In the Still of the Night

by Charlotte Lamb

  ‘I can’t. I’m pregnant,’ Annie bleakly said, not caring.

  Trudie almost hit the roof.

  ‘Oh, that’s right! Ruin the last chance you’re likely to get! Why did you have to open your mouth? You stupid little bitch.’

  Derek Fenn stared at Annie, frowning. ‘How many weeks? Are you going to have it?’

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ Trudie said. ‘The boyfriend has dumped her and God knows what she’s going to do.’

  Tears came into Annie’s eyes. They still hadn’t heard from Johnny; she was afraid he had gone for good. She missed him badly, she had never been so unhappy in her life. She had believed he loved her as much as she loved him. Why had he gone away? Did he blame her for what Roger Keats had made her do? Oh, God, surely, surely, he hadn’t thought she enjoyed doing it? Didn’t he know her better than that?

  ‘Go to bed, Annie. I’ll talk to Mr Fenn,’ her mother ordered, and Annie listlessly got up. She didn’t care about losing the TV job. All she thought about was Johnny, and her mother would never let her leave the house; she wasn’t left alone all that week. Trudie had closed the shop, hung a sign on the door, Closed Through Illness.

  All Annie’s decisions had always been made by her mother. Trudie made them now and Annie didn’t have the strength to argue. She no longer cared what happened to her. Sadness consumed her; she just did what she was told, unquestioning, indifferent, even to signing a letter to the drama school which her mother wrote for her, resigning her place.

  She got a phone call from her friend Scott a week later. Annie was helping her mother cook lunch when the phone began to ring out in the wide hall passage.

  Trudie hurried out to answer it. Annie checked on the potatoes simmering on the stove, then looked out of the kitchen window at the grey wintry day, hearing her mother say sharply, ‘Yes, who is it?’

  Annie went on staring out at the garden, bare trees, a few snowdrops under them, a robin on a black branch chattering angrily.

  Trudie came back into the kitchen, her face uncertain. ‘It’s that friend of yours from drama school – Scott. Do you want to talk to her? I could tell her you’re ill, but she said she might come round and we don’t want that, do we?’

  Annie shook her head obediently. No, they did not want visitors. She was too weary and listless to want anything. She went out into the hall with its odour of polish and chrysanthemums, the chill February wind whistling under the sill of the front door.

  ‘I just heard you were leaving,’ Scott said. ‘Why? Annie, you’re good – don’t give up! You’re a born actress!’

  Annie told her about Derek Fenn’s offer and Scott said, with scorn, ‘TV? A children’s programme? You could do much better than that – you should be in the theatre, not on TV!’

  Annie changed the subject. ‘How is everyone?’

  Scott was distracted by gossip. She talked about the latest play being put on at school, love affairs among their friends, then said, ‘And of course we’ve lost Roger Keats. We’ve got a new senior tutor, quite dishy. Everyone’s talking about Roger – nobody knows for sure what happened, but there are all sorts of rumours flying about.’

  Annie was silent, her stomach cramped with sickness. Had it all got out? Did everyone at the school know? Did Scott?

  ‘I’ve got to go, Scott, sorry.’ Annie hung up, turned slowly, and found her mother watching her, frowning.

  ‘What’s wrong? What did she say?’

  Annie was trembling, she couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. ‘She was just talking about school.’

  Trudie gruffly said, ‘Forget about school. You don’t need them any more. You’re a professional now.’ She put an arm round Annie and hugged her. ‘It will be OK, you’ll see. We’re doing the right thing. The future is what matters.’

  After talking to Scott, Annie was so scared of Roger Keats that she wouldn’t go out of the house, wouldn’t open the door if anyone knocked until she had checked through a window, never answered the telephone.

  But week after week went by and there was still no sign of him. Or of Johnny. She began to believe she would never see either of them again, until a year later, on another cold, raw, February day, she opened a Valentine’s card. The message was printed in capital letters.

  ‘Did you think I’d forgotten you? I haven’t, so don’t forget me, because I’ll be back.’

