There was a long pause. Geoffrey kept the usual tight rein on his emotions. ‘Well, Charles, you give me credit for a lot of ingenuity.’
‘I do.’
‘And I can see that, if all your assumptions are correct, it would have been possible for me to kill Charlotte. But you need a ripe imagination to follow the twists of what you’ve just told me. I think you might have difficulty persuading the police of it all — particularly as at the moment they have two crimes and for each one they have a self-confessed criminal.’
‘But Hugo only confessed because he couldn’t remember and because he didn’t care.’
‘If he didn’t care, then why should we?’
‘I don’t know. I just want the truth to come out.’
‘Admirable sentiments. Well, I’m sure as soon as you can produce evidence to back up your preposterous allegations, the truth will come out.’
Yes, there was the rub. Charles knew he had nothing except his own convictions to support his theory. It was right, but, as Geoffrey observed, it was going to be almost impossible to persuade the police to take it seriously. Particularly if the persuader was someone who stood as low in the estimation of Breckton Police Station as Charles Paris.
He felt his confidence begin to ebb and, with an effort, tried to regain momentum. Maybe he could shock a confession out of Geoffrey. ‘What makes the whole crime so ironic, even tragic, is the fact that Charlotte wasn’t even pregnant.’
‘What!’ This time Geoffrey reacted. This time, for a moment, the mask crumbled. And from that instant Charles knew for certain that he was right. He might have got some of the details of the plan’s execution wrong, but Geoffrey Winter definitely killed Charlotte Mecken.
‘No,’ he continued coolly. ‘The police post-mortem revealed that she wasn’t pregnant.’
‘But — ’
‘Oh, she thought she was, but it was just some freak effect of her going on the Pill. If she’d had the nerve to go to her doctor about it, he could have quickly disillusioned her. But no, she told you she was pregnant; she said, as a Catholic, she was going to keep the baby and, what was more, if you wouldn’t tell your wife about it, then she would. When she made that decision, she signed her death warrant.’
Geoffrey’s eyes were closed and he was breathing deeply. Charles turned the knife in the wound. ‘And, if you’re looking for further ironies, between the time that she saw you on the Monday lunch time and the time that you killed her, Charlotte had decided that she would have an abortion. She rang up a friend for advice on how to end the pregnancy that never was. So her death was doubly unnecessary.’
Geoffrey was badly shaken, but he rallied. There was only slight tension in his voice when at last he spoke. ‘This has been very interesting. May I ask what you are going to do now, Charles?’
‘Nothing. I’m going to go away. I’m going to leave you with the knowledge that I know exactly what happened and see how you react. Maybe you’ll come round to the conclusion that you ought to devise another equally ingenious method of disposing of me. My knowledge makes me just as much of a threat to your way of life as Charlotte was.’
‘You sound almost as if you are issuing a challenge.’
‘Yes, Geoffrey. I am.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The next few days were an agony of vigilance for Charles. He hadn’t really meant to challenge Geoffrey to kill him, but without evidence he saw no other way of drawing the man out into the open. All he had to do was to keep on his guard and see Geoffrey before Geoffrey saw him.
In case the worst happened, he wrote down a detailed reconstruction of what had taken place on the night of Charlotte’s murder and lodged it with Gerald. Then if Charles Paris were found murdered, it could be delivered to the police, who would know where to start looking for their murderer.
But Charles didn’t intend to be murdered; he intended to catch Geoffrey Winter attempting to murder him. That attempt would be tantamount to a confession to Charlotte’s murder.
Charles tried to live as normally as possible. He stayed round Hereford Road a lot, so that Geoffrey should have no difficulty finding him. He drank less, so as to remain alert. He rigged up an elaborate alarm over the door of his bedsitter so that he should not be surprised in the night. And he waited.
Meanwhile he tried to continue his career, as funds were getting low. In this he encountered an unexpected setback.
He rang through to Mills Brown Mazzini on that Friday to find out when the next Bland recording session would be. Ian Compton told him with ill-disguised glee that the housewives of the Tyne-Tees area had given the thumbs-down to the Mr. Bland television commercials. They had found the animation too frivolous for something as important as a bedtime drink and they didn’t like the name.
As a result, Ian had worked out a completely different approach for the product, and it had been approved by Mr. Farrow. The new campaign for the drink (now renamed Velvet-Sleep) was to feature a young couple who had just finished a hard day’s decorating. The voice-over was going to be done by Diccon Hudson.
So that was it. Charles was paid off for the Tuesday’s cancelled recording session and suddenly the heady vistas of infinitely repeated commercials bringing in infinite repeat fees shrank down to a few solitary session payments. Needless to say, there had been no long-term contract signed. The dazzling prospects had existed only in conversations between Charles and Hugo. With his sponsor still remanded in custody, Charles was suddenly out of the voice-over world. He never heard the result of the No Fuzz test.
He rang Maurice Skellern and said he would audition for the Cardiff company. He had to live on something.
He also kept thinking he should ring Frances, but didn’t get round to it.
On the Saturday morning he received a letter.
Dear Mr. Parrish,
Thank you so much for letting us see your play, How’s Your Father? which we read with some amusement.
We regret that we do not feel it to be suitable for our World Premieres Festival, as we feel it is too slight and commercial a piece for production in what has increasingly become one of the main outlets for modem experimental theatre in this country.
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.