by TP Fielden
Ray Cattermole was no longer, alas, young Lochinvar. As he awaited his conveyance he carried no shining broadsword, nor did his countenance offer youthful hope. Were it not for his palpable age and sagging waistline he might resemble nothing so much as a tired, naughty schoolboy needing to be sent to bed with a cup of Horlicks. Certainly Mrs Phipps was no Ellen and would not be racing away into the night with him – more likely she would be issuing a stiff talking-to across the brim of her gin glass.
All this was ahead. Now as the green and cream vehicle noisily approached, Cattermole dug in a pocket and fished out a threepenny bit for his fare.
The bus lumbered into view – like old Ray, it had seen better days, and the omnibus company should have retired it long ago. Still, it wheezed faithfully to a halt outside the station building and a single passenger alighted.
‘Youm up town?’ asked the conductor, displaying not the slightest shred of interest in his reply. Ray nodded queasily. He was not looking forward to explaining himself to Mrs Phipps. She was as easy-going as they come, but like all actresses she demanded attention and lots of it. Just occasionally Ray had to get away, for heaven’s sake!
It wasn’t just Mrs Phipps. Other factors had joined to precipitate his sudden departure from Temple Regis. That last night in the theatre had rattled him. He was doing his one-man show My West End Life and had just cheerily parked a trilby on his head to do his Tommy Trinder when one of the audience – there were only a handful in – got up and started heckling. Said they’d heard it all before, that half the anecdotes Cattermole claimed as his own came out of the Sunday newspapers.
It put him off. At half-time he had a drink and then decided he wouldn’t go back on. He got his box-office lady Yolande to issue the refunds and sat in his office, brooding.
Old Ray had been heckled before – Life was never very popular with the locals, but it was cheap to stage at the end of the season and he was generally thick-skinned enough to bear the occasional brickbat. No, what had rattled him was this Gerry Hennessy business. And then Arthur Shrimsley! Miss Dimont’s double front-page stories of their deaths in the Express had left him with a sense of foreboding – a fear that the police might come asking questions, and worse, that his life might too be in danger . . .
*
Were she as gifted as most Temple Regents believed, Athene Madrigale might have sensed the tectonic shift which occurred in her hometown with the arrival of the 4.30 p.m. Riviera Express and the return of the bewigged native to his homeland. But at that moment she was in Lipton’s buying her special tea and too busy struggling to get rid of the heavy brass coins which were weighing down her purse.
‘So if I give you eight farthings and seven ha’pennies, that’ll make up the difference?’ she vaguely asked the shop assistant sweetly. The reply was no more than a grunt.
Athene stepped out into the sunlight, her wardrobe’s luscious palette of colours creating a sudden splash in a street where most people wore variations on the colour grey. Though this was first and foremost a seaside resort, few of its townsfolk had altogether shrugged off the austerities of war and preferred to clothe themselves soberly and anonymously. Athene was given special dispensation because of who she was and what she could tell you: ‘Pisces – a thrilling event is just around the corner. Prepare yourself for something special!’
She caught sight of Judy Dimont walking speedily back from the Grand Hotel, and waved across the street.
‘Just got my special, dear,’ she said as the two set forward towards the office. ‘Got time for a cup?’
‘Seem to be seeing a lot more of you in daylight these days,’ said Judy conversationally. ‘Normally I only see you at night.’
‘Been a change, dear. I don’t want to talk about it.’
Miss Dimont turned to look at her friend. ‘What is it, Athene?’
Devon’s most gifted astrologer suddenly stopped, and bowed her head. ‘I’m losing touch,’ she finally said. ‘It’s getting harder to read the stars. There are days, Judy, when I’m completely lost. Lost! I try to give my best, honestly, but . . .’ It looked as though she was ready to burst into tears.
Her friend motioned to a bench in the market square and they sat down. This is a tragedy, thought Miss Dimont, that the town’s shining light, its beacon of optimism and hope, its joyous ray of anticipation, should suddenly run out of inspiration. Her practical mind instantly hit on the solution – make it up, Athene, as the scribbled joke over the news desk tells you to do! Who, after all, was to tell what was right and wrong in her predictions? If they didn’t work for one reader, they were sure to work for the next. And anyway, who could remember, next day, what their stars had foretold the previous lunchtime?
