by Simon Brett
[GARSTON CAME INTO SHOT, AS THE SECURITY MAN STOPPED HIS TROLLEY AND MOVED THE PACKAGE TO THE HORIZONTAL.]
‘I myself removed the outer packing from the parcel. [BOB GARSTON WAS SEEN TO CUT THE STRING AND REMOVE SOME OF THE BROWN PAPER]. And I immediately saw this notice stuck on the next layer of wrapping.
[THE CAMERA HOMED IN ON A PRINTED NOTICE ON RED PAPER, STUCK ON TO THE NEXT LAYER OF WHITE PAPER WRAPPING THE RECTANGLE. THE NOTICE READ:
WHY NOT HAVE THE CAMERA RUNNING WHEN YOU OPEN THIS
LITTLE BOX OF GOODIES? YOU MIGHT FIND IT INTERESTING.
PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1]
‘Because I thought it might serve the public interest by helping to solve a crime, I decided we would follow the suggestion of whoever it was who had dubbed himself “Public Enemy No. 1”, and we filmed the opening of the parcel – with sensational results which you will see throughout the rest of the programme. I should warn viewers of a nervous disposition that they may find some of what follows . . . upsetting.
‘This sequence you are now watching is a reconstruction. Until we saw the message we obviously had not thought of having our cameras ready. But everything else you will see throughout the programme was filmed live – exactly as it happened.’
The ponderous voice-over stopped, the camera homed in on the printed notice, and that image mixed to the usual Public Enemies opening credits. Throughout the country millions of viewers thought, if they didn’t actually say out loud. ‘That package looks just about the right size to hold a human torso.’
After the credits, Bob Garston gave another little teaser about the opening of the package, before introducing an innocuous fill-in item on the methods used by counterfeiters and ways of spotting counterfeit banknotes. It was pretty dull, but at least it didn’t mention the word ‘insurance’.
Then, momentously, the presenter announced that they would show the next stage in the opening of the mystery package.
It had been moved from the office and the trolley was no longer in evidence. The white-wrapped oblong stood like a gravestone in a studio set of white tiles and chromium tubes, which suggested the image of a forensic pathology lab. Uniformed police, including Sam Noakes, stood by, as well as medical-looking white-coated figures. Everyone had rubber gloves on.
Bob Garston, dressed in white coat and rubber gloves, stepped forward and talked himself through his actions in the way beloved of regional news reporters.
‘Well, I’ll just tear off this sellotape here and pull off this corner of the paper. I’m afraid I’m going to have to tear it a bit. Ah, it looks like there’s something wooden underneath. Yes, I’ll just move a bit more of the paper and . . . ah, here we go. Strip the rest off and . . . There it is.’
With the remains of the paper jumbled on the floor like clothes someone had just stepped out of, what stood revealed was a wooden chest about four feet by two feet by two feet.
In silence the camera homed in on this. Then the filmed insert ended and they cut back to Bob Garston live on the regular Public Enemies set.
‘In a few minutes you’ll see the next stage of our opening that package, but first an update on some of the art works that have been recovered following the raid on Birmingham’s Merton Frinsley Gallery in July.’
The great British public sat through another more or less tedious item. Only a few hands strayed to remote controls, opting for the familiar warm bath of Dad’s Army.
Then, after the agony had been extended by a further link from Bob Garston, the programme cut back to the wooden chest in the forensic pathology lab. Garston, in his white coat, watched silently as two uniformed police officers (wearing rubber gloves of course) ceremoniously moved the chest over to the horizontal. The camera moved in on the brass latch that held it closed.
Bob Garston’s voice was heard again. ‘Don’t know whether this is going to be locked or not. We do have a police expert with a picklock on hand if that should prove necessary, but let’s see . . .’
His rubber-gloved hands came into shot. ‘It may just be on the latch, so I’ll try that first.’ The hands fumbled with the latch, pressing in a button and trying to raise the chest’s lid. These actions took longer than was strictly necessary, as Bob Garston milked the drama of the situation.
