Pirate King (3 page)

“What does that—”

“Wait. The following year, Fflytte did a story about a young woman whose life was taken over by drugs—
Coke Express
, it was called. The month following its release in the cinema houses, we had an unusual number of drugs parties along the south coast.”

“Yes, but—”

“And last year, one of their pirate movies was about rum-running into America. It came out in November.”

“I was busy in November. What happened?”

“McCoy’s arrest. ‘The Real McCoy’? The man’s made a small fortune smuggling hard liquor into the United States.”

“Hmm. Is this perhaps the same studio that was making a film about Hannibal?”

“Fflytte Films, that’s them.”

“Odd, I don’t recall hearing about a sudden influx of elephants racing down the streets of—”

“I knew this was a mistake. Never mind, Miss Russell, I’ll—”

“No no, Chief Inspector, sit down, I apologise. Surely there must have been something more concrete to interest you in the case, even in a peripheral manner?”

He paused, then subsided into his chair. “Yes. Although even that I can’t be at all certain about. We were beginning to ask some questions—in a hush-hush fashion, so as not to set the gossip magazines on fire—when the studio’s secretary went missing. Lonnie Johns is her name.”

“When was that?”

“Well, there’s the thing—it was only four or five days ago. And there’s nothing to say that the Johns girl didn’t just quit her job and go on holiday. The girl she shares a room with said it wouldn’t surprise her, that Lonnie’s job would shred the nerves of a saint.”

“But Miss Johns didn’t say anything to her, about going away?”

“The room-mate didn’t see her go—she’d just got back herself from a week in Bognor Regis.”

“Any signs of foul play at the flat?”

“Neither disturbance nor a note, although some of her things did seem to be missing, tooth-brush and the like.”

“If the girl had run off to the Riviera with a movie star, she’d probably have told everyone she knew,” I reflected.

“Normally, we’d barely even be opening an enquiry into a disappearance of a girl missing a few days, but time is against us. The entire crew is about to set sail out of England, and if we don’t get someone planted in their midst, we’ll lose the chance. And when my likely officers were unavailable, I thought, just maybe Mr Holmes would have a few days free to act as a sort of place-holder, until I could get one of my own in line for it. But never mind, it was only a—”

“And in addition, if it does blow up in the face of a gaggle of blue-bloods and splatter them all with scandal, it would be nice if Scotland Yard were nowhere in sight.”

“Miss Russell, I deeply resent the im—”

“Chief Inspector, I have nothing in particular on at the moment. I’ll be happy to devote myself to the Mysterious Affair of the Coincidental Film Crew.”

He looked shocked. “You mean you’ll
do
it?”

“I just said I would.”

“I thought you’d laugh in my face.” He gave me a suspicious scowl. “You aren’t a ‘fan’ of the cinema world, are you?”

“By no means.”

“And yet you seem almost eager to take this on.”

Motion pictures, or Mycroft? I reached out to snatch the folder from his hand. “My dear Chief Inspector, you have no idea.”

CHAPTER THREE

PIRATE KING:
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do.

F
ROM
L
ESTRADE’S OFFICE
, I went directly to that of Fflytte Films. It overlooked the friendly confusion of the Covent Gardens flower mart, where I dodged sweepers, buckets, carts, heaps of pulped blossoms, and a dark and winsome young lady aiming a heather sprig at my lapel.

At the top of a flight of stairs, I found a door standing open, a ring of keys protruding from its lock. Inside, the chaos was nowhere near as colourful as that on the street outside, and the cries of vendors had been replaced with a raised telephonic voice from an inner office. I followed it to its source.

“—don’t care what he says, the alcohol is to go into the hold, not in his quarters. Yes, I know it’s not your job to search him, I’ll take care of that, you just— That’s right, into the hold, and we’ll worry about his rooms on the day. Great, thanks.”

The telephone clattered onto its stand, and I rapped my knuckles against the half-open door, then repeated it when I realised that the man’s muttered epithet had hidden my first attempt.

Geoffrey Hale, the general manager of Fflytte Films, raised his head from his hands, presenting me with a pair of cornflower blue eyes in a face too young for the white of his hair—or, what I had thought was white hair, but with a closer look became merely very pale blonde. He was in his late thirties, and would have been quite attractive but for his haunted expression. “Yes?” he said, a syllable that tried for irritable but came out more than a little fearful.

“I’ve come about the position,” I replied. “Sir Malcolm—”

For Hale’s benefit, I began to trundle out Lestrade’s manufactured story, which in point of fact was a reasonably efficient means of inserting a person (male or female) into Fflytte Films. In the manner of all things English (particularly things in any way connected to the House of Lords) it had drawn its particulars from the old-boys network: a luncheon conversation at a club; Hale bemoaning the abrupt loss of his secretary-assistant and going frantic over the number of hours required to grease the machinery of a moving picture company; the old boy/luncheon mate saying that he might know someone, if Hale didn’t require a person who knew the industry; Hale answering that he’d hire a myopic orang-utan if the chimp could take dictation and manipulate a telephone.

And here I was, with three of those four characteristics.

(That, in any event, was how Hale remembered it. According to Lestrade, it had begun the other way around, with Lestrade actively hunting for a man with links to Fflytte or Hale; on finding one, he had arranged for the old boy to invite Hale to lunch, drawing the scent of a potential assistant before his nose.)

(That, at any rate, was how Lestrade remembered it. However, knowing the House of Lords and its fondness for meddling in the lives of those who actually worked for a living, I thought it equally possible that Lestrade had been handed the plan ready made:
Here’s our suspicions
, the peers had told him;
here’s what your man is to do; here’s the path we’ve paved for him to get there
.

