Situation Tragedy (7 page)

‘What was his name?'

‘Walter Proud,' said Mort Verdon as he swept back into the conference room.

THE MORNING AFTER the
Strutters
read-through, Charles's eyes opened with their customary reluctance and closed again with their customary promptness, hoping to recapture the dwindling oblivion of sleep.

But it was no good. He was awake. After a few moments of tight-eyed pretence, he let them open again.

He supposed he should be grateful that he slept as well as he did. A lot of his contemporaries complained of long watches through the night and assumed sleeping pills to be a regular part of their diet for the rest of their days.

Charles felt a perverse righteousness from the fact that he hardly ever took sleeping pills. Such a solitary activity. His own solution to the sleep problem, alcohol, was at least taken socially. Usually. Taking sleeping pills was never social. Except in the case of a suicide pact. And that was hardly convivial.

Of course alcohol had its disadvantages, but it was so long since he hadn't woken up with a furred tongue and tender head that he hardly noticed them.

He looked round his bedsitter, trying to delay thinking about things he didn't want to think about. The room had changed little during the seventeen years of his occupancy. He had moved into Hereford Road within a year of walking out on Frances and, except for periods of working out of town or the occasional good fortune of finding a lady willing to share her bed, he had been there ever since.

The fixtures and fittings of the room were unaltered. Still the same low upholstered chair and asymmetrical wooden one, both painted grey by some earlier occupant. The same low table, masked by magazines and papers. The fact that these now covered the portable typewriter expressed well the likelihood of Charles ever getting down to serious writing again. His own contributions to the decor, yellow candlewick on the single bed and a different plastic curtain suspended to hide the sink and gas-ring, had now been there for over ten years, and reached a kind of dull middle age that made them impossible to distinguish from the rest.

Contemplation of the room didn't cheer him.

Perhaps he should get up.

He gave this unwelcome thought a minute or two to settle in his mind.

Charles always envied people who could spring gazelle-like from bed and bound straight up the gradient of the day. He awoke always to the North Face of the morning, and usually held long internal discussions about whether or not to call the whole expedition off, before achieving the precarious base camp of a cup of coffee, from which he could at least contemplate the arduous climb ahead.

So it was on this occasion. When he had made the coffee, he animated it with a slug of Bell's whisky. This was a practice which in principle he deplored, but increasingly he found his principles would waver in the face of life's practicalities.

With the coffee in his hand, he could delay thinking no longer.

There were two things he didn't want to think about. The first was his wife. The school of which Frances was headmistress would soon be breaking up for Easter and he really felt he should get in touch to find out whether she was going away for the holiday. In spite of their estrangement, he liked to know her movements and, though they met comparatively rarely, he could still miss her when he knew her to be away. Also, he wanted to see her.

Still, thinking of Frances did raise all kinds of emotional questions whose answers he wished to continue to evade, so he focused his mind on the less personally challenging subject of Sadie Wainwright's death.

Though he had satisfactorily accepted the common verdict of death by accident or perhaps, following the Ernie Franklyn Junior thesis, death by suicide, there was still one jarring element he couldn't reason away.

It was what he alone had heard in the Production Control cubicle on the day of
The Strutters
recording. Sadie Wainwright saying, You couldn't kill me. You haven't got it in you.'

If only he had heard just a few seconds more, so that he could identify whom she had been addressing. The words, out of context, sounded ominous, but it was quite possible that they were just another example of showbusiness hyperbole.

He wished he knew a bit more about television studios and their sound systems. He knew that a variety of people could talk back into the Production Control box. Certainly the Sound and Vision Controllers on either side could. So could the four cameramen . . . and of course the Floor Managers with their little walkie-talkies. Then he was sure he'd heard PAs talking to people or places with technical names like VTR and Telecine. And there was always sound from the studio microphones on their booms.

In fact, Sadie could have been speaking from almost anywhere in the immediate studio area. That didn't give him any clues as to who she was with. Maybe it could be investigated, but two months had passed and, apart from the dauntingly technical nature of the enquiry, Charles thought it unlikely that anyone was going to remember exactly which microphone might have been left open to catch Sadie's words.

