A Series of Murders (11 page)

‘Anyway, who wants to know my availability?'

‘W.E.T.'

‘Hey, how about that? Success breeds success. What is it? Supporting artiste given his own series? New spin-off called
Sergeant Clump Investigates
? Or are they asking me to appear as a well-loved W.E.T. personality on some wacky, tacky game show?'

He offered these suggestions as jokes, but only partly as jokes. No actor can suppress that secret hope that one day, it really is all going to happen for him.

‘It's none of that, Charles. It's still
Stanislas Braid
.'

‘Are they committing themselves to the second series already?'

‘No, they're adding some extra dates to this series to pick up the episode they lost last week.'

‘Ah, yes. Yes, of course.' So Ben Docherty had finally given in to the pressures around him. Sippy Stokes was to be erased completely from the series of
Stanislas Braid
. Russell Bentley had had his own way yet again.

‘That's good news, Maurice. When is it? How're they doing it?'

‘Just tacking a fortnight on to the end of this series. I mean, that's assuming everyone can make the dates. As I say, it's only an availability check at the moment. Presumably, if any regulars are committed elsewhere, they'll have to rethink. I mean, Russell Bentley's never out of work, so he might be a problem.'

‘He said he'd definitely make himself available for this. It came up at the read-through yesterday.'

‘Oh, well, it should be all right, then. He's the one who's likely to be difficult. I can't think anyone else is going to have much coming up.'

Charles cleared his throat. Then he cleared his throat again.

‘What's up, Charles? Touch of the old laryngitis?'

‘No, Maurice' came the dignified reply. ‘But isn't there something you've forgotten?'

‘What's that? Not your birthday, is it?'

‘No.'

‘Wedding anniversary? But I thought since you and Frances weren't living together anymore, you didn't –'

‘No, Maurice. Just think. W.E.T. rang you to check my availability?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, isn't there something you haven't done?'

The agent was still at a loss. ‘What's that, then?'

‘Come on, Maurice. You haven't checked my bloody availability, have you!'

‘What – you mean, I haven't asked whether you'll be free for a fortnight at the end of this contract?'

‘Exactly.'

There was a silence from the other end of the phone. Then it was interrupted by a sound that could have been an asthmatic having an orgasm. Charles recognised that Maurice was laughing.

‘Oh, I'm sorry,' said the agent when he was sufficiently recovered to speak. ‘I am so sorry, Charles. Aren't we being grand?' This idea sent him off into another burst of hysterical gasping. ‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear. All right, Charles. Here we go. Ready?'

‘Yes,' Charles replied primly.

‘Right. Charles Paris, is it possible that you might be available to record an extra episode of the
Stanislas Braid
series for West End TV in the two weeks immediately following the cessation of your current contract with the company?'

‘Hang on a minute,' said Charles. ‘I'll check.' Then, after a pause during which someone who possessed an engagements diary would have had time to consult it, he returned to the phone. ‘I think it might be possible. There are one or two things in the air but nothing firmed up yet.'

‘I see,' said Maurice soberly, playing out the game to its conclusion.

‘Yes, I think so long as W.E.T. issues their contract pretty sharpish, we should be all right.'

‘Oh, good, Charles. That is a weight off my mind.'

‘Mine, too, Maurice,' said Charles, and then spoiled the whole effect by giggling. ‘Good news, though, isn't it?'

‘Excellent. How'd the Rhymer girl shape up at the read-through?'

‘Great. She's really good. No, I'm afraid the whole show will be immeasurably better without the services of Sippy Stokes.'

‘Ah, well . . . Incidentally, did you hear about the inquest?'

‘What?' Once again Charles was taken aback by the efficiency of his agent's information service.

‘Inquest on Sippy Stokes. Yesterday morning.'

‘No, I haven't heard anything. What happened?'

‘Not a lot. Police asked for an adjournment while they made further investigations.'

‘Oh.'

‘Well, you know what that usually means, don't you?'

‘What?'

