A Series of Murders

by Simon Brett

  He rang her Highgate flat and was gratified to find her in. He felt suddenly very close to her. Yes, he had decided while the phone was ringing, they should meet up the next day for lunch. Sunday lunch, just like the old days. He could take her out somewhere on his W.E.T. loot. Or, better still, she might offer to cook lunch for him. Now that really would be like old times.

  ‘See, Frances, here I am, ringing you at a reasonable time of day and stone-cold sober. What more could you ask?’

  ‘A divorce?’ she suggested, but her tone was not as hard as her words.

  ‘You don’t want one really, Frances. You love being unmarried to me.’

  ‘Ha. Ha. Anyway, tell me about this job you’ve got.’

  He told her. She was impressed. ‘Three-month contract – running character. You realise you’re in danger of becoming a success, Charles Paris?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think that’d ever happen,’ he said in mock self-depreciation.

  ‘No, nor do I,’ Frances agreed dryly. ‘Still, I’m glad they’re doing W. T. Wintergreen. I used to like her books.’

  ‘I have to confess I’d never heard of them until the job came up.’

  ‘They’re good, if you like that sort of thing.’

  ‘Having read the scripts, I’m not sure that I do. They’re totally unrealistic.’

  ‘That’s part of their charm. Stanislas Braid is one of those completely unbelievable superman-sleuths who know everything about everything. School of Lord Peter Wimsey. And he has these wonderful and totally unrealistic relationships with everyone around him. Blodd, the chauffeur . . . the delightfully innocent and deeply loved Christina. Yes, totally unbelievable, but comforting.’

  ‘Hmm. I think I prefer my detective heroes a bit more realistic.’

  ‘No, no. Couldn’t disagree more. The last thing I want is reality muscling in and spoiling a good detective story. I’m a great believer in the “Warm Bath” school of crime fiction – you know, books that are all snug and soothing and reassuring, books in which the Goodies are Good and the Baddies are Bad and you need never have a moment’s anxiety about the fact that Good Will Triumph.’

  ‘I find some of them a bit arch and mimsy-pimsy.’

  ‘Wimsey – mimsy-pimsy?’ asked Frances in mock horror.

  ‘Oh, shut up. When did W. T. Wintergreen write her books?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Maybe she still is writing them?’

  ‘Surely not still about Stanislas Braid? Not still set back in the thirties? In that old country-house time warp?’

  ‘No, perhaps not. I’m not sure. I know she published a few before the war, and at that time apparently they were spoken of in the same breath as Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. Then I think she went on till . . . late fifties, maybe? I certainly haven’t been aware of any new titles since then. But I’m really not up-to-date. Ages since I’ve read one. Mind you, they were very important during my adolescence. Read all of them then; it felt like dozens. I had these fantasies of marrying someone as suave and debonair and brilliant as Stanislas Braid.’

  ‘Good heavens. Did you really?’

  ‘Yes, I did. And look what I ended up with.’

  ‘Thank you, Frances, for those few kind words. Anyway, you will no doubt be impressed to hear that I am going to have tea with W. T. Wintergreen herself on Tuesday.’

  ‘Are you really?’

  ‘Mm. Shall I tell her my wife’s a fan?’

  ‘Yes, by all means.’

  ‘Right, I will.’ A silence hung between them. ‘Frances, I was actually ringing to see if we could meet up.’

  ‘Ah.’ She didn’t sound one hundred percent welcoming to the idea.

  ‘We did talk about it.’

  ‘You talked about it.’

  ‘Yes. Well?’

  ‘When do you want to meet?’

  ‘Soon. Sooner the better.’

  ‘Well, I’m leaving this afternoon to go and stay with some friends for the weekend.’

  ‘Oh.’ He felt a stab of disappointment.