‘No, I don’t think it’s . . . Oh, just a minute, maybe it’s . . . No. One more try and . . . yes, I think it is going to open.’
Very slowly he lifted the lid. The camera veered away a little and moved round to peer over his shoulder, almost exactly reproducing the presenter’s point of view as he looked downwards.
Inside the chest was revealed a bulky object, wrapped in a tartan rug.
The viewers only had a moment’s sight of this, an almost subliminal flash, before they were whisked back to live action in the studio.
Bob Garston, promising ‘more of that footage later in the programme’, then introduced an achingly boring feature about new anti-theft devices for cars. But Dad’s Army didn’t gain any more viewers. The audience for Public Enemies was far too caught up in the ghoulish scenario that was unfolding before them.
The next insert of film was very short. Bob Garston’s rubber-gloved hands were seen beginning to unwrap the tartan blanket in the chest, then the camera cut sharply to his face. Sudden shock registered there, as he gasped, ‘Quick, police surgeon!’
The programme’s final pre-recorded feature – about a group of pensioner vigilantes who had banded together to fight crime on a Newcastle housing estate – seemed to last for ever. But finally Bob Garston cued back to the set with the chest.
It was totally transformed now. Policemen bustled in every direction. There were photographers and men picking at things with tweezers. There was lots of plastic sheeting all over the place. It looked like a classic scene of the crime.
The edges of the tartan blanket spilled out of the chest, so that its contents must have been exposed.
But the camera did not show what was inside. Not quite. It showed everything else, darting around, catching odd angles of the chest, approaching as if to reveal more, then sliding off when it drew close. It was the camerawork of the strip-tease, the technique that was used in all those nude movies of the early sixties which kept avoiding the hairy bits.
And in the middle of all this chaos stood Bob Garston. He was very pale (whether naturally or through the ministrations of the make-up department was hard to know) and he had on the grittiest expression even he had ever attained.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced grimly, ‘I can now inform you that the contents of that chest are . . .’ He held the pause with the skill of a professional torturer ‘. . . a human torso.’ And the programme ended.
Half the country shuddered gleefully in communal shock. But no one was more shocked than Charles Paris. He recognised the tartan blanket and the brassbound chest. He had last seen them in Greg Marchmont’s flat.
Chapter Fifteen
IT WAS ONLY a twenty-minute walk, but Charles picked up a cab in Westbourne Grove and gave the driver Greg Marchmont’s address. He hadn’t worked out what he was going to do when he arrived, just knew he had to get there as quickly as possible.
As he hurried down the stairs he could see a light on through the basement curtains. His excitement took him beyond fear. Some kind of confrontation was now inevitable. He raised his hand to bang on the door.
But then he noticed it was slightly ajar. Charles pushed and the door gave silently inwards.
He stepped into the tiny hall, off which two doors gave, one on to the bedsitting room, the other presumably to a bathroom. The sitting-room door was also ajar.
‘Hello?’ said Charles softly. ‘Is there anyone there? Greg?’
No voice answered him; nor was there any sound of movement. He pushed the door open and sidled into the sitting room.
The first thing he noticed was that the brassbound pine chest was missing. Nor was there any sign of the tartan rug in the disarray of sheets on the sofabed.
Ot
herwise the room looked even more of a mess than it had the previous day. Drawers of a desk hung open and papers were scattered all over the floor.
Charles bent down to look at these and found all the symptoms of a life fallen apart. There were stern letters from bank managers, statements showing overdrafts galloping out of control, final demands for telephone and gas bills. On Metropolitan Police headed notepaper was a vigorous denunciation from a chief superintendent, assuring Detective Sergeant Marchmont that if there was any repetition of the incident when he was drunk on duty, his career in the force would be at an end.
There was a cold note about late maintenance payments, signed ‘Yours, Maureen.’
And a memento of the cause of the trouble. A faded card with a picture of a satisfied ginger cat on the front. Inside were the words: ‘Thanks for last night. It was wonderful. Love, Sam.’
