The Dead Side of the Mike (10 page)

‘Any idea when he arrived in this country?' Johnny gave the date, three days before Andrea's return from her holiday. That meant if they had met and had an affair during her week in New York, it was an extremely brief one.

‘What about the actual death?'

‘He'd had a lot to drink, huge amount to drink, presumably to soften the blow. Police reckon he had got through a whole bottle of whisky – and just to make sure, he'd crushed a couple of sleeping pills in with it. So, properly juiced up, he got this bit of tubing, fixed it to the exhaust, round into the back window, got in the driver's seat, switched on the ignition and the radio – for company perhaps – and waited. With the amount he'd had to drink, and the pills, the police doctor reckoned he was probably asleep before he died. Quite a painless way out, I gather.'

‘What were the pills?'

‘Mogadon.'

Hmm, a coincidence. At least a coincidence.

‘When did it happen?'

‘Tuesday night. He was staying at the Kensington Hilton. Seems he left there about quarter to ten in the evening, got into his Avis hire car with a road map, and drove off into the night till he found somewhere suitably lonely to end it all.'

‘And where was that exactly?'

‘Place called Greenmoor Hill. Near Woodcote. Very lonely. He'd driven the car into the woods. Found the next morning by some kids truanting from school.'

‘And do the police know when he died?'

‘Not exactly. Some time during the night. The tank was empty and the ignition switched on, so presumably carbon monoxide just kept on pumping into the car until it ran out of petrol.'

‘Right. Well, many thanks for all that.'

‘It's extremely unethical, you know.'

‘I know. You'd better get off for your interface.'

‘Yes. Why don't you join us? We could be there some time.'

‘Why don't I? You know, I might. Is it still that Mother Bunch's place?'

‘No. Mr Barretta's.' Johnny Smart gave the address and Charles said he'd be along in an hour or so.

As he put the phone down, Charles assessed what new information he now had. The first, and most important, fact was that Danny Klinger who had killed himself in the backwoods of Oxfordshire was almost definitely the same one whose name Andrea Gower had written down. The link with Musimotive made any other explanation too much of a coincidence.

Beyond that, he felt sure that he had other new information which was relevant, but he couldn't sort it out in his mind yet. He needed time, time for his subconscious to work while he was doing something else. Like, say, having an important and meaningful interface with Johnny Smart and a wine bottle.

He took all the money he could find in the bedsitter. It was going to be an expensive evening. He hadn't got much. There hadn't been a great deal of work recently and ever at his back he heard the Inland Revenue's winged chariot hurrying near. Still, he had enough cash for one last fling. Start saving tomorrow.

As he was passing the payphone on the landing, it rang, and he received the second jolt to all his previous thinking on the case.

It was Steve Kennett. ‘Charles, I've found something new.'

‘What?'

‘A letter from Mark to Andrea. I was tidying up her bed this morning and I found it slipped down the side. I didn't want to ring you from work, because there are always so many people eavesdropping. But I've just got in.'

‘What does the letter say?'

‘It dates from just after Andrea broke off the affair. Mark was writing to try and get her back. It's all a bit melodramatic.'

‘That's Mark's style.'

‘There are various protestations, recriminations and so on. But there's one bit that seems more relevant – or more worrying, maybe – in retrospect.'

‘What does he say?'

‘Well, like I said, it's all a bit melodramatic . . .' She was losing confidence, wondering whether she should have rung to tell him of her discovery.

‘Go on.'

‘He writes: “I suppose I could learn in time to accept the fact that I haven't got you, and learn to live without you. But what I don't think I could ever accept is the thought that someone else has you, that someone else makes love to you. If I ever found out you had another lover, I would not be responsible for my actions. I couldn't stand it. I would kill you both.”'

There was a pause. Charles decided to make light of it, though his mind was reeling with possibilities. ‘As you say, very melodramatic.'

‘Yes. I mean, knowing Mark, as you say, it's very much his style. Dog in the manger.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's just . . . now that Andrea's dead . . .'

