THE SCRIPT WRITER

When a writer runs out of ideas...

THE SCRIPT WRITER

Spencer Cooley had run out of ideas, and it was ideas that filled his oversized stomach with all manner of delicious delicacies when he put them down onto paper.

He was a scriptwriter, and not just any scriptwriter but in his own mind the most extraordinary scriptwriter that had ever placed a laptop on his pale thighs, and created magic with a wand of words.

Detective Inspector Trumble was his creation, and how he loved that genius. From the least smidgen of evidence he could create a watertight case against the most innocent seeming character in his story. Like the one last week on the telly when the Bishop who, by dropping a button in the dead girl’s garden, had proved that he’d been there and killed the poor innocent virgin. And just a button sent the bishop to jail for a very long time! Because Detective Inspector Trumble had pulled all manner of bits and pieces together and proved it beyond all doubt.

Or a couple of weeks back when, in an episode that had gained unbelievable ratings, a senior politician’s wife had been proved, again beyond all doubt, to be the call girl who had led a financial adviser of great repute to commit suicide before he was caught out with a hand in her knickers and a drawer full of stolen cash. It had all been because of half a finger print on a carelessly cast off brassiere, and that was all the proof his genius indeed. Enough, anyway, to lead to suicide.

But Spencer Cooley had hit hard times because he was at a lost to dream up what D.I. Trumble might do next. The trouble was, he had covered most possible crimes from just about every angle and hated the idea of repeating himself. What he needed was a sudden flash of inspiration or the director would get someone else to take over the writing, and that would never do. Trumble was his!

“I know,” he said to his wife, a weary soul fed up with being the backbone to his genius and the fountain of many of his better ideas, “I’ll take a walk down by the river for inspiration.”

“Be careful that you don’t fall in, dear,” she cooed at him, hoping that might prove an interesting departure to his usual hackneyed themes with the actual scriptwriter drowning, and she giggled when she contemplated the plot that involved a famous screen-writer being slung into a fetid river by a world weary D.I. Trumble.

It was a lovely afternoon and the river made exactly the right gurgling noises to fill a creative heart with joy. Until that is, a sudden noise attracted his attention.

Spencer spun round (in the same way as most of his characters did when about to find the one tiny thing that would solve the case) to see if there was someone lurking in the bushes, or bush as there was really only the one.

At first it was clear that there wasn’t, but that wasn’t good enough for Spencer. He wanted some evil character with criminal intent to be lurking behind the only bush within half a mile that was big enough to conceal a human being. There just had to be, and then his plot would write itself. Sort of..

“I can see you!” he hissed.

The next noise was more obvious. It consisted of a visual interpretation as well, because a lad in his mid-to-late teens leapt from behind the single bush with a chance of concealing him, and dashed at a speed Spencer would never think of personally matching, racing down the river bank until he was out of sight round a bend.

Now comes Spencer’s interesting bit.

He decided to explore, looking for evidence that he could hand over to the next policeman to come his way, and so he tip-toed towards the single bush and tripped over something unnatural and metallic, like a partly submerged rather large axe, that sent him diving head first into its thorny heart.

There was only one thing for him to do, and that was curse, not after the manner of his D.I. but as an echo from his own boyhood when he had been caned by a sadistic history teacher for cursing.

Then, his direction of dive and acceleration being what they were, he semi-emerged from the other side of the bush and landed splat on to the naked body of a female human in her late teens or early twenties and with the handle of a knife sticking out of a red patch on what would otherwise be a delightful chest.

He now discovered that he could write stuff, but if he had to experience it, that was quite a different matter.

He vomited. D.I Trumble never, ever vomited on any occasion and certainly not all over the legs and crotch of a dead naked girl. Or woman: it might be a woman, which, for no rational reason, made him feel better.

He fought like a demon to free himself from the bush and had just about succeeded and was dislodging loose bits and pieces from his clothing, including a badge proclaiming he was a member of a screen writer’s guild, when a policeman in uniform and with a proper helmet came along, literally quite out of the blue.

“Nice day, sir,” he said, “having a bit of trouble, are we?”

Now Spencer was a fool when it came to correcting what he saw as the bastardisation of the English language (after all, it was his bread and butter, was writing), and if anyone was having a bit of trouble it was he and not we.

“We are not, but I am,” he told the police officer.

“Let me see, then, sir,” said the constable (it had to be a constable because everyone else at the station was either behind a desk googling panties or driving around Brumpton for the heck of it in a police car.

So there was a certain inevitability about what the officer said next.

“Is the lady a friend of your, sir?” he asked, and then he pulled out his walkie talkie and spoke into it, giving a detailed description of the lady he had noticed bleeding into the ground behind a bush, a polished badge lying just above the lady’s inverted navel, the gentleman who had just cheeked him off by having the nerve to correct his English, and the fact that as far as he could see there was nobody else around unless you could count the teenage cyclist coming furiously towards them from the distance, with one of his trouser legs flapping dangerously close to the bicycle’s chain.

The river bank then became something like a circus, with little tubes of rancid vomit being hurried off to the police laboratory, Spencer himself being carted off to that same laboratory to be checked over in every possible upsetting way, his shoes borrowed just in case, and D.I Trumble’s look-alike, Detective Inspector Gloombitch, who was taking a dim view of having such a nice afternoon spoilt by a murder, and for no good reason a cycle-clip one of the officers found near the body’s poor dead head

Then everything was put into a hypothetical barrel and shaken up until an answer came out. According to D.I Gloombitch it was quite obvious that the man who claimed to write for television and who actually created the stories he based his own character on, was as guilty as hell and would be charged pronto with rape and murder and anything else that it subsequently emerged he might have done.

“It was the bloke on the bicycle!” snapped Spencer, but the cyclist had long since vanished with a frayed trouser leg into the cooling streets of town and anyway Gloombitch, proving that his adoption of the personality of a fictitious policeman in no guarantee of anything but personal inadequacy, jumped to one and only one conclusion.

“You’ll do life, sonny Jim, with all the little bits of physical evidence you’ve left on the poor lass,” he gloated, and Spencer burst into tears.

He cried again when, weeks later, a judge actually did sentence him to life behind bars.

But he did have enough material for a couple of episodes of D.I.Trumble of the Yard.

© Peter Rogerson. 28.08.23

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