A Touch of Drama

Book 42: Murder Room

by Guy Cullingford

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Archie Wayne, successful playwright, could not say what impulse had made him return to the small town of his boyhood. On impulse, he called on his boyhood friend, and the matter would have ended there had he not met and fallen for his friend's daughter, the young and innocent Christine. Their brief idyll is interrupted by a police enquiry: Archie's wife Irma is missing, leaving behind a disquieting message, and he finds himself suspect number one in a possible murder case. But Archie is convinced that Irma is alive and trying to ruin him - and tragedy and violence will take their toll on both the guilty and innocent in the search for the truth.

Release date: November 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 219

Sample

IT was vile. It was disgusting. It was the grisly remains of last night’s party as seen by a non-participant at 10
a.m. the following day.

Naturally the woman hadn’t come. With the usual acumen of the seasoned char, she’d seen fit to withdraw her services at the exact moment when they were most required. She must have
felt a twinge of her favourite malady coming on as soon as she saw the crates of special deliveries from the wine merchant. And who could blame her?

The room stank like a bistro and looked like a battlefield without the corpses. Those, I sincerely hoped, were decently laid out on their own premises. I crossed the rucked carpet, avoiding a
small table tipsily lying on its back with its foot in the air, drew the curtain cord and flung up the sash window, all with the maximum amount of noise.

Then I walked from one switch to the other, turning off the lights and putting on the fire, before I paid further attention to the mess, adding up the cigarette scars and the glass rings;
generally assessing the damage.

Someone had been sick in the corner by the grand piano – very discreetly. It scarcely showed.

Before I was really angry enough, my wife, Irma, appeared at the door leading off into her bedroom, wearing a house-coat and an ugly expression. Obviously she had tumbled into bed without
washing off her make-up. Her lips were smudgy but still a reddish purple. What remained of her eye-shadow was strictly unnecessary – nature was prepared to do as much for her.

Her complexion, once her boast, was now the colour of grocer’s candles kept too long in stock, and it had the same tallow greasiness. She was losing all her looks and it was a pity,
because she had started off well-endowed. On her present diet, she would soon lose her figure as well. And then where would she be? Not in my flat if I knew it.

‘Who’s been banging about in here?’ she asked fretfully. ‘Oh, it’s you, Archie. I might have known. What the devil do you think you’re doing with that
window?’

‘Just trying to let a little fresh air into the place.’

‘You’ll have me down with pneumonia. Where’s Mrs. Thing?’

‘She hasn’t turned up.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘Charming sight, isn’t it? Worth getting up for, just to look at it. I see the Ming vase has gone. I wonder if there’s anything left whole.’

‘What a fuss you make. The trouble is, Archie, you’re a proper killjoy.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Well, so you are. You don’t want to enjoy yourself and you can’t bear to see anyone else having a good time.’

‘Having a good time doesn’t seem to me synonymous with breaking up the furniture.’

‘How you do like to exaggerate! There’s nothing which can’t be put right with a lick or two of polish.’

‘Well, start licking.’

‘If you were so keen on keeping an eye on your precious belongings, you should have stayed about instead of sneaking off to your own room like a sulky little boy. It makes me feel small
when you behave in that idiotic way. I suppose that’s what it’s done for.’

‘You’re a fool, Irma. You know perfectly well I had some work on hand. Naughton is clamouring for a new scene for act two and he wants it today. How do you think I could concentrate
with all that racket going on? I had the utmost difficulty in getting anything down at all.’

‘That’s your own damn’ fault. You should have waited until the party broke up.’

‘Huh! I knew when that would be. Not before the liquor gave out. Four a.m., wasn’t it? You must have stocked up pretty well.’

‘So now you’re going to grudge my friends a few miserable drinks!’

‘I grudge them more than that. I grudge them the air they breathe. I’d as soon offer hospitality to a pack of hyenas.’

‘Don’t you go calling my friends names! If you’re so damned superior you ought to live by yourself. I don’t wonder Belle walked out on you.’

‘You mean I walked out on her. Just what will happen again unless you mend your ways, my sweet. I don’t keep house with a slut!’

At this the curtain went up with a vengeance, and there we were bang in the middle of our big scene. The dialogue crackled and spat. Nothing was censored, and we should have been a riot at the
Royal Court. As it was, it wasn’t long before we’d attracted an audience. She began to shriek, and, to bawl her out, I began to shout, and as I’d noticed on other occasions, the
well of the building acted as a sounding board.

You had to be broad-minded to take a flat in that particular block. At night you could raise the roof and no one cared. But at ten o’clock in the morning, that was a different matter. They
wanted to catch up on their rest.