  2

  Seven years later, on a mild, rainy January morning, a man sitting in a dentist’s waiting-room saw a photo of Annie in an old magazine among those littering a low coffee-table in the middle of the room between the chairs lining the walls, and felt his body jerk as if he had touched an electric wire.

  The article on the TV series in which she was starring was very short and told him nothing he did not know. He had seen every episode and read every article on the series that he could get his hands on. But he obsessively read every word, and then his gaze returned to the photo.

  She never seemed to change, except that she’d cut her hair; it was short now, and he didn’t like that, it made her look like a boy and he had loved it the way it was, all that long, straight, silky hair, pale and shining, especially when she wore a blue headband to keep it back from her face, like Alice in Wonderland.

  He remembered touching it, remembered her face, looking up at him. Those eyes …

  His body burned. He shut his eyes, remembering, breathing fast.

  One day. One day, he promised himself, then opened his eyes to look at the photo again. God, it never ceased to amaze him – eight years and she still had that wide-eyed, shining innocence, the shy, nervous mouth.

  The years had done almost nothing to her. They had crucified him.

  He deliberately dropped the magazine and knelt down to pick it up, his body hiding what he was doing from the three other men in the room. Soundlessly, deftly, he tore out the page and slid it into his pocket, then stood up, holding the magazine, and sat down again.

  Another one for his collection. He had dozens of pictures of Annie pinned up in his room on every available piece of wall; he lay on his back, staring at them for hours.

  ‘Next,’ the dentist’s nurse said, looking at him, and he dropped the magazine back on the table and followed her into the room which smelt of disinfectant and fear and years of polish on the woodblock floor.

  The dentist was a middle-aged man who reminded him of his father; something about the mouth, the cruel lines around the eyes. As he leaned back in the worn, old leather chair he stared at the man with hostility. He had hated his father.

  ‘Which tooth hurts? Upper right molar? What … here?’ grunted the dentist, probing mercilessly. ‘Oh, don’t be such a coward, man. It can’t hurt that much. Just a little spot of decay. Have to be cleaned out and refilled. Relax, this won’t hurt. Much.’

  It did, of course. He gave a gasp of pain as the needle went in, then slowly his mouth began to go numb; he closed his eyes to try to ignore the buzz of the dentist’s drill. At least he wasn’t in pain any more. He had been in agony with it all night, not that anybody cared.

  There was nobody in the world who cared about him. He had lost everything. He had had to leave everything he knew, it was years since he had been back, and all because of Annie.

  He knew there was no man in her life. From time to time the press had talked about some actor she was seeing; there had been a few photos of her at first nights or arriving at a party, or having dinner with someone, but it had never lasted. He had watched feverishly each time until the stories faded away.

  So far she was still alone. And women alone were vulnerable: helpless, fragile, easy to hurt. He tightened with memory, remembering another woman. The whispered pleading, the fear in the voice, and then the moans of pain, before the screaming began.

  ‘Please don’t, please, oh, no, please don’t … Oh, God help me …’ She had been so terrified. So helpless.

  ‘There you are, all done, rinse out now,’ said the dentist, stepping away.

  He was almost
dazed as he leant over to rinse his mouth in the pink disinfectant fountaining in the white china bowl.

  Pink turned red with his blood as he spat the liquid out again. He stared at it, eyes fixed. Blood. Blood got everywhere; it took forever to clean it all away and you had to make sure you got rid of every trace of it or it might betray you. Luckily, it hadn’t mattered the first time.

  Well, after all, it had been an accident, that first time, hadn’t it? That was what he’d told the police, and it was true, in a way, because he hadn’t meant to do it. He had been scared into it, he’d acted in self-defence. And they’d believed him, they hadn’t guessed the truth.

  ‘Send the next one in,’ the dentist said.

  He stumbled out of the chair and walked unsteadily towards the door.

  ‘Make sure you brush your gums properly in future,’ the dentist said.

  ‘I will,’ he promised and smiled, thinking: go to hell, you sadistic bastard, you enjoy your job, don’t you?

