Death Scene Read online

  In the car on the way to Shoreham, Henry wrote in his journal.

  I do not agree with Dr Freud that we should be constantly probing our dreams for meaning. I have no wish to sit or lie on a psychiatrist’s couch and recall the moments of my history that cause me pain. Frankly, if I found myself capable of forgetting, of hiding the truth, then I would do so. I am afraid that in this – and probably only in this – regard I am in agreement with Nietzsche that those who stare into the abyss should beware in case the abyss should stare back.

  I once asked Cynthia what she does with those bad memories we share and, I suspect, many bad memories that are hers alone. She seems so solid, so sound, and I wondered how she managed that. She told me that she imagined the tartan biscuit tin that had held Christmas shortbread. It sat on the pantry shelf in our mother’s kitchen. She told me that whenever a memory grew too big or too vivid she would imagine that tin, open it and put the memory inside.

  I laughed, but I suspect she was serious.

  I also suspect that Cynthia would have no truck with the abyss. That it would not dare to stare back at her.

  He found himself smiling at the thought.

  FOUR

  Ten days earlier

  She had been standing on the rocks beside the old fort looking out to sea and he had taken her by surprise. More than surprise when he had called her by her old, half forgotten name.

  ‘Cécile,’ he said ‘Cécile Rolland.’

  And she had turned, shocked to look at the young man and to recognize who he was.

  Cécile’s hand rose to her lips and she stared at him in disbelief. ‘Philippe? Can it truly be you? I never thought I would see you, not ever again. How are you here? How did you find me?’

  He laughed. ‘Finding you was easy. Your photograph is in the newspapers, you appear on the cinema screen. Cécile, you may have changed your name but nothing else about you is altered in the slightest jot.’

  Philippe, she remembered, had always had a good command of English and his accent was soft, nothing like the faux French accents that her theatrical friends liked to practise for the stage. All zis and zat and oh monsieur!

  Her own accent had been largely eradicated in the eleven years that she had been in England. She had listened to the native speakers around her and carefully contrived to shorten her vowels and harden her consonants. The slight accent that remained was considered exotic but still within the parameters of acceptability. She had done her best to become in real life the Englishwoman that she portrayed on screen.

  ‘I never thought to see you again,’ she repeated. ‘Philippe, this is wonderful, but I don’t understand. What brings you here? When I left you said—’

  ‘You left at a time of war. I had no hope of either of us surviving. Our families did not. And I had no belief that there would be a time when it was safe for me to find you. But times change, Cécile.’

  He spread his arms as though encompassing Cécile, the fort, the rocks, the River Adur, and not quite believing any of it. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘Look at how splendid you have become.’

  She laughed with him. ‘I must go back. Filming will begin again in less than half an hour and I must not be late.’

  He nodded, then followed as she picked her way back across the rocks trying hard not to trap the kitten heels of her shoes in the cracks and crevices.

  ‘Hardly suitable for scrambling on the rocks,’ he said, and Cissie laughed.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Philippe, I must work now. But we must talk, later. Tell me how I can meet you. We must celebrate this reunion.’

  He told her where he was staying and suggested a restaurant where they could meet for an evening meal, and she agreed.

  Cissie, once the girl called Cécile Rolland, had walked away from Philippe with her head held high and a smile on her lips, but the young woman with the camera whom neither of them had observed but who had been happily photographing the pair could not help but note that it was one that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  They were in the car on the way back to Shoreham-by-Sea, Mickey driving Cynthia’s Ford Tudor sedan that she’d had shipped back from the States after their last visit.

  Henry examined the photographs that Mickey had taken the previous day. He had borrowed one of the postcards from Cynthia’s scrapbook and he held it up now to compare with the images of the dead woman, fixing in his mind the way she had looked before someone had chosen to take her life away and the ravages of early decomposition had reshaped her features, caused the eyes to sink back in their sockets and drained the lips of colour.

  He handed the postcard to Mickey. ‘Victim,’ he said.

