An Amateur Corpse cp-4 Read online

  ‘But you never asked her directly?’

  ‘No. Towards the end we didn’t talk too much. Only to make domestic arrangements or to shout at each other. Oh, I’m sure she had a man somewhere.’

  ‘When did you start to think this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Two, three months back.’

  ‘Round the time she started rehearsing The Seagull.’

  ‘Possible. And, in answer to your next question, no, I have no idea whether she was having an affair with any of the Backstagers. I just felt she was having an affair with someone.’ Hugo’s voice was slurred with fatigue. Charles could feel Gerald’s protective restlessness and knew he hadn’t got much longer for his questioning.

  ‘Hugo, I’ll leave you now. Just one last thing. I want to find out more about Charlotte. Did she have any friends’ I could talk to, to ask about her?’

  Hugo replied flatly, ‘No, no friends in Breckton. No close friends. That’s what she always complained about. That’s why she joined the Backstagers, to meet people. No, no friends, except lover boy.’

  ‘Didn’t she keep in touch with people she’d known before you married?’

  ‘One or two. Not many. Diccon Hudson she used to see sometimes. And there was a girl she’d been at drama school with, used to come round sometimes. Not recently. I didn’t like her much. Too actressy, hippy… young maybe is what I mean.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Sally Radford.’

  ‘Thank you. I will go now, Hugo. I’m sorry to have to put you through it all again. But if there’s a chance of finding something out, it’ll be worth it.’

  Hugo spoke with his eyes closed. His voice was infinitely tired. ‘I wouldn’t bother Charles. I killed her.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Charles sat over a pint in the bay-window of a coach lamp and horse brasses pub and looked out at the main shopping street of Breckton.

  It was dominated by a long parade of shops with flats overhead, built in the thirties by some neat planning mind which had decreed that this would be enough, that there was room here for a baker, a butcher, a grocer, a greengrocer, a fishmonger, an ironmonger and one of everything else that the area might need. It would all be neat, all contained, all readily accessible.

  Maybe it had had five years of this neat, ordered appearance. But soon shops had changed hands or identities and the uniformity of the original white-lettered names had been broken down by new signs and fascias. Now the line above the shop-windows was an uneven chain of oblongs in neon and garish lettering. And the frontages of the flats had been variously painted or pitted with the acne of pebbledash.

  The original parade had quickly proved inadequate to the demands of the growing dormitory suburb. New rows of shops had sprung up to flank it, each date-stamped by design, and each with its uniformity broken in the same way.

  As the final insult to symmetry, opposite the old parade an enormous supermarket had been built in giant Lego bricks.

  The street was crowded with shoppers. Almost all women with children. Outside the pub Charles saw two young mothers, each with a child swinging on the end of one arm and another swaddled in a baby buggy, stop and chat And he began to feel the isolation of Charlotte in this great suburban incubator.

  The whole place was designed for young couples with growing families and all the daytime social life revolved around children.

  What could a girl like Charlotte have done all day in a place like this? Little more than a girl when she married, she had presumably come from some sort of lively flat life in London. The shock of her lonely incarceration in the suburbs must have been profound.

  What had she done all day? At first there had been thoughts of her continuing her acting career, but, as time went on, the terrible slump of unemployment which all young actors go through while they are building up their contacts must have extended hopelessly to the point where she lost those few contacts she had. Hugo, while probably not actively discouraging her career, had come from nearly twenty years of marriage to a woman who had done nothing but minister to him and, however vehement his protests that his second marriage was going to be totally different from his first, was too selfish to give real encouragement to something that could take his new wife away from home. So Charlotte’s horizons were limited before the marriage had gone sour.

  What had gone wrong with the marriage? Charles felt he knew. Something comparable had happened to him. With a mental blush he remembered himself equally dewy-eyed two years before, equally certain that a young girl called Anna could put the clock back for him, that he could fall in love like an adolescent in a romantic novel. In his case, the disillusionment had been rapid and total, but he could still feel the pain of it.

  With Hugo the realization must have been slower, but even more devastating. As the relationship progressed, he must have understood gradually that he had not married a goddess, only a girl. She wasn’t a symbol of anything, just a real person, with all the attendant inadequacies and insecurities. Even her beauty was transient. In the short years of their marriage, he must have seen her begin to age, seen, the crinkles spread beneath her eyes and know that nothing had changed, that he was the same person, growing older yoked to a different woman. And a woman in many ways less suitable than the wife he had left for her.

  No doubt the sexual side of the marriage had also palled. Charles knew too well the anxieties men of his age were prey to. Perhaps Hugo had left Alice when their sex-life had started to fail, making the common male mistake of blaming the woman. He had married Charlotte as the new cure-all and then, slowly, slowly found that all the old anxieties had crept back and left him no better off than before.

  Once the marriage had started to go wrong, deterioration would have been rapid. Hugo had always had the ability to shrink back into himself. No doubt when love’s young dream began to crack, he didn’t talk to Charlotte about it. He probably ceased to talk to her at all, morbidly digging himself into his own disappointment. He took to drinking more, arriving home later, leaving her longer and longer on her own. Again the question — what did she find to do all day?

