A Reconstructed Corpse (7 page)

Still, he thought philosophically, there are compensations. First, I will be working again tomorrow. And, second, I have been expressly forbidden to tell anyone I'm working. So maybe I can get away without paying any commission to Maurice Skellern.

The high level of security was maintained during the following day's filming in Brighton. The substantial police presence which kept the general public away from Charles Paris showed just how seriously they were taking it. Nothing would be allowed to leak before the transmission of
Public Enemies
the following evening.

Charles's actual filming was scheduled for after dark, but he was booked for the full day. This he didn't mind at all, as it meant overtime. At ten a car picked him up from Hereford Road to drive down to Brighton. He had assumed that it was one of the hire cars regularly used by W.E.T., and was surprised to discover the driver was a policeman. Presumably this was another reflection of the high security surrounding the operation.

Once in Brighton, Charles was smuggled into the same hotel as before and put up – though he couldn't keep the phrase ‘holed up' out of his mind – in a private suite. Here he met Geoffrey Ramage and other members of the
Public Enemies
team, as well as even more policemen. Charles got quite a buzz out of the situation, all the cloak-and-dagger secrecy reminding him of a post-
Ipcress File
espionage movie in which he'd had a small part. It had secured him a memorable notice from the
Observer:
‘Charles Paris's character looked so confused by all the crossing and double-crossing that the bullet which put paid to him on the Berlin Wall must have come as a merciful release.'

A lavish room-service buffet was laid on, but Charles regretfully rationed himself on the free wine. He was, after all, working. The surrounding policemen showed no such inhibitions. It seemed that the line Charles had said in so many stage thrillers, ‘No, thank you, sir, not while I'm on duty', was yet another fabrication of crime fiction.

After lunch the reason for his early call became apparent. It was not that his portrayal of Martin Earnshaw required greater psychological depth than it had the previous week, simply that on this occasion the character had to walk. Being filmed sitting in a pub drinking called for limited skills of impersonation, whereas movement needed coaching. To this end, Geoffrey Ramage insisted that Charles watch videos of the missing man.

The only available footage dated from Martin Earnshaw's first marriage, inept wobbly shots of him acting up for the camera on holiday in Majorca. The property developer was then presumably benefiting from the boom of the early eighties. He looked very happy and carefree, anyway, with an almost childlike innocence about his clowning.

Charles wondered idly what had happened to the first marriage. If he had been investigating Martin Earnshaw's disappearance, that was certainly something he would have looked into. But it was a safe assumption that the combined intellects of the entire police force and Ted Faraday had already made that mental leap and acted on it. Charles, who had in his time been involved in investigating a few crimes, was rather enjoying his current position on the periphery of one but without personal involvement.

Martin Earnshaw seemed to walk like most other people of his age and build, but Charles patiently – and literally – went through his paces for Geoffrey Ramage, making minuscule adjustments to stride length and arm swing as required. After an hour or so, the director was satisfied.

To Charles it all seemed a bit pointless. Given Geoffrey's tastes in lighting, he knew that on the final print ‘Martin Earnshaw' would appear as little more than a blur.

The evening's task, when it was spelled out to him, did not promise to stretch Charles Paris as an artiste. He had to leave the Black Feathers, and walk – in the approved Martin Earnshaw manner – through a few dark alleys and lanes to the sea front. Once there, he had to walk down on to the beach underneath the Palace Pier.

That was it. Hardly King Lear, but, from an actor's point of view, the part did have a couple of things going for it. First, there were the free meals. And, second, no other actors were involved. It was a one-man show.

Charles was interested to find out the source of the new information about his
doppelganger's
movements. So great had been the appeal to the British public of Chloe Earnshaw's television appearances that her own home telephone had been constantly ringing with offers of new leads. Since many of the potential informants had rung off when answered by a policeman, it had been decided to return Chloe from the ‘secret address' to her home. Here she was left on her own, though under heavy surveillance, to answer the telephone. All calls were recorded by the police and checked for authenticity.

The details of Martin Earnshaw's route from the pub to the Palace Pier had come from a woman who refused to give her name. In fact Chloe Earnshaw had been out shopping when the call came through and it was recorded on the answering machine.

The voice quality was muffled, as if the caller had been resorting to the old B-feature cliché of a handkerchief over the receiver. The woman had given no clues to her identity, and police thought it probable that she shouldn't have been in Brighton at the relevant time. Possibly she'd been with a lover. Perhaps she even had some connection with the people responsible for Martin Earnshaw's disappearance. Certainly her muffled message gave the police no means of tracking her down.

Her information, though, they took very seriously, which was why Charles Paris was made to retrace the route she outlined. After the filmed insert had been played in on the following night's
Public Enemies,
Bob Garston would do another of his impassioned, straight-to-camera pleas.

‘We do need the woman who gave that information to come forward. We will ensure absolute secrecy for her, but there are a few more follow-up questions we need to ask. Please. We know you're out there somewhere. You've already done the public-spirited thing once by giving that information. Please don't be afraid. Call us again. Who knows, you might be able to tell us that one little, apparently insignificant, detail that enables us to catch these . . . “
Public Enemies
”!'

For Charles Paris the filming was frustrating. Not because of the actual work – anyone capable of copying Martin Earnshaw's walk could have done that – but because of the knowledge that all the crew around him knew the details of the revelation to be made on the following evening's programme.

He tried, with varying degrees of subtlety, to elicit the odd hint from Geoffrey Ramage, from the cameraman, the Make-Up girl, the police who kept the public away from the location. Not one of them cracked. They'd all taken Sam Noakes's words to heart. The security screen was impenetrable.

Charles Paris, even though he
was
Martin Earnshaw, would, in common with the rest of the British population, have to wait till nine o'clock on Thursday to find out what had happened to the missing man.

