A Series of Murders

by Simon Brett

  All the answers except one. Tony Rees, the quiet A.S.M. who seemed content to live in the shadow of the more flamboyant Mort Verdon, produced a different version of events from what Charles remembered.

  ‘I went to the canteen for coffee as soon as the break was called,’ the young man told the police. His voice was so rarely heard that it was quite a shock to hear how thick the Welsh accent was. ‘I was going back to the studio when I remembered I had to pick up a props list from Design Department. So I went up there.’

  ‘And what time did you get back into Studio A?’

  ‘I don’t remember exactly.’

  ‘Well, was it before twelve o’clock or after?’

  ‘Definitely after,’ said Tony Rees.

  The police did not question this answer, but Charles Paris knew it was a lie. He clearly remembered seeing the A.S.M. behind the set at about a quarter to twelve, only moments before his unpleasant discovery in the props room.

  He also remembered that at the moment Tony Rees had looked extremely guilty.

  Immediately on his return from the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Great Hall to the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall, Charles was swept up into rehearsal by the new Director. (‘I’m Director of this show, and already far too much of my time has been wasted this morning.’) When he next had a break, Charles noticed with dismay Tony Rees had left the rehearsal room.

  The following day he wasn’t there, either. According to Mort Verdon, the A.S.M. was laid up with the flu. So Charles couldn’t pursue his most intriguing line of investigation.

  In fact, the only constructive thing he did the rest of that week was to pluck up courage and ring Frances. She agreed to have dinner with him on Saturday night. She didn’t sound over the moon about the idea, but at least she agreed.

  ‘Dear, oh, dear, Charles Paris, are you becoming a theatrical smoothie?’

  ‘Hardly, Frances.’

  ‘Well, I mean, taking me out to dinner at Joe Allen’s.’ She looked around the dark wood-panelled basement, with its long noisy bar, its red checked tablecloths, its blackboard menus, its swooping waiters in long white aprons.

  ‘Oh, come on. We’re only here because the food’s good. And it’s cheap.’

  ‘Nothing to do with the fact that it’s a favoured haunt of stars of stage and TV?’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m not like that.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Anyway, they didn’t give us a table by the wall where they put the stars.’

  ‘They didn’t, did they, the rotters? Perhaps you have a little way to go before you’re really a big telly name.’

  ‘Shut up, Frances.’

  ‘But it’s true, Charles. You are different. Subtly different. Being in lucrative employment has wrought a mysterious change in you.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have taken me to Joe Allen’s a year or so ago. You’d have made some disparaging remark about theatrical trendies if the place had even been mentioned. Now you think it’s just possible that you might be becoming a theatrical trendy.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ But the idea she had planted did, for the first time in his life, have a little sneaking appeal. Why, after all, shouldn’t he be successful? He’d waited long enough, in all conscience. He’d served his time. Why shouldn’t Charles Paris become famous in his declining years?

  And if he could be a success in his professional life, why couldn’t he get his private life sorted out, too? Time for decisive action.

  ‘Frances . . .’ he began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wanted just to talk for a moment about us.’

  ‘Us? That sounds ominous.’

  ‘Where we stand.’

  ‘We’re sitting down,’ she said, evasively flippant.

  ‘No, I meant –’

  ‘I know what you meant, Charles. All right.’ She laid her hands, almost as if she were laying her cards, on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth in front of her. ‘Where do we stand? Well, my stance is that of a headmistress of a girls’ school, living in a flat in Highgate. Your stance is that of an intermittently employed actor living in a bed-sitter I’d rather not think about in Bayswater. My job is extremely time-consuming and uses up most of my energy. Your job is intermittently time-consuming, and I don’t think I really want to know how you use up the rest of your energy. We are neither of us in the first flush of youth.’ She lifted her hands up in a ‘That’s about it’ gesture. ‘Yes, Charles, I’d say that’s where we stand.’

  ‘You have forgotten to mention one thing, Frances.’

  ‘Really? What’s that?’

  ‘That we’re married to each other.’

  ‘Oh, Charles, I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that.’

  ‘How strongly would you put it, then?’

  ‘Well, I think I’d go as far as to say that we’re not divorced.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  She wasn’t making it easy for him. On the other hand, why should she? There was too much history between them. Too many promising starts at repairing their relationship had come unstuck for her to be anything other than wary in her dealings with her husband.

  ‘Am I to gather that this is another attempt at a rapprochement, Charles?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, Frances, it is.’

  ‘I see. And how far are you proposing to rapproche this time?’

  ‘As far as possible.’

  ‘All the way? I say. Dramatic stuff. Do you mean you want to rapproche your way back into my bed?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, I do. But not just that.’

  ‘What, you mean rapproche your way back into living together? Even rapproche your way back into’ – her voice dropped to an awe-struck whisper – ‘being married to each other?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what I mean.’ She looked bewildered. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘What do I say?’ She mused for a moment, as if considering a plethora of possibilities. ‘Well, I think the first thing I’d say is Why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes, why should we go back to being married? It didn’t work first time.’

  ‘No, I agree. But if we tried harder –’

  ‘I tried extremely hard the first time, Charles,’ she said with some asperity.

