The Word Is Murder

Twenty An Actor’s Life

Grace Lovell had not returned to the flat in Brick Lane and I can’t say I blamed her. It would take a long time to wipe away all the blood that had been spilled and longer still to erase the memories of so much violence.

She and Ashleigh were staying at her parents’ home in Hounslow, close to Heathrow Airport, where her father worked as a senior commercial manager. Martin Lovell had taken the day off. He was a large, intimidating man, wearing a polo shirt that was too small for him, with shoulders straining at the fabric and butcher’s arms bursting out of the sleeves. He had shaved his head, which made it difficult to guess his age, but he must have been in his late fifties. Grace didn’t look anything like him. He was holding Ashleigh and had to be careful to concentrate on what he was doing. I could easily imagine him accidentally smothering the little girl in his bear-like embrace. As usual, she was showing no interest in what was going on, absorbed in the pages of a rag book.

The house was clean and modern, part of an estate which must have been perfectly aligned with the main runway as we were deafened every few minutes by the roar of the planes taking off. Grace and her father didn’t appear to notice the noise. Ashleigh positively enjoyed it, giggling with pleasure every time a plane went past. Grace had told us that Rosemary Lovell, her mother, was at work, teaching maths at a local secondary school. This left the five of us sitting awkwardly close to each other on sofas and armchairs that were rather too big for the room. Martin had offered us coffee, which we had refused. He sat quietly while Grace did most of the talking. From time to time I noticed him watching us with a strange, smouldering anger in his eyes.

Over the next twenty minutes, Grace described her life with Damian Cowper, how they had met, their relationship, their time in America. She was quite different from how she had been the last few times we had met her, as if Damian’s death had released her from some sort of obligation. As she talked, I realised that she had fallen out of love with him a long time ago and I remembered Hawthorne sarcastically dismissing her as ‘the grieving widow’. Well, he’d been right about that. She’d been the actress all along and this was her moment in the spotlight. I don’t mean to be unkind. I liked her. She was young and charismatic and she had allowed her life to be stolen away from her. Although she never said as much, it was clear that Damian’s death would give her a chance to start again.

This is what she said.

‘I always wanted to be an actress, for as long as I can remember. I loved drama class when I was at school and I went to the theatre whenever I could afford it. I’d go to the National first thing in the morning and queue up for ten-pound seats or I’d get tickets right at the back of the top circle. I worked part-time in a hairdressing salon in the school holidays so I could afford it, and Mum and Dad were brilliant. They always supported me. When I told them I wanted to apply to RADA, they were a hundred per cent behind me.’

‘I tried to talk you out of it!’ Martin Lovell growled.

‘You came into town with me, Daddy. When I had my first audition, you sat in that pub round the corner.’ She turned back to us. ‘I was eighteen years old and I’d just taken my A levels. Dad wanted me to go to university and apply when I finished but I couldn’t wait. I had four auditions and they got more and more difficult. The last one was the worst. There were thirty of us and we were there for the whole day. We had to do a whole lot of classes and all the time we knew we were being watched by all these different people and that at least half of us wouldn’t be coming back. I felt sick with nerves but of course if I’d shown it that would have been the end of me. And then a few days later I got a telephone call from the head of RADA – he actually rings everyone personally – to say that I’d been accepted and it was like “Oh my God! That’s impossible!” It was all my dreams come true.

‘Then, of course, I had to work out how to pay for it. Dad said he’d put up half the money, which was amazing …’

‘I did it because I believed in you,’ Martin muttered, contradicting what he had said a moment before.

‘ … but I still had to find the other half. There hadn’t been local authority grants for five years and I couldn’t borrow the money, so there was a time when I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to go. In the end, RADA helped me out. There was a famous actor – they never told me his name – and he wanted to support someone who was just starting out. Maybe it helped that I was black. I heard they were keen to have a proper ethnic mix, so half my fees were taken care of and the following September I began.

‘I loved being at RADA. I loved every minute of it. Sometimes I felt completely exposed. It was an incredibly tense atmosphere and they made us work really hard. There were only twenty-eight of us in the year and a couple of students – a Scottish boy and a girl from Hong Kong – dropped out, so it was very intimate but at the same time you had to make yourself vulnerable. That was part of the training. There were times when I thought I just couldn’t do it and I’d go home and cry but then a teacher would encourage me or my friends would support me and somehow I’d get through it and I’d be stronger when I came out on the other side.

