Killings on Jubilee Terrace

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Something like this came out in our last conversation, Inspector.’

  ‘It did.’

  ‘That was while Reggie was with us, and it really concerned Hamish and his tastes.’

  ‘That’s right. But people with way-out tastes tend to…cling together – I can’t think of another expression.’

  ‘But the fact is,’ said Melvin, ‘that neither Sylvia Cardew nor Bet Garrett were children, and only Sylvia could, let’s say, childify herself through make-up and clothing.’

  ‘That’s right… You once told me, sir, about the ethos of Jubilee Terrace. Ordinary people in ordinary situations which sometimes become extraordinary.’

  ‘That’s roughly it.’

  ‘How does that translate into the show’s PR, or the studio’s PR about the show?’

  ‘Well…that’s not my business, but…it’s cosy, our PR. It plays down the fact that it’s made by actors and plays up the parts they play. We want to make it a family thing – family viewing, with characters of all ages so that several generations can find things of interest to them in it.’

  ‘That’s what I’d have said from watching interviews with cast members on daytime television.’

  ‘Oh God! Daytime television. Why do you bother?’

  Charlie refused to be side-tracked.

  ‘I would have thought that the sort of actor that goes down well with the PR department is Marjorie Harcourt-Smith, and maybe (I haven’t met him yet) Bill Garrett – chunky, dependable, right-minded: the sort of person everyone would like as their next-door neighbour. Or of course their pub landlord.’

  ‘Yes, I think that’s true. Where is this leading?’

  ‘Whereas they would be much less interested in someone like Garry Kopps, who’s not only a pretty good actor but he’s also gay, and writing a book about soaps which isn’t fan-fodder but a serious analysis of their appeal and what we seem to be calling their ethos.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t recall Garry ever having been on This Morning or the Richard and Judy show.’

  ‘What I’m getting at is the cosy, “invite us into your home” aspects of soaps, or this soap, with actors and characters merging into each other, and a feeling of everyone being at heart rather nice.’

  ‘You make it sound pure escapism, but I suppose it’s true.’

  ‘So the PR department would be pretty upset not only if a character or even a behind-the-scenes man was arrested on charges that were definitely criminal (pederasty, let’s say), but also if it was something that was perfectly legal sexually but had an aura about it of the ridiculous or the unsavoury.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose they wouldn’t be happy.’

  ‘So you don’t know anything about any of the cast or the background boys that could have been used in that way?’

  ‘No, I know of nothing. If I did I would have told you.’

  ‘Would you, sir?’ said Charlie, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Well, not while Reggie was in the room, but in private.’

  ‘I ask because there hasn’t been much thought in that direction. But Sylvia Cardew’s last part – the adolescent paper-girl – should have alerted us.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I see that now.’

  ‘We have two possible intended victims here: one of them was a full-time prostitute with an interest in acting – or at least in getting a high-profile television part. She was just into her third projected role in Jubilee Terrace. These could have been brought about by a bit of genteel blackmail by Hamish Fawley. Or more likely by a concerted piece of genteel blackmail by the two of them, Hamish and Sylvia, of one or more members of the Terrace team.’

  ‘I hope you’re not suggesting—’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m looking at possibilities. And I’m trying to work out why a tawdry soul like Sylvia Cardew, whose only gift was an ability to play children as well as girls of her own age, could wield such influence on the second most popular television soap.’

  Melvin said nothing, looking into the middle distance. Then he shook himself.

  ‘I wish you well in trying to find out the truth. You’ll be trawling in some pretty murky waters.’

  ‘Most of the waters I trawl in are murky.’ Charlie stood up and went to the door. ‘Are you a devoted family man, sir?’

  Settle looked up as if he was going to break out into an apoplectic response. Then he swallowed and spoke softly.

