Play to the End (20 page)

Only just good enough, to be honest. I wanted The Plastic Men in my hands, there and then, to comb for clues to what had happened and evidence to use against Roger Colborn. Short of going up to London to get it, however, I was going to have to wait until Moira brought it to me. The matinee meant I couldn't leave Brighton. The consequences of another no-show by me, with no understudy on hand, didn't bear contemplation. I suspected Moira had volunteered to act as courier because she wanted to reassure herself as to my state of mind. She'd lost two clients in this run of Lodger in the Throat Jimmy Maidment was one of hers as well so maybe she was getting twitchy.

If so, it seemed she wasn't the only one. I let myself out of the house and headed round the corner into London Road to catch a bus back into the centre. While I was waiting at the stop, Brian Sallis rang me.

"Good morning, Toby. How are you?"

"You don't need to worry, Brian. I'll be at the theatre by two o'clock."

"Oh, I didn't phone to check up on you. Please don't think that."

"I'll try not to."

"It's true. The thing is, well.. ."

"Spit it out, for God's sake."

"All right. Sorry. Leo and Melvyn are coming down to see the matinee.

I thought you ought to know."

"The pair of them?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Just to see how we're going, I suppose."

"Don't give me that. We're two days from closure."

"Ah, but are we?"

"What do you mean?"

"I have the impression Melvyn's report on Tuesday night's show may have made Leo think twice about taking us off."

"You can't be serious."

"I don't see any other way to read it. Play it this afternoon like you did Tuesday and .. . who knows? It could be very good news."

Brian's definition of good news and mine were quite a way apart at that moment. I sat on the top deck of the number 5 as it rumbled south, bemused by the ironies of my situation. If Leo really was considering an eleventh-hour stay of execution for Lodger in the Throat and, by implication, a London transfer, I should be psyching myself up for a persuasive and possibly clinching star turn as James Elliott. The rest of the cast could be relied on to pull out all the stops. The chance was there to be seized.

But the chance was to me more of a burden. I couldn't spare much thought for acting as matters currently stood. In fact, I couldn't spare any. Reality doesn't often intrude into the life of an actor.

Pretence is all, off stage as well as on. For me, though, that had changed. Utterly.

The only problem was explaining my predicament to other people in a way that would make sense to them. And I knew it was a problem I couldn't hope to solve.

As if to underline the point, Brian was back on to me before I'd even got off the bus.

"I've just spoken to Melvyn, Toby. I'm having lunch with him and Leo at the Hotel du Vin. It's in Ship Street. You know, where Henekeys used to be."

"I'm sure you'll have a wonderful time."

"Ah, but Leo's suggested you join us, you see. That's why I called.

Not for the whole meal, obviously. Wouldn't want to put you off your stroke." His laugh was not contagious. "One o'clock OK for you? It's only a ten-minute walk from there to the theatre."

I agreed, of course. I only had to think how rejecting a lunch invitation from our esteemed producer would go down with my fellow cast members, whose salaries he paid, to realize I had no choice. Buttering up Leo and Melvyn was something I had neither the wish nor the leisure to engage in, but come one o'clock I was going to be doing it none the less.

I hopped off the bus at the Steine and doubled back at an Olympic-style walk to the Local Studies Library in Church Street. I glimpsed a representative sample of library-going folk poring over microfilm-readers as I entered, but fortunately there were several vacant places. I just had to hope none of those using the machines were consulting November 1995 editions of the Argus.

As I peeled round to the enquiries desk, however, I came face to face with someone extremely unlikely to have come there in search of anything else.

"Toby," said Jenny, shuffling together a sheaf of photocopied pages, conspicuous by their having been printed white on black. "What are you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same question' was such an obvious retort that I didn't utter it. I just looked at her, then down at the sheets of paper in her hand, recognizing at a glance the headlines and columns of a newspaper page and deciphering a date at the top of one: Friday, November 17, 1995. Then I looked back up at her and said simply,

"Snap."

