A Little Local Murder

by Robert Barnard

  One of his first programmes with Radio Broadwich had been just such a documentary made for an Essex village with a twin in Canada. It had been stupendously tedious, for Ted, in his infinite lethargy, had let all the local bigwigs shoulder their way into the act. The powers-that-be at Radio Broadwich had told him it was a damned bad programme but a damned good idea. There might be money in more link-ups like that, and money was something Radio Broadwich was not getting enough of. Thus, when the talk turned on that January day in the Lamb and Child to the matter of the twin towns scheme (which was widely ridiculed), Ted’s mind was made up. He contacted the Wisconsin station, and everything else flowed naturally from there.

  The memory of Mrs Billington’s various charms (she drew a good pint as well) had perhaps become a mite less vivid by early April when, in reply to his formal note to the chairman of the District Council telling them that the joint venture with the Wisconsin station had been set up, and that they would be arriving in Twytching in May, he had received Mrs Withens’s magisterial reply. He’d had such letters when he set up the previous programme, but whereas they had been transparently interested offers of assistance Mrs Withens’s letter read more like a royal summons to the presence, or a Papal Bull. If she was allowed to get a grip on the programme, his credit at Radio Broadwich would sink to zero.

  ‘Screw her,’ said Ted Livermore, as he threw the letter back on to the pile on his chaotic desk.

  ‘Who’s that, darling?’ said the Assistant Features Producer, with whom he shared an office, pausing in the process of nail-filing, and fluttering a delicate eyelash in his direction.

  ‘This old cow,’ said Ted, looking with distaste at the aggressively dyed orange hair, the necklace of chunky beads and the lavender slacks. He asked himself for the hundredth time why the big-wigs at Radio Broadwich had had to wish this thing on him. When there were plenty of others who’d be grateful, too. What he wouldn’t do for a nice lazy day to himself in the office. A real feet-up-on-the-desk day. Suddenly a brainwave struck him.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘this is the sort of situation that requires personal contact. Yes – someone should go down and talk to the old bitch. I think this is a job for you, Harold.’

  • • •

  ‘Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more, Mrs Withens darling,’ said Harold Thring next day, prancing nervously up and down the living-room of Glencoe. ‘I’m with you every teeniest step of the way. But you’ve got to understand the position.’

  Mrs Withens, who at her best resembled a frog of the least companionable kind, had acquired in the course of this brief interview with the representative of Radio Broadwich a vulpine look, like Clytemnestra on one of her difficult days. She had hardly been able to bring herself to invite him into the house, until she realized what people would say if they saw her talking to him on the front doorstep. Now she averted her eyes from the orange hair, specially permed for the trip, and contented herself with looking daggers at the lavender slacks while she waited for ‘the position’ to be explained.

  ‘We have done this sort of show before,’ said Harold, with a brilliant smile in her direction, ‘and we’re hoping to do more, and make quite a money-spinner out of them. And Ted has taken the view that if we always have the Mayor and the Chairman, and the Squire and so on – or even if we have their charming ladies – the whole thing does become just a tiny weeny bit predictable. We’re going to keep these shows bright as a button, and each one different! We take the view that it takes all sorts to make a village, to coin a phrase, and we’re going to get all those sorts on to our programme. So though our producer will want to talk with you, quite informally, to get the atmosphere, the feel of the place as it were, I do rather doubt whether he’ll decide to interview you, actually on the air, as it were.’

  There was a heavy silence.

  ‘I see,’ said Mrs Withens.

  ‘You’ll like Ted,’ pursued Harold. ‘He’s a lovely boy. You’ll get on like a house on fire, I just know.’

  Mrs Withens felt able to make no promises of combustion on her part. She felt a deep pain in her bowels which any competent physician could have diagnosed as thwarted ambition. Her instinct was to rise from her chair, seize this painted gentleman and tear him apart, limb from limb, as she very well could, even though she didn’t do the Eileen Fowler exercises. All that prevented her was the thought of how great would be her overthrow in Twytching estimation if it were known that she and the powers-that-be at Radio Broadwich had come to a violent parting of the ways. Better, much better to let people think her power was as great as they had hitherto assumed it to be. So she watched in silence as Harold Thring drew a beringed hand through his Seville orange hair. Then, when he had worked himself up into a quivering lather of nervous excitability, she intoned: ‘I have drawn up a list. A list of the inhabitants of Twytching who in my opinion would be suitable for interview.’

