Killings on Jubilee Terrace (10 page)

‘Was that rare?’

‘Almost unprecedented.’

‘So what happened next?’

‘I told the script team, then I wrote a little note to the Finance Department saying that whatsername – Sylvia Cardew – was to be put on the payroll for one week, this week, for the part of florist’s assistant. I signed it and gave it to Hamish.’

‘I see…’ said Charlie, his voice charged with significance. ‘I’m grateful to you for telling it so
fully. But if you could have kept quiet about it you would, wouldn’t you?’

Reggie dropped his eyes, then seemed to decide on a course of action.

‘Well, wouldn’t you, Inspector? There was something a bit sleazy about the whole transaction. Hamish, after all, never did anyone a good turn.’

‘You mean he’d got her a part, and would be demanding what I believe is called a quid pro quo?’

‘I think you know perfectly well what a quid pro quo is, Inspector, and yes: that is exactly what Hamish would demand. I don’t think I’m being over-sensitive on this one, but I felt it almost put me in the position of a pimp.’

‘Then why did you do it, sir?’

‘I told you, I wanted to keep Hamish sweet… I also recognised the name, thought she’d probably been an extra or had a small part of some kind – you know the kind of thing: customer in the Duke of York’s, a patient at the medical centre. So I thought she’d have had
some
experience, knew our ways… What I mean is, I suppose, that I thought Hamish hadn’t just picked her up on a street corner and promised her a part in
Terrace
. It may sound silly, but that
is
the sort of thing he could have done, in a spirit of pure mischief. But I felt pretty sure that wasn’t the case this time…
Poor cow: I wish now I’d turned her down flat.’

Charlie was about to thank him when Melvin Settle spoke.

‘You know, now I’ve heard the name I’m beginning to think I’ve heard it before too. Reggie, wasn’t she the girl who delivered papers, the one Bert Porter was to get a pure sort of crush on?’

‘Search me. I didn’t direct the scene they did together, though I saw the rushes.’

Charlie felt mystified.

‘But that was a schoolgirl, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh yes. But as I recollect it, the part wasn’t played by a schoolgirl.’

‘Going by the skirt I saw in the bedroom, Sylvia Cardew certainly wasn’t one.’

‘I think I’d better explain,’ said Reggie. ‘There is a certain sort of young woman who, with a little help from the make-up department, and costumes, can be made to look like an early or pre-adolescent girl. That’s how Sarah-Louise in
Coronation Street
, when she became pregnant at twelve, could be played by an eighteen-year-old actress.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Charlie.

‘Exactly. With boys of course that’s much more unlikely because of the voice breaking. That’s why in Benjamin Britten’s operas the boys are always played by boys, but the girls are often
played by a young adult woman who can be made to seem girl-like.’

‘Quite apart from other reasons,’ said Charlie.

‘All right, all right. Anyway I assume this Sylvia Cardew was of the same type as Sarah-Louise, and could quite simply be made to look twelve or thirteen.’

‘Which might have given added piquancy to Hamish’s designs on her.’

‘Possibly. Though you mentioned a mini-skirt in the bedroom that—’

‘True. But it was just the sort that a
preadolescent
might wear when pretending to be a fully grown whore.’

‘Well, that’s how Sylvia Cardew could first be engaged for an adolescent then as a much older girl. And unless they scanned the cast-lists no one would have noticed.’

Charlie thought for a moment, not getting up as he thought was expected of him.

‘I’m still thinking of the little-girl aspect, the special thrill that could have been part of Hamish’s designs on her, if he was that way inclined.’

‘I’ve never seen any signs of that,’ said Reggie.

‘Nor I,’ said Melvin. ‘Quite the reverse. His engagement to Bet Garrett suggested he was really attracted to very experienced sexual operators.’

‘The engagement was a red herring,’ said
Charlie. ‘I gather there was hardly a soul who thought it was a genuine result of mutual attraction. In a sense the piquancy of a pre-teen is a red herring too.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Reggie. ‘You’re the one who floated the idea.’

‘I mean it’s irrelevant whether he felt a special sexual excitement at the thought of bedding young girls. He was the victim, after all. The important thing is whether anybody else might have guessed that his taste was for young girls.’

The two men looked at him.

