by David Bowker
Billy heard the doorbell ring. Then Maddy squealing and Nikki talking to her softly. The bedroom door juddered as air rushed in through the front door. Billy heard distant voices, then footsteps on the stairs. The door opened. It was Nikki, carrying Maddy. As soon as he glanced at Nikki’s face, Billy knew something had happened. “What’s the matter?” he asked her.
“The police are here. They want to talk to us.”
“What about?” said Billy.
Nikki didn’t know. “You haven’t done anything wrong, have you?”
Billy wasn’t sure how to answer that but shook his head anyway. He kept thinking, It’s Rawhead; it’s something to do with Rawhead.
He got out of bed and slipped into a sweater and jeans. Then he walked to the window and drew back the curtains. Nikki came and stood beside him, holding up their daughter so she could see the scene below. A row of men in white boilersuits were crawling over the front lawn on their hands and knees. The road outside was cordoned off and lined with vans and police cars. A stretcher was being carried into an ambulance.
“It’s Mrs. Reisler,” said Nikki.
“What the fuck’s going on?” said Billy.
The driver closed the doors and the ambulance moved off.
“Car,” said Maddy happily. It was the only word she knew.
* * *
Detective Superintendent Janet Harrop was a fine, rather fierce-looking redhead. Although Prestbury was under the jurisdiction of the Cheshire Constabulary, Harrop was on loan from Greater Manchester because of her vast experience in the investigation of gun-related crime. It made sense, especially for such a high-profile inquiry. The Greater Manchester Force had infinitely more money and equipment than their neighbors across the border, who struggled to get by with outdated computers, radios that didn’t work, and patrol cars that routinely failed their MOT inspections.
Harrop’s bag carrier, Detective Sergeant Hughes, was also from Greater Manchester. Hughes was neat and unassuming, with a baby face and prematurely white hair. Billy made the mistake of assuming that Hughes was in charge, forcing the sergeant to correct him.
“Sorry,” said Billy.
“It takes more than that to offend me,” said Harrop, her lips forming a thin smile. But her eyes told Billy to go and fuck himself.
Amid constant interruptions from their daughter, Billy and Nikki tried to answer Harrop’s questions while Hughes took notes. “So you heard or saw nothing strange last night? Nothing at all?”
“Like what?” said Billy.
Harrop just looked at him. She had very clear sea green eyes and had chosen to sit on a straight-backed wooden chair while Nikki and Billy slumped on the sofa. This enabled the detective superintendent to look down on them, something she found easy to do. “Neither of you are hard of hearing?”
“No,” said Billy. “Although I sometimes get a buildup of wax in my left ear. Always the left ear, for some reason. Never the right.”
To Billy’s amazement, Hughes jotted this down.
“What did you both do yesterday?”
“Nothing,” said Nikki. “We stayed in.”
“All day?”
“All day and night,” said Billy.
“Neither of you left the house for any reason?”
“No,” said Billy. He thought about this for a few seconds. “Actually, that isn’t true. I think I went out to the car. I’d left the Radio Times on the front seat. I went to get it.”
“What time would this have been?”
“After putting Maddy to bed,” said Nikki. “It must have been about seven.”
Harrop stared at Billy for a few moments. “Did you see anything unusual? Think carefully before answering. What may have seemed unimportant to you might turn out to be absolutely vital to us.”
Billy thought for a moment. “When I went to the car,” he said, “I remember noticing that a bird had crapped all over the windscreen. It really annoyed me, because the car had just been through the car wash.”
“Anything else?” asked Harrop.
“Yeah,” said Billy. “The bastard thing had crapped on the bonnet as well.”
Nikki sighed despairingly. Billy turned to her and shrugged. “Well? Who’s to say that bird shit isn’t evidence?”
“Mr. Dye,” said Harrop carefully. “I very much hope you don’t find this amusing.”
Billy shook his head and mumbled an apology.
