Paul Temple and the Harkdale Robbery. Francis Durbridge
He didn’t feel happy having his face made up.
‘Do I have to be made up like this?’ Paul protested as a matter of form.
‘Oh yes, it’s terribly hot under the lights. You’ll perspire, and we wouldn’t want you to look shiny, would we?’
‘Heaven forbid.’
Miss Benson put the finishing touches to his lips, patted his face with powder and then whipped away the towel from under his chin. ‘There, now you look like an extremely well preserved novelist.’
He rose from the chair and scowled. ‘I am an extremely well preserved novelist.’
‘Exactly.’
Another girl popped her head round the door, exactly on cue, and said, ‘Are you ready for Hospitality now, Mr Temple?’
‘I suppose so.’
Paul waved a resigned farewell to Miss Benson and followed the second girl to a room at the end of the corridor. Four brightly attractive young ladies were chatting up four nervous middle aged men.
‘My name’s Andrea Turberville,’ Paul’s bright young lady told him. ‘I gather you’ve been through all this before.’
‘Yes. What happens next is that you conjure up a very large whisky and ginger wine.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘and a small sherry for me.’ In fact they were conjured up by a chirpy young man. ‘Not nervous, are you?’ Andrea asked.
‘Terrified.’ He wasn’t, but it seemed the right thing to say. Paul didn’t want to appear blasé. ‘I’m always tempted on occasions like these to hire a professional actor, so that he can project his personality and remember all the witty lines I think of afterwards. Do you know any good professional actors?’
She laughed as if it were all part of her job.
‘Don’t worry. Brian’s terribly good at putting people at their ease. He’ll help you out if you forget the title of your latest novel or if you suddenly become convinced that your flies are undone. Brian’s terribly professional.’
Paul glanced cautiously down at his trousers.
‘By the way, have you met your fellow performers? Let me introduce you –’
Brian Clay conducted a chat programme for ITV that aspired to treat serious subjects in a serious way between interludes of pop song and dance. The serious subject this week was crime. Paul Temple had just written a series of newspaper articles in which he claimed that crime was no longer a haphazard collection of underdogs dabbling in a spot of burglary, as it had been, but an organised business with no place for the amateur. So Paul Temple was on the show.
He would be talking to Freddy the Drummer, a man who had spent most of his life in and out of approved schools, borstals and gaol, to a retired agent of MI5 or MI6, nobody seemed sure which, and to an elderly MP who wanted to bring back the birch and arm the police.
Paul said hello to them and mentioned the weather. It would take all of Brian Clay’s well known sincerity and charm to produce brilliant talk from this bunch of egotists, Paul decided. The MP was talking as if he feared that once he paused for breath somebody else might speak, and the braying tones were designed to wake up apathetic voters at the back of the hall.
‘What do you think of this circus?’ Paul asked the MI5 or 6 agent.
‘I think everybody’s terribly talented and sincere,’ he said absently. His brightly attractive young lady was keeping him primed with a continuous supply of whisky. ‘Terribly professional.’
Paul nodded and wondered whether to talk instead to Freddie the Drummer. But Freddie was sprawled in an armchair, sprawling lower and lower in an attempt to get a better view of Andrea’s mini skirt.
‘I think it’s time we went onto the set,’ said Andrea Turberville. ‘It’s a few minutes early, but we ought to see you under the lights. I’ll take you to Richard Cross. He’s the director.’
The set was the usual table surrounded by armchairs. There was water in carafes and there were ashtrays everyone was told not to use while on camera. Andrea sat them all down to face a tiered audience of two hundred people. There was a stage over to the right where the dancers would dance, and behind the stage a dance band was playing to warm up the audience.
‘Paul Temple, eh?’ barked the MP. He had sat in the next armchair. ‘I suppose you writer chaps have been hit by the abolition of capital punishment. No dragging off the villain at the end of the piece. Who cares who dun it when the fellow just goes and spends the rest of his life in comfort at the expense of the ratepayer?’
Richard Cross scurried across the studio to welcome them all. He said that it should be a terribly controversial programme and Brian was thrilled to have them all on the show. ‘I think we’ll start with Paul’s thesis about big business, is that all right, Paul? And then we’ll talk about how the police aren’t really equipped to cope with such streamlined organisation, and we’ll talk about spies and undercover work. It’ll be riveting. The milk will boil over in a million homes. Any questions?’
‘Yes,’ said the man from Intelligence. ‘What happened to that little dolly with the whisky?’
Richard Cross gave a faintly distraught laugh.
The Melody Girls had been rehearsing on the stage to the right, and Paul noticed that one of them had remained on the set. She was a tall redhead with strikingly troubled green eyes. Paul thought that she was coming across to them, but somebody called her, and after a moment’s hesitation she went away. Her green flaired chiffon costume was too brief to be hanging around in draughts.
‘Sir Michael,’ the director said to the MP, ‘I wonder whether you’d change places with Paul? Your spectacles are upsetting camera number two. Miss Benson! Where’s Miss Benson? Freddie the Drummer needs some powder on his bald patch –’
The audience suddenly applauded as a dark, moodily intense young man walked onto the set. He was dressed in a dramatic black suit with white frills, and the one touch of colour was his floppy red bow tie. Without looking across he waved a languid hand in acknowledgment of the clapping. ‘Hi,’ he said to his guests in general. ‘Great to see you, marvellous. It’ll be a great programme.’ He was Brian Clay.
‘We’re on in ninety seconds, Brian,’ said the director.
‘Great.’ The super-cool young man sat in the centre seat behind the desk and smiled dramatically. ‘Hi,’ he said to Freddie the Drummer, ‘great to have you out in time for the programme. Paul! How nice to have you on the show.’ He leaned across and offered a languid hand. ‘I thought your last book was great.’
Paul beamed complacently. The nice thing about being flattered by Brian Clay was that he bothered to do it. Clay had the art of seeming to bestow a royal favour, which was warming for the brief moment it lasted. He was terribly sincere. But while Paul was grinning at the military intelligence agent in private amusement they had gone on the air.
‘Hi,’ Brian Clay was saying, ‘and good evening. Tonight we’re going to discuss one of the central, most real threats to our health and security, one of the most dramatic aspects of the world today. I’m talking about crime, and the way it is likely to touch us all in the next ten years, because it’s the fastest growing disease in our society. It no longer only happens to other people –’
His voice was faintly rasping, as if the menace were there among them. ‘And here to discuss it with us tonight –’ He was a professional. He had all the sensational statistics on cards before him, and his intensity would have quite a few old ladies glancing over their shoulders at the back door. ‘Mr Paul Temple, crime writer and in his own way, criminologist!’
A man over to the right waved and the audience applauded. Paul glanced down in sudden apprehension at his trousers.
‘Paul, tell me what’s so different about this present situation. Is