Magnus put the phone down and swore. Not there. Just that cool little piece of a housekeeper, saying that Rose was away for the day, that Miss FitzPatrick had indeed called but had left again. Now where was she? Anywhere in the hills, by the ocean, anywhere really between here and Santa Barbara. Driving and horribly upset. He rang the Zwirns. Fleur hadn’t been in touch. Chloe was anxious, fearful. Should he, should she, ring the police?
‘Christ,’ said Magnus, ‘No. No, I don’t think so. What do we tell them? I – shit!’
‘Magnus, are you all right?’ Chloe sounded almost concerned.
‘Yes, I’m all right. I have this lousy arm, and it hurts like hell and I knocked it on the table. Oh God – look, Chloe, all we can do is wait, really. At least she’s in no danger, if Rose is out of town. If she calls call me here, and tell her to ring me and then get back up to Santa Barbara fast, OK?’
‘Yes,’ said Chloe. ‘OK.’
God, his arm hurt. It really needed strapping up again. That always eased it. Who the hell would do it? He wondered if the tennis pro might know a physio who could help. That’d be an idea. He went out down to the courts, asked for the pro; he was having an early lunch, they said, but he’d be back in ten minutes. Magnus decided to wait. The pain was distracting him; he couldn’t think clearly. If it was strapped up, it would ease. He knew it would.
Twenty minutes later the pro hadn’t come back; Magnus swore, and asked in reception; they said they had a doctor on call, would Mr Phillips like to wait. Mr Phillips said he’d see the doctor later, and decided to take some more pain-killers for now. He went to his bag, and found he was out of the things; the pharmacy in the hotel only sold aspirin. Christ, he was in bloody agony. He’d have to go out and buy some something really strong like Distalgesic. They’d at least take the edge off the pain. And he wouldn’t be long. He left a message for Fleur at the desk, saying he’d be back in half an hour if she rang, and please to come to the hotel and wait for him, and went out to the Mercedes he’d hired. Thank God it was an automatic. Gritting his teeth, he set out on his journey.
‘Fleur, please! Stay a little while longer. I feel so terrible still, so guilty. I suppose I’m hoping I can make you understand even now. And you don’t look very well, darling. Stay and rest.’
‘No, really, I think I should go,’ said Fleur. ‘Could I just go and get a glass of water, I’m so hot, it’s so terribly hot.’
‘I’ll get you some water, darling. You just stay there. Why don’t you get into the pool for a minute or two, cool down, take a costume from the poolhouse, and I’ll bring the water out.’
‘Well – I–’
Fleur looked at the water. It might just do the trick. Not just cool her down, but clear her head. She felt very strange. She went into the poolhouse, picked out a black costume which was about two sizes too big for her, put it on and got into the water. It sagged loosely around her body. What did it matter?
She did feel better; just a little. Still woozy, but better. She swam up and down, slowly, trying not to think, just concentrating on her strokes and keeping her mind blank.
‘Fleur!’
It was Rose. Fleur swam to the side, looked up, squinting slightly; Rose was silhouetted against the sun. She had put her glasses back on: she looked strangely sinister.
‘Fleur,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking. I’ve decided to tell you a bit more.’
‘Honestly, Rose,’ said Fleur, ‘honestly, I don’t want to hear any more.’
‘Maybe,’ said Rose, ‘but you’re going to.’
‘Rose,’ said Fleur, trying to keep her voice calm, ‘Rose, I don’t . . .’
Her voice trailed off. Rose had picked up the long pole with the short net on the end that she used to clear the odd leaf from the surface of the pool; she was holding it just above her.
It was ridiculous, Fleur knew, but she felt oddly threatened. She swam away, pushed off the side with her feet, and turned in the other direction to climb out. Rose was there, waiting for her, above her, with the pole. She pushed Fleur with it very gently, away from the side.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to hurt you. But I would like you to stay there.’
‘Rose, please!’ said Fleur. She fought to keep her voice calm and firm.
