by Simon Brett
‘No, I watch it on Mondays.’
Charles took a risk. What he had to say next was going to sound more like interrogation than casual conversation. He hoped she wouldn’t notice. ‘That’s strange. I rang Geoffrey on Wednesday and I could have sworn he said you were watching it then.’
He played it very light, but still threw her. She looked at him, flustered and bewildered. ‘Oh… oh yes, I did watch it on Wednesday this week.’
He didn’t volunteer any comment. Just left her to explain.
She did a goad performance as someone sorting through her memory. ‘Oh, of course. My mother rang on Monday just after it had started. She always natters on so, the show was practically over by the time I got off the phone.’
Charles joked, as if the information meant nothing to him, ‘I think everyone’s mother’s like that.’ But he felt sure she was lying.
‘Yes, mine always rings at inconvenient times. Still, I suppose 1 shouldn’t grumble, if the odd phone call keeps her happy. Better than continually traipsing up to Lytham St. Anne’s to see her.’
That was very helpful. He knew Vee’s maiden name was le Carpentier. There shouldn’t be too many old ladies of that name in Lytham St. Anne’s with whom to check her alibi.
Eventually (and it seemed to take for ever) they came to the end of the photographs. ‘Fascinating,’ Charles lied.
Vee looked disappointed, as if she had expected more. What did she want him to do, for God’s sake, say that she was the greatest actress to tread the boards on the evidence of a load of amateur snapshots?
But it seemed there was more evidence about to be offered. Vee was now turning her attention to the cassette player and the black plastic-covered box of cassettes. ‘Actually,’ she said with elaborate casualness, ‘I’ve got recordings here for some of the stuff I’ve done.’
‘Oh, really?’ Charles gave the last dreg of his supply of simulated interest. ‘What, recorded off stage?’
‘Some of them. Some I’ve just done at home — really just for my own benefit, so that I can get a kind of objective view of what I’m doing.’
‘I see.’
‘I thought you might like to hear one or two little bits. It’d give you some idea of how I do act.’
Charles quarried a smile from his petrifying features. ‘Great.’ She fiddled with the machine. ‘Geoffrey lets you borrow his recorder then?’
‘It’s not his, it’s mine. He occasionally borrows it when he’s learning lines.’
‘And to dub off his music.’
‘What? Good God, no. He’s far too much of a purist for that. Only happy when music is being perfectly reproduced on all that hi-fi stuff he’s got upstairs. He always says I’m a bit of a Philistine about it. I mean, I’ve got some music cassettes — popular stuff — which I play round the house, but he gets very sniffy about them. This recorder’s only mono for a start and he says you’re missing ninety per cent of the enjoyment if you don’t hear music in stereo.’
‘So he would never use it for music?’
‘Not a chance. Look, there’s a bit here that’s an extract from a production of The Country Wife that we did. I played Mrs Pinchwife. Got very good press. I think this speech is quite amusing. Would you like to hear it?’
The affirmative smile was another triumph of engineering. Just before she switched it on, they both heard a strange wail from outside. A sound like a child in pain. Vee rose and Charles looked at her with some alarm.
‘I must go to the kitchen to let him in,’ said Vee.
‘Who is he?’
‘Vanya.’
‘Vanya?’
‘The cat.’
As soon as she was out of the door, he leapt to the cassette box. Her recorded voice wound on, but he didn’t listen. His mind was too full.
When he had first gone up to the study, Geoffrey Winter had been copying Wagner’s Liebestod from his expensive stereo on to this cheap mono cassette machine. Geoffrey had given some specious line about it being handier, which had seemed reasonable at the time, but which now seemed extremely suspicious.
If you don’t want a cassette copy of a piece of music, then why copy it? Only one answer sprang to mind — in order to cover something already on the cassette.
He felt a prickle of excitement. Now at last he was on to something. Geoffrey’s recording of the Wagner had taken place on the Tuesday, the day after Charlotte’s murder. The architect must somehow have found out about his wife’s crime and known that there was incriminating evidence on a cassette, which had to be removed. But Charles was due for supper just after he made the discovery, so he had to destroy the evidence while their guest was there without raising his suspicions. What was easier than to record over it?