But the reporter instantly dismissed the thought. Ethereal, strange, out of place and out of time, Athene had brought a something special to Temple Regis which deserved preservation and protection.
‘Would you like to come and stay the night?’ she asked. ‘We could have a nice long chat.’
Athene looked imploringly at her friend and nodded. ‘That would be very kind.’ More words might have been spoken but, just then, the green and cream single-decker of the South Devon Omnibus Company grumbled by and Miss Dimont, in the act of pushing her spectacles up her concave nose, glimpsed a familiar figure aboard.
‘Athene,’ she said excitedly, ‘you’re a genius! Look who you’ve brought me!’
Miss Madrigale had spotted him too. ‘Raymond Cattermole,’ she cried. ‘I knew . . . I knew he would come back!’
Given her most recent confession, some might question the substance of that statement. However, in her presence something good had occurred, and when something good happens we all look to find the person to thank.
But Miss Dim was no longer there to issue words of gratitude. With remarkable speed she launched herself across the square, corkscrew hair bobbing in the wind, and jumped on to the bus’s running-board just as it ground its gears and headed off down the hill to the seafront.
‘Now, Mr Cattermole,’ she called commandingly, half out of breath as she forged her way up the bus aisle, ‘where have you been?’
The old thespian barely bothered to look up. ‘Been up to London to visit the Queen,’ he snapped. He knew coming back home was going to be disagreeable, but did he have to have the press harassing him even before he’d got his feet under the table?
‘I wonder if you know what a fuss your absence has caused. Some people in the police force were beginning to suspect you’d been murdered. Along with Mr Hennessy and Mr Shrimsley.’
Cattermole turned white. The bus ground to a halt at some traffic lights and it looked like he might make a bolt for it.
‘Erm,’ he gibbered, ‘erm? Murdered? What d’you mean? What’s happened?’
‘For a moment it looked as though you were the third victim.’ Miss Dimont’s wartime training was coming in very handy, for Cattermole was suddenly very rattled.
‘You’d better let me know what’s going on,’ he spluttered. ‘I’ve been away for three days and the world’s gone mad in my absence! What I need is a . . .’
The bus stopped conveniently outside the Fortescue and the pair alighted, entered the saloon bar, and ordered drinks. Miss Dimont paid, and having scored this advantage wasted no further time.
‘You were going to meet Gerald Hennessy when he came down to Temple Regis. You knew Arthur Shrimsley, and had met him recently. Both men are dead. That’s no coincidence.’
Cattermole looked shiftily into his whisky. Miss Dimont intuited he was already in hot water with Mrs Phipps and did not have the reserves to put up much of a fight when it came to sharing information.
‘Of course not!’ he said finally. ‘They knew each other of old – Shrimsley used to work in Fleet Street and used to write about Gerry when he was a stage actor in the West End.
‘And me,’ he snarled, ‘there was a time when I was a bigger star than Gerry-ruddy-Hennessy and he used to write about me.’
Cattermole looked slowly round the empty bar. ‘Gerald Hennessy was not all he was cracked up to be, you know,’ he said. ‘By the end of the war he was lording it around the place in his uniform as if he’d beaten the Nazis single-handed. It wasn’t like that at all. He got called up like the rest of us but he managed to get away. He told the interview board he was an actor and had, ah, certain tendencies. To be put into a barrack-room full of rough soldiery would almost certainly bring about a return of the nervous breakdown he’d had.’
‘I never heard about that,’ said the reporter.
‘Don’t be soft,’ growled Cattermole. ‘There was no nervous breakdown. There were no certain tendencies.’
Miss Dimont was secretly relieved.
‘But it meant his call-up was deferred and he escaped to Scotland. Pitlochry. Only after late 1942 when it looked like we had a chance of winning the war did he volunteer, and he went straight into ENSA. The rest of us had put our lives on the line for the duration but not Gerry, oh no.’
