A Reconstructed Corpse (14 page)

‘If it
is
a murder case,' Kevin Littlejohn interposed doubtfully.

Charles managed to curb his reaction to this, and continued evenly, ‘Superintendent Roscoe is staying at the hotel I've been staying at for the last couple of days. If you ring him there, I'm sure he will be able to tell you who I am.'

The desk sergeant still wasn't totally convinced, but Roscoe's name had struck some chord and he was prepared at least to call Charles's bluff. ‘What's the name of the hotel?' he asked.

He rang through and it was confirmed that Superintendent Roscoe was staying there.

‘See,' said Charles, ‘see! How would I have known that if I wasn't down here for the filming as I said I was?'

While the hotel receptionist tried to make contact with Superintendent Roscoe's room, the desk sergeant gave Charles a narrow look over the receiver. ‘It is not unknown for criminals of a certain exhibitionist type to follow closely the police investigations into the crimes in which they are implicated.'

Charles threw his eyes to heaven. The desk sergeant reacted to something said at the other end and put the phone down. ‘He's not there.'

‘Well, ring them back and give them a message for him to ring here as soon as he gets in!'

‘Don't you order me around, Mr Earnshaw.'

‘For the last bloody time, I am
not
Mr Earnshaw!' Charles's anger was by now almost uncontrollable. ‘Listen, is it impossible for your single brain cell to cope with the idea that you might be wrong?'

‘Don't you be offensive, Mr Earnshaw!'

‘No, don't you be offensive!' Kevin Littlejohn parroted.

‘Don't you start! I don't care whether you used to be in the Commandos or not, you're now nothing but an officious little nit-picker!'

The desk sergeant came immediately to Littlejohn's defence. ‘There's no need to insult someone just because he has a sense of civic duty. Let me tell you, if more people shared Mr Littlejohn's attitude to responsibility, our job would be a lot easier. It's malicious time-wasters like you, Mr Earnshaw, who cause the trouble!'

It was a long time since Charles Paris had been so angry. Maybe the sour, aching residue of his hangover shortened his temper, or maybe it was just the mindless self-righteousness of the two men he was up against that got him going. Whatever the cause, Charles, normally a man to avoid confrontation, found himself shouting back, almost totally out of control. ‘I have never encountered such incredible stupidity! All right, anyone can make a mistake, but now you should recognise it's a mistake and bloody let me go! Or can't your Neanderthal mind stretch to take that idea on board!!!'

There was a silence before the desk sergeant said, ‘Neanderthal, eh?' Another silence. ‘What's that mean then?'

The storm in Charles had blown itself out. ‘Oh, never mind,' he sighed wearily.

‘Neanderthal,' said Kevin Littlejohn smugly, ‘means prehistoric or underdeveloped.'

‘Oh,
does
it?' said the desk sergeant, his voice heavy with menace.

Charles Paris wasn't really surprised to be confined to a cell for the night. He submitted passively to the indignities of having his bag and pocket contents inventoried and his belt and shoelaces removed. The desk sergeant assured him grimly that a message would be left at the hotel for Superintendent Roscoe, but Charles wasn't convinced.

Oh well, he thought, as he lay down on the thin mattress under the unforgiving nightlight, serves me bloody well right, doesn't it? Be a long time before I lose my temper again.

The only possible advantage of his situation was that he did – albeit inadvertently – achieve his wish of not having another drink that day.

Charles Paris didn't sleep much during his incarceration, and was quite encouraged to discover that what he missed most through the long watches of the night was not a bottle but a book. He really felt bereft without anything to read; that would be the abiding memory for him of the deprivations of prison life.

Breakfast in the morning was pretty dire and, in spite of Charles's questions, the policeman who brought it volunteered no information about what was going to happen to him. Surely they can't keep me long without charging me, thought Charles, trying desperately to remember what little he knew of the law. Wasn't there something called
habeas corpus
which guaranteed prisoners certain rights in these circumstances?