  ‘School as usual next week, and at the moment I find I’m too tired really to enjoy going out weekday evenings. Next weekend, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes.’ Now he was near to clinching the date, Charles felt unaccountably gauche and unwilling to firm it up. Almost as nervous as he had felt in such circumstances during his teens. And this was with his own wife, for God’s sake. ‘Well, look, I’m not absolutely certain of the schedule on the series for this week. They add odd days of filming and things. I think next weekend’d be all right, but can I get back to you on it?’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ said Frances. But she made it sound as if it didn’t really matter to her a great deal whether he did or not.

  He had his designer lunch in the pub. Dutch Rollmop Ploughman’s. That really was taking the Common Agricultural Policy too far, he reckoned. Still, it gave him a good thirst for the beer.

  He felt pretty good, really. Almost content. There was no one in the pub he knew more than to nod at, but that suited him fine. And of course no one recognised him as an actor. He wondered idly if that situation would change once Stanislas Braid was being funnelled into the nation’s sitting rooms. Six months thence, if he sat on the same chair, would he be aware of people on the fringes of his vision nudging each other and whispering, ‘Isn’t that . . .?’ The idea seemed ridiculous. But the extrovert in Charles Paris, the part that made him an actor, wasn’t wholly repelled by it.

  He picked up a tabloid newspaper that someone had left on the table and glanced through it. World news didn’t seem to get any less depressing. In fact, now it seemed to him that the bits that weren’t depressing or horrifying were just boring. He tried to remember when he’d last read something in a newspaper that had interested him. A very long time ago. Dear, oh, dear, he was becoming a cynical, desiccated old stick.

  His eye was caught by a familiar name on the gossip-column page, and he read the snide little paragraph with fascination.

  ‘Everyone knows there’s nothing wrong with gilded warbler Jimmy Sheet’s marriage. He keeps telling us that after the threatened earthquakes of last year it’s as solid as a rock. So no doubt loveable cockney Jim has told his wife all about the mystery brunette he squired to Stringfellow’s on Tuesday night. Otherwise one might say that Jimmy, now turning his attentions from music to acting, is in danger of being caught in the act!’

  It was a typical piece of nudging copy, but it confirmed what Mort Verdon had told Charles. And confirmed Sippy Stokes’s fairly lowly profile in the entertainment industry. The columnist had presumably tried without success to identify her. Just as well, from Jimmy Sheet’s point of view, that no one had made the connection between the mystery girl at Stringfellow’s and the dead actress whose photograph was all over Thursday’s newspapers.

  Still, the paragraph offered an intriguing new sidelight on the character of Jimmy Sheet. Hmm, thought Charles, maybe newspapers do sometimes contain news that’s interesting.

  Chapter Seven

  CHARLES sometimes wondered who found television rehearsal rooms. Was there an elite band of dedicated men whose sole mission was to scour London for boys’ clubs and rugby clubs and church halls and drill halls that passed the stringent tests of suitability for their purpose? How many potential venues were rejected on the grounds of being too comfortable or insufficiently dispiriting? How many were rejected for being too convenient for public transport or because they had adequate parking? How many failed selection because they were actually congenial places in which to spend one’s time?

  The conjectural band of searchers had clearly excelled themselves when they found the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall, in which the rehearsals for Stanislas Braid took place. This was the apotheosis of the television rehearsal room, the one for which every other hall in London must have been rejected.

  Situated a good twenty minutes’ walk from the nearest tube station, jammed in an alley between a cement works and a timber yard, wh
ose lorries were a perpetual hazard to anyone foolish enough to risk leaving their car outside, the Lesser Hall’s high windows were so begrimed that what light did filter through had an unhealthy, diluted pallor about it. The lights inside, kept constantly switched on, apologetically illuminated walls the colour of baby shit. As Charles looked around the room on the Monday morning of the second read-through, he realised with delight that he had finally found a context in which to use one of his favourite words: ‘fuscous’.

  The only bright colours in the room, apart from the clothes of the cast and production team, were the strips of variously coloured tape with which the outlines of the different sets had been marked on the floor by assiduous stage managers. But these were largely covered by the long chain of tables, surrounded by chairs, at which the read-through was to take place.

