Dead on Cue (13 page)

Maria laughed. ‘The way Charlie goes about conducting his cases, he'll
never
be promoted,' she said. ‘I'm not sure that he even wants to be. But that's not the point.'

‘So what is?'

‘Sooner or later, you've got to stop acting like his bagman – and it might as well be sooner.'

‘That's pretty much what he said to me himself,' Rutter admitted.

‘And he was spot-on. Look, Bob, if inspectors didn't have a role to play in their own right, the job wouldn't exist. So what you should do is find out exactly what that role involves – and get on with it.'

Rutter gently pulled her head to his chest. ‘You're a complete marvel,' he told her.

‘Yes, I do have my uses,' Maria said complacently. She paused for a second. ‘There is one other thing you can do.'

‘Yes?'

‘It's something that Charlie's been doing for everyone who's worked under him for years – but which he'd never ask anybody else to do for him.'

‘And what's that?'

‘You know what he's like when he's working on a case. Nothing else exists for him. Other men of his rank spend half their time plotting and scheming – Charlie just gets on with the job.'

‘That's true enough,' Rutter agreed. ‘I suppose that's what makes him such a bloody good bobby.'

‘But he does need somebody watching his back,' Maria said, ‘and since he won't do it himself, I think that “someone” should be you.'

I
t would not have been quite accurate to describe the
Maddox Row
studio canteen as a ‘room', Monika Paniatowski decided. It was really no more than a large alcove off the central concourse. Its walls were made of bare breeze-blocks, and its floor covered with heavy chocolate-brown industrial linoleum. Strip lighting hung overhead, filling the whole area with an antiseptic glare. It was not the kind of place she would choose to spend much time in, she thought as she paid for her cup of tea and digestive biscuits at the counter – but then perhaps the whole purpose of its design had been to discourage unnecessary lingering.

The sergeant looked quickly around the room. Several of the cheap Formica tables were unoccupied, but she was not tempted to go to one of them, because she would learn absolutely nothing sitting alone. Instead, her gaze settled on a table which was occupied by three women. They were all in their early twenties and all respectably – if not expensively – dressed. And, as if they'd been drawn together by the need to create a contrast, one was a heavy blonde, one a skinny brunette and the third a curvaceous redhead.

Perfect! Monika thought.

She carried her tray over to women's table, hovered uncertainly for a moment, then said, ‘Do you mind if I join you?'

The women looked up.

‘You what?' the heavy blonde asked.

‘I was wondering if I could join you,' the detective sergeant repeated meekly. ‘You see, it's my first day here, and I don't know a soul in the place. Then I saw you, and I thought to myself: Come on, Monika, don't be a wallflower all your life – force yourself to start talking to somebody.'

The three women exchanged questioning, almost tribal looks, then the redhead smiled and said, ‘Well, I suppose that now you've made the effort, you'd better sit down.'

Monika returned the smile with an artfully shy and grateful one of her own, and slid into the spare seat.

‘You chose a rum day to start working here – what with there bein' a murder an' us havin' bobbies runnin' all over the place,' the blonde said.

‘I wouldn't have been working here
at all
if it hadn't been for the murder,' Monika said.

‘How's that?'

‘I'm only a temp. I'm replacing the girl who actually found the body. Apparently she's in too much of a state to come into work herself.'

The announcement caused the temperature around the table to drop by several degrees.

‘So you're working for Jeremy Wilcox, are you?' the heavy blonde girl asked warily, after several seconds had passed.

‘That's right,' Monika agreed.

‘Ooh!' the skinny brunette said, in what could only be called mock awe. ‘So you're practically management, then!'

Which automatically makes me an enemy, Monika thought.

She laughed, self-deprecatingly. ‘Not really management. Not at all, in fact. Like I said, I'm only here for a few days, until the regular girl feels better – then it's back to the typing pool in head office for me.'

‘We're from the typing pool here in the studio,' said the blonde.

Well, of course you are. What else could you be? Monika thought. But she kept the remark to herself.

‘So what do you think of our Mr Wilcox?' the brunette asked.

It was not so much as casual question as a test, Monika realised. If she gave the right answer, they would be on her side. If she gave the wrong one, they would freeze her out again.

‘Mr Wilcox? I suppose he's much the same as every other boss I've ever worked for,' she said carefully.

‘The same in what way?' the brunette asked sceptically.

‘Oh, you know!'

‘I'm not sure we do. Why don't you explain it to us?'

Monika shrugged. ‘Well, he seems very full of himself, if you want to know the truth. And he seems quite happy to just sit back and let other people do most of the work, while he's the one who pulls in the big wage.'

The vigorous nods from the blonde and the redhead – and the grudging one from the skinny brunette – told her she'd said exactly the right thing.

‘You want to watch him,' the brunette advised.

‘Who?'

‘Mr Wandering-hands Jeremy Wilcox, that's who. If he ever asks you to stay behind and do a bit of overtime for him, make sure he never gets between you and the door.'

‘Like that, is he?'

‘He's tried it on with every girl in the place,' the skinny brunette said. ‘Of course,' she continued, glaring at the redhead, ‘there's some who are more willing to give into him than others.'

‘It was the Christmas party, and he caught me under the mistletoe,' the redhead protested. ‘What was I supposed to do?'

‘I know what I'd have done!'

‘If he'd ever given you the chance!'

‘Who do you think killed Val Farnsworth?' Paniatowski said, stepping into the middle of the developing catfight before any blood was actually drawn.

The three typists fell instantly silent, but Paniatowski did not miss the rapid glances they gave each other.

‘Doesn't any of you have any idea?' the sergeant asked. ‘I know if I'd been working here, I'd have been bursting with theories.'

There was more eye contact between the three women, then the blonde said, ‘Well, when you think about it, it could have been anybody, couldn't it? I mean, for all we know, it might even have been a passin' tramp.'

