An Amateur Corpse

by Simon Brett

  ‘But Hugo only confessed because he couldn’t remember and because he didn’t care.’

  ‘If he didn’t care, then why should we?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just want the truth to come out.’

  ‘Admirable sentiments. Well, I’m sure as soon as you can produce evidence to back up your preposterous allegations, the truth will come out.’

  Yes, there was the rub. Charles knew he had nothing except his own convictions to support his theory. It was right, but, as Geoffrey observed, it was going to be almost impossible to persuade the police to take it seriously. Particularly if the persuader was someone who stood as low in the estimation of Breckton Police Station as Charles Paris.

  He felt his confidence begin to ebb and, with an effort, tried to regain momentum. Maybe he could shock a confession out of Geoffrey. ‘What makes the whole crime so ironic, even tragic, is the fact that Charlotte wasn’t even pregnant.’

  ‘What!’ This time Geoffrey reacted. This time, for a moment, the mask crumbled. And from that instant Charles knew for certain that he was right. He might have got some of the details of the plan’s execution wrong, but Geoffrey Winter definitely killed Charlotte Mecken.

  ‘No,’ he continued coolly. ‘The police post-mortem revealed that she wasn’t pregnant.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Oh, she thought she was, but it was just some freak effect of her going on the Pill. If she’d had the nerve to go to her doctor about it, he could have quickly disillusioned her. But no, she told you she was pregnant; she said, as a Catholic, she was going to keep the baby and, what was more, if you wouldn’t tell your wife about it, then she would. When she made that decision, she signed her death warrant.’

  Geoffrey’s eyes were closed and he was breathing deeply. Charles turned the knife in the wound. ‘And, if you’re looking for further ironies, between the time that she saw you on the Monday lunch time and the time that you killed her, Charlotte had decided that she would have an abortion. She rang up a friend for advice on how to end the pregnancy that never was. So her death was doubly unnecessary.’

  Geoffrey was badly shaken, but he rallied. There was only slight tension in his voice when at last he spoke. ‘This has been very interesting. May I ask what you are going to do now, Charles?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m going to go away. I’m going to leave you with the knowledge that I know exactly what happened and see how you react. Maybe you’ll come round to the conclusion that you ought to devise another equally ingenious method of disposing of me. My knowledge makes me just as much of a threat to your way of life as Charlotte was.’

  ‘You sound almost as if you are issuing a challenge.’

  ‘Yes, Geoffrey. I am.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE NEXT FEW days were an agony of vigilance for Charles. He hadn’t really meant to challenge Geoffrey to kill him, but without evidence he saw no other way of drawing the man out into the open. All he had to do was to keep on his guard and see Geoffrey before Geoffrey saw him.

  In case the worst happened, he wrote down a detailed reconstruction of what had taken place on the night of Charlotte’s murder and lodged it with Gerald. Then if Charles Paris were found murdered, it could be delivered to the police, who would know where to start looking for their murderer.

  But Charles didn’t intend to be murdered; he intended to catch Geoffrey Winter attempting to murder him. That attempt would be tantamount to a confession to Charlotte’s murder.

  Charles tried to live as normally as possible. He stayed round Hereford Road a lot, so that Geoffrey should have no difficulty finding him. He drank less, so as to remain alert. He rigged up an elaborate alarm over the door of his bedsitter so that he should not be surprised in the night. And he waited.

  Meanwhile he tried to continue his career, as funds were getting low. In this he encountered an unexpected setback.

  He rang through to Mills Brown Mazzini on that Friday to find out when the next Bland recording session would be. Ian Compton told him with ill-disguised glee that the housewives of the Tyne-Tees area had given the thumbs-down to the Mr. Bland television commercials. They had found the animation too frivolous for something as important as a bedtime drink and they didn’t like the name.

  As a result, Ian had worked out a completely different approach for the product, and it had been approved by Mr. Farrow. The new campaign for the drink (now renamed Velvet-Sleep) was to feature a young couple who had just finished a hard day’s decorating. The voice-over was going to be done by Diccon Hudson.

