Star Trap

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It seemed strange to continue working with Christopher Milton after that. Or perhaps the strangeness lay in how easy it was, how much of the time it was possible to forget the grotesque suspicions which had now hardened in Charles’ mind. And they were busy. Lumpkin! was scheduled to open at the King’s Theatre on November 27th and the problems of re-rehearsing great chunks of the show were now exacerbated by extra rehearsals for Mark Spelthorne’s understudy. (The management were dithering in London as to whether they should leave the part in the understudy’s hands or bring someone else with a bit more name value. The boy who’d taken over wasn’t bad… and he was cheaper than his predecessor… but was his name big enough…? Or with Christopher Milton above the title, did one perhaps not need any name value in the supports…? And after the cuts Young Marlow wasn’t much of a part anyway… The usual impersonal management decisions continued to be made a long way from the people they concerned.)

There was not much fuss over the death. Police were round asking about Mark’s state of mind before the incident and there were rumours that some representatives of the company might have to attend the inquest, but the assumption of suicide was general. The coincidence of the failure of the radio pilot, the demise of the Fighter Pilots and troubles over Lumpkin! were thought to be sufficient motive. To a character like Mark Spelthorne, whose life was driven by ambitions of stardom, this sequence of blows, with the implication that he was never going to make it in the way he visualised, could be enough to push him over the edge.

Even Charles found the explanation fairly convincing and tried to make himself find it very convincing. But other thoughts gatecrashed his mind.

An unwelcome logical sequence was forming there. What he had heard from Julian provided the thread which pulled all the wayward strands of the case together into a neat little bundle. Christopher Milton’s history of mental illness was just the sort of thing that he would fight to keep from his adoring public. The mass audiences for popular entertainment are not the most liberal and broad-minded section of the population and they would not sympathise with anything ‘odd’.

Everard Austick and the pianist Frederick Wooland had passed unnoticed through Dickie Peck’s Approval of Cast net and Christopher Milton must have recoiled in shock when he saw them at rehearsals. They were links with the one episode in his past he was determined to keep quiet and so far as he was concerned, they had to be removed. Not killed or even badly injured but kept out of Lumpkin! Hence the airgun pellet and the shove which sent poor, pissed Everard downstairs. Charles kicked himself for being so blinkered about the evidence he had found in the Corniche. He had been looking for something to incriminate the driver and had found what he wanted, without considering that its location could be equally damning to the car’s owner.

Because now he had no doubt of Christopher Milton’s personal involvement. Apart from anything else, at the time of Mark’s death, Dickie Peck was in London and the driver was in hospital. And everything became quite logical if the star was considered as potentially unbalanced. In his morbid self-obsession he saw everyone who challenged him as a serious threat to his personality and as such someone who should be removed or punished. It wasn’t a case of Dickie Peck or the driver being overprotective; it was a paranoid man protecting himself. And it meant that Charles was dealing with a madman.

Only a madman would believe that he could continue to behave like that without ultimate discovery and disgrace. Only someone totally locked in his own world, someone who had lost touch with everyday reality. Christopher Milton’s unshakable belief in his talent was matched by a belief in his immunity from discovery.

And he had been skilful. All of the crimes had the appearance of accidents or unrelated acts of violence. Charles felt certain that no one else in the company saw any pattern in them. And because Lumpkin! was on the move, it was unlikely that the different police forces involved would be aware of a sequence of crimes.

But now, with the death of Mark Spelthorne, the whole situation became more serious. Beating up people who get in your way is one thing; killing them puts you in a different league.

And Charles was still left with the dilemma of what he should do about it. Gerald’s original instructions to him to protect the show and its star from sabotage now seemed grotesquely irrelevant. The situation had got beyond that. But he still did not have enough evidence to go to the police with a tale which must strain their credulity. The airgun pellets and the liquid paraffin were unsubstantiated evidence; he could have planted them, and anyway his own behaviour in snooping around the Holiday Inn car park could be liable to misinterpretation. He didn’t have any proof that Christopher Milton was at the scene of most of the incidents.

He considered the possibility of talking directly to his suspect, but he couldn’t imagine what he would say. A quiet word in the ear may stop a schoolboy from smoking behind the cycle sheds, but in a case of murder it’s seriously inadequate. And if he was dealing with a potentially homicidal maniac, it was asking for trouble to draw attention to such suspicions. But the alternative was sitting and waiting for someone else to get hurt or even killed.

