A Comedian Dies Read online

  It took him about a minute to come to the conclusion that Bill Peaky had not actually been very good. There was a freshness of attack in the performance and some clever business with the guitar, but otherwise it was run-of-the-mill stuff. The well-loved television personality’s mixed metaphor about ‘one of the brightest flames that the entertainment firmament has seen this century so sadly extinguished so soon’ (Good God, who wrote his stuff?) was just another example of showbiz hyperbole.

  Having formed his own opinion of the late comedian’s merits, Charles looked round to see what effect the clip was having on the potential murder suspects. Walter Proud was gazing at the screen with the proper maudlin awe. Lennie Barber, bored and slightly irritated, was modelling the inside of his bread roll into a dachshund. Miffy Turtle, helping Carla back to her seat in the subdued lighting, was not looking at the screen.

  But on Paul Royce the effect was profound. The boy sat forward rigid in his seat. His face was set in a hard line of hatred.

  When the last award had caused its studied surprise and the last drop of sentiment had been wrung from the occasion and the television recording had been cleared (presumably if there had turned out to be anything wrong with it, the whole process would have to be repeated and everyone be surprised all over again), the crowd of very wonderful people started to disperse. Charles hurried across to the BBC table, fearful of losing his quarry. But on his way he almost bumped into Carla Pratt. She was standing forlorn; Miffy Turtle was a little way away, talking to some prosperous-looking old men with cigars.

  She reacted with some shock when she saw Charles. ‘Mr. Paris. I didn’t expect to see you here.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to be here.’

  She looked round quickly to see that no one was listening and then asked in a soft, urgent voice, ‘Have you got any further on . . . you know, what we talked about?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Have you found Janine? Have you put the police on to her?’

  Oh yes, of course. When he had spoken to Carla, it had seemed certain that Janine was the guilty party. His mind had been through so many suspicions since then, that it seemed a long time ago. ‘Yes, I found her. But no, I’m fairly certain she didn’t kill your husband.’

  ‘You mean, it was an accident after all?’

  Charles shook his head. ‘No, the further I get into the case, the more convinced I become that he was murdered.’

  ‘So you mean you suspect someone else?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I can’t really tell you yet. Quite soon, I hope.’

  ‘You must tell me as soon as you have anything definite. Ring me at any time of the day or night, please. You must. I really want to know what happened. Let me know even before you get in touch with the police.’

  There was no questioning the sincerity of her emotion now. She was deeply upset. Charles felt quite guilty for suspecting her before. Obviously the emotion of the occasion and the sight of her husband on screen had churned her up considerably.

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said soothingly. ‘I promise.’

  Carla turned her head quickly to see Miffy Turtle approaching. With a look of complicity to Charles, she moved off with her late husband’s manager.

  He took Paul Royce to the Montrose, a little drinking club round the back of the Haymarket, which was one of his regular haunts. The boy seemed subdued, almost resigned. He hadn’t asked Charles what it was all about, just followed along unquestioning.

  They both drank large Scotches. Charles decided to leap in with both feet. ‘Paul, I’ve seen Janine.’

  The name prompted only a slight reaction. Paul Royce seemed to be dulled by depression. ‘So?’

  ‘I know about you and her. I know that you were living together.’

  ‘So? What are you doing – taking on the role of my Moral Tutor. There’s no law against people living together.’

  ‘No, but there are laws against beating people up.’

  This didn’t produce the shock reaction Charles had hoped for; just a sardonic smile. ‘Listen, Charles, I don’t know what your game is, but why don’t you mind your own bloody business? You know nothing about my relationship with Janine and, if I did beat her up, you can rest assured that I had a damned good reason for doing so.’

  ‘You mean her affair with Bill Peaky?’

  This did shake the writer, but he recovered himself quickly. ‘My, you know everything, don’t you?’

  ‘I know quite a lot, Paul. I know, for example, that Bill Peaky was electrocuted.’

