When The Devil Drives (15 page)

Her head spun to think of how much money had been spent on this affair, but that was pocket change compared to how much it was likely to bring in. This was the first touring run for the show that had reportedly proven to be Hamish Queen’s most profitable West End production to date. However, despite five years of runaway box-office results, this was one production that he would not be transferring to Broadway. It was a strictly British phenomenon: a stage musical based on the eighties schooldays drama series
Grange Hill
.

Satisfied with whatever he’d said to the guy in the overalls, Hamish Queen strode across the stage to where Jasmine was waiting, slaloming scenery and stage-hands with practised grace.

He greeted her with a grin and a handshake.

‘Hello. You must be Yasmin.’

‘Jasmine,’ Melanie corrected, before Jasmine could.

‘Sorry. Jasmine. Shall we go somewhere a little quieter? Maybe grab a coffee?’

‘That would be great.’

For a guy named Hamish, his accent was as Scottish as cricket and warm beer, but his sense of nationality had evidently always been very pronounced.

He led her through a side door out of the stalls and up a back stair, from which they emerged into the dress circle. They made their way to the bar, which was deserted, but even as Hamish pulled a seat out for her a member of the theatre staff entered briskly and ducked beneath the bar-top. Jasmine didn’t know if Melanie had facilitated this or whether the Playhouse staff were simply on standby for such courtesies, but either way it communicated that this was a man used to things quietly being arranged for his convenience. She was almost embarrassed now to consider the absurdity of believing she could make a lasting impression that might one day serve her well if she was ever to audition. Once this meeting was over he was as likely to remember her as he was the bloke who had sped in to serve them cappuccinos.

‘Charlotte told me you were at the Academy together.’

‘That’s right. She was a couple of years ahead of me. A couple of light-years, actually.’

Hamish liked this. A man of his success was probably inured to flattery, but Jasmine doubted he’d ever tire of hearing his daughter being praised.

‘Forgive me, I’ve been travelling and the old memory is still on New York time. Charlotte said something about you researching the early days of Glass Shoe. Is that right?’

‘That’s right,’ she confirmed. Jasmine had phrased it very precisely too, saying she wanted to ask about ‘Glass Shoe’: not Glass Shoe Productions or the Glass Shoe Company. The ambiguity was intended to protect her by Hamish being the one who misinterpreted rather than her being the one who misled. She was aware that the Glass Shoe Company must have been a failure: that somewhere back in the day Hamish Queen’s attempt to create a stridently artistic and
distinctly Scottish repertory company, his dreams of being an actor-director and his aesthetic idealism had all crashed and burned. Glass Shoe Productions had risen in its place, but Jasmine was aware that rich, powerful and successful people preferred to talk about the phoenix rather than the flames.

Hamish demonstrated that he was no exception by quickly turning the subject of the early days into a conduit for discussing his present concerns.

‘I’m going to need the caffeine then, if I’m rifling through the dustier reaches of the memory vaults,’ he said, having a sip of cappuccino. Then it was back to the future. ‘It’s certainly been quite a journey, though I do have to ask myself whether I’ve come all that far when I’m putting on a musical based on an eighties TV show. It’s taken me aback, though, truly. I was always very wary about whether I could make it fly. When I first came up with it, I remember thinking to myself that it was either the best idea I’d ever had or by far the worst, and I don’t think I’d made my mind up until I saw the first month’s receipts.’

He was being modest, in the way one can afford to be when discussing the origins of an enterprise that delivered vindication in such bounteous measure. The
Grange Hill
musical was typical of his alchemical touch. As Dot Prowis had said, he had the vision and sometimes outright audacity to gather elements that didn’t make sense until he’d put them together, then in retrospect they seemed so obvious that every other producer was asking themselves why they never thought of it first.

Other commentators Jasmine had read suggested he had signed a deal with the devil whereby all his naff ideas somehow turned to hits. The implied price, of course, was his artistic soul.

Making a musical out of
Grange Hill
was a perfect example of an apparently base idea rendered gold, but to appreciate Hamish Queen’s true acumen you had to look at how he’d packaged it, paying particularly close attention to the soundtrack albums. Plural. Instead of cherrypicking all the best-known (and thus over-familiar) hits of the eighties, he had bucked the West End singalong trend in pursuit of evoking what he called ‘genuine nostalgia’.