‘Fleur, this won’t take long. Just listen to me, please. I really think you should know. It would be best.’
‘Know what, Rose? You’ve told me about my father and you, about how much he hurt you. I don’t think there’s anything else.’
‘There is, Fleur. There is. Quite a lot more. You see, I didn’t feel I’d done enough, selling his story to the magazine. Oh, did I tell you, I got quite a lot of money for it? Very satisfactory. I felt better for a while, and then I started getting angry again. It was very bad. Very bad.’
‘Rose, please. I’m getting cold now. Let me get out. I’ll stay and listen to you.’
Fleur struggled to get out on to the side. Rose pushed her back in with the pole. She turned and swam to the steps but Rose was waiting for her. Panic began to rise in her: hot, heady panic. She fought it down: taking deep breaths, trying to be calm. If she listened to Rose she’d be all right. Of course she would.
‘All right,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll stay here, and you can tell me whatever it is. Go on.’
Rose stood there holding the pole, watching her.
‘Well, you see, I decided in the end I actually hated him enough, felt he’d hurt me enough, to do more. I couldn’t wait for ever for him to drink himself to death. I knew he was living on the beach, knew none of his friends was helping him. Well, most of them weren’t his friends at all, and Piers was totally occupied with Gerard. Maybe he’d even gone home by then. I don’t remember. I went to see him, Fleur. He was living on the beach, with the other down-and-outs. He looked in pretty bad shape. I said I’d like to buy him a meal. If he wouldn’t take my offer of a job – I’d offered him a job as my driver, you know – then he could at least let me feed him. After a while he agreed. So I took him out for a meal in some dive in Venice. I didn’t want anyone to recognize us. And I bought him a lot of liquor. He was pretty low, pretty upset.’
Fleur didn’t think she could take much more of this. Any of it. She struggled again to get out; again Rose pushed her back in. She wondered if she should shout for help, but Sue was out for the day, she knew, and she had seen Ricardo and Marcie leave herself. It was pointless. Rose’s voice went on.
‘So then I got him back into the car, put a bottle of bourbon in his hands – he always liked bourbon, Fleur, could never get enough of it – and started to drive him out along the highway. He was sitting there, getting drunker and drunker; I did a circuit, we went right along to Malibu, turned round and came back again. It was pretty late; very few cars. Just as we reached the road up to Santa Monica, where the highway hits the hill, I stopped, opened the door and told him to get out.’
Don’t think, Fleur, don’t think about anything, not this, not your dad, just concentrate on keeping calm. She swam up and down hard, to keep warmer; the pool was very cold.
Rose smiled. ‘It is cold, isn’t it? I turned the heating off. Well, I’m sure you can guess the rest of the story. He was stumbling up the hill; I turned at the top, and drove down and hit him. It was a wonderful moment.’ She smiled at the memory, the sweet wistful smile she was famous for. ‘I felt soothed, healed. Fleur, don’t cry, darling, you mustn’t cry, it’s so long ago.’
Magnus went into a pharmacy in the mall in Rodeo Drive. They must have been the most expensive pain-killers in the whole of California, he thought, handing over ten dollars for a packet of Dista. The packet told him to take two; he asked for some water, took four. He decided to go and have a coffee and wait for them to take effect before driving back to the hotel. He wandered into the café on the ground floor of the mall, ordered some iced te
a and sat staring moodily in front of him. And then he saw Sue Robinson.
He waved at her.
‘Mr Phillips. What are you doing in here? On vacation?’
It seemed a slightly odd remark to make to someone she’d spoken to an hour or so ago, but still. They were a funny lot, the Californians. ‘Sort of. What you are doing? Shopping?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling, ‘treating myself. It’s my day off.’
‘What happened just now then? Did you forget something?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘When you were at the house. About an hour ago?’
‘I wasn’t at the house, Mr Phillips. I haven’t been at the house since very early this morning.’
‘But –’ His mind was racing. ‘Didn’t I speak to you? Just now? Didn’t you tell me Rose was away?’
