Killings on Jubilee Terrace Read online

  The Killings on Jubilee Terrace

  ROBERT BARNARD

  Contents

  Title Page

  CHARACTER LIST

  CHAPTER ONE: A Death

  CHAPTER TWO: A Wedding

  CHAPTER THREE: In Sickness and in Health

  CHAPTER FOUR: At Home

  CHAPTER FIVE: Deathbed Scene

  CHAPTER SIX: Aflame

  CHAPTER SEVEN: A Burnt-Out Case

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Actors Born and Made

  CHAPTER NINE: Scripting a Death

  CHAPTER TEN: Private Lives

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Kinds of Loving

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Wife and Mother

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: On Location

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A Special Case

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Night in Question

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Those Responsible

  About the Author

  Also by Robert Barnard

  Copyright

  CHARACTER LIST

  Arthur Bradley – played by Garry Kopps

  Will Brown – played by James Selcott

  Maureen Cooke – played by Shirley Merritt

  Harry Hornby – played by Les Crosby

  Dawn Kerridge – played by Susan Fyldes

  Norma Kerridge – played by Carol Chisholm

  Peter Kerridge – played by Philip Marston

  Kevin Plunkett – played by Stephen Barrymore

  Bert Porter – played by Vernon Watts

  Gladys Porter – played by Marjorie Harcourt-Smith

  Rita Somerville – played by Bet Garrett

  Vicar – played by George Price

  Cyril Wharton – played by Hamish Fawley

  Lady Wharton – played by Winnie Hey

  Bob Worseley – played by Bill Garrett

  Sally Worseley – played by Liza Croome

  Young Foulmouth – played by Theodor Mossby

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Death

  ‘Bert – I’m home,’ Gladys Porter called up the stairs, when she had let herself into the hallway of her terraced house. ‘I’ll put the kettle on for a nice cup of tea.’

  She was about to potter through to the kitchen when her face registered that there had been no reply.

  ‘Bert? I said I’d make a nice cup of tea.’

  Still there was silence from above.

  Gladys put down her shopping bag and ran stumbling up the stairs. Seconds later she was running down them, through the door, and out into Jubilee Terrace, where she fell into the arms of her neighbour Norma Kerridge.

  ‘It’s my Bert,’ she sobbed, her face a picture of distress. ‘Help me, Norma. I think he’s…dead.’

  The viewing public, of course, already knew that Bert was dead. Vernon Watts, the actor who for the past ten years had played Bert in Jubilee Terrace, had had a heart attack two months previously while crossing the road in Highgate, where he lived. He had been hit by a bus and had died shortly afterwards in hospital. Since then the character had been written out of the series, apparently confined to bed with a vague, undiagnosed illness. Now he was out for good.

  The public had been grieved by the death of Vernon Watts. He had once been a comic round the Northern clubs and smaller music halls, and his public image was of a plump, genial man, ‘a bit of a card’. St Stephen’s Church in Highgate, where Watts had not worshipped, was ablaze with flowers from his fans, most of them addressed to Bert Porter. His widow received very little media attention, but his Jubilee Terrace widow had been lovingly photographed sobbing as she came out of the church. His real widow did not mind her neglect. She was glad not to have had to pay public tribute to her hated husband.

  ‘He was like a second husband to me,’ his television widow was quoted as saying to a Daily Star reporter.

  In the studio canteen, after filming the scene of Bert’s demise, Marjorie Harcourt-Smith, who played Gladys, dabbed at her eyes with a little lace handkerchief.

  ‘I’ve been dreading doing that scene,’ she said, in her impeccably Mayfair normal voice. ‘And it was awful. Thank God it’s in the bag. It was really upsetting.’

  Carol Chisholm, who played Norma Kerridge the neighbour, sipped at her tea and kept her eyebrows firmly unraised.

  ‘But you and Vernon never really…got on, did you?’ she said, trying to be tactful.

  ‘I hated Vernon Watts more than anyone in my whole life – barring my husband, God rest his soul. That’s beside the point. We had a professional partnership. The fact that we also had a personal guerilla war is neither here nor there.’