Charles found the distinctive yellow and green container which held the cassette Geoffrey had used. There was a chance, a very long chance, that some part of its previous recording remained unerased. He slipped the thin rectangle into his pocket.
Meanwhile Vee Winter’s interpretation of Wycherley ground on.
Suddenly the door opened and Geoffrey walked in. ‘Hello, Vee, I — ’
The surprise was so great that even his well-controlled emotions were caught off their guard. In the flash of time before he recovered himself, Geoffrey’s face bared his thoughts. He found another man alone in his house with his wife. And he was extremely suspicious.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Gerald Venables was much more friendly when Charles rang him the next morning. Maybe he was less tired and the arrival of the weekend had cheered him. Or maybe the fact that it was the weekend meant he could relax his professional guard. Outside the office he could see Hugo’s predicament as a case to be investigated rather than as an inconvenient and time-consuming legal challenge.
Whatever the cause, he agreed that they should meet and invited Charles down to Dulwich for lunch. As he signed off on the phone, he said. ‘So long, buster. See you at my joint round twelve. Okay, coochie-coo?’ An encouraging sign.
As Charles walked from West Dulwich Station, he found that he was casting a Breckton eye over everything he saw, assessing the suburb from a suburban point of view. He hadn’t quite got to the stage of pricing the houses he passed, but he could feel it wasn’t far off.
Dulwich had the same air as Breckton of quiet desperation. Paranoid car-cleaning, wives pulled in every direction by children, buggies and shopping, determinedly jovial husbands taking the kids for a walk, track-suited executives sweating off some of the week’s lunches in unconvinced jogging, others bearing their loads of wood and ceiling tiles from the brochured neatness of the Do-It-Yourself shop to the bad-tempered messes of a constructive weekend.
Gerald’s house was predictably well-appointed. Part of a newish development, with that fraction more room between it and the next house which is the mark of success in the suburbs. The front door had a brass lion knocker and was white, with small square Georgian panels. The up-and-over garage door was panelled in the same way. In fact the whole scheme of the house was Georgian, with thin-framed white windows set in neat red brick. It was exactly the sort of house that anyone in Georgian England who happened to own two cars, a central heating oil tank, a television and a burglar alarm would have had.
Gerald was manifesting the schizophrenia of a Monday to Friday worker. He was dressed in a pale blue towelling shirt and evenly faded jeans (the summery image made possible by the blast of central heating which greeted Charles as he entered). His feet were encased in navy blue sailing shoes and a Snoopy medallion hung around his neck. This last was worn a bit self-consciously. Perhaps it was a fixture, always round the solicitorial neck beneath the beautifully-laundered cotton shirts and silk ties, but somehow Charles doubted it.
The shock of Gerald without a suit made him realize that it must have been nearly twenty years since he had seen his friend in informal gear. For a moment he wondered if he had come to the right house.
‘Kate’s taken the kids to some exhibition in Town, s
o we’ve got the place to ourselves. She sent love and so on. There’s some kind of basic pate lunch in the fridge for later, Have a beer?’
Predictably Lowenbrau. Charles descended into the depths of a light brown leather sofa and took a long swallow. ‘Well, are you beginning to think I might have a point?’
‘Hardly, Charles, but I am willing to go through the evidence with you and see if there’s anything. What do you reckon might have happened?’
Charles outlined his current view of Charlotte’s death, moving swiftly from point to point. As he spoke, his conjectures took a more substantial form and he could feel an inexorable pull of logic.
Gerald was impressed, but sceptical. ‘I can see that that makes a kind of sense, but in a case like this you’ve got to have evidence. If you’re ever going to convince the police that their nice neatly-sewn-up little case is not in fact nice and neatly-sewn-up at all, you’re going to have to produce something pretty solid. All we’ve got so far is the slight oddness of a woman watching her favourite television program twice in three days. And that could well be explained if it turns out that her story about her mother’s phone call is true.’
