The Dead Side of the Mike Read online

  Charles rang Brenda, who again regrettably misinterpreted his call, and got the number of Dave Sheridan’s agent.

  While the phone was ringing to Creative Artists Ltd, Charles tried to visualise the agent. He knew he had seen him in the bar after the Swinburne recording. But all he could bring to mind was a shiny chestnut-coloured toupée. Of what was underneath it he had no recollection.

  He also tried to decide whether he should use his own persona for the call or assume another identity. He rather fancied using the accent he’d perfected for a revival of The Second Mrs Tanqueray (‘Effete and degenerate capitalist rubbish’ – Time Out). Or maybe the Welsh he’d done in See How They Run in Darlington (‘Presumably a comedy’ – Yorkshire Post).

  But by the time he had been put through, he had opted for caution and told Mr Michael Oakley that he was Charles Paris, he was working on a feature for Radio Three about Dave Sheridan and he wondered if he could ask a few questions.

  ‘Well, okay, but make it quick. I’m a busy man.’ Oakley’s accent was firmly American, making him sound like every agent in every Hollywood movie.

  ‘I really just want to know about the sort of work schedule Dave keeps up. He seems to me to put in a daunting number of hours.’

  ‘Sure, he’s a hard worker.’

  ‘I mean, with the radio show and the television as well. It must be very tiring.’ Charles decided that naive ignorance was going to be his most fruitful approach.

  ‘That’s only the half of it. There’s also all the personal appearance stuff, his weekly column in Teen Dreams, guesting on quiz shows, even got a pantomime coming up for Christmas, talk of hosting a telly chat show, if Thames can get themselves together. I tell you, that boy is very big and about to get a lot bigger.’

  Strange how all the show business agents Charles encountered said their clients were about to become very big. He wondered if Maurice Skellern had ever said that of him. It somehow didn’t seem likely.

  ‘Yes. But, Mr Oakley, his work doesn’t seem to stop at the end of the radio show. I mean, that’s over at midnight, but I gather he still goes on and does personal appearances after that.’

  ‘Sure, if the money’s right. That’s my business, to sort out how much he does. Dave’s a professional, anyway. Been in this business all over the world, one way and another, for years.’

  ‘I mean, I was driving in the country the other day, long way out, towards Wallingford, and I saw that Dave was opening some big disco out there at one in the morning.’ Charles hoped he wasn’t overdoing the wide-eyed innocent bit.

  It seemed not. Oakley took it without suspicion. ‘Sure, does a few of those. Did two hours, the money made it worth doing.’

  ‘But he must have leapt into a car the minute he came off the air.’

  ‘Exactly what he did do. I know. I went with him.’

  ‘Do you usually go along to that sort of thing?’

  ‘Well, not all the time, of course. Just a few here and there. See how it’s going. I’m his personal manager, you know, not just an agent.’

  Oh, I see, thought Charles – twenty per cent rather than ten.

  ‘So you leapt into the car and went straight down there . . . what, and then you had a little break before he went on?’

  ‘Nope. He arrived on the dot of one and went straight on stage. I tell you, he’s a professional.’

  ‘But then he had a break in the middle of his session, did he?’ Charles’s whole new script depended on Sheridan having half an hour in which to leave Brassie’s, meet up with Klinger, kill him and get back to the disco without anyone noticing his absence.

  The script was quickly rejected. ‘Nope. He didn’t get a break. He got there at one, did the gig, finished on the dot of three, I got the money from the manager – you can never trust these new outfits, better to get it straight away – then we were back in the car by five past three and all in bed by four.’

  ‘Dave didn’t stay down there for anything, for –’

  ‘Hell, no. The guy’s got to sleep sometime.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Charles felt dejected. It had been a nice new script and he had begun to envisage dramatic success for it. Now he was nowhere.

  But not for long. Unwittingly Michael Oakley threw him a lifeline. ‘Look, Mr Paris, I’d love to chat to you all day, but there’s no percentage in it for me, do you see? I do have other things to do. Look, if you really want to know about Dave’s working methods, why not follow him round for a day? I could arrange that for you.’

