‘God, kids like that get jobs, while people with experience. . If I had my way — ’
But Charles never found out what would happen if Walter Proud had his way. The door from the fire escape into the bar suddenly burst open to admit Mort Verdon, waving his arms and screaming.
He was making so much noise that everyone was distracted and gathered round him, trying to find out the cause of his agitation.
Charles and Robin Laughton understood at the same moment that it was something he had seen outside on the fire escape, and rushed to the door. Most of the rest of the crowd followed.
It was after half-past ten and dark outside. Charles look down the fire escape, but could see nothing untoward. The car park below was shrouded in darkness.
Then a departing member of West End Television’s staff switched on the headlights of his car. A swathe of light cut across the car park.
In the middle of it, at the foot of the fire escape, lay a foreshortened figure in beige cord trousers and a flowered shirt. The light glinted on a gold necklace.
The car’s headlights also played on the lower parts of the fire escape. They showed the regular parallels of painted steel and the sudden asymmetry of the railing that had given way.
The car below did not move. Its owner got out to inspect the horror he could half-see ahead.
Charles felt the press of people behind him on the small metal balcony. He looked round at the shocked faces of Robin Laughton, Bernard Walton, Rod Tisdale, George Birkitt, Walter Proud, Scott Newton, Jane Lewis and Aurelia Howarth, and at the grinning incomprehension of Barton Rivers.
There was a long silence as they all looked down at the corpse of Sadie Wainwright, and waited for someone else to be the first to say they were sorry.
Then Peter Lipscombe’s cheery face appeared in the doorway. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘’Everything okay?’
CHAPTER THREE
West End Television Ltd,
W.E.T. House,
235-9 Lisson Avenue, London NW1 3PQ.
22nd March, 1979.
Dear Charles,
I’m sure you’ve already heard from your agent, but I wanted to write personally to say how delighted I am to be able to tell you that
I’m sorry it has taken so long for me to be in a position to pass on the news, but the ‘powers that be’ always take their time deliberating over this sort of thing. However, they have now made up their minds and are backing
Many thanks for all your hard work on the pilot, which contributed to make the show such an exciting success. I’m sure you’re looking forward to the series as much as we all are — we think it’s going to be very exciting! The dates will be within the option period agreed with your agent, with prefilming probably starting the last week in May, six shows recorded on Tuesday evenings June 12th-July 17th, a couple of weeks’ break, and then the remaining six (which, with the pilot, will make a series of thirteen) starting on 3rd August. All sewn up by mid- September.
We at W.E.T. don’t believe in changing a winning team, so the casting will all be as for the pilot, and Scott Newton, who did such a splendid job for us then, will again be directing. Rod Tisdale, whose way with a line, as you know, puts him in the Oscar Wilde class, will certainly be writing the first six scripts, though, with the pressure of time, we may bring in other writers for later episodes. But don’t worry, we’ll keep up the high standards we have set ourselves with that very exciting pilot!
I do hope that everything is OK with you, and that you’re going to be able to fit this new very exciting project into your already busy schedule. I very much look forward to seeing you for our preliminary read-through, probably in mid-May, when we hope to assemble as many of the people who worked on the pilot as we can for the start of what I’m sure you’ll agree is going to be a very exciting series.
With the warmest good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Peter
Peter Lipscombe
Producer
Charles Paris had six reactions after reading the producer’s letter.
1. No, he hadn’t already heard from his agent, but since his agent was Maurice Skellern, possibly (and this was a bold claim, but one he believed he could substantiate) the least efficient of the breed in existence, that did not surprise him.
2. Yes, it was good news. The Inland Revenue had recently developed an unhealthy interest in his affairs and made the laughable demand that he should supply them with accounts for the last seven years. He felt betrayed by this. How did they know he had earned anything over that period? He certainly hadn’t told them. He was left with the unavoidable conclusion that the people who had actually paid him the money must have ratted on him. He reckoned it rather cheapened the magnanimous gesture of paying someone if you then went and told the tax authorities what you’d done.
3. Try as he might, he couldn’t find the news as exciting as Peter Lipscombe evidently did. Financially encouraging, yes; good, because being in work was better than being out of work, yes; but he had great difficulty in viewing the prospect of doing fourteen lines and two moves twelve times over with anything approaching excitement.
4. If Peter Lipscombe could seriously describe what Charles had done on the pilot as ‘hard work’, then he needed his head examined.
5. On the other hand, if Peter Lipscombe dared to refer to Charles’s ‘already busy schedule’, he must be either very ignorant or capable of irony. So perhaps the ‘hard work’ reference was also a dig.
6. However keen the producer was to assemble everyone who had worked on the pilot, there was one person whose services he would have to forego. And that was the PA, Sadie Wainwright.
The letter made Charles think about her death again. Straight after the pilot he had thought about it quite a lot, and in the eight weeks since it had nagged occasionally at his mind.
Because of his interest in detection and the tendency, that seemed to increase with age, to find himself repeatedly involved in criminal cases, his first instinct was that Sadie Wainwright had been murdered. Falls, he reasoned, are always murders disguised. In detective fiction the next most popular question, after ‘Whodunnit?’, is ‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’
It could have been an accident. On the evening of her death, Charles himself had noticed the rickety nature of the fire escape, and he heard later that the railing that had given way had been eaten through to nothing with rust. On the other hand, Sadie Wainwright, whatever one thought of her character, had seemed to be a supremely efficient woman. Not the sort to make silly mistakes.
Nor, from her surface behaviour, the sort to take her own life.
And, given a theory of murder, one didn’t have to look far for people with a motive. Charles knew nothing of her personal circumstances, but it seemed likely that if she behaved at home anything like she did in public, she could well foment considerable resentment in a husband or lover. She had worn a chunky gold wedding ring, but that didn’t mean a lot in television; Charles often thought that a broken marriage was one of the qualifications for a job in the medium.
But putting domestic fury, the most common cause of murder, to one side, the studio day had supplied an ample sufficiency of people with reasons to want her out of the way. Indeed, Charles wondered whether there was