  It was a distinction Carol Chisholm grasped very easily. She nodded her professional understanding.

  ‘Of course it’s different with us. Philip and I get on quite well. I don’t mean I’m in the least attracted, or him to me, or that we’d marry if my husband and his wife died or anything like that. But we do enjoy each other’s company. We have a lot of drinks together, as you know, and a lot of laughs. That means that filming the Kerridge family scenes is usually a pleasure.’

  Marjorie tucked a cigarette into an immensely elegant ivory holder. It was a demonstration against the fact that smoking was now forbidden in the canteen. The gesture was weakened by her failure to light up.

  ‘It’s Susan you can’t abide,’ she said shrewdly.

  ‘Now that’s not fair. We’re always perfectly polite to each other. She’s still young. There’s lots of time for her to grow out of her…’ Carol’s voice faded away as she gazed over to the other side of the canteen. ‘Look at her now. Snotty little bitch.’

  The Porters and the Kerridges were next-door neighbours on Jubilee Terrace, and (barring occasional upsets) bosom friends. The Porters had had just the one son, a ne’er-do-well youth who had emigrated to Australia where he was said, as even Mr Micawber was said, to be doing well. The Kerridges had a son and a daughter. The son was in the merchant navy. The actor who wants out of a soap is usually either killed or sent to the colonies. If he wants out with the option of occasional return spots he is as often as not sent to sea with the Royal or merchant navy, and the next the public hears of him he is doing pantomime in Worthing. The fact that Britain hardly has a fleet of any kind these days has not impinged on the world of soaps.

  Which left the Kerridges’ daughter. Dawn was her name, and ten years back she had been an enchanting child – played by a dire little tot from stage school, now with the Royal Shakespeare Company and infinitely contemptuous of television soaps. Dawn had disappeared from the series for a time, spoken of but not seen, and she had reappeared two years before, a pretty, pouting sixteen, and played by Susan Fyldes.

  The two women stared over to where Susan was deep in conversation with Dawn’s current boyfriend, a young black actor with a pronounced public school accent.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Carol, in a boding-ill voice, ‘if she didn’t keep throwing it at you how bloody well-born she is.’

  ‘Oh yes, we’ve all been told her family limps back to the seventeenth century,’ agreed Marjorie. ‘Who cares? And it’s hard to see that as a qualification for working on Jubilee Terrace.’

  ‘But she’s a good little actress,’ said Carol, very obviously trying to be fair. ‘She’s got the accent off almost as well as you have, and she does the sweet ingénue to the life.’

  ‘But a shade vacuous, don’t you feel?’

  ‘Well, but that’s not a drawback. The Kerridges in general are hardly likely to produce a mastermind.’

  ‘There is a blankness behind the eyes – the ultimate give-away,’ pronounced Marjorie magisterially. ‘Look at early Elizabeth Taylor films.’ She watched the young pair’s close, conversing heads. ‘She seems
to be getting on better with James at the moment.’

  ‘Darling, she detests him. It’s just as with you and Vernon. They’re good professionals.’

  ‘He’s certainly wonderfully handsome,’ said Marjorie. ‘I could fancy him myself.’

  ‘Fancy, yes,’ agreed Carol. ‘But not like. Considering they are currently the nation’s sweethearts they are neither of them very high in the likeability stakes.’

  ‘I know Bill absolutely loathes James,’ said Marjorie. ‘He’s been like a bear with a sore head ever since James came into the series. Look at him now – just gazing at them.’

  They looked towards another table, where Bill Garrett and his Jubilee Terrace wife Liza Croome were drinking halves of lager. Bill and Liza played Bob and Sally Worseley, licensees of the Duke of York’s. The character of Bob, established there since the series began, was an ex-boxer, now publican, whose barmaid wife was a perpetual source of anxiety and sexual jealousy. Rather unfortunately life mirrored fiction, for Bill was in fact an ex-boxer whose tarty wife at home, and her goings-on with all and sundry, had provided staple canteen gossip for the Terrace cast since time immemorial. The fact that she had an occasional role in the Terrace did not help matters. Liza Croome, however, was the reverse of her role: her blowsiness was a matter of makeup and accent, and she was in reality a gentle and warm-hearted soul who had acted as shoulder-to-weep-on to Bill in his emotional troubles more often than she cared to remember.