  So that was it. Charles was paid off for the Tuesday’s cancelled recording session and suddenly the heady vistas of infinitely repeated commercials bringing in infinite repeat fees shrank down to a few solitary session payments. Needless to say, there had been no long-term contract signed. The dazzling prospects had existed only in conversations between Charles and Hugo. With his sponsor still remanded in custody, Charles was suddenly out of the voice-over world. He never heard the result of the No Fuzz test.

  He rang Maurice Skellern and said he would audition for the Cardiff company. He had to live on something.

  He also kept thinking he should ring Frances, but didn’t get round to it.

  On the Saturday morning he received a letter.

  Dear Mr. Parrish,

  Thank you so much for letting us see your play, How’s Your Father?, which we read with some amusement.

  We regret that we do not feel it to be suitable for our World Premières Festival, as we feel it is too slight and commercial a piece for production in what has increasingly become one of the main outlets for modem experimental theatre in this country.

  We have also been fortunate to receive a new play by George Walsh. It is called Amniotic Amnesia and concerns the thoughts of a group of foetuses awaiting a fertility drug-induced multiple birth. It raises many interesting questions of philosophy and ecology and is much more the sort of work we feel the Backstagers should be doing.

  We will hope to see you down here for our next production, The Winter’s

  Tale by William Shakespeare.

  Yours sincerely,

  Robert Chubb

  World Premières Festival Sub-Committee

  PS Your script is being returned under separate cover.

  It was over a week before the truth sank in. That Geoffrey was not going to be drawn, that so long as he didn’t rise to Charles’s challenge, he was safe He knew that there was no evidence and he did not intend to supply any.

  Charles felt ridiculous when this dawned on him. He had nothing; he should have realized. Geoffrey Winter had killed Charlotte Mecken, but it could never be proved.

  Charles was furious. Having got so near, to be thwarted at the end . . . Hugo would be sentenced to life imprisonment and maybe come out after eight years to drink himself to death. Geoffrey would get a fine or a short sentence or maybe – if Willy, the Hobbses’ solicitor, were really good – a suspended sentence for the crime he’d had to commit as a cover-up. Then he’d take up a job with Denis Hobbs in the ‘construction industry’ and continue to play all the leads at the Breckton Backstagers. And Mary Hobbs would have the satisfaction of feeling that she had done something direct and positive for the artistic life of the community. And memories would heal over and the case would trickle away.

  He couldn’t stand the thought. He resolved to get back to Breckton for one last try. There must be something he had missed.

  It was Monday. Exactly two weeks from the night that Charlotte had died. Monday. November 15th. It had been a bright autumn day, but was dark by the time Charles arrived once again at Breckton Station.

  Nearly seven o’clock. Instinctively he walked towards the Winters’ house. As he rounded the corner of their road, he stopped.

  Geoffrey and Vee were walking ahead of him towards the main road.

  Of course. Rehearsal. Up to the Back Room for a quick one, and then ready to give artistically at seven-thirty. Leontes and Perdita, played by Geoffrey
Winter and Vee le Carpentier. The stars of the Breckton Backstagers. Oh yes, he knocks around a bit with other women, but they’re really very close. No children, no. But they’re very close.

  He tailed them at about fifty yards distance, but they didn’t look round. It was uncannily silent. Geoffrey, like Charles, must be wearing his favourite desert boots and Vee’s shoes also must have had soft soles, for there was no sound of footfalls on the pavement of the footpath. Just the occasional chuckle from up ahead. Geoffrey sounded more relaxed alone with his wife than Charles had ever heard him in company. Oh yes, he needed Vee. When Charlotte threatened that relationship, she had to go.

  Charles followed them all the way, keeping the same distance behind. It was sickening. He knew what had happened, the criminal was right in front of him and yet he could do nothing about it. Nothing without proof.

