The Word Is Murder

Twenty-one RADA

I had no idea what Hawthorne meant, but the more I thought about it, the gloomier I became. How could I possibly have been responsible for an arson attack on Nigel Weston’s home? I hadn’t even known where he lived until I went there and I hadn’t spoken a word while Hawthorne, with his customary lack of tact, had laid into the older man. Nor had I told anyone we were planning to see him – apart from my wife, my assistant and perhaps one of my sons. Was Hawthorne deliberately taking his anger out on me? It wouldn’t have surprised me. Something had happened that he hadn’t anticipated so he had lashed out at whoever happened to be closest.

I wondered where this left our inquiry. When he was at my flat, Hawthorne had more or less eliminated Alan Godwin from his investigation and I thought I’d heard the last of the former judge too. It was true that Weston’s connection with Diana Cowper and the fact that he had allowed her to walk free were troubling but there was no proof that he had committed any crime. And yet now he had been attacked! Just when I was beginning to think that there was no connection between the murders and the car accident after all, the exact opposite had proved to be true.

Diana Cowper had been driving the car that had killed Timothy Godwin and injured his brother. She had fled from the scene to protect her son, Damian Cowper. Judge Weston had let her off with the very lightest slap on the wrist. All three of them had been attacked … two of them fatally. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

But that raised another question. How did Amanda Leigh, the girl who had acted with Damian Cowper at RADA and who had mysteriously disappeared, fit into all this? It might be, of course, that she didn’t. I had been the one who had looked her up on my iPhone after we left Grace Lovell’s house and although Hawthorne had read the newspaper article he hadn’t made any comment on it. So I couldn’t be sure that it had any relevance at all.

I was suddenly disgusted with myself.

It was the middle of the afternoon and I was sitting on my own, in the cheap, garish café next to Hounslow East tube station which I had entered after I had parted company with Hawthorne. He had taken the tube. I was surrounded by mirrors, illuminated menus and a wide-screen TV showing some daytime antiques show. I had ordered two pieces of toast and a cup of tea which I didn’t actually want. What had happened to me? When I had first met Hawthorne, I had been a successful writer. I was the creator of a television show that was seen in fifty countries and I also happened to be married to the producer. Hawthorne had worked for us. He had been paid ten or twenty pounds an hour to provide information which I had used in my scripts.

But in just a couple of weeks, everything had changed. I had allowed myself to become a silent partner, a minor character in my own book! Worse than that, I had somehow persuaded myself that I couldn’t work out a single clue without asking him what was going on. Surely I was cleverer than that. For too long I had been following in his footsteps. Now, with Hawthorne away, there was an opportunity for me to take the lead.

There was an oily sheen on the surface of my tea. The toast had been covered in a spread that had melted into something that might have come out of a car. I pushed the plate away and took out my phone. Hawthorne was going to be away for the rest of the day, which gave me plenty of time to investigate this new suspect: Amanda Leigh. Oddly, there had been no photograph of her accompanying the article in the South London Press. I wondered what she looked like. There were no pictures that I could find on the net and only a couple of other references to her. She had disappeared and she had never been found. That was it. Her parents might still be grieving but public interest had evaporated.

I wanted to know more about her. If I really had been looking in the wrong direction all this time – which is to say, in the direction of Deal – then it was time to find out what I had been missing. What could possibly have happened at RADA that might link Amanda, Damian and Diana Cowper and how could it conceivably have led to murder?

Even as I considered the question, it occurred to me that I had a way in. Occasionally, RADA invites actors, directors and screenwriters to come in and meet the students and the year before I’d talked to a whole bunch of them about that curious love triangle: actor, writer, script. Over the course of an hour, I’d tried to explain to them how a good actor will always find things in a script that the writer doesn’t know are there while a bad one will insert things that the writer would prefer they didn’t. I’d talked to them about the way a character is created. Christopher Foyle, for example, existed on the page a long time before Michael Kitchen was cast but only when that decision had been made did the real work begin. There was always a tension between the two of us. For example, Michael insisted almost from the start that Foyle would never ask questions, which made life difficult for me and seemed, to say the least, unusual for a detective. And yet it wasn’t such a stupid idea. We found other, more original ways to get to the information that the plot demanded. Foyle had a way of insinuating himself, getting suspects to say more than they intended. In this way, year after year, the character developed.

