The Dead Side of the Mike

by Simon Brett

‘. . . and we should have Mr Piggott from Birmingham on the line. Are you there, Mr Piggott?’

  ‘Yes, I am, Dave.’

  ‘Good, good, the boffins in the backroom have got the phones working. Tell me, Mr Piggott – or can I call you Kevin?’

  ‘Please do, Dave.’

  ‘Fine. Tell me, Kevin, what sort of a night is it in Birmingham?’

  ‘Oh, very nice, thank you, Dave.’

  ‘Good. And let’s hope your lucky star’s out tonight as you play . . . “Ten for a Tune”.’

  ‘Let’s hope so, Dave.’

  ‘Right, to have ten pounds winging their way to you tomorrow, all you have to do is to tell me what this piece of music is and who’s singing it.’

  TAPE OF SCRAMBLED MUSIC

  ‘Well, there it was, Kevin. A fairly difficult one, but tell me – do you have any idea what it might be?’

  ‘Yes, Dave, I think I know exactly.’

  ‘There’s confidence for you. Right, what do you think it is?’

  ‘I think it’s There’s an Old Mill by the Stream and I think it’s sung by Danny Klinger.’

  The impact was immediate. Sheridan looked as if he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. Hard. He mouthed, incapable of speech.

  ‘Is that right?’ asked Charles inexorably, watching his victim through the slit in the blind.

  ‘No. No,’ Sheridan managed to croak.

  ‘Oh, what a pity. Well, never mind. I’d like a dedication, please. It’s for Andrea Gower and all at Musimotive and the number we’d all like to hear is Confessin’.’

  ‘Well . . . you . . . can’t have it.’ Sheridan’s shaking hands reached forward to the turntable, banged against the pick-up and knocked it jolting into the middle of the disc. Music started with an ugly rasp. He rose to his feet and rushed into the control cubicle as Charles hurried out from his hiding-place.

  ‘Who – did – that?’ Dave Sheridan mouthed incoherently.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ asked his new producer with concern.

  ‘What’s up, Dave?’ asked his agent with equal concern.

  ‘Who did it?’ asked Dave Sheridan more firmly.

  Keith Nicholls rose from the control panel just as Charles entered the suite. ‘We did it, Dave,’ he said softly. ‘Now perhaps you know what it feels like to be really frightened, maybe you know what Andrea felt like when you pulled her wrist across the blade, what Klinger felt like when he smelt the exhaust fumes, what I felt like this afternoon when I saw that spool coming towards me.’

  ‘You’ve no proof,’ said Sheridan.

  ‘Oh yes, we have,’ Charles lied firmly.

  ‘Look, what is all this?’ asked Michael Oakley.

  ‘The record’s coming up in thirty seconds,’ said the new producer feebly.

  Dave Sheridan suddenly turned round to his case on the table. When he turned back, he was holding a small automatic pistol. ‘Out of my way, all of you.’

  ‘You won’t get away,’ said Charles.

  ‘Yes, I will. I got away from the last bit of trouble I had, with Danny in the States. And I’ll get away with this. Let me pass.’

  The gun was held in a very purposeful manner and Charles felt discretion was the better part of valour. He drew back to make a gangway for Sheridan to leave the studio.

  But Keith Nicholls was not going to let that happen. ‘No. You’re not going to get away with it. Not after what you did to Andrea.’ And he launched himself at the disc jockey.

  There was a sharp report from the gun. Keith was frozen for a minute in mid-air, then slumped to the ground. By the time the moment of shock was over, Dave Sheridan had left the studio.

  ‘Good God, what shall I do?’ the new producer asked. ‘The record’s finished. There’ll be silence on the air. Oh my God – silence.’ He stopped, appalled at the thought.

  ‘Ring the duty office,’ Keith’s voice came weakly from the floor. ‘Tell them there’s been a shooting. Tell them to stop Dave Sheridan, not to let anyone leave the building.’

  The new producer still hesitated.

  ‘Come on, surely even you are capable of doing that,’ hissed Keith, and passed out.

