A Reconstructed Corpse

by Simon Brett

  In the hospitality suite, Charles learned a little more. Faraday was evidently well known to the police contingent and many of his exchanges with Sam Noakes had prompted jokes and barracking. After her last remark one of the policeman shouted, ‘Well, you got to be a PI, haven’t you, Ted? Should have realised the golden rule – if you want to stay in the Met, keep on the right side of the right people . . . isn’t that right, Superintendent Roscoe . . .?’

  The superintendent looked up from his beer, whose level had gone down very little in the previous half-hour, and smiled. It was a complex smile. Within it were unease and caution, but also undeniably triumph.

  ‘Hey, listen, listen!’ shouted one of the policemen and attention returned to what Bob Garston was saying.

  ‘. . . and we on Public Enemies are always trying to find out more about crime on behalf of you, the audience. So we thought we’d hire our own private eye and put him on the Martin Earnshaw case. Are you game to take up the challenge, Ted?’

  ‘If you’re prepared to pay my usual rates – plus expenses . . . you’re on, Bob.’ Faraday grinned. Clearly this part of the programme had been heavily set up.

  Bob Garston turned to the Detective Inspector. ‘And, on behalf of Scotland Yard, are you prepared to take up the challenge?’

  Sam Noakes also grinned. ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘So we’ll keep up progress reports here on Public Enemies and see whether the real police, with all the resources at their disposal, can be beaten to the solution by the gifted amateur!’

  Ted Faraday again winced at the description and would probably have remonstrated, but Bob Garston had already turned to another camera and started reading his next link off the autocue.

  The last item on that week’s Public Enemies was another follow-up on the Martin Earnshaw disappearance. This, needless to say, featured the missing man’s wife, currently Britain’s favourite sufferer.

  Geoffrey Ramage may have been denied the set-dressing of a moody Charles Paris silhouette in the background, but the effect he came up with was still pretty theatrical. Chloe Earnshaw, dressed again in simple black, was shot against a blown-up black-and-white photograph of the Black Feathers. The overhead lighting bleached the colour out of her hair and skin, so that only the deep blueness of her eyes disturbed the monochrome. The light also sparkled off her unshed tears.

  What she said was the usual stuff. ‘There must be someone out there who knows something about where Martin is. I appeal to them – I beg them – to tell me where he is or what’s happened to him. Even if the news is bad, I want to know it. When I know, I can start to rebuild the rest of my life. Please, please, if anyone knows anything – the smallest, smallest thing about Martin . . . just pick up the phone.’

  And all over the country men thought unworthily, ‘I wouldn’t mind picking up the phone and asking for her number.’

  Charles had an unworthy thought too. There was no doubt that Chloe Earnshaw was one of those people whom, as the showbiz cliché has it, ‘the camera loves’. Charles Paris couldn’t help suspecting that the camera’s devotion was reciprocated.

  Chapter Three

  DI SAM NOAKES had changed into a figure-hugging red dress after the programme. Its colour had been carefully selected to complement rather than scream at her hair. Out of uniform, she still looked good, but softer, less of the disciplinarian.

  Her appearance in the hospitality suite was greeted by a tide of catcalls and innuendo which washed off her unnoticed. The silent, heavy-drinking plain-clothes man turned towards her.

  ‘Quite the television star now, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Police investigation meets game show, eh? What’ll it be next, Sam – Blind Date?’

  She looked at him coolly. ‘Well, if it was, I’m afraid I wouldn’t pick you, Greg.’ It was spoken lightly, but the words stung. Before he could respond, she went on, ‘Anyway, I’m a copper. All this television stuff is irrelevant – just means to an end. If it helps solve crime, then I’ll do it.’

  ‘Even if it means a “head-to-head play-off” against Ted Faraday?’

  ‘Even if it means that.’

  ‘And so you’re doing all this in the line of duty? You don’t get any buzz out of just being on the box?’

  She shook her head decisively, setting the red hair swaying. ‘I just get a kick out of doing my job well, Greg . . .’ The pale blue eyes gave him an even stare . . . doing it as well as a man would.’