  ‘She looks like a child in this picture,’ Mickey observed. He flipped the card over and found a date on the back, written in Cynthia’s hand. ‘Taken only a year ago, but presumably there was a little camera trickery and a great deal of cosmetic intervention. She was getting a little old to be the ingénue. Even the wife commented on that the last time we saw her on the screen.’

  ‘The film industry likes to keep actresses young, I suppose. Youth in love or in peril presumably has more appeal to the cinemagoers than would middle age.’

  ‘Not so different from real life then,’ Mickey observed. ‘A young person goes missing and the newspapers have an attractive photograph to slap on to their front pages, and the world is in outcry. My advice to would-be victims is to be either very young or very, very old. Either way you will elicit sympathy, but to be somewhere in the middle is to be forgotten and neglected.’

  ‘Unless you are rich,’ Henry corrected him.

  ‘Unless that,’ Mickey agreed. ‘So, our tasks for the day are?’

  ‘Interview her friends, go to this film studio and speak again, I think, to Mr Owens. Try to have that discussion when his wife’s not present.’

  ‘You think he knows more than he’s prepared to say in front of her?’

  ‘I think he observes things that his wife does not, that perhaps she chooses not to see. Though what those might be I can only guess.’

  ‘And that guess would be?’

  ‘That Cissie Rowe had some young man in tow that Mrs Owens would not have approved of. That her husband might’ve seen Cissie Rowe become, shall we say, more involved with one of her admirers than his wife believed.’

  Mickey nodded. ‘Your sister could have a point,’ he said. ‘It’s possible our young victim was a thief and that bracelet was stolen.’

  ‘So we follow that line of enquiry, but I think it the less likely of the two. A young woman who chooses to steal either needs a receiver for her stolen goods, in which case she needs connections, or she steals something she can wear openly that would cause no comment. The bangle seems elaborate, obvious, something to be noticed. So we need to find out whether she wore it and whether, if anyone noticed it, she had any explanation for it.

  ‘And we keep an open mind; I would not like to predict where this case might lead. The manner of her death, from what we have seen so far, suggests to me that there was rage there. That, had he used a knife, there would have been multiple wounds. It is one thing to strike someone in temper but quite another to follow this up by carrying them into their home, forcing poison or a sleeping draft down their throat and then finishing them with asphyxia.’

  ‘We are making assumptions,’ said Mickey. ‘Until the post-mortem is complete you cannot be sure of any of those things.’

  Henry nodded solemnly. ‘So I’ll wait for the post-mortem to confirm it then,’ he said. ‘You’re not telling me that she went gently.’

  ‘No, I will not try and tell you that.’

  FIVE

  Ten days earlier

  In the corner of Cissie’s bungalow was a little table and on the table were three photographs. The subject of one of the photographs was a couple then in their forties and a young boy. Philippe, Cissie thought, would have been eleven or twelve when this picture was taken and she recalled the day with sharp intensity. She had been eight yea
rs old and the sun had been shining. The two of them had paddled in the brook and then run home through her aunt’s orchard where the greengages had been ripening and the mirabelle plums were almost ready to drop from the trees.

  Cissie remembered being as happy on that day as she could ever recall being in her entire life. Her uncle had brought out his little camera, placed the heavy box in her hands, reminded her how to crank the handle to wind on the film and trusted her to take a picture of the three of them. Himself, his wife and their son Philippe. Other pictures had been taken, but this one Cissie had been allowed to keep and she had cherished it even through the darkest days. It was like a talisman, and she had cleaved to the belief that if she kept this image safe, kept the memory alive and perfect in her mind, she could survive the worst the world had to throw at her. She had that one bright moment, that remembrance of pure, unadulterated happiness.

