by Jilly Cooper
‘I’ll shut my eyes if you both will,’ said Rupert, a shade more amiably.
‘OK,’ said Debbie. ‘What time did she ring?’
After a long pause, Fanshawe opened his eyes to see Rupert vanishing through a side door. ‘Mr Campbell-Black,’ he shouted, ‘you are impeding a police inquiry.’
‘And we are in the middle of a funeral.’
‘Only of a dog, sir.’
The fury on Rupert’s face made them both retreat.
‘We are investigating the murder of Mrs Lovell’s stepfather,’ protested Fanshawe.
‘Who was only a human,’ said Rupert contemptuously, ‘and a particularly loathsome one at that. Now get out.’
‘Arrogant shit,’ fumed Fanshawe as he belted down the drive.
‘How dare he talk to us like that. All those upper-class fuckers stick together. Same when Lord Lucan copped it, they close ranks and keep their traps shut.’
‘And just think how Gablecross will sneer when he hears we’ve been thrown out,’ sighed Debbie.
DS Gablecross was a deep thinker. He rose early, like the sun, moved slowly round examining everything from a different angle, before setting in the west, sleeping on things before he came to a decision. Reassured by his lazy smile and deep, West Country drawl, few people realized the bitterness and frustration simmering beneath the surface.
In the middle eighties, the world had seemed at his feet. A loving wife had looked after him, his three children hero-worshipped him. Working on hunches, playing suspects against each other, he and his running mate, Charlie, had been the most dazzlingly successful villain-catchers in the West Country. Charlie had not been above knocking suspects about. Like a foxhound, he was the kindest animal in the world until he got on to the scent of a quarry.
But then Gablecross’s life had changed. His wife, Margaret, had returned to teaching, the implication being that as he was more interested in catching villains than angling for promotion, they could no longer support three children on a sergeant’s salary. She had swiftly risen to deputy headmistress of the local comprehensive. She was so conscientious that Gablecross often returned after midnight to find her asleep over reports or exam papers. He had preferred the old days: being greeted by charred steak and kidney and Margaret feigning sleep through gritted teeth upstairs. His children had also become teenagers, questioning his every attitude, and regarding policemen at best as fascist pigs who persecuted blacks, gays, women and teenagers.
Worst of all, last Christmas Charlie had been shot in a drugs raid. His killer had been the brother of a young black guy who had committed suicide after Charlie had forced a confession out of him and banged him up for five years.
But if Gablecross’s world had been turned upside down, so had the law. As a result of the 1984 Act, hunches suddenly had to be justified and everything backed up with forensic or tape-recorded evidence. Supposed to make it easier to prove guilt, this gradually took the personality out of investigation and only the safety players prevailed. As a result, Gablecross’s battle-scarred contemporaries had taken early retirement or dull jobs in security. But being a hunter was the only thing Gablecross knew.
Surrounded by the fresh-faced young turks of the inquiry team, he felt old, edgy, almost a figure of fun. Particularly, as if to rub salt in the wound of Charlie’s death, the dandified ego-maniac Gerald Portland had teamed him up with the only black on the inquiry team, Karen Needham.
Karen, who had watched every instalment of Prime Suspect, intended to be the first woman head of Scotland Yard. A dusky Cleopatra, with long shiny hair drawn back in a dark blue bow, she had an undulating body and legs so long they made all skirts look like minis. Whenever she swayed through the incident room, the telephones and word-processors fell silent.
Karen, like Debbie Miller, was messianically into the peace interview. You made witnesses and suspects feel you were fascinated in them and what they had done. You utterly understood their trespasses, whether they had abused a tiny child or bashed up an old lady. Faced with her sweet smile and big kind eyes, everyone sang to the rooftops.
All the young turks told Gablecross he was a lucky sod to be paired with someone so pretty and clever. But Gablecross, who liked women, felt he was being sexist if he told Karen she looked beautiful, and racist if he complained about her slow driving and the even slower way she took down evidence in her clear round hand. Otherwise she had only one drawback: she couldn’t contain her laughter, even during interviews, over the absurdities of life.
Chief Inspector Portland was crazy about her. In his most paranoid moments Gablecross imagined their pillow-talk.
‘Who would you like to work with, Karen?’