  ‘Yes. That’s my idea of poetic justice.’ Royce spoke with enthusiasm. ‘That’s what he deserved, the little sod. Not only did he have the nerve to reject some bloody good material I sent him, he also seduced Janine. Electrocution was too good for him.’

  ‘You hated him?’ Charles asked gently.

  ‘You bet I hated him.’

  Charles paused, planning how he was going to play the scene. ‘Paul, there’s something else I know too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Bill Peaky didn’t die by accident.’

  ‘You mean that somebody . . . did away with him?’

  ‘Exactly that. Somebody deliberately switched the wires in the cable to his amplifier, so that his guitar would become live. Somebody who hated him very much did that. And he did it during the interval of the show that afternoon.’

  Paul Royce looked at Charles blankly. It was impossible to gauge what thoughts lived behind the writer’s sleepy, depressive’s eyes. Charles pressed home his advantage. ‘I also know, Paul, that you are a hi-fi expert and would have had no difficulty in altering the wiring. I know you went backstage at the interval that day in Hunstanton. You’ve just told me how much you hated Peaky and, having seen what you did to Janine, I don’t find it difficult to believe that you are capable of killing.’

  There was a long silence before Paul Royce spoke. When he did, his voice was soft, almost amused. ‘I see. So that’s it. Well, I never did. And I mean that literally too. I never did. Sure, I hated Peaky. I was delighted that he was killed. I don’t make any pretence about that. But no, I didn’t kill him.’ He mused for a moment. ‘Funny, it never occurred to me that he might have been murdered. I thought his death was just serendipity, divine intervention to show that, in spite of the bad press He tends to get these days, God still has a sense of justice.

  ‘However . . . since you think I murdered him, I had better produce my alibi, had I not? Yes, I went backstage that afternoon in Hunstanton. I went backstage with Walter Proud, Dickie Peck and Miffy Turtle – dear God, sounds like the Seven Dwarfs. We got to Bill Peaky’s dressing room and he wasn’t there. Miffy and Walter went off to find him. I stayed in the dressing room with Dickie Peck, failing to find any subject in which we were both interested, in fact failing to find any conversation at all. I wasn’t out of his sight, though, for the whole interval. You can check, if you like.’

  ‘I will,’ asserted Charles vehemently, but the vehemence was reaction against the toppling of yet another of his houses of cards. Paul Royce was an unpleasant young man, he had treated Janine Bentley unforgivably, but he had not killed Bill Peaky.

  A new thought suddenly came rushing into the vacuum. ‘Tell me, when Peaky came into the dressing room, were Walter and Miffy with him?’

  ‘No. Walter came back a few minutes later. He had been to the lavatory. Miffy didn’t come back. I got the impression he was rather . . . pardon the pun . . . miffed at the presence of Dickie Peck.’

  ‘I see. Yes, he was Peaky’s manager and just when his client was about to hit the big time . . .’

  ‘The big boys started to move in.’ Paul Royce finished the sentence for him. He rose to his feet and spoke with heavy sarcasm. ‘Well, this has been delightful. Next time you want to accuse me of murder, don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’m afraid I must be going now. If I get into the habit of drinking whisky all afternoon, I’m going to end up as a debauch
ed middle-aged incompetent.’

  There was no mistaking the barb in that parting shot, but Charles’ mind was too full to take much notice of the unpleasant young man’s departure. Unfortunately, it wasn’t constructively full, just clogged with conflicting theories and unformed suspicions, Out of the confusion only one image was clear – Carla’s face, wracked with genuine pain. Do let me know.

  Maybe another talk to the victim’s widow would clear his mind about the murder.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  COMIC: I dreamt about your wife last night.

  FEED: Did you?

  COMIC: No, she wouldn’t let me.

  When he got back to Hereford Road Charles rang Carla’s number. It was engaged. He tried again ten minutes later. With the same result. He kept trying at ten-minute intervals for over an hour. Either she was having a very long phone call or something was wrong.

  He dialled the operator and asked for the line to be checked. They rang him back and said that the phone was not in use, but ‘appeared to have been left off the hook’.

