A Series of Murders

by Simon Brett

  He lifted it up and turned it over. He didn’t quite know what he was expecting – dried blood, a lingering dark hair? – but whatever it was, he was disappointed. Just the discoloured base of a brass candlestick with the name of the hire firm painted on it in blue.

  He put it back. Then he remembered that the set had been completely dismantled and rebuilt during the last fortnight. It was quite possible that the candlesticks had been put back the other way around.

  With a burst of excitement, he picked up the second candlestick and upturned it.

  Nothing except the name of the hire company. Or at least nothing the naked eye could discern. Maybe a police forensic examination could find some minuscule traces for incrimination. Once again he wondered what the police were up to. Had they written off the death as an accident? Or was their investigation still proceeding?

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Charles turned at the voice to face Mort Verdon. The stage manager was looking at him suspiciously.

  ‘Just interested in where these things were hired from.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Mort didn’t sound convinced. ‘Sorry, we have to be careful. You’d be amazed how much stuff disappears off television studio sets.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes, boofle. Lots of light-fingered people about, you know. Whenever it’s something historical, when you’ve got a few antiques littered round the place, you’d be surprised how little of it finds its way back to the hire companies. There’s a great deal of, what shall we say, natural wastage?’

  ‘Oh, well, Mort, I can assure you that I wouldn’t dream of –’

  ‘No, never really thought you would, boofle. Just . . . as I say, we have to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Series like this is an absolute field day for those of kleptomaniac tendencies. All this stuff . . .’

  ‘Yes. Has a lot gone missing already?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Those candlesticks, for a start.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Those aren’t the ones we had on the first episode.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. The first pair . . . disappeared at the end of the week.’

  ‘Where do you think they went?’

  The Stage Manager shrugged. ‘Some member of the production team sneaked them out under his anorak, I suppose. Expect they’re on a stall in Church Street Market by now. We had to hire some more.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Never mind. W.E.T. can afford it.’

  ‘Ben Docherty keeps saying the budget’s very tight on this show.’

  ‘The budget may be tight, but W.E.T. can still afford it.’ Mort Verdon’s wry smile suggested that, like Russell Bentley, he hadn’t much time for commercial television companies pleading poverty.

  ‘Hmm. Well, look, Mort, I’m sorry you suspected that I –’

  ‘No, I didn’t, really. Not when I saw it was you. Anyway, actors very rarely walk off with things from the set.’

  ‘Oh, good. I’m glad that my profession has a reputation for honesty.’

  ‘No, actors usually walk off with their costumes.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Be surprised at the end of a series how many leather jackets and tailor-made suits somehow don’t find their way back to Wardrobe.’

  ‘Well, Mort, I really don’t think you have to worry about that happening with me on Stanislas Braid, do you?’

  The stage manager looked appraisingly at Sergeant Clump’s ancient blue serge and grinned. ‘No, Charles, I think we’ll be all right there.’ A thought struck him. ‘Unless of course you’re one of those fetishists who gets his kicks in bed from dressing up as a policeman.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Charles’s face took on a horrified expression. ‘Mort, how on earth did you find out?’

  The break for lunch was announced, and Charles was about to make another bid for a Personal Best to the bar when he noticed Tony Rees.

  The Assistant Stage Manager might well have been around the studio all morning, but Charles hadn’t seen him. He looked pale and wretched, so the flu that had laid him low for a week appeared to have been genuine. But what interested Charles more was that Tony Rees also looked furtive. He was hanging around the fringes of the set as if waiting for all the rest of the production team to leave.

  Charles decided that he, too, would linger. He wanted to talk to the A.S.M., but first he wanted to see what the young man was up to. Charles called a loud ‘See you later’ to no one in particular and then made for the props-room exit. He opened the double doors and let them close with a soft thump, like an intake of breath. He remained inside the studio and moved to a vantage point behind the window of Christina Braid’s bedroom. Gauzy print curtains (‘far too strident’ in W. T. Wintergreen’s estimation) hid him from the rest of the studio but did not impede his view of Tony Rees.

  The A.S.M. stood immobile for a long couple of minutes, testing the silence of the studio. It was complete; after the bustle of the morning, the stillness was absolute.

  Satisfied that he was alone, he moved briskly into action and started straight toward the bedroom set. Charles pushed himself back into the angle between two flats but realised with horror that Tony Rees was coming around the edge of the set toward him. The actor dropped to an uncomfortable crouch behind a loudspeaker.

  Tony Rees was too preoccupied to be vigilant. Having made the decision that he was alone, he had no suspicions of surveillance. He walked quickly past Charles, who was close enough to have touched his trouser leg, and continued around the back of the set.

  But only ten or fifteen yards farther on he stopped. There was a sound of something being moved, fabric at first, then maybe metal. Charles wished he could see what was going on. He craned around as far as he dared from his uncomfortable crouch but still couldn’t see enough. He leaned forward on all fours.

  This was a foolish position for someone dressed as Sergeant Clump to take up. One of the features of the sergeant in the W. T. Wintergreen books – and one of the few that had been carried over into the television series – was that he always had in his breast pocket a row of pencils with which to scribble laboriously in a notebook his criminal theories (all of them doomed to be proved wrong by the quicksilver intellect of Stanislas Braid).