“Because two of our colleagues died last night. Along with your neighbor. A man whose wife is now so badly traumatized she may never lead a normal life again. Now, you may find that amusing, but I can assure you we don’t.”
“Which neighbor?” said Billy, instantly chastened. “Which neighbor died?”
“Dr. Reisler.”
Rawhead, Billy was thinking. It’s got to be.
Nikki, now tense and pale, had to ask Harrop to repeat what she’d said.
“How well do you know the Reislers?” asked Hughes.
“Not very well,” admitted Nikki. “It sounds awful now, but we didn’t actually hit it off.”
“Why was that?” said Harrop, sitting bolt upright in her chair.
“Oh, just silly little things. When we first moved in, we sometimes parked our car out in the road. We had builders in, sometimes three big vans at a time, so we parked our car outside the gate. Dr. Reisler came round to lecture us about why we shouldn’t park in the road when we had a drive.”
“What happened?”
“We started parking in the drive,” said Nikki.
“OK,” said Harrop. “I have a slight problem with what you’re telling me and I’ll explain why. Three people dead. All of them killed by what looks like a high-caliber firearm. That’s at least three shots. Out here, where it’s so peaceful, that’s got to be pretty noticeable. Yet you both maintain you heard nothing.”
“We were having an argument,” said Billy.
Harrop wasn’t impressed. “Then you must have very loud voices.”
“We really didn’t hear anything,” said Nikki. Harrop was beginning to grate on her.
“What were you arguing about?”
Nikki began to say something, but Billy got in first. “Whether the police are all bastards or it’s just ninety-nine out of a hundred.”
Harrop sighed. “All right,” she said. “That’s enough for now. We may need to question you further. If you could stay close to home for the next week or so we’d appreciate it.”
The officers took down a series of contact numbers and got up to leave. At the door, Billy felt he had to say something but didn’t know what. So he said the first arsehole thing that came into his head. “Is it OK to wash my car? Or are you planning to take any bird-shit samples?”
* * *
On the Monday, Billy had an early script meeting at Granada Studios. In television land, early meant eleven o’clock. Billy sat in the lobby, where two large TVs broadcast simultaneous daytime dross and portraits of successful soap stars smiled ingratiatingly down at the poor bastards being kept waiting. Many of the actors had appeared in Granada’s most famous soap, Coronation Street. A soap about ordinary northern people. Its actors, unsurprisingly, were chosen because they looked and sounded ordinary.
Nonetheless, this didn’t prevent many of them, particularly the younger ones, from leaving after a year or so to try their luck as movie stars. None of them ever became movie stars. Like Billy, most of them spent their lives waiting in lobbies. Some didn’t even make it that far.
Billy didn’t look down on the actors, even though their portraits looked down on him. He knew success was a fragile thing.
At Manchester Grammar School, where he and Rawhead had been uneducated two decades before, Billy’s teachers had assured him that he had a great deal of talent. That if he worked hard—which in those days he seldom did—he would thrive in our society, a society that rewards effort. In other words, Billy only had to pass his exams and he would become a well-paid middle-class arsehole, with a big house, two
children, an erotic car, and a neurotic wife.
It hadn’t worked out that way. Billy had passed his exams but had gone to art school to study painting. In two years he studied only one painting, and that was by someone else. Billy spent the rest of the time getting blasted. After the second year he got thrown off the course for being so chronically lazy that even his deadbeat, failed-artist tutors produced more work.
Desperate for money, he wrote a review of a Nirvana concert he hadn’t seen and sent it to a music paper as a sample of his work. The editor thought he showed promise, sent him off to review bands. People noticed he was funny, so magazines asked him to write satirical pieces about topics like dying young or having a cock. Soon Billy noticed that all the best jobs went to a small group of writers who all drank together and went to one another’s weddings. These people were never going to invite him to join their club. Billy wouldn’t have joined if they had. He thought they were a bunch of ugly, boring fuckers and made no secret of his disdain.
