The Festival Murders

Chapter 1

Leave me alone, you pig!’ Grace hissed as, once again, she pushed Billy’s groping hand away from her leg. She wanted nothing more than to immerse herself in the play but Billy’s boorish behaviour was completely spoiling her evening. She shook her head in disbelief that her mother, who was sitting on Billy’s other side, could be so blind to what was going on. Billy had shown no interest in the play and it was now perfectly clear to Grace that he was unaware that one of the most poignant moments in any Shakespearean play was about to take place.

When, a few minutes later, that fateful dagger flashed in the spotlight, Grace looked on in frightened fascination. She didn’t even notice Billy’s hand, which had started on its wandering course yet again. The slender blade caught the light as it hung suspended in the air for a drama-filled moment before, with force and passion, it flashed down to burst through clothing, flesh and sinew, finally piercing Juliet’s very heart. With amazing realism, blood immediately began to well from the fatal wound and the ill-fated child fell across the body of her already dead lover. Grace was spellbound and horrified, in equal measure, as with new realism and power, the well- known Shakespearean tragedy drew to a close.

Romeo and Juliet was in its second week in Edinburgh’s annual International Arts and Music Festival and, for once, the critics were unanimous in giving the production rave revues. The theatre was full to capacity and, thanks to those favourable revues, future performances were fully booked for weeks ahead. The Festival organisers were already rubbing their hands together with delight. At least this part of the programme they had been instrumental in bringing to the City promised to be a financial as well as an artistic success.

Sixteen-years old Grace Robinson was stage-struck. Even more, she was convinced acting was in her blood; after all, her mother’s brother, Oliver Wheeler, Uncle Ollie to Grace, was a well-known and very successful theatrical agent. Uncle Ollie represented many internationally famous stars, including the stunningly handsome Dean Brodie, who was superbly playing the part of Romeo in that season’s festival offering? It was Grace’s firm conviction that some day soon, she too would be as famous. Indeed, it was her fervent hope that her mother might persuade Uncle Ollie to help her when she started out on her theatrical career.

Grace’s talent had been slow to appear and, to-date, her acting opportunities had been limited to minor roles in the annual school play but in the last twelve months she had grown and matured in every way and now looked much older than her still tender years. She was now an attractive, confident young woman who expected – and all her friends told her she was right to expect – far more important and better acting roles in this, her final year at Pilrig Academy. Unfortunately, as Grace was already finding out, wanting something, and even being properly qualified and prepared for that something, is no guarantee of receiving it.

The brutal fact was that some years earlier Grace had incurred the wrath of Miss Brenda Bourges, the English teacher who always organized the school plays. In a moment of spiteful brilliance she had coined the nickname “Gorgeous Bourges” for the hapless woman and it was Miss Bourges’s misfortune that the apparently flattering nickname had stuck.

Competent as she was as an English teacher, not even Miss Bourges’s mother ever regarded her only child as gorgeous. Now, each time the unfortunate woman heard the name whispered behind her back it was like a dagger thrust into her heart; a thrust almost as deadly as the one Grace had just witnessed Juliet deliver to her own person. And salt was rubbed further into the wound when Miss Bourgess could only stand by and observe the slow but inexorable flowering of the child who, so easily and thoughtlessly, had caused her so much hurt. Year after pain-filled year she had watched in silent frustration as Grace had metamorphosed from a gangling, untidy adolescent into a lovely young woman. It was just not fair!

While the nickname persisted – and it was a name that was destined to follow the ill-fated teacher to her grave – and try as she might, Grace had still not received Miss Bourgess’s forgiveness. With the limited horizons of the typical adolescent, Grace was innocently unaware of the serious and lasting damage she had done both to her English teacher’s pride as well as to her own career prospects. She was also quite unaware of the depths of Miss Bourgess’s hatred for her and naively believed she only had to try a little harder to win her schoolmistress’s approval.

Having encountered few setbacks in her young life, Grace could imagine no one or anything thwarting her final and inevitable success and had already convinced herself – aided and abetted by her best friend, Mandy – that this year, “Gorgeous” Bourges would have no option other than to hand her a leading part in the school play.

By no means a stupid girl, Grace was perfectly well aware that until very recently, she had largely wasted the long years she had spent in school but was now determined this final year would be different. Not before time she recognised the importance of getting decent examination results and was now determined to give it her best shot. This was her last chance to demonstrate to her teachers her true worth, certain in the knowledge that one day soon she would become the centre of international attention. Her name would be on everyone’s lips and when the press went back to her old school to research articles about her for magazines like “Hello”, even Miss Bourges would be forced to say, ‘I really feel that it was I who discovered her, you know. I always knew she had it in her. And of course, her performance in the school play during her final year was quite exceptional; she practically brought the house down.’

