Killings on Jubilee Terrace

by Robert Barnard

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Charlie. ‘The physical decline works two ways: he could be projected forward into the path of a car without any difficulty, or any bruise; on the other hand, he could have just wimbley-wambled himself into the road.’

  The two men thought this over.

  ‘He wasn’t mad,’ said Melvin, ‘or even a bit soft in the head. He had all his marbles, and you could hear that in any of the rows he had.’

  ‘Nobody has suggested he was mad,’ said Reggie.

  ‘No, that’s right,’ said Charlie, getting up. ‘I think we’ve gone as far as we can go. I didn’t expect to get any great distance, but we have put a marker down. If something turns up that makes us think there was anything in this letter-writer’s allegations then at least we can say we didn’t bin them without giving them a go. It’s the most they can expect.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Reggie. ‘Nobody here thought it was anything but natural causes.’

  ‘Not quite true, Reggie,’ said Melvin. ‘Garry Kopps says that the first thing he thought when he heard the news was that Vernon had been done in.’

  ‘He’s got an overactive imagination,’ said Reggie.

  ‘And who is Garry Kopps?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Our resident gay – in real life. Also our resident intellectual. In the soap as Arthur Bradley, the keeper of the corner shop.’

  Charlie nodded, said he’d got everything he needed and didn’t imagine there would be any need for him to come back. So much for policeman’s instinct.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Aflame

  ‘Good evening Peter. And how are you this fine evening?’ Bob Worseley’s arm had gone automatically to the draught Guinness, Philip Marston’s regular tipple. ‘And is the gorgeous Mrs Kerridge in her usual fine fettle?’

  ‘Cut the crap, Bill. They’ve not even finalised the camera angles yet. And anyway your pub landlord is fatally dated. All you get these days is a horrible little man with a short-term contract and about as much warmth and bonhomie as the Pope receiving an official visit from the Reverend Ian Paisley.’

  ‘Everything about Jubilee Terrace is dated, right down to white people running the corner shop,’ said Bill Garrett, unperturbed. ‘Hadn’t you noticed?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Marjorie Harcourt-Smith, sitting with her ‘sweet sherry’ (actually a neat cognac) at a table beside them with Winnie Hey. ‘How often do you see people in the Terrace talking into their mobile phones or listening to music on their iPods as they walk along. Only the teenagers, just occasionally. But go out into the real street and everybody is at it.’

  ‘She’s hit the nail on the head as usual,’ said Philip Marston, who loved double-meanings. ‘Go out on the street and everybody is at it.’

  ‘Don’t turn me into a smut-merchant,’ said Marjorie. ‘Smut’s not your line at all, and not mine either.’

  ‘Ah, now this brightens my day,’ said Bill, polishing a glass ‘A new customer at the Duke of York’s. What’s the betting he drinks orange juice?’

  Marjorie and Winnie looked around. All the characters for the pub scene that was shortly to be filmed were already there: Norma Kerridge, Arthur Bradley and his still-new wife Maureen, Dawn Kerridge, tonight without James, all supervised by Reggie Friedman, being everywhere at once.

  And there, over by the door, was the new curate.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ asked Marjorie. ‘He’s not in this scene.’

  ‘Maybe he is,’ said Winnie. ‘Melvin could have done a little re-write. He was awfully good in those scenes with my Cyril.’

  ‘I know he was. I was there,’ said Marjorie but Winnie was not listening.

  ‘Only a filmed run-through. But awfully good, and really very moving. Though maybe I was especially moved because it was the last of Hamish… No, I don’t think it was that. It was because this youngster’s an actor, a real actor.’

  ‘Do you know, I don’t think I even know his name,’ said Marjorie. ‘I just think of him as the curate.’

  ‘He’s Stephen Barrymore, and he’s in his last year at the Music and Drama College here in Leeds. His Terrace name is Kevin Plunkett.’

  And by then he was standing by Winnie’s shoulder, talking to Philip Marston and downing a pint.

  ‘I hear you did a good job with Hamish’s death scene,’ said Philip.