Windows were thrown up. Various voices on different levels yelled ‘Shut up’, ‘Pipe down’, ‘Quiet there!’

The porter must have crawled out of his lair amongst the boilers. He took up a pitch directly underneath, six stories below and began a bellowed chant: ‘Close that winder, per-lease. Close
that winder, per-lease.’

Irma was too wrapped up in her part for it to register. But after a minute or two I got it, stopped in the midst of a torrent of invective, and went over to comply with his instructions.

I stood there with my back to all the chi-chi draperies and watched her yelling her head off. And suddenly I tired of putting on an act and, rather enjoying it, I lost my temper in real earnest.
The whole business of our life together seemed as much a filthy mess as the room itself. My hands began to shake and I felt a fierce, intense, radiating heat somewhere down in my guts as if
I’d swallowed the electric fire. My eyes went misty and I couldn’t see her other features clearly; only that silly great mouth opening and shutting. I was beyond rational thought. I
must have marched over to her and dotted her one right on the top of her pate with my closed fist, because suddenly there we were, face to face, with my arm still in the air.

I don’t suppose it came with much force or that it hurt much, but it certainly did the trick. She dried up immediately, and as her face came into focus I could see that it had set into a
sort of shocked stupefaction.

She remained perfectly still, as if she thought she might come to pieces if she moved. When she did manage to speak, it was in a sort of squeak.

‘Archie, you struck me!’

Such an obvious remark hardly called for a reply.

‘You must be out of your senses. I’m getting out of here straightaway.’

‘Better get some clothes on first, hadn’t you?’

‘Don’t you understand? I’m leaving you.’

‘Suits me. Which man are you going to?’

‘Is that any of your business?’

‘It will be eventually, I suppose. Get in touch with my solicitors when you’ve decided.’

‘I’ll never forgive you for this. I’ll get even with you if it’s the last thing I do.’

‘My dear girl, that sort of play went out with the turn of the century, unless you’re doing a burlesque. When you’re dressed you might tidy up a bit before you abandon me for
ever.’

She turned on her heel and went back into the bedroom. That was the last I saw of her – the bare heel in the over-elaborate mule.

Then I remembered that I had an appointment with Naughton at the theatre for eleven. I looked at my wrist-watch. I might just make it. I left the room in its muddle and went
into what Irma was pleased to call my study . . . a blend of bed-sitter and workshop. There I collected up the stuff I’d typed last night and crammed it into a briefcase. I grabbed a hat and
left the flat. On the way out I passed the porter. He gave me a sickly grin. He knew which of his flock had been responsible for the free entertainment, but he also knew that my weekly tip was
bigger than most.

I was still seething as I walked down to the theatre, and a bit worried as well, thinking what a fool I should look if she sued me for assault. My own head was buzzing. I thought that whatever
I’d done to Irma, she couldn’t feel worse than I did. She was due for a hang-over headache anyway, after last night’s orgy. Oh, devil take the girl! Whatever had I seen in her to
make me chuck up Belle, who, whatever her failings, never made a mock of my labours.

But, of course, it was more a question of what she had seen in me – ogling the prosperous dramatist – never mind if his hair was thin on top – from her bit parts and lousy
lodgings. On the stage she could not act for little apples, but when it came to putting on a private performance for my benefit, no one could have done better. Yet when she had her hooks well and
truly into me, she hadn’t even the stamina for a decent run. She had the woman’s magazine mentality. She’d been nurturing herself on dreams for years, and it was a staggering blow
for her to find that life with a working playwright is just about as romantic as life with a working foreman. She’d confused the word with playboy. She should have known better. How did she
think I’d got to where I was if not by constant grind? But her idea of success was of a sort of manna descending from the skies; she simply couldn’t appreciate that it was something
which had to be earned. Well, the silly so-and-so, she deserved a thump on the head, if only to let in the light of reason.

Could I help it if the daily round didn’t consist of a whirl of social activities interlarded with trips to the Caribbean? When she was deprived of my company for what she considered
unreasonable periods, she took up a pair of hobbies, closely related; indulging in what she called ‘little drinkies’ and the encouragement of amorous young men. Well, now the amorous
young men would have a chance to provide the little drinkies and see how they liked that.

I got to the theatre, thought what a shabby, down-at-heel old bag of tricks it was, and slipped in at the stage-door with a nod to George, who was brewing himself one of his
innumerable cups of tea in his cubby-hole.

