The Dead Side of the Mike

by Simon Brett

  Needless to say, its effect was most devastating in a small audience. There was no hope that it might be swamped by sound from the handful assembled for Dad’s the Word. And, with an uncanny instinct for immortality, The Laugh was always seated directly under one of the audience microphones.

  Charles first heard The Laugh in action when Nick Monckton went on to do his warm-up. The poor young man looked even more nervous as he plunged through the curtains to face the senescent apathy of the audience and welcome them to the Paris Studio. But maybe the reaction to his first line would relax him. He said, ‘Welcome to the Paris Studio’ and he got a laugh, which should have been an encouraging start. Unfortunately, the laugh he got was The Laugh, and it seemed to fluster him more than ever.

  When Charles heard it, he started to giggle. Childishly and uncontrollably. When Nick introduced him and he came on stage to a palsied rattle of applause, it seemed funnier still. The sight of three rows of Old Age Pensioners sunk in their seats and clapping like glove puppets soon had tears running down his cheeks. He sat on his chair and stared fixedly at the script; that should have been enough to stop anything from seeming funny. But for the next five minutes his eyes streamed, he let out spasmodic snorts and his chest ached from the effort of control.

  Nick Monckton told the audience that it was a funny show and that they should laugh and, if they didn’t understand a joke, they should still laugh and work it out on the way home, and, if someone raised both arms to them, it was a signal for them to clap and not to get up and leave. Then he introduced the ‘star of our show, Dave Stockin’ and went off ‘to see how Max is getting on in the box.’

  Dave Stockin walked up to the microphone and said, ‘This is Stockin knockin’, which was greeted by a death rattle of applause. He then told the audience that it was a funny show and that they should laugh and, if they didn’t understand a joke, they should still laugh and work it out on the way home, and, if someone raised both arms to them, it was a signal for them to clap and not to get up and leave. He then told three jokes, two slightly smutty and one extremely unwholesome. The audience laughed more warmly, in expectation of further filth (an expectation soon to be dashed once the cast started wading through the script, which was as clean as a whistle – and about as funny).

  Dave Stockin then, to show what a warm, lovable personality he was, said, ‘Finally, there’s one more person who I got to introduce to you, a very important person, who’s a great chum of all of us here. This is a BBC show and a BBC show can’t start without a genuine BBC announcer and we’re very lucky to have with us today a very fine announcer, one of the best, who’s a terrific fellow and someone we’ve all known for years – ladies and gentlemen, will you put your hands together and welcome – Mr Roger Beckley!’

  Dave Stockin gestured off towards the curtain and a young man in a tweed suit entered diffidently. Stockin threw an arm round his shoulders and led him to the microphone, where the young man said, ‘Roger Ferguson is my name actually’.

  The recording started. The bouncy signature tune, sounding like all the other bouncy signature tunes on the mood music LPs from which they have been selected from time immemorial, bounced out of the speakers, the announcer made his announcement with a little chuckle in his voice (because he had been told this was Light Entertainment) and the script trickled out.

  The audience didn’t find it any funnier than Charles had. But they were willing to laugh and react, if only someone told them where the laughs should be. They were fine on applause; every time someone raised their hands, they clapped long and vigorously, with the result that scenes which had gone through without a titter would be greeted at the end by a huge ovation. But laughs were more difficult to orchestrate. Dave Stockin worked very hard and found he could get some by sticking his tongue out or clutching his crotch on relevant lines. He was obviously quite capable of dropping his trousers if necessary.

  It was a strange experience for Charles, something his acting career had not up until that point encompassed. Working from a script was one thing, and playing to an audience was another. It seemed odd to see actors standing at a microphone reading to a live (well, almost) audience.

  Sharing the microphone with Dave Stockin was also a novel experience. In fact, sharing was not the appropriate word; it was a question of elbowing in and raising one’s voice or being totally inaudible. Either because he was a complete egotist or, more charitably, because he was used to doing stand-up routines in clubs, Dave Stockin worked directly in front of the microphone and very close. This meant that the rest of the cast were put at a considerable disadvantage. The microphone was live over a fairly limited arc, most of which the comedian hogged. The rest of the cast were increasingly pushed round to the flanks, on to the dead side of the mike, where their words made no impression.

  The regular cast members coped well with the hazard. Everything is experience, and they had learnt to throw their lines in over Stockin’s shoulders, bobbing in and out like small fish scavenging from a shark’s teeth. Charles did his best to imitate the trick.

  He gazed out over the audience. It was impossible not to see them all. Unnerving. Like his only experience of Theatre in the Round, The Lady’s Not For Burning at Croydon (‘Last night an audience with a hole in the middle was treated to a play with a hole in the middle’—Croydon Advertiser).

  And then he saw a face he recognised. Sitting in the audience was Mark Lear.

  It felt odd to have given a performance (however minimal) and be finished by lunchtime. He remembered the same emptiness after doing his one-man Thomas Hood show, on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. And he remembered from then that the best way of resolving the mood was to have a drink.

