Dead Room Farce

by Simon Brett

But the silence didn’t last for long. ‘Who would want to murder him, though?’

  ‘I don’t know. Someone who had a secret Mark knew about, and someone who so much didn’t want that secret known that they were prepared to silence him for ever. If you remember, he did kind of issue a challenge that afternoon, that he was going to spill the beans about something.’

  ‘Did he? I don’t remember. I guess my mind’s full of other things too.’ Cookie had affected a throaty American voice, and pressed the length of her body against his. Oh God, thought Charles, not again.

  But there was an ‘again’. After it, out of sheer exhaustion, they both fell asleep.

  They were woken by the peremptory buzzing of the entryphone. Charles looked at his watch. Half-past nine. Oh God! Vinnie! Lavinia Bradshaw!

  He bustled Cookie into wakefulness. ‘For heaven’s sake, I’ve got someone coming to see me!’

  ‘Another woman?’ she asked, sleepy but already jealous. ‘Yes, she is a woman, but not one that need cause you any anxiety. Please get some clothes on quickly! You’ve got to get out!’

  Charles picked up the entryphone, but Cookie’s rampant paranoia had not been appeased. ‘She’s coming here to your flat at half-past nine in the morning and it needn’t cause me any anxiety? You really expect me to believe that, Charles?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Now put some bloody clothes on!’ He apologised into the entryphone. ‘Sorry, sorry. Look, I’ll be right down to let you in if you just wait –’

  ‘But surely,’ Lavinia Bradshaw’s imperious tones crackled back, ‘you can let me in by simply pressing the –?’ He cut her off, not without relish.

  Shouting at Cookie, which he hadn’t done before, had also proved an effective way of silencing her. Another one to bear in mind. She sat on the bed, resentfully pulling on tights, while Charles stumbled into his trousers.

  The room looked a mess, fuggy with recent sex. He scrambled the bedspread inadequately over the twisted duvet, and threw open the window to let in cold air as an inadequate means of fumigation.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he pleaded once he’d pushed his feet into his shoes.

  ‘Not quite.’ Cookie seemed deliberately to have slowed down her dressing.

  The entryphone buzzed again, seeming to echo the shrillness of Lavinia Bradshaw’s tone.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go and let her in. I’ll try and delay a bit on the doorstep, but you get down as soon as you can. When you see me, just kind of nod, you know, like you were somebody else living in the block.’

  ‘I see. Still ashamed of me?’ asked Cookie.

  He countered the resentment in her voice by bellowing, ‘Just do as you’re bloody told! And I’ll see you in Birmingham!’

  Once again, the shouting silenced her. Charles crossed to plant a dry kiss on her pouting lips, checked he’d got his keys with him, and went down to open the front door.

  ‘What the hell kept you?’ demanded Lavinia Bradshaw. She was expensively dressed, her image sharpened up considerably from the childbound earth mother Charles recalled from their earlier meetings. Whatever her real age, plastic surgery had put her back firmly into her late thirties; and though the reddish-gold of her hair couldn’t possibly be natural, it contrived to look natural.

  ‘Sorry, Vinnie. I, er, um . . . sorry.’

  ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’ asked Lavinia Bradshaw, to whom the idea was entirely incongruous.

  ‘Good heavens, no. I just, er . . .’ Charles loomed aimlessly, blocking the door.

  ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in? It is quite cold out here.’

  ‘Yes, sorry. I, erm . . .’

  Still he hovered, preventing her entrance. Then he heard the welcome sound of footsteps behind him. He turned with relief to see a fully dressed Cookie tiptoeing demurely down the stairs.

  She was not an actress for nothing. ‘Good morning, Mr Paris,’ she said without interest, as she passed him.

  On the doorstep, Cookie came face to face with Mark Lear’s widow. ‘I know you, don’t I?’ said Lavinia Bradshaw.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Cookie Stone, before hurrying off down Hereford Road towards Westbourne Grove.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WHEN IT came to sniffs of disapproval, Lavinia Bradshaw left Charles’s Bath landlady standing. Sniffs of disapproval were what her face did best. Maybe the fining-down of plastic surgery had sharpened its ability, but Charles seemed to remember the Vinnie of old had a pretty good line in withering scorn.