‘Army Pay Corps for you, wasn’t it?’ asked Miss Dimont sweetly.
Cattermole ignored her. ‘He came out of the war covered in glory and became every cinemagoer’s dream of a war hero. Hah! Nothing could have been further from the truth.’
‘What has this got to do with Shrimsley?’
‘Well, they’re both dead so it doesn’t matter now. Arthur Shrimsley was going to ghost Gerry’s memoirs. Gerry was coming down to Temple Regis to talk it all over with him and, I imagine, pop into the golf club he’d inherited from old Bill Pithers.
‘Honestly,’ he said angrily, ‘you’d think that Gerry Hennessy was the Duke of Plaza Toro the way he waltzed around, when in fact his grandfather ran the most disgusting business in the world. Do you know, exactly, what fat-renderers do?’
It was Miss Dimont’s turn to go pale and she swiftly pushed the conversation onwards with the order of more whisky from the bar.
‘He inherited a huge pile of money from Pithers and didn’t need to work any more,’ said Cattermole bitterly. ‘While some of us . . .’ He paused. ‘He broke my arm, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘It finished my career.’
‘I know.’
‘I used to get better notices than him, more press coverage, bigger parts. Then he broke my arm.’
‘Is that why you decided to blackmail him?’ asked Miss Dimont softly.
Cattermole looked stricken, like a curate caught with the Communion bottle. ‘I . . . don’t . . . know . . . what . . . you . . . mean,’ he said, very slowly.
‘No point in beating about the bush,’ said Miss Dimont briskly. ‘We went to Shrimsley’s house and found a letter. You were going to tell Hennessy to cough up or you’d tell Shrimsley all about his draft-dodging. What would that do to his brand-new image as an actor of the people – that he spent half the War behind the reception desk at a hotel in Scotland using a walking stick as his alibi?’
Cattermole shook his head. ‘Shrimsley was employed by Hennessy to write his memoirs, he wasn’t going to put in a story like that. Why would he? There’s no possible gloss you could put on that story and make it sound like the act of a war hero.’
‘Shrimsley was a rat,’ said Miss Dimont. ‘He wouldn’t hesitate to take Gerald Hennessy’s money to write the memoirs, then sell the hotel story to his chums in Fleet Street. Just think of the headlines!
‘So yes, Mr Cattermole,’ she went on, ‘you were about to blackmail Gerald Hennessy.’
‘Never happened. You can’t prove a thing.’
‘One thing I can prove is that he was murdered. And almost certainly Shrimsley too. Since there were three of you in this, isn’t it just possible you may be next?’
The thought which had been lurking somewhere at the back of Cattermole’s mind rose suddenly like a harvest moon and confronted him, with alarming results. He swallowed the remains of his whisky, took off his toupee and put it in his pocket.
‘Don’t you say a word to anyone,’ he hissed, his eye scanning the bar for possible assassins.
‘Mr Cattermole, this is a murder investigation. Nobody keeps anything from anybody – and if they do,’ said Miss Dimont, pausing dramatically, ‘well, you can see the likely consequences.’
The actor stumbled to the bar and brought back two drinks, both for himself. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘OK.’
Sunshine fell through the Fortescue’s stained-glass windows and splashed the table between them with a rainbow of light. ‘Who killed Gerry?’ he said, his eyes stretching wide. ‘Who killed Shrimsley? Who’s trying to kill me? What’s this all about?’
‘I think you must know the answer to that, Mr Cattermole. Why don’t you start by telling me what you planned to do when you met up with Gerald Hennessy?’
‘I was sick of it all. Do you know what it takes just to keep the Palace Theatre running? It’s getting harder and harder to get people to come down here. They ask more and more money just to put in an appearance. They’re all doing television these days, they can’t be bothered with a six-week run at the end of the pier. The music halls are dead and the only people I can attract are all those out-of-work acts who were household names ten years ago but mean nothing now.’
Cattermole paused for breath. ‘I gave up the West End and came here, to Temple Regis, with fire in my belly. I was angry at having my career cut short. I was going to show them all what a great actor-manager could do. And in the beginning it worked.’
