An Amateur Corpse

by Simon Brett

  ‘Good God.’ For the first time the lines of scepticism left the solicitor’s face. ‘And what about words ending in ed? There must be thousands.’

  ‘Thousands that are spelled that way, not so many that are pronounced like that.’

  ‘No. I suppose there’s coal shed again. If the two parts came the other way around . . .’

  ‘Or there’s dead, Gerald.’

  ‘Yes,’ the solicitor replied slowly. ‘Yes, there is.’

  ‘May I use your phone, Gerald?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m going to crack Vee Winter’s alibi.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t sound so grumpy about it. Cheapest time to phone your friends – after six and at weekends. I’ll pay for the call, if you like.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. The firm sees to the phone bill anyway.’

  ‘Of course. I’d forgotten. You never use your own money for anything, do you?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’ Gerald smiled complacently.

  Given Lytham St. Anne’s and the unusual name of le Carpentier, Directory Inquiries had no difficulty in producing Vee’s mother’s phone number. Charles put his finger down on the bar of Gerald’s Trimphone and prepared to dial.

  ‘Are you just going to ask her direct, Charles? Won’t she think it’s a bit odd?’

  ‘I’m not going to ask her direct. I have a little plan worked out, which involves using another voice. Don’t worry.’

  ‘But that’s illegal,’ wailed Gerald as Charles dialled. ‘You can’t make illegal calls on a solicitor’s telephone.’

  Mrs le Carpentier answered the phone with the promptness of a lonely old lady.

  ‘Hello. Telephone Engineer.’ Charles was pleased with the voice. He had first used it in a stillborn experimental play called Next Boat In (‘Captured all the bleakness and, I’m afraid, all the tedium of dockland’ – Lancashire Evening News). He thought it was a nice touch to be Liverpudlian for Lytham St. Anne’s.

  ‘Oh, what can I do for you? I hope there’s nothing wrong with the phone. I’m an old lady living on my own and –’

  The Telephone Engineer cut in reassuringly over Mrs le Carpentier’s genteel tones. ‘No, nothing to worry about. Just checking something. We had a complaint – somebody reported that your phone was continually engaged when they tried to ring, so I just have to check that the apparatus was in fact in a state of usage during the relevant period.’

  ‘Ah, I wonder who it could have been. Do you know who reported the fault?’

  ‘No, Madam.’

  ‘It could have been Winnie actually. She lives in Blundellsands. We play bridge quite often and it’s possible she was trying to set up a four for –’

  The Telephone Engineer decided he didn’t want to hear all of Mrs le Carpentier’s social life. ‘Yes, Madam. I wonder if we could just check the relevant period. The fault was reported last Monday. Apparently someone tried to call three times between nine and half past in the evening. Was the apparatus being used at this time?’

  So confident was he of a negative response that the reply threw him for a moment. ‘I beg your pardon, Madam?’

  ‘Yes, it was in use.’

  ‘Oh. Oh.’ Still, it wasn’t necessarily Vee to whom she was speaking. ‘Local calls, were they, Madam?’

  ‘Oh no, it was just one call. Long distance.’

  ‘Where to? We have to check, Madam, when it’s been reported.’

  ‘It was a call to Breckton. That’s in Surrey. Near London.’

  Charles felt the concoction of logis he had compounded trickling away from him. ‘Are you absolutely confident that that was the time, Madam?’

  ‘Absolutely. It was the time that that I, Claudius was on the television.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, you see, I saw it for the first time last week and I thought it was a shocking program. So much violence and immorality. My daughter had mentioned that she watched it, but after I’d seen what it was all about, I thought it was my duty as a mother to ring her up while it was on, so that she couldn’t watch it. Do you see?’

  ‘I see,’ Charles replied dully. Yes, he saw. He saw all his ideas suddenly discredited, he saw that he must flush every thought he’d ever had about the case out of his mind and start again with nothing.

