by TP Fielden
On the other hand, Sticks, Cornish and the Manifold were here for a six-week season only – the moment Moomie beat it back to London, they’d fly as well – and with caution born of long experience Betty felt things with Sticks were unlikely to last beyond the summer. Better to hang on to Dud.
‘Your turn to make the tea,’ called Judy from a brief lull in her cannonade. It wasn’t.
Yet again, if she made some excuse to Dud she could have the weekend away and get her scoop – Sticks had promised an introduction to his cousin – and anyway she needed some fresh air. The furthest she’d been from Temple Regis recently was Newton Abbot, and that was no party.
The editor’s door opened – now was her moment! She waved at Mr Rhys and skipped up the office, teamaking duties casually abandoned.
Terry came over to Judy’s desk and sat in Betty’s chair. The thundering ceased and Judy pulled the paper from the roller.
‘What happened to you?’ she said, stiffly, ‘I had to get the bus back.’
‘Went off to copy that photo album you borrowed from Topham,’ said Terry with a note of self-importance. ‘The dead woman. Didn’t want to hang around listening to that old bat from Ban the Bomb and her crackpot ideas.’
Judy bit her lip. If Terry had no care for the future of the planet, if he couldn’t see that it only took a finger on a button to see us all in smithereens, this was hardly the time to re-educate him.
‘What have you got?’
‘There were only seven photos left in the album, some more had been stuck in at some stage but then taken out again. Quite a few blank pages.’
‘Did you take a picture of the album itself?’
Terry tipped up his head and looked down his nose. ‘Whaddya think?’
‘And the pictures show what, exactly?’ They weren’t getting on terribly well this morning. Was it the way he slammed the car door just before they came across the protest march?
No, it was before that – that silly tune he was singing, ‘He Socked Her In the Chopper’. Deliberately out of tune, just to set her teeth on edge.
No, it was… it was… Betty. He’d taken Betty to see Moomie Etta-Shaw when really if anybody should have been poking their noses in the Marine Hotel last night, it should have been… the train of thought petered out as she watched Betty follow Rudyard into his office and close the door.
Or… maybe it was the whisky last night. Like most people who had supposedly reached maturity Judy didn’t want to admit to self-inflicted wounds. It must be Betty or Terry that made her feel so grumpy.
‘I’ve printed them up if you want to have a look,’ said Terry. It sounded like he didn’t care whether she did or she didn’t.
‘Oh well, I suppose…’ said Judy, sounding just the same. ‘Just let me hand this copy in. Did you get something decent from the protest march?’
‘Jumped on a wall and got a top-shot.’
‘Show how many people were in the march?’
‘Whaddya think!’ Things really weren’t going well between them. ‘Come on!’
The print room next to the darkroom was an oasis of calm in the noisy Express office. Few people came here and it would be a welcome retreat were it not for the overpowering smell of developing fluid which seeped from next door.
‘’Ere we are,’ said Terry, drawing up two chairs to the print table.
Before them lay more than a dozen 10 × 8 prints, already curling slightly at the edges from the heat of the low overhead light. The first five showed the picture album, a small leatherbound pocket-size book of indeterminate origin but of some age.
‘Front, back, spine, front inside, back inside,’ said Terry. He was nothing if not efficient.
‘When you picked it up,’ said Judy, ‘did you get any kind of feeling about it?’
‘Foreign,’ said Terry. ‘It smelt foreign. Like…’ he searched for a description, ‘like when I was in Spain.’
‘Anything else?’
‘It had thirty pages, most of them not used. First couple of pages had whatever prints had been there removed, then a couple of pages with more blanks. Seven images remaining. I was able to take some of them off the page, just to see if someone had written on the back, like they do – but no dice. A couple of them had a pencilled initial – I reckon that was the shop that developed them leaving their mark. You’ll see when we get to it.’
The print table was quite small and they had to sit close to each other in order to look at the images.
