Simon Brett - So Much Blood

‘How long’s the bloody scene?’

‘We’ll only do the end. Three, four minutes.’

‘Why you can’t just pose them… I’ve got some fashion pictures to do later this afternoon.’

‘I don’t want them to look like amateur theatricals.’

‘Why not? That’s what they bloody are.’

The scene started and Charles sat under a light at the back of the hall to watch. Mary, Queen of Sots was written in a blank verse that was meant to sound archaic but only sounded twee. Since Willy needed a prompt every other line, it was heavy going.

‘Willy, for God’s sake!’

‘Shut up, Michael!’ The tall figure looked incongruous in doublet and hose.

‘Look, for Christ’s sake, can’t we get these bloody photos taken? My time’s expensive and these models are waiting.’

‘I say, we haven’t got the daggers,’ said Martin Warburton suddenly from the recesses of a dramatic conspirator’s cloak.

‘Oh, Pam, where the hell are they? Here, quick. Look, the blades retract on the spring like this. O.K.? Now come on, let’s get it right first time.’ Charles started to scan his So much Comic… script.

Suddenly his eyes were jerked off the page by a scream. Not a theatrical workshop scream, but an authentic spine-tingling cry of horror from Stella Galpin-Lord.

Onstage the scene was frozen. Anna stood white-faced in her black Tudor costume, looking down at Willy Mariello, whose great length had shrunk into a little heap on the stage. Around him were a circle of cloaked conspirators clutching daggers with retracted blades. In the centre Martin Warburton gazed fascinated at the weapon in his hand. Its blade was metal and the Arterial Blood which dripped from it was not made by Leichner’s.

The police arrived promptly and were very efficient. An ambulance took Willy to hospital, but he was dead on arrival. Everyone gave statements and was told to expect further enquiries. Pam Northcliffe and Martin Warburton were taken away for extended questioning. A distraught Pam was returned to Coates Gardens in the early hours of the Wednesday morning and treated in the girls’ dormitory with sleeping-pills and inquisitive sympathy.

The atmosphere in the house throughout the Wednesday was charged with tension. The accumulated pressures of living together and building up to the shows’ openings were aggravated by the shock of Willy’s death. Rehearsal schedules were thrown out and the continual reappearance of policemen at the house and hall got on everyone’s nerves. All day Coates Gardens was full of uneasy jokes, sudden flares of temper and bursts of weeping.

Charles escaped the worst of it. Fortunately James Milne had suggested that he might be glad of a little seclusion from the community hysterics and offered the sanctuary of his flat. It was a great relief to be with someone who did not want to discuss the death. Milne dismissed the subject. ‘I didn’t know the boy well and I wasn’t there at the time, so I don’t feel too involved. It’s an unpleasant business. And the best thing to do about unpleasant things is to put them out of your mind.’

But Charles did not find it so easy. He felt he was involved and, as he tried to concentrate on revising So Much Comic…, his mind kept returning to the scene in the Masonic Hall. He suffered from the communal shock. And another uncomfortable feeling which he did not want to investigate.

By the Thursday morning the atmosphere among the D.U.D.S. was more settled. The Procurator-Fiscal’s enquiry (which is held instead of a public inquest in Scotland) was no doubt following its private course, but the students were unaffected by it. Only Martin Warburton remained hysterical, which was hardly surprising after his long ordeal of questioning.

The police were not making any charges against him and, though the investigation was far from complete, the general impression was that they considered the death to have been a ghastly accident. The real knife had been put in one of Pam’s carrier bags with the treated ones by mistake and foul play was apparently not suspected.

On the Thursday afternoon rehearsals restarted in earnest. More than in earnest, in panic. Everyone realised at the same time that a day and a half had been lost and there were still three shows opening on the following Monday. Brian Cassells’ rehearsal schedule was ignored. (Since its originator was still in London he could not argue.) Stella Galpin-Lord commandeered the Masonic Hall for the rest of the day as her right and Michael Vanderzee demanded it for the Friday. Charles began to think he would be lucky to get onstage there for his actual performances. Rehearsal in the house was equally impossible. In the basement Pam and a couple of A.S.M. s were building a wall for Pyramus and Thisbe. Three smelly technicians lay over a greasy lighting plot in the men’s dormitory. The Laird’s flat was locked and silent. In fact Charles was relieved; his mind was too full for serious rehearsal.

Still, as a gesture of good faith, he tucked his script and Hood’s Collected Poems under his arm before he set off into the city. It was a warm afternoon and only five o’clock. There were lots of places to sit and study in Edinburgh-Princes Street Gardens, the Castle, or it might even be worth a stroll down to Arthur’s Seat. He weighed the possibilities, but was not surprised when he went straight into the nearest pub and ordered a large whisky.

He sat hunched at the bar and realised that he could not put off thinking any longer. And the one thought which he had been holding back for nearly two days resolved itself clearly in his mind.

Whatever the police thought, Willy Mariello had been murdered.

Charles could not forget the expression in those brown eyes during the Truth Game, when Willy had spoken of finding out something about someone that he would rather not know. There had been pain in that look, but also there had been fear, even horror. Whatever it was that he had found out it was nasty. Nasty enough for someone to commit murder to keep it quiet.

Charles had tried to express this suspicion to the detective who took his statement, but he knew the man did not take it seriously. Somehow the words had not come out right. ‘It was a moment of such concentration… I could see such fear in his eyes… It made me feel a sense of danger…’ The further he got into it, the more tenuous the idea seemed and the more Charles knew he sounded like an effete actor emoting. In spite of polite assurances about complete investigations, that was obviously what the detective took him for. By the time he got to Charles, he had probably had a bellyful of the ‘vague feelings’ and ‘premonitions’ of self-dramatising students.

And, objectively, it did sound pretty nonsensical. Charles, whose normal thought processes involved reducing everything he did to the absurd and seeing if there was anything left, was surprised that the conviction remained so strong. But it did. It was an instinct he could not deny.

Facing the fact that Willy had been murdered led automatically to the question of what should be done about it. Charles had done his duty as a citizen by voicing his suspicions, and it was quite possible that the police were already way ahead of him, working on investigations of their own. He was no longer involved.

But involvement does not cease like that. It was easy enough for James Milne to say he wanted to forget about it; he had not sat opposite Willy in the Truth Game, he had not been present at the killing.