by Simon Brett
The only possible advantage of his situation was that he did – albeit inadvertently – achieve his wish of not having another drink that day.
Charles Paris didn’t sleep much during his incarceration, and was quite encouraged to discover that what he missed most through the long watches of the night was not a bottle but a book. He really felt bereft without anything to read; that would be the abiding memory for him of the deprivations of prison life.
Breakfast in the morning was pretty dire and, in spite of Charles’s questions, the policeman who brought it volunteered no information about what was going to happen to him. Surely they can’t keep me long without charging me, thought Charles, trying desperately to remember what little he knew of the law. Wasn’t there something called habeas corpus which guaranteed prisoners certain rights in these circumstances?
Yes, surely he’d been in a late episode of Z Cars where that had been a significant plot point. He scoured his memory for more detail, but the only thing that had stayed with him was the notice Stage had given of his performance. ‘If real-life offenders were as ineffectual as Charles Paris’s villain, then the battle against crime would be as good as won.’
That recollection didn’t help much. Half formed beneath the surface of his mind lurked the anxiety that, however long they decided to keep him in the cell, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.
Relief came late morning when his door was opened by a taciturn constable who led him through into an office. There, to his surprise, Charles found Superintendent Roscoe, dressed in full uniform, sitting on his own behind a desk. The officer looked half amused and distinctly smug.
‘Well then . . . what have you been getting up to, Mr Paris?’
‘A misunderstanding. Some old idiot got convinced that I actually was Martin Earnshaw.’
‘So I gather. Don’t worry, that’s been sorted out. They now know who you really are.’
‘Oh. Thank you. And indeed thank you for coming here this morning. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t think of anyone else whose name would have had the same effect.’
Roscoe inclined his head, accepting the implied compliment. ‘But I understand it wasn’t just a case of mistaken identity . . .?’
‘What do you mean?’
The superintendent looked down at some notes in front of him. ‘Coppers don’t like being insulted any more than the rest of the population. What did you reckon – that the desk sergeant wouldn’t understand the word “Neanderthal”?’
‘He didn’t,’ Charles couldn’t help saying.
‘No.’ Roscoe examined the notes. ‘Had a bit of a problem spelling it too.’
Charles chuckled, but the cold eyes that peered up at him told him the superintendent was not in joking mood. ‘Insulting a police officer could be quite a serious charge, Mr Paris.’
‘I was just frustrated by his stupidity. Surely it’s not very serious?’
‘We can, generally speaking, make a charge as serious or unserious as we choose to. Just as we can generally speaking make an investigation as detailed or perfunctory as we choose to. And on the whole you’ll find the police tend to look after their own.’
Charles nodded, chastened.
‘What I want to know, Mr Paris, is what you were doing round that part of Brighton last night anyway . . .?’
‘Well, I . . .’
‘The message from W.E.T. that you weren’t required for further filming got to the hotel early afternoon. I wonder why you didn’t just take a train straight back to London then.’
‘I was asleep.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Nobody gave me the message.’
‘Still doesn’t explain what you were doing where you were found last night.’ Charles was silent, undecided how much he should reveal. ‘Mr Paris,’ the superintendent went on, ‘it’s come to my notice, from sources which I have no intention of revealing, that you have occasionally in the past dabbled in a bit of crime investigation yourself . . .’
‘Well . . .’
‘If there’s one thing a real policeman hates, Mr Paris, it’s the idea of some bloody amateur muscling in on the act.’
‘Yes. Right.’
‘So please don’t tell me your activities last night had anything to do with you trying to do a bit of investigation into the Martin Earnshaw case off your own bat.’
‘No. No, that wasn’t what I was doing. I’ll tell you exactly what happened.’
And he did. He described how he’d caught sight of DS Marchmont and started following him ‘just out of curiosity’; and he went right through to the moment when his trailing of the ‘tramp’ had been interrupted by Kevin Littlejohn’s ‘citizen’s arrest’.
At the end of his narrative there was a silence before Superintendent Roscoe said, ‘I see. And no doubt you have a theory about who the “tramp” was . . .’
‘I think it was Ted Faraday in disguise.’
‘Do you? And may I have the benefit of your theory about what he might have been carrying?’
‘I hadn’t really thought about that.’
‘It seems to me there’s quite a lot you “hadn’t really thought about”, Mr Paris.’ Roscoe was angry now. ‘Not least the potential chaos that could be caused by some unqualified amateur getting involved in a professional police investigation!’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean –’
‘I can see to it you’re not charged for this lot, Mr Paris –’ The Superintendent gestured to the desk ‘– but if I ever hear that you’ve been doing anything in this case other than the acting job for which W.E.T. are employing you –’ A blunt finger was held in front of Charles’s face ‘– I will see to it that you get put away for an uncomfortably long time. Got that?’
Charles Paris assured the superintendent that he had got that. How much longer the dressing-down might have gone on was hard to know, because he was let off the hook by the appearance of a uniformed constable at the office door. ‘Urgent call for you, Superintendent. It’s being switched through here.’
