Gerald Venables was much more friendly when Charles rang him the next morning. Maybe he was less tired and the arrival of the weekend had cheered him. Or maybe the fact that it was the weekend meant he could relax his professional guard. Outside the office he could see Hugo’s predicament as a case to be investigated rather than as an inconvenient and time-consuming legal challenge.
Whatever the cause, he agreed that they should meet and invited Charles down to Dulwich for lunch. As he signed off on the phone, he said. ‘So long, buster. See you at my joint round twelve. Okay, coochie-coo?’ An encouraging sign.
As Charles walked from West Dulwich Station, he found that he was casting a Breckton eye over everything he saw, assessing the suburb from a suburban point of view. He hadn’t quite got to the stage of pricing the houses he passed, but he could feel it wasn’t far off.
Dulwich had the same air as Breckton of quiet desperation. Paranoid car-cleaning, wives pulled in every direction by children, buggies and shopping, determinedly jovial husbands taking the kids for a walk, track-suited executives sweating off some of the week’s lunches in unconvinced jogging, others bearing their loads of wood and ceiling tiles from the brochured neatness of the Do-It-Yourself shop to the bad-tempered messes of a constructive weekend.
Gerald’s house was predictably well-appointed. Part of a newish development, with that fraction more room between it and the next house which is the mark of success in the suburbs. The front door had a brass lion knocker and was white, with small square Georgian panels. The up-and-over garage door was panelled in the same way. In fact the whole scheme of the house was Georgian, with thin-framed white windows set in neat red brick. It was exactly the sort of house that anyone in Georgian England who happened to own two cars, a central heating oil tank, a television and a burglar alarm would have had.
Gerald was manifesting the schizophrenia of a Monday to Friday worker. He was dressed in a pale blue towelling shirt and evenly faded jeans (the summery image made possible by the blast of central heating which greeted Charles as he entered). His feet were encased in navy blue sailing shoes and a Snoopy medallion hung around his neck. This last was worn a bit self-consciously. Perhaps it was a fixture, always round the solicitorial neck beneath the beautifully-laundered cotton shirts and silk ties, but somehow Charles doubted it.
The shock of Gerald without a suit made him realize that it must have been nearly twenty years since he had seen his friend in informal gear. For a moment he wondered if he had come to the right house.
‘Kate’s taken the kids to some exhibition in Town, so we’ve got the place to ourselves. She sent love and so on. There’s some kind of basic pate lunch in the fridge for later, Have a beer?’
Predictably Lowenbrau. Charles descended into the depths of a light brown leather sofa and took a long swallow. ‘Well, are you beginning to think I might have a point?’
‘Hardly, Charles, but I am willing to go through the evidence with you and see if there’s anything. What do you reckon might have happened?’
Charles outlined his current view of Charlotte’s death, moving swiftly from point to point. As he spoke, his conjectures took a more substantial form and he could feel an inexorable pull of logic.
Gerald was impressed, but sceptical. ‘I can see that that makes a kind of sense, but in a case like this you’ve got to have evidence. If you’re ever going to convince the police that their nice neatly-sewn-up little case is not in fact nice and neatly-sewn-up at all, you’re going to have to produce something pretty solid. All we’ve got so far is the slight oddness of a woman watching her favourite television program twice in three days. And that could well be explained if it turns out that her story about her mother’s phone call is true.’
‘I’d care to bet it isn’t. Anyway, that’s not all we have. We’ve also got this.’ With an actor’s flourish Charles produced the yellow and green cassette box from his pocket.’
‘Oh yes.’ Gerald was not as overwhelmed by the gesture as he should have been. ‘You mentioned that. I’m afraid I don’t quite see where you reckon that fits into the scheme of things.’
‘What, you don’t want me to repeat all that business about my coming in and finding Geoffrey copying the Wagner?’
‘No, I’ve got that. What I don’t understand is what you are expecting to find on it. Except for Wagner. I mean, he could just have been copying it for a friend or something.’
Charles wasn’t going to shift from his proudly-achieved deduction. ‘No, I’m sure he was trying to hide something, to erase something.’
‘But what? What could possibly be put on tape that was incriminating? The average murderer doesn’t record a confession just to make it easy for amateur detectives.’
‘Ha bloody ha. All right, I don’t know what it is. I just know it’s important. And the only way we’re going to find out what’s on it is by listening to the thing. Do you have a cassette player?’
