A Series of Murders (10 page)

‘Well, fine, if that's all right. Where is it?'

‘Not far. We'll go in the motor.' His cockney glottal stop completely removed the ‘t' from the word. He pronounced it ‘mo-ah.'

The ‘mo-ah' turned out to be a two-seater silver Mercedes. It had a personalised ‘JS' number plate. Not for the first time, Charles reflected on the contradiction he had encountered in the personality of many ‘celebrities', who, while constantly asserting their desperate desire for privacy, drove everywhere in vehicles that advertised their presence.

The car was parked athwart double yellow lines opposite the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants. Jimmy Sheet wasn't going to put his ‘mo-ah' at risk from the swinging lorries of the cement works or the timber yard. And the risk of traffic wardens clearly didn't worry him. Without comment, he removed the ticket from the windscreen and shoved it into the glove compartment to join a pile of others.

As soon as they were under way, Jimmy Sheet picked up the car phone and punched out a number from the memory. ‘Won't be a sec., Charles. Oh, hello, love, it's me. How's things? Yeah, great. No, I'm not called again till tomorrow. Sure. Yes, well, I'll be back round four, I reckon. Four, half past. No, just going off for a drink at the club with one of the cast. No, love, of course not. He's a bloke. Charles Paris. No, well, he – You might recognise the face. Of course I am. Say hello, Charles.'

Charles looked in amazement at the telephone thrust in front of him.

‘It's the wife,' Jimmy Sheet said, as if that explained everything. ‘Sharon. Go on, say hello.'

‘Oh, hello, Sharon,' Charles obeyed, though he felt somewhat bewildered.

Jimmy Sheet took the phone back. ‘See? Told you. Okay, then, see you later, love. Love you. ‘Bye.'

He returned the phone to its rest and made no comment on the bizarre incident that had just taken place.

Jimmy Sheet's club was on a small street not far from Grosvenor Square. Once again he pulled the Mercedes to a halt on double yellow lines directly outside the entrance and, pausing only to don dark glasses, got out, clearly intending to leave it there.

‘Aren't you worried about getting clamped?' asked Charles tentatively.

‘Nah. There's this service that sorts it out for you. And I've got an account with this limo company what'll send one round pronto to take me home.'

Money, it seemed, was not a problem for Mr. Sheet.

His club looked expensive, too. But whereas Charles had been expecting something rather glitzy and American, a place full of girls with variegated hair where no drink was served without a cluster of umbrellas in it, the reception into which Jimmy Sheet ushered him was very restrained and patrician. Panelled walls and marble pillars, much nearer the Athenaeum than the Groucho.

The porter, who would have been well cast as a minor retainer in an episode of
Stanislas Braid
, goodafternoon-Mr.-Sheeted him, and Jimmy magnanimously asked after the porter's family while signing Charles in. It was interesting to see how quickly new money absorbed the habits of old money.

In the dark wood-and-leather peace of the bar, Jimmy Sheet greeted a few pinstriped gentlemen who showed no resentment of his open-necked shirt and oyster-grey leather jacket. They were too much gentlemen even to show resentment of Charles's neolithic sports jacket.

A waiter, so discreet as to be almost invisible, took their orders for a large Bell's and a spritzer. Jimmy Sheet popped a stuffed olive in his mouth, chewed it, and asked, ‘How'd you think it's going, then?'

‘Not too bad,' said Charles cautiously. ‘Rather better as of this morning than it was last week.'

‘Yeah.' Jimmy Sheet nodded reflectively but did not pick up the cue to talk about Sippy Stokes. ‘Hope it'll be all right. The agent said it'd be a good series for me to do. Don't want to end up in a bummer.'

Charles tried to imagine what it must be like to move in a world where your agent recommends shows that would be ‘good for you to do' rather than one where you grabbed anything that was offered.

‘I'm sure it'll be all right,' he said automatically. ‘Because actually this is your first big acting break, isn't it?'

‘Could say that,' Jimmy Sheet agreed. ‘Mind you, “break” makes it sound like it was accidental. I mean, this was a calculated career move.'

