Situation Tragedy

by Simon Brett

  The traffic jam on the gravel in front of the house was increased when Bernard Walton brought his dark blue Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud out of the garage. He had to be up in Town for the Charity First Night of some new movie, and was suddenly dressed in a midnight-blue dinner suit, with a midnight-blue butterfly bow at the neck of a froth of pale blue shirt. He didn’t lock the house, since his housekeeper remained. (Bernard Walton was unmarried. He and his Publicity Manager had not yet found a woman who would keep her fashion value long enough for him to justify this step.)

  Charles, in the mellowness of the afternoon’s wine, felt confident that however the traffic was sorted out, the coach would probably he the last to leave, so he didn’t rush into it to sit and wait.

  The Bentley went first, its huge power held back to cope with the dangerous curves of the hill. Aurelia turned and waved, while Barton grinned ahead. They looked like something out of a Thirties film. The noise of the engine faded quickly to silence as they passed out of sight. The steep bank cut off sound quickly and ensured that the domestic calm of the great Bernard Walton should not be disturbed by the vulgar sounds of traffic on the main road below.

  Bernard himself set off next, the Rolls moving faster than the Bentley, secure in its knowledge of every contour of the steep drive. Once again the powerful engine sound died quickly.

  Scott Newton moved over to the side of his Porsche, his face beaming the unrestrainable smile of a father with his first daughter. But once there he hesitated. He wanted to make a departure which would be noticed, or rather by which his car would be noticed, but he wasn’t sure how to time it.

  The sight of Peter Lipscombe came to his rescue. The Producer, having checked with everyone that everything was okay, was about to get into his company BMW and return to London. Scott Newton called across to him, ‘Last one back to W.E.T.’s a sissy.’

  The producer smiled. I’ll be back before you, Scott.’

  ‘No chance. Yours doesn’t go as fast as this.’

  ‘I’m not saying it does. But I know the back ways when we get to Town. You may get there first, but I’ll beat you through the rush hour. I’ve done it back from here within the hour.’

  ‘Want a bet on it?’

  ‘Fiver.’

  ‘You’re on.’

  The Producer and Director walked towards each other and shook hands. ‘What’s more,’ said Peter Lipscombe, ‘I’m so confident I’ll beat you, that I’ll let you go first.’

  Scott Newton thought for a second, but then decided to take advantage of the offer and make his exit while everyone was still watching. He leapt into the silver Porsche, gunned the engine and shot off in a burst of gravel.

  The sound of the engine faded, but just before it disappeared, the note changed to a scream of metal. This was followed by a series of heavy thuds, and then a great boom which seemed to shake the hill on which the house stood.

  Charles Paris reached a viewpoint of the accident a little behind the younger men who had rushed down the drive. There was no doubt what had happened.

  Round one of the hairpins in the drive, an urn lay in the middle of the gravel, its bright confusion of flowers spilled in the fall. The ridges swept up by the Porsche’s tyres showed how Scott, coming on the obstruction blind and too fast, had swerved to avoid it. And how the car had got out of control.

  The scarred flower beds and uprooted shrubs charted its passage down the hill. The jack-knifed TIR lorry from Spain showed what it had met when it reached the main road.

  And, because there was nothing else in sight that could be it, the shapeless mass like crumpled kitchen foil must have been the silver Porsche.

  CHAPTER SIX

  West End Television Ltd,

  W.E.T. House,

  235–9 Lisson Avenue, London NW1 3PQ.

  30th May, 1979.

  Dear Charles,

  Just a note to fill you in on developments on The Strutters front. Obviously we were all very shocked by what happened but we mustn’t let our imaginations run away with us. People are talking about our two misfortunes and saying they must be connected and that it’s a bad luck show and . . . All rubbish! The show must go on and the show will go on. There is no danger of anything stopping the advance of this very exciting project.