Miss Dimont had her reservations about this claim, but let him speak.
‘Now, it’s almost impossible. I was angry with Gerry Hennessy – God,’ he groaned, ‘I’ve been angry with him ever since . . . my arm . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘When I heard he’d inherited Bill Pithers’ fortune I just thought, Why him? Why should it always go right for him when I have to struggle from year to year, trying to keep my head above water?’ He was becoming more and more tense as he spoke, his fists scraping the table, pushing the whisky glasses to one side.
‘Did you mean to kill him?’
‘What?’
‘Did you mean to kill Gerald Hennessy?’
Cattermole barely paused before he gave his answer. ‘Yes.’
Miss Dimont froze. Here came the moment of confession.
‘Yes, I think I did mean to kill him. He was going to come here, to the theatre, ostensibly to take a look at the work I’ve been doing – maybe get a publicity photograph of the two of us together. Then I was going to go over to the golf club with him – I’m a member, you know – and show him around.
‘I just had, in the back of my mind, an idea that we would take a healthy stroll down the pier at sunset and . . . over he would go . . . but I don’t know,’ snuffled Ray, ‘I don’t think I’ve got it in me. Doing a scene where you’re supposed to kill someone is all very well, and you can even fool yourself sometimes that you really mean to do it. But in real life . . .’ He shook his head, and his shoulders slumped dejectedly.
‘So it was blackmail instead.’
‘He could afford it,’ said Cattermole, rallying.
‘You told Shrimsley about Pitlochry, why?’
‘I knew he had contacts in Fleet Street. I wanted to find out how much he could make from selling the story, then I was going to tell Gerry, and ask him for double.’
‘Shrimsley could have sold the story without coming back to you at all.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
There was a pause.
‘So,’ said Miss Dimont, coolly appraising the man opposite, ‘instead of your killing Gerry, someone else did it. Then Shrimsley. Who could it be, and why?’
Before he could answer Miss Dimont went on, ‘You know Prudence Aubrey. You and she were . . . close . . . once upon a time. You know her well. Was it her?’
‘How did he die?’ asked Cattermole.
/> Miss Dimont told him. The bald-headed man laughed bitterly, twice, and fished in his pocket for the toupee. On it went again.
‘Typical of Gerry,’ he said bitterly. ‘To be murdered by caviar! And him the grandson of a fat-renderer! I suppose it would have been too much to hope that he might have choked on a pork chop!’
‘Who had the motive, who had the means? Apart from Prudence Aubrey?’
‘I’ll let you into a little secret,’ said Cattermole, leaning forward.
‘Yes, Mr Cattermole?’
‘When I . . . knew . . . her, there was nothing she liked better than to go to Bertram Mills’ circus and watch the wild beasts being tamed with a whip. You know those long fingernails of hers? She once just raked them down my cheek, no particular reason. Drew blood, left scars. She has a cold, cruel streak – mark my words.’
‘You think she could have killed her husband, and then Shrimsley? Why Shrimsley?’
‘Stands to reason,’ said Cattermole. ‘Even with Gerry dead, Shrimsley could still produce the biography she was dreading which would reveal the ghosts from her past. All those dressing-room secrets! But with both of them gone, the story would be buried with them. What’s more, as the grieving widow of Britain’s most popular film actor, what do you think the chances were of her stalled career taking off again?
‘Of course,’ said Cattermole with force, his eyes hard now, ‘it was Prudence Aubrey. Who else?’
TWENTY-FIVE
It was rare for Betty to do The Calls. For one thing she was so easily distracted – someone might stop her in the street for a chat and she would forget the council offices, or the Magistrates’ Court, or the police station – and she almost always forgot the great wooden board outside the Corn Exchange where Miss Dimont never failed to find a story.
This morning there was much on Betty’s mind. Claud Hannaford had asked her to go away for the weekend, but on the other hand there was the Ladies’ Inner Wheel reception on Friday night, where she had met some very nice company in the past. And then there was the hockey on Saturday.