  Mrs le Carpentier was still in righteous spate. ‘I think too many parents nowadays neglect their duties as their children’s moral guardians. I mean, Victoria’s over thirty, but she still needs looking after. She mixes with all kinds of theatrical people and –’

  ‘Victoria?’

  ‘My daughter.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘That’s another thing I don’t like in young people today – taking the name of the Lord in vain. It’s –’

  ‘Mrs le Carpentier, thank you very much. You’ve been most helpful. I can confirm that there is nothing wrong with your apparatus.’

  ‘Oh good. And do you think maybe I should ring Winnie?’

  “Yes, I would.’

  He slumped on to the sofa, not hearing Gerald’s remonstrances about the illegality of impersonating people over the telephone and the number of laws under which this action could be charged and how the fact that the owner did not stop the crime might well make him an accessory.

  It all flowed past Charles. The void which had been left in his mind by the confirmation of Vee’s alibi had only been there for a few seconds before new thoughts started to flood in. He pieced them together into a rough outline and then spoke, shutting Gerald up with a gesture.

  ‘Vee’s real name is Victoria.’

  ‘So what? What about her alibi? Was she telling the truth?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Charles dismissed the subject.

  ‘Well then, that seems to put the kybosh on the whole –’

  ‘But don’t you see – her real name is Victoria.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘I should have guessed. The way all these amateur actors fiddle about with their names, it should have been obvious.’

  ‘I don’t see that her name is important when –’

  ‘It is important, Gerald, because it means that it was Vee whom Charlotte was going to see at one o’clock the day after she was murdered. During the school lunch hour. Charlotte couldn’t stand all those affected stage names, so she would have called her Victoria as a matter of principle. And I bet that the reason she was going to see Vee was to tell her she was pregnant.’

  ‘So Vee didn’t already know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But surely that throws out all your motivation for her to have done the murder and –’

  ‘She didn’t do the murder. Forget Vee. She doesn’t have anything to do with it.’

  ‘Then who did kill Charlotte?’

  ‘Geoffrey Winter.’

  ‘But Geoffrey didn’t have any motivation to kill her. He had a very good affair going, everything was okay.’

  ‘Except that Charlotte was pregnant.’

  ‘We don’t even know that.’

  ‘I’ll bet the police post-mortem showed that she was. Go on, you can ask them when you’re next speaking.’

  ‘All right, let’s put that on one side for the moment and proceed with your wild theorizing.’ The lines of scepticism were once again playing around Gerald’s mouth.

  ‘Geoffrey and Vee Winter are a very close couple. In spite of his philandering, he is, as he told me, very loyal to her. Now all marriages are built up on certain myths and the myth which sustains Vee is that her childlessness is Geoffrey’s fault. His infertility gives her power. She can tolerate his affairs, secure in the knowledge that he will come back to her every time. But if it were suddenly proved that in fact he could father a child, everything on which she had based their years together would be taken away from her. I think, under those circumstances, someone as highly-strung as she is could just crack up completely.

  ‘Geoffrey knew how much it would mean to her, so when Charlotte told him she w
as pregnant, he had to keep that knowledge from his wife. No doubt his first reaction was to try to get her to have an abortion, but Charlotte, nice little Catholic girl that she was, would never have consented to that. Equally, being a conventional girl, she would want to have the whole thing open, she’d want to talk to his wife, even maybe see if Vee would be prepared to give Geoffrey up.

  ‘So she rang Vee up and fixed to meet her on the Tuesday during her lunch hour. On the Monday she went up to Villiers Street for her assignation with Geoffrey and told him what she intended to do. He could not allow the confrontation of the two women to take place. He decided that Charlotte must never go and see Vee. So he killed her.’

  Charles leaned back with some satisfaction. The new theory felt much more solid than the old one. It left less details unaccounted for.

  Gerald said exactly what Charles knew he would. ‘I’m impressed by the psychological reasoning, Charles, but there is one small snag. Geoffrey Winter had an alibi for the only time he could have murdered Charlotte. He was at home rehearsing his lines so loudly that his next door neighbour complained to the police. How do you get round that one?’

