Noose

ONE

Twice tonight, within a couple of hours, he was invited back into his past. Invited? Frogmarched, more like it. Not a totally happy feeling. Recently, a novel had come out with an already famous opening sentence comparing the past to a foreign country. He’d agree. And not just foreign. Fundamentally and cantankerously hostile. Vengeful.

He had a call at home from Percy Lyall on the Mirror News Desk, the usual flippant but, behind-it-all, urgent tone. ‘Here’s a possible tale that’s very much your sort of thing, Ian – a poignant mix of near tragedy, possible thwarted romance, glamour. Can you get over there? Needs sensitive but, of course, dramatic treatment. And it goes without saying, so I’ll say it, depth. I immediately thought of you.’

‘How right you were.’

‘Daphne West,’ Lyall said. ‘Heard of her?’

Ian Charteris paused for a moment, or a moment plus. Yes, say three moments. The shock deserved that.

‘Heard of her, Ian?’

Well, yes, sort of. She might be my sister. Might. We possibly share an amphibious father. Most probably. Certainly. But Ian didn’t say any of this. ‘Actress?’ he replied. ‘Television, stage, a film or two? Twenty or so.’

‘A beauty. Starred very young, like Jean Simmons. Hang on. I’ve got some background cuttings here and very fetching library pix. Yes, born 1936, so, as you say, twenty.’

That would be about right. ‘Near tragedy? How?’

‘She’s tried to kill herself. Standard method – gas, the ever-available, as long as the meter’s stoked. Half in love with easeful death because a love affair of a different sort turned un-easeful and sank. She’s in hospital, possibly OK now. But touch and go. Her publicity people, bless them, and their protectiveness and speed, are putting out the usual kind of horse shit: an accident – water boiled over, extinguished the flames, but the gas kept coming, as gas will. Daphne dozing nearby didn’t notice. Tired after early morning wake-up for filming. Luckily, or maybe not, someone in the next flat smelled gas and after knocking and yelling got no reply so barged the door in. Stove immediately switched off. Windows swiftly, recuperatively, opened. The customary PR gab. Get the truth, would you, please, Ian? That’s our business, isn’t it – at least, as long as the truth is (a) gripping and (b) convenient for the paper. See if rolled towels were in place under door gaps, including the door of the break-in. The rumour is she was getting fucked on a reasonably regular basis by a big-deal theatre producer, Milton Skeeth. Could have been mistaken by the girl for something serious, the way girls do. Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis women’s whole existence. Byron. Heard of him?’

‘Byron?’

‘Skeeth.’

Oh, yes, indeed. Heard plenty. But that was added to the great unsaids. ‘The name seems familiar.’

‘It looks as though Daphne was only one of his bed mates. A lad in his position can move around among young, ambitious lovelies. He has parts to offer. His. Fay Doel. Heard of her?’

‘Another actress – TV and so on?’

‘Like that, yes. Skeeth lives at twelve Feder Road, Chelsea.’

Lived. Has lately long-term exited. But Charteris didn’t say this, either. ‘I’m making a note. Feder Road, twelve. Right, Percy?’

‘Right. Perhaps Doel is there with him.’

Charteris knew nobody was at twelve Feder Road and wouldn’t be tomorrow or the day after or possibly for weeks, months ahead. There had been what battlefield communiqués during the war called ‘a tactical withdrawal’. Hoof it, in other words. From Ian Charteris, though, more silence.

Lyall said: ‘Maybe West had been ditched. And so, despair. These theatrical people, they emote easily. They’re trained to it. It’s their long suit. And so, a decision to end it all. And so, gas.’

‘Which hospital?’

‘St Thomas’s. Talk to her, if possible. Well, obviously. This is a voice from the almost Beyond. Lazarus, but prettier and with tits. Normally I’d give the tale to one of our staff people. But it seems so very right for you. They probably won’t let us in to do new pix. She might not be looking her best. No problem. We’ve plenty in stock. An eyeful. Ask her what really happened. That’s one of your flairs, isn’t it – getting folk to confide, blub on your shoulder, reveal all? You sport that kind of sympa face and chummy voice. You could become an agony aunt when age sets in and your career starts to wind down. I want to hear the flagging of her gas-strangled heartbeat in your stuff, Ian. This calls for prose. This calls for prose that sobs and strums and reaches, above all, our lady readers. Some might have been thinking of gas themselves.