  I am delighted to be able to tell you that we now have a new Director for the series, and even more delighted to say that he’s Bob Tomlinson, whose work I’m sure you know from such hit series as No Kidding, O’Reilly and Truly, Last, But Not Least and, last but not least, that smashing show set in a municipal rubbish dump, Hold Your Nose and Think of England! From that list of credits, I don’t need to tell you that Bob certainly knows his stuff when it comes to sit com!

  I can’t think that Bob’s going to want to make major changes to the schedule, but I’m sure you’ll hear in plenty of time if any of your calls are different. I look forward to seeing you at the read-through next Monday, 4th June, and am confident that, after this rather unfortunate start, we are going to have a really exciting and successful series.

  With the warmest good wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  Peter

  PETER LIPSCOMBE

  Producer The Strutters

  The payphone on the landing at Hereford Road rang the morning Charles received the letter. The various Swedes were out at their various Swedish occupations, so he answered it.

  ‘Hello, Charles, it’s Walter.’

  ‘Oh, hello. How are things?’

  ‘So-so. I hope you don’t mind my ringing, but I want to pick your brains.’

  ‘You’re welcome to anything you can find there.’

  ‘It’s a slightly ticklish thing, actually. I read in the paper about that poor boy’s terrible accident . . . you know, your Director. Obviously I was terribly shocked, but I couldn’t help thinking, you know, the way one does, that that must leave your series without a Director. So I thought I might give Peter Lipscombe a buzz and see what gives, but I though I’d check with you first, just to make sure nothing’s been sorted out yet.’

  Charles didn’t like the drift of the conversation, and said rather shortly, ‘I’ve just heard. We’ve got a new Director.’

  ‘Oh. Who?’

  ‘Bob . . . Tomlinson I think it was.’

  ‘Ah, yes. He’s never out of work. Yes, of course. He would be free. He was going to do that series about the dance band called Hands Off My Maracas, but it’s been cancelled because of problems with the Musicians’ Union. Oh well, never mind . . . We must meet up for a drink again sometime, maybe.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And you will let me know if you hear anything coming up, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Charles went back into his room feeling depressed. Of course Walter had to follow up any job possibility that might emerge, but it was unpleasant to hear him reduced to the role of professional vulture. For a moment suspicion of Walter returned. Certainly he was someone who might hope to gain from Scott Newton’s death, and he’d made no secret of his resentment of the young man’s success.

  But there were many arguments against casting Walter in the role of the director’s murderer. The first, and most potent, was that he hadn’t been at the scene of the crime. Short of introducing a conspiracy theory or the use of a hired killer, there was no way he could have toppled the flower urn which had caused Scott’s death.

  And why should anyone want Scott dead? He had seemed pleasant enough, not the sort to raise instant antipathy like Sadie. Just an ambitious young television director with money problems.

  Mind you, the money problems seemed to have resolved themselves. The new clothes, the new car . . . Charles’s mind did a little spurt. Suppose Scott had witnessed the first murder and blackmailed the killer, thus providing a motive for his own death . . .? Hmm, there might be something there, but there was a distinct lack of hard evidence.

  And, anyway, was there even a murder to investigate? There seemed no real reason to think that
the young man was the victim of anything more sinister than an accident. The police, who had made extensive investigations at the scene of his death, seemed satisfied with this solution. And, after all, a young man, flushed with success after a good day’s filming, showing off a powerful and unfamiliar car, was unlikely to be concentrating much on his driving. And the urn of flowers could have fallen of its own accord. Charles knew from having leant against one that they weren’t fixed, just balanced on the wall.

  Yes, it could have fallen of its own accord. But it was a substantial piece of terracotta and there had been no wind. Perhaps a bird could have flown into it or a rabbit or something brushed against it . . . or maybe the vibrations of one of the passing cars had dislodged it, but it all seemed pretty unlikely.

