Dead on Cue (25 page)

‘Aye, I remember those early days.'

‘But gradually stars
did
start to emerge, either because they had particularly good lines or because they somehow managed to strike a chord with the viewers. And the biggest star of them all was Val Farnsworth. At first she was as surprised as anybody, but it didn't take her long to start coming over the
prima donna
.'

‘An' you think the other actors resented it?'

‘Well, they were bound to, weren't they? They must have looked at her and thought: That could have been me! I could have been the one who rose out of the ranks.'

‘An' if she was dead, I could
still
get my chance?'

‘Exactly. After all, the only real competition she had was Larry, and Larry was going to leave the show. So once Val was dead, the field was open again. Except that things didn't turn out quite that way, did they? With Val gone, the show needed Larry, so he was told he had to stay on whether he wanted to or not.'

‘An' this murderer – whoever he or she is – was in as bad a position as he or she had been before Val Farnsworth died?'

‘Exactly. But if Larry were to die, too . . . You see how my mind was working?'

‘Yes, I do. What happened to change it?'

‘Bill Houseman's murder, of course.'

‘An' why was that?'

‘Well, because Bill couldn't possibly have been killed by one of the cast.'

‘Jeremy Wilcox would disagree with you on that.'

‘I'm not surprised,' Jane Todd said. ‘He's bound to tell you he thinks it's one of the cast, because—'

She came to an abrupt halt and clamped her hand over her mouth.

‘Because of what?' Woodend asked.

‘Because . . . er . . . he has his opinion, and I have mine.'

‘That isn't what you
were
goin' to say, is it?'

‘Perhaps not. But it's what I
did
say.'

‘All right, we'll leave that aside for a minute,' Woodend said. ‘Do you want to tell me why you think none of the cast would have killed Houseman?'

‘Because he was the devil they all knew, and whatever else they might have thought about him, they could at least take comfort from the fact that he'd chosen them to be part of his team. Jeremy Wilcox is quite another matter. He's only been on the show for six months, and he probably wants to find ways to make his own mark.'

‘An' that might include bringin' new actors in? People who would be beholden to him for their big break, rather than to Bill Houseman.'

Jane Todd smiled. ‘Now you're starting to think like someone in this industry,' she said.

‘Which means that, as far as the cast of
Maddox Row
is concerned, Bill Houseman's death is the worst thing that could have happened?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘So who did have a motive for killin' Houseman?'

Jane Todd looked away from him. ‘I have no idea,' she said.

Woodend chuckled. ‘Oh, come now, lass. I'd have to be really dense not to see the direction you've been tryin' your best to point me in for the last five minutes.'

I
f Elizabeth Driver had been waiting in ambush for him when he, Rutter and Paniatowski walked into the Red Lion that lunchtime, Woodend had already determined that he would find a reason –
any
reason – to have her arrested and locked away for a couple of hours. But there was no sign of the journalist with the dyed jet-black hair, and they made their way to a corner table unmolested.

Rutter was the first to taste his drink. He took one sip from his half of best bitter, then pulled a face and laid his glass back on the table.

‘Somethin' wrong with your ale?' Woodend asked.

‘Probably not,' Rutter answered. ‘Anything would taste sour at the moment. Do you know, taking down those statements this morning was like watching a programme you've already seen. You go through the motions of listening, but all the time you know exactly what's going to be said next.'

‘Meanin' what?' Woodend asked.

‘Meaning that this lot of statements will read exactly like the ones that were taken after Valerie Farnsworth's murder. Everybody was so busy attending to their own concerns during the evacuation that they've only got a vague idea – at best – of what anyone else was doing.'

‘Look at it this way,' Monika Paniatowski said, trying to sound positive. ‘The killer's not just exposed himself once – he's done it twice. And that's given him two opportunities to make mistakes. All we have to do is find out what those mistakes were.'

‘So that's how you see it, is it?' Woodend asked. ‘Two murders an' one murderer?'

Paniatowski frowned. ‘Isn't it how
you
see it?'