  ‘It was just a first run-through, but I thought it hit the right buttons,’ said Stephen. ‘I got the usual bullshit from the man I shared it with, but I’d been warned and I just took it with a clerical sweetness.’

  ‘I suspect you’re getting the soap bug,’ said Philip.

  ‘I think I might be, just for a year or two.’

  ‘Wouldn’t even a year as a well-meaning clergyman be a bit limiting?’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking necessarily of Jubilee Terrace,’ said Stephen, obviously trying not to sound cocky. ‘I’ve got three weeks’ work on Emmerdale coming up when I sign off here.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Philip, genuinely impressed. ‘Jobs on two soaps and you haven’t even finished drama school!’

  The young man’s cherubic face assumed a deprecatory expression.

  ‘Oh, it was luck. You were there in the church, weren’t you? And I heard that Emmerdale was looking for a young Australian. Pure good fortune.’

  Philip Marston gaped.

  ‘You’re not Australian, are you? I heard nothing—’

  ‘I’m as Aussie as they come, cobber. Watch your mouth when you mention God’s own country or I’ll land one on you that you won’t forget in a hurry.’

  Philip Marston pondered.

  ‘When people say they’re as Aussie as they come I usually find their people went out there when he or she was two or three. Oh and, by the by, you haven’t got the regulation tan either.’

  Stephen Barrymore looked shamefaced.

  ‘Actually that is what happened to me. As to the tan, you must have heard the word ‘pommies’. Most of the English who emigrate go red in the Australian sun, or pink like a pomegranate. I’m surprised you didn’t hear any Australian in the accent though.’

  ‘Lots of Australians are very good at English pronunciation, but they usually slip up on something or other: “salt”, for example, or “school”.’

  ‘Oh, I can say ‘sawlt’ with the best of you English. But if it comes up in the Emmerdale scripts I’ll rhyme it with ‘colt’. At home we always pronounced in the English way. My parents have never adapted. They’d die rather than spend Christmas day on the beach. My mother has sleepless nights when someone takes her for an Aussie.’

  ‘So when are you recording Emmerdale?’

  ‘A month’s time.’

  ‘And who are you playing?’

  ‘Louise’s kid brother. Come over to see all the people she’s mentioned, which means mostly the people she has slept with. Chance to bring him back again later on – once he’s been around and taken his fill of The Old Country.’

  ‘Well, well: doors are opening for you.’

  The same idea had occurred to Marjorie Harcourt-Smith. She had left her table near the bar and nipped across to where Reggie was standing, near the door to the Terrace. Marjorie had a surprising turn of speed when she was after something.

  ‘I don’t think you can have heard that, Reggie—’

  Reggie sighed.

  ‘Get to the point, Marjorie. We’re busy.’

  ‘The new curate, Stephen Barrymore: he’s got a bit part in Emmerdale. Starts when he finishes with us, playing Louise’s brother from Australia. He is Australian, though he’s been keeping it quiet. There’s already talk in the Emmerdale camp of using him again later in the year.’

  She was delighted to see she had caught Reggie’s attention at once.

  ‘Really? The snakes! Jumping in like that.’

  ‘Reggie, please could he come and lodge with me? It would be ideal—’

  ‘Marjorie, I’m surprised at you. At your age. And I happen to know you’ve
only one bedroom.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Reggie. I mean on the Terrace. Gladys Porter desperately needs someone to react to, someone of the opposite sex to talk things over with, have special little scenes with.’

  ‘You rat, Marjorie.’ The voice was Winnie’s, from behind her left ear. ‘Jumping the gun like that. Reggie, if he is to lodge anywhere on the Terrace it should definitely be with me. With Lady Wharton. We formed a close bond during the terrible time he was visiting the dying Cyril. He’s become quite a second son to her. And a good deal nicer than the first one.’

  Marjorie turned, rather condescendingly, to her.

  ‘Winnie, darling, you’re being quite unreasonable. You were on your own all the time Cyril was in San Francisco or wherever it was. And it suited you. As a Lady you feel alone in the Terrace. But I’ve only just lost Vernon – Bert I mean – and I’m finding it very difficult. It would be natural for Gladys to offer Stephen her spare room. I’ve been talking to Melvin about Gladys’s need, and I’m sure he’ll back me up.’

