Nanny Cole eyed him suspiciously, then turned to Derek and Emma. “I designed Lex’s costumes and makeup,” she said. “I created his bloody-awful image. Had to turn Grayson into a raving lunatic. Not as much of a stretch as he’d like to think.”
“Nanny’s costumes were brilliant,” Grayson said. “She has the soul of a poet and it embarrasses her terribly. Hence the bluff exterior.”
“I’ll buff your posterior if you don’t stop,” Nanny Cole growled, and Derek flinched as she grabbed him by the wrist. “Keep still,” she ordered as she held the sleeve of the nearly finished sweater up to Derek’s arm. “Good Lord,” she muttered, dropping the arm. “Built like a bloody great ape.”
Grayson snorted. “Nanny shaved my head and painted it red for the cover of the first album. I promise you, not even Grandmother would’ve recognized me once Nanny had finished with her paint pots. I scarcely recognized myself.”
“Surely you made some personal appearances,” Derek said, rubbing his wrist.
“Very few,” said Kate. “Lex refused to attend ceremonies of any kind and he was never seen in public without his makeup. It was perfectly in keeping with the character we’d established.”
“The press posed some danger,” Grayson went on, “but Hallard solved that as well. Whenever they showed up, Lex would scratch himself rudely and spout all those words one mustn’t say on the telly, at decibel levels impossible for microphones to miss. And we had Newland here, to look after security.”
Newland nodded but, unlike the rest of the staff, made no effort to explain his role. An uneasy silence enveloped the room, and everyone turned to Kate gratefully when she broke it.
“And then there were the videos,” she said.
“A godsend.” Grayson clapped Derek on the shoulder. “Remember the chaps I ran around with in Oxford?”
Derek nodded.
“One of them is a well-known rock singer now. I won’t mention his name, as he’s made an assiduous effort to deny his bourgeois past, but he’s the one who put me on to rock videos. That’s how we were able to get in at the right time.”
Kate’s eyes were dancing. “Lex Rex became the first pop star to take full advantage of the video boom. And we filmed them right here, in Gash’s studio.”
Gash twiddled his thumbs. “Jury-rigged from start to finish. Had no idea what I was doing, but that didn’t bother His Grace. Had no capital, neither, so I had to make do. Cleared out one of the subcellars, soundproofed it as best I could. Bought secondhand stage lights and cheap video equipment and off we went.”
Emma rolled her eyes, recalling the praise Richard had heaped on Lex Rex’s “rough-edged authenticity.” She wondered what he would say if she told him that the qualities he most admired were due solely to inexperience, ineptitude, and a tight budget.
The duke flopped into his chair and crossed his legs. “As it turned out, we had eight years in which to plan the whole thing, down to the smallest detail. I was twenty years old when my father died.”
“Grayson came down from university to follow in his father’s reclusive footsteps and disappear from public view,” Kate went on.
“When I reappeared, I did so as Lex Rex,” said the duke. “After eight years of intensive study, I was able to give rock-music fans exactly what they wanted. Then, of course, I gave them more of the same.”
“Look at any best-seller list,” Hallard murmured thoughtfully, “and you’ll know where that idea came from.”
“But...” Emma scratched her head. “But what about the Series Ten?”
“The what?” said Hallard.
“Hallard simply uses the computers,” the duke put in. “We leave the rest to Crowley.”
“Crowley?” Derek and Emma chorused.
From his place near the gaming table, Crowley smiled his polite, distant smile, tugged at his stiff cuffs, and folded his hands in his lap. “After leaving the old duke’s employ,” he began, “I moved to Plymouth, to be near my only daughter.” He looked down at the floor for a moment, then shook his head. “What the others have failed to tell you is that it is not a simple matter for a person of mature years to find employment. Nanny Cole had her flair with the needle; Gash, his mechanical skills; Hallard, his God-given gift with words; and Newland ...” He squinted at the tight-lipped security man. “Well, I’m not at all sure what Newland got up to, but I do know that his talents are in demand in many places.
“But what did I have to offer?” Crowley sighed. “Thirty years of loyal service counts for very little in the modem world, it seems. You can imagine my relief when I eventually won a post at a bank, entering check numbers on a computer. It was a very low-level position and tedious to the extreme. Sheer boredom led me to read up on computers and to explore my little machine’s capabilities.”
“Crowley was to the keyboard born,” the duke declared. “He took to programming like a duck to water, and he’s a dab hand at code-cracking, too. He’s had the best trackers after him, and they’ve yet to find a single broken blade of grass. Only one came within shouting distance, but he backed off.”
“Tut, tut,” Crowley murmured, accepting the tribute with a self-effacing wave of the hand.
“He salted records with facts about Lex’s alleged background,” said Kate, “and he managed every pound of Lex’s income.”
“He managed to make it disappear,” the duke put in. “Crowley tied Lex’s money-trail in so many knots that it would have taken a magician to unravel it. He made it appear as though Lex had frittered away his fortune on playthings.” The duke clucked his tongue. “Just another self-indulgent pop star.”
Emma pictured Crowley’s storklike figure hunched over the keyboard of a computer late at night, after the bank had closed, sailing freely through the electronic networks, and she was filled with awe. It wasn’t every day that she got to meet a natural-born hacker who’d discovered computers at such an advanced age.
Derek rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know, Grayson. This doesn’t sound like you. I find it difficult to believe that you could be quite so cynical.”
“Of course I was cynical, dear chap,” the duke acknowledged easily. “But you must admit that it was a healthy sort of cynicism. Lex Rex did not wish to be loved—he wished only to be paid. It kept his ego in check, kept his mind focused—it kept him from drink, drugs, and all the other slings and arrows that had slain so many before him. He never promoted such things, either. My alter ego’s only sins were poor taste and a severely limited vocabulary—”
“Which you enjoyed to the hilt,” Nanny Cole reminded him.
“Well ... yes,” the duke admitted, with a shame-faced grin. “It was rather ... liberating.” He tugged on an earlobe, then settled back in his chair, businesslike once more. “At the end of the second year, we’d earned enough to replace the roof and begin restoring the hall’s interior. In four more years, we’d amassed a fortune, which Crowley invested with good results. Computers were not the only thing he studied at the bank.”
Derek nodded. “Then you decided that it was time for Lex’s abrupt departure from the world of rock music.”
“Poor old Lex,” the duke agreed, with mock sadness. “He never was much of a sailor, was he, Tom?”
“No, indeed, Your Grace.” The chief constable chuckled. “It were the Tregallis boys that fixed that up. Born fishermen, they are, and want nothin’ more’n to carry on as their father had done. The Tharbys at the Bright Lady felt the same way, and so did old Jonah Pengully and my mother. So we worked it all out with Hallard and watched the weather maps, waitin’ for a storm. When it looked as if a likely one was brewin’, His Grace hightailed it for France—”
“I was traveling a great deal by then,” the duke added, “recovering my family’s scattered treasures.”