Simon Brett - A Comedian Dies

‘Let’s hope so.’

The push-button time-switch in the hall produced no more light. Either the bulbs had been nicked or just not replaced by absentee landlords. As Charles and Barber groped their way up the banister, they became aware of the smell of the house — a compound of used cooking oil, beer and wet cardboard. Reggae music and softly accented voices issued from behind the doors of the other bedsitters they passed.

On the second landing Charles paused to let Barber catch up with him. The comedian was breathing heavily, suddenly an old man. Struggling for his breath, he leaned against the banister and gestured straight ahead through the murk. ‘It’s that one,’ he gasped.

The door was slightly ajar, but no light showed through the crack. Charles knocked softly. Then harder. Harder again. Nothing.

Struck by an abrupt sense of panic, he pushed the door open with his left hand and with the right reached round for the light switch.

He felt its outline and the pain hit him. As his fingers stung with the snapping flash of electricity, he had a vision of Bill Peaky’s wild face as he had grasped the microphone in Hunstanton. At the same time the impact of the shock slammed him, backwards against the banister.

FEED: There’s a man outside with a nasty look on his face.

COMIC: Tell him you’ve already got one.

Charles felt as if some demonic barman had mixed him with ice and fire and was determined to shake him into the cocktail of all time.

Lennie Barber was crouching over him, his face old and anxious in the half-light. ‘You all right? What happened?’ he kept repeating.

After a bit, Charles decided that he wasn’t that badly hurt. His fingers still stung and his arm felt numb. The impact with which he had met the banisters was going to leave a great bruised line across his back. But basically, he would survive.

‘I’ll be OK, Lennie. Help me up.’

It hurt, but he could walk. He rubbed his tingling wrist and moved across to the door of Chox’s bedsitter again. There was still silence from inside. From the other doors on the landing there were human sounds, but no one had come out to see what had caused the crash. Perhaps the sounds of violence were too familiar to be investigated. Perhaps it was wiser to keep out of other people’s troubles.

Charles felt confident that Chox’s room was empty and went in. After a bit of fumbling in the dark, he found a bedside lamp of the Chianti bottle variety that went out of fashion in the fifties, and switched it on.

The room was a terrible mess. A mattress on the floor served as a bed and hadn’t been made for some weeks. The floor was littered with copies of Melody Maker, New Musical Express and other less-established music papers. In the gaps these left, LP sleeves poked through. Encrusted coffee cups were marooned among the flotsam.

He moved across to the light switch, aware of Lennie Barber’s frightened face peering round the door-frame. The booby trap had been simple. Chox had merely taken off the plastic cover of the switch and pulled out the wires so that they would be the first thing a reaching hand would meet. Simple, but efficient.

Charles became aware of what Lennie Barber was saying. ‘I shouldn’t have told him.’

‘Shouldn’t have told him what?’

‘Shouldn’t have told him you were coming, Charles. Someone must have mentioned that you had this sideline as an amateur detective and he must have realized you were on to him.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘He intended to kill you, Charles. God, it’s just struck me. If I hadn’t been such a short-winded old fart, I could have been the first one into that room.’

‘Yes. Just a minute.’ A new thought.

‘What?’

‘You don’t think Chox is out to get you, do you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was just thinking back to the accident you had in Hunstanton. When you burned your hands. Had Chox been round to your digs?’

‘He had, but — ’

‘It’s possible that he’d sabotaged your kettle. He seems to have an unhealthy interest in murder by electrical accident.’

‘Yes. You had a lucky escape, Charles.’

‘Maybe. Of course, the switch wasn’t certain to kill me. As I have proved by standing here before you now.’

‘No. Maybe he just wanted to warn you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘To discourage you. To indicate that, if you go on hounding him, he’ll try something a bit less hit-and-miss.’

Suddenly the electric shock seemed to be on him again and Charles shivered uncontrollably. ‘Do you know,’ he managed to say, ‘at the moment I feel very inclined to take the hint. Let’s go and have an extremely large drink.’

Fortunately he didn’t have much time over the next few days to examine the ethics of the case. In the brief moments when it loomed into his mind, the questions it posed were quite simple: do I want to go on pursuing Chox Morton or can I be content with the intellectual satisfaction of knowing that he killed Bill Peaky? (There was now no doubt about this last assertion; the booby-trapping of the light switch was tantamount to an admission.) Does Bill Peaky’s death matter anyway, since he was such an unpleasant person? Or is the world just rid of another bastard? Do I believe in an Ultimate Truth, which must always be upheld?

And each time Charles answered the final question: no. Having reached his solution, he felt no urgency to bring the culprit to justice. He now recognized Chox’s warning for what it was and decided to heed it. Further inquisitiveness might not get off so lightly.

But the peace he achieved with this nolle prosequi decisions was never complete. He could not forget that he was the possessor of secret knowledge about Chox Morton and it had been for just such knowledge that Bill Peaky had died.

However, as rehearsals for The New Barber and Pole Show picked up pace, he had little time for such gloomy thoughts. The actual rehearsing was tiring, but the constant breaks for script carpentry were even more exhausting. Every change meant learning completely different lines (or slightly different lines, which was worse). Walter Proud was constantly being summoned from his office to make peace between Lennie Barber and the writers as another of their original gems was replaced by a joke long past pensionable age. Wayland Ogilvie, who had no interest in the words at all (or indeed, the performances; he would have been quite happy photographing bowls of fruit so long as he was allowed to do it artistically), kept complaining that the changes were ruining the composition of his pictures and fulminating quietly against Aquarians. The Stage Manager muttered evilly as props were cut and new ones suddenly required. Generally, Lennie Barber was not making himself the most popular person around the production.

And yet Charles did not lose his respect for the old comedian; he still felt sure Barber’s instincts were right. The trouble was that, while Barber had an exact image of his own comic persona and knew instantly what material fitted it and what didn’t, he was not articulate enough in talking about comedy to explain his reasons. He would just stop when he came to a line that wasn’t right and could not go on until it had been changed.

There was nothing prima donna-ish about these constant breaks in the rehearsal; he seemed genuinely to regret his inability to say the lines; but nothing would induce him to take them on trust and try them out on the studio audience.

‘We can always edit it out if it doesn’t get the laugh, love,’ Wayland Ogilvie would say in a bored voice.

‘Of course it’ll get the laugh,’ Paul Royce would object heatedly. ‘It’s a bloody good line.’