Vasili, however, read his tabloids and knew all about the affair. He recognized Charlie Fenton as the perfect victim. The guy had gone off with Kenny’s girlfriend! Fyodor wouldn’t need any convincing that that was a proper motive for murder.
So Vasili had lain in wait outside the Notting Hill house, confident that sooner or later Charlie Fenton would appear. As indeed he did, on the dot of ten o’clock. A car drew up some hundred yards away from Kenny Mountford’s house and the very recognizable figure of the director emerged, blowing a kiss to someone inside. Vasili drew out his favoured weapon, the PSS Silent Pistol which had been developed for the KGB, and when his quarry was close enough, discharged two bullets into Charlie Fenton’s head.
Job done. Coolly replacing the pistol in his pocket, Vasili had walked away, confident that there was nothing to tie him to this crime, as there had been nothing to tie him to any of his previous fifty-odd hits. Confident also that Fyodor would assume that the job had been done by Kenny Mountford.
What he hadn’t taken into account was Charlie Fenton’s tomcat nature. No sooner had the director bedded one woman than he was on the lookout for another, and his honeymoon of monogamy with Lesley-Jane Walden had been short. She, suspecting something was going on, had been watching at the window of the house that evening for her philandering lover to return. As soon as Charlie Fenton got out of the car she had started to video him on her camera, and thus recorded his death. The footage, when handed over to the police, also revealed very clear images of Vasili, from which he was quickly identified and as quickly arrested.
Lesley-Jane Walden was in seventh heaven. To be at the centre of a murder case – there were actresses who would kill to achieve that kind of publicity. In the event, though, it didn’t do her much good. The police made no mention of the help she had given to their investigation in any of their press conferences. They didn’t even mention her name. And all the obituaries of Charlie Fenton spoke only of “his towering theatrical originality” and his reputation as “a loving family man”. Lesley-Jane Walden was furious.
Her mood wasn’t improved when Kenny ordered her to get out of the house. She moved into a girlfriend’s flat and started badgering her agent to get her on to I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here!
“You are a clever boy, Anatoli Semyonov,” said Fyodor, when they next met. “To get rid of your girlfriend’s lover and arrange things so that Vasili is arrested for the murder – this is excellent work. I have wanted Vasili out of the way for a long time. You are not just a clever boy, Anatoli, you are also a clever Semfiropol Boy.”
“You mean I have qualified to join the gang?”
“Of course you have qualified. Now you will always be welcome here. You are one of the Semfiropol Boys.”
So Kenny Mountford too thought: job done. Except, of course, having done that job was not going to lead on to the other job. Kenny had done what he promised – infiltrated a London gang – but the man to whom he had made that promise was no longer around. There would never be a Charlie Fenton production about London gangs. All Kenny Mountford’s efforts had been in vain.
And yet the realization did not upset him. No one could say he hadn’t tried everything he could to achieve respectability as an actor, and now it was time to move on. Time to get back to being Kenny Mountford. All that “Method”, in-depth research approach to characterization might be all right for some people in the business. But, for him, he reckoned he preferred something called “acting”.
When he finally spoke to his agent, she revealed that she’d been going nearly apoplectic trying to contact him over the previous weeks. The BBC was doing a new sitcom and they wanted him to play the lead! He said he’d do it.
But Kenny Mountford didn’t lose touch with Fyodor and the Semfiropol Boys. As an actor, it’s always good to have more than one string to your bow.
THE MAN WHO TOOK OFF HIS HAT TO THE DRIVER OF THE TRAIN by Peter Turnbull
OVER THE YEARS the story of the man who took his hat off to the driver of the train grew to have three parts. Three, George Hennessey mused as he walked a pleasant walk on a pleasant summer’s evening, late, from his house to the pub in Easingwold for a pint of stout, just one before “last orders” were called. Yes, he thought, the story had three distinct parts. There was, he remembered as his eye was caught by a rapidly darting bat, the incident itself and the story therein, then there was the story as he had told it to Charles, then finally it was seeing the woman: again.
She had not grown old gracefully: she had refused to surrender to the years, and like so many women who pursue that policy she had, in the opinion of George Hennessey, quite simply made things worse for herself. Even if her figure had remained slender she could not at the age of fifty plus wear tee-shirts and jeans and trainers, and drink among the city’s youth and hope to blend.
Hennessey was walking the walls from the police station at Micklegate Bar to the fish restaurant on Lendal, intending to take lunch ‘out’ as was his custom, when he saw her approaching him. She didn’t recognize him and walked quickly, urgently, in such a manner that a casual observer would see her as a woman about a pressing errand, a woman going somewhere. But Hennessey, a police officer for the greater part of his working life, and now nearing retirement, was a keen student of human behaviour. He saw a rather frightened woman, speeding away from something, something within her, something in her past from which there was no escape, no matter how breathlessly fast she walked. He recognized her as she wove in and out of the tourists who strolled the walls but he could not immediately place her, except that he knew she belonged to his professional rather than to his private life. She approached him and swept past him, the sagging cheeks, the heavy make-up, glistening red lips and scraggy hair, and the quick, quick, quick, short, short, short steps along the ancient battlements, beneath a vast blue, cloudless July sky. On impulse, George Hennessey turned and followed her, quickening his pace to keep up with her.
She passed Micklegate Bar and left the walls at Baile Hill, turned sharp left into Cromwell Road and entered the Waggoner’s Rest. Hennessey followed her into the pub. He was familiar with the Waggoner’s Rest though he didn’t often frequent it, knowing it to be a “locals” pub. Few tourists to the Faire and Famouse Citie of York find it and, further, it is in the evenings the haunt of a youthful set of locals, to which the woman clearly felt she belonged. By the time Hennessey entered the pub, the woman had purchased a large port and was sitting alone in the corner of the then empty lounge bar. Hennessey purchased a non-alcoholic drink and sat in the far corner, observing her out of the corner of his eye.
Olivia Stringer.
Of course, Olivia Stringer. Her name came to him suddenly. So this is how she has ended up, alone, wasted, probably a drunkard if not an out and out alcoholic, judging by her emaciated appearance. A massive glass of port wine and no food to be seen, and that in the middle of the day. And a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence too, judging by the threadbare denims and the shapeless green tee-shirt. But he felt no pity for her, no compassion, not after what she had done twenty years earlier.
The case, as Hennessey recalled, had unfolded when the driver of an Edinburgh to London express train had brought his train to a rapid but controlled stop and had reported to York control that he had had “one under”, giving the approximate location. All railway traffic on the up line was halted, and the emergency services had sped to the scene.