‘You don’t feel nostalgic when you hear the big hits of the eighties,’ he explained to Jasmine, relaxing into his subject, ‘because you’ve been hearing them throughout every decade since. You feel genuine nostalgia when you hear something you
haven’t
heard since then, something in the background that you weren’t aware you were noticing at the time.’

To this end, he had scoured old playlists to find songs that had been in high rotation on radio stations during the eighties, but which had not been hits: songs such as ‘See That Glow’ by This Island Earth, ‘Day and Night’ by Balaam and the Angel, ‘Swallow Glass’ by The Flaming Mussolinis and ‘Glasshouse’ by The Promise. Not only did this give him the ‘overheard’ nostalgia effect he was looking for, but he picked up the track licensing rights for next to (and in some cases precisely) nothing. Then the true sprinkling of fairy dust came in casting a host of beautiful young teens, each already known to the public by being TV talent show runners-up, and getting them to record modern versions of the songs.

The result was a stage musical that was a massive hit across two generations, each purchasing its own preferred flavour of the official soundtrack. Those raised on
The X-Factor
bought the ‘original stage cast’ album, while their parents snapped up a compilation of revived subconscious memories, few of which had previously been available on CD, never mind iTunes.

Jasmine’s mum had bought it. Jasmine thought it was ghastly, strong evidence for why these songs had merely lurked in the background, with two notable exceptions: ‘Send My Heart’ by The Adventures and a track called ‘Stranger on Home Ground’.

‘But there I go, babbling about today’s show when you’re here to talk about the past. I have to apologise. I have this “auto-promote” reflex and go into publicity mode whenever I start talking to a journalist. Is it the
Stage
you’re with? I can’t remember if Charlotte said. I’m sure she told me, but it was a few days ago and I’m a bit jet-lagged.’

‘I’m not a journalist, Mr Queen,’ she decided to make clear. ‘I’m a private investigator.’

She surprised herself by how easy that was to say. It helped that
she had briefly contemplated a worse alternative, that of allowing Hamish to persist in his misapprehension.

His eyes narrowed for a second, then his face lit up in recollection.

‘No, of course. I warned you the memory wasn’t firing on all cylinders this morning. Charlotte told me all about you, I’m sure. You’re the girl who was involved in that business over the Ramsay disappearances.’

‘That’s me,’ she said, trying to sound professional and conceal the buzz it gave her that he knew about this stuff.

‘I remember it from at the time. Spooky business. And yet you got to the bottom of it all these years later. I suppose I should be worrying about what skeletons you might shake out of my closet, especially if you’re talking about the early days.
Metropolis
at the Dominion,
Treasure Island
at the Aldwych: there were some corpses strewn around those, let me tell you.’

He said all this with a little chuckle, benignly patronising. As Dorothy had so frankly confessed, people generally didn’t know what to say when you told them you were a PI, but in Hamish’s case nor had he given any thought to the ramifications, otherwise he might not be sounding so glib.

‘I’m actually looking to dig a little further back than that. It’s to do with an actress named Tessa Garrion. I believe she worked with you under the auspices of the Glass Shoe Company, the precursor to Glass Shoe Productions.’

He stopped mid-sip. Those ramifications were impacting now. I’m a private investigator. That means I’m going to be sticking my nose into the very things you least want anyone to. Such as your failed theatre company.

‘Tessa Garrion,’ he said, his eyes widening as he repeated the words. ‘There’s a name I haven’t heard in …’ He did his mental arithmetic. ‘Jesus, is it really thirty years? And the Glass Shoe Company: where did you unearth that little coffin?’

‘Tax records,’ Jasmine told him. ‘The Glass Shoe Company paid her a month’s salary.’

‘And no more, unfortunately. If you’re trying to find Tessa Garrion,
then I’m afraid the history of the Glass Shoe Company is unlikely to constitute a rich seam of information. It was a stillborn venture, over almost as soon as it began. It’s a testament to the fastidiousness of our tax collectors that they own the only record of the company’s existence. Blink and you’d have missed it. We certainly didn’t do anything so eyecatching as stage a play.’

