My Beautiful Best Friend, the late film producer Hugh Burnett.

I dressed quickly, putting on my panama, a red silk dress and pale pink pumps. I left the house and walked to the village green, where my close friend and mentor, the film director and producer of BBC's Face To Face, Hugh 'Dickie' Richard Burnett lived in a Grade Two listed house next to the old castle ruins. His house reminded me of the one in Dickens’ Great Expectations. The high walls of the front of the house hung with deep forest green ivy, it had dark leaded windows and a high yellow brick front garden with a heavy wrought-iron gate.
Hugh came from a bygone age where all was cocktails on the Camomile lawn and clipped vowels. Dickie, as he once had been known, had been in MI6 and based out in what used to be Ceylon. After MI6, he entered the Foreign Office but eventually ended up working for the BBC and produced a program called Face to Face. This had been his own series, featuring interviews with Carl Jung,
Martin Luther King, Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh and Richard Nixon. He loved to talk about the people he had met and used to reminisce about the evenings he had spent in a cafe on Sunset Boulevard chatting with Marlon Brando.
He was a widower and had been my friend for the past 20 years after someone had introduced us. I liked to go round to his ivy covered mansion on Richmond Green near Dickie Attenborough to talk.
He was trapped in grief over the loss of his first wife and also two of their three sons. His first son Julian had died at age eleven in a swimming pool accident with his school, Chris the second had got into heroin abuse and killed himself. When his third son Max who drank passed away, we grew closer.
Hugh answered his heavy white door on a June morning in a royal blue dressing gown and slippers and grinned at me. ‘So!’
‘Hi.’ I grinned back and followed him into his shady drawing room and sat down on his chesterfield. He was a rabid intellectual and had a set of even white teeth he often bared at some terribly wicked joke or other and penetrating grey eyes that hypnotised me.
Hugh was wolfish – he even had the head of a Canadian Gray Wolf hanging on his wall.
‘I’ve got some interesting news,’ I told him as he lounged behind his drawn curtains. ‘I’ve got a letter from a murderer in America.’
‘What?’
‘I told you about the guy who had murdered 13 women.’
Hugh sat down and smiled. I smiled back at him. He was older than me but there was a strong chemistry between us as we were both high dominance and saw the world as a mystery that we had to delve into. The theory of high-dominance was one I’d read about in my many delvings into psychology. An American psychologist called Abraham Maslow believed that human beings could be divided into three categories – low dominance, medium dominance and high dominance– and they all mate within their groups. High-dominance humans need to self-actualize and are often leaders. I was high dominance and so was Hugh.
‘What made you do that that for God’s sake? I told you don’t bother he replies to no one. Give me it here! Keep me in the loop.’ I passed it over to him as I did all the future letters.
‘He says he’s not guilty. I think he was possessed by something.’
‘You mean because you’re a bloody Catholic that you believe in possession by some kind of demonic power? Are you nuts?’
‘All Catholics believe in demons, didn’t you know that, Hugh?
You’ve covered stories on Catholicism.’
Hugh went to make us tea and came back with a tray laden with blue, gold-rimmed china from Mauritius and a plate of his favourite ginger biscuits. I poured the tea and watched him as he went back to his leather armchair. He was good looking in a refined, British way; his hair was neatly cut and swept back off his good looking almost feminine face, his aquiline nose was strong and sat over his gentle mouth, his china blue eyes were heavy and his sharp intellect beamed out of them, so that his age became unimportant.
‘Exorcism is the biggest rubbish they’ve ever invented. They even believe that children are born evil with original sin. It’s nonsense,
Chris, you blonde dame.’
‘Bugger off. I’m not going to sit here and be insulted. I’ve just come to see if you think I’d get anywhere with him. I’ve my eye on doing a book on him.’
‘All Catholics are crazy to believe that crap; mind you, they are entitled to believe anything they like. Where do these demons live?
Have you read the Bible?
‘Not much.’
I nibbled on a ginger biscuit and watched him as he openly admired my legs.
‘Try the story of Legion. Jesus goes to see a man nicknamed
Legion and casts demons out of him. It actually says that Jesus talked to them and he asked them if they could go into a herd of pigs. Guess what happened next, Chris?’ He got up to pour us both another cup of tea and then went back to his armchair.
‘I don’t know.’ I sipped my tea, looked around his drawing room and felt bored.
‘All the pigs jumped over the cliff and drowned. Now what happened to the demons? Did the demons drown? Have you ever heard of such load of nonsense? This level is all we have – nothing else going on I can assure you.’
‘Bianchi might have been possessed by creatures who hate us; his story ticks all the boxes. They’re the Archons and they look like lizards – you know David Icke talks about them.’
‘No such thing!’
He read the letter, ignoring me. His long, dark green and brown shabby velvet curtains were drawn against the mid-afternoon sun and they billowed slightly.
His shady drawing room was full of old books and artifacts from his TV programs about South Africa and Jerusalem. He had DVDs of his interviews with Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger and Carl Jung. I enjoyed the musty smell of books and his glass cases full of large butterflies and moths. I noticed that when he’d gone off to make tea, Hugh had also changed into a beige pair of summer slacks, a white cotton shirt, open at the neck, and worn brown felt slippers, one of which hung off his foot as he crossed his legs in his wingback armchair. I loved Hugh. I just squashed it down.