Charles moved across to the desk and looked through its remaining contents. There were more, similar letters, more bank statements, a stiff communication from the building society about mortgage arrears.
And down at the bottom, as if they had been hidden away, two documents which brought a dry nausea to the back of Charles’s throat.
On one were typed the following words:
‘IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR MARTIN EARNSHAW, YOU COULD DO WORSE THAN OPEN A COUPLE OF COFFINS IN COLMER.’
On the other the message read:
‘IF YOU WANT A BIT MORE OF ME, YOU MIGHT FIND SOMETHING PARKED AT BRIGHTON STATION.’
Charles inspected the sheets closely. Plain white photocopying paper. And on the back of each a little circular red stamp, indicating that the sheets had been faxed.
It looked as if Charles Paris had found Martin Earnshaw’s murderer.
He scanned the sad, anonymous room – its open wardrobe with jumbled clothes spilling out, its gas rings with kettle and pressure cooker, its silent telephone, its air of seedy despair. And once again he felt how close he himself had come to this.
He moved dejectedly back to the hall, uncertain what to do next. Obviously the police must be contacted. But Charles Paris was disinclined to involve himself in the inevitable fuss which would follow. He was suddenly terribly tired, unable to face a long night of explanations and statements. No, an anonymous 999 call was the answer. Put on a voice, mention the Martin Earnshaw case, give Greg Marchmont’s address and let the police procedures take their course.
He decided he might as well take a look in the bathroom. Not that he expected to find out anything else. There wasn’t really anything else to find out.
He turned the handle, opened the door, and looked inside. Greg Marchmont was slumped on the closed lavatory seat in a parody of drunken collapse. Charles couldn’t see the wound, which must have been on the far side of the policeman’s head, but blood was spattered over the tiles and cistern and had drenched the right shoulder of his grey pullover.
His right hand dangled, almost ape-like, a few inches above the cracked lino. On the floor beneath it lay a black automatic pistol.
Detective Sergeant Greg Marchmont was undoubtedly dead.
Chapter Sixteen
CHARLES PARIS felt numb, almost detached. His mind wasn’t working properly. Ideas floated there loosely, unable or perhaps unwilling to make connections.
He forced himself to go closer to the body. He registered that the spattered blood was still bright red and shiny. It had only just stopped flowing, and had not yet begun to dry and turn brown.
With an even greater effort he leant forward to touch the flesh of Greg Marchmont’s hand. It was warm. The sergeant had not been long dead.
Then he noticed on the floor a sheet torn from a notebook. On it were scrawled the words:
‘I’M SORRY. I THOUGHT I COULD COPE WITH EVERYTHING, BUT WHEN IT CAME DOWN TO IT, I JUST COULDN’T STAND THE PRESSURE’
There was no means of knowing whether the lack of full stop after the last word was just carelessness or whether the message was incomplete. The dutiful use of punctuation in the rest of the message might point to the second conclusion.
Charles Paris backed away. Ring the police. Dial 999 and get the message across. That was the only coherent thought crystallising in his mind.
He could make the call from where he was. Use Marchmont’s phone and then get the hell out of the place. He tried to remember how much Bell’s he’d got back at Hereford Road. He was going to need a lot to anaesthetise him that night.
Charles Paris looked at his watch, wondering if he might still find an off-licence open. Twenty-seven minutes past ten. The transmission of Public Enemies had finished less than half an hour before. It felt so long ago it could have happened in a previous incarnation.
He moved automatically out of the bathroom, averting his eyes from the corpse, through the hall and back into the sitting room.
He approached the telephone, then hesitated. Was it sensible to make the call from there or might that link him to the place?
Fingerprints. God, his fingerprints were already on the door handles, possibly on the drawers and the papers he had picked up.
A dull panic made its slow progress through him. He was still too traumatised to feel anything stronger.