He wanted to discuss it with someone, but Gerald Venables, who was the only suitable confidant, was too involved in the situation and might panic.

So he would have to work it out on his own. He thought through the known facts and wished there were more of them. He made vague resolutions to find out as much as he could about Christopher Milton’s past and current activities. One useful idea did come into his head. He recollected that the first two crimes had been committed between nine and ten in the morning and suddenly tied this up with the unusual ‘no calls before ten-thirty’ clause in the star’s contract. It would be interesting to find out what he did in the mornings. Was it just that he liked a lie-in? That did not tally with the voracious appetite for work he demonstrated the rest of the day. He was prepared to stay up all night getting a new number together and yet the day never began until half past ten. That was worth investigating.

But it was one stray positive thought in a scrambled mind. Everything else circled round uselessly, tangling with emotions and producing nothing.

The Queen’s Theatre, Brighton, was one of the great old touring theatres of Britain. It had been built for more spacious times, in the 1870s, before the cinema had cheapened illusion by comparisons with the real thing. When the Queen’s was put up, people went to the theatre for spectacle and they got it. Entertainments were built round special effects — shipwrecks, fires and falling buildings, magic, ghosts and live animals. And the theatres were designed to cope.

The original stage machinery had been built for the Rise and Sink method of set changing, whereby the stage was made up of separate narrow sections, which could be raised and lowered with different sets on them by an elaborate system of pulleys and counterweights. There was a cellar below the stage as deep as the proscenium was high and above the audience’s sight lines there was equivalent space in the flying gallery. The complex of girders and hawsers in the cellar was a feat of engineering comparable to one of the great Victorian railway bridges.

When the stage was designed, it had been equipped with the full complement of trap doors which were written into many plays of the period. Downstage were the corner traps, small openings used for the appearance or disappearance of one actor. Often these would be used as Star Traps, so called because the aperture was covered with a circle made up of triangular wooden segments like cake slices, hinged with leather on the outside, which would open like a star to deliver the actor on to the stage and then fall back into place.

Then there was the Grave Trap centre stage, which was always used for the Gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet. And originally the theatre had had the most elaborate trap of all, the Corsican Trap, or Ghost Glide. This had been developed for the 1852 play The Corsican Brothers and enabled a ghost to rise from the grave as he moved across the stage.

Charles found it fascinating. He had always been intrigued by the mechanics of theatre and just being in the old building gave him that pleasantly painful feeling of hopeless nostalgia which always comes from the knowledge that, however much one exercises the imagination, however much one researches, it is never possible to know what earlier times were really like. He picked the brains of Len, the stage doorman, about the theatre’s history and tried to spend as much time as he could alone there, sensing the building’s past, hearing echoes of old triumphs, tantrums and love affairs.

But it was not easy to indulge this sentimentality. For one thing, the theatre had undergone many changes. The divided stage had been replaced in the forties and now most of the old equipment was boarded over. Only the Star Trap on the fore-stage was still kept working for the annual pantomime appearances of the Demon King (complete no doubt with miscued puff of smoke).

Then again the frantic re-rehearsal schedule for Lumpkin! was not conducive to luxuriating in nostalgia. But, most of all, the looming problem of what should be done about his knowledge of Christopher Milton’s criminal activities kept Charles’ mind naggingly full.

As in the other towns of the tour, the local press greeted the arrival of Lumpkin! in Brighton with a big spread about the show’s star. There was a photograph of Christopher Milton in one of his lovable poses and the column was headed ‘BACK TO SCHOOLDAYS FOR LIONEL WILKINS’. Intrigued, Charles read on.

Lovers of television’s Straight Up, Guv are in for a surprise this week at the Queen’s Theatre when they see the show’s lovable star Christopher Milton in a different role as an eighteenth-century rogue by the name of Tony Lumpkin.

‘Actually, he’s not that different from Lionel,’ confides boyish 34-year-old Christopher. ‘They’re both con-men. I think, if anything, Tony Lumpkin is slightly more successful than Lionel. Well, let’s face it — that wouldn’t be difficult.’

