Dead on Cue (6 page)

But Woodend, with his holier-than-thou attitude, refused to see things in that light, and Ainsworth's main fear, ever since the chief inspector had been posted to Whitebridge, was that Woodend would come across some of his own particular back-scratching and blow it up out of all proportion.

Now – although he had not recognised it as such at first – he was being handed the opportunity to do what he'd wanted to do all along. To put Cloggin'-it Charlie in a situation through which he would ensure his own destruction.

Ainsworth took another generous slug of his whisky. Murder was a terrible thing – as he had often pointed out in public – but this particular murder might turn out to be a real stroke of luck.

I
t was shortly after the final credits for
Maddox Row
had appeared on the screen that the first policeman – Detective Inspector Hebden – arrived at the studio. He was quickly followed by several more detectives in unmarked cars and a dozen uniformed constables in a Black Maria. Under Hebden's guidance, the policemen swarmed all over the old mill like busy worker ants. A specialist team examined Valerie Farnsworth's dressing room, taking measurements and dusting for fingerprints. Other officers made lists of names and took down the details of what would, hopefully, prove to be alibis. At half past eight, the police doctor arrived and examined the body. By nine o'clock, both the corpse and the murder weapon had been removed.

‘So what happens now?' Hebden's sergeant asked him at a quarter past nine.

‘Not a lot,' the inspector replied. ‘We've done about as much as we can ourselves. The rest will be up to the Big Cheese that headquarters sends down in the morning. Post a few lads at key points around the studio to make sure that nothin's disturbed, and send everybody else home.'

‘What about the television people?'

‘They can go as well.'

‘But one of them might be the murderer.'

‘One of them probably
is
the murderer, but if he's not done a runner already, it's unlikely he'll go missing now.'

Hebden positioned himself by the main exit, and watched the cast and crew troop out. Reactions to Valerie Farnsworth's death were as varied as the people themselves, he noted. Some had eyes which blazed with the kind of wild excitement you always saw in the eyes of crowds gathered near the scene of a crime. Others left the building almost like zombies, as if they still found it hard to accept that violent death could ever impinge on their secure little lives. As he had told his sergeant, one of these people had probably killed that night, but watching them, Hebden found himself totally unable to point the finger.

‘Is that it?' the inspector asked, after the initial flood had become a trickle, and then even the trickle had dried up. ‘Is the building empty now?'

‘Not quite,' his sergeant said. ‘The producer and a few of his team asked if they could stay on. There's no harm in that, is there, sir?'

‘No harm at all,' Hebden replied. ‘But why should they
want
to stay on? I'd have thought they'd have had enough for one night.'

‘It seems they have a problem,' the sergeant told him.

‘
They
have a problem!' Hebden repeated, incredulously.

There were five of them in the conference room. Bill Houseman sat at the head of the table, Jeremy Wilcox at the other end. Paddy Colligan and Ben Drabble, as befitted their status as mere writers, sat together along the left-hand side, and a secretary, her eyes red with tears, was positioned at Houseman's right.

‘This has been a terrible shock for all of us,' the producer said sombrely, ‘but even in the face of tragedy and loss, life still has to go on. And as distressed as we are by Val's death, we still have to face the fact that several of the plot lines we've developed for future episodes will have to be abandoned.'

Yes, they will, won't they, Paddy Colligan thought. And why? Because every time Val asked for more lines, you gave in without a fight, until
Maddox Row
had become less of a portrait of a Northern working-class street and more a personal showcase for Valerie Farnsworth. He thought it – but, wisely, he said nothing.

‘What we need is something light and humorous,' Houseman continued. ‘Something that will leave the viewers with a smile on their faces.' He turned to the writers. ‘That shouldn't be any problem, should it?'

None at all, Paddy Colligan thought. At least, not for you. You're the producer – the man who can demand results.
You
don't have sit staring at a blank sheet of typing paper until your eyes start to bleed.

‘It's going to be rather tricky coming up with several new incidents at such short notice—' Ben Drabble said.

