A Reconstructed Corpse (16 page)

For the first he had used a vague burr slightly West of Mummerset, and for the second he thought he'd been using Glaswegian until someone he met backstage congratulated him because ‘it's so rare to hear a Belfast accent actually done right'.

As he entered PRINTSERVE he still hadn't decided which of these to plump for and in fact, when he came to speak, found himself falling back on a slightly roughened version of his own accent.

‘Erm, excuse me,' he said to the pert-looking girl busy at the photocopier.

She replied with a preoccupied ‘Mm?'

Charles went straight into law-breaking mode. ‘I'm a police officer.'

‘Oh yes?' She turned to face him. ‘Have you got any identification?'

Damn. This girl had watched too much television. He reached into his jacket for his wallet, trying desperately to remember what he'd got in it that might vaguely look like an identity card. She wasn't going to be fooled by Visa or Access, was she? Or by the video membership he'd once taken out and then never got round to buying a VCR?

But just as he was contemplating an ignominious retreat from the shop, his hand closed round a piece of paper, which he remembered was a letter confirming his filming schedule from the
Public Enemies
office at W.E.T.. That would have to do.

‘As you'll see from this . . .' He flashed the letterhead at the girl ‘. . . I am currently seconded to the
Public Enemies
programme . . .'

‘Ooh yes!' Television worked its customary magic on yet another member of the British public. ‘I watched that last night. It's horrible, isn't it? I mean particularly with the Martin Earnshaw murder having taken place right here in Brighton. That poor wife of his . . . And what kind of sick mind would cut a body up like that? It's almost as if he's actually staging the discovery of the bits in time for the programmes, isn't it?'

This echoed a suspicion which had formed more than once in Charles's mind, but he made no comment, simply pressed on with his enquiry. ‘It's about the
Public Enemies
programme that I'm calling, in fact. As you know, we've been asking members of the public to send in information and –'

“Ere,' said the girl. ‘You look a bit like him.'

‘A bit like who?'

‘Martin Earnshaw. The bloke who was murdered.'

‘Do I? Really?' Charles Paris screwed up his eyes behind the glasses to look as unmartinearnshawlike as possible. ‘Well, nobody's ever said that to me before. Perhaps it's just because the case is on your mind that you're seeing likenesses that aren't there.'

‘Perhaps . . .' the girl reluctantly agreed.

‘Now as I say, in the
Public Enemies
office we get information from all over the country and a lot of it comes by fax. Some of these faxes we like to check up on, just to see whether they're authentic or not, and there was one sent from this office earlier in the week . . .'

‘Sent to
Public Enemies
?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ooh. Which day was it?'

Charles did a quick calculation of when he'd been in the
Public Enemies
office. ‘Tuesday. About quarter past eleven.'

‘I'll look at the journal,' said the girl.

She quickly found the details on the print-out. ‘This is a London number. That the right one?'

Charles checked it against the letterhead. ‘Yes.'

‘All right then. I can confirm that it was sent from here. Is that all you wanted to know?'

‘I wonder if by any chance you can remember who it was who sent it . . .'

The girl racked her brains and, with a bit of prompting, managed to come up with a rough description.

Though the fax purportedly came from him, her description certainly didn't fit Ted Faraday.

Indeed, the only person involved in the case it could have fitted was Greg Marchmont.

‘I know you, don't I?' said Sam Noakes, as she opened the door of her hotel room.

‘Well, I'm Martin Earnshaw.' Her eyes narrowed, suspicious for a moment that she was up against a crank. ‘That is to say, my name is Charles Paris. I'm the actor who's playing Martin Earnshaw in the reconstructions.'

‘Oh, right, of course. Sorry, should have recognised you straight away. Won't you sit down?'

