A Reconstructed Corpse Read online

  He took her hand. She didn’t resist. He fondled it in his, feeling the reassuring ridge of the kitchen knife scar on her thumb, and was swamped by the knowledge of how much she meant to him.

  Frances’s hand returned the pressure. He kissed her thin lips.

  The last episode of Public Enemies was, inevitably, an anticlimax. The news media were not going to let themselves be upstaged again and were hungry for revenge.

  The story broke on the Saturday, so the weekend papers and television news bulletins took great pleasure in producing ever new revelations about the death and dismemberment of Ted Faraday. All their reports made references to Public Enemies, the television programme which had devoted nearly a whole series to investigating the wrong murder.

  By the following Thursday the public was sick to death of the story and of the very mention of Public Enemies. They voted with their feet – or rather with their remote controls – and the ITV ratings plummeted. Dad’s Army had never been so popular.

  Bob Garston and Bob’s Your Uncle Productions, realising that the prospects for another series of Public Enemies had been seriously jeopardised, started developing a new True Crime format called The Sex Offenders. This would reconstruct historic and current sex crimes with the same public-spirited grittiness which had characterised Public Enemies. The thinking was that an appeal to the public’s prurient fascination with sex, as well as to their prurient fascination with violence, could not fail.

  Bob’s Your Uncle Productions did not mention the new idea to Roger Parkes, whose contract at W.E.T. had not been renewed. Geoffrey Ramage, however, thought he was in with a chance of being employed because in his time he’d directed quite a few blue movies.

  The Sex Offenders, however, fell foul of an increasingly puritanical IBA, and was abandoned at an advanced stage of preparation, after Bob’s Your Uncle Productions had spent a considerable amount of development money.

  Bob Garston, so recently flavour of the month, suddenly couldn’t be given away with soap. His girlfriend, Detective Inspector Sam Noakes, very quickly left the sinking ship and started an affair with a junior cabinet minister who was very strong on law and order issues.

  Her police career continued to advance, but not as quickly as had once been prophesied. When the new head of the ‘Video Nasties’ department was announced, it wasn’t Sam Noakes. Her involvement in the Public Enemies debacle had left a permanent black mark against her.

  The true story of Ted Faraday’s death never emerged. The police closed ranks and, though the suicides of Greg Marchmont and Superintendent Roscoe were reported, no connection was ever made between them and the private investigator’s murder.

  So far as the public knew – and it was a thought which gave them a deliciously unpleasant frisson – the man who had killed and dismembered Ted Faraday was ‘still at large’.

  Chloe Eamshaw was not prosecuted for wasting police time. Though her fabrications had cost them hundreds of thousands, it was reckoned impossible to proceed against her without raising embarrassing questions about the force’s own shortcomings during the investigation.

  Martin Earnshaw became a kind of folk hero. His simple manner and the tag of ‘The Man Who Came Back From The Dead’ made him ideal tabloid fodder. And when he married his beloved Veronique, the paparazzi gave the occasion almost as much coverage as a royal divorce. The couple retired happily to her family farm, where they bred Limousin cattle and children.

  Chloe Earnshaw, almost as discredited as Bob Garston but still drawn to publicity like a moth to flame, tried to set up a charitable trust to help victims of tabloid character assassination. She arranged a major launch, featuring a couple of minor film actors, three rock musicians, a television weather girl and innumerable soap stars.

  Unfortunately, though the event was well organised and publicised, no press arrived to cover it. Chloe Earnshaw should have realised that she would never get away with biting the hand that had so lavishly fed her.

  Within a year, the public had completely forgotten the name of Chloe Earnshaw. And that hurt more than any of the supposed sufferings during her brief camera-flash of fame.

  The tests on Frances were inconclusive. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said the consultant jovially, ‘or if there is we haven’t found it!’

  She said she felt fine, but still tired easily. Her husband made all kinds of extravagant promises that he’d keep more closely in touch with her, that he’d really try to rebuild their relationship.

  But Charles Paris remained Charles Paris, and the road to hell is paved with empty bottles of Bell’s.

  He went back into empty-glove-puppet mode, and his so-called ‘career’ returned to its customary stasis. The theatre was, as Maurice Skellem put it, ‘very quiet’, and nobody seemed to be making television drama any more. Or those who did seemed determined not to employ Charles Paris in their productions.

  Sometimes, when things were really bad, Charles would walk through the streets of London and, if he saw someone of approximately his build and age, would think idly to himself, ‘If I killed that man, I might be employed to play him in a television reconstruction of the murder. But is it really worth the hassle?’

  Generally speaking, the answer he came up with was no.