Blood at the Bookies

Eighteen

Jude picked up the ticket that Andy Constant had promised would be left at the box office and went through into the theatre. The building was named after the company which had stumped up the money for its construction, with a view to raising their local charitable profile. (They had made a very favourable deal with the university, which would allow them free use of the halls of residence for conferences during the vacations.) As Andy had said, the theatre was new, new even to the extent of still smelling of paint and freshly varnished wood. And it was a rather splendid structure.

The auditorium was buzzing with the sounds of young people, fellow students there to support their mates, but there were also quite a few parents, coming to see what all those tuition fees were being spent on.

Jude had been presented with a programme, just an A5 sheet printed in black with a list of actors and production credits. The title of the evening’s entertainment was Rumours of Wars: The Interface Between Society and Violence. She noted that the show had been ‘Conceived and Directed by Andy Constant’.

She saw him briefly before the show. He gave her a wave of acknowledgement as he bustled busily up the aisle from the pass-door by the stage. He was dressed exactly as when she’d last seen him, but there was now a greater aura of importance about him. In his wake scuttled the pretty dark-haired girl who had summoned him from the university coffee shop on their last encounter. As he passed Jude, Andy Constant said, “If I don’t see you in all the confusion after the show, let’s meet up in the Bull. Just opposite the gates of the campus – do you know it?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Won’t be such a scrum there as there will in the student bar.”

“Can I set one up for you?”

“Pint of Stella would be wonderful.”

And he whisked his important way to the back of the auditorium, where the dark-haired girl was now waiting for him.

Just as the lights were dimming, Jude caught sight of Ewan and Hamish Urquhart a few rows in front, presumably there to cheer on Sophia.

The show was not bad, but it did feel slightly over-inflated for its own good. The subject of war is a big one and Rumours of Wars tried to take on all of it. There were the obligatory scenes of carnage from 1914-18, juxtaposed with the clinical battles of new technologies. There were scenes of everyman squaddies punctiliously obeying orders given to them by idiots, of bereaved mothers weeping over the deaths of children in air raids, of blimpish generals planning mass slaughter over post-prandial port.

All of this was realized in a form that involved much shouting, a certain amount of dance, some a cappella singing and a lot of mime (which was about as interesting as mime usually is). The show was built about a lot of tableaux of human bodies, dramatic images precisely engineered. It was all impressive and just a tad worthy.

Also old-fashioned. Andy Constant must have been very young during the sixties, but that was definitely the period when his ideas of theatre had been formed. Jude got the feeling that he’d definitely seen Oh! What A Lovely Wars at an impressionable age. There was a simplicity in his anti-war message which accorded better with the protest years of Vietnam, when there were still perhaps some illusions remaining to be shattered, than the cynical wartime of Iraq. The show seemed to be taking a battering ram to a door that was already wide open.

And the acting wasn’t terribly good. The kind of slick ensemble playing required by that kind of theatre was beyond the capacity of the University of Clincham’s Drama students. Though individual talents shone through in various areas, none had the all-round versatility that the piece demanded. And of all the cast Sophia Urquhart was probably the weakest. She looked pretty enough and went through the motions of what she had rehearsed, but didn’t convince. However much she threw herself around the stage, she remained quintessentially a young lady of the Home Counties who had been to all the right schools. Wherever the girl’s future lay, it wasn’t in acting.

Her singing voice, though, was something else. In the one solo number she had, she was transformed. This, again harking back to the sixties, was Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ As the girl’s pure unaccompanied soprano spelt out the message of pacifism, she seemed not only to evoke an earlier era, but also to swell with confidence and to take effortless control of the whole auditorium. As a singer, Sophia Urquhart might make it.

The best thing about Rumours of Wars, in Jude’s view, was its length. An hour and twenty minutes with no interval. Quite long enough to preach to the converted that war is a bad thing.

Jude’s overall impression of the evening was the dominance of Andy Constant. The show was supposedly built up from improvisation, but had all the hallmarks of contrivance. Yes, the students may have come up with individual ideas, but they had been welded into a preconceived form by the director. The iron will of Andy Constant lay behind every line and every gesture. In a way, the weakness of the material served only to highlight the skill with which it had been pressed into theatrical shape.

