A Reconstructed Corpse

by Simon Brett

  The only officer he felt inclined to inform was Sam Noakes. From what he now knew of the detective inspector’s ambition, Charles reckoned she’d welcome new leads to follow up. To have cracked the case apparently single-handed was just the kind of entry she’d like to see on her CV.

  But Charles didn’t know where to contact her, and anyway wasn’t quite ready to do so yet. He needed to get his own ideas on the case clear first.

  These thoughts went through his head as he sat over his hotel breakfast. It was a step up from the police station, but only just. Bacon, egg, shrivelled tomato and soggy fried bread slithered about his plate on a little slick of grease. Nor did the fact that all the other deterrently silent denizens of the tiny dining room were smoking add to Charles’s enjoyment.

  Also he felt the dull thud of another hangover. He’d needed a few slurps of Bell’s to calm him down when he got back the previous night, and they had had a disproportionate effect on his head. It all comes of not drinking the night before, he thought wryly. When you start again, the stuff really does feel powerful. Oh dear, getting back into the old cycle again. Must cut down. Wouldn’t be that hard to have a few days completely off the booze, would it, he tried to convince himself.

  With an effort he brought his tired mind to bear on the murder of Martin Earnshaw – in which he felt increasingly certain both Ted Faraday and Greg Marchmont were involved, though at what level he did not know. Marchmont, he was sure, had done the clean-up of the Trafalgar Lane flat. The timing and the fact that the detective sergeant had been in shirt-sleeves and rubber gloves made that certain.

  But had he been cleaning up after his own crimes or after those of Ted Faraday? The ‘tramp’ Charles had seen could not have been Marchmont, who was safely ensconced at the time in the pub where Kevin Littlejohn drank, so it seemed a safe bet that it was Faraday in disguise. Roscoe had certainly pointed up the connection between the private investigator and a flat in Trafalgar Lane.

  If the contents of the ‘tramp’s’ package were what Charles strongly suspected, Faraday’s involvement became even more chilling. Why would he be carrying the dead man’s legs, presumably to their hiding place in the car park, if he had not had a hand in Martin Earnshaw’s murder?

  If he had, didn’t the meticulous cleaning-up operation and the stubborn bloodstains that had survived it suggest that, if not the actual killing, then at least the dismemberment had taken place in the flat?

  What the private investigator’s motive for murder might have been Charles had no idea. But he remembered Greg Marchmont speaking of Faraday’s investigation into a loan-sharking operation and his possibly too close involvement with the criminals concerned. It was Martin Earnshaw’s escalating debts to loan sharks that were believed to have led to his murder.

  Difficult to get much further without talking to someone. Maybe it would have to be Roscoe or Marchmont after all. Charles decided he would check whether the two policemen were still in Brighton, and rang through to the hotel where they had all stayed.

  No, the two gentlemen had checked out the previous day.

  Fortunately Charles then asked if any other members of the police were currently staying at the hotel or expected in the near future.

  ‘One of them’s booked in for tonight,’ the girl replied, with a lack of discretion that suggested she was new to the hotel business. ‘That lady policeman . . . you know, the pretty one from the telly.’

  ‘DI Noakes?’ said Charles, wondering how Sam would have reacted to her description.

  ‘That’s the one. She’s arriving after lunch.’ A note of doubt came into the girl’s voice. ‘Ooh, perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Charles Paris, as he put the phone down.

  There was one small detail of investigation he could undertake on his own before trying to contact Sam Noakes. He consulted the local Yellow Pages. To his surprise, he found no entry under ‘Fax’, but then he knew that reading Yellow Pages often involved lateral thinking and cross-reference. Indeed, one of his favourite jokes was an entry he’d found in the Yellow Pages: ‘Boring: SEE CIVIL ENGINEERS.’

  He found what he wanted under ‘Facsimile Bureaux’. ‘PRINTSERVE’ was there, with an address in Churchill Square. He thought of ringing them, but decided an in-person approach might be more fruitful. So he paid his bill and left the hotel without regret. His lips were still slicked with the taste of that breakfast.