Offstage, Christopher Milton is nothing like his bungling television counterpart. He is a hard-working performer with a great belief in the live theatre. ‘Television is strange,’ he muses. ‘It’s in one way the most intimate of the media, because everything you do on it is very small, you know, just for the camera, and because the viewers are just sitting in their living-rooms to watch. And yet in a strange way, for the performer, it’s a distant feeling playing to a camera, even when there’s a studio audience. It doesn’t bear comparison with the contact you can get with a live theatre audience. That’s electrifying, intoxicating, magic.’

For Christopher, being in Brighton is almost like coming home. ‘I spent seven years of my life here at Ellen da Costa’s Stage School. I came when I was a very young ten-year-old and left when I went into full-time professional theatre. In many ways, Ellen taught me all I know. I think she’s retired now, but I certainly hope to see her while I’m in Brighton. I hope she’ll come and see the show — and no doubt rap me over the knuckles for sloppy enunciation! She used to be very hot on enunciation. I can’t think that she’d approve of Lionel Wilkins’ style of speech…’

The article went on to complete the plug for Lumpkin! with information about Carl Anthony and Micky Gorton. It made no mention of Mark Spelthorne’s death. But then the whole thing read like an Identikit PR interview which had been prepared long in advance.

Still, the information about the stage school was interesting. If the key to Christopher Milton’s behaviour lay deep in his past, then it might be worth paying a visit to Miss Ellen da Costa.

The rehearsals were hard. They started with a ten-thirty call on the Monday morning and it was like working on a new show. Wally Wilson’s typewriter had been busy and few scenes had escaped ‘improvement’. The charming cadences of Goldsmith’s lines had now completely vanished and were replaced by the staccato banality of television comedy. There was more work for everyone. At enormous cost, the band had special rehearsals with Leon Schultz. The choreographer kept snaffling dancers away to learn new routines in the theatre bar. Actors were rarely seen without scripts in their hands as they tried to flush the old lines out with the new. Wherever there was a piano it was surrounded by a knot of actors struggling to pick up altered songs. The atmosphere was one of intense pressure.

But surprisingly it was cheerful. The company seemed more united than ever. And this was almost solely due to Christopher Milton. His enthusiasm was infectious and he inspired everyone to greater and greater efforts, he made them think that they were working on the greatest show that had ever happened and that every change was only going to make it that much greater. Charles could not help admiring the Pied Piper strength of the man’s personality. The company was carried along on the wave of his vitality. Even the previous doubters, like Winifred Tuke, made no more comments on the evisceration of Oliver Goldsmith. The triumph of the Christopher Milton was total.

He was everywhere. David Meldrum no longer even made a pretence of directing. He acted as a glorified messenger boy for the star, organising rehearsal schedules as instructed and fixing the details of the increasingly elaborate technical side of the show.

Christopher Milton shared Charles’ fascination for the mechanics of theatre and seemed to feel the magic of the old building. But he didn’t just want to stand and dream while a sense of history seeped into him; he wanted to recapture that history and recreate the splendours of Victorian illusion. The Star Trap was quickly enlisted into the Chase sequence to fire Tony Lumpkin on to the stage from the bowels of the earth. (It was hoped to accompany this entrance with a flash from an electrically-fired maroon, but with the IRA bombers again in action, managements were nervous of sudden bangs in their theatres.) Moments later, Tony Lumpkin descended from the flies on a Kirby wire, then shot behind a tree only to reappear within seconds (thanks to the judicious use of a double) rising from the Grave Trap flanked by two eighteenth-century go-go dancers. The sequence was a far cry from She Stoops to Conquer, but it was moving towards the Chaplinesque quality the star wanted. Of course as the business got more and more detailed, so it expanded and yet more of the original plot had to be cut to accommodate it. At the current rate of progress, by the time the show got to London it would have no more substance than a half-hour episode of Straight Up, Guv. ‘This week lovable con-man Lionel Wilkins fools some supporting actors into believing that a private house is a pub — with hilarious consequences.’

But Lumpkin! was beginning to work. Taking Christopher Milton’s advice and forgetting Goldsmith, Charles began to see what was emerging, and it was something with enormous potential. In his own strange way, Christopher Milton was a considerable artist. His instinct for the theatrical and particularly the comic was unerring. Charles began to see the situation as a Faustian one in which the star was achieving earthly success at the cost of his immortal soul. The dark side of madness and crime was a necessary complement to the genius of the public image.