  ‘Oh, I’d be very grateful,’ murmured Charles, still dejected.

  ‘And if you want to know more about that Brassie’s gig, ask Dave’s producer. He went down with us that night.’

  ‘His producer?’

  ‘Yeah, producer of the Late Night Show at the Beeb. I don’t think he’s still doing it, but the guy’s name is Kelly Nicholls.’

  ‘Kelly Nicholls?’ Some instinct told Charles to probe a little further.

  ‘Oh yes, I think I met him once. The same evening I met you in fact.’

  ‘I didn’t know we’d met.’ Oakley didn’t sound suspicious, just uninterested.

  ‘In the BBC bar. Nita Lawson introduced us. It was the night that girl committed suicide, I don’t know if you remember.’ It was worth the risk. Oakley must get introduced to a lot of people; he’d be unlikely to remember a passing introduction in a bar.

  So it proved. ‘Oh yes, I remember vaguely.’

  ‘I think I met Kelly that night. He was producing the show. You must have seen him. I remember you were showing a young lady the studio in action.’

  ‘Oh, it comes back to me, yeah.’

  ‘I dropped into the studio during transmission and saw Kelly then,’ Charles lied.

  Oakley disagreed. ‘No, must have been another night. Kelly wasn’t in the studio that night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All the other SMs were, but not Kelly. Dave does that show on his own, anyway. Just needs some jerk to play in the tapes and route the phone calls. An experienced jock doesn’t need a producer; it’s just one of those quaint old things the Beeb insists on.’

  ‘So Kelly wasn’t around all that evening?’

  ‘Certainly not when I was there, no.’

  Which, if it was true, meant he was somewhere else. Organising his wife’s murder, perhaps?

  He rang Steve at work and found out how to contact Bill Hewlett, the custodian of Keith’s alibi. She had to consult some schedule and find an extension number for him.

  Though she couldn’t really discuss the case in the office, she was obviously hurt that Charles didn’t tell her more about the progress of his suspicions. But he felt an inclination to secrecy, until he had something more positive to offer. Once he had a proven case, then he would present it to her as a rich gift. And maybe claim some sort of reward.

  He decided to get Detective-Sergeant McWhirter out of mothballs again for Bill Hewlett’s benefit. The extension number he had been given was for a studio control cubicle. When the phone was answered, the first thing he heard was treacly, undistinguished music like that on the Musimotive tape. Radio Two. He asked if Bill Hewlett could have a quick word and was told, yes, they were only rehearsing at the moment.

  ‘Mr Hewlett, this is Detective-Sergeant McWhirter of Scotland Yard.’ He had a moment’s doubt; should he say ‘New Scotland Yard’ these days?

  But Bill Hewlett was not in a mood to notice irregularities. He sounded frightened as he asked in what way he could help. Illegal it might be, but impersonating a police officer brought results.

  ‘This is just a routine enquiry, Mr Hewlett. You may remember an unfortunate incident some weeks ago when a young lady called Andrea Gower committed suicide.’ Better stick to talk of suicide; no need to raise even more suspicions.

  ‘Yes.’ Bill Hewlett sounded properly awed.

  ‘Well, please understand that there are no grounds for suspicion in the lady’s death, but I’m afraid I do have to check out the mo
vements of various people connected with her. Now I’ve been investigating her estranged husband, Keith Nicholls.’

  ‘Ah.’ Bill Hewlett didn’t sound at all happy.

  ‘So far I’ve checked with one or two people and received conflicting reports. Some say he was in the studio all of the evening in question working on the . . . Dave Sheridan Late Night Show, have I got that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bill Hewlett miserably.

  ‘Now I believe you were working on that show that evening?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bill Hewlett even more miserably.

  ‘I wonder if you could confirm that you were with him all evening. Well, the time I’m really concerned about is the hour between nine and ten when the show started.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I’m sorry? Was he there?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’

  Charles Paris kept the elation out of Detective-Sergeant McWhirter’s voice. ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘No. You must understand, one or two other people have asked me that, you know, people inside the BBC, and I’ve said Keith was there. I just thought, you know, that he had enough problems at the moment, without getting into trouble at work for not being where he should have been.’

