Dead on Cue

by Sally Spencer

  The success of Maddox Row was due to many things, but no small part of it was due to her, and from the way she was treated by the people she worked with, it was obvious that they were as aware of that as she was herself.

  She heard a soft noise behind her as her dressing-room door clicked open, and, moving her head slightly, she could see the reflection of the person who had entered the room.

  ‘Don’t you ever knock?’ she asked, not even trying to keep the irritation out of her voice.

  ‘I’m . . . I’m sorry,’ her unexpected visitor said. ‘I thought you might be asleep, and if you were, I didn’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘If I’d been taking a nap, I’d have locked the door – and you know that as well as I do,’ Valerie said sharply. ‘Shall I tell you the real reason that you didn’t knock?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘It was because if you had done, I’d have asked who it was, you’d have had to answer, and I’d have told you to go away. You probably worked out that by not knocking I’d get a chance to see just how pathetic you look, and might start to feel sorry for you.’

  ‘You can be very hard,’ the visitor said sadly.

  ‘I’m as soft as anything,’ Valerie replied. ‘But there has to come a point when even I’ve got to be firm. If I could make you happy just by snapping my fingers, I’d do it in a second. But what you’re asking is really too much.’

  ‘Valerie . . . Val . . .’

  ‘Don’t try using that wounded tone with me again, because it just won’t wash. It’s time you learned how to stand on your own two feet, like I’ve had to learn to stand on mine.’

  ‘If you’d only—’

  ‘Just go away!’ Valerie said. ‘Go away and give me a bit of peace. I need my rest. I’ve got some big scenes to play tonight.’

  She dropped her eyes so she was once again looking at her own reflection instead of her visitor’s. She heard the door click closed, and automatically assumed that she was alone again.

  It was only a second later that the soft footfalls behind her told her she’d been mistaken – but by then it was too late to do anything about it. It was even almost too late to scream.

  Four

  Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend was sitting on the sofa in the living room of his recently acquired handloom weaver’s stone cottage, a large mug of tea in one hand and a Capstan Full Strength cigarette dangling in the other. His eyes were on his new seventeen-inch television set, but his ears were listening to the sound of his wife, Joan, washing up the tea plates in the kitchen.

  ‘Do you want any help, lass?’ he asked.

  ‘Now there’s a worryin’ question,’ Joan called back cheerfully.

  ‘Worryin’? What’s worryin’ about it?’

  ‘When you offer to come into the kitchen, it always starts me thinkin’ there must be somethin’ wrong with you. You haven’t got a fever, have you, Charlie? You’re not feelin’ delirious?’

  Woodend grinned. ‘I’m fine. I just thought that if I gave you a hand, you’d be finished with the washin’-up by the time Maddox Row came on.’

  ‘I might be finished by the time the programme starts – but not if you help me,’ Joan said tartly. ‘With you as my assistant, we’ll still be doin’ the dishes when the last show’s finished, an’ all there is to watch is that bubble in the centre of the screen.’

  Woodend’s grin widened. Joan might occasionally complain about having to do so much around the house herself, but she didn’t really want him in her kitchen. She was typical of the northern women of her generation – like Dot Taylor on Maddox Row – and she wasn’t about to stand for any interference in her preserve. As far as she was concerned, men brought home wages, lagged the cockloft and whitewashed the coalhouse – and they had absolutely no business sticking their big noses into anything else.

  He heard the key scraping in the lock and then the sound of the front door opening.

  ‘Is that you, Annie?’ he called out – though who else could it be but his darling daughter, the apple of his eye?

  Annie didn’t reply, though he could hear the rustle of cloth as she took off her coat.

  ‘I said, is that you?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  She sounded sullen, he thought. Sullen – and perhaps a little resentful. He balanced his cup carefully on the arm of the sofa, stood up and walked into the hallway. Annie had already hung up her coat, and was heading for the stairs.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Annie replied, not looking at him. ‘I’m going up to my room.’

  ‘Aren’t you goin’ to eat anythin’? Your mam’s been keepin’ your supper warm in the oven.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You should eat a bit of somethin’.’

