Either Side of Midnight : A Novel (2020)

by Stevenson, Benjamin

  Jack should have been wary talking to Harry in this environment. Words wear disguises in the dark. There’s a reason it’s when we tell secrets. Late at night, under covers. A reason that’s the first time most people say ‘I love you’. If someone tells you they love you in daylight, believe them.

  But that was any normal person. Harry, who worked so hard to keep anything genuine from his expressions, resting behind a wall of chemically whitened teeth and sparkling eyes, was the opposite. To get him to be honest, Jack had to take his face away. Harry talked a lot. In the dark, he was finally saying something.

  ‘Yeah,’ Harry said eventually. ‘Even with five years between drinks, I think I know him. That’s why I hired you.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Even if there is no who, I was hoping you could help me find out why.’

  ‘But you think Gareth planted the pornography. Or at least you want to blame him for something.’ Harry was quiet, which Jack took as agreement. ‘So let me ask you this – is that really why you hired me? Do you want me to clear your brother’s name, or are you trying to get revenge on Gareth for cutting you loose?’

  ‘Mate,’ Harry gave a soft chuckle, ‘ever heard of multi-tasking?’

  Before Jack could respond, his thoughts were interrupted by a series of sequential clunks, like doors slamming in a corridor. One by one, rows of rectangular lights shuddered to life above. And Jack got his first look at the graveyard of both Midnight Tonight and Mr Midnight himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  The studio lighting was clinical, and it exposed both the size and barrenness of the sound stage. Normally a rig of reds and blues in the roof, and tripod stalks with warm yellow spots, would fill in the tones. But the spotlights had been packed away, and the rigging bar lay on the floor, wires travelling up into the ceiling, the lights stripped from it and repurposed somewhere else. Because the walls, floor and ceiling were painted black, the stark white light from the remaining fluorescent bars above bounced straight off the surfaces, leaving the whole room in too sharp a focus. Jack could see every shoe scuff on the painted floor, every seam where the stage was inelegantly bolted together: everything that was so perfectly glossed over on a broadcast. Studio shows are supposed to look fun, a panning shot of a packed audience cheering to the smiling host, but pull back and all you have is a few dozen people crammed into cold raked seating, with some sweaty part-time comedian roped into ‘Audience Warm Up’ as his promised big break, standing just off camera and attempting to gee-up applause as the anchor stuffs his monologue up for the third time. This was the real version. The version where the audience is tired of wheeling out praise for someone who can’t get their lines right. The version where the smiling host has a bullet in his head.

  Jack blinked away the harsh light, which seemed to be sharpening with time, and looked around. Harry was somewhere behind a curtain or a set dressing; Jack assumed he’d wandered off to look for a light switch. The space was huge, and it looked more like a trucking garage than a TV studio. That the space had been ransacked for its technical equipment made it feel even emptier. White tape marked the floor, crosses and right-angles in a crime-scene-chalk mimicry of what used to be in the room. There, the lights. There, the cameras. There, the teleprompter.

  Jack had guessed correctly about the audience seats: they’d been on his right as he walked in and were flipped up, bolted into rows on a rake. There was more white tape creating boxed rectangular paths, showing where to walk without tripping on cords. Everything in a TV studio is taped out, set down, has its place.

  As if she too had a mark on the floor to get to, a woman strode in (not at newsroom speed, but still a stride), flipped a seat and dropped into it. Beth Walters, Jack assumed. What had Gareth said her role was? A producer? She had a satchel over one shoulder, a tablet poking out the top. A black knee-length skirt, and a matching jacket over a plain white t-shirt. She crossed one leg over the other and started tapping at her phone, the soft click of her fingernails filling the silent studio. ‘You’re not going to find anything in the dark,’ she said without looking up. ‘I’m here to show you around.’ She didn’t move.

  ‘Some tour,’ Jack said.

  ‘You want the tour?’ She gave up on her phone and made a series of sweeping gestures with her typing hand, flicking it limp-wristed around the room as if skipping stones. She punctuated each movement with a description as she worked in a circle: ‘Stage door. Stage. Curtains. Rigging. Backstage. Follow-spot. Green room. Audience. Dead guy.’ Her finger lingered in the middle of a rounded desk that dominated the set. Its front was translucent plastic and in its centre had a three-dimensional squiggle – which Jack assumed lit up in neon when filming – of the name Midnight Tonight. She swatted a hand as if shooing him, and then returned to her phone. ‘Knock yourself out.’

