by Simon Brett
‘Then get some.’
‘I will.’
Charles felt furiously angry when he put the phone down. The whole thing was getting out of proportion. The protection of Christopher Milton must continue, whoever got hurt on the way. It was hearing such blinkered lack of consideration from Gerald that made him so cross. The world, even his friends, would forgive anything done in the name of Christopher Milton. Gerald had asked for evidence and an arrest and he’d get them, though they might not be what he expected. Charles felt a wave of anger against the whole star set-up, the charming public persona that needed the support of thuggery to survive. Whether or not Christopher Milton was directly involved in the crimes, the rottenness and meanness of what had been going on should be exposed to the public. From now on Charles wasn’t working for Gerald Venables representing Arthur Balcombe. He was working for himself.
After the Thursday show, he dressed carefully for his midnight jaunt. As an actor, he knew how much the right costume could help in a difficult rôle, and the rôle in which he had cast himself was a very difficult one.
He wore a pair of his own black trousers and a black sweater borrowed from Julian (in what he hoped was a casual manner). He had bought a pair of plimsolls in Woolworth’s and, since Woolworth’s don’t sell ready-dirtied plimsolls for house-breakers, he had shabbied them up with earth from Julian’s garden. Other investments were a balaclava helmet and a pencil torch. He knew the preparations were over-elaborate, but they took his mind off what he had to do.
With the balaclava on, he looked like a very young photograph of himself as Second Sentry in Coriolanus (‘Leaden production’ – Richmond and Twickenham Times). Without it, he looked a cross between himself as Lightborn in a modern dress Edward II (‘Flamboyantly sinister’ – Birmingham Evening Mail) and as Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (‘Ill-considered’ – Luton Evening Post). He crept down the stairs to the front door and realised he was using the walk he’d perfected for Rookery Nook (‘Uneven’ – Jewish Telegraph).
Unfortunately he met Julian coming in. ‘Where are you going dressed like that, Charles? You look as if you’re about to commit a burglary.’
That didn’t help.
Residents of the Holiday Inn in Bristol park their cars in the adjacent multi-storey car park. It was a simple matter to walk in. He found Christopher Milton’s distinctive Rolls on the first level without any problem.
And his luck held. The Corniche was unlocked. He slipped in by the passenger door and closed it quickly to douse the interior light. He reached to get the torch out of his pocket, but his hand was shaking too much. He closed his eyes and practised rib-reserve breathing, trying to keep the thought of what he was doing at bay. But a schoolboy fear of being found out remained. He wished he could remember some of the relaxation exercises various experimental directors had tried to put him through. None came.
Still, the deep breathing helped. He opened his eyes and, very slowly, like a man under water, he got out the torch and switched it on.
The glove pocket opened easily. A tin of boiled sweets came first into the light. He prised it open and found nothing but the sugary debris that should have been there. Next a large stiff envelope. He felt inside. The shiny surface of photographs. He pulled one out and shone the torch on it. Christopher Milton grinned cheerily at him. Fan photographs. The sight of the familiar face brought on another pang of guilt. At the same moment he noticed that his thumb had left a perfect print on the photograph. The light caught it on the shiny surface. That was one that the police wouldn’t need powder to spot. He wiped at it roughly, but seemed only to add more prints. He shoved the photograph back into the envelope and replaced it.
Sweat prickled on his hands and he thought he’d done enough. His grandiose schemes for following the raid on the car with a search of the driver’s hotel bedroom were evaporating fast.
Finish the glove pocket and go. He ran his fingers along the angle at the back and felt some small bead-like objects under his finger-nails. He picked one out, held it between thumb and forefinger and turned the light on it.
And at that moment his whole attitude to what he was doing changed. What he held was a small-waisted piece of lead. The shape was unmistakable. It was an airgun pellet. Just the sort of airgun pellet which had hit Lumpkin!’s first rehearsal pianist in the hand on the second day of rehearsal. It was evidence.