  Maybe one of the cars had scraped against the wall and bumped the urn off . . . But logic was against that too. Whereas one could imagine that the ancient Barton Rivers, at the wheel of his huge Bentley, might be less than secure on the tight turns of the drive, he and Aurelia had not been the last people to go down it. Bernard Walton had followed them and, apart from the fact that he must have known every curve of the approach to his house perfectly, he was unlikely to scrape the gleaming surface of his precious Rolls. And he wouldn’t have been able to drive over the urn if Barton’s Bentley had dislodged it before him.

  So either it just fell, or someone deliberately moved it. And if it had been deliberately moved, it must have happened just after Bernard’s Rolls had driven past.

  If it was a murder, and if it had been planned, then the perpetrator was likely to be someone who knew the layout of Bernard’s grounds, someone who had been there before. The list included Bernard himself, obviously, and, from what they had said during the day, Aurelia and Barton and Peter Lipscombe. Presumably the unfortunate Scott had also been down on a recce to check the location, and who knew how many people would have accompanied him? Certainly the Designer, certainly the Location Manager, possibly Janie Lewis, the PA, possibly dozens of other people. That was the trouble with a crime committed in television – there were always so many people about, it was difficult to reduce lists of suspects.

  Charles concentrated, and tried to remember where everyone had been at the moment of Bernard Walton’s departure in the Rolls. The conjectural saboteur of the urn need not have been in a car; he, or she, could have walked down the hill and moved it. But the picture didn’t come back to him with any clarity. He just remembered a lot of people milling about, clearing up; he couldn’t place individuals.

  No, he came back to one fact: if the urn was moved in order to cause an accident, then the person with the best background knowledge and the best opportunity to do it was Bernard Walton.

  And it was also Bernard Walton with whom Sadie Wainwright had had a blazing row just before her death.

  But why? Why should a highly successful television and theatre star hazard everything by committing murder? Charles supposed that if The Strutters had been being made at the expense of What’ll the Neighbours Say?, then Bernard might be seen to have a motive for sabotaging production of the new series, so that it would have to be cancelled and replaced with the older one. But that motivation didn’t work, because the options on the next series of What’ll the Neighbours Say? had been taken up and, though Bernard didn’t know that at the time of Sadie’s death, he certainly did when Scott died. Nope, it didn’t work.

  But, as a theory, it did contain one attractive element, and that was the idea of sabotage to the production. If the violence was directed against the whole series rather than individuals, then the random nature of the murder schemes made more sense. Maybe the saboteur had fixed the railing on the fire escape to injure Sadie Wainwright or anyone else connected with The Strutters pilot. The dislodged urn, too, might have been a random act of violence.

  This idea answered a doubt that had been nagging at Charles ever since Scott’s death. Any theory that assumed murder directed specifically at the young director also assumed an enormous amount of luck. There was no guarantee that Scott was going to be the next person down the hill after Bernard. He might well have chosen to leave last of all and demonstrate the powers of his Porsche by overtaking everyone else on the motorway back to London. Even if the murderer could have predicted the bet with Peter Lipscombe, he couldn’t have known that the producer would offer the opportunity for the director to go first. (Unless of course the producer were the murderer . . . But no, that was a blind alley; it was Scott who had suggested the race.)

  And, as well as having no guarantee who his victim would he, the conjectural murderer had no guarantee that he would murder anyone. A more prudent driver than Scott Newton might have been going slowly enough to stop safely when he saw his path obstructed. And, even given Scott’s precipitous speed, he might well have survived his descent on to the main road. No murderer, however much of a criminal mastermind, could have arranged the simultaneous arrival of a Spanish juggernaut to finish off his victim.

  So, if any crimes had been committed, it looked as if they were just random sabotage. And the only person who had ever had a motive for such actions, Bernard Walton, had had his motive removed by the guarantee of a new series of What’ll the Neighbours Say?

  Unless, of course, the acts of sabotage were the work of a psychopath. Oh dear, Charles did hope not. Psychopathic crimes offered no prospect of satisfaction; if their motivation was without reason, then no amount of reasoning was going to provide a solution to them.

