In the audience at Lumpkin!’s first public performance on Monday, October 27th 1975 were some people with a special interest in the show. There were the Friends of the Palace Theatre who spent the performance preparing witty things to say at the discussion with the cast which their secretary, Miss Thompson, had arranged to take place on stage after the final curtain. There were Kevin McMahon’s parents whom he hadn’t been able to dissuade from coming. There was Dickie Peck, just arrived from London to see that everyone was doing exactly what his protege wanted. And there was Gerald Venables, up in theory in his legal capacity to extort money from a wealthy mill-owner, and in fact to keep an eye on his investment and get a progress report from Charles Paris.
The performance they watched was unusual, in that it started with one central character and ended with another. Charles saw it all from the fly gallery. It was strictly against theatre discipline for him to be up there, but he had asked Spike, who didn’t seem to mind. Spike was easy-going about most things. He had that equable technician’s temperament that never failed to amaze Charles. The ability to continue hard physical work up to seventy-two hours without ever losing his resource and surly good humour. And all without any sort of public recognition. The extrovert actor part of Charles could not understand that. What made people like Spike tick? Where did they come from?
He looked across at the intent acne-ridden face as the stage manager pulled on a thick rope and delicately eased a huge piece of scenery up between two metal bars with their heavy load of lights. Charles instantly remembered stories of flying disasters, of cumbersome pieces plummeting down on actors below, of faulty counterweighting snatching technicians up from the stage to dash them against the chipping machine of the grid in the roof. But the sight of Spike’s strength and control put away such thoughts. The eternal stage manager. As the name implied, he could always manage. There was no point in thinking what Spike might have done before; it was impossible to imagine him in any other world.
As the show progressed, Charles’ attention soon moved from speculations about the stage staff to the strange transformation which was taking place onstage, the transformation of the character of Tony Lumpkin. Christopher Milton’s performance started as it had been in rehearsal. The knowing yokel dominated the stage, his voice deeply rustic and his movements capturing the clumsy grace of the farm-boy. Charles settled down to enjoy it.
The change, when it came, was quite abrupt. Audience reaction was a bit slow, but no slower than one would expect from a Monday night house of stuffed shirts from the clothing industry and a few stray television fans, awestruck by the unaccustomed space of a theatre. Charles had been in many shows which had got worse reaction at this tender stage of their lives.
But Christopher Milton was worried. His anxiety was not apparent to the audience, but to Charles, who knew the performance well, the fear showed. There was a hesitancy in delivery, a certain stiffness in dancing that betrayed the inward unrest. It came to a head in the Liberty Hall number. This involved a parodic country dance for Tony Lumpkin and the dancers. It was a well-choreographed routine, which started with heavy deliberation and speeded up until Christopher Milton was spinning giddily on a rostrum centre stage, from which he did a final jump to a kneeling position, an inevitable cue for applause.
He’d done it perfectly in rehearsal, but on the first night he mis-timed it. He came out of the spin into the jump and landed untidily on one leg. It was not a serious error and certainly did not hurt him, but it was messy. The audience realised it had gone wrong, lost their own natural timing and did not come in with instantaneous applause.
The pause was tiny, the audience goodwill to clap was there, but the mistake had thrown them. Christopher Milton felt the hiatus and came in quickly with the line, ‘Ooh, I done it all wrong.’
This time the reaction was enormous. An instant laugh, the loudest of the evening, which melted naturally into vigorous clapping, as if the audience wanted to make up for missing their first cue.
As a professional Charles could recognise Christopher Milton’s immaculate timing of the line, but it was not that which struck him most about it. It was the voice in which it had been delivered. The star had not used his own voice, nor that of Tony Lumpkin. The line had been spoken by Lionel Wilkins of the television series Straight up, Guv.
And from that point on, Lionel Wilkins took over. For the next ten minutes or so, Tony Lumpkin fought a desultory rearguard action, but he was defeated before he started. The rustic burr was replaced by a London whine. The brown frock coat was thrown into the wings and the part was played in timeless shirtsleeves. Oliver Goldsmith, who had probably done a few gyrations in his grave over the previous weeks, must by now have been turning fast enough to power the National Grid. One of the central themes of his play, the contrast between Town and Country, had just vanished. The plot lost yet another of its tenuous links with sense.
And the audience loved it. Familiarity gave them the confidence they needed to express their enthusiasm. It may have been a bit difficult to follow the twists and exposition of an old-fashioned story, but to be presented with an instantly recognisable character from their television screens, that made it all simple. Charles watched from the fly gallery in amazement. ‘What the hell is he doing?’ he murmured to Spike, who was leaning on the rail beside him.
‘His own thing,’ Spike grunted. ‘Never does anything else.’
