Killings on Jubilee Terrace

by Robert Barnard

‘Aye, we are,’ said Danny.

  ‘Prostitutes don’t usually have much to boast about.’

  ‘Oh, she could boast about her “earnings”. No holding back there. It was another example of pushing our noses in it. And she’d talk about her “varied clientele” with “special tastes”. We hated her visits, tell the truth. We were glad when they stopped, God help us.’

  ‘Mr Peace,’ said Maggie tentatively. ‘Could I ask you a question?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll answer if I can.’

  ‘Was the man she died with – the man whose flat she was in – connected with television?’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘That’s what the policeman who rang told me. Was he connected to one of the soaps?’

  ‘Yes. He had a part in Jubilee Terrace.’

  The two looked at each other.

  ‘Why I’m asking is that she was on about the Terrace last time she came to see us – well, not “on about”, but she did mention it.’

  ‘Did she now?’

  ‘Said she had a date fixed up with someone who was “on the Terrace team”. I didn’t know what she meant by that, an actor or someone behind the scenes, but I didn’t care to ask and get sneered at. She was very uppity by then: called herself an “escort”, which seemed to mean meeting men in up-market hotels, with their special needs all marked out in advance.’

  ‘I suppose she mentioned no names or their parts in the soap?’

  ‘Oh no, nothing like that. And it wouldn’t have meant much to us. We weren’t viewers of it, and we always avoided it after that. We really didn’t want to see her if she ever got a part in it, knowing how she would have got it.’

  Her husband was frowning.

  ‘Didn’t you say Mr Judson said something about the Terrace a few months ago, Maggie?’ he asked her.

  ‘Said he’d seen someone who looked just like our Sylvia on it, only it couldn’t have been her because she was much too young.’

  ‘This was on Jubilee Terrace?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Ohyes. He said this girl had a scene with Vernon Watts. Danny and I remember him when he did the working men’s clubs. And he used to be at the City Varieties, didn’t he, Danny?’

  ‘Aye. Never that good, though. More of a warm-up artist than a star. Died not long ago.’

  ‘I know,’ said Charlie. ‘I’d perhaps better tell you that your daughter did get a part – two in fact – in Jubilee Terrace. So it wasn’t all fantasy. It was your daughter doing that scene with Vernon Watts.’

  The pair looked at each other, bewilderment and pain in their eyes, not pride or satisfaction.

  Liza Croome was making up in her bathroom. She was ‘opening’ a new supermarket in Keighley that evening, and the punters who would be there would expect her to look as like as possible to her Sally Worseley persona. The supermarket had in fact been open a couple of months, and Liza had been assured that a lot of the regular customers would be coming. She put on the makeup with a practised hand. She had ‘opened’ a great many supermarkets. She had begun to see them as the churches of the modern era, the present-day equivalents of all those little non-conformist chapels that were run up cheap in the nineteenth century.

  Liza lived alone at the moment. In fact Liza had lived alone for long periods, and she thought she would soon come to prefer it. Her last partner, Denzil, a curator at the city’s art gallery, had upped and left her on an impulse – easy to do because he lived lightly and had moved out, as he had moved in, with only two suitcases of possessions. He had said then: ‘You’re a lovely girl, Liza,’ (he scorned political correctness) ‘but I can’t find my way around Sally Worseley. And these days you’re more often Sally Worseley than you are Liza Croome. Find out who you are and I might still be interested.’

  Liza had said ‘Good riddance’ and denied she might still be interested if he ever deigned to return. But at heart she agreed with him that she was an unmendable split personality. It was not for her a criticism or a joke. She rather enjoyed having two personalities.

  She looked at her face. The light make-up she preferred covered the damage of the years less well than the heavier coating preferred by the studio’s make-up team.

  ‘I’ve grown old as Sally Worseley,’ she said to herself. ‘Or middle-aged. We’ve grown middle-aged together, Sally and I.’

  She looked at herself so often in a mirror that she knew every line on her face, could almost put a date on when they had come.