He grabbed three or four more of the slugs and put them in his pocket. His panic had changed to surging confidence. He reached forward for one more sweep into the glove pocket and his hand closed round the firm outline of a small bottle. Hardly daring to hope, he drew it out and flashed the torch on it. LIQUID PARAFFIN (Liquid Paraffin BP). The bottle was half-empty. He could not believe his good fortune.
There was a noise of a door banging. He turned. Someone was coming from the direction of the hotel. A guest going to another car. He’d wait for them to drive off and then beat a hasty retreat. He shrank down into the leather seat and slipped the balaclava helmet over his head. He pulled it round to cover his face.
The silence was unnaturally long. No slam of a car door, no choking of an engine. He began to think that the visitor must have gone out down the ramp and slowly eased himself up to look.
At that moment there was a click of the door opening and he felt light through the latticed wool of the balaclava. He was face to face with Christopher Milton’s driver, who was leaning forward to get into the car.
The man’s eyes bulged as he saw the intruder and in shock he jerked his head back sharply. There was a loud crack which shook the car and he slid gracefully from view.
Charles, his mind full of ugly pugilistic visions, edged slowly across to the driver’s seat and looked down over the edge.
The driver lay neatly on the ground with his eyes closed. He was out cold. Charles got out of the car, shut the door to put the light out and turned his torch on the body on the ground.
There was no blood. Regular breathing. Strong heart-beat. Strong pulse. Probably just concussion. He loosened the man’s tie and put a cushion from the back of the car under his head.
Then, with the precious pellets and bottle in his pocket, Charles crept down the stairs out of the garage. As he emerged into the street, he removed the balaclava.
There was a phone-box opposite. It seemed a natural conclusion to the dream-like flow of luck which had characterised the previous half-hour. Charles dialled and asked for the ambulance service in his own voice before thinking to disguise it. When he was connected, he had a moment’s agonising decision choosing a voice. Northern Irish seemed the most natural for this sort of thing, but it might be unduly alarmist in a bomb-conscious Britain. The voice that came to hand was American-Italian. Sounding like something out of The Godfather, he said, ‘Could you send an ambulance to the big car park beside the Holiday Inn.’ He was tempted to say, ‘There’s a stiff there’, but made do with, ‘There’s somebody injured’.
‘What’s happened to them?’ asked the voice and it was only by putting the phone down that Charles could prevent himself from saying, ‘Someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse’.
He hung about until he saw the ambulance safely arrived, and then went briskly back to Julian’s place, using the walk he’d developed when playing a gangster in Guys and Dolls (‘This guy didn’t like it and nor did the doll he was with’ – Bolton Evening News).
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHARLES WOKE IN an excellent mood. The events of the previous night were very clear to him. It was as if he had found the instant cure-all he had always dreamed must exist somewhere. All his problems had been resolved at once. He now had evidence of the wrong-doing of the driver and just to make his job easier, the driver himself was temporarily removed from the scene. There was still the minor question of what he should do about it – confront the villain and threaten police proceedings, go direct to the police or send them an anonymous deposition advising investigation – but that would keep. The warm completed-Times
-crossword sensation had developed into an even better feeling, as if his solution to the puzzle had won a prize.
Helen Paddon cooked him an enormous breakfast, which he consumed with that relish which only a fulfilled mind can give. She was pleased to have something to do. The last heavy weeks of pregnancy were dragging interminably.
He finished breakfast about nine and took the unusual expedient of ringing Gerald at home. After pleasantries and must-see-you-soons from Kate Venables, the solicitor came on the line. ‘What gives?’ he asked in his B-film gangster style.
‘It’s sorted out.’
‘Really?’
‘Uhuh.’ Charles found himself slipping into the same idiom.
‘You know who’s been doing it all?’
‘I know and I’ve got evidence.’
‘Who?’ The curiosity was immediate and childlike.
‘Never mind.’ Charles was deliberately circumspect and infuriating. ‘Suffice to say that I’ll see nothing else happens to threaten the show, at least from the point of view of crime or sabotage. If it fails on artistic grounds, I’m afraid I can’t be held responsible.’