‘Means the police think the death's suspicious, doesn't it?'

‘Oh,' said Charles. ‘Does it?'

He thought he might need a few drinks at lunch-time to get him through his encounter with the Railton sisters, but he drank whisky rather than beer. There was a danger that two or three pints diluted with tea would keep him running back and forth to the lavatory all afternoon.

As it did for most people living in central London, the thought of a journey all the way out to Ham Common took on the dimensions of a search for the source of the Nile. That people commuted daily from that kind of distance (it took about half an hour by car) was a constant source of amazement to him.

He caught the tube to Waterloo and a train to Richmond. From there he took a cab to the address W. T. Wintergreen had given him at the read-through. (What is all this with cabs, Charles Paris? he found himself wondering. Honestly, one three-month contract with W.E.T. and you start behaving like a bloody plutocrat.)

Because of the Nilotic proportions of his imagined expedition, he had left far too much time for the journey, and it was only a quarter to three when he approached his destination. Hastily, so that his early arrival would not be an embarrassment, he managed to stop the cab just before it turned off to Ham Common and spent three-quarters of an hour walking away from the Railtons' cottage toward Ham Gate of Richmond Park.

It was a pleasant April afternoon, and Charles Paris felt as if he were in the depths of the country. Amazing to think all this lay such a comparatively short distance from central London. He really ought to get out more. There were any number of lovely places he could get to without great effort. And being out in the open air must be better than just mooching around his bed-sitter or spending too long in the pub.

But even as he formed these pious intentions, he knew that he would never put them into practice. Like moving out of Hereford Road, organised expeditions into the countryside somehow weren't Charles Paris.

There was an ancient black Volkswagen Beetle parked outside the cottage on whose door Charles knocked at precisely three-thirty. W. T. Wintergreen admitted him with old-fashioned formality.

The cottage that Winifred and Louisa Railton shared was so small it felt like a doll's house, and entering it was like stepping back thirty years. The decor, the furniture, everything about the place had a fifties feel to it.

So did the spread laid out on the table in the tiny sitting room. Charles didn't realise that people still had ‘tea' on that kind of scale. It was a meal that had never particularly appealed to him, but he couldn't help being impressed by the serried ranks of sandwiches, the plates of rock buns and almond slices on doilies, the – yes, they really were
fairy cakes
(goodness, when had he last seen a fairy cake?) – the sugar-dusted Victoria sponge, the ginger cake, the meringues, the Dundee cake. It had an air of excess about it, as if a television designer had been determined to show every aspect of his research into the period and piled on too much detail.

Yet the two Railton sisters seemed to find nothing unusual about the scene. It did not appear that they had pushed the boat out particularly in Charles's honour. The feeling was that they had a tea like this every afternoon of their lives.

And why not? Everything about the cottage bespoke an orderliness, a life of neat predictability, in which untidy emotions were controlled by an unshakeable daily timetable. In a television studio or in the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall, the Railtons looked anachronistically out of place, whereas in their own environment they fitted in. But then, of course, it was a deeply old-fashioned environment.

Charles looked at the sisters while Winifred went through an elaborate tea-pouring ritual of jugs and strainers and sugar tongs and spoons and tried to estimate how old they were. Louisa was clearly the younger, perhaps by as much as seven years, though it was difficult to tell with women of their age.

Both had salt-and-pepper hair cut in straight lines across the napes of their necks and clipped back with slides on either sides of their heads. Their skins were freckled, but with sun spots rather than the blotches of age. They were thin, both above average height, with Winifred a couple of inches taller than her sister. Winifred wore glasses with almost transparent frames. Both had on flowered print dresses that buttoned all the way up the front and stout buckled sandals at the end of bare, thin freckled legs.

They could really have been any age between sixty and eighty. Charles tried to work it out. If the first W. T. Wintergreen books had come out before the Second World War, even given exceptional literary precocity, Winifred must have been at least twenty in 1935. Which would put her in her late seventies. With Louisa around the seventy mark. Yes, that'd be about right.