And with the panic came a new thought, a thought that started as a tiny inkling but quickly grew to a hideous certainty. Maybe Marchmont’s message had been unfinished. Maybe it was missing the word ‘COOKER’.
Zombie-like, almost in slow motion, as in one of those dreams where you run hopelessly through sand, Charles Paris moved towards the gas rings. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it loosely round the handles of the pressure cooker. Feeling their outlines through the cloth, he eased them apart. He closed his hand round the lid handle and lifted it up.
His intuition was confirmed. In the dry interior of the pressure cooker was a human head.
Mercifully, the eyes were closed, but the shock that ripped through Charles was still intense.
It wasn’t the shock, though, of seeing the face of the man he was employed to resemble.
Though discoloured and a little battered, the features were easily recognisable.
The head belonged to Ted Faraday.
Chapter Seventeen
CHARLES PARIS tried to piece it together the following morning on the train down to Brighton. His head felt as if it had been scrubbed by an over-diligent housewife with a pot-scourer. There hadn’t been a great deal of Bell’s back at Hereford Road, but enough. To his shame he’d bought another half at the Victoria Station off-licence that morning and already made inroads into it. The remaining contents sloshed around noisily in the bottle in his sports jacket pocket.
But, Charles told himself, it wasn’t the booze that had made him feel so shitty; it was the fact that he’d hardly slept. Every time he closed his eyes, the screen of his mind had filled with that head in the pressure cooker. On the few occasions when he did doze off, he was quickly woken by a dream of the head in even less wholesome circumstances, steaming away with a selection of vegetables. Through the night he had felt – and still felt – as tight as a coiled spring.
After consideration, he hadn’t rung the police. He reckoned they would make the discovery for themselves soon enough. Instead, he’d attempted a few futile gestures with a handkerchief to wipe the surfaces where fingerprints might incriminate him, and left Greg Marchmont’s flat, slipping the latch and closing the front door behind him.
Through the traumas of the night he hadn’t done much coherent thinking, but in the privacy of his empty early-morning railway compartment, he tried to bring an aching brain to bear on the subject.
The night before, his first thought was that Greg Marchmont must have been murdered. The sergeant knew too much and needed silencing. But morning reflection made him question this conclusion.
In some ways, for Marchmont to have been murdered didn’t match the rest of the crime. Though he didn’t hold much brief for most of what Roscoe had said, Charles agreed with the superintendent that the
murderer was an exhibitionist, who got a charge from the way he was manipulating the police, the Public Enemies team, and indeed the entire British public.
Everything about the case so far showed meticulous planning skills. Though the crime was grotesque, its perpetrator had brilliantly controlled the flow of information about it, keeping always one step ahead of the official investigations, and providing dramatic climaxes for the weekly Public Enemies programmes with all the artistry of an award-winning screenwriter. His technique suggested someone familiar with the workings of police work or television – or, more likely, both.
Greg Marchmont fitted some elements of this profile, but there were others he didn’t. For a start, he didn’t appear to have enough intelligence or imagination to devise the killer’s macabre scenario. Then again, his emotional tension and short temper seemed at odds with the cold-blooded detachment with which the crime must have been organised.
And, even though the faxes in his flat suggested the sergeant had been responsible for passing on information about the body parts to the police, Charles found it easier to cast him in a supporting role than as the initiator of the whole concept.
It seemed more credible that Greg Marchmont had sent the faxes on behalf of someone who had a hold over him.
That might explain his behaviour in Brighton too – clearing up the Trafalgar Lane flat on someone else’s orders.
And it could also support the theory that his death was suicide. If Greg Marchmont had not only been responsible for sending the faxes, but also for arranging delivery of the gruesome package to the Public Enemies office – and the use of his chest and blanket suggested he was at least involved – then the pressure on him must have been intensifying beyond endurance.
The presence of the severed head in his flat – or maybe the instructions for what he had to do with it – might have proved too much. Stress on that scale could easily have pushed a man in his emotional state over into suicide – and the note he left could be interpreted to confirm such a supposition.
