A Series of Murders

by Simon Brett

  ‘Maurice Skellern Artistes,’ the voice at the other end of the line grudgingly conceded.

  ‘Maurice, it’s Charles.’

  ‘Oh, Charles, I nearly rang you yesterday.’

  ‘Really?’ For Maurice to have rung him would have been almost unprecedented.

  ‘Had a couple of availability checks.’

  ‘On me?’ That, too, was an event of sufficient rarity to be included in one of Arthur C. Clarke’s collections of astounding phenomena.

  ‘Yes, it was some feature-film company and . . . oh, er, yes, the National Theatre.’

  ‘What? Why on earth didn’t you contact me?’

  ‘Well, you’re not available, are you, Charles? You’re tied up with W.E.T. for the next three months.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ It was true, though. Wasn’t that typical of his life, Charles thought bitterly. For nearly two years his phone had been so silent he had kept considering getting British Telecom to check whether it was still working; for two years the producers, directors, and casting directors of every theatre, film, and television company in the world had been clinically immune to the magnetism of his talent; and then suddenly, once he was working, the interest started flooding in.

  Or did it? He had no proof that the calls had actually happened. And inventing them was an excellent way for Maurice to make it look as if he were being a punctilious agent. Though Charles was not basically a suspicious person, he took much of what his agent told him with a cautionary pinch of salt.

  ‘Did they really call, Maurice?’

  ‘Who?’ came the innocent reply.

  ‘These people from the film company and the National.’

  ‘Charles, would I lie to you?’

  Yes, of course you would, you old bastard. And often have. But he didn’t voice the thought. What was the point?

  Maurice moved hastily on, not giving his client time for second thoughts about answering his question. ‘Nasty business you had in the studio the other day.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That actress. Slippy . . .’

  ‘Sippy. Mind you, that’s no less silly than Slippy. Yes, she had chosen to call herself Sippy Stokes. At least I assume she had chosen it. No one’s actually christened “Sippy”, are they?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have thought so. At least she’d have been safe with Equity. No likelihood of a clash with someone else of the same name.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Nasty business, though. Getting crushed by all those props falling on top of her.’

  ‘Maurice, how is it that you know all this?’

  ‘Like to keep my ear to the ground.’

  ‘Yes, but how is it that you keep your ear to the ground to pick up all the gossip but never know who’s doing any casting or where there are any jobs going?’

  ‘Ah, now, come on, Charles, be fair. Who was it who tickled up the interest from this feature-film company and the National Theatre?’

  It was wonderful, Charles reflected, how these two – probably fictitious – calls out of the blue to check availability had now metamorphosed into opportunities that Maurice had painstakingly engineered on his client’s behalf. But once again it wasn’t worth pointing out the anomaly.

  ‘Anyway,’ his agent went on, ‘be a big compensation bill for W.E.T.’

  This seemed to be a universal first reaction to the news of Sippy Stokes’s death.

  ‘Yes, I guess so. Incidentally, since you seem to know everything about it,’ Charles went on with heavy but wasted irony, ‘you haven’t heard any suggestions that the death was not an accident, have you?’

  ‘What, murder or something like that, you mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s a thought. She wasn’t the most popular person round the production.’

  ‘No, haven’t heard anything like that. Isn’t the buzz I’m getting from my sources, anyway.’

  Not for the first time in their relationship, Charles wondered who on earth Maurice’s ‘sources’ might be. Whoever they were, they were pretty good. For relaying gossip, that is. Not for the business of finding out where the jobs were. In that they were as hopeless as Maurice Skellern himself.

  ‘Mind you,’ the agent continued, ‘I gather the police are still investigating, so maybe something’ll come out at the inquest.’

  ‘Well, if you do hear anything, Maurice . . .’

  ‘I’ll let you know. And anytime, anything you want found out, so long as it’s in “the business”, you know you have only to ask.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But,’ said Maurice, moving on with enthusiasm, ‘have you heard who’s taking over Sippy Stokes’s part?’

