Simon Brett - A Comedian Dies

While Charles’ mind stove to digest this incongruity, his voice said he didn’t want to speak to Vita anyway.

‘Oh.’ Norman sounded desperately unhappy.

‘It’s about the dancers in the Hunstanton show.’

Of course Norman took it wrong. ‘Look, you said you’d never mention that. Are you trying to blackmail me, because I daren’t let Vita find out about — ’

‘No, no,’ Charles soothed. ‘I wouldn’t dream of breaking your confidence.’

‘Oh.’ Norman sounded appeased but still suspicious. ‘Then what do you want?’

‘I’m trying to trace one of the dancers. Janine. She was the one who was having an affair with Peaky, wasn’t she?’

‘Everyone reckoned so. Mind you, I don’t think she was the first in the company.’ This was said with a kind of wistful relish. Maybe Norman del Rosa didn’t confine his voyeurism to peeking at girls changing.

‘And she had a row with Peaky on the day he died?’

‘Yes.’

‘When he broke off the affair.’

‘That’s what everyone reckoned.’ Norman del Rosa was unwilling to answer anything off his own bat; he needed the support of majority opinion.

‘And then she went off in the middle of the show?’

‘Yes, she wasn’t well. Gastric trouble.’

Fairly easy to fake. Lots of visits to the lavatory and nobody would question their authenticity. ‘So, what. . she went home?’

‘Back to her digs, yes. Got a taxi. Actually. .’ Norman dropped his voice for the great daring of an opinion, ‘I think it could have been caused by the emotional upset.’

Charles agreed, but didn’t say so. ‘Do you happen to remember when she got the taxi home? Straight after their opening number, or what?’

She may have ordered it then. I don’t think it arrived till the end of the interval.’

Giving her plenty of time to tamper with the amplifier extension. ‘Look, I want to get in touch with this Janine. Any idea where she lives?’

Anyone would have asked why Charles wanted to contact the girl, but Norman del Rosa wasn’t going to get involved. ‘I don’t know, Charles. I mean, I know where she was staying in Hunstanton, but she’ll have gone from there.’

‘Give me the address anyway. She must have told the landlady where she lived.’

Norman gave the information, again making no concession to curiosity. Maybe he regarded this as the price of Charles’ silence over his own sad little secret.

‘And if I don’t get any joy there, do you know who the group’s agent was?’

Again Norman obliged. Then, with ill-disguised relief, he put the phone down.

Janine’s Hunstanton landlady had stepped straight out of Your Favourite Seaside Landlady Jokes. As she fulminated down the phone, Charles visualized a McGill postcard figure, arms folded righteously beneath her enormous bosom, bottom thrust backwards with rectitude, body swathed in a print overall and curlered hair scooped up into a red print handkerchief.

Basically she was offended by his call. And she let him know it. ‘I keep a respectable private hotel and I don’t give the addresses of my clients to any Tom, Dick and Harry who phones up out of the blue. I’ll have you know, I only allow in a very respectable type of client. I don’t want you to think that I’m prepared to act as a mere convenience. I don’t set up assignations for girls who come and stay here. You ought to be ashamed at your age — chasing after young girls. She’s not been here for weeks, anyway. I know you dirty old men, pestering girls young enough to be your daughters. Well, I don’t keep a licensed brothel and — ’

‘Look, all I’m trying to do is to contact the girl to — ’

‘Don’t you come the heavy breather with me, my man. Oh, I know your sort. You think just because a girl’s a dancer, because she’s prepared, for her art, to show a little leg onstage that — ’

The pips went. Charles decided it wasn’t worth putting in more money.

He stood irresolute by the pay phone on the landing of the Hereford Road house where he lived. One thing the affronted landlady had told him was that he needed a cover. Unless he found some story to explain why he wanted to find the girl, all his inquiries were going to be met with the same suspicion. Maybe he even needed another identity to help him out. With a little bubble of school-boy excitement, he went into his bedsitter to look at his range of clothes.

The man who walked into the office of Alltalent Artistes in Berwick Street was wearing a trilby hat and a long beige mackintosh. The trilby dated from the days when men actually wore trilbies and the raincoat Charles had bought at a jumble sale during one of his economy drives and never worn because it was too big. He thought the image was not inappropriate to an insurance salesman. The potential shabbiness of the garb was offset, he felt, by a rather distinguished pair of silver-rimmed half-glasses and a slim black briefcase.

The girl in the hardboarded-off cupboard which served as reception was not impressed. She peered over her typewriter and the detritus of coffee-cups, publicity photographs and handouts that littered her desk. ‘What do you want? If it’s Danielle, French Model, that’s up two more floors.’

‘No, I wanted to come here,’ said Charles in the precise tones of an insurance salesman, innocent of any activities of French Models other than modelling Parisian fashions. He had worked quite hard on the characterization. He was using the voice he had developed for The Fireraisers in Newcastle (‘Had I not known it to be a good play, this production would not have convinced me of its merit.’- Hexham Courant .) And if he ran out of motivation or vocabulary for his character, all he had to do was to focus his mind on his son-in-law, Miles Taylerson, who was a rising force in the insurance world and spent all of Charles’ rare visits to his home trying to get his signature onto a policy.

Charles produced his carefully prepared identification routine. ‘I’m from the Eagle Crown Insurance Company.’ He didn’t give a name; there was always the danger he might forget it. ‘I’m trying to contact Miss Janine Bentley, whom I believe is a client of Alltalent Artistes.’ Maybe the ‘whom’ was a bit much. Still, the girl was not a discriminating audience.

‘Well, she doesn’t live here. Why don’t you try her home?’

‘I have tried, but had no success at the address where we previously had dealings.’

‘Hmm.’ The girl still looked at him askance. ‘I’ll go and tell Mr. Green you’re here.’

She edged round her desk and through a door in the hardboard partition. Opposite Charles hung a publicity poster for These Foolish Things. As when he had seen them on-stage, he was struck that Janine Bentley was the prettiest one. She intrigued him. There was a quality of innocence in her face that seemed out of place in a murder investigation.

The thinness of the hardboard which separated off Mr. Green’s office meant that Charles could hear exactly how the agent’s secretary described him.

‘There’s a funny sort of bloke outside trying to contact Janine.’

‘Oh yeah. Who is he?’

‘Says he’s from some insurance company.’

‘Legit?’

‘Dunno. Looks a bit weird.’

Weird? It is the actor’s lot to have his performances dissected by ill-informed critics.

‘You better show him in.’

The secretary came back into view and scuttled behind her desk as if Charles had rabies. ‘Mr. Green will see you. If you’d like to go in.’

Mr. Green was a thick-set man, whose nose appeared to have been the victim of cosmetic surgery. The disparity between it and the rest of his heavy features made it almost impossible to conduct a conversation with him without staring transfixedly at the little button in the middle of his face.’