  As he walked through Brighton, with the sexy whiff of the sea in his nostrils, Charles Paris tried to decide how to conduct his enquiry at the fax bureau. The direct approach might yield results, but he felt an urge to take on a character for the task. Partly he thought it might get a better response, and partly he was just an old ham.

  He went into a tatty junk shop and bought a pair of thick wire-framed glasses. As he put them on, he felt the little lift of excitement taking on a new identity always prompted.

  Now who . . .? Perhaps he should present himself as something to do with the police . . .? That would at least give a reason for his making the enquiry. It would also give him the guilty frisson of breaking the law. Impersonating a policeman he knew to be an offence, but Charles Paris relished some kind of quiet revenge for the dressing-down he’d received from Superintendent Roscoe.

  But who exactly should it be? Mentally he reviewed his gallery of policeman performances. They divided naturally into three: those who’d had speeches beginning, ‘We have reason to believe . . .’; those who’d said, ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Mrs Blank . . .’; and those who’d shouted, ‘Not so fast!’

  His favourites perhaps had been seen at a Soho fringe theatre in the early seventies (‘Charles Paris’s policeman was clearly intended by the author to provide comic relief in this depressing farrago. His was the only performance that didn’t make me laugh.’ – Time Out), and on an extended tour of a sub-Agatha Christie epic called Murder at the Bishop’s Palace, in which he’d appeared in Act Three to arrest the murderer all the way from Winchester to Wilmslow and attracted from the Nottingham Evening Post the ambivalent notice: ‘The cast was completed by Charles Paris.’

  For the first he had used a vague burr slightly West of Mummerset, and for the second he thought he’d been using Glaswegian until someone he met backstage congratulated him because ‘it’s so rare to hear a Belfast accent actually done right’.

  As he entered PRINTSERVE he still hadn’t decided which of these to plump for and in fact, when he came to speak, found himself falling back on a slightly roughened version of his own accent.

  ‘Erm, excuse me,’ he said to the pert-looking girl busy at the photocopier.

  She replied with a preoccupied ‘Mm?’

  Charles went straight into law-breaking mode. ‘I’m a police officer.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ She turned to face him. ‘Have you got any identification?’

  Damn. This girl had watched too much television. He reached into his jacket for his wallet, trying desperately to remember what he’d got in it that might vaguely look like an identity card. She wasn’t going to be fooled by Visa or Access, was she? Or by the video membership he’d once taken out and then never got round to buying a VCR?

  But just as he was contemplating an ignominious retreat from the shop, his hand closed round a piece of paper, which he remembered was a letter confirming his filming schedule from the Public Enemies office at W.E.T.. That would have to do.

  ‘As you’ll see from this . . .’ He flashed the letterhead at the girl ‘. . . I am currently seconded to the Public Enemies programme . . .’

  ‘Ooh yes!’ Television worked its customary magic on yet another member of the British public. ‘I watched that last night. It’s horrible, isn’t it? I mean particularly with the Martin Earnshaw murder having taken place right here in Brighton. That poor wife of his . . . And what kind of sick mind would cut a body up like that? It’s almost as if he’s actually staging the discovery of the bits in time for the progr
ammes, isn’t it?’

  This echoed a suspicion which had formed more than once in Charles’s mind, but he made no comment, simply pressed on with his enquiry. ‘It’s about the Public Enemies programme that I’m calling, in fact. As you know, we’ve been asking members of the public to send in information and –’

  “Ere,’ said the girl. ‘You look a bit like him.’

  ‘A bit like who?’

  ‘Martin Earnshaw. The bloke who was murdered.’

  ‘Do I? Really?’ Charles Paris screwed up his eyes behind the glasses to look as unmartinearnshawlike as possible. ‘Well, nobody’s ever said that to me before. Perhaps it’s just because the case is on your mind that you’re seeing likenesses that aren’t there.’

