Situation Tragedy (24 page)

Quite a lot of money, Charles reckoned when they went into the library. It was a purpose-built circular room. Packed bookshelves rose to the ceiling, alternating with tall windows protected with metal grids. All their books, arranged with the pernickety neatness that characterised their owner, were hard-backs of this century.

Charles made suitably appreciative noises.

‘Yes, not bad,' said Stanley Harvey smugly. ‘One of the largest private collections in the world, so I believe.'

‘Of what?' Charles couldn't resist saying.

‘Detective fiction. All first editions of course. I have my own private cataloguing system.'

Yes, you would.

‘Conan Doyles along there – complete set of English and American firsts. Agatha Christie, the same. Raymond Chandler . . . Dorothy Sayers, of course. Simenons in the original, English editions and some selected translations and –'

‘What about R. Q. Wilberforces?' asked Charles. It was twenty past six, the eight o'clock curfew was approaching fast, and he felt a desperate urgency to find out if he was on to something or just caught up in an elaborate fantasy.

‘Yes,' said Stanley Harvey, with a
moue
of annoyance. ‘Of course. Right, if that's all you're interested in, over here.'

He moved across the room and pointed to a row of matching blue spines. ‘Here we are. R. Q. Wilberforce. The only one I haven't been able to track down yet is
Death Takes A Back Seat.
But here we have
Death Takes A Tumble, Death Takes The Wrong Turning, Death Takes A Drive, Death Takes A Stand
and
Death Takes A Short Cut
. I also have some manuscripts and drafts of stuff that was never published, if that's of interest.' He gestured towards a rank of metal filing cabinets.

‘Did you collect them all one at a time?'

‘No, not the R. Q. Wilberforces, actually. I do with most of the stuff, get it from publishers or through dealers, but in fact I got all this lot together. Just after the war I wrote to R. Q. Wilberforce and asked if he'd got any material he wanted to get rid of. To my surprise he sent me the lot. With a very strange letter. Said that he had been going to throw it all away, said that the War had changed everything, that there was no time for frivolity any more, that life had been shown up in its true colours and it was a tragic business. He said that R. Q. Wilberforce was dead and he never wanted to hear anything about him again. The letter was very odd, sounded a bit unbalanced.'

‘Did he sign his own name?'

‘He signed R. Q. Wilberforce, I don't know whether that was his name or not. I've got the letter filed if –'

‘It doesn't matter.'

Stanley Harvey smiled a self-satisfied smile. ‘So I got a nice little haul there for nothing. Shows what a letter arriving at the right time can do. Always worth writing a lot of letters if you're building up a collection.'

‘Yes.' Charles looked at his watch. Half-past six. And he looked at the thickness of the five blue books on the shelf. ‘Look, perhaps you could save me a bit of time. All I need to find out is about the deaths in the books. Perhaps you can remember something of the plots.'

Stanley Harvey looked at him in amazement and stroked his little beard. ‘Good Lord, no. I only collect this stuff, I don't read it.'

Stanley Harvey perched watchfully at his desk in the middle of the library while Charles did his research. The circular room strengthened the impression of a spider at the centre of his web, as did the little man's suspicious eyes. He clearly expected Charles to try to leave with an illicit Margery Allingham under his jacket.

But once he got into the books, Charles was too intrigued to be inhibited by any hostile spectator. He read with fascination as the pattern he had suspected unfolded in all its lunacy.

He soon realised that he wouldn't have to read all the text. The relevant bits were not hard to find.

He opened each book and checked the date to confirm their sequence. There was a dedication in each one, too. In the first,
Death Takes A Tumble,
it read ‘To Darling Hilary', and in the subsequent ones, ‘To Hilary again, with all my love'. That introduced a new element. Barton and Aurelia's had always been hailed as the great example of a show business marriage that remained faithful, and yet who was this Hilary to whom he had dedicated five books? Charles knew he would have to find that out.