  ‘I could make a map,’ she said sometimes. ‘Like one of those atlases with all the altitude levels.’

  She saw a new line – another little claw on the crow’s foot. She leant over and pulled the light cord. Then she stayed looking at the dim reflection of herself from the low light in the hall.

  If I’m more often Sally Worseley than I am Liza Croome, she said to herself, what does that say about me and Bill Garrett? I always tell people he’s my best friend but I don’t in the least fancy him, and that’s true – I think. And yet…and yet I care about him more, infinitely more, than I cared about Denzil, or about Ian, Francis, Neill, Mark and all the others. They said hard things about me when we broke up, and it was all water off a duck’s back. But if Bill had said them I’d have been really hurt. I’d have gone over them in my mind for weeks.

  That suggested something, didn’t it? If I care like that it surely must be something like love. I may not want him sexually, but the caring shows how enormously important he is to me. I would never want to be Mrs Garrett, but if he married someone else when he was free I’d be shattered. And the more important the new wife was to him the more shattered I’d be.

  This must be more than friendship. And it means that I can’t mention to the police the visit he made to the Red Deer’s loo – the visit so much longer than usual – covered by a muttered ‘touch of tummy trouble’ when he returned.

  Carol Chisholm had got home half an hour before, and had already peeled potatoes, shelled peas (imported from God-knows-where) and got out the Sainsbury’s chicken breasts in white wine and mushrooms – something both her husband and her children liked. The husband in question was meanwhile regaling her as usual with details of his day – more of them, if the truth be known, than she needed or wanted, though she was used to switching down to half-attention.

  ‘I said to him, I said “If you think that’s a power screwdriver, go to the cash desk and buy it, but I tell you you’ll never get a screw in with an electric plane”. My God! Some people!’

  ‘I expect I’d just let them get on with it, even if they bought the wrong thing,’ said Carol in her comfortable voice.

  ‘More trouble in the long run,’ said Malcolm. He always said this when she said that. And he usually followed it up with ‘How was your day?’ as he did now.

  ‘Rather eventful really,’ she said evenly. ‘Bill Garrett’s wife was reported dead in a fire that was started deliberately. You should have seen the faces when she marched into the studio, large as life and twice as brassy. It turned out the dead woman was a young girl who’d had a couple of small parts with us. She was sleeping with Hamish Fawley, but if this was divine retribution for that, most people feel it was a bit excessive.’

  Malcolm had only taken a little of this in. He heard but didn’t listen, especially to Carol.

  ‘Sounds quite a day. Oh, I forgot to tell you this chap who said he wanted an electric screwdriver eventually walked away with a set of garden furniture – said he’d heard we are due for a hot summer next year.’

  Carol in her turn switched to full off. It was the only way. Every one in the Terrace knew she had married a bore, and she knew she had married a bore, and did not, at least with the surface of her mind, regret it. At least her private life did not intrude on her life as a mildly well-known soap actress. Unlike poor Bill, whose whole time on the Terrace had been marked by Bet’s exploits, her neglect of the girls, her attempts to secure a proper and long-lasting role in the soap. His marriage had been a visible part in the tapestry
of his private and public personae, and even his decision to divorce Bet would not wipe that background out.

  As they were eating their meal, with her daughter at the table with them and her son watching Hollyoaks on Channel Four, her husband suddenly said:

  ‘You know, now I come to think of it, someone said they’d seen something about the Terrace on the Northern TV news at 1.30. He was in his lunch break. Some kind of police press conference.’

  ‘That’s right. As far as we can gather someone at Northern TV told the police that Bet was Hamish’s fiancée and partner, and the police thickly assumed that the person who was incinerated with him was Bet. Red faces all round when it was found out that it was someone else.’

  ‘Wow! That’s quite a story. I’ll be telling it all tomorrow, because everyone will be interested.’

  ‘Well get it right. I’ll go over the details again at breakfast.’

