Killings on Jubilee Terrace (11 page)

Philip Marston himself was a lot more
interesting, and had to suppress lots of areas of his personality to stick within the narrow confines of the character he was playing. Odd, thought Carol, that she had never even considered an affair with him. If one had happened she doubted whether she would have classed the affair as adultery. She would, after all, be sleeping with her
other
husband.

But she had never considered any such thing, perhaps because the Philip Marston she saw was always playing Peter Kerridge, and was thus only displaying his boring sides. If I want ‘dull as ditchwater’, she thought, I can get that at home.

On the evening of the day that he learnt that his wife was dead and then that she was not dead, Bill Garrett’s main concern was for his children. All three had been at school when the first news came through. He had been at home, having no filming that day. He had considered going to fetch the girls home, and then had thought better of it. His wife, after all, had over the last few weeks become no more than an occasional visitor to the family home. He could go and fetch them in the lunch break, by which time the story would not have broken. He could have some sandwiches and Coke ready at home, and then tell them all at once. By eleven o’clock he was profoundly glad he had made that decision. He was phoned from Millgarth station
with the news that the identification was much less certain than had been first thought. He decided he could collect the children and bring them home at 12.30, the lunch break. That way he could prevent them hearing the totally erroneous report put out by the police earlier. He would try to play down the fire as nothing to do with them. The children would get enough snide and sensationalised commentary from other children in the days ahead. They could then just shrug and say it was a colossal police boob. He tried to get from the policeman on the phone how he should explain the boob: had there been an attempt on Bet’s life that she had survived? The policeman at the other end, who sounded Asian, remained stumm. His ‘we can’t comment at this stage’ sounded as final as a cement wall.

So when he had his daughters around the table – a rare occurrence – he made sure they’d all got sandwiches or the cream cakes they loved before he started talking.

‘I got you home because something has happened, and you’re all going to have a difficult time at school, because other children will be talking about it, and will be asking for explanations, and that’s going to be awkward and embarrassing.’

‘Why? What’s happened? Is it Mum?’

‘No. Nothing’s happened to your mother. But for a time the police thought she was the person
involved, and a very silly policeman announced it to the press, and it will probably be in the early editions of the
Yorkshire Evening Post
. They thought your mum had died in a fire.’

‘But why should they think that?’ asked Angela. ‘If it wasn’t her?’

‘They thought it because it was at the home of the man your mother was – said she was – engaged to.’

They took some time to digest this.

‘Is that Hamish?’ asked Angela.

‘Yes. Hamish Fawley.’

‘Yuck,’ said Debbie. ‘He’s the pits.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Bill, trying to keep any urgency out of his voice. ‘Have you ever met him? Seen him?’

‘No. Betty Chisholm’s in my class at school. Her mother plays Mrs Kerridge in
Jubilee Terrace
. I hear more about
Jubilee Terrace
from her than I do from you.’

‘Good to know your school time is so well spent,’ said Bill.

‘But is Mummy dead?’ asked Rosie, still
wide-eyed
from the announcement.

‘No. It wasn’t Mummy.’

‘Was somebody else with Hamish?’ asked Angela.

‘Yes. There was a woman with him, but it wasn’t your mother.’

He waited while they took it in, each one champing on sandwiches Bill himself had no appetite for.

‘Can I go back to school this afternoon?’ asked Debbie.

It suddenly struck him that his second daughter was going to be an actress. She wanted to go back to school because she knew she would be the centre of attention. She would have even more to give in the form of information than Betty Chisholm. It was the impulse to bask in the spotlight which drove so many people, talented and untalented, into the acting profession.

‘If that’s what you want, darling,’ he said.

That evening, when Angela and Debbie were in their rooms upstairs and behaving pretty much as they did every day of the week, his youngest daughter Rosie seemed to follow him around, watch him, as if he was the cornerstone of her life which she tried to keep an eye on for fear he would disappear. When finally, all chores done, he sat down on the sofa, Rosie climbed up and sat on his lap, something she had not done for months.

‘Daddy, I’m glad Mummy hasn’t died.’