Yes, surely he'd been in a late episode of
Z Cars
where that had been a significant plot point. He scoured his memory for more detail, but the only thing that had stayed with him was the notice
Stage
had given of his performance. ‘If real-life offenders were as ineffectual as Charles Paris's villain, then the battle against crime would be as good as won.'

That recollection didn't help much. Half formed beneath the surface of his mind lurked the anxiety that, however long they decided to keep him in the cell, there wasn't a lot he could do about it.

Relief came late morning when his door was opened by a taciturn constable who led him through into an office. There, to his surprise, Charles found Superintendent Roscoe, dressed in full uniform, sitting on his own behind a desk. The officer looked half amused and distinctly smug.

‘Well then . . . what have you been getting up to, Mr Paris?'

‘A misunderstanding. Some old idiot got convinced that I actually was Martin Earnshaw.'

‘So I gather. Don't worry, that's been sorted out. They now know who you really are.'

‘Oh. Thank you. And indeed thank you for coming here this morning. I'm sorry, I just couldn't think of anyone else whose name would have had the same effect.'

Roscoe inclined his head, accepting the implied compliment. ‘But I understand it wasn't just a case of mistaken identity . . .?'

‘What do you mean?'

The superintendent looked down at some notes in front of him. ‘Coppers don't like being insulted any more than the rest of the population. What did you reckon – that the desk sergeant wouldn't understand the word “Neanderthal”?'

‘He didn't,' Charles couldn't help saying.

‘No.' Roscoe examined the notes. ‘Had a bit of a problem spelling it too.'

Charles chuckled, but the cold eyes that peered up at him told him the superintendent was not in joking mood. ‘Insulting a police officer could be quite a serious charge, Mr Paris.'

‘I was just frustrated by his stupidity. Surely it's not very serious?'

‘We can, generally speaking, make a charge as serious or unserious as we choose to. Just as we can generally speaking make an investigation as detailed or perfunctory as we choose to. And on the whole you'll find the police tend to look after their own.'

Charles nodded, chastened.

‘What I want to know, Mr Paris, is what you were doing round that part of Brighton last night anyway . . .?'

‘Well, I . . .'

‘The message from W.E.T. that you weren't required for further filming got to the hotel early afternoon. I wonder why you didn't just take a train straight back to London then.'

‘I was asleep.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Nobody gave me the message.'

‘Still doesn't explain what you were doing where you were found last night.' Charles was silent, undecided how much he should reveal. ‘Mr Paris,' the superintendent went on, ‘it's come to my notice, from sources which I have no intention of revealing, that you have occasionally in the past dabbled in a bit of crime investigation yourself . . .'

‘Well . . .'

‘If there's one thing a real policeman hates, Mr Paris, it's the idea of some bloody amateur muscling in on the act.'

‘Yes. Right.'

‘So please don't tell me your activities last night had anything to do with you trying to do a bit of investigation into the Martin Earnshaw case off your own bat.'

‘No. No, that wasn't what I was doing. I'll tell you exactly what happened.'

And he did. He described how he'd caught sight of DS Marchmont and started following him ‘just out of curiosity'; and he went right through to the moment when his trailing of the ‘tramp' had been interrupted by Kevin Littlejohn's ‘citizen's arrest'.

At the end of his narrative there was a silence before Superintendent Roscoe said, ‘I see. And no doubt you have a theory about who the “tramp” was . . .'

‘I think it was Ted Faraday in disguise.'

‘Do you? And may I have the benefit of your theory about what he might have been carrying?'

‘I hadn't really thought about that.'

‘It seems to me there's quite a lot you “hadn't really thought about”, Mr Paris.' Roscoe was angry now. ‘Not least the potential chaos that could be caused by some unqualified amateur getting involved in a professional police investigation!'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean –'

‘I can see to it you're not charged for this lot, Mr Paris –' The Superintendent gestured to the desk ‘– but if I ever hear that you've been doing anything in this case other than the acting job for which W.E.T. are employing you –' A blunt finger was held in front of Charles's face ‘– I will see to it that you get put away for an uncomfortably long time. Got that?'