‘I’d like to zap that arrogant, geriatric, racist, homophobic pinko-basher Tim Gablecross.’
Gablecross found Portland hell to deal with. One of a breed known as ‘butterflies’, the handsome Chief Inspector had moved from station to station, upping his status and his salary, ironing out his accent. He had a rich wife, children at private day schools, their photographs prominently displayed on his desk, and an old house outside Rutminster, much modernized and crammed with inglenooks. Portland had been so busy going on courses he had never had time to be a policeman. Although he was a good manager and, out of laziness, able to delegate, he didn’t want anyone stealing his limelight. He would have preferred a team composed entirely of keen, deferential youngsters, but to crack this murder and cover himself with glory he needed Gablecross’s local knowledge and his genius at nosing out a killer.
Despite a shower, Gablecross felt crumpled and sweaty when he rolled up for the first early-morning briefing on Tuesday. Portland, on the other hand, his chestnut hair matching his smooth brown face, looked as sleek and shining as a new conker. Having hung his coat, with the Cardin label, on the back of his chair, loosened his tie and rolled up his very white shirtsleeves to show off suntanned arms, he smiled briskly at Gablecross.
‘Lady Chisledon phoned to complain you didn’t have enough identification, Tim, when you popped in yesterday. Said the photo on your ID card makes you look more villainous than any of your suspects. Suggest you get a more flattering one and stop frightening the witnesses.’
Sitting and standing around Portland’s office, laughing deferentially, were the Inner Cabinet. They consisted of two boffins from the incident room, where a Home Office computer was gathering all data on the murder, two reps from the uniformed house-to-house task force, and twelve plain-clothes officers in teams of two. These included Gablecross and Karen, Gablecross’s bitter rival, the fit, flat-stomached Kevin Fanshawe and Debbie Miller, who’d fallen foul of Rupert yesterday, the blushing DC Lightfoot, who’d been traumatized by the Valhalla orgy, and the aggressive DC Smithson, who was, above all, present and politically correct, sir.
From now on the Cabinet would meet every morning to absorb what had happened the day before. Gerry Portland’s job was to read autopsy reports, printouts and statements, corroborate all the evidence and give each team lines to follow.
And then go and sleep on the sunbed, thought Gablecross.
On the wall, beside group photographs of Portland’s various courses, was a map of Paradise and Valhalla with Rannaldini’s watch-tower, the tennis court and Hangman’s Wood ringed in red. A day chart, listing the pairs of the inquiry team and the leads they were following, was flanked by a blow-up of Hype-along Cassidy’s photograph of the entire unit.
The meeting began with a debriefing. Some officers had been unravelling the tangled skeins of Rannaldini’s last hours, when he seemed to have upset everyone, some talking to the family, others touring the houses of Paradise.
‘Problem with this lot, guv’nor,’ said Fanshawe, ‘is they’re used to dodging awkward questions and evading the press. They’re lying, but they’re all shit scared. They can’t believe the reign of terror’s over.’
‘Won’t be when Rupert Campbell-Black moves in,’ snapped Portland. He was livid that Fanshawe and Miller had been chucked out.
There was no way Rupert was going to walk all over his team.
‘You sort him out, Tim,’ he added, as a sop to the crack about the ID photograph. ‘Nail him when he rolls up to kick ass on the set this evening. Don’t let Karen’s legs distract him.’ As he smiled at her, the politically correct DC Smithson looked boot-faced: only by persistent lobbying had she got the girlie calenders taken down from the male officers’ walls.
On their return from Penscombe, Fanshawe and Miller had interviewed Mr Brimscombe. Dead-heading the rose walk, he had seen Tabitha racing towards Rannaldini’s watch-tower in a pretty grey dress ‘wafting perfume, and all dolled up’ for the first time in months. Empty-handed, she had waved and run on.
Several people, according to the house-to-house team, had seen, after ten fifteen, the ghost of Caroline Beddoes, clutching a little dog, with her ripped grey dress soaked in blood. After one sighting, the captain of the Paradise Cricket Club had rushed into the Pearly Gates begging for a quadruple whisky.
Wolfgang Rannaldini had claimed Tabitha went home because her stepmum’s dog went missing, said Gablecross.
‘Dead now,’ said Debbie Miller. ‘Kevin and I stumbled on this weird funeral yesterday. Tabitha looked like a battered ghost.’