  ‘Five. We have five children. I was very slow to realise that that was far too many. I have no particular affection for children, Inspector Peace. I was with them all evening on the night of the murder – or, rather, they were with me. Shouting, laughing, fighting, galumphing around the house, they and their friends, possibly making love, with me fuming every five minutes without even creating a temporary five-minute truce. Oh yes, I could not have burnt that sad pair to death – not me, a devoted family man. Or, as I prefer to call it, familied man.’

  But Charlie’s mind, as he drove back to Leeds, had left the subject of sex with children. He had talked all the time of two candidates for the role of main intended victim. He must never ignore the likelihood that in fact there were three.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Wife and Mother

  The room where Bet Garrett had settled bore every resemblance to a cheap hotel room, if such still exist. The building called itself a guest house, but it was no more friendly or welcoming than more grandly designated buildings. There was a tiny box with washbasin and shower, and the main room contained so much useless furniture that you grazed your calves and shins whenever you moved around. The three-quarters bed seemed to be permanent home to an open suitcase, from which items could be taken as they were needed, and from which dirty washing spilt on to the eiderdown.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Bet. ‘You make the room seem small.’

  ‘It is small,’ said Charlie. He was in no mood for sexually tinged compliments about his size.

  Bet was not, at that moment, an enticing figure. She had apparently just emerged from the shower, in which she had washed her hair, and she wore only a blue bathrobe, loosely tied to draw the eye to her full front. Charlie’s were duly drawn, but the breasts didn’t materially alter the general impression of a sloven trying to be voluptuous.

  ‘I’ve got to get down to finding a permanent place,’ she said. ‘I’m just here because a friend took pity.’

  The friend presumably owned the Otley Road Guest House, not far from the cricket ground. It bore all the hallmarks of going through a bad patch, and Bet’s person and slatternly habits seemed to encapsulate this.

  ‘You’re not thinking of going back to the family home, then?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Am I heck as like! I suppose I might if Bill handed it over lock, stock and barrel, and with vacant possession.’

  ‘You’re not interested in custody of your daughters?’

  She grimaced.

  ‘Enthusiasm for that is pretty near rock-bottom. I suppose at a pinch I might take them on, if Bill paid a hefty sum for their upkeep. Kids’ clothes cost the earth, and these ones eat like horses as well, usually from takeaways. It’s not that I need the money. The custody claim was just a laugh at Bill’s expense. He thinks the sun shines out of those girls’ BTMs. I’d screw money out of him for pure pleasure, to pay him back for I-don’t-know-how-many years of marital boredom.’

  ‘I see,’ said Charlie, neutrally, he thought. He was not neutral on the subject of daughters, since he loved his elder child to bits, in spite of her tyranny over him.

  ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong about my brood,’ said Bet, trying a hefty fluttering of the eyelids. ‘They think I’m a hoot, and they love me in their way. Their dad always gets things badly wrong. He used to read them fairy stories which bored them rigid because what they really wanted was The Simpsons on video. He’ll be doing the same sort of things now he’s on his own with them – taking them to the Lord of the Rings when what they really want is Pirates of the Caribbean. Poor old Bill. Always the loser.’r />
  ‘You don’t seem to have been on a winning streak yourself recently,’ said Charlie. Bet’s eyes widened dramatically, to make her look like a Disney stepmother.

  ‘Eh? What’s that mean?’

  ‘I mean splitting up from your fiancé, then losing him in a fire.’

  Bet sighed.

  ‘Bloody sight better than losing myself in a fire,’ she said. ‘What do you see before you? Nine stone four of pure womanhood raring to go. If me and Hamish had stayed together there would have been me in that bedroom, and you’d have been looking at charred remains. I’m grateful, thinking it over, to Hamish and that Sylvia Whatsit.’

  ‘Do you think you could have been the one aimed at?’

  The reply was very definite.

  ‘No. Anyway it doesn’t do to think like that.’

  ‘Why do you say “no”?’ She looked at him pityingly.

  ‘You stupid or something? How long have you been on this case? Don’t you know that Hamish was the most hated man on the set? He made it his business to put people’s backs up. I’m the same – that’s what drew us together for a bit. We like to make things happen, and deliciously unpleasant things too, as a rule. But compared to Hamish I’m Mother Teresa.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. How did you two come together?’

