by Simon Brett
“And that was the only copy?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“But in these days of computers,” said Carole, “copies of any text are ten-a-penny. The original stays on the writer’s computer.”
“It is my belief that Polly also had her laptop computer in the same haversack. That, too, was burnt beyond recognition or repair.”
“How fortunate then that I have this,” said Carole, producing the flash drive that she had just bought at PC World.
“What on earth is that?”
“A miracle of miniaturization, Flora. This tiny object, called a flash drive or a memory stick, is a wonderful device for storing data. You can put an enormous amount of text on a little thing like this. A whole book, if you want to. And that’s what Polly used this one for. The whole text of her book is retrievable from this tiny little rectangle of plastic.” As she spoke, Carole placed the flash drive casually on the table next to Flora Le Bonnier.
Then she looked glumly across to Jude. “Sorry, it looks as if we’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”
“Oh?” Jude wasn’t quite sure what her neighbour was up to, but was happy to play along until an explanation arrived.
“Our clever theory about Polly having been killed by her grandmother looks a bit threadbare now, doesn’t it, Jude? With her hands in that condition, Flora wouldn’t have been capable of holding a gun, let alone pulling its trigger. And she certainly wouldn’t have been capable of sending the text message from Ricky’s phone that summoned Polly back to Gallimaufry. I’m sorry, Flora, I think we owe you an apology,” Carole concluded, standing up as she did so.
“Apology accepted,” said the old lady gracefully. “I’m afraid the shock of tragic events has a tendency to stop people from thinking straight.”
“Well, goodbye,” said Jude, also rising from her seat. She still didn’t know what Carole’s plan was; she just hoped her friend had one.
“Excuse me if I don’t see you out, but movement is getting increasingly difficult for me.”
“No, of course. That’s fine,” said Jude, looking enquiringly at Carole in hope of some elucidation of what the hell was going on.
But she got nothing. Dutifully, she led the way into the hall and reached up to open the front door. Just at that moment, Carole said, “Oh, good heavens, I forgot the memory stick!”
Both women turned back towards the sitting room. And both women saw Flora Le Bonnier’s hand reach instinctively forward to grab the memory stick. Between her fingers. Which, though their knuckles were swollen, were otherwise straight and fully functional.
♦
“…and none of us likes losing power,” said Flora, “particularly when one has been powerful, when one has been the centre of attention. And for most of my life I had certainly been the centre of attention.” She sighed. “Anyway, the acting work just wasn’t there anymore. Enquiries to my agent were getting more and more infrequent.” Carole remembered Rupert Sonning describing the same experience – death by a thousand silent telephones.
“And I didn’t want to announce my retirement, because something might still have come up, and one must never say never. And my hands, which had once been one of my great beauties…” she stretched them out to look at them – “were getting misshapen with arthritis, and so I thought why not exaggerate that a bit more? Why not pretend I can’t use them at all? And it seemed to work.”
“You mean it got you attention?” asked Jude, not very sympathetically.
“Yes. It didn’t quite get me back centre stage – nothing was going to do that – but it did mean that people took more notice of me, felt sympathetic towards me because of my disability, helped me out. And with the autobiography written – ”
“Did you have a ghost-writer for that?”
“Yes, but it’s mostly me. I talked into tape machines at great length, then this little chap typed it all out, and I went through it and cut out all the extra stuff he’d added.”
“Personal stuff?” Carole suggested.
“Most of it was. Stuff that I didn’t want made public, anyway.”
“By the way, who was Ricky’s father?” asked Jude.
“Do you know,” said Flora Le Bonnier with a winsome smile, “I really can’t remember.” And it might even have been true.
“And do you feel any guilt about having murdered Polly?”
Flora gave Carole’s question a moment of thought before answering, “No, I really don’t. She was not a happy child. She never really recovered from her mother’s death. And, anyway, that book she had written, it was a complete betrayal of her family.”
“One could argue that it was simply telling the truth about her family.”
“One could argue that, but for me it would always be a betrayal.”
“When did you decide to kill Polly?” asked Jude.