  The producer got on the phone. Charles knelt down beside Keith. The bullet appeared to have hit his stomach. There was a lot of blood. ‘And get a doctor too,’ Charles said harshly. ‘Quickly!’

  He stood up. Gerald Venables, Michael Oakley and the dolly-bird looked at him in astonishment. ‘Come on Gerald, let’s get to the front of the building. There may be explanations necessary.’

  Gerald nodded and they started to leave the studio.

  ‘This is a tragedy,’ said Michael Oakley. ‘That guy was going to be very big.’

  They met the Duty Officer, the Head of Security and a lot of other security men in the main Reception. The police had been called. Unwilling as the BBC always was to make its troubles public, on this occasion the Duty Officer reckoned there was no way of excluding the police.

  And no, Dave Sheridan hadn’t gone past them. No, there was no other way he could have got out. All the other exits were firmly locked.

  ‘Couldn’t he have broken a window or a door?’

  ‘We’ve been round and checked on the ground floor and first floor. There’s no sign of anything.’

  ‘So you reckon he’s still in the building?’

  The Head of Security nodded. ‘As soon as the police come we’re going to have a thorough search.’

  ‘Has the doctor arrived?’

  ‘Yes, he’s just gone up to the studio. We’ll want to talk to you later. I suggest you go up to the canteen and have coffee or something. We’ll find you there.’

  ‘Okay.’ Charles and Gerald got into the lift and pressed the button for the eighth floor.

  ‘Charles,’ asked Gerald, ‘had you really got proof to pin the murders on him?’

  ‘No, it was complete bluff.’

  ‘It worked.’

  ‘Yes, and now there’s no question about his having committed a crime. In front of seven witnesses. I just hope to God it’s not another murder.’

  ‘Yes.’ The lift slowed down. ‘I wonder where he’s gone.’ The lift doors opened. ‘Ah, here we are at the top.’

  They stepped out. Charles stopped suddenly. ‘Gerald, that book you talked about . . . Death in Broadcasting House was it called?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How did you say it ended?’

  ‘In a chase across the roof of the building.’

  ‘I wonder . . .’

  Opposite them was a notice at the foot of a small staircase:

  UNAUTHORISED STAFF ARE NOT ALLOWED ON THIS STAIRCASE OR ON THE ROOF WHICH IS STRICTLY OUT OF BOUNDS

  ‘What was that?’ Both froze.

  ‘It sounded like a door. Along the corridor.’ Charles whispered. ‘It must be him. There can’t be many people about at this time. I should think he is trying to get to the roof. Must be looking for the staircase.’

  They started back along the old corridor towards the canteen. They turned a corner. Both gasped. Dave Sheridan stood in front of them, holding his gun.

  A shot sounded, appallingly loud, as they threw themselves back. They heard the bang of a door out of sight.

  ‘Are you all right, Gerald?’

  ‘I think so. I felt the wind of it, but I don’t think it hit me.’

  Charles peered round the corner cautiously. ‘No sign.’

  ‘Where do you reckon he’s gone?’

  ‘That way leads to the canteen. I wouldn’t have thought he’s gone there. Or . . .’ Charles pointed to a stout pair of double doors.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘It’s a studio. 8A. I’ve worked there.’

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘I reckon we go in and try to find him.’

  Gerald took a deep breath. ‘Okay, buddy boy.’

  They pushed the studio door open. It made no noise. It had been muffled to prevent its sound from interfering with recor
ding. Inside it was dark and deathly quiet. All sound was muffled. The two of them stood there, trying to accustom their eyes to the darkness, trying to prise its heavy drapes apart. But it was unyielding. They could see nothing.

  Charles moved forward. His footstep sounded heavily on wood. Of course, damn it, this was the live end of the studio. The other end, behind a curtain, was carpeted for dead acoustics. This end the bare boards were meant to ring out with steps and voices.

  Well, hell, if he was going to be audible whatever he did, there was no point in pussyfooting. Go the whole hog. He jumped forward, landing with a resounding thud on the boards and shouted, ‘All right, Sheridan, you may as well give yourself up. Even if you get up to the roof, you won’t get away.’