  There was a particular note of glee that always came into his voice when he was imparting information he felt confident his audience didn’t know, and it was there as he asked this question.

  ‘No. No, I knew they’d recast, but I haven’t heard who it’s going to be.’

  ‘Name “Joanne Rhymer” mean anything to you?’

  ‘The “Rhymer” bit does, obviously. Any relation to Gwen Rhymer?’

  ‘Daughter.’

  ‘Ah.’ The name brought back not wholly unpleasant memories for Charles. ‘I wonder if she shares her mother’s well-known proclivities?’

  ‘Which proclivities?’

  ‘I was only thinking of the promiscuity, actually. I mean, in the old days Gwen Rhymer used to be called the Blue Nun.’

  ‘Blue Nun?’

  ‘Yes, like the wine.’

  ‘Eh?’ Maurice was being more than usually obtuse.

  ‘Blue Nun is recommended as the ideal accompaniment to all meals,’ Charles spelled out, ‘and Gwen Rhymer used to be called the Blue Nun because she . . . went with everything.’

  ‘Ah, with you. Nice one, Charles, nice.’

  ‘So her daughter’s getting the part . . . hmm. Big advantage that can be for a young actress, having a parent in the business.’

  ‘Yes, well, if you think of the number of producers who probably still fancy getting inside the lovely Gwen’s pants, the daughter could pick up quite a few favours, I’d imagine.’

  ‘And of course if she does carry on the family tradition, she could pick up a good few in her own right. Oh, well, I will look forward to meeting her on Monday. That’s when we’ve got the read-through for ep. two, “The Italian Stiletto Murder”.’

  ‘Still having read-throughs, are you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, most series like this, once you get up and running, they dispense with the read-through. Go straight into rehearsal.’

  ‘I think to call the Stanislas Braid series “up and running” would be a gross distortion of the truth, Maurice. Apart from the problems raised by the recasting, Russell Bentley’s making very heavy weather of the whole thing. He’s not going to give up the read-throughs in a hurry. They give him his first opportunity to cut new directors down to size.’

  ‘Dear, oh, dear,’ said Maurice with fond nostalgia. ‘Russell Bentley. He’s been around forever. I remember all those dreadful movies in the fifties – The Hawk’s Prey, was that one of them? They were all stinkers, anyway, that’s all I remember. Ah, well, there’s always been a strong spirit of forgiveness in the British public.’ He chuckled. ‘Anyway, have fun, Charles. Keep smiling.’

  ‘Incidentally, Maurice, I’m intrigued. How is it you manage to know more about the production I’m working on than I do myself?’

  ‘My job, isn’t it? Someone’s got to have their finger on the pulse of this business, haven’t they? I mean, where do you think you’d be if you hadn’t got me looking after your interests?’

  The possible answers to this question were so varied and the options they offered so attractive that Charles didn’t bother to say anything.

  Charles put down the receiver of the pay phone on the landing and went slowly back to his room. He filled the kettle and switched it on for coffee, then moved a couple of shirts spread out over his armchair in lieu of ironing and sa
t down.

  He looked around the bed-sitter and saw it as a stranger might. Tatty, tacky, and untidy. The bed lumpy under its crumpled yellow candlewick. The furniture, which had been painted grey so long ago that it might even have been at a time when grey was trendy. The discoloured, dead gas fire. The dusty plastic curtain that hid the sink and gas ring, and beside it, as if to mock his infirmity of purpose, the equally dusty but more attractive curtain he had bought some months previously to replace it.

  But that sort of activity required so much effort. Well, perhaps not effort. After all, it was simply a matter of transferring the hooks from the old curtain to the new one and hanging it up. No, the problem was more one of will. He had to want to do it, had to want to make his environment attractive, to turn the anonymous room into a home.

  It was something he had never been good at. Frances had been good, very good. She turned everywhere they lived into a home, and while they were living together, he had liked the warmth of that feeling. But after he had walked out on the marriage in pursuit of some unattainable concept of freedom, he had reverted to type. Reverted to the sense that everything was temporary, that he was just camping until he sorted his life out. But his life remained resolutely unsorted-out; his bed-sitter, resolutely unimproved and anonymous.