  One of Malcolm’s most irritating habits was getting things wrong, which he had been told by his wife was because of his habit of only half listening. He was always, with the other half of his brain, thinking of what from his not-very-fascinating life as manager of a B&Q store he would regale to his family next. Really he was a very boring husband, and it could not be said that her on-screen life with her Jubilee husband was much more exciting.

  Philip Marston himself was a lot more interesting, and had to suppress lots of areas of his personality to stick within the narrow confines of the character he was playing. Odd, thought Carol, that she had never even considered an affair with him. If one had happened she doubted whether she would have classed the affair as adultery. She would, after all, be sleeping with her other husband.

  But she had never considered any such thing, perhaps because the Philip Marston she saw was always playing Peter Kerridge, and was thus only displaying his boring sides. If I want ‘dull as ditchwater’, she thought, I can get that at home.

  On the evening of the day that he learnt that his wife was dead and then that she was not dead, Bill Garrett’s main concern was for his children. All three had been at school when the first news came through. He had been at home, having no filming that day. He had considered going to fetch the girls home, and then had thought better of it. His wife, after all, had over the last few weeks become no more than an occasional visitor to the family home. He could go and fetch them in the lunch break, by which time the story would not have broken. He could have some sandwiches and Coke ready at home, and then tell them all at once. By eleven o’clock he was profoundly glad he had made that decision. He was phoned from Millgarth station with the news that the identification was much less certain than had been first thought. He decided he could collect the children and bring them home at 12.30, the lunch break. That way he could prevent them hearing the totally erroneous report put out by the police earlier. He would try to play down the fire as nothing to do with them. The children would get enough snide and sensationalised commentary from other children in the days ahead. They could then just shrug and say it was a colossal police boob. He tried to get from the policeman on the phone how he should explain the boob: had there been an attempt on Bet’s life that she had survived? The policeman at the other end, who sounded Asian, remained stumm. His ‘we can’t comment at this stage’ sounded as final as a cement wall.

  So when he had his daughters around the table – a rare occurrence – he made sure they’d all got sandwiches or the cream cakes they loved before he started talking.

  ‘I got you home because something has happened, and you’re all going to have a difficult time at school, because other children will be talking about it, and will be asking for explanations, and that’s going to be awkward and embarrassing.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened? Is it Mum?’

  ‘No. Nothing’s happened to your mother. But for a time the police thought she was the person involved, and a very silly policeman announced it to the press, and it will probably be in the early editions of the Yorkshire Evening Post. They thought your mum had died in a fire.’

  ‘But why should they think that?’ asked Angela. ‘If it wasn’t her?’

  ‘They thought it because it was at the home of the man your mother was – said she was – engaged to.’

  They took some time to digest this.

  ‘Is that Hamish?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Yes. Hamish Fawley.’

  ‘Yuck,’ said Debbie. ‘He’s the pits.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Bill, trying to keep any urgency out of his voice. ‘Have you ever met him? Seen him?’

  ‘No. Betty Chisholm’s in my class at school. Her mother plays Mrs Kerridge in Jubilee Terrace. I hear more about Jubilee Terrace from her than I do from you.’

  ‘Good to know your school time is so well spent,’ said Bill.

  ‘But is Mummy dead?’ asked Rosie, still wide-eyed from the announcement.

  ‘No. It wasn’t Mummy.’

  ‘Was somebody else with Hamish?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Yes. There was a woman with him, but it wasn’t your mother.’

  He waited while they took it in, each one champing on sandwiches Bill himself had no appetite for.

  ‘Can I go back to school this afternoon?’ asked Debbie.

  It suddenly struck him that his second daughter was going to be an actress. She wanted to go back to school because she knew she would be the centre of attention. She would have even more to give in the form of information than Betty Chisholm. It was the impulse to bask in the spotlight which drove so many people, talented and untalented, into the acting profession.

  ‘If that’s what you want, darling,’ he said.