‘Thanks.’ The phone on the desk pinged and Roscoe picked it up. ‘What? Where? Has it been cordoned off? Are the public being kept away? OK, I’ll be right there.’ He put the phone down and picked up his peaked cap. ‘I must go.’
‘Development on the Earnshaw case?’ Charles couldn’t help asking.
A stubby finger was again thrust very close to his nose. ‘Have you not got the message yet, Mr Paris? Mind your own fucking business!’
Chapter Eleven
IT WAS AFTER one by the time Charles Paris was released from the police station. The desk sergeant, though different from the one who had been on duty the night before, was apparently under instructions to make the prisoner aware of the enormity of his crime. He made a big production of returning Charles’s bag, his pocket contents, shoelaces and belt. All of the sergeant’s slow actions were accompanied by a litany of reproof and when finally allowed to depart, Charles slunk out of the police station like a beaten schoolboy leaving the headmaster’s study.
The first thing he did was find a pub and down a couple of large Bell’s. To his annoyance, he found some lines of verse repeating in his head.
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
Really, after sixteen hours in a police cell, it was a bit much to be quoting The Ballad of Reading Gaol!
He stared out of the pub window at the grey November clouds, trying not do it with ‘a wistful eye’, nor to think of what he was looking at, ‘that little tent of blue / Which prisoners call the sky’.
And he thought about the case. Up until then any thinking he’d done about Martin Earnshaw’s disappearance had been detached, a prurient general interest shared with the millions who watched Public Enemies. Nothing about it touched Charles Paris personall
y; there had been nothing to awake his own dormant investigative instinct.
Now somehow his attitude had changed. It wasn’t the activities of Greg Marchmont the night before; it was the sight of the ‘tramp’ that had done it. Charles felt certain he had been following Ted Faraday in disguise; and that idea fired his curiosity.
The other stimulus to Charles’s interest was Roscoe’s overreaction to the idea of his involvement. Surely the superintendent wouldn’t have made such a fuss unless he thought there was something about the case Charles Paris was likely to find out.
He moved from the Bell’s to a pint of bitter and ordered a steak-and-kidney pudding to erase the memory of his police-station breakfast. Then he rang W.E.T. from the pub’s payphone.
‘Louise Denning, please.’
He was put through to the gallery of the Public Enemies studio and the researcher herself answered. ‘Yes?’
‘Hello. It’s Charles Paris.’
‘Oh,’ she said in a tone of voice that meant ‘Why?’
‘I thought you might have been trying to contact me.’
‘No.’
‘It’s just that I’ve been . . . well, a bit tied up, and, er . . .’
‘I told you – I haven’t been trying to contact you,’ she repeated in a tone of voice that meant ‘Why should I want to?’
‘I just thought I should check in . . .’
‘Oh.’
‘. . . you know, to see if I might be needed today for the studio or anything.’
‘No, you’re not.’ And with her habitual charm, Louise Denning put the phone down.
Charles Paris went back to his drink and found his steak-and-kidney pie had just been delivered. As he sat down to eat it, he decided he’d stay another night in Brighton.
Charles had no difficulty booking into a cheap hotel, and amused himself until dark with a bottle of Bell’s and indistinct children’s programmes on the crackling television. Then he walked back through the dark streets of Brighton to Trafalgar Lane.
It was about six when he got there. Once again the light was on in the flat above the second-hand clothes shop. First checking that there wasn’t another Kevin Littlejohn lurking in the shadows, Charles moved into the doorway of a boarded-up shop opposite and watched. He thought he discerned occasional flickers of shadowy movement in the flat, but he couldn’t be sure.
After about an hour he got bored. Well, that is not strictly true. He got bored after five minutes, but it was only after an hour that he felt so bored he had to do something about the situation or go mad.
He decided to try an old schoolboy trick – ringing the doorbell and running away. The doorway in which he was hiding was too exposed, so he checked out another further along the road before putting his plan into action. He wouldn’t be seen there, but should get a good view of anyone who came to the door.
He pressed the broken bell-push, uncertain whether or not it would be working, then scurried off to his hideaway. There he waited.
Just when he had given up hope, decided that either the bell wasn’t working or there was no one in the flat, the door was cautiously opened. The hand that opened it appeared to be wearing a rubber glove.
For a moment Charles feared that, seeing no one there, whoever it was would go straight back inside. But no, a figure in shirt-sleeves stepped out on the pavement and looked in each direction before stepping back inside and closing the door behind him.
The man was out there long enough and there was sufficient light for Charles to recognise Greg Marchmont.
An hour and a half later Charles Paris still maintained his vigil, but with diminished conviction. It was bloody cold, apart from anything else. And what was he hoping to see, for God’s sake?
He looked at his watch, registered it was twenty to nine, and suddenly remembered Public Enemies.
It was the let-off he’d been waiting for. Convincing himself that he couldn’t hope to find out anything about the case without the very latest information, Charles Paris rushed back to his hotel and was snugly settled into his armchair with a large Bell’s by the time the opening credits started.
