A Reconstructed Corpse

by Simon Brett

  Table of Contents

  The Charles Paris Mystery Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Charles Paris Mystery Series

  CAST, IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE

  SO MUCH BLOOD

  STAR TRAP

  AN AMATEUR CORPSE

  A COMEDIAN DIES

  THE DEAD SIDE OF THE MIKE

  SITUATION TRAGEDY

  MURDER UNPROMPTED

  MURDER IN THE TITLE

  NOT DEAD, ONLY RESTING

  DEAD GIVEAWAY

  WHAT BLOODY MAN IS THAT?

  A SERIES OF MURDERS

  CORPORATE BODIES

  A RECONSTRUCTED CORPSE

  SICKEN AND SO DIE

  DEAD ROOM FARCE

  A RECONSTRUCTED CORPSE

  A Charles Paris Mystery

  Simon Brett

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This title first published in Great Britain in 1993 by Victor Gollancz

  eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 1993 Simon Brett.

  The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0018-1 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Ian and Penny,

  with thanks for the idea

  Chapter One

  CHARLES PARIS had never thought that he looked like a murder victim. And for most of his life he didn’t. But then someone who looked a little like the actor apparently got himself murdered, and Charles Paris was faced with the unusual prospect of employment.

  It was for a programme called Public Enemies, one of the rash of ‘True Crime’ series which had suddenly appeared on British television. Like the others in the genre, the hour-long Public Enemies programmes used a worthy, pious, together-we-can-beat-crime approach to pander to its audience’s worst instincts of prurience and ghoulishness.

  The programme was presented with straight-faced grittiness by self-appointed ‘man of the people’ Bob Garston who, after lucrative excursions into the lighter areas of television game shows, had returned to what he continuously described as his ‘no-nonsense hard-bitten journalistic roots’. (Usually he also managed to get a reference to ‘working at the coalface of real life’ into the same sentence.)

  Public Enemies was produced for ITV by West End Television, in association with ‘Bob’s Your Uncle Productions’. Bob Garston had, in common with many other successful presenters and writers, formed his own production company to secure a bigger slice of profits and greater control over the shows he worked on. The company’s name reflected his game-show identity rather than his serious crime-fighter image, but was retained because its on-screen credit had already appeared on a good few programmes. That put ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’ into an exclusive minority, way ahead of the recent proliferation of other independent production companies which had never made a programme.

  Charles Paris had worked for W.E.T. before, but never through an independent producer, and from his first interview for the job, one morning early in November, he was aware of tensions between Roger Parkes, executive producer for the parent company, and Bob’s Your Uncle Productions, represented by Bob Garston himself. The presenter had always regarded shows he worked on as private adventure playgrounds for his ego. The involvement of his own production company seemed to him completely to vindicate this attitude, and justify the inexorable imposition of his will on every aspect of the proceedings.

  In common with most megalomaniacs, Bob Garston totally lacked the ability to delegate. His management style depended on personally monitoring all details of the production process. The workload this entailed might from time to time threaten to drive him into the ground, but at least doing everything himself allayed Bob Garston’s increasingly paranoid fears that somebody might be doing something behind his back.

  So he was present even at the interviews to find an actor who resembled the missing Martin Earnshaw, the kind of chore that most producers would have delegated to a casting director. Because Garston was there, so was Roger Parkes. The executive producer had caught on to the presenter’s penchant for making decisions behind his back, and now tried to cover every move.

  A casting director was present as well, Dana Wilson, fastidiously groomed and languid to the point of torpor. Letting Bob Garston run all the interviews and make all the decisions perfectly suited Dana’s inert approach to her job.

  Charles Paris had met the casting director before. He’d had a general interview with her some years earlier. Come to that, he’d met Bob Garston too, worked with him on the pilot of If the Cap Fits!, the mindless entertainment whose long run had been the foundation of all the presenter’s subsequent game show successes. But Charles didn’t expect either of them to remember him. The peremptory phone call from the programme’s researcher Louise Denning announcing the time of his call had reminded him of the low priority held by good manners in television.

  He was proved right. Neither his name nor his face produced the tiniest flicker of recognition from Bob Garston or Dana Wilson.

  Charles did sometimes wonder whether he actually looked anonymous. He hoped not. Though actors pride themselves on their versatility, they still like to feel they have a core of individualism, which separates them from the other faces that beam – or more frequently these days scowl – from the pages of Spotlight.

  But Charles’s positive sense of his own identity was frequently undermined. Like most actors, he had the knack of remembering none of the good, but all of his bad notices, and one that rankled particularly had come from the East Kent Mercury. ‘Charles Paris was apparently in the play too, though he made so little impression that it was easy to overlook the fact.’ He would have minded less if he hadn’t been playing Hamlet.

