by Nev Fountain
‘Yep.’ Randall felt his wounded shoulder tenderly. ‘Yep. The things I let myself in for…’
‘You killed Ken in cold blood. Just as an instrument of revenge.’
‘He was just like the others!’ Randall was suddenly angry. ‘You heard the CD. He took his car and he ran over someone, and he didn’t even think about what he left behind, just like Nick and Glyn. Even worse, Ken did it as a bloody rehearsal! These guys don’t think about the pain they leave receding in their rear-view mirrors. I was with Sarah through the physio, the operations, the drugs, the tears, locking the hockey trophies away because she couldn’t bear to look at them… Well let me tell you this, Mervyn, I’ve given them justice—one by one, Ken, Nick and now Glyn, they’ve all found out; objects in that mirror are much closer than they appear…’ Randall went quiet.
Mervyn felt he had to keep him talking. The longer Randall leaned against the car in silence, the longer he had time to think. How long before it would occur to Randall that it would be easy just to toss Glyn’s lifeless body on the bonnet of the car and push the car over the cliff?
‘So the video. Ken sent it to you?’
‘Sure did. Ended up right on my desk at my old TV company. I thought it was a gag at first, then I did some research and realised it was complete dynamite; a real account of a man planning and failing to commit a murder.’
Mervyn shrugged. ‘I’m impressed.’
Randall turned to him, flicked his cigarette away and leered through the windscreen. ‘You’re impressed? You’re impressed with that? Now came the hard part—manipulating events to fit the CD so it looked like Ken wanted to kill you right now; so it looked like he killed Nick. Manipulating everything to make it look like the events on the tape were being played out in the here and now, not 20 years ago. So what did I have to do, Merv…?’
‘You had to revive Vixens from the Void.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I did. I joined Product Lazarus and persuaded my bosses to revive your shitty little show. Didn’t have to push too hard, my friend; in the States, it’s all the rage to asset-strip and renovate creaky old sci-fi.’ He took a cigarette packet from his shirt pocket and tapped it on the roof of the car. ‘It was all a means to an end. Filming in Cornwall, giving Ken a job, getting Graham on set, using the Styrax, hiring Roger Barker—in a very weird role, granted, but it was the best I could think of—but it fitted it with the “old woman” line on the CD, didn’t it? That was cute. And, most importantly, I got Nick to come and work for me. And all I had to do to get him here was hire his master, this lying asshole lying at my feet.’ He gave Glyn a kick and Glyn gurgled helplessly. ‘And you, of course, Mervyn. You had to join us too.’
‘Because Ken said on the tape he tried to kill me in 1990?’
‘Yep. Three times, and you didn’t even notice. Poor old Ken. What a useless excuse for a guy.’
‘And you faked three attempts on my life, to fit his words on the CD.’
‘Now that was fun. I lured you into that meat locker, closed the door on you, waited five minutes and opened it again. Easy. I was just standing there, listening to you shout your guts out.’
‘And the poisoned sandwich?’
‘There was nothing in the sandwich. I was carrying that dead seagull around for days in my refrigerator box, waiting to find an opportunity to use it. When you skipped off into the garden to pick flowers with “Maggie” I just ripped up your sandwich and planted the seagull.’
‘Yes, now…’ Mervyn braced himself. ‘What about Maggie?’
‘Poor, lovesick Merv. I had to keep you down in Cornwall. Had to keep you on site, even when you were being stalked by a so-called murderer. I couldn’t have you running out on me. So I did my research. I found the best way to keep you in one place was a nice plump piece of tail to flirt with.’
‘You bastard.’
‘Ha! Come out here and say that.’
Mervyn felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He sagged in his seat, staring bleakly at the rocks and the black sea. He could cope with being stalked by a potential murderer, but this was something that really hurt. But Randall didn’t even notice that Mervyn wasn’t saying anything; he’d lit another cigarette and rattled on, more to himself than to Mervyn.
