Dead on Cue (29 page)

‘You tell me,' Diana Houseman hissed.

‘All right, I will. The best way to make sure that your husband believed that the man you pointed the finger at was guilty was to fix it so that he really
was
.' Woodend paused for a moment. ‘You didn't discuss this idea of yours with Paddy Colligan, did you?'

‘Of course I didn't.'

‘I thought not. He's a romantic soul. He'd never have agreed to anythin' so hard-boiled an' callous. But you had no such scruples, an' so you started a
second
affair – with the man you'd decided to set up to take the fall when that became necessary.'

‘I did it for Paddy,' Diana Houseman said weakly.

‘You did it for yourself – so you could carry on havin' your cake an' eatin' it as well.'

‘And now I suppose you want me to tell you who this second lover of mine was?'

Woodend shook his head. ‘That won't be necessary. I took a while gettin' there, but in the end I worked it out for myself.'

Ben Drabble and Paddy Colligan were knocking a few of the rough edges out of the following Monday's script when the door opened and Woodend entered their office in a purposeful manner.

‘Can I help you?' Ben Drabble asked.

‘It's your mate I want a word with, not you,' Woodend told him. ‘I noticed that now my lads have finished workin' on it, the cafeteria's open for business again, so your best plan would be to go an' grab yourself a quick cup of tea.'

Drabble looked first at his partner, then back at Woodend. ‘I'm not thirsty,' he said.

‘Don't you think he'll work a lot better after he's had a brew?' Woodend asked Paddy Colligan.

‘Go and get yourself a drink, Ben,' the Irishman said.

Drabble hesitated for a second, then stood up and left the room.

Woodend slid his big frame on to the chair the writer had just vacated. ‘How do you feel about justice, Mr Colligan?' he asked.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘From readin' that play of yours, I'd guess that you were brought up a Catholic. Are you still a believer?'

Paddy Colligan nodded slowly. ‘I suppose I must be. I wouldn't feel so guilty about my own sins if I wasn't.'

‘It's interestin' that you should mention sin,' Woodend said. ‘As I understand it, your lot think that a sin can never be forgiven as long as it's kept hidden. Have I got that right?'

‘Where's all this leading?'

‘I know who killed Valerie Farnsworth an' Bill Houseman,' Woodend told him. ‘My only problem is that all my evidence is circumstantial. What I really need now is a confession. An' I thought you could write it for me.'

‘You want me to confess to the murders!' Paddy Colligan demanded, outraged. ‘Well, I won't do it! My hands may not be entirely clean, but there's certainly no blood on them.'

‘Did I say I wanted you to confess to the murders?' Woodend asked mildly.

‘You said you wanted me to write a confession!'

‘So I did,' Woodend agreed. ‘But I never said it was
your
confession you'd be writin', did I?'

Jeremy Wilcox looked down at the sheets of paper which had dropped on his desk in front of him, and then back up at Woodend.

‘What's all this?' he asked.

‘Read it,' Woodend told him.

‘I haven't got the time to—'

‘It's only three pages. Bloody read it!' Woodend said commandingly.

After the first few lines Wilcox looked troubled, and by the time he had reached the bottom of the third page, his eyes were wide with astonishment.

‘You see what it means, don't you?' Woodend asked.

‘I understand the words, if that's what you mean, but I find it completely incredible that—'

‘It's all true,' Woodend said firmly.

‘Does that mean that you're going to . . . that you're going to . . .?'

‘Make an arrest?' Woodend supplied. ‘Yes, as soon as this little scene's been played out, that's exactly what I'm goin' to do. But I'll need your help.'

‘You're asking me to sabotage my own show!' Wilcox protested. ‘I refuse! I absolutely refuse!'

‘Do this one thing for me, an' I'll be out of your hair forever,' Woodend promised him. ‘Don't do it, an' I'll have my lads create so much disruption that it'll be impossible for you to broadcast a show tonight, or any time in the next month for that matter. So what's it to be? It's your choice.'

‘You call that a choice?' Wilcox asked.

‘It's more of a choice than Val Farnsworth an' Bill Houseman were ever given,' Woodend pointed out.