  Nor was his sense of identity much bolstered by his agent. Maurice Skellern, in a rare moment of analysing his client’s strengths and weaknesses, had once said, ‘Thing about you, Charles, is you’re one of those actors who blends in anywhere. You can play anything.’

  ‘Except major parts, it seems,’ the actor had
responded bitterly.

  ‘But that’s your strength, Charles. Stars may do very well when they’re on top, but when they run out of star parts they’re finished. Whereas actors like you never need to be out of work.’

  ‘If that’s the case, Maurice, why is it that I’m always out of work?’

  ‘Ah, well . . .’ But the agent was never thrown for long. He always had the same excuse at the ready. ‘Thing is, Charles, things are very quiet at the moment.’

  ‘Been quiet for rather a long time, haven’t they?’

  ‘Well, yes . . . that is in the nature of the business, of your chosen profession. And also, Charles . . .’ Maurice had paused, trying to shape his next words in the least harmful way possible. ‘The fact is you don’t always help yourself . . .’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, actors do have to get out there, you know. See people . . . hustle a bit . . . network, know what I mean . . .?’

  The only response to this had been a grunt.

  ‘Thing is, with the best will in the world, Charles . . .’ Why is it that people always start like that when they’re about to demonstrate lavish amounts of ill will? ‘With the best will in the world, I have to say that you do tend to be rather passive in your approach to your career.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that I’d say –’

  ‘I mean, I do everything I can, I work my butt off on your behalf, but you do have to take the occasional initiative yourself, you know.’

  The conversation had left Charles, as all conversations with his agent left him, fuming and furious. For Maurice Skellern, an agent who had raised inactivity to the level of an art form, to claim he ‘worked his butt off’ on behalf of a client was . . . It made Charles so angry he couldn’t finish the thought. And what made him even angrier was the knowledge that there was a lot of truth in what his agent had said.

  It actually was through Maurice that he’d been contacted for the Public Enemies job. Not that any effort on the agent’s part had been required. The programme’s researcher Louise Denning had trawled through Spotlight looking for faces which resembled the missing – presumed murdered – Martin Earnshaw, had found Charles’s in the back section of quarter-page photographs, and simply phoned the agent listed.

  No one would have known this, however, from the way Maurice presented the situation to his client. ‘You know how I’m always beavering away on your behalf, Charles, never letting any potential opening slip by. Well, some of my groundwork at W.E.T.’s beginning to pay off. After my relentless bombardment of them with reminders about you, they’ve finally come back to me with something.’

  ‘What is it?’ Charles had asked, as ever unable to flatten out the instinctive surge of excitement any chance of work prompted. This time, he always thought, this time maybe it’ll happen. This time my talent’ll be taken seriously, this time I’ll be offered something meaty at the National or a major telly series.

  But this time was, as ever, another disappointment. To rub salt in the wound, this time the approach had no connection at all with his acting talent. Charles Paris had been short-listed simply because his face fitted. God, it was so humiliating.

  Even so, when he went to the interview, he desperately wanted to get the job.

  To call the encounter an ‘interview’ was over-flattering. It was more like a police line-up, which, given the nature of the programme, was perhaps appropriate.

  Five potential Martin Earnshaws had been called, and they were told to parade in front of a screen with height-lines marked on it. Charles found the selection process mystifying. Though a couple of the candidates looked vaguely like each other, none of them seemed to bear the slightest resemblance to him. And since he couldn’t see the photographs which Bob Garston, Roger Parkes and Dana Wilson so assiduously pored over, he couldn’t judge whether any of them looked at all like the missing Martin Earnshaw.

  During the selection no attempt was made to treat the aspirants like human beings. Their physical attributes and oddities were anatomised without restraint. They were there simply as set-dressing and the winner would be the one who most closely fitted the preconceived design.

  It turned out to be Charles Paris, though Roger Parkes had favoured one of the other candidates. Still, Bob Garston made the decisions and, with that lack of tact only mastered by the totally self-absorbed, bulldozed the executive producer’s opinion out of the way. Bob did not even notice the tight-lipped manner in which Roger Parkes walked out of the room, saying he had ‘other things to be getting on with’.

  Even when informed that he’d got the job, Charles was still treated as if he wasn’t there. This didn’t surprise him. He’d worked in television long enough to know what to expect. No one even offered to show him a photograph of the man he apparently so resembled.

  The casting decision made, Bob Garston bustled off to lean inhibitingly over the shoulder of some other member of the production team, while Dana Wilson suppressed her yawns long enough to take down Charles’s details.