‘I’d care to bet it isn’t. Anyway, that’s not all we have. We’ve also got this.’ With an actor’s flourish Charles produced the yellow and green cassette box from his pocket.’
‘Oh yes.’ Gerald was not as overwhelmed by the gesture as he should have been. ‘You mentioned that. I’m afraid I don’t quite see where you reckon that fits into the scheme of things.’
‘What, you don’t want me to repeat all that business about my coming in and finding Geoffrey copying the Wagner?’
‘No, I’ve got that. What I don’t understand is what you are expecting to find on it. Except for Wagner. I mean, he could just have been copying it for a friend or something.’
Charles wasn’t going to shift from his proudly-achieved deduction. ‘No, I’m sure he was trying to hide something, to erase something.’
‘But what? What could possibly be put on tape that was incriminating? The average murderer doesn’t record a confession just to make it easy for amateur detectives.’
‘Ha bloody ha. All right, I don’t know what it is. I just know it’s important. And the only way we’re going to find out what’s on it is by listening to the thing. Do you have a cassette player?’
‘Of course,’ Gerald murmured, pained that the question should be thought necessary.
In fact he had a cassette deck incorporated into the small city of mart grey Bang and Olufsen hi-fi equipment that spread over the dark wooden wall unit. The speakers stood on the floor like space age mushrooms.
‘Now I reckon,’ said Charles as Gerald fiddled with the console, ‘our best hope is that there’s something right at the beginning, that he started recording too far in and didn’t wipe all the…’
The opening of the Prelude from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde gave him the lie.
‘Well, if that was our best hope…’ Gerald observed infuriatingly, as he bent to fiddle with more knobs.
When he was happy with the sound, he sat down with a smug smile on his face, waiting to be proved right. The Prelude wound moodily on. Charles remembered how cheap he had always found the emotionalism of Wagner’s outpourings. He began to get very bored.
After about five minutes it became clear that Gerald was going through the same process of mental asphyxiation. ‘Charles, can’t we switch it off? Kate’s taken me to this stuff, but I’ve never cared for it much.’
‘No. Some American once said Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.’
‘It needs to be. I think it’s going to go on like this for some time and we’re not going to get any dramatic murder confessions.’
‘I agree. Let’s spool through. There might be something where he changed sides. That’s a C90 cassette, forty-five minutes each way. The LP could only have had about twenty minutes each side, so he must have flipped the disc. Might be something there.’
There wasn’t. They could hear the blip of the pick-up being lifted off, then the slight hiss of erased tape until the bump of the stylus back on the other side, the tick of the homing grooves and the return of the music.
‘No.’ Gerald’s smugness was increasing.
‘Let’s try the end. Yes, if there’s only forty minutes on the disc and it’s a forty five minute tape…’ Charles felt a new surge of excitement at the thought.
He tensed as Gerald spooled through till nearly the end of the tape and uttered a silent prayer as the replay button was pressed.
God was apparently deaf. Tape hiss. Again, nothing but tape hiss. ‘I think he just left the Record button down and let the tape run through until it was all erased.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Charles agreed gloomily. Then, with sudden memory — ‘No, but he didn’t. I was there. I remember quite distinctly. Perhaps he had intended to do that, but because I was there he switched it off when the music stopped. He must have erased the last bit after that. Which would, suggest to me that he did have something important to hide.’ Suddenly he got excited. ‘Look, suppose he missed a bit just at the end of the music…’
‘Why should he?’
‘Well, with some of these cheap cassette players it’s difficult to press the Play button and Record at exactly the same time. He might have put down the Play a moment earlier and left something unerased.’
‘But surely he would have heard anything and gone back over it.’
‘Not necessarily. Most of these machines have another button with which you switch off the sound to prevent microphone howlround. So he wouldn’t have heard it. And, given his great respect for music, even in this situation I don’t think he’d want to risk going back and wiping the final reverberation of his Wagner.’