‘What will David Humdrum say?’
Charles knew the answer to his question, but Spike supplied it ‘He’ll say, “Fine”.’
And he did. Charles saw the encounter between star and director in the green room at the interval. ‘Christ, this needs a lot more work,’ said the star.
‘It’s going fine, Christopher, just fine,’ soothed the director.
‘That Liberty Hall number will have to come out for a start. I always thought it was a load of crap.’
‘I’m sure, with a bit more rehearsal — ’
‘Shut up! It’s coming out.’ Christopher Milton went up to his dressing-room.
Charles decided that it was in his interests as the show’s secret watchdog to keep his eyes on the movements of Kevin McMahon. If the writer lived up to half of his drunken threats, there was going to be trouble.
The trouble started as soon as the curtain had come down on the final call. Kevin McMahon was in the green room to greet the cast as they came offstage. He went straight up to Christopher Milton and shouted, ‘What the hell do you mean by performing my stuff like that? This isn’t one of your tatty TV comedies!’
The star seemed to look through him and greeted a man with greasy swept-back hair and a cheap suede zip-up jacket. ‘Hello, Wally. What did you think?’
‘Good bits, bad bits,’ said Wally Wilson in broad Cockney.
‘Never mind. Nothing that can’t be changed.’
‘Too right. Soon be up to the Straight Up, Guv standard!’
‘Now you bloody listen to me, Mr Christopher Bloody Milton….’ Kevin began belligerently.
The response came back like a whip-lash. ‘Shut up, I’m talking to a writer.’
The implication was too much for Kevin McMahon. With a cry of fury, he drew his fist back for a blow.
Christopher Milton moved fast. He side-stepped with a dancer’s ease. Kevin swung himself off balance and at that moment Dickie Peck, who had moved from the doorway at amazing speed when the fracas started, flicked up Kevin’s head with his left forearm and smashed a hard right knuckle into the writer’s mouth. The knees gave, the body crumpled and blood welled from a cut lip. ‘Don’t you ever dare lay a finger on him,’ Dickie Peck hissed.
The action had all been so quick that it left behind a shocked silence. The unexpectedness of the fight paled into insignificance compared to the transformation of Dickie Peck, suddenly converted from a middle-aged joke figure to a bruiser. Charles recollected a distant rumour that the agent had started his career as a boxer.
Christopher Milton broke the silence. He continued in an even tone, as if nothing had happened. ‘Wally, come up to my dressing-room and have a chat.’
‘Love to.’ Wall’s casualness was more studied.
‘Um, er, Mr Milton.’ A young man who had been hovering uneasily round the edges of the green room, stepped forward, blushing furiously.
‘What?’
‘I’m, er, um… my name is Bates and, er, I’m representing Mr Katzmann, who, as you know, is, er, the general manager of the theatre and — ’
‘What the hell are you burbling about?’
‘Well, er, as you know, the; er… the, er…’ He ran out of syntax. ‘The Friends.’
‘Are you coming, Wally?’
‘Mr Milton.’ Panic made the young man articulate again, and he blurted out his message. ‘The Friends of the Palace Theatre are about to hold their discussion of the show on stage and, as Mr Katzmann arranged, you and the other members of the cast will be joining in the discussion.’
‘I bloody won’t. It’s the first I’ve heard of it. If you think I’m going to piss around talking crap to old ladies, you can forget it.’
‘But — ’
Dickie Peck cut the young man short with a gesture and again took control. ‘Has this been advertised?’
‘Yes. Mr Katzmann arranged it months ago.’
‘Not through me, he didn’t. You’d better do it, Chris.’
‘Look, I’ve just done a bloody performance, I’ve just been assaulted by a lunatic hack-writer, I’m not going to — ’
Dickie Peck raised his hand and the voice petered out. ‘You’ve got to do it, Chris. It’s a bloody lumber and — ’ with a glance at Mr Bates, who trembled visibly — ‘there’ll be hell to pay for someone in the morning when I find out who made the cock-up. But if it’s been advertised, you can’t afford to get the reputation of someone who jacks out of that sort of thing.’
Christopher Milton swore obscenely and loud, but accepted the logic of the argument. He went upstairs to take off his make-up and, as often happened when he left the room, the atmosphere relaxed. People started to drift away. Charles went across to Kevin McMahon, who had dragged himself quietly to a sofa and was dabbing at his lip with a handkerchief. ‘I think it’s time to take the money and run, Kevin. Put this down to bad experience. Reckon that it’s just a grant of money to buy you time to go off and write what you really want to.’
‘I really wanted to write Liberty Hall.’
‘Yes, but there must be other things, more original, more your own that you want to get on with.’