Terry switched off the overhead lights and all that remained were the print lights beaming down on his photographs, otherwise the room was a pool of darkness. He smelt rather nice.
‘OK,’ said Miss Dimont, ‘fire away, Terry. Tell me what you see. Are these pictures going to solve the murder for us?’
FIFTEEN
‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘They should tell some kind of story, but they don’t.’
Miss Dimont drew the prints towards her, one by one. The first confirmed Terry’s ‘foreign’ description – it was a picture of a large house overshadowed by olive trees, taken in bright sunlight. A lunch-party is in progress with maybe eight or nine figures around the table. A young woman stands in the foreground, behind her two men, their arms around each other’s shoulders.
The next featured one of the two men, holding in his arms a girl of maybe six or seven. It was followed by a picture of a small group of people outside a restaurant, but the feel, the lighting, and the clothes were all different.
Miss Dimont was trying to weigh up what she saw. ‘This looks like one family, they have strong facial similarities, at least the men do. Mediterranean – Spanish, Italian, Greek.
‘This woman here,’ she pointed. ‘I think it’s the same woman in each picture – I think the little girl is her too. The whole thing looks more complicated than it actually is because her hair’s different in each shot. But take away the hair and – don’t you agree?’
‘Dunno,’ said Terry. The light was bouncing off the table and when she turned her head, she could see a small area on his chin where the razor had missed its target this morning.
Terry pulled the next picture towards her – this time a rear view of a woman in her twenties sitting on the edge of a diving board, looking back towards the house – a very different kind of house – behind her. It was followed by a street scene with the unknown woman – it could be her, but then again might not be – wearing dark glasses and with a much older man by her side, also with dark glasses. Neither looked happy.
‘Then this,’ said Terry. The last shot was dark, muzzy, an interior. The room it depicted belonged to someone of wealth but not especially good taste. There didn’t seem to be any particular point to the photo, which in any case was marred by a thick score across its middle. ‘This one had been torn in half, and half again, and then put back together and the pieces glued back into the album,’ said Terry. ‘And that’s it.’
They sat in the pool of light, neither moving or speaking. The print room was cold but Terry’s wiry frame gave off a measure of heat. Shoulder to shoulder, neither seemed in a hurry to move.
‘Well, there’s a link, obviously,’ said Judy finally. ‘Let’s try and assemble a storyline – I sometimes did this sort of thing in the war. Doesn’t always work but it helps collect our thoughts.’
Terry was looking at the prints, proud that he’d got them so sharp. Picture narratives weren’t particularly his thing, but he was pleased his work was receiving so much detailed attention – more than it did out on the editorial floor, where week after week they banged his stuff in the paper without comment.
‘The common factor, quite clearly, is the girl. We see her as a child in the arms of what I take to be her father – or her uncle, maybe. The house behind shows this is a well-off family – the people at the side are servants from the way they group together and stand back from the camera as if in deference. It’s a very big house, so we can assume they’re rich.’
‘There’s one more.
’
‘I saw it, it’s just an old car.’
‘Not just a car, an Alvis. A TA-14. You don’t see too many of those around these days.’
‘Well, you can’t see its registration number, so no clues there.’
‘It’s gorgeous,’ sighed Terry. ‘Alvis started making them just after the war. Based on the pre-war 12/70, you know – they were really were…’
Judy turned and gave him a look. Their noses were only inches apart. ‘Honestly, Terry, the boxes of useless knowledge you keep up there in that attic of yours!’
It was water off the proverbial. Terry had grabbed a magnifying glass and was busy admiring the stately lines of the limousine. ‘Looks new – you can tell by the sheen on the paintwork. If we can work out the sequence of these photos, we might just be able to put a date on it. They only made this model for a short while. And look, Judy, this one’s painted white or cream or some very light colour – that’s got to reduce the number of possibilities. Then, if we’ve got the date, and the model, and a rough guide to the colour we can ask around a few dealers, and maybe we…’
‘Take a month of Sundays, Terry. Do you have any idea how many cars Alvis actually sell?’