  ‘She’s not here to show us around,’ said Harry flatly, emerging around the side of the set and walking towards her. His gaze was steady. Sizing her up. ‘She’s here to keep an eye on us.’

  ‘Ding ding,’ she said. Then she looked up to find the owner of the new voice, clocked Harry, and said, ‘Oh. Happy birthday.’

  ‘It’s not my birthday.’

  ‘Shit. Never could tell you guys apart.’

  ‘Most people struggle.’

  ‘Tell you what though, due to recent events . . .’ She paused. ‘I think it’s getting easier.’

  At that, Harry quickened the last few steps between them. Beth stood in response. Just as Jack started mentally practising his witness statement, Harry spread his arms and embraced her, unleashing a bark of a laugh.

  ‘Beth,’ he said, pulling away, big hands gripping each of her shoulders. She wasn’t small, but he still engulfed her. As if her coat was hanging on nothing but a wire hanger, rather than bones and flesh, and he was shaking the creases out. It occurred to Jack that Harry held her the way people held him. By the shoulders, at arm’s length: dwarfed. Head cocked. Examining. But Harry’s eyes were different. When people measured up Jack they were searching for flaws. Harry was just taking this woman in. ‘Lost none of that black humour, I see. Been a while.’

  ‘You deserve it. Took all this for you to come and see me.’

  ‘I’ll run out of siblings if we go get coffee.’

  ‘So that’s why you never tried to sleep with me?’

  ‘Millions would die.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘You should be an acclaimed comedian now, you’ve got the trauma. Dead brother. Powerful.’

  ‘That was a sperm joke.’

  ‘I got it. I just expected better.’ She turned to Jack, spoke to Harry. ‘Speaking of wet patches, who’s your mate?’

  Jack didn’t miss the aggression in her question. A third-person mate is no one’s mate. ‘This is my mate’ means ‘Meet a friend of mine’. ‘Who’s your mate?’ means ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’

  Jack slid a hand between their reunion, pried them apart. ‘Jack Quick.’

  ‘I know who you are.’ Beth rolled her eyes at Harry. ‘I just couldn’t be bothered saying, “Why are you here with the guy who parlays dead bodies for ratings, and what the hell has he convinced you to get into?”’

  Jack reminded himself that she would know all of the fall-out from the vineyard documentary. HR would have had to brief everyone at the station in the way large companies respond to public crises. Banks, insurance companies, television: right, we’ve been busted, so keep doing what you’re doing, but now we’re training you how not to tell anyone. His past was a case study in what not to do. He had to assume he had no secrets from any of the staff here.

  ‘Other way round,’ Jack said.

  ‘It was my idea,’ Harry interjected. ‘Jack’s helping me.’

  ‘Jack? Helping?’

  ‘Sure.’ Jack shrugged in backup. ‘I don’t believe a lick of it but he pays well.’

  Beth furrowed her brow at Harry. ‘How much are you paying him? He’s taking you for a ride.’

  ‘He’s not,�
� said Harry.

  ‘I am,’ Jack cut in. ‘I’ve told him.’

  Beth considered this. ‘Honesty a new fit for you, Mr Quick?’

  ‘Chafes occasionally,’ Jack said.

  Harry, tired of people talking around him and not at him, clomped off towards the Midnight Tonight desk. Jack swapped a conspiratorial I don’t know why I’m here either glance with Beth that seemed to be returned in mutual camaraderie. Even though on the surface they were here for material reasons – money, boss’s orders – both of them knew they were here to entertain Harry’s whims. And there’d be a point where someone had to sit him down and say that enough was enough, and that his brother was gone, and maybe he was the person his hard-drive said he was. But that was perhaps Harry’s best trick: neither of them knew him well enough to intervene. By surrounding himself with acquaintances, he ensured no one cared enough to stop him trudging through any fantasy he wanted instead of dealing with his grief. An actual friend might step in. Jack blinked back to the night before, squared off against his father in Liam’s bedroom, where he’d had the conviction to object. Here his loyalty was bought more out of laziness than anything else.