  ‘All right. If I tried harder.’

  ‘I have seen a few of your attempts at trying harder. Not always very impressive. No, I don’t think that’s a very good argument as to why we should get back together.’

  ‘But, Frances, I’m not getting any younger.’

  ‘And that is an even worse argument. You are offering me the unique opportunity of sharing your arthritis and incontinence, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m just saying that, I don’t know, we do have a lot of things in common.’

  ‘Name one.’

  ‘Well . . .’ The pause was longer than it should have been. ‘Juliet.’

  ‘Yes, we have a daughter in common, but she is now grown up, with a family of her own. We no longer need to “stay together for the sake of the children”, particularly since we didn’t stay together at the time when that argument might have been relevant.’

  No, she certainly wasn’t making it easy. He tried another, more sentimental tack. ‘Even after all this time, Frances, and after everything that’s happened, still, even now, in a strange way, we were made for each other.’

  ‘I blame the manufacturer,’ said Frances.

  ‘But it’s true. We do still love each other.’

  She was silent. She looked away from him. When she looked back, her eyes were glazed with unshed tears. ‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘it’s true. But it’s not relevant.’

  ‘Of course it’s relevant. If two people love each other –’

  ‘Then what? It doesn’t mean they can live together. Good God, Charles, we’re living proof that it doesn’t mean that.’

  ‘Love is important.’

  ‘I don’t deny it. But a lot of oth
er things are important, too. And though I don’t question the quality of your love, I have less faith in your ability to deal with the other things in life.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Come on, you have absolutely no interest in domesticity. And by domesticity I don’t mean housework or anything like that. I just mean living in a house with someone else.’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘You can’t deny it, can you, Charles?’

  ‘No.’ He sighed and gazed into the middle distance. ‘There are some things I’m interested in, though. Even good at. I often think if life were all making love and getting drunk, I could cope with it better.’

  ‘Yes, I think most of us could. But I’m afraid it isn’t. And even if it were, some people could be forgiven for wishing that the love-making was always directed towards the same person.’

  The bitterness of her final words reminded him of how much he had hurt her in the past. At that moment he felt infinite regret for his behaviour toward her. At that moment he vowed he would never again make love to any woman other than Frances. At that moment he vowed that if Frances wouldn’t have him, he would never make love to anyone ever again. At that moment . . .

  ‘Well, Frances, it sounds as if you don’t really want to rapproche that far.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So won’t we see each other again?’

  She let out a huge exasperated sigh of frustration. ‘Yes, of course we’ll bloody see each other again, Charles Paris! God, I know you’re an actor, but why do you have to make everything so dramatic all the time? Like it or not – and most of the time I don’t think I do like it – we are involved with each other. I can’t just shake you off and pretend you don’t exist – much as I would often like to. No, you’re part of me. I’ve got Charles Paris in the same way that some people have got colour blindness . . . or hay fever . . . or eczema.”

  Charles grinned. ‘Do you know, Frances, I think that was a compliment.’

  She grinned, too. Unwillingly. ‘Nearest you’re going to bloody get to one,’ she said, and leaned across the table to ruffle his hair.

  They had a second bottle of wine and finished the meal in high good spirits. Charles put his arm around his wife as they left the restaurant.

  They were just at the door when he caught sight of two familiar figures at a table in the far corner. A man and a woman, heads bowed together, deep in intimate conversation.

  The man was Ben Docherty, Producer of Stanislas Braid. But it was the woman he was with who interested Charles.

  She was the Blue Nun. Gwen Rhymer. Mother of Joanne Rhymer.

  So maybe Ben Docherty had had a vested interest in the recasting of the part of Christina Braid?

  Chapter Eleven

  THE FILMING for the second episode of Stanislas Braid was standard W.E.T. filming; in other words, no location was more than half a mile away from W.E.T. House. But the production team did not have the freedom of selection that some other series enjoyed. Stanislas Braid was set in the thirties – or at least in that cloud-cuckoo Golden-Age-of-Detective-Fiction Country-House-Murder time that approximates the thirties – and so the usual moody shots of urban decay at the tail-end of the twentieth century could not be indulged.

  As a result, the location managers had their work cut out finding suitable venues for the Great Detective’s investigations. It wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of buildings of the right period – London is full of them – but tracking down buildings unmarred by television aerials, entryphones, or an adjacent McDonald’s was not so easy. Double yellow lines had to be painted out, parking meters disguised as lampposts, and glass-sided telephone boxes dressed up as red ones. There were many interruptions to the schedule as traffic of far too contemporary a design was diverted and the five expensively hired vintage vehicles were repositioned to give an illusion of metropolitan bustle.

  (The authentic 1930s bus had cost so much to hire that Ben Docherty insisted it should earn its keep by appearing in almost every shot. Its destination board was constantly changed to give the impression that the whole bus network of London was on the screen.)