‘You’re thinking of Bill Garrett,’ said Melvin.

‘I’m not thinking of anyone in particular,’ said Charlie. But in fact he was thinking of Bill, of his three daughters and of his protective instincts towards them. The fact that he could have thought his victims would also include his wife made him doubly interesting to Charlie.

‘Dying like
that
!’ said Maggie Cardew. ‘The pain! The terror!’

‘It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said her husband. But he looked as if he could think of nothing else.

‘She were a lovely little girl,’ his wife went on, dabbing at her eyes and looking as if she was in another world. ‘The sweetest and kindest thing imaginable when she were four.’

‘Aye. And what was she when she were thirteen?’ said Danny Cardew bitterly. His words provoked a storm of tears, and he regretted them. ‘I’m sorry, love. I shouldn’t have said that. There’s nowt to be done about all that now.’

‘But what shall we tell the policeman when he
comes? We can’t tell him we haven’t seen her in the last eighteen months. She living in the same town an’ all.’

Her husband considered until the tears had died down. Then he said: ‘Them’s difficult years. Our Fiona were a handful when she were that age. Most girls are. But Fiona came through – look at her today. And worse girls come through, often. Something, we don’t know what, meant that Sylvia just went off the rails.’

‘What are you trying to say, Danny?’

‘I’m trying to say there’s no earthly good to be had from hiding things from the Inspector. He’ll find out what she’s been these last years. He might as well find out from us. If it helps him to catch the coward as done this, we’ll have done Sylvia the last service we could do her. God knows, we tried.’

His wife thought.

‘Do you mean that Sylvia was known to the police?’

‘Must have been, I’d say. Probably got a record. If it had been int’paper no one would have told us. If she were clever about it and kept out of that sort of trouble, there’s still plenty of men who could tell the police what she were and what she did.’

‘But do we tell him everything, then? It’s like a sort of betrayal.’

‘It’s no betrayal when Sylvia never hid owt. We tell him all we know. It’s little enough, God knows. But at the very least we’ll save the man’s time.’

So when Charlie knocked on their door prompt on two, after walking round the neighbourhood and savouring the atmosphere of nicely ageing semi-detacheds with neat gardens of roses and peonies and the odd dated lavatera, he was welcomed, invited to sit down and was showered from the beginning with information.

It was a sad enough tale. Sylvia had been a late addition to the family of three children but one who, once arrived, was loved and probably spoilt by her older siblings and by her parents. She was, they assured Charlie, the loveliest and most biddable of children until she reached about twelve, and then she went off the rails in ways that twelve-year-olds never knew about in Cardew’s younger days, leaving them at a loss how to impose a discipline and set of standards that had been missing till then.

‘It was alcohol, drugs, and sex – sex at twelve!’ said Maggie. ‘And the more we tried to tie her down, rein her in, the more she deceived us, wriggled out, flaunted curfews – just really, like we said, went off the rails. She were so lovely, everyone said so. And then she were so impossible – wanting all the most dangerous things going,
and screaming blue murder if she were thwarted.’

‘Which wasn’t very often,’ said Danny Cardew grimly. ‘We knew how to say “no”, but we’d no idea how to enforce it.’

‘That must have been horrible for you,’ said Charlie.

‘It were. In the end she moved out, or just disappeared rather.’

‘When was this? How old was she?’

‘She were fifteen. That’s four year sin’.’

‘It was terrible,’ said Maggie. ‘Like the end of the world, our world. She couldn’t even be discreet about it – not her. You’d go into the bathroom and the evidence would be left everywhere. I’d gather it up, though I hated doing it, touching it, and I’d dump it in her bedroom. But it would be straight back in everyone’s view, like she was trying to rub our noses in what she was doing.’

‘Do you have other children?’

‘Three, all older. Fiona, the next youngest, moved out as soon as Sylvia started going wild. Fiona said she’d been through all that herself, but she could see that Sylvia was going to be something else again.’

‘Didn’t you try to get one of her siblings to talk to her?’

‘Oh, we did. You can take it, Mr Peace, that we tried everything. Fiona it were who had a talk
with her. She were that shocked when she came out she just said: “I’d get rid of her, Mum. It’s the only thing you can do and stay sane”.’

‘Is that what you did?’

