In the Still of the Night

She wasn’t pretty, thought Harriet, staring at her, especially first thing in the morning, when her face was pale from lack of sleep, her eyes smudged in with bluish shadows. She was much smaller than you imagined on screen, she could look almost childlike in some clothes, especially if she wasn’t wearing make-up. Harriet hadn’t missed the way men reacted to her – there was something about her that made them feel she needed protection. She could look frail and helpless, a bit like a lost kid.

What exactly was going on between her and Derek, though? If any media hound sniffed it out it could hurt the series. Harriet glanced over at Derek again and Annie’s gaze followed.

‘Who’s that with Derek?’ she asked Harriet who shrugged.

‘She started in wardrobe this week. Good references, she’s been working at the National.’

Annie pulled a face. ‘Oh, the theatagh …’ she said in a superior drawl. ‘Come slumming, has she? What made her switch to TV?’

Harriet grinned at her. ‘We pay better.’ They were both touchy on the subject of television’s image, resenting the attention paid to theatre by the critics who mocked their own drama simply because it counted its audience in millions instead of hundreds.

‘Her hair is unbelievable,’ Annie said.

It exploded in a wild confusion of orange curls above a heavily made-up face. The woman wouldn’t see forty again; might be over fifty, thought Harriet. Small and skinny; she wore purple jeans and a blood-red sweater, and the hands waving about as she talked excitedly to Derek had blood-red talons at the end of the fingers.

‘Yes, Marty’s quite a sight, isn’t she?’ agreed Harriet.

At that moment the other woman looked over towards them, as if picking up on the fact that they were talking about her, and gave Annie a poisonous look, her eyes like little black stones.

Annie was taken aback. Why that look? ‘Marty?’ she repeated, frowning. ‘Marty what?’

‘Keats,’ Harriet said, and Annie did a double-take, turning pale.

‘Keats?’

Harriet laughed. ‘No relation to John – I asked! She didn’t laugh, so I guess everyone does!’

Keats? thought Annie. It had to be a coincidence; Keats was not an uncommon name.

A black Porsche shot round the corner at the far end of Middlesex Street and was waved down at once by a policeman there to control the traffic and make sure the TV company didn’t cause any problems.

‘Here’s Sean now!’ Harriet said with satisfaction. ‘That didn’t take him long, I only rang him half an hour ago, and he was still in bed. He’s such a pro. He’ll probably have to rewrite if Mike doesn’t show up at all, or we’d have to abandon this morning’s shoot.’

‘I wish he’d rewrite to leave him out of the series!’ spat Annie, but Harriet merely laughed, watching Sean leap out of his Porsche.

He was big and muscular, with cold grey eyes, straight, short-cut blond hair and an aggressive chin. Harriet found his combination of threat and good looks irresistible. She did not like pretty men, or weak ones. She liked her men to be a challenge, and Sean Halifax had been that, from their first meeting.

Most of the TV companies had their own police series – it wasn’t easy to come up with something different, but Harriet had managed it when she was a guest lecturer at a weekend conference on working in TV, and met up with Sean, then a very young detective inspector with a drawer full of scripts about the City of London police force, in which he had been working for twelve years.

She had been instantly attracted, had let him take her out to dinner, had agreed to look at one of his scripts, not expecting much, but wanting to see more of him alone. As she read that first one, though, she had got more and more excited. Harriet had a passion for her job which was deeper than any passion she had ever felt for a man. She had had a couple of relationships but her job had always wrecked them; both the men she had been in love with had resented her obsession with work, had wanted her to be more interested in them, but no man she met had ever driven the job from her head. That was what set her adrenalin going every morning, the job and her desire to be the best at doing it.

Sean’s script was crisp, well-written, fast-moving, but most of all the ideas were original, and the writer really knew what he was writing about. Harriet had had an instant hunch that this could be a hit.

She had taken that first script to Billy Grenaby, who ran the TV production company, and read some of it to him. Billy never read scripts himself; it wasn’t even known if he could read – you had to act scripts out for him, sketch characters, scenes, a storyline, in as few words as possible.

As soon as she had Billy’s approval, Harriet had assembled a strong, solid cast of actors she trusted. She wanted ensemble playing; no stars, no big names, just teamwork among equals, and Billy liked that, too. No stars, no big salaries. Even for the lead role she wanted someone who wasn’t too well known. She had her eye on Annie from the start; she’d seen her in several good TV productions. Annie had acquired a reputation as a good character actress already.

‘This will make you famous, if it takes off,’ Harriet had told her. ‘And it will, believe me! This series is going to be terrific.’

She had been a hundred per cent right. Always am, she thought complacently. That’s my great knack – knowing what will work, and what won’t.

The pilot had been a huge hit and Sean had been asked to write six more scripts – he had resigned from the City police then, and had worked on the scripts with Harriet until they were the way she wanted them.

He had taken a big gamble, risking failure, but he wasn’t married and had only himself to worry about. Sean liked his freedom too much to want to commit to anyone, Harriet suspected, and he was fiercely ambitious. She understood that, because so was she, and Sean was also extraordinarily talented; so far Harriet was convinced he hadn’t even begun to stretch himself, but he knew people inside out, and created immediately recognisable characters

every week. He had an original mind, hard, cool, logical, and yet with a lot of instinctive understanding of human nature.

The viewers took to the series from the first episode. Every episode ran at least two subplots; they were busy scripts, never a dull moment.