Coincidence

Vince Poll didn’t like coincidences.  In fact he hated them.  Every writer working in his department knew that.  Submit a script to Vince Poll constructed on a coincidence and he would reject it out of hand. 

‘Coincidences don’t happen.  End of story.’  Vince had said this in so many script conferences that it had become a mantra.

         He rose from his vast, steel and glass desk and prowled across his cathedral-sized office to the wall-mounted mirror.  There he checked his reflection as he did numerous times every day.  He was self-consciously aware that he was a man with an image.  He gazed at himself and was pleased with what he saw.  In spite of his diminutive stature (he was five foot two in his elevator shoes) his obsessive workouts had built his body until he was almost as broad as he was tall.  He knew the distended contour of his jaw-line betrayed two decades of steroid abuse but he preferred it to the puny chin he was born with.  His thinning hair was expensively dyed chestnut brown, sharply salon cut and parted at the side.  His crisp white Hugo Boss shirt with the button-down collar was open at the neck and tucked into a pair of neatly ironed Armani slacks.  Perfect. 

‘She isn’t going to know what’s hit her,’ he thought. 

If only he didn’t need to wear the spectacles.  He’d tried contacts but they were intolerably painful and so he had reverted to glasses.  Due to his extreme myopia his lenses were bottle thick and large, giving him the permanent aspect of a surprised owl.  Other than that he was happy with his appearance, allowing for his extreme shortness of course.

         So what had brought the police to his office today of all days?  A cold case, the DI had said.  Vince knew all about those.  He should do, given the number of cop shows he’d made.  It was the timing that bothered him.  Why today?

A supporting artist called Jenny Desmond had disappeared eighteen years ago in Liverpool.  She’d been working at Citrus Pictures on the legendary soap opera, ‘Lark Lane’.  Vince had been there at the time, during his brief period as a Third Assistant Director.  Her remains had been discovered the previous week and the cops were interviewing everybody who had been in contact with the girl around the time of her death.

         ‘Was she murdered?’ Vince had asked them.  In his huge chair behind his vast desk, his feet didn’t reach the floor.

         ‘People don’t bury themselves in the woods, Mr Poll,’ DI Bale had answered grimly.  The cops were seated in small chairs on the other side of the vast desk looking up at Vince.  Detective Inspector Geoffrey Bale (‘call me Geoff’) was a tall, lanky man in his forties.  In his little chair his knees were up around his chin.  He had sandy hair turning grey at the temples and a large reddening nose.  His ruddy features betrayed a fondness for the bottle but he moved like a man who spent enough time in the gym to stay fit.  His younger partner was Detective Constable Indra Bose.  He was shorter than DI Bale and fuller in girth.  He sported a tightly clipped beard and his clear olive skin, Vince surmised, was the result of clean living as much as youth.

         ‘Am I a suspect?’ asked Vince.

         ‘Just routine.  Did you know this woman?’  DI Bale passed a black and white photograph of Jenny Desmond across the desk to Vince.  It was an old eight by ten publicity still.  The sort all aspiring actors have taken.  Vince had seen thousands of these over the years.  The cops must have got it from the girl’s agent.  He glanced at the picture.  She was quite pretty with long dark hair, dimpled cheeks and a willing, toothy smile.  He shook his head.

         ‘Sorry,’ he said.

         ‘You sure?’

         ‘You’re asking me to remember an extra from two decades ago, Geoff.  My memory’s good but…’ he raised his hands in a helpless gesture and left the thought hanging there.

         ‘We understand Mr Poll,’ said DI Bale, ‘but a Third Assistant Director’s job, it does bring you into contact with, what do you call them, supporting artists, doesn’t it?’

         ‘Yes,’ replied Vince.  ‘Directing the background is one of the main elements of the job but there are so many supporting artists and it was a very long time ago.  Another thing is, not wishing to be unkind but, they aren’t exactly the type of people who linger in the memory.  Know what I mean?  There’s a reason why these people are extras, not actors.’

         ‘I see.’ DI Bale was struggling out of his low chair and indicating to DC Bose that they were leaving.

         ‘Well thank you for your time Mr Poll,’ he said.