‘Of course,’ Gerald murmured, pained that the question should be thought necessary.
In fact he had a cassette deck incorporated into the small city of mart grey Bang and Olufsen hi-fi equipment that spread over the dark wooden wall unit. The speakers stood on the floor like space age mushrooms.
‘Now I reckon,’ said Charles as Gerald fiddled with the console, ‘our best hope is that there’s something right at the beginning, that he started recording too far in and didn’t wipe all the…’
The opening of the Prelude from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde gave him the lie.
‘Well, if that was our best hope…’ Gerald observed infuriatingly, as he bent to fiddle with more knobs.
When he was happy with the sound, he sat down with a smug smile on his face, waiting to be proved right. The Prelude wound moodily on. Charles remembered how cheap he had always found the emotionalism of Wagner’s outpourings. He began to get very bored.
After about five minutes it became clear that Gerald was going through the same process of mental asphyxiation. ‘Charles, can’t we switch it off? Kate’s taken me to this stuff, but I’ve never cared for it much.’
‘No. Some American once said Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.’
‘It needs to be. I think it’s going to go on like this for some time and we’re not going to get any dramatic murder confessions.’
‘I agree. Let’s spool through. There might be something where he changed sides. That’s a C90 cassette, forty-five minutes each way. The LP could only have had about twenty minutes each side, so he must have flipped the disc. Might be something there.’
There wasn’t. They could hear the blip of the pick-up being lifted off, then the slight hiss of erased tape until the bump of the stylus back on the other side, the tick of the homing grooves and the return of the music.
‘No.’ Gerald’s smugness was increasing.
‘Let’s try the end. Yes, if there’s only forty minutes on the disc and it’s a forty five minute tape…’ Charles felt a new surge of excitement at the thought.
He tensed as Gerald spooled through till nearly the end of the tape and uttered a silent prayer as the replay button was pressed.
God was apparently deaf. Tape hiss. Again, nothing but tape hiss. ‘I think he just left the Record button down and let the tape run through until it was all erased.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Charles agreed gloomily. Then, with sudden memory — ‘No, but he didn’t. I was there. I remember quite distinctly. Perhaps he had intended to do that, but because I was there he switched it off when the music stopped. He must have erased the last bit after that. Which would, suggest to me that he did have something important to hide.’ Suddenly he got excited. ‘Look, suppose he missed a bit just at the end of the music…’
‘Why should he?’
‘Well, with some of these cheap cassette players it’s difficult to press the Play button and Record at exactly the same time. He might have put down the Play a moment earlier and left something unerased.’
‘But surely he would have heard anything and gone back over it.’
‘Not necessarily. Most of these machines have another button with which you switch off the sound to prevent microphone howlround. So he wouldn’t have heard it. And, given his great respect for music, even in this situation I don’t think he’d want to risk going back and wiping the final reverberation of his Wagner.’
‘It sounds pretty unlikely to me.’
‘It is. But it’s possible. Spool back to the end of the music.’
With the expression of someone humouring the mentally infirm, the solicitor returned the controls. It was the end of the Liebestod. The soprano warbled to death and the orchestra rose to its sullen climax. The regular hiss of the stylus on the centre groove seemed interminable. Then abruptly it was lifted off. This sound was followed by the woolly click of the recorder being switched off. Then another click as it had been restarted and, seconds later, a third as the Record button had been engaged.
Between the last two clicks there was speech.
Charles and Gerald looked at each other as if to confirm that they had both heard it. They were silent; the evidence was so fragile, it could suddenly be blown away.
Charles found his voice first. ‘Spool back. Play it again,’ he murmured huskily.
Again Wagner mourned in. Again the pick-up worried against the centre of the record. Then the clicks. And, sandwiched between them, Geoffrey Winter’s voice. Saying two words — no, not so much — two halves of two words.
‘-ed coal-.’ Charles repeated reverentially. ‘Play it again.’
Gerald did so. ‘It’s cut in the middle of some word ending in ed, and it sounds as though the coal is only the beginning of a word too.’
‘What words begin with coal?’
Charles looked straight at Gerald. ‘Coal shed, for one.’
‘Good God.’ For the first time the lines of scepticism left the solicitor’s face. ‘And what about words ending in ed? There must be thousands.’
‘Thousands that are spelled that way, not so many that are pronounced like that.’
‘No. I suppose there’s coal shed again. If the two parts came the other way around…’
‘Or there’s dead, Gerald.’