‘The dog attack at Graham’s was a stroke of genius, though I do say so myself. When Graham boasted about his “little pets” I thought it was Christmas. I got “Maggie” to put a note under your door, got you right in the middle of Graham’s place, using the attack signal for the dogs. I knew Graham was there, so I was sure you wouldn’t get eaten by hounds. Well, reasonably sure, that is.’ He moved his face up against the window and grinned. ‘Don’t worry Mervyn, you were completely safe with me. Up till now…’
Randall grabbed the door handle and Mervyn realised with horror that the door had been unlocked the whole time. All Randall’s talk had simply been a way to distract him and take his finger away from the ‘lock’ button. The door was wrenched open, and Mervyn was hauled out.
‘Such a pity, Mervyn. All those fake murder attempts and you were never in danger. But now you’ve just gone and got yourself killed.’ Randall punched Mervyn to the ground and Mervyn kicked upwards for his life, but Randall was an incredibly strong man. He beat Mervyn savagely until the fight went out of him, picked him up and slammed him against the car. ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna explain two people in the car. Writers’ suicide pact? I dunno. I’ll think of something. I always do.’
And then Glyn Trelawney was behind Randall.
‘At last,’ gasped Mervyn.
Glyn swung Randall round and punched him—not in the face, but on the shoulder where the Gorg’s bullet had entered. Randall howled and collapsed against the side of the car—which was where Mervyn wanted him. Mervyn slammed the driver’s door shut, trapping Randall’s pretty green tie. He dived at the ground where the car keys had landed and locked the car again. Randall strained against the tie, stretching the little Styrax patterns out of shape, but he couldn’t free himself. He started pulling the knot from around his neck.
And then Mervyn realised what Glyn was doing. He was behind the car, heaving with all his might.
‘Glyn, no!’
Glyn wasn’t listening. The car moved very, very slowly. Randall had left it in neutral, in preparation for Glyn’s ‘accident’. The car was huge and heavy, but it was on a slope and it didn’t have far to go.
‘Mervyn! Help me!’ cried Glyn.
‘I can’t!’
‘Help me, Merv!’ croaked Randall.
‘This is murder! Stop!’ Mervyn shouted.
‘It’s survival. He did it to Nick…’ He gave a huge heave. ‘So he fucks with me, I fuck him back,’ grunted Glyn.
‘He plays games with me, I play games with him. That’s television,’ said Randall in a tiny voice, whispering like a man already dead. The car moved and Randall staggered alongside it, clutching his neck, trying to wrench free. He sobbed in frustration. It glided smoothly to the very edge and stopped, as if wondering whether to take a late-night swim or not, and then it tipped over.
‘Farewell, my lovely!’ yelled Glyn.
There was a gurgling scream, which didn’t last long. It was submerged beneath the crash and tinkle of the car as it cracked apart on the rocks below.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Mervyn and Glyn agreed a story to tell the police. Somehow Glyn convinced him it was the simplest thing. No need to make things ‘messy’.
Randall planned the whole thing; he killed two people and he tried to kill Mervyn and Glyn. He attempted to escape when they got the better of him, but left his car in the wrong gear and ended up lurching over the cliff.
End of story.
Mervyn hoped he’d done the right thing.
*
Mervyn finally realised why Maggie looked familiar when he checked out of the Black Prince Tavern.
‘Maggie’ had left her bag behind, and when she realised ‘Maggie’ w
asn’t coming back the woman at the front desk gave it to Mervyn for safe keeping. After all, given the badger incident, ‘Maggie’ and Mervyn were obviously close.
The bag contained clothes, a few towels, nothing much of interest—except a DVD. It was lots of clips of US shows with their names scribbled directly onto the disc in felt marker. To his surprise, one of the names was the US cop show he’d vainly tried to watch on Channel Five a week ago (it felt like a lifetime).
He slid it in to his computer and was treated to a pin-sharp image. How interesting—so the male detective had a moustache? And the female one had glasses—and was black? Well, well. It was a completely new viewing experience, watching them investigate that woman’s murder without stretching into nightmarish shapes or turning electric purple.
After about ten seconds, he paused the DVD. Yes, there was no mistake about it. No wonder she looked familiar. The dead body in the episode, the one lying by the trash can? The one whose death the amazingly attractive cops were investigating? It was ‘Maggie’.