  Charles started to feel a little quickening of anxiety. He had seen too much of violence and its effects over the last few days. He decided to go out to Chigwell to check that all was well.

  It was still a hell of a long way and the evening tubes and buses were interminably slow. As Charles joggled about in them, he tried to focus his mind on his suspicions. But names and details tangled infuriatingly like a board game, little hopeful ladders of logic counteracted by long snakes of conflicting evidence. His only constant impression was one of slight dread.

  It was after nine o’clock when he reached the wrought-iron gates of the Peakys’ bungalow. The moon had taken the night off and it was dark. All the curtains at the front of the house were drawn. The distant hum of traffic on a main road served only to accentuate the local silence.

  He lifted the metal latch gently and opened the gate with care. Instinctively he trod on tiptoe and left the gate ajar to avoid the slight clang of closing it. He glided up the concrete path to the front door.

  There was no light showing through the wrought-iron-framed window in the door. The house seemed locked up in its own silence; nothing offered hope of any life within.

  Still, it was worth ringing the doorbell to be sure. But as his finger moved towards the button, he checked it. No, not yet.

  He moved back gently from the front door and looked at the. bungalow. Yes, there was a slight blur of light on the lawn to the left-hand side. Still slowly, with his weight poised on the balls of his feet, he moved round to its source.

  The shaft of light came from a thin triangle at the bottom of imperfectly closed curtains. Breathing shallowly, Charles moved towards the window. He peered through.

  He was looking into what must have been Bill and Carla’s bedroom. It was dominated by an enormous circular bed. But it was what he saw on the bed that snatched his breath away in shock.

  Two naked bodies writhed in the paroxysms of love. Carla’s face was turned to the window, the eyes closed, the mouth open, gasping with pleasure. The man’s face was hidden, buried in her shoulder.

  Their bodies arched and snapped together as they climaxed. Then they subsided, panting. After the moment the man drew away from her. Charles saw the chunky gold identity bracelet on the wrist and when the mystery lover swung his legs round to sit on the bed, he could see the man’s face clearly.

  It was Miffy Turtle.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  COMIC: Two girls talking – one says to the other, ‘Are you going out with your boy-friend tonight or are you going to sit in and watch television?’

  ‘Doesn’t make a lot of odds, really,’ says her friend. ‘Either way I get a lot of interference.’

  The unfamiliar experience of being in work meant that Charles could not immediately pursue his detective investigations, but it gave him time to collect his ideas.

  He had decided against confronting the post-coital couple in Chigwell until he had a clearer idea of what to confront them with. But what he had seen turned on its head everything he had hitherto thought about the case.

  As he walked from Anerley Station to the RNVR Drill Hall, Wilberforce Street, where the rehearsals for The New Barber and Pole Show were being held, he tried to piece together a new version of Bill Peaky’s murder.

  The important change from all the previous versions was that Miffy Turtle was now cast in the role of villain. With that alteration to the Dramatis Personae, a lot of previously indigestible details were liquidized and made palatable.

  Charles started from the assumption that the affair between Miffy and Carla had been going on for some time. It was possible that the agent had just been cashing in on the widow’s loneliness the previous evening, but the logic was stronger for a relationship which had started while Peaky was alive. And Charles could now define an impression he had received at the awards ceremony, of a relaxed closeness between the couple. An affair of long-standing also gave Miffy an excellent motive for wanting Peaky out of the way.

  Nor was that the only reason for him to kill his client. There was something else that Charles should have deduced in Hunstanton, but had only realized when Dickie Peck mentioned it at the awards’ lunch. The London agent’s sole purpose in going to Hunstanton was to sign up the rising comedy star and, by doing that, he was going to ace out the manager who had struggled up with his client from obscurity. Miffy’s outburst to Lennie Barber in the Leaky Bucket Club showed how sensitive he was to the dangers of losing his artistes just at the point when they began to make real money. If Bill Peaky was as unpleasant and self-centred as everyone suggested, he would have had no qualms about dumping his old friend and agent. That, together with the inconvenience of Carla’s having a husband around, might well push a wide boy like Miffy into crime.