She gestured to the chair in front of the dressing table, and sat herself on the side of the double bed. It was just an ordinary room, more or less identical to the one Charles had had in the same hotel. Sam Noakes had suggested he should join her there to avoid the security risks of the public rooms, and he was sure that was part of her reason. But he also detected in it a kind of feminist bravado, inviting a strange man up to her room to show how unaffected she was by the cautions other women might have felt. There was even perhaps an element of challenge, to test out the reception he'd get if he did try anything on.

Trying anything on, however, was the last thought on Charles Paris's mind. Though Sam Noakes carried a permanent aura of sexuality and looked good in jeans and loose-fitting jumper, he would have sooner tangled with a boa constrictor. Even before Greg Marchmont had told him about her character, Charles had identified Sam Noakes as dangerous territory. Anyway, he wasn't in the habit of making advances in hotel rooms to women he didn't know. Well, certainly not when he was sober.

‘So . . . what is it, Mr Paris? You said when you phoned it was something to do with the Earnshaw case.'

‘Yes. It is.'

‘Have you been making your own enquiries into it? We've already got one private investigator on the strength. Does every aspiring gumshoe in the country now feel entitled to have a go?'

‘If they do, then programmes like
Public Enemies
are as much to blame as anything else.'

She nodded, conceding the truth of this. ‘Yes, well, I guess we are encouraging people to be observant, take note of any information that might be useful. What have you got for us, Mr Paris – a clue?'

‘Maybe. A lead, anyway. Certainly something that might be worthy of further investigation.'

‘Tell me about it.'

And he told her. Sam Noakes listened impassively, her pale blue eyes steady, reacting neither to his mentions of Greg Marchmont nor Ted Faraday. At the end she shook her red hair and asked, ‘Why do you think there's any connection between the flat and Faraday?'

‘Superintendent Roscoe mentioned Trafalgar Lane when we were talking about Faraday going undercover in Brighton. What he said to Sergeant Marchmont certainly implied that it was from there that Faraday was conducting his investigations.'

‘Except what you said implied that his involvement with Martin Earnshaw was rather more sinister than just investigation.'

‘Well . . .'

‘Accusing someone of murder is a pretty serious allegation, Mr Paris.'

‘I know.'

‘. . . and not one that should be bandied about lightly.'

‘No.'

‘And I'm not quite sure what it is you're accusing Greg of, but I'd be pretty careful about that too, if I were you.'

‘Yes,' Charles agreed humbly.

‘It is possible, you see, that you have by chance stumbled on part of the police investigation and completely misconstrued what's been going on.'

‘I suppose that is possible, yes.'

‘You bet your life it is. Mr Paris, I'm very grateful to you for sharing your opinions with me, and I will be even more grateful if you give me your solemn word you will keep quiet about them to anyone else. This investigation is reaching a very critical stage, and the last thing we need at this point is to have the whole thing screwed up by an amateur.'

She didn't raise her voice or put particular emphasis on the final word, but it still stung. It stung all the more because of its aptness. Charles felt totally excluded. The police investigation was proceeding and he was on the outside, without access to any of their skills or information.

But he felt he had to say something in his own defence. ‘Look, I know it was Greg Marchmont who cleaned the flat up; and I'm pretty convinced it was Ted Faraday dressed up as the tramp; so the Trafalgar Lane flat has got to have some connection with the case.'

‘I'm not denying it has, but isn't it likely that Greg was cleaning the place up because he had been given orders to do so by his superiors? As to the idea that Ted would use as crass a disguise as the one you describe, that alone – apart from all the other wild allegations you've made about him – means that you're certainly one hundred per cent wrong there. You have absolutely no basis for saying that the man you followed
was
Faraday, do you, Mr Paris?'

Charles was forced to admit that he hadn't.

Sam Noakes smiled, evidently taking pity on him. ‘Look,' she said, as if soothing a fractious child,
‘Public Enemies
is an exciting programme. It's meant to be an exciting programme, and inevitably members of the public get caught up in that excitement. For someone like you, actually involved in the making of the programme, the temptation to get carried away by the whole thing is all the stronger. But just remember – that doesn't justify making allegations against a hard-working member of the police force, based on nothing more than unsubstantiated guesswork. OK? Television is a glamorous medium, Mr Paris, and some people just can't resist the pull of that glamour.'

