The Midnight Hour, page 3
‘Eighty-seven I think. The woman claimed the child had been conceived when he was in his late sixties. I don’t know what happened to her. I think Ma paid her off. But what if this woman, or someone else with a grudge against Pa, turns up out of the woodwork?’
Was Seth worried about his reputation? wondered Max. He didn’t think that having a philandering father would necessarily reflect badly on a film star. But Seth’s next words showed that he had something rather darker in mind.
‘What if one of these women decided to kill him?’
‘It’s a bit of a stretch,’ said Max, ‘from claiming paternity to killing someone.’
‘I know,’ said Seth. There was another pause, then, ‘My dad could be a bit of a bastard.’
‘Mine could too,’ said Max.
‘But I bet your mum made up for it.’
‘I’m sure she would have but she died when I was six.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Seth. ‘But my mum did make up for my dad. She was always so . . . so much fun, you know. I can’t bear to think of her going to prison.’
‘She won’t go to prison if she didn’t do it.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Seth. ‘What about Rillington Place? They got the wrong man there, didn’t they? Hanged him too.’
‘That’s true.’ Max remembered the case, which happened fifteen years ago. Timothy Evans, wrongly convicted for a murder committed by his landlord, serial killer John Christie. ‘This is why I don’t believe in the death penalty,’ Edgar had said at the time. Well, they were talking about scrapping it now.
‘Max.’ Seth leant forward. ‘Will you at least talk to your friend? Find out what the police are thinking. Tell him that Ma would never do anything like that. She’s tough—she’s had to be—but she’s got a kind heart. She feeds stray cats and wouldn’t even kill a spider.’
Lydia was kind to animals too, but Max wasn’t sure that this always extended to humans.
‘I can’t promise anything,’ he said. ‘But I’ll talk to Edgar.’
He’d been looking for an excuse anyway.
Four
‘So, our main suspect is obviously Aaron,’ said Emma.
Emma and Sam were sitting in their office above a jeweller’s called Midas and Sons. It was in the Lanes, the maze of narrow streets in the centre of Brighton, full of antique shops and newly opened coffee bars where longhaired students spent all day dreaming over a cappuccino. Their office consisted of one room and a tiny windowless kitchen and was so close to the house on the other side of the road that they often waved at the occupants, two elderly men who owned the hairdresser’s below. Holmes and Collins Detective Agency was only about two hundred yards from Bartholomew Square, where the police station squatted below the town hall. There were rumours that the police were soon to vacate the dark, damp rooms for a spacious new location in Hove but, given that the basement had been condemned in the 1930s and yet the station and the cells were still there, Edgar and his team weren’t holding their breath. Emma often missed being in the force but, when she thought of the women’s changing room where mice ran over your feet, she was glad of the relative luxury of Midas and Sons. At least here, if they leaned out of the top window and craned their necks, they could see the sky.
‘Aaron?’ said Sam, her feet on the desk. ‘Not Verity? She’s the obvious suspect. I mean, she prepared his last meal. And didn’t get sick herself. Plus, she knew his taste-buds had gone and he wouldn’t taste the poison.’
‘But she called us in,’ said Emma. ‘I know murderers are always engaging private detectives in crime novels but it’s a bit unlikely in real life.’
‘Misdirection?’ suggested Sam. She’d been eating nuts and tried to lob a piece of shell into the bin. It missed and joined the others on the linoleum floor. Sam was a great partner, but her untidiness made even Emma—who could live quite happily in the mess generated by three children—feel twitchy. Emma and Sam had met when Emma was a police officer and Sam was a reporter on the local paper. They had become friends when, a few years later, they had run into each other at a village fete; Emma riding the swing boats with toddler Marianne and Sam moodily reporting on the ‘guess the weight of the pig’ competition. They stayed in contact through two more children and countless local news articles. When tragedy ended Sam’s career at the Evening Argus, it was she who had suggested the agency, even offering to change her name to Watson.
‘You sound like Max,’ said Emma. She’d often suspected that Sam had a crush on Max.
