Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 3

  Hale, and now me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PIRATES: A rollicking band of pirates we.

  GEOFFREY HALE LIVED in St John’s Wood. A rotund and shiny-headed person on the far side of middle age opened the door, his chins gathered above the sort of collar that labelled him a butler of the old school.

  “Mary Russell, for Mr Hale,” I told him. His manner made me regret keenly that I did not have a card at hand for him to carry upon a polished salver.

  He bore up under the disappointment, parked me in the room designated for the parking of intruders, and glided away, returning a precise four and a half minutes later to convey me to the presence of the master of the house, up a set of magnificent mahogany stairs that looked as if someone had recently dragged a piece of light artillery down them. I avoided the worst of the splinters, wondering if Hale’s cousin and partner was experimenting with a scene from a forthcoming war movie.

  Despite what I had said to Lestrade, I had in fact heard of Fflytte Films. (“Fflyttes of Fun!”) I believe even Holmes would have known the name. Over the course of a decade of film-making, the trademark element of Fflytte Films had become Realism. In an industry with papier-mâché Alps and Babylonian temples made of composition board and gilt; where Valentino’s Sheik pitched his tents a quick drive from Los Angeles (rumour even had it in Queens), and Blood and Sand showed not Spain, but a Hollywood back lot; where even Robin Hood had been born in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Fflytte Films made it known that when this company made a movie about the open seas, to the open seas the crew went; and when Fflytte Films produced a story about an aeronaut, by God the cameraman and his instrument were strapped in and set to turning. In Quarterdeck, half a ton of equipment had gone down in a storm; in Jolly Roger, men had been washed overboard—and if no lives had actually been lost, the great movie-going, gossip-magazine–reading public stoutly believed to the contrary.

  One might have expected this rigid commitment to authenticity to require that any version of Pirates of Penzance be filmed in Penzance. However, during the course of that long day, I had come to suspect we were not bound for that sleepy watering-place on England’s south coast.

  Hale had shaved since flying out of the office that afternoon, although the smears of tiredness under his blue eyes were no lighter. He crossed the opulent library with his hand out, a ready apology on his lips.

  “Miss Russell, can you ever forgive me for my state this afternoon? You must have thought you were in the company of a raving maniac—Thank you, Pullman, that will be all—or, no, ask Mrs Corder to send up a tray of—coffee, Miss Russell? Or tea? To go with these sandwiches and what-not? Coffee, then. Do sit down, Miss Russell, honestly, I’m not always in that sort of state.”

  The first three minutes were spent with my mouth full as Hale delivered honeyed apologies while simultaneously performing the sort of dance upper-class males do when faced with a woman both of a lesser rank and in their employ: a polite, brotherly flirtation that lacks the faintest element of sex. It is amusing, particularly when based on invalid assumptions, but it must be even more exhausting to generate than it is to receive. Once I had relieved a meal’s worth of dainty snacks from the platter, I used my linen napkin, then cut the dance short.

  “Mr Hale, I have a degree from Oxford, I am on the boards of several companies, I speak four languages fluently, five haltingly, and can read several more. As I said, this is a lark for me, since I’m at loose ends at the moment and I’m always up for a new experience. This is not a job I need to pay the rent. Why don’t you tell me what you are looking for, and I’ll tell you if I can do it?”

  He sat back, startled as much by my blunt attitude as by what I had told him. “Er, yes. Very well. Perhaps you’d care for a drink instead of coffee?”

  And so over glasses of brandy, he told me what I was in for: actors, crew, sets and costumes, local negotiations, food and housing, the lot. “We’re scheduled to spend ten days in Lisbon doing rehearsals—which, since you have little experience with the picture industry, I should note is not always the case, that many companies have neither rehearsals nor scripts. Fflytte Films uses both. We’ve found that if we don’t prepare the choreography, as it were, of the fight scenes, we waste a lot of time and miles of film.”

  “And you have a number of fight scenes?”

  “We do.”