‘W
hat's all this?' George Adams asked, as Paddy Colligan dumped a sheaf of papers in front of him, then walked around the table and dropped a similar pile in front of the rest of the cast members who had been summoned to Rehearsal Room Two.

‘It's next Monday's script,' Jeremy Wilcox said from the doorway.

‘We've already been given it,' Jennifer Brunton said.

‘Not this one, you haven't, Jennifer. It's a new version. We've made a few changes, and I want to see how they work out,' Wilcox told her. ‘The scene is the bar of the Tinker's Bucket. You've all just come back from Liz Bowyer's funeral and—'

‘Then why are there so few of us?' Jennifer Brunton asked. ‘The pub would be absolutely packed on an occasion like that.'

‘More people will drift in as the scene progresses and—' Jeremy Wilcox stopped, suddenly, as if something had just occurred to him. ‘Let's get one thing clear,' he continued in a much louder voice. ‘I'm the producer of this show now, which means that what I say goes. And if I tell you the script calls for you to dance naked with a chimpanzee, you don't argue, you ask whether I want you to do the waltz or foxtrot! Got that?'

The actors moved their heads slightly in what may – or may not – have been grudging nods of acceptance.

‘Right, let's have a read-though,' Wilcox said. ‘And just to make my job a little easier, could you try to do it without fluffing any of your lines or stopping to ask stupid questions?'

Jennifer Brunton looked down at her script. ‘Liz could be a bit of a devil sometimes, but I'm really goin' to miss havin' her around,' she read.

‘Yes, so I am,' Larry Coates read. ‘She was a bit too free with her favours at times, but at least she wasn't calculatin' about it, like some women are.' He looked up from his script. ‘“A bit too free with favours”?' he repeated. ‘Would Jack Taylor really say that?'

Jeremy Wilcox sighed. ‘Am I talking to myself here? I said I wanted it reading through without interruptions.'

‘Still, it's a bit close to the bone,' Larry Coates said dubiously.

‘It's an idea – that's all. We're playing around with a few
ideas
.'

‘That's all very well for you to say,' Larry Coates replied, ‘but any character who besmirches the memory of Liz Bowyer isn't going to be very popular with the viewers, now is he?'

‘That's the only bit about Liz, and if you really don't like it, we can cut it later on,' Wilcox assured him. ‘Let's just get through the rest of the scene, shall we?'

‘Yes, at least she wasn't calculatin' about it, like some women are,' Coates read from the script in his Jack Taylor voice. ‘Not like a woman I knew in my last job.' He looked up again. ‘What's all this about my last job? I thought I'd always been a postman.'

‘So you have, but not always in the same post office,' Jeremy Wilcox said exasperatedly. ‘Read on, and you'll see how it all fits together.'

‘She was the head postmaster's wife, this other woman,' Coates read. ‘We had an affair. What I didn't know was that she was already havin' another affair with one of the clerks in the back office.'

‘An' didn't she give him up when she started goin' out with you?' Jennifer Brunton read, her bemusement evident in her voice.

Larry Coates frowned, as if he was starting to suspect something was seriously wrong, but could not be entirely certain what.

‘No, she didn't give him up,' he read, ‘because he was the one she was really interested in.'

‘So why did she have the affair with you?' Jennifer Brunton asked, now so confused she was almost starting to sound panicked.

‘She did it because she wanted someone to accuse, if her husband started to think she was playin' around,' Larry Coates answered.

‘This will never bloody work, Jeremy!' George Adams protested. ‘It doesn't sound like
Maddox Row
at all. And Larry's right. There's no reason at all why you should ask his character to commit professional suicide.'

‘If you don't like the direction I'm taking the show in, I'm sure I can always find some other starving actor to play a loveable old-age pensioner,' Jeremy Wilcox said nastily. ‘And that goes for the rest of you, as well. Can we
please
proceed, Larry?'

Coates's face had turned grey. ‘The chief postmaster said he was goin' to fire me for havin' an affair with his wife,' he read, ‘but it was a good job an' I didn't want to leave it. That's when I . . . when I decided to kill him.'