Sure enough, Sam blushed before replying, ‘It’s a good way to appear innocent, hiring a private detective. Maybe she thinks that we’ll point the finger at the wrong person.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Emma. She hated the thought that they might have been hired in the hope that they’d get it wrong. ‘Verity read about us in the paper. She knows we’re good.’
‘Only because I wrote the article,’ said Sam.
‘I’ve made a list,’ said Emma, ignoring this. She pushed it across the desk, an impressive piece of furniture, rescued from a solicitor’s office who were about to throw it out, and pleasingly called a partner desk. It was vast, a wide expanse of mahogany with brass-handled drawers on either side. You could imagine Scrooge and Bob Cratchit sitting facing each other, arguing about the advisability of finishing early on Christmas Eve.
To interview
Verity Malone—Bert’s wife
David Billington—eldest son. Runs Bert Billington Productions. Lives in Hampstead, London.
Sheena Billington—David’s wife. Helps run the business.
Seth Billington—middle son, actor
Aaron Billington—youngest son. Runs a garage in Hove.
Alma Saunders—daily woman. Lives in Rottingdean.
Ted Grange—gardener. Lives in Woodingdean.
Pamela Curtis—used to be Bert’s assistant. Lives in Hove.
‘David, Seth and Aaron,’ said Emma. ‘Biblical names. I wonder if either of the parents is religious.’
‘Jewish?’ said Sam. ‘They sound Old Testament to me.’ Emma thought back to the house in Tudor Close. She couldn’t recall any menorahs or crucifixes or any signs of religious affiliation at all.
‘Bags I interview Seth,’ said Sam.
‘“Bags I”,’ repeated Emma. ‘Are you still at school?’ Sam attended a grammar school in Southend, Emma went to Roedean, the famous public school outside Brighton, although she spent a lot of time trying to hide the fact. But, despite the social gulf between these two establishments, they had a lot of vocabulary in common.
‘Seth is making a film with Max,’ said Sam. ‘The Prince of Darkness. One of those Dracula things.’
‘I can imagine Seth as Dracula,’ said Emma. ‘He’s got a rather villainous face.’
‘Gorgeous, you mean,’ said Sam. ‘I think they’re filming up north. In Whitby.’
Emma was looking at the list. ‘The police will start with the family. And they’ll go door-to-door in Rottingdean. We should interview someone else. Get ahead of them.’
‘It’s not a competition,’ said Sam. Although she knew it was, really.
‘Pamela Curtis lives quite nearby,’ said Emma. ‘And Verity said that she hadn’t given her name to the police. Let’s walk into Hove and talk to her. I haven’t got long.’ Her parents were looking after Jonathan, but they were getting frail now and she couldn’t leave him with them for too long.
‘OK.’ Sam took her feet off the desk. A true reporter, her preference was always for action.
* * *
Emma was right. Meg was interviewing the neighbours at Tudor Close. It was slow work. Although the main entrance to the building was rather grand, with a stained-glass shield above a pointed portico, around the sides the sloping roofs almost touched the ground and the low doorways were almost hidden behind ivy and twisted brickwork. Meg would knock and then wait until the resident, inevitably aged and well-spoken, emerged to tell her that they’d seen and heard nothing unusual on the fateful Sunday. They would then shut the trompe-l’œil door very firmly indeed.
It wasn’t until Meg had almost finished her circuit that she struck gold. She found a door on the very edge of the west wing. It was actually fitted onto two sides of a right angle, like a window in an advent calendar. Meg knocked and, after a lot of pattering and scuffling, one side of the aperture opened and a large, lean dog appeared, attached to a small not-lean man. Instinctively, Meg bent her knees slightly.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘I’m WDC Meg Connolly from the Brighton police. I’m calling about an incident that occurred just over a week ago, on Sunday, nineteenth of September.’
‘Was that when Bert Billington was killed?’ said the man. ‘You’d better come in. Lola will never leave you alone otherwise.’
Lola, a grey, hound-like animal, was trying to get her paws on Meg’s shoulders. Meg was very happy to sidestep the dog’s embrace and follow the man into the house. For one thing he had said ‘killed’ and not ‘died’.
