Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn Read Free Book Online

which is what you are!’ He sensed her teetering towards consent, and gave her a final push. ‘Look, if it is him, he’s done in two girls already. You could save someone else’s life.’
    She looked at him still. The case was unarguable, she saw that. Lying through her teeth, pretending the drawing was her own – hardly something that would test her skill as an actress. And she could lie in good conscience, she supposed, given this likeness in front of her might be instrumental in catching a killer. The end would justify the means. And yet something about the business unsettled her profoundly.
    She picked up the sketch. ‘Well, then,’ she said, in a resigned voice, wishing once again that she had never clapped eyes on him.

3
    JIMMY SHIFTED IN his seat and sneaked another look at his pocket watch. Half past eight. What?! He had last checked about three hours ago and it was ten past. Had his trusty timepiece given out at last? It had been with him since the summer of 1914, just before he went to France. Bought in a little shop on the Strand, he remembered. ‘It’ll work for sentries, that will,’ the man had said. Jimmy, in uniform at the time, was offended to have been mistaken for a mere sentry – then realised that it was the fellow’s sales patter.
Centuries
. It’ll work for
centuries
. Well, twenty-two years so far without mishap . . .
    No, he knew there was nothing wrong with his watch. It only
felt
like three hours ago. Time was proceeding as normal. It was the play – his fourth this week – that was dragging. He looked along the row (he always sat at the end, to make a quick getaway) and found every other face dutifully still, slightly uptilted, aglow in the footlights. What was it about this domestic drama – he rummaged for the title, without success – that kept them so entranced? Oh, it was averagely competent, averagely performed, averagely staged and lit. It positively
shimmered
with averageness. That seemed to be enough for them. For the critic, though, it was a killer. He, too, had a duty to entertain, on the page as opposed to the stage, and nothing choked inspiration more effectively than the play that was neither good nor bad. Give him something uproariously great, or loutishly inept, just so long as it was something he could get his teeth into!
    He willed himself back into the action of the play. The character in the tweed suit who had entered the scene a few minutes ago had just revealed a noticeable lisp. Perhaps he could make something of that, a racy paragraph on the telltale signs of a – no, much too dangerous. Nine out of ten readers wouldn’t even know what he was talking about . . . That tweed suit, now. It was very like one he had had made, years ago, by Huntsman, was it? – he could picture it, the long bolt of cloth on the cutter’s table . . . a sort of marmalade colour with a windowpane check in purple, no, more like heather than purple . . .
    A rasping, catarrhal
cggghhhuh
snapped his chin up suddenly from his chest, where it had been lolling. My God, that snore –
that was him
. The man in the next seat had turned an enquiring face. He had just fallen asleep –
narcolepsia dramatica
– and not for the first time lately. Quite an irony that he should be restless in his own bed at night only to drop off while on duty in the stalls! He found that the older he got the less well he slept, he wasn’t sure why. Eating and drinking late perhaps had something to do with it; but then he had always eaten and drunk late. Somehow he had lost the knack for sleep. What did Macbeth call it? ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,/The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,/Balm of hurt minds . . .’ tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum. He was getting old – sixty next year. Back in the long ago he could have recited that speech entire. He would quote long runs of Shakespeare