by Simon Brett
Carole’s opinion of Ricky Le Bonnier plumbed new depths. Was there any lie the man wasn’t capable of telling?
Rupert Sonning, however, didn’t share her opinion. “He’s a good man, Ricky,” he said. “Generous to a fault.”
Carole knew it was the moment for her to take a leap into the unknown. “And do you think he gets that characteristic from you?”
“From me? Why on earth do you think he should get anything from me?”
“Because,” said Carole coolly, “you are his father.”
The one reaction she hadn’t been expecting was riotous laughter, but that was what she got. Waves of hilarity shuddered through Rupert Sonning’s great frame till he was choking and incoherent. Eventually, he managed to gasp out, “His father? Where on earth did you get that idea from?”
Carole was disquieted, but not completely abashed. “You don’t deny that you worked with Flora Le Bonnier in Gainsborough films after the war?”
“No, I don’t, but the theatrical myth that all leading men sleep with all their leading ladies, though perhaps flattering, is just an invention of the gutter press. I can assure you I have never been to bed with Flora Le Bonnier. She may be one of the most beautiful women of her generation, but she’s too much like a piece of Dresden china for my taste. I have always gone for something rather earthier in my women. Dirty knickers, I’m afraid, are my thing. So Flora Le Bonnier has never ticked any boxes for me.”
“So you never even went out together?”
“Oh, we did a bit of that. For the benefit of the press.”
“What do you mean?”
“Flora and I first met at the Rank Charm School. Being trained up to become film stars. The publicity department there was always dreaming up romances for their stars. So Flora and I might be photographed leaving a restaurant together, but it was only to increase our public profiles, not because either of us had any genuine interest in the other.
“They were notorious, that publicity lot. They’d invent anything to get a few column inches about their embryonic stars. I mean, that’s where the nonsense started about Flora having a connection with the Le Bonnier family.”
“You mean there never was any truth in it?”
“No, complete fabrication from beginning to end. But she looked the part – and sounded it. Her very boring solicitor father had sent her to the right schools, so the cut-glass accent was there. She looked like an aristocrat, sounded like and aristocrat, so the Rank publicity boys thought: ‘Why not make her into an aristocrat?’”
“But people believed it?”
“The general public did, yes. In ‘the business’ nobody had any illusions but, equally, nobody cared that much either. We’d all had our past lives reshaped in the cause of publicity. If Flora Le Bonnier wanted to claim an aristocratic lineage, good luck to her.”
“I’m surprised the press didn’t expose her.”
“The press was different in those days, Carole. They were genuinely in love with the British film industry. Nothing they liked better than printing out word for word whatever press releases the publicity departments sent them. They knew it was mostly hokum, but they played along. They actually became part of the conspiracy.”
“But you’d have thought, in more recent times, when the nature of reporting has changed so much, somebody would have exposed Flora Le Bonnier’s real background.”
“Maybe.” Rupert Sonning shrugged. “But by then she had become a national treasure. And the public don’t like having their national treasures shot down in flames. Anyway, for the tabloid-reading public, Flora’s now way too old to be interesting. All they want to hear about is the doings of drugged-up girl singers or love-rat footballers.”
“So there never was a newspaper exposé of Flora?”
“There was one, actually, now I remember. Early seventies, as I recall. Done by a music journalist called Biff Carpenter. I think it was a hatchet job on Ricky Le Bonnier, actually, but it did bring in the fact that his mother’s background was completely fabricated. There was a bit of a fuss at the time, but it soon blew over. The British public liked to think of their national treasure Flora Le Bonnier as an aristocrat, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like the truth get in the way.”
Carole made a mental note to google the name of Biff Carpenter as soon as she got back to High Tor. Then she turned the conversation back to the fire at Gallimaufry. “Suppose you’d got it wrong, Rupert? Suppose it wasn’t about your residency at the beach hut that the police wanted to talk to you?”
“Ricky told me it was about my being in the beach hut.”
“But he might have been lying. Your being out of the way here might not be in order to protect you, but to protect Ricky himself.”
“But why?”
“Because, Rupert, you did see Ricky from your beach hut the night Gallimaufry burnt down, didn’t you?”
“Yes, all right, I did, but there was no way I would have told the police that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like authority.”
Carole took a risk and asked, “Is that all?”
“What do you mean?”
“I got the impression, when we last met, that you might have a particular reason for wanting to steer clear of the police.”
His pale blue eyes looked sharply into hers. “How much do you know?”
Carole wasn’t about to answer this truthfully and say, “Nothing.” She shrugged, hoping that her silence would prompt further revelations.
It did. Rupert Sonning’s gaze moved rather shamefacedly down to his battered trainers. “Last summer I had a bit of a set-to with the cops. I hadn’t done anything, but if you live my lifestyle, you open yourself up to certain accusations.”
“How do you mean?”
“As you know, I spend most of my time wandering along the beach and inevitably, during the summer, I walk past lots of families with young kids. Well, some of them don’t like that.”
