Free A Series of Murders by Simon Brett

turning his attentions from music to acting, is in danger of being caught in the act!’
    It was a typical piece of nudging copy, but it confirmed what Mort Verdon had told Charles. And confirmed Sippy Stokes’s fairly lowly profile in the entertainment industry. The columnist had presumably tried without success to identify her. Just as well, from Jimmy Sheet’s point of view, that no one had made the connection between the mystery girl at Stringfellow’s and the dead actress whose photograph was all over Thursday’s newspapers.
    Still, the paragraph offered an intriguing new sidelight on the character of Jimmy Sheet. Hmm, thought Charles, maybe newspapers do sometimes contain news that’s interesting.

Chapter Seven
    CHARLES sometimes wondered who found television rehearsal rooms. Was there an elite band of dedicated men whose sole mission was to scour London for boys’ clubs and rugby clubs and church halls and drill halls that passed the stringent tests of suitability for their purpose? How many potential venues were rejected on the grounds of being too comfortable or insufficiently dispiriting? How many were rejected for being too convenient for public transport or because they had adequate parking? How many failed selection because they were actually congenial places in which to spend one’s time?
    The conjectural band of searchers had clearly excelled themselves when they found the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall, in which the rehearsals for
Stanislas Braid
took place. This was the apotheosis of the television rehearsal room, the one for which every other hall in London must have been rejected.
    Situated a good twenty minutes’ walk from the nearest tube station, jammed in an alley between a cement works and a timber yard, whose lorries were a perpetual hazard to anyone foolish enough to risk leaving their car outside, the Lesser Hall’s high windows were so begrimed that what light did filter through had an unhealthy, diluted pallor about it. The lights inside, kept constantly switched on, apologetically illuminated walls the colour of baby shit. As Charles looked around the room on the Monday morning of the second read-through, he realised with delight that he had finally found a context in which to use one of his favourite words: ‘fuscous’.
    The only bright colours in the room, apart from the clothes of the cast and production team, were the strips of variously coloured tape with which the outlines of the different sets had been marked on the floor by assiduous stage managers. But these were largely covered by the long chain of tables, surrounded by chairs, at which the read-through was to take place.
    W. T. Wintergreen – or Winifred Railton – had acknowledged Charles with an inclination of her head but made no reference to their conversation of the previous Friday. She had a script open on her lap and, with her sister, Louisa, as ever, close beside her, was deep in conversation with Dilly Muirfield. From the expression on the script editor’s face, she was getting yet more complaints that the script of this episode, ‘The Italian Stiletto Murder,’ had diverged too far from the original book and that, as Louisa Railton recurrently complained in fierce whispers to her sister, ‘Stanislas Braid just wouldn’t do that.’
    Charles spared a few moments of sympathy for Dilly Muirfield’s role. She was the mediator; it was she who had to listen to the endless cavils of the writer of the books, the writers of the scripts, the stars, the producer, and the director. She then, rather as the floor manager did in the studio, had to translate the complaints into acceptable demands for the people against whom they were made.
    Charles had heard this process in action more than once. He had heard Russell Bentley denouncing the script to Dilly with the words ‘It’s a load of shit – the work of an absolute