‘Leave her a couple of days till we get the post-mortem, but her alibi looks very thin. Have a look at her cottage,’ Portland told Fanshawe. ‘Talk to the servants at Penscombe and Valhalla, have a word with Tab’s husband. We know Wolfgang switched on the machine at Valhalla around ten forty-five,’ he went on, ‘and claims she asked him to take her own dog back to Penscombe.’
‘Chloe Catford claims Wolfie swore he was going to kill his dad after hearing that tape,’ said Gablecross. ‘Unfortunately it’s gone missing. Wolfie probably whipped it.’
The memoirs and Rannaldini’s safe had also gone walkabout. Miss Bussage was the chief suspect in the case of the former, but she certainly hadn’t smuggled the safe into the limo when she left.
‘Go and see her, Tim,’ grinned Gerald Portland. ‘You’re good with maiden ladies. Ask her if she knows why Rannaldini went to the doctor on Friday, and if sheknows the whereabouts of a Picasso and the Étienne de Montigny hanging in Rannaldini’s watch-tower. Both may have been torched in the fire, but if stolen, could be a motive for murder.’
Other tasks included checking who had helicopters in the area, other than Rupert Campbell-Black and George Hungerford, and which one had landed beside Hangman’s Wood on Sunday night.
Out of the window, through the trees, Gablecross could see the Herbert Parker Hall, home of the Rutshire Symphony Orchestra. He wondered what their boss, George Hungerford, had thought of Flora’s and Baby’s photographs.
‘Hungerford was seen driving towards Valhalla like a bat out of hell around ten twenty-five on Sunday night,’ said one of the house-to-house team. ‘And Montigny went the other way, only earlier.’
‘Tristan was seen at Valhalla by Jessica. God, she’s gorgeous,’ sighed DC Lightfoot, ‘and by that Russian, Mikhail Pezcherov, but he was too smashed to be trusted.’
‘Pezcherov claims he spent five minutes on Sunday night in the maze with Chloe Catford. She says it was three hours,’ volunteered Gablecross.
‘Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself,’ giggled Debbie Miller.
Checks would have to be carried out on whether Chloe’s mother, Alpheus’s agent and Rozzy Pringle had made phone calls when they were said to have done. Lady Griselda, Bernard Guérin, Granville Hastings, none of them fans of Rannaldini, had all been crashing around looking for balls near the watch-tower at the time of the murder.
‘Flora Seymour and Meredith Whalen have very thin alibis, but Sexton Kemp looks in the clear,’ said Gablecross.
‘I spent most of last night trying to pin down Baby Spinosissy-something,’ said Fanshawe crossly. ‘Dame Hermione was also too upset to speak to anyone, but I’m certain they’re talking to the press if not to us.’
‘Hermione was heard singing in the wood around ten thirty,’ said Gablecross.
‘Could have been another singer,’ piped up Karen Needham. ‘Flora Seymour or Chloe Catford.’
‘She’s a cracker.’ Fanshawe raised his eyes to heaven.
‘Or Gloria Prescott,’ said DC Lightfoot, ‘another cracker.’
‘Which one’s she?’ Portland peered at the blow-up.
‘That one. She’s blinking but her boobs aren’t,’ said DC Lightfoot excitedly, and got punched in the ribs by DC Smithson.
‘Go and see Dame Hermione, Tim,’ said Portland. ‘You’re good with middle-aged nymphos too, but remember, her alarm’s wired by umbilical cord to the Chief Constable’s navel, so watch it.’
Gablecross ground his teeth. The rest of the team laughed.
The French crew had evidently been hopeless to interview. Their English, which had improved so dramatically during filming, had deteriorated equally dramatically when confronted by DC Smithson’s truculence.
‘“I was weeth heem, and he was weeth me and other heems, and heem was with heem,”’ snapped DC Smithson. ‘They’re more obstructive than that appalling Campbell-Black.’
‘But not quite as gorgeous,’ sighed Debbie.
‘We have a host of suspects.’ Portland rubbed his hands together. ‘Priority is to find the memoirs and Rannaldini’s safe.’
‘Clive may have got them,’ said Gablecross. ‘He was whispering to that ugly cow from the Sentinel yesterday.’
‘Well, nobble him today.’