“You mean they think you have designs on their children?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s exactly what I mean, Carole. The press is so full of hysteria about kids being abducted and paedophiles and…any man who goes for a walk on his own puts himself at risk of that kind of accusation.”
“So somebody did make that accusation against you?”
“Yes, some uptight Yummy Mummy whose daughters had been changing into their bathing costumes as I walked past. She called the police and made a complaint against me. So I was hauled in and…well, let’s say, they didn’t give me a very nice time.”
“Were you charged?”
“No. There was nothing they could charge me with. And that made them even more furious. Anyway, the result of that rather unpleasant experience is that I vowed never to go out of my way to co-operate with the police again.”
“Even if you were a witness to a murder?”
“Even then.” He looked up at her again, an expression of definace now on his face. “I don’t know whether you want to believe me or not – that’s up to you – but I can assure you that I have no interest in small children. The sight of a mature adult female in a bikini can still sometimes get the old juices flowing, but children – no. That has never turned me on. As I say, you don’t have to believe me.”
After a silence, Carole said, “Actually I do.” And she did.
“Anyway, it was an unpleasant experience – and one that’s characteristic of the way things are going these days. I think there are too many people around in this country trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives. What happened to the great British principle of minding your own bloody business? That seems to have gone from contemporary life. We’ve become a nation of busybodies, whistleblowers, informers, sneaks. Like all these officials who’re trying to get me out of Pequod. We’ve lost far too many basic freedoms during my lifetime – particularly since we joined the European Union. I think people should have the right to use their own property as
they think fit.”
“Even to the point of burning it down?”
“In Ricky’s case, yes. His wasn’t the first and it certainly won’t be the last insurance fire in the history of the world. Gallimaufry was doing badly – hardly surprising, it was a stupid thing to set up in the first place – money was getting tight, so Ricky burnt it down.”
“Did you see him do that?”
“I saw him go in the back way carrying a can of something. Then I saw him drive away. A few minutes later I could see the flames licking upwards from the downstairs window.”
“What time would that be?”
“Soon after midnight, I think.”
“From what you say, Rupert, you don’t seem to regard lighting an insurance fire as a crime?”
“Not really. Well, if it is, it’s a victimless crime. The only people who suffer from it are some faceless bureaucrats in an insurance company.”
“You say they’re the only people who suffer. You’re forgetting that Ricky’s stepdaughter was inside the shop when it burnt down.”
“Yes, but she must have been already dead. Ricky would never have lit the fire if he’d known she was alive in there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“So who do you think killed Polly?”
“As to that, Carole,” said Rupert Sonning, “I have no idea.”
∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧
Thirty-Three
While she continued to play the Hiding Things game with Mabel, Jude took only Woolly Monkey out of the secret hiding place. She left the mobile phone sock where it was and slid the hidden drawer back into the skirting board. It moved with great ease, as if it had been recently oiled, but she reckoned the mechanism was probably quite old. Fedingham Court House had borne witness to many generations who had no doubt used the secret space to hide valuables, jewellery, private papers perhaps even the vessels and vestments for a Catholic Mass.
Mabel’s parents didn’t arrive back at seven, but if they had, they would have found all calm at Fedingham Court House. Their daughter had given Jude very detailed instructions about how to serve supper for herself and her brother, told her about the bit of CBeebies television they were allowed to watch, and talked her through the required rituals of bathtime. Henry, a model of docility, had a bottle of milk before retiring and allowed himself to be put back in his cot with no fuss at all. Mabel indicated to Jude the three stories she required to have read to her – all of which she seemed to know by heart – and then she, too, had her light turned off and settled down for the night. Neither child seemed at all fazed by having their bedtime routine conducted by a relative stranger.
As soon as Mabel’s light was off Jude went back downstairs. She had no moral qualms about reopening the secret drawer and removing the fluorescent pink sock, which, as she had hoped, did still contain a mobile phone. She hadn’t decided yet what she would do with this vital piece of evidence, but was glad her neighbour wasn’t with her. Carole would undoubtedly say that they should hand it straight over to the police. Jude was quite prepared to do that…eventually…but certainly not until she had checked out the phone for any information it could provide. The odds are always so heavily stacked in favour of the police over the amateur investigator that she was not about to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.
She tried switching it on, but the battery had run down. So, having put the phone and its sock safely into her handbag, Jude did as Lola had suggested and poured herself a glass of white wine from the well-stocked fridge. Then she sat in front of the open fire in the sitting room, very near to the hidden drawer, and tried to control the excesses of her speculation until the Le Bonniers returned home.
At about eight she had a phone call from Lola, apologizing that they were only just then leaving St John’s Wood. Flora had been “at her most demanding. I had to unpack for her. She claims she can’t do that with her hands in the state they are. And then she found plenty of small jobs for Ricky, which, of course, he did for her without complaint.”
Lola sounded pretty fed up. Then she asked after the kids, and was relieved to hear that bath and bedtime had gone without a hitch. She said she and Ricky would get back as quickly as they could, but it was unlikely to be before ten. The fridge, though, was full of food left over from the party and Jude was encouraged to help herself to anything she wanted.
