blinked and said nothing for just a little longer than was normal during small talk.

‘I quite don’t know what to say to that,’ she eventually replied.

‘That’s okay,’ said Jasmine with an apologetic laugh, as though she was responsible for Dorothy’s discomfiture.

‘No, sincerely. I’m seldom astonished by the answer when I make that inquiry of former students. I would ordinarily be able to respond with “well done” or “how interesting” or a usefully noncommittal “oh, yes?” but you’ve left me with no frame of reference whatsoever. Goodness gracious. And are you here … on business?’

‘I am indeed. I was hoping you might be able to offer some insight into a case I’m working on. Do you have a few minutes?’

‘Certainly, certainly.’

Dorothy stepped off into the wings, while the students continued to wander, climb, jump and occasionally tumble from the platforms. The Pantechnicon’s stage had a surprisingly steep rake, so that moving downstage was also moving downhill, and this was going to do for someone’s ankle if they didn’t learn quickly.

‘I’m looking for information about an actress who worked here back in the early eighties. Her name was Tessa Garrion.’

Dorothy looked down at the floor for a moment, searching her thoughts, then stared back at Jasmine with genuine surprise.

‘Tessa Garrion? My goodness, isn’t that extraordinary? I’d quite forgotten that name.’

‘Well, it has been a very long time.’

‘No, you misunderstand. I have total recall when it comes to actors, and she’s no different. I can see her right there, beneath the fly gallery, as Katherina to Morgan Spark’s Petruchio in
The Taming of the Shrew
. But it just struck me that I hadn’t heard her name in all this time. Theatre can be a small world, but people move on and you don’t hear what happened to them unless they become terribly famous, or perhaps you’re talking to someone and they happen to mention working with a person you used to know. Tessa Garrion. One moment she’s standing on that stage. Boom. Thirty years pass and you’re the first person to say her name.’

‘What do you remember of her?’

‘I remember thinking we had unearthed a gem. Quite simply, the woman could act. I know that sounds rather trite, but it was as true then as it is now that a young girl with a pretty face can have a lot of stage presence, often concealing a lack of true talent. The same goes for beautiful young men. Tessa was not classically good looking. She was far from
un
attractive, but it wasn’t her face that drew so much notice. She had real craft. As a result, she was incomparably adept at playing women older than herself.’

Dorothy smiled wryly at a memory, casting her eyes to the apron as though Tessa Garrion was standing there.

‘She was Lysistrata. Quite brilliant. She could convey the sense of a young woman wise beyond her years, and she could truly convince as an older woman; which is not to say she couldn’t play a giddy young thing when required. But you have to understand that the wisdom and maturity were all in the performance. In person, there was probably more of the giddy young thing about her than the wise old head on young shoulders; though perhaps my impression was skewed by the maturity of her work, which tended to make one
forget she was only in her early twenties. I don’t wish to imply that she was particularly giddy or impulsive; just that one noticed it more in contrast to her professional conduct.’

‘And what about her personal life?’ Jasmine asked. ‘Do you remember anything about that? Did she have anyone significant in her orbit at that time?’

‘I’m afraid I have less of a facility for recalling such details, unless they impacted professionally. She didn’t want for male attention, I remember that much, and she enjoyed it. Not in any kind of coquettish manner; she enjoyed male company. She held her own around men. She was the kind of young woman that men wished to impress, and by that I mean that first and foremost they wanted her to respect them, as opposed to merely wishing to possess her. What is your interest, incidentally?’

‘I’m trying to locate her for a relative. They lost touch some time ago and I’m having difficulty tracking her down. In fact, the last time they spoke, Tessa was still working here, so I’m trying to work out what she did after that.’

‘I regret to say I won’t be able to assist. I haven’t heard from her or indeed of her since she left us after the spring season in 1981.
The Merchant of Venice
,’ she added with a troubled frown. ‘She was Jessica. It wasn’t the best use of her talents. Not a very memorable production, in fact. End of the season. We were potless, so we engaged the standard tactic: put on some Shakespeare and hope the audience interprets a Spartan set as minimalist
mise-en-scène
rather than an indication that there wasn’t enough left in the budget to buy a tin of paint.’