There was no mistaking the barb in that parting shot, but Charles’ mind was too full to take much notice of the unpleasant young man’s departure. Unfortunately, it wasn’t constructively full, just clogged with conflicting theories and unformed suspicions, Out of the confusion only one image was clear — Carla’s face, wracked with genuine pain. Do let me know.
Maybe another talk to the victim’s widow would clear his mind about the murder.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
COMIC: I dreamt about your wife last night.
FEED: Did you?
COMIC: No, she wouldn’t let me.
When he got back to Hereford Road Charles rang Carla’s number. It was engaged. He tried again ten minutes later. With the same result. He kept trying at ten-minute intervals for over an hour. Either she was having a very long phone call or something was wrong.
He dialled the operator and asked for the line to be checked. They rang him back and said that the phone was not in use, but ‘appeared to have been left off the hook’.
Charles started to feel a little quickening of anxiety. He had seen too much of violence and its effects over the last few days. He decided to go out to Chigwell to check that all was well.
It was still a hell of a long way and the evening tubes and buses were interminably slow. As Charles joggled about in them, he tried to focus his mind on his suspicions. But names and details tangled infuriatingly like a board game, little hopeful ladders of logic counteracted by long snakes of conflicting evidence. His only constant impression was one of slight dread.
It was after nine o’clock when he reached the wrought-iron gates of the Peakys’ bungalow. The moon had taken the night off and it was dark. All the curtains at the front of the house were drawn. The distant hum of traffic on a main road served only to accentuate the local silence.
He lifted the metal latch gently and opened the gate with care. Instinctively he trod on tiptoe and left the gate ajar to avoid the slight clang of closing it. He glided up the concrete path to the front door.
There was no light showing through the wrought-iron-framed window in the door. The house seemed locked up in its own silence; nothing offered hope of any life within.
Still, it was worth ringing the doorbell to be sure. But as his finger moved towards the button, he checked it. No, not yet.
He moved back gently from the front door and looked at the. bungalow. Yes, there was a slight blur of light on the lawn to the left-hand side. Still slowly, with his weight poised on the balls of his feet, he moved round to its source.
The shaft of light came from a thin triangle at the bottom of imperfectly closed curtains. Breathing shallowly, Charles moved towards the window. He peered through.
He was looking into what must have been Bill and Carla’s bedroom. It was dominated by an enormous circular bed. But it was what he saw on the bed that snatched his breath away in shock.
Two naked bodies writhed in the paroxysms of love. Carla’s face was turned to the window, the eyes closed, the mouth open, gasping with pleasure. The man’s face was hidden, buried in her shoulder.
Their bodies arched and snapped together as they climaxed. Then they subsided, panting. After the moment the man drew away from her. Charles saw the chunky gold identity bracelet on the wrist and when the mystery lover swung his legs round to sit on the bed, he could see the man’s face clearly.
It was Miffy Turtle.
CHAPTER TWELVE
COMIC: Two girls talking — one says to the other, ‘Are you going out with your boy-friend tonight or are you going to sit in and watch television?’
‘Doesn’t make a lot of odds, really,’ says her friend. ‘Either way I get a lot of interference.’
The unfamiliar experience of being in work meant that Charles could not immediately pursue his detective investigations, but it gave him time to collect his ideas.
He had decided against confronting the post-coital couple in Chigwell until he had a clearer idea of what to confront them with. But what he had seen turned on its head everything he had hitherto thought about the case.
As he walked from Anerley Station to the RNVR Drill Hall, Wilberforce Street, where the rehearsals for The New Barber and Pole Show were being held, he tried to piece together a new version of Bill Peaky’s murder.
The important change from all the previous versions was that Miffy Turtle was now cast in the role of villain. With that alteration to the Dramatis Personae, a lot of previously indigestible details were liquidized and made palatable.
Charles started from the assumption that the affair between Miffy and Carla had been going on for some time. It was possible that the agent had just been cashing in on the widow’s loneliness the previous evening, but the logic was stronger for a relationship which had started while Peaky was alive. And Charles could now define an impression he had received at the awards ceremony, of a relaxed closeness between the couple. An affair of long-standing also gave Miffy an excellent motive for wanting Peaky out of the way.
Nor was that the only reason for him to kill his client. There was something else that Charles should have deduced in Hunstanton, but had only realized when Dickie Peck mentioned it at the awards’ lunch. The London agent’s sole purpose in going to Hunstanton was to sign up the rising comedy star and, by doing that, he was going to ace out the manager who had struggled up with his client from obscurity. Miffy’s outburst to Lennie Barber in the Leaky Bucket Club showed how sensitive he was to the dangers of losing his artistes just at the point when they began to make real money. If Bill Peaky was as unpleasant and self-centred as everyone suggested, he would have had no qualms about dumping his old friend and agent. That, together with the inconvenience of Carla’s having a husband around, might well push a wide boy like Miffy into crime.
The new theory also explained the inconsistencies in Carla’s behaviour. It had been strange that, when nobody else had a good word to say for her husband, she had painted a picture of a perfect marriage, while admitting her husband’s frequent infidelities. Charles had yet to meet the wife who, whatever her protestations, was genuinely complaisant about her husband’s affairs.
And now he understood Carla’s strange story about Janine Bentley. Having met the dancer, albeit at a time of great physical and emotional pressure, Charles had been struck by her essential level-headedness. Though this could have been one of the many smoke screens of schizophrenia, he preferred to accept his own assessment of her character than the unbalanced one presented by Carla. Anyway, that had been too quick, too glib. The widow knew he was coming full of suspicions, so she had hastily provided him with a convenient focus for them.
Such behaviour made very good sense if Carla was protecting her lover. If she knew Miffy had killed Peaky, or even came to suspect him when Charles first mentioned the idea of murder, then it was in her interests not only to provide the name of a potential murderer, but also to present the image of a desolated widow, whose life had been ruined by the premature loss of a beloved husband. Given the facts of such an idyllic marriage cruelly cut off, it would never occur to Charles that Carla had anything to gain from Bill Peaky’s death.
She had thought quickly that afternoon. Full marks to her. She had thrown him off the scent very effectively. But the strain of thinking on her feet had affected her performance of bereavement and it was that which had made Charles suspicious of her sincerity.
Yes, if Miffy had killed Peaky, everything made sense. Even as he thought it, another piece clicked into place. Miffy, on the scene at Hunstanton for much of the run of Sun ’n’ Funtime, was much better placed than any of the other suspects to check out the theatre’s electrical system and plan the crime.