Dead Room Farce

by Simon Brett

  ‘No.’

  The glee at her own cleverness gave way to a sudden recollection. ‘Ooh, I’ve just remembered the name Mark said, the name of the person who’d come into the studio. It didn’t mean anything to me.’

  ‘No, but then you don’t know any of the people who were doing the recording that afternoon.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So tell me what Mark said. The name might mean something to me.’

  She told him the name. It did mean something to Charles Paris.

  ‘One other thing, Lavinia . . .’ They had said their goodbyes and she had started off down Hereford Road.

  ‘What now?’ she asked crossly.

  ‘That woman who was coming out of the house when you arrived . . .’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Where was it you and Mark met her?’

  ‘It was in the hospital.’

  ‘Hospital?’

  ‘Private clinic, I should say. God, the prices they charge in those places! You pay out all that money in medical insurance, but they still have the nerve to –’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, Lavinia, but what were you in the clinic for?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind. Unlike some women, I’m very proud of my new body.’

  ‘So you were in for plastic surgery?’

  ‘That’s right. Bags under the eyes, breasts, bum, the whole shooting match.’

  ‘And Cookie – the woman we saw this morning – was in the clinic at the same time? And that’s when Mark met her?’

  ‘Yes. God knows why he bothered coming to see me. I’d made it abundantly clear by then that there was nothing left between us, but he insisted on turning up and whingeing away in the lounge for an hour or so.’

  ‘And that woman was in the lounge at the same time?’

  ‘Some of it, yes. I introduced them, you know, casually, the way one does.’ She looked at her watch with irritation. ‘I’m sorry, Charles, I really must be –’

  ‘Just one more question, Lavinia . . . Do you happen to remember why Cookie – that woman – was actually in the clinic?’

  She let out a harsh little laugh. ‘Well, of course I remember. She was having the same as me.’

  ‘Bags under the eyes, breasts, bum, the whole shooting match?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Lavinia Bradshaw, and set off briskly down Hereford Road.

  Chapter Sixteen

  BEFORE Charles left for Birmingham, he made a couple of phone calls. One was to Lisa Wilson to warn her that she might be contacted by Lavinia Bradshaw. He didn’t spell out the details, but made it clear that she would have the option of telling Mark’s ex-wife about the locked studio door. Whether she did or not was up to her.

  Their conversation was civilised, even friendly. No one listening in would have detected that they’d ever been lovers, or that less than twenty-four hours previously one of them had announced they were no longer lovers.

  Charles’s second call was to the actors’ union, Equity. He had a useful contact in the membership records there, who supplied him with the information he required.

  By then, the confusions of the morning had not left Charles time to do as he’d intended and take the tour’s dirty clothes to the launderette. Have to wait till Birmingham, he thought resignedly, as he scooped last week’s dirty shirts, socks and underwear back into his suitcase (which felt uncomfortably light without its customary ballast of a Bell’s bottle). By then he was so close to the train departure time, he had to take a cab to Euston.

  He’d hoped to sleep for the hour and forty minutes of the train journey. He was utterly exhausted after the emotional upheavals of the previous few days – not to mention two virtually sleepless nights spent listening to Cookie Stone.

  But sleep didn’t come. His mind was too full. And, mostly, it was Cookie Stone who filled it.

  A lot of details fell into place. The unusual firmness of her breasts, for a start. Charles Paris wondered whether, unwittingly, he’d recently had his first encounter with silicon.

  But his other thoughts about Cookie Stone were more serious. She was an extraordinarily neurotic woman, of that there could not be any doubt. And she was deeply anxious about her attractiveness, or lack of it, to the opposite sex. She was also, regrettably, in love with Charles Paris.

  He wondered just how deep Cookie’s insecurities went, and what kinds of erratic behaviour they might drive her to. Finding out that she’d had plastic surgery fitted the overall picture, filled in a few more pieces in the jigsaw of her personality.

