Death and the Chaste Apprentice (15 page)

Charlie coughed. “What the class newspapers call ‘sexual favors,' sir?”

“Well, maybe,” said Dundy. “I haven't had a very strong sexual whiff from this case yet. More a matter of sheer black bile, as far as Capper is concerned. But we'll have to talk to people and find out if that was one of his interests. I presume there are some reasonably attractive women around connected with the play in one way or another. His wife would be the last to know—or, on the other hand, she could be leading us on in a big way, don't forget. Still, I would like something just a little more definite than sexual favors.”

“There's nothing written down, is there, sir?” asked Nettles. “No kind of record of the little things he found out?”

“That's what I've been wondering. Nothing's been handed over by the technical experts, and we haven't come across anything today. I wonder if he was the sort to write things down. What impression do you get?”

The other two frowned, then shook their heads.

“No impression, sir,” said Charlie regretfully. “Could have been a real little Samuel Pepys. Could have kept it all in his head.”

“The sheer
amount
he seems to have accumulated might be a hopeful sign,” said Nettles.

“Yes, and at least that generation's more likely to write things down than a younger one,” said Dundy hopefully. “Youngsters these days need a keyboard connected to a screen if they want to remember anything. I suppose the first thing is to organize a search of all the obvious places—desks, drawers, sideboards, and so on. You take the big bedroom, Peace, you take the small one and the manager's office downstairs, Nettles, and I'll take this room and the kitchen. If we get no results, we'll start thinking of hiding places.”

And so they got down to it. But of results in the obvious sense, there were none.

There were just a few things that they thought it worthwhile to collect up and mull over afterward. Des had apparently eaten All-Bran for breakfast and taken Ex-Lax regularly. He had used a mouth spray against bad breath, and an antiperspirant. His teeth were his own, but he used a toothpaste designed to remove heavy stains. There were many used packs of playing cards and a backgammon set. There were road maps with routes laboriously marked out, perhaps by Win. The routes, mostly from Carlisle, had not taken them to well-known beauty spots or places
of tourist fame, not to Wordsworth's Cottage or Castle Howard. They had been exclusively to towns. When Dundy compared them to a leaflet downstairs on the reception desk, he found that they were all towns that boasted hotels in the Beaumont chain.

No harm in that, of course. Doubtless the Cappers would have got a reduction on their stays. But the fact that most of the routes were from Carlisle made Dundy wonder if they had been prospecting during Des's previous job, deciding which of the hotels they—or rather
he,
surely—was going to blackmail himself into the managership of.

On a personal level the only haul they got was a few letters and postcards. There was little any of them could make out of the postcards: one of the Alhambra with “Fantastic place—Kevin” on the back; one of Michelangelo's
David
with “Christ what a nancy boy, eh? Jacko.” The postmarks were from the fifties, and they were addressed to hotels in Parkes and Coonabarabran, New South Wales. The only reason the policemen could see for keeping them had to be the pictures.

The letters were marginally more revealing. Three of them were from Des's mother. The latest, very feeble and practically without meaning, was addressed to Des and Win after their move to Britain in 1974. The earliest had also been addressed to Des in Britain—in fact, to a street in Pimlico. The date was December 1945, and it expressed the wish that he had waited until things were more settled before going “home”:

But then you always did what you want, but I hear such dreadful things on the wireless and wonder and with everything so short there are you getting enough to eat?

The other was addressed to Private Capper, of the Second Borderers, serving in India, apparently stationed
near Bombay. So Des's army career had begun
after
the Second World War. Not the impression he had given Frank, the doorman. The letter expressed bewilderment as to why he had joined up:

You always were a mystery to me, but one blessing youll be nearer home so when the three years are up you can come back, this is where you really belong son I hope you've learnt that by now with all love Your Ever Loving Mum.

The only other letter of interest was from India, dated 1947, and addressed to Corporal Capper, stationed in Hong Kong. After jocose preliminaries, it said:

You lucky bastard, getting out before it all turned nasty. My God, the things I've seen, but I expect you've heard from some of the boys, and you can believe it. Don't write and tell me you're living the life of Riley in H.K., Des, because I don't want to know. You always were the kind of crafty bastard who could slip out from under.

Not this time, thought Dundy.

“Well,” he said, shaking his head and looking at the meager haul. “This is the sum total of finds of interest, and I can't say it gets us much further. No written notes of discoveries, no written evidence of any blackmail attempts. What does that mean? That he didn't write anything down?”

“Could be,” said Nettles. “If he was a serious blackmailer, it would be much the wisest thing.”

“Yes . . .” said Dundy. “Somehow the vibes I'm getting from this man don't suggest that he would always do the wisest thing. . . . But maybe I'm getting him entirely wrong.”

“I may be wrong, too, sir,” said Charlie, “but the vibes
I'm getting suggest that he was a very
obvious
man, for all his cunning. As I said before, not subtle at all. Awful in an obvious way . . . obvious minded, somehow.”

“Sort of second-rate brain?” suggested Dundy.

“Yes, or third. You know, the sort of person who thinks it's true because he's read it in the papers. Quotes
Reader's Digest
as if it were the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.”

“Oh, God, yes.”

“That's how I see him. And I wonder—if he's taken notes of any sort, then it seems to me he's probably hidden them in a very obvious place. I mean the sort of places old ladies hide things, the places that are always the very first ones that the experienced burglar looks in.”

“Kept under the geranium pot, do you mean?”

