A Reconstructed Corpse (2 page)

It turned out to be Charles Paris, though Roger Parkes had favoured one of the other candidates. Still, Bob Garston made the decisions and, with that lack of tact only mastered by the totally self-absorbed, bulldozed the executive producer's opinion out of the way. Bob did not even notice the tight-lipped manner in which Roger Parkes walked out of the room, saying he had ‘other things to be getting on with'.

Even when informed that he'd got the job, Charles was still treated as if he wasn't there. This didn't surprise him. He'd worked in television long enough to know what to expect. No one even offered to show him a photograph of the man he apparently so resembled.

The casting decision made, Bob Garston bustled off to lean inhibitingly over the shoulder of some other member of the production team, while Dana Wilson suppressed her yawns long enough to take down Charles's details.

‘You should actually have them all on file,' he said.

She looked puzzled. ‘Why?'

‘Well, I have worked for W.E.T. a few times before.'

‘Oh really?' This information made not the tiniest dent in the impermeable surface of Dana Wilson's mind. ‘Full name . . .?'

It's strange how some murders are sexy. Not sexy in the sense of being sexually motivated, but sexy in the sense that the media takes them up and keeps on and on about them.

Whether a murder becomes sexy or not depends on the personnel involved. The killing of a pretty woman always attracts the press. Colour photos of her in her prime, snapped laughing in a strapless dress at a disco, can be juxtaposed with bleak shots of the alley or waste ground where she met her end. Newspaper readers enjoy the
frisson
prompted by such contrasts, seeing how quick bright things have come to confusion.

Love triangles also catch the public imagination, regardless of the glamour of the participants. A wife and lover plotting the demise of a husband is a reliable stand-by; while a woman removing her rival for a man's affections is even more popular. When it comes to sexy murders, the public know what they like, and fortunately in this country there are enough people of homicidal tendencies to keep them adequately and entertainingly supplied.

The disappearance of Martin Earnshaw did not fit any of these stereotypes. What made that case sexy was the victim's wife. Chloe Earnshaw was a waif-like blonde of steely determination on whom the media had seized from the moment her husband went missing. Her first press conference, at which, with glistening eyes, she hovered throughout on the edge of breakdown, made the national news on all channels, and from then on she never seemed to be off the screen or out of the papers.

What also made the public interest unusual was that no one knew for a fact Martin Earnshaw was dead. He had certainly disappeared under suspicious circumstances, he had certainly been under threat of death, but as yet no trace of his body had been found. Without the constant appearances of his photogenic wife asserting that he had been murdered, the public would soon have lost interest in the case.

Once Charles Paris had been cast in the role, he tracked down and read everything he could find concerning Martin Earnshaw's disappearance. This was not because he was under any illusions about the part. Dana Wilson had told him firmly that it didn't involve any speaking, so Stanislavskian efforts to get under the character's skin – even if Charles had been the kind of actor to indulge in such excesses – would have been pointless. No, it was just from interest that he delved into the Earnshaws' background.

What he found out was by then well known to any tabloid reader. Charles Paris, always having been more of a
Times
man – and in fact a
Times
crossword rather than a
Times
news man – had been cheated of the more lurid details.

Martin Earnshaw was – or had been – in his fifties, a property developer based in Brighton. Hit hard by the recession, he had endeavoured to refloat his business by borrowing. Because the banks were unwilling to oblige, he had resorted to less respectable sources of funds and got into the clutches of a major-league loan shark.

As his repayments fell further and further behind, Martin Earnshaw had become the object of increasingly violent threats. A few weeks before his disappearance, he was found near his home with facial and abdominal bruising. A strong-willed man, he had apparently not buckled under in the face of these threats, but been determined to expose the extortioners. In fact, he made an appointment to tell a local detective inspector all the details.