‘I know, everything takes on new meanings.'

‘Exactly.'

‘I've had a few other thoughts actually, got something new on Danny Klinger. Maybe we could get together and talk about it.'

‘Sure.'

He suggested a time, but she was spending the weekend away, so it was left that he would ring her the next week.

As he put the phone down, he wondered if he had been hypersensitive to detect in her voice a slight unwillingness to meet. He really must stop this, a grown man behaving like a teenager over some girl who was totally unaware of his feelings.

He didn't want to think about it. Nor, for the moment, did he want to complete the simple deduction that Mark's letter could produce. He saw no reason to change his previous plan, and set off for Mr Barretta's.

FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS on his contract, Charles presented himself at the Paris Studio in Lower Regent Street on the following Monday just before the nine-thirty rehearsal call for
Dad's the Word
. It was the first morning he had felt that all his body fitted into the skin provided since the Friday's heavy interface with Johnny Smart and friends.

He had read his script over the weekend. He didn't find it particularly funny, but put this down to the fact that he could never judge comedy material and, anyway, since this was one of many, perhaps appreciation depended on familiarity with previous episodes. He recognised the name of the writer. Steve Clinton had been responsible for some of the script of
The New Barber and Pole Show,
a somewhat unwieldly vehicle in which Charles had made a brief journey into television comedy. He hadn't found much of that script very funny either.

Dad's the Word
chronicled the misadventures of a middle-aged man, who, after a lifetime abroad, returns home to find he has to look after three young children, who call him Dad. Whether he was actually their father, what had happened to their mother, what had brought him back to England (and indeed why he didn't just stay abroad), the script did not make clear, and Charles thought it impolite to ask. The programme was merely a showcase for the talents of a once-loved radio comedian, Dave Stockin (famous in the Fifties for his riotously witty catch-phrase, ‘This is Stockin knockin').

Stockin was one of those dated characters whom radio management love and from whom the radio audience has slowly drifted away. Nick Monckton was the latest in a long line of producers faced with the challenge of putting Dave Stockin ‘back where he ought to be' (as the young producer's boss had put it to him). Nick had more brutal ideas of where the comedian really ought to be, but he was too diffident to suggest them.

Charles hadn't realised on first acquaintance just how shy Nick Monckton was. But during rehearsal he was uncomfortably aware of the young man's constant nervous movements and sweating brow. The whole thing was a frightful ordeal and the producer was patently scared witless by his star. The tentative notes he gave on lines and performance showed a good sense of comedy, but, if Dave Stockin disagreed on any point, Nick immediately recanted. The comedian had an unpleasantly snide way of asking, ‘Look, do you want me to do it your way, or do you want me to do it right?'

Stockin worked in a little sealed unit of his own ego. Charles, with experience of other stars, had been wary, knowing how capricious some could be in their reactions to their supporting artistes, but he need not have worried. Dave Stockin was totally unaware of the other people in the show; he only thought about his own lines and how he could get more of them.

His three children were played by an actress of thirty-seven, an actor of thirty-three and an actress of fifty-four (who took the part of the six-year-old boy). A character actor called Toby Root (one of that band of highly skilled character actors who are never out of work and who, in their quiet way, probably make as much in the long run as most stars) played a travel agent, and Charles Paris had the small part of a second travel agent. The script revolved, needless to say, about Dad's efforts to take the three children away on holiday, with all the predictable mix-ups that might involve. After the ups and downs of a disastrous trip to Skegness, Dad had a brief scene with the second travel agent, in which he tried to book a holiday to the Chamber of Horrors, ‘or anywhere else where kids aren't allowed'. The script could have been written twenty years before and, knowing Steve Clinton's zealously conservationist approach to comedy material, probably had been.