  ‘I’ve told you – I’m not hungry!’ Annie said – almost shouted – and then she took the stairs two at a time.

  ‘Don’t you think you should . . .?’ Woodend began, but Annie had already turned the bend, and disappeared from sight.

  He was worried about her – had been worried since the family had moved back up North, which had meant her leaving her school and her friends behind. For a while he’d thought she’d made the transition easily enough, but plainly, he’d been wrong.

  He was on the point of following his daughter upstairs when he felt his wife’s hand on his elbow.

  ‘Leave it, Charlie,’ Joan said.

  ‘But she seems upset.’

  ‘Then this is just about the worst time to talk to her, isn’t it? You’d be far better off waitin’ until she’s calmed down a bit.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Woodend said, not totally convinced.

  ‘I am right,’ Joan said firmly. ‘Give it an hour, then go up an’ see her. An’ in the meantime, sit down and watch your show.’

  He allowed himself to be led back into the living room, and lowered himself carefully on to the sofa, so as not to upset his mug of tea. He’d been aware of his concern about Annie ever since he got the ‘gypsy’s warning’ during his investigation on Blackpool’s Golden Mile. But he was sure he’d been unconsciously worrying about her for much longer than that – probably since the moment he’d been given the choice between being kicked off the force or moving back to Lancashire.

  ‘I can feel you frettin’ even from in here,’ Joan called from the kitchen. ‘There’s no point in talkin’ to her while you’re all wound up yourself. Try to relax a bit.’

  His wife was talking good sense – like she always did – he thought. He pushed Annie temporarily to the back of his mind and focussed his eyes on the television screen. He really did need to calm down a little, he told himself.

  An advertisement for a toothpaste, which promised to banish the yellow from your teeth forever, came to a close. North West Television’s logo appeared on the screen, and then disappeared again to be replaced by a picture of endless rows of terraced roofs. To the accompaniment of brass band music, the credits began to roll for Maddox Row.

  Woodend remembered what a sensation Maddox Row had created when it had first appeared on the box a couple of years earlier. And rightly so, in his opinion! Before then, all the characters in television dramas had lived in awfully nice houses on awfully nice estates and spoken the sort of awfully nice Standard English which hardly any normal people actually used. The only hint of a regional accent in those programmes had come from the minor players who appeared briefly to deliver the milk or read the gas meter. The people of Maddox Row, on the other hand, lived in terraced houses in urban backstreets, dropped the Gs from the ends of their words, mended punctured bike inner-tubes in their front rooms and worried about the kinds of things that the ordinary folk he knew worried about. Aye, it was a real change to see a genuine slice of life on the telly.

  ‘It’s on!’ Woodend shouted.

  ‘Stop your blinkin’ mitherin’! I’ve told you I’ll be there in a minute,’ Joan replied.

  The real
difference between men and women wasn’t what they’d got between their legs, Woodend thought. What made them breeds apart was that while a man would willingly postpone washing up the last few cups until the end of a programme, women were simply incapable of leaving the kitchen until everything was perfect.

  By the time Joan finally sat down on the sofa beside her husband, Jack Taylor, the Laughing Postman, had already assured Sam Fuller, the old-age pensioner, that despite his poisoning his niece’s canary, she would soon be coming round to see him, and now Sam was standing on the street talking to the hair-netted Madge Thornycroft.

  Jeremy Wilcox shifted his gaze from the preview monitors – which showed what all the cameras in the studio were seeing – to the master monitor which contained only the image being beamed into seven million homes. George Adams stood in the centre of the screen, a look of uncertainty crossing his face.

  Perfect, Wilcox thought. Absolutely perfect! There wasn’t a viewer in the land who wouldn’t feel for poor old Sam Fuller as he grappled with the problem of how to tackle Madge Thornycroft. And the reason they would feel for Fuller was not because Adams was such a good actor – though he wasn’t half bad – but because he was being directed by a man who really knew what he was doing.

