Death of a Scriptwriter (3 page)

Harry Frame greeted Patricia by kissing her on the cheek, an embrace from which Patricia visibly winced.

Patricia was as disappointed in Harry Frame as she was in the building. He was a big man with a mane of brown hair and a puffy face. He was wearing a checked workman’s shirt open nearly to
the waist, and he had a great mat of chest hair.

‘Sit yourself down, Patricia,’ he boomed. ‘Tea? Coffee? Drink?’

‘No, I thank you,’ said Patricia. ‘I would like to get down to business.’

‘I like a businesswoman,’ said Harry expansively. He introduced her all round, ending up with, ‘And this is Fiona King, who will be our producer.’

Patricia concealed her dismay. ‘I am not familiar with your television company, Mr Frame. What successes have you had?’

‘I have them written down for you,’ said Harry, handing her a list.

Patricia looked down at the list in bewilderment. They seemed to be mostly documentaries with titles like
Whither Scotland?
,
Are the English Bastards?
,
The Arguments for Home
Rule
,
The Highland Clearances
,
Folk Songs from the Gorbals
. She had not seen or heard of any of them.

‘I do not see any detective stories here,’ said Patricia.

Harry ignored that. ‘Because of this your books will be back in print,’ he said. ‘We suggest a publicity tie-up with Pheasant Books. We plan to start serializing
The Case of
the Rising Tides
.’

Patricia stared at him unnervingly. Then she suddenly smiled. From being a rather tatty building inhabited with people who were definitely not ladies and gentlemen, Strathclyde Television and
all in it became suffused with a golden glow. She barely heard anything of the further discussion. She did, however, agree to signing an option contract for a thousand pounds and accepting an
agreement that if the series were sold to the BBC or ITV or anyone else, she would receive two thousand pounds per episode. Money was not important to Patricia, who was comfortably off, but the
thought of getting her precious books back into print made her pretty much deaf to other concerns.

Business being done, Fiona and Harry said they would take Patricia out for lunch. As they ushered her towards the door, Harry glanced down the table to where Sheila Burford was making notes.
Sheila had cropped blonde hair, large blue eyes and a splendid figure which her outfit of bomber jacket and jeans could not quite hide. ‘You’d best come along as well, Sheila,’
said Harry.

They took her to a restaurant across from the television centre. It was called Tatty Tommy’s Tartan Howf and was scented with the aroma of old cooking fat. They were served by Tatty Tommy
himself, a large bruiser with a shaved head, an earring and blue eye shadow.

Patricia was disappointed. She had thought that a television company would have taken her to some Glaswegian equivalent of the Ritz. She bleakly ordered Tatty Tommy’s Tumshies, Tatties and
Haggis, thinking that an ethnic dish of haggis, turnips and potatoes might be safer than some of the more exotic offerings on the menu; but it transpired that the haggis was as dry as bone, the
turnips watery and the potatoes had that chemical flavour of the reconstituted packet kind.

‘In my book,’ said Patricia, ‘the setting is a fictitious village called Duncraggie.’

‘Oh, we’ll be setting it in the Highlands,’ said Fiona brightly. ‘Pretty setting and lots of good Scottish actors.’

‘But the characters are
English
!’ protested Patricia. ‘It is a house party in the Highlands. Lady Harriet is Scottish, yes, but educated in England.’

Harry waved an expansive arm. ‘English, Scottish, we’re all British.’

Sheila repressed a smile. Harry was a vehement campaigner for Scotland’s independence.

‘I suppose,’ began Patricia again, but Harry put a bearlike arm about her shoulders.

‘Now, don’t you be worrying your head about the television side. Just think how grand it will be to see your books on the shelves again.’

He had shrewdly guessed that, at that moment in time, Patricia would agree to anything just so long as she got her books published.

‘Who will play the lead?’ asked Patricia. ‘I thought of Diana Rigg.’

‘Bit old now,’ said Fiona. ‘We thought of Penelope Gates.’

‘I have never heard of her,’ said Patricia, pushing her plate away with most of the food on it uneaten.

‘Oh, she’s up and coming,’ said Fiona.

And cheap, reflected Sheila cynically.

‘Have I seen her in anything?’

