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