Hoping to carve an escape route for himself, Billy decided to fulfill a childhood ambition and write a book. He translated his love of classic ghost stories into a novel called Unholier than Thou, telling the story of one night in the lives of a group of ordinary, everyday necromancers. Billy concentrated all his passion and acquired skill into the book, convinced that it would make his name. The book found a publisher. Surely a new golden age was dawning?
What Billy forgot was that a book needs publicity and reviews. And many of the journalists he had snubbed over the years, those ugly boring fuckers, had gone on to edit the very magazines and papers he hoped to be reviewed by.
So Billy had floundered, for five bitter years. His books were published but unreviewed and largely unread. Until a film director called George Leica had picked up a copy of Unholier than Thou in a London bookshop, read it on the plane home, and arranged for his assistant to phone Billy the next day.
The subsequent deal had led to representation by Fatty Potts, one of the best-fed agents in London, the commission to write about Manchester gangland, and the meeting Billy was about to attend.
Billy looked up and saw Artemesia, the script editor. The first time Billy had heard her name, he’d almost pissed himself. She was a little like Uma Thurman, only not as tall or dirty-looking. Artemesia asked Billy how he’d got into Manchester, as if she fucking cared. But he told her he’d got the train, just so they had something to talk about in the lift upstairs.
Artemesia led the way to Larry Crème’s office. Larry, head of drama, was sitting behind his desk. To his left sat Tim, the director. Larry was in his fifties, well groomed, and likably insincere. Always watching his back or knifing someone else’s back or making promises he couldn’t keep, because Larry knew fuck all about drama and never knew which horse to back. So he backed every horse, told everyone they were wonderful until the ratings proved otherwise.
Tim was thin, nervous, and bespectacled, skin bluish gray, looking more like a consumptive eighteenth-century country parson than a TV director.
There were croissants and Danish pastries on the table and a pot of fresh coffee. For the first ten minutes everyone quizzed Billy about the shootings in Prestbury. Larry Crème, not to be outdone, told a story about getting hit in the leg by an air-rifle pellet when he was a kid. Smiling, Larry rolled up his right trouser leg. There was a peanut-sized scar under the knee. The leg was tanned. Larry owned a sun bed.
Larry’s leg effectively killed the conversation. Billy took advantage of the lull to ask what the meeting was about.
Larry turned to Tim. “Tim? Would you like to get the ball rolling?”
Tim looked as if he’d sooner lie facedown on the floor while a rat gobbled a Mars Bar out of his arse. “Well, we all love your writing, we think you’re absurdly talented, and we’re all thrilled to be working with you.”
“And?”
“That’s why we’ve called this emergency meeting.”
“What’s the emergency?”
“Your second script, basically.”
“What about it?” said Billy.
Tim sighed and bit into a croissant.
“None of us think it’s quite there yet,” said Artemesia.
Larry nodded in somber accord.
“Quite where?” Billy demanded.
“Not filmable,” said Tim, brushing crumbs off his tweedy trousers.
“But Larry said he loved it,” said Billy, going red in the face. “He told me it was one of the best first drafts he’d ever seen and I shouldn’t change a word of it.”
“Yes. I did say that,” conceded Larry. “But, in my own defense, that was before I’d actually read it. Then we showed the first episode to Sheila.”
(Sheila Burman was the head of drama at ITV.)
Tim took up the sorry tale. “She said that if it goes out this year, as planned, we couldn’t have anyone getting shot. Especially after those policemen getting shot in Prestbury. So basically, the last episode needs a complete rewrite.”
“But you were all happy with it,” protested Billy. “What happened to the outline? I thought Sheila had approved it.”
“She may not have read it,” said Larry with a shrug. “She’s a busy woman.”
“It was only one page long,” said Billy.
“It’s really a question of journeys,” suggested Artemesia. “If the hit man, Bonehead, is cold and frightening all the way through, where can we take him? What’s his character arc?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Billy. “You worked on the script with me. You told me you loved it.”