  Anachronistic passers-by also had to be kept out of shot, and as filming always attracts crowds – particularly when the setting is historical – this was a major problem. The limited number of background artistes that Ben Docherty’s budget allowed stood around in their thirties garb as city gents, ladies of leisure, policemen, barrow boys, nurses, newspaper boys, and flower sellers (it is an unalterable rule of British television that any London daytime exterior set before the war shall include at least one newspaper boy and one flower seller), but there was always the threat of the irruption of a track-suited jogger, a leather-clad motorbike messenger, or a wandering Rastafarian with a ghetto blaster. The location managers were kept busy fielding such invasions.

  The result of all these restrictions was that the shooting tended to be very intimate – a lot of close-ups against authentically ancient backgrounds. Opening the shots out always ran the risk of including glimpses of an Indian takeaway, a distant billboard advertising computers, or an errant punk listening to a Walkman.

  These difficulties added to the problems of a schedule that was already tight. Stanislas Braid was being made on a fortnightly turnaround – a week’s rehearsal, two days’ filming, three days in the studio, to produce fifty-two minutes of television – so there wasn’t much room for finesse in the production. The new Director, who, needless to say, saw himself as the latest messiah of the British film industry, was constantly frustrated in his attempts to ‘make every frame a Rembrandt’ by Ben Docherty’s urgings that they were slipping behind schedule. The Producer was terrified of losing time so early in the production. Most of the later episodes involved filming outside London, and what with the amount of travelling and local difficulties likely to be encountered, the threat of slippage would be much greater then.

  Charles Paris did not have a great deal to do in that week’s filming. Sergeant Clump was rarely off his home patch of Little Breckington, so his involvement in the London scenes was limited. This gave Charles plenty of opportunity to observe the other people around the set and, particularly, to think about the death of Sippy Stokes.

  Most of the potential suspects were there. Jimmy Sheet, to whose shaky marriage an indiscreet Sippy Stokes might have posed a threat, acted his scenes efficiently and spent a lot of time signing autographs for the crowds that gathered.

  Russell Bentley, when not showing resentment that more people asked for Jimmy Sheet’s autograph than for his own, spent most of his time paraphrasing his lines, much to the fury of Will Parton. It also infuriated W. T. Wintergreen and Louisa Railton, who insisted on watching everything that went on.

  Filming offered great opportunities for paraphrase to an actor like Russell Bentley. Since the scenes were mostly done in very short takes, the lines were not really learned, simply mugged up seconds before each take. And if the lighting, the sound, the background action, and the framing of the shot had worked, the Director was unlikely to worry about how approximate the lines might have been. So Russell Bentley had wonderful opportunities to say fewer and fewer lines as Stanislas Braid might have said them and more and more as Russell Bentley would say them. None of these opportunities did he waste.

  The star seemed to have developed a very good working relationship with his new daughter. Joanne Rhymer, as well as being attractive, really was a very good little actress, and though Russell Bentley kept complaining that the relationship was a bit too good to be true, they played their scenes together well. So her appearance on the set was good news for him.

  Presumably, it was also good news for Ben Docherty, since it advanced his campaign with the girl’s mother.

  But surely neither of them would have resorted to murder to make that good news happen? Would they?

  What about the Railtons? What about Will Parton, come to that? They were all better off without Sippy Stokes. But, again, murder seemed an extreme way of d
efending the integrity of one’s writing.

  No, there was only one person who Charles thought could help his investigations in any meaningful way. Tony Rees. And the Assistant Stage Manager was still off work with the flu.

  The first studio day of that episode, Wednesday, began with another row between the new Director and W. T. Wintergreen. It was about a set that had made its first appearance that day. Christina Braid’s bedroom.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the crime writer said. ‘It just shouldn’t be like that. It’s too bright. The blue is too bright.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be blue, anyway,’ her sister contributed. ‘In the books it’s made quite clear that Christina’s room is done in the subtlest of pastel shades. Almost white wallpaper, with a tiny motif of a pale yellow flower. And bedclothes of the palest pink.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the new Director, ‘but this is how the designer sees it.’

  ‘Well, then, I’m afraid he sees it wrong,’ W. T. Wintergreen objected calmly. ‘Has the designer actually read any of the books?’

  ‘I don’t know. I expect he read one or two before the series started.’

  Oh, yes? thought Charles. I bet he didn’t.

  W. T. Wintergreen was implacable. ‘It’s wrong. It’ll have to be changed.’

  ‘It will not be changed,’ said the new Director. ‘It has just been built, and we have a very busy schedule for the next three days. There is no way it could be changed even if anyone wanted it changed.’

  ‘I want it changed,’ said W. T. Wintergreen.

  ‘So do I,’ Louisa Railton agreed.

  ‘Well, you can both forget it. Look, I am the Director of this show, and it’s my job to see that the show gets made. And if you keep wasting my time, it won’t be.’

  ‘I am not wasting your time. I am merely trying to get things right.’

  ‘Listen, if you two continue to disrupt my production, I will have you banned from the studio.’

  ‘You can’t do that. I am W. T. Wintergreen. I wrote the books.’

  ‘And I am the Director, and I am making a television programme! Or trying to!’

  The argument was clearly going to run for some little while yet. Charles Paris drifted over to the set of Stanislas Braid’s study. There was no one about. He moved toward the mantelpiece and picked up the candlestick that had been missing at the time of Sippy Stokes’s death.