‘Not at all and don’t hesitate to come back if I can be of any further help,’ said Vince, hopping down from his huge chair.  A quick handshake and the cops were gone.

  Vince stood in the office with his dainty hands on his hips, pondering.  Why today?  Why did they come today?  Paranoia was an essential requirement for the television executive.  The ability to sniff out and neutralise back-stabbing manoeuvrings before they come to fruition was a key weapon in the successful executive’s armoury and Vince was a very successful executive.  The thing that bothered him now was that, perversely, he wasn’t feeling paranoid enough.  His antenna was barely twitching.  He actually believed that they were just, ‘eliminating him from their enquiries.’  Those dumb cops with their bovine, slack-jawed grins and their trusting eyes, he had the impression that they were just happy to be here in televsionland.  Vince reflected that although coincidences can’t happen in drama, in real life they happen all the time. 

         He had killed Jenny Desmond out of love.  At the time a career as a serial killer had beckoned but instead he had subsumed his psychopathic impulses into management.  While firing people and destroying careers was as unsatisfying to Vince as methadone is to a heroin addict, these activities were not illegal and largely as a result of his fabled ruthlessness, he had risen rapidly through the television ranks.

         Yes, he’d killed Jenny out of love but not love for Jenny.  It was his only murder so far, though he’d often contemplated committing more.  Finding the opportunity was the thing, that and getting away with it.  He’d been lucky with Jenny, he knew that.  These days he left nothing to chance.

         The love of Vince’s life, though she didn’t know it, was Anita Chantelle.  She was the young star of ‘Lark Lane’ and to his then youthful eyes, the epitome of glamour.  He remembered the first time he had seen her in the flesh.  How could he forget it?  It was Nineteen Ninety-Three and he had recently started work as a runner at Citrus Studios.  In those days he was bean-pole thin as well as half-blind, but he saw her well enough through his horn-rimmed spectacles, that early morning in the studio canteen.  In full costume and made up for what appeared to be a nightclub scene, she was plucked, preened, fluffed and dressed, eating cheese on toast; a breakfast bird of paradise.  Naturally he was familiar with her from the television.  She and her character, Cheyenne Christie, were then scandalising the tabloids on a weekly basis.  However he was completely unprepared for the unmediated effect of being in the same room with her.  Cheyenne had, until that moment, seemed to him to be a fairly standard soap character, but in that canteen Anita Chantelle shone like a supernova.  He suddenly understood what the word, ‘star’, when applied to actresses, really meant.

Bounteous black tresses tumbled over her sublimely balanced shoulders like a midnight waterfall.  Her eyebrows were thick like Liz Taylor and locked toward a knitted brow as if permanently puzzled, suggesting vulnerability beneath her splendour.  Those dazzling black eyes contained deep mystery.  The famous dimpled cheeks and wide mouth revealed her impossibly perfect ivory overbite every time she smiled and she smiled a lot.  Self-supporting and gravity defying; her super-abundant breasts, hovering at his eye height were miraculous to him.  The child thin waist.  Her Botticelli bottom was a masterpiece.  Rappers had declared lewd rhymes in praise of it.  It was one of nature’s natural works of art, levitating above her strident, dancer’s legs.  Her pointed toes were horned into towering platform stilettos.  She was sex in all its luxurious, indulgent potential, sheathed into a sequinned, silver gown. 

In that cataclysmic moment, Vince had become aware of one over-riding imperative.  He had to have her.  Absurd as it seemed for a lowly and extremely short runner to dream of such a thing, Vince knew that he was destined to possess Anita Chantelle, one way or another. 

That very day he began a determined campaign of ingratiation.  Over the coming months he slaved tirelessly to make himself invaluable to all the cast members but most of all to Anita.  He became their fixer, their driver, their confidant, their social secretary, their drug dealer and their pimp.  He was the indispensible go-to-guy for their every need, available twenty-four seven.  Vince became used to being awoken in the small hours by phone calls from actors in urgent need of class A drugs.  He never complained and always delivered.  There was the time Vince saved Danny Sparx’s skin when he drove a comatose girl to hospital after she had OD’d in Danny’s bed.  Danny had been extremely grateful that the story never got out.  All these favours and more Vince did for no reward other than proximity to the cast but mostly access to Anita.  To make himself more appealing to her, he began working out.