‘In the end when we told her we were at the end of our tether she just vanished, like I said.’

‘Did you keep up any sort of connection with her?’

‘She rang now and then. She called maybe once a year, always with something to boast about, usually things most decent folk would die to have hidden. After a time she didn’t think us worth her while, and visits and calls stopped.’

Charlie thought.

‘You’re saying she was a prostitute, aren’t you?’

‘Aye, we are,’ said Danny.

‘Prostitutes don’t usually have much to boast about.’

‘Oh, she could boast about her “earnings”. No holding back there. It was another example of pushing our noses in it. And she’d talk about her “varied clientele” with “special tastes”. We hated her visits, tell the truth. We were glad when they stopped, God help us.’

‘Mr Peace,’ said Maggie tentatively. ‘Could I ask you a question?’

‘Of course. I’ll answer if I can.’

‘Was the man she died with – the man whose
flat she was in – connected with television?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘That’s what the policeman who rang told me. Was he connected to one of the soaps?’

‘Yes. He had a part in
Jubilee Terrace
.’

The two looked at each other.

‘Why I’m asking is that she was on about the
Terrace
last time she came to see us – well, not “on about”, but she did mention it.’

‘Did she now?’

‘Said she had a date fixed up with someone who was “on the
Terrace
team”. I didn’t know what she meant by that, an actor or someone behind the scenes, but I didn’t care to ask and get sneered at. She was very uppity by then: called herself an “escort”, which seemed to mean meeting men in up-market hotels, with their special needs all marked out in advance.’

‘I suppose she mentioned no names or their parts in the soap?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that. And it wouldn’t have meant much to us. We weren’t viewers of it, and we always avoided it after that. We really didn’t want to see her if she ever got a part in it, knowing how she would have got it.’

Her husband was frowning.

‘Didn’t you say Mr Judson said something about the
Terrace
a few months ago, Maggie?’ he asked her.

‘Said he’d seen someone who looked just like our Sylvia on it, only it couldn’t have been her because she was much too young.’

‘This was on
Jubilee Terrace
?’ asked Charlie.

‘Ohyes. He said this girl had a scene with Vernon Watts. Danny and I remember him when he did the working men’s clubs. And he used to be at the City Varieties, didn’t he, Danny?’

‘Aye. Never that good, though. More of a warm-up artist than a star. Died not long ago.’

‘I know,’ said Charlie. ‘I’d perhaps better tell you that your daughter did get a part – two in fact – in
Jubilee Terrace.
So it wasn’t all fantasy. It was your daughter doing that scene with Vernon Watts.’

The pair looked at each other, bewilderment and pain in their eyes, not pride or satisfaction.

Liza Croome was making up in her bathroom. She was ‘opening’ a new supermarket in Keighley that evening, and the punters who would be there would expect her to look as like as possible to her Sally Worseley persona. The supermarket had in fact been open a couple of months, and Liza had been assured that a lot of the regular customers would be coming. She put on the
makeup
with a practised hand. She had ‘opened’ a great many supermarkets. She had begun to see them as the churches of the modern era, the
present-day
equivalents of all those little non-conformist chapels that were run up cheap in the nineteenth century.

Liza lived alone at the moment. In fact Liza had lived alone for long periods, and she thought she would soon come to prefer it. Her last partner, Denzil, a curator at the city’s art gallery, had upped and left her on an impulse – easy to do because he lived lightly and had moved out, as he had moved in, with only two suitcases of possessions. He had said then: ‘You’re a lovely girl, Liza,’ (he scorned political correctness) ‘but I can’t find my way around Sally Worseley. And these days you’re more often Sally Worseley than you are Liza Croome. Find out who you are and I might still be interested.’

Liza had said ‘Good riddance’ and denied she might still be interested if he ever deigned to return. But at heart she agreed with him that she was an unmendable split personality. It was not for her a criticism or a joke. She rather enjoyed having two personalities.

She looked at her face. The light make-up she preferred covered the damage of the years less well than the heavier coating preferred by the studio’s make-up team.

‘I’ve grown old as Sally Worseley,’ she said to herself. ‘Or middle-aged. We’ve grown
middle-aged
together, Sally and I.’

She looked at herself so often in a mirror that she knew every line on her face, could almost put a date on when they had come.