That appointment was never kept. The night before it, a Wednesday in early October, Martin Earnshaw told his wife he was going out for a drink, and never returned. It was her assumption and everyone else's – probably even the police's, though they tended to play their cards closer to their chests than the tabloid press – that Martin Earnshaw had been murdered by the men he was about to shop.

All these details were related to the media by the doll-like figure of Chloe Earnshaw. She was his second wife, the first having died some seven years previously. It was a perfect marriage. Chloe was twenty years younger than Martin, they had been together for two years and – at this point during that first press conference the glistening, dark blue eyes began to spill – ‘had been intending soon to start a family. Something which now,' she had continued, recovering herself with agonising discipline, ‘looks unlikely ever to happen.' She still hadn't lost hope of seeing Martin again, she insisted, but was prepared for the worst.

That worst, everyone knew – and indeed gleefully anticipated – was the discovery of her husband's body.

Official enquiries continued and grew in intensity. But as information dried up and leads proved abortive, the power of television was enlisted to help the investigation. The police, having tried themselves to reconstruct Martin Earnshaw's last evening without much success, had readily accepted
Public Enemies'
offer to reconstruct it for them.

This had necessitated a couple of days filming in Brighton, which was no hardship for Charles Paris. The town had always held a raffish attraction for him, full of memories of the one woman he'd made love to there, along with fantasies of all the other women he'd like to have made love to there. Was it a generational thing, he wondered, a post-war nostalgia, that still made Brighton's air, like that of Paris, heavy with sex? He had only to step out of the train from Victoria to feel the lust invade his mind.

The Black Feathers, in which Martin Earnshaw had last been seen, was in the hinterland of the Lanes between the Royal Pavilion and sea front. It wasn't one of the highly tarted-up pubs of the area, but retained a proletarian – and indeed slightly deterrent – grubbiness.

The landlord and staff, however, had proved infinitely cooperative to the W.E.T. team, led by director Geoffrey Ramage. This was not pure altruism. While a positive disadvantage for someone trying to sell a house, murderous connections in a pub are good news for business. And if those connections are advertised to millions on nation-wide television, the potential boost to trade is enormous. The viewing public is notorious for seeking out any location featured on the small screen, regardless of the context in which it was seen.

In the cause of verisimilitude, Geoffrey Ramage had asked the landlord to get together all the regulars who might have been present on the evening of Martin Earnshaw's disappearance. To Charles's surprise, when he spoke to those who had been assembled, none had any recollection of seeing the missing man.

The actor's instinctive suspicion about this was quickly allayed by further conversation. It turned out that very few of the other drinkers had actually been there on the relevant night, but the lure of television coverage had prompted them to finesse the truth a little.

The sighting of Martin Earnshaw in the Black Feathers had not, as it transpired, come from one of the pub's regulars. An anonymous caller had passed on the information to Chloe Earnshaw, and this had been corroborated by a subsequent telephone call – also unidentified – to the police.

It became increasingly clear to Charles that the Black Feathers was in fact one of those pubs which doesn't have many regulars. In spite of the landlord's attempts to give the impression of a convivial community, the pub was – like Charles's own ‘local' in Westbourne Grove – a joyless and anonymous environment.

The landlord himself stoutly maintained that he had seen the missing man sitting with two others on the night in question, though he was vague about further details.

Not for the first time, Charles had brought home to him the fallibility of human witnesses. Recollection is quickly clouded and distorted. From his own experience – and this wasn't just due to the Bell's whisky – Charles Paris knew how difficult he would find it to report accurately what he had been doing even a few days before. So the landlord's vagueness did not surprise him. Cynically, he even wondered whether the man was making up his story. From the point of view of trade, it was certainly in the interests of the Black Feathers that he remembered Martin Earnshaw.

Charles Paris's role in the filming was not onerous, though Geoffrey Ramage, in the self-regarding way of television directors, made as big a deal of it as he could. Dressed in clothes and fake Rolex watch identical to those worn by the missing man, Charles had to sit at a gloomy corner table with two other extras and drink. It could, uncharitably, have been called ‘typecasting'.

