Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin Read Free Book Online

long recession of halls and passages which in the upshot brought them, quite implausibly, to French windows giving on to a small, sinister, overgrown courtyard, tentatively Arabic in style and with a patently unworkable fountain at its centre; with its pitted walls it looked, Fen thought, like a place of execution left over from the Spanish Civil War. At its far side a flight of steps impelled them underground, and they traversed a short, dimly lit tunnel which inexplicably debouched, through a rickety wooden door, on to the roof of a box-like single-storey building; and from this, having achieved ground level by means of a spiral staircase, they emerged, disconcertingly enough, in front of a genuine greystone Victorian villa nestling amid laurestinus and rhododendrons. By this kaleidoscopic sequence of incongruities Humbleby was provoked to a muffled imprecation; and Johnny, who clearly took pride in the studios and who equally clearly interpreted this noise as a deprecatory comment on the relic confronting them, desisted from whistling for long enough to explain apologetically that the villa was already there when the studios were built and that in consequence it had been permitted to remain—-on sufferance, like a sort of Red Indian Reservation—amid the modernistic splendours put up by the Leiper organisation.
    “And it’s only the Legal Department that uses it,” he added—much, Fen thought, as a man might justify his possession of a cheap cotton handkerchief by saying that he kept it only to blow his nose on. “There’s the door.”
    With this unnecessary information—apparently he feared that left to their own devices Fen and Humbleby would never succeed in making an entry—he beckoned them forward and into the presence, inside the villa, of another youth, with a pencil behind his ear, who greeted them mistrustfully and on learning Humbleby’s identity retired, with enhanced suspicion, to consult with some person of more consequence than himself. Presently he returned—faintly complacent, like one who has contrived in the face of great odds to introduce a mountain into the presence of a prophet—with an exhausted-looking, grey-haired man; and with this individual Humbleby went into conference on the subject of Gloria Scott’s contract for The Unfortunate Lady, learning that it did, in fact, exist, that it had been signed nine days previously, and that the remuneration and conditions were normal for that type of agreement.
    “Responsibility for assigning the part?” the grey-haired man said in answer to a question. “Oh, that rests with the producer, though of course there are other people he consults about it.”
    “Ah,” said Humbleby. “I think that’s all I want to know, then. Thank you very much.”
    They retrieved Johnny, who by now had exchanged La Donna e Mobile for O Star of Eve, and set off in search of Valerie Bryant. The box-like building, the underground tunnel and the Arabic courtyard marked the stages of their return to the main body of the studios, but thereafter they struck out into hitherto unexplored territory, and it was only after a lengthy and bewildering journey that they came at last to the barnlike vastness of Stage Five. The end at which they entered it was in virtual darkness (there were, of course, no windows), but in the middle distance a moderate degree of activity was discernible, and across the tangle of ropes and cables on the floor they plodded cautiously towards this. The facade of a London public-house—of the rococo type distinguished by Mr. Osbert Lancaster as Public-house Classic—met their gaze; opposite it, on a frame covered with black cloth, the rudiments of shops were sketched in white chalk; in front of it was a pavement; inside it, and partly visible through the painted-glass windows, a number of extras in Victorian costume stood about waiting for something to happen. On the pavement were two young women in bustles and bonnets. A camera confronted them,