A Reconstructed Corpse (19 page)

CHARLES PARIS felt numb, almost detached. His mind wasn't working properly. Ideas floated there loosely, unable or perhaps unwilling to make connections.

He forced himself to go closer to the body. He registered that the spattered blood was still bright red and shiny. It had only just stopped flowing, and had not yet begun to dry and turn brown.

With an even greater effort he leant forward to touch the flesh of Greg Marchmont's hand. It was warm. The sergeant had not been long dead.

Then he noticed on the floor a sheet torn from a notebook. On it were scrawled the words:

‘I'M SORRY. I THOUGHT I COULD COPE WITH EVERYTHING, BUT WHEN IT CAME DOWN TO IT, I JUST COULDN'T STAND THE PRESSURE'

There was no means of knowing whether the lack of full stop after the last word was just carelessness or whether the message was incomplete. The dutiful use of punctuation in the rest of the message might point to the second conclusion.

Charles Paris backed away. Ring the police. Dial 999 and get the message across. That was the only coherent thought crystallising in his mind.

He could make the call from where he was. Use Marchmont's phone and then get the hell out of the place. He tried to remember how much Bell's he'd got back at Hereford Road. He was going to need a lot to anaesthetise him that night.

Charles Paris looked at his watch, wondering if he might still find an off-licence open. Twenty-seven minutes past ten. The transmission of
Public Enemies
had finished less than half an hour before. It felt so long ago it could have happened in a previous incarnation.

He moved automatically out of the bathroom, averting his eyes from the corpse, through the hall and back into the sitting room.

He approached the telephone, then hesitated. Was it sensible to make the call from there or might that link him to the place?

Fingerprints. God, his fingerprints were already on the door handles, possibly on the drawers and the papers he had picked up.

A dull panic made its slow progress through him. He was still too traumatised to feel anything stronger.

And with the panic came a new thought, a thought that started as a tiny inkling but quickly grew to a hideous certainty. Maybe Marchmont's message had been unfinished. Maybe it was missing the word ‘COOKER'.

Zombie-like, almost in slow motion, as in one of those dreams where you run hopelessly through sand, Charles Paris moved towards the gas rings. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it loosely round the handles of the pressure cooker. Feeling their outlines through the cloth, he eased them apart. He closed his hand round the lid handle and lifted it up.

His intuition was confirmed. In the dry interior of the pressure cooker was a human head.

Mercifully, the eyes were closed, but the shock that ripped through Charles was still intense.

It wasn't the shock, though, of seeing the face of the man he was employed to resemble.

Though discoloured and a little battered, the features were easily recognisable.

The head belonged to Ted Faraday.

CHARLES PARIS tried to piece it together the following morning on the train down to Brighton. His head felt as if it had been scrubbed by an over-diligent housewife with a pot-scourer. There hadn't been a great deal of Bell's back at Hereford Road, but enough. To his shame he'd bought another half at the Victoria Station off-licence that morning and already made inroads into it. The remaining contents sloshed around noisily in the bottle in his sports jacket pocket.

But, Charles told himself, it wasn't the booze that had made him feel so shitty; it was the fact that he'd hardly slept. Every time he closed his eyes, the screen of his mind had filled with that head in the pressure cooker. On the few occasions when he did doze off, he was quickly woken by a dream of the head in even less wholesome circumstances, steaming away with a selection of vegetables. Through the night he had felt – and still felt – as tight as a coiled spring.

After consideration, he hadn't rung the police. He reckoned they would make the discovery for themselves soon enough. Instead, he'd attempted a few futile gestures with a handkerchief to wipe the surfaces where fingerprints might incriminate him, and left Greg Marchmont's flat, slipping the latch and closing the front door behind him.

Through the traumas of the night he hadn't done much coherent thinking, but in the privacy of his empty early-morning railway compartment, he tried to bring an aching brain to bear on the subject.

The night before, his first thought was that Greg Marchmont must have been murdered. The sergeant knew too much and needed silencing. But morning reflection made him question this conclusion.

In some ways, for Marchmont to have been murdered didn't match the rest of the crime. Though he didn't hold much brief for most of what Roscoe had said, Charles agreed with the superintendent that the murderer was an exhibitionist, who got a charge from the way he was manipulating the police, the
Public Enemies
team, and indeed the entire British public.

Everything about the case so far showed meticulous planning skills. Though the crime was grotesque, its perpetrator had brilliantly controlled the flow of information about it, keeping always one step ahead of the official investigations, and providing dramatic climaxes for the weekly
Public Enemies
programmes with all the artistry of an award-winning screenwriter. His technique suggested someone familiar with the workings of police work or television – or, more likely, both.

Greg Marchmont fitted some elements of this profile, but there were others he didn't. For a start, he didn't appear to have enough intelligence or imagination to devise the killer's macabre scenario. Then again, his emotional tension and short temper seemed at odds with the cold-blooded detachment with which the crime must have been organised.

And, even though the faxes in his flat suggested the sergeant had been responsible for passing on information about the body parts to the police, Charles found it easier to cast him in a supporting role than as the initiator of the whole concept.

It seemed more credible that Greg Marchmont had sent the faxes on behalf of someone who had a hold over him.

That might explain his behaviour in Brighton too – clearing up the Trafalgar Lane flat on someone else's orders.

And it could also support the theory that his death was suicide. If Greg Marchmont had not only been responsible for sending the faxes, but also for arranging delivery of the gruesome package to the
Public Enemies
office – and the use of his chest and blanket suggested he was at least involved – then the pressure on him must have been intensifying beyond endurance.

The presence of the severed head in his flat – or maybe the instructions for what he had to do with it – might have proved too much. Stress on that scale could easily have pushed a man in his emotional state over into suicide – and the note he left could be interpreted to confirm such a supposition.

