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?’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Charles didn’t want to hurry things. He was now confident that he knew how Charlotte had been killed, and he could afford to take time to check it. There was no point in confronting Geoffrey Winter or going to the police with an incompletely researched solution.
He left Gerald late on the Saturday afternoon. (Gerald wanted to watch Doctor Who and Charles didn’t really much.) They agreed that Charles should make various further investigations and then report back. Gerald was now more or less convinced by the new solution, but his legal caution remained.
Since there was nothing useful he could do that day, Charles went for the evening to one of his old haunts, the Montrose, a little drinking club round the back of the Haymarket. As he expected, it was full of out-of-work actors (and even, after the theatres finished, some in-work ones). A great deal of alcohol was consumed.
He woke feeling pretty ropey on the Sunday morning and did the tube and train journey to Breckton on automatic pilot. It was only when he emerged into the stark November sunlight outside the suburban station that consciousness began to return.
Blearily he reminded himself of the plan he had vaguely formed the day before. He had come down to Breckton to check the timing of the crime, to retrace the steps that Geoffrey Winter had taken on the Monday night and see if it was feasible for him to have killed Charlotte in the forty-five minutes the tape allowed.
Charles was early. Since he didn’t want to run the risk of meeting any of the principals in the crime, he had decided to conduct his exploration after two-thirty when they would all be emoting over The Winter’s Tale up at the Backstagers.
He arrived just after twelve, which was a remarkably convenient time for him to go into a pub and kill time and his hangover at one blow.
There was a dingy little Railway Tavern adjacent to the station which was ideal for his purposes. The railway line was at some distance from the posher residential side of Breckton and he was in no danger of meeting any of the Backstagers down there.
When he entered the pub, it was clear that the clientele came from ‘the other side of the railway’, an expression of subtle snobbery that he had heard more than once from the theatrical circle. On the ‘other side of the railway’ there was a council estate, yet another socio-geological stratum in the complex structure of Breckton. At the bottom was the bedrock of ‘the other side of the railway line’, then the unstable mixture of rising lower middle and impoverished upper middle class ‘the other side of the main road’ (where Geoffrey and Vee lived), then the rich clay of the newer detached executive houses like the Meckens’ and finally the lush topsoil of extreme affluence which manifested itself in mock-Tudor piles like the Hobbses’. Across the strata ran the faults and fissures of class and educational snobbery as well so that a full understanding of the society would be a lifetime’s study.
Charles ordered a pint which made his brain blossom out of its desiccation like a Japanese flower dropped in water.
Being a Sunday, there was nothing to eat in the pub except for a few cheese biscuits and cocktail onions on the bar, but Charles was quite happy to resign himself to a liquid lunch.
As he sat and drank, his mind returned to Charlotte’s murder. Not in a depressed or panicky way, but with a kind of intellectual calm. He felt as he had sometimes done when writing a play, the comforting assurance that he’d sorted out a satisfactory plot outline and only needed to fill in the details.
And little details were slotting into his scenario of the death of Charlotte Mecken. One was disturbing. He was beginning to think that Geoffrey might be on to his suspicions.
First, the interrogation in his office must have put him on his guard, if Charles’s phone call on the evening of Hugo’s arrest hadn’t already done so. But there was something else. On the Friday night, when Geoffrey had discovered Charles on his sitting room, he had looked extremely suspicious. At the time, Charles had assumed that the suspicion had a sexual basis.
But, as he thought back over the circumstances, he found another interpretation. When Geoffrey arrived, the cassette player was running, reproducing Vee’s performance of Wycherley’s Mrs Pinchwife. Geoffrey had entered speaking to Vee, as if he expected her to be in the room. Maybe the suspicion arose when he saw that he had been fooled by the sound of the cassette player, that in fact he had been caught by his own deception. If that were the case, then he might have thought that Charles was further advanced in his investigation than he was and that playing the tape of Vee had been a deliberate set-up to see how the supposed murderer would react.
It was quite a thought. Geoffrey was a cold-blooded killer and if he could dispose of his mistress without a qualm, he would have little hesitation in getting rid of anyone else who stood in his way. Charles would have to tread warily.
Because if Geoffrey Winter did try to kill him, he would do the job well. He was a meticulous planner. Charles thought of the set model for The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Geoffrey’s study. Every move carefully considered. Little plastic people being manipulated, disposed (and disposed of) according to the director’s will.
The thought of danger cast a chill over the conviviality of the pub and the glow of the fourth pint. Well, the solution was to get to the source of the danger as soon as possible, to prove Geoffrey’s guilt and have him put away before he could make a hostile move.
The pub was closing. Charles went to the Gents with the uncomfortable feeling that the amount he had consumed and the cold weather were going to make him want to go again before too long.
It was after two-thirty when he reached the Winters’ road. He walked along it at an even pace, apparently giving their house no deeper scrutiny than the others. Somehow he felt that the watchers of Breckton were still alert behind their net curtains on Sunday afternoons.
The Winters themselves had resisted the suburban uniform of net curtains, so from a casual glance he could feel pretty confident that they were out. But he did not start his timed walk from then. He felt sure there must be a route from the back of the house.
When he got to the end of the road, his hunch was proved right. The gardens of the row of identical semis (identical to everyone except their proud owners) backed on to the gardens of the parallel row in the next road. Between them ran a narrow passage flanked with back gates into minute gardens.
The alley was concreted over, its surface cracked and brown, marked with moss and weeds. Suburban secrecy insured that the end fencing of all the gardens was too high for anyone walking along the alley to see in (or,