  And now Philippe had returned to her and Cissie was not sure how she felt about that. He was not twelve years old any more and she was not eight and the world was not the same. Her aunt and uncle were now dead, as were her own parents, and the places they had cherished were churned to mud and ruin, blasted out of existence by the war she had fled not so many years after this picture had been taken. She had then been almost seventeen and Philippe had been twenty and she had expected, as had he, that this would be a final farewell. She had adjusted her mind to it, to the fact that her past was gone and ruined and utterly spoilt – apart from the memory of that one day which now stood as a symbol for everything else in her first sixteen years of existence. Cissie could rarely bear to think of the rest. The loss, the sense of isolation became too acute if she did.

  She should have rejoiced that Philippe had come back into her life and yet, standing in her little bungalow, surrounded by all the things that symbolized the life she had now, the person she had become, Cissie could not bring herself to rejoice. Instead she felt vaguely afraid. It was as though Philippe had packed all of that first sixteen years of life into his valise and brought it with him, opened it like some leather-clasped Pandora’s box and released all the ills of the world to settle on her shoulders.

  Cissie picked the photograph up and peered closely at it. The truth was that she was a little short-sighted and she often wore spectacles in the privacy of her own home – though rarely outside it. She looked into the face of the boy Philippe had been, smiling and open and trusting that the world would always be as wonderful as this. She had known his voice, of course, when he had first spoken her name and brought the memories crashing over her. And no doubt she would have recognized his face. It was familiar once she was able to look closely at him, though, she realized with shock, this young man she had once loved could have passed her in the street and she would not have picked him out from the crowd.

  ‘What is he doing here?’ Cissie asked herself. She sighed. If she were to be truthful with herself she probably knew the answer to that, and knew that it was not going to end well.

  Henry and Sergeant Hitchens had been given a quick tour of the studio and introduced to ‘the people that matter’ by one of the senior cameramen. They had spotted Mrs Owens in a lean-to space that she proudly announced was ‘the wardrobe’ and Mr Owens in the glasshouse talking to someone about light and whether the cloud cover was likely to increase in the afternoon.

  Mickey was dispatched to go and speak with him. Henry was told that the local police had already interviewed most of Cissie’s friends but that, of course, he and his sergeant should have free rein. He was asked to remember that this was a working studio and that time was money. Henry promised to try and keep out of the way and in turn reminded his guide that this was a murder inquiry.

  Mickey Hitchens looked around with interest. The main studio building was indeed a giant glasshouse. Their guide had told them that the Shoreham Film Studio had been taken over by Progress Films in the early 1920s and the studio had been one of the first to make use of custom-made, functional sets. Progress had built a joiners’ shop for producing the sets and a small preview theatre and also accommodation for actors – a sparse but functional building called Studio Rest. There had been a fire in 1923 that had damaged part of the studio site but the glasshouse itself had escaped with only a few cracked panes of glass.

  It was an impressive building, Mickey thought, and the current set, a flight of very convincing stairs leading to a very convincing landing, could have found a place in any grand house.

  Mickey caught Fred Owens’ attention and beckoned him across. ‘You have a moment or two?’ he asked politely.

  Fred Owens excused himself from his colleague and came over.

  ‘Sergeant Hitchens, sir. You spoke to my boss yesterday. I believe your poor wife was unfortunate enough to find Miss Rowe dead?’

  Fred Owens nodded, his expression a picture of sadness. ‘She was a lovely young lady,’ he said. ‘It’s a real tragedy, Sergeant. I’m finding it impossible to believe. Who would want to hurt poor Cissie?’

  Mickey was a man who believed in coming straight to the point. ‘My boss left with the impression that you wanted to tell him something, but didn’t want to speak in front of the wife,’ he said. ‘He thought that it was perhaps something of a personal nature that you know about Miss Rowe but that you didn’t think suitable to … speak of in feminine company, shall we say. We all know that ladies can be a little sensitive about such issues, especially when they relate to a friend.’

  Fred Owens pursed his lips as though he disapproved of Mickey even introducing the subject. ‘I’m sorry that the Inspector gained that impression,’ he said. ‘Miss Rowe, as I said, was a lovely young lady. Never did any harm to anyone. And certainly does not deserve to be gossiped about.’