Grace allowed herself to bask for a moment in the treacherous glow of achievements yet to be attained and at that moment, life was full of excitement and promise. She knew she had so much talent bottled up inside her, she felt she would burst. Little did she realize just how soon her dreams of fame would become a reality.

Prettier by far than most teenagers, Grace was otherwise an average and unexceptional young girl – except for her dreams. Where most of her contemporaries might have dreamed of meeting Mr Right, getting married, setting up home and starting a family, though not necessarily in that order, Grace dreamed of fame and riches, two commodities she had so far been denied. When she compared herself with the starlets whose photographs took up so much space in the magazines she avidly read from cover to cover, it was plain to see that not only was she prettier, she already had a much better figure than most of them. She was convinced she only needed one good break before the world of show biz would be beating a path to her door.

Unfortunately, the reality of her present life was quite different from that of her dreams. Sadly, Grace lived in a broken home; a home in which money was scarce. To make ends meet, a few years earlier, Yvonne, Grace’s mother, had started her own little business making novelty cushions. In a small way, the enterprise had flourished and was now quite successful. The downside was that it demanded most of Yvonne’s time and what little spare time she had, Yvonne shared between her daughter and a string of lovers, the latest and longest lasting being Billy Jenkins. While he brought some much-needed stability to the Robinson household, Billy brought little else.

At twenty-eight years old, Billy was nine years younger than Yvonne, who was now in her late thirties. That said, Yvonne might easily have passed for someone much younger if her sixteen-year-old daughter didn’t gave the lie to any claims she might make to fewer years. Yvonne had been an innocent, sheltered, twenty-year-old when she married Frank Robinson. At thirty, he was ten years older, a worryingly large age gap as far as Yvonne’s parents were concerned. Yvonne wouldn’t listen to them and Frank’s maturity and sophistication had swept her off her feet. Sadly, Frank soon bored of his pretty but shallow wife but, largely for the sake of their child, the marriage struggled on for a number of years before the final and inevitable breakdown occurred.

During the first few glorious years of being married to Frank, the physical side of her relationship with her husband had become very important to Yvonne. Sadly, that side declined and died as his interest turned in a quite different direction. Frank had awakened Yvonne’s dormant need for physical gratification and then, callously, had ignored it. This might explain why, since separating from and then divorcing her husband, Yvonne had entertained herself with a series of minor flirtations. She enjoyed being in charge for the first time in her life and she used her lovers quite shamelessly. But her life had undergone a dramatic transformation when Billy Jenkins appeared on the scene.

Billy Jenkins was about mid-way in age between Yvonne and young Grace. He was handsome in a rough sort of way and when he made an effort to spruce himself up he could make himself look quite presentable. Yvonne was flattered to have attracted such a young and virile lover but, for all the pleasure she derived from her relationship with Billy, she had no illusions it would ever mature into anything deeper and more long lasting. In any case, Billy was out of work and Yvonne had no intention of keeping him a moment longer than he failed to satisfy her needs or remained other than her exclusive property. In the meantime, he was good company and he gave what her body craved. Billy had few talents but he was a gifted lover and he kept Yvonne completely satisfied. For this, she was prepared to forgive him the innocent and comparatively minor teasing that went on when he amused himself with Grace.

But, as his performance that evening proved, even in a public place, Billy was not prepared to hold back. Since early in the first act he had shown himself to be far more interested in pursuing Grace than in trying to follow the intricacies and subtleties of a play which, truth to tell, went way over his head the moment it started.

When Billy had agreed to part with some of his hard-won winnings, thanks to a lucky guess on the horses, and had bought three upper circle tickets to Romeo and Juliet, it was in the mistaken belief that the play would be sexy and might ‘do him a bit of good’, as he put it to his pals down at the local. The curtain had hardly rolled back, however, before he recognised his mistake. The quickly spoken words and the complex sentences were far too difficult for his less than agile mind to follow. Indeed, the clever puns and subtle nuances of the play – which he was only made aware of when the audience around him laughed or sniggered – were quite lost on him. He should have listened to his pals, he thought ruefully. They had told him he was making a mistake but he had refused to listen. Still, ever the optimist, and sitting next to Grace as he was, he still harboured hopes that the evening would not be a total washout.

Living in the same house as Grace but not being able to touch her as and when he wanted was a constant frustration to Billy. With her blond, flowing hair, her regular features and her smooth complexion, she was already taller than her petite mother. Physically, Grace took after her father, Frank Robinson, who, four years earlier, had run off with his lover. At the time it had been an awful shock for the twelve-year-old child. It is always difficult for a young, impressionable child to understand why their father should want to leave them and their mother to run off with another woman but when Frank Robinson ran off with another man, his action, coming as it did as a complete surprise to both of them, generated feelings of loathing and humiliation in both of them.