  Jack, accepting his role as follower, trailed Harry onto the set. Beth lagged behind them. The stage itself was semicircular, like the hosting desk, arcing out towards the audience, raised a step off the floor and a good three metres away from the first row of seats. The surface was a shimmering black gloss. There were two chairs behind the desk, in the middle and on the right. Jack knew that was because Sam would sit in the middle for pieces to camera, and then shuffle to the left to interview guests on the right. That corresponded with three white Xs on the floor at even intervals around the stage. A camera for each perspective: host in host position, host as interviewer, and guest. Depending on the budget, there might have been a fourth, back further, for audience pans, or they could have used one of the main three that wasn’t active at the time.

  Behind the desk was ornamental cubic fake-wood panelling, crisscrossed like a bookcase that had been in a car accident. Further right, a door was cut into the backdrop, and a set of stairs descended to the stage. Behind the scenes to get to these stairs was a simple stepladder, and every guest had to walk out and wave as if the whole thing was linked to a green room. Jack could picture the entrance: jangly music, the host saying ‘please welcome a very good friend of mine’ (which they always do even when they’ve never met), and polite applause. Harry disappeared up the steps into the backstage area. Also mounted to the set were two large flat-screen televisions. There should have been three, in symmetry with each chair position. The middle one was missing.

  Jack peered under the table. There was residue under the desk. He pressed a finger to it. Sticky. He stood up.

  Beth was standing on the other side of the desk, watching him pick his way through the set. ‘Duct tape,’ she said, before Jack could ask. ‘He made a makeshift holster under the desk. We removed it.’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘Silver tape. Looped over itself, pretty sturdy. Pretty far back too. No one would have had cause to look for it while we set up.’

  Jack sat in the central chair and tried to imagine himself in Sam Midford’s place. Spotlights on, sweat on his neck, stage make-up on his forehead like a tight wetsuit with an oiled lining. He looked at where the central camera would have been. Reached under and tapped his hand until he felt the stickiness, where the gun would have been waiting for Sam. It was far back, stretched his shoulder. Well hidden. ‘I saw the metal detectors on the way in,’ he said.

  ‘We figured the same thing. He didn’t walk on set with the gun in his pocket.’

  Jack agreed. ‘So he put it here in advance. The front desk, that’s twenty-four hours?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Any other way into the studio?’

  Beth pointed to the large roller door that served as a side wall if closed. ‘If we open this. It’s not for casual entry, though – more for bumping in sets, if we need to back a truck in, smoko.’

  ‘Done that recently?’

  ‘Smoko?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Nah. Would you believe every single tech’s reformed since you went to prison?’

  ‘Backed a truck in.’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t have a log. I’ll see if I can find someone who knows.’

  Jack locked his hands on the desk and rolled the chair back and forth, trying to put himself in Mr Midnight’s shoes. ‘Did he seem nervous to you?’

  ‘Yeah, a bit. Me and the crew thought he was going to pop the question to his girlfriend. They’ve been at it a while. Got a kid.’

  ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘An intern saw a ring in his dressing room. Or so she said. Confidentiality and interns rarely go hand in hand here. And once the rumour started flying, well, it made sense.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You met him, right? He was a bit of a show-off.’

  ‘No shit,’ called Harry from behind the stage, his voice echoing through the studio like the ghost of his brother.

  ‘You don’t have to yell. You can hear us, we can hear you,’ Beth said.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Murder weapon.’ Harry’s voice bounced off the walls again.

  ‘And on the day,’ Jack said, returning his attention to Beth, ‘he looked particularly agitated?’

  ‘Not quite. More like what you said before. Nervous.’

  ‘And why specifically?’

  ‘I’d have to watch the footage.’

  ‘I can watch that myself. I’m interested in your recollection. Stand where you were standing. Maybe it’ll help.’

  Beth hopped off the stage and stood beside the camera marks nearest to the entryway. ‘Here.’ She paused. ‘I think. I don’t remember exactly. But this usually lets me get backstage without walking in front of the audience.’