But he did now have another line of enquiry. It was one he was reluctant to pursue, because it involved a friend. But he could no longer pretend that he knew nothing of the dead girl's private life. And he had got Walter Proud's phone number.

He decided that they perhaps should meet for a drink.

Walter was very apologetic that they had to meet in a pub. ‘I'd have said come round to my place, but really, I've hardly got a place for anyone to come to now.'

‘Well, never mind. I'm always happy with a pub.'

But it still seemed to worry Walter. ‘Thing is, I've moved from that service flat in Kensington. I'd have invited you round there, but the place I'm in now . . . well, it's really just a bedsitter.'

The emphasis he put on the last word amused Charles. ‘Oh, come on, that's not the end of the world. I live in a bedsitter, you know.'

‘Yes, I know. I mean, it's all right for someone like you, but for someone with . . .' Walter Proud realised he was on the brink of being insulting and stopped. Charles, who wouldn't have been offended anyway, wondered what the next word would have been. Standards? He certainly had standards, but on the whole they didn't concern material possessions.

Walter tried to cover up. ‘What I mean is, the last few years have been a series of shocks for me. Angela and I had been married for eighteen years, you know, and we'd been in that house in Datchet for twelve. So when we split up, it was quite an upheaval. I mean, don't get me wrong – I wanted the divorce, no question, but it was . . . an upheaval. And then leaving the BBC so soon after, and I'd done . . . what? . . . fifteen years with the Corporation . . . well, it all made sense at the time, and it was the right thing to do, careerwise, but . . . er . . .'

He seemed unable to resolve the sentence.

‘Do you see Angela at all now?'

‘No.' Walter Proud sounded very hurt. ‘No, she won't see me. I see the girls occasionally, but . . .'

‘I'm sorry,' said Charles formally, giving Walter the opportunity to move on to another subject.

But the producer was unwilling to do so. ‘What makes it worse is that she's ill.'

‘Angela?'

‘Yes. She had a growth, apparently, on her breast, about a year ago and had a . . . what do they call it . . . mastectomy. But apparently it didn't get rid of it all. It's spreading.'

‘Oh.'

‘I only hear this from the girls, you know. I keep offering to go and see Angela, but they say, no, she doesn't want to see me and . . . I don't know, it makes me feel terrible.'

‘Let me get you another drink.' Charles tried another way of breaking the flow, but when he returned with a large gin and tonic and a pint of bitter for himself (still irrigating the brain, move back on to the scotch later), Walter continued.

‘You break up a marriage because it doesn't work and because you want to get around a bit, see a few more other women, have a bit of life for God's sake, before you're too old, and then you come up against something like this. And you realise perhaps you are too old, that you're now in the generation to whom illnesses happen, and you should have just stuck together, because there really isn't any time.'

Charles felt a cold pang of depression. Walter's situation was too close to his own for comfort. Suppose something happened to Frances. Suppose she became ill or, worse, was suddenly killed in an accident, and he was nowhere around . . . He must ring her.

Walter's tale of woe wasn't making it easy for him to get round to the real purpose of their meeting. It was bad enough suspecting a friend of murder, but to interrogate a friend in this sort of state was really kicking a man when he was down.

Fortunately, Walter seemed to realise how low he was getting and made a determined effort to pick himself out of his slough of despond. With something approaching the old bravado Charles remembered, he said, ‘Still, a man has to do what a man has to do. I don't really regret any of it. Okay, I was very cosy at the BBC, and, to some extent, at home, but I was dying on my feet. At least I've seen a bit more of life and things by cutting loose.'

‘Things . . . being women?' Charles fed gently.

Walter responded to this man-of-the-world approach. ‘Oh yes, there have been one or two. It's only when you're on your own that you realise quite how many of them there are.'

Charles laughed conspiratorially, hoping to stimulate further information, but got nothing more than an answering chuckle. He would have to be a bit more direct in his approach. ‘Down at W.E.T., the other day, someone was saying you'd had a bit of a fling with someone there.'

