Resort to Murder

by TP Fielden

  ‘You went up to the Retreat? How did you manage to get in? Did you hide yourself among those dotty old folk from the Lazarus League?’

  ‘I had to queue outside with them – they’re crazy. They truly believed in Larsson, talked of him like he was a god. I started to tell them about my mum but it was as if they were on another planet. Anyway I didn’t want to draw attention to myself because I wanted to get inside the house, so I shut up and waited for someone to open the door.’

  ‘You actually got to see Mr Larsson?’ Valentine couldn’t believe he was about to hear a killer’s confession; he agonised over the fact the notebook was still in his pocket.

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘You didn’t see Larsson?’ Meaning, you didn’t murder him?

  ‘No. While I was standing in the queue up came Gavin, our manager, and he hoicked me out and told me to push off. He gave me a long lecture about how the Youthenator was going to make a fortune for us all and that I had no business sticking my nose in. He was really angry, angrier than I’ve ever seen him, so I thought, I can always come another day. I was determined to confront that murderer, face to face.’

  ‘What were you going to do when you did? Kill him?’

  ‘Kill him?’ said the bassist, looking alarmed. ‘What are you talking about? I was going to show him a photograph of my dead mother with the so-called bloody Rejuvenator by her bedside. I wanted him to see what he’d done with his so-called invention, to say sorry. To say sorry, and to mean it. That’s all.’ His face was ashen and he was near to tears.

  It seemed convincing, but it had the effect of destroying Valentine’s carefully constructed double-murder theory. He couldn’t let it go just yet – what would Miss Dimont say if he did?

  ‘So …’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘Faye Addams …’

  ‘I thought we were talking about Larsson.’

  ‘When did you last see Faye?’

  ‘Before we all came down here. Faye and me went to the Hackney Empire to see them making Oh Boy! because The Urge hoped to get on the show. Marty Wilde, Cliff Richard, the Dallas Boys … It’s hot stuff, the future of television I can tell you!’

  ‘Did you know Faye was going out with one of The Shadows?’

  ‘Had been. She was out with me now.’

  ‘Do you know someone called Cyril Normandy?’

  ‘Never heard of him. Why?’

  ‘He was the man organising the beauty pageants down here, the ones that Faye went in for.’

  ‘I didn’t know his name, but she did tell me what he was doing. She said she’d been promised a win if she quit her job at Selfridges and got on the beauty pageant circuit.’

  ‘Promised a win?’

  ‘It’s all a fix, didn’t you know?’

  This offended Valentine’s sense of fair play, but it was hardly the time to be pondering the ethics of making money out of semi-clad women.

  ‘Did you know she was entering Queen of the English Riviera?’

  ‘She didn’t say, but then the band was on the road playing gigs here, there and the other place. Quite often we wouldn’t see each other for two-three weeks at a time.’

  ‘Was she the kind of girl who …?’ Valentine faltered. He was too new at the journalism game to know how to phrase a fundamentally offensive question about a dead person.

  ‘Faye and this man Normandy?’ Boots McGuigan was more worldly than Valentine had given him credit for. ‘Nah. She said he tried it on but she told him to go fly a kite.’

  ‘Look,’ said Valentine, ‘I’ve something terrible to tell you. Will you sit down for a moment?’

  Boots narrowed his eyes, as if Valentine was threatening to stab him with a knife. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What …?’

  ‘A girl, a beautiful girl, was found dead on a beach five miles away from here. She had been killed. Nobody knew who she was, we’re not sure even yet, but almost certainly it was Miss Addams.’

  ‘I knew it!’ cried Boots, throwing his arms around his chest and clutching himself tight.

  ‘You knew it? How did you know?’

  ‘I knew she’d leave me. She only stayed because I asked her to marry me – she didn’t care who she married, as long as he was rich! I knew she wouldn’t stay in my life! Dead? Oh my God!’

  This was not the confession of a killer. Or was it? The Urge put on a tremendous show when performing – none of them was like his stage persona in real life – was Boots putting on a huge act now? Valentine tested the water gently, telling the guitarist about how Faye was found, the story in the newspaper, the missing persons broadcast on the radio. The hopeless inquest.