He played it through; there were sitcoms, cop shows, true-life dramas. In all of the clips, there was ‘Maggie’. Sometimes she was lounging at the back in a crowd of bystanders, sometimes standing in a room full of cops. In one sitcom she was a silent woman who threw a jug of water out of an upstairs window on to the head of the star.
It was a showreel. Of course.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Nick’s funeral was a quiet affair. Mervyn was struck by the similarities with Ken’s service: both had a scattering of family members, but neither was well attended by the production team of Vixens from the Void—classic or remake. It seemed that Ken and Nick had not made a habit of forming friendships at work. Mervyn was the only one who made it to both services. He felt he was obliged to.
He was expecting Glyn to make a speech, some sparkling eulogy that sounded sincere and was beautifully written but always somehow led back to Glyn’s feelings about Nick, Glyn’s experiences with Nick, how important Nick was to the Glyn Trelawney project. But he couldn’t see Glyn anywhere; he was still craning his neck and looking around for him when a man shuffled to the lectern. He was a sweet, baffled man, dressed in a shapeless black jacket, like Mervyn, crumpled black cords, like Mervyn, and his hair sprouted shamelessly in all directions. Just like Mervyn’s.
‘I knew Nick for a long time, but I didn’t really know him at all. I was too self-obsessed to bother hearing about his life, his hopes and fears…’
The man lost his place, inspected his notes, frowning. Who was this guy? wondered Mervyn. A feeling of horror grew inside him. He didn’t know why he had the feeling, or who the guy was, but he got the sense he was going to find out both very soon.
‘Anyway, I didn’t know Nick, but I talked to a lot of people about Nick who really knew him, and this is what they all said. His sister Mary said he was the kindest, sweetest brother who ever walked the earth. He protected her on her first day at school, and got her Barbie back from the gym’s guttering where some bullies had stuck it. He didn’t care that all the teachers were watching…’
It was then that Mervyn realised that the shambling figure at the lectern was Glyn.
*
After the service, Glyn shuffled up to him and whispered in his ear. ‘Are you going to go to the wake, Mervyn?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Good. My thoughts exactly. Let’s go and slip into a pub and drink to the memory of Nick Dodd.’
‘And Ken Roche.’
‘Of course! Can’t forget Ken.’
*
Mervyn reached unconsciously for the beer mat on the table, only to find it sliding out of his grasp. Glyn had retrieved it and was starting to tear it into little strips. Mervyn wished he’d been quicker; he wanted something to tear up right now. Glyn sighed. ‘You’ve got to help me, Mervyn. Can’t you see? I’m turning into you!’ He touched Mervyn’s sleeve. Mervyn recoiled as if Glyn were a leper.
‘What?’
‘I’ve copied them all, Mervyn, all the writers. I’ve aped the best. I’ve morphed into writers that were cool. Writers that are “now”… Pinter, Potter, Davies, Bleasdale… God that was tough. Try being an angry Scouser when you come from Cheam. Family Christmases were a nightmare.’ He ran his fingers through his newly-unmade hair. ‘I first started to get a sneaking respect for you when I was forced to rewrite that bloody script at gunpoint. I thought, Christ, this is hard, making this work as crappy space opera with cardboard cut-out characters shouting gibberish. Mervyn must be better than I thought. I tried to resist it…’ Mervyn remembered the angry scribbles on Glyn’s script. ‘…Then, when you worked out who the killer was and when you saved my life… I sort of started respecting you properly, Mervyn. For the first time in my career I actually started admiring someone like you, a has-been loser writer…’ He shrugged. ‘As you do.’
As you do. Mervyn said that kind of thing. It was just the kind of empty silence-filler Mervyn specialised in. Glyn frowned in a very Mervyn-like way.
‘I find myself trying to have sex with people who are completely useless to the furtherance of my career. I’m being modest for God’s sake! I was so self-effacing back there at the funeral!’
‘I’m sure you’ll snap out of it,’ said Mervyn reassuringly. ‘Why not go to America and become Charlie Kaufman or JJ Abrams?’
‘That’s a good idea. Perhaps I will.’
