Simon Brett - An Amateur Corpse

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…

Good Lord, had Charlotte been worried that she was pregnant? Suddenly, the thought seemed attractively plausible. A lot of what she had said in the Backstagers’ car park would be explained if that were the case. That business about being off alcohol. It could be checked through the police post-mortem. Mental note to ask Gerald.

If she were pregnant, a whole new volume of possible motives for killing her was opened. He felt a catch of excitement.

He tried the drawer next. That didn’t seem to offer anything unexpected. A couple of rings, a broken string of beads, no doubt awaiting mending, a polythene bag of cotton wool balls, a nail-file, an empty key-ring, a jar of nail polish and… what was that at the back? He pulled it out. A small book covered in red leather.

It was a Roman Catholic missal. Inside the cover was written, ‘To Charlotte. On the occasion of her first communion, with love from Uncle Declan and Auntie Wyn.’

Yes of course, the Northern Irish background. Good little Catholic girl. Which might raise problems if she had got herself pregnant. And moral issues over contraception. Difficult to know how strong the Catholic influence would have remained. She had married Hugo in spite of his divorce. But Charles had gathered from his friend’s unworthy ramblings in the Trattoria that she had let Hugo take the responsibility for birth control in the relationship. Which might mean that Charlotte would be in danger of getting pregnant if she started sleeping with someone else. Which would make sense.

He opened the fitted wardrobe on Charlotte’s side of the room. The sight of her fashionable clothes gave him a sharp pang. She had worn them so well, been so beautiful. And now they hung lifeless, misshapen by the bony shoulders of the clothes hangers..

Charles ruffled through the dresses and looked with care among the litter of shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe. He still didn’t know what he was looking for, but he didn’t feel the time was wasted. Somehow, among her things, he felt closer to Charlotte, closer to understanding what had been going through her mind in the days before her death.

Her clothes smelt strongly of her scent, as if she were still alive. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see her walk in through the door.

The wardrobe revealed nothing unexpected. Nor did the rows of drawers which flanked it. He was about to start looking round the bathroom when he stopped. There had been nothing unexpected among her clothes, but equally there had not been something that might have been expected there either.

Charlotte Mecken had been strangled with a scarf. Hugo had identified it as her own scarf and yet there were no others among her clothes. There were any number of dresses, skirts and shirts for her to choose from, any number of pullovers and pairs of shoes. But only one scarf.

When he came to think of it, Charles realized he had never seen Charlotte wearing a scarf. And what was more, even his sketchy knowledge of current fashion told him that scarves were not ‘in’. Certainly not those crude Indian prints like the one he had seen knotted around Charlotte’s neck. No, those had had a vogue in the late sixties, they now looked rather dated. Charlotte, with her sharp fashion sense, would not have been… He smiled wryly as his mind formed the phrase ‘been seen dead in one.’

What it meant was that Charlotte was most unlikely to have been wearing the scarf with which she was killed. Which made the accepted picture of the murder, of Hugo reaching out to her in a drunken fury and throttling her, unlikely. Whoever killed Charlotte must have gone to get the scarf with which to do it.