‘Yes,’ the solicitor replied slowly. ‘Yes, there is.’
‘May I use your phone, Gerald?’
‘What for?’
‘I’m going to crack Vee Winter’s alibi.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t sound so grumpy about it. Cheapest time to phone your friends — after six and at weekends. I’ll pay for the call, if you like.’
‘No, it’s not that. The firm sees to the phone bill anyway.’
‘Of course. I’d forgotten. You never use your own money for anything, do you?’
‘Not if I can help it.’ Gerald smiled complacently.
Given Lytham St. Anne’s and the unusual name of le Carpentier, Directory Inquiries had no difficulty in producing Vee’s mother’s phone number. Charles put his finger down on the bar of Gerald’s Trimphone and prepared to dial.
‘Are you just going to ask her direct, Charles? Won’t she think it’s a bit odd?’
‘I’m not going to ask her direct. I have a little plan worked out, which involves using another voice. Don’t worry.’
‘But that’s illegal,’ wailed Gerald as Charles dialled. ‘You can’t make illegal calls on a solicitor’s telephone.’
Mrs le Carpentier answered the phone with the promptness of a lonely old lady.
‘Hello. Telephone Engineer.’ Charles was pleased with the voice. He had first used it in a stillborn experimental play called Next Boat In (‘Captured all the bleakness and, I’m afraid, all the tedium of dockland’ — Lancashire Evening News). He thought it was a nice touch to be Liverpudlian for Lytham St. Anne’s.
‘Oh, what can I do for you? I hope there’s nothing wrong with the phone. I’m an old lady living on my own and — ’
The Telephone Engineer cut in reassuringly over Mrs le Carpentier’s genteel tones. ‘No, nothing to worry about. Just checking something. We had a complaint — somebody reported that your phone was continually engaged when they tried to ring, so I just have to check that the apparatus was in fact in a state of usage during the relevant period.’
‘Ah, I wonder who it could have been. Do you know who reported the fault?’
‘No, Madam.’
‘It could have been Winnie actually. She lives in Blundellsands. We play bridge quite often and it’s possible she was trying to set up a four for — ’
The Telephone Engineer decided he didn’t want to hear all of Mrs le Carpentier’s social life. ‘Yes, Madam. I wonder if we could just check the relevant period. The fault was reported last Monday. Apparently someone tried to call three times between nine and half past in the evening. Was the apparatus being used at this time?’
So confident was he of a negative response that the reply threw him for a moment. ‘I beg your pardon, Madam?’
‘Yes, it was in use.’
‘Oh. Oh.’ Still, it wasn’t necessarily Vee to whom she was speaking. ‘Local calls, were they, Madam?’
‘Oh no, it was just one call. Long distance.’
‘Where to? We have to check, Madam, when it’s been reported.’
‘It was a call to Breckton. That’s in Surrey. Near London.’
Charles felt the concoction of logis he had compounded trickling away from him. ‘Are you absolutely confident that that was the time, Madam?’
‘Absolutely. It was the time that that I, Claudius was on the television.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, you see, I saw it for the first time last week and I thought it was a shocking program. So much violence and immorality. My daughter had mentioned that she watched it, but after I’d seen what it was all about, I thought it was my duty as a mother to ring her up while it was on, so that she couldn’t watch it. Do you see?’
‘I see,’ Charles replied dully. Yes, he saw. He saw all his ideas suddenly discredited, he saw that he must flush every thought he’d ever had about the case out of his mind and start again with nothing.
Mrs le Carpentier was still in righteous spate. ‘I think too many parents nowadays neglect their duties as their children’s moral guardians. I mean, Victoria’s over thirty, but she still needs looking after. She mixes with all kinds of theatrical people and — ’
‘Victoria?’
‘My daughter.’
‘Good God.’
‘That’s another thing I don’t like in young people today — taking the name of the Lord in vain. It’s — ’
‘Mrs le Carpentier, thank you very much. You’ve been most helpful. I can confirm that there is nothing wrong with your apparatus.’
‘Oh good. And do you think maybe I should ring Winnie?’
“Yes, I would.’
He slumped on to the sofa, not hearing Gerald’s remonstrances about the illegality of impersonating people over the telephone and the number of laws under which this action could be charged and how the fact that the owner did not stop the crime might well make him an accessory.
It all flowed past Charles. The void which had been left in his mind by the confirmation of Vee’s alibi had only been there for a few seconds before new thoughts started to flood in. He pieced them together into a rough outline and then spoke, shutting Gerald up with a gesture.
