had done something direct and positive for the artistic life of the community. And memories would heal over and the case would trickle away.
He couldn’t stand the thought. He resolved to get back to Breckton for one last try. There must be something he had missed.
It was Monday. Exactly two weeks from the night that Charlotte had died. Monday. November 15th. It had been a bright autumn day, but was dark by the time Charles arrived once again at Breckton Station.
Nearly seven o’clock. Instinctively he walked towards the Winters’ house. As he rounded the corner of their road, he stopped.
Geoffrey and Vee were walking ahead of him towards the main road.
Of course. Rehearsal. Up to the Back Room for a quick one, and then ready to give artistically at seven-thirty. Leontes and Perdita, played by Geoffrey Winter and Vee le Carpentier. The stars of the Breckton Backstagers. Oh yes, he knocks around a bit with other women, but they’re really very close. No children, no. But they’re very close.
He tailed them at about fifty yards distance, but they didn’t look round. It was uncannily silent. Geoffrey, like Charles, must be wearing his favourite desert boots and Vee’s shoes also must have had soft soles, for there was no sound of footfalls on the pavement of the footpath. Just the occasional chuckle from up ahead. Geoffrey sounded more relaxed alone with his wife than Charles had ever heard him in company. Oh yes, he needed Vee. When Charlotte threatened that relationship, she had to go.
Charles followed them all the way, keeping the same distance behind. It was sickening. He knew what had happened, the criminal was right in front of him and yet he could do nothing about it. Nothing without proof.
By the time Charles got to the Hobbses’ house, Geoffrey and Vee had disappeared inside the Backstagers. Everything went on just the same — drink, rehearsal, home, work, drink, rehearsal… Why should he try to break it up? Hugo was long past hope — what did it matter whether he despaired in prison or at large? He had nothing to live for. Geoffrey Winter at least had his love for his wife, his acting, his little affairs. What was the point of trying to break that pattern?
Charles decided he would go back to the station, get the train back up to Town and forget the case had ever happened.
A feeling almost of nostalgia for the time he had spent retracing Geoffrey’s movements made him take the long way round past the Meckens’ house.
It stood dark and unfriendly. Presumably, after Hugo’s trial it would go on the market, someone would buy it. There would be stories of what had happened there. If the buyer were imaginative, Charlotte’s ghost might even be seen. If not, it would all be forgotten. Sooner or later, all would be forgotten.
As he stood there, he was seized by an impulse to do it once again. One more retracing and that was it.
This time just as Geoffrey must have done it two weeks before. He slipped across the gravel drive to the side gate. He no longer cared about the net curtain snoopers. Let them report him if they wanted to. He was about to leave Breckton for the last time.
The side gate was not locked. He lifted the latch and let himself into the back garden. He had a small pencil torch in his pocket and he shone it on the ground before his feet as he walked towards the coal shed.
It was a shock not to find Charlotte’s body still there. That embarrassingly sprawled figure had so etched itself on his subconscious that he felt cheated when there was only coal in his torch-beam.
He stood there for a moment looking round. Nothing. Not the perfect crime, but a crime that was by now undetectable. Maybe at the time, maybe if Geoffrey had been the first suspect, there might have been something which would have given him away. Maybe the blood from the abrasion on Charlotte’s neck had been on his hands as he walked home. But if so, that blood had been long washed away, long dispersed and unidentifiable. Now there was nothing. Not a chance of anything.
Charles’s footsteps crunched in the coal-dust as he sighed and left the coal shed. Back across the drive, along the road and down the tarmac footpath to the common.
There was no one, about, of course. No one to see him, just as there had been no one to see Geoffrey Winter a fortnight before.
He walked doggedly along the hard mud path skirting the football fields towards the path to the main road. He passed the untidy bit, the dumping ground, still dominated by the washed-out crater of the Guy Fawkes bonfire.
He reached the paved path and walked a couple of paces. Then he stopped.
He felt a little tremor of excitement. Twisting one foot round on the paving, he heard the crunch of coal- dust.
Good God, it stayed on. He’d have thought it would have been wiped off by the walk across the common, but no. The little grains of coal embedded themselves into the rubber sole of the desert boot and took a lot of shifting.
And if he had noticed the difference in sound when he came on to the paving, so would someone else have done two weeks before. Could Geoffrey have taken the risk of carrying that incriminating dust into his own house?
No, surely he would have tried to remove the evidence. Charles looked at his own sole with the pencil torch. Little chips of coal glinted in the beam. He tried to scrape them off. Some came, some stayed. He could have got them all out, but it would have taken time. And time was the one commodity which Geoffrey hadn’t had. His tape gave him a maximum of forty-five minutes.
And on the morning Charles had visited him in his office, Geoffrey had been wearing new shoes.
Charles looked round. There was only one obvious place to dispose of a pair of shoes. You could throw them into the bushes, but there they’d be retrieved by the first nosey dog who came along. But in the bonfire.
After all, so long as suspicions were held off for four days, the evidence would be burnt publicly and no one any the wiser. And as soon as Geoffrey heard about Hugo’s arrest, he could relax. He had only to wait till November 5th to be absolutely secure.
But sour Reggie had reckoned the fire was out of control and it had been doused by the fire brigade. There was still that soggy mess of ash. If Geoffrey had shoved the shoes into the middle at the bottom to be inconspicuous, there was a long chance that they might still be there.
Charles scrabbled through the damp debris of ash, half-burnt sticks and charred rubbish by the light of his torch. He spread it all flat on the ground. There was nothing big enough to be a shoe. One half of a heel might have come from a lady’s sandal, but otherwise nothing.
He sat down deflated, mindless of the debris. Oh well, it had been a good idea. Too easy though, really. Geoffrey wasn’t stupid. He’d have found a way round the shoes, scrapped them or changed them, destroyed them at home. Or just put them high enough in the bonfire to ensure that they would burn quickly.
No, the case was over. Charles put one hand down on the ground to lever himself up.
And felt close round a soft flesh-like lump.
He had the object up in his torch-beam. At first it seemed to be a plastic-covered ball, which had survived by rolling to the bottom of the fire before it was doused. It was shapeless and blackened with ash.
But then he saw that it had once been a pair of plastic gloves, rolled together. Now deformed and fused by the heat, but recognizably a pair of gloves.
But that wasn’t what brought a catch of excitement to his throat. It was the fact that the gloves had been wrapped around something. Something soft.
The melted plastic had made a little envelope which gave easily to his fingernail. Inside, preserved like a packet on the supermarket shelf, was a handkerchief.
A blue and white handkerchief he had last seen when Geoffrey Winter had lent it to him in the Back Room. On the night of Charlotte’s murder.
The brown smudge across it showed why it had been thrown away to be burned in the fire.
It was blood.
Blood that could be identified by a police laboratory.
Blood from’ the scratch on Charlotte Mecken’s neck.
And was it fanciful for Charles to catch a hint of a familiar expensive scent?
As expected, the police took a lot of convincing. When he first started to expound his reconstruction of events, Charles could feel how unlikely it sounded.