“Yes. Laughable, and a bit pathetic. Where in the house do old people hide their little bits of money, their pension books, their savings certificates?”

“The backs of cushions,” said Nettles promptly. “Behind the books in the bookcase. Under the sofa cushions. Under the mattress. In the tea caddy. On top of the kitchen dresser.”

“That's the sort of place. I just wondered, sir, whether it might be worthwhile looking there.”

In the event, Charlie turned out to be right about the obviousness of Des's mind. Des and Win had gone in for Scandinavian-style beds, with the (hard) mattress laid straight onto a board. Good for the back, as Des would no doubt have told many a bar customer at length in his time. His notebook was pushed under the mattress, on top of the board. Apparently Win Capper had not had the aristocratic sensibilities of the princess who could not sleep on a pea. The notebook was on her side.

But there was no doubt it was Des's. Dundy took it downstairs and compared the handwriting with his entries in
the hotel register. It was Des's hand, all right. Or fist, more likely. Because the little notebook, bound in green plastic, was mostly a jumble of jottings in no particular order and dubiously legible in places. These ill-spelled notes were
aides-mémoires
in the strictest sense. They seemed to be scribbled down pretty much anywhere, just as he felt the urge to commit things to memory. So that “Geary—gin?” came two or three pages after another note that read: “Geary—ten half bottles in six days
known
.” There was, then, no sequence or continuity, and Dundy and his two assistants had to get from it such isolated nuggets as they could. If they were baffled, it had to be said that Des was frequently, too. His bafflement expressed itself in such diagrams as:

Underneath the diagram there was scrawled the question “What gives???”

Question marks, in fact, were very frequent. There were “Gillian S.—Ronnie Wimsett??” There was “Fortnum—Natalya R—phone calls—where?—expensive—what's up? Defecting?” Later, presumably connected with this, there was “Why Mallory not involved?” Mallory also appeared in “Mallory—Singh???” Underneath which was written: “Where?”

But there was one page in the book where there seemed to be some sort of organization, where the information seemed grouped around one central figure. There was a note that said: “Girls—young.” Then he had added: “Constant supply—recruited by bodyguard. Bodyguard paid by the girls? Age?” This last word had been underlined many
times. At the bottom of the page there was an enigmatic “HAD 9.” What could that mean? That he'd had nine such assignations with classical music groupies to Des's knowledge? But there was a shaky arrow leading to the side of the page that suggested that this entry related to something on a previous page. In any case, it was overshadowed by an entry in red: Stretching from the bottom left hand corner to the top right, misspelled but sharp in impact, in letters that bit deep into the page as if they had been scrawled in a fury, there was the legend:

GET GOTLIEB

“I think we may have struck gold,” said Iain Dundy.

F
OR THE ACTORS
it should have been a day of delicious anticlimax. It should have been a day for reading the early reviews, letting off a bit of steam, of shopping for unnecessaries. But it wasn't like that at all.

Reviews there were, luckily. Reviews that praised the “tireless energy” of the
Apprentice
cast, the “mature warmth and humanity” of Carston Galloway's Ralph Greatheart, and “the sense of a send-up of a parody” behind Ronnie Wimsett's chaste apprentice. The music critics had done their bit, too. There was acclaim for the “incredible and flamboyant richness” of Singh's voice and for the “golden opulence and vivid femininity” of Natalya in the letter scene. All these were lapped up, swapped, discussed, and disputed, though not by Clarissa Galloway, whose Melinda Purefoy was not mentioned at all.

But it was all, somehow, a bit academic. A bit of a sideshow. Because at half past eleven the superintendent, who had only been glimpsed hitherto walking purposively around the hotel, began interviewing people who he thought
might be of help to him. And since the staff of the hotel had all been together at the crucial time and had been given a thorough going-over by one of his men, that left the actors and the residents. And of course, it was all quite ridiculous, but . . . but one really had to decide how much to tell him, didn't one? And one had to decide which of one's fellow actors one could talk to about how much to tell him. Probably it would be mostly routine, wouldn't it, and rather dreary, but then there would be those areas . . .

And it
was
mostly routine, this preliminary round of interviews. But there were areas in which Dundy and his men found tiny nuggets of interest.

• • •

“But I
can't
see,” said Clarissa Galloway, “why we can't be interviewed together. We do everything together. Except sleep together, sometimes, but that goes in waves.”

She crossed a shapely black-stockinged leg, doing it
at
Charlie Peace, as being the youngest man in the room. His eye gleamed with a spark of amused appreciation. Iain Dundy's mouth tightened. Of course with these arty people it all came back to sex in the end.

“I'm afraid interviewing you together would be quite against regulations,” he said.

“It must be terrible to be so
bound
by regulations,” said Clarissa with stage thoughtfulness.

“You say you do everything together, but in fact you weren't playing husband and wife in this play, were you?”

“Good God, no. Ralph Greatheart is an
ancient
character.”

“Do your parts link up? Are you together onstage a great deal in the course of the evening?”

“No, we have a scene together at the end of the first act, but then we're hardly onstage at all together until the last act.”

“Then were you offstage together a lot?”

“Oh, yes, a fair bit.”

“Talking together in the dressing rooms behind the stage?”

“Well, I don't re
mem
ber talking together,” said Clarissa, again with that contrived thoughtfulness. “But of course terribly
aware
of each other.
Al
ways terribly aware. It's what distinguishes us as a partnership.”