‘But it can be done?' the producer interrupted.

‘Probably. If we don't hit any snags.'

‘Then
don't
hit any,' Houseman said. ‘So that's the medium term dealt with. Now let's get on to the short term – Friday's episode. How do we deal with Valerie's – or should I say, Liz Bowyer's – demise?'

‘We could simply ignore it,' Paddy Colligan suggested.

‘Ignore it!' Jeremy Wilcox repeated. ‘How, in God's name, can we possibly bloody ignore it?'

Paddy Colligan shrugged. ‘It's what people do in real life,' he said. ‘You know how it goes. You meet somebody for the first time since they've lost a relative, and you say how sorry you are for their loss. But after that, everybody goes out of their way never to mention the deceased again.'

‘That may
well
happen in real life,' Bill Houseman said, ‘but for some of our viewers the characters in
Madro
are
more
real than real life.'

That was true, Paddy Colligan thought. When they had plotted a pregnancy for Tilly Woods the previous year, the television studio had been deluged with toddlers' clothes that eager viewers had knitted for the expected baby. There were people out there in television-land – a large number of them – who seemed unable to grasp the idea that what they saw on their screens was no more than a story. There were people out there for whom Liz Bowyer seemed to have more reality than their own next-door neighbours.

‘So what do you propose, Bill?' Ben Drabble asked.

‘We kill Liz off on Friday's show,' Houseman said.

‘But she's already dead!'

Houseman sighed exasperatedly. ‘For goodness' sake, don't go making the same mistake as the people you're writing for.
Valerie's
dead. We know that. But Liz
isn't
. Yet! She isn't dead until we say she is.'

‘What have you got in mind?' Paddy Colligan asked. ‘A conversation in the corner shop between Sam Fuller and Madge Thornycroft, in which Madge says something like, “Terrible thing Liz having that unexpected heart attack, isn't it, Sam?” And Sam answering, “Yes, she mustn't have been feeling too well the other day. That's probably why she turned back instead of havin' a row with you, Madge.”?'

‘Is that the best you can come up with?' Houseman demanded.

‘Well, it's a bit crude at the moment,' Paddy Colligan admitted, ‘but once we've polished up the lines—'

‘You could polish them all you liked, and it still wouldn't do.'

‘Why not?'

‘If you'd just take the trouble to stop to think about it for a few seconds, you'd be able to work it out for yourself,' Houseman said cuttingly. ‘The story of what's
really
happened will be splashed over the front pages of all the papers tomorrow. Correct?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘And after exposure like that, do you really think we kill Liz off with mere words?'

‘So what
do
you want?'

‘I want to see her die on screen. And so will the punters!'

Paddy Colligan wondered for a second if he was dreaming, and then decided that even his fertile imagination couldn't come up with a dream as bizarre as this.

‘It's a good idea, but the problem is, she's already dead,' he said. ‘Now if she'd thought to inform us last week that she was about to be murdered, we could already have had something in the can, but since she decided to spring it on us unexpectedly like this . . .'

Houseman glared at his scriptwriter. ‘I think you're showing very poor taste to make a remark like that,' he said.

I'm
showing poor taste! Colligan thought. What the bloody hell have
you
been showing ever since we sat down?

‘I think you're still one step ahead of us on this, Bill,' Ben Drabble said. ‘If you could just spell it out a little more clearly . . .'

‘Why not?' Houseman asked. ‘And then I'll go and do the cleaner's job for her, shall I?'

‘I think I'm starting to get the picture now,' Paddy Colligan said, knowing he was making a mistake, and not giving a damn. ‘You want us to find a medium who can summon up Val's ghost at precisely half past seven on Friday night.'

Houseman slammed the palm of his hand down hard on the tabletop. ‘I've just about had enough of this,' he said. ‘I really bloody have! If all you can do is sit there and make snide comments, Colligan, you can just piss off right now – and I'll hire a monkey to do your job.'

‘Paddy didn't mean it,' Ben Drabble said. ‘He's just a bit tense. We all are. If you'd just explain what you've got in mind . . .'