‘Oh yes, things where I express the real me, things that the world has been waiting to have written by some genius who only needs time to get on with it.’
Charles ignored the heaviness of the irony. ‘Yes, that sort of thing.’
‘Don’t you patronise me!’ Kevin stood up. ‘I’m going to kill the bastard,’ he said and walked out of the theatre.
‘But,’ said Mrs Crichton-Smith, whose husband owned a sock factory and played off an eight handicap, ‘I remember doing She Stoops to Conquer at school and I must say a lot of the original plot seems to have been obscured in this production.’
Christopher Milton flashed her a frank, confiding smile. ‘I agree, Mrs Crichton-Smith, but Goldsmith was writing for his time. This is 1975, we can’t just do a production as if nothing has changed since the play was written. And, anyway, this is not She Stoops to Conquer, this is a new musical. What we’re trying to do, and I think our writer, Kevin McMahon, would agree with me here,’ he added, as if to impress the image of a big-happy-family, all-working-towards-the-same-end company, ‘is to create an original show. I mean, entertainment is variety. Your husband wouldn’t think much of you if you produced the same meal for him every night — however good it was.’
His middle-class half-joke produced the right middle-class half-laugh and Charles was once again impressed with Christopher Milton’s ability to adapt to any audience and say the right things. It was not an intellectual gift; he probably did not have the intelligence or knowledge to argue the merits of the piece on a literary level; it was just an instinct that never failed.
Miss Thompson, the secretary, next introduced a question from: ‘Mr Henry Oxenford, one of our keenest members, who’s interested in all things theatrical.’ Mr Oxenford, one of the bow-tied types who hang about amateur dramatic societies, content to be precious rather than queer, stood up and put his well-rehearsed enquiry, ‘I would like to know whether you, as a performer, be it as Tony Lumpkin or Lionel Wilkins, find the danger that a part tends to take over your private life and you become like that person?’
Christopher Milton laughed boyishly. ‘You mean when I’m working on the television series, do I go around trying to con money off everyone I meet?’
‘Well, not exactly.’
‘Oh, I beg yours.’ The Lionel Wilkins line was, as ever, perfectly delivered and got its laugh. Charles watched Christopher Milton’s eyes and saw him decide to continue in the Wilkins voice and prolong the misunderstanding. ‘Oh, I see what you mean — do I go up to people in the street and say, Look ’ere, I’ve got this great project. Wouldn’t you like to buy shares in the first motel on the moon? Not only do you get the normal dividends, but you also get a free weekend every year once the motel is completed. Now the shares aren’t yet officially on the market, but I can let you have some at a price which…’ And he was away, re-creating the plot of a recent episode of Straight Up, Guv. The Friends of the Palace Theatre loved it.
As he drew to the end of his routine, before Miss Thompson could introduce Mrs Horton who had been waving her arm like a schoolgirl know-all between each question, he glanced at his watch. ‘Oh, look at the time. I’m afraid we’ve gone on much longer than we intended. We’ve still got a lot of work to do on this show — oh, you may have liked it, but there are a good few things to he altered yet — so we must draw it to a close there.’
The Friends of the Palace Theatre started to leave through the stalls. An autograph cluster gathered round the star. The other members of the cast, who hadn’t got much of a look-in on the discussion, trickled back through the curtains. Mark Spelthorne dawdled, seeing if there were any fans of The Fighter Pilots on the autograph trail. When it became apparent there weren’t, he vanished smartly.
Christopher Milton finished the signings and waved cheerily from the stage until the last Friend had gone out of the doors at the back of the stalls. When he turned his face was instantly twisted with rage. ‘Cows! Stupid, bloody cows!’ He pushed through the curtains, shouting imperiously, ‘Wally! Dickie! Come on, we’ve got to get this script altered, even if we have to work all bloody night.’
As Charles waited to hear the inevitable news that there would be a rehearsal call at ten the following morning, he began to understand the personality-splitting pressure of a public image.
Gerald Venables was sitting waiting in his car, a Mercedes 280 SL, with the lights doused, by the stage door. He had the collar of his raincoat turned up and was slumped against the window in an attitude cribbed from some B-movie. He was trying so hard to be inconspicuous that Charles saw him instantly. ‘Hello.’
‘Ssh. Get in.’ The passenger door was slipped open. Charles climbed in clumsily. ‘So, what gives?’ Gerald hissed, his eyes scanning the empty road ahead.
‘Just been a bit of a dust-up, boss,’ Charles hissed back.
Gerald didn’t realise he was being sent up, but ran out of slang. ‘What? You mean a fight?’
‘Too right, boss.’
‘Irons?’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Irons — you know, guns. God, don’t you watch any television?’
‘Not much.’