  Gerald couldn’t have set it up more perfectly for him if he had tried. ‘This is how he did it.’ Charles picked the cassette box up off the table.

  ‘So easy. He even told me he used the cassette recorder for learning his lines. All he had to do was to record a full forty-five minutes of The Winter’s Tale on to this cassette, put it on, slip out of the French windows of his study, go and commit the murder, come back, change from recording to his own voice and insure that he started ranting loudly enough to annoy his neighbour with whom his relationship was already dodgy. After previous disagreements about noise, he felt fairly confident that she would call the police, thus putting the final seal on his watertight alibi.’

  Gerald was drawn to this solution, but he was not wholly won over. ‘Hmm. It seems that one has to take some enormous imaginative leaps to work that out. I’d rather have a bit more evidence.’

  ‘We’ve got the cassette. And I’ve suddenly realized what it means. The words – it’s Leontes.’

  ‘It’s what?’

  ‘Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. One of the most famous lines in the play. When he speaks of Hermione’s eyes, he says; “Stars, stars! And all eyes else dead coals”. ’That’s the bit we’ve got on the tape.’

  Gerald was silent. Then slowly, unwillingly, he admitted, ‘Do you know, you could be right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right,’ said Charles. ‘Now where’s that lunch you were talking about?’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHARLES DIDN’T WANT to hurry things. He was now confident that he knew how Charlotte had been killed, and he could afford to take time to check it. There was no point in confronting Geoffrey Winter or going to the police with an incompletely researched solution.

  He left Gerald late on the Saturday afternoon. (Gerald wanted to watch Doctor Who and Charles didn’t really much.) They agreed that Charles should make various further investigations and then report back. Gerald was now more or less convinced by the new solution, but his legal caution remained.

  Since there was nothing useful he could do that day, Charles went for the evening to one of his old haunts, the Montrose, a little drinking club round the back of the Haymarket. As he expected, it was full of out-of-work actors (and even, after the theatres finished, some in-work ones). A great deal of alcohol was consumed.

  He woke feeling pretty ropey on the Sunday morning and did the tube and train journey to Breckton on automatic pilot. It was only when he emerged into the stark November sunlight outside the suburban station that consciousness began to return.

  Blearily he reminded himself of the plan he had vaguely formed the day before. He had come down to Breckton to check the timing of the crime, to retrace the steps that Geoffrey Winter had taken on the Monday night and see if it was feasible for him to have killed Charlotte in the forty-five minutes the tape allowed.

  Charles was early. Since he didn’t want to run the risk of meeting any of the principals in the crime, he had decided to conduct his exploration after two-thirty when they would all be emoting over The Winter’s Tale up at the Backstagers.

  He arrived just after twelve, which was a remarkably convenient time for him to go into a pub and kill time and his hangover at one blow.

  There was a dingy little Railway Tavern adjacent to the station which was ideal for his purposes. The railway line was at some distance from the posher residential side of Breckton and he was in no danger of meeting any of the Backstagers down there.

  When he entered the pub, it was clear that the clientele came from ‘the other side of the railway’, an expression of subtle snobbery that he had heard more than once from the theatrical circle. On the ‘other side of the railway’ there was a council estate, yet another socio-geological stratum in the complex structure of Breckton. At the bottom was the bedrock of ‘the other side of the railway line’, then the unstable mixture of rising lower middle and impoverished upper middle class ‘the other side of the main road’ (where Geoffrey and Vee lived), then the rich clay of the newer detached executive houses like the Meckens’ and finally the lush topsoil of extreme affluence which manifested itself in mock-Tudor piles like the Hobbses’. Across the strata ran the faults and fissures of class and educational snobbery as well so that a full understanding of the society would be a lifetime’s study.

  Charles ordered a pint which made his brain blossom out of its desiccation like a Japanese flower dropped in water.

