Killings on Jubilee Terrace (14 page)

‘Hello Bill.’

‘Hello Bet.’

‘Why are you keeping out of my way? You’ve no reason to. You’ve heard from my solicitors, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, I have.’ He had been keeping out of her way so as not to feel the need to thank her. ‘Thanks Bet. It’s a weight off my mind.’

‘I bet it’s a weight off the little horrors’ minds as well. Now they’ll only have you to torment – and I bet they’ll get their way one hundred per cent of the time.’

‘Well, you won’t have to worry your head about that,’ said Bill. ‘I hope to give them a happy childhood.’

But he said it to Bet’s departing back.

Sergeant Hargreaves had very good hearing. He had never ruined it by having crap music played at him at high volume in a confined space. So though James Selcott, talking into his mobile, kept his voice low, Hargreaves, standing a few feet away, could hear every word.

‘And what did my favourite piranha fish do with its evening? Did it go to some hideous club long since blackballed by all right-thinking young people of Leeds?’

‘No, actually I didn’t. I went to Club Monterey, with its crowds of fashionable youth.’

‘It’s as I thought.’

‘And by the way, if I were you I’d try to avoid the word “blackballed”. Rumour has it you are about as undermanned in that department as Adolf Hitler.’

‘Rumour, as usual, speaks false.’

‘And did my pit bull terrier friend find anyone willing to endure his perpetual monologue on himself and his prospects, or did he stay home and nurse his self-love in his usual isolation?’

‘When I can find company suitably intellectual and talented I’m always happy to share myself
with her. And did you have the company of your leading (and only) fan last night? And did you find his cretinous adulation perfectly to your taste?’

‘He’s actually with me now, and he heard that and—’ she paused. ‘Oh, watch it. Shooting is starting.’

Hargreaves, preparing to reconstruct the other half of the conversation from the half he had heard, noticed that too. Reggie Friedman was back on the ground and doing some last-minute rearrangements in the crowd, most of which seemed to give special prominence to Stephen Barrymore. So the Church was going to play a crucial role in the happy resolution. In soaps, hostage situations always involved the young and always were resolved happily. You really couldn’t imagine a Down’s Syndrome child being thrown from a church tower in a soap. There would be questions in Parliament and in general a gruesome mixing of fact and fiction the like of which had not been known since Tony Blair pleaded for Deirdre Barlow to be released from her horrendous woman’s prison.

Cameras rolled, and Stephen Barrymore moved to his central position in front of the church’s main entrance, carrying a loud-hailer. He raised it and began speaking.

‘Brian, I’m here to help. We’re all here to help.
You’ve been to me these last few weeks, and I’ve tried to do all I can for you. The reason we want to help, all of us, is that we know you love Colin. You do, don’t you?’

There was an inarticulate choking sound.

‘Yes, I know that because we’ve talked about it when you came round. Only last week. And you said you were off your head with worry because you were afraid your former partner wanted to stop you having access to Colin. Now I’ve talked to Maureen and she’s said she would
never
do that. She’s adamant about that, Brian.’

There was a spate of invective from Brian Whiteley, in which the only comprehensible sound was ‘bitch’.

‘You know that’s not true, Brian. You and she lived lovingly together for six years. You’ve got to get it into your head that the only person threatening to take Colin away from you is yourself.’

‘I’d go too.’

‘What good would that do, if you killed your son? This is a terrible situation you’ve got yourself into – and got your son into too. We come from the same part of the world, you and me. We love our children Down Under. We’d do anything for them, because we know they’re our future…’

And so it went on. The scriptwriter had reproduced in condensed form the sort of
conversation that goes on, sometimes for hours at a time, at hostage-takings. Charlie, who had been at several, had no doubt that the nation would be glued to their screens. For once in a soap a clergyman would be something more than a well-meaning twerp. A first! And Charlie had no doubt that the scene would be the making of Stephen Barrymore. He, in one leap, would be transformed from drama student to nationally known face. Such fairy-tale metamorphoses were in the gift of Reggie Friedman and Melvin Settle.