  That evening, when Angela and Debbie were in their rooms upstairs and behaving pretty much as they did every day of the week, his youngest daughter Rosie seemed to follow him around, watch him, as if he was the cornerstone of her life which she tried to keep an eye on for fear he would disappear. When finally, all chores done, he sat down on the sofa, Rosie climbed up and sat on his lap, something she had not done for months.

  ‘Daddy, I’m glad Mummy hasn’t died.’

  ‘Are you, dear?’ Bill asked, then hastily amended it to: ‘Of course we all are.’

  Rosie seemed to want to be asked why she would have been sorry if her mother had died, and when she wasn’t she told him anyway.

  ‘Mummy’s funny. She says funny things and does funny things when you’re not expecting it.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true enough.’

  ‘I know Angela has done all the mummy things for Debbie and me, and we love her, but when Mummy comes, or when she was around when you were sort of married, she often said wonderful things that made me laugh out loud.’

  ‘Yes, she could do that sometimes.’

  ‘Daddy, are you glad she’s still alive?’

  There was only the tiniest of pauses, but Bill thought his daughter noticed it.

  ‘Yes, darling. I’m very glad.’

  Shirley Merritt, was not one of the show’s players who fraternised. She went in when called in, did her scene or scenes impeccably, sometimes improving her dialogue, then went home, usually to paint. Her relationship with Garry Kopps, her screen husband, was excellent, and so were the terms on which she lived with the rest of the cast, with the exceptions of Hamish Fawley, whom she loathed as everyone did, and Young Foulmouth, whom she avoided with a fastidious pursing of the lips. She came from a family that regarded obscenity or blasphemy as one degree worse than passing wind in public.

  Thus she avoided hearing of the murder in Bridge Street until late on the day following, when she rang up the head caretaker at the Northern Television studios about a briefcase with papers in which she’d left behind the day before.

  ‘It’s somewhere here, Mrs Merritt,’ he said. ‘Can’t lay my hand on it just now, but I’ll have it for you tomorrow. We’re all at sixes and sevens here, as you can imagine.’

  So when she said she couldn’t, knowing nothing about it, she was given the news of the double
murder, of the policeman who assumed the female victim was Bet Garrett only to find after the announcement of this fact that it was somebody else entirely. When Shirley heard who the victim was, she was mystified.

  ‘I don’t think I know her.’

  ‘She was playing an assistant to Mrs Garrett in the flower shop,’ said the caretaker, for the twentieth time that day. ‘And just before Mr Watts died he’d had a little scene with her as one of the kids who deliver newspapers.’

  ‘I don’t think I know her. I don’t watch,’ said Shirley. She added, but only to herself, that she thought Bet Garrett a much more likely victim than a girl still playing adolescents.

  Shirley lived over a shop in Briggate in the centre of Leeds. It suited her, as an observer of busy humanity who preferred not to participate. She went over to the window, where her watercolour pad was sitting on a table. It showed a half-finished picture of Briggate on a Saturday, with bustling, spending humanity on a late spring afternoon. It had something of the feel of Lowry, without his matchstick quality.

  For her more experimental pictures she preferred oils. These pictures were by subject more in the manner of fifty years ago: abstracts or seeming abstracts which, with prolonged viewing, made real sense. She prepared a canvas and got out her palette which was always in a state of readiness. In the centre of the canvas she started, in a violent, shiny red, to paint. The red assumed the shape of lips, half-opened lips. Soon she went on to off-white inside the aggressive rose-bud shape, and they became two or three teeth which somehow had an aggressive quality like a naturally quarrelsome dog’s. Around the lips, in an order that was not nature’s, there was fashioned first nostrils, unnaturally distended, then mascaraed eyes, blue and cold, then hair which made no pretence of being anything other than dyed blonde.

  At a small exhibition of her work in a gallery in Woodhouse Lane later that year, the occasional visitor from the Northern Television studios stood in front of the picture, and if he or she stood long enough they discerned a likeness to Bet Garrett: predatory, disaster-hungry, destructive.