  Charles decided that was the first thing for him to find out. And he knew where to start. Still in his pocket was the spare key which Hugo had pressed on him so hospitably. He set off towards the Meckens’ house.

  The road of executive residences was almost deserted. Distantly an old lady walked a dog. The houses looked asleep, their net curtains closed like eyelids.

  Charles felt chilly as he crunched across the small arc of gravel in front of Hugo’s house. There was a strong temptation to look round, to see if he was observed, but he resisted it. There was no need to be surreptitious; he was not doing anything wrong.

  Inside everything was tidy. Very different from the Tuesday night. The police had been through every room, checking, searching. And they had replaced everything neatly. Too neatly. The house looked like a museum.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for, but it was something to do with Charlotte. Something that would explain her, maybe even answer the nagging question of how she spent her time. He had thought he understood her in the Backstagers’ car park on Saturday night, but it was only since her death that he was beginning to feel the complexity of her character and circumstances.

  Like the Winters, Hugo and Charlotte had had the luxury of space in a house designed for a family. Their double bed was in the large front bedroom which had a bathroom en suite. But when Charles had come to stay with them for the first time, some three months before, Hugo had slept in one of the small back bedrooms and used the main bathroom. Husband and wife lived in a state of domestic apartheid.

  The bed in the mis-titled master bedroom was strangely pathetic. It was large with a white fur cover, a defiant sexual status symbol. It had been bought for a new, hopeful marriage, a marriage that was going to work. But now the pillows were only piled on one side and one of the bedside tables was empty.

  He looked through the books on the other si
de. Nothing unexpected in Charlotte’s literary taste. A few thrillers, a Gerald Durrell, a copy of The Seagull. All predictable enough.

  On the shelf below was something more interesting. A copy of a Family Health Encyclopaedia. It was not a new book, printed in the fifties, probably something Hugo had brought from his previous married home. Not a great work of medical literature, but useful for spot diagnosis of childish ailments.

  But why was Charlotte reading it? Was she ill? And why was she reading it in a slightly surreptitious way, half-hiding the book. Surely, if she thought she were really ill, she’d have gone to a doctor. Or at least consulted some more detailed medical work. Unless it had been the only work of reference to hand. Unless she had a panic about something she didn’t dare to discuss…

  Good Lord, had Charlotte been worried that she was pregnant? Suddenly, the thought seemed attractively plausible. A lot of what she had said in the Backstagers’ car park would be explained if that were the case. That business about being off alcohol. It could be checked through the police post-mortem. Mental note to ask Gerald.

  If she were pregnant, a whole new volume of possible motives for killing her was opened. He felt a catch of excitement.

  He tried the drawer next. That didn’t seem to offer anything unexpected. A couple of rings, a broken string of beads, no doubt awaiting mending, a polythene bag of cotton wool balls, a nail-file, an empty key-ring, a jar of nail polish and… what was that at the back? He pulled it out. A small book covered in red leather.

  It was a Roman Catholic missal. Inside the cover was written, ‘To Charlotte. On the occasion of her first communion, with love from Uncle Declan and Auntie Wyn.’

  Yes of course, the Northern Irish background. Good little Catholic girl. Which might raise problems if she had got herself pregnant. And moral issues over contraception. Difficult to know how strong the Catholic influence would have remained. She had married Hugo in spite of his divorce. But Charles had gathered from his friend’s unworthy ramblings in the Trattoria that she had let Hugo take the responsibility for birth control in the relationship. Which might mean that Charlotte would be in danger of getting pregnant if she started sleeping with someone else. Which would make sense.

  He opened the fitted wardrobe on Charlotte’s side of the room. The sight of her fashionable clothes gave him a sharp pang. She had worn them so well, been so beautiful. And now they hung lifeless, misshapen by the bony shoulders of the clothes hangers..

  Charles ruffled through the dresses and looked with care among the litter of shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe. He still didn’t know what he was looking for, but he didn’t feel the time was wasted. Somehow, among her things, he felt closer to Charlotte, closer to understanding what had been going through her mind in the days before her death.

  Her clothes smelt strongly of her scent, as if she were still alive. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see her walk in through the door.

  The wardrobe revealed nothing unexpected. Nor did the rows of drawers which flanked it. He was about to start looking round the bathroom when he stopped. There had been nothing unexpected among her clothes, but equally there had not been something that might have been expected there either.

  Charlotte Mecken had been strangled with a scarf. Hugo had identified it as her own scarf and yet there were no others among her clothes. There were any number of dresses, skirts and shirts for her to choose from, any number of pullovers and pairs of shoes. But only one scarf.

  When he came to think of it, Charles realized he had never seen Charlotte wearing a scarf. And what was more, even his sketchy knowledge of current fashion told him that scarves were not ‘in’. Certainly not those crude Indian prints like the one he had seen knotted around Charlotte’s neck. No, those had had a vogue in the late sixties, they now looked rather dated. Charlotte, with her sharp fashion sense, would not have been… He smiled wryly as his mind formed the phrase ‘been seen dead in one.’