‘Then recovery. I need to watch via your phrasing how near-deadly emptiness for a while colonized her lovely photogenic eyes – grey-green in most of the cuttings, aquamarine once, but in the Herald. I want to share the pain and piquant hopelessness of a nice cast-off piece of thespian arse.’

‘We don’t actually know that, do we?’

‘You believe her publicity people’s version?’

‘Was there a note?’

‘You don’t get notes with an accident. That’s the thing about accidents – they come out of nowhere and don’t give you time to write notes.’

‘But if there was a note it would show definitely it wasn’t an accident.’

‘Probably the publicity people have been around to her flat and destroyed any note.’

‘Conspiracy theory?’ Ian said.

‘What keeps journalism going.’

Hospital stories could turn out difficult. Although wards were, in a sense, public areas, open to visiting at certain hours, managements hated any Press scrummage around beds of the famous and would often try to exclude reporters and photographers, claiming hospitals had a duty to protect the privacy of patients. Maybe they did. But news aces had a duty to get the news and, as Percy said, to expose conspiracies.

Hospital security people were guarding Daphne West. When Ian reached St Thomas’s this evening he found reporters from the Sketch and Mail already hanging around Reception and trying to negotiate admission for a brief interview. So, the word about the star and her gas was out in Fleet Street. Ian gave his name and the Mirror’s and added his plea for an interview. They were told the requests would be passed on and up. Nothing happened, though. The Mail man left. It wasn’t really a broadsheet tale. Tacky? TV obsessed?

At the end of another forty minutes, Ian and Greg Amber of the Sketch heard that one of them, and one only, might be allowed a quick visit to Daphne West. Ian and Amber agreed to toss a coin. Amber won. The arrangement was that whoever interviewed her showed his notes to the other afterwards. Ian felt nervy but thought it might be all right. Tabloid honour did exist, even if not standard issue. A couple of hospital officials accompanied them upstairs to the ward. Ian hung back, as stipulated. Amber walked with a guard on each side like a deserter on his way to be shot. He tried to do some amiable chat but they weren’t having any. At the entrance to the ward they seemed to tell Greg to wait while the two went into what might be the sister’s office and closed the door. Another formality? Or an invitation to Greg to nip into the ward and talk to Daphne without their approval, so there’d be no later reproofs for caving in to the Press?

From where he stood, Ian could see West in the second bed. She was sitting up, looking alert and very wholesome. This was not in any sense an ordinary moment for him. He tried to think brotherliness, in case she did turn out to be his sister. There wasn’t really much doubt. He didn’t understand why Greg went on waiting. The agreement could still be countermanded by someone bossy and non-cooperative in that room. Amber was experienced, tough, as pushy as any Sketch reporter. Did hospitals paralyse him? They were home ground to Ian. He walked past Greg to the side of Daphne’s bed. ‘Hello, Miss West,’ he said, notebook ready.

‘Who are you? Press? Is it as important as that?’

‘You’re important. Think of all the worried fans.’ She had on a short blue silk jacket over what might be hospital pyjamas with faded red and orange stripes, not new. Ian found himself sniffing at her hair for gas. ‘Are you all right now?’ he said.

‘Oh, fine, fine. What an idiot I was, though, causing so much fuss! Sorry. So, sorry.’ A big, stagey, ‘So sorry.’ At once then she started the boiling water flimflam, telling it with lots of face pulling and minor groans to indicate the extent of her stupidity. Yes, actress. Very successful young actress, so there would have been enough in the meter. He wondered if she worked out the explanation alone or whether, as Percy Lyall suggested, she’d had expert public relations advice. Her agent might already have visited.

Ian, of course, kept ‘glamorous’ in his head for the statutory description of her, but she wasn’t made-up now, and at some moments between the gushes of self-mockery she seemed almost haggard and resentful at being alive still, as if sure suicide would have been her grandest performance yet. He searched for resemblances to his father. Was there something about the slant of those light-blue eyes, and an unusual depth from the bottom of her nose to her top lip – supposed to be characteristic of a comedian? Well, Dad was one, but without knowing it. Daphne’s tale about the boiling water had its giggle aspect, too – the daft unlikelihood.

She seemed to become unsettled by the thoroughness of his gaze, though someone with her attractions should have been used to men staring. ‘I look pretty rough, I expect,’ she said.