While Portland gave the others lines to follow, Gablecross’s mind drifted back to something old Miss Cricklade, who took in washing, had told him when he’d given her a lift into Rutminster that morning. What with Dame Hermione, Miss Bussage in Abingdon, Clive, if he could catch him, Rupert Campbell-Black on the set this evening, it was going to be a long day.
He was brought back to earth by DC Smithson whining that everyone at Valhalla was a publicity-obsessed nutter.
‘Well, as one not unacquainted with the media,’ Portland examined his fingernails, ‘you have to know how to use them. I suggest we ask the help of Lady Rannaldini to appeal to the nation for info.’
‘She was in bad shape yesterday,’ said Gablecross quickly.
But Portland wasn’t listening. He loved press conferences and publicity. He couldn’t wait to wrap up the meeting so he could gloat over the smashing photographs of himself in the morning’s papers.
‘Doubt if you’d learn much,’ Gablecross was saying. ‘Certain it’s an inside job.’
‘I’m the best judge of that,’ said Portland coolly. ‘Lady R’s a lovely lady, she’s chairman of Enid’s NSPCC committee.’
‘She could start by paying more attention to her own child,’ snapped Gablecross.
Few people had seen inside Hermione’s pretty Georgian Mill – which stood, hidden by trees, two hundred yards from the river Fleet – because she was far too lazy and tight with money to entertain.
Gablecross was surprised therefore to find the dark green front door open and his wife’s favourite singer standing radiant and smiling in the hall. Only when he’d waved his ID card at her did he realize that he was about to shake the outstretched hand of a replica of Hermione’s waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s.
‘Pack it in,’ he hissed, as Karen burst out laughing. ‘Show some fucking respect.’
Dame Hermione, veiled and clad entirely in black, lay on a dark red chaise-longue, with Sexton and Howie dancing attendance. Hermione had not forgiven Howie for being in the know about Pushy’s top notes and espousing her cause as Delilah, and was determined he shouldn’t get any cut out of her newspaper deals, offers of which were pouring in from all over the world and being handled by Sexton. Howie, who loathed the country, was equally determined to hang in.
Spurred on by Gerry Portland’s mockery and having often been impeded in car chases by Dame Hermione’s limo, parked slap across Paradise High Street, Gablecross was determined to stand no nonsense. This excited the hell ou
t of Hermione, who loved her men masterful. Whipping back her veil, she patted the sofa beside her. ‘I know we’re going to be friends, let’s call each other by our given names. Mine’s Hermione, and yours is . . . ?’
‘Officer,’ said Karen tartly.
‘Shut up,’ snarled Gablecross. ‘It’s Timothy.’
‘Does she have to be in here?’ Hermione glared at Karen.
‘Yes,’ said Gablecross regretfully.
‘I’ve just been talking to my very good friend Chief Constable Swallow,’ announced Hermione.
Which, translated, thought Karen, means, ‘Mess with me and you’re a dead duck.’ Looking round the room, she decided, you could fall asleep counting the photographs, paintings and sculptures of Hermione. Magazines with her face on the cover lay on a nearby table. Among the trophies on the shelf was the Artist of the Year award she’d won in October.
‘I urged the Chief Constable to call a press conference,’ Hermione was now telling Gablecross, ‘so I can beseech people to come forward and shed light on this dreadful crime. My son, Little Cosmo, has lost a father, I a cherished friend.’
‘Lady Rannaldini might want to do it,’ said Sexton, as he whisked out of the room to get to the telephone before Howie.
‘Lady Rannaldini has no experience of the media,’ said Hermione dismissively.
‘Nor is she as universally beloved as you, Dame Hermione,’ lied Howie.
‘Indeed.’ Hermione bowed, then turned to Gablecross. ‘I have had a thousand and twenty-three letters already, Timothy, and lost ten pounds in weight.’
Sexton, thank goodness, was as adept at twiddling the knobs on her weighing scales as Rannaldini had been on her recordings.
‘I feel I owe it to my public, and to Rannaldini, to appeal to the nation on television,’ went on Hermione.
‘I wouldn’t, Hermsie.’ Sexton trotted back into the room and squeezed her hand. ‘They always turn out to be the one wot’s done it.’
‘Sexton, Sexton.’ Hermione gave a low laugh. ‘How wise you are.’