The Dead Side of the Mike (12 page)

Mark Lear had tagged along with everyone else. ‘I met Nick in the Salad Bar the other day and he said you were going to be in this, so I thought I'd come along and give you support.'

‘Thank you. We all needed it.'

‘Yes.'

‘Rather different from Further Education.'

Mark's brow furrowed. ‘You know, I'm afraid I don't understand Light Entertainment.'

It was said very seriously and Charles realised that that was exactly what Mark meant. As a professional, he did not understand one particular thread of broadcasting. It wasn't that he had found
Dad's the Word
a bad example of it; all Light Entertainment was equally mystifying. Mark Lear had no sense of humour.

This realisation brought back other suspicions. The lack of sense of humour tied in with the obsessional note in the letter that Steve had discovered. Mark's self-dramatising was not flippant; he always meant what he said.

Charles knew he should start some investigation. Something inside him wanted an explanation of Andrea Gower's death.

And of Danny Klinger's. He felt sure Mark Lear held the key.

But subtly. He had to probe subtly or he'd arouse Mark's suspicions.

An opportunity arose easily in the course of conversation. Dave Stockin had finished his drink and left, causing some mutterings among the SMs. Unlike a lot of stars they worked with, he was a man with long pockets who, even at the end of a series, had never been seen to reach his hands into them to buy a round of drinks. Nick Monckton, relief relaxing him by the second, came over and joined them, offering more drinks. Mark said he'd get the round and while he was at the bar, the conversation turned to a programme from the previous night's television, which had been about human memory. One of the SMs raised the subject and Nick Monckton fell on it avidly, keen to talk about anything, so long as it wasn't
Dad's the Word
.

They discussed the imprecision of human recollection and how half a dozen witnesses of a crime could come up with half a dozen widely diverging descriptions of the same criminal. They moved on to the fallibility of their own memories and, when Mark returned laden from the bar, it was easy for Charles to bring him up to date on the conversation and ask casually, ‘I mean, how much do you remember, Mark? Even of recent events. Say last week. What did you do last Tuesday?'

Mark was game to test himself. ‘Let's see. Up about eight, office about ten – that bit never changes. Then I . . . let me see, was I in the studio? No, editing. Right, morning spent editing. In fact, editing your Swinburne epic, which I must say sounded very good. I'll fix a playback at some point if you'd like to hear it.'

‘I'd love to. But go on, what did you do after your editing? See how your memory holds up.' Charles wasn't going to be deflected so easily from finding out Mark's whereabouts at the time of Danny Klinger's death.

‘Okay.' Mark still played along. ‘Right . . . lunchtime spent in the Salad Bar, too much wine consumed, in the knowledge that all I had on that afternoon was an ideas meeting with HFE(R). Had said ideas meeting – predictably sterile – my idea for a series of Comparative Marxism and accompanying expenses-paid trip round the world rejected for the millionth time. Then what? – let me think back. Right, a few drinks in the club and then . . .' He looked up, suddenly shrewd. Or was Charles being hypersensitive? ‘Yes, of course, back home to Vinnie and the kids. Latter still up, which they shouldn't have been at seven-thirty, but which they always are. Dinner with wife, early bed. Typical domestic evening.'

‘Not bad,' said Charles. ‘Almost total recall after six days.'

The conversation moved on. One of the SMs started bemoaning how little sociology she remembered from three years at LSE.

It was only after the pub closed at three and Charles was gliding towards Piccadilly Circus tube that he remembered what Mark had said on the night of Andrea's death. That his wife and children were going to spend the next week with her mother.

He was aware, from previous experience, that it was risky impersonating police officers, even on the phone. On the other hand, people do tell things to the police. And from a coin box it wasn't such a risk.

For nostalgic reasons, he decided he'd be Detective-Sergeant McWhirter of Scotland Yard. The Glaswegian voice was one he had first used in a Thirty Minute Theatre (‘Is competence the highest we can now hope for in a television play?' –
The Financial Times
).

‘Is that Mrs Lear?'

‘Yes.'