‘You want to know about Damian. You have to understand that we were very close as a group. We all loved each other. We really did. And we weren’t competitive at all – at least, not until the very end when we had to do our Tree and the agents were circling.’

‘What’s a tree?’ I asked.

‘Oh – it’s a showcase. You have to perform short scenes and monologues and lots of agents come to see your work. It’s named after the actor Beerbohm Tree.’ She picked up her train of thought. ‘At the beginning, of course, everyone got into different cliques. There were three girls from the north of England and we were all a bit scared of them. There were a couple of gay guys. Some of the students were older, in their late twenties, and they felt more comfortable with each other. To begin with, I was completely on my own. I remember sitting in a big circle on the first day, thinking to myself that these were the people I was going to spend the next three years of my life with and I didn’t know any of them. I was terrified!

‘But then, as I say, we got closer and almost from the very start if there was one person who stood out, it was Damian. Everyone knew him. Everyone admired him. He was the same age as me and he had hardly ever been in London – he lived in Kent – but he had this extraordinary confidence and the teachers were all over him. Nobody said he was a star; it didn’t work like that. But Damian always got the best casting and the best feedback and everyone wanted to be his best friend. Somehow that ended up being me. We didn’t sleep together, by the way. Well, we did … once. But it’s like I told you, we only got together after we’d left, quite a few years later.

‘Damian and me were very close but there was another girl he fancied – Amanda Leigh – although Damian always said that wasn’t her real name. She was crazy about the actress Vivien Leigh, and people said she’d changed her name to be more like her. I’ll tell you a bit more about her later. So there was Damian and Amanda and me and another boy, Dan Roberts, who was also a brilliant actor. A lot of people thought that Damian and Dan were into each other but that wasn’t true. The four of us were best friends and we stayed that way for the whole time we were there. It was only after we left that we all went our separate ways but I suppose that’s the business. My first job was with the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow. Damian was with the RSC. Dan was in Twelfth Night in Bristol. And I can’t remember what Amanda did but the main thing is we were apart.

‘I could talk to you all day about RADA. What I remember most is just this sense of belonging, of being with the right people in exactly the right place. They made us work incredibly hard – movement classes, voice classes, singing classes – and you had a ton of homework too. Nobody ever had any money. That was the funny thing. We’d hang out in this disgusting café called Sid’s and all the boys would be eating huge plates of chips and sausages and stuff like that because it was cheap. Some nights we’d go drinking at the Marlborough Arms. That was the pub where you waited for me, Daddy. But mainly everyone just went home and did their Lloyd or whatever else they had to do and then crashed out.’

I had no idea what doing a Lloyd meant. But this time I didn’t interrupt.

‘But if you’re interested in Damian, then I have to tell you about the third-year production of Hamlet, because that was when everything sort of came to a head. It was a really, really important production – first of all because it was Hamlet and whoever got that role was going to have a fantastic launch pad. Loads of agents would be there and it was going to be directed by Lindsay Posner, who’d done a whole load of great work at the Royal Court and we’d all seen his brilliant American Buffalo at the Young Vic. Everyone thought that Dan would get cast. He’d only had small parts in the last two productions and the rumour was that he’d been held back on purpose because he was going to be given this great chance to shine. Also, his Tree hadn’t gone as well as expected – he’d fluffed some of his lines. So it was his turn.

‘We were all excited, waiting for the list to go up. There was a tiny, cramped space near the pigeonholes where they’d put up the cast list and everyone would crowd around to see who was going to play what and which theatre was going to be used. By now, we were getting nervous too. We’d been there for three years and we were getting close to the end. The worst thing that could happen to you was to leave RADA without an agent. So these last productions really mattered.

‘Anyway, the list went up, and sure enough, Dan was cast as Hamlet. I got Ophelia, which was fantastic. Amanda only got a tiny part, as Osric – they were going to do it cross-gender. She only turned up in Act 5 but she’d played Imogen in Cymbeline earlier in the year so that was fair enough. Damian was going to play Laertes and he was happy about that although a lot of people said he should have been Hamlet. He’d done the ‘rogue and peasant slave’ soliloquy for his Tree and everyone said it was awesome. The production was going to be in modern dress and it was being staged in the GBS Theatre, which was down in the basement, and it was the coolest space in the building. Much cooler than the Vanbrugh.

