A Decent Interval

by Simon Brett

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Further Titles by Simon Brett

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A Selection of Further Titles by Simon Brett

  The Charles Paris Theatrical Series

  CAST IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE

  SO MUCH BLOOD

  STAR TRAP

  AN AMATEUR CORPSE

  A COMEDIAN DIES

  THE DEAD SIDE OF THE MIKE

  SITUATION TRAGEDY

  MURDER UNPROMPTED

  MURDER IN THE TITLE

  NOT DEAD, ONLY RESTING

  DEAD GIVEAWAY

  WHAT BLOODY MAN IS THAT

  A SERIES OF MURDERS

  CORPORATE BODIES

  A RECONSTRUCTED CORPSE

  SICKEN AND SO DIE

  DEAD ROOM FARCE

  A DECENT INTERVAL *

  The Fethering Mysteries

  THE BODY ON THE BEACH

  DEATH ON THE DOWNS

  THE TORSO IN THE TOWN

  MURDER IN THE MUSEUM

  THE HANGING IN THE HOTEL

  THE WITNESS AT THE WEDDING

  THE STABBING IN THE STABLES

  DEATH UNDER THE DRYER

  BLOOD AT THE BOOKIES

  THE POISONING IN THE PUB

  THE SHOOTING IN THE SHOP

  BONES UNDER THE BEACH HUT

  GUNS IN THE GALLERY *

  THE CORPSE ON THE COURT *

  * available from Severn House

  A DECENT INTERVAL

  A Charles Paris Novel

  Simon Brett

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 2013 by Simon Brett.

  The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Brett, Simon.

  A decent interval. – (A Charles Paris mystery ; 18)

  1. Paris, Charles (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Actors–Fiction. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.

  Hamlet–Fiction. 4. Theater–Fiction. 5. Detective and

  mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-044-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-539-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-412-6 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To

  Ali and Tim,

  who know about the theatre

  ONE

  It’s been a while, thought Charles Paris. A while since I’ve been dressed as a Roundhead for a part. A while since I’ve had a part – any part, come to that.

  Later in the day he would be dressed as a Cavalier. Because Charles Paris was fighting the Battle of Naseby. Alone. Still, it was work.

  It had indeed been some time since he’d had any of that precious commodity, work, but then that wasn’t unusual in what he laughingly called his ‘career’. Like most actors, when unemployed, Charles Paris went into a kind of half-life. Yes, he met up with friends in the business, he continued to drink Bell’s whisky either with them or more often alone, but the animating spark that made him fully alive was missing. And he kept wondering, as members of his profession in their late fifties tend to, whether he had already received his last ever job offer. An actor’s career does not have a retirement cut-off point like more regulated types of employment. No farewell parties, gifts of carriage clocks and private pensions kicking in (few actors even know what the word ‘pension’ means). No, for them the end is a slow process of attenuation, six months of being offered no parts being followed by another six months of being offered no parts, and so on until the realization dawns that, yes, the moment of retirement did indeed occur, almost unnoticed, some years previously.

  Charles Paris had therefore been extremely surprised to receive a call one Thursday morning in his studio flat in Hereford Road from the man who he supposed was still his agent, Maurice Skellern.

  ‘Charles, how’re things?’

  ‘What things did you particularly have in mind?’

  ‘Oh, work, you know, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Maurice, if I had any work you of all people ought to know about it. You are my agent, after all.’

  ‘Maybe, but you do hear of artistes who take jobs without telling their agents.’

  ‘And have I ever done that?’

  ‘Well, not in my recollection, no. But you do hear of these things. I mean, you know Edgar, the very clever boy I represent who’s just finished a stint at the National and is now off filming with Tom Cruise—’

  ‘No, I don’t know him – and what’s more I don’t want to hear about him.’ One of his agent’s many annoying habits was going into excessive detail about the successes of his other clients while providing absolutely no work for Charles. ‘Anyway, Maurice, to what do I owe the pleasure of a call from you out of the blue after eight months of total silence?’

  ‘Eight months? Surely it hasn’t been—?’

  ‘Eight months,’ Charles confirmed implacably.

  ‘Well, everything’s been very quiet in the business recently.’ How many times had Charles heard that from his agent? ‘Television budgets being cut back, the West End filling up with jukebox musicals or ones based on old movies. It’s not a good time, you know. I mean if I hadn’t got Edgar filming in the States and Adrian playing the name part in that cop series and Xanthe giving her Cleopatra at the RSC, I’d—’

  ‘All right,’ Charles interrupted. ‘That’s enough! I don’t want to hear about your other clients. So once again I ask: to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?’