  Fortunately he had taken the precaution of landing in a crouch. The bullet that zinged over his head would have found his heart had he been upright.

  ‘Aagh,’ he said liquidly, as he had in Richard III at Guildford (‘Mr Paris perhaps a trifle over-parted’ – Surrey Comet) and fell to the floor with a thud. Then rolled, he hoped quietly, to one side.

  Quietly enough. Another bullet dug into the wooden floor where he would have been if he hadn’t moved.

  Dave Sheridan’s voice came coolly from where the gun had flashed. ‘Right, if the other one of you wants the same, you just try and stop me getting up on the roof.’

  Ah, thought Charles comfortingly, he thinks I’m dead.

  Gerald, with the discretion which had made him such a success in the legal profession and contributed to the purchase of his Rolls-Royce, kept very quiet.

  ‘Right. Goodbye,’ said Sheridan’s voice. Then there was a sound of footsteps running up stone stairs. They reached a level and stopped. Then there was a rattle and clang of at least six different bolts as he fought to open the door. Finally the last one gave, and he leapt forward to the freedom of the roof of Broadcasting House.

  At that moment all the lights in the studio came on. Charles, from his vantage point on the floor, looked up to where the sound of the door had come from.

  He saw Dave Sheridan clutching at his nose. The door with which he had struggled had opened on to a blank wall. It was a Sound Effects door and all its bolts and latches were only there for the illusions of Saturday Night Theatre.

  And the stairs up which he had dashed were Sound Effects stairs. He had run up the stone side. Had he gone up the other side, he would have made the sound of running up wooden stairs.

  Dave Sheridan had dropped his gun when he ran into the brick wall. Blood from his nose trickled through his fingers as he turned to face the police.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE THIRD AND, as it turned out, final full meeting of the Features Action Group was a somewhat muted affair.

  A flamboyant touch was provided by the girl with Shredded Wheat hair, who appeared dressed in a man’s pin-striped suit, shirt and tie ‘as a protest against the sexist bias of the assembly’.

  The young man with wild teeth and hair registered his protest against the lack of blacks in the group by not appearing at all, and rather a lot of members, for one reason or another, followed his example.

  The most notable absence was that of John Christie, the scheme’s instigator. Following his brief appointment as Co-ordinator, Drama Department (CDD), he had been elevated to a position in Secretariat so important that it didn’t even have any initials. He was now involved in liaison with yet another government-sponsored committee which had been appointed to investigate the state of broadcasting.

  So he continued his urbane climb up the Management ladder, forgetting none of the people with whom he had made contact during the brief but stimulating experience of the Features Action Group meetings. Oh no, they would all come in useful, their opinions would be quoted at Management meetings, their Christian names would be invoked to demonstrate his common touch, their ideas would be presented as his own. Nothing would be wasted in what he saw as his inexorable climb to Director-General.

  He sent a fulsome note of apology, but felt confident that the project was very much alive and that he left the group under the more than able chairmanship of Ronnie Barron.

  Ronnie Barron took his new responsibilities seriously, expressing this gravity by talking at half his normal speed. He read out John Christie’s note and the apologies of all the other absentees who had bothered to send any. He then got Harry Bassett from Leeds to read out the minutes (now that he was chairman of the group he was above such menial tasks), and asked if he could sign them as a true and accurate record of what took place at the last full meeting.

  This suggestion prompted considerable debate, not least from the reader of the minutes. Harry Bassett, with his group member hat on, could not help noticing that, not to put too fine a point on it, not only had his objection at the previous meeting to the lack of minutes of his references to regional broadcasting at the first meeting not been minuted, there was also no mention in the current minutes of certain telling points he made about the vitality of feature ideas in the main regional areas. As it were.

  Others were equally incensed by what was described as the expurgation of the minutes. There was dark talk of censorship, threats to free speech and gagging the voice of the individual on a scale unequalled even in Nazi Germany.

  Charles Paris found it difficult to get that excited. All he noticed about the minutes was that once again John Christie moved through them like a cross between Napoleon and Florence Nightingale, redressing a grievance here, giving a masterly summing-up there, expressing always superb judgment and supreme intellect.