“A couple of weeks before Christmas. Well, I didn’t decide to kill her. I decided to offer her the opportunity to destroy all copies of the book. Had she done as I requested, the girl would still be alive.” Flora Le Bonnier’s tone made it sound as if Polly’s intransigence was responsible for her own death.
“How did you come to know the book’s contents?”
“The girl actually came round here to see me. She gave me a copy. She was proud of what she’d done, she wanted me to read all the cruel things she had written about me.”
“And did you read the whole manuscript?”
“I did. Then, of course, I had that copy destroyed. And I contacted Polly to find out how manymore copies there were. But she refused to suppress the work. It was then that I thought more drastic action might be required.”
“Where did you get the gun from?” asked Carole.
“It was used in a film I made in the late fifties. Called, perhaps not surprisingly, The Lady with the Gun. One of my rare forays into the contemporary thriller. At the end of the filming I was given the gun as a souvenir. I showed it once to a close friend, who told me, to my surprise, that it was in full working order. There was rather more laxity about safety issues on film sets in those days. I kept the gun and tracked down some ammunition for it. Having it gave me a sense of security. I never knew when I might need it.”
“So you took the gun down to Fedingham Court House with you?”
“Of course.”
“And,” said Jude, “you cold-bloodedly planned to kill your own granddaughter?”
“No. And I wish you would stop calling her my ‘granddaughter’. She was my step granddaughter. Anyway, if she had destroyed the book as I requested, nothing would have happened to her.” Again she made the murder sound as though it had been caused by Polly’s unreasonable behaviour.
“Did you tell her you might want to meet before you sent the text from Ricky’s phone?”
“I had prepared her for the possibility.”
“And why did you fix to meet in Gallimaufry?” asked Carole.
“It had to be somewhere that could be burnt down. Then, when the girl’s body was found, it would be assumed by the police that she had died in the fire.”
“But it wouldn’t work like that. The police forensic examination would be bound to find the bullet in her body and the real cause of death.”
“It worked like that in The Lady with the Gun,” Flora Le Bonnier asserted.
So she had based her homicidal plan on the plot of a fifties thriller movie.
“How did you get from Fedingham Court House to Fethering?” asked Carole.
“I got Ricky to take me there. I rang him when he was in the shop with his latest bit of skirt.”
Which explained the call he had taken while he was with Anna. “How did you know about that?” asked Jude.
The old actress smiled complacently. “Ricky always tells me everything.” And only then did Carole and Jude realize the strength of the hold Flora Le Bonnier had exercised over her son.
“Was he with you when you confronted Polly?”
“No, I told him to wait
outside.”
“Did he even know it was she that you were meeting in the shop?”
“No.”
“So when you told him to torch the place, he didn’t know his stepdaughter’s body was inside?”
“No.”
“Why did you do it, Flora?” asked Jude.
“Because I had to defend the Le Bonnier name. I couldn’t have lies told about my family. It would have upset my public.”
The full extent of Flora Le Bonnier’s selfishness, and the delusions which fed that selfishness, became clear. According to her priorities, even a murder was justified in the cause of maintaining the old lies about her family history. Lies which had been long discredited. Lies which, if she’d read the newspapers, she would have known scarcely anyone believed in. Flora Le Bonnier and reality had parted company a long time ago.
There was a silence in the little, overheated flat. Then Carole said, quite gently, “You realize we’ll have to tell all this to the police.”
“Yes, I suppose you will. And I will have to submit myself to the due processes of the law.” But she spoke calmly, there was even a hint of pleasure in her voice. She was, after all, being offered another role to play. And Flora Le Bonnier had always been good in courtroom dramas.
∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧
Forty-Two
In the event, Flora didn’t get her day in court. A few days after Carole and Jude’s visit, her home help came in one morning to find the old lady dead in her bed. The newspaper obituaries were effusive, on television and radio elderly thespians vied with each other to say how ‘wonderful’ she had been, ‘what heaven to work with’. In some of the papers there were hints about her true origins. One was blatant enough to assert that she ‘supposedly came from an aristocratic family, but that was a stunt dreamed up by some publicist at the Rank Charm School’. So, as Carole and Jude had deduced, the secret she had gone to such vicious lengths to keep had been one that was common knowledge anyway.