‘I’ve enjoyed a lot of your stuff on television,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ She was thrilled and real pleasure sweetened her face, rather than the put-on, jolly, self-mocking chirpiness.

Ian said: ‘Look, I might get thrown out in a minute. Can we talk about – about the gas? What’s your first memory after waking?’

‘My first memory? Oh, being slapped twice across the chops, to bring me round. And then the ambulance. Have you ever been carted off as an emergency in an ambulance?’

Yes, he’d been carted off as an emergency in an ambulance. And screaming for his mother. But this bedside meeting wasn’t about him. He said, ‘A siren? Flashing blue light?’

‘So frightening, ambulances,’ she said. ‘Those terrible bright red blankets, and the shine on all the metal gear.’

‘Is this stuff about the boiling water total garbage?’ he replied. ‘Your flunkeys have been along and told you what to say? They don’t like Star in suicide bid? Not good for the image, is it? Not good for their percentage.’

‘Flunkeys?’

‘You’re an investment. There’ll be an organization behind you, won’t there? A manager. An agent. An impresario. They have to look after their property – you.’ Percy Lyall had spoken about Ian’s empathy flair – spoken about it satirically, but with some truth there, too. Occasionally, though, in this game an amount of brutality – verbal brutality – had to take over: when time was short, for instance, and when you suspected you were being soft-soaped.

‘No, it isn’t like that. Not at all,’ she said. Her voice had weakened, though, as if she’d been knocked off-balance by what he said. She wouldn’t have been able to get her lines to people in the back row of the stalls.

‘Is it a love affair? Something gone wrong between you and a man? Was it a serious relationship, at least from your point of view, and suddenly it’s finished?’

She looked startled. ‘Why do you say that?’ she said.

‘Has he disappeared, perhaps with another woman? The gas wasn’t an accident, was it? As I see it now, you—’

‘Disappeared with another woman?’

‘Something like that.’

She stared about the ward, as though searching for Matron, to ask her, ‘How come this rude, offensive, gutter reporter can get in here to torment me?’ Aloud she said, ‘What do you know?’

‘It’s a guess, a reasonable guess, that’s all. "Cherchez le gaz, cherchez l’homme."’

‘What do you know?’ She whispered the question. They’d suddenly entered an area of secrets, though there remained for now one secret she wouldn’t be dealing with – her/his father.

‘I’m asking, no more than that,’ he said. ‘This kind of thing – it’s usually a matter of a fractured romance.’

‘You see scores of such cases, do you? Professionally?’ She turned away from him and began to sob.

‘Oh, look, I’m sorry,’ Ian said. ‘I’d hate to hurt you, believe me.’ He leaned forward over the bed and gently touched her hair. ‘Look, Daphne, you and I might …’

He’d been about to cough the familial lot to her, or the familial lot as it might be, but those hospital security people plus a ward sister arrived at the bedside just then. They had Amber with them. They told Ian and him to leave at once. They said Ian was blatantly upsetting a patient and it couldn’t be allowed. Her recovery would be set back.

‘But we’re only here to help,’ Ian said.

‘You’re reporters. You’re here to help yourselves,’ the sister said.

‘Out, please,’ one of the guards said. ‘Out now.’

In the corridor afterwards, Ian gave Amber all the boiling-water quotes and full atmospherics of Daphne’s blue silk jacket, the old pyjamas, the way her face seemed to sag and crumple now and then, though no gas smell in her hair. Maybe they’d given her a full rinse.

‘This is total, routine fucking rot, isn’t it – her account of things?’ Greg said. ‘You can buy it by the yard from some protect-your-reputation firm.’

‘Sure.’

‘So, what’s the real story? Man trouble? He’s dumped her?’

‘Not that I discovered,’ Ian said.

‘Is she up the duff? You wouldn’t con me? I was the one who should have been talking to her.’

‘Why weren’t you?’

The ward sister came out from her office. She’d be in her mid-thirties, long-faced, auburn-haired, authoritative looking, not too friendly, good, enticing legs. Ian thought something had messed up to a major extent in her life, and being a ward sister with her own office and the power to vet visitors didn’t totally compensate. You could meet people like this: grudge driven. ‘That was quite a little shock when someone brought your names and the papers’ names up from Reception. I’ve often seen your byline on reports – that’s the term, isn’t it, byline – and wondered,’ she said.