‘Are you, dear?’ Bill asked, then hastily amended it to: ‘Of course we all are.’

Rosie seemed to want to be asked why she would have been sorry if her mother had died,
and when she wasn’t she told him anyway.

‘Mummy’s funny. She says funny things and does funny things when you’re not expecting it.’

‘Yes, that’s true enough.’

‘I know Angela has done all the mummy things for Debbie and me, and we love her, but when Mummy comes, or when she was around when you were sort of married, she often said wonderful things that made me laugh out loud.’

‘Yes, she could do that sometimes.’

‘Daddy, are you glad she’s still alive?’

There was only the tiniest of pauses, but Bill thought his daughter noticed it.

‘Yes, darling. I’m very glad.’

Shirley Merritt, was not one of the show’s players who fraternised. She went in when called in, did her scene or scenes impeccably, sometimes improving her dialogue, then went home, usually to paint. Her relationship with Garry Kopps, her screen husband, was excellent, and so were the terms on which she lived with the rest of the cast, with the exceptions of Hamish Fawley, whom she loathed as everyone did, and Young Foulmouth, whom she avoided with a fastidious pursing of the lips. She came from a family that regarded obscenity or blasphemy as one degree worse than passing wind in public.

Thus she avoided hearing of the murder in
Bridge Street until late on the day following, when she rang up the head caretaker at the Northern Television studios about a briefcase with papers in which she’d left behind the day before.

‘It’s somewhere here, Mrs Merritt,’ he said. ‘Can’t lay my hand on it just now, but I’ll have it for you tomorrow. We’re all at sixes and sevens here, as you can imagine.’

So when she said she couldn’t, knowing nothing about it, she was given the news of the double murder, of the policeman who assumed the female victim was Bet Garrett only to find after the announcement of this fact that it was somebody else entirely. When Shirley heard who the victim was, she was mystified.

‘I don’t think I know her.’

‘She was playing an assistant to Mrs Garrett in the flower shop,’ said the caretaker, for the twentieth time that day. ‘And just before Mr Watts died he’d had a little scene with her as one of the kids who deliver newspapers.’

‘I don’t think I know her. I don’t watch,’ said Shirley. She added, but only to herself, that she thought Bet Garrett a much more likely victim than a girl still playing adolescents.

Shirley lived over a shop in Briggate in the centre of Leeds. It suited her, as an observer of busy humanity who preferred not to participate. She went over to the window, where her
watercolour pad was sitting on a table. It showed a half-finished picture of Briggate on a Saturday, with bustling, spending humanity on a late spring afternoon. It had something of the feel of Lowry, without his matchstick quality.

For her more experimental pictures she preferred oils. These pictures were by subject more in the manner of fifty years ago: abstracts or seeming abstracts which, with prolonged viewing, made real sense. She prepared a canvas and got out her palette which was always in a state of readiness. In the centre of the canvas she started, in a violent, shiny red, to paint. The red assumed the shape of lips, half-opened lips. Soon she went on to off-white inside the aggressive rose-bud shape, and they became two or three teeth which somehow had an aggressive quality like a naturally quarrelsome dog’s. Around the lips, in an order that was not nature’s, there was fashioned first nostrils, unnaturally distended, then mascaraed eyes, blue and cold, then hair which made no pretence of being anything other than dyed blonde.

At a small exhibition of her work in a gallery in Woodhouse Lane later that year, the occasional visitor from the Northern Television studios stood in front of the picture, and if he or she stood long enough they discerned a likeness to Bet Garrett: predatory, disaster-hungry, destructive.

Shirley the private, the withdrawn, the observing, had always seen Bet as a terrible source of evil and heartbreak. That was what came from the canvas: the quality of inhumanity that almost disqualified its possessor from being part of the human race.

The viewer who could see this wondered why Shirley Merritt seemed to have hated Bet so much. Because the force of the image led anyone who knew Shirley to question the depth of her detachment from the world of emotions.