  ‘Well, he knew who I was, of course, as I knew him. He’d been in for about a year, then he was written out. He’d seen me with Bill, as well as all sorts of other men. He probably had a good idea what sort I am – game for anything, that’s my motto. When he came back in he came in on a scene we were filming outside St Michael’s Church in Headingley. He was delighted when everyone showed quite clearly that he was the last person they wanted written back into the series. It was quite funny how unanimous they were – except for me. I just watched and thought: “there’s fun to come from this”.’

  ‘And he saw you were different, and you got talking.’

  ‘He just came over and asked me out for a drink.’

  ‘And did the idea of the engagement spring from that?’

  ‘A bit later, actually. Good ideas take time to mature.’ She let out a cackle of laughter. ‘But we took to each other at once – and we slept with each other from the start too.’

  ‘Was that unusual?’

  ‘Pretty much standard practice, actually.’

  ‘What sort of person was Hamish from the sexual point of view?’

  ‘Try everything and do it regular. He wasn’t highly sexed so much as variously sexed.’

  Charlie thought about this.

  ‘I think I understand. What about children?’

  ‘What do you mean “what about children?” He didn’t want any.’

  Charlie sighed.

  ‘Was he interested in sexual acts with children?’

  She screwed up her face. ‘Sure to have been. Just his line, screwing up the helpless and the vulnerable. Targeting their weaknesses, making them laughing stocks. He’d have slept with lambs and calves as soon as eat ’em. But live lambs and calves are rare in Leeds.’

  ‘So was there any relationship between Hamish and your own children?’

  She looked at him, twisting her face with distaste, possibly genuine, possibly assumed.

  ‘No there was not. I made sure not to have them round while I was living in Bridge Street. It may surprise you, but I don’t act as pimp for my own children.’

  ‘So you draw the line somewhere?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you might have used Hamish as one of the key elements in gaining custody. “M’Lud, the plaintiff is shortly to marry, and will be able to provide a stable environment in a two-parent family, so important for growing girls” – that kind of garbage.’

  She thought for a time, her mouth working as if she were chewing gum.

  ‘I thought along those lines for a time. But as I’ve told you, that was just a game at Bill’s expense, whether he realised it or not. I was never going to go the whole hog – not to court or wherever. I had had him squirming, and that gave me a big laugh. I was always going to withdraw the action and leave those three little angels as a rich gift to Bill.’

  ‘You sound scornful of him for wanting them,’ said Charlie, still the father of a daughter.

  ‘I am.’ She thought, and then said. ‘It’s not as though he can be sure all of them are his.’

  ‘Oh. Are you sure?’

  ‘I could make informed guesses.’

  ‘Maybe it wouldn’t make much difference either way. Maybe he just loves them.’

  ‘You’re probably right. That would be just like Bill. What a wanker!’

  Charlie decided to pocket his own little obsession with fathers and go off on a slightly different tack.

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘Bill and me? In a pub in the centre of Leeds. Can’t remember which one. Quite posh.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘How old is Angela?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her.’

  ‘Well, around fourteen. No, wait – it’s October. Say fifteen. Add nine months and you’ve got it. We actually married when I was seven months gone.’

  ‘Were you in love?’

  ‘Of course I wasn’t. I’ve never been in love. Not daft enough for that.’

  ‘So why? To get a job in television?’

  ‘Yes, maybe. Bill had been in Terrace for a couple of months then. That’s how I recognised him in the pub as an actor, and that’s why I started to talk to him. I’d taken a few acting classes at the College of Music and Drama. I had dreams, ambitions… And a fat lot of good Bill was to my brilliant career.’

  ‘You got a part in the series.’

  She shrugged, sneering.

  ‘If you call that a part. I’m called in now and then, when they need flowers for an occasion, and someone with a genteel Yorkshire accent to complete the scene.’