  The new theory also explained the inconsistencies in Carla’s behaviour. It had been strange that, when nobody else had a good word to say for her husband, she had painted a picture of a perfect marriage, while admitting her husband’s frequent infidelities. Charles had yet to meet the wife who, whatever her protestations, was genuinely complaisant about her husband’s affairs.

  And now he understood Carla’s strange story about Janine Bentley. Having met the dancer, albeit at a time of great physical and emotional pressure, Charles had been struck by her essential level-headedness. Though this could have been one of the many smoke screens of schizophrenia, he preferred to accept his own assessment of her character than the unbalanced one presented by Carla. Anyway, that had been too quick, too glib. The widow knew he was coming full of suspicions, so she had hastily provided him with a convenient focus for them.

  Such behaviour made very good sense if Carla was protecting her lover. If she knew Miffy had killed Peaky, or even came to suspect him when Charles first mentioned the idea of murder, then it was in her interests not only to provide the name of a potential murderer, but also to present the image of a desolated widow, whose life had been ruined by the premature loss of a beloved husband. Given the facts of such an idyllic marriage cruelly cut off, it would never occur to Charles that Carla had anything to gain from Bill Peaky’s death.

  She had thought quickly that afternoon. Full marks to her. She had thrown him off the scent very effectively. But the strain of thinking on her feet had affected her performance of bereavement and it was that which had made Charles suspicious of her sincerity.

  Yes, if Miffy had killed Peaky, everything made sense. Even as he thought it, another piece clicked into place. Miffy, on the scene at Hunstanton for much of the run of Sun ’n’ Funtime, was much better placed than any of the other suspects to check out the theatre’s electrical system and plan the crime.

  New confirmatory thoughts kept sparking in Charles’ mind. At last he was really on to something. He would have to go and talk to Miffy Turtle.

  The read-through in the RNVR Drill Hall was the first time that Charles had met the director of The New Barber and Pole Show, Wayland Ogilvie. Walte
r Proud had spoken much of the young man, commending his own original thinking in bringing an established drama director into the less gracious arena of Light Entertainment, and Lennie Barber had mentioned meeting the director over a preliminary script conference. But none of this had prepared Charles for the parrot-faced aesthete with gold wire-rimmed glasses and quilted Chinese jacket to whom Walter Proud introduced him. ‘Looking forward to a long and happy association,’ said the producer jovially.

  ‘Hope so.’ Charles smiled a stupid smile.

  Wayland Ogilvie looked at him intensely for a moment. Then he spoke. ‘Scorpio. I’m quite compatible with Scorpios.’

  Charles’ reactions were twofold. First, he thought astrology was an affectation. And second, he was impressed in spite of himself that the director had got his sign right.

  Also present at the read-through were Lennie Barber, the two writers Paul Royce and Steve Clinton, a few hardened comedy support actors who had been cast in some of the sketches, Wayland Ogilvie’s PA (a dauntingly attractive girl called Theresa), a Trainee PA, a Stage Manager, an Assistant Stage Manager and a Chief Petty Officer in full uniform. This last turned out to be an official of the RNVR, who gave a short talk on things that could not be done in the Drill Hall. After his departure, the Stage Manager was berated for having allowed him to appear in the first place.

  They all sat round a Formica-topped table at one end of the hall. The rest of the space was marked out with lines of different-coloured tapes and upright posts on wooden stands. These were the entrances and the whole surrealist forest represented the set (later in the day to be explained by the designer, who appeared in a beige corduroy boiler-suit).

  Walter Proud welcomed everyone, saying how marvellous they all were and how very big the show was going to be and how he, as producer, would be keeping a very low profile and putting everything in the capable hands of Wayland Ogilvie and, once again, how, with a combination of the best artistes and the best writers in the profession, the show could not fail to be very big.