  ‘I’ve heard he was thinking of bringing on someone you’ve met at the University of the Third Age,’ said Reggie, mischievously. ‘There’s any number of more-or-less male would-be actors who’d give their right arms to play him. Now go away and squabble elsewhere. I’ll think this over when I’ve got this scene in the can.’

  Philip Marston, who by now was sitting at a table by the window with his Terrace wife Carol Chisholm, had watched this exchange with a cynical smile on his face (an expression which was never allowed to cross it when shooting Terrace, for which he had a small repertoire of dependable and concerned expressions). He said to Carol:

  ‘Marjorie and Winnie are both bearding Reggie. I bet I know what they’re after.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Who, more like. They’ve heard that this new curate has got an in-and-out job on Emmerdale, and they want Reggie to step in now and offer him a six-month contract, probably with an option of a further six.’

  ‘Why should they care?’

  ‘They want to be his landlady on the Terrace. They both lack a regular partner – in the widest sense – who they can build a relationship with, have sparring matches with, or just humorous exchanges. They think young Stephen seems eminently likeable, and they both covet him.’

  ‘Likeable actors frequently turn out to be anything but underneath the veneer. Anyway, we can acquit them of lust. He is not exactly a sex bombshell… Still, he might add something to the Kerridge household. Be a replacement for the son in the merchant navy.’

  ‘You forget we’ve only got two bedrooms. Both taken.’

  ‘Can’t we get rid of that bitch Dawn? Isn’t she just the type to go to university? Nobody does in soaps, and a woman doing it might even be a first. I think Ken Barlow was the last to go in Corrie, and that must have been in the early Sixties. But in real life everybody’s going, and studying all sorts of quite outlandish subjects. Dawn could go and study the History and Social Significance of Cosmetic Surgery, and this Stephen could have her room.’

  ‘That’s no go.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’d never leave Leeds, wouldn’t Dawn.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because our Susan would be years before she could get another job that paid as well, and gives her national exposure.’

  ‘That’s not in Susan’s hands.’

  ‘She’d use every weapon, and Susan has many weapons, including a high degree of adhesiveness.’

  ‘That’s the only one of her weapons she never uses on Bill Garrett. Every muscle in her body says Noli Me Tangere.’

  They giggled – close, almost like real married people. They watched as Bill slipped from behind the bar and went over to Susan Fyldes’s table. He stopped by it, obviously wondering whether he could sit companionably on it, then did exactly that. Susan sat back in her chair, clearly disenchanted by Bill’s hind quarters.

  ‘Good that you can come into the Duke of York’s at last,’ he said. Susan removed the plugs and wires from her ears with palpable reluctance.

  ‘What?’ she asked. It was not the yobbish teenager’s ‘what?’, but a middle-class matron’s ‘what?’ addressed to a social inferior not eligible for ‘I beg your pardon’.

  ‘I said it’s good you can come into the Duke of York’s at last,’ repeated Bill, his heart already sinking.

  ‘You know I’ve been going into pubs for years,’ said Susan.

  ‘But that was Susan. I’m just saying I’m glad that Dawn has caught up with Susan, and I can expect scenes with her.’

  Susan rummaged in her handbag and took out her mobile phone.

  ‘Do you mind – I’m busy. I’ve got to ring my mother – my real mother, who gave birth to me, not my soap mother. That shouldn’t have to be explained every time my mother’s mentioned, but apparently it has to be. You’re old, Bill. You’re played out. You’re a nothing guy, so in future, Bill, will you please stop wasting my time, because I certainly won’t be wasting yours.’

