Read Online Cast For Death by Margaret Yorke - Free Book Online Page A

silently registering horror at his effrontery.
    ‘Well, I’ll ask,’ said the girl. ‘But I’m sure she won’t see you.’
    She disappeared through a chocolate-brown door. Certainly Sam’s agent wasted no percentages on the premises, thought Patrick. He sat down, well away from the trio of men. The alert one was fidgeting, twitching his foot up and down and snapping his fingers. Patrick wondered if he was mentally practising some dance routine. The other two men stared into space. As the girl came back, the telephone on her desk rang.
    ‘You’re to go in,’ she said to Patrick, swinging her hips behind the desk and seizing the receiver while she spoke.
    Watched resentfully by the other men, Patrick went through the chocolate-brown door.
    A fat, white-haired woman sat behind a scratched desk talking into another telephone. She had stubby fingers with chunky rings on most of them, and her nails were painted blue. The walls here were covered with more photographs, and this time Patrick recognised nearly all the faces. He saw Joss Ruxton, the actor who had played Othello last year at Stratford, and his Desdemona, and a print of Sam taken long ago dressed as Jaques.
    ‘Yes—I know you’ve an audition on Tuesday, but this would be better for you – eight weeks filming and who knows what might come after that if the film’s any damn good. Now, you get along there,’ the woman was saying, and she waved a hand at Patrick to sit down.
    He did so, watching while she talked on, cajoling and bullying, and eventually reached agreement with her client, after which she slammed down the receiver.
    ‘Now. Three minutes, that’s all,’ she said, fixing Patrick with a bright blue stare from tiny, deep-set eyes. Her voice was youthful, and her diction crisp; he guessed she had once been on the stage herself.
    ‘Sam’s funeral – do you know when it is?’ Patrick asked her.
    ‘He can’t be cremated – some ban by the coroner. It’s on Wednesday at ten,’ said Leila Waters. She scribbled something on a piece of paper, tore it from a pad and gave it to him. ‘There. That’s the cemetery and the name of the undertaker.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Patrick.
    ‘Well, Sam’s troubles are over. Pity,’ said Leila. ‘He had talent.’
    ‘Why didn’t he get any further?’ Patrick asked.
    ‘It was his own fault. There was that business years ago – you knew about it?’
    Sam had been mixed up in a drug scandal; he had been acquitted in court of any complicity in what had gone on but he had had a breakdown, broken a contract, and been out of work for years.
    ‘He needn’t have dropped out of sight then,’ Leila went on. ‘But his nerve went – he wouldn’t turn up for auditions, or if he did, he dried – couldn’t do a thing. He was almost washed up.’
    ‘What made him keep at it?’
    ‘I did. Told him to stop wallowing in self-pity and get on with it, and found fresh opportunities for him when no other agent would have bothered. I always believed in his ability, but his temperament was too much – it beat him in the end.’
    The telephone rang, and she spoke into it again for some minutes. It was a call about finding an actress for a commercial. Patrick listened with interest to the conversation. He thrived on seeing aspects of life so different from his own.
    ‘Stratford,’ he said, when Leila had finished. ‘Sam was going to be Friar Lawrence and Cinna.’
    ‘Not Cinna – Caesar,’ said Leila. ‘That could have made him. He might have settled down and become a regular part of the company.’
    ‘Caesar himself, indeed,’ said Patrick thoughtfully. Denis had got it wrong.
    ‘Yes. Another actor was picked first, but he couldn’t do it in the end – a film part came up, and he took that.’
    ‘So it was offered to Sam? He was already going up there for Romeo and Juliet?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘He seemed to have no friends,’ said Patrick.
    ‘He was a loner. I doubt if anyone ever got close to him,’