I ran Naughton to earth in the second row of the stalls, doing one of his famous last-minute improvisations on the old theme of exits and entrances. Four drab-coloured figures on the stage were
standing about in the dejected attitudes which meant that they were fed to the teeth, and only living for the coffee break. Naughton was full of cheer and indecision in equal parts. I never could
understand why such a man was also a first-class director.

‘Darling,’ he was saying, ‘I think it would be much, much better if you entered from the left. Do try it again.’

Darling shrugged her shoulders, and went off in a controlled sulk. I wouldn’t have minded betting that they’d been over this at least half a dozen times.

‘Look, Naughton’, I said urgently. ‘There’s the new script for that scene in act two. It wasn’t easy, but I think I’ve brought it off.’

‘What’s that, Archie? Oh . . . that. My dear, I don’t think we’ll be needing it after all. It seems quite all right as it is.’

‘But curse you, I spent four hours last night on that damned thing. You must use it.’

‘Oh, how sickening for you. Now, do be quiet, there’s a dear chap. This is frightfully important. Come on, darling, stir your stumps. We can’t stay here all day.’

I thumped down a seat and sat on it and started to take a look at the interior of the theatre rather than at that noodle marching on from the left and then the right, and then the left again.
The house smelled to me very much like my own living-room. Perhaps my sense of smell was permanently affected. It all looked as tatty as could be, the plush on the seats nearly worn to the wood,
the gilt peeling off the cupids, the paint flaking off the walls. What would it be like when the lights were up?

‘Look, Naughton,’ I said hotly, ‘this place is a disgrace. They’d be ashamed of it in the provinces. What do you think foreigners think when they see a dump like this in
the heart of London?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, my dear. Perhaps they think it’s oldy worldy. Do shut up, there’s a good fellow. Darling, what’s the matter . . . don’t you feel
comfortable making that entrance? Would you like to try it once again?’

‘Naughton, talking of trying things, you’ve damn’ well got to try out that new scene. It’s only fair to me. If you don’t like it, then you needn’t use
it.’

‘But if I’m not going to like it or use it, it’s simply a waste of time, dear boy. There’s so much to be done. So much . . . Do you realize that we’ve only got just
over two more weeks? We shall never be ready unless we concentrate on the absolute essentials. Now, look, darling. I can see you’re not happy over this. All right, I’m going to be very
kind and put you back as you were. And I think it’s going to work out. I can see it all now. Once more, darling . . . from the right this time.’

I know exactly what the burghers must have felt when that old fool Drake would persist in finishing his game of bowls with the Armada on the horizon.

I jumped up from my seat and clutching the one in front for support, declaimed in a voice which wouldn’t have disgraced Henry Irving:

‘Gentles all, you are gathered here in order to rehearse a play in which I, as the author, take some slight interest. The opening night of this play is less than three weeks ahead.
I’m not so fussy as my friend Naughton here. I don’t mind if you come on to the damned stage on your hands or on your rumps. I don’t mind if you come in from the left or from the
right, or if you drop down from the flies. I only ask that you should get on with the job and strive to achieve some result which will make my work reasonably intelligible to the general public who
will pay to hear it. If you don’t, then God have mercy on us all.’

‘What the hell!’ exclaimed Darling.

Naughton hadn’t budged. He continued to sit there with his round face under its frosty pow good-humoured but bewildered. As I slipped out of the row of seats and down the aisle, still
clutching that confounded briefcase, I heard him say tolerantly:

‘Just one of Archie’s moods. Don’t mind him, my dears. I don’t. Now, darling, what about that entrance?’

As I went past George’s cubby-hole, he was coming out with a cupful of tea. Perhaps he intended it for one of the cleaners. I clenched my fist, and brought it up and under, and cup and
fluid shot up into the air. I heard the tinkle of china breaking on the cement floor as I went out into the street.

I came up the alleys in a blind rage and charged into the Charing Cross Road, that wash-pot of the nations, home of second-hand culture, foreign postage stamps and rubber accessories. I elbowed
a Cypriot, bumped against a German, and pushed a black man, origin unknown, into the gutter without any racial prejudice. I came up into Oxford Street just at the time when tubes and buses were
beginning to disgorge their daily cargo of silly women up from the suburbs, bent on enjoying themselves with a surfeit of window shopping, a welsh rarebit and an hour in a news theatre. And
suddenly I had a sickener of the whole ruddy set-up, and knew that I must get out of it or burst.

Without a second thought, I made tracks for the mews where my car was garaged. I unlocked the padlock, pushed back the door on its rollers, and there were the backs of the two of them, like man
and wife, my Rolls in sober black, and Irma’s little runabout in eggshell blue, living, unlike their owners, in perfect amity.

