There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union

by Reginald Hill

  The alternative endings we’d already been considering were concerned with Pascoe making a choice between Ellie and his career. The new idea now put forward by Morland, at Adamson’s prompting, was that Ellie should herself turn out to be the killer!

  ‘But there’s nothing in the narrative which makes that possible!’ protested Griffin.

  Morland looked at him pityingly.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘That’s what’ll make it all that much more of a shock!’

  Gordon looked unconvinced. He was right, of course, but I saw it would be easy enough to bend things a little to make Ellie’s guilt fairly credible. What was really bugging Gord was the way in which his role as the larger-than-life, irrepressibly vulgar Superintendent Dalziel had been reduced to next to nothing. He opened his mouth to speak again, then shut it tight, working out, I guessed, that he would be in a minority of one.

  I was beginning to catch the infectious excitement of the rest of those present. Mickey Defoe was talking now.

  ‘We’ve got to get it just right,’ he said. ‘I mean, we could have here just the kind of thing the European critics like. Small-budget film which transcends its limitations, right? Great art and fine entertainment reconciled, and neither dependent on a cast of thousands and a budget of millions!’

  We all laughed at his parody of a review in the more pretentious journals, but we all knew what he meant.

  ‘And the Yanks love something like this coming out of England, as long as it doesn’t happen too often!’ added Adamson. ‘There’s nothing like a bit of breast-beating. Why can’t we do this? Small is beautiful! That sort of thing.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jake Allen, who like most cameramen not-too-secretly believed that movies were lovely camera-work usually spoilt by directors, actors and writers. ‘Let’s talk turkey. What’s to be done? There’s only a couple of days left.’

  ‘And, before anyone asks, there’s no money to extend into a studio. What we’ve got by Friday is what we’ve got,’ said Defoe firmly.

  Morland looked at Adamson and I guessed that he was wanting his cue for part two of ‘his’ idea.

  Something must have moved behind the beard.

  ‘Here’s what I think,’ Morland said. ‘Pascoe, faced by the choice between taking Ellie in, or saying nothing and letting her get away with it, which of course faces him with another choice in his own personal relationship with her, takes the only way out. He kills her.’

  There was silence, then a storm of protest in which I joined. Morland knowing that Adamson, though still silent, was behind him, stood firm.

  ‘It’s the natural outcome,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the rushes. He’s a man obsessed by two things, justice and sexual passion for this woman. His two obsessions clash. There is only one way in which he can respond to them both and remain true to himself.’

  ‘He could commit suicide,’ said Griffin sourly.

  ‘Always a weak ending,’ said Morland promptly. ‘Could Heathcliff commit suicide? No way. That’s what we’ve got here really. Sergeant Heathcliff! No, I’m not joking, not altogether. Some of those outdoor shots of you, Sam, there’s that same brooding intensity like Olivier way back when.’

  Sergeant Heathcliff! This echo of my own mocking response to Adamson’s complaints about my performance early in the shooting now rang like a bell of good omen. Adamson looked at me as if he too were remembering and smiled gently as I nodded my agreement.

  Only Mickey Defoe had anything like the clout necessary to stand up to this uncompromising assertion, and I suspect his mind was already echoing with the gentle tinkle of box-office returns slowly swelling to a Niagara roar.

  ‘Everyone happy?’ said Adamson.

  Gordon Griffin wasn’t, but he didn’t speak. I expect he was weighing large personal success in an ordinary film against a small association with a big earner. It was a sum he had no influence over, no matter how he personally worked it out.

  ‘Then that’s how we play it. There’s not much time. Let’s turn this into a great movie.’

  I went away excited at the thought that this could mean a brake on my skidding career and relieved that Adamson had shown no awareness of what had happened between Wanda and me.

  When I got back to my room and found her waiting there, my first reaction was to get rid of her as soon as possible. I didn’t want to be too rough and provoke a scene, but my efforts at easing her out by yawning, and saying how tired I was, and what a long hard day it had been, went unnoticed.