  That was certainly the expression with which she greeted the interior of his flat. The cold blast of early November air which came in through the window did not seem to have dispelled the stuffiness of recent body contact, merely spread it more evenly around the room.

  Lavinia Bradshaw focused her disapproval on the window. ‘I’m all in favour of fresh air, Charles, but there is a limit.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I . . .’ He closed the window, sealing in the night’s fustiness. ‘Could I offer you a cup of coffee or –?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Lavinia Bradshaw’s refusal may not have been prompted by the room’s insalubrity, but that was certainly the way it came across.

  ‘OK, fine.’ He gestured to a chair for Lavinia. She looked at it dubiously. He hurried forward to remove a few weeks’ shirts and socks. Very gingerly, Lavinia Bradshaw sat down, allowing her skirt minimum contact with the chair’s doubtful surface. Charles perched with unconvincing insouciance on the edge of the bed. ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘Needless to say, it’s about Mark. I’ve –’

  ‘Oh, I hope you don’t mind my interrupting, Vinnie . . .’

  She clearly did. If her face hadn’t already given him that information, he would have got it from the coldness with which she said, ‘I’m no longer called “Vinnie”. Everyone calls me “Lavinia” these days.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. Lavinia. No, well, the thing is, before you start, just a quick question. That girl . . . that woman . . . who came down the stairs when I let you in –’

  ‘Or seemed very unwilling to let me in, and kept me waiting on the doorstep.’

  ‘Yes, yes, all right. I’m sorry about that. But that woman . . . you seemed to know her.’

  ‘Well, I recognised her. We had met before.’

  ‘And did Mark know her?’

  ‘He’d met her too.’ But she didn’t want to be diverted. ‘Charles, I’m not here to discuss passing acquaintances. I’m here to talk about Mark’s death.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Now let me tell you, I am not getting involved in this business for sentimental reasons. Once I finally left Mark, the only question in my mind was how on earth I’d managed to stay with him for so long. I put up with his drinking, his infidelities. I cooked for him, virtually brought up the children single-handed. Any debt I might have had to Mark I have paid over and over again.

  ‘So I’m not raking through the sordid circumstances of his death for any reason other than the purely practical.’ She then went on to confirm Lisa’s assessment of the situation. Mark’s life had been heavily insured, with a policy designed to benefit their children. But now the insurance company was kicking up a fuss, and had started the police re-investigating what had caused her husband’s death. ‘Basically, they’re suggesting it could have been suicide and, if it was, that invalidates the policy. I didn’t pay out all that money in premiums not to get the payoff, so I’m determined to prove that Mark didn’t kill himself. Have you any reason to believe that he might have done, Charles?’

  The direct question put him in a difficult position. Yes, Charles did have a reason to believe that Mark Lear hadn’t killed himself, but only because he knew his friend to have been murdered. Lisa had found the door to the little dead room locked. So far she had been extremely unwilling to pass that information on to the police. For Charles to pass it on now to Lavinia Bradshaw might be regarded as a betrayal of Lisa, because he couldn’t envisage Lavinia keeping quiet about it. She would ensure
that the police’s investigation was very quickly redirected.

  ‘Come on, Charles!’ Lavinia Bradshaw made him feel as if he was back at prep school, doing badly in one of Miss Pybus’s quick-fire mental arithmetic tests. ‘Apparently you were with Mark the afternoon he died. Did he say anything that could have led you to believe he was about to take his own life?’

  ‘Well, he was severely depressed, and he was drinking heavily.’

  Lavinia Bradshaw snorted. ‘That is no surprise to me at all. I gather he’d pretty soon regretted setting up house in Bath with that slut.’

  Charles resisted the temptation to come to Lisa Wilson’s defence, as he went on, ‘And yes, he did say things that could have been interpreted as expressing suicidal intentions. He said he felt old, he had nothing to look forward to, he couldn’t see the point of going on.’

  That prompted another derisive snort. In the course of their married life, Lavinia had heard Mark maundering on on similar lines far too often to take it seriously.

