A Series of Murders

by Simon Brett

  But even as he formed these pious intentions, he knew that he would never put them into practice. Like moving out of Hereford Road, organised expeditions into the countryside somehow weren’t Charles Paris.

  There was an ancient black Volkswagen Beetle parked outside the cottage on whose door Charles knocked at precisely three-thirty. W. T. Wintergreen admitted him with old-fashioned formality.

  The cottage that Winifred and Louisa Railton shared was so small it felt like a doll’s house, and entering it was like stepping back thirty years. The decor, the furniture, everything about the place had a fifties feel to it.

  So did the spread laid out on the table in the tiny sitting room. Charles didn’t realise that people still had ‘tea’ on that kind of scale. It was a meal that had never particularly appealed to him, but he couldn’t help being impressed by the serried ranks of sandwiches, the plates of rock buns and almond slices on doilies, the – yes, they really were fairy cakes (goodness, when had he last seen a fairy cake?) – the sugar-dusted Victoria sponge, the ginger cake, the meringues, the Dundee cake. It had an air of excess about it, as if a television designer had been determined to show every aspect of his research into the period and piled on too much detail.

  Yet the two Railton sisters seemed to find nothing unusual about the scene. It did not appear that they had pushed the boat out particularly in Charles’s honour. The feeling was that they had a tea like this every afternoon of their lives.

  And why not? Everything about the cottage bespoke an orderliness, a life of neat predictability, in which untidy emotions were controlled by an unshakeable daily timetable. In a television studio or in the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall, the Railtons looked anachronistically out of place, whereas in their own environment they fitted in. But then, of course, it was a deeply old-fashioned environment.

  Charles looked at the sisters while Winifred went through an elaborate tea-pouring ritual of jugs and strainers and sugar tongs and spoons and tried to estimate how old they were. Louisa was clearly the younger, perhaps by as much as seven years, though it was difficult to tell with women of their age.

  Both had salt-and-pepper hair cut in straight lines across the napes of their necks and clipped back with slides on either sides of their heads. Their skins were freckled, but with sun spots rather than the blotches of age. They were thin, both above average height, with Winifred a couple of inches taller than her sister. Winifred wore glasses with almost transparent frames. Both had on flowered print dresses that buttoned all the way up the front and stout buckled sandals at the end of bare, thin freckled legs.

  They could really have been any age between sixty and eighty. Charles tried to work it out. If the first W. T. Wintergreen books had come out before the Second World War, even given exceptional literary precocity, Winifred must have been at least twenty in 1935. Which would put her in her late seventies. With Louisa around the seventy mark. Yes, that’d be about right.

  The thought of Winifred’s books reminded him of the message he had to pass on.

  ‘My wife is a great admirer of your detective stories, er . . .’ Like Ben Docherty, he had difficulty in knowing how to address the writer. He settled on ‘. . . Miss Railton.’

  She didn’t offer any informality of the ‘Please call me Winifred’ variety but simply acknowledged the compliment. ‘That’s very nice to hear, Mr. Paris. I don’t think any writer can tire of hearing that people enjoy his or her books. Not, I hasten to add, that it’s something which I hear often enough to be in any danger of tiring of it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure . . .’ Charles shrugged ineffectually.

  ‘I was not actually aware that you were married, Mr. Paris.’

  ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. Something someone said around the television company led me to suppose that you were not married.’

  ‘I am . . . sort of . . . technically married.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘But we don’t live together all of the time.’

  Any of the time, actually, he thought with a sudden access of misery. He really must ring Frances. See if there was any chance of their getting back together. Yes, he’d make that his number-one priority. Ring her that evening.

  ‘No, my wife was saying,’ he moved on, ‘that your books really got her through her adolescence.’

  ‘How nice.’

  ‘She said the first ones came out in the late thirties.’

  ‘Yes. The Spanish Rapier Murder was published in 1937.’ Winifred Railton flashed a modest smile. ‘I did begin rather young.’

  ‘And then you continued till – when, the late fifties, was it?’

  ‘Yes, excepting the war years. Sixteen titles in all.’

  ‘Very impressive. Why did you stop? Was it that styles were changing in crime fiction?’

  ‘No, not really.’ She cleared her throat. ‘We had domestic problems. Our father was ill. I found I had my time cut out looking after him.’

  ‘That’s our father,’ Louisa Railton said suddenly.

  She pointed to a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. The clothes dated it as having been taken in the late twenties. A large fair-haired man sat at a garden table. Behind him, with an arm around his shoulder, stood a tall, bespectacled girl in a tennis dress. On his knee sat a smaller girl without glasses who looked up adoringly into her father’s eyes. Both children were strikingly pretty, and there was no doubt that they were the originals of the two old women with whom Charles sat over that lavish tea in Ham Common.

  The house in front of which the group had been photographed was a huge Edwardian pile. Clearly, though a cottage in Ham Common was a very desirable property, the Railton sisters had come down in the world since their childhood.

  Louisa Railton was looking at him with such naked appeal in her eyes that Charles felt he had to make some comment on the photograph. ‘A very fine looking man,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Louisa agreed.