More important than all these arguments was the fact that Marchmont's suicide ruined the dramatic structure of the crime. The murderer's slight lapse, in making his first two discoveries of body parts too similar, had been more than retrieved by his stunning inspiration of the torso in the chest.

Surely the mastermind behind that must have planned some even more sensational
coup de théatre
for the discovery of the head – particularly given the fact that it wasn't the head everyone was expecting.

But now that dramatic sequence had been broken. Presumably in the next few days Greg Marchmont's flat would be entered and the head in the pressure cooker found. And that discovery would be fed to the media in the usual journalistic way. Given the build-up, it would make a distinctly bathetic last act to the murderer's play.

For a moment, Charles toyed with the idea of the
Public Enemies
office receiving the suggestion that they take their cameras when the door to the flat was broken down. Bob Garston and Roger Parkes would have leapt at the idea, he was sure, and for Geoffrey Ramage, to direct the shot of the camera homing into the interior of the pressure cooker would have been the consummation of all his ambitions. To make the event even more exciting, they could do it as a live Outside Broadcast.

But, appealing though the idea might be to the programme-makers, Charles knew that even in television there are limits, and he couldn't see such a sequence being allowed by the IBA.

It would be another sensational first, though, for
Public Enemies
– the entire ITV audience watching as the camera revealed that the severed head belonged not to Martin Earnshaw, but to Ted Faraday.

That change was the real shock, and Charles's battered mind had not yet worked out all the effects it had on his previous thinking about the case.

One immediate question arose – was there one murder victim or were there two? Did all the scattered body parts belong to Ted Faraday, or was it a kind of ‘Mix'n'Match' situation between the dead private investigator and the dead property developer?

The arms had certainly been identified as belonging to Martin Earnshaw. Which was why Charles Paris was once again travelling down to Brighton.

His first thought had been just to ring her up, but then he'd remembered that the police were recording all her calls, so decided on a face-to-face confrontation. The surveillance team might be recording everything that was said in the house as well, but that was a risk he'd have to take.

Even though it was daytime, there was still no one about in the road where Chloe Earnshaw lived. Before he rang the bell, Charles looked across, but no unmarked van was parked opposite. If the police protection was continuing, it now had a more discreet profile.

Chloe Earnshaw did not appear surprised by his arrival on her doorstep. Nor was she hostile. Indeed, she seemed pleased to see someone who had even the most tenuous connection with the world of television.

‘I haven't had a single call from that
Public Enemies
lot for nearly a week,' she complained as she led Charles through into the kitchen. ‘Tea? Coffee?'

‘Coffee, please.' It might help his head a bit. ‘You saw last night's programme, did you?'

‘Yes.' She busied herself with the kettle.

‘Must have been quite a shock for you.'

Chloe Earnshaw shrugged and turned to face him. She was swamped in a big black jumper that came down almost as far as her short black skirt. Tights and shoes were also black. ‘Quite honestly, I've had so many shocks since this thing started, I hardly feel them any more.'

If she'd been saying that on camera, Charles reckoned, all over the country people would have been murmuring, ‘Plucky little thing.' As before in Chloe's presence, he could feel the sexuality coming off her like a strong perfume. He had to remind himself how very unerotic actual physical contact in the form of their kiss had been.

‘Still, if you did see the programme, you can understand why they didn't need you for any more reconstruction or appeals. A rather more dramatic development in the story had broken, hadn't it?'

‘Yes, but they could have
told
me they weren't going to need me. I spent most of the week by the phone, waiting for them to call.'

Charles had heard those lines more times than he could recall, though usually from actresses who'd gone up to an interview for a television part and then not heard another word. He was struck by how very like a disgruntled actress Chloe Earnshaw behaved. Her husband's fate had become secondary to her own affront at being ignored by
Public Enemies
.

‘They've obviously been very busy,' Charles conciliated, then couldn't help adding, ‘and good manners are not something for which television as an industry is particularly well known.'

‘Huh.' The kettle had boiled. Chloe Earnshaw turned back to make the coffee, continuing bitterly, ‘I don't know – they pick you up, get you all excited, and then drop you – just like that.'

‘Yes . . . When you say “get you all excited”, you mean excited about the prospect of solving your husband's murder?'

Charles felt the reproachful beam of those dark blue eyes. ‘Yes, of course I mean that.'

‘Hmm . . . And have all the other telephone calls stopped too?'

‘Which other telephone calls?'

‘The ones from the members of the public.'

‘Oh. Oh, those. There never were that many of those. I mean, the programme's phone lines got plenty, but hardly any came through here.'

‘Except the one from the woman who'd seen Martin leaving the pub and going to the pier . . .'

‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course, there was that one, but that's about it . . .'

‘I thought you were moved back in here so that you could answer the phone if anyone rang . . .?'

‘That may have been one of the reasons. Sugar in your coffee?'

‘No, just black. Thank you. Are the police still recording all your telephone calls?'

Another petulant shrug. ‘I don't know. They're supposed to be. Mind you, they're
supposed
to be keeping me under twenty-four-hour surveillance and I haven't seen much sign of that recently either.'

‘Well, they wouldn't want to make it obvious, would they?'

‘If you're under surveillance by the British police, you
know
you're under surveillance by them. Look, they let you walk in here this morning without any questions, didn't they? You could have been a thug out to murder me for all anyone cares.'

‘Mm. But have you actually been told by the police that they're stopping the surveillance?'

‘I've been told they're “cutting it down”. Some stuff about resources being stretched and personnel being needed for other duties. It seems I've ceased to be a priority with the police as well as with
Public Enemies
.' The disgruntled actress tone in her voice was stronger than ever.