A few minutes later, we were standing in the grounds of the Royal Pavilion, near the entrance to the Museum. It was cold enough to ensure we were in no danger of being overheard. A dusting of frost still clung to the grass where the sun hadn't reached. And Jenny's breath clouded faintly in the air as she spoke. Anger as well as a chill wind had reddened her cheeks.

"You set me up, didn't you? It was a test, to see which way I'd jump.

Well, congratulations, Toby. You twitched the lead and I came running."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I should have realized you'd put Ian Maple up to it, of course."

"Up to what?"

"Drop the pretence, Toby. It won't wash."

"You've spoken to Ian Maple?"

"You know I have."

"No. I don't. When was this?"

Jenny shifted her gaze and took a long, slow breath. The white-on-black photocopies were clutched tightly in her hand. I reached out and tugged gently at them. She let go.

"The print's come off on your fingers," I remarked, irrelevantly. She shivered, tempting me for a moment to put a warming arm round her shoulders. But of course I didn't. "Why don't we grab a coffee somewhere?"

"Tell me the truth, Toby." She looked me in the eye. "Did you send Ian Maple to see me?"

"No."

"He came to the shop just after we opened." Which meant before I phoned him from Viaduct Road, I realized; nice of him to mention the visit. "He was very .. . insistent. And the things he said about Roger .. ." She shook her head. "I don't believe any of it."

"I told him you wouldn't."

"So you did send him?"

"No."

"But everything he knows .. ."

"He had from me, I admit."

"Including this nonsense about Oswin being abducted?"

"Not nonsense, actually."

"It must be."

"If you're so sure, why did you look these up?" I fanned out the photocopies in my hand.

"To remind myself of the facts. Which Roger told me a long time ago, in case you're wondering."

"And what are the facts, Jenny?"

She cocked an eyebrow at me. "Perhaps you should read them for yourself."

"Why don't you just tell me?"

"Because you might not believe me."

"If we could agree on what the truth is, Jenny, we'd have no choice but to believe each other."

Her mouth tightened. Her focus flicked cautiously around the middle distance. Then she said, "All right. We'll talk. But you'll have to read the Argus reports first. Then we'll both know what we're talking about. There's a cafe in the Museum. I'll wait for you there."

I sat down on a bench where the surrounding buildings screened me from the wind but not the sunshine and sorted the photocopied sheets into chronological order.

There were seven in all, the first five dating from November 1995. A short but prominent article, accompanied by an indistinct photograph of a car cordoned off behind police tape in a country lane, reported Sir Walter Colborn's death in the issue of 14 November. The headline reads, PROMINENT LOCAL BUSINESSMAN KILLED IN COLLISION WITH CAR. It goes on:

Sir Walter Colborn, former chairman and managing director of Brighton-based plastics company Colbonite Ltd, died yesterday after being struck by a car while walking along a lane close to his home, Wickhurst Manor, near Fulking. The incident occurred shortly after 3

p.m.

The driver of the car, a dark-blue Ford Fiesta, has not been named. He has been detained in custody and is assisting the police with their inquiries.

By the following day, the Argus was able to report SURPRISE

MANSLAUGHTER CHARGE FOLLOWING DEATH OF SIR WALTER COLBORN: Police yesterday charged a man in connection with the death on Monday of prominent local businessman and politician Sir Walter Colborn.

Kenneth George Oswin, 63, from Brighton, has been charged with manslaughter and will appear before Lewes magistrates tomorrow.

Another page of the same issue carried a fulsome obituary of the eminent departed.

Walter Colborn was born in Brighton in 1921. He was the grandson of the founder of Colbonite Ltd, a plastics company based in Hollingdean Road, Brighton, which closed in 1989. Walter Colborn was educated at Brighton College and went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, after serving with distinction in the Army during the Second World War. He succeeded his father as chairman and managing director of Colbonite in 1955 and later served as a West Sussex County Councillor for many years, latterly as deputy leader of the Conservative group. He was also energetically involved in a host of charitable causes and was a prominent member of the Brighton Society and an adviser to the West Pier Trust. He was knighted in 1987 in recognition of his distinguished record of public service. He married Ann Hopkinson in 1953. The couple had one son, Roger, who survives Sir Walter. Ann Colborn died in 1982.

