Murder Unprompted

to his delight, that he was free.

To the agent in question, Maurice Skellem, his client’s ‘freeness’ was no surprise. Charles Paris’s engagement diary was a joke on the level of all those corny old lines about The Kosher Book of Pork Recipes, Britain’s Economic Miracle or The Pope’s Book of Birth Control. ‘I’ve sorted out a great job for you, Charles,’ the agent asserted when he rang.

‘Oh yes?’ Charles had replied sceptically.

‘Sure. Great new play called The Head Owl.’

‘Where?’

‘Taunton.’

‘Ah.’

‘Director asked for you specially.’

‘Oh.’

‘Said he wanted someone who really smelt of failure.’

‘Thank you, Maurice.’

So it was that Charles Paris joined the cast of The Hooded Owl.

It was the day before rehearsals started that the agent of the former Cruises star rang to say that she had just signed up to do a series for West End Television of a new sit. com. set in a lingerie shop and called Knickers; so, because that was going to keep her very busy, she had flown off the day before to Kenya for a safari holiday. And no, sorry, she hadn’t actually signed The Hooded Owl contract.

Frantic phoning ensued. Paul Lexington tried in vain to produce a star in twenty-four hours, but eventually had to accept Peter Hickton’s casting of Salome Search, a Taunton regular, ‘who’s awfully solid, Paul, and, you know, has never really had the breaks, but could be massive’.

So it was that, while the former Cruises star pointed her camera at world-weary rhino, her predestined dressing room at the Prince’s Theatre, Taunton, was shared on the first night of The Hooded Owl by Alex Household and Charles Paris.

CHAPTER TWO

Nerves, like hopes, Charles found, didn’t go away, however long he worked in the theatre. The fact that he had survived a few hundred first nights did not make each new one any easier. In some ways it made it more difficult; he now had more experience of the things that could go wrong than he had in his twenties, and so the dark side of his imagination had more to work on.

But two things delayed the full impact of his nerves about the opening of The Hooded Owl. The first was having a large part, a fortune that was not often his lot. He began to realise how stars could remain cool right up till the first night. Their responsibility was greater, but the mechanics of learning all their lines and rehearsing kept them pretty busy. It was those with small parts and long gaps in rehearsal who had time to sit around twitching over endless diuretic cups of coffee.

The other factor which staved off the assault of nerves was the work-rate Peter Hickton demanded of his cast. Because most of them had worked with him so much, they knew what to expect, that he would rehearse every waking hour (and a good few normally allocated to sleep). Equity rules about maximum hours were ignored. There was an Equity representative in the cast, duly elected by the rest, but he was one of the Peter Hickton rep. too, so he made no demur.

Peter Hickton was one of those people who gained ascendancy over others by demonstrating how little sleep he needed. Charles, whose ideal was a whisky-sodden eight hours, found this was a contest in which he did not wish to participate, but he had no alternative. He couldn’t turn up for a nine o’clock call in the morning and complain that he hadn’t finished rehearsing till one the night before, when he knew that the director had been up till four working on the lighting plan.

Charles also found this relentless rehearsal made serious inroads into his drinking time, a part of the day he had always regarded as sacrosanct. He wasn’t an alcoholic (he kept telling himself), but he did enjoy a drink, and he found resorting to a half-bottle of Bell’s in his pocket somewhat undignified. Apart from anything else, it gave his antiquated sports jacket a lop-sided look. And it tended to clink against things. Also it gave the wrong impression. When Salome Search caught him one day taking a surreptitious swig in the Green Room, she gave him a look that showed she had got a completely false idea of his relationship with drink. She obviously regarded it as a till-death- do-us-part marriage, whereas he liked to think of it more as a casual affair, in which either partner could drift off at will (though, when he came to think of it, neither often did).

Peter Hickton’s rehearsal schedule (probably a misnomer for a process that was simply continuous) intensified towards the end. The Monday night’s Tech. Run, which followed a full day in the rehearsal room, finished at three-thirty a.m.. As a special concession, the next morning’s call for notes was not until nine-thirty, then rehearsal of odd scenes continued till it was time for the evening’s Dress Rehearsal, which, though intended to be played as per performance, did not end till a quarter to two a.m.. Because of this, Peter Hickton demanded a second Dress Rehearsal, on the Wednesday afternoon before the first night. This was followed by notes, taking everyone right up to ‘the half’ (the time half an hour before curtain-up, by which all members of the cast have to be in the theatre).

So Charles didn’t even have time for the half-hour in the pub over a couple of large Bell’s, which he regarded as such an essential preparation for the full realisation of his art.

What was more, he was down to about half an inch in his pocket-bottle thanks to the pressures of the previous days. He had been sure there’d at least be time for him to nip out and buy a replacement.

But there wasn’t. And all the A.S.M.s and hangers-on were too busy to have this important commission delegated to them.

It was a serious situation.

And it didn’t improve the half-hour before curtain-up, when all the pent-up nerves came crashing in with devastating force. Normally he could control the incipient nausea and limit the number of rushes to the lavatory by judiciously-spaced doses of Bell’s whisky, but now he felt as if he was having a leg off without anaesthetic.

He drained the half-bottle to attain some sort of stability, but five minutes later, when something started doing macrame with his intestines, he wished he had saved it.

Alex Household’s method of building up to a performance did not involve alcohol. He did not believe in the use of stimulants, being an advocate of the use of the mind’s internal resources to control the waywardness of the body. It was part of an elaborate philosophy he had developed from reading the first chapters of a few paperbacks about Eastern Religion and talking to other actors over cups of jasmine tea.

His build-up method involved lying dead straight over three chairs, with the head free and lolling back and breathing deeply. A deep intake of air sounding like a gas central heating boiler igniting, a long pause, and then exhalation over a muttered phrase, which may have been some potent mantra, but to the casual observer sounded like ‘Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub’.

Charles was becoming a decreasingly casual observer as the half-hour ticked away and his nerves were twisted tighter. Alex’s charade didn’t help. Charles, normally most accommodating about the foibles of others, began to think sharing the dressing room might have its drawbacks.

Alex was that very common theatrical type, a faddish actor. He believed in vegetarianism, transcendental meditation, homeopathy, transmigration, the occult and a variety of other semi-digested notions. Alex was always talking about communion with nature and being at one with the world. He had a habit of producing herbal snacks in the dressing room, seeds, grasses, nettles and other less identifiable greenery. He had read a few chapters of a book called Food for Free, and kept going on about ‘the earth’s plenty’.

Normally, Charles could accept all this with good humour — after all, he did quite like the man — but, as he again suffered the interminable pause between the intake and the inevitable ‘Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a-duba-dub’ he thought he was going to scream or lash out. To avert both these dangers, he left the dressing room to go to the lavatory, though he couldn’t resist slamming the door as he went.

In the corridor he met Lesley-Jane Decker, whose arms were full of purple tissue-wrapped parcels. She was