‘I could make a map,’ she said sometimes. ‘Like one of those atlases with all the altitude levels.’

She saw a new line – another little claw on the crow’s foot. She leant over and pulled the light cord. Then she stayed looking at the dim reflection of herself from the low light in the hall.

If I’m more often Sally Worseley than I am Liza Croome, she said to herself, what does that say about me and Bill Garrett? I always tell people he’s my best friend but I don’t in the least fancy him, and that’s true – I think. And yet…and yet I
care
about him more, infinitely more, than I cared about Denzil, or about Ian, Francis, Neill, Mark and all the others. They said hard things about me when we broke up, and it was all water off a duck’s back. But if Bill had said them I’d have been really hurt. I’d have gone over them in my mind for weeks.

That suggested something, didn’t it? If I
care
like that it surely must be something like love. I may not want him sexually, but the caring shows how enormously important he is to me. I would never want to be Mrs Garrett, but if he married someone else when he was free I’d be shattered. And the more important the new wife was to him the more shattered I’d be.

This must be more than friendship. And it means that I can’t mention to the police the visit he made to the Red Deer’s loo – the visit so much longer than usual – covered by a muttered ‘touch of tummy trouble’ when he returned.

Carol Chisholm had got home half an hour before, and had already peeled potatoes, shelled peas (imported from God-knows-where) and got out the Sainsbury’s chicken breasts in white wine and mushrooms – something both her husband and her children liked. The husband in question was meanwhile regaling her as usual with details of his day – more of them, if the truth be known, than she needed or wanted, though she was used to switching down to half-attention.

‘I said to him, I said “If you think that’s a power screwdriver, go to the cash desk and buy it, but I tell you you’ll never get a screw in with an electric plane”. My God! Some people!’

‘I expect I’d just let them get on with it, even if they bought the wrong thing,’ said Carol in her comfortable voice.

‘More trouble in the long run,’ said Malcolm. He always said this when she said that. And he usually followed it up with ‘How was your day?’ as he did now.

‘Rather eventful really,’ she said evenly. ‘Bill Garrett’s wife was reported dead in a fire that
was started deliberately. You should have seen the faces when she marched into the studio, large as life and twice as brassy. It turned out the dead woman was a young girl who’d had a couple of small parts with us. She was sleeping with Hamish Fawley, but if this was divine retribution for that, most people feel it was a bit excessive.’

Malcolm had only taken a little of this in. He heard but didn’t listen, especially to Carol.

‘Sounds quite a day. Oh, I forgot to tell you this chap who said he wanted an electric screwdriver eventually walked away with a set of garden furniture – said he’d heard we are due for a hot summer next year.’

Carol in her turn switched to full off. It was the only way. Every one in the
Terrace
knew she had married a bore, and she knew she had married a bore, and did not, at least with the surface of her mind, regret it. At least her private life did not intrude on her life as a mildly well-known soap actress. Unlike poor Bill, whose whole time on the
Terrace
had been marked by Bet’s exploits, her neglect of the girls, her attempts to secure a proper and long-lasting role in the soap. His marriage had been a visible part in the tapestry of his private and public personae, and even his decision to divorce Bet would not wipe that background out.

As they were eating their meal, with her
daughter at the table with them and her son watching
Hollyoaks
on Channel Four, her husband suddenly said:

‘You know, now I come to think of it, someone said they’d seen something about the
Terrace
on the Northern TV news at 1.30. He was in his lunch break. Some kind of police press conference.’

‘That’s right. As far as we can gather someone at Northern TV told the police that Bet was Hamish’s fiancée and partner, and the police thickly assumed that the person who was incinerated with him was Bet. Red faces all round when it was found out that it was someone else.’

‘Wow! That’s quite a story. I’ll be telling it all tomorrow, because everyone will be interested.’

‘Well get it right. I’ll go over the details again at breakfast.’

One of Malcolm’s most irritating habits was getting things wrong, which he had been told by his wife was because of his habit of only half listening. He was always, with the other half of his brain, thinking of what from his not-
very-fascinating
life as manager of a B&Q store he would regale to his family next. Really he was a very boring husband, and it could not be said that her on-screen life with her
Jubilee
husband was much more exciting.