  Except in cases of extreme deformity, the decision to have plastic surgery can never be a random one. The patient must be expecting some payback for the pain and inconvenience. In most cases, there must be some level of expectation that the transformation of the body will lead to some kind of transformation in the life. Lack of self-esteem, based on feelings of unattractiveness, the theory runs, will vanish when the external appearance has been adjusted.

  And clearly it could work. For Lavinia Bradshaw, the plastic surgery of which she was so proud had been part of the reinvention of herself. Vinnie, wife of Mark Lear, the coping earth mother in droopy cardigans, had been transformed into Lavinia Bradshaw, designer clotheshorse, with a new body to complement her new lover.

  But had Cookie Stone’s transformation been so effective? From hints she’d dropped, Charles gathered Cookie’s sex-life had been pretty inactive in the months before she met him. It was even likely that he was her first postoperation lover. Maybe for her, to have ensnared a lover – and a lover who called her ‘beautiful’ – was an endorsement of her decision to have the plastic surgery. It had worked!

  But how would someone as deeply insecure as Cookie Stone react to the danger that her lover might find out what had happened? Did Charles believe that the body he evidently enjoyed making love to was the real thing? Would his discovery that it was in fact a patched-up, reconditioned body make him ‘go off’ her?

  That was Cookie’s greatest fear. That was the phrase that occurred most often in her monologues of self-doubt. ‘Are you sure you haven’t gone off me, Charles?’ ‘That hasn’t made you go off me, has it, Charles?’ ‘You would say if you’d gone off me, wouldn’t you, Charles?’

  Yet again, Charles Paris asked himself the recurrent question:

  How on earth did I manage to get myself into this? How can I ever break it to someone who’s paranoid that I’m about to go off her, that I was never really ‘on’ her in the first place?

  And with this came the even darker, more uncomfortable question: What lengths would someone like Cookie Stone go to, to prevent her lover from finding out that she’d had plastic surgery?

  Mark Lear had definitely recognised her that afternoon in the studio. At the time, he didn’t seem to know where he recognised her from, but his words might have been enough to set Cookie’s ever-present paranoia racing. And the challenges he was flinging out about uncovering people’s secrets could have applied as much to her as to anyone else in the studio.

  Charles didn’t like the thought. So long as there were other possibilities to be considered, he’d rather not think it. But the thought wouldn’t leave his mind, and troubled him all the way up to Birmingham.

  He walked from New Street Station to the theatre. It was not so much that he needed the exercise – though he undoubtedly did – but that he wanted to compose his mind for the confrontation ahead. Now so many pieces of the puzzle had slotted into place, Charles Paris didn’t want to screw up on the final details.

  He felt very low. He didn’t really notice the splendours of Birmingham city centre, so totally transformed since the last time he’d been there. He was too full of his own thoughts.

  He passed a lot of pubs, most of which were open all day. The pull of a large Bell’s was almost agonisingly strong, but he resisted it. After the confrontation, maybe . . . after that night’s show . . . after the end of the Birmingham run . . . then perhaps he’d have a drink. He knew that w
as how alcoholics had to think, one step at a time. Give yourself small targets, and try to meet them. Meet one target, and set up another one a little bit further away. And so on.

  God, it was a boring prospect. But Charles Paris was determined to keep trying. What Lisa Wilson had said to him the night before had really hurt.

  He stopped in a square, now dominated by a modern fountain above a large circular pool. He sat on the low wall of the pool and took out of his pocket the list of names he’d scribbled down that morning at Maurice Skellern’s dictation. The names of the actors who’d been involved in the gay porn tapes Mark Lear had produced more than twenty years before.

  There were six names. Henry Heaney. Stanley Murphy. Bernard Miles. Geoffrey Thomas. Robert Stephens. And Ransome George.

