Rebus chatted with Sue for ten minutes or so, and watched as the production team went through its paces. Really, it was a two-man operation – producer and engineer. There was a last-minute panic when Penny’s microphone started to play up, but the engineer was swift to replace it. By five minutes to eleven, the hysteria seemed over. Everyone was calm now, or was so tense it didn’t show. Like troops just before a battle, Rebus was thinking. Penny had a couple of questions about the running order of the night’s musical pieces. She held a conversation with her producer, communicating via mikes and headphones, but looking at one another through the window.
Then she turned her eyes towards Rebus, winked at him, and crossed her fingers. He crossed his fingers back at her.
‘Two minutes everyone…’
At the top of the hour there was news, and straight after the news…
A tape played. The show’s theme music. Penny leaned towards her microphone, which hung like an anglepoise over her desk. The music faded.
‘Hello again. This is Penny Cook, and this is What’s Cookin’. I’ll be with you until three o’clock, so if you’ve got a problem, I’m just a phone call away. And if you want to ring me the number as ever is…’
It was extraordinary, and Rebus could only marvel at it. Her eyes were closed, and she looked so brittle that a shiver might turn her to powder. Yet that voice… so controlled… no, not controlled; rather, it was as though it were apart from her, as though it possessed a life of its own, a personality… Rebus looked at the studio clock. Four hours of this, five nights a week? All in all, he thought, he’d rather be a policeman.
The show was running like clockwork. Calls were taken by the two operators, details scribbled down. There was discussion with the producer about suitable candidates, and during the musical interludes or the commercials -‘… and mmm… it tastes so good’ – the producer would relay details about the callers to Penny.
‘Let’s go with that one,’ she might say. Or: ‘I can’t deal with that, not tonight.’ Usually, her word was the last, though the producer might demur.
‘I don’t know, it’s quite a while since we covered adultery…’
Rebus watched. Rebus listened. But most of all, Rebus waited…
‘OK, Penny,’ the producer told her, ‘it’s line two next. His name’s Michael.’
She nodded. ‘Can somebody get me a coffee?’
‘Sure.’
‘And next,’ she said, ‘I think we’ve got Michael on line two. Hello, Michael?’
It was quarter to midnight. As usual, the door of the production room opened and Gordon Prentice stepped into the room. He had nods and smiles for everyone, and seemed especially pleased to see Rebus.
‘Inspector,’ he said shaking Rebus’s hand. ‘I see you take your work seriously, coming here at this hour.’ He patted the producer’s shoulder. ‘How’s the show tonight?’
‘Been a bit tame so far, but this looks interesting.’
Penny’s eyes were on the dimly lit production room. But her voice was all for Michael.
‘And what do you do for a living, Michael?’
The caller’s voice crackled out of the loudspeakers. ‘I’m an actor, Penny.’
‘Really? And are you working just now?’
‘No, I’m what we call “resting”.’
‘Ah well, they say there’s no rest for the wicked. I suppose that must mean you haven’t been wicked.’
Gordon Prentice, running his fingers through his beard, smiled at this, turning to Rebus to see how he was enjoying himself. Rebus smiled back.
‘On the contrary,’ the voice was saying. ‘I’ve been really quite wicked. And I’m ashamed of it.’
‘And what is it you’re so ashamed of, Michael?’
‘I’ve been telephoning you anonymously, Penny. Threatening you. I’m sorry. You see, I thought you knew about it. But the policeman tells me you don’t. I’m sorry.’
Prentice wasn’t smiling now. His eyes had opened wide in disbelief.
‘Knew about what, Michael?’ Her eyes were staring at the window. Light bounced off her spectacles, sending flashes like laser beams into the production room.
‘Knew about the fix. When the ratings were going down, the station head, Gordon Prentice, started rigging the shows, yours and Hamish MacDiarmid’s. MacDiarmid might even be in on it.’
‘What do you mean, rigging?’
‘Kill it!’ shouted Prentice. ‘Kill transmission! He’s raving mad! Cut the line someone. Here, I’ll do it-’
But Rebus had come up behind Prentice and now locked his own arms around Prentice’s. ‘I think you’d better listen,’ he warned.
‘Out of work actors,’ Michael was saying, the way he’d told Rebus earlier in the day. ‘Prentice put together a… you could call it a cast, I suppose. Half a dozen people. They phone in using different voices, always with a controversial point to make or some nice juicy problem. One of them told me at a party one night. I didn’t believe her until I started listening for myself. An actor can tell that sort of thing, when a voice isn’t quite right, when something’s an act rather than for real.’
Prentice was struggling, but couldn’t break Rebus’s hold. ‘Lies!’ he yelled. ‘Complete rubbish! Let go of me, you-’
Penny Cook’s eyes were on Prentice now, and on no one but Prentice.
‘So what you’re saying, Michael, if I understand you, is that Gordon Prentice is rigging our phone-ins so as to boost audience figures?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Michael, thank you for your call.’
It was Rebus who spoke, and he spoke to the producer.
‘That’ll do.’
The producer nodded through the glass to Penny Cook, then flipped a switch. Music could be heard over the loudspeakers. The producer started to fade the piece out. Penny spoke into her microphone.
‘A slightly longer musical interlude there, but I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll be going back to your calls very shortly, but first we’ve got some commercials.’
She slipped off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
‘A private performance,’ Rebus explained to Prentice. ‘For our benefit only. The listeners were hearing something else.’ Rebus felt Prentice’s body soften, the shoulders slump. He was caught, and knew it for sure. Rebus relaxed his hold on the man: he wouldn’t try anything now.
The Camelot Coffee ad was playing. It had been easy really. Recognising the voice on the commercial as that of the phone caller, Rebus had contacted the ad agency involved, who had given him the name and address of the actor concerned: Michael Barrie, presently resting and to be found most days in a certain city-centre wine bar…
Barrie knew he was in trouble, but Rebus was sure it could be smoothed out. But as for Gordon Prentice… ah, that was different altogether.
‘The station’s ruined!’ he wailed. ‘You must know that!’ He pleaded with the producer, the engineer, but especially with the hate-filled eyes of Penny Cook who, behind glass, could not even hear him. ‘Once this gets out, you’ll all be out of a job! All of you! That’s why I-’
‘Back on in five seconds, Penny,’ said the producer, as though it was just another night on What’s Cookin’. Penny Cook nodded, resting her glasses back on her nose. The stuffing looked to have been knocked out of her. With one final baleful glance towards Prentice, she turned to her microphone.
‘Welcome back. A change of direction now, because I’d like to say a few words to you about the head of Lowland Radio, Gordon Prentice. I hope you’ll bear with me for a minute or two. It shouldn’t take much longer than that…’
It didn’t, but what she said was tabloid news by morning, and Lowland Radio’s licence was withdrawn not long after that. Rebus went back to Radio Three for when he was driving, and no radio at all in his flat. Hamish MacDiarmid, as far as he could ascertain, went back to a croft somewhere, but Penny Cook stuck around, going freelance and doing some journalism as well as the odd radio programme.