Charlie strayed through the crowd, staying as far as possible from the cameras, but fascinated by the developing scene. Soon Brian was clutching his son again, and Charlie got another glimpse of the boy’s plump, puffy face. He hoped if he and Felicity had such a child they would be able to love him or her as strongly as Brian Whiteley did – and more wisely, he added to himself.

Hargreaves, half a churchyard away, was finding it difficult to act up to his instructions. The crowd of extras and others was on its best behaviour, and there were only brief exchanges to be heard between members of it, not extended conversations. He stopped trying, and slowly and circumspectly wheeled round to survey the scene. One member of the crowd had withdrawn from the majority and was now over by the lich-gate taking out his mobile. Hargreaves, who knew
the churchyard well as a place where druggies congregated at night, made his way as quickly and silently as his bulk allowed round to a clump of trees a few feet away from the gate. It was a
Terrace
actor who he thought, from Charlie’s introduction, was the pub landlord. Garrett, that was the name – biggish, pot-bellied, but with a lined and frown-marked face. He was the one whose wife that prat Birnley had announced as the dead victim of the fire, only to have her turn up at the TV studio. What a cock-up!

‘Is she all right, darling…? You’re sure it was nothing worse than a graze…? Yes, I know it’s the kind of things kids like Rosie pick up in the school playground.’ Bill Garrett was totally absorbed, and now took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I’m an old worrier. You can be a pretty good worrier yourself, Angie… How are you then?’

The conversation then got on to domestic details. The children had had something from the freezer for their ‘tea’, and Angie had just put the two younger ones to bed. Rosie was still young enough to have a story read to her, and Angie had chosen one of her favourites. Hargreaves was nearly ready to pack it in, not being a domestic kind of chap himself, but he was pulled up by a note of steel in the voice in the next words.

‘What’s that?’ he said, his voice still low, but strong. ‘No, they haven’t… I expect they
will soon, but they seem to be concentrating on Reggie Friedman at the moment… No, I don’t think he does, and nobody dares to tell him.’

Garrett took another long breath.

‘Angie, there’s nothing for you to worry about. I had a hand-delivered letter from her solicitor saying she was withdrawing her claim to custody. If they come you can tell them what we talked about. You remember it, don’t you…? You’re a great lass, Angie. I don’t know what I’d do without you… Looks as if the scene is ending. Bar reshootings I could be home in twenty minutes or so… Love you too, my darling.’

And he kissed into his mobile phone.

The whole unreal scene was breaking up. Colin, the boy, was back down on terra firma and reunited with his real mother, to whom he was talking volubly. Most of the rest were drifting, or in the case of
Terrace
regulars hurrying, away to buses and cars. Hargreaves went toward his boss, confident he would have at least one nugget of information that would be of interest: it seemed that Bill Garrett had been coaching his daughter what to say to the police.

But it was later on the car-trip back to the station, when his news about Bill Garrett had been received with grunts by Charlie, and also a ‘Well, you’d expect that: the innocent and the guilty prepare what they’re going to say to us’, that Hargreaves finally struck gold.

‘You’ve met Friedman, haven’t you, sir?’

‘Oh yes. Before and after the murder.’

‘Would you say he was a likeable man?’

‘Hmmm. Efficient, good at his job, every aspect at his fingertips. But likeable – I never got any vibes that suggested he’s that. Why?’

Hargreaves shifted in his seat.

‘Looking at him up the tower reminded me of someone I once played rugby with. A big forward, no particular character that I knew of, and I can’t say I disliked or liked him. Then, after I’d seen him with a mentally handicapped girl, daughter of one of the fans, I was told he was a man who got his kicks from sex with handicapped children. Kids of either sex, mentally or physically handicapped.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I didn’t do anything… I try to be broadminded. But this was beyond anything I could accept. This man, I couldn’t go near him. I felt – revulsion I suppose is the best word.’

‘Difficult in rugby. It’s a very
tactile
sport.’

‘I gave it up. I should have done that two or three years earlier, when I was really fit and still quite fast. But I’ve always remembered that chap… And seeing this producer chappie Friedman with the lad, holding him…it reminded me.’

Charlie was glad that it had.