  Charles endorsed her reaction. ‘But though, quoted out of context, those words might have come from someone who was genuinely suicidal, you know and I know that Mark often said things like that.’

  ‘Yes. And I always treated them with the contempt they deserved. Do you know, he even rang me that afternoon?’

  ‘The afternoon he died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, the usual maudlin rubbish. He was extremely drunk. He did all the nonsense about how we should never have split up, and how he still hoped we could get back together again, and how he loved me and the children, and how his life wasn’t worth living without us. I’d heard it all many times before.’

  ‘Did you tell the police about this?’

  Lavinia Bradshaw was affronted by the suggestion. ‘No, of course I didn’t! They’d have immediately interpreted that as a sign that he was suicidal. Whereas, as you know, in his cups Mark was always saying things like that. And he didn’t mean a word of them.’

  ‘No. Probably not. I mean, of course – to play devil’s advocate for a moment – there is always the Last Straw Syndrome to consider. He’d gone on saying that kind of stuff all his life, but eventually perhaps there came a point when the pressures on him were so great that –’

  ‘Poppycock!’ Lavinia Bradshaw snapped briskly. ‘Mark was a shallow poseur. Like his emotions and his enthusiasms, his depressions were never more than skin-deep.’

  It was chilling to hear the depth of resentment in her voice, a resentment that had been simmering away for more than twenty years of marriage.

  ‘Well, I’m not so sure . . .’ said Charles, trying to be loyal to his friend’s memory, though rather afraid that she had assessed her ex-husband all too accurately.

  ‘It’s true!’ Lavinia Bradshaw smoothed down her skirt, as if somehow to separate it from the contamination of Charles Paris’s armchair. ‘But is there anything else, Charles? Any actual proof you could bring forward to make it clear once and for all that Mark did not deliberately take his own life?’

  ‘But if he didn’t . . .’ asked Charles cautiously, ‘then how did he die?’

  ‘Of drink and stupidity. He was so drunk when he went into the little studio that he passed out, and didn’t wake up, even when he started to suffocate. It was an accident,’ Lavinia Bradshaw announced with unarguable finality.

  ‘Yes, quite possibly . . .’

  ‘Everyone knows it was. It’s only the bloody insurance company trying to duck out of its obligations, as usual. Come on, Charles. I told you. I need proof that my ex-husband didn’t commit suicide.’

  ‘Well, look . . .’ he hedged, ‘I can’t actually supply that proof at the moment . . .’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Lavinia Bradshaw had no patience with such shilly-shallying.

  ‘. . . but I can make a suggestion.’

  ‘Then make it!’

  ‘Yes, all right. Erm . . .’ He had to phrase the next bit carefully. ‘The person who found Mark’s body was Lisa Wilson . . .’

  ‘His latest bit of stuff.’

  Charles didn’t waste time taking issue with the description. ‘I should think if anyone knows the detail of what actually happened to Mark, it’d be her.’

  That seemed the fairest thing to do. Put the two women in contact and let them sort it out between them. If Lavinia Bradshaw was really determined to find out about her ex-husband’s death, then she’d have to overcome her scruples and speak to his ‘latest bit of stuff’. Whether or not Lisa Wilson would come across with the goods, admit she’d found the studio doors locked . . ., well, that was up to her.

  Charles thought the probability was that the two women would communicate, and Lisa would share all she knew. If they could overcome their instinctive antipathy, they’d recognise that co-operation was in both their interests. Lavinia Bradshaw was determined to secure her ex-husband’s insurance money, and Lisa Wilson wanted to nail Mark’s killer. Her attempts to achieve that with the help of Charles Paris having proved less than successful, she would probably be ready to try another approach.

  They were two determined women. If they worked together, Charles didn’t give much for the murderer’s chances of escaping detection for ever.

  Lavinia Bradshaw wasn’t pleased by Charles’s suggestion. She had the feeling that he was holding something back, that he could tell her more. But, in spite of her fierce badgering, he didn’t give in.