‘We had five weeks of rehearsals, which sounds a lot but it was incredibly demanding. And then, one week in, everything changed – and the reason I’m telling you about this is that you could say it’s what changed my life. Dan got ill with glandular fever and couldn’t come to rehearsals, so after a lot of discussion he changed parts with Damian, which meant that suddenly Damian and I were working together for hours and hours on all these incredibly intense scenes. When I look back on it, that’s when I fell in love with him. When he was on the stage, he had this … magnetism. I mean, he was impressive when you met him in the street but when he was performing, it was like looking into a pool of water … or a well. He had a depth and a sort of clarity. Lindsay Posner loved working with him and that was how he got into the RSC. Lindsay was doing a whole lot of work at Stratford and the Barbican and he took Damian with him.

‘People still talk about that production of Hamlet. Damian, Dan and I all got agents as a result of it and the artistic director told me it was one of the best he’d ever seen. We did it in the round with no set and very few props. We used a lot of masks – Lindsay had been very influenced by Noh theatre. And there was no doubt that Damian was brilliant. He stole the show. Dan was great too – you could feel the energy and the violence in the fight scene in Act 5 – it was done with fans, not with swords. We actually got a standing ovation and that’s something that doesn’t often happen at RADA, not with agents in the audience.

‘But I remember it mainly because of Damian. You must know the play. Act 3, Scene 1. I was in tears at the end of it. Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown. All the suffering and the madness in the scene stayed with me. At one moment, Damian grabbed me by the throat and his face was so close to mine I could feel his breath on my lips. When he let me go, he left bruises. After we’d got together, he said he didn’t want to act with me again – but by then my acting career was on hold anyway, because of Ashleigh. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that what I loved most was the actor, more than the man. As a man, he could be …’

She couldn’t find the word she was looking for so her father supplied it: ‘A bastard.’

‘Dad!’

‘The way he treated you, the way he used you—’

‘He wasn’t always like that.’

‘He and his mother were like that from the very start. Both of them, as bad as each other.’

Grace looked at him disapprovingly but she didn’t argue with him. And then she was off again.

‘I was signed up by Independent Talent and my first job was an appearance in a TV show, Jonathan Creek. I only had a few lines – I played a magician’s assistant – but at least it was something on my CV. I got a few other jobs in TV: Casualty, Holby City, The Bill. And I did an advert for Stella Artois, which was amazing. I got to spend a week in Buenos Aires! I also started getting a lot of theatre. My best job was the Jonathan Kent season at the Haymarket. I had good parts in The Country Wife and a play by Edward Bond, The Sea. I even got a mention in the reviews. Fiona Brown, my agent, was certain things were going to happen for me. I was getting some great auditions too.

‘And then I met Damian again. He came to see The Country Wife. He hadn’t even realised I was in it but he had a friend who was playing Mrs Fidget. We bumped into each other backstage and went out for a drink. It was terrible really. I mean, we’d known each other and we’d been so close, yet we hadn’t seen each other for years and years.’

‘That was him,’ Martin Lovell said. Ashleigh had finished the rag book and fallen asleep in his arms. He laid her gently on the sofa. ‘All he cared about was his career. He never had friends. He used you.’

‘Don’t say that, Daddy.’ Grace still wasn’t disagreeing with him. ‘Damian was quite famous by now. I mean, people recognised his face even if they weren’t queuing up for autographs. He’d been in a lot of big films and TV shows and he’d got an award from the Evening Standard. He was already working in Hollywood. He was about to start shooting Star Trek. I saw at once that he was different. He was harder than I remembered. He had a sort of steel edge to him that might have come with being so rich and so successful – he’d just bought the flat on Brick Lane – but actually I think a lot of it was a sort of defence. You’ve got to be hard in this business. I’d say it’s part of an actor’s life.

‘We had a wonderful evening. Everyone loved the play and there was a real buzz in the air. We had far too much to drink and we started talking about RADA and all the times we’d had together. Damian had worked with a couple of people from the school. He told me that Dan had dropped out of acting, which is a shame because he was super-talented but that’s how it goes sometimes. You get offered tiny parts or understudies but the big auditions never quite click. Dan very nearly got the main part in Pirates of the Caribbean – in the end it went to Orlando Bloom. He also just missed out on Dr Zhivago for ITV. Amanda had disappeared, of course. Damian talked a lot about himself. Star Trek was paying him enough to put a deposit on a house in Los Angeles and he was thinking about moving out there altogether.