‘Wondered what?’ Amber said. ‘About me? About him?’

‘Him. Whether he was the same one. The same Ian Charteris. I can see now the age is about right.’

Charteris felt a second, disturbing, frightening tug into the past. At least disturbing, and maybe frightening. First Daphne West, now this. But he couldn’t work out yet what the sister meant. ‘Age about right for what?’ Ian said. ‘Have we met before? I’ve done other hospital tales from here.’

She answered to Greg Amber, not to Charteris. ‘Back in 1941 he got a man hanged, you know.’

‘He what?’ Amber said.

‘He was a kid of eleven or twelve then,’ the sister replied, ‘and he got a man hanged. His words helped get a man hanged. They did quite a bit of hanging in those days.’

‘No, I didn’t know,’ Greg said. ‘That right, Ian?’

Yes, it was right. How did she know about it, though? Why should she care about it, though? Why should she blurt it now, though? ‘A man got himself hanged,’ Ian said. ‘He stuck a knife into his brother because of money. All sorts saw it. Several described what happened.’

‘But you told the story so well in court the jury was bound to convict,’ she said.

‘He’s good with stories,’ Amber said.

‘It wasn’t a story,’ Ian said. ‘Daphne West tonight is a story. The other was evidence. There’s a difference.’

‘What is this, Ian?’ Amber said.

‘You read about it in the Press at the time, did you?’ Ian asked her. ‘You must have some memory!’

She nodded. ‘Yes I did read about it in the Press. But I knew about it anyway. It had touched my life.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Ian said.

‘You sent a man I loved, and who loved me, to the drop,’ the sister said. ‘He’d been swindled, and because he struck back against that duplicitous, greedy bastard brother he was hanged.’

‘Oh, God,’ Ian said.

‘Is that right, Ian?’ Amber asked.

‘This is terrible,’ Ian said.

‘It’s right all right,’ she said.

Yes, it might be. ‘Back then, he did tell me he was on his way to see a lady,’ Ian said. ‘You?’

‘Me,’ she said.

‘An air raid had stopped him. We talked by the public shelter in our street. I was going to bring you a note from him to say what had happened.’

‘Were going to, but didn’t.’

‘I couldn’t.’

She spoke again to Amber: ‘And this one actually went down to the prison to see the execution notice posted – so proud of himself, purring while the noose snapped a neck inside, glorying in it, squinting at the notice on the prison door eventually, saying it had been done nice and tidily. People made a fuss of him. His mother advertised him.’

‘Were you there as well, then?’ Ian said.

‘As well?’ she said.

‘Oh, there was a woman present who scared my mother,’ Ian said.

‘Not me. Why would it be? But I had to be there.’

‘You sent those postcards – the nine postcards?’ He softened his voice. As Percy Lyall had said, Charteris could do that, and do it well.

‘Postcards?’ Amber said.

‘There were anon postcards,’ Ian said. ‘But what happened to you afterwards?’ he asked her. ‘You moved to London?’

‘Afterwards, this is what happened to me, in due course,’ she said, giving a little wave, apparently meaning the hospital and her job.

‘Have you got … well, a family?’ Ian asked.

‘Would I have?’ she said, and walked away, back towards her office.

‘I don’t follow all this,’ Amber said. ‘What nine postcards?’

‘Leave it. Daphne’s the story.’ That’s how Ian would prefer it. He knew that however he wrote up Daphne West and phoned the words in, the Daily Mirror machine would shape it to the correct tabloid formula. In fact, when his piece led the paper next day, it struck Ian as one of the most brilliant and ruthless exercises in coding he’d seen for at least weeks. He did not claim complete credit – wouldn’t want it; he’d have liked the report to be gentler with Daphne. Same genes? One or two gifted sub-editing touches had been applied, though.

By ‘coding’, he meant that the story appeared to say one thing but actually said something else, something much more risky and unpleasant. Well, naturally: if it were not risky and unpleasant no code would be necessary. Newspapers often went in for what might be called ‘reverse writing’ when the topic was legally dangerous. For instance, suppose the prevailing idea was that Mr A had murdered his wife, Mrs A; a reporter would ask Mr A, ‘Did you murder your wife, Mrs A?’ Of course, Mr A would reply, ‘No.’ And the paper could then say: ‘Mr A denied yesterday