Nicola Upson - An Expert in Murder

With an amiable nod to the statue that gave the square its name, Aubrey turned his back on her mannered serenity and headed for the more worldly stimulus of St Martin’s Lane. He loved his work and was diligent in its undertaking, spending most of his waking hours in the two theatres which his parents had built and entrusted to him, theatres which he had developed beyond even their wildest hopes through an addiction to the challenge of balancing art with money. It was a business founded on risk and he was not infallible, but his errors of judgement were few and far between, and he had been blessed with a talent for anticipating what the public would look for next, as well as with the financial means to provide it. The 49

considerable fortune which he had amassed along the way had been wisely reinvested and his instincts were underpinned by a tireless energy: he spent as many nights in the theatre as any actor and, on Sundays, when the stage was empty in deference to the pulpit and the family table, he was invariably to be found at his desk, taking advantage of the lull in one achievement to plan for the next. To actors and playwrights unused to such commitment, he was a self-effacing benefactor; privately, he knew that his ability to make or break a career overnight was little more than a by-product in a quest to prove something to himself, a quest which was nothing short of an obsession. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. Looking back, he could not honestly say if his bond with his wife and child had been sacrificed because of it or whether, in sensing that the emotional commitment required for family life was not his to give, he had instinctively thrown his energies into something he was more certain to be good at.

Driven by pride rather than by ambition or greed, Aubrey was not the sort of man who contemplated failure easily, or who liked to be anything other than a few steps ahead.

Today, as usual, he rejected the convenient option of a ten-minute journey to work courtesy of the city’s underground railway and set off on foot. The peculiar atmosphere evoked by London’s tunnels was not for him, and he never failed to wonder at the willingness with which people now accepted darkness and confinement as a natural part of their day-to-day existence. For Aubrey, the lingering, acrid smell of those subterranean passageways brought back ghosts from a past he tried in vain to forget.

Too old at forty-five to take part in the trench war but with a distinguished military record behind him, he had spent those terrible years as a tunneller in the guts of the French earth and had no wish to return to its horrors in his waking hours as well as in his nightmares. A tunneller’s war required a different sort of heroism to the fighting above ground, and if the strength and bravery involved had been psychological rather than physical, the sacrifice was often the same. Thousands of miners had been killed underground in explosions which made the water in the tunnels run 50

with blood, and which rendered the precious air thick with the stench of death.

Four years of battling with earth and suffocation as well as with an unseen enemy played lasting tricks on the mind, and the fear and anxiety of those years had haunted Aubrey ever since. On one occasion, not long after the war had ended, his wife had endeavoured to free him of his crippling claustrophobia by persuading him to try the underground at Piccadilly Circus. Before he was halfway down the steps, he could smell burning hair once again, and the pounding of his heart sounded in his head like the muffled thud of a miner’s pick. Giving in to the panic which he had always managed to suppress when it mattered, he emerged choking and sobbing into a crowd of embarrassed shoppers. A cure had never been spoken of again, and his illness had only worsened with time: to mix with the crush of bodies in a confined space – even in a theatre bar or foyer – demanded from him the strictest self-control. A vast underground city had opened up beneath London’s pavements, expanding further as its open-air counterpart grew, but he was more than happy for it to remain out of bounds.

Pulling his hat further down against the rain which had begun to fall more steadily, and cursing the umbrella that was still in its rack in the hallway, Aubrey strode past the government offices in Great George Street and into Parliament Square, one of the wide open spaces that he blessed the city for preserving. Not even the shabby row of houses to the west of the square could mar the grandeur over which so many of the faces from the past presided. As he walked on, he looked up to see if a regular occupant of one of those dust-dimmed windows was sitting in her usual place. He was not disappointed: there she was, as still and indistinct as ever, but framed this morning in an oblong of yellow light which she had switched on to counteract the gloom of the day. In the last few weeks, this figure had become as much a part of his daily walk as the impassive statues in the square. Every morning, no matter how early the hour, she sat at that window with such reliability that he had begun to question whether she, too, were a statue, until one day he had seen her get up and move back into the room. He won-51

dered at the life she led in that faded building, too near the top to be the lady of the house and not high enough to be the maid –

although this was the sort of house in which a maid’s services were no longer required. There must be thousands of women like her in London now, widowed or single and long past the age at which marriage would be a realistic prospect, living in reduced circumstances in a bed-sitting-room, staring out at life rather than taking part.

He considered waving but decided, on reflection, that a greeting from a stranger, particularly a well-dressed and affluent stranger, might be regarded as impudent or condescending, so he moved on.

A quick glance at his watch confirmed that there was plenty of time to make a detour to Westminster Bridge for a view of which he never tired, no matter what the weather. For once he was in no hurry to reach the New Theatre, where a long and no doubt argu-mentative day awaited him. That afternoon, he was due to make the final arrangements for the provincial tour of one of his longest-running productions and to discuss the West End staging of its author’s new play. He normally looked forward to such meetings, sure of his decisions and confident that those involved would trust his experience, but trouble was brewing with Richard of Bordeaux . Admittedly, none of the problems were insurmount-able: his leading actor, who fancied himself – with some justification – as lord of the London stage, had changed his mind about the lure of the provinces in favour of the silver screen and wanted out of his contract, but Aubrey had no intention of releasing him; he would consider financing the film, perhaps, but only after John Terry had graced the likes of Manchester with his royal presence.

As for Josephine Tey, she was far too principled to be easy to deal with, although he admired and respected her writing and could see its long-term potential. In a reversal of his difficulties with Terry, the issue with Tey was getting her into the public eye, and that wretched trial had not helped. Not for the first time, he cursed himself for allowing it to happen. Knowing Vintner, he should have seen it coming.

In fact, those newer to the taste of success than Aubrey seemed to 52

have been transformed by their sudden notoriety – and not always for the better, in his opinion. The entire cast seemed to think that one hit play was enough to keep them in work for the rest of their professional lives, and all the bickering and tension was beginning to tire him; after all, he could usually find that at home. He knew he was perfectly capable of putting a stop to it, yet he felt uneasy about the confrontations ahead. If he had been a superstitious man, he might have said that to plan the play’s future before its current run was finished was to tempt fate, but he was far too old to start pandering to the more ridiculous notions of his profession. Having said that, perhaps tonight was the wrong time to indulge in a tradition of his own making. Whenever a play under his management entered its final week, it was customary for him to make a cameo appearance on stage, and tonight he was due to walk on as a guard in the final scene. The moment was supposed to be a celebration, the only part of the limelight that he ever allowed himself, and the idea – thought up in a frivolous moment by his favourite St Joan –