‘Is that all you’re going to tell me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Damn your eyes.’ Charles chuckled. ‘But you’re sure that Christopher Milton is in no danger?’
‘I don’t think he ever has been in any danger from anyone but himself.’ On that cryptic note he put the phone down, knowing exactly the expression he had left on Gerald’s face.
There was a ten-thirty call for the entire company to hear what Desmond Porton of Amulet Productions had thought of Lumpkin! and what changes he had ordered before the show could come into London. Charles ambled through the streets of Bristol towards the theatre, his mood matched by the bright November sun. The people of the city bustled about their business and he felt a universal benevolence towards them. His route went past the Holiday Inn and he could hardly repress a smile at the memory of what had happened the night before. It was strange. He felt no guilt, no fear that the driver might have been seriously hurt. That would have spoiled the rounded perfection of the crime’s solution.
The people of Bristol looked much healthier than those of Leeds. His mind propounded some vague theory about the freedom of living near the sea as against the claustrophobia of a land-locked city, but it was let down when the sun went in. Anyway, the people didn’t look that different. In fact, there was a man on the opposite side of the street who looked exactly like the bald man with big ears whom he’d idly followed in Leeds. He kicked himself for once again trying to impose theories on everything. Why could he never just accept the continuous variety of life without trying to force events into generalisations?
There was a lot of tension at the theatre. The entire company sat in the stalls, exchanging irrelevant chatter or coughing with self-pity to show that they’d got The Cold. There were three chairs on the stage and, as Charles slumped into a stalls seat, they were filled by the company manager, David Meldrum and Christopher Milton.
David Meldrum stood up first as if he were the director and clapped his hands to draw attention. The chatter and coughing faded untidily. ‘Well, as you all know, we had a distinguished visitor in our audience last night, Desmond Porton of Amulet, who, you don’t need reminding, are putting up a lot of the money for this show. So for that reason, if no other, we should listen with interest to his comments and maybe make certain changes accordingly.’
‘Otherwise the show will never make it to London,’ added the company manager cynically.
‘Yes.’ David Meldrum paused, having lost his thread. ‘Um, well, first let me give you the good news. He liked a lot of the show a lot and he said there is no question of the London opening being delayed. So it’s all systems go for November 27th, folks!’ The slang bonhomie of the last sentence did not suit the prissy voice in which it was said.
‘And now the bad news . . .’ For this line he dropped into a cod German accent which suited him even less. ‘We were up quite a lot of the night with Desmond Porton going through the script and there are quite a lot of changes that we’re going to have to make. Now you probably all realise that over the past few weeks the show has been getting longer and longer. Our actual playing time is now three hours and eight minutes. Add two intervals at fifteen minutes each and that’s well over three and a half.’
A derisive clap greeted this earnestly presented calculation. David Meldrum appeared not to hear it and went on. ‘So that means cuts, quite a lot of cuts. We can reduce the intervals to one, which would give us a bit of time, and the King’s Theatre management won’t mind that because it saves on bar staff. But we’ve still got half an hour to come out of the show. Now some of it we can lose by just shortening a few of the numbers, cutting a verse and chorus here and there. We can probably pick up ten minutes that way. But otherwise we’re going to have to lose whole numbers and take considerable cuts in some of the dialogue scenes.
‘Now I’m sorry. I know you’ve all put a lot of work into this show and I know whatever cuts we make are going to mean big disappointments for individuals among you. But Amulet Productions are footing most of the wage bill and so, as I say, we have to listen carefully to their views. And after all, we have a common aim. All of us here, and Amulet, we all just want the show to be a success, don’t we?’
The conclusion of the speech was delivered like Henry V’s ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’ but was not greeted with the shouts of enthusiasm which follow Shakespeare’s line in every production. There was an apathetic silence punctuated by small coughs until one of the dancers drawled, ‘All right, tell us what’s left, dear.’