Charlie enjoyed being on the road. He decided that he was a nature man at heart, though whether he would actually enjoy trudging through the fields and woodlands around him was another matter. He had just bypassed Keighley and was on the motorway towards Skipton, and the truth was he probably enjoyed driving fast through the nature he thought he worshipped. But some way up from Steighton he began looking for an exit road.

The rather primitive way led through a tiny village, then became a virtual cul-de-sac, with only dirty paths branching out in both directions. Charlie, who had talked to Keighley police, took the left path, bumpy but quite navigable, and eventually landed up in front of a stone
farmhouse – perhaps eighteenth-century, large but basic, and probably modernised inside into a perfect media person’s residence, expressing every aspect of his personality and lifestyle as he wanted those two aspects of him to be perceived.

Just what he needed, Charlie thought, to get a handle on the enigma that was Reggie Friedman.

He left his car beside the other one – an old Honda Civic, small and dirty – in the dirt square which was the parking area. He sensed he was watched from a window, but he refrained from waving or smiling and rang the doorbell like a casual but not unfriendly visitor.

As the door opened slowly he could hear from a distant room a child crying. When it was fully opened he saw a small, thin woman in a baggy frock looking at him appealingly.

‘Are you the police?’

Charlie flipped round his ID card, and she looked at it with interest.

‘Detective Inspector Peace,’ said Charlie. ‘Is Mr Friedman at home?’

She shook her head vigorously.

‘No. He is on his way. He is annoyed you came here without telling him in advance.’

‘We like to talk to people if we can in their home environment, away from interruptions.’

This was less than the whole truth, and no answer to her. He had got Reggie’s home address
from the offices of Northern Television, and then only by pulling police rank and muscle. ‘He likes to keep his home life separate,’ the secretary had said. ‘Don’t we all,’ he had replied, adding: ‘This is a murder case. Perhaps a triple murder case. I don’t think Mr Friedman would want obstacles put in our way. Not if he’s wise he wouldn’t.’ She had caved in.

‘Could I come in and wait for him?’

‘Of course.’

She stood aside and let him into a high hallway. Her English was verbally perfect, but accented. She walked with him across to an open door, leading to a sitting room with tea things laid out on a low table. Orders from Reggie, Charlie thought. He sat down and she sat opposite him and pressed the switch on the electric kettle.

‘Why don’t we wait until your husband arrives?’ Charlie said.

She shook her head.

‘Reggie doesn’t like tea. And yours is not a social call, is it?’

‘Not really. Milk and sugar, please.’

‘How I like it too.’

It seemed to Charlie like a shy advance.

‘Your English is very good,’ he said, taking up his cup.

‘Thank you. There was good teaching in Romanian schools. Maybe a little old-fashioned,
because we were cut off for so long, but good.’

‘Cut off? Do you mean during the Ceausescu years?’

‘Yes. Years, you say. When I talk to older people they make it seem like an age, an eternity. Half a lifetime, with nothing happening.’

‘How did you meet up, you and your husband?’

‘Reggie had leave from the
Terrace
. He was to make a documentary film on the Romanian orphans. That is what everyone knows about Romania, and sometimes it is the only thing.’

‘And what were you doing?’

‘I was liaising between his crew and the Romanian television company. Also with the Romanian staff in the orphanages. It was very interesting, but also very upsetting. All of us were very much moved by what we saw.’

Charlie found the faint, breaking voice moving too, though the manner was rather that of reciting a lesson.

‘And did you get married over there?’

‘Oh yes. We were married by the British Consul in Timisoara. With some of the British cameramen as witnesses. It was very simple and very emotional.’

‘How do you like living in England?’

Once again the suggestion of reciting a lesson was strong.

‘I am very lucky. Most of my friends in Romania would have given anything for the chance I have had. I live very well, and I learn all the time.’

Charlie noticed she had not answered the question.

‘And you have a child,’ he said.

‘Yes – so lucky. A lovely boy. Perfect. And I have a little car of my own, and we can go, he and I, to Keighley or to Skipton, and I can do shopping. One day I will be able to go into Leeds, but Reggie says driving there is very, very difficult, and I am not to try it yet.’