  Charles was only really there to maintain contact with the BBC, to find out if there were any more details known about the Dave Sheridan scandal, to check on Keith Nicholls’s progress . . . and to see Steve Kennett.

  It was with huge disappointment that he saw she wasn’t at the meeting.

  A sub-committee was appointed to check through the minutes and produce an impartial version of events at the previous meeting. Then the business of the current meeting started.

  Harry Bassett again took the floor. His problem concerned the very nature of the assembly. It was an unofficial body, as it were, and so, in a sense, secret. Until its deliberations had taken what you might call concrete form, it had, if his recollection served, been agreed that the group’s existence should be kept from the powers that be, as it were. This, however, placed him on the horns of a dilemma. Coming, as he did, from the regional centre of Leeds, he was involved in what could only be described as considerable capital outlay in fares and overnight accommodation, which he regarded as legitimate expenses on BBC business. His Head of Department, however, had refused to authorise his expense claims, unless he were informed, as it were, of the nature of the business on which Harry had travelled to London. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, put him in a bit of a jam.

  Helmut Winkler, looking more like a mad professor than ever, was appalled by this. ‘Vot hope haff ye got off producing anysing of artistic merit in zis country vile zat sort off petty-minded mercenary attitude obtainz? Vun must suffer for art. Vot does a few poundz matter compared to ze creation off a true york off art?’

  ‘Well now, that’s all very well, Helmut,’ reasoned Harry Bassett, ‘but I do have a mortgage and a family and, in a sense, considerable responsibilities of a, as it were, financial nature. And while I sympathise with your, er, sense of priorities, I do feel –’

  ‘Ass long ass zis attitude exiztz in ze BBC . . .’ Helmut Winkler (who was a bachelor and whose income was well subsidised by the incomprehensible articles he wrote for The Listener and various higher-paying American periodicals) shrugged in despair. ‘Novun seemz to be sinking about ze philosophy off audio anymore. Ven vill people learn zat radio iz not just a matter of communication? Not efen a matter of communication. Radio has nuzzing to do viz communication.’

  ‘Bloody nonsense,’ said the woman from Woman’s Hour. ‘Radio is communication, talking directly to the audience. That’s what worked so
well in our feature on hysterectomy.’

  They were in the bar within half an hour. The discussion had not progressed and Ronnie Barron had closed the meeting with the intention of reassembling sometime very soon, when everyone had had a bit more time to work out their own views on the direction in which the group should be going. Everyone had agreed to this idea, but none had got out their diaries. Ronnie Barron had said that his secretary would ring round in a few days to fix a date and a venue.

  It was about half-past seven on a Friday night. The crowd in the Ariel Bar was thinning. There were a few people Charles recognised. The Drama Rep. actress from the Dad’s the Word recording perched on a tall stool in the middle of other Drama Rep. members. In a corner Mark Lear was talking intensely to a pretty young girl. And standing on her own in the middle of the room was Steve Kennett.

  He went across to her. She looked better than ever. Her huge eyes sparkled animatedly. ‘Hello, Charles, how are you?’

  ‘Fine. Didn’t see you at the meeting.’

  ‘No. I didn’t think it was going anywhere.’

  ‘It didn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise.’

  ‘Have you heard any news of Keith?’

  ‘Yes, making good progress. Out of hospital next week, if all goes well. Apparently the bullet went straight through and didn’t hit any vital organs.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And another thing’s happened to Keith actually. A producer’s job has come up in Radio Two, and, because he did so well on his attachment, he’s been appointed to it without a board.’

  ‘That’s terrific. So no recrimination about the illicit tape-copying?’

  ‘The BBC is unwilling to admit it ever took place. They made a mistake over Dave Sheridan, but this is the only crime they will recognise.’

  ‘That sounds in character. I bet Keith’s pleased.’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘It’s funny, the Beeb can sometimes be very humane. Just now and then, you know, the right gesture at the right time.’

  ‘Yes. The benevolent Auntie.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Look, you haven’t got a drink. Let me –’

  ‘I’m getting one got.’