‘Forgive me troubling you, Mrs Lear. This is Detective-Sergeant McWhirter of Scotland Yard. I'm investigating a series of burglaries which took place in your area last week and I'm doing some routine checks. Just asking people if they saw anything suspicious during the week. You know, people hanging about, unfamiliar vehicles parked in the streets, that sort of thing.'

‘I'm sorry, I don't think I can help you.' The voice had the bored languor of a girls' public-school education. ‘I'm afraid I was away all last week, staying in Gloucestershire with my mother.'

‘Oh.'

‘My husband would have been here in the evenings. If you'd like me to give you his office number, I could –'

‘Oh, no thank you. I needn't trouble him. Most of the break-ins seem to have occurred in the afternoons. We believe it may be schoolchildren playing truant.'

‘As I say, I can't help you.'

‘No. Well, if you could keep an eye open . . . I'm sure you don't want your house to be the next.'

‘Our house is adequately burglar-proofed, thank you,' came the frosty reply. Perhaps not so surprising that Mark felt bound to look outside the frigidaire of his marriage bed.

‘Right. So just to confirm, you were away all of last week. From the Monday right through to the weekend.'

‘That's what I said.' The phone went dead. Mrs Lavinia Lear didn't suffer fools gladly.

He rang Steve Kennett straight away and, after the statutory wait on the BBC switchboard, got through to her. She was about to leave for a trip to Birmingham where she was producing one end of a current-affairs link-up discussion. The car was arriving in ten minutes at Broadcasting House Reception. He said he'd hurry up there and try to catch her for a quick word before she left. He had something new on Andrea's death.

It took longer than he had anticipated to weave through the crowds of Arabs in Regent Street and, when he finally arrived at the ocean-liner frontage of Broadcasting House, Steve was looking very agitated. A taxi waited on the kerb beside her with the back door open.

‘What is it, Charles? I'm really in a terrible rush. Couldn't it wait?'

‘It's about Andrea's death – well, not about hers, about Danny Klinger's death.'

‘Danny Klinger's?'

Oh God. He realised he had never told Steve anything about the second apparent suicide. And this was hardly the moment for long explanations. Someone inside the taxi called out, ‘Come on, Steve. We'll miss the train. Don't just stand there nattering like a woman.'

The gibe stung her. It was presumably, like her bisexual nickname, part of a long-standing fight she had for her identity in a man's world. ‘I've got to go, Charles. I'm back on Wednesday. Ring me then.'

‘Basically,' he whispered urgently as she stepped into the taxi, ‘Mark told me he spent last Tuesday evening, the evening Klinger died, at home with his wife and kids, and I've discovered that isn't true. His wife was away. So he was somewhere else.'

‘Yes,' said Steve. ‘He spent Tuesday night at my place.'

Charles tried to numb his feelings by a visit to the Montrose, a little drinking club behind the Haymarket, but when he got back to Hereford Road at half-past nine that evening, another shock awaited him.

A note had been pushed under his bedsitter door. Scrawled by one of the Swedes, it read, ‘YORE MOTHERINLORE DIE. RING WIFE.'

CHARLES REALLY FELT unsophisticated when he saw how many children there were on the flight to New York. All these cosmopolitan tots were plugging in their in-flight entertainment earphones and summoning stewardesses as if they'd been doing it all their lives (which can't have been very long) and there was he, fifty-one years old, peering round at the unfamiliarity of a jumbo jet interior, locating the loos, reading his safety instructions, checking that he hadn't dropped his passport, and generally making it obvious that he had never crossed the Atlantic before.

And was childishly excited about it. In spite of the sadness of the reason for the trip, he felt a ridiculous glee at the prospect of finally going to America. All kinds of corny songs about Manhattan and Broadway and Fifth Avenue came unbidden into his head and he tried to stop himself from humming them. Apart from showing up his shameful inexperience of the world, it might also be an inappropriate invasion of Frances's mood.