As part of her divorce settlement, Yvonne had kept the family house in East Pilrig Terrace, a compact region situated to the north east of the city centre. A small, two bed-roomed, terraced house, it was conveniently located both for the city centre and for the shops in Leith. With no front garden, the front door opened directly onto the pavement outside. But the street, which was set back away from the busy main road, was a quiet one with only the occasional child or dog to disturb its tranquillity. It was also so narrow that when cars were parked on both sides, only a very narrow gap remained for the occasional visiting traffic.

Her divorce had forced Yvonne to reassess her life and Frank would have been surprised to see her now. For a start, her business success gave her a confidence she had not previously known. She was now her own woman and, for the first time in her life, she felt good about herself. Never again would she be a slave to any man. From now on, she was determined to control her own destiny.

If Yvonne was pleased with her Billy goat, as she privately but affectionately called him, her daughter positively loathed the young man and was by no means convinced that Billy’s “teasing” was as innocent as her mother believed it to be. In fact, Grace did not trust Billy Jenkins one little bit. She knew him to be an exhibitionist and someone who was far too free with his hands. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, and in Yvonne’s small house many such opportunities did indeed present themselves, he took whatever liberties he could. Naturally, Grace complained to her mother but Yvonne merely laughed and called Grace a silly little prude. She would live to regret that opinion.

In the Festival Theatre, the play was coming to its climax and Grace had eyes only for the action on stage. How she envied the actors. Her Uncle Ollie was due to arrive in Edinburgh in a few day’s time and over the phone had promised he would introduce her to some of them. She would be sure to remind him of his promise. It was some years since Grace had last met her Uncle Ollie in person and she remembered him as being a bit weird, both in the way he dressed and in the way he walked. He also had an unnaturally high voice and effeminate ways and, with the narrowness of youth, Grace was already prejudiced against him. Nevertheless, with a toughness that would have surprised her mother had she been aware of it, Grace was astute enough to recognise that her “weird” uncle represented a unique opportunity for her. So, while he could be useful to her, she was quite prepared to hide her dislike and even to forgive him his little idiosyncrasies.

When the curtain finally came down, Grace stood with the rest of the audience to give the players the ovation they so richly deserved. So overcome with the emotion of the experience was she, her eyes filled with tears, and she was by no means the only one in the audience to succumb to the moment. Grace could fully relate to Juliet’s tragedy. After all, was she not also misunderstood? Not even her own mother understood her.

Grace was acutely aware that at the advanced age of sixteen she had not yet experienced the deep passion that thirteen-year-old Juliet had already experienced before her untimely death. Billy’s crude advances to her might bear some resemblance to the crude ways of Romeo’s friend, Mercutio but without any of the charm of the latter. Grace decided she needed a Romeo in her life. Where to find him was the problem.

Standing in the Grand Circle less than twenty feet away and immediately below Grace, Yvonne and Billy Jenkins, and completely oblivious to the circumstances that would soon link their lives, Detective Inspector Ralph Kingdom of the Lothian and Borders Police stood next to Sara Bakewell, his close companion on this as on many other evenings.

Ralph Kingdom was a big-boned, rather gaunt-looking man with a heavily scarred face. The scars gave him a sinister and even dangerous appearance and many stories had been made up to explain them, including knife fights with murderous gangs in dark alleyways. In fact, the truth was much less exciting. He had received them sixteen years earlier when he was thrown through the windscreen of a friend’s car. They had both been university students at the time and were returning home from a late party during which both had drunk far more than was good for them. His friend, the driver, had not been so lucky; he had lost the use of his legs.

Sara, Kingdom’s companion, was a tall, athletic, rather statuesque-looking woman with a flawless complexion and beautifully regular features, except for a slightly twisted nose, which she had broken as a child when she had fallen from her horse on her first foxhunt. She was the Equestrian Events Organizing Officer for Scotland and she and Kingdom had met some months earlier. They were now steady companions and lovers.

Many years earlier, as a schoolboy, Kingdom had studied Romeo and Juliet and, fortunately, he still half-remember the plot. That earlier study enabled him to appreciate some of the finer aspects of the play and he now proceeded, enthusiastically, to demonstrate his appreciation. Sara, who had purchased the tickets months earlier, stood beside him with tears flowing freely and unashamedly down her cheeks as she too clapped her admiration for the outstanding performance.

Unheard by Kingdom and amidst all the emotion of the experience, so magnificently drawn out by the players, Grace heard Billy say, ‘What a load of old rubbish! When I think how much these tickets cost me I could cry. Come on Grace, move your pretty little butt. If we hurry we’ll be in time to catch the late film on cable TV.’ She could have died with embarrassment to be associated with so coarse and stupid a man.

Yvonne, however, seemed quite undisturbed by her lover’s comment and replied a trifle petulantly, ‘I thought we were going to stop off for a drink first, Billy.’