  ‘Have you, dear?’ said Harold. ‘Super! Fabulous! Well, we’ll be doing our own little bit of homework in the area – oooh!’ He paused in his perambulations around the room to admire a pastel-blue figurine of a ballet dancer, female of course. ‘Pretty, ever so pretty – well, as I was saying, we’ll be making our decisions in the next few weeks, then perhaps we could compare lists. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? And of course we may find that you, with your local knowledge and all, have found some really lovely people that we missed, and that will be awfully grateful-making.’

  The idea that she was being given a total brush-off got through but slowly to Mrs Withens.

  ‘Then you do not wish to go through my list now,’ she said in her most Mrs Siddons voice.

  ‘Much more jolly later on,’ said Harold, picking up a little brass bell from the mantelpiece. ‘Oh – tinkle-tinkle!’

  ‘In fact you intend to ignore altogether the leaders of Twytching, the best elements in the community?’

  ‘It’s not a question of me, Deborah ducky,’ said Harold, flashing a choir-boy’s come-hither look in her direction. ‘If it was a question of me, I’d interview you like a shot, really I would. It’s just a question of the programme, and the policy laid down. And if Ted says we avoid councillors and mayors and things, he’s boss, and what he says goes.’

  Mrs Withens had been called Deborah ducky, and the heavens had not fallen in. Mrs Withens thought she might be forced to revise her opinion of the heavens. Her soul screaming with shame at having to petition for information, she made a last attempt to winkle out the intentions of this odious Ted, so that she could at least make a show of being in his innermost counsels:

  ‘May I ask who, then, you intend to interview, if I may be taken into your confidence to that extent?’

  ‘That’s just what we don’t know yet, darling,’ said Harold, brightening up now that Clytemnestra seemed to have gone on to the defensive and showed signs of being about to bring the interview to a close. ‘As I say, we intend to be unpredictable. Footloose and fancy-free, that’s us. I’ll be going around today having a high old time – talking to everybody, quizzing into every little thing. All the village traditions, all the things you’ve been doing from time imm. All the hobbies and oddities, all the clubs and pubs. Just so I’ve got the feel of the place, the whiff, you might say. Then when I get back to Broadwich I’ll brief Ted, and then he’ll be down on the actual week to do some more scouting, and he’ll take the final decision. Did I tell you what a lovely boy Ted was? Oh, I did. Well, we’re a marvellous team, him and I. We’re Features, you know. We go very deep into the places we visit. We’re a thorough pair, I do assure you.’

  Mrs Withens gave him a baleful look intended to assure him that she would not dispute that fact, and got up.

  ‘Then,’ she said, ‘if you decline to accept my advice, if you refuse to pay attention to those best suited to guide you on community matters, I have nothing further to say. Nothing at all. This is, in fact, exactly what I should have expected from a commercial radio station, and I blame myself for not having foreseen it.
We shall see, Mr . . . Mr Thrrrring, but when I think of the sort of account I fear you are only too likely to give of Twytching, I shudder – I shudder to the very marrow of my bones!’

  And she shuddered accordingly, and showed him majestically to the lead-lighted front door, with its elaborate pattern of tulips and daffodils on a violet background.

  ‘Nice,’ said Harold, touching it appreciatively, ‘ever so handsome.’ And he pranced down the front path, waving gaily, and telling himself that he had got off a lot better than he had first expected. The front door shut behind him with an Ibsenite finality.