‘But you paid Tessa a month’s salary. What for?’

‘She was paid in advance, as much as anything to convince her that the company was the real deal. She wasn’t a person who needed to take some dodgy deferred-payment gig just to get work.’

‘I’m told she was very talented.’

‘God, yes. A true natural,’ Hamish said, with genuine warmth. ‘When she announced she was leaving the Pantechnicon, I pleaded with her to join my company, even if only for one play. It was like asking a budding superstar to come and play for Elgin City when you knew Manchester United, Barcelona and Bayern Munich were waiting with open chequebooks.’

‘But she said yes.’

‘No, actually, she didn’t. She went to London in search of stages big enough both for her ambitions and her talent.’

‘So how come …’ Jasmine prompted needlessly. They both knew he was going to explain, but she could tell that a few oohs and ahs were expected of her in the role of his audience.

‘She ended up with Glass Shoe? I’m not entirely sure. There were offers in London, certainly. To return to the footballer metaphor, I think it was like the budding young superstar found his head was spinning as he contemplated the career that lay ahead of him, so he opted to play out the remainder of the season with Elgin City, knowing he could hone his game away from the bright lights.’

‘Hadn’t she done that enough at the Pantechnicon?’

‘Those lights were still pretty bright. What we were planning was a tour of small Highland venues: community centres, church halls and the like. A few weeks later she called me up at rather short notice and asked if the offer was still open. I couldn’t believe my luck. Turned out it was the only luck that particular venture enjoyed. We barely made it
in
to rehearsal, let alone out.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Oh, just a mishmash of rookie mistakes, naiveté and a large dollop of hubris. Typified by the fact that our debut production was going to be the Scottish play. Height of arrogance, tempting the fates like that. Glass Shoe derives from the Gaelic for Glasgow; I was determined that we be a Scottish company committed to putting on Scottish plays. Thus it was my bold – older heads might say reckless – declaration of intent to start with
the
Scottish play.’

‘You mean
Macbeth
?’ said Jasmine, committing this small heresy partly for purposes of clarity and partly because she hated both the superstition and the posturing that went along with it.

Hamish gave her a sour look, like some bourgeois auntie who had just heard her swear. Then he sighed regretfully, his head shaking just a little.

‘I used to call it that too,’ he confessed. ‘I thought saying “the Scottish play” was a dreadful affectation, people wearing it like a badge just to show they were fully paid-up luvvies. I’ve learned humility since. It
is
a dreadful affectation, but experience has taught me to tread lightly regarding its source. Let’s just say there won’t be any light-hearted musicals based on it coming soon from Glass Shoe Productions.’

‘So what happened afterwards? Do you know where Tessa went next? When did you last speak to her?’

Hamish picked up his coffee, saw that the cup was all but empty, put it down and frowned.

‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea. I didn’t speak to her afterwards. We all abandoned the project, went our separate ways – in my case to lick my wounds. Sent homeward to think again, though in retrospect I was more the Bruce with his spider than proud Edward. I did try again.’

And back to the phoenix, Jasmine thought.

She caught him glancing to the side and spied Melanie hovering just outside the bar. She was waiting to haul him away on a made-up pretext if she got the nod, and she’d just received it. Jasmine had time for one last question, if she got it in before Melanie reached the table.

‘Who else was in the company?’ she asked, interrupting before he could saddle up to go into auto-promote mode, as he’d described it.

Hamish glanced to the side again, tracking Melanie’s progress. He wanted to be rescued.

‘It’s been such a long time. I really wouldn’t know where to find any of them,’ he said apologetically.

‘That’s my area,’ Jasmine replied. ‘I just need names.’

Melanie made it into range, iPhone in hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ the PA began. She was looking at Jasmine, ostensibly in apology for the interruption, but it could equally have been addressed to Hamish for not reacting sooner. ‘Hamish, you’re needed downstairs. It’s Jocelyn. She says it can’t wait.’

‘Duty calls,’ Hamish said to Jasmine, getting up from his seat.