As his value to the cast increased, so too did his value to the production.  Soon he found himself promoted to Third Assistant Director.  No longer was it his job to fetch coffee for the director.  Now he could order someone else to fetch coffee for the director. 

The supporting artists soon came to fear him.  They now relied on him for work but he despised their neediness and took sadistic delight in exploiting their weakness.  He had never been so happy.  So began his ascent of television’s greasy pole. 

Then everything fell apart. 

Vince was now spending every possible moment in Anita’s company.  He knew her foibles and her habits and anticipated her every need.  He had succeeded in making himself essential to her.  He had also become convinced that she loved him, just as he loved her.  How could she not?  It was only natural.  Nevertheless, lunging at her in the car after the Christmas party had been a mistake. 

It was his habit to act as unpaid chauffeur after a cast night out and he would always insist on ferrying Anita wherever she wanted to go.  He had driven her home that night and when he parked she had kissed him on the cheek, as actresses do.  He had over-responded.  Screaming, kicking and tears followed.  He saw the fear in Anita’s eyes and experienced a sublime epiphany as she ran from the car.

This brief moment of pleasure was then tainted when he found he was ostracised by the cast.  He couldn’t believe that after everything he had done for them he was suddenly persona non grata and Anita wouldn’t even look at him. 

A profound bitterness entered his soul. 

He spent his days sulking on set, until he noticed that one of the extras bore a passing resemblance to Anita.  She even had dimples in her cheeks.  Her name was Jenny Desmond.  In a blinding moment of clarity Vince realised that with Jenny there was a way to consummate his love for Anita and to satisfy his burning lust for revenge. 

She was simple and trusting.  She wanted to get into modelling so he arranged for her to come to the studio one Sunday when it would be empty for a photo shoot.  He would take the pictures.  She would wear Anita’s silver dress.  Only the two of them would be there.  She would die.  It would be perfect.



Eighteen years later in his enormous office, Vince glowed at the memory.  He had achieved many things in life but killing Jenny had been his finest moment.  That was when he came to understand what creatives talked about when they discussed art.  Art?  They hadn’t a clue.  Their concept of ‘art’ was so puny, so meaningless as to be beneath contempt.  Jenny had been Vince’s masterpiece.  A sacrificial work of true art dedicated to the love of his life, Anita Chantelle.

The phone rang.

‘Yes,’ he snapped into the receiver.  It was Lottie, his PA on the other end.

‘She’s here,’ said Lottie.

Vince felt a sudden prickly warmth.  He coughed and said as calmly as he could, ‘Show her in.’

Today of all days, he reflected.  The coincidence was extraordinary.  It was just pure chance that Jenny’s body had been discovered last week and that the police had called on the very day he had arranged this meeting.  Vince now saw that coincidence could work in drama and considered amending his spiel at script conferences.  While he was contemplating this revision of his editorial policy the door opened.

Lottie entered, followed by Anita Chantelle. 

Vince’s heart jumped.  Anita was still gloriously beautiful, very Hollywood now and power dressed.  If anything her hair was even more lustrous than it had been eighteen years previously.  Long careers in the business are rare and Vince could see that she had acquired the steeliness of a survivor.  Time had added a veneer of showbiz bizzaz to her natural loveliness and it suited her.  He smiled his most beneficent smile and opened his arms in greeting.  He felt like the Pope receiving a prodigal daughter.

‘Anita,’ he purred.  ‘Thanks for coming.’

She smiled that smile.  The famous dimples were still there.

‘The pleasure’s all mine,’ she replied.

‘I tried to…’ Lottie began to say but the words died when Vince gave her the look.  This was not a time for PAs to speak.  Lottie scuttled out of the room.  As she did so she crossed with DI Bale and DC Bose as they entered.  They were followed by three uniforms.  Vince was confused.

‘Geoff?’ he enquired, suddenly anxious.

‘Miss Chantelle?’ said DI Bale.

Anita looked directly at Vince.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Vince blinked.

‘That’s him.’