Speak for yourself, thought Charles Paris savagely.

If there was one thing he couldn't stand, it was being patronised.

‘I HOPE THE murderer realises just how much hangs on what he's doing,' said Bob Garston grimly. ‘We held steady on last week's overnights, but we didn't get the kind of build in the figures I'd been hoping for.'

‘Well, there was the first showing of yet another new Michael Caine movie on Sky,' Roger Parkes offered by way of explanation.

‘Come on, bloody satellite shouldn't dent our figures.'

‘Beginning to. More serious, though, the BBC had started their umpteenth rerun of
Dad's Army
right opposite us after the News. A lot of people probably switched over for that.'

‘Why? There can't be a single person in the country who hasn't seen those seventeen times already.
Public Enemies
is giving them something unprecedented in British television, something of today, reflecting all the violence and ghastliness of modern society. I really can't believe that anyone would prefer the anodyne nostalgic claptrap of
Dad's Army
to what we're offering.'

Roger Parkes shrugged. ‘The figures speak for themselves. There are a good few millions out there for whom the reason they have a telly is to watch anodyne nostalgic claptrap.'

‘But
Public Enemies
is holding up a mirror to the real world!'

‘Plenty of people would do anything to avoid the real world. You know there's always got to be tacky entertainment fluff as well as serious journalism on the box. It's not as if you didn't spend all those years doing
If the Cap Fits!
'

Bob Garston seethed visibly. ‘
If the Cap Fits!
was not “tacky entertainment fluff'. It was the best game show of its kind. I make sure that every show I do is the best of its kind.' His expression found new extremes of grittiness. ‘But
Public Enemies
is something even more special. In this show I'm going back to my no-nonsense hard-bitten journalistic roots, bloody well working at the coalface of real life.'

‘Yes,' Roger Parkes agreed automatically. He'd heard all this a good few times before.

So had Charles Paris. It was absolutely typical of television people, he thought, that the presenter and producer should continue their conversation as if there was no one else in the room. He'd been summoned to a briefing meeting on the Monday morning and already spent an hour sitting in the
Public Enemies
office without anyone taking any notice of him. There seemed no prospect of his being briefed about anything.

Louise Denning swanned imperiously into the room, brandishing some stapled sheets of paper. ‘Got the first audience breakdown on last week's show.'

Bob Garston seized the report eagerly and pored over it.

‘What's the general message?' asked Roger Parkes.

Louise Denning screwed up her face. ‘A lot of people switched over in the middle of the programme. Round twelve and a half minutes in.'

Bob Garston, despite his furious concentration on the report, had heard this. ‘See, Roger. I told you that item on how to make an insurance claim after a burglary was a boring load of shit.'

‘It's something we get a lot of enquiries about,' the executive producer replied patiently. It was not the first time they had had this argument.

‘Yes, well, we should write back to them with the information, not put it on the bloody screen! “Insurance” is one of those instant switch-off words on television. Like “Northern Ireland” or “European Community” or “Bosnia”. I'm going to put a total ban on it. No more mentions of bloody “insurance” on
Public Enemies
– ever!' Bob Garston buried himself back in the research.

Roger Parkes raised a wearily interrogative eyebrow to Louise Denning. ‘And overall impressions . . .'

‘General view was the punters enjoyed it, but found it a bit the same as last week's programme. You know, discovery of the arms at the end of one, discovery of the legs at the end of the other. General feeling they'd like the contents varied a bit.'

Roger Parkes grimaced ruefully. ‘Well, we're really in the hands of the murderer there, aren't we? I mean, there's no question about the fact that he's aware of the programme. He's an exhibitionist and he gets a charge from the publicity, showing how clever he is and all that. So maybe he's also aware of the need to keep building the excitement – and the figures.'