Dead on Cue (22 page)

‘Dear Mam and Dad,' Woodend read,

I know this letter will come as a shock to you, and for a long time I've put off writing it, but now I don't feel as if I have any choice. I've tried to like Lancashire, but I just can't. I miss London and I miss my friends. So I've gone back.

The words clawed their way around Woodend's brain like a ferret trying to bite its way out of a sack.

Gone back! Gone back! Gone back!

The letter continued:

You don't need to worry about me. I won't do anything foolish, and I'll keep out of trouble. I promise I'll give you a ring as soon as I'm settled somewhere. In the meantime, please don't try to find me.

Love

Annie

‘We have to do somethin', Charlie!' Joan sobbed. ‘We have to find her an' bring her back.'

‘That's just what she asked us not to do,' Woodend replied, as he felt the world he thought that he knew crumbling around him.

‘She's only a kid!' Joan protested.

‘She'll be sixteen in a couple of weeks. That means that legally she can live away from home if she wants to, as long as she doesn't break the law.'

‘Bugger the law!' said Joan, who rarely swore. ‘I want my daughter back again.'

‘An' so do I. But there's ways an' ways to go about it.'

‘Forget that you're a bloody bobby for once, can't you?!'

‘I am forgettin' it,' Woodend said. ‘I'm tryin' to put myself in Annie's place. If I went down to London tomorrow, I could probably find her. An' I could probably talk her into comin' back home. But it wouldn't last. She'd be off again in a fortnight – and this time she'd make sure she vanished without trace.'

‘So what do
you
suggest we do?'

‘Wait until she calls us—'

‘An' what if she doesn't?'

‘She's promised she will. An' you know our Annie – she always keeps her promises.'

‘So she'll call. What happens then?'

‘Then I
will
go down to London an' talk to her. Or you can go, if you'd prefer it.'

‘No, it'd be better if you went,' Joan said. ‘She's always paid more attention to what you say – though God knows why, because you're hardly ever here to say
anythin
'.'

Woodend could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times his wife had criticised him during their married life – and he could not recall her ever saying anything which had hurt him more. Yet he recognised the justice behind the remark. He hadn't been there often enough. Even when he'd planned to be, his work had usually got in the way.

‘We'll ring all her friends,' he said. ‘We'll tell them that if they see her, they're to pass on the message that we miss her, an' that there's always a place for her back home whenever she feels she needs one.'

‘An' we'll ask them to call us, an' tell us where she is,' Joan said.

‘No, we won't,' Woodend told her. ‘That would be the worst thing we could possibly do. It would make her feel hunted. It would make her go to ground.' He put his arm around his wife's shoulder, and felt a tension there which was new to him. ‘This is the best way, love. I promise you it's the best way.'

‘The best way would have been if she'd never felt the need to run away at all!' Joan said bitterly.

T
hough it was already the chilly dead of night in England, it was still a pleasantly sunny mid-afternoon in California, and the Plymouth Fury which roared down the canyon pretty much had the road to itself.

The man behind the wheel of the Fury had been christened Walter Schmidt, but for the previous twenty years the only name he had gone by had been Preston Vance. He was drunk, and he was angry. And he was driving much too fast.

He pulled hard on the wheel of the Fury to negotiate a sharp bend. He loved this car. It had a 6276cc engine and tailfins the size of small cities. It was not the most expensive automobile on the market, but the very fact that he could afford to buy pricier, yet had chosen not to, was a statement in itself.

Could have afforded, he corrected himself. Not ‘could afford', but ‘could
have
'!

He took another swig from the Jack Daniels bottle which he had wedged between his body and the door, and he felt his foot, as if it had a mind of its own, press down harder on the gas pedal. And why shouldn't it press down harder? He had been born to drive fast cars, sleep with fast women, earn his money fast and spend it in the same way.

It had been a mistake to go to the brunch. A big mistake. Everybody there had been polite – friendly even – but he had caught the occasional condescending stare, and he was sure that the moment he'd left, his hosts would be among the first to start the back-biting.

Well, screw them!

He had drunk their booze. He had sniffed up their lines of coke. He had vomited into their swimming pool.

So let them talk about him, if they wanted to. Let them talk about him until they'd talked so much that their own existences paled into nothingness, and his misfortunes became the centre of their lives.

It didn't matter a damn, because underneath it all he was still the big star he'd always been.

For a second he found his vision was starting to blur, but he wiped the back of his hand across his eyes and they began working properly again.

How much had he drunk in the last couple of hours, he wondered as the needle on the speedometer passed the sixty mark. A whole bottle of whiskey? More than that? It didn't matter. Nothing mattered when you lived in a town without pity – a town where everyone loved a winner for just as long as he was winning, then rubbed their hands with glee when he fell off his perch.

He took another slug of whiskey, and decided that what he really needed now was a cigarette. He patted the pockets of his tuxedo, but the pack was not there.

‘Where are my goddam smokes?' he shouted into the rushing wind.

Had they known – those people back there at the brunch – that the tuxedo was rented? Well, screw them if they did, and screw them if they didn't.

He still needed a smoke – worse than ever now. He glanced down at the floor, and saw the pack lying there, next to the brake pedal.

He must have dropped it, his befuddled mind told him. He must have dropped it, and that was why it was on the floor.

He bent down to pick the pack up. It was more of a stretch than he'd thought it would be. He gasped with the effort, then felt his fingers wrap around the Luckies. He straightened up again, and saw that something strange had happened. The road, which should have directly in front of his hood, had somehow managed to sneak away to the side when he wasn't looking.

He'd have to do something to correct that, he thought.

He was still thinking it when his Plymouth smashed into the tree at over seventy miles an hour.