He suddenly looked up at me with his wolfish grin that showed his neat row of white teeth.
‘What a nut Bianchi is saying he’s innocent.’ I laughed.
Hugh was a very loving uncle to my son, ever enjoying Arthur’s boundless energy, telling him stories about his time spying in the war or teaching him to draw cartoons, of which he had published eight books. We would often come over for Sunday dinner. I would make roast chicken and imagine that we were a family. I loved his fine house, particularly the small kitchen with the Brady china cock watching out of the window and the blue jugs in a row along his square leaden windowpane. In the summer he and I sat in the front garden and had tea with strawberries and
Rose’s lime juice as we sunbathed and discussed Evelyn Waugh and their friendship after Waugh had appeared on Face To Face.
Hugh looked across the room at me and woke me from my thoughts. ‘When you rang me last month to say you’d seen a program about the Hollywood Strangler, Chris, I researched him on the Internet. Bianchi never replies to letters, so you’ve done well to get a response. What are you going to do? Reply?’ ‘No, I’m going to ignore him,’ I said sarcastically.
Hugh pulled a wry face. ‘What is it you want from him? Why bother?’
I scratched my chin and looked at Hugh’s wispy hair; it was so clean.
‘Dunno. It’s this nagging voice in the back of my mind that tells
me I have to get to know him to heal my own holes. I scratched my nose and felt silly.
‘I have no idea what it means, but I’m a journalist aren’t I? My hunches and feelings are my only compass.’
‘No such thing as good and evil, I’ve already checked it out before you; it made me curious too, Chris. I did a good few programs investigating the supernatural – its all madness. I do find this thing about Bianchi interesting though – keep me in on it, won’t you?’
‘OK, and, Hugh, if you don’t mind I’ll do my own research!’
He stood up, saying, ‘Broads!’ He went to the toilet, which was out near the door, and begun singing loudly in a mock American twang: ‘Cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women – they’ll drive you crazy – they’ll drive you insane.’
I smiled as I heard him. He came back, pinching a ginger biscuit off the tray on the table as he passed, and winked at me.
‘Chris, come on, cheer up. I’ve got something for you. You know I’ve been all over Rome, looking up the dirt about the Greg Catholic Church. I went all around the Vatican. I went to a house where the beams were out of shape and they believed that the Devil had done it. I found some nuns living under a huge mural of the Devil. And I found a photograph from Palermo of nuns holding the Devil’s signature – this shows you how mad they all were. And that’s just the beginning of the rubbish that’s hanging around
Rome. There’s even a bit of the true Cross, not to mention a footprint of Christ that I filmed in Jerusalem for the BBC.’ He left the room and then returned dragging a battered antique trunk.
‘In Italy, St Catherine’s head is on an altar and she believed her wedding ring was the foreskin of Jesus.’
‘God, how gross.’
I eyed his trunk with trepidation. What was he going to pull out, a load of dried foreskins? I felt sick.
Hugh clicked it open. ‘Do you want some of these photographs that I have collected for the program I was producing for Panorama at the BBC on Heaven and Hell? Take your pick. I found them last night and thought, Hmm these will interest that blonde of mine.’
I looked through the old trunk; it was full of beautiful photographs of paintings of angels and some of demons.
‘May I send this angel painting to Bianchi?
‘Yes, send him a Catholic angel; he’s probably a bit short on the
Heavenly Hosts.’
I picked out some stunning photographs of the work of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. I picked one of the Martyrs in the Coliseum lying naked on the floor in terror, surrounded by lions with blood around their mouths. As they lay dying – in the distance, a flock of angels were descending from heaven to come to their aid as they gave up their lives. I wondered would the shot trigger Bianchi.
I put them all into a brown envelope I managed to find in Hugh’s sideboard and addressed it to the Penitentiary with a note saying:
Dear Mr Bianchi,
Thanks for the email for the ex cop but I talk to you direct or I talk to no one. I haven’t got time to waste playing games. By the by, why not get your side of the story out with a memoir? I’ve just published mine, Searching For Daddy by Hodder and I could help you write yours. I’m sure my publisher would be interested. I’m enclosing some photos of paintings, you can have them if you like.
Best Chris.
After I had listened to Hugh, his friend Rick arrived with some groceries. I smiled at Rick and left to cross the green to go to the post office.
For my angelic faced son Arthur Charles I was extremely grateful. I found a job serving Eccles cakes in a cafe and making my trademark home-made soup for the customers. I did the school run at 3.30 in dark glasses watching through a dark lens the other happily chatting, beautifully Boden dressed other Mothers and feared that I was going to have a breakdown. I had fallen so low. The rich wives talked to me as if I was slightly retarded. The shabby single Mother who serves Eccles cakes. Fear pervaded my life – it grew in my tummy it choked at my throat and I wondered how I could come to terms with my utter stupidity over finances.
I envied the kept wives in their pink tutu ballet skirts – of course I did – the eternal girl. That they judged and left my son out of birthday parties just because I worked in a cafe. I felt like a failure. I was an idiot who had failed to give my son a home and to have an income.