After a very hard day’s rehearsal on the Tuesday Charles was leaving the theatre to grab a quick bite before the evening performance when he met Suzanne Horst ‘Ah,’ she said accusingly, ‘there you are. Have you asked him yet?’

‘What?’ His mind was completely blank. He could only remember Suzanne drunk in his arms at the time of Pete Masters’ accident.

‘About the interview. You said you’d ask him.’

‘Oh, did I?’ He tried to sound ingenuous and squirm out of it. ‘Yes, and you didn’t do it in Bristol, which means I’ve lost some time. So look, I want to do the radio interview this week. It’s for Radio Brighton and I’ve promised them I’ll do it while he’s down here.’ The last sentence was not an appeal for help from a position of weakness; it was a reproof to Charles for failing to discharge a duty. Suzanne was a sharply efficient young lady once again; the warmth of their last encounter was only a product of the drink. Either she had forgotten it or was determined that it should be forgotten. ‘So look, when am I going to be able to do it?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he prevaricated. ‘We’re rehearsing very hard at the moment and — ’

‘Have you asked him yet?’

Faced with the point-blank question, Charles could only admit he hadn’t.

Suzanne Horst gave a contemptuous grunt. ‘Do you realise, you’ve wasted a lot of my time. I thought you were asking him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled inadequately, trying to remember how he’d got into the position of agreeing to help her. ‘Does that write off the magazine article as well?’

‘No, it only slows that down too.’ Her mind did not accommodate the idea of failure. ‘But I’ve been doing quite a lot of background research on it.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes, I went to see the old lady who ran his stage school, that sort of thing.’ A firm reminder to Charles that that was his next priority. He started to make leaving noises, but did not escape without the final rap over the knuckles. ‘I’m very disappointed in you, Charles. I was relying on you. Now I’ll have to try my own more direct methods.’

Maybe it was the meeting with Suzanne that decided Charles to present himself at the Ellen da Costa Stage School in the guise of a journalist, or maybe it was just the obvious role to take when seeking information. Some inner warning mechanism told him not to go as Charles Paris.

There were some good old-clothes shops near the station in Brighton and he had kitted himself out well. The suit was cheaply cut, but looked newish, and the tie was a touch of psychedelic bravado, too young for its wearer and too old to be fashionable. His hair was greyed and Brylcreemed back like raked grass. A pair of pebble glasses changed the shape of his face and made seeing almost impossible. He stained two fingers of his right hand yellow and bought a packet of cigarettes. He didn’t shave and rubbed a little Leichner No. 16 on to darken his jowl. Then an unfamiliar after-shave to cover the grease-paint smell.

He studied the effect in the mirror and thought he looked sufficiently anonymous. The face that looked back at him was like a child’s Potato Man, random features stuck on to a vegetable. He adopted a slightly hunched stance, as if shrinking from the cold. It looked all right.

‘Now just a name and a voice. He fabricated Frederick Austick from the names of the first two victims of the accidents, then decided it was too obvious and amended it to Alfred Bostock. Despite temptations to go fancy or double-barrelled, he stuck at that. He tried a few words in his Moby Dick voice (‘Allegorically inconsistent’ — Coventry Evening Telegraph), but was more satisfied with the one he’d used as Bernard in Everything in the Garden (‘Authentic suburban twang’ — Surrey Comet).

He didn’t really know who he was disguising himself from — the rest of the Lumpkin! company were rehearsing on the Wednesday morning — but as usual he felt more able to cope with a difficult task in character.

The Ellen da Costa Stage School had closed some years before, but its principal still lived in the building (and still kept her hand in by giving elocution lessons to the young people of Brighton who had impediments or social aspirations). The school was a tall Victorian private house off one of the sea-front squares. Its owner’s reduced circumstances were indicated by the cluster of tenants’ doorbells attached with varying degrees of permanency to the old front door frame. Charles pressed the one whose plastic window showed a copperplate ‘Ellen da Costa’ cut from a visiting card.

She answered promptly, a long gaunt lady in black, whose flowing dress and shawl combined with a tangle of hanging beads to make her look like a bentwood hat stand. Her hair was swept back in flamenco dancer style, as if to justify her Spanish surname, but the white line at the roots gave the lie to its sleek blackness. The skin of her face was drawn tight over her cheekbones, as if, like the hair, its tension was maintained by the system of asymmetrical combs at the back of the head. She was made up with skill, but a skill which belonged to an earlier age and survives now only in opera.

