Free Whitstable by Stephen Volk

showed it.
    He’d brought a few pages of script from Scream and Scream Again , the Christopher Wicking draft. He was taking a gamble that Wake hadn’t seen the film and didn’t know it had already been made and released a year ago. He’d torn off the title page and said the film was called Monster City —not a bad title, he thought: he’d been in worse. His role had been Benedek, a Nazi-like cameo with only a couple of scenes, but he told Wake he was lined up to play the Alfred Marks part, Superintendent Bellaver, the Scotland Yard detective given the run around by a spate of vampiric serial murders.
    For a full three-quarters of an hour he asked the policeman questions about playing Bellaver. How would he address his assistants? How would he talk to a murder suspect? Whether a line seemed plausible. Whether another was properly researched. And when Wake replied, he scribbled notes copiously in the margins, underlining or circling the text, double-underlining on occasion, when he received details of special, usable significance. This, he knew, would please Wake as a kind of flattery. These days people’s hearts were warmed by an affiliation to Hollywood in the way that past generations were by touching the hem of royalty. But, of course it was all nonsense. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the Inspector’s advice, and was hardly listening to his answers. The important questions—the vital questions—were yet to come. He was treading water, if the man but knew it. He had a plan. And it was nothing to do with the neatly-formatted pages in front of him.
    “Well, thank you. You’ve been most helpful. I shan’t take any more of your time.” Cushing rose from the chair. “I’m sure you have better things to do than talk to me.” He shook hands in his sincere, country-parsonish way, buttoned up his coat and moved to the door. Whereupon he paused, his fingers fluttering next to his mouth—perhaps too theatrical a gesture?—before turning turned back to the seated detective.
    “Yes?”
    “Actually there’s another script. Not a script, a story treatment I’ve been sent by a film company. Very intense. Very troubling. I’m not at all sure I shall accept the part, but…” He hesitated, tugged his lower lip, waved his hand as if dismissing the idea, criss-crossing his scarf on his chest, showing Wake his back then peeking back over his shoulder. “I feel in my bones the writer hasn’t really done his homework. In a legal sense.”
    “Well, here I am. Run it by me. I’ll be able to tell you if it rings true. In a police sense, at least.”
    “Are you sure? I don’t like to—”
    “Not at all. I enjoy it. You know I do. It livens up my tea break. Fire away.”
    “Very well.” He sat back down and placed his fingertips together in a steeple. Very Sherlock Holmes. Too Sherlock Holmes? “This is a Canadian production. The lead is a Canadian actress who plays the mother. But they might film it in this country.” He didn’t like improvising, but in this instance an off-the-cuff quality was essential. The telling details were most important in a barefaced lie. “I play a headmaster. I suppose it’s essentially a version of M .” No flash of recognition. “The Fritz Lang film?” Still nothing. “The Peter Lorre movie? Set in Germany?”
    “Oh.”
    “Have you seen it?”
    “Yes, of course.” Clearly he hadn’t. “Remind me what it was about again.”
    “Lorre plays a disturbed man. A man who kidnaps and murders children. A child molester who becomes hunted down by society. A horrible character, paradoxically portrayed as sad and lonely and even strangely sympathetic.”
    “No, I’ve never seen it.” The policeman stood up. “Why would anyone want to see a film about that?”
    “These things happen in the world, I suppose.”
    “All the more reason not to put them in films. I go to the pictures to enjoy myself, I don’t know about you.” He stood, running his fingers round the