‘He was in England for three weeks, filming a mini-series, and we spent almost all that time together. I thought his flat in Brick Lane was amazing. I was sharing a tiny house in Clapham with two other actors and this was like another world. His phone never stopped ringing. It was his agent, his manager, his publicist, a newspaper, a radio station. I realised that this was the dream that I’d had in my head when I went to RADA except that for him it was real.’

‘It’ll be real for you too, Grace, now that he’s gone.’

‘That’s not fair, Dad. Damian never stood in my way.’

‘He got you pregnant just when your career was about to take off.’

‘It was my choice.’ She turned to us. ‘When I told him the news, Damian said he wanted to have a baby with me. He was thrilled. He asked me to move in with him. He said he had more than enough money for both of us and the baby. He told me to get on the next flight to LA.’

‘Did the two of you get married?’ Hawthorne asked. Unusually for him, he had been silent throughout Grace’s testimony although he had been listening intently.

‘No. We never did. Damian didn’t think there was any point.’

‘Damian was thinking of Damian,’ her father insisted. ‘He didn’t want to be tied down. And his mother was just as bad. All she cared about was her precious son. She never gave you the time of day.’

‘We both made the decision, Dad. You know that. And Diana wasn’t that bad. She was just lonely and a bit sad and thought the world of him.’ She went over to Ashleigh and brushed the hair out of her eyes. Then she continued: ‘I did what he told me. He sent me the ticket …’

‘Premium economy. He wouldn’t even pay business class.’

‘ … and I moved in with him. His agents managed to get us a visa. I don’t know how they did that but as things turned out Ashleigh was born in America and she even has American citizenship. Damian was already shooting Star Trek when I arrived, so I didn’t see a lot of him, but I didn’t mind. I helped him find the house that he bought. It only had two bedrooms but it was a lovely little place high up in the hills with wonderful views and a tiny pool. I loved it. He let me decorate it the way I wanted. I had a baby room decorated for Ashleigh and I went shopping in West Hollywood and Rodeo Drive. Damian came home late sometimes but we had weekends together and he introduced me to all his friends and I thought everything was going to be all right.’

She looked down and just for a moment I saw the sadness in her eyes.

‘Only it wasn’t. It was my fault, really. I didn’t much like Los Angeles even though I tried to. The trouble is, it’s not really a city at all. You have to get in the car to go anywhere but actually there isn’t anywhere to go. I mean, it’s shops and it’s restaurants and it’s the beach but somehow it all just feels a bit pointless. It was always too hot, particularly when I was pregnant. I found myself spending more and more time on my own in the house. I said that Damian introduced me to his friends, but he didn’t actually have that many of them and they were always gossiping about the work they were doing so inevitably I felt left out. They were mainly Brits, mainly actors. It’s funny out there. People seem to have their own little circles and they’re not unfriendly but they don’t want to let you in. And I was homesick! I missed Mum and Dad. I missed London. I missed my career.

‘Damian and me didn’t have fights but we weren’t completely happy together. It seemed to me that he was quite different from the Damian I’d known at RADA. Maybe it was because he was getting so famous. He’d come home and he’d be glad to see me and sometimes we’d be close but I often thought it was all just an act. He was always telling me about the famous people he’d met – Chris Pine and Leonard Nimoy and J. J. Abrams – and of course I was just sitting at home and that made me resentful. I wanted to be a mother but I wanted to be more than that too. Ashleigh was born and that was magical and Damian had a big party and he was the proud dad. But after that I found that he was away more and more. He’d been cast in season four of Mad Men and his whole life seemed to be about parties, premieres, fast cars and models, while I was stuck at home with feeding bottles, prams and nappies … or diapers, I should call them. He was getting through the money like nobody’s business. There was never enough for the gardeners and the grocery bills. It was like some cheap paperback version of Hollywood. All the clichés.’

‘Tell them about the drugs,’ her father said.

‘He took cocaine and other stuff – but that wasn’t anything special. All the Brits out there did the same. You couldn’t go to a party without someone getting on their mobile and minutes later a motorbike dispatch rider would arrive with the little plastic bags. In the end, I stopped going to the parties. I’ve never taken drugs and I didn’t feel comfortable.’

Ashleigh stirred on the sofa and Martin scooped her up again. The child lolled happily in his arms.

‘I make it all sound awful,’ Grace continued. ‘But that’s only because I’m telling it now that it’s all over. You can’t be completely unhappy in Los Angeles. Not when the sun is shining and the garden is full of bougainvillea. Damian never hurt me. He wasn’t a bad man. He was just …’

‘ … selfish.’ Martin Lovell finished the sentence.