The cast assembled for the read-through in the small Narrator's Cubicle, off the main studio, with the communal gloom of people all serving the same sentence for the same crime. They read with lethargic precision and funny voices. Steve Clinton roared hugely throughout and Nick Monckton smiled terrified encouragement.

Compared with television, Charles's most recent experience of this sort of work, it was all refreshingly quick. With the audience arriving at half-past twelve, there was only time for one read-through, notes, a run on mike, more notes and a short break before the show was actually performed. He felt that the script, like some poisons, would be in and out of the system so quickly that it wouldn't have time to do any harm.

After the read-through, Dave Stockin took Nick Monckton on one side to tell him all the lines he was going to change and all the long-remembered jokes he was going to insert into the script, and the cast started desultory conversations among themselves. Like people at a funeral, they spoke of anything but the corpse (or in this case, script).

Charles discovered that he knew one of the actresses from way back. Or at least she knew him. ‘Charles, darling, I haven't seen you since
Hot and Cold Running Water
in Cheltenham.'

‘Ah yes.' He remembered the production vaguely. (‘I don't know who this show was meant to appeal to. Certainly not me, and judging from their reaction, not last night's audience either.' –
Gloucestershire Life and Countryside
.)

The actress then revealed that she was on the BBC Drama Rep. ‘Lucky to be working on this series for Light Ent.,' she confided. ‘Usually it's difficult to get regular bookings, because of course Drama has first call.'

‘Ah.' Charles nodded wisely. He looked at her covertly and with a little surprise. He had long had a private joke with himself that the BBC Drama Repertory Company was made up entirely of actors and actresses so handicapped and disfigured that they could only act on radio. He knew it was untrue, but the fantasy had taken root in his mind and he had difficulty in shifting it. It was a surprise to find the girl had the normal complement of arms and legs.

As they were talking, a young man came in with some enquiry for Nick Monckton. He could have stepped off a pop LP sleeve. He had smartly cut long black hair and wore tight blue jeans and a black T-shirt with ‘Sardi's' written in glitter on the front. His expression was one of contempt for his surroundings. When he looked at Nick Monckton, that contempt seemed to grow, and the young producer was aware of it. The nervous movements intensified.

The newcomer turned to go, his query answered, but the Drama Rep. actress called out to him, ‘Hello, Keith, back with us then?'

‘For a bit.' He spoke without enthusiasm. ‘They were short. I basically do Radio Two stuff now.'

‘Oh, and, Keith, sorry to hear about . . .' She shrugged helplessly.

He gave as little acknowledgement of the sympathy as he could without actually being rude, and left the room. Charles looked up enquiringly, but got the information unprompted. ‘Poor boy, his wife died last week. Well, I say died – committed suicide, actually. I think they were separated, but it must still be a shock for him.'

Charles asked the wife's name and got the answer he expected. So now he had met another of the people in Andrea Gower's life. He raked through his memory for anything Steve might have told him about the husband. Only that his name was Keith and that he had been on an ‘attachment'. Presumably if he was back working as a Studio Manager, his attachment had been detached.

Charles got confirmation of this just before the run on mike. Dave Stockin had formed another little huddle with Nick Monckton to graft some more moribund jokes on to the script and everyone was kept hanging around. The rest of the cast started discussing the commercial voice-overs they were doing or the books they were going to record for the blind (Charles hadn't before registered the specialisation of actors who worked mainly in voice), and he wandered through the curtained area at the side of the stage, where he found Keith sitting disconsolately by a table loaded with unlikely objects. ‘Are you doing Spot?' asked Charles, remembering the technical term, Spot Effects, for the sounds made at the time of recording.

Keith nodded ungraciously and Charles decided to lay on a little theatrical naiveté. ‘I'm fairly new to radio. Is this all the stuff you make the noises with?' He pointed to the table.

Again Keith inclined his head.

‘I'm Charles Paris.'

He received a grudging ‘Keith Nicholls'. Ah, so Andrea had reverted to her maiden name when the marriage broke up. Or perhaps she had never changed it for work purposes.