‘He’s quite right about that,’ said Charlie. He had not meant to imply that he was wrong about much else, but the little wife – what was her name? – seemed to take it in that way. She leant forward.

‘He is a very good man, Reginald. You notice I call him by his big and proper name. So beautiful a name, so let others call him Reggie. In his work he has to be the big dictator, the man who takes all the important decisions. That is how it should be, otherwise chaos! But in his private life he is such a good person, so caring, so so-lic-i-tous about us. Because he loves little Ian so much. We think hard about the name, and we call him Ian so that I can think of him as Ion – a good Romanian name! He takes such good care of us,
and is always so loving. Ian is so lucky, and so am I.’

‘I’m glad to hear—’

But Charlie was interrupted by the front door being thrown open. Reggie Friedman strode in, obviously blazing with anger, but keeping a strong control over it because he knew to let it loose on a policeman would be the height of unwisdom.

‘Oh – Inspector Peace. I was told you were coming to my home. It was quite unnecessary. We could have talked in the studio.’

‘Quite. Or at the police station,’ said Charlie. ‘That is usually the best place if you want to avoid interruptions. But I thought that my purposes could best be served by talking to you at home.’

‘Oh,’ said Reggie, nonplussed. Then he pulled himself together. ‘You’ve had tea, I see. Perhaps you would leave us, Livia?’

‘Of course.’ She got up. Charlie saw for the first time that one shoulder on her thin body was twisted, as if she had been slightly abnormal since birth, and had learnt to live with it, to conceal its severity from casual gaze. She nimbly packed up the tea things on the tray and, with a shy smile at Charlie, disappeared from the room.

‘I expect you’ll want to get down to this as quickly as possible,’ said Charlie.

‘Please. I have to get back to the studio.’

‘I apologise for inconveniencing you, and for not getting round to talking to you earlier. Naturally with three possible intended victims of the fire, and three corpses, two of them certainly, one of them possibly, murdered, our investigation is a complex one. Who was hated so much that the murderer could adopt such a horrific and wholesale method to kill him or her?’

‘And you’re going on to say that only Hamish Fawley fills the bill, aren’t you?’ There was always something of the smart alec about Reggie Friedman in conversation, even with a policeman.

‘Yes, I was. I can’t see Sylvia Cardew as anything other than unfortunate, a bit player who’s been unlucky enough to fall into a major role. Bet Garrett was more generally hated, but Hamish Fawley was almost universally hated, mostly because he went out of his way to be.’

‘And what about Vernon Watts?’

‘Also generally hated, but surely much less poisonous than Fawley, and put up with for so many years that it is difficult to see what motive there could be for getting rid of him
now
, so late in the day.’

‘So we’ll settle on Hamish. Universally hated, as you said.’

‘No, I said
almost
. So far as I can tell the exception was yourself.’

Reggie had seen this coming.

‘There are limitations on the person who leads a team,’ he said, with just a slight access of pomposity. ‘Which is what the cast of a soap opera is. You have to exercise restraint on what you say and do, for the sake of the show.’

‘And did you exercise such restraints with Vernon Watts?’

‘Yes… Oh well, not so many, perhaps. He was less poisonous as you said, and the last thing that he’d do was endanger his job on the programme. He’d push me so far, and I’d flash a danger signal, and he’d draw back.’

‘But Hamish would not?’

‘Hmmm…a difficult question. But not usually he wouldn’t. I could imagine him pulling out of the show without filming his dying scene. That would have been just like Hamish, but not like Vernon, who would have milked a death scene for all it was worth, just to satisfy his abnormally large ego.’

‘Why did you have Hamish back?’

Reggie sighed.

‘Haven’t we been over this? The cast had been sinking into a rut. It happens in all soaps. They all hated Hamish, and they snapped out of it to league up against him. By having him dying of TB I assured them that the torment wouldn’t last long.’

‘Right. Now let me put an alternative theory. Hamish had something on you, and was pressurising you to bring him back on the show.’

‘You can use the word blackmail if you wish, Inspector. I’m not a sensitive flower.’