Fiona and Harry exchanged quick glances. ‘Do you watch television much?’ asked Fiona.

‘Hardly at all.’

‘Oh, if you had,’ said Fiona, ‘you would have seen a lot of her.’

And most of it naked, thought Sheila. Scotland’s answer to Sharon Stone.

Sheila did not like Patricia much but was beginning to feel sorry for this old lady. She had asked Harry why on earth choose some old bat’s out-of-print books when they meant to pay scant
attention to characters or plot, and Harry had replied that respectability spiced up with sex was a winner. Besides, the book they meant to serialize was set in the sixties, and he planned to have
lots of flared trousers, wide lapels, Mary Quant dresses and espresso bars, despite the fact that the fashions of the sixties had passed Patricia by.

Patricia’s head was beginning to ache. She wanted to escape from this bad and smelly restaurant and these odd people. All would be well when she was back home and could savour in privacy
all the delights of the prospect of being back in print.

They asked the usual polite questions that writers get asked: How do you think of your plots? Do you have a writing schedule? Patricia answered, all the time trying to remember what it had
really been like to sit down each morning and get to work.

At last, when the lunch was over, Patricia consulted her timetable and said there was a train in half an hour. ‘Sheila here will get you a cab and take you to the station,’ said
Harry.

Patricia shook hands all round. Sheila had run out and hailed a cab while Patricia was making her farewells.

‘It must all seem a bit bewildering,’ said Sheila as they headed for the station.

‘Yes, it is rather,’ drawled Patricia, leaning back in the cab and feeling very important now that freedom was at hand. ‘When will I hear from you again?’

‘It takes time,’ said Sheila. ‘First we have to find the main scriptwriter, choose the location, the actors, and then we sell it to either the BBC or ITV.’

‘The BBC would be wonderful,’ said Patricia. ‘Don’t like the other channel. All those nasty advertisements. So vulgar.’

‘In any case, it will take a few months,’ said Sheila.

‘Did you read
The Case of the Rising Tides
?’ asked Patricia.

‘Yes, it was part of my job as researcher. I enjoyed it very much,’ said Sheila, who had found it boring in the extreme.

‘I pay great attention to detail,’ said Patricia importantly.

‘I noticed that,’ said Sheila, remembering long paragraphs of detailed descriptions of high and low tides. ‘Didn’t Dorothy Sayers use a bit about tides in
Have His
Carcase
?’

Patricia gave a patronizing little laugh. ‘I often found Miss Sayers’s plots a trifle
loose
.’ And Dorothy Sayers is long dead and I am alive and my books are going to be
on television, she thought with a sudden rush of elation.

She said goodbye to Sheila at the station, thinking that it was a pity such a pretty girl should wear such odd and dreary clothes.

Sheila walked thoughtfully away down the platform after having seen her charge ensconced in a corner seat. She scratched her short blonde crop. Did Harry realize just how vain Patricia
Martyn-Broyd was? But then he had endured fights with writers before. Writers were considered the scum of the earth.

At a conference a week later, Harry announced, ‘I’m waiting for Jamie Gallagher. He’ll be main scriptwriter. I gave him the book. He’ll be coming along
to let us know what he can do with it.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought he was at all suitable,’ suggested Sheila. ‘Not for a detective series.’

‘BBC Scotland likes his work, and if we want them to put up any money for this, we’d better give ’em what they want,’ said Harry.

The door opened and Jamie Gallagher came in. He was a tall man wearing a donkey jacket and a Greek fisherman’s hat. He had a few days of stubble on his chin. He had greasy brown hair which
he wore combed forward to hide his receding hairline. He was a heavy drinker, and his face was criss-crossed with broken veins. It looked like an ordnance survey map.

He threw a tattered copy of Patricia’s book down on the table and demanded truculently, ‘What is this shite?’

‘Well, shite, actually,’ said Harry cheerfully, ‘but we need you to bring all that genius of yours to it.’

Jamie sat down and scowled all around. He was battling between the joys of exercising his monumental ego on the one hand and remembering that he was currently unemployed on the other.

‘What you need to do is take the framework of the plot, all those tides and things,’ said Fiona, ‘and then add some spice.’