Next day, Kenneth Oswin was remanded in custody by Lewes magistrates, according to a terse paragraph lodged obscurely near the bottom of a page. Someone had cottoned on to his connection with Colbonite by the day after, however, raising the profile of the case. MAN CHARGED WITH

MANSLAUGHTER OF SIR WALTER COLBORN WAS FORMER EMPLOYEE ran the headline, above an article revealing how Roger Colborn had got in on the act.

Roger Colborn, son of the late Sir Walter Colborn, confirmed yesterday that Kenneth Oswin, the man charged with manslaughter following Sir Walter's death on Monday after he collided with a car being driven by Mr. Oswin, was a former employee of Colbonite Ltd, the Brighton-based plastics company, founded by Sir Walter's grandfather, which closed in 1989. Mr. Colborn, who assisted his father in the management of the company, said he knew of no reason why Mr. Oswin should bear Sir Walter any ill will. Mr. Oswin, he added, had been 'generously treated, like all the company's staff, at the time of its closure, a regrettable but unavoidable event brought about by increasingly intense foreign competition'.

How nice, how bland, how very reasonable Roger sounded. There was no mention of chloro-aniline or cancer or shell companies or deftly dodged compensation. The average uninformed reader probably concluded, if they concluded anything, that Kenneth Oswin was some kind of nutter with a grudge, the details of which would emerge at his trial.

But there was to be no trial, as a paragraph in the Argus for Wednesday, February 7,1996, made clear.

Kenneth George Oswin, 63, of Viaduct Road, Brighton, the man awaiting trial for the manslaughter of Sir Walter Colborn last November, died yesterday at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, where he had recently been transferred from Lewes Prison. He had been suffering from cancer for some time.

That wasn't quite the end of the matter, however. An inquest followed two months later, skimming over the ground that a trial would doubtless have examined in depth. SIR WALTER COLBORN'S DEATH WAS UNLAWFUL

KILLING, CORONER RULES, ran the Argus headline.

An inquest heard yesterday that the prosecution would have argued at the trial of Kenneth Oswin for the manslaughter of Sir Walter Colborn that Mr. Oswin intended to do Sir Walter serious and probably fatal harm when he drove a Ford Fiesta car into him on a quiet country lane near Sir Walter's home north of Brighton on the afternoon of November 13 last year.

Detective Inspector Terence Moore of Sussex Police told the coroner that the collision occurred on a stretch of the lane with good visibility and that examination of the car showed that Mr. Oswin had first struck Sir Walter a glancing blow, knocking him to the ground, then reversed over him. A charge of manslaughter was only preferred to murder because of doubts about Mr. Oswin's state of mind, which might well have justified a plea of diminished responsibility. Mr. Oswin was suffering at the time from cancer, of which he later died while awaiting trial. Detective Inspector Moore added that Mr.

Oswin consistently denied deliberately killing Sir Walter, but refused to give any account of what had occurred on the afternoon in question.

The coroner said in his summing-up that the outcome of Mr. Oswin's trial could not and should not be taken for granted, but that a verdict of unlawful killing was clearly appropriate in the matter of Sir Walter's death. He added a personal tribute to the deceased, whom he described as a great loss to the community.

I went into the Museum and up to the cafe on the first floor. Jenny was waiting for me at a table overlooking the art gallery. She'd have been able to see me coming from there, though the intensity with which she was staring into the frothy remains of her cappuccino suggested she might easily have missed me. I bought a coffee for myself and joined her.

"OK. I'm up to speed on the facts," I said quietly, laying the sheaf of photocopies on the table between us. "Those the Argus printed, at any rate."

"Kenneth Oswin murdered Roger's father," said Jenny, leaning forward across the table and treating me to a lengthy, scrutinizing stare. "You accept that?"

"Yes." I had to. Derek's suggestion that the collision was accidental could only be wishful thinking at best. His version of the event was seriously at variance with the facts. "But the question is: why?"