But she had style and must once have been a beautiful woman. Though probably seventy, she behaved with the assurance of a woman who has no doubt of her sexual magnetism. There was no coquetry, but a grace and dignity, heightened by her theatrical manner.

‘Good morning,’ she enunciated with the attention to each vowel and consonant which she had instilled into generations of young hopefuls.

‘Hello, I’m Alfred Bostock.’ He slipped easily into his Everything in the Garden twang. ‘I’m a journalist. I’m researching an article on Christopher Milton and I’m here because I’ve heard that you had so much to do with shaping his early career.’

She laughed a clear, tinkling laugh, only shown to be staged by the over-dramatic intake of breath which followed it. ‘Ah, dear Christopher. Everyone wants to know about him.’

‘Other members of the Press, you mean?’

‘Yes, dear boy. There was the cub from the local rag, then a charming American girl, and now you.’

‘Yes, I hope you don’t mind going over the ground again.’

‘Mind? But, mon cher, I am always delighted to speak about my little ones. And when it is the one, the one of all others who had the je ne sais quoi, the unknowable something that is stardom, why should I refuse? We who serve genius must do our duty. Do come in.’

Charles, who was beginning to find her language a bit excessive, followed her up a couple of staircases to a dark sitting-room. It needn’t have been as dark as it was, but much of the window was obscured by an Art Deco glass fire-screen with a colourful design of a butterfly. The splashes of pale green, blue and red which the sun cast over the floor and furniture gave an ecclesiastical flavour to the room and this was intensified by the rows of photographs in ornate metal frames on the walls. They looked like images of saints and youthful miracle-workers, with their slicked hair and unearthly smiles. They were presumably the ‘little ones’, the pupils who had taken their theatrical orders under Miss da Costa’s guidance and gone on to work in the field.

Two untimely candles added to the stuffy atmosphere of Italian Catholicism which the room generated. Every surface was crowded with souvenirs, more tiny framed photographs, dolls, masks, gloves, programmes, massed untidily like offerings before a shrine.

The votaress sank dramatically into a small velvet chair and lay back so that the candle-light played gently over her fine profile. It reminded Charles of Spotlight photographs of ten years before, when every actor and actress was captured in a fuzzy light which picked out their bones in a murk of deepening shadows. (Nowadays actors tend to be photographed as if they’ve just come off a building site or are about to start life sentences for rape.) ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you want to ask me about Christopher.’

She didn’t ask for any credentials, which was a relief, because Charles hadn’t thought through the details of what Alfred Bostock was meant to be researching.

‘Yes, I’m after a bit of background, you know, what was he like as a child?’ Charles mentally practised his Alfred Bostock voice by repeating ‘Ford Cortina’, ‘double glazing’ and ‘ceiling tiles’ to himself.

‘Christopher came to me when he was ten.’ Ellen da Costa settled down to her recitation from Lives of the Saints. ‘Just a scrap of a boy, but with that same appealing charm and, of course, the talent. Even then, when he was unformed, the talent was there. Quite exceptional. His parents had died, in a car crash, I think, and it was an aunt who brought him to me. Very self-possessed he was.’

‘When was this that he first came to you?’

Ellen da Costa gave him a look for talking in prayers, but she answered his question, revealing that she had not been in on the shedding of four years considered necessary to the star’s career.

She then continued at some length describing the evolution of the embryo talent under the ideal laboratory conditions of her school. Charles was beginning to feel sated with superlatives when she offered to illustrate her lecture with a collection of press cuttings pasted into large blue ledgers.

They weren’t very revealing. One or two good notices for the young Christopher Milton, but nothing which suggested a performer set to take the world by storm. Charles mentioned this to Ellen da Costa in suitably reverential tones.

‘Ah well, the press has never been notorious for its recognition of true quality, particularly in the theatre. I once knew an actor.. ’ the pause was deliberately left long to summon up images of years of wild passion. ‘… a very great actor, who was nearly crucified by the critics. It was a martyrdom, a true martyrdom, very triste. Pardon my speaking so of your chosen occupation — ’ for a moment Charles couldn’t think what she was talking about — ‘but in my experience the press has never, in this country anyway, had the delicatesse to understand the workings of genius.’