‘Come on, don't be so stuffy. We're only playing a game here,' Paniatowski cajoled. ‘After all, it's not as if any of us know a bobby, is it?'

‘If you must know, we think it was one of the cast,' the brunette said, almost in a whisper.

‘One of the—!' Paniatowski exclaimed. Then she, too, lowered her voice. ‘You think it was one of the cast? In heaven's name, why?'

‘Because, as far as they were concerned, Val Farnsworth was getting far too big for her boots,' the brunette said. ‘She hadn't quite gone as far as suggesting that they change the name of the show to
The Liz Bowyer Half-Hour
, but she would have done in the end. And the other actors didn't like it.'

‘Did they tell you that themselves?' Paniatowski probed.

‘Of course they didn't tell us!' the brunette said contemptuously. ‘They're far too important, these days, to lower themselves to talk to anybody from the typing pool.'

‘Then how do you—?'

‘There are other ways we can get to know things. You'd be surprised how many scripts we've had to re-type because Valerie Farnsworth didn't like this line here, or wanted another line adding there. The woman was like a little tin god.' A horrified look came to the brunette's face, as if she were hearing her own words as others might hear them. ‘Not that I want to speak ill of the dead,' she added hastily.

‘Still, at least they won't have to kill anybody else off in the script, now,' the heavy blonde said.

‘What do you mean?' Paniatowski asked.

‘The show's been losing viewers recently – I know, because I was the one who typed up the reports.'

‘The management think we're nothing but robots,' the brunette said. ‘They think we just sit there hitting the keys on our machines, and we don't have a clue what it is we're typing. Well, they're dead wrong. We have more of an idea what's going on round here than most people do. Certainly more than the bloody actors – who can't see anything beyond their own lines.'

‘Somebody at head office made the suggestion that the company should quit while it was ahead – take the show off the air when it was still quite popular,' the redhead whispered conspiratorially. ‘I don't think it would have come quite to that, but even if they'd just cut it back to one episode a week – which was one of the other plans – things would have been bad enough. You don't need anything like as many people when you're filling half an hour of airtime a week, instead of an hour. Actors, technicians, caterers – they'd all have suffered. The typing pool wouldn't have got away unscathed, either.'

‘I still don't see . . .' Paniatowski said.

‘Have you ever listened to
The Archers
on the wireless?' the redhead asked her.

‘Now and again.'

‘It's a bit like
Maddox Row
in a way – except that it's set in the country rather than the town, and there's no pictures, but only voices.'

‘True,' Paniatowski agreed, mystified.

‘It's a very popular series, is
The Archers
, but the BBC were really worried that independent television might take a big chunk of its audience away from it. So do you know what they did?'

‘No. As I said, I'm not a regular listener.'

‘On the night of ITV's first broadcast, there was a fire in
The Archers
. A serious one. So serious that Grace Archer, who was one of the main characters, was burned to death. That was over five years ago, but I can remember it as clearly as it was yesterday.'

‘So can I,' agreed the blonde. ‘The next morning, everybody at work was still in a state of shock. Nobody mentioned the new television station. All they wanted to talk about was poor Grace's death.'

‘Do you see what we're saying?' the brunette asked.

‘I'm not quite sure,' Paniatowski said – although she thought that she had a pretty fair idea.

‘When the last lot of viewing figures for
Maddox Row
came in, there were memos flying all over the place,' the brunette said. ‘The management was going spare. Talk about your headless chickens! There was a lot of talk about what they should do get the figures up again, and in the end it was decided the best way was to kill one of the most popular characters off. The one they finally decided on was Jack Taylor, the postman. I expect that was because the actor who plays him – Larry Coates – is planning to leave the series soon anyway.'

‘He was supposed to die in next Monday's episode,' the blonde said. ‘The idea was that people would keep tuning in to see how the other characters would take his death for at least a week, and by then they'd have been hooked on another plot-line.'

‘Would it have worked?' Paniatowski asked the redhead.

The other woman laughed. ‘How am I supposed to know? I'm just a copy typist, not a highly paid executive like your new boss.'

‘You seem like a bright girl, and you've been in this business for a while,' Paniatowski coaxed. ‘You must have some thoughts about whether it would have been a good idea or not.'

‘I think it
was
a good idea,' the redhead said, obviously flattered that her opinion carried so much weight with the new girl. ‘Nobody would have given a monkey's if Andy Sutcliffe, the Row's layabout, had got himself topped, but Jack Taylor's a very popular character, and people would have felt as if they'd lost one of their own family. I know I would have watched, and I'd have already known what was going to happen. Still, there'll be no need for Jack to meet with an unfortunate accident now, will there?'

‘Won't there?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Of course there won't. After all the publicity we got in the papers this morning, we'll have the highest viewing figures we've ever had on Friday night – however they decide to explain away Liz Bowyer's disappearance.'

‘And nobody will be in any danger of losing their jobs,' Paniatowski said sombrely.

‘You don't think . . .?' the blonde woman began.

‘I don't think what?'

‘You don't think that somebody killed Valerie Farnsworth just to make sure they kept getting a pay packet every Friday?'

‘No, that never even occurred to me,' Paniatowski said.

But she had come across less compelling motives for murder in the past.

J
ane Todd didn't look the least as Woodend had pictured she would. There was no evidence at all of a hard shell coating about her, nor did she have the young, sleek, sophisticated look which would have blended in well with Houseman's office décor. Instead, she turned out to be a plump, middle-aged woman with amused eyes and a no-nonsense air about her.

‘Now where shall I take you first?' she asked, when Houseman had first grudgingly performed the introductions, and then beat a hasty retreat. ‘The studio would be as good a place as any to start. But be prepared to be disappointed.'