  What it meant was that Charlotte was most unlikely to have been wearing the scarf with which she was killed. Which made the accepted picture of the murder, of Hugo reaching out to her in a drunken fury and throttling her, unlikely. Whoever killed Charlotte must have gone to get the scarf with which to do it.

  The bathroom did not offer much space for secrets. The pale green bath, basin, bidet and lavatory were modem and functional. Fluffy yellow towels hung from the heated rail. Only the mirror-fronted cabinet gave any opportunity for concealment.

  The contents were predictable. Make-up, various creams, nail scissors, a tin of throat sweets, shampoo, an unopened box of Tampax, cough medicine, a roll of sticking plaster.

  The decor of the bathroom was recent. The walls were olive green and the floor was covered with the same mustardy carpet as the bedroom. It was all very neat, very attractive, like a picture out of Homes and Gardens.

  The only blemishes were two small screw-holes above the cabinet. It must have been set too high initially and been moved down to the right level for Charlotte. Maybe it had been moved when Hugo exiled himself to the other bedroom and bathroom.

  Now it had been moved down, the cabinet’s bottom edges rested on the top row of white tiles which surrounded the wash-basin. As a result it was tilted slightly and there was a narrow triangle of space between it and the wall.

  Charles knew there would be something in there. He didn’t know why. It was part of the understanding he was beginning to feel for Charlotte. She had been so young, so young, almost childlike in some respects. It was in character for her to have a hiding place for her Secret things, like a girl at boarding school making one ‘little corner of total privacy that the teachers would never know about. It was a way of maintaining her identity in a challenging situation.

  Charles pressed his face to the wall and squinted along the gap. Then very calmly, he fished in with a pen and slid out a brown envelope. It was not sealed. As he raised it to shake out the contents, the front door-bell rang.

  He shoved the envelope in his pocket and swallowed his first impulse to run and hide. After all, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Hugo had given him the key Without prompting. He wasn’t even trespassing on his friend’s property.

  He tried to calm himself with such thoughts as he walked secately downstairs, but he still felt as guilty as a schoolboy caught with an apple in his hand in an orchard.

  This mood was intensified when the opened front door revealed a uniformed policeman.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said the policeman in a tone that indicated that he was prepared to start quite reasonably, but was ready to get tough when the need arose.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Charles echoed foolishly.

  ‘Might I ask what you’re doing here, sir?’

  ‘Yes, certainly.’ Charles affected man-of-the-world affability, to which the policeman seemed immune. ‘My name’s Charles Paris. I’m a friend of Hugo Mecken. I’ve stayed here a few times. He gave me a key, actually.’ Charles reached into his pocket as if to demonstrate until he realized the fatuity of the gesture. ‘Said I could drop in any time.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ The policeman’s tone remained reasonable, but it had a strong undercurrent of disbelief. ‘Rather an unusual time to drop in, sir. Or haven’t you heard what’s been happening here?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know all about it.’ Charles replied eagerly and, as he said it, recognized his stupidity. If he’d claimed ignorance of the whole affair, he could just have walked away.

  ‘I see, sir. In fact, we had a call from someone in the road who had seen you go into the house and who thought, under the circumstances, it was rather odd.’

  Good God, you couldn’t blow your nose in Breckton without someone seeing. There must be watchers behind every curtain. Time for a tactical lie. ‘In fact, officer, the reason I am here is that, as I say, I stayed with the Meckens a few times and on the last occasion Mrs Mecken was good enough to wash out a couple of shirts for me. Now all this terrible business has happened, I thought I’d better pick them
up without delay.’

  The policeman seemed to accept this. ‘And have you found them?’

  ‘Found what? Oh, the shirts — no, I haven’t yet. I’ve been looking around, but I’m not sure where Mrs Mecken would have put them.’

  ‘Ah. Well. Would you like me to accompany you round the house while you find them?’ It was phrased as a question, but it wasn’t one.

  Like Siamese twins they went through the house They looked in the airing cupboard, they looked in the wardrobes. Eventually Charles produced the solution he had been desperately working out for the last few minutes. ‘Do you know, I think Mrs Mecken must have mixed them up with her husband’s clothes and put them away in his drawer.’

  ‘Well, sir, I dare say you’ll want to be off now.’

  Charles didn’t argue.

  ‘And, sir, I think, if you don’t mind, you’d better give me that key. I’ll see that it gets put with the rest of Mr. Mecken’s belongings. I think, under the circumstances, with the possibility of further police investigations, the less people we have walking around this property, the better. I quite understand why you came in, sir, but if a key like this got into the wrong hands… well, who knows, it might be awkward.’

  ‘Of course.’ Charles had no alternative but to hand it over.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The policeman ushered him out of the front door and closed it behind them. Then he stood in the middle of the doorstep. ‘Goodbye, sir.’

  Charles walked across the gravel and along the road in the direction of the station, conscious of the policeman’s eyes following him. He wasn’t going to get another chance to get inside that house without breaking and entering.

  Still, the search had not been fruitless, In his pocket there was an envelope.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘You realize it’s probably illegal,’ said Gerald grumpily. ‘It’s withholding evidence… or stealing evidence or… I’m sure there’s something they could get you for.’