‘No.’ She looked puzzled. ‘She isn’t away anyway. She’s at the house. She starts rehearsing her new movie tomorrow, said she wanted some peace today to look at the script.’
‘Shit,’ said Magnus. ‘Dear God. Dear Mother of God. Sue, will you call the police, please. Tell them to get up to Rose’s house. Immediately. Immediately.’
He ran faster than he would have believed possible into the car park, flung himself into the Merc, threw a twenty-dollar bill at the attendant and screamed up the street. His heart was banging, beating, bursting; fear rose in his throat like vomit. He shot a red light, then another; good. If any cops started after him so much the better. Shit, it was a long way: fifteen minutes at least. And even then he might be too late.
‘Anyway, that was the end of it, I suppose. Except that it wasn’t, because your friend Magnus Phillips started snooping about. I don’t know quite how much he knows, but too much, I suspect. If he publishes that book – well, they’re not going to now, are they? After Mr Windsor’s, I mean Sir Piers’s sad demise. What a tragedy. And how sweet. Him and that scrawny little friend of his going the same day.’
Fleur swam harder. She had given up hope of getting out: just wanted to keep from freezing to death.
‘Anyway, Fleur, you know much too much now. I thought I’d like to tell you. Where was I? Oh, yes. Mr Phillips. He phoned just now. I pretended to be Sue and said I was out, that you’d left. I’m a very good mimic. As you may know. Mr Phillips. Now there is a sexy man. My type absolutely. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite reciprocated. He seems to be in love with you. I even tried again in London, quite recently; doing a little extra checking on him and his book at the same time. You rang up one day, didn’t you? I recognized your voice. I couldn’t resist answering. I knew you’d know it was me. For some reason, I rather liked hurting you, Fleur. Probably because you manage to be more important to the men I want than I am.’
‘Rose, I think you should stop this,’ said Fleur. ‘I think I should go home now. You have told me everything, and I’m glad you have. As you say it’s a long time ago, and it’s all over. I certainly won’t be mentioning any of it. Please let me get out.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Rose. She had got the pole now, and was beginning to push Fleur under the water. Fleur was getting weaker, with the cold, fear, exhaustion. She fought up again, looked up at Rose’s face, still unreadable, still masked by her glasses.
‘It was all your fault really, wasn’t it?’ said Rose. ‘He left me for you. Not Naomi. So he could make some money, make a home for you. Have you down there. He loved you more than he loved anyone, Fleur. Much more than he loved me. I find that a little hard, Fleur, even now.’
Push again. Under the water. Longer this time. She wriggled, tried to get clear, come up, but Rose was there, with her pole, holding her down. Suddenly she released her; she came up again into the sunlight, gasping, fighting for breath.
‘Rose, please, please let me out.’
‘No, darling. I’m sorry. I can’t. Not now. Goodbye, Fleur darling. What a terrible accident you’ve had today. Too much champagne, those sleeping pills you always carry with you, me having a nap inside, not hearing you call for help. So sad. So very sad. Goodbye.’
She pushed again. Somewhere deep in the darkness that was engulfing her Fleur could hear a police siren. How ironic. How very ironic. If only they knew what was happening to her, here, now.
Her last thought was of Magnus Phillips, and how much she loved him and how terrible it was that he would never know it.
Epilogue
October – November 1972
‘I love you,’ said Fleur.
‘I know you do,’ said Magnus.
She kept saying it. It seemed terribly important; that she did, that she could.
It had been a long day: she had woken up in hospital with Magnus sitting beside her, grey with pain and exhaustion.
‘You look terrible,’ she said.
‘I feel terrible. You look all right.’
‘I feel all right,’ she said with some surprise. ‘Really all right.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ he said, ‘because I have to have this arm reset. They’re coming for me quite soon. I broke it again. Well, Rose broke it for me. It’s bloody agony.’
‘What happened to Rose?’
‘They took her away. For a long time, I think.’
