by Nev Fountain
‘Oh, nonsense Mervyn,’ erupted Marcus vigorously. ‘I’ve been through this time and time again, “The Burning Time” was fair comment about how religions can distort their original message over time. All that business in the Council of Nicaea. This was just like that in reverse. It’s all completely fair comment.’
‘Even so. We were just making adventure stories for telly after all; with hindsight it might have been a little provocative…’
‘It was intended to be. Take that whipping scene. All we did was glorify a method of torture in exactly the same way Christianity does; why else do they wear their rinky-dinky little crosses round their necks?’
Brian instinctively moved his hand to the crucifix around his neck. Mervyn wished that Marcus expressed himself in slightly less pugnacious terms.
Marcus was building up a head of steam. He was now in his element, declaiming on the subject that had earned him a place in Who’s Who, two PAs, a bodyguard and a house in the country.
‘Christians glorify an instrument of Roman torture and suppression by erecting it in their houses and genuflecting to it! How appallingly tasteless can you get? Mohammed told his followers not to make images of him because he didn’t want to be worshipped like a god, and that message becomes so twisted, so corrupted, that images of him can’t be made on pain of death because they think the mere depiction of his face desecrates his name…so he’s worshipped like a god anyway! It’s diametrically opposite to what Mohammed intended, and are we allowed to say this? Are we hell!’
‘I know all that,’ Mervyn was starting to get testy. He was becoming annoyed at being painted as some craven apologist, and was sure that this was Marcus’s revenge on him for embarrassing him before the break.
Marcus wasn’t going to be deflected. ‘Being an honest writer takes courage, Mervyn. There’s no point acting like a dormouse, hiding in your teapot and hoping the nasty men with their swords and placards and burning effigies don’t notice you. There’s an idiotic mob outside this building trying to curb our free speech, and there’s nutters out there threatening murder over doodles, and it’s about time we spoke out. I think it’s brilliant that this episode is being released now, perhaps it should be repeated on BBC1 as well, to give a sense of perspective to all the bloody madness going on out there. Mark my words, we’re heading back to a new dark age, where people are once again put to the sword for simply saying the world is round, and it was created a few thousand years ago; those are the stakes we’re playing for… And I for one don’t want to be tied to one just yet.’
His well-rehearsed diatribe finally over, Marcus leaned back triumphantly and groped in his pocket.
KLAK-LAK-LAK-LAK-LAK.
‘Can we stop there?’ crackled Robert. ‘We heard a noise in the studio.’
‘Sorry, just opening my water,’ said Marcus, and raised his water bottle to the figures behind the glass in an ironic toast. He took a deep, triumphant swig
‘I know all that, I wouldn’t have…commissioned the story if I didn’t believe that,’ said Mervyn coldly, watching Marcus glug away. ‘But there are plenty of moderate people of faith in the world who despair of extremism just as much as we do. Being thoughtlessly provocative doesn’t help anyone’s case. All it does is leave a nasty taste in the mouth.’
‘Oh!’ Marcus suddenly shouted. ‘This can’t be what I…’ He got slowly to his feet, stared at the water bottle curiously, and then he started coughing and gasping, retching noisily.
‘Marcus? Are you all right?’ Samantha’s voice had dwindled to that of a frightened little girl’s.
Marcus spun round in an odd, almost graceful way and collapsed to the floor. The bottle flew from his fingers, hit the wall and lay in the corner, its contents bleeding into the carpet.
CHAPTER TEN
No one moved.
Robert was listening through his headphones at the desk. Wondering what was happening, he looked through the glass, gaped, clapped his hands to either side of his shiny head as if trying to unscrew it then rushed into the studio, closely followed by Joanna.
‘Oh my God…’ Robert knelt over Marcus and touched his neck.
Joanna took charge. ‘Jesus Christ. He looks like he’s choking. Lie him flat on his back and open his mouth.’
Robert didn’t do any of those things. He straightened up and stepped back, his mouth hanging open. He shook his head disbelievingly.