The house was as twisty inside as outside. Meg followed Lola and her owner along a narrow corridor that took several turns before ending up in a sitting room dominated by a grand piano. There was only room for a small sofa where all three of them sat in a line.
‘I’m Eric Prentice,’ said the man, extending a hand over Lola’s bony back. ‘Eric “Piano Man” Prentice.’
Meg was definitely meant to recognise the name. She made an admiring noise.
‘I had a comic piano-playing act,’ said Eric. ‘It’s much harder than you think to play the piano badly. I was a serious musician before the war. Then I joined ENSA and started with the comedy stuff.’
Meg’s father had told her about ENSA, the Entertainment National Service Association (or Every Night Something Awful), an organisation formed to entertain the troops during the war. Her dad had seen several ENSA shows when stationed in Egypt. He sometimes said it was the most terrifying experience he’d had while on active service.
‘Did you know Bert Billington from your . . . theatrical days?’ asked Meg. She wasn’t quite sure how to put it.
Eric Prentice gave a bark of laughter, accompanied by an actual bark from Lola.
‘Everyone knew Bert. He had the circuit sewn up, especially after the war. But I knew him from before, when he was actually on the boards. He was quite a serious actor once, you know.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Meg was also wondering how old Eric was. His hair was white and it was almost conceivable that he was Bert’s contemporary. But he moved and sounded like a much younger man.
‘I first met Bert when he was playing Laertes in Hamlet,’ said Eric. ‘That was in Leeds in 1910. I was twenty and had a job with the symphony orchestra. There were a whole group of us actors and musicians and we became quite friendly. Bert was a lot of fun in those days, always ready for anything. Then the war—the first war—came. I got called up and, afterwards, nothing seemed so much fun.’
‘Was Bert in the First World War?’ asked Meg.
‘No,’ said Eric, with another short laugh. ‘He was too old by then, he must have been nearly forty. The war was when Bert made his money. He started buying up houses, great blocks, tenements, you know. He’d smarten them up a bit and then sell them for a profit. When everyone else was dying—all the lads in my first troop were dead by 1915—Bert was getting rich. After the war, he started his theatrical agency and he took me on. I was very grateful.’
Meg wasn’t quite sure what Eric sounded but it wasn’t grateful.
‘Bert had married Verity by then,’ said Eric. ‘He was always one for the ladies.’
‘So you knew Bert and Verity well before you moved here?’
‘I was here first,’ said Eric. ‘I’d stayed at Tudor Close when it was a hotel. It was a grand place once, you know. The loveliest hotel on the south coast, people called it. You could rent out a whole house and there was an annex with a swimming pool and billiards room. Bette Davis stayed here. And Cary Grant. Julie Andrews is meant to have visited as a young girl. I heard that it was the first place she sang publicly. I love Julie Andrews, don’t you? Have you seen Mary Poppins?’
‘Yes. I went with my sister last year. We loved it.’ They had been blown away by the film, she remembered, as if on one of Mary’s magical winds. They had sung ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ all the way home on the bus.
Eric was still talking about Rottingdean. ‘You know that there were Canadian troops billeted here in the war? There was a village on the Downs, Balsdean, that they used for target practice. Bombed it to smithereens. You can still see the ruins.’
People were always telling Meg stories like this. She’d never seen Balsdean, she’d never even walked across the Downs. She always felt that the countryside belonged to people like Emma Holmes, not girls from Whitehawk.
‘When did you move to Tudor Close?’ she asked.
‘In 1953, just after the hotel closed and they sold off the houses. Verity and Bert moved here about five years ago. Around 1960. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw Verity in the gardens one day. They’re communal gardens. Very nicely kept. At first, the sun was in my eyes, and I thought I was seeing a vision. She didn’t seem to have changed at all since 1949.’
Meg thought of the figure in the Chinese robe with the gold curls balanced on top of her head. The sun must have been very strong, she thought.
‘It must have been good to see an old friend,’ she said.