  By the time Charles got to the Hobbses’ house, Geoffrey and Vee had disappeared inside the Backstagers. Everything went on just the same – drink, rehearsal, home, work, drink, rehearsal . . . Why should he try to break it up? Hugo was long past hope – what did it matter whether he despaired in prison or at large? He had nothing to live for. Geoffrey Winter at least had his love for his wife, his acting, his little affairs. What was the point of trying to break that pattern?

  Charles decided he would go back to the station, get the train back up to Town and forget the case had ever happened.

  A feeling almost of nostalgia for the time he had spent retracing Geoffrey’s movements made him take the long way round past the Meckens’ house.

  It stood dark and unfriendly. Presumably, after Hugo’s trial it would go on the market, someone would buy it. There would be stories of what had happened there. If the buyer were imaginative, Charlotte’s ghost might even be seen. If not, it would all be forgotten. Sooner or later, all would be forgotten.

  As he stood there, he was seized by an impulse to do it once again. One more retracing and that was it.

  This time just as Geoffrey must have done it two weeks before. He slipped across the gravel drive to the side gate. He no longer cared about the net curtain snoopers. Let them report him if they wanted to. He was about to leave Breckton for the last time.

  The side gate was not locked. He lifted the latch and let himself into the back garden. He had a small pencil torch in his pocket and he shone it on the ground before his feet as he walked towards the coal shed.

  It was a shock not to find Charlotte’s body still there. That embarrassingly sprawled figure had so etched itself on his subconscious that he felt cheated when there was only coal in his torch-beam.

  He stood there for a moment looking round. Nothing. Not the perfect crime, but a crime that was by now undetectable. Maybe at the time, maybe if Geoffrey had been the first suspect, there might have been something which would have given him away. Maybe the blood from the abrasion on Charlotte’s neck had been on his hands as he walked home. But if so, that blood had been long washed away, long dispersed and unidentifiable. Now there was nothing. Not a chance of anything.

  Charles’s footsteps crunched in the coal-dust as he sighed and left the coal shed. Back across the drive, along the road and down the tarmac footpath to the common.

  There was no one, about, of course. No one to see him, just as there had been no one to see Geoffrey Winter a fortnight before.

  He walked doggedly along the hard mud path skirting the football fields towards the path to the main road. He passed the untidy bit, the dumping ground, still dominated by the washed-out crater of the Guy Fawkes bonfire.

  He reached the paved path and walked a couple of paces. Then he stopped.

  He felt a little tremor of excitement. Twisting one foot round on the paving, he heard the crunch of coal-dust.

  Good God, it stayed on. He’d have thought it would have been wiped off by the walk across the common, but no. The little grains of coal embedded themselves into the rubber sole of the desert boot and took a lot of shifting.

  And if he had noticed the difference in sound when he came on to the paving, so would someone else have done two weeks before. Could Geoffrey have taken the risk of carrying that incriminating dust into his own house?

  No, surely he would have tried to remove the evidence. Charles looked at his own sole with the pencil torch. Little chips of coal glinted in the beam. He tried to scrape them off. Some came, some stayed. He could have got them all out, but it would have taken time. And time was the one commodity which Geoffrey hadn’t had. His tape gave him a maximum of forty-five minutes.

  And on the morning Charles had visited him in his office, Geoffrey had been wearing new shoes.

  Charles looked round. There was only one obvious place to dispose of a pair of shoes. You could throw them into the bushes, but there they’d be retrieved by the first nosey dog who came along. But in the bonfire.

  After all, so long as suspicions were held off for four days, the evidence would be burnt publicly and no one any the wiser. And as soon as Geoffrey heard about Hugo’s arrest, he could relax. He had only to wait till November 5th to be absolutely secure.

  But sour Reggie had reckoned the fire was out of control and it had been doused by the fire brigade. There was still that soggy mess of ash. If Geoffrey had shoved the shoes into the middle at the bottom to be inconspicuous, there was a long chance that they might still be there.

