Dead on Cue

by Sally Spencer

  ‘You’re right, there,’ Pickup agreed enthusiastically. ‘It’s getting’ so that people don’t really need to go into Whitebridge at all.’

  They entered the village. The houses were all built of the dressed stone which Rutter – as a man raised in the land of red brick – had found strange at first, but now was getting used to. There was a pub called the Red Lion just ahead of them, and the inspector indicated, then turned on to its car park.

  ‘Do you fancy a drink before we get started?’ he asked Pickup, as they got out of the car.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no,’ the constable replied, then quickly added – as if he’d begun to suspect this might be some kind of test, ‘That is, I wouldn’t mind one if it’s all right with you, sir.’

  ‘I’d never have suggested it if it wasn’t,’ Rutter replied – and found himself wishing that he didn’t always feel the urge to turn round and see who was standing behind him when anybody called him ‘sir’.

  Pickup seemed to assume his new boss – being a boss – would prefer to drink in the best room rather than the public bar, and Rutter, still lacking Charlie Woodend’s confidence, didn’t contradict him. The landlord, a jolly-looking, red-faced man of around forty, greeted the young constable warmly and said wasn’t it a terrible thing about Val Farnsworth. Pickup agreed it was, and Rutter ordered two halves of best bitter.

  ‘Where would you like to start, sir?’ Pickup asked, when the landlord had served them their drinks.

  Rutter ignored the twitch in his neck muscles which told him to glance over his shoulder, and said, ‘It’d probably be best to start with the immediate family.’

  Pickup looked distraught. ‘I’m afraid there aren’t any, sir,’ he confessed.

  ‘What? None?’

  ‘None at all. The Farnsworths were off-comers to the village. Came from Rawtenstall, or somewhere like that. There was only her an’ her mam an’ dad, an’ both the parents are dead now.’

  ‘But there are still people in the village who knew her, aren’t there?’

  ‘Oh yes, there’s plenty of them,’ Pickup replied, looking relieved. He turned towards the bar, where the landlord was polishing glasses. ‘You knew Val, didn’t you, Mr Gilgrass? Personally, I mean.’

  ‘I knew her all right,’ the landlord confirmed. ‘Knew her very well, as a matter of fact. We were in the same class at school.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Rutter asked.

  ‘Very determined,’ the landlord replied, without a second’s hesitation. ‘She always knew exactly what she wanted, an’ was always willin’ to do whatever was necessary to get it.’

  Rutter grinned good-naturedly – a trick he’d learned from Woodend. ‘Used her feminine wiles to get her own way, did she?’

  ‘Oh no, she wasn’t like that back then,’ the landlord said. ‘Not at all. She was a bit of a tomboy, if the truth be told. As willin’ to use her fists as any of the lads – an’ better with them than most of the boys, too.’

  ‘You must be very proud of her in the village,’ Rutter said.

  ‘We are. There’s not many people can say they’ve known somebody as famous as Val Farnsworth.’

  Pickup put his glass down on the counter. ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I think I’ll just have to nip out the back for a minute,’ he said.

  The landlord watched Pickup disappear through the door which led to the toilets, then turned his back to Rutter.

  ‘Not got the bladder for drinkin’, these young lads, have they?’ he asked. ‘They get one half pint in them, an’ they’re peein’ for a good fifteen minutes.’

  ‘That’s the younger generation for you,’ Rutter said, choosing to overlook the fact that he was far closer to Pickup’s age himself than he was to the landlord’s. ‘Did you see much of Val in the village?’

  ‘Not really,’ the landlord admitted. ‘In fact, I can’t remember the last time she was here.’

  ‘And people didn’t resent that? Didn’t they feel she must have decided she was too good for Sladebury?’

  ‘No, not at all. We understood that she must have been very busy, what with Maddox Row an’ all the public appearances she had to put in all over the place. You’ll not find one person in Sladebury who’s got a bad word to say against Val Farnsworth, I can assure you of that.’

  ‘No one? Not a single person?’

