Simon Brett - An Amateur Corpse

We have also been fortunate to receive a new play by George Walsh. It is called Amniotic Amnesia and concerns the thoughts of a group of foetuses awaiting a fertility drug-induced multiple birth. It raises many interesting questions of philosophy and ecology and is much more the sort of work we feel the Backstagers should be doing.

We will hope to see you down here for our next production, The Winter’s

Tale by William Shakespeare.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Chubb

World Premieres Festival Sub-Committee

PS Your script is being returned under separate cover.

It was over a week before the truth sank in. That Geoffrey was not going to be drawn, that so long as he didn’t rise to Charles’s challenge, he was safe He knew that there was no evidence and he did not intend to supply any.

Charles felt ridiculous when this dawned on him. He had nothing; he should have realized. Geoffrey Winter had killed Charlotte Mecken, but it could never be proved.

Charles was furious. Having got so near, to be thwarted at the end… Hugo would be sentenced to life imprisonment and maybe come out after eight years to drink himself to death. Geoffrey would get a fine or a short sentence or maybe — if Willy, the Hobbses’ solicitor, were really good — a suspended sentence for the crime he’d had to commit as a cover-up. Then he’d take up a job with Denis Hobbs in the ‘construction industry’ and continue to play all the leads at the Breckton Backstagers. And Mary Hobbs would have the satisfaction of feeling that she had done something direct and positive for the artistic life of the community. And memories would heal over and the case would trickle away.

He couldn’t stand the thought. He resolved to get back to Breckton for one last try. There must be something he had missed.

It was Monday. Exactly two weeks from the night that Charlotte had died. Monday. November 15th. It had been a bright autumn day, but was dark by the time Charles arrived once again at Breckton Station.

Nearly seven o’clock. Instinctively he walked towards the Winters’ house. As he rounded the corner of their road, he stopped.

Geoffrey and Vee were walking ahead of him towards the main road.

Of course. Rehearsal. Up to the Back Room for a quick one, and then ready to give artistically at seven-thirty. Leontes and Perdita, played by Geoffrey Winter and Vee le Carpentier. The stars of the Breckton Backstagers. Oh yes, he knocks around a bit with other women, but they’re really very close. No children, no. But they’re very close.

He tailed them at about fifty yards distance, but they didn’t look round. It was uncannily silent. Geoffrey, like Charles, must be wearing his favourite desert boots and Vee’s shoes also must have had soft soles, for there was no sound of footfalls on the pavement of the footpath. Just the occasional chuckle from up ahead. Geoffrey sounded more relaxed alone with his wife than Charles had ever heard him in company. Oh yes, he needed Vee. When Charlotte threatened that relationship, she had to go.

Charles followed them all the way, keeping the same distance behind. It was sickening. He knew what had happened, the criminal was right in front of him and yet he could do nothing about it. Nothing without proof.

By the time Charles got to the Hobbses’ house, Geoffrey and Vee had disappeared inside the Backstagers. Everything went on just the same — drink, rehearsal, home, work, drink, rehearsal… Why should he try to break it up? Hugo was long past hope — what did it matter whether he despaired in prison or at large? He had nothing to live for. Geoffrey Winter at least had his love for his wife, his acting, his little affairs. What was the point of trying to break that pattern?

Charles decided he would go back to the station, get the train back up to Town and forget the case had ever happened.

A feeling almost of nostalgia for the time he had spent retracing Geoffrey’s movements made him take the long way round past the Meckens’ house.

It stood dark and unfriendly. Presumably, after Hugo’s trial it would go on the market, someone would buy it. There would be stories of what had happened there. If the buyer were imaginative, Charlotte’s ghost might even be seen. If not, it would all be forgotten. Sooner or later, all would be forgotten.

As he stood there, he was seized by an impulse to do it once again. One more retracing and that was it.

This time just as Geoffrey must have done it two weeks before. He slipped across the gravel drive to the side gate. He no longer cared about the net curtain snoopers. Let them report him if they wanted to. He was about to leave Breckton for the last time.

The side gate was not locked. He lifted the latch and let himself into the back garden. He had a small pencil torch in his pocket and he shone it on the ground before his feet as he walked towards the coal shed.

It was a shock not to find Charlotte’s body still there. That embarrassingly sprawled figure had so etched itself on his subconscious that he felt cheated when there was only coal in his torch-beam.

He stood there for a moment looking round. Nothing. Not the perfect crime, but a crime that was by now undetectable. Maybe at the time, maybe if Geoffrey had been the first suspect, there might have been something which would have given him away. Maybe the blood from the abrasion on Charlotte’s neck had been on his hands as he walked home. But if so, that blood had been long washed away, long dispersed and unidentifiable. Now there was nothing. Not a chance of anything.

Charles’s footsteps crunched in the coal-dust as he sighed and left the coal shed. Back across the drive, along the road and down the tarmac footpath to the common.

There was no one, about, of course. No one to see him, just as there had been no one to see Geoffrey Winter a fortnight before.

He walked doggedly along the hard mud path skirting the football fields towards the path to the main road. He passed the untidy bit, the dumping ground, still dominated by the washed-out crater of the Guy Fawkes bonfire.

He reached the paved path and walked a couple of paces. Then he stopped.

He felt a little tremor of excitement. Twisting one foot round on the paving, he heard the crunch of coal-dust.

Good God, it stayed on. He’d have thought it would have been wiped off by the walk across the common, but no. The little grains of coal embedded themselves into the rubber sole of the desert boot and took a lot of shifting.

And if he had noticed the difference in sound when he came on to the paving, so would someone else have done two weeks before. Could Geoffrey have taken the risk of carrying that incriminating dust into his own house?

No, surely he would have tried to remove the evidence. Charles looked at his own sole with the pencil torch. Little chips of coal glinted in the beam. He tried to scrape them off. Some came, some stayed. He could have got them all out, but it would have taken time. And time was the one commodity which Geoffrey hadn’t had. His tape gave him a maximum of forty-five minutes.

And on the morning Charles had visited him in his office, Geoffrey had been wearing new shoes.

Charles looked round. There was only one obvious place to dispose of a pair of shoes. You could throw them into the bushes, but there they’d be retrieved by the first nosey dog who came along. But in the bonfire.

After all, so long as suspicions were held off for four days, the evidence would be burnt publicly and no one any the wiser. And as soon as Geoffrey heard about Hugo’s arrest, he could relax. He had only to wait till November 5th to be absolutely secure.

But sour Reggie had reckoned the fire was out of control and it had been doused by the fire brigade. There was still that soggy mess of ash. If Geoffrey had shoved the shoes into the middle at the bottom to be inconspicuous, there was a long chance that they might still be there.