  ‘Ah, well, something’s come up.’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For me?’ Maurice Skellern was quite capable of ringing Charles simply
to crow about the fabulous contract one of his other clients had just netted.

  ‘Of course for you, Charles.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a television …’

  Wonderful.

  ‘… directed by Tibor Pincus.’

  Even better. Tibor Pincus was one of the legendary television directors. Having escaped from Budapest when the Soviet tanks moved in in 1956, he had quickly risen through the ranks of British television drama. He’d directed a play for ABC’s Armchair Theatre, before joining the BBC and working on The Wednesday Play, a series which transmuted in 1970 into the Play for Today strand. Tibor Pincus had been at the top of his game at a time when the one-off play was one of the nation’s glories, when it made headlines and prompted furious debate about the issues of the day.

  Charles had had a tiny part in one of Tibor Pincus’s productions in the early 1980s. He couldn’t remember what the play was called, but it was one of the proudest entries on his CV – unlike his performance as Sir Benjamin Backbite at the Bristol Old Vic. (‘In this Restoration comedy Charles Paris himself looked in need of restoration.’ – Western Daily Press.)

  Charles was touched that someone of the stature of Tibor Pincus should have remembered him (and surely there could be no other reason for this unexpected summons). He was also slightly surprised that the acclaimed director was still alive and working.

  But most of all, he was extremely cheered and encouraged. The demise of the one-off television play had been much lamented over the years. Its time-slots had been taken over by endlessly recycling soaps and indistinguishable series set in hospitals, police stations or forensic pathology labs. Or, even worse, reality shows. Like most actors, Charles Paris had a deep-seated resentment for that form of entertainment. Pointing a camera at members of the public and waiting for them to make fools of themselves was not the highest form of art. But it was cheap, and television executives didn’t care that such programmes put out of work a lot of actors and writers who might actually have produced well-crafted drama.

  So the fact that a director of the stature of Tibor Pincus was back in business might herald the return of the single television play. That would be really good news.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Charles.

  ‘What’s what?’ asked Maurice.

  ‘The play, the part Tibor Pincus is offering me?’

  ‘Ah, well there isn’t actually a script.’

  This was even better news for Charles. One of Tibor Pincus’s great triumphs of the late 1960s, long before Mike Leigh hijacked the form, had been a play called Nexus, built up by the actors through improvisation. It was still hailed as one of the landmarks of television drama.

  If he was going to feature in a new improvised play by Tibor Pincus, then Charles Paris’s acting career was about to take a very definite turn for the better.

  Disillusionment had started to set in when Maurice Skellern told him that he was only required for one day’s filming near Newlands Corner in Surrey. And that he was required to be there the next day, which was Friday. Dreams of Charles Paris being part of a long-planned masterwork by the great Tibor Pincus began to melt away.

  It was a six a.m. call for costume and make-up. The car arrived in Hereford Road at four in the morning to pick up a somewhat frail Charles Paris. The excitement of having some work, combined with nervous uncertainty about what the work was, had led him to hit the Bell’s whisky rather hard the night before.

  He’d ended up slumped in front of the television, watching what was apparently some programme about the Wars of the Roses. It was the style of historical documentary which had become popular over recent years, in which modern-day footage was intercut by ancient documents and images, together with a minimal amount of costumed reconstruction, to produce a half-hour programme padded out to an hour which would have worked better on the radio.

  The show was presented by a quite dishy woman with large breasts. Charles had read somewhere that she was a Professor of something at some university – and a feminist historian. She had written a book on changing attitudes to menstruation through the centuries, called The Bleeding Obvious, and appeared on Newsnight whenever a feminist guru was needed to pontificate on anything.

  Knowing that she was a feminist made Charles feel guilty about being so aware of her breasts. For someone of his generation gender politics were a minefield. He had discovered the hard way that it was now all right to fancy women, but not to ‘objectify’ them. And being overly aware of the large breasts of a television presenter he’d never met was dangerously close to objectification. He wasn’t quite sure of the politically correct approach for a man to a feminist with big breasts. Probably to pretend not to notice them, that’d be safest. Certainly not to look at them. God, it was sometimes difficult being a man.