  He turned his attention back to the preview monitors. Camera Two was focussed on Madge Thornycroft; Camera Three was already in position to focus on Liz Bowyer when she walked down the street. This was the moment in the week that Wilcox lived for. His moment of divinity. The point in the process at which he – and only he – could see what all the cameras in the studio were seeing.

  ‘Are you sure all them rumours you’ve been spreadin’ about Liz Bowyer are true?’ Sam Fuller demanded, from the speaker on the wall.

  ‘Shot Twenty-Eight, cut to Camera Two,’ said Lucy Smythe to the vision mixer who was sitting next to her.

  The image changed – Madge Thornycroft, her jaw stuck out defiantly.

  ‘I saw her leavin’ Ted Doyle’s house at well past midnight,’ she said.

  ‘Shot Twenty-Nine, cut to Camera One,’ Lucy Smythe instructed.

  Sam Fuller, looking shocked, filled the screen again.

  ‘But whatever were you doin’ out on the street at that time of night?’ he asked.

  ‘Shot Thirty, cut to Camera Two.’

  ‘I wasn’t out on the street. I got up to spend a penny an’ I saw her through the window.’

  ‘Shot Thirty-One, cut to Camera One.’

  ‘Evenso . . .’

  ‘Shot Thirty-Two, cut to Camera Two.’

  ‘An’ I know for a fact that Ted’s wife has been workin’ nights at the pie factory all this week.’

  ‘Shot Thirty-Three, cut to Camera One.’

  ‘Still, if she finds out what you’ve been sayin’ about her, she’s bound to blow her top.’

  ‘Shot Thirty-Four, cut to Camera Two.’

  ‘I don’t care what she does. When I see somebody doin’ somethin’ wrong, I don’t keep it to myself.’

  Woodend took a sip of his tea, and chuckled.

  ‘There was a woman just like that Madge Thornycroft who lived on our street when I was growin’ up,’ he told his wife. ‘An’ there was a Liz Bowyer type who lived just around the corner.’

  ‘There was a Madge Thornycroft and Liz Bowyer on everybody’s street,’ his wife replied.

  On the screen, Sam Fuller had turned away from Madge Thornycroft, and was looking up the street. ‘She’s comin’ now,’ he whispered.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Liz Bowyer. An’ she looks furious. You’d best go.’

  ‘I’m stayin’ where I am,’ Madge said. ‘It’d take a better woman than Liz Bowyer to make me turn tail an’ run.’

  ‘Shot Thirty-Nine, cut to Camera Three,’ Lucy Smythe said.

  Jeremy Wilcox turned his eyes towards the central monitor. Camera Three was pointing down the set of the exterior of Maddox Row, just as it was supposed to be – but it was revealing nothing more than empty street.

  ‘She’s missed her bloody cue,’ Jeremy Wilcox said furiously. ‘The bitch has missed her bloody cue!’

  Why didn’t these actors ever seem to realise that every second counted – that beyond their own little world there was a whole apparatus which depended on split-second timing? They weren’t on the stage, where it didn’t matter whether the production lasted a minute or two longer than it was intended to. They were on bloody live television!

  There was still no sign of Valerie Farnsworth on the central monitor.

  ‘I’ll have the stupid cow for this!’ Jeremy Wilcox exploded. ‘I’ll make her pay for it if it’s the last thing I do!’

  The picture had changed again. Now the camera was no longer focussing on the empty street but on the Row’s old age pensioner and resident gossip. Both of them looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  ‘She . . . she won’t be long now,’ Sam Fuller said nervously. ‘I expect the reason she’s takin’ so long to get here is that she’s in such a temper.’

  Woodend, from the comfort of his sofa, remembered going to Saturday matinees at his local cinema. Whenever the villain had appeared on the screen and starting creeping up on the hero, he and his mates had screamed at the hero to look behind him, even though they’d really known the hero couldn’t hear them. And he felt like that now – felt like shouting to Sam Fuller that it wasn’t that Liz Bowyer was walking slowly, it was that she wasn’t there at all.

  The camera angle shifted hopefully back up the street, but there was still no sign of Liz Bowyer.