  ‘I only listen to music on the radio. The only newspaper I get is Melody Maker. And the only inquest I heard about was Larsson’s.’

  ‘You see,’ said Valentine, still trying to gauge Boots’ reaction, ‘you appear to be the link between two dead people – Ben Larsson and Faye Addams. You were up at the Retreat at the time Larsson died and Faye … er—’ here his logic started to falter ‘—Faye was your fiancée.’

  Boots’ eyes looked wide with grief. ‘How much do they pay you on this local rag of yours?’

  ‘Not very much.’

  ‘Pay peanuts, you get monkeys,’ Boots said in a voice packed with emotion. ‘Are you honestly trying to tell me these two deaths are connected, and that somehow I’m the link? Are you saying somehow I killed them both?’ His voice started to climb as he rose out of his seat. The other members of the band down at the stage end of the auditorium stopped what they were doing and stared.

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ said Valentine, fumbling for words and the thoughts to support them. ‘But you see the link,’ he ended lamely.

  ‘Look,’ said Boots, ‘Faye and me was an item. Solid. She was the best-looking girl I’d ever had, but I wasn’t allowed to have girlfriends, it would kill the sex appeal of the group stone dead.

  ‘OK, I’d asked her to marry me – you can’t print that! – but the last few months we only saw each other from time to time because I was on the road with The Urge. But I’d got worried because I hadn’t heard from her like she promised, and so I telephoned her mum. She told me Faye had come down to do this English Riviera circuit so she could be with me during the summer season.

  ‘And so she did,’ he said soulfully, ‘so she did. Maybe she wanted to marry me more than I thought.’

  ‘I’m sure she did,’ said Valentine soothingly.

  ‘But it would never have worked with her down here. Gavin has us cooped up in that van day and night – he wouldn’t let her near the place. He warned us all with the sack if any of us got hooked up with a girl. “Look at Marty Wilde,” he used to say. “Britain’s top pop idol. Marries his girlfriend, career’s killed stone dead. Overnight.” Gavin threatens us all the time like that.’

  ‘You could have rented a cottage. There are plenty down here in out-of-the-way places.’

  ‘He’s got all our money. It’s in a special account, we’ll get it when we get back to London.’

  I wonder if you will, thought Valentine. He went on, without much hope, ‘So you last saw Faye when?’

  ‘End of May.’

  ‘You planned to meet up again when?’

  ‘She told me she’d send me a telegram when she knew where she was going to be. It never came.’

  Well, bang goes my theory, thought Valentine. ‘Let’s just go back to your visit to the Retreat.’

  ‘Look, we’re going round the houses now. I’ve got a new number to rehearse.’ Valentine could see he wanted to get away and put the hurt from him with music and noise and distraction.

  ‘Just one last thing,’ called the reporter desperately. ‘Gavin Armstrong sent you back to the Pavilion after he winkled you out of the queue with the Lazarus lot.’

  ‘I already said that.’

  ‘Did he come back with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did he do then?’

  ‘Went in with the Lazarus lot, as you
call them.’

  Good heavens, thought Valentine. Never thought of that as a possibility.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  His years in the desert had strengthened and shaped Frank Topham, and if perhaps he’d once been a better soldier than he was now a policeman, that did not take away from his integrity and his determination that things which were wrong in the world should be put right.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, coldly.

  A supercilious Gus Wetherby looked down from where he stood on the terrace steps. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I’d like you to sit down so that we can talk. This is official business, not a social cup of tea.’

  Gus stuck his hands deep into the pockets of his white cricket flannels and looked down his nose at the policeman.

  ‘This is my house,’ he drawled, ‘I’ll do what I like.’

  Topham’s instinct was to get up and shout in Wetherby’s face. He knew the words to cower supercilious brats, had learned them on the parade ground, but his police training taught him that bellowing at suspects does not always bring the most useful result.