  Harold, tripping delicately round in his Italian shoes, had a lovely day after that. From the moment he had arrived in Twytching and asked the way to Mrs Withens’s, he had been marked down as an emissary from the world of mass communications. ‘When I saw the purple trousers I thought ‘e might be a new curate,’ said Mrs Leaze to Miss Potts, leaning confidentially over the cash register, ‘but when I saw the eyelashes, I knew it must be Radio Broadwich!’ Thus he was accosted, flattered, and bombarded with information, invitations and self-advertisements. He basked in the sort of popularity which had not been his since his first years at public school. He tasted innumerable home-baked scones, admired innumerable babies and herbaceous borders, and drank endless toasts to Twytching in little glasses of cloudy home-made wine. When the day ended he made himself a nook in an ever so cosy corner of the Lamb and Child, and even there he found himself so much the centre of attention that one after another of the locals came over to have a chat and buy him a gin and tonic. ‘I’ll do the same for you when my ship comes in,’ said Harold. And in the rare intervals when he was left alone, he enjoyed himself enormously gazing doe-eyed at the manly form of Tom Billington, a stalwart cockney, born to the hotel-trade, ex-part-time wrestler and the heftiest pump-arm in the business. One way or another, it seemed likely that the name of the Lamb and Child would soon become familiar to the inhabitants of Twytching, Wis.

  • • •

  Ted Livermore’s quiet day in the office was not as idyllic as he had hoped. Though nominally Features Producer, he was, like everyone else in the harum-scarum world of Radio Broadwich, jack-of-all-trades, and called on to do anything and everything at short notice, from announcing programmes to threading typewriter ribbons for incompetent secretaries. So in the course of the morning he did a bit of interviewing, a bit of disc-jockeying, said ‘Super’ a dozen or so times, and then settled down for a snooze over The Times crossword. But, in fact, he had dozed for no more than twenty minutes when he was aroused by a tap on the door. When he had snorted and shaken the sleep out of his head, and when he had sat himself up against the desk as if in the process of writing a letter, he was forced to shout ‘Come in’.

  It was a tall, elegant figure that met his eyes, the sort of woman that city dirt never seems to dirty, a coolly perfect creature.

  ‘Is it Mr Livermore?’ she said with a smile of deep personal interest in the matter.

  Ted nodded and gestured towards the armchair.

  ‘You’re going to produce This is Twytching, aren’t you? Charles told me to come along and see you.’

  ‘Charles?’ said Ted.

  ‘Sir Charles Watson. He owns the Barstowe Gazette. I think he’s your principal shareholder too, isn’t he? My name is Mailer, by the way – Alison Mailer.’

  CHAPTER V

  A CONCERN FOR THE AMENITIES

  It was not generally known that Twytching had a Town Amenities Protection Group. Mrs Withens knew, because Mrs Withens knew everything. Miss Potts knew, because she had had to send to the County Library for various old maps which might (but did not) illuminate controversial matters concerning boundaries and rights of way. But the vast majority of the inhabitants of Twytching were unaware of the Amenities Protection Group, and might even have been hard put to it to name many amenities, let alone any that needed protection. Which suggested that few of them read ‘Twytching Tattle’ in the Barstowe Gazette, for Timothy Jimson had given the group a great deal of publicity in his column. Not surprisingly, since he himself was the founder, and one of the very few members of the group.

  Timothy had had the idea of forming such a pressure group when a local farmer had threatened to enclose totally a field near the Jimson home. Timothy was in the normal way no great lover of nature, thinking of himself as an eighteenth-century figure (Pope or Swift, of course, with his family and friends as dunces or Lilliputians) and therefore above the irrational excesses of the Romantics. On the other hand, his children were accustomed to use a footpath across this field to get to the track leading to the bluebell woods – a favourite spot for children and courting couples, who found it difficult enough to get any privacy away from the prying eyes of Twytching gossips. And Timothy was accustomed to sending his children to the bluebell woods as often as possible at weekends and during the long summer evenings, to get them out of his artistic hair. Thus he worked himself up into a tremendous lather in his column over a space of several weeks, talking a great deal of nonsense about rights of way and common land from time immemorial. From this it had been but a short step to discovering two or three other burning issues such as the design of the new street lighting and the provision of seats for old people, and then calling a public meeting to discuss these and related topics. Six people had turned up to the meeting, two of them old-age pensioners who went to anything where the room was likely to be heated. A committee of three had been formed, consisting of Timothy, Miss Marriot, the local primary-school teacher who had recently displayed an interest in drama, and Alison Mailer, who could never bear to be left out of anything that might get her talked about. Timothy had done a bit of research into public footpaths, with the help of little Miss Potts, but after a month or two the farmer had changed his mind for agricultural reasons (government policy having changed yet again), and Timothy had been able to hail this in his column as a great victory for public spirit and civic awareness. The Amenities Protection Group had been promptly forgotten.