  ‘Better than a lot of them.’ The man called Greg looked across the room and murmured intimately, ‘Oh-oh, talk of the devil.’

  He moved out of the way as Superintendent Roscoe came across to Sam and embraced her with a clumsy, old-fashioned peck on the cheek. ‘Another lovely performance, Noakes. Very well done indeed, my dear.’ Charles saw her wince at the endearment, but the superintendent didn’t notice. ‘Whenever I watch this programme, I feel really glad that I backed the suggestion of doing it so strongly in the early days.’

  ‘Yes.’ DI Noakes sounded neither interested nor as if she believed him. Her eyes were already over his shoulder, searching out someone else to talk to. Superintendent Roscoe seemed to have the same effect on all his colleagues. Superior in rank he might be, but they all ignored him.

  There was a commotion at the door, as more of the production team entered. Sam Noakes, taking advantage of the diversion with a murmured ‘Excuse me’, moved away from Superintendent Roscoe.

  Charles Paris also moved. The booze was getting low and he wanted to ensure a refill before the new influx. He knew it was a bit unfair to take drink from the mouths of people who’d just been busting their guts in the studio, but there are extreme situations in which fairness cannot be the first priority.

  He managed to drain what looked like the last bottle of red into his beer glass. That half-filled it, which would have to do.

  He was moving away from the bar when he felt a tap on his shoulder. ‘Ted.’

  Charles turned to find himself facing the plain-clothes officer Sam Noakes had called ‘Greg’. The man reacted with some surprise. ‘Sorry, I thought you were Ted Faraday.’

  ‘No, I’m Ted Faraday.’ The real owner of the identity had just entered the suite.

  ‘Yes, of course you are,’ said Greg. ‘Just from the back it looked . . . Ted, this is, um . . .’ He didn’t know the name . . . the guy who played Martin Earnshaw in the reconstruction.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Charles Paris,’ Charles Paris supplied helpfully.

  ‘Ah. Good to see you.’ Charles felt his hand firmly grasped as the private investigator gave him a thorough look. ‘Yes, not a bad likeness.’

  ‘Just get you a drink, Ted.’ Greg moved to the bar.

  ‘Oh, thanks, I’ll have a –’

  ‘Be a matter of what there is, I’m afraid.’

  Left alone with Faraday, Charles Paris felt the need to make conversation. ‘You know anything special about the Earnshaw case?’

  The investigator shrugged. ‘No more than anyone else does. Till we find a body . . .’

  ‘You think that’s what will be found?’

  ‘Oh yes, Charles. Somebody knows something. Scotland Yard wouldn’t be taking a disappearance this seriously if they weren’t pretty damned sure it’s a murder.’

  ‘And you think you’ll find the body before the police do?’

  ‘I’ll give it a bloody good try. Probably easier for me to go underground than someone on the force.’

  ‘But if you’re reporting back on the programme every week, isn’t it going to be difficult for you to go completely underground?’

  ‘I’ll file my reports by phone – or fax more likely. As with all these programmes, the skill is in how much information you give to the public.’

  ‘Bob Garston gave the impression he wanted this story to run through the series. What happens if Martin Eamshaw’s body’s found straight away?’

  A cynical smile tugged at the corners of Ted Faraday’s lips. ‘Be bloody inconvenient, woul
dn’t it? Murderers just have no sense of what goes to make a good television programme. Actually, though, there is a contingency plan for that.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘If they find the body, then the stakes go higher. It’s a race between me and the Met to find the murderer.’

  ‘Do you really approve of methods like this?’

  The investigator screwed up his face wryly. ‘Well . . . everything else is showbiz these days. Politics . . . the Monarchy . . . why should the police force be any different? And these programmes do sometimes turn up information you wouldn’t get from any other source. Anyway, from my point of view, it’s bloody marvellous.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘For someone who’s only recently set up as a PI, this kind of publicity’s like gold dust.’