  For a moment, as he looked around the room, he contemplated moving. Why not? Buy somewhere, put a foot back on the bottom rung of the property ladder he had formerly climbed with Frances. After all, at the moment he could afford it. W.E.T.’s fees were very generous. And, in spite of Rick Landor’s gloomy prognostications for its success, there had been talk of a second series of Stanislas Braid. According to Will Parton, there were enough W. T. Wintergreen titles to do at least six more. And then they could move on to new story lines, ‘opening the writing out,’ as Dilly Muirfield put it (or ‘wheeling in the massed hacks,’ as Will put it).

  Yes, this one could run and run. And having his face seen in the country’s living rooms on a weekly basis might bring Charles Paris the actor back into fashion. (Well, into fashion – he had to admit he’d never really been there before.) Yes, it might all be all right. He probably could risk the commitment of buying somewhere.

  But even as he had the thought, he knew he’d never do it. It wasn’t really lack of money, it wasn’t his environment either that was at fault. It was him. Wherever he was, he would still be Charles Paris. And Charles Paris would always feel transitory, never quite committing himself to an environment, a community, perhaps even an identity. That was the reason he was an actor. So much easier to channel yourself into other personalities than to stand up and be counted on your own.

  Anyway, he felt more at ease – or if not more at ease, at least less challenged – living in anonymous surroundings, seeing as little of them as possible, and then ideally through a permanent haze of Bell’s whisky. That was just the way he was.

  Having dispelled from his mind the idea of moving, Charles found it quickly filled with thoughts of Sippy Stokes’s death, or as he preferred to think of it, Sippy Stokes’s murder.

  Maurice’s words about the police still investigating encouraged this conjecture. Yes, it could have been an accident, but why should the shelves suddenly have toppled over when Sippy was in the props room? Why should she have been in the props room, anyway? And why should she have had the bad luck to be hit by a randomly falling object?

  The idea of her having been hit by a carefully aimed object was much more attractive. And the idea that that object was the temporarily removed candlestick was even more appealing.

  Charles thought back forty-eight hours and tried to remember the exact sequence of events.

  On the Wednesday morning, when the studio broke for coffee after recording Russell Bentley’s cutaway shot, Charles remembered seeing Sippy Stokes alive and well. She had turned down his casual invitation to join him in the canteen. It was only about half an hour later that he had found her body, still warm and bleeding, in the props room.

  The actual coffee break had only been twenty minutes, but Charles thought it reasonable to assume that that was when the murder had taken place. Then the studio and its environs would have been almost deserted; to commit a murder once the cast and crew had returned would be much more risky.

  But who could have been in the studio during the break to do the deed? Charles focused his memory, trying to re-envision who had been in the canteen and for how long.

  Rick Landor hadn’t been there at all. Nor had Russell Bentley. Nor, come to that, had W. T. Wintergreen and her sister. Any of them could have been anywhere during the break.

  Will Parton had been in the canteen but been dragged away before the end of the break by Ben Docherty and Dilly Muirfield. However, their proposed script discussion hadn’t taken place, so any of those three could in theory have gone back to the studio to dispose of Sippy Stokes.

  Jimmy Sheet had left at the same time as Will, claiming he was going to look through some lines in his dressing room. But then, if he was planning a murder, he wouldn’t have balked at lying about his intentions.

  Mort Verdon had stayed chatting with Charles until after the end of the break, so he seemed to be in the clear, but the quiet A.S.M., Tony Rees, had left at the same time as Jimmy Sheet. And, Charles suddenly remembered, Tony Rees had looked very guilty when surprised around the back of the set, just before the discovery of Sippy’s body. Yes, that young man certainly merited investigation.

  But what motive might he have had to kill the actress?

  What motive might any of them have had, come to that?