  ‘Sam,’ she said, ‘what’s going on? With the film, I mean?’

  ‘You should’ve come to the meeting.’

  ‘Andy explained it all to me beforehand and said it would be OK for me not to go.’

  Adamson was no fool! When you want your own way, don’t let your wife in on the act. I learned that years ago. God bless Estelle who had no views of acting, and not many on anything else either!

  ‘If Andy explained it …’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but I need someone to explain his explanation. Look. I’ve read the script and I’ve learned my part. I even read the novel it comes from.’

  She said this proudly as if expecting applause. I guessed that novel-reading didn’t figure large in Wanda’s recreational activities.

  ‘Now, the script wasn’t all like the book, but there was a lot of it like in the book. I mean, the Principal got murdered and buried under her own statue, right? Then that student got murdered. And the biology teacher had been screwing her, and he killed himself too, and it all turned out it was down to the art teacher who’d done the statue and the president of the students’ union, right? And you and me had a bit of a fling. Well, all that’s changed hasn’t it? I mean, it’s been changing gradually, and that was funny enough. But suddenly Andy says it’s got to turn out that I’m the killer and then you kill me! Well, it’s crazy! I just can’t see it!’

  I could tell she was genuinely upset. It took a little time for it to dawn on me that what was bothering her was that having at last begun to feel comfortable inside Ellie’s skin, she found it impossible now to think of herself as a murderess.

  I looked at her with a new respect. It was a naïve reaction, of course, the reaction of a tyro. But it was a real actor’s reaction.

  I tried to explain this to her, praising her for her identification with the part, but adding that the next and necessary stage was for her to be in control of the character, not the character of her.

  I’m not sure if I got through to her, but my efforts to ease her out of the room were abandoned very soon, and it seemed natural and inevitable that we should pass from an exploration of minds to an exploration of bodies.

  Afterwards I felt guilty, of course. I mean, if Wanda had been ready to take our relationship seriously on the basis of one coupling, she’d be taking it twice as seriously now.

  I tried to minimize the damage by saying, ‘Wanda, for everyone’s sake, don’t say a thing about … this to anyone. Especially not to Andy.’

  She looked at me in doubtful puzzlement and I heard myself adding, ‘Not till the film’s finished. We can’t risk ruining your first movie, can we?’

  I saw that I’d hit the right button and sighed with inward relief. Later? Well, later could look after itself. I was planning to take Fiona and Estelle on a trip to the States to show off the kid to her folks. Estelle deserved it. She’d been looking a bit strained and pale lately. Once I’d got her in the States, we’d be safe. I’d always warned her that the gossip writers would be inventing dirt about me, so Wanda could do her worst when we had the Atlantic between us.

  Now she pouted and said, ‘I suppose you’re right. But it’d do Andy good.’

  They still have the power to amaze me! I said, ‘Believe me, honey, you don’t do husbands good by telling them you’ve been screwing around!’

  ‘I’m not screwing around,’ she flashed. ‘I’m screwing you. Anyway, he treats me more like a child than a wife.’

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ I said
earnestly. ‘He dotes on you. He got you into movies!’

  My appeal to her worse instincts failed.

  ‘He got me in, but I’d have got straight out if it hadn’t been for you,’ she said. ‘It’s you who’s got me acting, Sam. It’s you who’s explained things so I know what’s going on.’

  I closed my eyes in despair. In my experience, a grateful woman can be even more dangerous than a scorned one. Pride can keep them quiet about scorn, but gratitude turns most of them into blabbermouths.

  Next day, happily, there were once more plenty of diversions to keep Adamson busy.

  Firstly, the weather changed to precisely that sort of bright and blustery spring day which he had attempted to create artificially with his lights and wind machine. The trouble was that, without these dull grey skies and still trees in the background, the striking effects of the earlier shots vanished completely. Adamson and Jake Allen spent half the morning experimenting to see how they could by art deliberately recreate in nature the effects they had previously achieved by art accidentally!