  ‘Fuck you, madam,’ was Bill’s comment, but only in his mind.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ he said to Liza Croome, his soap wife, when he was back behind the bar, drawing his forearm across his forehead and looking at Garry Kopps and Shirley Merritt who were sitting on stools on the public’s side of the bar, ‘that the English have become incapable of communicating with each other? They plug crap music into their ears to prevent encounters of any sort. They don’t want to talk to people face to face, they don’t even want to talk to them by phone, so they do it by mobile, where you’ve got a rotten line that robs the voice of any individuality and frequently fades entirely. They advertise free mobile calls under the slogan “Widen your social circle”. Nobody cooks, they just watch cookery programmes. They live out a surrogate life through television, watching setup situations, which they laughingly call “reality TV” and then they—’

  ‘Bill,’ said Garry Kopps.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She slapped you down, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. Told me to get lost. Said I was a nothing guy.’

  ‘And you knew perfectly well, didn’t you, that that would be the result, made more likely by your planting your fat arse on her table?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t expecting her to throw her arms around me.’

  ‘Why can’t you ever learn?’ said Liza. ‘That’s what Garry is trying to say.’

  ‘Because I don’t want to, Liza, I suppose. I’m not that old. If only she’d—’

  But at that point Reggie bellowed out a call for action, and everyone took their allotted instead of their chosen places. The filming of the scenes went ahead with the rather unexciting efficiency that long familiarity with characters and settings inevitably produces. During the session the camera jumped from group to group in the old-fashioned bar: over by the window the Kerridges were joined by Gladys Porter, and the three of them discussed the latter’s loneliness and the progress of Dawn’s romance with James. The question of James’s colour did not come up, and neither did the question of whether they had slept together. The second of these subjects would come up, but the first never would. Meanwhile their screen daughter was filmed on her mobile, talking not to her mother but to James, with whom she had some sub-Juliet love talk.

  Over the beer pumps the Bradleys from the corner shop moaned to the Worseleys, the only bar staff on that night, about the difficulty of getting and keeping casual workers. They went together well, being all in the service-with-a-social-conscience line. Meanwhile Lady Wharton, alone as Gladys had proclaimed her to be, drank her gin and tonic in a dignified and benign manner.

  When the scenes in their scripts had been filmed, Reggie held up his hand for silence.

  ‘There’s just one more scene. Just a couple of minutes. Here, Stephen, Winnie – read this over and tell me if you could have a conversation roughly along these lines.’

  Winnie looked terrified for a moment, then reluctantly removed her spectacl
es from her handbag. Stephen came from his snug position over near the darts board and took the page with a confidence which, if only apparent, was at least convincing.

  ‘I think we could do that, don’t you, Winnie?’ he said, without a break in his voice. Winnie looked up anxiously at the producer.

  ‘Let me get this right, Reggie. You want us to have a few words, which we make up ourselves, about the state of Cyril’s mind and likely death in the next few days?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Nothing on paper, and we just make up something appropriate?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we can try.’

  Reggie sent Stephen over to the main door, and the cameras rolled. Stephen went outside, then opened the door, looking nervously from end to end of the public bar, the quintessential unsure-of-himself cleric in a strange pub. He finally saw Winnie on her own at a small table, and went over to her with more confidence.

  ‘Do you mind if I join you, Lady Wharton?’

  ‘Not at all. I’d be delighted. Beer? A pint of Thornbury’s, Bob.’

  The curate waited until the beer was in front of him before he said: ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Lady Wharton, that Cyril is quite a bit worse than when I saw him the last time.’

  Winnie shook her head miserably, with a strangled ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to feel as strongly as I do about his mental state—’

  ‘You mean his spiritual state, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. My hope is that he might come to terms with God and his approaching death before he is beyond thought.’

  Lady Wharton pursed her lips.

  ‘I’m an Anglican myself, of course, but Cyril has never been interested. And no – I can’t say that’s much in my mind, his spiritual state. I’ve faced up to what is going to happen, and what I want is for him to have as easy a death as possible.’

  ‘Believe it or not that is what I want too.’

  Stephen leant forward in order to discuss matters of faith when ‘CUT’ called Reggie from the door. He came down to the centre of the Duke of York’s set. ‘That was perfect. Just what I wanted: both of you entirely natural and convincing. It went much better than most scripts. We must think over what that means for the scripts generally. Right – that’s it for tonight.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m sorry for the evening shoot, but it was the only way we could fit it in. Sleep well, my children, or whatever else you choose to do.’