  The watering place for people working at the Paris is called The Captain’s Cabin. There Nick Monckton bought a huge round of drinks, terrified of missing out the most menial member of the cast or production staff. Dave Stockin then took him to one side and lectured him on why the show would be better if he had more lines and the rest of the cast had less.

  Mark Lear had tagged along with everyone else. ‘I met Nick in the Salad Bar the other day and he said you were going to be in this, so I thought I’d come along and give you support.’

  ‘Thank you. We all needed it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rather different from Further Education.’

  Mark’s brow furrowed. ‘You know, I’m afraid I don’t understand Light Entertainment.’

  It was said very seriously and Charles realised that that was exactly what Mark meant. As a professional, he did not understand one particular thread of broadcasting. It wasn’t that he had found Dad’s the Word a bad example of it; all Light Entertainment was equally mystifying. Mark Lear had no sense of humour.

  This realisation brought back other suspicions. The lack of sense of humour tied in with the obsessional note in the letter that Steve had discovered. Mark’s self-dramatising was not flippant; he always meant what he said.

  Charles knew he should start some investigation. Something inside him wanted an explanation of Andrea Gower’s death.

  And of Danny Klinger’s. He felt sure Mark Lear held the key.

  But subtly. He had to probe subtly or he’d arouse Mark’s suspicions.

  An opportunity arose easily in the course of conversation. Dave Stockin had finished his drink and left, causing some mutterings among the SMs. Unlike a lot of stars they worked with, he was a man with long pockets who, even at the end of a series, had never been seen to reach his hands into them to buy a round of drinks. Nick Monckton, relief relaxing him by the second, came over and joined them, offering more drinks. Mark said he’d get the round and while he was at the bar, the conversation turned to a programme from the previous night’s television, which had been about human memory. One of the SMs raised the subject and Nick Monckton fell on it avidly, keen to talk about anything, so long as it wasn’t Dad’s the Word.

  They discussed the imprecision of human recollection and how half a do
zen witnesses of a crime could come up with half a dozen widely diverging descriptions of the same criminal. They moved on to the fallibility of their own memories and, when Mark returned laden from the bar, it was easy for Charles to bring him up to date on the conversation and ask casually, ‘I mean, how much do you remember, Mark? Even of recent events. Say last week. What did you do last Tuesday?’

  Mark was game to test himself. ‘Let’s see. Up about eight, office about ten – that bit never changes. Then I . . . let me see, was I in the studio? No, editing. Right, morning spent editing. In fact, editing your Swinburne epic, which I must say sounded very good. I’ll fix a playback at some point if you’d like to hear it.’

  ‘I’d love to. But go on, what did you do after your editing? See how your memory holds up.’ Charles wasn’t going to be deflected so easily from finding out Mark’s whereabouts at the time of Danny Klinger’s death.

  ‘Okay.’ Mark still played along. ‘Right . . . lunchtime spent in the Salad Bar, too much wine consumed, in the knowledge that all I had on that afternoon was an ideas meeting with HFE(R). Had said ideas meeting – predictably sterile – my idea for a series of Comparative Marxism and accompanying expenses-paid trip round the world rejected for the millionth time. Then what? – let me think back. Right, a few drinks in the club and then . . .’ He looked up, suddenly shrewd. Or was Charles being hypersensitive? ‘Yes, of course, back home to Vinnie and the kids. Latter still up, which they shouldn’t have been at seven-thirty, but which they always are. Dinner with wife, early bed. Typical domestic evening.’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Charles. ‘Almost total recall after six days.’

  The conversation moved on. One of the SMs started bemoaning how little sociology she remembered from three years at LSE.

  It was only after the pub closed at three and Charles was gliding towards Piccadilly Circus tube that he remembered what Mark had said on the night of Andrea’s death. That his wife and children were going to spend the next week with her mother.

  He was aware, from previous experience, that it was risky impersonating police officers, even on the phone. On the other hand, people do tell things to the police. And from a coin box it wasn’t such a risk.

  For nostalgic reasons, he decided he’d be Detective-Sergeant McWhirter of Scotland Yard. The Glaswegian voice was one he had first used in a Thirty Minute Theatre (‘Is competence the highest we can now hope for in a television play?’ – The Financial Times).

  ‘Is that Mrs Lear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Forgive me troubling you, Mrs Lear. This is Detective-Sergeant McWhirter of Scotland Yard. I’m investigating a series of burglaries which took place in your area last week and I’m doing some routine checks. Just asking people if they saw anything suspicious during the week. You know, people hanging about, unfamiliar vehicles parked in the streets, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help you.’ The voice had the bored languor of a girls’ public-school education. ‘I’m afraid I was away all last week, staying in Gloucestershire with my mother.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘My husband would have been here in the evenings. If you’d like me to give you his office number, I could –’

  ‘Oh, no thank you. I needn’t trouble him. Most of the break-ins seem to have occurred in the afternoons. We believe it may be schoolchildren playing truant.’

  ‘As I say, I can’t help you.’

  ‘No. Well, if you could keep an eye open . . . I’m sure you don’t want your house to be the next.’

  ‘Our house is adequately burglar-proofed, thank you,’ came the frosty reply. Perhaps not so surprising that Mark felt bound to look outside the frigidaire of his marriage bed.

