Free A Series of Murders by Simon Brett Page A

incompetent. I mean, the character of Stanislas Braid virtually disappears for the whole middle of the episode.’
    And he had heard Dilly relaying the message to Will Parton in conciliatory tones: ‘I was just wondering whether it might be better if we inserted a little extra scene for Stanislas Braid in the middle here, you know, just to remind the audience how he’s proceeding with his investigation?’
    He had also heard Will Parton’s response to this suggestion, and though the object of the writer’s vilification had been Russell Bentley, it was Dilly Muirfield who had to listen to all the foul language. She really was in a no-win situation.
    Working for a producer like Ben Docherty, whose daily Jekyll and Hyde act made him quite capable of spending the whole afternoon reversing all the decisions he had made in the morning, can’t have made the script editor’s job any easier.
    What was striking about that morning in the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall was how little impact the death of Sippy Stokes had made on the production. Rick Landor, the one person who might have been personally affected, was not there, and for the new Director it was ancient history, something that had happened the week before, nothing to do with him.
    The new Director was only in his late twenties. This was his first major production, and he was very much on his dignity, determined to impose his authority on the proceedings. His mind was too full of the professional challenges of the coming fortnight to have any room for thoughts of the previous week’s death.
    But the rest of the cast and production team, those who had been working with the dead girl only a few days before, seemed equally unaffected. The ripples caused by her death had quickly smoothed themselves out, and the surface of the production was just as it had been before.
    Or, to be truthful, it was rather better than it had been before. Previously, the knowledge of what a bad actress Sippy Stokes was had infected everyone with a kind of unease, the feeling that her incompetence might be sabotaging the chances of their series.
    The new girl, Joanne Rhymer, it was immediately evident, would be a very different proposition. For a start, she looked much better for the part. Sippy Stokes, though an attractive girl, had had a gypsy, almost tarty quality about her. Her dark hair and sensuous lips had seemed too knowing for the innocent Christina, and the woodenness of her performance had given some of her lines an unwanted air of innuendo, as if she were sending up their naiveté.
    But Joanne Rhymer, although dressed as fashionably as befitted a twenty-year-old actress, had about her a timeless quality. Her face was heart-shaped, and her blond hair showed off flashes of auburn even in the muted lighting of the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Lesser Hall. She had a trim figure that would suit the range of thirties dresses so painstakingly assembled by Wardrobe.
    Above all, she had about her an air of credible innocence. The potentially twee lines of Christina, the cloying relationship between her and her father, might become almost believable when expressed by this child-woman.
    Charles couldn’t help speculating about how much her character reflected the innocence of her appearance. His conversation with Maurice had reminded him of Gwen Rhymer’s fabled nymphomania. Was it by any chance a characteristic that the daughter had inherited? Was he looking at another Blue Nun in the making?
    You’re a disgusting, prurient old sod, he told himself. Real classic dirty old man. But this self-administered admonition didn’t stop his speculations. The trouble was, you see, he had once been the beneficiary of Gwen Rhymer’s ‘proclivities’, and while not approving of her behaviour or reputation, he couldn’t help remembering that he had enjoyed the experience enormously. So he felt justified in having