  ‘Yes, but publicity in your line of work could be a two-edged sword, couldn’t it? Not much use having a face that’s famous from television when you’re doing undercover stuff, is it?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I am a master of disguise.’ Ted Faraday rolled the cliché ironically round his mouth.

  ‘And when your name’s nationally known you’ll get a whole lot more enquiries and bookings?’

  ‘Reckon so. And another thing about Public Enemies employing me is –’ Faraday grinned ‘– the money’s bloody great. That is the big difference from the Met, let me tell you. As a PI, when you get the work, you get properly paid for it.’

  ‘Very nice too.’

  ‘You bet. No, I’ve really found my feet since I’ve been out of all that form-filling crap. I wouldn’t go back into the real force if they asked me on bended knee.’

  ‘No danger of that happening.’ The new voice belonged to Superintendent Roscoe who had sidled into the periphery of their conversation.

  Ted Faraday’s reaction was interesting. He very positively ignored the superintendent and, talking into the empty air, announced, ‘At least in the real world I don’t have to deal with superannuated timeservers with no understanding of crime or criminal methods.’

  The antagonism hung almost visibly between the two men. Superintendent Roscoe seemed for a moment to contemplate a riposte, but either he changed his mind or couldn’t think of anything clever enough to say, because he lumbered off awkwardly to join the fringes of another group.

  ‘Ex-boss?’ asked Charles.

  Ted Faraday grinned drily. ‘You’d make a great detective, picking up subtle nuances like that. Actually, Shitface Roscoe is the reason I left the force.’

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘Too complicated to go into. Let’s just say a personality clash. You’re never going to find much in common between someone with a bit of imagination and a talentless bureaucrat whose priorities are stifling initiative in others and taking any available credit for himself.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Charles Paris. Faraday’s answer seemed to have covered the question pretty thoroughly.

  The noise in the room abated as Chloe Earnshaw entered. Her television make-up was gone and she looked more vulnerable than ever, as though a layer of protective skin had been removed. There was a momentary hesitation among the policemen who towered around her, before the one Sam Noakes had addressed as ‘Greg’ moved forward protectively.

  ‘Another very moving appeal, Mrs Earnshaw.’

  She turned the blue eyes on him with an air of bewilderment. ‘Just so long as it does some good.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I think it’s bound to.’ He fell back on cliché. ‘There must be someone out there who knows something.’

  ‘I hope so.’ She look gauchely round the room. ‘I shouldn’t really have come in here.’

  Then why did you? Charles instinctively asked himself, surprised how readily Chloe Earnshaw had prompted another unworthy thought.

  ‘I find crowds difficult at the moment,’ she went on.

  Then why do you walk into one? Charles’s mind unworthily continued.

  ‘Better than being on your own, though,’ said Greg. ‘At least you can’t brood so much when you’re with people.’

  Chloe Earnshaw gave him a little wry smile, which seemed to announce her infinite capacity to brood in any circumstances.

  ‘Come on,’ he said gently, ‘let’s get you a bevvy.’

  As he spoke, he took her arm and led her towards the drinks table. To Charles there seemed something oddly flamboyant about the gesture, as if it were made for the benefit of someone else. And from the glance Greg flashed towards her, that someone else appeared to be Sam Noakes. But either the detective inspector didn’t see the move, or deliberately showed no reaction to it.

  The noise level in the room rose again as Bob Garston entered, in the middle of an argument with Roger Parkes. Its subject was, needless to say, the programme and, also needless to say, Bob Garston was doing the talking.

  ‘Listen, it’s our job to keep Public Enemies one step ahead. We’re not the only True Crime series on television at the moment, but we’re the best and I’m bloody determined we’re going to stay the best. We’re not going to achieve that, though, if we fill the programmes with half-baked ideas and make-weight features.’

