Dead Giveaway

took a long swallow of tea. He still hadn’t decided how to explain his presence. True, she hadn’t questioned it yet, but the moment must come.

He made a kind of start. ‘Terrible business at the recording, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. The poor girl. I mean, I know men can be bastards, but to be driven to that. . to kill someone. .’

‘Yes. Poor Chippy.’

‘I thought the name was Caroline something.’

‘Chippy was her nickname, the name she used at work.’

‘I wonder what she’ll get. Surely not life for something like that. .? I mean it was a crime of passion, wasn’t it?’

‘I suppose so. Though that’s not always a category the British Law recognises. She could still get a hefty sentence.’

‘But I’d have thought when something’s spur-of-the-moment like that. .’

‘Not completely spur-of-the-moment. Taking the cyanide from one studio to the other must have involved a degree of premeditation.’

‘As I said, poor girl. .’

Charles decided to take a risk. ‘There has been talk around W.E.T. that maybe she wasn’t the one who did it. .’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There have been suggestions that someone else killed Barrett Doran.’

‘What!’ She turned her wide brown eyes on him in amazement. Either the idea was a total shock to her, or she was putting up a very skilful front. Charles, who knew a bit about the subject, didn’t think she was a good enough actress to be shamming. He decided it was worth taking another risk. The truth, he had often found, could be a useful surprise tactic.

‘In fact, that’s why I’m here. As I say, various people at W.E.T. have had doubts about Chippy’s guilt and I’m just sort of investigating, on their behalf, to see if there’s any other possible explanation for what happened.’

‘I see.’ The eyes went down quickly, but not quickly enough to hide their disappointment. ‘And, if Sydnee had been able to come today, is that what she would have been coming about?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah.’ The hurt was still there.

‘Why, what did you imagine she might — ?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

Charles looked at the bowed dark head in its neat suburban living-room, and suddenly he saw everything. It was just another manifestation of the power of television. Trish Osborne thought she had done well on If The Cap Fits. And indeed she had. She had been a good lively contestant (in spite of what Aaron Greenberg and Dirk van Henke felt). But that was all she had been. She, with that ignorance of scale that always afflicts amateurs, had not recognised the limits of her performance. She had seen it as the start of something. With time on her hands at home for ideas to grow like ginger-beer plants, she had fantasised of directors hailing her as a ‘natural’ for television, of offers of work, of a new impetus to dig her out of her domestic rut, of a career to fill the void left by her departed children. She had thought that Sydnee’s wish to see her would be about the next step on that ladder. It was all very commonplace, very predictable and very sad.

He knew he was right, but he passed no comment on his findings. ‘So I’m here, really, to ask you to think back over that studio day, think if there was anything suspicious, anything you noticed that seemed out of the ordinary.’

She laughed, jogging herself out of self-pity. ‘The whole day seemed pretty out of the ordinary to me. I’d never been in a television studio before. It may seem pretty ordinary to you, but let me tell you, being on television is the answer to many a Billericay housewife’s dreams.’ Her face clouded. ‘I suppose, after what happened, I’m not even going to be on television. I mean, there’s no way they can put out that recording, is there?’

‘No.’

She clutched at a straw. ‘They couldn’t sort of edit on another ending. .?’

Charles shook his head. ‘Sorry, love.’ (For a moment he wondered, ‘Do I normally say ‘love’ as much as this, or have I picked it up from the infinitely understanding Joanie Bruton?’) ‘Think about it — with a show of that sort, you can’t suddenly change hosts in the middle. You couldn’t even if there had been no publicity about Barrett’s death. As it is. .’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I was just being silly. Not thinking. Of course they couldn’t use it.’

Moved again by the disappointment in her eyes, Charles searched for another reassurance. ‘It probably hasn’t made that much difference, actually, love.’ (Doing it again.) ‘With a show like this, they’d be very unlikely to put out the pilot. They’d be almost bound to want to make some changes in the casting or the format before they got into a series.’

This was not at all the right thing to say. The brown eyes blazed. ‘What, you mean we went through all that for nothing? We were just being used as guinea pigs with no chance of the show actually being on the television? The producer swore it would go out unless there was something terribly wrong.’

‘Well,’ said Charles, redirecting the conversation off this sticky patch, ‘there was something terribly wrong, wasn’t there?’

This brought her up short. ‘Yes,’ she replied softly.

‘Barrett Doran’s death. Can we talk about that?’

‘If you like.’ She remained subdued, still inwardly boiling at the perfidy of a television company that could put her under such strain on what she regarded as false pretences.

‘Starting from the idea that Chippy didn’t kill her former lover. .’

‘Was he? I didn’t know that.’

‘Yes. That was presumed to be her motive. ‘Hell hath no fury. .’

‘Sorry?’

‘. . like a woman scorned.’

She gave a small shake of her head. The quotation didn’t mean anything to her.

‘Anyway, if Chippy didn’t, somebody else did. And the murderer put cyanide in Barrett Doran’s drink at a very specific time. During the meal-break, between six-thirty and ten to seven. Sydnee and I have been going round, checking up on the movements of people connected with the show at that time.’

‘Oh yes?’ There was a new reticence in her manner; she didn’t volunteer anything.

‘I wondered what you were doing then, Trish. .’

She coloured. ‘Oh, you know. This and that. I can’t really remember.’

‘You left Chita in the Conference Room at a quarter past six. You were back in there at twenty to seven. You left the room with Tim Dyer. You both said you fancied a steak. Neither of you had one.’

‘You have been doing your research.’

‘Outside the Conference Room you both got into separate lifts. I want to know what you did for the next twenty-five minutes.

She now looked very flustered. ‘I said. I can’t really remember. I was very nervous. I just walked about to calm me down.’

‘This is important, Trish. I’m talking about the time that the cyanide was put into the glass.’

The brown eyes widened. ‘But surely you don’t think that I had anything to do with it?’

‘I’m just trying to eliminate as many people as possible from suspicion,’ Charles replied stolidly, in a voice he’d used as a Detective-Inspector in an Agatha Christie play (‘About as lively as a Yorkshire pudding that’s still wet in the middle’ — West Sussex Gazette).

‘Well, there wasn’t anything suspicious about what I was doing.’

‘Trish,’ he said with a little more force, ‘nothing was seen of you from the moment you got into the lift. . until you came out of Barrett Doran’s dressing room at about twenty-five past six. At which time you were crying.’

She looked for a second as if she might be about to cry again, but then regained control of herself and appeared to make the decision to tell the truth. ‘All right. I did go to his dressing room.’

‘Straight after you came out of the lift in the basement?’