  “Sorry, but I’d understood that you were filming The Pirates of Penzance?” Which I remembered as a distillation of saccharine songs, much tip-toeing about, topsy-turvy logic, and slapstick chases. My attempt to keep any dubious feelings out of my voice was only partly successful: Hale’s quick glance at me glimmered with understanding and humour.

  “Nothing so simple as that, Miss Russell, although making a silent film about a musical performance would be just the sort of thing Randolph would love to try. This is Pirate King: a film about a film about The Pirates of Penzance.”

  “Very well,” I said slowly.

  This time he laughed outright, and his face lost its pinched look, becoming both younger and more nearly handsome. “What do you know about Fflytte Films?”

  “Not a whole lot. Randolph Fflytte is in the papers from time to time, of course, but I have to admit, I only go to the cinema a handful of times a year.”

  “Don’t let Randolph hear you say that. Not unless you want to be sat down for a marathon screening of his work. You might say that Fflytte Films began in 1902, when Randolph got his first camera. He was seventeen at the time. For some years it was a summer-holiday toy, recording the antics of friends, playing around with effects. Randolph’s first serious attempt at telling a story on the screen came in ’07, when he bought up a lorry-load of Boer War uniforms and had every working man on his estate dress up to re-enact the Siege of Mafeking.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve seen that one.”

  “You won’t, either. There were only three prints made, and nine years ago, he threw them on the fire. Nearly burned the house down—cellulose nitrate is remarkably flammable. He was unhappy with Mafeking even as he was editing it, since a battle across Berkshire countryside looks nothing like a battle across open veldt. Every time he looked at it, he regretted that he hadn’t just piled his workers on a boat and taken them to South Africa.

  “Two years after Mafeking, he took some friends to Paris to make a film, as a joke more than anything. This time, once he’d done the editing, he sold it. And decided that was what he wanted to do with his life. Before we knew it, we were making films commercially—most of them so dreadful they’ve blessedly disappeared from the scene, although Hester’s Grandmum wasn’t too bad, and She Begs to Differ had its moments.

  “Then came the War, and while the Americans happily went on building studios and hiring actors, Randolph was reduced to filming the local evacuees and German prisoners on pig farms. But in 1915, he talked his way into France, where he shot The Aeronaut, about a spotter balloon. Two and a half years later, in winter of 1917, he managed to return, and was thrilled to come under live fire. Or within a mile or so of live fire, at any rate.

  “It was a revelation. Randolph came home and burned those copies of Mafeking as a sort of vow, that utter realism would be the guiding light of Fflytte Films. And so it’s been to this day: We make the audience feel ‘the wind in your face and the lash on your back.’ ”

  “I do remember that—the Roman galley film!”

  “The first time Fflytte Films hit the headlines.”

  “But wasn’t the case dismissed?”

  “Not dismissed: settled out of court. Randolph paid the actor off, although, truth to tell, the chap hadn’t actually been beaten. It was camera tricks. Occasionally, we are reduced to mere verisimilitude.”

  “I’m glad to hear you don’t sacrifice your actors for the battle scenes. Or bury them under volcano ash. But why on earth pay the man off?”

  “One cannot buy that kind of publicity, Miss Russell. Fflytte Films pummelling its actors bloody for the sake of realism? Pri
celess word-of-mouth. Almost as good as burning down the village in Krakatoa—although the ash there was flour, and the volcano was only waist high.”

  “Good to know. And now you’re doing The Pirates of Penzance—or at any rate, a picture about a picture about it.”

  “The plot is, a film crew is making a picture about the pirates who come to Penzance in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. And as they film, the crew gets involved with real-life Barbary pirates.”

  “Er, you do know that there aren’t any more Barbary pirates?” An American film-maker might not have picked up on this little fact, but a man with Hale’s accent would surely have had a modicum of history thrust down his throat.

  “Of course. On the other hand, there will always be pirates of one stripe or another in the world.”

  “And this film-within-a-film is about real pirates wrapped around fictional pirates?”

  “You’re catching on.”