  ‘I don’t recognise your accent as genteel Yorkshire.’

  A vocal change came over her.

  ‘Do you not? Well, it would probably surprise you to know that I went to two excellent schools, St Ethelberga’s, near Knaresborough, and the Thornton School for Girls, near Bradford. No expense spared. My family at the time was on an upward curve.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘I think I recognised, if they didn’t, where I naturally belonged. And that was on the streets. I had been expelled from both those excellent schools before the penny finally dropped with them. By then I spoke the accent of the streets for preference, and I’ve remained a streets person.’ She went back to her preferred brogue. ‘Common as muck, that’s me.’

  ‘It sounds as if you were rather young to get the part of a shop manageress,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t start as the manageress. I started as a shop girl – genteel Yorkshire shop girl in a very nice trade, daughter of the manageress, who took over when her mother retired. I suppose that slut Sylvia Cardew was hoping to rise by a similar route.’

  ‘Is that the slut you’re so grateful to?’ Bet stuck out her tongue like a naughty schoolgirl.

  ‘Yes. It takes one slut to know another…Sylvia though! Would you believe it? No one is called Sylvia these days.’

  ‘I think it was her actual name.’

  ‘There you are. Why couldn’t she change it to Sharon or Kerry like all the other girls who want to get on in the profession?’

  ‘Getting back to your marriage,’ said Charlie, who thought he was being led on to the paths of madness, ‘you stayed married to Bill for fifteen years, but with a few interruptions when you had other men, is that right?’

  She smiled in unashamed self-adulation.

  ‘I had them queuing. Don’t ask for a list. With most of the men at Northern Television I’ve simply forgotten whether we did or we didn’t.’

  ‘In the meantime you had these children, paternity uncertain and you had occasional acting jobs, while your husband was permanently under contract t
o the makers of Jubilee Terrace.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why now?’ asked Charlie urgently, trying to break down the wall of self-love. Bet thought for a few seconds.

  ‘I take it that you mean why did the marriage finish just at this time? Well, you can take so much boredom and squabbling back and forth. And you can take only so much of being expected to look after three brats, and feed them and wipe their dirty mouths – not to mention their dirty backsides. I got tired of domesticity, that was it. It had nothing to do with Hamish’s reappearance. The engagement and custody stuff was simply a wicked ploy to drive Bill out of his mind. I wanted to launch myself out on my own. And I never, repeat never, will get married again.’

  Charlie nodded and thought hard.

  ‘Were you often called in to play this part as florist?’

  ‘Maybe once every three months or so.’

  ‘Was it usually one day’s work?’

  ‘Sometimes. They’d usually pay for more, to cover retakes.’

  ‘And this week? You were called in for how many days?’

  ‘Two days, but they paid for four.’

  ‘And I gather you filmed with Sylvia Cardew.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What was your impression of her?’

  ‘Go-getter. I should know. I’m a go-getter myself. And there’s no way a go-getter is going to offer a helping hand to another go-getter.’

  ‘And did she seem to think you might?’

  ‘Not really. She had a much more effective ally than I could ever be.’

  ‘And who was that?’ asked Charlie, knowing.

  ‘Who do you think? Hamish of course. I was absolutely flabbergasted. When a new face appears we all try to be nice to them. Company policy. So I asked about what she’d done, and of course she didn’t mention having been – still being, I gather from gossip in the canteen – a high-class whore. But she did say she’d had another part in Terrace, and that just a few weeks back. One of Harry Hornby’s newspaper deliverers, with a storyline in the offing when Vernon – Bert Porter, that is – takes a shine to her. That was torpedoed by Vernon being careless in the London traffic. Then she told me she’d had a part lined up eighteen months ago, one involving Cyril Wharton. Hamish. So she’d had three parts allocated to her, all different, two of them substantial ones, at least prospectively. “Who’s a lucky girl then?” I said. She could see I was boiling. I wanted to say “How long did you have to lie on your back to get those?” but luckily held back.’