In her brief experience as an actress Jude had come across directors like that. For them the written text was an irrelevance, an obstacle to be overcome by their stagecraft. And working from improvisation gave them the perfect opportunity to impose their wills on actors. The aim of the production was only to show how clever they, the directors, were. The whole exercise was an ego-trip.

Jude knew that that was exactly how Andy Constant would have treated his students during the rehearsal period. What he was after was control, pure and simple.

And even as she identified the kind of man he was, she was aware of the way she was drawn towards him. She could regret, but she couldn’t deny it.

Andy had said that the Bull pub would be less of a scrum than the student bar, but it was still pretty crowded, the regular clientele augmented by parents who had just experienced Rumours of Wars. From the conversations Jude overheard as she struggled towards the bar, they had thought rather more of the show than she had. Or maybe it was just because their offspring had been participating.

There were also quite a few of the students who’d been in the show, and a lot of their friends who hadn’t. Jude saw the girl with long dark hair at the centre of a giggling bunch of youngsters.

Given the crowd, she was glad she’d suggested setting up a drink for Andy Constant. One trip to the bar took long enough. As she eased her way through the crowd with a Chardonnay and a pint of Stella, she found herself face to face with Ewan and Hamish Urquhart, both dressed in Drizabone coats over their corduroy.

“Ah, Jude, isn’t it? I thought I saw you in there. So, what did you think of my little Sophia, eh?”

“I thought there was a lot of talent there,” she said tactfully.

“Yes. Bloody stupid thing for a girl to do, though, isn’t it? No security in acting. Hope she’ll see the light soon and start doing something sensible. Mind you,” he couldn’t help saying, with a father’s pride, “she is rather gifted, and she’s pretty enough to make a go of it.”

“Let’s hope so. Her singing is really excellent.” No need to say anything about the acting.

“Yes. Hamish, you get them in, will you?” Ewan Urquhart’s son obediently scuttled into the mêlée around the bar. “No, she’s a good little singer, my Soph. You can catch her singing in here most Friday nights.”

“Really?”

He pointed to a poster pinned on to a board nearby. It had been printed up on a home computer by someone who had only just discovered how many fonts and colours it was possible to use, and advertised ‘MAGIC DRAGON, Clincham Uni’s Number One Folk⁄Rock Band’. A rather smudged photograph showed a longhaired figure who was recognizably Sophia Urquhart fronting two guitarists and a fiddler.

“Obviously they’re not doing it tonight because of the show. But most other Fridays during term-time you’ll find her in here singing her little heart out.”

“I must try and catch them one day. As I say, she has got an exceptional voice.”

“Yes.” Ewan Urquhart agreed in a voice that mixed pride with scepticism. “Trouble is, if she goes into that kind of business – singing, acting – God knows what kind of riff-raff she’s going to mix with. Funny lot, actors, aren’t they?”

“Some of them. So there isn’t any showbiz in your family?”

“Good God, no. I went to Charterhouse, spent all my time doing sport. No time for bloody acting.” Ewan Urquhart seemed to need to shoehorn his status as an Old Carthusian into every conversation.

“I thought maybe Sophia’s mother…”

“Sophia’s mother and I parted company some years ago,” he responded with some asperity. “And if you’re wondering whether Sophia got her acting or singing talent from that source, let me tell you my ex-wife had no talent of any description.”

Jude deduced from the vehemence of this response that it was Mrs Urquhart who had left her husband, rather than vice versa. And she didn’t blame her.

She noticed that Andy Constant had just entered the pub and so, with an ‘Excuse me’, edged her way towards a table for two she’d just seen vacated.

He flopped down in front of his pint, long limbs drooping in a parody of exhaustion. “God, I’m wiped out. I find directing takes more out of me than acting ever did. Particularly with these kids…you never quite know what they’re going to do from minute to minute.”

“They seemed very disciplined to me, from what I saw on stage.”

