Play to the End (23 page)

But her self-control was palpable. There was no way to tell whether she had just been recounting the circumstances of her sister-in-law's suicide or the state of her preparations for Christmas.

"Would you like a drink, Mr. Flood?" she enquired. "Jenny and I are having tea."

"Tea would be fine, thanks."

Jenny poured me a cup. We all sat down. I sipped some tea.

"My husband and I have tickets for your play on Saturday night," said Delia. "I'm sure we'll enjoy it."

"We aim to please." Whether Orton's scatological humour would appeal to her I privately doubted. The state of mind of the lead actor come Saturday night was also questionable. Delia was facing a less certain prospect than she knew.

"Jenny's explained your .. . difficulty, Toby. May I call you Toby? I dare say you find people tend towards overfamiliarity because of your profession. It must be a bore for you."

"Not at all. And certainly not in your case."

"Very well, Toby. You should understand that I'm not in the habit of discussing my family's affairs with outsiders. Indeed, I'm hardly in the habit of discussing them with other members of my family." She smiled thinly. "The Colborns do not wear their hearts on their sleeves. But that doesn't mean they don't have hearts. Or consciences. The illness that affected so many Colbonite employees has weighed on Roger's conscience, I know, as it should have. I believe Jenny has told you of his efforts to help some of them." "Yes." I glanced across at Jenny. "She's told me." "No doubt you think those efforts inadequate. Well, you may be right. He is constrained, however. You should be aware of that. I've done a little for some of them myself. Again, no doubt, too little. I played absolutely no part in the management of Colbonite, of course. I had no idea what .. .

corners .. . Walter might have been cutting to sustain the business at a time when others were going to the wall in the face of foreign competition. They were Walter's decisions, however. No-one else's.

Certainly not Roger's. I believe he did his best to improve safety practices after joining the company. As for his purchase of the shares Gavin and I held, I regarded that as an expression of his confidence that he could make a success of it. I was happy to sell. So was Gavin. Roger took a risk and profited from it. Why should I resent that? I know Gavin resents it, but I fear he's blaming Roger for his own mistakes. You've met Gavin. You know the kind of man he is."

"He sends his regards."

My remark drew a sharp look from Jenny, but Delia smiled tolerantly, as if she'd been the subject of a justified rebuke. "Ours would be called a dysfunctional family in the current jargon. Gavin's character is flawed by self-indulgence. A refusal to accept responsibility for his own actions is the greatest self-indulgence of all."

"He seems to think he was cheated out of his inheritance." "You can't be cheated out of something you haven't earned, Toby. Gavin has never understood that. But I don't want to be too hard on him. His elder brother was not without flaws himself. They were flaws of a rather different order, however. Walter wasn't a self-made man. How could he be as the third generation to run Colbonite? But he'd have liked to be, you see, and probably would have been in other circumstances. The company could easily have collapsed in the nineteen fifties. Walter sustained it virtually single-handedly. Father's contribution was negligible by then. Thanks to Walter, the Colbonite workforce probably had an extra twenty to thirty years of employment. He saw that as a genuine achievement."

"But there was a price to pay, Delia, wasn't there?"

"Yes. It's clear now there was. Which brings me to Walter's greatest failing: his absolute inability to admit a mistake when he'd made one.

Gavin's tactic is to blame others. Walter's was denial. I don't believe he went to such lengths to evade liability for the cancer cases simply because of the huge amount of money that might have been involved. I believe he did it because he couldn't convince himself that he was liable. It would have meant he was wrong to have done the things he did to keep Colbonite in profit, which, by his definition, he couldn't have been. There was his reputation to consider as well. He feared public disgrace far more than bankruptcy. He was a stubborn and dogmatic man. I say that though I loved him dearly. He could not, would not, admit to error, in large things or in small. He could be infuriating. Sometimes worse than infuriating."

"Is that what drove his wife to suicide?"