  ‘Perhaps . . .’ the girl reluctantly agreed.

  ‘Now as I say, in the Public Enemies office we get information from all over the country and a lot of it comes by fax. Some of these faxes we like to check up on, just to see whether they’re authentic or not, and there was one sent from this office earlier in the week . . .’

  ‘Sent to Public Enemies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ooh. Which day was it?’

  Charles did a quick calculation of when he’d been in the Public Enemies office. ‘Tuesday. About quarter past eleven.’

  ‘I’ll look at the journal,’ said the girl.

  She quickly found the details on the print-out. ‘This is a London number. That the right one?’

  Charles checked it against the letterhead. ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right then. I can confirm that it was sent from here. Is that all you wanted to know?’

  ‘I wonder if by any chance you can remember who it was who sent it . . .’

  The girl racked her brains and, with a bit of prompting, managed to come up with a rough description.

  Though the fax purportedly came from him, her description certainly didn’t fit Ted Faraday.

  Indeed, the only person involved in the case it could have fitted was Greg Marchmont.

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’ said Sam Noakes, as she opened the door of her hotel room.

  ‘Well, I’m Martin Earnshaw.’ Her eyes narrowed, suspicious for a moment that she was up against a crank. ‘That is to say, my name is Charles Paris. I’m the actor who’s playing Martin Earnshaw in the reconstructions.’

  ‘Oh, right, of course. Sorry, should have recognised you straight away. Won’t you sit down?’

  She gestured to the chair in front of the dressing table, and sat herself on the side of the double bed. It was just an ordinary room, more or less identical to the one Charles had had in the same hotel. Sam Noakes had suggested he should join her there to avoid the security risks of the public rooms, and he was sure that was part of her reason. But he also detected in it a kind of feminist bravado, inviting a strange man up to her room to show how unaffected she was by the cautions other women might have felt. There was even perhaps an element of challenge, to test out the reception he’d get if he did try anything on.

  Trying anything on, however, was the last thought on Charles Paris’s mind. Though Sam Noakes carried a permanent aura of sexuality and looked good in jeans and loose-fitting jumper, he would have sooner tangled with a boa constrictor. Even before Greg Marchmont had told him about her character, Charles had identified Sam Noakes as dangerous territory. Anyway, he wasn’t in the habit of making advances in hotel rooms to women he didn’t know. Well, certainly not when he was sober.

  ‘So . . . what is it, Mr Paris? You said when you phoned it was something to do with the Earnshaw case.’

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘Have you been making your own enquiries into it? We’ve already got one private investigator on the strength. Does every aspiring gumshoe in the country now feel entitled to have a go?’

  ‘If they do, then programmes like Public Enemies are as much to blame as anything else.’

  She nodded, conceding the truth of this. ‘Yes, well, I guess we are encouraging people to be observant, take note of any information that might be useful. What have you got for us, Mr Paris – a clue?’

  ‘Maybe. A lead, anyway. Certainly something that might be worthy of further investigation.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  And he told her. Sam Noakes listened impassively, her pale blue eyes steady, reacting neither to his mentions of Greg Marchmont nor Ted Faraday. At the end she shook her red hair and asked, ‘Why do you think there’s any connection between the flat and Faraday?’

  ‘Superintendent Roscoe mentioned Trafalgar Lane when we were talking about Faraday going undercover in Brighton. What he said to Sergeant Marchmont certainly implied that it was from there that Faraday was conducting his investigations.’

  ‘Except what you said implied that his involvement with Martin Earnshaw was rather more sinister than just investigation.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Accusing someone of murder is a pretty serious allegation, Mr Paris.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘. . . and not one that should be bandied about lightly.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I’m not quite sure what it is you’re accusing Greg of, but I’d be pretty careful about that too, if I were you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charles agreed humbly.

  ‘It is possible, you see, that you have by chance stumbled on part of the police investigation and completely misconstrued what’s been going on.’

  ‘I suppose that is possible, yes.’