They sat there, drinking. Not speaking. Finally, Glyn said: ‘We did good work that night, Mervyn. If you hadn’t told me your suspicions about Randall, I wouldn’t have avoided drinking that beer he gave me… And if I hadn’t faked being drugged we would have both gone over that cliff. Hey, we caught a killer! How about that?’
No, you killed a killer.
‘A great result,’ agreed Mervyn warily.
‘What a team!’ Glyn made a great show of savouring his whisky, pressing it to his nose, making smacking noises with his lips. He seemed to be waiting for the moment to say something, but—and this was very unlike Glyn—he seemed embarrassed about coming to the point.
He did, finally. ‘Mervyn, I’m still confused about the CD… Ken’s CD. I don’t suppose you could tell me…um…’ Of course. Glyn was now Mervyn. He was curious now. He wanted to know everything.
‘So you want an explanation of the plot?’
‘Um… Please.’
‘Really?
‘Oh yes.’
‘Even though it might be boring, might slow down the climax of our little adventure?’
Glyn gave him a look. ‘Very funny.’
‘Because I’m told that a lot of talking at the end about plot points can just lose the audience’s attention very quickly.’
‘You’ve made your point. Look, I know that Randall was a man driven by revenge. He’d been watching Nick for years, thinking about ways to get him, and I know that Ken sent him a recording by accident. But what was this recording? Was it really made in 1990? What was all that stuff about Ken trying to murder you?’
Mervyn grabbed a bit of remaining beer mat and shredded it. ‘What dropped on Randall’s desk was a private video diary Ken made during a Vixens from the Void location shoot in Cornwall. Yes, it was made in 1990. It was a video of Ken, pretty strung out on coke, staring into a camcorder, recounting the hell of each day’s filming, how he hated me and was planning to kill me, how he hated the Styrax robots, Cornwall and everything else.’
‘But what about his “rehearsal” murder—when he talked about running over someone walking a dog?’
‘Yes, that actually happened. I looked it up in the newspapers of 1990 and there was indeed a hit and run during our original location shoot; but the woman was just injured. Ken didn’t stop to find out whether he killed her or not. He just assumed he had.’
‘So trying to kill you three times? He did that?’
‘And I didn’t even notice, yes.’ Mervyn sipped his drink, thinking about the horrific location shoot from 20 years past; all the
innocent incidents that now carried so much more significance for him. How odd. He was so blasé about the inept attempts on his life he thought were taking place just a few weeks ago. The realisation that his life might have been in danger back then and he had been blissfully unaware… His hand started to shake. He quickly put down his port and drew in a calming breath. ‘Did you notice, on the CD, how much sighing Ken was doing?’
‘Yes I did, now you come to mention it.’
‘Ken sighed a lot anyway, but even for him I thought he was overdoing it. The sighing on the tape was sampled, covering up edits Randall made on Ken’s original recording. The police found the unedited version on Randall’s laptop, and thanks to my—ahem—sources on the force, I know exactly what Ken did 20 years ago.’
‘So what exactly did he do?’
‘Luckily for me, he was so out of it on drugs that he made a very lousy murderer. First, he tried to drop an arc light on me. It missed. When that didn’t work he had a go at cutting the brake cables on my old Fiesta Popular. Unfortunately for Ken, in that type of car the brakes are right next to the tube that supplies the windscreen cleaning fluid; Ken cut the wrong one. The worst I got was a muddy windscreen.
‘Then he had another go. This time he did cut my brake cables, but luckily for me the minute I got in the car it slid down a mud bank very slowly and went into a tree. I never found out about the sabotage because I just gave up on the car and left it where it was. I phoned some garage and got it towed away for scrap.’
‘So three attempts, three failures. It’s almost funny.’
‘Finally, in sheer frustration, he pushed Nicholas Everett off a boat on the way to an island location shoot. Nicholas caught pneumonia, ended up in a coma and was very bad for weeks; Ken thought he’d killed him, came to his senses and panicked, hence those last lines on the CD about ‘doing something about it’. Basically, he was going to clean up his act and get off the coke, which he did…
‘Nicholas Everett recovered, but thanks to his fever, he couldn’t remember anything about the circumstances of his unscheduled swim…’