‘She was ace,’ said Sharon, sprawled on the large bed in her pad over a shop near the market. It was the second day after the fire. Charlie made notes from the depths of a Lloyd Loom chair which had been made oddly comfortable with the aid of two cushions. ‘She had everything, did Sylvia. She knew what she wanted and she knew how to get it.’

‘And was what she wanted being a prostitute?’ asked Charlie, feeling he hadn’t phrased that in the best way possible.

‘Escort,’ corrected Sharon. ‘No, ’course it wasn’t. Some of the girls enjoy it, but they know it’s only short term. An aim but not an end, if you get me.’

Charlie thought he should go more carefully.

‘I think I get you,’ he said. ‘I suppose being an escort brings you a sort of independence and sufficient money – you hope – so you can start planning on being something else.’

‘Well, something like that,’ said Sharon. ‘But don’t be obsessed with money. We’re not. That’s only part of it. I’d say it wasn’t even the most important thing. I’d say the most important is contacts.’

‘Right,’ said Charlie. ‘But before we get on to them, could you give me some idea what sort of…escort Sylvia was?’

‘Bloody brilliant,’ said Sharon. ‘She was up in every possible preference, if you follow me, and she was willing to do whatever it was that was asked of her.’

Sharon, Charlie was finding, was a wonderfully communicative witness. He had half expected that. Sharon had heard the presumed identity of the other fire victim on Radio Aire in the eight o’clock news that morning. She had rung the police and told them Sylvia was her ‘best mate’ and said she was willing to do anything to help them catch her murderer. People who do that are either true friends or anxious to deliver the dirt on a rival under cover of helping the authorities. So far Sharon had been undeniably in the first category. Indeed, she seemed to have taken Sylvia as her role model.

‘So Sylvia was versatile, could minister to every taste,’ said Charlie.

‘Pretty nearly,’ said Sharon. ‘Homosexuals didn’t have much use for her, natch.’

‘I suppose not. She presumably earned a fair bit of money.’

‘A fair bit about covers it. She wasn’t on the game for every hour God sends – she had lots of other interests, not like some.’

‘One of the interests would be acting, I suppose.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sharon, ‘that was the main one, no question.’ But she wriggled as she said it.

‘Was she trained?’

‘Nah. She started at that Manchester School or College, or whatever, but it got in the way.’

‘Of her…escort work?’

‘Yeah. They didn’t combine well.’

Charlie felt he was being given the picture of a girl who was into high class prostitution to put by a nest-egg of money that would enable her to train as an actress, but she gave up the training to concentrate on her escort work. That hardly made sense, and he didn’t get the impression that Sylvia was a muddled thinker.

‘I suppose she was going to break into acting some other way,’ he said.

‘’Course she was. Didn’t you see her on
Jubilee Terrace
?’

‘Watching soaps doesn’t sit easily with
a policeman’s job. Either we’re on duty and preparing for a busy night, or we’re catching up on family life.’

‘Well, you missed a treat. She was brill.’

‘Her parents have just seen the scene. They found it very disturbing.’

‘I bet.’

‘It was like having the old Sylvia back, but they knew that at that age she was…quite different.’

‘I’ll say. I met her back then, when she was in school. She discovered sex, or sex discovered her, when she started High School. Wham Bang!’

She laughed appreciatively.

‘This scene she had with Vernon Watts—’

‘Is that the old git the wrinklies go on about? Used to be on the music halls – gasp, gasp. Cue for gypsy violins and sobs into grubby handkerchiefs. I don’t get the sentiment. If it died the death it must have been because it couldn’t attract audiences. Where were the grubby handkerchiefs then? I’d bet the music halls were the last refuge of really
crap
comedians and singers, wouldn’t you?’

‘Probably,’ agreed Charlie. ‘By the end anyway. Did Sylvia talk about Vernon Watts?’

‘She said he propositioned her.’

‘She must have had plenty of experience of that.’

‘Oh, she did. But she never let on about her
escort work to Watts. It would have been round the cast, and done her no good, and especially not with the Powers That Be. She just turned him down flat – she’d got experience of that too, though you might not believe it.’

‘I do. Sorting out clients into the safe and the dangerous is one of the escort’s first priorities. But what did you mean: “done her no good”?’