  Then Mickey Defoe, whose mind becomes even sharper when honed against the prospect of making a lot of money, rang the BBC and got an area weather forecast which promised a return to the previous conditions within twenty-four hours, so that solved that.

  Meanwhile, Dick Morland, whose first version of the new dénouement was set out of doors, had produced an alternative indoor version. Adamson decided to film this anyway in case the weather forecast was wrong. This threw Wanda into a great tizzy. She’d been puzzling away with my help all morning at the new ending. Now to be told that the same afternoon Adamson proposed to film another version with, of necessity, different moves and different lines, was almost too much for her.

  This was their first public quarrel and the audience of cast and crew settled back to enjoy it. All except me, of course. Women love a comparison to beat you with. What man hasn’t had the whole of his male acquaintanceship cited as shining examples of something or other during marital altercations? I guessed it wouldn’t be long before Adamson was being assured that Sam Stuart knew how to treat a lady film star.

  But before this point was reached, there came a new diversion.

  Dick Morland appeared, pursued by the bearded novelist who was beating him over the head with what looked like a rolled-up copy of the script. Among the thick-crowding oaths, words like ‘monstrous travesty’, ‘sue’, ‘injunction’, and ‘hospitalize’ were scattered like little flowers in the grass. By the time order was restored by the forcible removal of the novelist, the marital quarrel had been reduced to the status of a preliminary bout. I took Wanda by the arm and steered her quickly away, leaving Adamson and Defoe discussing whether the publicity attendant on bringing charges against the novelist would help or hinder the film.

  ‘Listen, honey,’ I said. ‘Don’t start rowing with your director till you’re a star, not even if he is your husband.’

  ‘The bastard won’t be that for long,’ she gritted.

  I hastily urged her away from this disturbing line.

  ‘And you were completely in the wrong too,’ I said.

  This brought her up sharp.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah! You’ve got two hours to prepare the new scene, and two hours is a long time in movie-making. I mean, how many of the most famous scenes in film history have been written in at the last moment? Songs too, composed on the set while the orchestra’s tuning up.’

  ‘How many?’ she asked, not satirically but with genuine interest.

  ‘A hell of a lot,’ I said firmly. ‘Come on. Let’s get this scene worked out before your lord and master comes and tells us how he wants it done!’

  That proved the right carrot and by the time Adamson joined us we were making some sense of the scene.

  He was not in a good mood but his anger had been re-channelled.

  ‘Some stupid bastard must have gone straight to that lunatic and told him about the re-write,’ he said. ‘If I could get my hands on him …’

  ‘Probably one of the crew let something slip in the local boozer,’ I said placatingly.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  I guessed he shared my suspicion that the man who’d primed the novelist had been the highly disgruntled Gordon Griffin, desperate for a sympathetic ear.

  ‘I’ll find out,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, let’s have a look at this scene, shall we?’

  It didn’t go well. The scene itself was partly to blame. Briefly, Pascoe, having worked out that Ellie is the killer, goes to confront her with the evidence which includes the revolver she used for one of the murders. She doesn’t deny it, but taunts him with his stupidity. But her taunts are only a desperate attempt to conceal her love and her despair at what might have been. She tries to leave him, he aims the gun and orders her to halt. She turns, looks at the gun and begins to laugh. It is her laughter which makes him squeeze the trigger. He goes to her. She has an envelope in her hand. It is addressed to him. He opens it. It contains a suicide note in which she declares her love.

  There’s only one way to deal with such full-blooded melodrama and that’s with great panache. Outside with the wind-machine blowing and the dark clouds lowering above the sighing trees, Andy Adamson and Jake Allen might just about get away with it. Inside, it was always likely to sprout ears of pure corn and things weren’t helped by Wanda’s difficulty in remotivating herself as a murderess, and still less by the way in which Adamson pushed at her relentlessly in a manner totally at odds with his previous precious-porcelain handling of her.