  ‘Of course Bill’s dislike of James is racial,’ said Marjorie, with that air of omniscience that many found irritating. ‘We all dislike him, but Bill dislikes him because he is black.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’ demanded Carol. ‘I’ve never heard him use words like “wog” or “nigger”, not about James or anyone else – and he would if that was the way he thought. Bill is rather uncouth underneath.’

  ‘He’s rather uncouth on top. But it’s obvious. Bill was a boxer. All the best boxers are black. He must have been knocked to the canvas – is that the expression? – countless times by black boxers, because he was never very good. I’m sure he nurses a grudge.’

  ‘You’re going off into one of your fantasy worlds,’ said Carol. ‘Bill was never a boxer, except to get a bit of money while he put himself through drama school. We all did the same – waitressing, barmaiding, right down to going on the game. Bill doesn’t nurse grudges through half a lifetime, and certainly not about being knocked to the canvas.’ She leant forward. ‘But I think there is a quite different explanation.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘I think he fancies Susan.’

  ‘But he’s old enough to be her father!’

  ‘Didn’t we just agree we fancied James?’

  Liza Croome sat beside Bill Garrett in what once would have been companionable silence. They had often been thus – or else Bill had sat there, telling her in a low voice and hopeless tones about the latest exploits of his wife. They were exceptionally close, though there was not a spark of sexual attraction between them. Liza knew him through and through, liked being near him, and could predict his every reaction. Almost as if I were his wife, she often thought – the wife in a long-established marriage which had settled into a comfortable and comforting routine.

  But in the last few weeks a new element had entered, something she did not quite know how to cope with.

  ‘Bill,’ she said, a clear note of warning in her voice.

  Bill sat up and shook himself.

  ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’

  ‘What were you thinking about?’ she asked, her voice back into neutral.

  He turned to her, squared his shoulders, and said, as if he had received a sudden, divine clarification: ‘I’ve decided to leave Bet.’

  It was what Liza had been urging him to do for years. Bet was no good for him – no good for anyone. She was a whore with a heart of steel. Now it had come, and she felt the need to inject a note of caution.

  ‘I’m glad. But it won’t do any good, you know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Liza nodded towards the table where Susan and James sat, still close and absorbed.

  ‘The only thing that will do any good there is to keep out of Susan’s way as much as possible – go out to the pub when she comes to the canteen, keep away from her dressing room, keep away from her on set. Just don’t go near her.’

  ‘Come off it. You don’t think I have hopes—’

  ‘You have dreams, which is no better. You let them invade real life, and that’s dangerous. You’ve just got to close down on the whole thing – like any other fire.’

  Bill Garrett looked away from her.

  ‘She’s of age to come into the pub in a fortnight’s time,’ he muttered.

  ‘What do you mean? Susan’s twenty. She’s been going to pubs for years.’

  ‘Not Susan, Dawn Kerridge. She’ll be of age to come into the Duke of York’s. There’ll be a lot more scenes involving the two of us.’

  That was true, and unwelcome. Liza Croome wished that Susan would find a steady boyfriend, though she rather thought that at the moment she too much relished her position as sexual tease to the male cast of Jubilee Terrace and to the males of the nation at large.

  ‘We’ll insist on a close-up of the two of us there,’ said James. ‘When you say “I’ve never done it seriously before. Only at school for fun.”’

  ‘That’s right. And they can hold it for “I thought I was serious, but it was never like this.” Christ, what an awful line!’

  ‘Ghastly. But pure soap. It would be a pity to change it. Then they can back off a bit for the next lines, and then come closer as our two faces come together for the kiss, and you go down on to the bed.’

  ‘Cut. Cut before I get there. Reggie will insist on that. Leaving the mugs in doubt whether we do or we don’t.’