  Now it is a simple fact of gravity that pencils do not stay in the breast pocket of someone leaning forward on all fours, and sure enough, a cascade of them fell to the floor in front of Charles.

  The sounds around the back of the set ceased instantly. Charles, scrabbling to pick up his pencils, saw Tony Rees’s feet appear in front of him. Using the innocent expression that had got him such a big laugh in See How They Run in Chester (‘about as funny as being woken up in the middle of the night by a motorbike’ – Liverpool Daily Post), he said, ‘I seem to have dropped my pencils.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Tony Rees, and he stood unmoving in front of the prostrate policeman.

  Charles gathered together the last of the pencils and stood up. ‘That’s all of them,’ he said fatuously.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tony Rees, still immobile.

  ‘Well, I was just about to leave the studio,’ Charles babbled on.

  ‘So was I,’ said Tony Rees.

  They walked out silently, side by side. Whatever it was the A.S.M. had been doing around the back of the set, he had no intention of continuing it now that he knew he had been observed. Equally, he did not intend to leave Charles alone in the studio to check on his activities.

  ‘I wondered if we could talk?’ said Charles diffidently as they walked up toward the bar.

  ‘I’m busy this lunch hour,’ said Tony Rees, sullenly Welsh.

  ‘Well, maybe some other time?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Whatever the nature of Tony Rees’s ‘busyness,’ it seemed to take second place to keeping an eye on Charles. As he commiserated with Will Parton in the bar over the latest sequence of rewrites Ben Docherty and Dilly Muirfield had demanded, Char
les was aware of the A.S.M. sitting alone at a table in the corner, making one Perrier last a long time. And when Charles and Will decided to nip down to canteen for a W.E.T. subsidised steak, Tony Rees coincidentally also decided that it was time he had something to eat.

  Whatever the secret he kept behind the set was, the A.S.M. didn’t want Charles to sneak into the studio and investigate it.

  Charles Paris was kept busy at the beginning of the afternoon with another Little Breckington Police Station scene. Though this involved three policemen from other forces, Charles did not recognise any of the background artistes involved. He felt a momentary pang for the dashed hopes of the two who had seen Stanislas Braid as a prospect of long-term employment.

  The scene involved, as usual, Sergeant Clump putting forward his thesis about the solution of the current crime, which this week was ‘The Italian Stiletto Murder,’ and Stanislas Braid, with a few deft thrusts of logic, cutting it to shreds. All of these scenes were so similar that Charles envisaged problems with lines before the end of the series; even after two recordings, he was worried about which speeches fitted in which episode.

  And Russell Bentley, whose skill with paraphrase during the filming seemed to have gone to his head, now regarded every line as merely an idea around which he could embroider. This led to conflicts with the new Director, who insisted, ‘I’m the Director of this show, and I have to hear the lines as printed if I’m going to know when to cut my shots.’ It also made life difficult for Charles, since he never knew when his cue had come. The only indication he received was a quizzical silence coupled with a mildly reproachful look from Russell Bentley.

  But these were mere ripples compared to Studio A’s major storm of the afternoon, which occurred in a scene involving Stanislas Braid, his daughter, Christina, and Sergeant Clump. The action was simple enough. Because of the danger of the mission he was about to undertake, Stanislas entrusted his precious daughter to the care of the trustworthy British bobby. Rehearsal for the scene the week before had been slightly sticky, because Russell Bentley kept objecting to the extravagant terms in which Stanislas Braid referred to his daughter.

  ‘I mean, it is over the top, love,’ he said at one point to the new director, whose name he never attempted to master. ‘You know, okay, they love each other as father and daughter should, but lines like “I want this, my most precious jewel, kept in the strongest casket in Christendom” sound a bit much to me. I mean, can’t he just say, “She means a lot to me. I want you to guard her with your life, Clump”? Something along those lines’d be better, wouldn’t you agree, er, old man?’ He appealed to Charles, of whose name he remained equally ignorant.

  The discussions had rumbled on through rehearsal without any final decisions being made about changing the lines. Charles thought Russell Bentley had a good point, for once. The Stanislas/Christina relationship was potentially cloying, and though the casting of Joanne Rhymer made the lines possible, they did still seem excessive. Will Parton also thought the relationship was a bit much, but he was pleased with the way he had adapted it from the books and reckoned he had ‘taken the curse off it’ sufficiently.

  So he didn’t want changes to his carefully wrought dialogue. And, needless to say, W. T. Wintergreen and Louisa wanted the relationship more sugary rather than less. As usual, they couldn’t understand why a single word had been changed from the original book.

  The new Director didn’t seem too concerned about the issue. Like all directors, he regarded words as just things that got in the way of his pictures. But because it was easier for him to work from a fixed text than one that kept changing, he recommended leaving the lines as they were.

  When they rehearsed the scene that afternoon in the studio, Russell Bentley spoke his speeches more or less as written. ‘Sergeant Clump, I am handing into your care a jewel of inestimable price. She is the star who from her birth has shone over my life.’

