by J M Gregson
He sat in his room and looked westward towards the Welsh hills and the sunset. There was not a cloud in the sky now and the sun obstinately refused to dip behind the mountains. He tried to read. He’d found a battered Wodehouse on the shelf of discarded books at the side of the lounge area; suitable light, escapist stuff for his purpose, but the print danced before his eyes and the bon mots and the Shakespearean allusions refused to register with him. The sky was reddening to the west, but the light intensity remained distressingly high. He couldn’t go out of his room because he didn’t wish to speak to other people. His phone rang twice but he ignored it.
It was definitely dusk when he stole out into the car park. Late dusk, he thought. You needed your car headlamps when you drove and that made it immediately seem darker. He could have used the M50, which was quiet enough at this time of night, but some instinct for privacy drove him on to the A438, which twisted and turned more as the darkness he had craved finally closed in around him and obliterated the pleasant Gloucestershire countryside. He was making for Tewkesbury, where the great battle in the War of the Roses had been fought in 1471; he wondered why on earth that totally irrelevant fact thrust itself into his head now. Because big things were at stake, he supposed; bigger things than he had ever had to deal with before in what he had considered quite an eventful life.
He had a clear picture in his head of where he wanted to go and his memory did not desert him. He found the place more easily that he had thought he would. Piece of cake, really. Only one simple action left now. But don’t get over-confident, Watts. Take it easy. Take it cautiously. He parked the car in a bay beside the road and walked the last two hundred yards. There was very little traffic about; he hadn’t seen a car for the last two miles. But people might notice you and remember your car, if you parked on the bridge.
He was wearing navy trousers and a black sweater. Ideal gear to pass unnoticed at night. Ideal gear to make you a road casualty, if you didn’t keep well clear of any traffic. But no vehicles came as he walked swiftly to the middle of the bridge.
The wide waters of the Severn gleamed silent and sinister far beneath him, as he had known they would. That is why he had chosen to come here. He paused for a minute before he threw it, as if he needed to check for one last time that this was the right thing to do. But God knew he had been over this often enough in his mind. He had rehearsed this moment like a nervous beginner Thespian who had been given a single line to deliver.
He flung the thing away into the darkness, watched it turn briefly over and over before it disappeared into the black. The water was so far beneath him that he neither saw nor heard the splash. The mighty Severn, which had covered so many things over the centuries, received the mobile phone of Samuel T. Jackson and moved quietly on.
FIVE
The weather held for Wednesday. Lambert, arriving early at the site with Hook, gave permission for filming to be resumed, though the caravan where Jackson had died and the ground around it was still cordoned off as a scene of crime area.
It took some time for the mechanics of location shooting to be set up. The first scene was to be a parish council meeting followed by three of the leading suspects conversing outside after the formal proceedings were completed. The scene was swiftly set up in the building designated for it. Gordon Priestley, assistant director, was able, even eager, to do this: there were not too many opportunities for an assistant director to show his metal when the main man was around. But this morning the main man, John Watts, was busy.
Watts was being interviewed by the senior CID man, as he had been warned he would be on the previous day. The case had provided sensational headlines for the day’s newspapers. ‘TV TYCOON BRUTALLY MURDERED. LOCAL SUPER-SLEUTH TO LEAD INVESTIGATION’. The headlines had occupied most of the front page of one tabloid. Hook did not bring them to Lambert’s attention. It would not have improved the mood of his chief. He made sure instead that the chairs were set ready for business at the end of the temporary building which had been hastily imported to the site to serve as the police murder room.
John Watts was not an impressive figure physically, though he carried an air of quiet authority which helped to explain his achievements as a theatre and television director. He also compelled respect among the assortment of histrionic mavericks, male and female, who figured inevitably among the people he had to guide towards the polished television product he envisaged. He was below average height and he stooped a little as he came into the murder room. He seemed to be looking around him as though he needed to check exactly how this scene had been set up.
Watts had deep-set grey eyes which revealed less than eyes usually did, because they remained narrowed through most of the next twenty minutes. He seemed to be anxious to create the impression that it was they and not he who were on trial here, perhaps because he was so used in his working life to taking charge of situations. The small beard he carried jutted two inches below his chin and was fractionally too long, so that it moved disconcertingly each time he spoke. The helpful notes provided by DI Rushton told his SIO that Watts was fifty-two; that was useful because his thin face might have passed for anything between forty-five and sixty.
‘You discovered the body.’ Lambert made it sound like an accusation. He was uncomfortable among these theatrical types, but in this situation he felt he held most of the cards. The problem was to extract accurate information from people whose business was dissembling. He couldn’t see any reason why most of them wouldn’t tell him the truth, but would he be able to distinguish the ones who wished to deceive him? There was almost certainly one and quite possibly several of these actor types who would seek to do that.
Watts nodded to acknowledge that he had discovered Sam’s body. Then he crossed his thin legs deliberately and precisely, as though emphasising to them how little this interview worried him. ‘I discovered Sam’s body at one forty-seven yesterday afternoon. I know the time because the uniformed officer who took my statement recorded the time exactly for me.’