Because of the hotel set’s poor reception, Bob Garston looked grittier than ever as he promised ‘yet another startling revelation later in the programme – a gruesome new twist in the investigation into the murder of Martin Earnshaw’.
Once again, the audience was teased by trailers through a sequence of more or less irrelevant criminal features until the moment of maximum impact arrived.
Bob Garston back-announced an item about self-switching security sensors and turned gravely to another camera.
‘Now the murder of Martin Earnshaw . . . Police investigations into the crime are of course continuing and we’ve had another faxed report from our very own private eye Ted Faraday assuring us he’s still on the case. But we also have a startling new development.
‘On last week’s programme Public Enemies brought you exclusive coverage of the ghastly discovery of the dead man’s arms . . .’ He let the pause linger, relishing it. ‘This week another, equally gruesome and appalling find has been made. I regret to have to tell you this . . .’ Oh no you don’t, oh no you don’t, thought Charles. You’re over the moon about it. ‘. . . but only today a pair of dismembered legs have been discovered.’
Bob Garston left space for the nation’s collective gasp before continuing. ‘Early tests suggest that these match the arms found last week. Needless to say, today’s discovery is yet another indication of the kind of sick mind behind this appalling crime. This particular “Public Enemy” is without scruples or compassion, a cold-blooded monster . . .’
And a brilliant television scheduler, thought Charles.
‘And I can assure all of you,’ Bob Garston went on, ‘that I, and all of the other members of the Public Enemies team, will not rest until we have tracked down this merciless killer. Don’t worry – with the help of you, the public, we can do it!’
After this crusading climax, he passed over to ‘DI Sam Noakes for the details of today’s macabre discovery’.
She looked as good as ever, though, after what he’d heard from Greg Marchmont, Charles was even more aware of the hardness in her face.
‘At just before eleven o’clock this morning,’ the detective inspector announced, ‘a passenger from a London train arrived at Brighton station. He went to the car park to retrieve his car, but as he was driving away, noticed a polythene-wrapped package which must have been pushed under the vehicle while it was parked. He looked at the package and, becoming alarmed about its contents, summoned the police. The polythene was opened and inside were discovered the severed legs of a man probably in his fifties.’
Sam Noakes left it there. The dramatic impact, all the Public Enemies professionals knew, would be greatest without any comment.
The camera cut back to Bob Garston, now so gritty that he could have got a job as a pit-head.
‘Needless to say, Martin Earnshaw’s wife Chloe is devastated by this latest development. We know, from the letters and phone calls the programme has received for her, how much all of you out there sympathise with her sufferings, and I can assure you that she is very aware of and grateful for . . . your support.’
The presenter had by now turned up his Sincerity Control almost to danger point. ‘And I’m sure you know that the best thing you – and we on Public Enemies – can do for Chloe Earnshaw . . . is to come up with that vital piece of information that will lead us to her husband’s killer.
‘So . . . just to see if this jogs anyone’s memory – and if it does, remember our phone lines are open twenty-four hours a day – here is a reconstruction – with Chloe Earnshaw pluckily playing herself – of the last time she saw her husband, as he went out . . . “just to have a drink” . . . only a few short weeks ago.’
As the reconstruction began, Charles couldn’t help reflecting that his double act with Chloe Earnshaw really had now got top billing.
But that thought was swamped by anoth
er shocking realisation.
Now he felt certain he knew what had been in the package the ‘tramp’ had been carrying the night before.
No light showed from the flat when Charles got back to Trafalgar Lane. He pressed long and hard on the bell-push, this time with no thoughts of concealment.
But there was no response. No one came.
He tried the handle. The door was locked, but felt loose and feeble in its crumbling frame. Too excited for caution, Charles Paris threw himself shoulder first at the door. Just like they do in the movies.
There were two shocks. First, how much it hurt his shoulder. And, second, that, in a splintering of rotten wood, the door gave inwards.
He rushed up the dark stairs, certain that the flat was empty. He should have brought a torch, but was reckless now and, when he opened the door to the front room, switched on the light.
The space was completely empty and smelt of detergent. Every surface gleamed. Some of the paintwork was still sticky and the floorboards damp. The cleaning-up job had been extremely thorough.
He searched through the sitting room, tiny kitchen, lavatory and bathroom, but there was nothing. Every trace of recent occupancy had been erased.
Only on the floorboards of the bathroom was there anything that might constitute a clue. The area was damper than its surrounds, and had clearly been subject to even more vigorous scrubbing.
But two stubborn marks had resisted all the cleaner’s efforts. Two spots, each about the size of a new penny piece.
They were rusty, the colour of dried blood.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS A DILEMMA. Charles Paris felt certain he had found out something of real significance in the Martin Earnshaw case, but he didn’t know what to do about it. His natural instinct would have been to take his findings to the police, but what police? Of those he knew connected with Public Enemies, Greg Marchmont quite possibly had some part in the actual crime, and the terms in which Superintendent Roscoe had warned Charles off further investigation ruled him out as a sympathetic ear.