  ‘Then I shall stand,’ he said, and did so, very slowly. He was a good head and shoulders taller, and the two men eyed each other warily – the younger, believing himself to be of officer class, attempting to pull rank. The other, with the law on his side, impervious to this innate snobbery, was nettled by it all the same.

  ‘Oh, stop behaving like dogs waiting to attack each other,’ said Pernilla crossly. ‘Come and sit down, both of you!’

  Reluctantly, they obliged. Topham picked up his notebook, more for show than anything else, and started his questioning.

  ‘You disliked your stepfather and you plotted against him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were to benefit by his death on two counts – one, because you could distance yourself from his invention, while the publicity caused by his death after all that press criticism would bring the spotlight favourably on to your Youthenator. Two, because you were the ultimate beneficiary of his very considerable estate.

  ‘There’s the motive,’ said Topham emphatically, ‘plain and simple. And then you had the means so readily to hand – you knew the inner workings of the Rejuvenator, you knew how to alter the rheostat so that when it switched on it would spark a fatal electric charge.’

  ‘Complete rubbish,’ said Gus easily, crossing his legs and reaching for a table lighter.

  ‘You had the opportunity,’ Topham soldiered on, ‘you were in the house when there were a lot of other people milling around. There was Mr Rhys from the local paper having a row with your stepfather, there was Mrs Larsson popping her head round the door, there was the manservant Lamb fussing about the place – plenty of time to get into the study and alter the machine.’

  ‘You’re talking through your hat, Inspector. I wasn’t even there.’

  ‘Motive, means and opportunity. Of all the people who might wish to see an end to your stepfather’s life, name me one other who …’

  Gus Wetherby smiled. ‘Lamb. He’d been caught out selling stories about Ben to the newspapers, plus he’d been discovered putting something in Ben’s coffee.’

  He raised his hand and counted off his fingers. ‘Then there’s my mother. She and Ben weren’t getting on particularly well. This Daily Herald business – she challenged him, told him he must stop selling the Rejuvenator before it killed any more …’

  ‘GUS!’ shrieked Pernilla. ‘Are you trying to imply I killed Ben?’

  ‘Could have done,’ came the insouciant reply.

  ‘Gus, I am your mother!’

  ‘Married to a murderer, Mum. Maybe you felt he’d done enough and it was time to stop him. You knew as well as I did how that Rejuvenator worked. How difficult would it be for you to recalibrate it? All done in a matter of moments.’

  Pernilla Larsson burst into tears. They washed down her face, irrigating its perfect make-up, but her son remained unmoved by the sight. ‘You helped me,’ he went on ruthlessly, ‘and if there was a plot, you were part of it – you’d told me you couldn’t bear to hear any more about the Rejuvenator deaths, you wanted my Youthenator to take over and save the family reputation. You colluded in putting sedatives in his coffee to give me the breathing space to be able to perfect the Youthenator. And then you said you’d take Ben off to Argentina so I had a clear field to issue a statement which would say the Rejuvenator had been withdrawn, and a new and radically better model was taking its place.’

  Wetherby seemed settled and in his element. ‘You knew Ben wouldn’t buy that. You knew he had to be stopped somehow. And, Mum, you’re soft on your one-and-only Gus, aren’t you? You’d do anything for him, now wouldn’t you, darling?’

  Mrs Larsson was beside herself. ‘After all I’ve done for you,’ she sobbed. ‘Protecting you from your stepfather, giving you money when he wouldn’t. Getting you into the family business so that you could eventually take over. And then … and then … you say I killed Ben! He may not have been particularly kind to you, but then why should he? You were never particularly kind to him, were you?’

  She dabbed at her tears with a flimsy handkerchief. ‘He was lovely to me, kindness always. I adored your stepfather, I looked up to him. If I encouraged you with your invention it was because I wanted to save his reputation before it was shattered by those animals in Fleet Street.’

  She turned to Topham, eyes wide. ‘There was no plot, Inspector. Just a wife who wanted to protect her husband. And,’ she added bitterly, ‘a son who, it turns out, hated his stepfather far more than his mother had cause to know or understand.’

