Simon Brett - A Comedian Dies

‘You just asked him like that?’

‘No, I was a bit subtle. I implied it was a legal matter of urgency and discretion and that members of the Royal Family were not uninvolved. The old boy was very flattered to be asked. Got quite excited about it.’

‘I see. So, as I thought, those two are out of the running.’

‘It’s all very well to say “as I thought”. True detective work is the product of endless painstaking research, of inquiry and counter-inquiry.’

‘So I’ve heard. Maybe that’s why I’m not a true detective. Mind you, I think I’m getting somewhere this time.’

‘With Suspect Number 348? This boy called Chips?’

‘Chox.’

‘All the people in this case have such ridiculous names.’

‘That’s show business, Gerald. Anyway, Chox is certainly a strange piece of work. If he is a drug addict, it explains quite a lot about him. Yes.’

This last word was spoken with a sudden insight, which prompted Gerald to ask, ‘Yes what?’

‘I’ve just thought of something else. Heroin addicts inject into their forearms, don’t they?’

‘I don’t know. Not exactly the circles I move in, Charles.’

‘I’m sure they do.’ Anyway, when I grabbed the boy’s arm a couple of days ago, he reacted pretty violently. Said he was afraid I was queer and he’d had nasty experiences that way, but thinking about it now, I reckon I’d hurt his arm or he was afraid I’d pull his sleeve up and expose him. I think junkies get pretty secretive about their addiction. Read something somewhere that that’s part of the attraction, a kind of self-punishment, death-wish thing. That’s why they often inject themselves in squalid places, lavatories and so on. And why they sometimes deliberately use infected needles.’

‘This wealth of detail is a fascinating insight into the circles you move in, Charles.’

‘Oh come on, Gerald, you’re a solicitor. You must come up against drugs cases from time to time.’

‘I’m pleased to say that the only occasion I have come up against one was when the teenage son of a titled client of mine was found to have marijuana on his person. At Ascot.’

‘I might have guessed. And no doubt you got him off on the grounds that he was reacting against a nanny who’d always told him to keep off the grass.’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘Anyway, I’m going to find out a bit more about Mr. Chox Morton. If what Miffy Turtle said was true, he had a motive — and I must say, that business about Bill Peaky liking to have holds over people confirms the impression I had got of his character. He does seem to have been a really unpleasant bit of work. I wasn’t sure for a bit, because his wife painted such a different picture, but now I’ve discovered she was lying, the verdict seems to be more or less unanimous.’

‘You’re rambling, Charles.’

‘Sorry. Just working it out for my own benefit. Yes, Chox had a motive all right. He also had the knowledge to commit the crime. He was better qualified than anyone, knew that sound system inside out, would have heard about the old theatre electrician dying, no problem. It’s funny.’

‘What?’ asked Gerald, exasperated at Charles’ long stream-of-consciousness monologue.

‘When I last saw him, Chox raised the subject of Peaky’s death. Quite unprompted. Said how he had described the electrocution process to some of the company. I think perhaps in a twisted way he was boasting about the crime, crowing at the fact that he had got away with it.’

‘Or perhaps he was testing, trying to find out how much you knew, how far you were behind him.’

‘No. I’m sure he doesn’t know I’m even investigating. Lennie Barber’s the only one in the case who knows anything about my futile hobby. Him and Walter Proud.’

‘I see. How’s the show going, by the way?’

‘Somewhat jerkily. Nothing gets rehearsed for more than thirty seconds before Barber wants to change it. Then there’s a long discussion where he agrees with everyone that he’s going to be doing something different in the show. We start rehearsing again and he wants to change another line back to a hoary old joke which went down very well in the fifties. Classic comedian’s insecurity, I guess. Terrified of anything new.’

‘How are the writers reacting?’

‘Pretty badly. Steve Clinton roars with laughter and cracks fatuous jokes; Paul Royce wanders around like Hamlet and keeps staging dramatic walkouts. The trouble is that Barber has no respect for writers at all. He comes from a tradition where you didn’t have them, or, if you did, they were something you didn’t mention, like bad breath. All in all, it doesn’t make for the easiest working atmosphere.’

‘Can’t wait to see the show. I’ll be there.’

‘It’ll probably all be marvellous. From what I’ve seen of him, Barber’s instincts about material are usually right.’

‘How’s the director coping?’

‘Oh, he walks around composing Rembrandts in his mind’s eye and saying how he doesn’t get on with Aquarians. The whole thing’s a riot.’

‘Sounds it.’

‘Yes, I’m glad I’ve got a murder investigation to think about. Keeps my mind off the show.’

Rehearsals in the RNVR Drill Hall had broken down again. This time it had been over the line, ‘It’s like a quack doctor charging for worthless advice — a duck-billed platitude,’ which Lennie Barber felt (with, to Charles’ mind, some justification) was neither very funny nor suited to his style of performance.

In the course of the row, Paul Royce walked out again, Steve Clinton said ‘Keep your hair on — as the Commissioner said to Kojak’ and laughed a lot, Wayland Ogilvie decided he had to go and have a conference with the designer about a rococo mirror and the PA Theresa told two of the support characters that they should go and have wardrobe fittings.

The rehearsal being effectively over, Lennie Barber and Charles Paris went round to the pub (having first hidden behind a hedge until Steve Clinton had left the vicinity — a precaution which was becoming routine for everyone on the production).

The new Barber and Pole started in a determined way with large whiskies. ‘How’d you reckon it’s going, Lennie?’

‘Death.’

‘You don’t think it’s got a chance?’

‘God knows. Depends how it goes on the night. And how many actual jokes we can get in instead of bloody university revue lines.’

‘Do you want it to work?’

The old comedian looked at Charles in amazement. ‘Of course I want it to work. What do you take me for?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just that sometimes you seem so cynical, it’s hard to believe that you have any real ambition.’

Lennie Barber’s eyes flickered as he assessed this remark. ‘Do I? Do I really do that, Charles? Yeah, I suppose I do.’ He rubbed his thumb against the point of his chin reflectively. ‘And if I do, my boy, it’s very simply what a psychologist would call a defence mechanism. I don’t want to tempt providence, but of course I want the bloody show to work, of course I want to be a star. What do you think it’s been like for me, having been at the top, to slide slowly downwards? Every time I watched the bloody telly I’d see some new comic. At first it was blokes who’d been on the same bill as me when I’d toured the Number Ones — except they’d been way down the bill and I’d been the top. I think that was the worst bit really, when it was people I recognized, people I knew weren’t as good as me. After a bit they were just faces that come on. I’d never seen any of them before and, as far as I was concerned, they all looked exactly the same. Styles changed a bit, different jokes came round, but it was all the same really, and I knew I could do better. Comedians nowadays, they’re nothing. . Did you hear that great line Arthur Askey come up with when Granada started that Comedians series? ‘I see they’ve opened a new tin of Irish comics,’ he said. That’s what they all are now — pre-packaged, inoffensive, characterless. OK, I sound like an old man wittering on about things being better when I was young. Well, I am an old man and, what’s more, things bloody were better when I was young. Comedy certainly was better, Variety was. Television has taken the guts out of everything. No rough edges, no. . nothing.’ He was silent, then emptied his glass with a positive movement. ‘But I want to come back, even if it means television. Yes, I want this show to be a thumping great, enormous, copper-bottomed success.’