‘I suppose that would save time,' Houseman said wearily. ‘Look, we've been doing this show for two years now, haven't we? We must have thousands of feet of film in the archive. Look through it. Find something we can use.'

‘Use?' Ben Drabble repeated, mystified.

‘Something we can incorporate into the death scene.' Houseman clicked his fingers, as if he'd had a sudden inspiration. ‘Ironing!' he exclaimed.

‘Ironing?'

‘We've always gone out of our way to show our characters doing the same mundane household tasks as the viewers themselves. Surely we can find a few shots of Valerie doing the ironing.'

‘Probably,' Drabble agreed. ‘But what good would that—?'

‘We show the old footage first: close-ups of Val doing the ironing. Then we cut to a live shot: a back view of a woman with the same build as Val – and wearing the same frock as she is in the clip – standing over the ironing board. She starts to writhe, and then, without turning her face to the camera, she falls on to the floor. And there we have it – the part of our audience which is so thick that it believes in Liz Bowyer as a real person will actually see her die.' He turned to Jeremy Wilcox. ‘That's all technically possible, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' Wilcox agreed. ‘It's technically possible.'

‘But sick!' Paddy Colligan said.

‘Sick?' Houseman demanded. ‘What's sick about it? Valerie's dead, isn't she? There's nothing we can do to hurt her now. And we have a responsibility to keep the show running as smoothly as possible. We owe it to our viewers. We owe it to our mortgages.'

‘But we've already got one death at the ironing board scripted,' Ben Drabble protested. ‘We can't have two in a matter of a couple of weeks.'

Bill Houseman sighed again, and wondered how he'd ever come to be lumbered with a pair of incompetents like Drabble and Colligan.

‘Of course we can't have two characters die in the same way in just a couple of weeks,' he said. ‘We can't have two characters die in
different
ways in a couple of weeks. So Jack Taylor, the Laughing Postman, will just have to stay in the show for a while, won't he?'

‘Yes, I suppose he will,' Drabble agreed.

Houseman glanced down at his watch. ‘Right,' he said, ‘you all know what you've got to do before Friday afternoon. Get on with it.'

‘Will you be attending the script conferences yourself, Mr Houseman?' Ben Drabble asked.

‘No, I won't,' Houseman told him. ‘I've decided to give up keeping a dog and barking myself. Besides, I'll have quite enough on my hands looking after the PC Plods who'll be tramping all over the bloody studio trying to find out who killed Valerie.'

‘How long do you think they'll be here?' Jeremy Wilcox asked. He paused, as if he wished he'd never asked the question. ‘I mean . . . they're going to be in the way, aren't they?'

‘Undoubtedly they'll be in the way,' Houseman agreed. ‘As to
how long
they'll be in the way, I really couldn't say. My confidence in the boys in blue's ability to do their job isn't exactly overpowering at the best of times, and in a case like this, when they'll be faced with more suspects than their befuddled little brains can handle, well, they could be here for the duration.'

Suspects! Paddy Colligan turned the word over in his mind. He hadn't really thought about it in those terms before, but now he came to consider it, he supposed that that was what they all were – Suspects, with a capital S!

‘Why . . . why should you think they'll have a lot of suspects?' Ben Drabble asked uncertainly.

‘Isn't that obvious?' Houseman countered. ‘They'll be looking for people who might have wanted Valerie dead – and there are enough of them around, aren't there?' He stood up. ‘Fancy a quick one before we call it a day, Jeremy?' he asked the director.

Wilcox nodded, but without much enthusiasm, and the two men left the room. The secretary closed her notebook, dropped it and her pencil in her handbag, and followed them, leaving the scriptwriters alone.

For a few moments Colligan and Drabble sat in silence, then Drabble said, ‘You should watch your step, you know.'

‘Watch my step?'

‘With Bill Houseman. A couple of times back there I thought he was on the point of hitting you.'

‘If he had have done, he'd have got back as good as he gave.'