‘And what was your immediate reaction to what you found?’
It wasn’t the question Lambert normally asked of someone who had discovered a murder victim. If John Watts found it surprising, he gave no evidence of that. ‘I was shocked, I could not believe the evidence of my eyes for a moment. I was nothing like as calm as I am now, when I have had a whole night to get used to the idea.’
‘You handled the corpse.’
The words came again like a second accusation. ‘Yes. I felt for a pulse. It was automatic. I suppose I knew from the appearance of his face that he was dead, but my first instinct was to feel his wrist for a pulse. There wasn’t one and that confirmed what I already knew in my heart, that Sam was dead.’
‘Yes. The fingerprint specialist in the scene of crime team found your prints on his neck as well as his wrist.’
‘I don’t remember touching him there. I suppose my natural reaction was to try to remove the thing which had killed him, which seemed to be his own tie. But the absence of a pulse told me that he was dead and that any attempt to revive him was futile.’
‘And would have resulted in further contamination of a crime scene.’
‘You would no doubt think in those terms. I did not. My mind was reeling with the knowledge that the man who had set up the series, the man who controlled all our destinies, was dead in that chair in front of me.’
‘That was your first thought, was it? This was the man who controlled all your destinies.’
Watts managed a first thin smile, barely visible beneath his droopy moustache and beard. ‘Samuel T. Jackson was prone to reminding us of that fact.’
‘You say in your statement that the flesh was still warm.’
‘Yes. I shouldn’t put too much reliance on that. I was naturally very upset at the time. It was the first thing that struck me, but it may not be very important. You’ve just pointed out that I touched Sam’s neck, which I hadn’t recalled myself.’
‘But your impression at t
he moment of discovery was that Mr Jackson had only just been killed?’
‘Yes. But maybe I was wrong.’
Lambert nodded. ‘That’s possible. The windows and door had been closed and the caravan was hot. People who know much more about these things than either of us have told me that Mr Jackson could have died a couple of hours earlier and still felt warm to the touch when you reached him. But it seems you were the first person to see him after his death.’
This apparent non sequitur was added calmly and clearly, as if it was a fact which had to be born in mind. It was in fact designed to provoke a reaction in his hearer and it did that. John Watts uncrossed his legs and bent earnestly forwards. ‘I didn’t kill him, you know. It was a hell of a shock to me to find him like that.’
‘I’m sure it was, Mr Watts. And the sooner we can eliminate you from our list of suspects, the happier we shall be. There are far too many possibilities around for us at the moment.’ He sighed a little theatrically – in this context, he rather liked that adverb. ‘No doubt we shall be able to whittle the list of possibilities down to a much smaller number in the next day or two. Those closest to Mr Jackson will obviously form a nucleus of suspects for us. We usually proceed by elimination – unless of course a prime suspect presents himself to us immediately. Confessions are always useful, but regrettably thin upon the ground. You’re not about to confess, are you?’
‘No I’m not!’ Watts looked hard at the gaunt face and found no sign of humour there. This wasn’t at all the way Inspector Loxton proceeded, and that fictitious creation was the nearest he had come to murder and real detectives before this case.
‘Had you seen Mr Jackson yesterday before you discovered his mortal remains?’
‘No. He’d arrived here on Monday afternoon. He gave all and sundry a routine bollocking because we weren’t shooting when an expensive location had been hired for the filming. Sam knew perfectly well that you couldn’t shoot what were supposed to be outdoor summer scenes when it was pouring with rain, but he wasn’t interested in reason. A bollocking and a reminder of the money he was spending were Sam’s ways of keeping everyone, actors, directors and support staff, on their toes.’
‘And did it work?’
It was the first time John Watts had been asked to consider what might seem to an outsider an obvious proposition. Samuel Terence Jackson had always seemed to him and others around him a force of nature, entitled to throw his considerable weight about because he provided the funds which drove forward this strange, erratic and occasionally wonderful activity. ‘I suppose it did work, most of the time. Whatever his methods, Sam achieved things. There are people all over this site today who would be less successful, might in many cases not be working at all, without his money and his vision and his drive.’
Bert Hook, who had seen something of Jackson and his methods during his brief encounter with him in the studios of Central Television, spoke for the first time since Watts had entered the murder room. ‘Energy and drive I can accept he had. But he was boorish for a lot of the time, wasn’t he?’
John Watts weighed the adjective, then nodded slowly. ‘That wasn’t the word I’d have used, but I have to accept it. I’d probably have said “ebullient”, but then I’d got used to Sam over the years.’
‘And you didn’t want to offend him.’
Watts frowned, then produced a smile which looked a little forced beneath his whiskers. ‘I suppose that’s true. You get used to being careful in this business. You can’t afford to offend the people who have the money when you’re an actor or a director. Generally speaking, the people who have the money also have the power.’
‘I thought directors had quite a lot of power.’