‘This is ridiculous,' George Adams protested. ‘This is brain-buggering insane.'

The door clicked softly open, and Woodend stepped into the room. ‘I was listenin' outside,' he explained, ‘but I thought I'd come inside to see the really interestin' bit in the flesh. I believe you still hold the centre stage, Mr Coates.'

Larry Coates looked up at him. ‘I don't want to read any more,' he said.

‘You're surely not goin' to back out now, are you?' Woodend coaxed. ‘This is your big scene. Don't you want to see how it ends? Wouldn't you like to know if it really works as a piece of theatre? Or would you rather somebody else read the lines for you? I can do it, if you like.'

‘You'd only make a hash of it,' Coates said contemptuously. He looked down at the script again. ‘The only problem was that even if I killed the head postmaster, I couldn't be sure I'd keep my job, because the other bosses had all agreed with him that it would make the post office more popular if they sacked one of us,' he read in his Jack Taylor voice. ‘So before I murdered him, I had to make sure I was indispensable. That's why I decided to kill the most popular postwoman in the office first – so they'd have to give me her job.'

‘This . . . this isn't about the Laughing Postman at all, is it?' George Adams gasped.

‘No, it isn't,' Woodend agreed. ‘Shall you an' me go an' have a private chat, Mr Coates?'

Woodend and Larry Coates sat facing one another across the table in the conference room.

‘This theory of yours is all supposition, you know,' Coates said. ‘You can't actually prove a thing.'

‘Maybe not at the moment,' Woodend agreed, ‘but once we know where to start looking, it's remarkable what we can find. I've got a team goin' through your dressin' room at this very moment. They don't need to find much – a speck of Valerie Farnsworth's make-up stained with her blood; a thread from the clothes she was wearin' when she died. It'll only take a little thing to make the case against you cast-iron. But why wait for that? If you co-operate now, it'll go in your favour at the trial, an' that – combined with the fact that you'd never have killed anybody at all if you hadn't been caught up in the web of lies that bitch Diana Houseman had woven – is bound to work in your favour. Besides, you're an actor – a man of spirit. If you've got to go down, then at least go down with some panache.'

‘Is it true that the only reason Diana slept with me was to cover up her affair with Paddy Colligan?' Coates asked.

‘Perfectly true.'

Coates laughed. ‘And there was me thinking I was totally irresistible.' He paused for a second. ‘How did you get on to me?'

Woodend forced himself to suppress a sigh of relief. ‘My good luck an' your bad,' he said. ‘If Preston Vance hadn't died when he did, I'd never have found out that the good job you were supposed to be goin' to after you'd left
Maddox Row
had fallen through. An' that would have meant that I'd never have realised how important it was for you to stay on the show.'

‘You spend your whole working life performing in draughty provincial theatres in front of audiences who wouldn't recognise good acting if it hit them in the face,' Coates said sadly. ‘And finally you make it. Finally you're a star. Then some bastard says he's going to take it all away from you.'

‘How often did you sleep with Diana Houseman?' Woodend asked.

‘Three or four times. No more.'

‘But Bill Houseman didn't believe that?'

‘No, he didn't.'

‘Of course not. Whatever Diana told you she'd said to her husband, she'd done her best to convince him that you'd had a long, passionate affair – that all the time she'd been spendin' with Paddy Colligan, she'd actually been spendin' with you. What I don't understand is why he didn't just sack you. Why both pretend that you were goin' off to a new job in California which no longer existed?'

‘It was a way of saving both our faces,' Coates said. ‘I didn't have to admit I was being kicked out on to the street – and he didn't have to admit that the reason he was getting rid of me was because I'd slept with his wife.'

‘I lied to you earlier, you know,' Woodend said. ‘The judge an' jury might show you a bit of sympathy for killin' Bill Houseman, but they're never goin' to forgive you for killin' Valerie Farnsworth.'

‘For killing
Liz Bowyer
, you mean, don't you?' Larry Coates said.

‘Aye, maybe I do mean that,' Woodend agreed.