  W. T. Wintergreen – or Winifred Railton – had acknowledged Charles with an inclination of her head but made no reference to their conversation of the previous Friday. She had a script open on her lap and, with her sister, Louisa, as ever, close beside her, was deep in conversation with Dilly Muirfield. From the expression on the script editor’s face, she was getting yet more complaints that the script of this episode, ‘The Italian Stiletto Murder,’ had diverged too far from the original book and that, as Louisa Railton recurrently complained in fierce whispers to her sister, ‘Stanislas Braid just wouldn’t do that.’

  Charles spared a few moments of sympathy for Dilly Muirfield’s role. She was the mediator; it was she who had to listen to the endless cavils of the writer of the books, the writers of the scripts, the stars, the producer, and the director. She then, rather as the floor manager did in the studio, had to translate the complaints into acceptable demands for the people against whom they were made.

  Charles had heard this process in action more than once. He had heard Russell Bentley denouncing the script to Dilly with the words ‘It’s a load of shit – the work of an absolute incompetent. I mean, the character of Stanislas Braid virtually disappears for the whole middle of the episode.’

  And he had heard Dilly relaying the message to Will Parton in conciliatory tones: ‘I was just wondering whether it might be better if we inserted a little extra scene for Stanislas Braid in the middle here, you know, just to remind the audience how he’s proceeding with his investigation?’

  He had also heard Will Parton’s response to this suggestion, and though the object of the writer’s vilification had been Russell Bentley, it was Dilly Muirfield who had to listen to all the foul language. She really was in a no-win situation.

  Working for a producer like Ben Docherty, whose daily Jekyll and Hyde act made him quite capable of spending the whole afternoon reversing all the decisions he had made in the morning, can’t have made the script editor’s job any easier.

  What was striking about that morning in the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall was how little impact the death of Sippy Stokes had made on the production. Rick Landor, the one person who might have been personally affected, was not there, and for the new Director it was ancient history, something that had happened the week before, nothing to do with him.

  The new Director was only in his late twenties. This was his first major production, and he was very much on his dignity, determined to impose his authority on the proceedings. His mind was too full of the professional challenges of the coming fortnight to have any room for thoughts of the previous week’s death.

  But the rest of the cast and production team, those who had been working with the dead girl only a few days before, seemed equally unaffected. The ripples caused by her death had quickly smoothed themselves out, and the surface of the production was just as it had been before.

  Or, to be truthful, it was rather better than it had been before. Previously, the knowledge of what a bad actress Sippy Stokes was had infected everyone with a kind of unease, the feeling that her incompetence might be sabotaging the chances of their series.

  The new girl, Joanne Rhymer, it was immediately evident, would be a very different proposition. For a start, she looked much better for the part. Sippy Stokes, though an attractive girl, had had a gypsy, almost tarty quality about her. Her dark hair and sensuous lips had seemed too knowing for the innocent Christina, and the woodenness of her performance had given some of her lines an unwanted air of innuendo, as if she were sending up their naiveté.

  But Joanne Rhymer, although dressed as fashionably as befitted a twenty-year-old actress, had about her a timeless quality. Her face was heart-shaped, and her blond hair showed off flashes of auburn even in the muted lighting of the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall. She had a trim figure that would suit the range of thirties dresses so painstakingly assembled by Wardrobe.

  Above all, she had about her an air of credible innocence. The potentially twee lines of Christina, the cloying relationship between her and her father, might become almost believable when expressed by this child-woman.

  Charles couldn’t help speculating about how much her character reflected the innocence of her appearance. His conversation with Maurice had reminded him of Gwen Rhymer’s fabled nymphomania. Was it by any chance a characteristic that the daughter had inherited? Was he looking at another Blue Nun in the making?

  You’re a disgusting, prurient old sod, he told himself. Real classic dirty old man. But this self-administered admonition didn’t stop his speculations. The trouble was, you see, he had once been the beneficiary of Gwen Rhymer’s ‘proclivities’, and while not approving of her behaviour or reputation, he couldn’t help remembering that he had enjoyed the experience enormously. So he felt justified in having more than a passing interest in her daughter’s character.