I drove the Rolls back to the flats, and backed it up into the runway between the blocks, reassuring the porter who was in his usual state of expecting a delivery of coke. I refused his offer of
a hand with my bags, and went up in the lift to bundle a few things into a suitcase. There was no sign of Irma, for which I was profoundly thankful, and I didn’t go into the living-room at
all, thinking she had probably gone back to bed, and that any noise there might bring her out of her retirement.

When I came down again I saw no one, not even the porter, and I thought, not for the first time, that the truly remarkable thing about those flats was that a whole colony of people could remain
virtually invisible to each other. I knew them to be fully occupied, but the comings and goings of the residents were extraordinarily sparse. Sometimes I wondered if the older inhabitants
didn’t remain for ever in their rooms, slowly mummifying until their corpses were removed secretly and with the utmost discretion by the management. Actually, to die in a flat casts an aura
of disgrace over the entire building. It’s the sort of thing that the office likes to keep dark.

I put the suitcase in the boot and drove off.

The first ten miles were sheer hell, but finally I got on to the Eastern Avenue where I could play tag with petrol tankers and holiday coaches in and out of the thirty-mile limit. At intervals
there were cemeteries of used cars waiting for their ghosts to be raised by rash youths and unwary clerks. Then villadom started to thin out into single examples of the jerry-builder’s art,
and those dismal box-like houses left stranded by time on every high road. Eventually I arrived at Brentwood, squeezed through a bottle-neck, shaved a pedestrian’s whiskers, and Heaven be
praised, after shaking off a clutter of tradesmen’s vans, reached what passes for the country in these parts.

I began to get some sort of pleasure out of driving the car, which you will already have observed was more of a gentleman than I am. Trees and fields flipped by, and soon I was by-passing
Chelmsford and Colchester. Thinking back, I fancy at this stage I must have been bound for Frinton, but as I drew within hailing distance, I decided against it because of its theatrical
associations. I didn’t want East London by the sea, either, or the Boy Scout’s Paradise, so what else was there left?

I saw a signpost and trod on the brake. I turned off to the left, and suddenly, almost shockingly, I was in the real country, miles away from anywhere. Rustics in scarecrow clothes were
hoeing in the fields, cottage women were pottering about in three-cornered gardens, cow-eyed children turned from their play to gawp at the big car and grin through gappy teeth.

I squeezed the Rolls through a long, narrow-waisted village, braked down a twisted hill, and came upon a miracle stretch of river as glassy as a pond and full of swans. Then up another hill, and
after that a road as full of bends as a corkscrew, and each bend revealing fresh beauties, dazzling water, sloping fields, flowery embankments.

And before I knew where I was, the scene had shifted again. The road flattened out into something dull and ugly, sandwiched between two slices of cheap and nasty ribbon development. I passed
through something neither village nor town with only the old church and a handful of cottages to lend it grace, and straight on to the beginnings of the residential area which led to the
sea-front.

I could smell the sea, and finally I could see it.

My rage had evaporated, and I was deuced hungry or thirsty, I wasn’t sure which. I trundled along the Marine Parade and drew up with a flourish outside the hotel.

This is the honest truth, as far as I can remember it, of my return to the place of my origin after an absence of more than thirty years.

WHEN, later on, I was asked by the police officer what had prompted me to set off for Stourkey (pronounced Sturky by the
inhabitants) in that impetuous manner, I could only answer weakly that I supposed it was a whim. Well, wasn’t it? What else could it have been?

If there was some deeper psychological reason, this didn’t seem the time to mention it.

‘Hum’, he said, puffing away at his pipe, a property which I was sure he only employed to put me at my ease. ‘Hum. Twenty years seems a pretty long period of gestation for a
whim.’

‘Pity it wasn’t still-born. I never liked this place. Never was any good to me.’

‘But it was where you first saw the light.’

‘Not exactly in the sense you mean. When I saw the light I was fourteen. I got out as fast as a train would take me.’

‘Funny. Most people have some attachment to their native heath.’

‘Pure affectation, if you ask me. You might suppose from the fuss some make that the Almighty had personally inspected the terrain before deciding where they were to make their first
public appearance.’

‘This seems a nice enough little spot. Healthy too, I should say.’

‘It’s healthy enough. If you don’t die here, you live. You should stand on one of these corners in the grip of an east wind during the winter months before you decide to come
here when you retire on pension, chief inspector.’

‘I dare say, sir, I dare say. But you can’t complain of today.’

No, I couldn’t complain either of that day, or the day of my arrival, if it was simply a question of weather. It was mild for spring, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I left the
c. . .