Free Sextet by Sally Beauman

were now reaching crisis point. These difficulties Rowland had been co-opted to solve. Colin, as he noisily insisted, was suffering; his sufferings emanated from his current employer, the ‘bloody man’, not taking his calls that evening, the American film director, Tomas Court.
    Quite how he had been cast in the Sherlock Holmes role in this saga, Rowland was unsure. Colin’s techniques, as usual, had involved emotional blackmail, hysteria, genuine pathos and winning charm; Rowland had found himself shifted by millimetres from the role of spectator to the role of participator. Now, apparently, he was on the case and expected to solve it by means of his intellectual and deductive powers. Colin had a touching faith in these powers; Rowland had rather less faith, but he was fond of Colin and anxious to help him, so now, walking on, he set his mind to his task.
    In Colin’s view, canvassed with great frequency, all his current difficulties could be overcome, and the looming crisis averted, if only they could, together, decode Court’s perplexing character.
    ‘If we could just figure him out, Rowland,’ he had announced earlier that day, ‘my problems would be over. I’m not reading him, that’s the trouble. He’s like a bloody anagram—and it’s an anagram I can’t solve on my own.’
    Rowland, who was gifted at anagrams, indeed at verbal puzzles of all kinds, now set himself the task of rearranging the vowels and consonants that comprised what he knew of this famous man. It interested him to do so, since Court was a director Rowland admired, though he was sometimes repelled by the darkness and chilly precision of his films. These films, it seemed to Rowland, set a series of cinematic traps for their audience; they were orchestrated with great care, although that care was often well disguised. Certain critics, and they tended to be ageing and male, missed the shape and purpose of Court’s movies, unable to see beyond their genre disguise. Younger critics, and Rowland agreed with them, could see the use Court made of cinematic conventions. To Rowland, Court’s movies had an inexorable logic; frame by frame, they bore the stamp of his vision; they were conceived, shot and edited by a cunning and well-disciplined directorial hand.
    The movies then, Rowland thought, were his best clue to Court’s character; beyond them, the facts were few. Court rarely gave interviews, and any biographical evidence was minimal. He was of Czech descent, and as far as Rowland could remember, had grown up poor in the Midwest, at some point Anglicizing his original family name. He was now in his forties, and had come to movies unusually late for an American new-wave director. He was not some Hollywood wunderkind, but had studied movies as a mature student, after several years in the military, in—as far as Rowland could recall—the Marines. His early work as a director attracted an art-house following; it was only after his marriage to the already famous Natasha Lawrence that his career took off. With their third film together, Dead Heat , the Court cult truly began. Now Tomas Court was divorced, some parties claiming the divorce was bitter, others amicable; whatever the truth, Court and his former wife continued to work together, and were about to do so again, as Colin confirmed. According to Colin, Tomas Court had loved and lost—in which case, Rowland thought dourly, Court’s circumstances mirrored his own.
    Still intent on releasing memory’s grip, the last clinging grasp of its small, cold-fingered hand, Rowland turned his mind from such considerations. The track forked here, and he decided to head off to his left, making for the shadowy outcrop of rocks high above him. He began to consider his richest source of information, his friend Colin. Colin was scarcely the most reliable of witnesses, but he was an entertaining one. With a sense of growing relief and amusement, walking on, Rowland considered Tomas Court the professional,