  Anyway, he didn’t like the documentary much. To Charles’s mind there was something ridiculous about the 1455 First Battle of St Albans being discussed by a woman walking through a shopping mall in modern St Albans. In what way could the Tesco’s, PC World and W.H. Smith she passed be helping to give a historical context to her commentary? Also, the cargo pants and tight cotton shirt she wore gave the mall an impression more of a catwalk than a lecture room. Which was probably the programme-maker’s intention.

  Charles did keep coming back to the fact that they were very striking breasts, though. And he couldn’t help feeling that they must have had something to do with her success on the box. He was sure that British universities boasted plenty of equally knowledgeable academics whose less generous contours kept them out of the nation’s sitting rooms.

  As he sipped at his glass of Bell’s, Charles Paris, not for the first time, pondered mournfully the impossibility of balanced relationships with the opposite sex (though that, he reflected, was probably too adversarial an expression to use – nowadays no doubt you couldn’t call women the ‘opposite’ sex, you had to call them the ‘complementary’ sex).

  He must have dozed off. The television was still on when he woke, showing an early hours repeat of some talent show. Called StarHunt, the series was apparently searching for an unknown actress (or ‘female actor’, as Charles kept reminding himself he had to say nowadays) to play the part of Ophelia in a forthcoming West End production of Hamlet. The aspirants were amateurs – that was one of the show’s selling points. It was based on the – to Charles’s mind completely fallacious – view that anyone can become a star. All of the contestants – girls in their late teens identically over-made-up with heavily mascaraed false eyelashes and unnaturally white teeth – said how big a part of their life StarHunt had become, how they were ‘really going to go for it’, how much support they were getting from their families (cut to simpering parents in the studio audience), how nervous they were, and how much they respected their fellow contestants and the judges.

  Charles was surprised to discover that this panel of D-list celebrities included someone he knew. Ned English, who would be directing the Hamlet when it finally got to the stage, was someone he had worked with. A very long time ago – about twenty-seven years – in Hornchurch, Charles had been in Ned’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost playing Costard (‘Charles Paris’s Mummerset accent was well-nigh incomprehensible’ – Romford Recorder.) The director had then been an enfant terrible of the English theatre, notorious for stirring controversy by his ‘reimaginings’ of classic plays. While still at Cambridge, his King Lear, whose action had been transplanted into an aquarium, caused a minor sensation. And his Doll’s House, in which all the characters were dressed like dolls and moved as if they were string puppets, was still talked about.

  The Love’s Labour’s Lost in which Charles Paris had given his Costard had been set (for no very good reason) in the trenches during the First World War. When interviewed about his work, Ned English always said he ‘listened to what the play was telling him’. If that was the case, Charles Paris reckoned that in Love’s Labour’s Lost the director must have been working from a
different text of Shakespeare’s play than the one he had.

  As with most enfants terribles, Ned English’s star had waned and he settled later in his career into comfortable predictability. A new generation of thrusting young directors hogged the limelight by doing things like setting J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls in a collapsing doll’s house. (Damn, Ned had never thought of that.) Like Ned’s, the approach of these new Young Turks demonstrated complete contempt for the text. This play, they seemed to be saying, is so bad that it can only be salvaged by my genius, my own particular brand of visual pyrotechnics.

  So, having ceased to be flavour of the month, to get the job directing Hamlet must have been a considerable boost for Ned English. Particularly as it involved appearing on television. Charles Paris was constantly surprised by the compulsive attraction of television to people in the theatre. Not the attraction of acting on the box – that was fine, and the money was much better than in the theatre. But so many actors and directors wanted to appear as ‘themselves’ (or rather a contrived version of themselves). They wanted to be on chat shows and panel games, showing how nice they were, how jolly they were. And very few of them were any good at it.

  The idea of exposing himself in that way was total anathema to Charles. One of the reasons he had gone into the theatre was because the profession offered him opportunities to disguise his own personality under layers of others. He loved acting, but he shrank from revealing the real Charles Paris (or even a sanitized television-friendly version of his persona).

  And yet Ned English was clearly glorying in his new-found fame on the box. In all such talent shows the mix of judges is the same. There’s an acerbic pragmatist who is very rude to all the contestants. (In StarHunt this part was taken by Tony Copeland, a producer famous for his very lucrative touring productions and other wide media interests, who would be guiding the Hamlet on its trajectory into the West End.) There’s a dishy young woman vaguely attached to show business who is sympathetic to ‘how hard’ the contestants have worked to get to this point in the show. And there’s a lovable professional who is very encouraging, particularly when a contestant is patently rubbish.