  ‘No young lady who’s met her death in such an unfortunate manner deserves to be gossiped about,’ Mickey agreed. ‘But it’s a sad fact, sir, that not everyone in the world is as gentle as Miss Rowe. Not everyone in the world is as blameless. And if your Miss Rowe brushed up against one of these … others, shall we call them – through no fault of her own, you understand – then we should know about it. If we are to catch the perpetrator of this sad and terrible act then things need to be spoken of, even those things that a gentleman such as yourself would not usually wish to mention.’

  That he had read his man right was confirmed for Mickey when Fred Owens straightened himself up and squared his shoulders decisively.

  ‘No,’ Fred Owens said. ‘Of course you are right. Needs must. You understand I would not wish to speak ill of the dead – anyone dead, and certainly not someone of the calibre of Miss Rowe. But even such young women can make misjudgements and I believe she did. My wife was of the opinion that although she had admirers, she took none of them seriously.’

  ‘But you think different,’ Mickey prompted, afraid that the man was about to clam up again.

  ‘I’m afraid I do. There were two young men, one who worked on the set here and another who was an outsider. Both made something of a play for Cissie in the last few months. And she treated both equally. Going to the cinema with one on one week and perhaps for a walk along the beach with the other. You must understand that she was always careful to maintain proprieties and that each young man knew about the other. But of late …’ He paused.

  ‘Of late?’ Mickey prompted.

  ‘Of late, the other young man, the outsider, he had been a little … shall we say impatient? He put pressure on Cissie to make up her mind, and to make it up in his favour. He and the other young man, on one occasion, almost came to blows.’

  ‘You understand I shall need names and addresses for both of these young gentlemen?’ Mickey said. ‘If not from you, Mr Owens, then I am bound to get them from someone who is perhaps less discreet and less caring of Miss Rowe’s reputation than you are. You understand that?’

  Fred Owens nodded regretfully. ‘Unfortunately, Sergeant, I do realize that. And I should have spoken to your inspector yesterday.’

  ‘The chief inspe
ctor is always discreet, sir. In fact you can depend on both of us, as far as it is possible in a case like this. You understand that things will be said, that things will come out, especially when the press become involved. The death of an actress always attracts the headlines.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Fred Owens said heavily. ‘I take it you’ve seen this morning’s … I cannot call them newspapers. Rags, I call them. And I would not credit the perpetrators with words like journalist.’

  Mickey, who had in fact only had a chance to glance at the more upmarket papers that Cynthia and her husband had delivered every morning and had had little opportunity for gossip with servants or a glimpse at the papers that they would have bought, was a little at a disadvantage here.

  ‘It’s a sorry story,’ he agreed. ‘Best I hear the truth from someone who knew her, don’t you think?’

  Fred Owens nodded reluctantly and gave Mickey the names and, as far as he knew them, the addresses of the two young men involved.

  ‘In fact, I’m surprised young Jimmy Cottee isn’t here this morning. He should have been in an hour ago. But we all assume he’s heard the news and is too grief-stricken.’

  Mickey nodded. ‘Well, we’ll get someone to speak to him as soon as we can,’ he said. ‘Mr Owens, one of the things I wanted to ask you about was, would either of these young men have been likely to give Miss Rowe presents? I mean nothing by it, you understand, no impropriety is suggested. But it is not unusual for a young gentleman who is fond of a young lady to give little gifts.’

  Fred Owens frowned, and then he smiled as though remembering something pleasant after all. ‘Jimmy would always arrive with flowers,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean florist flowers, not big bouquets and that sort of nonsense. You may have noticed down on the beach there’s always something pretty growing. Marguerites and sea thrift and the like. He would make a little posy for her. And sometimes he would buy her chocolates. He is a sweet lad, is Jimmy. Not the brightest or most polished pebble on the beach, but he works hard and as I say is a sweet lad.’