It had been a set-up from the beginning, although there was no knowing at this point how many layers of deception there were: Hale definitely was being manipulated, Lestrade possibly, me almost certainly. Even that conveniently missing secretary had the faint odour of red herring, a ploy designed expressly to attract the attentions of the police. And if Lonnie Johns was safely tucked up for a quiet holiday in the south of France, it was more likely that the House of Lords was paying her bills than Scotland Yard.

Apart from which, Lestrade was not a good enough liar to manufacture a false concern for a missing girl.)

(Only some days later, as I leant miserably over the storm-tossed railing, desperately searching for something to bring my mind up from my stomach, did it occur to me that Mycroft’s threatened trip to Sussex had been an oddly convenient piece of timing. And once that idea had swum to the surface, a great cloud of morbid thoughts boiled up in its wake: Since the notion of Mycroft Holmes doing the bidding of any number of Lords was laughable, it suggested that the House of Lords were not the instigators of this investigation, but the puppets of Mycroft Holmes. Mycroft had moved them: They had moved Lestrade: Lestrade had moved—

Which in turn suggested that Mycroft had wanted me to do this, but knew that if he were to ask me directly, I would refuse.

Later, when I was not in quite such a vulnerable position, I decided that it was a ridiculously convoluted, Heath Robinsonian piece of machinery, a bit much even for Mycroft. My brother-in-law was sly, but he was practiced enough to know that setting a fox before Lords might take the hunt in any direction.

One thing I was certain: If plot there was, Holmes had not been in on it.

But all the doubt and suspicion came later, when it was too late. Had I put the pieces together earlier, I would not have found myself standing before Geoffrey Hale’s chaotic desk in his Covent Garden office that November afternoon, laying out the story Chief Inspector Lestrade had provided for me.)

“—so I don’t actually know anything about the picture industry, but a friend mentioned this and I’m between projects just at the moment and I thought it sounded like a lark. I’m a whiz at type-writing,” I added with a bright smile.

I was none too certain how Hale would feel about the person being thrust towards his manly breast—one Mary Russell, who, although well dressed and reasonably energetic, was far too young for the sort of placid maternal secretarial authority that his typhoon-struck offices cried out for, who moreover admitted that she knew exactly nothing about co-ordinating a film crew. But before I could finish my prepared explanation, dawn came up across his unshaven features and he rose as if to fling himself at my feet.

I hastened to stick out my hand, forestalling any greater demonstration; he clasped it hard and pumped away with hearty exclamations.

“Oh how utterly jolly, a life-saver in sensible shoes, you are so very welcome, Miss—what was it? Russell, of course, like the philosopher, although I’d guess looking at you that you’re a dashed sight more practical than him. Oh, Miss Russell, you can’t believe what a mess things have got into here—I had a perfectly adequate assistant who seems to have upped and left, just as we’re about to set sail. Both literally and figuratively.”

“Er,” I said, retrieving my squashed hand and glancing down at my shoes, which were the most fashionable (and hence impractical) I owned. “Do you want to see some letters of recommendation or something?”

“You speak English and you’re dead sober at two in the afternoon, what else could I ask for? You know your alphabet?”

“I know several alphabets. And shorthand.” Holmes, when going undercover, could disguise himself as anything from garage mechanic to priest; I was forced into the more womanly rôles of secretary or maid. (Although after one stint in the kitchen of a manor house, I tried to avoid being hired as cook; still, the fire had been quickly doused.)

“And you have a passport, and no small children or aged grannies needing you at home? If you spoke with Malcolm, you’ll know that we will be away from London for some weeks? Although we’ll try our best to be home by Christmas.”

That was either a gross and self-delusional underestimate, or a blatant lie designed to soothe a nervous would-be employee. But I did not blink. “I am aware that the job entails travel, yes.”

“Perfection. Can you start with these?”

He stabbed the air with a desk spike impaled with more than four inches of paper. Avoiding the wicked point, I extracted the object from his hand. “You want me to begin immediately?”

“Absolutely. That is, could you?” he asked, recalling his manners with an effort.

“I could, although it might be good if I had some idea what you’d like me to do.”

When he flung himself out of the office six minutes later, late for a meeting with a last-minute addition to the cast on the other side of town, I had not much more of an idea. However, I soon discovered that by identifying myself as “—with Fflytte Films,” the voice in the earpiece would instantly break in with the urgent business at hand, much of which had to do with unpaid bills. At 6:40 that evening, I reached the bottom of the spike, having taken care of roughly half its problems and transferred the remainder onto a single sheet of lined paper for consultation with Hale. With that in hand, along with another page holding a list of cheques needing to be sent, I locked the door with the abandoned keys, and set off for Hale’s home.

At 7:00 that morning, Mrs Hudson’s coffee in hand, I’d neither heard of nor cared about Geoffrey Hale, Randolph Fflytte, or the business of putting a moving picture before the great British public. Twelve hours later, I felt I had been intimately involved for weeks.

Geoffrey Hale was the lifelong friend, long-time business partner, and (another inevitability in English business arrangements) second cousin of Randolph Fflytte himself. Hale was the man who enabled the director’s vision to inhabit screens around the world. Hale was the one to assemble cast and crew, negotiate with the owners of cinema houses and would-be filming sites, and in general see to the practical minutiae of taking a film from initial discussion to opening night. Hale was the one to ensure that the actors were sober enough to work, that the actresses had enough flowers and bonbons to soothe their delicate egos, the one to make certain that the country house where filming was to take place actually possessed four walls and a roof.

Hale, and now me.

CHAPTER FOUR

PIRATES:
A rollicking band of pirates we.

G
EOFFREY
H
ALE 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? Priceless 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.”