  ‘So tell me how you get from nervousness to an imminent proposal?’

  ‘He looked pale.’ Beth was studying Jack hard, putting Sam in his place and slowly remembering the details that may have slipped away from her in the chaos after the gunshot. ‘And he kept fidgeting. Yes.’ A flash in her eyes. ‘He had one hand under the desk. I thought it was the ring in his pocket.’

  ‘And where is that ring?’

  ‘Police didn’t find one on him.’ Beth shrugged. ‘And we didn’t find one when we packed up his dressing room. Must have never had one.’

  ‘And if he didn’t have a ring – that means when his hand was under the desk . . .’

  ‘He was fiddling with the gun in the holster, and that’s what was making him nervous.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking too,’ Jack said, delicate with his wording to make them sound like a team. Another old trick, textbook. It was working, too. Beth was warming to him, talking more.

  ‘I brought the footage you asked for.’ Beth patted her satchel. She came back to the stage, grabbed the guest’s chair and rolled it around closer to Jack. She pulled out a tablet, placed it on the desk, and sat down. They both hunched over the screen. She and Sam had probably held pre-show meetings in almost exactly the same position. Jack shook the thought.

  ‘Just the last episode though,’ she added, somewhat apologetically. ‘Gareth told me you wanted the security cameras, but . . .’

  Jack raised his eyebrows, which said enough.

  ‘I know, I know.’ Beth sighed. ‘We were filming some event television and security was paramount. It sounds stupid, but it was one of our soaps, a major death, so we couldn’t risk it leaking. Spoilers are big business these days.’

  Jack knew this was true. In prison one of the weaker inmates had stopped a beating from the most vicious of prison gangs by threatening them with Game of Thrones spoilers. ‘Gareth told me you’ve had problems with Channel 12. In the ratings.’

  ‘Pricks,’ Beth affirmed.

  ‘So your solution was to turn all the security cameras off?’

 
She nodded. ‘And then we forgot to turn them back on. We only noticed when the police asked for the footage after Sam’s . . .’ She clearly didn’t want to say ‘suicide’, and instead left it lingering.

  ‘Jesus.’ Jack leaned in, whispering, ‘We’re trying to make this not look like a conspiracy.’

  ‘What’s a conspiracy?’ said Harry, stomping down the on-set stairs. A very good friend of mine, Jack thought – Harry Midford!

  ‘There’s no security camera footage,’ Jack said, as matter-of-factly as he could.

  Jack wasn’t sure if he expected Harry to be disappointed or annoyed, but he definitely wasn’t prepared for him to be excited. Harry enthusiastically slapped a meaty hand on Jack’s bony shoulder, encasing it. ‘Fuck. Yes.’ He punctuated each word, giving Jack a rattle per beat as he did so. ‘This is great.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Beth said.

  Harry mouthed the word conspiracy back at her.

  ‘We’ll settle for the episode footage.’ Jack nodded down at the tablet. ‘You right to watch this, Harry?’

  ‘Seen it before.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Beth said. ‘We dumped the broadcast on our seven-second delay.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘There is’ – she hesitated – ‘slightly more footage on the live feed.’

  ‘I told you. I’m fine.’ Then he reached over the top of both of them and hit Play.

  CHAPTER 9

  The episode started with a wide pan, the camera swinging from the audience to the stage, underscored by a smattering of applause and a musical sting. It was quick, hard to see every face in the crowd as it spun. They seemed older, mostly silver haired. No one grabbed Jack’s attention. A woman in a green cardigan sneezed. Beth was standing almost where she’d guessed she’d been, by the camera on the left, wearing a headset and all in black. The camera finished its pivot and settled on Mr Midnight, who was acting flattered with some thank you, thank you gestures. He was wearing a crisp white shirt with cufflinks, a thin unpatterned tie, and a tailored blue pinstripe jacket. Jack noticed that the missing third plasma screen was mounted behind him; otherwise the set – though lit up – was the same as it was now. Then the applause faded, the camera zoomed tight for Sam to spread his arms, lock his eyeline, and say, ‘Hello, and welcome to Midnight Tonight!’