Situation Tragedy by Simon Brett Page A

the scene of the crime. Short of introducing a conspiracy theory or the use of a hired killer, there was no way he could have toppled the flower urn which had caused Scott’s death.
    And why should anyone want Scott dead? He had seemed pleasant enough, not the sort to raise instant antipathy like Sadie. Just an ambitious young television director with money problems.
    Mind you, the money problems seemed to have resolved themselves. The new clothes, the new car . . . Charles’s mind did a little spurt. Suppose Scott had witnessed the first murder and blackmailed the killer, thus providing a motive for his own death . . .? Hmm, there might be something there, but there was a distinct lack of hard evidence.
    And, anyway, was there even a murder to investigate? There seemed no real reason to think that the young man was the victim of anything more sinister than an accident. The police, who had made extensive investigations at the scene of his death, seemed satisfied with this solution. And, after all, a young man, flushed with success after a good day’s filming, showing off a powerful and unfamiliar car, was unlikely to be concentrating much on his driving. And the urn of flowers could have fallen of its own accord. Charles knew from having leant against one that they weren’t fixed, just balanced on the wall.
    Yes, it could have fallen of its own accord. But it was a substantial piece of terracotta and there had been no wind. Perhaps a bird could have flown into it or a rabbit or something brushed against it . . . or maybe the vibrations of one of the passing cars had dislodged it, but it all seemed pretty unlikely.
    Maybe one of the cars had scraped against the wall and bumped the urn off . . . But logic was against that too. Whereas one could imagine that the ancient Barton Rivers, at the wheel of his huge Bentley, might be less than secure on the tight turns of the drive, he and Aurelia had not been the last people to go down it. Bernard Walton had followed them and, apart from the fact that he must have known every curve of the approach to his house perfectly, he was unlikely to scrape the gleaming surface of his precious Rolls. And he wouldn’t have been able to drive over the urn if Barton’s Bentley had dislodged it before him.
    So either it just fell, or someone deliberately moved it. And if it had been deliberately moved, it must have happened just after Bernard’s Rolls had driven past.
    If it was a murder, and if it had been planned, then the perpetrator was likely to be someone who knew the layout of Bernard’s grounds, someone who had been there before. The list included Bernard himself, obviously, and, from what they had said during the day, Aurelia and Barton and Peter Lipscombe. Presumably the unfortunate Scott had also been down on a recce to check the location, and who knew how many people would have accompanied him? Certainly the Designer, certainly the Location Manager, possibly Janie Lewis, the PA, possibly dozens of other people. That was the trouble with a crime committed in television – there were always so many people about, it was difficult to reduce lists of suspects.
    Charles concentrated, and tried to remember where everyone had been at the moment of Bernard Walton’s departure in the Rolls. The conjectural saboteur of the urn need not have been in a car; he, or she, could have walked down the hill and moved it. But the picture didn’t come back to him with any clarity. He just remembered a lot of people milling about, clearing up; he couldn’t place individuals.
    No, he came back to one fact: if the urn was moved in order to cause an accident, then the person with the best background knowledge and the best opportunity to do it was Bernard Walton.
    And it was also Bernard Walton with whom Sadie Wainwright had had a blazing row just before her death.
    But why? Why should a highly successful television and theatre star hazard everything by committing