  Charles scrabbled through the damp debris of ash, half-burnt sticks and charred rubbish by the light of his torch. He spread it all flat on the ground. There was nothing big enough to be a shoe. One half of a heel might have come from a lady’s sandal, but otherwise nothing.

  He sat down deflated, mindless of the debris. Oh well, it had been a good idea. Too easy though, really. Geoffrey wasn’t stupid. He’d have found a way round the shoes, scrapped them or changed them, destroyed them at home. Or just put them high enough in the bonfire to ensure that they would burn quickly.

  No, the case was over. Charles put one hand down on the ground to lever himself up.

  And felt close round a soft flesh-like lump.

  He had the object up in his torch-beam. At first it seemed to be a plastic-covered ball, which had survived by rolling to the bottom of the fire before it was doused. It was shapeless and blackened with ash.

  But then he saw that it had once been a pair of plastic gloves, rolled together. Now deformed and fused by the heat, but recognizably a pair of gloves.

  But that wasn’t what brought a catch of excitement to his throat. It was the fact that the gloves had been wrapped around something. Something soft.

  The melted plastic had made a little envelope which gave easily to his fingernail. Inside, preserved like a packet on the supermarket shelf, was a handkerchief.

  A blue and white handkerchief he had last seen when Geoffrey Winter had lent it to him in the Back Room. On the night of Charlotte’s murder.

  The brown smudge across it showed why it had been thrown away to be burned in the fire.

  It was blood.

  Blood that could be identified by a police laboratory.

  Blood from’ the scratch on Charlotte Mecken’s neck.

  And was it fanciful for Charles to catch a hint of a familiar expensive scent?

  As expected, the police took a lot of convincing. When he first started to expound his reconstruction of events, Charles could feel how unlikely it sounded.

  But when he showed them the handkerchief, they got more interested. After about an hour they agreed to go up to the common with him to look at the bonfire. A plain-clothes man and a uniformed constable.

  They didn’t talk much. They inspected the scene and started assessing times and distances. Charles didn’t push his luck by saying anything.

  Eventually the plain-clothes man spoke. ‘Well, it’s just possible. Of course, we won’t really know until we get this handkerchief looked at by forensic. But I think we’ll go and talk to Mr Winter, get his version of events. Where did you say he lived?’

  ‘He won’t
be there at the moment. He’s rehearsing a show for the Breckton Backstagers.’

  The rehearsal was in full swing when they arrived. The cast were doing the awakening of the statue of Hermione.

  The queen stood frozen centre stage, with Geoffrey as Leontes on one side of her and Mary Hobbs as Paulina on the other. Vee, as Perdita, knelt behind her husband. By her side stood Clive Steele as Florizel.

  As Charles and the policemen entered at the back of the rehearsal room, Geoffrey was declaiming. They stood in silence while he continued.

  ‘O! thus she stood,

  Even with such life of majesty, – warm life,

  As now it coldly stands, – when first I woo’d her.

  I am asham’d: does the stone rebuke me

  For being more stone than it? Oh –’

  As he acted, Geoffrey took them in. Charles could see the pale grey eyes flicker from him to the uniformed policeman, then to the plain-clothes man and finally come to rest on the soiled handkerchief which the detective was still holding gingerly in front of him.

  When Geoffrey saw the handkerchief, his voice wavered. There was a little gasp like the beginning of a giggle.

  The supposed statue of Hermione let out the snort of a suppressed laugh. Then Mary Hobbs went off into uncontrollable giggles. Vee and Clive started laughing too.

  None of them knew what the joke was, but soon all the Backstagers in the room were roaring their heads off. It was one of those moments that often happen at rehearsal, when suddenly a tense scene breaks down into the ridiculous. A mass ‘corpse’.

  Gradually, one by one, the actors stopped, slowing down to gasping breaths, and wiping tears from their eyes. Then they turned to look, with growing concern, at Geoffrey Winter.

  But he just kept on laughing.