Simon Brett - An Amateur Corpse

‘Sorry I’m a bit early, Vee. The train didn’t take as long as I expected.’

‘No, they put on some fast ones during the rush-hour. But don’t worry, supper’s nearly ready. Geoff’s just got in. He’s up in the study. Go and join him. He’s got some booze up there.’

The house was a small Edwardian semi, but it had been rearranged and decorated with taste and skill. Or rather, someone had started rearranging and decorating it with taste and skill. As he climbed the stairs, Charles noticed that the wall had been stripped and rendered, but not yet repapered. In the same way, someone had begun to sand the paint off the banister. Most of the wood was bare, but obstinate streaks of white paint clung in crevices. The house gave the impression that someone had started to renovate it with enormous vigour and then run out of enthusiasm. Or money.

The soprano wailing of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde drew him to Geoffrey Winter’s study. Here the conversion had very definitely been completed. Presumable the room had been intended originally as a bedroom, but it was now lined with long pine shelves which extended at opposite ends of the room to make a desk and a surface for an impressive selection of hi-fi. The shelves were covered with a cunning disarray of hooks, models, old bottles and earthenware pots. The predominant colour was a pale, pale mustard, which toned in well with the pine. On the wall facing the garden French windows gave out on to a small balcony.

Geoffrey Winter was fiddling with his hi-fi. The Wagner disc was being played on an expensive-looking grey metal turntable. Leads ran from the tuner to a small Japanese cassette radio.

‘Sorry, Charles, just getting this on to cassette. So much handier. It’s nearly finished.’

‘This room’s really good, Geoffrey.’

‘I like it. One of the advantages of not having children — you have space.’

‘And more money.’

Geoffrey grimaced. ‘Hmm. Depends on the size of your mortgage. And your other bills. And how work’s going.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I’m an architect.’ Which explained the skill of the decor.

‘Work for yourself?’

‘Yes. Well, that is to say, I work for whoever will pay for my services. So at the moment, yes, I seem to work just for myself. No one’s building anything. Can I get you a drink?’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s sherry or sherry, I’m afraid.’ And, Charles noticed, not a particularly good sherry. Cypress domestic. Tut, tut, getting spoiled by the ostentatious array of Hugo’s drinks cupboard. It would take a distressingly short time to pick up all the little snobberies of materialism.

While Geoffrey poured the drinks, Charles moved over to the shelves to inspect a theatrical model he had noticed when he came in. It was a stage set of uneven levels and effectively placed columns. Plastic figures were grouped on the rostra.

Geoffrey answered the unspoken question as he handed Charles his sherry. ‘Set for The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I’m directing it for the Backstagers in the new year.’

‘You’re a meticulous planner.’

‘I think as a director you have to be. In anything to do with the theatre, in fact. You have to have planned every detail.’

‘Yes, 1 could tell that from your Trigorin.’

‘I’m not sure whether that’s meant to be a compliment or not, Charles.’

‘Nor am I.’

Geoffrey laughed.

‘No, Geoffrey, what I mean is, you had more stagecraft than the rest of the company put together, but occasionally one or two tricks — like that very slow delivery on key lines, separating the words, giving each equal emphasis — well, I was conscious of the artifice.’

Geoffrey smiled, perhaps with slight restraint. ‘Don’t waste it, Charles. Keep it for the Critics’ Circle. Professional criticism.’

The record had ended. The stylus worried against the centre groove. Geoffrey seemed suddenly aware of it and, with a look at Charles, he switched off the cassette player. He replaced the disc in its sleeve and marshalled it into a rack.

The conversation clipped. Charles found himself asking about the previous night’s television. Dear, oh dear. Slip-pine into commuter habits. ‘Did you get back in time for your ration of rape and murder in 1, Claudius last night?’

‘No. I was back in time but I left Vee to watch it on her own. I did some work on Leontes. Trying to learn the bloody lines.’

‘Shakespearean verse at its most tortured. How do you learn them? Have you any magic method?’

“Fraid not. It’s just read through, read through. Time and again.’

‘It’s the only way.’

At that moment Vee called from downstairs to say the meal was ready.

There was quite a crowd in the Back Room before the Critics’ Circle. And for once they had a topic of conversation other than the theatrical doings of the Breckton Backstagers.

Denis and Mary Hobbs had been burgled. They had come home from their weekend cottage at about midnight the previous night and found the house full of police. A burglar had smashed one of the diamond panes in a downstairs front window, reached through and opened it, gone upstairs and emptied the contents of Mary’s jewel box.

That’s what’s so horrible about it,’ she was saying into her fourth consolatory double gin, ‘- the idea of someone in your house, going through your things. It’s ghastly.’

‘Were they vandals too? Did they dirty your bedclothes and scrawl obscenities on your walls?’ asked sour Reggie hopefully.

‘No, at least we were spared that. Remarkable tidy burglars, closed all the cupboards and doors after them. No fingerprints either, so the CID. boys tell us. But After her proprietory reference to the police force, she warmed to her role as tragic queen. ‘… that only seems to make it worse. It was so cold-blooded. And the idea of other people invading our privacy — ooh, it makes me feel cold all over.’

‘Did they get much?’ asked Reggie, with morbid interest.

‘Oh yes, there was quite a lot of good stuff in my jewellery box. Not everyday things — I dare say a lot of them I don’t wear more than twice a year. But I’d got them out of the bank for this Masonic do of Denis’s last Monday and it didn’t seem worth putting them back, because next week there’s this dinner-dance thing at the Hilton — did I tell you about that?’

The snide expressions on the faces of the surrounding Backstagers suggested that Mary missed no opportunity to give them details of her posh social life. Anyway, the question seemed to be rhetorical. The role was shifting from tragic queen to wonderful person.

‘Oh, I don’t care about the stuff as jewellery. I’m not materialistic. But they’re presents’ Den’s given me over the years, birthday, Christmases and so on. That’s the trouble-the insurance will cover the value in money terms, but it can never replace what those things mean to me.

‘It serves us bloody right,’ said her husband. ‘We’ve talked enough times about having a burglar alarm put in. But you put it off. You think it’ll never happen to you.’

‘Do the police reckon there’s a chance of getting the culprits?’

‘I don’t know. Never commit themselves, the buggers, do they? But I think it’s unlikely. They seem to reckon the best chance was missed when Bob first saw the light.’

‘What light?’

‘Oh, didn’t you hear?’ You tell them, Bob.’

Robert Chubb took his cue and graciously moved to centre stage. ‘I was the one who discovered the ghastly crime. Proper little Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps I should take it up professionally.

‘I’d been sorting through some stuff in the office last night after I handed the bar over to Reggie and I was walking home past Denis and Mary’s at about ten-fifteen, when I saw this light.’