  The landlord frowned. ‘Well, there is one,’ he admitted reluctantly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Funnily enough, it’s young Pickup back-there’s Uncle Arthur.’

  ‘And what’s Uncle Arthur got against her?’

  ‘Well, this was years ago, I’m talkin’ about now. He was engaged to a lass called Ellie Tomkins, and when she broke the engagement off, a few months before the weddin’, he blamed Val for it. But nobody took much notice. To tell you the truth, everybody round here thinks he’s a bit do-lally.’

  Woodend made his way up the central concourse to the studio. After his slightly unpleasant encounter with George Adams, he’d had just about enough of Houseman’s ‘aristocracy’ for one morning, he decided, and it was about time he had a word with the peasants.

  The studio was full of hectic activity. Some of the sets he’d seen the day before were being taken down, and the moment the flats had been removed, new ones were being constructed in their place. Woodend watched, fascinated, as an empty space began to take the shape of the living room he’d so often watched Madge Thornycroft spread her salacious rumours from.

  With a gait that would have seemed aimless to anyone who didn’t know him, he wandered over to Jack Taylor’s front room. The carpenters seemed to have finished their work there, and a young man with a bouffant hairstyle was fussing over the ornaments on Dot’s sideboard.

  ‘You’re that policeman, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Won’t put you off if I watch you work for a few minutes, will it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ the young man replied. ‘A true artist always appreciates an audience.’

  The set dresser picked up a photograph which was lying on the sideboard, studied it for a moment, then moved a Toby jug a couple of inches to the left.

  ‘Do you have to be that careful?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Oh God, yes,’ the young man said. ‘If anything’s even the tiniest bit out of place, we get letters. It’s the same with the corner shop. If we don’t have Valentine’s Day cards on display there at the beginning of February, you can be sure one of our eagle-eyed viewers will complain. I’ve got a friend who works in prop buying, and he wakes up in a cold sweat worrying that one of the washing powder companies might have changed their packaging without him noticing.’

  Woodend grinned. ‘Sounds like a tough life.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ the young man said earnestly. He stepped back from the sideboard, cocked his head first to one side then the other, then nodded with satisfaction. ‘That should do it. Now all that’s left is the blowing down – if you’ll excuse the expression.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘I have to spray the light switches and door handles with a fine film of dark water paint. It looks strange to the naked eye – pardon the expression again – but on camera it takes away the pristine edge and makes them seem used.’

  ‘All is not what it seems.’

  ‘You’re telling me! In one episode we had Harry Sugden getting the daft idea of building a goldfish pond in his back yard . . .’

  ‘Aye, I remember that.’

  ‘Well, we got a tin bath, surrounded it with fake bricks, and filled it with water. The bricks looked fine on camera, but the water just didn’t seem right. We tried different lighting and different camera angles, and it was still no good. So do you know what had to do in the end?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘We tipped the water away, and spread a plastic sheet across the top of the pond. And that really did look like water.’

  Woodend suddenly realised he was enjoying himse
lf so much that he was in danger of forgetting why he was there. ‘What can you tell me about Val Farnsworth?’ he asked.

  ‘Not a lot,’ the set dresser said. ‘Our job’s finished by the time hers starts. But if you want to talk to somebody who knew her outside work . . .’ He searched around the studio, and his gaze fell on a short-haired woman who was dressing a set close to his. ‘Can you come here a minute, Susan?’ he called.

  The woman stopped what she was doing, and walked over to them. She was around thirty, Woodend guessed, and perhaps a little sturdily built. Her eyes were red, and she didn’t look at all happy.

  ‘Yes?’ she said tremulously, as if she would much rather be somewhere else.

  ‘This policeman wants to know about Val Farnsworth,’ the set dresser told her. ‘She was a sort of a friend of yours, wasn’t she?’

  Tears began to well up in the woman’s eyes immediately. ‘She . . . I . . . can’t talk about it now,’ she said.

  Then she turned and hurried away towards the other side of the studio.