Actually she seemed to be taking it pretty well. The second heart attack had hit her mother the night before she was due to be discharged from the hospital. It had been huge and final. Frances had been businesslike and unsentimental when Charles rang through on his return from the Montrose. And she had maintained that practical exterior since then. No tears, just plans, organising the flight (she had done the trip many times before), sorting out things at school so that she could leave in the last week of the summer term. Very practical. Too practical. Charles, knowing her, knew how much she was holding back. When she relaxed, when there were no longer any arrangements to make, that was when the tears would come.

He had wondered for a dark moment whether she had already broken down, succumbed to tears, but regarded him as now too distant from her to be privy to such weakness. But no, surely she wouldn't think of him as a stranger. In spite of everything, he felt very close to her and thought she sometimes shared the feeling.

He looked around the plane again. Of course all the sophisticated kids were with their parents. Happy families. To outsiders they must look the same. A happy family. The three of them, husband, wife and daughter. Charles, Frances and Juliet.

He took Frances's hand. She seemed to welcome the gesture. By instinct his finger moved to stroke the familiar kitchen-knife scar on her palm. At such moments it was inconceivable that they had ever split up. But he knew such moments were suspended of time, little capsules of experience, magic, but unrelated to daily life.

He looked across Frances to Juliet and the familiar numbness came over him. He knew he felt a lot for his daughter, but a lot of what? Not admiration, surely. She was a reasonably attractive housewife in her twenties, but he found her irredeemably boring. He knew, from observation and from conversations with Frances, that Juliet had deliberately restricted the horizons of her life in reaction against the lack of organisation in her father's, but he couldn't find that a justification for her total predictability.

And yet, although she bored him, she still affected him powerfully. He remembered her as a tiny child, how cuddly she had been, how giving. Then they had got on all right, then they had had a relationship. But not one that could survive growing-up. Presumably that was all he would ever feel for her now, a cumbersome bulk of undefined emotion.

Still, she seemed happy enough. Matched up with her husband Miles, who was apparently doing awfully well in insurance. Charles got on all right with Miles (or as all right as two men could, whose similarity was restricted to their number of arms and legs). The only two things he really objected to were that his son-in-law kept trying to sell him a private pension scheme and then compounded the felony by calling him ‘Pop'.

It had been fun leaving Miles at the airport, though. He was in charge of his twin sons, at least until the weekend, when his mother, a strange lady interested in flower-arranging, was going to Pangbourne to help out. Miles, one of those boring young men who could always ‘cope' and was ‘sensible' about things, was clearly beginning to doubt his omnicompetence as the moment came for the twins' mother to leave them. He was in complete control while he explained the intricacies of his camera (which he was lending to his wife at great personal cost), but less secure at the prospect of being alone with his sons.

Damian and Julian, in spite of their names, or perhaps in reaction to their names, seemed determined to show that the sleeping gas of bourgeois convention had not yet penetrated their systems. After the most casual of farewells to their mother, Damian had found a melted Mars Bar, which he proceeded to rub into his hair, and while Miles was attempting to clean that up, Julian, who was in the process of being potty-trained, gravely lowered his dungarees and started peeing against his father's Marks and Spencer's checked trousers.

For a long time Charles would treasure the expression he saw on Miles's face as they disappeared into the Departure Lounge.

He was impressed by how quickly the flight went. All the seasoned cosmopolitan tots seemed to find it boring and predictable, but to his inexperience, the natural breaks were well spaced. First fiddling with the headset, dipping into the in-flight entertainment, noticing how it's always the same names who seem to corner the market on that sort of show biz spin-off production; then having a couple of drinks; then lunch (which, contrary to the accepted wisdom of hardened travellers, he found quite tasty); and then the movie. This was an unexpected bonus. It was a long time since he had last flown at all, and he'd never been on such a long trip, so the idea of watching a film in the middle of the Atlantic was mildly glamorous. The fact that it was an awful movie didn't matter. It passed the time and felt (though it wasn't) like something for nothing.

It was only after the film had finished, while Frances, who hadn't slept for two nights, dozed beside him, that he could think about the two apparent suicides. Since the news of his mother-in-law's death, things had moved quickly and the case had been pushed to the back of his mind. And, he suspected, because of his feelings for Steve Kennett he had been content to leave it there. But now he made himself think about it.