‘Right. The opportunity for you to give in to the blackmail without arousing too much comment came with Vernon Watts’s death. Lots of vacant space where his sentimental friendship with the paper girl had been. So Hamish comes back. But you trick him, because he’s doomed to a short life which will end any later chances of jobs with the soap.’

‘I didn’t trick him. I can prove that to be untrue. I have correspondence with him in which I tell him clearly it’s a short-term contract, because his character dies.’

Charlie nodded, inwardly registering that the letter could have failed to be posted.

‘Once he rejoined the cast,’ he said, ‘there was another possibility: that he then started blackmailing you again, to get his character reprieved. A new miracle cure, perhaps? Misdiagnosis by his American doctors? That’s a real possibility, because the medical profession in the US is over here regarded as one degree lower than used car salesmen.’

‘We’re shown in Canada, so we’d have to be careful,’ said Reggie, ever the professional.

‘I’m sure you would go just so far, and no further.’

Reggie shifted himself forward in his chair.

‘You’re forgetting one thing, Inspector. There is no way that Hamish saw his future as an actor in a soap. He didn’t, any more than Susan and James do. You know our love interest?’

‘I know them, and know
of
them.’

‘Good. Then you’d know they’ve set their sights on the RSC or the National, or alternatively on a high-class sort of film stardom. Soaps are a real comedown for their great expectations.’

‘But Hamish was rather different, surely? He was twenty years older, for a start.’

‘About seventeen years, actually. Oh, admittedly he wasn’t aiming at the young parts. But for a male actor the really meaty parts come to the older men. If James and Susan were aiming at Romeo and Juliet, Hamish would be aiming at Macbeth and Othello, with King Lear to follow twenty years on. No contest who would get the better parts. No, Hamish aimed at the stars, and he was a very good actor.’

‘Very
good
?’

‘Well, very competent, if you prefer that. But he made Cyril Wharton into a real man who happened to be homosexual, not one of your prancing parodies, spitting out every consonant.’

Charlie considered this for a moment.

‘You’re talking as if you thought he was a very fine actor who could well have ended up in one of the big national companies.’

‘He was. In the RSC fine actors play Banquo and Macduff. He could have done that. Great actors play Macbeth, and that he would never do.’

‘But if he had these ambitions, why was he so poisonous to everybody?’

Reggie shrugged.

‘Actors aren’t saints, and most of them have egos well above the national average. Hamish enjoyed being beastly to people, so he was beastly to people.’

‘Looking at his life since he came back to the
Terrace
,’ said Charlie, ‘the two people he had most to do with, on a personal level, were Bet Garrett and Sylvia Cardew. Both on the fringe of the prostitution trade. Sylvia most of the time well into it, but with strong ambitions to be an actress. Bet was sleeping around for a variety of reasons: as a way of getting what she wanted in the acting profession, because she enjoyed it, and probably from time to time simply for money and other favours.’

‘Let me interrupt you. I’ve never heard that Bet was very successful at screwing – sorry! – money out of people. She was generally known to be available, and that lowers your market
value something chronic. She never got what she wanted – a stable part in the
Terrace
. In the main, she went sleeping around because she enjoyed it.’

‘Fair enough. My point was to wonder whether Hamish made a habit of associating with people who had a stake in the sex trade.’

Reggie visibly tensed up.

‘That’s surely your job to find out, Inspector. My acquaintanceship with him was almost entirely confined to the set and the canteen.’

Charlie consumed a metaphorical pinch of salt.

‘But the fact that you got on fairly well with him means that, apart from Bet Garrett and Sylvia Cardew, you will have had the most open conversations with him, were most likely to be his confidant.’

‘Hamish didn’t need a confidant. He was too bloody self-confident to go around baring his heart. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember a single occasion on which he had the sort of man-to-man talk you seem to be hinting at.’

‘OK – but let’s assume for a moment that he was active in the sex trade, on its grubbier edges. The likely thing is, surely, that it was there he did something for you, or gained knowledge of you, that he could use against you. He left the cast first time round, presumably he got a more prestigious job—’