  ‘I never imagined she’d taken it so badly,’ the set dresser said, nonplussed. ‘If I’d known she was going to break down like that, I’d never have called her over.’

  ‘Aye, she did seem rather upset, didn’t she,’ Woodend agreed thoughtfully.

  The woman had gone back to her own set, but instead of resuming her work she stood in one corner, head bent and shoulders heaving.

  ‘I think I’ll just go an’ have a word with her – see what the trouble is,’ Woodend told the dresser.

  He was halfway between the two sets when he noticed that Monika Paniatowski had entered the studio, and was making a beeline for him. What the bloody hell was his sergeant playing at? he wondered.

  Paniatowski came a halt just in front of him. ‘Are you Chief Inspector Woodend?’ she asked, deadpan.

  ‘Aye, that’s me,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘Mr Wilcox sent me to find you,’ Paniatowski explained. ‘There’s been a call for you from Whitebridge. Your chief constable’s been taken seriously ill, and they want you back there as soon as possible.’

  Twenty-Five

  Bill Houseman very rarely took enough time off work in the middle of the day for a full luncheon, and as his wife sat opposite him in the Red House Restaurant, she found herself wondering why, when everyone else in the studio seemed to be in such a panic about getting the next show together in time, he had chosen to do it on that day. She wondered, too, why he had hardly said a word during the starters, though it was obvious that he had something preying on his mind.

  It was after the waiter had brought them their main courses that Houseman looked up from his steak, and with an expression in his eyes which could have been pain, anger, or sadness – or a combination of all three of them – and said, ‘I want you to stop coming to the studio.’

  ‘You want what?’ Diana asked.

  ‘I want you to stop coming to the studio,’ Houseman repeated firmly.

  Diana slid a mouthful of poached salmon into her mouth, and chewed on it thoughtfully. She knew now why he’d taken her out to lunch. He’d done it so they could have this particular conversation in a place where he was almost sure that she wouldn’t make a scene.

  ‘What’s brought all this on?’ she asked, when she’d swallowed the salmon.

  ‘I thought after I’d shown you just how seriously I took it the last time, you’d learned your lesson,’ her husband said. ‘But you haven’t, have you? I can’t prove it yet, but I’m sure you’re up to your old tricks again.’

  Diana Houseman smiled. ‘My old tricks,’ she said, savouring the words almost as much as she’d been savouring the salmon. ‘What a quaint, old-fashioned way you have of putting it.’

  ‘You promised me when you married me—’

  ‘I promised you nothing,’ his wife said cuttingly.

  ‘I asked you if you’d stop carrying on as you had been—’

  ‘And I said I’d try. Well, I have tried.’

  ‘But not very hard.’

  Diana sighed. ‘Do you really think you’ve been giving me what I need in bed?’ she asked.

  ‘I put in long hours at the studio,’ Houseman said, suddenly defensive. ‘I’m exhausted by the time I get home. Soon I should be able to hand some of the day-to-day running of the show over to someone else, and then I won’t—’

  ‘You’ll never hand it over,’ his wife interrupted him. ‘You’d never give up an ounce of control if you had any choice in the matter. And even if you did, it wouldn’t make any difference. As far as you’re concerned, a sex drive is what you take to get to a stag night.’

  ‘That’s very clever,’ Houseman said bitterly. ‘Who made it up? One of your boyfriends?’

  ‘What did you want out of marriage?’ Diana demanded. ‘A dumpy little wife who’d keep your meals warm until you decided to come home, and never leave the house unless she was on your arm? Or did you want a wife who every other man looked at longingly when she walked past – a wife who all your drinking friends wished belonged to them? Because if that’s what you wanted, you’ve got just what you paid for.’

  ‘The price is too high,’ Houseman told her. ‘I didn’t think it would be, but it is.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but the deal is done and it’s too late to start asking for a refund now,’ his wife said indifferently.

  Why did their arguments seem, inevitably, to follow this same route, Houseman wondered. Why did he always suddenly find himself in retreat?