The thought of Winifred's books reminded him of the message he had to pass on.

‘My wife is a great admirer of your detective stories, er . . .' Like Ben Docherty, he had difficulty in knowing how to address the writer. He settled on ‘. . . Miss Railton.'

She didn't offer any informality of the ‘Please call me Winifred' variety but simply acknowledged the compliment. ‘That's very nice to hear, Mr. Paris. I don't think any writer can tire of hearing that people enjoy his or her books. Not, I hasten to add, that it's something which I hear often enough to be in any danger of tiring of it.'

‘Oh, I'm sure . . .' Charles shrugged ineffectually.

‘I was not actually aware that you were married, Mr. Paris.'

‘Well, I . . .'

‘No, I'm sorry. Something someone said around the television company led me to suppose that you were not married.'

‘I am . . . sort of . . . technically married.'

‘Ah.'

‘But we don't live together all of the time.'

Any
of the time, actually, he thought with a sudden access of misery. He really must ring Frances. See if there was any chance of their getting back together. Yes, he'd make that his number-one priority. Ring her that evening.

‘No, my wife was saying,' he moved on, ‘that your books really got her through her adolescence.'

‘How nice.'

‘She said the first ones came out in the late thirties.'

‘Yes.
The Spanish Rapier Murder
was published in 1937.' Winifred Railton flashed a modest smile. ‘I did begin rather young.'

‘And then you continued till – when, the late fifties, was it?'

‘Yes, excepting the war years. Sixteen titles in all.'

‘Very impressive. Why did you stop? Was it that styles were changing in crime fiction?'

‘No, not really.' She cleared her throat. ‘We had domestic problems. Our father was ill. I found I had my time cut out looking after him.'

‘That's our father,' Louisa Railton said suddenly.

She pointed to a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. The clothes dated it as having been taken in the late twenties. A large fair-haired man sat at a garden table. Behind him, with an arm around his shoulder, stood a tall, bespectacled girl in a tennis dress. On his knee sat a smaller girl without glasses who looked up adoringly into her father's eyes. Both children were strikingly pretty, and there was no doubt that they were the originals of the two old women with whom Charles sat over that lavish tea in Ham Common.

The house in front of which the group had been photographed was a huge Edwardian pile. Clearly, though a cottage in Ham Common was a very desirable property, the Railton sisters had come down in the world since their childhood.

Louisa Railton was looking at him with such naked appeal in her eyes that Charles felt he had to make some comment on the photograph. ‘A very fine looking man,' he said.

‘Oh, yes,' Louisa agreed.

Winifred seemed unwilling to get side-tracked into a conversation about her late father. ‘Mr. Paris, you may have wondered why we invited you here this afternoon.'

‘The thought did cross my mind, yes.'

‘The fact is, Mr. Paris, we are not at all happy with certain aspects of the way West End Television is making the
Stanislas Braid
series.'

‘No. Well, I'm afraid television is a difficult medium. I mean, often it's hard for a writer of a book to see why certain changes have been made to a –'

Winifred Railton cut through his flannel. ‘The fact is, Mr. Paris, that the W. T. Wintergreen books are very dear to us.'

‘I'm sure they are.'

‘We have lived through the creation of each and every word of those books.'

‘I can understand how –'

‘Have you ever done any creative writing, Mr. Paris?'

‘Yes, I have. I've written a few plays. Never quite had the nerve or the energy to tackle a novel.'

‘No, but you will know from writing your plays how deeply involved one gets with the characters one creates.'

‘Certainly.'

‘And how distressing it is to see one's characters incorrectly portrayed.'

‘I'm sure it is, Miss Railton. I think, with television, what you have to do is just take the money and forget about it.'

‘That seems an extremely spineless approach, Mr. Paris.'

‘Maybe, but it's one that will save you a great deal of heartache. Television is a medium notorious for making changes. Goodness, you should get Will Parton on the subject of things that've been done to his scripts over the years. You wouldn't believe it.'