An Amateur Corpse (10 page)

‘But you can't remember doing it?'

‘I can't remember anything when I'm that smashed.'

‘Then why did you confess to killing her?'

‘Why not? It fits the facts remarkable well. The motivation was there, the opportunity. I think my guilt is a reasonable deduction.'

‘Did the police put pressure on you to –'

No, Charles. For Christ's sake-' He mastered this momentary lapse of control. ‘I reached the conclusion on my own, Charles. I was under no pressure.' Realizing the irony of his last remark, he laughed a little laugh that was almost a sob.

‘So you are prepared to confess to a murder you can't even remember just because the facts fit?'

Gerald came in at this juncture with the legal viewpoint.

‘I think this may be one of the most fruitful areas for the defence, actually. If you really can't remember, of course we won't be able to get you off the murder charge and that's mandatory life, but the judge might well make some recommendation and you could be out in eight years.'

‘You're talking as though his guilt were proven, Gerald.'

‘Yes, Charles. To my mind –'

‘For Christ's sake, both of you shut up! What does it matter? What's the difference?'

Charles came in, hard. ‘The difference is, that if you are found guilty of murder, you'll be put away for life. And if you are not found guilty . . .' He petered out.

‘Exactly.' It was only then that Charles realized the depths of Hugo's despair. His friend was bankrupt of any kind of hope. It made little difference whether he spent the rest of his life in prison or at large. Except if he were free, drink might help him shorten his sentence.

Gerald got to his feet in an official sort of way. ‘You see, Charles, I didn't really think there was much point in your coming down here. I'm afraid it's an open-and-shut case. All we can do is to ensure that it's as well presented as possible. Actually Hugo, I wanted to discuss the matter of instructing counsel. I felt –'

‘Stop, Gerald, stop!' Charles also stood up. ‘We can't just leave it like this. I mean, as long as there's even a doubt . . .'

‘I'm afraid a signed confession doesn't leave much room for doubt. Now come on, Charles, I've taken a foolish risk in bringing you down here; I think we should move as soon as possible and –'

‘No, just a minute. Hugo, please, just look at me and tell me that you did it, tell me that you strangled Charlotte, and I'll believe you.'

Hugo looked at Charles. The eyes were still dull, but somewhere deep down there was a tiny spark of interest. ‘Charles, I can't say that definitely, because I can't remember. But I think there's a strong chance that I killed Charlotte.'

‘And you're prepared to leave it like that?'

Hugo shrugged. ‘What's the alternative? I don't see that it's going to be possible to prove that I didn't.'

‘Then we'll just have to prove that someone else did.' The remark came out with more crusading fervour than Charles had intended.

It affected Hugo. A new shrewdness came into his eyes. ‘Hmm. Well, if you think that's possible, then you have my blessing to investigate until you're blue in the face.'

The new animation showed how little Hugo had even considered the possibility of his innocence. Whether from his own remorse or because of the prompting of C.I.D. men anxious to sew up the case, he had not begun to think of any alternative solution.

But the shift of mood did not last. Hugo dropped back into dull despair. ‘Yes, if it'll amuse you, Charles, investigate everything. I'd like to feel I could be of use to someone, if only as something to investigate. And if you can t clear my besmirched name' – the italics were heavy with sarcasm – ‘then take up another hobby. Amateur dramatics, maybe?'

Gerald got purposeful again. ‘Charles, I think Hugo and I –'

‘Just a minute. Hugo, I've got to ask you a couple of things.'

‘Okay.' The voice had reverted to tonelessness.

‘You said the other evening that Charlotte was having an affair. Do you know who her lover was?'

‘Oh God, here we go again. I've been through all this with the police and –'

‘Look, Charles, I don't think – ‘Gerald butted in instinctively to defend his client.

‘No, it's all right, Gerald. I can go through it once again. No, Charles, I don't know who Charlotte's lover was. No, I'm not even certain that she was having an affair. It just seemed a reasonable assumption – like so much else.'

‘What led you to that assumption?'

‘She was a young, attractive woman. She was trapped in a marriage that was getting nowhere. She was bored, lonely. I spent more and more time out getting pissed. If she didn't start something up, then she had less initiative than I gave her credit for.'

“But you had no proof?'

‘What sort of proof do you want? No. I never caught her in flagrante delicto, no, I never saw her with a man, but if coming in at all hours, if going out on unexplained errands during the day, if saying she didn't have to stay with me, she could go elsewhere . . . if that kind of thing's proof, then I had it.'

‘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 side. 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 . . .