Death at the Dress Rehearsal by Stuart Douglas

Author:Stuart Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan Books

19

John remembered seeing the pictures in the newspapers, just after the War. Grainy, indistinct greys and blacks and dirty whites, British prisoners of the Japanese, smiling uncertainly at the camera as though unwilling to believe they were free, all recently released from starvation diets and back-breaking toil in the murderous heat of the jungle.

Matthew Peel had, it seemed, been one of those men.

* * *

Margaret Hunter was her name – “Call me Meg,” she’d said – and she was small and slim and fair-haired, a little younger than he’d expected. When he’d telephoned from the train station, after a journey that had actually turned out to be rather pleasant, she’d apologised she couldn’t pick him up. “Matthew does all the driving,” she’d explained, “and he’s not up to it at the moment” – and for a second he thought he knew her voice, only to realise that she reminded him of a landlady he’d had a youthful (on his part) and all-too-brief fling with many years previously. It was the combination of affection and apology in her voice.

She’d met him at the door, and after the awkwardness of explaining that, yes, he was the same John Le Breton who played the posh antiques chap on the BBC, but that also, yes, he was currently helping the police with their enquiries, unexpectedly hustled him into the kitchen, barely letting him stop long enough to remove his coat. She’d explained the reason as soon as she’d safely shut the kitchen door behind him.

“I just wanted to prepare you,” she said. “Matthew was a prisoner of the Japanese for three years, you see, and when he came home, he wasn’t the man who left for the War.” She’d been crying, he could tell from the redness of her eyes, but he guessed this was a strong woman, and not one to give in easily to public weakness. Even so, there was no missing the pain in her voice. “He was always a slim man, but when he walked off the ship that brought him home, he was skin and bones. And he never bulked up, not so you’d notice.”

He wondered exactly what the relationship was between her and Peel. She’d introduced herself as his housekeeper, and explained that his wife had died years ago, before the War. But all this talk of Matthew this and Matthew that was what his own father would have called over-familiar and his mother taking liberties. And then there was the crying. Perhaps she’d just been working for the family for a long time? Did that mean something, he wondered, then chided himself for being so suspicious. It really wasn’t like him.

While he was thinking, Meg sniffed and opened the cupboard behind her, reaching up for a teapot on a high shelf. “But that wasn’t the worst of it, Mr. Le Breton. Physically, he recovered, eventually, but mentally…” She dropped three teabags into the teapot and added hot water from the kettle. “Mentally, he’s been an angry, bitter man from that day to this.

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