  Charles scanned the possibilities:

  Rick Landor was having an affair with Sippy Stokes and seemed angry that Jimmy Sheet was trying to ace him out.

  If Jimmy Sheet was involved with her, maybe he had some motive of jealousy or anger.

  Ben Docherty had already made the decision to sack the actress, which surely ruled out any reason for trying to get rid of her prematurely.

  Russell Bentley was unhappy with the recording that they’d done so far, but even for someone with an ego as big as his, it was a little fanciful to imagine that he’d resort to murder to get the episode remade.

  Dilly Muirfield and Will Parton appeared to have no possible motive for killing Sippy Stokes, unless they felt extremely strongly about the effect her dire performance was having on their series. And surely, though television people were notorious for how seriously they took television, that was going a bit far.

  Oh, and then presumably W. T. Wintergreen and her sister might also have been snooping around the set during the coffee break. But again, except for the benefit of ridding the world of a dreadful actress, they didn’t seem to have an obvious motive.

  Insufficient information, Charles concluded. I’m going to have to find out a great deal more before I can start coming to any conclusions about the case. And do a lot more thinking.

  But fortunately he was prevented from doing any more thinking at that moment by the ringing of the phone on the landing.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oh, good morning. Is that Charles Paris?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is Winifred Railton speaking.’

  ‘Oh.’

  His monosyllable must have revealed how little the name meant to him, because the elderly, cultured voice explained, ‘You probably know me better as W. T. Wintergreen.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Funny, I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘Nothing bad, I hope?’

  ‘Ah. Well . . . um . . .’ He couldn’t really say that he’d been assessing her suitability as a murder suspect, could he? ‘No, no, of course not.’

  ‘Look, Mr. Paris, I was wondering if it would be possible for us to meet.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it would. But we’ll be meeting on Monday at the read-through, anyway, won’t we?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ll certainly be there. But I was meaning meet in a more private way. It’s so impossible to talk on those occasions.’

  �
��Yes. Well, perhaps a drink after rehearsal . . .’

  ‘I wondered if you would like to come to tea with me and my sister on Tuesday afternoon,’ W. T. Wintergreen said firmly.

  ‘Oh. Um . . . Well, I’m not quite sure what the schedule –’

  ‘I’ve checked. You won’t be required for rehearsal on Tuesday afternoon.’

  ‘Well, then, what can I say? Yes, of course I’d be delighted. Where would you like to meet?’

  W. T. Wintergreen had it all worked out. ‘If you come to our cottage at half past three, that will be fine.’

  ‘And where is your cottage?’

  ‘Ham Common.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sounded to Charles a hell of a way to go for tea. Still, he’d said yes. And it could be rather interesting.

  ‘I’ll give you the precise address on Monday. Louisa and I will look forward to seeing you then. I trust you have a pleasant weekend. Good-bye, Mr. Paris.’

  Well, thought Charles as he put the phone down, what on earth was all that about?

  On Saturday morning Charles rose late, more or less reassembled himself with coffee, and by half past eleven was feeling ready to go out to his local for a few pints and maybe even one of their range of Designer Ploughman’s Lunches. What would it be today? A Brie Ploughman’s? A Boursin Ploughman’s? A Terrine de Canard Ploughman’s? A Bratwurst and Sauerkraut Ploughman’s?

  He sometimes wondered what had happened to pub food in the last few years. In the old days, when you ordered a Ploughman’s Lunch, you got a chunk of dry bread, a slab of hard cheese, a gold-wrapped packet of butter, with a tomato and maybe a pickled onion by way of garnish. Whereas now the Ploughmen really seemed to have moved up the social scale to become at least Gentlemen Farmers.

  Charles blamed the Common Market. Most totally inexplicable developments in modern Britain had something to do with the Common Agricultural Policy.

  It was while he was indulging these thoughts that he realised he was at that moment uniquely qualified to ring his wife. ‘When you’re sober,’ Frances had said, and not a drop of alcohol had passed his lips for nearly twelve hours.