Delia didn't flinch at the mention of her late sister-in-law. She'd been prepared for it, after all. But her face did quiver slightly. It was a tender subject, even after twenty years. "Ann wasn't a strong person. That wasn't Walter's fault, of course. But he ignored the warning signs. He didn't take enough care of her. He was too busy.

With Colbonite. With his politics and good causes. It shouldn't have happened. But it did." Delia diverted her gaze towards the fire and fell silent. It seemed she'd said as much as she could bear to about Ann Colborn's fatal plunge from Beachy Head.

"I'm sorry for putting you through this, Delia," said Jenny, with a glare in my direction. "Toby insisted on hearing the whole story."

"With good reason, I've no doubt," Delia responded. She looked across at me then, her expression fractionally but significantly altered from the placid earnestness of earlier. Jenny couldn't have seen the strange, fleeting hint of ambiguity in her eyes. It was reserved for me. There was more she could have said, it lightly implied, more she could have divulged. But not more of the same. I'd been given the authorized version. And I wasn't going to be given any other.

Jenny showed me to the door, transparently keen on a private word before I left.

"It wasn't easy for Delia to go into all that, you know," she whispered to me as we stood in the porch, the front door half-open. "I hope you're satisfied."

"You think I should be?"

"Of course."

"Well, that's settled, then."

"I'd like you to say it as if you mean it."

"And I will. When I do."

"You have to give this up, Toby."

"Tell you what, Jen. If I find Roger has nothing to do with Derek Oswin's disappearance and the poor bloke duly reappears unharmed .. .

then I'll give it up."

"You promised to abide by what Delia said."

"No. I promised to take it seriously. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. What I want you to do is take care. I meant what I said earlier about Roger being dangerous. Hard as you may find it to believe, that's why I'm being such a pain."

"Not hard to believe, Toby." She opened the door wide. "Just impossible. As you always are."

When I left Powis Villas, I had barely half an hour at my disposal before I was due back at the theatre. Tomato juice and a bag of nuts in a nondescript pub halfway between the two made for a frugal pit Stop. I turned my mobile back on to check for messages and found one waiting for me from Moira. Fearing she'd changed her mind about delivering The Plastic

Men in person tomorrow and wondering how the bloody hell I was going to get hold of it in that case, I listened in.

"Toby, this is Moira. What exactly is going on? I thought we'd agreed I'd bring this wretched manuscript down to you tomorrow. If that wasn't good enough, you should have said. Anyway, is lunch still on or not? Perhaps you'd be so kind as to let me know."

What in God's name was the woman on about? I called her at the office, but only got the answering machine. It was the same story on her home number. I left messages on both to the exasperated effect that as far as I was concerned our plans were unaltered and I'd be expecting to meet her off the 12.27 train, The Plastic Men wedged firmly under her arm. She's always adroitly managed to avoid giving me her mobile number and now I was left wondering why I can be contacted more easily by my agent than she can be by me.

The time for wondering was not long, however. I was soon on my way down Bond Street to the stage door of the Theatre Royal. Brian greeted me with the news that Leo and Melvyn had departed for London well pleased with what they'd seen. I fancied he was just trying to put me and the rest of the cast in a good mood, but others seemed wholly convinced that a West End transfer had been snatched from the jaws of a provincial fizzle-out. Donohue was looking even more pleased with himself than usual, for instance, though Fred suggested to me in passing that Mandy Pringle was more likely to be responsible for that than Leo S. Gauntlett. "That's Brighton for you," he said with a wink.

"So they tell me."

This evening's performance is an even hazier memory for me than this afternoon's. I've been James Elliott for Lodger in the Throat's two and a half hours of running time on seventy-seven occasions since we opened in Guildford ten weeks ago, so it's hardly surprising that most of those are part of one vague and messily merged recollection. None of them faded faster into that melange than tonight's, however. It ended only a few hours ago, but it could as easily be several days, or even weeks. Those few hours have made sure of that.

