Read Killings on Jubilee Terrace for Free Online Page A

accompanied Winnie to the airport.
    ‘Oh, people,’ he said ungratefully.
    ‘Yes, darling. Isn’t it lovely of them? You know everyone—’
    But something had caught Cyril’s eye.
    ‘Cut,’ said Reggie. ‘Now we’ll go back and—’
    On his first word Cyril had begun pushing hisway past Gladys Porter, past Peter Kerridge and Arthur Bradley, and as he pushed he was becoming not Cyril any longer but Hamish, and the people watching him shed their Terrace personae as the scene enacted itself before their eyes.
    Standing beside a kiosk selling magazines and almost everything else a traveller or holidaymaker could need was Bet Garrett. She was there as Bet, not as Rita Somerville, the flower-shop owner she portrayed on her rare appearances in the soap. On her face was a smile – one of anticipation which added nothing of pleasantness or humour to her appearance.
    ‘Darling,’ shouted Hamish with abundant enthusiasm. ‘You didn’t tell me you were coming!’
    ‘I thought I’d see you welcomed back to the Terrace ,’ shouted Bet. ‘And it seemed a good time—’
    ‘It is! A wonderful time! Couldn’t be better.’ He turned to the assembled public, extras and fellow cast members. ‘Be happy for us, all you lot. We’re engaged to be married.’
    There was first silence, then a stunned babble:
    ‘But you can’t—’
    ‘Oh yes we can. You just watch us!’
     
    That night Marjorie Harcourt-Smith sat in the flat she owned in Headingley (where the neighbourscongratulated themselves on having a nationally known figure among them, not one of the dreaded students who infested every other street and alleyway in that unfortunate Leeds suburb) and poured herself a third glass of white wine.
    Marjorie was puzzled. She had been, in the scene that took place at Leeds–Bradford airport, no more than an extra. After Cyril and Lady Wharton had got into Peter Kerridge’s car, she and Arthur had been filmed going towards Arthur’s car, and Gladys Porter had had the momentous line ‘Doesn’t he look sick?’ One of her less memorable days of filming.
    But what worried Marjorie was her attitude towards Cyril. She had been consumed with hatred for him. Not for Hamish, but for the character Hamish played. She had never had any homophobic prejudices: in the acting profession one met homosexuals of all shapes and sizes and it was only a very unintelligent person who could slap easy labels on them as a reason to find them all untrustworthy or contemptible.
    Yet as the scene had been played out she was conscious that she intensely disliked Cyril. Why? What reason could she give herself? He was, in character, a stage designer of limited talents, he was intent on finding himself a working-class lover (or had been before he went off to America), but both here and probably there he had failed tofind any ‘rough trade’, he was both in thrall to his mother yet on occasion rude and dismissive of her. None of these were very dreadful traits, none of them a cause for hatred.
    And yet she suspected that the character of ineffectual, pathetic Cyril had somehow become merged with that of the all too effectual and constantly aggressive Hamish. When she remembered Cyril confiding the fact of his illness to his old mother she hated him because, behind the make-up and the assumed persona, she always saw the vile Hamish. In this, as his fellow participant in an apparently endless saga of conflicting personalities, she was perhaps more fortunate than the average viewer who knew not Hamish, perhaps less so.
    She wondered, not quite idly, if, supposing Hamish were ever murdered, it would be Hamish or Cyril who was the intended victim.

C HAPTER F OUR
At Home
    Garry Kopps, who played Arthur Bradley in Jubilee Terrace , sat at home in the Leeds suburb of Cookridge. He had learnt his lines for the next day – something he was expert at – and had written two pages of his projected work on British and Australian soaps, their moral, social and