  ‘Nice bit of twinkling,’ Charles murmured to Joanne Rhymer when they broke after this line.

  She grinned at him, a rather intimate grin. She looked very like her notorious mother when she did that. Charles felt a little illicit flicker of interest.

  When they came to shoot the scene, however, Russell Bentley, as he so often did, produced completely different lines. ‘Sergeant Clump,’ he said, ‘my daughter’s a good kid. You look after her properly, or I’ll have your guts for garters.’

  Remarkably, at the end of the short recording, the floor manager said, ‘That was fine. Okay, just wait for a “clear” on it and we’ll move on.’

  So the change of lines couldn’t have affected the new director’s camera angles. Probably so busy watching the pictures that he hadn’t even heard what was said.

  But before the floor manager had time to move them on to the next scene, the studio was suddenly invaded.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ shouted an elderly but authoritative voice.

  It was W. T. Wintergreen, sailing magnificently in with Louisa in tow, determined to save her dialogue.

  ‘We’ve got to go on,’ said the floor manager gently.

  ‘No! We will not go on until that last scene has been done right!’

  The floor manager was silent for a moment, receiving instructions in his earpiece. No doubt having filtered out the obscenities, he announced diplomatically, ‘The Director says he’s the Director of the show and we’ve got to get on with the next scene.’

  ‘I am the writer of the W. T. Wintergreen books, and I say we don’t go on until we get it right. I will not have actors massacring my characters.’

  ‘Hardly massacring the characters, old girl,’ protested Russell Bentley, as oblivious of W. T. Wintergreen’s name as he was of anyone else’s, ‘just making the characters a bit more realistic.’

  ‘I wrote them realistically.’

  ‘Yes, they are completely real!’ Louisa chipped in.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid the kind of reality people expect nowadays is a bit different. Listen, I have a reputation in television. If the public see that a show’s got Russell Bentley in it, then they –’

  The star’s thousandth reiteration of this routine was surprisingly interrupted. By Ben Docherty. And, even more remarkably, by Ben Docherty being decisive.

  He burst into the studio like a whirlwind. No doubt he was well fuelled by his lunch, but whatever its cause, his performance was impressive.

  ‘Right,’ he roared. ‘That’s enough!’

  The entire studio was silent.

  ‘We’ve wasted quite enough time on this sort of discussion! We’re slipping behind schedule, and we can’t risk doing that. Miss Wintergreen, the directors and I have been very patient. We have listened to your suggestions and followed many of them. But now I’m afraid you are just becoming disruptive. I must ask you and your sister to leave the studio and to keep away from W.E.T. premises until the production of Stanislas Braid is finished!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘But I wrote the books. I created Stanislas Braid.’

  ‘That is neither here nor there. You must leave!’

  W. T. Wintergreen stood her ground, preparing to defend herself. But then Louisa Railton began to cry, weakly, feebly, like a child. Winifred put her arm around her sister’s shoulder and said quietly, ‘Very well.’

  ‘Tony.’ Ben Docherty summoned the Assistant Stage Manager. ‘Will you please escort Miss Wintergreen and her sister out of the building.’

  Tony did as he was told. The three of them, a small funeral cortege, trooped out of Studio A in total silence.

  Charles realised it was his chance. He was not needed in the next scene. He moved surreptitiously to the edge of the set, then slipped behind, just as he had seen Tony Rees do earlier in the day.

  There was no one in sight, no one to interfere with this search. He gauged how far along Tony had gone and dropped to his knees.

  At the bottom of the flats there was a roll of excess canvas. Charles probed along its
length, feeling for some unexpected shape.

  He found it. Through the canvas it felt thin, hard, and metallic.

  He unwound it from its hiding place.

  It was an Italian stiletto. The point felt wickedly sharp.

  He thought back a fortnight. Once again he saw Tony Rees rising guiltily from something he had hidden at this very spot.

  While they were recording ‘The Brass Candlestick Murder,’ Sippy Stokes had been killed with a candlestick.

  Now they were recording ‘The Italian Stiletto Murder.’ Who was its victim intended to be?

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘IS THERE another murder on your mind, Charles?’

  ‘Well, there might be, Frances. Why do you ask?’

  ‘You sound preoccupied. You sound like you do when you’re investigating a murder. Is it that actress whose death was in the papers a week or so back?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘And do you reckon you know who killed her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then go to the police.’

  ‘I haven’t got any evidence. In my experience, when I go to the police with no evidence, they laugh at me.’

  ‘Yes. Well, one can see their point. Anyway, be careful, Charles.’

  ‘The fact that you say that must mean you care, Frances.’

  ‘Stop fishing for compliments. Of course I care.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But don’t assume that I’m particularly happy about the situation.’

  ‘No.’ A little, prickly silence on the telephone line. ‘I did mean what I said, Frances. I really would like us to get back together again on a permanent basis.’

  ‘Huh. No other women?’

  ‘No other women.

  ‘Suggest it again when you’ve gone a whole year without making love to any other women and maybe I’ll listen more seriously.’

  ‘A year from today?’

  ‘Yes. You know you’ll never manage it, Charles.’