‘Well, give us the dirt. Who swung a bunch of fives at whom?’ The grammatical resolution of the question rather weakened its underworld flavour.
Charles gave a quick account of the scene in the green room and the solicitor nodded knowingly. ‘So you reckon this McMahon could be our cookie?’
‘Our saboteur, the man devoted to the destruction of the show..?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know. Certainly he hates Christopher Milton. If anything were to happen to the star tonight, I would have no doubt about who to look for. But I don’t think Kevin can have been responsible for the other accidents, not the first two, anyway.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because why should he? When the pianist was shot at, Kevin didn’t know what was going to happen to his script, rehearsals had hardly started. I reckon at that stage he must have been full of excitement, you know, his first West End show and all that.’
‘But it can’t have taken long for him to realise the way things were going.’
‘Yes, I suppose he could have built up a sufficient head of resentment by the time Everard Austick met with his accident.’
‘Yes, surely, and — ’
‘There’s another snag, Gerald. Kevin’s resentment is completely against Christopher Milton. Sniping at these minor figures may be bad for the show, but it doesn’t hurt the star much. Christopher Milton doesn’t care who his supporting cast are, so long as they don’t argue with him or do anything better than he does. If Kevin McMahon did want to get at anyone he’d go straight for the one who was bugging him — and, with the star out of the way, there might be a chance that his musical could survive in another production.’
‘Yes. So we’ve got to look for someone else as the mastermind behind the whole sequence of crimes.’
‘If there is a sequence, Gerald, if there are any crimes. So far the only evidence I have of misdoing is what happened at the King’s Theatre. I know someone tampered with the rope holding those flats up. All the others could be genuine accidents. In fact, the thing at the King’s may have a perfectly legitimate explanation.’
‘I don’t know, Charles. I still have the feeling that they’re all linked and that something funny’s going on.’
There was a silence. ‘Hmm. Yes, I can feel a sort of foreboding too, but I don’t know why.’
As he spoke, light spilled across the road from the stage door. Christopher Milton, Dickie Peck, Wally Wilson and the show’s musical director, Pete Masters, came out, escorted by Milton’s driver, who smartly moved forward to the parked Corniche and opened the doors. They all got in. ‘Let’s follow them,’ whispered Charles, more to satisfy Gerald’s love of the dramatic than anything else.
They let the Rolls disappear at the junction on to the main road, confident that Leeds’ central one-way system would make it difficult to lose their quarry, and started up in pursuit.
Gerald’s ‘Follow that car’ routine was as exaggerated as his ‘I am waiting unobtrusively’ one, involving many sudden swivels of the head and bursts of squealing acceleration alternating with dawdling so slowly that it drew, hoots of annoyance from other road-users. But the inhabitants of the Rolls did not appear to notice them. There were none of the sudden right-angled swerves up side-roads beloved of gangsters in movies. They drove sedately round the one-way system and into Neville Street, where they swung off the main road and came to rest at the entrance of the Dragonara Hotel. Gerald, who hadn’t been expecting the stop, overshot, screeched to a halt and reversed to a spying position, flashed at by the righteous headlights of other drivers in the one-way street.
The party disembarking from the Corniche still did not take any notice of their pursuers. The four of them walked straight into the foyer and the driver slid the car away to the hotel car park.
‘Well…’ said Gerald.
‘Well, I guess we’ve found out where he’s staying.’
‘Yes. Yes, we have.’
‘I could have asked him and saved us the trouble.’
‘Yes, but at least this way we can tell if he’s lying.’
‘What on earth do you mean? Why should he lie about staying in the newest, poshest hotel in Leeds?’
‘I don’t know.’ They both felt very foolish.
‘By the way, Gerald, why aren’t you staying at the Dragonara? I thought that was your usual style.’
‘I didn’t know it existed. Polly, my secretary, booked me into the Queen’s. More traditional, I think… I’m only here for the one night. I suppose I could try and get transferred, see if there’s a room here.’
‘What good would that do?’
‘Well, then I’d be in the hotel, I could spy, I…’
‘What are we spying on? What do we want to find out?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘All we want to do is see that Kevin McMahon doesn’t get a chance to have a go at Christopher Milton.’
‘Yes.’
‘And since he’s got Dickie Peck and his driver in the hotel there with him, I think we’re superfluous.’
‘So what should we do?’
‘Go to our several beds,’ said Charles, with mingled desire and depression at the thought of his.
‘All right. I suppose we’d better. Mind you, we’re going to feel pretty silly in the morning if we hear that Christopher Milton’s been murdered.’
They needn’t have worried. Christopher Milton survived the night unharmed. But Kevin McMahon was found beaten up in the car park by the bus station.