Anyway, I talked to the students about this and many other things and I’m not sure how much they benefited from the session. I enjoyed it very much, though. There’s nothing a writer likes more than talking about writing.

I had been invited by an associate director. I’ll call her Liz as she’s asked not to be identified. I telephoned her from the café. Fortunately, she happened to be at RADA that afternoon and agreed to see me for an hour at three o’clock. Liz is a smart, rather intense woman, a few years older than me. She had trained to be an actor herself but had ended up writing and directing. She had gone back into teaching following a bruising encounter with the press. This had involved a play about British Sikhs which she had directed. Though well intentioned, it had led to riots, with two local councillors (she told me they had neither read nor seen the work) whipping the crowds into a fury. The artistic director had grovelled. The play had been cancelled. Nobody had come to Liz’s defence. Even now, many years later, she prefers to remain anonymous.

RADA’s main building on Gower Street is an odd place. The entrance, with its two statues of comedy and tragedy sculpted by Alan Durst in the 1920s, is both imposing and barely noticeable. The narrow door leads into a building that seems far too small for the three theatres, offices, rehearsal rooms, craft shops and so on that it contains. I remembered it as being a maze of white corridors and staircases, with swing doors everywhere, so that on my first visit I felt a little like a laboratory rat. This time, I met Liz in the rather chic new café on the ground floor.

‘I remember Damian Cowper very well,’ she told me. We’d both sat down with cappuccinos, surrounded by black and white photographs of the current third year. There were a few other students at the tables around us, chatting or reading scripts. She kept her voice low. ‘I always had a feeling he’d do well. He was a cocky little sod, though.’

‘I didn’t realise you were teaching here then,’ I said.

‘It was 1997. I’d just joined. Damian would have been in his second year.’

‘You didn’t like him.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. I tried to keep my feelings about all the students under wraps. The trouble with this place is that everyone is super-sensitive and you can all too easily get accused of favouritism. I’m just telling you the facts. He was very ambitious. He’d have stabbed his own mother if it would help him to get cast.’ She considered what she’d just said. ‘That’s not very appropriate, is it, given the circumstances. But you know what I mean.’

‘Did you see his Hamlet?’

‘Yes. And he was absolutely wonderful. I almost hate to admit it. He only got the part because the boy who was cast got glandular fever. We had a bit of an epidemic that year and for a while the whole place was like London during the Great Plague. Of course, he’d wanted the lead from the very start. He did it for his Tree, which was his way of showing off. Actually, you know, you were right – what you said a moment ago. I didn’t like him. He had a way of manipulating people which I thought was a little creepy and then there was that business in Deal.’

‘What about it?’ I was suddenly interested. Was there a link between the car accident and the drama school which Hawthorne didn’t know about and which we had both missed?

‘Well, it’s just that he used it in one of the acting classes. We were exploring what we called public solitude and the students had to bring in an object that mattered to them in some way and talk about it in front of their classmates.’ She paused. ‘He brought in a plastic toy, a London bus. He also played us a recording of a song, a nursery rhyme: “The wheels on the bus go round and round”. You must know it? He told us it had been played at the funeral of the little boy who had been killed in the accident, when his mother had been driving the car.’

‘What exactly was creepy?’ I asked.

‘I actually had a bit of a set-to with him afterwards. He was very emotional about it. He said the song had torn him to shreds, that he couldn’t get it out of his head – all that sort of stuff. But the truth is, I didn’t feel he was really connected to what had happened. I felt he was using it, almost like a prop. His monologue was too self-centred. In a way, that was the object of the exercise but in this case an eight-year-old boy had died. Damian’s mother might not have been entirely responsible but she had killed him. I didn’t think it was appropriate to use it in class and I told him so.’