‘We can’t take young Grace into a pub can we, Yvonne? Use your head. She’s under-age, ain’t she?’ Billy was anxious not to miss his film and was pleased to have found a plausible sounding excuse.

‘Well just you remember she is under-age then, Billy Boy,’ Yvonne said petulantly and meaningfully.

Like a plague of locusts descending on a harvest, taxis arrived outside the theatre to gobble up the emotionally drained theatregoers as they emerged into Edinburgh’s balmy evening air. And it was only by moving quickly that Grace managed to position herself in the taxi such that her mother was between herself and Billy.

‘What a load of prats those actors looked poncing about in their tights,’ Billy said, giving his first studied comment on the performance. ‘You wouldn’t catch me dressed like that, I can tell you.’

Grace did not join in the ribald laughter that followed her mother’s observation to that remark.

Their taxi dropped them outside Yvonne’s blue-fronted little house in Pilrig some fifteen minutes later. While Yvonne searched for her key, Billy put his arm around Grace’s waist and tried to give her a squeeze but she immediately pulled away from him with a scowl, which made him laugh.

Once inside, Grace made straight for her bedroom while Yvonne and Billy made themselves drinks in the kitchen prior to watching the late night film. Grace could guess what film it would be. Mandy, her special friend at school, and a few of the other girls had joked about it during the day. Mandy was much more experienced and worldly-wise than was Grace and often bragged about her exploits with her many boy-friends but Grace often wondered if her friend really had ever done what she claimed. As for Billy Boy’s film, she was surprised her mother was prepared to watch it. Sadly, since her divorce, Yvonne’s actions had become odd, to say the least. So, after washing and cleaning her teeth in the tiny, cluttered bathroom, Grace changed and made herself ready for bed.

One of the last tasks she routinely did before going to bed was to write a short note in the diary she kept hidden at the back of her wardrobe. She had little to fear from anyone reading her diary since her entries, although entirely innocent, were written in a special, cryptic code she used to disguise her true meaning. That done, she took up the writing pad a friend had given her for Christmas and wrote a short but passionate note to her favourite star whose performance she had so enjoyed watching earlier in the evening. After finishing her letter, she placed it carefully in an envelope and, as carefully, she addressed it. A first-class stamp was stuck in the corner and, turning the envelope over, she sealed it and kissed it. Finally, across the seal she wrote ‘SWALK’. She would post it on her way to school the next morning.

Behind her door was a colourful poster advertising ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and down both edges of the poster were photographs of the principal actors. In pride of place at the top on one side was the handsome Romeo, Dean Brodie. On the other side was the lovely Catherine Preston who played Juliet. Below Dean Brodie was the photograph of Raymond Dewar who played Mercutio, while below Catherine Preston were photographs of Maurice Brookes and Amanda Prentice who played Benvolio and the Nurse, respectively. ‘Good night,’ she whispered as she kissed the photograph of her favourite.

Grace was bending over rearranging the covers of her bed when she felt rather than heard someone behind her. Casually she looked over her shoulder. Billy was standing framed in the doorway, slowly licking his lips and leering at her.

‘Very tasty,’ he muttered quietly.

Grace had long since outgrown her thin, cotton nightdress which barely covered the tops of her thighs but she liked it still because she thought it made her look sexy, it being the nearest she had to a genuine shorty-nightdress. More practically, since there was so little of it, on hot summer evenings it kept her cool. The view young Grace had unwittingly provided had clearly inflamed Billy and he now stood breathing heavily devouring her with his eyes.

‘Get out,’ Grace hissed. ‘Get out or I’ll scream.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ Billy wheedled taking a tentative step into the room. ‘I only came to ask you if you wanted a nightcap. Yvonne and I are having mugs of hot chocolate and I thought you might like something hot, too.’ His eyes never left her as he took another step forward.

Grace tried to pull her nightdress down but only succeeded in pulling it yet more revealingly across her swelling breasts. ‘Get out, I said. Mum, Mum, Billy’s in my room,’ she shouted.

This had the desired effect on Billy who, still breathing heavily and leering at her, slowly backed out of the room. There was no sign of Yvonne, however. The sound on the television was on high volume below and she hadn’t heard what had gone on above her head. She was, however, surprised but by no means displeased by the urgency and power of her lover later that night.

 

While Grace was occupied between the Shakespearean play and fending off Billy Jenkins, Steve Morrisey, with no such distractions to upset his concentration, was carefully constructing his letter bomb. While he was so engaged, his girl friend, Jane Reay, occupied herself composing the letter that would accompany the bomb. Steve had located the instructions for making this highly specialised device from a publicly available web site on the Internet and after practising with various prototypes, was now satisfied with the power and efficiency of his planned device. The final package was now near completion. Jane was by no means certain her letter would survive the detonation, but still took no chances that she or her friends would be identified through it. She was using cuttings from a variety of newspapers collected from different parts of the country, which, presently were littered across the floor of their