  It was nearly three when he got to the theatre, a dead time on a day when the company weren’t called till four-thirty. The set had been erected; the lighting plan – or rather the computer disks that contained it – had been installed. The theatre waited only for the cast to come, to hear a few notes on the slight differences of staging required by the new theatre. They would then do a leisurely walk-through of a couple of moments that might need minimal changes of blocking, probably have a brief break before the six fifty-five ‘half’, and at seven-thirty not on your wife! would have yet another opening, this time hopefully to delight the good burghers of Birmingham. The tour had settled into a kind of rhythm.

  Though the theatre was silent, Charles knew it was not unoccupied. Somewhere in unseen offices administrators would be at work. Backstage, final adjustments would be being made by the stage management. In the dressing rooms various actors would be going through their pre-performance rituals. Though it was one in a long sequence of them, this was still a kind of first night, and not even the most blasé of actors would have dared claim that he or she approached it with no nerves at all.

  Charles Paris found the person he was looking for in the Green Room, sitting on a sofa, open copy of Not On Your Wife! on lap.

  ‘Hi,’ said Charles, and received a distracted answering ‘Hi.’

  ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I wanted to have a word.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘It’s in relation to the death of Mark Lear.’

  ‘Mark Lear?’ But the puzzlement in the echo had been a bit contrived. The name was familiar.

  ‘You remember . . . the drunk who produced that radio commercial in Bath.’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, with you.’

  ‘The man who died that same day.’

  ‘I heard about that. Terrible tragedy.’ The response was automatic, uninterested.

  ‘Some people,’ Charles began slowly, ‘are of the view that his death wasn’t an accident . . .’

  ‘Suicide, you mean? He certainly seemed in a pretty tense emotional state.’

  ‘No, not suicide. Murder.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘His girlfriend found the body the next morning. The doors to the studio he was in were locked.’

  ‘Good heavens. Did she tell the police?’

  ‘No. For reasons of her own, she didn’t.’

  ‘Oh.’ Was Charles being hypersensitive to detect relief in the reaction?

  ‘I’m pretty sure,’ Charles went on, ‘that Mark Lear was murdered.’

  ‘If you say so.’ A shrug, again uninterested.

  ‘. . . by one of the people who was in the studio recording the commercial that afternoon.’

  ‘What? Why, for God’s sake? Most of us were meeting him for the first time that day.’

  ‘No. In fact, Mark had met quite a few of us before, as it happened.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Being in the BBC, he’d worked with a lot of actors and actresses.’

  ‘Ah. I didn’t know he’d been in the BBC.’

  Was that a straight lie? Charles didn’t bother to investigate, but went on, ‘He didn’t do all his work for the BBC. Did a bit of moonlighting as well.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. In particular, over twenty years ago, Mark Lear was involved in producing some pornographic audio tapes.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Gay pornographic audio tapes.’

  ‘I’m surprised there’s a market for that kind of thing. I can understand people wanting videos, but –’

  ‘There was a market then. Video hadn’t really caught on in a big way.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Anyway . . .’ Charles Paris plunged boldly in. ‘It’s my belief that that afternoon in the studio, Mark Lear recognised somebody who’d worked on those tapes with him all that time ago. And when he said he was going to write a book exposing the things that went on in and around the BBC, that individual took it as a direct threat. He was so worried about his secret being exposed that, later in the afternoon, he returned to the studios, persuaded Mark Lear to go into the small dead room, perhaps even supplied him with a bottle of Scotch to take in there – and then locked the doors on him.’

  ‘Interesting theory,’ was all he got by way of response. ‘I’m intrigued why you choose to tell me about it.’

  ‘Because I’m convinced that you are the person who killed Mark Lear.’

  ‘What? Oh, really!’ The response was amused, rather than shocked. ‘And what on earth gave you that idea?’

  ‘Well, I asked myself who had most to lose by a revelation of what some might regard as a sordid past.’ Charles took Maurice Skellern’s list of names out of his pocket. ‘I’ve a list here of the actors who were involved in recording the porn tapes. There’s only one name here that appears on the not on your wife! programme, and that person was definitely in the studio to hear Mark Lear make his threat.’