  Hurting people could be addictive. He was no sadist, but he couldn’t deny he’d enjoyed killing that first time. He enjoyed remembering it.

  The face surprised, not believing what was happening; the open eyes, staring up at him. The mouth open, crying out, soundlessly, going backwards, going backwards, very slowly, so that it felt like watching a slow-motion film, the body going backwards, backwards endlessly, with the hands flung out, trying to grasp, to grab, to hang on, but meeting only empty air.

  Usually that was all he remembered, but sometimes his mind ran on like a video and the noises came through – the crashing, the sickening thuds, the screaming.

  He didn’t want to remember that.

  He preferred to remember afterwards – the silence, the body lying very still and silent, not hurting any more, at the foot of the stairs. Over. Finished.

  He stood at the top, staring down, transfixed. Then he realised what had happened, saw what it meant. All safe now. All quiet.

  The second time he hadn’t acted on impulse; he had planned it all, worked out how and where and what to do with the body afterwards. And it had all gone exactly as he planned, except for one, stupid unforeseen accident.

  Life wouldn’t let you get away with making plans. It always tried to trip you up if it could.

  Leaving the dentist’s surgery, he walked neatly and quietly back home.

  Safely in his room, he put up the picture of Annie among the others, and stared at it for a long time, then he got out the new Valentine’s card. He had had it for weeks: he liked to have them with him for as long as possible before he sent them, to enjoy imagining her opening the envelope, looking at the card, reading his message. He’d give anything to be a fly on the wall, able to see her face, watch her reaction.

  This year he had chosen an old-fashioned Victorian-style card, all dark red roses and white lace.

  The outside carried the words ‘Forever mine’ in shimmering red foil. He traced the words with one finger, smiling. How would she look when she read that? And she would be his … soon. He couldn’t wait.

  The following month, Annie was thinking about Valentine’s cards, too, as she sat in a chair in make-up, with other actors yawning all round her in the location caravan as the make-up girls attended to their faces.

  It was the thirteenth of February again.

  An unlucky day for her, she thought, shivering.

  ‘Working on a Sunday!’ one of the other actors moaned. ‘And in weather like this! I wouldn’t be surprised if it snowed!’

  ‘Not cold enough,’ someone else said. ‘And overtime, Paul – remember that. Overtime for working a Sunday.’

  ‘I’d still rather be in bed!’

  So would I, thought Annie, staring at her reflection in the mirror in front of which she sat. She was having a cut built up on her cheek; it had to match identically with the cut she had had there on Friday. Deirdre, the girl working on it, paused, her brush in her hand, to look down at a colour polaroid she had taken of the cut after she finished building it up the first time. Annie had only been in the chair for twenty minutes and it could sometimes take hours to create a make-up. It was six o’clock and outside it was still dark. She wanted desperately to go back to sleep but instead she mentally ran through her words again. She had a big scene coming up; they had only rehearsed sketchily, and the moves would be much harder to remember than the words, so it helped to know your part before you began, then you could concentrate on getting the moves right.

  Outside she could hear the stentorian roar of the unit producer, Frank Goodwin, a big man with a beer gut and a grin wider than a house.

  ‘Shift those bloody vans! We need room for the dolly to go through there. And don’t take all day over it! The market will be waking up any minute now and we need to be ready before the first stalls arrive. God, it is perishing. Whose brilliant idea was it to shoot at this hour of the bloody morning? And will ‘somebody get those braziers working?’

  They were shooting in Middlesex Street, one of London’s oldest and most famous street markets, popularly known as Petticoat Lane because it had once sold largely clothes.

  Working in a real location was always tough. People resented you getting in the way, you had to combat exterior noise, voices, traffic, planes overhead, and the public tended to stand about and stare, and even shout out comments, or laugh, which made things difficult for the soundman and cameraman.

  Despite the difficulties, real locations was one of the secrets of the success of their TV series.

  The Force was a police series that went out twice weekly, using the City of London as their living backcloth. Where you had crowds, you always had crime, their police adviser had told them, which was why they were here, in the busiest weekend market in London.