Watts laughed outright at that. ‘How little you know of this business, DS Hook! That makes you a lucky man, in my book. The people who have the power are the producers, who find the funds for a project and set up the machinery for it, and to a lesser extent the casting directors. Unless you are a very well-established actor whom everyone wants to hire, you’re dependent on casting directors to provide you with work, as far as television goes.’
‘So you don’t think directors are powerful people?’ Bert was all wide-eyed innocence.
‘Directors are hired and fired almost as easily as actors. They have no money and as a result of that very little power.’
‘But the job gives you power. You can make or break a production by the way you shape it.’
‘I’m grateful to you for saying that. I wish you could convince everyone in our business about it. There are one or two directors who are universally respected and always in demand: your Peter Halls and your Trevor Nunns. Most of us scrape for our livings and are dependent on a success here and there to keep us going and make us some sort of reputation.’
‘So the Inspector Loxton series can’t have done you any harm.’
Watts smiled and nodded, looking for the first time relaxed behind his whiskers. It made Bert Hook wonder if the moustache and beard were some sort of mask against the world, rather than the theatrical indulgence he had previously considered them. ‘It’s gained me kudos as a television director, yes. Nothing succeeds like success, and the Loxton stories have sold all around the world. But they’re not rated as high culture and people curl their lips if I’m compared with directors at the Royal Shakespeare or the National Theatre.’
‘So your destiny was still in the hands of Sam Jackson.’
‘Largely it was, yes. Sam provided the money and he did his own casting, so anyone who offended him was vulnerable. He talked about giving free rein to me and to his actors, but if we’d offended him we wouldn’t have lasted long. Actors in an established TV series have a certain advantage, because the public gets used to particular faces and doesn’t like change. But Sam always made it clear that no one was indispensable. Even Martin Buttivant as Ben Loxton could be written out and replaced, if he got too big for his boots – that was Sam Jackson’s phrase. He said that to me in the full knowledge that I would pass it on to Martin if necessary. Probably he used it directly to Martin himself, but if so I wasn’t present at the time.’
‘You’re telling me that this murder victim had lots of enemies.’
‘I’m saying we were all dependent on him. That’s two-edged. There might not be a lot of genuine grief around here this morning, but you can bet your boots that this site is throbbing with speculation about what will happen to the Loxton series now. Sam might have seemed at times like an ogre, but he was also our bread and butter – another cliché which he liked to throw at us as a reminder.’
‘Did you kill him, Mr Watts?’
John could barely believe the question had come so bluntly from that placid, village-bobby countenance. He checked that the man wasn’t joking, that he actually expected a reply. The detective sergeant was waiting expectantly with his head tilted a little to one side. ‘No, I damned well didn’t! I’m trying to give you all the help I can.’
‘We have to ask, Mr Watts. It’s part of being objective. The one who is the first person to be with a dead man is occasionally also the last one to have seen him alive.’
‘You mean that I might have killed Sam and then gone out and told people that he’d already been dead when I arrived.’
‘It’s a possibility which has to be considered. Especially as you told people immediately that he was still warm when you discovered him. We don’t often have that reported.’
Hook’s face had suddenly become inscrutable, so that John still wasn’t quite sure how serious the suggestion was. ‘Let me be quite clear, then. He was definitely dead when I arrived in the caravan. I didn’t kill him. I thought at the time that he must have died in the few minutes before I got there, because his wrist was still warm when I felt for a pulse. But it was an unusually warm day for late April and the caravan itself was hot and unventilated, as you’ve pointed out. So he might in fact have died much earlier. I’m not an expert on these things, as you are.’
He trie
d to curl his lip sarcastically as he delivered this last thought, to regain a little of the initiative, but Hook merely made a note on the pad in front of him. ‘Where were you between ten thirty and one forty-seven yesterday, Mr Watts?’
‘Working. I spent most of the time on set, either preparing for shoots or actually directing them.’
‘“Most of the time”, you say. Did you have any breaks from shooting?’
‘Yes. I went to my own caravan a couple of times during the morning. I took a coffee in there for one of them. I wanted a few minutes on my own to think about the scene with the vicar in the church and exactly what I wanted from him and his congregation.’
‘Can you tell us at what times you visited your caravan?’
‘No I can’t! I was busy with the whole business of getting as much done as efficiently as I could whilst the weather held. Location shooting revolves around the director and how he uses time and people most effectively. I can’t be precise about when I was alone.’ He didn’t trouble now to conceal his irritation; it was surely unreasonable of them to expect that he would know the times when he had been alone.
He got no reaction from Hook. The DS made another note and said, ‘I expect someone else will be able to pinpoint these times for us and confirm that you did indeed spend them in your own caravan.’
It was a reminder that everything he said would be checked, that it would be as well for him if he concealed nothing and gave them the most accurate account of yesterday he could. He wanted now to convince them of his innocence, whereas when he had stepped into the murder room he had not felt threatened. He said defensively, ‘Sam Jackson must have had a lot of enemies.’
Lambert gave him a grim smile and resumed the questioning. ‘As you have already indicated to us, Mr Watts. Which of them do you think killed him yesterday?’