Terry was cross. He tossed the photo to one side and picked up the others. ‘OK, Miss Clogs,’ he said, ‘take these photos and tell me a story with them.’
Judy gave him a smile. In the half-light cast by the print lamps she looked particularly beautiful, even though her hair was, as usual, all over the place. Terry looked away.
‘First thing,’ she said, ‘is to re-arrange the order they came out of the album. People don’t always put pictures in chronological order – they don’t always fit the page, or they paste them in randomly or sometimes they forget they’ve left the roll of film for developing at the chemist’s and it doesn’t come back till after they’ve put other pictures in. So you have to discount the order in which you found them.
‘Looking at these, we might take it that the girl and woman who features in them, though she looks different sometimes, is the same person throughout. So we start with the first one, which is her at, let’s guess, seven years old. She’s being held by two men who look very similar, they could be much older brothers, or it could be that one of them is her father and the other his brother.’
‘That’s just guesswork!’ said Terry. It didn’t sound very scientific to him.
‘Hear me out. Look at the light. And though this is a close-up, you can see trees in the background – olive trees. So it’s fair to assume we’re not in England but, let’s say, somewhere Mediterranean. The next picture – the lunch party – then bears that out. Large house in the sunshine, olive trees – so similar.
‘The girl is older now, maybe seventeen? If you look, you can see one of the two men from the first picture – he’s standing close to her, the others in the party keep their distance. So, could be that this is the man who owns the house, and this is his daughter.’
‘Where’s the mother, then?’ said Terry.
‘If you look there’s nobody here who looks like they belong to this man and his daughter – no woman of the right age claiming ownership of the girl – so she’s probably the one holding the camera and taking the picture.’
‘What next?’
‘Well, that’s when it gets difficult. It’s either the restaurant scene, or the one of her sitting on the diving board.’
‘The light’s different.’
‘So is the architecture, Terry. The house behind the swimming-pool is mainly obscured by trees, but you can see it has a slated roof, not terracotta tiles. The windows are really quite big – they need to let in a lot of light. And the trees, they’re not olives but oaks and elms – we’re now in England!’
‘And the restaurant?’
‘Well, they’re standing outside because they want a photo to mark an occasion – it’d be too dark inside without a flash-gun, and anyway it’s only people like you who have that sort of equipment. No, if you look closely you can see our woman – she looks different because she’s older, her hair’s been cut differently and she’s much paler. There in the background is someone who looks like her father – but it might not be. Looks like London, could be Soho. They are, I’d say, ten years older than the lunch-party in the sunshine. She doesn’t look happy.’
‘Maybe it’s somebody else’s birthday, not hers,’ said Terry.
Judy looked at him. ‘You know, from you, that’s quite a startling piece of observation.’ It started her thinking.
‘Get on with it, I’ve got to get the Leica fixed. It’s causing me no end of problems.’
‘Then there’s this. She’s standing against a lamp post with her father, they’re both wearing sunglasses – why?’
‘You can tell there’s no sun, they’re not lit by sunlight but daylight,’ said Terry.
‘Precisely. So why the sunglasses? Why the strained expressions on their faces?’
‘Just a minute,’ said Terry, who’d been inspecting the prints with his magnifying glass while Miss D had been pontificating, ‘this isn’t England. Though it’s blurry – must be winter – you can just see the corner of a car. That’s a Citroen Deux Chevaux. They’re in France!’
Cars again. It was all men thought about. Apart from beer and the obvious. ‘OK,’ said Judy, ‘I’ll buy that for the moment. Then we have these other two pics – the room in the house, and the car.’
‘No clues as to the room,’ said Terry. ‘It’s a duff shot, taken by mistake, I reckon. You know how you do sometimes – press the shutter release while you’re still lining the shot up. You do it all the time – I’ve seen your snaps.’ From the mouth of a professional photographer the word was nothing less than an insult but Judy had to agree, there was no point in her ever picking up a camera.