  ‘Right. So just to confirm, you were away all of last week. From the Monday right through to the weekend.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ The phone went dead. Mrs Lavinia Lear didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  He rang Steve Kennett straight away and, after the statutory wait on the BBC switchboard, got through to her. She was about to leave for a trip to Birmingham where she was producing one end of a current-affairs link-up discussion. The car was arriving in ten minutes at Broadcasting House Reception. He said he’d hurry up there and try to catch her for a quick word before she left. He had something new on Andrea’s death.

  It took longer than he had anticipated to weave through the crowds of Arabs in Regent Street and, when he finally arrived at the ocean-liner frontage of Broadcasting House, Steve was looking very agitated. A taxi waited on the kerb beside her with the back door open.

  ‘What is it, Charles? I’m really in a terrible rush. Couldn’t it wait?’

  ‘It’s about Andrea’s death – well, not about hers, about Danny Klinger’s death.’

  ‘Danny Klinger’s?’

  Oh God. He realised he had never told Steve anything about the second apparent suicide. And this was hardly the moment for long explanations. Someone inside the taxi called out, ‘Come on, Steve. We’ll miss the train. Don’t just stand there nattering like a woman.’

  The gibe stung her. It was presumably, like her bisexual nickname, part of a long-standing fight she had for her identity in a man’s world. ‘I’ve got to go, Charles. I’m back on Wednesday. Ring me then.’

  ‘Basically,’ he whispered urgently as she stepped into the taxi, ‘Mark told me he spent last Tuesday evening, the evening Klinger died, at home with his wife and kids, and I’ve discovered that isn’t true. His wife was away. So he was somewhere else.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Steve. ‘He spent Tuesday night at my place.’

  Charles tried to numb his feelings by a visit to the Montrose, a little drinking club behind the Haymarket, but when he got back to Hereford Road at half-past nine that evening, another shock awaited him.

  A note had been pushed under his bedsitter door. Scrawled by one of the Swedes, it read, ‘YORE MOTHERINLORE DIE. RING WIFE.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHARLES REALLY FELT unsophisticated when he saw how many children there were on the flight to New York. All these cosmopolitan tots were plugging in their in-flight entertainment earphones and summoning stewardesses as if they’d been doing it all their lives (which can’t have been very long) and there was he, fifty-one years old, peering round at the unfamiliarity of a jumbo jet interior, locating the loos, reading his safety instructions, checking that he hadn’t dropped his passport, and generally making it obvious that he had never crossed the Atlantic before.

  And was childishly excited about it. In spite of the sadness of the reason for the trip, he felt a ridiculous glee at the prospect of finally going to America. All kinds of corny songs about Manhattan and Broadway and Fifth Avenue came unbidden into his head and he tried to stop himself from humming them. Apart from showing up his shameful inexperience of the world, it might also be an inappropriate invasion of Frances’s mood.

  Actually she seemed to be taking it pretty well. The second heart attack had hit her mother the night before she was due to be discharged from the hospital. It had been huge and final. Frances had been businesslike and unsentimental when Charles rang through on his return from the Montrose. And she had maintained that practical exterior since then. No tears, just plans, organising the flight (she had done the trip many times before), sorting out things at school so that she could leave in the last week of the summer term. Very practical. Too practical. Charles, knowing her, knew how much she was holding back. When she relaxed, when there were no longer any arrangements to make, that was when the tears would come.

  He had wondered for a dark moment whether she had already broken down, succumbed to tears, but regarded him as now too distant from her to be privy to such weakness. But no, surely she wouldn’t think of him as a stranger. In spite of everything, he felt very close to her and thought she sometimes shared the feeling.

  He looked around the plane again. Of course all the sophisticated kids were with their parents. Happy families. To outsiders the
y must look the same. A happy family. The three of them, husband, wife and daughter. Charles, Frances and Juliet.

  He took Frances’s hand. She seemed to welcome the gesture. By instinct his finger moved to stroke the familiar kitchen-knife scar on her palm. At such moments it was inconceivable that they had ever split up. But he knew such moments were suspended of time, little capsules of experience, magic, but unrelated to daily life.

  He looked across Frances to Juliet and the familiar numbness came over him. He knew he felt a lot for his daughter, but a lot of what? Not admiration, surely. She was a reasonably attractive housewife in her twenties, but he found her irredeemably boring. He knew, from observation and from conversations with Frances, that Juliet had deliberately restricted the horizons of her life in reaction against the lack of organisation in her father’s, but he couldn’t find that a justification for her total predictability.

  And yet, although she bored him, she still affected him powerfully. He remembered her as a tiny child, how cuddly she had been, how giving. Then they had got on all right, then they had had a relationship. But not one that could survive growing-up. Presumably that was all he would ever feel for her now, a cumbersome bulk of undefined emotion.

  Still, she seemed happy enough. Matched up with her husband Miles, who was apparently doing awfully well in insurance. Charles got on all right with Miles (or as all right as two men could, whose similarity was restricted to their number of arms and legs). The only two things he really objected to were that his son-in-law kept trying to sell him a private pension scheme and then compounded the felony by calling him ‘Pop’.