Charles did not attempt to defend his assumed calling, but murmured something suitable. ‘Also,’ she continued, her finely modulated voice drawing out the final ‘o’ almost to breaking point, ‘perhaps Christopher was not fully realised at first. The potential was there, massive potential. Of course, with my experience I could see that, I was sympathique to it, but it was slow to blossom. At first there were others who appeared more talented than he, certainly who attracted more public notice, more press reaction, more work.’

‘They worked while they were here?’

She at once became guarded, as if this were a patch of coals over which she had been hauled before. ‘Most stage schools also act as agencies for child performers and a lot of our pupils do a great deal of work, subject of course to the legal restrictions of only working forty days in the year and with adequate breaks. All the children are chaperoned and — ’

But Charles was not writing a muck-raking article on the exploitation of child actors, so he tactfully cut her short, and asked if she would show him some of the early photographs of Christopher Milton.

She obliged readily. ‘Here are some from 1952.’ They looked very dated. Styles of period stage costume change quite as much as current fashion and the starched ruffs and heavy Elizabethan garments the children wore had the same distant unreal quality as Victorian pornography. ‘This is from a production of Much Ado my students did. Christopher was playing Claudio.’

Charles took the photograph she proffered. Christopher Milton’s face was instantly recognisable, even under a jewelled and feathered hat. All twenty-three years had done was to cut the creases deeper into his skin.

But it was the other two children who intrigued Charles. They were beautiful. Their grace in the heavy costumes made them look like figures from an Elizabethan painting and showed up Christopher Milton as very twentieth century, almost gauche in doublet and hose. The girl had a perfect heart-shaped face and long-lashed eyes whose grave stare, even from the old photograph, was strongly sensual. She appeared to be looking at the boy, who returned her gaze with the same kind of intensity. He had the epicene grace which some adolescent boys capture before they coarsen into adults. The face was almost baby-like in its frame of long blond curls. The eyes were deep-set and powerful.

‘Claudio,’ Charles repeated after a long pause. ‘That’s not the best part in the play. Presumably this young man played Benedict?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was he good?’

‘Yes, he was very good. He did a lot of film work in his teens. Gareth Warden, do you remember the name?’

‘It rings a bell.’ Yes, Julian Paddon had mentioned it and, now he saw the photograph, Charles realised that Gareth Warden had been in the film he’d caught the tail-end of on Jim Waldeman’s television. That seemed so long ago it was like a memory from a previous incarnation. ‘And the girl?’

‘Prudence Carr. She was a clever little actress, so clever.’

‘And she played Beatrice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any idea what happened to her? Or to Gareth Warden, come to that?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Bostock. The theatre brings its share of heartbreaks to everyone who is involved in it.’ She gave a long sigh, which was a good demonstration of the breath control so vital for elocution and which was also meant to imply a lifetime of theatrical heartbreaks. ‘Neither of them did much so far as I know. Dear Garry had the misfortune of early success. It’s so difficult for them to make the transition from playing child parts to adult ones. As you see, he was a beautiful boy. Perhaps he lost his looks as he got older. Perhaps he decided the theatre was not the career he wanted. Je no sais pas. He hasn’t kept in touch at all.’

‘And the girl?’

‘The same story. I haven’t seen her since she left my care. Maybe she didn’t go into the theatre.’

‘She should have done. With looks like that. And if she could act as well as you say.’

‘Ah, she was magic. But things change. Fate takes a hand. Maybe she settled down and got married. How many promising careers have been cut short by matrimony. And how many only started by the failure of matrimony,’ she added mysteriously with a suffering gaze out of the window to some distant memory. ‘But c’est la vie. Some rise and some fall. Of those three, all the same age, all so talented, one was chosen, one who was more talented, one who had the real magic of stardom, and that was dear Christopher. He triumphed and left his rivals standing.’

With recent knowledge of Christopher Milton’s methods of leaving his rivals standing, Charles wondered if there was some story from the past which might show a parallel. ‘Presumably, Miss da Costa, with three students who were so talented in the same area, there must have been moments of jealousy between them?’ he probed.