‘Oh yes.' Walter smiled a Lothario smile, but then seemed to recollect something unpleasant and changed his manner. ‘Yes, it was very unfortunate. The girl died.'

‘Really?' said Charles ingenuously.

‘Yes, she was . . . well, you were there.'

‘I was there?'

‘When you were making that pilot, you remember, the girl who fell off the fire escape.'

‘Oh, Good Lord, you mean that PA? What was her name . . . Sadie?'

‘Sadie Wainwright.' Walter nodded. ‘Yes, we had a thing. It went on . . . well, on and off . . . for two or three months.'

‘How awful for you, for her to have . . .'

‘Yes, it was pretty upsetting. But in fact the affair was over, had been for a month. Didn't work.'

‘But I seem to remember . . .' (Charles tried to disguise the interrogation in casualness) ‘. . . that you said you'd talked to her on that evening.'

‘Oh, talked to her, yes. We were still on speaking terms . . . at least I'd thought we were.

‘You mean she wasn't pleased to see you?'

‘She was bloody rude, if you must know.'

‘Seems to have been a habit with her.'

‘Yes, she had a sharp tongue. Mind you, that was only her manner. She could be very . . . well, different.' Walter Proud seemed to recollect some moment of tenderness, but quickly snapped out of the mood. ‘No, I'd gone to see her because she knew everything that was going on at W.E.T.. I thought she might know of something coming up for me. The fact is, Charles, not to put too fine a point on it, I am out of a job. I've been out of a job now for five months. I've tried writing round all the companies, going to see people, using every contact I've ever made, and all of them lead to the same answer – nothing doing.'

‘Couldn't you go back to the Beeb?'

‘No chance. They're in as bad a state as anyone else. Worse. They've got no money and can't think of taking on new staff. And if they did, I don't think people who resigned three years ago at the age of fifty-four would be top of the list. The BBC is very paternalistic and looks after you very well, so long as you remain on the staff. But if you commit the unforgivable affront of resigning, well, you look after yourself, matey. It's fair enough, but I'm afraid it means, in answer to your question, No, under no circumstances could I go back to the Beeb.'

‘Something'll come up,' Charles offered meaninglessly.

‘It'd better. Needless to say, I've screwed up the full pension I would have got if I'd stayed.'

‘Have you got any savings?'

Walter laughed shortly. ‘Never had many. By the time I'd sorted out the divorce and moved a couple of times . . . And then being out of work is bloody expensive. Trying to get jobs is, anyway. I mean, if you're chatting up an old friend who happens to be a Programme Controller somewhere, then you take him out to the sort of lunch you would have taken him out to in the old days. Except of course in the old days, you would have had an expense account. When you're paying with real money, boy, you notice the difference.'

‘So Sadie . . .' Charles steered the conversation back on to the course he required.

‘Yes, Sadie was a last-ditch attempt. A contact. I thought she might know the scene at W.E.T.. Tell me if they'd got all the producer/directors they needed for the new stuff they were doing. I mean, I know they've got
Wragg and Bowen
coming up, and I worked with them at the BBC. And then there's this series for the elderly. A real F.G., if ever I heard one.'

‘F.G.?'

‘Franchise-Grabber. You may have been aware, Charles, that all the ITV companies' franchises run out in a year or so. And so suddenly all of them have started doing very worthy programmes – stuff for minorities, heavily subsidised operas, all kinds of noble enterprises that they wouldn't normally do in a million years. It's just so that they can show the IBA what public-spirited and responsible companies they are, and why they ought to continue to have their franchises and continue to make huge amounts of money from their usual run of crap.'

This cynicism was unlike Walter, who had always been one of those people, like Peter Lipscombe, who found television enormously
exciting.
He read Charles's reaction. ‘Well, I'm just sick of the whole bloody business. God, I wish I'd just stayed in the BBC and coasted quietly down to my pension. Even taken an early retirement. I don't think I'd have any pride left about that sort of thing now. Have you any idea what it's like going round to people all the time, begging them to employ you?'