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.’