‘Ah.'

‘Well, I mean, I could've kept on with the singing, but, you know, last couple of singles didn't get as high up the charts as the ones before, and I always reckoned to get out of that while I was still on top. It's all only means to an end, isn't it?'

‘Is it?' asked Charles.

‘Oh, sure. I done the singing because, you know, gives you a good international profile, but I never was going to stay with it. I mean, the money's there if you want to. Go into cabaret, you know, keep recycling the old hits – you can do that till the cows come home. But that was never how I wanted my career to pan out.'

‘No?'

‘Nah. Anyway, all that travelling. You know, I reckon I done my bit on the touring front. Need something that doesn't take me away from home so much. Like to spend more time with Sharon and the kids.'

‘Actors do a lot of touring and location stuff.'

‘Oh, sure. But in the music business, you got to do it to keep up your profile. In acting, you know, you can choose your work.'

Can you? thought Charles. First I've heard of it.

‘And the acting, you know, you can keep it going, fit it round other things, business commitments and that.'

‘Really?'

‘Yeah. I mean, again television's only another kind of staging post.'

‘Is it?'

‘I'm just doing this series to, you know, like remind the public I'm not just a singer, I'm a good actor, and all. Kind of re-establish me in the public's mind in a different role.'

‘I see.'

‘Not going to stay with the television.'

‘Why not?'

‘Well, it's not sort of international.'

‘I thought it could be. I thought it was becoming increasingly international.'

‘Yeah, but not at the same level as the music business or feature films.'

‘Well . . .'

‘Apart from anything else, the money's peanuts, isn't it?'

Since the three months of the
Stanislas Braid
contract would be the best-paid three months of his life, Charles didn't feel qualified to reply to this.

‘No, as I say,' Jimmy Sheet went on, ‘it's feature films I'm going into in the long term.'

‘Oh, really?'

‘Might do some theatre as well . . . You know, if the right part comes up on Broadway, that kind of number.'

Charles kept wondering why all this didn't sound unconvincing. He had heard similar dreams expressed by any number of actors, and his normal reaction was, all sounds great; you just wait till you get out into the real world, sonny. But Jimmy Sheet spoke with such assurance that he made his plans sound more like business decisions than pipe dreams. He seemed to be in no doubt that he would be able to follow his proposed career path, and Charles found himself equally convinced.

‘What do you put your money in?' Jimmy Sheet asked suddenly.

‘I beg your pardon?' said Charles.

‘Your money – what's it in?'

‘Erm . . .' Difficult question to answer, really. The truth – I haven't got any – sounded just too pathetic and self-pitying. ‘Oh, this and that.'

‘Mm. Spread the investment – something to be said for that, certainly. I got most of my dosh in property.'

‘Have you?'

‘Yeah. Don't think you can ultimately lose with property.'

‘No. No, I suppose not. As Mark Twain said, “Buy land, my son, they are not making any more”.'

‘Who?'

‘Mark Twain.'

‘Don't know him.' Jimmy Sheet restlessly picked up another olive and flicked it into his mouth. ‘Got some property in the States, bit in Australia, quite a lot here in England.'

‘Ah.'

‘Well, you got to do something with it, haven't you?'

‘Yes, yes.'

Jimmy Sheet winked at the waiter, who ghosted up with more drinks. Charles decided it might be timely to move the conversation away from money, about which he'd never had the opportunity to know anything, to what he was really interested in.

‘Terrible business last week, wasn't it?'

‘What's that, then?' asked Jimmy.

‘Sippy Stokes.'

‘Oh, yeah, yeah.'

‘Dreadful when something like that happens. You know, you feel you should have done more.'

‘Done more like what?'

‘Got to know her better, perhaps.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, when someone dies –'

‘People die all the time.'

‘Yes, but when it's someone you know –'

‘You just said you didn't know her.'

Jimmy Sheet certainly wasn't making the conversation easy. ‘No, I mean . . .' Charles floundered on. ‘What I mean is, you just feel it's kind of a waste.'

‘Not a waste of an actress, certainly.'

‘Perhaps not. But a waste of a person.'