  As Steve had suggested, honour among SMs. ‘Very loyal,’ said Detective-Sergeant McWhirter laconically.

  ‘I’m sorry, it just seemed –’

  Charles took pity. ‘No, I think you did right. There’s no need to make extra troubles for him, as you say. In fact, if anyone else – anyone else unofficial, that is – asks you again, I’d stick to your story.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ Bill Hewlett sounded pathetically relieved.

  ‘And, by the same token,’ the detective said cunningly, ‘I wouldn’t mention my call to anyone either.’

  ‘Oh no, no, I won’t. If that’s it, I’d better go. We’re about to record.’ Charles Paris put the phone down with some satisfaction. He had got his old script back, but with two excellent rewrites.

  Brenda flushed when he walked into Nita Lawson’s office, confirming his worst fears. And when he stated the purpose of his visit, he felt he was only adding fuel to her fire. Its importance to him was very real, but he knew it didn’t sound convincing when he said, ‘I’ve got a tape of music here, and I wondered if you’d be able to name some of the titles of the numbers.’

  ‘Oh, Ten for a Tune, is it?’ asked Brenda with – horror of horrors – a wink.

  He laughed uneasily, realising that that probably made him sound like the eager lover, confused at first sight of the desired object. Under the circumstances, he feared that absolutely anything he did was liable to similar misinterpretation. Still, he had to press on. Brenda worked with light music all the time and, if there was some code hidden in the sequence of tunes, she would certainly be able to provide the key to it.

  ‘Well, all right, I’ll see what I can do,’ she went on. ‘But I’ll have to get on with my work at the same time. Most of us restrict playing games to outside office hours.’ Lest the ambiguity of the final sentence should be lost, it was reinforced by another wink.

  ‘Oh certainly, thank you.’ Charles went across to the office music centre. ‘Shall I put it in?’

  ‘Yes.’ Brenda picked up two square black boxes from the floor, put them on her desk and started to empty out records.

  ‘I don’t seem to be getting any sound from the tape.’

  ‘Ah, that’s because you’ve got it switched round to Line.’

  Charles nodded, mystified.

  ‘Look.’ Brenda clicked round a switch on the wall until the now-familiar sound of the Musimotive tape filled the office. Then she assumed her talking-to-trainee-production-secretaries voice. ‘You see, the points on the wall correspond to Radios One, Two, Three and Four, Radio London, even Capital’ – she giggled naughtily – ‘and the Playback Lines. It was switched to Playback.’

  Charles nodded sagely, Moses receiving the tables of testimony on Mount Sinai.

  ‘And,’ Brenda continued, ‘the first tune’s On A Clear Day. How many points do I get for that?’

  ‘Oh, lots,’ replied Charles waggishly, and wrote it down.

  While unpacking the discs and filing them according to some obscure system known only to herself, Brenda identified from the tape Gingerbread Man; The Rhythm of Life; Send in the Clowns; Here, There and Everywhere; and Love Is Blue. Charles could discern no pattern or meaning in the sequence. He felt as he did on those hangover mornings when The Times crossword was just a patchwork of accusing blanks and might as well have been in Finnish for all the sense it made to him.

  But his attention was abruptly shifted from the puzzle by Brenda’s action. She had finished putting the LPs away and was now opening a new box, from which she drew another package of records. They all had green sleeves and they were packed in a sandwich of cardboard squares, tied with coarse string.

  ‘What are those?’

  She looked up with surprise at the intensity of his question. ‘Archive Discs. We had them out for one of the competitions.’

  ‘May I have a look?’

  She handed him one of the green-sleeved records.

  ‘No, at the cardboard.’

  For the first time an expression of doubt replaced the simper which she had been training on him all afternoon. But she handed over the cardboard.

  It was identical to the squares which he had found in the old mill by the stream.

  ‘What are these used for, Brenda?’

  She looked bewildered. ‘Well, packing. Like this.’

  ‘Always packing discs?’

  ‘Discs or tapes.’

  ‘Tapes are this size too?’