“I think what Artemesia is saying,” offered Tim, “is that if Bonehead starts off nasty, then just gets nastier, it makes his character too unsympathetic.”
“He’s meant to be unsympathetic,” said Billy through gritted teeth. “He’s a fucking murderer.”
“But if it’s all played on the same level, it becomes monotonous to film and boring to watch,” said Tim. “Why not make Bonehead all jolly and friendly at the end of the story? So we know he’s moved on.”
Larry Crème sat upright in his chair when he heard this. “That’s it. We could make him a kind of conjurer. He could tell jokes and juggle with oranges. If it’s done right, it could be really fantastic.”
“We just think,” explained Tim, “that the first episode is very funny. All that stuff with the gangsters and Melvin Feast made me laugh out loud. But as soon as Bonehead comes into the story, everything gets a bit depressing. I’d like to see more laughs.”
“There are laughs,” countered Billy. “What about when we find that Bonehead has killed hundreds of people and buried them in his cellar?”
“To be honest, that’s one of the things we’re concerned about,” admitted Larry. “Because dead people really do end up in cellars in real life. And it’s no laughing matter for them or their families, I can tell you.”
Billy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So you think Rawhead should tell jokes?”
Artemesia frowned and began to leaf through her copy of the script. “Rawhead? Is there a character called Rawhead?”
“Uh, I meant Bonehead,” said Billy.
“No,” said Larry. “But how about this? At the end of the story, we find out that it isn’t just Johnny’s life he’s spared. That’s it! Maybe he’s been fooling everyone. He hasn’t killed a single person, just moved them to a safe place!”
“Like where?” said Billy. He hadn’t felt as bewildered since Malcolm Priest had ordered his execution.
“The cellar?” said Artemesia.
“Might work,” mused Larry.
Tim nodded. “Think of it from the audience’s point of view, Billy. They’ll have decided Bonehead is a cold-blooded monster. Then they’ll learn that he’s Oskar Schindler. It’s not that he doesn’t shoot people often—he’s never shot anyone in his life. He’s a complete fraud!”
“Also,” said Tim, “we don’t think there should be as much violence.”
<
br /> “It’s a gangster story,” said Billy wearily. “Violence is part of that world.”
“It’s the guns, really,” pointed out Larry. “You need to get rid of the guns.”
“I can’t do that,” said Billy. “It’d ruin everything.”
“Well, you definitely need to do something,” said Tim, “because I start filming this in ten days’ time, and I can’t film the script as written. It won’t hold, I fear.”
“Hold what?” said Billy.
“Hold the attention of a television audience,” said Artemesia primly.
“Would it help if we put you up at the Malmaison for a week?” suggested Larry pleasantly. “Nice suite, no interruptions, order whatever you like on room service. You can send the new scenes to us as and when they’re written.”
Billy sulked.
“Oh, go on,” urged Larry, who wanted the meeting to end so he could go to lunch. “Who needs guns? We can still show the gangsters pushing people around.”
“Bonehead in particular needs to be more sympathetic,” added Artemesia. “If he just shoots people and buries them in a charnel house, how can you expect the viewers, especially female viewers, to care about him? Why would Johnny care about him?”
“Whereas if he juggles oranges,” said Larry, “people will know that he’s basically nice. Because who ever heard of a nasty juggler?”
“You know, I rather like that idea,” said Tim. “Bonehead could have a day job as a conjurer—and what does a conjurer do? Like a hit man, he makes people disappear.”
“Clever!” enthused Artemesia.
“Of course, we’d have to change his name,” admitted Larry. “‘Bonehead’ doesn’t sound right for a stage magician.”
Silence fell as they all mused on this problem. “How about ‘Marvo’?” said Larry. “‘Marvo the Magnificent.’”
They all turned to look at Billy as if the incandescent brilliance of their ramblings was beyond question.
“I’ve given everything you’ve said very serious consideration,” said Billy, “and you can all go and fuck yourselves.”
* * *