‘I mean in getting on in television. That’s what she wanted. She’d had a client two or three years ago who’d promised to get her on. At the time she’d gone on and on about that, how she couldn’t wait, and so on. Then he’d been written out. It devastated Sylvia. And it was a real humiliation, because she’d gone on about it so much. She kept stumm when the chance came again.’

‘Was this another of her clients?’

Sharon shook her head.

‘Same one, so far as I know. He was pulling strings from a distance. So the chance came again. Sylvia was brilliant at doing children – for clients I mean, those that were that way inclined. And she auditioned and got this part in
Terrace
. She was over the moon.’

‘She only had a short scene, didn’t she?’

‘That’s all she’d done so far. She was promised that this relationship was going to develop over the months, and the old git was going to get
obsessed with her. She knew all about
that
, did our Sylvia. She was devastated when he fell under a lorry or whatever it was.’

‘Was that the end of her TV career?’ asked Charlie, thinking the role of innocent might pay dividends.

‘I don’t think so. She told me a week or two ago that she’d got another part lined up in
Terrace
.’

‘Same girl or different?’

‘Different. They couldn’t think of anything for a twelve-year-old so they gave her some other part more her own age. No more than a few words, though, in the script.’

A new idea struck Charlie.

‘Was she under contract?’

‘Yer what?’ It was a surprising descent into Sharon’s native dialect.

‘Did she have a contract with Northern Television for a certain period?’

‘I dunno. But she mentioned six months a lot.’

So she’d got much more than Reggie had let on about.

‘Right. So maybe she got this second role, as a florist’s assistant, to give her some employment in the time for which she already was under contract.’

He’d strayed beyond Sharon’s apparently formidable know-how.

‘Search me. But I bet the git who’d got her the
earlier job took all the credit for the later one.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because he was like that. A lot of the clients are. They take credit if you pick up a 5p piece off the pavement.’

‘Are you saying you knew him?’

‘No. I’m saying Sylvia talked about him a lot.’

‘Did she give him a name?’

‘No. We don’t if we’re talking about clients. It’s a question of confidentiality, and not getting robbed of good customers. We invent names sometimes. Syl often called this one Mr Fixit.’

‘I see… Because he could get her jobs on TV?’

‘Because he said he could.’

‘Seems to me he’d proved he could.’

‘S’pose so.’

‘Did she tell you anything else about him? About his sexual tastes perhaps?’

‘No. We like to keep quiet about that. Confidentiality again, but also to protect our territory. Say I make a speciality of some service that one of my best customers always requires. It doesn’t do to be too open, too explicit like. Someone else can go after this customer and persuade him she could give him an even better service.’

‘So you don’t know anything more about this man who claimed to get her jobs?’

‘Not that much.’ She frowned, trying as always
to give satisfaction. ‘I think she liked him as a customer. He could do something
for her
, instead of it always being the other way round. I think often money didn’t change hands, but promises did. And he was as good as his word, wasn’t he? He got her the jobs. But I don’t think she liked him as a person.’

‘Why not, do you think?’

‘Too sarky. Always getting some sly dig in. Always reminding her of what she did, and how a lot of people wouldn’t think it a legit trade. As if Syl would care about that! He enjoyed hurting people, even people he liked. Was he the man who killed Sylvia, do you think?’

‘I think he may have been the one who died with her.’

Sharon thought about this. She was a girl who would have puzzled Charlie if he had not come across many prostitutes in the course of his work. Her speech varied from coarse street jargon to quite sharp argumentation. The background that she came from and the class she now mingled with were fighting a messy battle in her mind. There was no doubt in Charlie’s mind about her attitude to Sylvia. There was no question she admired her, but he wondered whether she actually liked her: there were traces of jealousy in her tone, and Charlie had never had the impression that Sylvia had been a likeable
person. He thought that probably since she had discovered her body at the age of twelve she had had the driving ambition of using it to get wherever she wanted to go. And it had got her to that charred bedroom in Hamish Fawley’s rented accommodation.