After a long harangue about the English in general and Patricia’s writing in particular, Jamie said, ‘But I could do it this way. You say we’ll get Penelope Gates? Right. You
want the sixties feel. Lots of sixties songs. In the books, Lady Harriet is middle-aged. I say, let’s make her young and hip. I know, runs a commune in that castle of hers. Bit of pot. Love
interest.’

‘In the book,’ said Sheila, ‘it’s Major Derwent.’

‘Let’s see,’ said Jamie, ignoring her, ‘we’ll have a Highland police inspector, real chauvinist pig. And our Harriet seduces him and gets information about the case
out of him. Lots of shagging in the heather.’

‘We won’t get the family slot on Sunday night,’ said Fiona cautiously.

Jamie snorted. ‘We’ll get it, all right. Who the hell is going to object to pot smoking these days? No full frontal, either, just a flash of thigh and a bit of boob.’

Sheila let her mind drift off. Poor Patricia up in the Highlands, dreaming of glory. What on earth would she think when she saw the result? The air about Sheila was blue with four-letter words,
but she had become accustomed to bleeping them out. Someone had once said that you could always tell what people were afraid of by the swear words they used.

After six months Patricia began to become anxious. What if nothing happened? Pheasant Books had not phoned her, and she was too proud and, at the same time, too afraid of
rejection to phone them. She had not heard from her old publisher, either.

The Highlands were in the grip of deep midwinter. There was hardly any daylight, and she seemed to be living in a long tunnel of perpetual night.

She began to regret that she had not furthered her friendship with that policeman over in Lochdubh. It would have been someone to talk to. She had diligently tried to write again, but somehow
the words would not come.

At last she phoned the police station in Lochdubh. When Hamish answered, she said, ‘This is Patricia Martyn-Broyd. Do you remember me?’

‘Oh, yes, you stood me up,’ said Hamish cheerfully.

‘I am sorry, but you see . . .’ She told Hamish all about the television deal, ending with a cautious, ‘Perhaps you might be free for dinner tomorrow night?’

‘Aye, that would be grand,’ said Hamish. ‘That Italian restaurant?’

‘I will see you there at eight,’ said Patricia.

But on the following day, the outside world burst in on Patricia’s seclusion. Harry Frame phoned to tell her he had got funding for the series.

‘From the BBC?’ asked Patricia eagerly.

‘Yes,’ said Harry, ‘BBC Scotland.’

‘Not national?’

‘Oh, it will go national all right,’ Harry gave his beefy laugh. ‘The fact that we’re going to dramatize your books has already been in some of the papers. Haven’t
you seen anything?’

Patricia took
The Times
, but she only read the obituaries and did the crossword. She wondered, however, why no reporter had contacted her.

‘We’re sending you the contracts,’ said Harry. ‘You should get them tomorrow.’

Then Pheasant Books phoned to say they would like to publish
The Case of the Rising Tides
to coincide with the start of the television series. They offered a dismal amount of money, but
Patricia was too happy to care. She took a deep breath and said she would travel down to London immediately to sign the contract.

She packed quickly and drove down to Inverness to catch the London train.

Hamish Macbeth sat alone in the restaurant that evening. Crazy old bat, he thought.

Penelope Gates stood for a moment at the bottom of the staircase leading up to the flat she shared with her husband. She wondered for the umpteenth time why she had been stupid
enough to get married. No one got married these days. Her husband, Josh, was an out-of-work actor and bitter with it. To justify his existence, he had lately taken to acting as a sort of business
manager, criticizing her scripts and performance. They had first met when both were students at the Royal College of Dramatic Art in Glasgow. It had been a heady three-week romance followed by a
wedding.

The first rows had begun when Penelope had acted in a television series as a rape victim. Josh, when he got drunk, which was frequently, accused her of being a slut. Only the fact that he liked
the money she earned from subsequent and similar roles had stopped him from outright violence, had stopped him from ‘damaging the goods’. But the last time, he had extracted a promise
from her that she would never take her clothes off on screen again, and, anything for a quiet life, thought Penelope bleakly, she had promised. Maybe she could get away with it this time. She
nervously thumbed the script of
The Case of the Rising Tides
. She was not
totally
naked in any scene.

Penelope went upstairs and opened the door. ‘Josh!’ she called. ‘I’ve got a great part.’