  As soon as the read-through started, it was clear that Joanne Rhymer’s talent was equal to her looks. She brought a kind of resilience to the character’s naiveté. Lines that looked hopelessly sentimental on the page managed, through her delivery, to become charming.

  Everyone in the rehearsal room was aware of the contrast from the first read-through. At that stage they had suspected that Sippy Stokes was, like a lot of actresses, just a bad reader. The full deficiency of her talent had not then been exposed. But it had still made for an edgy atmosphere.

  With Joanne Rhymer in the part, though, everyone could relax. Charles watched as she read her first scene and saw the relief growing on various faces around the table.

  Will Parton looked positively triumphant, finally vindicated in the knowledge that his lines would work if played in the right way. W. T. Wintergreen and Louisa also beamed; for the first time they seemed to be happy about the way one of the Stanislas Braid characters was being portrayed. Russell Bentley seemed at ease, too. He probably wasn’t aware of why he felt better; the habit of not noticing what the rest of the cast did prevented him from realising how well his lines were being fed to him; but at last he seemed able to play the part of Russell Bentley.

  And Ben Docherty’s face glowed with benevolence, as if he were a proud father watching the performance of his favourite daughter.

  Yes, there was no doubt about it. Joanne Rhymer’s performance worked. She was Christina Braid.

  Except, of course, she wasn’t. She was Elvira Braid, just back from finishing school in Switzerland. Her sister, Christina, thanks to the inspired invention of Will Parton, had ‘gone to Paris to nurse an old school friend recovering from a nasty bout of influenza’.

  They got through the whole of the first Stanislas Braid/Christina scene before Russell Bentley interrupted the reading. ‘Look, there’s something wrong here.’

  ‘Sorry, could we read straight through?’ said the new Director. ‘We’re doing this on the watch. We’ll pick up any notes afterward.’

  ‘No, this is important. We’ve got to sort it out before we go on.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Read-through first,’ insisted the director, unaware that he was entering his first battle of wills with his star.

  ‘No,’ said Russell Bentley firml
y.

  The P.A. gave a short-tempered sigh and clicked off her stopwatch.

  ‘Look, I’m the Director,’ said the new Director, ‘and if I say we continue the read-through, then we continue the read-through.’

  ‘No,’ Russell Bentley repeated.

  ‘Come on, you’re a professional actor. Surely you know how to behave at a rehearsal?’

  This was dangerous ground. The worst insult that can be thrown at an actor is the accusation that he’s unprofessional. And for a new director to throw it at his star on a first read-through showed a lack of diplomacy that verged on the suicidal.

  Russell Bentley’s face flushed with anger. ‘Are you saying that I’m not –’

  Ben Docherty realised the gravity of the situation and fulfilled his producer’s role by interrupting. ‘Now just a minute. Don’t let’s get heated about this. I think Russell may have a point.’

  ‘I’m the Director,’ the new Director insisted doggedly, ‘and I say we should get on with the read-through.’

  ‘Well, I’m the Producer,’ said Ben Docherty, ‘and I say we should hear what Russell has to say first.’

  ‘All right.’ The new Director flung his script petulantly down on the table. ‘If you’re one of those producers who constantly undermines his director’s authority . . .’

  Ben Docherty didn’t rise to this bait. Instead, he turned to his star in a conciliatory manner and said, ‘Now, what was your point, Russell?’

  ‘Simply this, Ben. This lovely young girl – what was your name again, dear?’

  ‘Joanne.’

  ‘Yes, Joanne . . . is playing a part just like that of Christina, my daughter, and yet –’ Russell continued, repeating for emphasis ‘– and yet we keep referring to the character as “Elvira”.’

  ‘Yes, Russell, and you know the reasons for that. Look, I agree, the characters are virtually interchangeable, but that makes things even simpler. All you have to do is to say the different name.’

  ‘It’s not just that. I also have a bit of meaningless drivel about finishing schools in Switzerland and friends with influenza. Why can’t I just cut all that and call the character Christina?’