‘How would you sum up Sylvia?’ he asked, getting up.

‘Dead clever… Sorry, I didn’t mean that as a joke. She had an ambition and she kept her eye on it. And she would have made it, I know she would. She wouldn’t let anything hold her back.’

‘And you? Will you take your A-levels? Will you get a job worth doing?’

‘Yeah. I’ll do it. In time. There’s plenty of time.’

‘Well, don’t be like Sylvia: she dropped out of education.’

‘I guess she thought she could get the same career perks for far less hassle.’

Charlie sighed. That meant Sylvia had preferred to be on her back to sitting at a desk. He wouldn’t mind betting that Sharon would make the same career choice.

‘Where are you on your way to?’ Felicity asked Charlie.

‘Ilkley,’ said Charlie into his mobile. ‘I’m just approaching Ben Rhydding.’

‘Nice place, Ilkley.’

‘I’ve always liked it. But I won’t be taking the waters.’

‘Harrogate cured you of spa water.’

‘Whenever I’m in a spa I thank the Lord for my hardy stomach.’

‘Who are you talking to?’

‘The guy who supervises the scripts and writes a lot of them. A chap by the name of Melvin Settle.’

‘Ah. Wrote two goodish mainstream novels around about the mid-Eighties. Couple of sci-fis since then, no great shakes.’

‘What it is to have a wife who’s into literature. I’ll bear it in mind. Could be a self-loathing intellectual who despises himself for slumming it.’

‘Are you any further?’

‘An inch or two. It doesn’t help that we have two possible intended victims. It doesn’t make for clear thinking.’

‘I’m just sorry for the girl.’

‘Thought she was sleeping her way to a meaty part, and instead found herself burning her way to an early grave? It’s not quite like that. A bit more complicated. The tabloids will all be on to it by tomorrow or the next day. Save your tears till you’ve got the whole story.’

‘What would we do without the tabloids? They save us an awful lot of tear-shedding. How old was the girl?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘I think I’ll shed one or two.’

When he got to Ilkley, Charlie, who believed in doing his work in advance if possible, drove confidently through the handsome and busy centre of the small town and then up one of the roads leading to the moors. It never did a policeman any good arriving at a suspect’s house poring over town guides or listening to sat.nav. and peering at numbers on gates. If seen and in plain clothes he was put down as a burglar immediately.

Melvin Settle was certainly not a suspect, or at least not in the front line of them. Everyone connected with
Jubilee Terrace
had a wisp of a cloud of suspicion hovering over them, but Melvin had struck Charlie as amiable, clearheaded and inclined to be helpful. Up to a point, he corrected himself. Most of the people connected to
Jubilee Terrace
seemed with part of their minds to be protective of the soap, of its popular image as actor-friendly as well as
viewer-friendly
. It liked having the reputation of a place where a new actor is welcomed with smiles and hugs and one who is getting past it is eased out with tact and follow-up care. Since after night-duty he was often stranded at home with only daytime television, Charlie was used to seeing new characters and much-loved veterans telling the nation what a lovely and talented lot they
all were, and how working in the team was an unmitigated joy.

Funny about the murder then.

He stopped confidently outside Moorland Hill, number 24. It was a commodious
nineteenth-century
house, designed for a Victorian family with several servants – stone, solid, exuding comfort and durability. Melvin did pretty well out of his commanding place in the
Terrace
hierarchy, then. Probably not regretting his well-
thought-of
mainstream novels at all. Charlie could hear nothing from the road, but as he approached through the well-kept front garden he heard the sound of a child screaming – what he, with his own children, called ‘creating’. This sounded like a much older child, though – probably a teenager. As he rang the doorbell his stomach rumbled, and he wished he’d stopped for a sandwich.

‘Yes?’ shouted a woman’s voice as he rang the bell.

‘Inspector Peace, Leeds CID. I’d like to speak to Melvin Settle.’

‘You’re welcome… MEL!’ She screamed up the stairs, then when steps were heard on them seemed to go up to comfort the yelling child. Charlie was kept waiting a minute or so before the front door opened.