  ‘Maybe she . . . maybe she slipped into somebody’s house while we weren’t lookin’,’ Sam Fuller suggested off-camera, the panic evident in his voice.

  ‘An’ maybe it’s better we don’t have an argument right now,’ Madge Thornycroft said shakily. ‘Maybe it’d be better if I just went home.’

  For a moment, the television screen went completely blank and then a black and white notice appeared, promising that normal service would be resumed as soon as possible. Another second passed, and the commercials began.

  ‘There’s been a real bloody cock-up somewhere or other,’ Woodend said to his wife.

  Jeremy Wilcox hit the intercom button angrily with his index finger. ‘What the hell is going on, Roger?’ he demanded.

  ‘Val . . . Val missed her cue,’ the floor manager replied.

  ‘I know she missed her cue,’ Wilcox snapped, staring up at the bank of monitors. ‘But is she there now?’

  ‘No. There’s no sign of her.’

  Wilcox slammed his fist down hard on his desk. ‘Here’s what we do,’ he said. ‘As soon as we come out of commercials we go straight into the scene where the two kids try their hand at the thieving from the corner shop. Got that?’

  ‘Yes, but—’ the floor manager began.

  ‘But nothing!’ Wilcox interrupted him. ‘We’ll have to make some changes later on, but I can’t tell you what they are as yet, for the simple reason that I don’t bloody know myself.’

  He flicked the switch back, and turned to Lucy Smythe. His personal assistant was gazing down at her shooting script in horror, and looked as if she were about to burst into tears.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she moaned. ‘We can’t just leave it hanging in the air like that. It’ll be too jerky.’

  ‘We will have the argument,’ Wilcox said. ‘It just won’t come in this episode, that’s all.’

  ‘But . . . but without the argument, we’ve got over two minutes of air time unfilled,’ Lucy Smythe said.

  True, Wilcox thought. All too bloody true!

  ‘Give me the script,’ he said. ‘I’ll call the camera shots for the rest of the show.’

  ‘What will I . . . what do you want me to—?’

  ‘I want you to find those useless bastards Drabble and Colligan. Tell them I want a short link scene to explain away Liz Bowyer’s non-appearance. We’ll slot it in after Harry Sugden’s told a breathless world how worried he is about his whippets
.’

  ‘You . . . you can’t expect them to write a new scene in five minutes,’ Lucy Smythe protested.

  ‘Yes, I bloody can. They’re supposed to be professionals – it’s about time they earned their money.’

  ‘And even if they can come up with the lines, how are the cast going to have time to learn them?’

  Wilcox sighed with exasperation. Why did he have to do all the thinking? he asked himself. Why was everybody else totally incapable of using even the tiniest particle of initiative?

  ‘I only want a couple of extra lines,’ he said. ‘They don’t have to be smooth – just plausible. And those idiots we fondly call the cast don’t have to learn them – all they have to do is read them off a bloody cue card, which even they should be able to manage.’ He glanced down at the script. ‘And when you’ve talked to the writers, find Val Farnsworth. She’s got a couple more lines towards the end of the show, and she’d better be there to deliver them.’

  ‘Maybe . . . maybe she’s not feeling well,’ Lucy Smythe said tentatively.

  ‘I don’t care if she’s bloody dying – I want her on the set mouthing her lines,’ Wilcox said harshly. ‘Now stop raising objections to everything I say and shift your arse!’

  Lucy Smythe rushed to the door as if she were being pursued by a pack of ravenous wolves.

  Hopeless! Wilcox thought. She was bloody hopeless!

  And she was by no means alone in that. There was enough dead wood in the studio to build a replica of the Titanic. And he included the producer in that. Would the almighty Bill Houseman have coped with this emergency as well as he was doing? Not a chance!

  The sound of the floor manager conducting the countdown came through the intercom. Wilcox turned his attention back to the monitors. On Camera One, the two child actors – brought in for this single episode – were about to try their hands at shoplifting chocolate bars from the corner store. If God had decided to finally give him the break he so richly deserved, Wilcox told himself, the snotty brats should manage to get through their two minutes of fame without completely fluffing their lines.