  Winifred seemed unwilling to get side-tracked into a conversation about her late father. ‘Mr. Paris, you may have wondered why we invited you here this afternoon.’

  ‘The thought did cross my mind, yes.’

  ‘The fact is, Mr. Paris, we are not at all happy with certain aspects of the way West End Television is making the Stanislas Braid series.’

  ‘No. Well, I’m afraid television is a difficult medium. I mean, often it’s hard for a writer of a book to see why certain changes have been made to a –’

  Winifred Railton cut through his flannel. ‘The fact is, Mr. Paris, that the W. T. Wintergreen books are very dear to us.’

  ‘I’m sure they are.’

  ‘We have lived through the creation of each and every word of those books.’

  ‘I can understand how –’

  ‘Have you ever done any creative writing, Mr. Paris?’

  ‘Yes, I have. I’ve written a few plays. Never quite had the nerve or the energy to tackle a novel.’

  ‘No, but you will know from writing your plays how deeply involved one gets with the characters one creates.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And how distressing it is to see one’s characters incorrectly portrayed.’

  ‘I’m sure it is, Miss Railton. I think, with television, what you have to do is just take the money and forget about it.’

  ‘That seems an extremely spineless approach, Mr. Paris.’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s one that will save you a great deal of heartache. Television is a medium notorious for making changes. Goodness, you should get Will Parton on the subject of things that’ve been done to his scripts over the years. You wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘I don’t think Mr. Parton’s experiences are really relevant, Mr. Paris. It is not as if he is a creator of characters; he is merely a journeyman, an interpreter of other people’s original work.’

  ‘I think you may be underestimating the skill that he brings to what he does.’

  ‘Mr. Paris, he c
learly doesn’t care about it. He sees his work on the Stanislas Braid series as just another job of work.’

  ‘Well, yes, but –’

  ‘Do you know, before he started adapting them, he had not even read one of the W. T. Wintergreen books?’

  Charles found it interesting to note how Winifred constantly used the pronoun ‘we’ when describing the writing of the books and yet could speak of ‘the W. T. Wintergreen books’ as if they were somehow detached from her.

  She allowed a pause for him to appreciate the full enormity of Will Parton’s ignorance, and Charles had a horrible fear that he was about to be asked how many of the books he had read.

  But the danger passed. ‘As I say, Mr. Paris, there are far too many things in the production which the West End Television people have got completely wrong.’

  ‘Yes, I am sure there are a few details that –’

  ‘We are not talking about details, Mr. Paris. We are talking about major points in the tone of voice and the characterisation in the books which have been wantonly altered.’

  ‘Ah.’ There seemed little point in making further attempts to describe how television worked; better just to sit out their objections and mutter occasional condolences. They had dragged him out all this way just to have a moan, and a moan they were going to have, whether he liked it or not.

  ‘For a start,’ Winifred Railton began her catalogue, ‘they have got the character of Stanislas Braid completely wrong.’

  Charles said nothing.

  ‘He is meant to be an intellectual, and yet it is clear that that actor, Russell Whateveritis . . .’

  ‘Bentley.’

  ‘. . . Russell Bentley has probably never read a book in his life.’

  ‘Miss Railton, the whole point about acting is that actors take on characters. Just as you don’t have to be a murderer to play the part of a murderer, so you don’t have to be an intellectual to play the part of an intellectual. You act. You become another personality. You think yourself into the way that personality would react and behave.’

  ‘That Russell Bentley doesn’t. He makes no effort to think himself into anything. He is exactly the same when he’s playing the part as when he’s not.’

  This observation was so unanswerably true that Charles could think of no response to it.

  ‘What’s more,’ Louisa Railton suddenly burst out, ‘that actor’s got dark brown hair, and anyone who’s read even a couple of pages of any of the W. T. Wintergreen books knows that Stanislas Braid didn’t have dark brown hair!’

  There was a childlike petulance in the outburst, and when her sister calmed her, Charles realised that Winifred did treat Louisa almost like a child. She was protective, overprotective, as if she wanted to keep from her younger sister the truth of what the world was really like.

  ‘While one regrets,’ Winifred conceded, ‘that the physical appearance of the characters is wrong, that worries me less than the fact that their souls are wrong.’

  ‘Their souls?’ Charles echoed weakly. He sneaked a look at his watch. Dear God, it was only twenty past four. He’d asked the cab to pick him up at five-thirty, reckoning that two hours was probably an appropriately genteel time to spend over tea. The thought of over an hour more of this catalogue of complaints was deeply depressing. While he could feel sympathy with the Railton sisters’ objections, he knew that there was nothing he could do to help them. They had been involved with the characters of the W. T. Wintergreen books for over fifty years. They knew nothing of the workings of television. There was no level at which his explanations would make any sense to them.

  ‘Yes, their souls,’ Winifred confirmed. ‘Russell Bentley is nowhere near the soul of Stanislas Braid. And that other young man is hopelessly wrong for Blodd. Blodd is not meant to be a cockney. It is stated quite clearly in all the books that Blodd was brought up in Cornwall.’