‘It sounds pretty unlikely to me.’
‘It is. But it’s possible. Spool back to the end of the music.’
With the expression of someone humouring the mentally infirm, the solicitor returned the controls. It was the end of the Liebestod. The soprano warbled to death and the orchestra rose to its sullen climax. The regular hiss of the stylus on the centre groove seemed interminable. Then abruptly it was lifted off. This sound was followed by the woolly click of the recorder being switched off. Then another click as it had been restarted and, seconds later, a third as the Record button had been engaged.
Between the last two clicks there was speech.
Charles and Gerald looked at each other as if to confirm that they had both heard it. They were silent; the evidence was so fragile, it could suddenly be blown away.
Charles found his voice first. ‘Spool back. Play it again,’ he murmured huskily.
Again Wagner mourned in. Again the pick-up worried against the centre of the record. Then the clicks. And, sandwiched between them, Geoffrey Winter’s voice. Saying two words — no, not so much — two halves of two words.
‘-ed coal-.’ Charles repeated reverentially. ‘Play it again.’
Gerald did so. ‘It’s cut in the middle of some word ending in ed, and it sounds as though the coal is only the beginning of a word too.’
‘What words begin with coal?’
Charles looked straight at Gerald. ‘Coal shed, for one.’
‘Good God.’ For the first time the lines of scepticism left the solicitor’s face. ‘And what about words ending in ed? There must be thousands.’
‘Thousands that are spelled that way, not so many that are pronounced like that.’
‘No. I suppose there’s coal shed again. If the two parts came the other way around…’
‘Or there’s dead, Gerald.’
‘Yes,’ the solicitor replied slowly. ‘Yes, there is.’
‘May I use your phone, Gerald?’
‘What for?’
‘I’m going to crack Vee Winter’s alibi.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t sound so grumpy about it. Cheapest time to phone your friends — after six and at weekends. I’ll pay for
the call, if you like.’
‘No, it’s not that. The firm sees to the phone bill anyway.’
‘Of course. I’d forgotten. You never use your own money for anything, do you?’
‘Not if I can help it.’ Gerald smiled complacently.
Given Lytham St. Anne’s and the unusual name of le Carpentier, Directory Inquiries had no difficulty in producing Vee’s mother’s phone number. Charles put his finger down on the bar of Gerald’s Trimphone and prepared to dial.
‘Are you just going to ask her direct, Charles? Won’t she think it’s a bit odd?’
‘I’m not going to ask her direct. I have a little plan worked out, which involves using another voice. Don’t worry.’
‘But that’s illegal,’ wailed Gerald as Charles dialled. ‘You can’t make illegal calls on a solicitor’s telephone.’
Mrs le Carpentier answered the phone with the promptness of a lonely old lady.
‘Hello. Telephone Engineer.’ Charles was pleased with the voice. He had first used it in a stillborn experimental play called Next Boat In (‘Captured all the bleakness and, I’m afraid, all the tedium of dockland’ — Lancashire Evening News). He thought it was a nice touch to be Liverpudlian for Lytham St. Anne’s.
‘Oh, what can I do for you? I hope there’s nothing wrong with the phone. I’m an old lady living on my own and — ’
The Telephone Engineer cut in reassuringly over Mrs le Carpentier’s genteel tones. ‘No, nothing to worry about. Just checking something. We had a complaint — somebody reported that your phone was continually engaged when they tried to ring, so I just have to check that the apparatus was in fact in a state of usage during the relevant period.’
‘Ah, I wonder who it could have been. Do you know who reported the fault?’
‘No, Madam.’
‘It could have been Winnie actually. She lives in Blundellsands. We play bridge quite often and it’s possible she was trying to set up a four for — ’
The Telephone Engineer decided he didn’t want to hear all of Mrs le Carpentier’s social life. ‘Yes, Madam. I wonder if we could just check the relevant period. The fault was reported last Monday. Apparently someone tried to call three times between nine and half past in the evening. Was the apparatus being used at this time?’