W
oodend had tossed and turned for most of the night, and it was not until shortly before dawn that he had finally dropped into a troubled sleep.

He'd woken less than two hours later, with the hope that the nightmare in which Annie had left home would quickly dissipate itself from his befuddled mind. It had taken him only a few seconds to realise that it was no dream at all – that Annie really had gone – yet a vague kind of hope continued to cling to him as he went mechanically through his morning routines.

Annie saw what she was doing as glamorous, he told himself as he shaved, but it wouldn't take her long to realise that it wasn't, and she would be back on the evening train.

Annie was punishing him, he decided as he sipped lethargically at his tea and drew on his first Capstan Full Strength of the morning, but it would only be a short punishment, because she was too kind-hearted to make him suffer for any real length of time.

Annie . . .

Annie had
gone
, he finally accepted, as he knotted his tweed tie in front of the mirror. She'd hadn't done it because of some romantic idea of adventure, or because she wanted to get back at her father. That wasn't his Annie at all. She'd left simply because she was too unhappy where she was to stay there any longer.

When it was time for him to set out for the studio, Joan handed him his jacket and brushed the lint off his shoulders, as she always had done – but she did not look him in the eye.

He couldn't say that he blamed her!

Whatever else his faults, Jeremy Wilcox was by no means a stupid man. But even had he been a complete imbecile, he could still have worked out, within the first two minutes of the regular Thursday meeting, that something he was sure he would find personally unpleasant was afoot. How could he fail to work it out, when he had the tangible evidence – a perfectly typed script – right there in his hands?

Wilcox laid the script on the table and looked in turn at the other three men in the room. Drabble and Colligan seemed so uncomfortable that they were practically huddled together, he decided, but Bill Houseman – sitting in splendid isolation at the head of the table – was positively glowing with self-assurance.

The director cleared his throat. ‘Now here's a strange thing,' he said, forcing himself to keep his voice level and even. ‘Yesterday, when I sent my assistant for the script, you said you had nothing at all to show me. Yet less than a day later, you're in a position to present me with a complete episode. How is that possible?'

‘We worked through most of the night,' Ben Drabble said, avoiding eye contact.

‘And here's another strange thing,' Wilcox continued. ‘I haven't had time to study the script properly yet – how could I, when it's only just been handed to me? – but there seem to be all kinds of changes in it that we haven't even discussed.'

‘There simply wasn't the time to talk to everybody about it, Jeremy,' Ben Drabble said.

Wilcox's control cracked, and he slammed his hand down hard on the table. ‘Didn't have time to talk to
everybody
!' he repeated. ‘Well, for your information, I'm not just part of this “everybody” you're talking so glibly about. I'm the
director
. I'm what makes the whole bloody thing work!'

‘Is that right?' Bill Houseman asked. ‘You're the one who makes the whole thing work, are you?'

‘Of course I am,' Jeremy Wilcox said hotly. ‘You'd have to be blind not to see that.'

‘Then isn't it odd that though you've only been here for six months, the show's been a huge success for over
two years
?' Houseman mused.

‘That depends what you mean by successful,' Wilcox countered. ‘Which of the episodes we have in the archives do you think will survive the test of time? Which of them will the future historians of television hold up as examples of truly groundbreaking work? The ones I've directed in the last six months – or the ones my predecessor cobbled together before that?'

‘If I were you, I'd worry more about the audience you've been getting recently than I would about what future generations will think,' Houseman said.

‘Are you saying that's my fault?' Wilcox all but screamed. ‘Are you blaming
me
for the drop in viewing figures?'

‘No,' Houseman replied, sounding almost reasonable. ‘In fact, I'm more than happy to have you take all the credit for the
successes
of the show and none of the blame for its
failures
.'

‘We all know that it's not as simple as you two are trying to make it sound,' Ben Drabble said. ‘There could be dozens of reasons why the viewing figures have been falling.'

Houseman shot Drabble an angry look. I was under the impression that when you agreed not to show Wilcox the script, you realised which side your bread was buttered on, he thought. But you don't, do you? You're still trying to play both ends against the middle – and that won't work any longer.

‘There are people who I'm obliged to take lectures from – but you're not one of them,' he told Ben Drabble. ‘You're nothing but one of the writers. And writers are two a penny.'

‘I was only saying that—' Drabble began.

‘I'm not interested in what you were “only saying”,' Houseman told him. ‘I'm heartily sick of working with ingrates. I created
Maddox Row
. Me – and nobody else! If it wasn't for my efforts, you two scribblers would be drawing the dole every Friday, and talking incessantly over your halves of bitter about the great English novel which you secretly knew you were never going to write. And as for Jeremy . . . well, I expect he'd be back to directing commercials for washing powder.'

‘There was more real drama in my commercials than there ever was in
Madro
before I arrived,' Jeremy Wilcox said. ‘Your big problem, Bill, is that you wouldn't recognise good television if it hit you in the face.'

‘I think we all might feel a lot better after a short break,' said Ben Drabble, who, in the past, had borrowed money from both the producer
and
the director to pay off his gambling debts.

‘I've been far too liberal up to now,' Bill Houseman said, ignoring Drabble's interruption. ‘Well, that's all about to change. There are people working here today who'll be finding themselves out on the street by the end of the week.'

Oh God, let one of them be me, Paddy Colligan prayed silently. Force me to do what I haven't got the guts to do for myself – force me back into the work I
should
be doing. Yet even as the idea crossed his mind, he felt his stomach turn to water at the thought of being poor again.

‘You can't threaten me, you know,' Wilcox told Houseman.

The producer smiled. ‘People in a strong position – as I am – don't need to make
threats
,' he said.