  “It’s a farce, then?”

  “No, actually, it’s more along the lines of an adventure. Do you remember the story in The Pirates of Penzance?”

  “Dimly.” I had probably fallen asleep halfway through the first act: Music has that effect on me. A source of continual outrage from my musical husband.

  “The young pirate Frederic, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, announces to his fellows that he has never been able to stomach piracy, and that even though this particular band to which he has been apprenticed is soft-hearted, he intends to leave them and devote himself to fighting piracy. He falls in love with the daughter of a Major-General, but through a piece of trickery, the pirates take him back into their ranks, capturing the girl and her sisters to take as their wives. There follows a great deal of Gilbertian shenanigans before the pirates are revealed to be not only Englishmen, and loyal to the Queen, but of noble birth as well, which makes them appropriate husbands for the Major-General’s many daughters. Happy endings all around.”

  To such had the wit of Chaucer and Shakespeare descended.

  “How many daughters?” I asked.

  “Productions of the opera have varied in the numbers of both daughters and pirates—there are four named sisters and simply a ‘chorus’ of pirates. In addition to Mabel and Frederic, Randolph has decided on twelve of each.”

  “Thirteen daughters? Wouldn’t that make some of them a bit young to marry?” Or old.

  “We’re classifying them as four sets of triplets. And Mabel, of course.”

  “Mustn’t forget Mabel. And a dozen constables as well?”

  “For symmetry, one might imagine, but no, only six of those. Plus the sergeant.”

  “Twelve and twelve and two and seven—thirty-three actors?”

  “We won’t have pirates at first, but you have also to add Ruth, Frederic’s piratical nursemaid, and Major-General Stanley, Mabel’s father.”

  “And you want me to help keep that lot happy, healthy, and in some kind of order?”

  “Plus the crew—cameraman and assistant, make-up woman, seamstress, three or four others. No servants; Randolph banned the actors from bringing their servants along after Anna Karenina—two illegitimate pregnancies, one divorce, and a bullet wound between them. Because of the cold,” he explained.

  “Of course.”

  “So no personal maids or valets. However,” Hale added, his voice innocent but his eyes taking on a wicked gleam in their depths, “the four youngest sisters—youngest in fact, not youngest on film—will bring their mothers.”

  “Oh, Lord,” I said. I had encountered the mothers of young prima donnas before.

  He laughed aloud. “You begin to see why I greeted you with such enthusiasm this afternoon.”

  “You all but wept in joy. Well, if that’s the case, I’d best—” I started, but he cut me off.

  “There’s something else.”

  What on earth could surpass what he had already described? “Yes?”

  He reached for the decanter, replenishing our glasses. The level in the glass rose; I braced myself. “You seem a sensible kind of person, Miss Russell. The kind of person who pays attention to details.”

  “I try.”

  “And the kind of person who dislikes … wrongdoing.”

  The very model of an unwilling apprentice pirate, one might say. “Yes,” I ventured.

  “And quite, well, sensible.”

  Like my shoes? I wondered.

  “Plucky, even.”

  Plucky?

  “Because I was thinking, perhaps you would be willing to … extend your assignment. Just a little.”

  Please, please don’t ask me to dress up as one of the daughters. “Er,” I said.

  “So that in the course of your job, if you come across something—how to say this? Something out of the ordinary—you will bring it to my attention.”

  I kept my face still, although my heart gave a little thump. Was the man aware of the same activities that had attracted Lestrade’s attention? Or had one of his blue-blooded chums dropped a hint about the investigation, and he wished me to share any findings with him? Or—further concern—could he be laying a false trail for me by claiming concern for illicit behaviour?

  Pirates within pirates, crime within crime …

  “Perhaps you’d best explain what you mean by ‘out of the ordinary.’ ”

  He picked up his glass, to swirl the contents into an amber whirlpool.

  “Three years ago, Fflytte Films made The Moonstone. Do you remember it?”

  “I did see that one, yes. Very realistic, as I remember, the scenes in India.”