‘Vee’s real name is Victoria.’
‘So what? What about her alibi? Was she telling the truth?’
‘Oh yes.’ Charles dismissed the subject.
‘Well then, that seems to put the kybosh on the whole — ’
‘But don’t you see — her real name is Victoria.’
‘Yes, but — ’
‘I should have guessed. The way all these amateur actors fiddle about with their names, it should have been obvious.’
‘I don’t see that her name is important when — ’
‘It is important, Gerald, because it means that it was Vee whom Charlotte was going to see at one o’clock the day after she was murdered. During the school lunch hour. Charlotte couldn’t stand all those affected stage names, so she would have called her Victoria as a matter of principle. And I bet that the reason she was going to see Vee was to tell her she was pregnant.’
‘So Vee didn’t already know?’
‘No.’
‘But surely that throws out all your motivation for her to have done the murder and — ’
‘She didn’t do the murder. Forget Vee. She doesn’t have anything to do with it.’
‘Then who did kill Charlotte?’
‘Geoffrey Winter.’
‘But Geoffrey didn’t have any motivation to kill her. He had a very good affair going, everything was okay.’
‘Except that Charlotte was pregnant.’
‘We don’t even know that.’
‘I’ll bet the police post-mortem showed that she was. Go on, you can ask them when you’re next speaking.’
‘All right, let’s put that on one side for the moment and proceed with your wild theorizing.’ The lines of scepticism were once again playing around Gerald’s mouth.
‘Geoffrey and Vee Winter are a very close couple. In spite of his philandering, he is, as he told me, very loyal to her. Now all marriages are built up on certain myths and the myth which sustains Vee is that her childlessness is Geoffrey’s fault. His infertility gives her power. She can tolerate his affairs, secure in the knowledge that he will come back to her every time. But if it were suddenly proved that in fact he could father a child, everything on which she had based their years together would be taken away from her. I think, under those circumstances, someone as highly-strung as she is could just crack up completely.
‘Geoffrey knew how much it would mean to her, so when Charlotte told him she was pregnant, he had to keep that knowledge from his wife. No doubt his first reaction was to try to get her to have an abortion, but Charlotte, nice little Catholic girl that she was, would never have consented to that. Equally, being a conventional girl, she would want to have the whole thing open, she’d want to talk to his wife, even maybe see if Vee would be prepared to give Geoffrey up.
‘So she rang Vee up and fixed to meet her on the Tuesday during her lunch hour. On the Monday she went up to Villiers Street for her assignation with Geoffrey and told him what she intended to do. He could not allow the confrontation of the two women to take place. He decided that Charlotte must never go and see Vee. So he killed her.’
Charles leaned back with some satisfaction. The new theory felt much more solid than the old one. It left less details unaccounted for.
Gerald said exactly what Charles knew he would. ‘I’m impressed by the psychological reasoning, Charles, but there is one small snag. Geoffrey Winter had an alibi for the only time he could have murdered Charlotte. He was at home rehearsing his lines so loudly that his next door neighbour complained to the police. How do you get round that one?’
Gerald couldn’t have set it up more perfectly for him if he had tried. ‘This is how he did it.’ Charles picked the cassette box up off the table.
‘So easy. He even told me he used the cassette recorder for learning his lines. All he had to do was to record a full forty-five minutes of The Winter’s Tale on to this cassette, put it on, slip out of the French windows of his study, go and commit the murder, come back, change from recording to his own voice and insure that he started ranting loudly enough to annoy his neighbour with whom his relationship was already dodgy. After previous disagreements about noise, he felt fairly confident that she would call the police, thus putting the final seal on his watertight alibi.’
Gerald was drawn to this solution, but he was not wholly won over. ‘Hmm. It seems that one has to take some enormous imaginative leaps to work that out. I’d rather have a bit more evidence.’
‘We’ve got the cassette. And I’ve suddenly realized what it means. The words — it’s Leontes.’
‘It’s what?’
‘Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. One of the most famous lines in the play. When he speaks of Hermione’s eyes, he says; “Stars, stars! And all eyes else dead coals”. ’That’s the bit we’ve got on the tape.’
Gerald was silent. Then slowly, unwillingly, he admitted, ‘Do you know, you could be right.’
‘Of course I’m right,’ said Charles. ‘Now where’s that lunch you were talking about?’