  ‘You bet your life it is. Mr Paris, I’m very grateful to you for sharing your opinions with me, and I will be even more grateful if you give me your solemn word you will keep quiet about them to anyone else. This investigation is reaching a very critical stage, and the last thing we need at this point is to have the whole thing screwed up by an amateur.’

  She didn’t raise her voice or put particular emphasis on the final word, but it still stung. It stung all the more because of its aptness. Charles felt totally excluded. The police investigation was proceeding and he was on the outside, without access to any of their skills or information.

  But he felt he had to say something in his own defence. ‘Look, I know it was Greg Marchmont who cleaned the flat up; and I’m pretty convinced it was Ted Faraday dressed up as the tramp; so the Trafalgar Lane flat has got to have some connection with the case.’

  ‘I’m not denying it has, but isn’t it likely that Greg was cleaning the place up because he had been given orders to do so by his superiors? As to the idea that Ted would use as crass a disguise as the one you describe, that alone – apart from all the other wild allegations you’ve made about him – means that you’re certainly one hundred per cent wrong there. You have absolutely no basis for saying that the man you followed was Faraday, do you, Mr Paris?’

  Charles was forced to admit that he hadn’t.

  Sam Noakes smiled, evidently taking pity on him. ‘Look,’ she said, as if soothing a fractious child, ‘Public Enemies is an exciting programme. It’s meant to be an exciting programme, and inevitably members of the public get caught up in that excitement. For someone like you, actually involved in the making of the programme, the temptation to get carried away by the whole thing is all the stronger. But just remember – that doesn’t justify making allegations against a hard-working member of the police force, based on nothing more than unsubstantiated guesswork. OK? Television is a glamorous medium, Mr Paris, and some people just can’t resist the pull of that glamour.’

  Speak for yourself, thought Charles Paris savagely.

  If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was being patronised.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘I HOPE THE murderer realises just how much hangs on what he’s doing,’ said Bob Garston grimly. ‘We held steady on last week’s overnights, but we didn’t get the kind of build in the figures I’d been hoping for.’

  ‘Well, there was the first showing of yet another new Michael Caine movie on Sky,’ Roger Parkes offered by way of e
xplanation.

  ‘Come on, bloody satellite shouldn’t dent our figures.’

  ‘Beginning to. More serious, though, the BBC had started their umpteenth rerun of Dad’s Army right opposite us after the News. A lot of people probably switched over for that.’

  ‘Why? There can’t be a single person in the country who hasn’t seen those seventeen times already. Public Enemies is giving them something unprecedented in British television, something of today, reflecting all the violence and ghastliness of modern society. I really can’t believe that anyone would prefer the anodyne nostalgic claptrap of Dad’s Army to what we’re offering.’

  Roger Parkes shrugged. ‘The figures speak for themselves. There are a good few millions out there for whom the reason they have a telly is to watch anodyne nostalgic claptrap.’

  ‘But Public Enemies is holding up a mirror to the real world!’

  ‘Plenty of people would do anything to avoid the real world. You know there’s always got to be tacky entertainment fluff as well as serious journalism on the box. It’s not as if you didn’t spend all those years doing If the Cap Fits!’

  Bob Garston seethed visibly. ‘If the Cap Fits! was not “tacky entertainment fluff’. It was the best game show of its kind. I make sure that every show I do is the best of its kind.’ His expression found new extremes of grittiness. ‘But Public Enemies is something even more special. In this show I’m going back to my no-nonsense hard-bitten journalistic roots, bloody well working at the coalface of real life.’

  ‘Yes,’ Roger Parkes agreed automatically. He’d heard all this a good few times before.

  So had Charles Paris. It was absolutely typical of television people, he thought, that the presenter and producer should continue their conversation as if there was no one else in the room. He’d been summoned to a briefing meeting on the Monday morning and already spent an hour sitting in the Public Enemies office without anyone taking any notice of him. There seemed no prospect of his being briefed about anything.