  ‘I missed you in wardrobe – can I just check you?’

  Annie blinked at the continuity girl and smiled at her. ‘Oh, hi, Joan. Yes, sure.’

  Joan looked down at the clipboard she held and muttered under her breath. ‘Grey suit, white shirt, black stockings, black shoes … are those the same shoes you wore on Friday?’

  Annie nodded.

  ‘Don’t move the head!’ Deirdre moaned, jumping back with her brush held up in front of her.

  ‘Sorry.’ Annie gave her an apologetic grin in the mirror, making sure not to move her head again.

  ‘Not ready yet?’ another voice said from the door of the caravan, and in the mirror Annie saw Harriet, the series producer, frowning at her.

  ‘I’m going as fast as I can!’ Deirdre muttered. ‘It isn’t my fault we keep getting interrupted.’ She glared at the continuity girl, who glared back.

  ‘We’ve all got our job to do! And it isn’t easy out on location!’

  ‘Don’t be so ratty, the pair of you!’ said Harriet cheerfully. She wore a thick workman’s jacket over jeans, a thin cotton top, a thin sweater and then another sweater, because it was freezing out in the street at this hour of the morning and the more layers of clothes you wore the better. Her knee-high black leather boots lined with fur kept her feet warm however long she had to stand around.

  The clothes suited Harriet, who was as slim as a boy, wore her dark brown hair cut very short, tucked behind her ears, and had the calm, smooth face of a nun, a face which hid her true nature: her driving energy, her ambition, her sense of humour and her toughness.

  ‘Looking good, darling, for six o’clock in the morning!’ she said now, grinning at Annie in the mirror.

  ‘Well, I feel like death. I could do with another couple of hours in bed,’ groaned Annie.

  ‘Who couldn’t? That’s the business. Know your lines, I hope?’

  Annie gave her a thumbs-up.

  ‘Good for you.’ Harriet patted her on the shoulder. ‘I hope to Christ Mike does. He isn’t even here yet. He was out with that new ASM last night – the little redhead straight from training school.’

  Annie rolled her eyes in mock disgust and Harriet laughed.

  ‘Right. We all knew he�
�d make a play for her the minute we set eyes on her, didn’t we? Just up Mike’s street, another rabbit for him to bowl over. Well, I suppose it’s all experience.’

  ‘Do we shoot round him?’ asked Annie as the make-up girl stepped back to admire her finished handiwork. Staring at her own reflection, Annie said, ‘That’s great, Dee. I feel quite sorry for myself with a nasty cut like that.’

  ‘Suits you!’

  ‘Oh, thanks!’

  Deirdre grinned at her and moved off to deal with another actress.

  ‘We might leave Scene 5 until later,’ Harriet murmured. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort something out. I’m getting used to re-jigging Mike’s shooting schedule.’

  ‘I warned you what he was like, you can’t say I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, but he’s so damned good, he’s worth all the trouble he causes.’

  Was Harriet in love with Mike Waterford? Annie had a suspicion she might be and was worried. Harriet might be tough and capable but she was also warm-hearted and emotional. That was why everyone on the crew adored her. She always noticed if someone was upset, and did something about it; Annie had grown very fond of her, and would hate her to get badly mauled by someone like Mike. Watching her in the mirror, she tried to read Harriet’s eyes, but they gave nothing away. Annie’s stare moved on to her own reflection, her mouth twisting.

  She gave nothing away, herself, did she? Well, she hoped not. Anyone from the press who interviewed her always asked about her love life and tried to surprise some telltale reaction out of her. They never got one, because she didn’t have a love life. Oh, she had dates, now and then, but she hadn’t been in love since … oh, who knows when?

  You know, she thought, staring at herself in the mirror. – Stop pretending you don’t remember his name. Johnny. You’ve never been in love with anyone else.

  Just saying his name brought it all back, those hours in the old house, making love in front of the fire, the laughter and the poetry, and then the black plunge into misery and grief.