A Reconstructed Corpse Read Free

readily accepted
Public Enemies’
offer to reconstruct it for them.
    This had necessitated a couple of days filming in Brighton, which was no hardship for Charles Paris. The town had always held a raffish attraction for him, full of memories of the one woman he’d made love to there, along with fantasies of all the other women he’d like to have made love to there. Was it a generational thing, he wondered, a post-war nostalgia, that still made Brighton’s air, like that of Paris, heavy with sex? He had only to step out of the train from Victoria to feel the lust invade his mind.
    The Black Feathers, in which Martin Earnshaw had last been seen, was in the hinterland of the Lanes between the Royal Pavilion and sea front. It wasn’t one of the highly tarted-up pubs of the area, but retained a proletarian – and indeed slightly deterrent – grubbiness.
    The landlord and staff, however, had proved infinitely cooperative to the W.E.T. team, led by director Geoffrey Ramage. This was not pure altruism. While a positive disadvantage for someone trying to sell a house, murderous connections in a pub are good news for business. And if those connections are advertised to millions on nation-wide television, the potential boost to trade is enormous. The viewing public is notorious for seeking out any location featured on the small screen, regardless of the context in which it was seen.
    In the cause of verisimilitude, Geoffrey Ramage had asked the landlord to get together all the regulars who might have been present on the evening of Martin Earnshaw’s disappearance. To Charles’s surprise, when he spoke to those who had been assembled, none had any recollection of seeing the missing man.
    The actor’s instinctive suspicion about this was quickly allayed by further conversation. It turned out that very few of the other drinkers had actually been there on the relevant night, but the lure of television coverage had prompted them to finesse the truth a little.
    The sighting of Martin Earnshaw in the Black Feathers had not, as it transpired, come from one of the pub’s regulars. An anonymous caller had passed on the information to Chloe Earnshaw, and this had been corroborated by a subsequent telephone call – also unidentified – to the police.
    It became increasingly clear to Charles that the Black Feathers was in fact one of those pubs which doesn’t have many regulars. In spite of the landlord’s attempts to give the impression of a convivial community, the pub was – like Charles’s own ‘local’ in Westbourne Grove – a joyless and anonymous environment.
    The landlord himself stoutly maintained that he had seen the missing man sitting with two others on the night in question, though he was vague about further details.
    Not for the first time, Charles had brought home to him the fallibility of human witnesses. Recollection is quickly clouded and distorted. From his own experience – and this wasn’t just due to the Bell’s whisky – Charles Paris knew how difficult he would find it to report accurately what he had been doing even a few days before. So the landlord’s vagueness did not surprise him. Cynically, he even wondered whether the man was making up his story. From the point of view of trade, it was certainly in the interests of the Black Feathers that he remembered Martin Earnshaw.
    Charles Paris’s role in the filming was not onerous, though Geoffrey Ramage, in the self-regarding way of television directors, made as big a deal of it as he could. Dressed in clothes and fake Rolex watch identical to those worn by the missing man, Charles had to sit at a gloomy corner table with two other extras and drink. It could, uncharitably, have been called ‘typecasting’.
    There was an element of character-acting involved, though, because Charles had to drink draught Guinness rather than the more instinctive Bell’s. This was on