  It was doubtless entirely by coincidence that, as Chairman of the Group, Timothy decided to call a public meeting on the Monday of the week in May that Radio Broadwich’s This is Twytching was to be recorded. No one could appear more blithely unaware than he that the producer of the programme and his assistant would be in Twytching the whole of that week, but in fact this was one of the little gobbets of information which Mrs Withens had let fall after Harold Thring’s visit to reinforce people’s opinions that she and the gentlemen from Broadwich were hand in glove in this matter, and that no step would be taken without her express sanction.

  On the subject of who was to be on the programme Mrs Withens was playing her cards very close to her capacious bosom, and had caused a good deal of resentment and confusion thereby. For the most part she kept silence, but occasionally she made remarks of a nature so gnomic that people would shake their heads and say that Mrs Withens was a deep one and no mistake, and sometimes add that one day she would go too far. Her conduct caused particular concern to her closest friends and allies, who had expected by now explicit confirmation of their being the elect and chosen of the Lady. Little Miss Potts had cried tears more copious than usual into her Denise Robins as she sat in bed at night and sipped her Ovaltine. Her hopes had been high, and her musical choice had finally been made (a piece from Swan Lake, which seemed to her cultural without being aggressive), and now Deborah would speak on the subject only in riddles. It is thus that great leaders are accustomed to test the loyalty of their most devoted followers.

  So when Timothy called his public meeting, the public uncertainty on the position and intentions of Mrs Withens ensured a good deal more interest and enthusiasm than had existed on the last occasion. Just as Timothy himself felt that this was the ideal way to reinforce his already high claims as a writer, so most of the inhabitants of Twytching felt that there was just a chance that they might by-pass the iron maiden (the current favourite description of Mrs Withens) and make direct contact with
the producer or his rather strange deputy. And among the silent mass of Twytchingites there was a curiosity to see and recognize the gentlemen from Radio Broadwich which reports about Harold Thring’s visit had done nothing to quench.

  There was one surprising absentee. Timothy had sent a note to Alison Mailer, in her capacity of Committee Member of the Amenities Protection Group, telling her of his intention of calling the meeting, and he had been considerably surprised to receive a note a few days later saying that she was unavoidably prevented by business from attending, and wishing the meeting every success. Timothy had racked his brains to think of the motive behind this refusal. He didn’t know much about people, but he knew enough about Alison Mailer to know that she would move heaven and earth to get a spot on This is Twytching. And here she was throwing up a first-rate chance of impressing her elegant self on the mind of the producer. Strange indeed. What the ‘business’ which prevented her attending could be, Timothy puzzled greatly over. There was nothing else on in Twytching that night he was quite sure (there never was anything on in Twytching at night). Alison Mailer was only an occasional visitor to London, and when she went she went to swap patronage with the shop assistants of the better stores, and to walk up Bond Street looking as if she couldn’t quite decide how to invest her spare millions. Otherwise, as far as Timothy knew, Alison had no business. It was all very puzzling.

  He thought of co-opting Jean, his wife, on to the committee for the evening, but he decided it might make the meeting look too much of a put-up family affair, and he didn’t want to pay a baby-sitter, so he left her at home. On the platform of the primary school hall sat only himself and June Marriot, the leader of the newly-formed Twytching Thespians, a pretty little rosebud thing who on this occasion gave the impression that all she wanted to do was fade into the background of dirty beige and green-painted walls. But if the platform was thin, in the body of the hall, to compensate, there were no less than seventy souls, which surely must have been something of a record for public meetings in Twytching. There had been less when Mr Heath appeared at an election meeting. Considerably less.