A Comedian Dies

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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.’

‘It may be a bloody good line but it’s not a Lennie Barber line,’ the comedian would reason patiently before Paul Royce once again flung himself out of the room.

There was one oasis of calm in the turmoil of rehearsals. It was another barbershop sketch which had been taken intact from the original Barber and Pole music hall act. The set-up was as before and so were the catch-phrases, but the jokes were different. Still as corny as in the other sketch and still, handled by Lennie Barber, magic. Again he directed Charles in the timing of the piece, leaving Wayland Ogilvie mouthing at the corner of the Drill Hall. Charles knew the sketch could not fail to work and that, given time to tailor and familiarize himself with the new material, Barber could be brilliant throughout and make a sensational comeback.

But television schedules are tight and there was only a fortnight of rehearsal for the fifty-minute programme. With constant interruptions for rewrites, as well as the deprivations of costume fittings, design conferences and so on, there was just not going to be enough time.

Charles was not involved a great deal in the show, in spite of his grandiose billing in the title. He did the barbershop sketch and a couple of other quick items as Wilkie Pole. The rest of the time was filled by modem sketches featuring Lennie Barber and the team of comedy supports, an opening and closing monologue by the comedian and two guest spots.

The guests were a dance group (not in fact These Foolish Things, but totally indistinguishable from them) and a French singer whose big sad eyes and cloying romanticism won the adulation of agoraphobic housewives and the detestation of their red-blooded British husbands. Because of the tight schedule these two items were to be pre-recorded the day before and played in to the studio audience.

The dancers presented no problem. They just came in and did the Chuck Sheba dance to their pre-recorded vocal and music tracks, thus filling another three minutes of television time with viewzak.

But the French singer needed introducing. He was a guest on the show and Walter Proud was keen to have show business guests right through the (conjectural) series, so Lennie Barber had to learn how to give schmaltzy show business introductions. This part of the show probably caused more scripting problems than any other. Lennie Barber did not have the natural fulsomeness of the well-loved television personality at the awards lunch and the French singer’s agent turned down flat the idea of an insulting intro (which would have been the comedian’s natural style). Eventually a compromise was reached and the introduction was rewritten into a little sketch for Barber and Pole.

The French singer came into vision and Lennie Barber did not recognize him and kept getting his name wrong. Wilkie Pole knew who the man was and was acutely embarrassed by his partner’s ignorance and rudeness. After some linguistic by-play, Lennie Barber finally pronounced the guest’s name correctly (whereupon, on the night, the Floor Manager would cue applause from the studio audience).

The result of this was that Lennie Barber and Charles Paris were required in the studio on the day before the main recording.

The French singer proved to be arrogant and humourless, but the little introductory sketch was recorded satisfactorily after the usual long camera rehearsal, false starts, retakes, cutaway shots, etc. As it turned out, Lennie could have delivered a really vicious introduction, since the French singer seemed to have no English except for the tortured words of the song he sang (and from the way he sang it, he didn’t even understand them).

Charles and Lennie sat in the audience seats while the Frenchman mimed through a rehearsal of his song. He got involved in an altercation with Wayland Ogilvie, which seemed, so far as one could judge from the copious gestures, to be about which of his profiles was the better. Charles and Lennie stopped watching.

‘Do you get any excitement, Lennie, sitting here, where the audience is going to sit tomorrow and see you perform?’

‘Excitement, no. Nothing. Not in a television studio. You don’t get any feel of the audience when you’ve got all those cameras and monitors in the way. Now if this was a theatre, that’d be something else. . I can never sit in a theatre without getting a little flutter of excitement. I think it goes back to when I was kid and used to watch my old man from out front. Used to swell up with pride before he come on, could hardly breathe. I’d look round at all the people sitting there and I’d think, They’ve all come to see him, and he’s my Dad. Still get that funny feeling in the theatre.’

An elegiac mood had descended on them. There was no need to talk. Charles gazed round the studio, taking in the glittery set, the enormous number of people milling round the French singer, all the cameramen, sound boom operators, floor managers, scene shifters, make-up girls, prancing wardrobe assistants and grim-faced men whose function was known only to their shop stewards. He felt a slight tremor of fear. Television always frightened him. In front of so many people, apart from the audience, he never felt he could give a natural performance.

He looked on up to the lights and monitors hanging down from the grid. Then along the gallery that ran round the top of the studio walls. Somebody was standing up there at the corner, looking straight down at him.

It was Chox Morton.

Charles touched Lennie’s sleeve very gently. ‘Don’t look suddenly, but Chox is up there.’

‘Where?’

‘In the lighting gallery.’

The comedian moved his head slowly until the menacing, emaciated figure came into his line of vision. ‘Shit. Yes. It looks like he doesn’t think you were scared off sufficiently!’

‘If he’s come to scare me a bit more, he’s certainly succeeding. What shall I do?’

‘Look, you nip out of the studio through the control box. I’ll go and have a word with him and tell him you’ve gone home.’

‘He’s hardly going to believe you. I’m still in make-up and costume.’

‘He won’t think of that.’

‘You mean he thinks I normally go around in a red frock coat and red check trousers.’

‘Leave it to me. If I keep him talking long enough, you’ll have had time to get changed. But just stay in the back of the control box for about an hour. He’ll have gone by then.’

‘OK. I hope you are right. There’s rather a lot of electrical equipment round this place. Paradise for a murderer like Chox.’

‘Don’t worry, the unions won’t let him touch a thing. You can bet that in television there’s a special union in charge of electrocution.’

‘Ha bloody ha.’

Charles sat on a thickly upholstered seat in a small annex separated by glass from the main control room. It was designed for the accommodation of television executives, foreign buyers, agents of very important artists and directors’ girl-friends, but now it was empty. No one wanted to watch the pre-recording of an opening caption sequence on a Tuesday evening at eight o’clock.