Some of the press played along, still under the influence of her charm. Flora Le Bonnier was described by The Times as “an aristocrat of the theatre, and one of the few who was actually also an aristocrat in real life.”
No one mentioned the fact that she was a murderer, but then, of course, no one knew. Except for Carole and Jude, and Lola and Rupert Sonning, whom they had told. Oh, and the police, who now had assembled enough information to secure a conviction – or, as it turned out, to close the file on the murder of Polly Le Bonnier.
Lola’s recovery from her husband’s death was a long, slow process. At times she was overwhelmed by hopelessness and depression, and remembering Jude’s offer, turned to her for help and encouragement. Though healing could never reconstruct the past, it could over time do something to ease the pains of bereavement.
In fact, Lola’s rehabilitation came ultimately from adversity. When investigated, Ricky Le Bonnier’s affairs turned out to be in a terrible state. His flamboyance had been achieved at the cost of living way beyond his income for years. Fedingham Court House had to be sold and, when all the outstanding mortgages and other debts had been settled, Lola was left with very little. She had no alternative but to start up her own retail business to provide for her family, and it was through the success of that enterprise that she found her salvation.
Her children grew up healthy, and Henry, taking after Ricky, showed a considerable talent for music. Mabel, who had been deeply affected by the loss of her father, developed into a quiet, serious, lonely little girl.
Lola deliberately lost touch with Piers Duncton, not initiating any contact with him herself and not replying to his messages or texts. His television sitcom ran for a couple of series, but was then pulled because it wasn’t getting good enough viewing figures. He continued to work as a jobbing comedy writer, providing gags and links for a variety of shows and growing increasingly bitter as he saw younger and, to his mind, less talented writers become more successful than he was. What made things worse in his view was that quite a lot of them hadn’t even come up through the Cambridge Footlights.
As for his love-life, the affair with the sitcom actress turned out to be very brief and it was followed by a great many equally brief affairs with other women on the periphery of show business. In his cups, Piers would frequently tell the decreasing number of people who would listen to him about how he’d tragically lost the great love of his life to a murderer’s bullet.
Saira Sherjan continued to enjoy her life as a vet. She completed the London Marathon, raising a great deal of money for animal charities.
And Rupert Sonning, entirely happy in his chosen role as Old Garge, continued to read poetry and listen to Radio 3 in Pequod, only returning to his rented room when warned of a local council inspection. He still spent long hours walking his Jack Russell Petrarch along the shoreline, and in maintaining his role as ‘the eyes and ears of Fethering Beach’.
Occasionally he ran into Ruby Tallis, who would never fail to bring him the latest opinions of her husband Derek.
Anna Carter left the village early in the New Year. Perhaps she went off to reinvent herself somewhere else, but if so, nobody knew where.
In the Crown and Anchor Ted and Zosia ran a tight ship and, as spring approached and the fame of Ed Pollack’s cuisine spread, business started to pick up.
Kath Le Bonnier continued to do the books for Ayland’s boatyard for the rest of her life. And she was very happy that, having been rescued from the Devil Women, Ricky was hers for ever. Though not, of course, in this dimension.
Jude had a couple more meetings with the man with whom she’d spent New Year’s Eve, but she didn’t find him that interesting and the affair soon petered out. Her appointments book for healing was healthily full and, though occasionally afflicted by feverish wanderlust, she was content most of the time with her life at Woodside Cottage.
Next door at High Tor, with the zeal of a convert, Carole found she was spending more and more time exploring the Internet. Always upstairs in the same room, though. It still didn’t seem quite right to her that a laptop should be moved about the house.
And her son Stephen, with Gaby’s prompting, did stick his Glow-in-the-dark Computer Angel on his office laptop. It didn’t do much in the way of staving off viruses, but it did make some of his colleagues think that perhaps old Stephen Seddon wasn’t such a humourless nerd, after all.
Gaby put off going back to work at the agency, and Carole waited hopefully for the news of another Seddon pregnancy.
And Lily, in the eyes of her grandmother, just grew gorgeouser and gorgeouser.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 16d7d91a-b3e1-4c3c-8980-4e0ffb86b6c5
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 31.5.2012
Created using: calibre 0.8.53, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Simon Brett
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