But for the moment he was more concerned with the deaths. They were easily found. Barton Rivers, in the guise of R. Q. Wilberforce, wrote his books to an unerring formula. In Chapter One, Maltravers Ratcliffe would return to his wife, Eithne, from some gallant exploit, arid they would decide to go away somewhere to escape all thoughts of crime. In Chapter Two they would arrive at their destination, and, on the last page of the chapter, someone would die. Maybe this total predictability was one of the reasons why R. Q. Wilberforce couldn't find a publisher and had to produce the books himself.

The murders made fascinating reading.
In Death Takes A Tumble,
the victim apparently fell from a fire escape on the tower of a baronial castle. In
Death Takes A Wrong Turning
a rock, cunningly placed round a hairpin bend in the Dolomites, caused a young playboy to drive his Hispano-Suiza to destruction down the face of a cliff. In
Death Takes A Drive
the victim was run down by a Bentley that didn't stop (thus causing, because of the make of car, suspicion to fall on the spotless Maltravers Ratcliffe). And in
Death Takes a Stand
a young man in a stately home was killed by the apparently accidental fall of a heavy wall-mounted light-stand.

In each book the manner of the death was, either punningly or directly, suggested in the title.

And, in every case, whoever had actually committed the crime, behind it, masterminding the operation, had been ‘the evil genius of von Strutter' (usually followed by an exclamation mark!).

And so, in these old blue volumes were prefigured the deaths of Sadie Wainwright, Scott Newton, Rod Tisdale and Robin Laughton. Their individual identity had not been important; so long as they were connected with the series called
The Strutters
they had earned the right to die.

Charles returned the four volumes to their shelf long before Stanley Harvey's deadline. He didn't look at
Death Takes A Short Cut.
He knew what happened in that one.

Someone got impaled on a Japanese samurai sword.

THE TOWER BLOCK of W.E.T. House looked unchanged, modern, impassive, but internally it was crippled. There was no canteen or bar service, the security men's go-slow continued and members of other unions formed little mumbling groups. The company was like a very old man's body, in which no one knew which organ would fail next. Senior management sat like anxious doctors in their offices, waiting for the loudspeaker announcement or phone call that would signal the end, or at least the lapse into coma, of their patient.

But Peter Lipscombe was not the man to let that sort of atmosphere get him down. With Boy Scout brightness he welcomed each member of
The Strutters
cast into the building, and assured them all that everything was okay.

And so indeed it seemed. Costumes were laid in dressing-rooms, make-up girls waited to administer their tantalisingly short caresses, cameramen and sound-boom operators drifted towards the studio, Vision Mixer and PA to the control box, Sound and Vision Controllers to their adjacent stations. The set was up, and there seemed to be no reason why the rehearse/recording of Episode Eight of
The Strutters
should not start on camera at ten o'clock as scheduled.

Charles Paris wasn't there on the dot of ten, because, from force of habit, he had gone to the big Studio A, where
Wragg and Bowen
were having an uphill struggle with new directors and scriptwriters, and beginning to question the wisdom of their hugely expensive transfer from the BBC. (Why did they think they could change the inalienable law of television – that no comedy star was ever improved by moving from the BBC to ITV, and that for most a commercial offer was a sure sign that they had passed their peak of popularity?)

Charles realised his mistake as soon as he saw the set of garish tinsel and dangling silver bicycle wheels. As he turned to leave, he nearly bumped into a familiar, and not unattractive, figure. ‘Jay!'

Actually, I call myself Jan Lewis now. It looks better on the roller caption.'

‘Uh-huh. Well, how are things?'

‘Fine. This
Wragg and Bowen
show is so complicated. There's lots to learn.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘Did you hear what happened yesterday?'

‘Don't think so.'

‘Oh, it was an absolute
disaster
. You know, this programme for the elderly . . .'

Oh yes, the Franchise-Grabber. He nodded.

‘Well, you know they'd got this wonderful old boy in to front it. Ian Reynolds, he's nearly eighty.'

‘Yes, I had heard.' A few times.

‘Well, yesterday was their first day in the studio and when he got in front of the cameras – he dropped dead.'

‘Oh dear.'