“Yes, but it takes a while to get into their heads what acting’s about. Very few of them understand the concept of an ensemble. They don’t know that acting’s not about the individual, it’s about everyone working together.” Which Jude understood as ‘everyone doing what I tell them’.

“Still, the show played pretty well tonight,” Andy Constant went on complacently. “I like it when the audience gasps.” The audience had indeed gasped, but only at the crowbarring-in of a few four-letter words, which Jude hadn’t reckoned added anything.

“I’m intrigued that the show was worked out through improvisation,” said Jude. “It all felt very structured.”

He grinned, as if she had given him a compliment. “Yes, well, the ideas the kids come up with are not always very practical. You have to have someone there who’s shaping the thing.”

“And in this case that person was you?”

He acknowledged the fact with a nod, took a long sip of his lager and then looked at Jude through narrowed eyes. She guessed that at some stage he had been told he looked sexy doing that, and was annoyed with herself for actually finding it sexy.

“So…Jude…I don’t know much about you.”

“No.” That was, generally speaking, the way she liked things to stay. “Well, I live in Fethering. Is that enough information?”

“I’d like to know whether you’re married?”

“No.”

“In a long-term relationship?”

“No.”

“I’m surprised. You’re an attractive woman.”

“Thank you.” Jude had never been coy about accepting compliments. “And what about you…in the marital stakes?”

He ran his fingers through his long grey hair, flattening it either side of the central parting. “I am technically married, in that my wife and I haven’t bothered to divorce, but we haven’t really been married for sixteen years…no, I tell a lie, it’s seventeen now.”

“Children?”

“A couple.”

“How old?”

“Oh, finished with education. Off our hands.” The answer was airy and, to Jude’s mind, calculatedly vague. He didn’t want her to know exactly how old he was, which probably meant he was older than he looked.

This impression was confirmed by the way he immediately moved the conversation on. “You haven’t got any further in your search for the killer of Tadeusz Jankowski?”

“No further progress. Nor in finding a connection between him and Clincham College.”

That caught him on the hop. A momentary expression of anxiety was quickly quelled as he said, “Well, I think you’re very unlikely to find one.”

“Carole and I can keep looking.”

“Of course you can. It’s a free country. Though, with the current government, I’m beginning to wonder…” It was a line he had to say, to maintain his pose as the free-thinking outsider.

Their exchange of information was still incomplete, so Jude asked, “And are you in a relationship at the moment?”

He did the narrowed eyes routine again. “Nothing I couldn’t get out of if something better came along,” he murmured. God, the arrogance of the man.

“I think we should meet again,” he announced suddenly. “When we have more time to…appreciate each other.”

“It’s a thought,” said Jude, against her better judgement.

“A good thought.” He smiled lazily. “I’d suggest extending, this evening’s encounter, but…” He shrugged “…I’m afraid there’s some stuff I’ve still got to sort out back at the college.”

Jude didn’t say anything. The bar was quieter now. The first rush of students had gone back to the campus. Her hand was lying on the table. Andy Constant moved his forward as if to touch it, then abruptly changed his mind as he caught sight of the approaching Sophia Urquhart.

“Andy, bit of a problem.”

He looked shaken and turned to face the girl. “Something to do with the show?”

“No. A message from Joan.” She looked piercingly at Jude, not recognizing her but perhaps with a degree of suspicion. “If I could just have a quick word, Andy…”

“Excuse me.” He shrugged, as if to apologize for the bad timing of all young people, and uncoiled his lanky body from the chair.

There was a short exchange between him and Sophia, then he ambled back to the table with a magnanimous smile. “Sorry, she was just picking up on a note I gave her about tonight’s performance.”

Which was a perfectly reasonable explanation for what had happened. But for the fact that Jude had exceptionally good hearing and had caught the words the two of them had whispered to each other.

Sophia had said, “Joan thought her father would have gone straight after the show, but he’s just offered her a lift home. So she can’t come back with you tonight. She says she probably could tomorrow.”

“Tell her she’d better be able to,” Andy Constant had hissed. “I want her.”

“I’ll pass on the message.”

“Make sure you do,” he said intensely. “Make sure she knows what I feel.”

Jude found the exchange, to say the least, intriguing.