  ‘Surely that’s a relatively minor point?’

  ‘It would be a relatively minor point if the soul of the character were right. But it isn’t. No one reading the W. T. Wintergreen books could doubt that Blodd is a lugubrious character – positively melancholic at times. And yet this young man plays him as if he were running a side-show at a funfair.’

  ‘Don’t any of the characters seem right to you?’ Charles pleaded.

  ‘Well, now, the new girl who started yesterday, she seemed right for Christina.’

  ‘Yes,’ Louisa agreed softly. ‘The colouring’s right, apart from anything else.’

  ‘Except, of course, they’re destroying everything by not calling her Christina. They’ve got this dreadful idea about introducing someone called Elvira. I mean, the idea that Stanislas Braid could have two favourite daughters is just so ridiculous and incongruous.’

  ‘And the idea that he would call one of them Elvira . . .’

  ‘. . . . almost defies belief,’ W. T. Wintergreen concluded bitterly.

  ‘Well, I think, Miss Railton, that I can set your mind at rest on that matter.’ Thank goodness there was at least one detail on which he could bring the two poor old dears comfort. He related the conversation he had had with Maurice Skellern about his availability for an extra fortnight, and they were forced to concede that that was encouraging news.

  ‘But,’ he concluded, ‘with regard to the other things W.E.T. is doing, I’m afraid I can’t be of much help to you. I can’t make them change their policies.’

  ‘Oh, no, we know that,’ said Winifred. ‘You don’t think that was why we invited you down here, do you?’

  ‘Well, I hadn’t really thought . . . I don’t know . . .’

  ‘We invited you down here,’ she continued firmly, ‘to give you some tips on how you should play the part of Sergeant Clump.’

  ‘Oh, did you?’ said Charles weakly.

  ‘Yes. Now tell us – how do you see the character of Sergeant Clump?’

  ‘Well,’ he began cautiously, ‘I’d seen him rather as a not very intelligent village policeman.’

  ‘Yes, he is a not very intelligent village policeman . . .’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Charles with considerable relief.

  ‘. . . but there’s so much more to him than that. Isn’t there, Louisa?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Winifred. So much more.’

  ‘I mean, when you get into his soul . . .’

  ‘Yes, when you get into his soul. . . .’

  And for the remaining hour of his stay the two Railton sisters proceeded to fill Charles Paris in on the hidden depths of the soul of Sergeant Clump.

  It was the most exhausting hour of his life. He greeted the arrival of his cab as if it were a food lorry in a refugee camp.

  When he finally got back to Hereford Road, Charles Paris drank two inches of Bell’s whisky and fell fast asleep before he even had time to take his clothes off.

  He completely forgot about his intention to ring Frances.

  Chapter Ten

  TWO PLAINCLOTHES policemen arrived at the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants to interrupt rehearsals on Wednesday morning. They were making some inquiries into the death of Sippy Stokes, ‘just checking out,’ as they put it, ‘how exactly she met her end.’ The word murder was not mentioned, but its shadow immediately loomed in the minds of everyone present.

  The new Director was furious at this disruption in his schedule. ‘I am the Director of this show,’ he kept saying, ‘and it’s my job to see that it gets made.’

  The policemen were impassively firm; they knew he had a job to do, but they also had a job to do. Could they please talk to the members of the cast and production crew who had been in the studio on the previous Wednesday morning? Grudgingly, the new Director gave way, and the relevant members of his team were trooped away to be questioned in the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Great Hall.

  The police said that they had no reason to believe that the death of Sippy Stokes had been anything other than accidental, but in cases like this they did feel an obligation to find out as much about
the background as possible.

  Charles wondered what new evidence they had uncovered. As he had many times before in his detective career, he envied the police their research facilities. There’s nothing like an encounter with a professional criminal investigation to make an amateur sleuth profoundly aware of his amateur status. Why couldn’t Charles Paris have been blessed with a convenient brother-in-law on the force, like Lord Peter Wimsey’s Inspector Parker? Even Stanislas Braid was not above picking Sergeant Clump’s so-called brains when he needed a little privileged information.

  But Charles had no such handy informant. He could only guess the stage of investigation that the police had reached. Perhaps something had come up at the post-mortem. Maybe the doctor’s bland conviction that all he had to do was find the relevant fallen object to fit the dent in Sippy Stokes’s skull had proved inadequate. None of the objects had fitted? They were now looking for a murder weapon? An anonymous letter had been sent to the police announcing that Sippy had been murdered? Charles could only conjecture.

  The policemen didn’t give the impression that their inquiry was particularly urgent, though. They seemed to be going through the motions rather than conducting a life-or-death investigation. Their manner was that of men who had been given a directive from above to make certain inquiries; they were doing as they were told but didn’t have much faith in the value of what they were doing. Whether that was actually the case, or whether their apparent diffidence masked an uncompromising determination to get at the truth, was another question at whose answer Charles could only guess.

  They asked the assembled crowd of actors and production staff what they had been doing between eleven and twelve the previous Wednesday morning, and all the answers conformed with what Charles had witnessed in the canteen and Studio A during that period.