‘What can you tell me about Amanda Leigh?’ I asked.

‘I remember her less well. She was very talented but quiet. She and Damian went out for a while and they were very close. I’m afraid she didn’t have very much of a career after she left. A couple of musicals but nothing much else.’ She sighed. ‘That’s the way it happens sometimes. You can never really predict which way it’s going to go.’

‘And then she disappeared.’

‘It was in the newspapers and we even had the police asking questions here although her disappearance must have been four or five years after she’d left. There was some talk that she’d gone to meet a fan … you know, a stalker, although later on the police changed their minds and said it was probably someone she was dating. She’d dressed up smartly and her flatmates said she was in a good mood when she left. She was sharing a place somewhere in south London.’

‘Streatham.’

‘That’s right. Anyway, she went out and she was never seen again. Maybe there would have been more fuss about it if she’d been more famous or if anyone had made the connection between her and Damian Cowper. He was already making quite a name for himself. But I suppose lots of people go missing in London and she was just another of them.’

‘You said you had a picture.’

‘Yes. You’re lucky because there are far fewer photographs from that time. These days, of course, everyone has phones. But we kept this because of the Hamlet.’ She had brought a large canvas bag with her and lifted it onto the table. ‘I found it in the office.’

She took out a framed black and white photograph which she laid between the coffee cups and I found myself looking through a window into 1999. There were five young actors, posing with almost exaggerated seriousness for the camera on a bare stage. I recognised Damian Cowper immediately. He hadn’t changed very much in twelve years. Back then he had been slimmer and prettier … cocky was exactly the word that sprang to mind. He was looking straight into the lens, his eyes challenging you to ignore him. He was dressed in black jeans and a black open-necked shirt, holding a white Japanese mask. Grace Lovell, who had played Ophelia, and the boy who had played Laertes were standing on either side of them. They both had fans, spread out over their heads.

‘That’s Amanda.’ Penny pointed to a girl with long hair, tied back, standing just behind them. She was playing a male part and was wearing the same clothes as Damian. I have to say that her photograph disappointed me. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting but she looked quite ordinary … pretty, freckled, hair tied back in a ponytail. She was standing on the very edge of the group, her head turned towards a man who was approaching from the side.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

The man had barely entered the frame and I couldn’t make out his face. He was black, wearing glasses, holding a bunch of flowers, noticeably older than the others.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Liz said. ‘He’s probably one of the parents. The photograph was taken after the first performance and the GBS was packed.’

‘Did you ever …?’

I was about to ask her something about Amanda’s relationship with Damian but it was just then that I saw something and stopped, mid-sentence. I was looking at one of the people in the photograph and quite suddenly I knew who it was. There could be no doubt of it and with a rush of excitement I realised that I had discovered something that might be important and that, just for once, I was one step ahead of Hawthorne. I knew something he didn’t! He had deliberately taunted me when we left Grace Lovell’s home and all along he had treated me with an indifference that sometimes edged close to contempt. Well, how amusing it would be if I was able to tell him what he’d missed when he got back from Canterbury. I couldn’t help smiling. It would be a delicious payback for all those hours following him around London, watching silently from the sidelines.

‘Liz, you’ve been brilliant,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose I can borrow this?’ I was referring to the photograph.

‘I’m sorry. It can’t leave the building. But you can take a picture of it if you like.’

‘That’s great.’ My iPhone had been on the table, recording our conversation. I picked it up and took a shot of the image. I stood up. ‘Thanks a lot.’

Outside RADA, I made three telephone calls. First, I arranged a meeting. Then I called my assistant, who was waiting for me at my office. I told her I wouldn’t be coming back this afternoon. Finally, I left a message for my wife, saying I might be a bit late for dinner.

In fact, I wouldn’t have dinner at all.