‘Scudder?’
How could he have been so stupid? So drunk! Scudder was not just a dog, he was a valuable business asset. He might even put it more forcibly than that: Scudder was his ticket to future prosperity. And he had just abandoned him, as if he was a worthless street mutt! Would Hartmann have treated his star, Eloise, with equal carelessness?
Porrick rose to his feet. The remaining tip-up snapped shut. He groped his way to the end of the row and felt for the wall ahead of him. When he had that, he turned to the right and made his way along the wall towards what he knew was the rear of the auditorium.
At last the solidity of the wall gave way to the swing of drapery. He burst through into the dim half-light of the foyer before opening.
It took a while for Porrick’s eyes to adjust, for him to realize that the silhouette coming towards him was Max Maxwell.
‘Have you seen Scudder?’
‘Scudder?’
‘My dog. The Yorkie.’
Maxwell scrutinized Porrick’s face closely, as if he were struggling to remember ever having seen him with a dog. ‘No. I haven’t seen him since last night.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Maxwell held up a rolled newspaper that he was carrying. He used it to point at Porrick, almost accusingly. ‘You had him at the party with you last night, did you not?’
‘Yes, but you meant something, I’m sure.’
Maxwell dropped the hand holding the newspaper. ‘Did you not take him home with you?’
‘No … I … I did not, as it happens. I lost sight of him during last night’s … celebrations.’
‘That was very careless of you.’
‘I imagine he found a corner somewhere, where he curled up and went to sleep. Now he will be hungry, poor chap.’
‘That’s probably it. Try Hartmann’s place in Cecil Court. That was where I last saw him.’
There was something in Maxwell’s eye that Porrick didn’t like. An open hostility, brimming with impertinence. He had long suspected Maxwell’s hostility towards him, his hatred even. He knew that the man who had died in the fire in Islington had been a friend of his. It was reasonable that he would harbour a grudge. As an employee, Maxwell had kept his feelings close to his chest, until now. Porrick sensed that something had changed in their relationship.
‘Yes. I’ll do that. Thank you.’
Maxwell again lifted the newspaper. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘What?’
‘It’s all over the front page of the Clarion. It mentions Porrick’s Palace. And there’s a quote from Waechter.’
Porrick took the tubed paper and unfurled it.
Maxwell grinned sarcastically. ‘Was it right, I wonder, to have celebrations after this?’ Maxwell’s emphasis of the word that Porrick had just used was pointed. ‘Mind you, it will be good for the box office, I dare say. Unless they shut us down.’
‘You’d better hope that doesn’t happen, Max. Or you’ll be out of a job. I shall order prints of all Waechter’s previous films. Perhaps the time has come for a Waechter retrospective. I fear that this incident may indeed have excited a morbid interest in his work among the public.’
‘Which you of course will do your best to pander to!’
‘You know what pays your wage as well as I do, Max. If we don’t get them through the door and on the seats, then you and me both will be in the workhouse.’
Max held out his hand for his newspaper. As he took it back, a brief, mechanical smile spasmed across his mouth. ‘I hope you find your dog.’ But his voice was an emotionless sing-song.
THIRTY-TWO
As Quinn walked across Cavendish Square, the sun broke through a crack in the marbled clouds and ignited the shuddering foliage with a frail, green, luminescent pallor.
Quinn half-expected to see Grant-Sissons lit up in the unexpected flare, hiding ineffectually behind one of the London plane trees. He imagined the strange, bitter man beckoning him over. This time he would walk right up to him and hear him out as he divulged the secret of his father’s death. He wondered at his reluctance earlier. Why, after so many years of longing to know the answer to that mystery, he had turned and run from the first real opportunity of a breakthrough. He told himself that he was not ready to hear what Grant-Sissons had to say. It had come too much out of the blue. He had not been able to prepare himself. When he was ready, he would seek the man out and demand to be told what he knew.
Quinn’s heart seemed to fold and flutter. He had the taste of something bitter and empty in his mouth. The taste of regret, of a missed opportunity.
He had to accept that his fear of what Grant-Sissons might say had got in the way of his conduct of the investigation. One minute the man was a suspect in the attack on the girl. The next, Quinn was refusing to bring him in.
But he had enough acquaintance with violent death to know that whatever was behind it, it was never anything good. He did not doubt that the same would hold true with his father’s death.
When he was younger, he believed that his father had been murdered. This was the truth that he would one day prove. But Grant-Sissons had spoken categorically of suicide. Although he had consciously given up the consoling myth of his father’s innocence in his own death, it was clear that he retained some barely registered hope that the hero of his youth would not turn out to be a self-murderer.
The air temperature dropped perceptibly. The clouds huddled into a sudden mass. From nowhere, a shower of hail clattered over the pavement. Quinn hastened his step. The hailstones pelted his face in an icy assault.
The shower was over as suddenly as it had begun. The clouds began to scatter. The sun fingered its way through, the mottles of blue spreading until the sky was almost completely clear. It was like the lights going up at the end of a stage show. The weather seemed to be bowing for applause at the startling trick it had just pulled off, fishing for an encore.
Quinn’s spurt of energy carried him across Wigmore Street and into Harley Street, propelling him up the three steps to Dr Casaubon’s door.
The brass plaque revealed a little more than Macadam’s enquiries had been able to turn up: Augustus Casaubon, MD, FMPA.
From his own dealings with the medical profession Quinn was familiar with the last set of initials. He knew very well to what specialism they referred. Augustus Casaubon was a Fellow of the Medico-Psychiatric Association. He was a psychiatrist.
Quinn rang the bell and, when it wasn’t answered after several minutes, tried the door. He was surprised to discover it wasn’t locked. Presumably Dr Casaubon’s surgery was open now, and the door was left open for patients. Quinn dispelled the notion that Casaubon was waiting for him.
The door led on to a marble-tiled hallway. Gilt lettering and a pointing hand symbol on a small wooden sign indicated the reception. There was no one there. Quinn hit the bell push. When that produced no response, he leaned over the reception counter and called out into the cave of medical records behind it. ‘Hello?’
At last, a stooped, elderly man with silver hair and a neatly trimmed imperial beard appeared tentatively from a door at the rear of the practice office. ‘You must bear with me. I’m all on my own today.’ The man’s accent was genteel Edinburgh. ‘My nurse is ill. And the secretary, well, we had to let her go. Between you and me, she was an absolute disaster. Take the appointments book. I have no idea what she’s done with it. Would you credit it? How on earth are we meant to run a practice without an appointments book? I hope to God she hasn’t taken it with her. Out of spite, you know. People do the most extraordinary things out of spite. It’s hardly rational, but, well … I’m used to dealing in the irrational. Very well, you’ll just have to come straight in. I shall see people today on a first-come, first-served basis.’