‘Is he all right?’ asked Brian.
Robert’s voice was a dry whisper. ‘No. I think he’s dead.’
There was a ‘whump’ noise behind Mervyn. He turned. Samantha had crumpled to the ground in a faint.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was obvious that they couldn’t stay in the green room. They knew that Samantha would only have to catch a glimpse of the body in the studio and she would dissolve into hysterical whimpering.
They were ushered into the BBC club, where Robert provided free whiskies and coffees to steady everyone’s nerves. All around them, TV types drank, ate, jabbered and hooted with laughter, oblivious to what had just happened.
Joanna paced near the doorway, her severe bob fluttering slightly in the air conditioning. She had a mobile phone clamped to her ear, having one intense call, then another, and another. Mervyn was no lip-reader, but he knew after each call she made she said ‘Fuck’ to herself, before sighing and starting to dial again.
She eventually stopped phoning and turned her attention to Marcus’s minder (Adrian. Was that his name?). He didn’t look happy either. She talked to him in a low intense voice, in a swift rat-a-tat-tat delivery which wasn’t conducive to conversation; the minder started a lot of sentences which he wasn’t allowed to finish, and he said ‘Ma’am’ a lot. Despite his big muscles and his shiny sunglasses, the man looked diminished.
It didn’t seem fair to Mervyn. Here they were in the BBC club—a place packed with employees whose jobs thrive on self-defined measurements of success; where ‘Failure’ is a word never spoken, and poor old Aiden (Aiden! That’s it!) was the only one here with a job where there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room to massage the performance targets. He was a bodyguard, and the body he’d just been guarding had just keeled over and died. He couldn’t point to the very favourable audience appreciation figures, or show how well he’d done with the elusive 18-24-year-old demographic. He’d failed, and he was now being informed of the fact in no uncertain terms by Joanna.
Everyone had clustered around Samantha, cooing like maiden aunts around a newborn. She was making a striking recovery; all the way from hysteria, to smiling-through-the-tears in the space of 20 minutes.
Mervyn found himself an alcove to nurse his coffee, and he’d barely had a sip when Brian slipped in to join him. He dipped his head so it was close to Mervyn’s. Mervyn wasn’t surprised to see that Brian’s twitch had returned. It was dancing a jig all over his cheek and his left eye. ‘Merv. What the hell happened?’
Mervyn shrugged. ‘You tell me.’
‘But how? Was it a heart attack?’
Mervyn gave another shrug. ‘It looked like it.’
‘But he was so healthy. Pounding the Kensington pavements in his sweats every day… All the newspaper photographers used to run after him on his morning jog. Used to leave them standing.’
Mervyn shrugged. ‘He was acting very oddly in the studio…’
‘Yes he was, wasn’t he? Perhaps he was on drugs? Or the booze again? He used to be a pretty heavy drinker, like me; Cheryl even made him go to the same AA meets as me, but booze doesn’t make you keel over like that. Not dead. I don’t think he was on coke or heroin. Not now, anyway.’
‘It doesn’t matter if he wasn’t on it now. You know that stuff does lasting damage to the system, even if you give it up later and lead a blameless life. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of popstars and TV celebrities suddenly drop dead from heart attacks when they hit their 50s.’
Brian rolled the thought around his head. ‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right. That�
��s what must have happened.’
‘Yes. That’s what happened,’ repeated Mervyn, trying to convince himself as much as Brian.
Brian chuckled to himself. ‘I’m 52 you know. I suppose I’ve got all that to look forward to.’ He stared into the middle distance for a very long time (so long, in fact, that Mervyn was about to snap his fingers in front of his eyes) and then sighed. ‘It’s at times like these, when you finally see your own mortality staring you in the face…well, you do start to think; is my house in order? And I don’t mean just possessions and the like. I mean one’s metaphorical house…’ he thumped his chest. ‘One’s immortal soul.’