‘Maybe to the people who were close to her.'

‘Do you know who was close to her?'

Jimmy Sheet's eyes narrowed. ‘Well, I gather Rick Landor wasn't averse to giving her one every now and then.'

‘I suppose that's how she got the part.'

‘Can't think of any other reason. No, old Ben nearly bust a gut when he heard about it. They'd done most of the major casting, and he was still dithering about who was going to play Christina – mind you, I think he'd got that Joanne bird in mind from the start. Then suddenly he hears Rick's pulled a fast one and put through the booking for his little bit on the side.'

‘Couldn't Ben have put a stop to it?'

‘Contract had gone out. He'd have had to pay her off for the series. And we saw this morning just how keen he is on writing things off.'

‘Yes. Mind you, he had decided to pay her off after the first episode, anyway.'

‘Had he?'

Quickly, Charles filled Jimmy in on what Will had told him in the bar after Sippy's death.

‘Shit,' said the singer at the end of the account. ‘That Ben Docherty can be a really nasty operator.'

‘Yes. It's amazing that Sippy didn't hear from someone what he was planning.'

‘Well, she didn't. She didn't have a clue on the Tuesday night, anyway.'

Jimmy Sheet had given something away there, and Charles pounced on it. ‘Oh, really? Did you see her on the Tuesday night?'

‘What? No. No. Just at the end of the filming, you know, just had a chat.'

Charles would have recognised that the man was lying even if he hadn't known of his visit with the ‘mystery brunette' to Stringfellow's.

‘So you weren't one of the people who was close to her?'

‘No. No, course I wasn't.' Jimmy Sheet was becoming heated. ‘Shit, just because you've worked in the pop business, everybody thinks you're bloody bonking everything in sight. Look, all right, in what I do, things I've done, there's always been girls around. But I'm a happily married man. I got Sharon and the kids. Okay, in the past there may have been the odd flutter, but that's all finished – got it?'

It didn't take a very advanced student of psychology to recognise that the vehemence of this defence was totally disproportionate to the hint of an accusation that Charles had made. Nor to identify it as the operation of a guilty conscience.

As if to reinforce that impression – which hardly needed reinforcing – the ectoplasmic waiter suddenly materialised at Jimmy's side and murmured discreetly that Mr. Sheet's wife was on the telephone.

Checking up on him, Charles thought as the harassed husband went off to take the call. There was something amiss with Jimmy Sheet's marriage. His wife was a neurotically jealous woman, and she didn't trust him. As the newspaper gossip column had hinted, she could well be the sort to divorce him and take away his beloved children if she caught a whiff of any other extramarital excursions.

Taking Sippy Stokes out to Stringfellow's on the night before her death might well qualify under that heading.

Fine, so long as it remained secret. But it was a risky thing to do. Mort Verdon had seen them there. Any number of other people might have seen them there. It was only luck that the newspaper columnist hadn't been able to identify the ‘mystery brunette'.

Anyway, suppose Sippy Stokes didn't want it to remain secret? Suppose she had threatened to tell the lovely Sharon what had happened?

Then Jimmy Sheet might well feel that Sippy Stokes needed to be silenced.

‘OH, HELLO, Charles. It's Maurice.'

‘
You
ringing
me
? Good heavens, what's happened?'

‘Availability check.'

‘Good God, there's no stopping them at the moment. Is it the National Theatre again? I don't know, that lot just won't take no for an answer. Oh, well, I suppose if they
insist
on my giving my Lear, I can't really say no, can I?'

‘Ha. Ha. You're in a very chirpy mood this bright Tuesday morning, aren't you? What's got into you?'

‘I think it must be employment. I had forgotten how it felt to have things to do in the gaps between sleeping. And now my agent being flooded with availability checks . . .'

‘One's hardly a flood, Charles.'

‘What about the two you had last Thursday?'

‘What? Oh, yes. Yes, of course, I'd forgotten those.'

But the pause between the ‘What?' and the ‘Oh, yes' had been too long. Maurice had given himself away. As Charles had suspected, the availability checks of the previous week had been pure fabrication.