‘Now you’ll notice, two of the hats haven’t got any price marked on them. There they are — right next door to each other — the dunce’s hat and the crown! Now if the dunce’s hat comes to rest above your head, Tim, I’m very sorry, but you get absolutely nothing extra.’
‘Ooh,’ sighed the audience, contemplating a fate worse than death.
‘If, on the other hand, it’s the crown, you, Tim Dyer, will instantly become the proud owner of a brand-new Austin Metro!’
‘Aah,’ sighed the audience, reassured, and burst into spontaneous applause.
‘Right, are you ready, Tim?’
The contestant, still praying and now glistening with sweat, nodded. All the lights faded except for those on the wheel and on Barrett’s lectern.
‘Here we go.’ Barrett held the edge of the wheel and gave it a hefty pull. It span wildly.
The host returned to his lectern and watched. Tim Dyer didn’t move a muscle. The audience was totally still.
‘Nerve-racking stuff, this,’ said Barrett Doran. ‘Tense moment.’
He reached for the red-and-blue-striped glass in front of him.
The wheel showed little sign of slowing down. ‘Goes on for ever,’ said Barrett Doran jovially. ‘Dear, oh dear, the excitement’s too much for me. Need a drink of water to calm me down.’
He took a long swig from the glass.
The wheel was slowing. The audience started shouting at it, willing it to stop by the crown. Every eye was on a monitor, hypnotised by the decelerating ring of hats.
Suddenly they were all aware of a strange noise. It was a gasping, a desperate, inhuman wheezing.
A camera found Barrett Doran, from whom the sound came. The audience had time to register the face rigid with shock, before, pulling the lectern down with him, he crashed to the floor.
Full studio lights snapped up. Technicians rushed forward. The celebrities rose to their feet, overturning their long blue desk.
In the circle of hats Tim Dyer stood, pointing up at the still crown directly above his head. But no one looked at him. All eyes were drawn to the middle of the set, where Barrett Doran lay dead.
Chapter Five
Charles Paris heard about Barrett Doran’s death that evening. It was hard to escape it in the W.E.T. bar, where much less dramatic events were regularly inflated into Wagnerian productions. He heard that doctors and the police had been called, but had left W.E.T. House and was on his way back to his Bayswater bedsitter before anyone mentioned the word ‘murder’.
The next morning the death was reported on radio and in Charles’s Times, but it was not until the afternoon’s edition of the Standard that it was suggested the incident might have been caused by anything other than natural causes. Two days later the press announced that a woman was helping the police with their enquiries into Barrett Doran’s death, and the following day a 24-year-old employee of West End Television, Caroline Postgate, was charged with his murder. Then, as always with British crimes, all information on the case would cease until the trial.
The girl’s name meant nothing to Charles, but, having been virtually on the spot when the murder happened, he felt intrigued by it and wanted to find out more. His first move was to contact his agent. Maurice Skellern, though completely deaf to vibrations of new productions coming up which might lead to jobs for his clients, had a very good ear for theatrical gossip, and was likely to know as much as anyone about a juicy theatrical murder.
Still, first things first. Charles asked the mandatory question about whether there was any work coming up.
Maurice Skellern laughed wheezily down the phone, as if this was the best joke he had heard for a long time. He did not answer the question; nor did Charles really expect him to. He knew that, on the rare occasions when something did come up, his agent would ring him.
Maurice was quickly on to the real subject of the conversation. ‘Had a bit of excitement the other night at W.E.T., I gather.’
‘You could say that.’
‘You got any dirt on it to tell me?’
‘’Fraid not. I was ringing you in search of the same.’
‘But come on, Charles. You were actually there.’
‘Up in the bar.’
‘So what else is new? So how much do you know?’
‘Just that he died on the set at the end of the recording, and now some girl I’ve never heard of has been charged with his murder.’
‘Well, what can I tell you? For a start, he was poisoned. Did you know that?’
‘No. With what?’
‘Cyanide.’
‘Ah.’ One or two things began to fall into place. ‘Cyanide which was being used for the programme in the studio next door?’
‘You have it in one. Something that boring little poseur Melvyn Gasc was doing, apparently. Seems the cyanide got nicked from there and put into poor old Barrett’s glass instead of water.’
‘Gin.’
‘What?’
‘Instead of gin. Barrett’s water-glass on the set was filled with gin.’
‘Was it? How do you know that?’
Discretion dictated a slight editing of the next reply. ‘One of the researchers was talking about it. So presumably this girl who’s been arrested was the one who substituted the cyanide?’
‘Yes.’
‘Caroline Somebody-or-other. Know anything about her?’
‘She was an Assistant Stage Manager on Melvyn Gasc’s programme. She had been left in charge of all the props and that, so it was easy for her to lift the cyanide.’
‘Ah.’ Light began to dawn. ‘Was this girl nicknamed Chippy?’
‘That’s right. Why, you know her?’
‘I met her that night.’
The girl’s beautiful, fragile face came into his mind. So, when he saw her, she had been contemplating murder. Perhaps that explained the tragedy in her deep, dark eyes.
‘Needless to say, there was a background,’ Maurice went on. ‘She and Barrett had been having an affair. He had just broken it off. Classic situation. “Hell hath no fury. .”, all that.’
‘Yes,’ Charles agreed pensively.
‘Not a lot more I can tell you,’ his agent concluded. ‘Though I gather, talking to people in the business, nobody’s that sorry. Barrett Doran doesn’t seem to have made many friends on his way to the top.’
‘Having seen him in action, I’m not too surprised.’
‘No. Presumably means they’ll have to remake the pilot. Wonder if you’ll get booked again. .’
‘Not if anyone’s got any sense. It was a daft idea having an actor as one of the people in that round.’
‘Ah, but nobody has got any sense in the game-show world.’
‘You mean otherwise they’d be doing something else?’
‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Anyway, why do you say it’s such a daft idea having an actor for the round?’
‘Because the whole premise of that part of the game is based on people’s anonymity, and actors, by definition, aren’t anonymous. They’re always in the public eye.’
‘Are you saying somebody recognised you?’
Charles was forced to admit that this had not been the case.
‘But, come the game, you mean subconsciously they all recognised you and all identified you as the actor?’
Charles was forced to admit that two out of the four contestants had thought he was a hamburger chef.
Maurice Skellern thought this very funny. His asthmatic laughter was still wheezing down the line when Charles said his goodbyes and put the phone down.
He stood for a moment on the landing of the house in Hereford Road. He was feeling shaken. Not by the news of the murder, but by the thought of his illicit sips of gin from Barrett Doran’s glass. A little bit later and his thirst might have killed him. It was an unpleasant frisson.