  ‘Who are we talking about?’

  ‘Ransome George.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake. Ran wouldn’t worry about having done porn stuff. He’d glory in it. It’s the kind of thing he’d dine out on.’

  ‘I agree. I also happen to know that Ransome George has an alibi for the time of the murder. And that he has a very comfortable, ongoing blackmail system operating in connection with those audio tapes. So he was never going to upset the apple-cart, was he? No, Ran may be a creep and a blackmailer, but I’ve got to look for someone else in the role of murderer, haven’t I?’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘Going back to my question of who had most to lose . . . well, the obvious candidate was Bernard Walton.’

  The figure on the sofa was silent.

  ‘Because the situation for someone like Bernard Walton is different from old Ran’s. It matters rather more what a star did in the past – particularly when that star is currently involved in a high-profile campaign to turn the tide of violence and smut in the media.’

  Still not a sound from the sofa.

  ‘Yes, the name “Bernard Walton” would definitely be of interest to the tabloids, wouldn’t it? “Mr Squeaky-Clean in Gay Sex Revelation”.’

  ‘Working on a gay sex tape doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s gay,’ came an objection from the sofa.

  ‘I agree. God, you don’t have to tell me – of all people – to what subterranean depths of work an impoverished actor will sink. But the average tabloid reader doesn’t know much about the world of the theatre. Probably tends not to be very imaginative, either. For the average tabloid reader, the news that a well-known public figure once took part in a gay porn recording . . . well, it’s the kind of dirt that sticks. Wouldn’t do a popular figure any good at all. Certainly rule out the chances of a knighthood – and could also have a nasty effect on the box office of any show they might be involved in.’

  The figure on the sofa had reverted to sullen silence.

  ‘So I think it would have been very definitely worth keeping that particular secret quiet . . . even if keeping it quiet necessitated the murder of one drunken old has-been. Better surely that Mark Lear should die than that the precious image of Bernard Walton sh
ould be sullied.’

  ‘I’m not denying or confirming what you suggest,’ the accused said lightly, ‘but I’d be very interested to know how you’d set about proving your allegations.’

  That was indeed the problem. Charles felt sure he was right, but the evidence remained extremely thin on the ground. Still, no need to let his quarry know that. ‘Mark Lear was on the phone to his ex-wife when you came into the studio that afternoon. She heard him greet you by name.’

  This revelation produced a moment of discomfiture, but it soon passed.

  ‘You’re going to need more than that.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Assuming . . .’ again the voice was light, almost teasing. ‘Assuming there was any truth in what you’re saying, can I ask what put you on to me?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure till this morning, when I got the list of names of people who’d been involved in the porn recordings. Then I asked myself: Who actually had most to lose if the truth came out? And I looked at the names, and two stuck out like sore thumbs.’

  ‘Which two?’

  ‘Bernard Miles and Robert Stephens. Both very big names in the theatre at the time those recordings were made. Bernard Miles was running the Mermaid, and I think Robert Stephens was still married to Maggie Smith. He was half of the golden couple of British theatre. There is no way, at that stage of Robert Stephens’s career – or of Bernard Miles’s career – that either of them would have been involved in recording pornographic audio cassettes. So there was only one conclusion possible. If it wasn’t the famous Bernard Miles and the famous Robert Stephens, then it must have been another Bernard Miles and another Robert Stephens.

  ‘Now, the making of porn cassettes is a pretty hole-in-the-corner business. No names billed on the outside of the pack . . . young actors, new to the business, paid off in cash . . . so Equity rules wouldn’t have applied. But in the professional theatre it’d be different. And I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of that basic Equity rule, that an actor’s name is his stock-in-trade. You can’t have two Equity members with the same name. So if your parents christen you Anthony Hopkins, or Ian McKellen, and you want to be an actor . . . bad luck, sunshine, it’s already been bagged – you have to change your name.