HE WAS NOT called for the following day, so there was no way that Charles could once again see
Public Enemies
in the comfort of a W.E.T. hospitality suite. In common with nine million other members of the British public – or more if Roger Parkes's optimistic prognostication proved correct – he would have to watch in the comfort of his own home.

‘Comfort' was not a word readily applied to Charles's Hereford Road bedsitter. He had moved in there when he left Frances, and the room still appeared to be in mourning for their marriage. Maybe Charles had once entertained fantasies of a slick interior-designed bachelor pad to which an endless succession of glamorous women could be lured, but if so, reality had quickly quashed such ideas.

He'd never been good at home-making, drifting before his marriage from one anonymous set of digs to another, rarely bothering even to unpack. Frances it was who had brought into his life the concept of a home as more than somewhere to sleep. She had also introduced him to a love of possessions – not for their monetary value but as a cement of memories, mutual purchases marking off the phases and moods of their marriage.

With the marriage, however, all that had ended. The shared mementoes stayed in their Muswell Hill marital home, an unfinished collection frozen reproachfully in time. And when Frances had finally moved out to her flat in Highgate, many of them just disappeared. Reproducing the same acquisitiveness in his own environment, or even making that environment a little less squalid, would have felt to Charles like a further betrayal of his relationship with Frances. Some perverse, self-punishing instinct dictated that as he had made his bed, so must he lie on it. Except that he very rarely did make his bed when he wasn't changing the sheets. And he didn't do that as often as he should have done.

The room therefore had never fulfilled its promise as a seducer's silken lair. Though Charles had not been without female company since the end of his marriage, not many of the encounters had been conducted on his home ground. Few women had actually been inside the bedsitter. Which was probably just as well.

So it remained very much as it had been when he moved in, all those features about which he'd thought ‘that's the first thing I'll change' still unchanged. The grey-painted furniture, the yellow candlewick bedspread bleached now to an unhealthy cream, the sad curtain hiding sink and gas ring, the customary accumulation of glasses and brown-ringed coffee cups – everything gave off a miasma of defeat. It was an appropriate setting for Charles Paris in empty-glove-puppet mode.

That was the state in which he spent the Thursday, trying to pretend he wasn't infected by the same prurient interest as the other nine million who were waiting to watch
Public Enemies
.

His television was of a piece with the rest of the bedsitter – an old portable dating from the days before beige plastic had been appropriated exclusively for computer monitors. To its top was attached a ring aerial, which needed constant realignment to minimise the snowstorms that flurried across the screen.

By the time nine o'clock arrived, Charles found he had got through nearly half a bottle of Bell's, which was bad, even by his standards. Still, it's justified, he thought. I deserve a bit of a celebration. I am, after all, about to watch myself on television. But even he wasn't convinced by such sophistry.

As the applause for the preceding sofa-bound sitcom gave way to a teaser for
Public Enemies
and commercials, Charles realised that once again he'd omitted to tell Frances he was about to be on television. But he didn't feel inclined to do so now. Instead, he poured himself another substantial Bell's.

The credits for
Public Enemies
combined urgency and threat. Crime scenes of mounting violence were superimposed on each other against insistent background music in which jangling guitars mixed with electronic sirens and gunshots. In each of the scenes the criminal appeared as a black void, an evil outline punching, stabbing or slashing at a blurred victim. These outlines froze in place until they all conjoined and blacked out the screen. Over this the blood-red
Public Enemies
logo suddenly appeared.

The blackness melted to blue and fragmented into new outlines, this time of anonymous policemen and women. Out of the middle of this montage a new image took shape and, just as the blood-red words ‘with BOB GARSTON' appeared at the bottom of the screen, revealed itself to be a stylised picture of the presenter at his most no-nonsense, hard-bitten and journalistic. It was the gritty face of a man working at the coalface of real life.

The message of the credits was undoubtedly the one that Bob's Your Uncle Productions intended – only one man can find a solution to the rising tide of violent crime in this country, and that man is Bob Garston.

Charles Paris took a long cynical swallow of Bell's, as the image dissolved to zoom in on the real Bob Garston, live in the W.E.T. studio. He sat perched grittily on a high stool, wearing glasses for extra
gravitas
. His light double-breasted suit was beautifully tailored, in a way that eschewed dandyism and maintained the necessary grittiness quotient. It was certainly – and literally – a cut above the square-shouldered suits of the plainclothes men who were part of the presenter's backdrop.

Behind Bob Garston the W.E.T. designer had created a simulacrum of a police incident room, full of telephones, computers, maps and wall charts. Throughout the programme this area was criss-crossed by policemen and women, some in uniform, some not, but all possessed by a desperate urgency to fulfil some unknown mission. The constant, purposeless movement would have been extremely irritating if the viewer saw too much of it, but that was not a problem in a Bob Garston production. Characteristically, the presenter saw to it that he was held in tight close-up for all of his links.

Garston began the programme with even more concerned dramatic urgency than usual. ‘Good evening. Tonight on
Public Enemies
we bring you exclusive news on a case that has had the country holding its breath for the past few weeks – the disappearance of Martin Eamshaw. In what is a first for a non-News television programme,
Public Enemies
will bring you information which Scotland Yard have kept secret from all other media until now. We will also get a reaction from Martin Earnshaw's wife to the new breakthrough. That's in a moment, but first a follow-up on last week's report about the security van robbery in Ilford.'

The hook had been baited, the promised revelation cunningly designed to keep millions of hands from straying to their remote controls for the next half-hour. No doubt Roger Parkes hoped that all over the country, extra viewers were being called in from the kitchen. ‘Hey,
Public Enemies
's got something new on the Martin Earnshaw case – and they're going to have that dishy wife of his on again. Bet they've found the body. Come on, love, come and see what's happening.'