Free Star Trap by Simon Brett Page B

cleat. Equally, any of them could have been the intended victim. And since he couldn’t remember exactly who had been there, the possibilities were infinite. Add the difficulty of tying the motivation for that crime in with the other two and the problem was insoluble, or at least insoluble to a forty-eight-year-old actor who had spent too long in the bar at King’s Cross and who was having serious misgivings about going to stay with a woman with whom he had had a brief and not wholly glorious affair seven years previously.
    He looked out of the window at the matt flatness of the Midlands. He closed his eyes, but sleep and even relaxation kept their distance. A new question formed in his mind – Did the 15.10 train from King’s Cross to Leeds have a bar? He set out to investigate.
    Ruth was disagreeable. As soon as he saw her again he remembered. Not disagreeable in the sense of being unattractive; her trim body with its sharp little breasts and well-defined calf muscles remained as good as ever; she was disagreeable in the sense that she disagreed with everything one said. Charles never had known whether it was a genuine defence from a reasoned feminist standpoint or sheer bloody-mindedness. But it came back to him as soon as she spoke. Her voice was marinated in cynicism. Charles felt a great swoop of despair, as if all his worst opinions of himself were suddenly ratified, as if the thoughts that infected him in his lowest moods had suddenly been classified as gospel. He saw himself as an Everard Austick, an alcoholic whose failure in his chosen profession was only matched by his failure as a human being.
    It wasn’t that cynicism struck no chord. He himself tended to attribute the worst motives to everyone and was distrustful of optimists. But like all practitioners of an art, he liked to feel that his version of it was a definitive one. His cynicism could still be unexpectedly erased by the sight of a child or the shock of a sudden kindness or a moment of desire, while Ruth’s blanket coverage seemed to debase the currency of cynicism.
    It wasn’t that she’d had a particularly bad life. True, its emotional path had been a bit rocky. In her twenties she had had a series of affairs which never stood a chance of going the distance (Charles would have put himself in that category) and eventually at the age of thirty married a central heating systems salesman five years her senior. The marriage lasted three years until he went off with a croupier and they got a divorce. The fatalism with which Ruth accepted this reverse suggested that she had never had much faith in the marriage and had been undermining it for some time.
    â€˜So you came.’ She spoke with that exactness of enunciation which is more revealing than an accent.
    â€˜Yes, I said I would.’
    â€˜Oh yes.’ The disbelief in her tone instantly put the clock beck seven years. ‘And how are you, Mr Charles Paris?’
    â€˜Fine, fine.’
    â€˜Good. And your lady wife?’
    â€˜I don’t know. Well, when I last saw her. It’s a few months back now. I believe she has a boy friend, someone from the school where she teaches.’
    â€˜Good for her. Not going to wait forever on your filing system, is she? Can I get you a cup of tea or a drink or something? Or should I show you up to your room in true landlady fashion?’ She leant against the kitchen table in a way that could have been meant to be provocative. It was always difficult to know with Ruth. But seeing her, Charles remembered how much he had fancied her. That was really all there ever had been to the relationship. If there were nothing to life except bed, they’d still have been together. He felt a warm trickle of desire in spite of all the gloom which she had generated inside him.
    He overcompensated by the heartiness of his reply. ‘A cup of tea would be really . . . grand.’ Her flash of suspicion made him wish he had