  ‘If you can’t change, couldn’t you at least try to compromise a little?’ he pleaded.

  ‘That would depend on exactly what sort of compromise you have in mind,’ his wife told him.

  ‘If you must have affairs, at least try to be discrete. Stay away from the studio, as I asked you to. And stay away from any other men I know personally, as well.’

  Diana smiled again. ‘Just the men?’

  ‘All I’m asking is that you don’t do anything to embarrass me within my own social circle – or with the people outside it who look up to me.’

  Diana Houseman laughed as if her husband had said the funniest thing imaginable. ‘People who look up to you, Squeaky?’

  ‘I told you never – ever – to call me that!’ Houseman said angrily. ‘That’s all behind me now.’

  ‘Is it really?’ his wife asked. ‘Do you want to hear the joke that’s going the rounds at NWTV?’

  ‘This isn’t the time or the place for jokes.’

  ‘But I think you’ll really like this one. What’s the difference between Squeaky, Squiggy and Softy and Maddox Row?’

  ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘On Maddox Row, the characters can just about move without somebody’s hand up their backsides.’

  Houseman put his head in his hands. She should never have said that, he thought – she should never have chipped away at what he had come to regard as the very foundation stone of his being.

  Diana giggled. ‘They can just about move without somebody’s hand up their backsides,’ she repeated.

  And Bill Houseman, who had rescripted so many lives for the fictional people of Maddox Row, found himself starting to rescript his own. He had been frightened of too many things for far too long. It was time to fight back. He would make a phone call to the studio as soon as he left the table – a phone call which would set in motion a campaign which would demonstrate, once and for all, that he was Madro and Madro was him. But before that, he would deal with his wife.

  Houseman took his hands away from his face, and looked Diana squarely in the eyes. ‘I’ll divorce you,’ he said.

  His wife, still not understanding the transformation which had taken place in him, smiled again. ‘Don’t be silly, Bill,’ she said. ‘You know you’d never do that. You couldn’t stand the humiliation of going through a divorce.’

  ‘Do you think that would be any worse than the humiliation I’m going through now?’ Houseman asked. ‘At least if we were divorced, there might be
the possibility of seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.’

  Now – finally – Diana began to pick up some of the danger signals. Perhaps she had pushed him too far, she thought. Perhaps she had led him such a dance that it really would be less painful for him to divorce her than to go on as they were.

  ‘If you divorce me, I’ll make sure I take you for every penny you’ve got,’ she threatened.

  Houseman laughed – and to her horror she realised that it was with genuine amusement.

  ‘Do you really think that any judge in the land, after what he’d heard in open court about the way you’ve behaved, would hand all my hard-earned money over to you?’ he asked. ‘You’d be lucky if he let you leave with the coat on your back.’

  Oh God, he’s right! Diana’s brain screamed, as it was flooded with realisation and panic. There isn’t a judge in the country who’d give me a penny!

  She looked down at her hand, and realised that it had started to tremble. ‘You’re . . . you’re bluffing about a divorce, aren’t you?’ she said, and this time she was the one who was almost pleading.

  ‘Maybe I was bluffing at the start,’ Houseman admitted. ‘But, do you know, I’m really not any more.’

  ‘We could work things out if we really tried,’ Diana said.

  ‘Oh, there’ll be jokes and finger-pointing behind my back for a few weeks after the case, but then it will all die down again,’ Houseman said, as if she’d never spoken. ‘And then I’ll be free – free to find myself another gorgeous blonde if I want to, one who does know how to behave herself.’

  ‘Don’t you think you’re being a little hasty?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Houseman said, his voice growing more and more triumphant. ‘You were right – you’ll never change. The best thing I could do would be to cut my losses.’

  ‘But what will become of me?’

  Houseman positively beamed. He was no longer the cuckolded husband. He was Errol Flynn. He was Clark Gable. Tall, confident and masculine.

  ‘What will become of you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t really know. And frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!’