  Being a Sunday, there was nothing to eat in the pub except for a few cheese biscuits and cocktail onions on the bar, but Charles was quite happy to resign himself to a liquid lunch.

  As he sat and drank, his mind returned to Charlotte’s murder. Not in a depressed or panicky way, but with a kind of intellectual calm. He felt as he had sometimes done when writing a play, the comforting assurance that he’d sorted out a satisfactory plot outline and only needed to fill in the details.

  And little details were slotting into his scenario of the death of Charlotte Mecken. One was disturbing. He was beginning to think that Geoffrey might be on to his suspicions.

  First, the interrogation in his office must have put him on his guard, if Charles’s phone call on the evening of Hugo’s arrest hadn’t already done so. But there was something else. On the Friday night, when Geoffrey had discovered Charles on his sitting room, he had looked extremely suspicious. At the time, Charles had assumed that the suspicion had a sexual basis.

  But, as he thought back over the circumstances, he found another interpretation. When Geoffrey arrived, the cassette player was running, reproducing Vee’s performance of Wycherley’s Mrs Pinchwife. Geoffrey had entered speaking to Vee, as if he expected her to be in the room. Maybe the suspicion arose when he saw that he had been fooled by the sound of the cassette player, that in fact he had been caught by his own deception. If that were the case, then he might have thought that Charles was further advanced in his investigation than he was and that playing the tape of Vee had been a deliberate set-up to see how the supposed murderer would react.

  It was quite a thought. Geoffrey was a cold-blooded killer and if he could dispose of his mistress without a qualm, he would have little hesitation in getting rid of anyone else who stood in his way. Charles would have to tread warily.

  Because if Geoffrey Winter did try to kill him, he would do the job well. He was a meticulous planner. Charles thought of the set model for The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Geoffrey’s study. Every move carefully considered. Little plastic people being manipulated, disposed (and disposed of) according to the director’s will.

  The thought of danger cast a chill over the conviviality of the pub and the glow of the fourth pint. Well, the solution was to get to the source of the danger as soon as possible, to prove Geoffrey’s guilt and have him put away before he could make a hostile move.

  The pub was closing. Charles went to t
he Gents with the uncomfortable feeling that the amount he had consumed and the cold weather were going to make him want to go again before too long.

  It was after two-thirty when he reached the Winters’ road. He walked along it at an even pace, apparently giving their house no deeper scrutiny than the others. Somehow he felt that the watchers of Breckton were still alert behind their net curtains on Sunday afternoons.

  The Winters themselves had resisted the suburban uniform of net curtains, so from a casual glance he could feel pretty confident that they were out. But he did not start his timed walk from then. He felt sure there must be a route from the back of the house.

  When he got to the end of the road, his hunch was proved right. The gardens of the row of identical semis (identical to everyone except their proud owners) backed on to the gardens of the parallel row in the next road. Between them ran a narrow passage flanked with back gates into minute gardens.

  The alley was concreted over, its surface cracked and brown, marked with moss and weeds. Suburban secrecy insured that the end fencing of all the gardens was too high for anyone walking along the alley to see in (or, incidentally, to be seen).

  As Charles walked along, he could hear sounds from the gardens. The scrape of a trowel, a snatch of conversation, the sudden wail of a child, very close the snuffling bark of a dog. But except for the occasional flash of movement through the slats of fencing, he saw no one.

  And this was in the middle of Sunday afternoon. After dark one could feel absolutely secure in passing unseen along the alley. And Geoffrey Winter must have known that.

  When he reached the Winter’s garden gate, he pressed close to the fence and squinted through a chink. He could see the distinctive wall-colouring of Geoffrey’s study and, outside it, the little balcony and staircase, so convenient for anyone who wanted to leave the room unnoticed after dark.

  As anticipated, the pressure on his bladder was becoming uncomfortable and he stopped to relieve himself where he stood. He was again struck by the secluded nature of the alley, which enabled him to behave impolitely in such a polite setting.