‘Oh God,’ said Fleur. The horror came rushing back. ‘God, Magnus, that was bad.’
He stroked her hair back.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I knew.’
‘You should have told the police.’
‘Maybe.’
‘But you wanted to publish the book. Didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Yes, I did. It seemed worth the risk.’
‘Arrogant bastard,’ said Fleur good-naturedly. ‘Nearly got me killed.’
‘And myself,’ he said, ‘don’t forget me. Rose’s thugs, knocking me off my bike.’
‘You deserved it.’ She smiled at him, slightly warily. ‘Magnus, how did you know? Who told you?’
‘Her hairdresser. Always very close to their employers, hairdressers are. In Hollywood.’
‘Her hairdresser!’ She was silent, remembering the apparently irrelevant questions about Rose’s hairdresser by the pool that day.
‘Yes. Not her current one, a pathetic old biddy Rose dismissed years ago. She’d bought her off. But not quite enough. She had obviously adored her, idolized her. She heard her on the phone to the reporter. And then of course she wasn’t sure about the murder. But she heard her coming back late, and next morning she saw – well, she saw signs on the car. Rose told her she’d hit a dog. Sorry, Fleur – Fleur darling, don’t look like that. It’s all right. It’s over. All right, darling, cry. Have a good yell. It’ll do you good.’
Fleur yelled. She yelled and sobbed for quite a while. Magnus was right: it did help.
‘Incidentally,’ he said, as she lay back on her pillows, calmer now, holding his hand, ‘did she tell you she was pregnant by your dad?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘She told me too. It wasn’t true. The hairdresser told me that too. Sympathy bid. Not pregnant at all.’
‘Oh,’ said Fleur quietly. ‘Oh, I see. That’s – that’s nice. I’m glad about that.’
A nurse came in. ‘Time to get you ready for your surgery, Mr Phillips.’
‘Can we have just a minute?’ said Fleur.
‘Just one,’ said the nurse.
Fleur sat up, took Magnus’s head in her hands and kissed him very hard on the mouth.
‘I love you,’ she said, ‘and we have a lot of ground to make up.’
‘I look forward to that. Christ, I hope that nurse doesn’t come back just yet. I’m sure people don’t usually go into surgery with gigantic erections.’
‘Well,’ said Fleur, after a while, after reachi
ng out, caressing the bulge in his trousers, looking at it hungrily, ‘I guess the nurse would probably quite like it. Actually. Although not as much as I would.’ She lay back again with a sigh, taking the hand that was attached to his good arm. ‘Well, Rose did one wonderful thing. Before she tried to kill me.’
‘Which was?’
‘She managed to convince me my dad was one of the good guys. That he did love me best. After all.’
‘In that case,’ said Magnus, ‘it was all worth it.’
Fleur looked at him very solemnly for a long time. ‘The reason I love you,’ she said, ‘is that you always get it right.’
That night Fleur and Chloe took up occupation in Magnus’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
‘What a day,’ said Chloe.
‘You could say that,’ said Fleur cheerfully.
Chloe looked at her. ‘You’re very brave, I think,’ she said.
‘I didn’t have a lot of choice. I was shitting myself in that water.’
‘You were brave to go at all.’
‘Well,’ said Fleur, ‘actually it was worth it. In all sorts of ways.’
They phoned Michelle, to tell her they were all right. She told them Caroline had called, had been terribly worried.
‘Let’s call her,’ said Fleur, ‘we can put it on Magnus’s bill.’
She spoke to Caroline; she was shaken, almost tearful at the story.
Fleur played it down, told her she was fine, absolutely fine.
‘She really seemed upset,’ she said to Chloe, her voice surprised.
‘Of course she was upset,’ said Chloe, ‘she loves you.’
‘So do you think you’ll marry Magnus?’ said Chloe.
‘God, I don’t know,’ said Fleur. ‘I’ll let you know. Do you think you’ll marry Ludovic?’
‘I’ll let you know. I – don’t think so.’
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