David Meldrum reached round for his script, opened it and was about to speak when Christopher Milton rose and said, ‘There was another point that Desmond made, and that was that a lot of the show lacked animation. Not enough action, not enough laughs. So as well as these cuts, there will be a certain amount of rewriting of the script, which Wally Wilson will be doing. It’s all too sedate at the moment, like some bloody eighteenth-century play.’
‘But it is a bloody eighteenth-century play.’ Charles kept the thought to himself and nobody else murmured. They were all resigned – indeed, when they thought about it, amazed that the major reshaping of the show hadn’t come earlier. They sat in silence and waited to hear the worst.
David Meldrum went through the cuts slowly and deliberately. They were predictable. Oliver Goldsmith, whose revolutions in his grave must by this time have been violent enough to put him into orbit, was left with almost nothing of his original play. The trouble with most musicals based on other works is that the songs are not used to advance the action. A musical number is merely a break in the continuity and, when it’s over, you’re four minutes further into the show and only two lines further into the plot. Carl Anthony and Micky Gorton’s songs, written with an eye to the Top Ten and continuing profitable appearances on LPs, were particularly susceptible to this criticism. But because the songs were the set-pieces and the items on which most rehearsal time and money had been spent, they had to survive at the expense of the text. Charles, who remembered Goldsmith’s play well from his own Cardiff production, saw the plot vanishing twist by twist, as one of the most beautiful and simple comic mechanisms in English literature was dismantled and reassembled without many of its working parts.
But the cuts were selective. It was clear that Christopher Milton had been up through the night with David Meldrum and Desmond Porton, watching each projected excision with a careful eye. Tony Lumpkin’s part came through the massacre almost unscathed. One rather dull number was cut completely and a verse and chorus came out of another. And that was it. While all the other characters had their parts decimated.
The one who suffered most was the one who Goldsmith, in his innocence, had intended to be the hero, Young Marlow. Cut after cut shredded Mark Spelthorne’s part, until he had about half the lines he had started the day with.
For some
time he took it pretty well, but when the proposal to cut his second act love duet with Lizzie Dark was put forward, his reserve broke. ‘But that’s nonsense,’ he croaked. (He was suffering from The Cold and was determined that no one should miss the fact.)
‘Sorry?’ asked David Meldrum mildly, but the word was swamped by a sharp ‘What?’ from Christopher Milton.
‘Well, putting on one side for a moment the fact that the play no longer has a plot, if you cut the love duet, there is absolutely no romantic content from beginning to end.’
‘Yes, there is. There’s my song to Betty Bouncer.’
‘But that song has nothing to do with the plot. Betty Bouncer doesn’t even appear in the original play.’
‘Sod the original play! We aren’t doing the original play.’
‘You can say that again. We’re doing a shapeless hotch-potch whose only raison d’être is as a massive trip for your over-inflated ego.’
‘Oh, I see. You think I’m doing all this work just to give myself cheap thrills.’
‘I can’t see any other reason for you to bugger up a plot that’s survived intact for two hundred years. Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter to you what the show is. We might as well be performing a musical of the telephone directory for all you care. Just so long as you’ve got all the lines and all the jokes and all the songs. Good God, you just don’t know what theatre’s about.’
‘I don’t?’ Christopher Milton’s voice was ominously quiet. ‘Then please tell me, since I am so ill-informed on the matter, what the theatre is about.’
‘It’s about team-work, ensemble acting, people working together to produce a good show –’
‘Bullshit! It’s about getting audiences and keeping in work. You go off and do your shows, your “ensemble theatre” and you’ll get nobody coming to see them. People want to see stars, not bloody ensembles. I’m the reason that they’ll come and see this show and don’t you kid yourself otherwise. Let me tell you, none of you would be in line for a long run in the West End if this show hadn’t got my name above the title. So don’t you start whining about your precious lines, Mark Spelthorne. Just think yourself lucky you’ve got a job. You’re not going to find them so easy to come by now they’ve dropped that bloody awful Fighter Pilots.’