  It was in the middle of the badgering that his phone rang. ‘Excuse me,’ said Charles and picked up the receiver. Lavinia Bradshaw’s mouth went into a little moue of annoyance at the interruption.

  ‘Charles, it’s Maurice.’

  ‘Ah, hello. Maurice, if you could make it quick . . .’

  ‘What’s this, Charles? Hurrying me off the phone? I might be ringing about a fabulous offer of a year’s very lucrative work.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No. As it happens, I’m not.’

  ‘Well then, if you could make it quickish . . . I’ve got someone with me.’

  ‘Oh, Charles. Another of your little lady friends, is it?’

  ‘No. Well, it is a lady, but –’

  ‘Say no more. My lips are sealed. Your secret is safe with me.’

  ‘Maurice . . .’ Charles was tired, and his patience was not inexhaustible. ‘What is it you’re calling about?’

  ‘You may remember,’ said Maurice Skellern with lofty dignity, ‘that some time ago you asked me to find out about some gay porn tapes, produced by the late Mark Lear . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, I have been continuing my investigations into that matter, and I have found out the names of the actors who were involved.’

  Maurice stopped dead. If there was one thing he loved doing, it was to dictate the pace of his revelations.

  ‘Yes, Maurice, yes. Go on, tell me. Who?’

  ‘A very interesting list of names it turns out to be . . .’ the agent went on with infuriating slowness.

  ‘I’m sure it does. Who are they, Maurice?’

  Realising that he had squeezed the last drop of potential melodrama out of the situation, Maurice gave Charles the names. And he was right. A very interesting list it did turn out to be.

  When Charles had finished scribbling down the names, he said his grateful goodbyes and put the phone down. Lavinia Bradshaw looked extremely peeved at having been kept waiting so long. ‘And that’s really it, Charles, is it? You have nothing to tell me, except that I should get in touch with this Liza Wilson girl?’ She deliberately pronounced the name wrong.

  ‘Yes, ‘fraid so.’

  She snorted at the inadequacy of his information. ‘Well, I’d better go. If you find out anything else, you’ve got my number.’

  ‘Yes. If I do get anything, I’ll certainly let you know. Then we can ensure that justice is done.’

  Lavinia Bradshaw tossed her red-gold hair angrily. ‘I don’t give a damn about
justice. I just want the insurance money.’

  Charles Paris was seeing her off on the doorstep when another thought came to him. ‘That phone call Mark made to you the afternoon he died . . .’

  ‘Yes. What about it?’

  ‘How did it end? Did you put the phone down on him?’

  ‘No. I was about to, because I had to go out for a hairdresser’s appointment. But in fact it was Mark who ended the conversation. He said he had to ring off because someone had just come into the studio.’

  ‘Really? Did he say who that person was?’

  ‘Now let me think . . .’ Lavinia Bradshaw tried to piece the recollection together. ‘He did call out, “Hello . . .” and then I think he said a name, but . . .’

  ‘Try to remember. It could be very important.’

  ‘Why?’

  Suddenly Charles realised that, through all her bluster, Lavinia Bradshaw was in fact not very bright. ‘Because,’ he explained, ‘whoever it was was probably the last person to see Mark alive.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘And you haven’t mentioned how the phone call ended to the police?’

  ‘No, of course not, Charles. Really, you are dense. Suppose that person, whoever it was, got more of Mark’s drunken ramblings of self-pity. Then they might have got the impression that he was suicidal.’

  ‘That’s true. Have the police actually talked to you about the phone call? Because presumably they could check who Mark did ring that day.’

  ‘They haven’t been in touch yet, no.’ A sly look came into her eyes. ‘And, if they are, I have a perfectly good cover story ready. Mark rang me to check what one of the girls wanted for her birthday.’

  ‘Which of the girls?’

  ‘Claudia. It was her birthday the next week.’

  ‘Oh, is she the one who’s ill? Mark mentioned –’

  ‘Claudia is absolutely fine, thank you,’ she said sharply. The slyness came back into her face, and was transformed into self-satisfaction as Lavinia Bradshaw went on, ‘People about to commit suicide do not on the whole spend their last hours planning what they’re going to give their children as birthday presents, do they?’