  ‘And in fact we don’t, because that’s going to come up in about six weeks’ time. Will we, won’t we? God, what a sickening pair. Pantomime would be a greater challenge.’ James stood up. ‘Right. That’s all settled. I don’t think Reggie will disagree about the close-ups. See you on set.’

  He nodded brusquely and walked away. As she watched his back, Susan thought: I just love that oily black skin. I could go for him, if he wasn’t such a shit.

  And, walking away, James Selcott – Will Brown in the soap – thought the equivalent. He generally referred to her to outsiders as a prick-tease with pretensions. Their judgements, in both cases, were eminently fair.

  ‘Lady Wharton’ sat in a corner of the main set, learning her lines. Winnie Hey, who played her, found remembering anything increasingly difficult as she got older. Winnie loved sitting on the Terrace set, felt that it was as good as sitting in the garden. The houses were small, though room by room each had been enlarged over the years. The scriptwriters wished they had made them larger than the traditional two-up two-down. Then extra characters could be moved in and out more convincingly. As it was one house could contain six or seven characters without it being explained where they all slept. The scriptwriters relied on viewers not noticing, but a regular trickle of mail testified to the fact that the devoted viewer did. A two bedroom house containing three generations of a family, with boyfriends or girlfriends in and out, was obviously full to bursting.

  ‘Lady Wharton’ had been a brainwave of Reggie Friedman, the director, about five years before. Not one of the other soaps, he insisted, had a member of the aristocracy in it. Why should they be discriminated against? It could prove a trump card: Jubilee Terrace would be the only British soap with snob appeal. He carried the day: the people responsible for soaps love ‘onlys’ and ‘firsts’. Cyril Wharton had moved into a flat in the Terrace as the advance guard. He was a stage designer, and it was made clear that he was excessively mothered, and escaping from apron strings. His sexual leanings were sketched in, but they almost never met with success with the sturdy working-class boys of the Terrace. He decorated the spacious ground floor fl
at as if it were a set for Lady Windermere’s Fan. Not long after that his mother had moved in, and not long after that Cyril had fled to the more welcoming environment of San Francisco.

  But Lady Wharton had remained in Jubilee Terrace. It was never quite explained why, but it was delicately hinted that she was genteelly hard-up. Her elder son, the present baronet, was something of a brute in merchant banking. Anyway, there she was, the Terrace’s cut-price Lady Bracknell – cut price only because the posse of scriptwriters never thought up lines for her anything like as good as Wilde’s. Winnie was overjoyed she had been kept in. Stable employment was something to be valued at her age. She had been hard-up all her life – and not genteelly so. At times she had been cold, she had been hungry. Now she had recognition on buses and tubes, and above all butter on her bread. It was something a young actor might throw away, but not an old one. It was worth clinging to. Winnie, frowning, concentrated on her lines.

  ‘The haddock you sold me yesterday was so dubious even the cat thought twice,’ she intoned.

  ‘Hello, Winnie.’

  It was Reggie Friedman, breezing by. He was always breezing by, or throwing information at you in rapid staccato and not waiting for your reaction. Reggie had been the principal director of Jubilee Terrace for seven years, and still seemed to revel in it. This time, for once, he darted over.

  ‘I’ve had a marvellous idea, Winnie. To fill the gap left by Bert Porter’s death. I thought of the Kerridge boy, but Phil has got a long-term contract with the Glasgow Citizens, and he’s not interested till next year at the earliest. But I’ve come up with something much better. We’ll have Cyril back.’

  Winnie’s voice suddenly failed her. By the time she did get out ‘Oh no, not Cyril’ Reggie was in full flood of enthusiasm.

  ‘Yes. Isn’t it a great idea? Back from San Francisco. Big mystery. Why has he come home? And you know why? He’s got tuberculosis. Come home to die. Isn’t that a fabulous plot-line? None of the other soaps has woken up to the resurgence of tuberculosis. We’ve all had tactful looks at senile dementia. And of course there isn’t a soap that hasn’t done AIDS. But all the time TB has been staging a comeback.’