‘No, it bloody well isn't. I don't think we're lookin' for one murderer – I think we're lookin' for two. Or rather, since one of them's already dead, we're lookin' for the second one.'

‘You still think Bill Houseman killed Valerie Farnsworth?'

‘Why wouldn't I? We put a pretty strong case for him bein' the killer last night, an' nothin's happened since to change our minds.'

‘True,' Bob Rutter agreed. ‘But if Houseman really did kill Valerie Farnsworth, we'll never be able to prove it now.'

‘Tell me somethin' I
don't
know,' Woodend said gloomily.

‘So where does that leave us?' Rutter asked.

‘Given the depressin' fact that we can't prove Houseman committed the first crime, probably the best we can hope for is to find out who killed
him
, an' hope that the brass back in Whitebridge – an' the press, which is probably howlin' for our blood by now – will be satisfied with that. So what have we got to go on, as regards Houseman's killer?'

‘It's a fair assumption that he's a desperate man,' Paniatowski ventured.

‘Is it?' Woodend asked. ‘Why?'

‘Well, he must have been, to take the chances that he did.'

‘He took practically no chances at all. He could have murdered Houseman on his way out of the buildin', or slipped back in again durin' all confusion. Whichever it was, it will only have taken a couple of minutes. An' he could have been fairly sure that nobody was likely to miss him. No, I don't think we can say he was desperate – but he was certainly opportunistic.'

‘In what way?' Rutter asked.

‘He couldn't have been planning to kill Houseman at the moment he did, because he had no way of knowin' that the fire alarm would go off. But when
it
did go off, he saw his opportunity, and he grasped it with both hands.'

‘Do you have a suspect in mind?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Well, there's Jeremy Wilcox, for starters,' Woodend said. ‘He wanted Houseman's job so bad that it hurt, an' for a while – when the viewin' figures were startin' to slump – he probably thought he'd get it. Then Valerie Farnsworth was murdered, an' suddenly Houseman was lookin' very secure again. It must have been very frustratin' for him.'

‘Isn't he just
too
obvious a suspect?' Paniatowski asked.

Woodend grinned. ‘I admit Wilcox isn't the one the
Madro
scriptwriters would have chosen as the murderer. If they'd been writin' this particular case for television, they'd probably have picked on somebody much less likely – like one of them three lasses from the typin' pool that you were talkin' to in the canteen on Tuesday.'

Paniatowski smiled back at him. ‘But why should one of them have done it? What motive could a typist possibly have had?'

‘Exactly!' Woodend agreed. ‘That's the whole point – she would have
no
apparent motive. But the smart-arse bobby who was investigatin' the case would eventually have found out that she wasn't what she seemed. It would turn out that Bill Houseman was her father, an' that he'd abandoned her mother to a life of abject poverty. The mother had said nothin' about it until she was on her deathbed, then she'd revealed the whole story to the girl. So the girl had got a job on
Madro
, and when she saw her chance, she took her revenge.'

‘But why would she go through all that rigmarole?' Paniatowski asked, falling in with the game. ‘If she'd wanted to kill him, why pretend to be a typist at all? Why run the risk of bringing herself within the scope of the investigation? Wouldn't her easiest course have been just to wait for him in a dark alley one night?'

‘Of course it would,' Woodend agreed. ‘But then you wouldn't have a programme, would you? You see what I'm sayin', lass? This isn't a story we're involved in. This is real life – an' the fact that a suspect is bloody obvious is no guarantee at all that he's innocent.'

‘So we're targeting Wilcox as our likeliest suspect, are we?' Rutter asked.

‘He's certainly up there with the contenders,' Woodend said.

‘But you have others in mind as well?'

‘People
do
kill for power,' Woodend told him. ‘But more often they kill for either money or sex. An' we've got a couple of candidates who fall into both those categories.'