‘Ah, the young are always jealous. They are so afraid, they feel that if they are not the absolute best in the world, then they are the absolute worst. Only with time can they understand that most are destined to be fairly good or fairly bad, that the world is made up of mediocrity and that only a chosen few, like dear Christopher, will be the best.’

Charles tried to move her from generalisations to the specific. ‘You mean they were jealous of each other?’

‘But of course. They would not be normal if they weren’t.’

‘And was that jealousy ever expressed in violence?’

‘Violence?’ Her eyes widened and again she stiffened as if he were trying to find scandal. ‘Of course not I kept a respectable school, Mr Bostock. Nowadays, if one can believe the newspapers, violence in the classroom is commonplace. I did not allow it in my school.’

‘No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.’ Charles covered his retreat clumsily, realising that he wasn’t going to get any answers to that question. But then it struck him that a bit of well-placed journalistic boorishness might be productive. ‘Of course, Miss da Costa, another thing we keep reading about in the newspapers is sex in the classroom.’

‘Sex.’ She gave the word Lady Bracknell delivery.

‘Yes, I mean, a group of young adolescents together, it’s inevitable that they’re going to form relationships. I was wondering, I mean, say these three youngsters, was there also some kind of emotional attachment between them?’ He was glad he had come in disguise. Charles Paris could sever have managed this crudeness of approach.

The question touched a nerve which had apparently been exposed before. ‘Mr Bostock, I don’t think there is any need to go over this ground again. The investigation by the local education authority in 1963 revealed that I was quite blameless in that matter.’

Intriguing though it was, Miss da Costa’s dark secret had no relevance to his current enquiries, so Charles tried to retrieve some of the ground he had lost. ‘I’m sorry, I think you misunderstand me. I’m not talking about 1963. As you know, I’m interested only in Christopher Milton. What I meant by my question was, was there maybe some early schoolboy romance we could mention? You know, the women readers go for all that stuff. “My first romance.” It was a perfectly innocent enquiry.’

It worked. ‘Oh, I see.’ She sat back. ‘I’m sorry, but I have had cause in my life to be somewhat wary of the press. When one has figured in the private life of the great…’ Again she left the hint of her wildly romantic past dangling to be snapped up by anyone interested. Charles wasn’t, so she continued after a pause. ‘Well, of course, when you are speaking of young people, of beautiful young people, yes, l’amour cannot be far away. Oh, I’m sure at one time or another, all three of them were in love with each other. All such sensitive creatures. Yes, I have seen the two boys wildly, madly in love. I have seen them both look at Prudence in a way… in a way one can recognise if one has seen it directed at oneself. Then one understands. Ah, I sometimes wonder if one has loved at all if one has not heard a lover’s voice reciting Swinburne soft in one’s ear. Don’t you?’

He thought that Charles Paris, and Alfred Bostock’s answers to that question might well be identical, so he tried to get the conversation back on the subject and avoid the Ellen da Costa Anthology of Love Poetry. ‘Hmm,’ he offered, in a way that he hoped dismissed Swinburne. ‘I was wondering, do you know if either of the affairs with Prudence continued after they left the school?’

‘Mr Bostock, I do not like your word “affair”; it implies impropriety at my school.’

‘I’m sorry. You’re misunderstanding me again. I just meant, you know, the… friendships.’

‘That, Mr Bostock, I’m afraid I don’t know. For the first year after they left, I heard a little of them — well, that was inevitable. I act as agent for all my pupils for their first year out of school.’

‘You mean you put them under exclusive contract?’

‘I prefer to think that I protect them from some of the sharks and exploiters in the agency business. But after the year, I heard nothing of Garry or Prudence. Of course, I heard a great deal about Christopher. Everywhere these days, one hears about Christopher. Did you see this in the local paper?’ She opened one of the blue ledgers and pointed to the cutting from the previous day’s edition. It was already neatly glued in. Charles found the promptness of its filing sad. It opened a little window on to the great emptiness of the old lady’s life. He told her that he had seen the article and rose to leave.

Now she seemed anxious to detain him. ‘Did you notice, he said in the interview that he’d try to come and see me while the show’s down here?’

‘Yes. Well, I believe that the company are doing a great deal of rehearsal at the moment.’

‘Oh yes, I fully understand.’ She reclined elegantly in her chair, the High Priestess of the Cult, prepared to wait forever for her Mystic Experience.