Killings on Jubilee Terrace by Robert Barnard

drink at the end of the day, but not an alcoholic one, which had the opposite effect on her to that it had on most people: it kept her awake.
    Philip Marston had rung in the early evening to see if she wanted to come out to the pub. She often enjoyed being with a little knot of Terrace people who drank regularly at The Palace: she thought the other actors enjoyed her tales of Rep disasters in the Fifties and Sixties – and if they didn’t they were good at hiding the fact. She enjoyed their vitality and optimism – so different from the stale and bitter cynicism of Hamish. But she knew Philip asked her more from a sense of social correctness than anything else: she had once heard him say ‘the old are people like the rest of us’, and she’d thought grimly: ‘until they start losing all the things that make them individual’. She enjoyed pub nights, was grateful for being asked, but tried to refuse often enough not to become a fixture.
    She sat in her chair in the two-roomed flat in The Calls, bought before prices had gonethrough the roof but when they were already touching the ceiling. She was happy, satisfied, almost complacent. The end of Cyril was in sight, which meant a final farewell to Hamish. And what made her complacent was that nobody had suggested that Lady Wharton would move away from her inappropriately working-class flat in Jubilee Terrace. And why should she? She had friends there, things to do. If she, Winnie, had been a Lady Wharton she would have stayed on. The enchanting prospect was rising before her of employment until death, or until the dreaded nursing home became an inevitability.
    She had during the last years had a fantasy of being in a nursing home and acting as executioner to all who offended her morals or her tastes: gropers, lovers of Radio One, greedy coveters of other people’s unconsidered trifles. It would be so easy in a nursing home to kill someone, several someones, because people were dying all the time. She felt sure she could ram tablets down their throats while they were asleep, or even while they were in their usual comatose condition.
    Her fantasy of killing Hamish had become less vividly real as his departure date came nearer. Pity, really, because it had been a good idea. And, like all those people she would enjoy bumping off in her old people’s home, it presented itselfto her as an act of social and moral sanitation: benefiting all by an act that improved the quality of their lives.
    Yes, it was a shame that she would no longer be called upon to rescue people in advance from having to endure the agony of acting in a play, film or soap whose cast was also graced by that moral leper Hamish.
    But of course she’d never been serious, had she?
     
    Bet Garrett pushed open the door of her own semi-detached home – or what had until recently been that – and listened. Not a sound. The girls were still at school, and she’d ascertained the fact that Bill would be filming. She hauled her empty suitcases into the hall and went upstairs to the bedroom she had shared (on and off) with Bill. She pulled out the drawers in the dressing table and left the doors of the wardrobe open so she could simply grab the most desirable items and bundle them in the cases. There was no guarantee, she told herself, that Bill would not take all that remained and give them to one of the charity shops.
    She was happily, if haphazardly, engaged in filling the larger case when she became aware of a face at the door.
    ‘Christ, Debbie, you made me jump. What the hell are you doing home?’ She gave another,lesser jump when another face appeared behind the first. ‘Rosie! What is this? What’s that f–ing useless father of yours mean by letting you wag school?’
    ‘We’re not wagging school,’ said Debbie. ‘It’s half term.’
    ‘How was I supposed to know that when nobody told me?’
    ‘You haven’t been around to tell,’ said the third figure to appear at the door. ‘And Dad’s not