  ‘Bit smaller. Ten inches, but we use the same packing. They’re like that.’ She pointed to a thin square blue and white box.

  Before Charles could complete the deduction running through his head, he heard a voice behind him. ‘Why are you playing this?’

  It was Nita Lawson. Brenda blushed, as if she and Charles had been caught in flagrante delicto, then said, ‘Charles just wanted to know what some of the titles were.’

  ‘I thought you were having a playback. Gave me a turn, I thought it might be something I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘That’s all right then. Hello, Charles.’

  ‘Hello.’ She sat down at her desk. ‘I’m sorry, Nita, did I understand you correctly? You recognise this tape?’

  A new number had just started. Nita conducted the intro. ‘Seventy Six Trombones in the Big Parade . . . Yes, it’s Sounds Sympathetic.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s the name of the group.’

  ‘Oh. And you recognise this actual tape?’

  ‘I should do. The recording’s from six months ago. I produced the session.’

  ‘And now I know what the crime was,’ Charles announced to Steve with triumph. ‘I don’t mean the murders, but the crime that precipitated the murders, the crime that the murders were meant to cover up.’

  ‘Amaze me, Sherlock,’ said Steve with a grin, and poured him some more of the Frascati. It seemed very natural to sit in her flat drinking Frascati. The sort of thing that could very easily become a habit. Perhaps was already becoming a habit.

  She was wearing a skirt for once, which made her look less of a child. More of a woman. She seemed more relaxed. Maybe it was just that the shock of Andrea’s death was receding. Whatever the reasons, the welcome in those huge eyes was genuine and warming.

  And Charles felt pleased with himself, ready to show off a little as he presented his conclusions. ‘It all fits in, you see, fits in with things you said, fits in with things Fat Otto said in New York, things Ronnie Barron said here – it just ties up the whole package.’

  ‘You’ll have to spell it out for me, I’m afraid. I’m not there yet.’

  ‘No.’ He paused with satisfaction. It was like playing one of those terrible party guessing games, once you know the solution, you greet the continuin
g ignorance of everyone else with smug condescension. But he didn’t want to be cruel, least of all to Steve. ‘I should have worked it out from what you said about Keith once getting into trouble for illicit tape-copying. That’s what he continued to do, take copies of sessions recorded for Radio Two. But he wasn’t just doing it for a surreptitious quid from the MD, he was into a bigger league.’

  ‘When he went over to the States and met Danny Klinger, they worked out the deal. I would imagine Danny suggested it – the whole set-up, with the clues and everything, bears his stamp. What they agreed was that Keith would keep up a regular supply of BBC Radio Two session tapes, and they would become the Musimotive repertoire.

  ‘From Klinger’s point of view it was very attractive, because, if he didn’t have to make the major outlay of setting up music sessions and paying musicians, the only expenses of his business were tape-copying, advertisement and despatch. He would make trips over to this country to pick the stuff up and, to avoid direct contact and because he liked that sort of game, he and Keith would never speak, but arrange the pick-ups by the old code system Klinger had devised all those years before with Mike Fergus. Dave Sheridan, unwittingly, was their messenger boy.

  ‘I’ve checked through with the files of the programme, and the dates which Andrea wrote on the Musimotive cassette were all times when Klinger must have been over here, because during each span, there was a Dave Sheridan Late Night Show which began with Danny Boy.

  ‘So they’d got a nice little system going. Klinger would come over here every now and then to pick up tapes that would cost him thousands of dollars to make properly, and Keith was presumably getting some sort of pay-off for setting the thing up. Keith ran the risks of copying the tapes and leaving them in these obscure hideouts, but since he never made direct contact with Klinger, he wasn’t in much danger of being found out.’

  ‘Then why did this workable little system have to break up?’ asked Steve.

  ‘I’m not absolutely sure, but I would imagine it was because of the investigation into the company. I talked to Nita a bit about musical copyright and what have you, and it seems both sides of the Atlantic there’s been a clamp-down on what they call bootlegging or pirating music. It may have been just that Musimotive came under the scrutiny of some general enquiry which discovered there was something fishy about its sources of music.’