  In the end he said irritatedly, ‘OK. Let’s pack it in. This is getting nowhere. Maybe we’ll do better outside. I hope to hell we do. There’s no hope of a hit if we end with a whimper instead of a bang. Think about it, Wanda. Wouldn’t you rather end with a bang than a whimper?’

  His savage tone drew attention. Everyone sat back hoping for another row.

  Wanda said, ‘I’m sorry, Andy. It’s a question of motivation …’

  ‘Listen how she’s got the jargon already!’ mocked Adamson. ‘What’s with this motivation crap? Pascoe finds out you’ve been making a fool of him. You have a row. He produces a gun and blows you away. Who needs motivation? It’s like sex, honey. When he pulls it out and points it at you, just fall on your back and stick your legs in the air!’

  With this extraordinary outburst, he turned on his heel and strode away. Mickey Defoe looked accusingly in my direction, then went anxiously in pursuit.

  Only Wanda didn’t seem at all concerned about the incident. She was too wrapped up in this absorbing new game of being an actress.

  ‘You’ll rehearse me, won’t you, Sam?’ she said right out loud. ‘You’re the only one who can steer me right.’

  Jake Allen exchanged glances with the lighting man and they both doubled up in laughter.

  Things were getting out of hand.

  I said, ‘Yes yes,’ in some irritation and went off after Defoe and Adamson, determined to do all I could to pour oil on the waters. I realized now that I wanted this film very much, and I wasn’t going to let it slip from my grasp at the eleventh hour.

  Mickey Defoe was coming down the steps of Adamson’s trailer. He shook his head at me without speaking, took my arm and led me away.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother him just now,’ he said when we were out of sight of the trailer.

  ‘What’s going on, Mickey?’ I demanded.

  ‘I don’t know, Sam. All I know is what Andy thinks is going on, and that’s that you’re screwing Wanda.’

  I denied it half-heartedly and Defoe said, ‘Yeah, yeah. Listen, Sam, your private life is between you and your privates. You can be getting off on underage hens for all I care. But this is serious. Andy’s got himself so worked up, he’s threatening to dump the picture!’

  ‘He can’t do that! We’re almost finished.’

  ‘Finished is finished,’ said Defoe. ‘And almost’s nowhere. What am I going to do? Sell a fill-in-your-own-ending movie round
the networks? If Andy says stuff it, Jake Allen will probably say stuff it, and a lot of the rest of the crew too. He commands a lot of loyalty, that Andy.’

  ‘Money commands loyalty,’ I said.

  ‘You think so?’ he said, looking at me closely. ‘Well, it’s not just loyalty, Sam. There’s other things, like wanting to put one over on you.’

  ‘Me?’ I said in amazement.

  He laughed humourlessly.

  ‘You don’t do much to get yourself loved, do you?’ he said. ‘And there’s a lot of people might reckon it was a pretty low trick making a play at Wanda when Andy so obviously doted on her. Not to mention that it puts all our livelihoods in jeopardy, especially mine. I’ll not take it kindly if this lot folds under me now, Sam.’

  He glared at me with such unconcealed dislike that I had to turn away. That night I ate alone, not feeling like company. Later, I went to the phone booth in the college admin building and tried to ring Estelle, but I couldn’t get any answer. She’d probably gone round to one of her friends and taken the baby with her.

  On my way back to my room, I glimpsed a movement in a car parked on the driveway to the bar. Someone got out of the car. The opening of the door turned on the courtesy light and I saw it was the bearded novelist. At the same time, I recognized the car as Gordon Griffin’s. The novelist shut the door and the car drove off towards the bar. The novelist seemed to sense my presence for he turned and looked directly towards me for a few seconds, then he faded away into the shadows.

  There, at least, went one guy who’d be perfectly happy if the film folded.

  When I got back to my room, Wanda was there before me, in my bed. I ripped back the bedclothes. She was naked.

  I said, ‘Wanda, you’ll have to go.’

  ‘Andy’s locked me out,’ she said.

  ‘Oh shit! Why? You didn’t tell him anything, did you?’

  She shook her head so violently that her breasts trembled in a unison which was anything but negative.