He felt shivery and ill at ease. He trusted Lennie Barber, but suppose the comedian could not get to Chox, or suppose Chox didn’t believe him about Charles’ departure. . He began to wonder, too late as usual, why the hell he got himself into these situations.

On the opposite wall of the control room was the bank of monitors which showed the views of the various cameras and Charles watched these in a desultory manner to pass the time. Only two of the cameras seemed to be doing anything relevant. They were making a complicated sequence of graphics, superimposed on slides, which kept breaking down because the two pictures would not stay exactly in line. Tempers in the box were fraying. Wayland Ogilvie kept bawling out the vision mixer and muttering sulphurous asides about Pisceans. The vision mixer snapped back angrily. Only the PA Theresa maintained her customary cool, calling shots with the unruffled poise of a metronome.

Charles found it difficult to get involved in the scene, and the time passed very slowly.

Then he caught sight of something on one of the monitors. It was a shot from a camera which was focused nowhere in particular, just framing the edge of the set. Behind this two figures were visible. Lennie Barber and Chox Morton.

There was no microphone boom near them, so, though Charles fiddled with the speaker controls in the little observation room, he could not hear what was being said.

But the mime was expressive enough. Lennie Barber was definitely telling Chox to go away. Chox seemed doubtful at first, then resigned, and the two parted.

Which was hopeful. If Chox believed Lennie’s story about Charles having left the building, then the pressure was off for a little while at least. If only he could have actually heard what was being said between the two, Charles could have relaxed.

He was soon let off the hook. The door from the studio to the control room opened and Lennie Barber entered, followed by Walter Proud. The comedian came straight through to where Charles was sitting and whispered, ‘It’s all right. He’s gone.’

‘Thanks very much. Bless you, Lennie.’

Walter Proud bustled into the observation room, all jovial importance. ‘Charles, Lennie and I were going to have a bite to eat, talk through a few things. Going to Dollops, you know, that little bistro round the corner. You care to join us?’

‘That’s very kind of you, Walter. I might. Yes, why not? Got to get out of my Wilkie Pole gear, so I should think I’d be along in about half an hour.’

‘Fine. See you then.’

The producer and the comedian left. It was nine-thirty and the end of the studio session. The plugs were pulled out and everyone started to leave (straight to the bar). What hadn’t been done would have to wait for the next, already over-crowded, day.

Charles stretched out for a few minutes, letting the tension drain from his limbs. The problem of an avenging Chox remained, but at least he had earned a brief reprieve. After five minutes, he felt almost human and started out for his dressing room.

It was when he got into the corridor that Charles saw Chox. The roadie was visible through the glass doors at the end. He looked jumpy and nervous, waiting.

A moment of panic stopped his mind dead. Then he started to think quickly. The corridor was a dead end, leading only to the Ladies’ and Gents’ lavatories. The only escape for him was back through the control room into the studio.

But even as he realized this, it was too late. In the shock of seeing Chox, he had moved back and was now nearer the lavatories than the control room. Just as he was about to step forward, the roadie turned suddenly towards him and pushed open the door into the corridor.

Instinctively, Charles leaped backwards and shoved his way into the Gents. As he did it, he saw his folly. He was trapped in a cul-de-sac.

He went to one of the cubicles and locked himself in. It would give him a little protection. If necessary, he supposed he could stay in there all night. And in the state he was in, the lavatory could be very useful.

He heard the click of the outer door as someone entered. Then silence. He waited for Chox to speak, or for a blow on the door, or for the appearance of that thin cruel face over the top of the cubicle.

There was nothing.

Then, again, the click of the outer door being opened. This was followed sharply by the sound of another cubicle door being shut and locked. Presumably Chox had hidden himself from a potential witness.

The unseen newcomer seemed to take an unconscionably long time relieving himself, but eventually there was the swish of water in the washbasin and the clank of the roller towel being pulled down. Followed by the soft thud of the outer door closing.

Once again Charles and Chox were the only people in the room. Playing a waiting game.

The silence was oppressive. Every hum of the air conditioning, every gurgle of the cisterns took on a new and menacing identity. But there was no human sound.

Time crawled by, broken-backed. Charles was sweating a lot. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the idea of waiting till someone else came in. Now the studio work had stopped, the building would be empty but for the security men and the crowd in the bar, many floors above. He looked at his watch. Quarter to eleven. The bar-flies would soon be making their meandering ways home to disgruntled wives, to disappointed second wives or with unsuitable PAs.

He couldn’t face the idea of sitting there for another ten hours. Better confront whatever evil there was outside than let his imagination inflate it to terror proportions.

He swallowed deeply, then, in one movement, slid back the bolt, opened the door and stepped outside.

No one.

The row of blue doors was uniform, all closed. He moved softly along, tense for attack, pushing against each door.

Each one gave inward to his pressure. Each cubicle was empty.

Until he came to the one nearest the entrance. That was locked on the inside.

Plucking up courage, he knocked on the door.

Nothing.

He called Chox’s name.

There was no response.

He drew back and crouched to look under the door. He could see the end of a thin leg protruding from discoloured jeans. The foot was encased in a frayed grey plimsoll. He recognized Chox’s clothes.

Still, fearing a trap, he found a lavatory brush and poked at the leg underneath the door. There was no movement.

He rang the security men from the studio control room. Two of them came. One climbed over the top of the cubicle and opened the door. He came out and the three of them looked inside.

Chox Morton was sitting on the closed lavatory seat, leaning back against the pipes. His eyes were closed and his sleeve rolled up to show the pitted terrain of his forearm. The other arm hung loose by his side and on the tiled floor, where it had dropped from his hand, lay a plastic syringe.

He was not breathing.