In fact, the babysitting vigil didn’t last as long as it might have done. At about twenty to nine, just when Jude was thinking of making a foraging raid on the fridge, the au pair Varya arrived back at Fedingham Court House. She looked pretty wan – the vodka in Southampton had evidently flowed with Russian generosity – but she was quite capable of taking over the babysitting duties. So Jude rang for a cab to take her home.
♦
When she got back to High Tor after her encounter with Rupert Sonning, Carole had started googling. She still hadn’t got far with the thousands of references to Flora Le Bonnier, and going through all of them in search of one particular article would be a deterrently laborious process. So, instead, she typed in the name Biff Carpenter.
For him, too, there was a surprisingly large number of entries. Clearly, though few of the names he wrote about meant anything to Carole, he had been quite a significant commentator on popular music in the sixties and seventies. ‘Had been’ were the operative words, according to his very brief Wikipedia entry. Born in 1941, Biff Carpenter had died in 1977.
There was very little other information. Carole wondered whether life was actually long enough for her to trawl through endless articles about Jethro Tull and Procul Harum and King Crimson.
Then she had the thought of googling Biff Carpenter and Flora Le Bonnier together. No relevant references. (Well, she didn’t think a nineteenth-century family tree from Ontario featuring a ‘Biff ‘ and a ‘Flora’ was relevant.)
Carole then tried Biff Carpenter and Ricky Le Bonnier together, and that did produce a result. She was directed to the blog of someone who’d clearly been a drummer with various bands in the early seventies. The rambling style suggested that most of his writing was done under the influence of some powerful narcotic.
She was about to give up on the blogger’s turgid and misspelt prose when she spotted Ricky Le Bonnier’s name. She read the pertinent paragraph:
…Like back then we was getting the Cameleon Haze album together and we was working with Rickie Le Bonier as producer and having some great all-niters kind of open party scene in the studio while we was recording and doing a lot of, like, wacky backy and a lot of real heavy stuff too. And Biff Carpenter who was, like, the journo for our kind of music used to hang out at the studio which was good cos if he wrote about a band well you knew that like ment youd made it. Biff was writing for NME and all over including a new magasine called Prog Printz and he said he was going to do somthing about us for that which would have been like great. And Biff was good mates with all of us especially Rickie and they were smoking some seriously good shit together and injecting too but then, like, they had some bust-up which was bad karma for us because, like, suddenly Biff ‘s off writing a peace for Prog Printz that is not about the band but is, like, rubbishing Rickie Le Bonier, not only Ricky but his mother whose, like, some actress or somthing. And Biff really has a go and when the magasine comes out Rickie really loses his cool and suddenly he’s not producing our album anymore and we’re halfway thro and the bread’s running out and we’re totally buggerred. And then later we hear Prog Printz has folded and Biff Carpenter’s snuffed it o/ded on the old horse and I’m not talking geegees here and were well up shit creak with no sign of any like padels…
Thereafter, the blog seemed to maunder off into incoherent self-pity. Carole thought it reasonable to assume that Biff Carpenter’s exposé of Flora Le Bonnier’s past was included in the article he wrote attacking Ricky, but she wasn’t optimistic about tracking it down. She googled up a couple of references to Prog Printz, but they weren’t very h
elpful. The magazine had only run for three editions, and copies were now valuable collector’s items. There was no means of accessing their content online.
Carole was thoughtful as she closed down her laptop. Suddenly there were two drug-related deaths in Ricky Le Bonnier’s life – Polly’s mother and now Biff Carpenter. Of course, it could just be coincidence, a reflection of the lifestyle that Ricky indulged in at that time.
But Carole, being Carole, as she went next door to share her findings with Jude, wondered whether there was more to it than that.
♦
Of course there was still no display on the screen of the mobile. Assuming it was Polly’s – and every indication supported that idea – the phone hadn’t been used for nearly a fortnight. Its battery was extremely dead. And, frustratingly, neither Jude nor Carole had a charger that fitted it.
They would have to wait till the morning. Fethering didn’t boast a mobile phone shop. It was even doubtful whether there was one in Fedborough. Unlocking the secrets held in Polly’s mobile might require a trip to Worthing or Chichester. It was profoundly annoying, but there was nothing else they could do but wait.
And what Carole had found out about Ricky Le Bonnier and Biff Carpenter was also frustratingly incomplete. Neither woman slept well that night.
♦
Worthing was marginally closer than Chichester, so on Friday morning they made it their destination. Even though Carole had pinpointed the phone shop they wanted to go to from researches on the Internet, their purchase took them a long time. Worthing was extremely full of people who, released from the chore of being nice to relatives over Christmas, were desperate for retail therapy. And most of the residents of Worthing seemed to be in that one phone shop. Those who didn’t want to change the mobile they’d been given as a Christmas present were bent on upgrading their handset to the latest model which offered even more technological bells and whistles than their previous one. Transactions like that with the sharp-suited teenage salesmen took an inordinately long time and, though all Carole and Jude wanted to buy was a charger, they had to wait in a queue which threatened to redefine the concept of eternity.