Peter Lovesey - Stagestruck

He looked up wide-eyed and said, ‘I didn’t abuse you.’

Now he was denying it, the filthy creep.

The red mist descended. Diamond grasped him by the shoulders. ‘What are you saying, you faggot, that it wasn’t abuse?’

‘I swear to God I didn’t do anything to you.’

‘Don’t give me that. Think about someone else for a change instead of yourself.’ Diamond hauled him out of the chair and held him up like an old suit. They were eye to eye. ‘Each time I step inside a theatre something so foul is triggered in my brain that I want to throw up. I don’t know exactly what. Mentally a shutter comes down. But I know precisely when all this started – during that weekend when I was in the play.’

White’s face was contorted with terror. He tried to mouth some words and couldn’t. All that came out was bad breath.

Diamond shoved him back into the chair so hard that it skidded across the floor, rocked back and almost overbalanced. He advanced on him, fists clenched. The impulse to hit him was huge.

White screamed. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.

‘I didn’t touch you,’ Diamond said, disbelieving.

He was whimpering. When he opened his mouth it was obvious that he’d bitten his tongue.

The blood was White’s salvation. The sight of it acted as a check on Diamond, reminding him of all the promises he’d made to himself about non-violence. It wouldn’t take more than a few blows to kill this old perv, and what would that achieve?

‘Admit it,’ he said, panting for breath himself. ‘You know what you did to me. I need to hear you say it.’

White simply shook his head.

This was not going as planned.

Diamond made a fist again and then unclenched it. He was making huge efforts to stay in control. He took a step back, grasping his own hands to stop them from lashing out. ‘I didn’t come here to beat you up. The least you can do is tell me the truth.’

White wiped some of the blood from his chin and succeeded in saying, spacing the words, ‘I have never assaulted you in any way. Never touched you.’

‘Bloody liar.’

‘Really.’

‘How can you say this? Come on, the truth.’

He raised a pacifying hand while he gasped for air. Finally, he spoke. ‘Will you hear me out?’ Breathing hard, pausing often, he said, ‘You don’t know as much about me as you think. There are different sorts of child sex, Mr Diamond. I wasn’t ever attracted to small boys. Yours was a primary school. My offences were all at Manningham Academy. That’s a private school for girls aged eleven to eighteen. I took advantage of under-age girls of fourteen and fifteen. I’m a paedophile and ashamed of it, but I was never a pederast.’

Diamond heard the words and didn’t at first believe them. He did a rapid rethink of how he’d learned about this. Mike Glazebrook had said his mother had read in the News of the World that White had been convicted of sex offences against minors at a private school in Hampshire. And Scotland Yard had later confirmed it was Manningham Academy. That much, at least, was fact.

Was the rest a misunderstanding? The way the newspapers reported such cases, the names of the victims protected by law, there was scope for uncertainty. Mrs Glazebrook had questioned Mike to find out if he’d been abused. She’d evidently assumed that the victims were young boys and this assumption had stuck with Glazebrook and been accepted unquestioningly by Diamond.

Big mistake, was it?

Apparently so. It would have been easy to find out what sort of school it was. He’d failed to make a basic check. How unprofessional was that? He knew why he hadn’t looked at the newspaper files himself or tried to contact the school: because it was so personal. He’d backed off from the nauseating detail.

Yet the truth solved nothing. The facts still didn’t add up. He could trace his theatre episodes back to immediately after the Richard III play, when he’d gone on holiday with the family and refused to stay in the theatre at Llandudno.

‘I’m certain something deeply upsetting happened to me over the weekend of the play,’ he told White with a huge effort to sound reasonable. ‘You knew the people involved. Was there anyone else who could have targeted an eightyear-old boy? The actor who played the king? He would have handled us.’

‘Angus Coventry? I think not,’ White said. ‘He was having a passionate affair in real life with the actress playing Lady Anne. He wasn’t interested in anyone else.’

‘One of the others, then?’

‘I doubt it. There wasn’t the opportunity. It was a church-hall production, if you remember. The backstage area was minimal, and just about everything had to be done there, so it was always crowded with actors and scene-shifters and what have you.’

This chimed in with Diamond’s memory. He was forced to conclude that he wasn’t being duped.

White added, ‘I remember a scene when you and the other prince were smothered. In the Shakespeare version the murders were done off stage, but this was very far from Shakespeare. Could that have been what upset you?’

‘The smothering? I’m certain it wasn’t.’

‘I was thinking if Angus pressed too hard -’

‘No,’ Diamond said from direct memory. ‘The pillow was placed lightly over my face and I had plenty of space to breathe. That wasn’t the cause.’

‘I can’t think of anything else.’

‘And neither can I.’ To say that he was disappointed was an understatement. He’d psyched himself up, confident of getting the truth, however painful. To be denied any explanation at all was so unexpected that he had difficulty dealing with it.

‘What will you do about me?’ White asked.

‘You?’

‘If it gets known locally what I am, people are going to feel threatened, concerned for their children.’

‘Afraid of vigilantes, are you?’

‘It’s happened before. I’ve had to move out each time.’

‘Why didn’t you change your name?’

‘Because when you get found out, as you will in time, you become an even more sinister figure, a pervert trying to pretend he’s someone else, somebody normal.’

Diamond saw sense in that. ‘This was a personal visit, nothing to do with my job. If someone in the police asks me if I know your whereabouts, I’ll tell them. I know of no reason why they should.’

‘What about the other man, Glazebrook?’

‘He won’t come near you.’

During the drive back to Salisbury District Hospital, Diamond reflected on his failure. The visit to Wilton had not been one of his more glorious hours. He’d messed up, big time. He could have killed that old man, and all through a mistaken assumption. He felt more shamed, more tarnished, than before he’d started. And he still didn’t know how to deal with his private nightmare.

Lew Rogers was still in the Accident and Emergency waiting area.

‘What’s the latest?’ Diamond asked.

‘She’s going to be okay. They’re keeping her overnight as a precaution, but there’s nothing seriously wrong.’

‘Can we see her?’

‘She’s being moved to another ward as we speak, and we can talk to her there. Two of the local traffic guys are waiting to interview her as well.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Grabbing a coffee while they can.’

‘Let’s beat them to it.’ He called to a nurse.

They found Kate in a room of her own in a white dressing gown seated in an armchair beside the bed. Her forehead was bruised and she had a bandaged arm. She produced a smile fit to fill the royal circle and said, ‘Hi, darlings.’

‘You’re so lucky,’ Diamond told her while Rogers was collecting chairs from the stack outside. ‘We saw the state of your car.’