  Topham looked at them both. Experience told him that, left to their own devices, those closest to the seat of a crime will often squabble among themselves to the point where a shaft of light emerges, pointing directly at the true culprit. He felt they were reaching that important moment.

  He turned to Wetherby, who looked not the slightest bit unsettled by his mother’s outburst.

  ‘We seem to have run through the suspects,’ Topham said slowly, ‘and despite what you say you’re still the one who …’

  ‘All right, all right!’ snapped Wetherby. ‘If we’re getting serious about this, what about that man Rudyard Rhys? You know perfectly well he had a violent row with my stepfather just before his death.’

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Would have forgotten where he’d parked the fly-swatter.’

  ‘Lamb.’

  ‘Too drunk to think in a straight line.’

  ‘That Lazarus lot.’

  ‘Oh, come ON!’ barked Topham. ‘That’s enough of this silly nonsense. I’ve been patient long enough! This is a very grave matter, and I have the responsibility of finding and arresting the person who murdered Bengt Larsson. I’ve given you every opportunity to clear yourself, but – really – the circumstantial evidence points to one person, and one person only.

  ‘As a result,’ he said, standing up, ‘Augustus Wetherby, I am arresting you for the murder of Bengt Larsson. Anything you say will be …’

  ‘Just a minute, just a minute,’ said Gus, lolling back on the sofa cushions, eyes flicking. ‘You failed to ask me one very important question, Inspector.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Topham suspiciously.

  ‘Where was I at the moment my stepfather died? Where … was … I?’

  Topham waited impatiently. ‘Well?’ he barked.

  ‘I wasn’t here, Inspector, I wasn’t here,’ crowed Wetherby, ‘and what’s more, I can prove it!’

  The seagulls were gossiping on the roof, no doubt exchanging vital information about where the best day’s fishing was to be had or, more likely, who’d left their dustbin lid off down the street. Out in the kitchen, Valentine was wrestling with the rudiments of supper while his chief reporter wandered about with a gin and tonic in hand.

  ‘So how did you come by this place, Valentine?’

  ‘I told you, relation of mine.’

  ‘As yes, the Waterfords. Large family.’
/>
  ‘Just so. Erm, look, you couldn’t help me with this casserole, Judy? I don’t quite seem to have got the hang …’

  Miss Dimont smiled serenely at her junior. ‘Just carry on, Valentine, I’m sure it’ll be delicious.’ She had no intention of sharing the blame for the culinary disaster which lay ahead.

  ‘It’s just not my line of country. In the Army they did the cooking for you.’

  ‘Then what you need is lots more practice.’

  She continued her inspection of the cottage; it was clear that Valentine’s idea of making it into a home was to stuff the mantelpiece with photographs and a surprisingly large number of engraved invitation cards, but little more.

  ‘You seem to be enormously popular.’

  There was a muffled noise coming from the kitchen. He put his head round the door, blond hair in disarray. ‘The invitations? Mostly from people I don’t know, I think it’s because they like writing my title.’ Indeed, the heavy pieces of pasteboard summoning him to drinks and dances and dinners all carried his full due: ‘Sir Valentine Waterford, Bart.’ as if he were some ancient tweed-suited grandee instead of an ill-clad junior reporter making a dog’s breakfast of a supper in the cramped kitchen of a borrowed cottage.

  ‘Most impressive,’ said Judy, though he couldn’t be sure she meant it. ‘And these photographs? This is your mother?’ An elegant fowl with diamonds aplenty stared out of the picture with a chilly expression on her beautiful face.

  Valentine had obviously given up the struggle in the kitchen and came to join her with a glass in his hand. ‘Merely a reminder,’ he said distantly, ‘I haven’t seen her for years.’

  ‘And this?’ A not dissimilar face, wreathed in smiles, animated and interested.

  ‘My Aunt Baxter. She brought me up.’

  ‘And this?’ A crenellated edifice looking as though its better days had been many centuries ago.

  ‘Lovelocke. The old place. We don’t own it any more – it went at about the same time as my short trousers did.’