Mervyn was intrigued. ‘And have you put things in order, Brian?’
‘I hope so, Merv. I hope so. But once you’ve done that, it’s just the start. You realise there are always others who need help to find their way out of the murky forests of doubt…’
‘And into the designated picnic area of enlightenment?’
‘Exactly, Merv. I have a friend I’m working on at the moment, for example. Putting him back on the right path to God.’
‘Like who?’ asked Mervyn
‘Can I show you this leaflet?’ he said, pulling a sheet out of his pocket and unfolding it.
Trevor ‘Simpering’ Simpson came across. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Mr Crowbridge, sorry. But did you want another whisky?’
‘Oh, I should say so!’
Brian leapt up, all thoughts of everything else forgotten.
The leaflet was left on the table. Mervyn picked it up.
It was one of the Godbotherers’ leaflets.
The Godbotherers?
Surely Brian wasn’t a member of that crowd?
* * *
A thin bald man called Inspector Preece arrived with three uniformed constables. They took Marcus away, they took notes, they took statements, addresses and then they took their leave.
Finishing off the commentary was out of question; Robert was very solicitous—he all but pushed them into the best cars he could find.
Brian was poured into his. No one had noticed he’d been knocking them back until it was too late. The driver assured Robert that Brian would get to his front door safely, checked on him lying in the back seat (with a pain-stricken glance at the upholstery) and then inched out of the car park.
Samantha disappeared into a shiny Merc and pressed her frail little face to the window, waving as it drove away. She looked like she was a World War Two evacuee being packed off to the Cotswolds before the bombs arrived.
Once again, Mervyn refused a BBC car, intending to take the tube from White City. After everyone had been packed off home, he found himself standing, alone, outside Television Centre. The protesters had gone. The only evidence that they’d ever been there were brightly-coloured leaflets lying on the ground; the damp pavement had made them limp and transparent.
Now what?
The first time he’d seen a corpse, it affected him deeply; he remembered that he could barely stop shaking and his teeth chattered like castanets. Just last year, but it seemed a long time ago.
Marcus was the fourth body he’d witnessed in two years, and all he had now was a curious empty feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He walked to White City. There were the Evening Standard boards outside, with their enticingly vague headlines, designed to intrigue those not au fait with Teletext, radio, the internet and 24-hour rolling news into buying a paper.
The headline was “FAMOUS WRITER DIES”.
Mervyn wondered, when he finally failed to meet his last deadline and floated up to the Writer’s Room In The Sky, whether he’d merit a vague “FAMOUS WRITER DIES” from the Evening Standard.
Probably not.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Things carried on, as they inevitably do.
Mervyn spent the following day with his head buzzing about Marcus’s demise. He bought all the papers and spread them out across his living room floor, scouring the obituaries (he was mentioned once, or rather someone called ‘Melvin Stone’ was). But the day after that, the grind of trying to write his book, trying to write his radio play, and making cups of tea so he could avoid doing either, put the events out of his head.
There was another DVD commentary being recorded three days later, less controversial; just the usual type of episode with silly cheap monsters and sexy young girls with guns, thank heavens. Mervyn was invited to attend this one, too, as were a fresh gaggle of actors ready to groan about their 80s hair and get confused about which quarry they filmed in. As usual, he used public transport to get there.
He heard the sound even before he even left the tube station. It reminded him of a medium-wave radio left on late at night, oozing static and occasionally fastening on to the gibber of a foreign radio station. It ebbed and flowed like waves, a hiss of noise surging into a bubbling roar and back again.
He knew what it was, and the sound made his neck itch. There was a large crowd somewhere outside. Sure enough, there was another mêlée at the entrance of Television Centre, but this time it wasn’t Christians. Quite the opposite.
Journalists.
There were hundreds of them, dwarfing the Godbotherers’ protest by a factor of fifty. Six-deep, they covered the entrance like maggots seething at the bottom of a dustbin. Stepladders were erected and photographers hung from them like gibbons, trying to snap away at the startled people inside the glass-fronted reception.