‘It was good,’ said Eric. ‘But I don’t know if we were friends exactly. Not after all these years. Verity never came here. She’s not a fan of Lola—I think she’s scared of dogs—but sometimes I go round to her place and we have coffee or a snifter together. Bert kept himself to himself.’
‘Did you see or hear anything on Sunday the nineteenth?’ said Meg, getting down to business.
‘Ted, the gardener, came in the morning,’ said Eric. ‘We always have a nice chat. Then I took Lola for a walk. Just round the pond and up to the windmill. I saw Verity in the garden at midday. She was cutting some roses which, strictly speaking, isn’t allowed. I waved at her but didn’t speak. The next thing I knew, the ambulance was outside. I knew it was Bert. I mean, he was ninety and not in the best of health.’
‘At the door you said, “when Bert was killed”,’ said Meg. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘I assumed that’s why a policewoman was knocking at my door,’ said Eric. ‘Because there was something suspicious about his death.’
Meg still didn’t think that this was the first thing that would spring to mind. At any rate, it hadn’t sprung to the minds of any other Tudor Close residents.
‘You must have had some other reason for saying that?’ she said.
In answer, Eric got up and walked to the piano. He played a few dreamy chords before replying. ‘Bert was a difficult man,’ he said, hands resting on the keys. ‘And a successful one. He had enemies. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d been murdered, put it that way.’
‘Can you think of anyone who could have killed him?’ asked Meg.
Another arpeggio. ‘There was a girl,’ he said. ‘A girl who died. I’d start there if I were you.’
* * *
Pamela Curtis lived on First Avenue, one of the wide boulevards leading up from the sea. It was a sought-after address but Emma always found these streets rather depressing, something about the uniformity of the buildings and their solid, uncompromising façades. We’re not here for you, they seemed to say, we’re here to present an impressive aspect. When Emma and Edgar were first married they had lived in Hove but their flat in Brunswick Square was very different, dark and slightly damp, full of awkward corners and uneven floorboards. Emma had loved it.
Pamela also lived in a flat, a semi basement that nevertheless seemed light and airy. This was partly because all the walls were painted white, punctuated by the occasional, rather startling, piece of modern art. It was a young person’s apartment, thought Emma, but Pamela must have been in her sixties, at least.
‘I painted them myself,’ she said, when Sam admired a green woman with three breasts. ‘I used to be an art student.’
‘How did you come to work for Bert Billington?’ asked Emma. She had expected someone with a background in the theatre but Pamela, solid and grey-haired, looked far too respectable.
‘I answered an advert,’ said Pamela. ‘I had an interview at his office in Soho and got the job. Bert seemed impressed that I had secretarial experience. He said he was pleased that I wasn’t a dolly bird.’
‘Charming,’ said Sam.
‘I didn’t mind,’ said Pamela. ‘It was rather refreshing, to be honest. He said he didn’t think I was the type to run off with a chorus boy. I said he was safe there because I preferred women.’
She gave them a rather challenging look. Emma hoped that she wasn’t blushing. Although she knew that there were homosexual people in Brighton—the hairdressers opposite, for example—she’d never heard anyone declare their sexuality so openly. Especially a woman.
‘Good for you,’ said Sam. ‘Men are overrated.’
Emma was rather shocked but Sam had obviously hit the right note because Pamela laughed. ‘Quite right. Now, what did you want to know about Bert? He could be a real sod but I was sorry to hear that he’d died. He was one of a kind. Thank God for that, really.’
‘How long did you work for him?’ asked Emma.
‘Fifteen years. From 1945 to 1960. I booked all his tours, looked after the actors’ contracts, managed his properties, stopped people killing him.’
‘That sounds like a lot of work,’ said Sam.
‘It was,’ said Pamela, ‘but I loved it.’
‘What do you mean,’ said Emma, ‘“stopped people killing him”?’
‘Oh, there was always someone wanting Bert’s blood. Some agent or artiste. Some wronged woman.’
‘We’ve heard that he had extra-marital affairs,’ said Emma. She’d had this from Verity herself.