  ‘The public are interested in automatic security lights,’ Roger Parkes remonstrated wearily. ‘It’s just the kind of consumer information they want. And it’s the kind of feature that’s dead easy and cheap to set up and –’

  ‘That’s all you bloody think about, Roger – what’s easy and cheap. And I’ll tell you, items that’re easy and cheap look easy and cheap. You may have swanned through your career at W.E.T. doing the minimum, taking the line of least resistance, but you’re working with Bob Garston now. And I care about programmes that have my name on them. I work bloody hard to make myself the best I can be at what I do, and I demand the same kind of commitment from everyone who works for me – everyone!’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Even the bloody executive producer! I know that’s a title that usually means bugger all – just a way of giving some talentless pen-pusher the illusion of usefulness – but when the production’s one I’m involved in, then I see to it that everyone pulls their weight!’

  ‘Bob, there’s no need to be insulting. I –’

  ‘Listen, television’s a competitive business. We’ve got to do better than the opposition – doing as well as them is just not good enough. We’ve got to have new ideas, new approaches, new surprises. We’ve got to give the audience no alternative but to watch Public Enemies. They’ve got to watch the programme because they know they’re missing something if they don’t watch it. So we need a dynamic approach, not a line-of-least-bloody-resistance, let’s-do-it-because-it’s-cheap-and-easy approach!’

  ‘I am giving you all the backing I can,’ said Roger Parkes with some dignity, ‘but we’re only at the start of the series. We have to pace ourselves over the next six weeks. The production team have worked on overdrive for this programme and that’s fair enough – it’s the first, it needs to make an impact. But they can’t maintain that level of energy all the time. We need a few – as you so sneeringly call them – easy items to lower the tempo a bit.’

  ‘But we don’t want to lower the bloody tempo – that’s the way of mediocrity – and only a mediocre mind thinks like that!’

  The executive producer was having difficulty curbing his anger, but he managed it. Charles could guess at the motivations which lay behind that restraint. Not least among them, he imagined, was the fact that W.E.T. needed Public Enemies for its ratings potential, and if that meant putting up with the manic bad manners of Bob Garston, then so be it. In the changed climate of television, when staff jobs hardly existed, when everyone was only as good as their last short-term contract, the replacement of an executive producer was easily achieved. If he was going to keep his job, Roger Parkes could not risk upsetting the apple-cart.

  ‘Very well,’ he said in a conciliatory tone which must have cost him a great deal. ‘I’ll see to it that everyone gives you all the back-up you require, Bob.’
>
  ‘Good.’ Garston was momentarily appeased, until he saw Geoffrey Ramage entering the hospitality suite and went straight back on to the attack. ‘And that everyone includes the bloody director!’

  Ramage looked bewildered, still dazed from the exhaustions of the studio day. ‘What?’

  ‘Public Enemies,’ the presenter fulminated on, ‘is a piece of serious factual reportage. Its basis is no-nonsense hard-bitten journalism – it’s not an excuse for some bloody wanker to audition for the Fritz Lang School of Hard-Boiled Realism!’

  Before Geoffrey Ramage had time to respond to this assault, Bob Garston was interrupted by one of the lumbering policemen. ‘Hey, the booze has run out. Who’s the person who sorts that kind of thing out round here?’

  Roger Parkes replied instinctively. He might have a mediocre mind, he might never have made the greatest creative contribution to television, but he was highly skilled in the most important part of a producer’s role – getting drinks for people. ‘I could organise some more supplies from the bar,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Bob Garston.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bob’s Your Uncle Productions are controlling the budget on this show. We’ve allocated a certain amount for hospitality. If that’s finished, then that’s finished.’

  ‘What, you mean you’re not authorising any more booze?’ asked Roger Parkes in disbelief.

  ‘Exactly,’ Bob Garston replied with gritty relish.

  It must be wonderful, Charles Paris thought wistfully, genuinely not to care whether people like you or not.

  The W.E.T. bar was closed by the time the full impact of the hospitality suite drought had sunk in, so it was a somewhat disconsolate group of policemen and production staff who trickled out of W.E.T. House at the end of the studio day. Some left for public transport, some went to their own cars, others had hire cars organised. There was an official-looking vehicle with uniformed driver for Superintendent Roscoe. And something very close to a limousine waiting for Bob Garston. Whatever budgetary restrictions might apply to other members of the production team, he was a man with star status to maintain.