What was going on? This time it was definitely Robbie Williams appearing on the National Lottery. Must be.
Mervyn pulled out his mobile phone and called the contact number he’d been given. It must have been Robert Mulberry’s number, because it was Robert that answered. ‘Yes?’
It was scarcely a word, more of a hysterical squeak. Robert sounded very harassed.
‘Oh, hello Robert, it’s Mervyn, I’m outside Television Centre. I can’t get in because there’s some kind of hoo-ha outside, can someone come round and let me in another way?’
‘Mervyn? God! I’m sorry. Didn’t you get my message?’
‘What message?’ Even as Mervyn asked the question, he could see a flashing in the corner of his eye. He moved the phone from his ear and saw a little icon winking in the corner of the screen. ‘I’ve been on the tube.’ No signal, of course. ‘What message?’
‘I tried to get you before you left, but you’d gone. Everyone else got BBC cars, so I was able to contact the drivers and turn them back. I’m really sorry about this Mervyn, but the session’s been cancelled. Something big has come up.’
‘What’s going on?’
Mervyn was pacing, as he usually did when he was even slightly agitated. He was moving in a small circle on the pavement, and at that moment he turned so he was facing White City station again, and the Evening Standard boards by the entrance.
One read: “FAMOUS WRITER MURDERED INSIDE BBC.”
Another read: “POLICE BAFFLED BY ‘PERFECT MURDER’.”
Mervyn’s arm went slowly limp, allowing the phone to sink down to his waist. All he could hear was Robert’s distant squawk. He recovered himself, and brought it back to his ear.
‘Mervyn? Mervyn? Are you there?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘Did you say “You didn’t know?”’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you not seen the papers?’
‘No…’ he said slowly. ‘I have now.’
* * *
There was no point trying to get access to TV Centre; Robert and Trevor were far too busy to talk to him. He got the distinct impression that they were cordoned off by ‘Police—do not cross’ tapes even as Robert spoke to him.
Mervyn grabbed a Standard. There was talk of Marcus dying from foul play—poison was mentioned—but it was infuriatingly vague when it came to the actual details of this ‘perfect murder’. He guessed that most of the facts of the case were legally sensitive.
He was crazed with curiosity. It was so annoying being out of the loop on this; he only w
ished he could think of a way to—
Oh. Oh of course.
Him.
He was forced to admit that there was only one person he could contact; someone who might have the inside track on the information. Unfortunately for Mervyn, he’d resolved to have as little contact as possible with this ‘someone’.
He flicked open his phone, scrolled down the phonebook, stared at the little glowing screen, and pressed the ‘Call’ button.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Mr St— Mervyn!’
On seeing Mervyn, Stuart’s face exploded in delight. He was being guided by a flint-faced prison guard to a table where Mervyn sat. Mervyn had spent an anxious ten minutes in the visitors’ room, throwing nervous smiles of acknowledgement at the other visitors and inmates.
Stuart was wearing a T-shirt, jeans and an eye-rupturing fluorescent green bib. With his ruddy complexion and tidy muscles (arranged on his shoulders and arms like kitchen shelves full of the best china), he looked like he’d just bounded in from a friendly game of basketball.
Stuart was an ex-Special Constable and Vixens fan. He had helped Mervyn with the investigation of three murders at a science fiction convention last year. In the end, he had proved a little over-helpful because he’d committed the murders himself. The police hadn’t quite caught the distinction between murder and murder for moral support, and Stuart had ended up here.
‘How are you, Stuart?’
‘I’m great, Mr St— Mervyn. Just great. I’m settling in nicely. There’s some really nice people here.’
‘Really.’
‘Oh yes. You know, when I got sent down, all my old friends in the force said that prisoners hate bent coppers, and I’d be choking on broken glass and pooing out razor blades before my second night in prison… But I’m more popular in here than I ever was in the police force! Can you imagine that?’