  ‘You should actually have them all on file,’ he said.

  She looked puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I have worked for W.E.T. a few times before.’

  ‘Oh really?’ This information made not the tiniest dent in the impermeable surface of Dana Wilson’s mind. ‘Full name . . .?’

  It’s strange how some murders are sexy. Not sexy in the sense of being sexually motivated, but sexy in the sense that the media takes them up and keeps on and on about them.

  Whether a murder becomes sexy or not depends on the personnel involved. The killing of a pretty woman always attracts the press. Colour photos of her in her prime, snapped laughing in a strapless dress at a disco, can be juxtaposed with bleak shots of the alley or waste ground where she met her end. Newspaper readers enjoy the frisson prompted by such contrasts, seeing how quick bright things have come to confusion.

  Love triangles also catch the public imagination, regardless of the glamour of the participants. A wife and lover plotting the demise of a husband is a reliable stand-by; while a woman removing her rival for a man’s affections is even more popular. When it comes to sexy murders, the public know what they like, and fortunately in this country there are enough people of homicidal tendencies to keep them adequately and entertainingly supplied.

  The disappearance of Martin Earnshaw did not fit any of these stereotypes. What made that case sexy was the victim’s wife. Chloe Earnshaw was a waif-like blonde of steely determination on whom the media had seized from the moment her husband went missing. Her first press conference, at which, with glistening eyes, she hovered throughout on the edge of breakdown, made the national news on all channels, and from then on she never seemed to be off the screen or out of the papers.

  What also made the public interest unusual was that no one knew for a fact Martin Earnshaw was dead. He had certainly disappeared under suspicious circumstances, he had certainly been under threat of death, but as yet no trace of his body had been found. Without the constant appearances of his photogenic wife asserting that he had been murdered, the public would soon have lost interest in the case.

  Once Charles Paris had been cast in the role, he tracked down and read everything he could find concerning Martin Earnshaw’s disappearance. This was not because he was under any illusions about the part. Dana Wilson had told him firmly that it didn’t involve any speaking, so Stanislavskian efforts to get under the character’s skin – even if Charles had been the kind of actor to indulge in such excesses – would have been pointless. No, it was just from interest that he delved into the Earnshaws’ background.

  What he found out was by then well known to any tabloid reader. Charles Paris, always having been more of a Times man – and in fact a Times crossword rather than a Times news man – had been cheated of the more lurid details.

  Martin Earnshaw was – or had been – in his fifties, a property developer based in Brighton. Hit hard by the recession, he had endeavoured to refloat his business by b
orrowing. Because the banks were unwilling to oblige, he had resorted to less respectable sources of funds and got into the clutches of a major-league loan shark.

  As his repayments fell further and further behind, Martin Earnshaw had become the object of increasingly violent threats. A few weeks before his disappearance, he was found near his home with facial and abdominal bruising. A strong-willed man, he had apparently not buckled under in the face of these threats, but been determined to expose the extortioners. In fact, he made an appointment to tell a local detective inspector all the details.

  That appointment was never kept. The night before it, a Wednesday in early October, Martin Earnshaw told his wife he was going out for a drink, and never returned. It was her assumption and everyone else’s – probably even the police’s, though they tended to play their cards closer to their chests than the tabloid press – that Martin Earnshaw had been murdered by the men he was about to shop.

  All these details were related to the media by the doll-like figure of Chloe Earnshaw. She was his second wife, the first having died some seven years previously. It was a perfect marriage. Chloe was twenty years younger than Martin, they had been together for two years and – at this point during that first press conference the glistening, dark blue eyes began to spill – ‘had been intending soon to start a family. Something which now,’ she had continued, recovering herself with agonising discipline, ‘looks unlikely ever to happen.’ She still hadn’t lost hope of seeing Martin again, she insisted, but was prepared for the worst.

  That worst, everyone knew – and indeed gleefully anticipated – was the discovery of her husband’s body.

  Official enquiries continued and grew in intensity. But as information dried up and leads proved abortive, the power of television was enlisted to help the investigation. The police, having tried themselves to reconstruct Martin Earnshaw’s last evening without much success, had readily accepted Public Enemies’ offer to reconstruct it for them.

  This had necessitated a couple of days filming in Brighton, which was no hardship for Charles Paris. The town had always held a raffish attraction for him, full of memories of the one woman he’d made love to there, along with fantasies of all the other women he’d like to have made love to there. Was it a generational thing, he wondered, a post-war nostalgia, that still made Brighton’s air, like that of Paris, heavy with sex? He had only to step out of the train from Victoria to feel the lust invade his mind.