Simon Brett - An Amateur Corpse

‘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.’

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.