There was an element of character-acting involved, though, because Charles had to drink draught Guinness rather than the more instinctive Bell's. This was on the advice of Chloe Earnshaw. Her husband, she insisted, had always drunk draught Guinness.

Having Chloe on hand did nothing to drive away the lustful thoughts which Brighton always inspired in Charles. She was there to advise on the filming and they had been introduced by Geoffrey Ramage in the lounge of the hotel that was the
Public Enemies
base.

In the flesh she was even smaller than her photographs and television appearances suggested, but somehow more robust, more curved, more tactile. She was simply dressed in black, as if already anticipating the news she feared to hear, and her blonde hair was scraped back into an artless ponytail.

A tremor ran through her when she was introduced to Charles and an involuntary hand half reached out to touch his arm. She gave a little shake of her head. ‘I'm sorry. It's just . . . They've cast you very well. I mean, you don't really look like Martin, but there's something . . . Your height, the way you stand, it's . . .'

Tears once again welled up in the dark blue eyes. ‘I'm sorry. I'm not being very brave.'

‘Oh, but you are.' The words formed instinctively and were out before Charles was aware of them. ‘I mean, you've been very brave from the start – coping with the trauma of your husband's disappearance. And then there's the risk you take by speaking out at all. The same risk that your husband exposed himself to . . . I mean, that is, assuming what you are afraid has happened to him
has
happened to him.' Her brow wrinkled in pain. ‘I'm sorry, I'm saying all the wrong things.'

‘No, no. Not at all, Charles,' she reassured him softly.

And Charles Paris was hooked. Just like the rest of the public. There was something mesmerising about the woman's vulnerability. Anyone meeting her in ordinary circumstances would have found Chloe Earnshaw only moderately attractive. It was the knowledge of her jeopardy that gave her such charisma.

The onlooker was drawn to her, but at the same time felt guilty about being drawn to her. She looks fanciable, the thought process ran, but how awful of me to entertain ideas like that about a woman in such distress. It's dreadful to take pleasure from someone else's suffering.

Though of course the pleasure taken from someone else's suffering was the dynamo generating the success of programmes like
Public Enemies
.

CHARLES PARIS was used to the atmosphere of television hospitality suites, but this one was different. During the transmission of the first of the new series of
Public Enemies
, there was the usual undercurrent of showbiz excitement in the room, the usual panic elaborately disguised as cool, but there was also a more robust coarseness in the general badinage. It was because the police were there.

Public Enemies
collaborated closely with the police – Bob Garston kept banging on about
how
closely they collaborated with the police – and the police took this as a licence to bring as many of their number as possible to the W.E.T. studios when the shows were being transmitted. Some of the force justified their presence – the on-screen presenters obviously, the police researchers, those uniformed figures bent over computers and telephones who filled out the background of the set – but others were just along for the ride, attracted by their colleagues' involvement, the glamour of television and the prospect of free drink.

Charles Paris was there just for the free drink. He'd been meant to be there working. Geoffrey Ramage, fresh from the excitements of the Brighton filming, had had Charles called for the live transmission. He was proposing a moody background silhouette of the actor dressed as Martin Earnshaw while Chloe did her latest heart-wrenching appeal.

Geoffrey Ramage was actually always proposing moody background silhouettes. Like all television directors, he really saw himself in the movies and, though his only actual experience in cinema had been doing soft porn, he had been bitten at an early age by the
film noir
bug. The opportunities to indulge this obsession in
Public Enemies
made him feel like a child with limitless credit in a sweet shop.

Charles's only brush with the genre had occurred when a seventies movie he was in had been hailed as ‘a British homage to
film noir
' by a critic who didn't realise that the film's budget hadn't stretched to more lights. The actor's own contribution – a mere spit and a cough – had been characterised by the same critic as ‘unthreateningly menacing', and Charles had spent a long time puzzling over whether that was a good notice or a bad one.