The Glades Golf Club was midway between Whitebridge and Preston. Its members were on the whole reasonably affluent – without being obscenely wealthy – and most of them habitually attended their local Anglican Church nearly every Sunday and often twice at Easter. The club did not encourage any members of Whitebridge's growing Asian community to join, because the current membership felt that Pakistanis and Indians would simply not have felt comfortable in such surroundings. And since it was a well-known fact that Jews didn't really like golf either, there was no real point in inviting any of them to apply for admission.

The Glades had many amenities, not the least of which was a well-stocked bar in the clubhouse, and it was reassuring to know that if you decided to drop in for a drink, you were only likely to meet men you would wish to meet. And it was in the bar that Detective Chief Superintendent Ainsworth ran into Deputy Chief Constable Henry Marlowe – apparently by chance – that lunchtime.

‘How's the Chief?' Ainsworth asked, trying to look conerned.

‘He's as well as can be expected – for a man who died half an hour ago,' Marlowe replied.

Ainsworth bowed his head. ‘He'll be sadly missed,' he said.

‘Yes, he will,' Marlowe agreed. ‘But not – if we're honest about it – by either of us.'

It was perhaps wisest to get off the subject of John Dinnage, Ainsworth decided. ‘So you're in charge now, are you, sir?' he asked.

‘Yes – temporarily, at least,' Marlowe agreed.

But
permanently
, if you have any say in the matter, Ainsworth thought. ‘You can rely on me to give you all the support I can, sir,' he said.

Marlowe took a sip of his gin and tonic. ‘The best way you can help me is to see I don't have any additional problems landing on my desk. How's this investigation over at NWTV going, by the way?'

‘I've instructed Charlie Woodend to brief me on the whole matter tomorrow morning.'

Marlowe raised an eyebrow. ‘So you're keeping Woodend on the case, are you?'

‘Mr Dinnage gave specific instructions that—'

‘Mr Dinnage will be far too busy in that big interview room in the sky to worry about what we're doing down here. If you choose to keep Woodend on the case, then that must be entirely your own decision.'

‘But if you'd care to give some guidance . . .'

‘Unlike John Dinnage, I'm not the kind of man who goes breathing down my subordinates' necks.'

Ainsworth's hands had started to sweat. He did not like the direction this conversation was taking at all.

‘On the whole, I think that taking Woodend off the case would be a mistake,' he said, watching Marlowe carefully for any reaction. ‘It wouldn't look at all good in the papers.'

‘Wouldn't it? Not even after a second murder in only three days?'

‘
Especially
after a second murder in three days,' Ainsworth said. ‘If I pulled him out now, it would look as if he should never have been assigned to the case in the first place.'

‘So you're keeping him on for the good of the force?'

‘Exactly, sir.'

Marlowe's eyebrow quivered again, almost like a butterfly in flight. ‘And there's no personal motive behind your decision?'

‘None at all, sir.'

‘Shall I tell you what I think, Dick?' Marlowe asked.

‘If you'd like to, sir.'

‘I think you've done some very careful calculations, and decided this may well be a case we won't get a result on,
whoever's
in charge of it.'

‘It's far too early to make any kind of judge—'

‘We've both got where we are today by making judgements before anybody else realised they even needed to be made,' Marlowe said dismissively. ‘So where was I? Oh yes. You've decided it's unlikely you're going to get a result, which, in a widely publicised case like this one, means that someone is going to have to take a fall. Now if you replace Woodend, the person who takes that fall could be you. Whereas if you keep him, you could make the argument that the decision was John Dinnage's, and it was far too late in the game to reverse it. So Dinnage's reputation takes a battering – but he's dead, so that doesn't matter. And Charlie Woodend gets a serious black mark on his record – but you've been trying to get rid of him ever since he was first foisted on you, so that's something of a bonus.'

‘I assure you, sir—' Ainsworth protested.

‘It could all go disastrously wrong, of course. So wrong that even I end up taking some flak – and I wouldn't like to be in your shoes if that happened.' A sudden, unexpected smile appeared on Marlowe's lips. ‘On balance, though,' he continued, ‘I think you'll probably get away with it.'