‘Yes, they lost the whole studio day.'

Charles tut-tutted appropriately.

‘They're going to get Robert Carton in instead. I'm sure he'll do it awfully well.'

‘Oh, I should think so.' There was a silence. ‘It'd be nice for us to get together again soon.

‘Charles!' She looked at him as if he had made an improper suggestion. Which indeed he had. But not one that had worried her before.

‘What's the matter?'

‘But, Charles, I'm on a different
programme
now.'

His dilatoriness in getting to Studio B didn't matter. He had checked with Mort Verdon, who assured him that the samurai sword would be kept locked in the prop store until required for the final scene. ‘Can't leave things like that lying around, boofle. For a start, it's worth a few bob, and things have been known to disappear, you know . . . Also, it's an extremely businesslike weapon, dear. Very sharp. If somebody started fooling about with that, there could be a very sudden influx of new members to the Treble Section . . .'

Maybe Mort Verdon's protective eye would be sufficient to ward off any ‘accidents', but Charles knew Barton Rivers was cunning in his madness, and didn't feel confident. As soon as the sword appeared on the set, he would watch Barton Rivers's every move. Any attempt to touch it and he'd pounce. He needed evidence to ensure that the old maniac was put away where he belonged. But he'd have to be quick. He wanted evidence, but he didn't want another corpse.

Studio B, when he found it, looked quite a bit smaller than Studio A, but he was informed that it had the same floor area. The difference was that the larger studio had permanent audience seats, while when Studio B had audience shows, banks of seats were brought in, thus reducing the acting area. The seating was built
in situ
on frames of bolted metal sections, and stood up in great wedges away from the studio back wall. (A large gap had to be left between this wall and the back of the bank of seats because of fire regulations.)

Charles slouched in the front row and watched the recording with mild interest. The atmosphere was different to the usual studio day. Normally the tension mounted as the day went on, building to the mock-climax of the Dress Run, and then the final release of the end of the recording. On the revised schedule, each scene was rehearsed until satisfactory, and then recorded. It made everyone more relaxed. In spite of the industrial stormclouds outside, in the studio all was cosy. Many of the actors commented how much they'd rather rehearse/record the show every week, forget the moribund studio audience and either dub on the laughs or – heretical thought to any traditional Light Entertainment mind! – dispense with them altogether.

Peter Lipscombe explained at considerable length how much more expensive this would be because of the cost of VTR machine time, but soon lost his audience in a welter of budgetary jargon.

Through the slow processes of the morning Charles kept an eye on Barton Rivers. The old man sat in the audience grinning inanely and watching the every move of his wife. Whatever had happened to his mind, his devotion to Aurelia seemed absolutely genuine, a devotion reflected in such overblown and dated terms by the relationship between Maltravers and Eithne Ratcliffe.

Once again Charles wondered who on earth Hilary could be and where she fitted into the bizarre picture.

At one point he chatted to Barton. The old man, with his zany politeness, used a lot of ‘dear boys', commented that doing the show this way was ‘a rummy business' and asked Charles what chance he thought our chaps had against the Indians at the Oval.

Now that he had the key, Charles could hear the intonations of Maltravers Ratcliffe in every word. And, remembering the photograph of the fine young man in the Bentley, he could see that, if ever the filming of
Death Takes A Short Cut
had been feasible, Barton Rivers would have been ideal casting for it.

He contemplated challenging the old man with all he knew, but he didn't think it would work. The ruined mind would not be able to respond. No, he had to wait for the sword and see what happened.

They proceeded quickly on the new schedule and by lunchtime had recorded the bulk of the show. Of course, there were no canteen facilities, but Peter Lipscombe demonstrated that he did have his uses by laying on large supplies of take-away food in the dressing rooms. Mort Verdon was of the pessimistic opinion that this might be construed as strike-breaking and twitched visibly every time there was an announcement on the loudspeakers.

There were quite a few announcements on the loudspeakers that lunchtime, calling meetings of various branches of various unions, but, remarkably, the entire studio crew reassembled to continue work at two o'clock.