‘Successful,’ Grace contradicted him. ‘He was eaten up by success.’

‘And now he’s dead,’ Hawthorne said. He glanced bleakly in her direction. ‘You might say that it couldn’t have happened at a better time.’

‘I don’t know what you mean!’ Grace was angry. ‘I would never say that. He was Ashleigh’s father. She’s going to grow up without ever knowing him.’

‘I understand he left a will.’

Grace faltered. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what’s in it?’

‘Yes. His lawyer, Charles Kenworthy, was at the funeral and I asked him then. I had to know we’re going to be secure, if only for Ashleigh’s sake. I don’t have to worry. He left everything to us.’

‘He had life insurance.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘I do, Grace.’ Sitting there in his suit with his legs crossed and his arms folded, Hawthorne was both at his most relaxed and at his most ruthless. His dark eyes were fixed on her, pinning her down. ‘He took out a policy six months ago. From what I understand, you’ll get almost a million quid. Not to mention the flat in Brick Lane, the house in Hollywood Hills, the Alfa Romeo Spider—’

‘What are you saying, Mr Hawthorne?’ her father demanded. ‘Do you think my daughter killed Damian?’

‘Why not? From the sound of it, you wouldn’t have been too sorry and frankly, if I’d been stuck with him, I wouldn’t have thought twice.’ He turned back to Grace. ‘I notice you arrived in England the day before Damian’s mum died …’

I hadn’t had a chance to tell Hawthorne what I had found, looking through my notes. I was disappointed to hear he had got there without me.

‘Did you see her?’ he asked.

‘I was going to visit Diana. But Ashleigh was exhausted after the flight.’

‘I suppose you were flying premium economy again! So you didn’t go round?’

‘No!’

‘Grace was here with me,’ her father said. ‘And I’ll swear to that in a court of law if I have to. And when Damian was killed, she was still at the funeral.’

‘And where were you during the funeral, Mr Lovell?’

‘I was in Richmond Park with Ashleigh. I took her to see the deer.’

Hawthorne swung back to Grace. ‘When you were telling us about RADA, you said there was something more that you wanted to tell us about the girl who called herself Amanda Leigh. What was that?’

‘She was Damian’s first girlfriend, but right at the end they split up. As a matter of fact, I think she left him for Dan Roberts. I saw them kissing just before we started rehearsing Hamlet. And I mean kissing! They were completely into each other.

‘She played Osric in the production. I told you that. Afterwards, she did quite well. She did a couple of big musicals; that was her speciality. The Lion King and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But then she disappeared.’

‘You mean she stopped working?’ I asked.

‘No. She disappeared. She went out for a walk one day and she didn’t come back. It was in all the newspapers. Nobody ever found out what happened to her.’

A quick Google search on my iPhone outside Martin Lovell’s home produced the following newspaper report from eight years before:

I showed it to Hawthorne, who nodded as if it was exactly what he had expected to read. ‘So why are you interested in Amanda Leigh?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer. We were still standing in the middle of the estate, surrounded by identical houses and gardens, a few parked cars providing the only primary colours. Just then, another plane screamed overhead, its wheels lowered, its gigantic bulk blocking out the light. I waited for it to pass. ‘Are you going to tell me that Amanda Leigh was also murdered? But she’s got nothing to do with this. We never even heard of her before today.’

Hawthorne’s phone rang. He held up a hand as he dug it out of his pocket and answered it. The conversation lasted about a minute although Hawthorne barely said anything – just ‘yes’ two or three times, then ‘right’ and ‘OK.’ Finally he rang off. His face was grim. ‘That was Meadows,’ he said.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I’ve got to go back to Canterbury. He wants to talk to me.’

‘Why?’

Hawthorne looked at me in a way that made me feel uneasy. ‘Someone set fire to Nigel Weston’s house last night,’ he said. ‘They poured petrol through the letter box and set it alight.’

‘My God! Is he dead?’

‘No. He and his boyfriend got out all right. Weston is in hospital. He has smoke inhalation injuries but nothing serious. He’s going to be fine.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m going to get the train.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think you should. I’ll go there alone.’

‘Why?’ Another silence. I challenged him. ‘You know who was responsible for the fire, don’t you?’ I said.

And there it was again, the bleakness in his eyes that I knew so well and which somehow told me that he saw the world in a completely different way from me and that we would never actually be close.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You were.’