  So what was he left with? Two deaths. Both, according to police findings, accidental. And nothing to make him disagree with those findings except for a few ambiguous overhead words relating to the first one.

  All he could do was watch and listen, and wait to see if anything else happened.

  On Monday, June 4th, Charles arrived at the Paddington Jewish Boys’ Club for the first Strutters read-through, and found Peter Lipscombe predictably cooing over Aurelia Howarth. She appeared just to have given him a brown paper parcel.

  ‘Of course I’ll read them, Dob love, of course I will.’

  ‘I don’t know, I just think there might be something there, darling. They’re old-fashioned, but might adapt into a rather jolly series. Just an instinct I have about them.’

  ‘And when have your dramatic instincts ever been wrong?’ asked the Producer with a sycophantic laugh.

  Charles moved over to sit beside George Birkitt, who was reading the Sun. ‘How’s tricks, as the white rabbit said to the conjuror?’

  George brandished the newspaper. ‘Look at this – bloody Bernard Walton all over it.’

  Charles glanced at the page. ‘MY FIRST DATE – In our series of the Famous with Two Left Feet, BERNARD WALTON, hilarious star of TV’s What’ll the Neighbours Say? describes the visit to the pictures that went riotously wrong . . .’ He didn’t read any further. There was a half-page picture of Bernard, pulling one of the gauche expressions that was a feature of the character he played in the sit com (and indeed of every other character he played; whatever the part, he always gave the same performance).

  Charles shrugged. ‘So what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just get a bit sick of it,’ George Birkitt complained. ‘I mean, you just can’t get away from him. He’s always doing all these bloody interviews, and popping up on quiz shows and all that rubbish. All the Blankety-Blanks and Star Games and Celebrity Squares when that was around. Or he’s opening supermarkets or being photographed at premieres.’

  ‘I agree, it must be hell. But that’s the life he’s chosen. One of the penalties of being a star, you have to be on show all of the time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said George, with a tinge of wistfulness.

  ‘Surely you don’t want to get involved in all that, do you?’

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ he protested. ‘No, no, I value my privacy. I’m the last person to want to become a public property. No, no, I was just thinking from the financial point of view. I mean, there is quite a bit of money in all those spin-off things. An
d I think, you know, if you get the chance to do them, well, you shouldn’t turn them down from high-minded principles about the sanctity of your art. You should take advantage of whatever’s going.’

  ‘Oh, I agree.’

  ‘And, if there’s money going for all that sort of rubbish, I don’t see why it should always go to the same circle of boring professional personalities with heads too big for their bodies. Because, to be quite frank, Charles . . .’ George Birkitt lowered his voice, ‘I wouldn’t mind a little more money. They’re getting me damned cheap for this series. Okay, I know it’s the first time I’ve had my name above the title – as if I cared about things like that, for God’s sake – but they are still getting me damned cheap. No, if they want to do another series after this lot, I’m afraid they’ll find my agent in more of a negotiating mood. It’s not that one wants a huge amount of money, it’s just that one doesn’t want to be undervalued.’

  Further demonstration of George Birkitt’s unwillingness to fall into a star stereotype was prevented by the arrival of The Strutters’ new Director. Bob Tomlinson, the man who certainly knew his stuff when it came to sit com, proved to be a thickset individual in his fifties whose appearance behind a market barrow would have been less remarkable than behind a television control desk. He was dressed in a shiny blue suit and wore an expression of belligerent boredom.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s sit down and read this rubbish.’

  ‘Bob!’ cried Peter Lipscombe heartily. ‘Sure you’d like to be introduced to everyone, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’ll get to know them soon enough in rehearsal,’ said Bob Tomlinson, and sat down.

  ‘But you haven’t worked with Dob Howarth, have you?’ Peter Lipscombe persisted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, do allow me to introduce you to our lovely leading lady.’

  Bob Tomlinson looked up briefly. ‘Hello. Right, PA got the watch ready? Let’s start reading.’