‘And the car – well, despite what you say, Judy, it shouldn’t be impossible to narrow down its ownership.’
‘Only if it was still in the possession of the person who first bought it.’
‘True.’
Terry could tell he’d perhaps overstepped the mark with his snaps comment.
‘Pub?’
‘Pub.’
As they gathered up the prints and wandered out through the editorial floor they stepped around a tired-looking school party docked alongside the chief sub-editor’s desk. John Ross was wearily instructing his audience in the rudiments of journalism.
‘. . . the five Ws,’ he was saying, his foot pushing his desk drawer to and fro so they could glimpse the Vat 69 bottle rolling around below. ‘If ye have the five Ws, ye have yer story. So easy to remembairr – it’s who, what, why, when, where. Tell me,’ he said, bringing his gaze down from the ceiling where it had been resting for some minutes, ‘who can repeat back what I just told you? Maybe we can find a journalist among the bunch of you.’
Alas that particular day, there was no future Hannen Swaffer to be found. The girls’ eyes were soaking up the myriad sights and sounds of a great newspaper in production while the boys had homed in on Joyce, energetically doing her errands in a tight sweater.
Judy and Terry’s onward journey past the editor’s open door might have offered them the sight of Rudyard Rhys and Betty Featherstone in heated debate, but neither bothered to look – both were too preoccupied with the photographs to pay any attention.
Inside the inner sanctum, however, editor and reporter were feverishly arguing the toss about the weekend ahead. Betty had laid before Rhys her London plans, hoping the chance of identifying the murder victim would find favour not only in his eyes but incidentally those of Fleet Street’s talent-scouts, too.
‘No.’
‘But it could be the breakthrough! Old Inspector Topham sounds like he hasn’t got a clue!’
‘No, Betty, no! I have a special assignment for you on Saturday – no time to be running up to London. And I suppose you’d be expecting to put it on expenses, too.’
‘Well…’
‘Rrr-rr,’ growl
ed Rhys, fishing for his pipe, ‘just an excuse for a shopping trip! No, I want you over at Buntorama on Saturday and just be thankful it’ll get you out of doing the wedding reports.’
‘Buntorama? But…’
‘No more about the murder, Betty, I’ve had enough – in fact I’m sick of hearing about it. No, new things are happening with Bunton and his crew and I want a comprehensive report back from you my desk on Monday morning.’
Betty looked desolate. She still hadn’t made up her mind whether she would actually stand Dud up on their cinema date, but she wanted the freedom to make the choice herself. If Mr Rhys insisted on her working on Saturday, she wouldn’t be able to get to London in time to meet up with Sticks and his cousin.
On the other hand, she couldn’t be sure about the drummer’s invitation, and in some ways it was a relief. But the choice should have been hers alone, not Mr Rhys’s! She tried to catch up with what he was saying, but he did drone on so.
‘. . . Archbishop of York. But really what I want you to pay attention to is…’
‘. . . have you got a piece of paper, Mr Rhys? Left my notebook on my desk.’
‘Rr-rrr! Reporters should have their notebooks with them at all times.’
‘And a pencil?’
‘Rr-rrr!’
‘You were saying about the Archbishop?’
‘No, this is really the reason why I want you there – just make a few notes of what the Archbishop says, only a couple of pars, mind! Damned if I’m going to do Bunton’s publicity for him! No, the real reason for your visit is to find out about a new member of the board, Admiral Sir Cedric Minsell.’
‘The one who’s on telly?’
‘Ah, you’ve seen him. I haven’t. He’s joining the Bunton board and I gather will be there to greet the Archbishop on his arrival. I want you to engage him in polite conversation, say you want to write something nice about him, and look, here’s a list of questions I want you to put to him. Only not in an obvious way, just sort of chatting as it were.’
Betty thought this odd. ‘Should I mention that you were in the Royal Navy, Mr Rhys? He might know your name, that might help if I’m asking him off-the-record questions.’