Charles Paris assured the superintendent that he had got that. How much longer the dressing-down might have gone on was hard to know, because he was let off the hook by the appearance of a uniformed constable at the office door. ‘Urgent call for you, Superintendent. It's being switched through here.'

‘Thanks.' The phone on the desk pinged and Roscoe picked it up. ‘What? Where? Has it been cordoned off? Are the public being kept away? OK, I'll be right there.' He put the phone down and picked up his peaked cap. ‘I must go.'

‘Development on the Earnshaw case?' Charles couldn't help asking.

A stubby finger was again thrust very close to his nose. ‘Have you not got the message yet, Mr Paris? Mind your own fucking business!'

IT WAS AFTER one by the time Charles Paris was released from the police station. The desk sergeant, though different from the one who had been on duty the night before, was apparently under instructions to make the prisoner aware of the enormity of his crime. He made a big production of returning Charles's bag, his pocket contents, shoelaces and belt. All of the sergeant's slow actions were accompanied by a litany of reproof and when finally allowed to depart, Charles slunk out of the police station like a beaten schoolboy leaving the headmaster's study.

The first thing he did was find a pub and down a couple of large Bell's. To his annoyance, he found some lines of verse repeating in his head.

Really, after sixteen hours in a police cell, it was a bit much to be quoting
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
!

He stared out of the pub window at the grey November clouds, trying not do it with ‘a wistful eye', nor to think of what he was looking at, ‘
that little tent of blue / Which prisoners call the sky
'.

And he thought about the case. Up until then any thinking he'd done about Martin Earnshaw's disappearance had been detached, a prurient general interest shared with the millions who watched
Public Enemies.
Nothing about it touched Charles Paris personally; there had been nothing to awake his own dormant investigative instinct.

Now somehow his attitude had changed. It wasn't the activities of Greg Marchmont the night before; it was the sight of the ‘tramp' that had done it. Charles felt certain he had been following Ted Faraday in disguise; and that idea fired his curiosity.

The other stimulus to Charles's interest was Roscoe's overreaction to the idea of his involvement. Surely the superintendent wouldn't have made such a fuss unless he thought there was something about the case Charles Paris was likely to find out.

He moved from the Bell's to a pint of bitter and ordered a steak-and-kidney pudding to erase the memory of his police-station breakfast. Then he rang W.E.T. from the pub's payphone.

‘Louise Denning, please.'

He was put through to the gallery of the
Public Enemies
studio and the researcher herself answered. ‘Yes?'

‘Hello. It's Charles Paris.'

‘Oh,' she said in a tone of voice that meant ‘Why?'

‘I thought you might have been trying to contact me.'

‘No.'

‘It's just that I've been . . . well, a bit tied up, and, er . . .'

‘I told you – I haven't been trying to contact you,' she repeated in a tone of voice that meant ‘Why should I want to?'

‘I just thought I should check in . . .'

‘Oh.'

‘. . . you know, to see if I might be needed today for the studio or anything.'

‘No, you're not.' And with her habitual charm, Louise Denning put the phone down.

Charles Paris went back to his drink and found his steak-and-kidney pie had just been delivered. As he sat down to eat it, he decided he'd stay another night in Brighton.

Charles had no difficulty booking into a cheap hotel, and amused himself until dark with a bottle of Bell's and indistinct children's programmes on the crackling television. Then he walked back through the dark streets of Brighton to Trafalgar Lane.

It was about six when he got there. Once again the light was on in the flat above the second-hand clothes shop. First checking that there wasn't another Kevin Littlejohn lurking in the shadows, Charles moved into the doorway of a boarded-up shop opposite and watched. He thought he discerned occasional flickers of shadowy movement in the flat, but he couldn't be sure.