  “As I said, our hallmark. The actor playing Ablewhite—who you may remember dies in the story—was killed a few days after his final scenes were filmed.”

  “How unfortunate.”

  “He was drunk playing the Dame in a Christmas panto and fell into the orchestra pit, breaking his neck on the kettle drum, but yes, it was a tragedy. Later that year, we went to Finland for Anna Karenina, Finland being the closest we could come to Russia without getting involved with the Reds. But as I said, it was cold, and our Anna got frostbite when the filming was only halfway through and went home (quit the profession entirely, I heard the other day; she now runs a boarding house in Leeds), so we had to turn the story into a short about the frozen North instead. And even then, the polar bear rather chewed up its handler.”

  “Oh dear. Perhaps a crew as accident-prone as yours ought to go into a less hazardous business.”

  “And then in Jolly Roger, we almost lost two men in a freak wave.”

  “Yes, so you mentioned.”

  “With Krakatoa, two of the cinema houses where it was running burned down. In Coke Express, one of our actors decided to drive through Town in the altogether—that one took a lot of work to hush up. I had to prove that he was just drunk, not coked.”

  I said nothing: True, the coincidences were piling rather high, but clumsiness in stunts did have a way of bringing its own punishment, and Hale himself had pointed out how inflammable film could be. And actors had been known to drink.

  “Hannibal was cancelled, but one of the men we’d used as a consultant for Rum Runner was arrested, for rum-running. The Writer, about a failed writer, well, failed.” He knocked back a hefty swallow from his glass, and continued bleakly, “We’re cursed. Whatever the movie’s about, it happens. There: Now you’ll probably quit on me, too.”

  I blinked. Lestrade wanted me to look into chronic lawbreaking; Hale was suggesting I investigate—

  “You want me to help you with a curse?”

  Hale went on with an air of determination. “Miss Russell, this current picture is about piracy. And yes, I will admit it sounds mad, but I’ve got the wind up about it. Getting fined for mistreating an actor is one thing, but I don’t have time for a court case involving some dastardly deed on the open seas.”

  I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of If a beaten galley slave sells movies, wouldn’t a pirates’ curse make for a sure-fire hit? but
caught myself. If someone in Fflytte Films had come up with that brilliant publicity scheme, it would either be Hale, or Fflytte himself.

  Still, looking into a fantasy threat would give me the ideal excuse to snoop, if Hale happened to catch me at it. And he would be so grateful I stayed with the company—at any rate, stayed long enough to find who was responsible for the crimes that concerned Lestrade: say, fourteen days, 336 hours—that he would overlook any oddities in my behaviour.

  “It would appear that building a reputation for realism has its drawbacks,” I remarked.

  “It’s a major pain in the backside,” Hale replied. “But it is what we do. When we’re filming The Moonstone, we send a camera to India. If we’re making a film about the Punic Wars, we take some elephants to the Alps. Even if it nearly kills us all and leaves us bankrupt.”

  “And when the script says pirates, you go to sea.”

  “Lisbon first.”

  “ ‘On, on, the vessel flies, the land is gone.’ ”

  He cocked his head, and replied, “ ‘What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold!’ ”

  “ ‘But whoso entereth within this town / That, sheening far, celestial seems to be / Disconsolate will wander up and down.’ ”

  “Yes, Byron was not fond of Portugal, even before he had an unhappy affaire there.”

  Long, long ago, as an unschooled orphan preparing for university examinations, I had a tutrix with a marked, even startling, affection for Lord Byron. There were lines of Childe Harold that the Byron-besotted Miss Sim had taken care to skip lightly over—thus guaranteeing that her adolescent student should commit them indelibly to memory. Triggered by mention of the Portuguese capital, some of those phrases began to rise now to the surface of my mind: memorials frail of murderous wrath, and the shrieking victim hath / Pour’d forth his blood beneath the assassin’s knife, and Throughout this purple land, where Law secures not life … I could see from the way Hale fiddled uneasily with his cigarette case that those phrases were pressing at his memory as well.