The others must be getting used to me opting out of communal supper parties after the show. No-one made more than a desultory effort to talk me into joining them. Perhaps they realized I wasn't likely to be good company.

I walked down to the pier after leaving the theatre, bought a portion of fish and chips and ate them in the biting cold night air, staring out across the sea that could be heard more than seen in the inky darkness, wondering with oddly detached curiosity whether I really was going to go through with what Ian Maple had planned. I still didn't really know, when the time came, which way I'd jump.

I got back to the Sea Air just before 11.30. That was past Eunice's normal bedtime, so it was a surprise to see her light still on and even more of a surprise to be met by her in the hall, looking flustered and far from sleepy.

"Thank goodness," she breathlessly greeted me. "I was beginning to think you'd be out till the small hours."

"Would it have mattered if I was?"

"Ordinarily, no. Of course not. But .. . after what's happened ..

."

"What has happened?" My first thought was that Binky had met with an accident. What else could disrupt Eunice's domestic routine as dramatically as something clearly had?

"I didn't like to phone you at the theatre. I knew you'd need to concentrate on your performance. But it's been such a worry for me, not knowing what to make of it."

"Make of what, Eunice?" I piloted her into the residents' lounge, switching on the lights as we entered.

"It's been such a to-do. My nerves are all a-jangle."

"Sit down and tell me all about it."

"Yes. Of course. You must be wondering why I'm making such a fuss."

We settled in opposite armchairs in front of the gas fire. "Turn that on, will you, Toby? It's as cold as the grave in here."

"Sure." I flicked the fire into life and returned to my chair. "So, what, erIt was while I was out shopping this afternoon. You were at the theatre for the matinee, of course, which meant the house was empty. It's almost as if they knew it would be. The policeman who came reckoned it was what he called ... an opportunist. Looking for money to buy drugs, like as not, and just gave up and went away when they couldn't find any. I'm not so sure though."

"Are we talking about a burglary, Eunice?" (If so, the policeman sounded spot-on to me.)

"I suppose we would be if anything had been taken. But that's the point. Nothing was. They smashed a pane in one of my windows and forced the latch. The basement's out of sight unless you're right outside on the pavement, of course. Upset my Busy Lizzie, climbing in, they did. But nothing else was touched downstairs, as far as I can tell. If they were looking for money, they didn't look very hard.

Walked straight past my Chivas Regal. There must be a good few quid in there all told. The policeman reckoned notes were what they had in mind, but, like I told him, if they're so desperate, why would they be so choosy?"

A dimly recalled glimpse in Eunice's kitchen of an old Chivas Regal bottle, used as a repository for small change, mostly of the copper variety, was all that enabled me to follow this account. Once again, I had to side with the policeman. But I sensed that wasn't what Eunice wanted to hear.

"Till the glazier's been tomorrow, I shan't feel safe. And there's you to consider, Toby. They'd have gone through the house, wouldn't they?

Stands to reason. Was there any money in your room? The policeman asked me to check with you. Nothing looked to have been disturbed up there, but how can I say for sure?"

"The only cash I've got is in my pocket, Eunice. Nothing to worry about there." Then it struck me that maybe there was something to worry about. "Hold on, though. There's my chequebook."

"Oh, my."

"I'd better go up and see if it's still there. You stay here. And relax. There's not much you can do with a chequebook these days without the plastic to back it up."

When I reached my room, I saw at once that Eunice was right. It had a distinctly and reassuringly undisturbed look. I pulled open the drawer of the bedside cabinet and there was my chequebook, lying just where I'd left it. All was well.

Except that it wasn't. As I turned round from the cabinet, my glance fell on the small table next to the armchair. The dictaphone was also where I'd left it, on the table. But the hatch of the cassette compartment was open. As I moved towards it, I knew what I'd see. The cassette was missing. Trembling now, I went back to the cabinet and reopened the drawer, wider than before. The previous cassette was also missing.