by TP Fielden
‘I wonder how he’ll feel about them when he learns you ramped their records into the charts.’
‘Who told you this?’ Gavin had gone quite white, and rose from his desk. It was only then that he noticed Auriol sitting quietly by the door.
‘Valentine Whatsit, as you call him, had a chat with Mr Boots after he talked to you yesterday.’
‘McGuigan?’
‘The very one. You were a little too generous in the way you boasted of your manipulative skills to the boys. Whatever you think of them, they’re not complete idiots.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong. Who other than a complete idiot would agree to live in the back of a van for a whole summer? Do their hearing permanent damage by standing next to those deafening amplifiers? Injure their health, probably permanently, with all those pills they take? All so they can be screamed at by a bunch of schoolgirls?’
‘I see you have their interests very much at heart,’ said Auriol sarcastically.
‘They’d be nothing without me – nothing!’
‘Where did you get the money to pay off those people? To get the records to the top of the hit parade?’ asked Judy.
‘I didn’t, I keep telling you.’
‘Five thousand pounds, I think it was. If I am right you are not rich. Where did it come from?’
The young man looked baffled and frightened at the same time. He reached into a crate on the floor and brought out a beer bottle which he proceeded to wrench open with his bare hands.
‘Let me put it like this,’ said Judy. ‘You and Gus Wetherby were at school together, were you not?’
‘What of it?
‘Harrow?’
‘That doesn’t mean …’
‘I spent a long time talking to Pernilla Larsson, Gus’s mother, the other day. She told me Gus had asked her many weeks ago for a loan of £5,000. She assumed it had something to do with his new invention and handed it over. But that money never went into the Youthenator – after Gus was arrested, she had a look through his papers and saw that when it came into his account it went straight out again. And you, Mr Armstrong, were the beneficiary.’
She went on: ‘When Valentine Whatsit talked to Mr Boots yesterday, he told him you’d boasted about buying the boys their place in the hit parade. You said that was why they couldn’t have any money and had to live in a van – you’d bought them their fame, but at a high price, and they had to earn it out. One more hit record, you kept saying to them, and they’d be in clover.’
‘McGuigan’s lying. He was about to be fired from the band.’
‘Really? Your biggest draw? The one all the girls swoon over? Why would you get rid of him, Mr Armstrong? Because he’d proposed marriage to Faye Addams? Because a married member of the band would destroy its allure in the eyes of the fans? Is that why he was about to be fired?’
‘I warned him, I warned them all.’ Gavin’s eyes were flicking from side to side.
‘I’ll tell you what I think happened. You struck a deal with Gus Wetherby that in return for that loan to buy your way into the hit parade, you’d let your newly famous teen stars endorse his Youthenator. All the fans would want to buy an exciting new piece of machinery which they thought would give them a thrill and at the same time keep them young for ever.’
‘You’re wrong. You …’
‘The whole plan came unstuck when Ben Larsson found out Gus was plotting against him and threw him out of the house. Suddenly, he had no money and, just as important, he didn’t have access to the workshop. He was high and dry.
‘That’s when Gus suggested you kill his stepfather, wasn’t it? The publicity of his death, particularly in the way he devised it – being killed by his own machine – would draw attention to Gus and his new invention. Your musicians would still endorse it, according to the original plan, and everything would go on as before.
‘You’d bamboozled your grandmother Mrs Phipps into giving the band a summer season here at the Pavilion, and you made a fortune out of it – enough to pay back Gus, and to plan a future for yourself once the band lost their popular appeal. Am I right so far?’
‘I’m not sticking around here to listen to this complete madness. Where do you get these ideas? You’re crazy, both of you – just look at you, a couple of old spinsters with nothing better to do than make up fairy tales. Go out and get yourselves a man! That’d give you something to think about!’
‘Don’t think about leaving,’ said Auriol quietly and commandingly. ‘I telephoned Inspector Topham. He’s on his way.’
Miss Dimont was relieved to hear it.
‘You went up to the Retreat and, while Ben Larsson was having an argument with my editor, you slipped in to the room where Mr Larsson greeted those oddball guests he used to have, where the Rejuvenator lay on the table. You’d been told by Gavin he always gave a little talk and demonstration to those loopy visitors of his.’
‘No.’
‘Such are the depths of your cynicism, your plan was that old Larsson would pick up the Rejuvenator and fatally electrocute himself in front of the Lazarus League. At a stroke, you’d have killed Larsson, destroyed the League’s faith in him, placed the suspicion of murder on the League themselves, and allowed the Daily Herald to crow that finally Ben Larsson had got his just desserts.’
‘You’re just making this up. You …’
Miss Dimont dismissed his denial with a powerful sweep of her hand. ‘You got into the Retreat by pretending to be a member of the League and while Lamb was giving them a cup of tea you stole into the reception room and fixed the calibrator on Larsson’s machine. You’d be out of the building and back at the Pavilion before he was dead.
‘What you couldn’t know, but Lamb confirmed to me, is that sometimes Mr Larsson would test out the machine before he admitted his visitors to the room. On this occasion, that’s exactly what he did, and so he died alone. How furious you must be that your hideous plan went awry – you may have killed Mr Larsson, but you failed to throw suspicion on the Lazarus League. They never entered the room, as Lamb confirms.’
‘I was never there. I …’
‘You were there, Mr Armstrong. Your handsome Mr Boots was standing in the queue and you sent him away with a flea in his ear. If you’d been a bit cleverer, you could have pinned the murder on him when your first plan failed. As it was, your perfect alibi was blown. Meanwhile, Gus Wetherby had established his alibi by going into town and buying some aspirins from the chemist. You planned the murder between you, but it was you who committed it.’
Gavin gulped at his beer and said nothing.
‘And so we come to Faye Addams.’
‘Oh yeah, I suppose I’m to blame for that as well.’
‘You are, Mr Wetherby, you are,’ said Miss Dimont. ‘Your biggest worry was that the magic bubble created by Danny and The Urge would burst if it emerged that Boots McGuigan was engaged to be married. You could fire him, certainly, but the contagion was certain to spread anyway – if he’d secretly got himself hitched, what about all the other members of the band? Did they have secret wives and children? You could see the end was near even though with just a little adjustment, the loss of a single life, this particular golden goose could go on laying a few more golden eggs for a while yet.’
‘Rubbish. Complete rubbish!’
‘It might well be, but for one thing – the Larssons have a boathouse at the foot of the cliff, do they not? In it they keep the motor tender which used to take old Mr Larsson out to his big yacht in the estuary. My guess is that when you visited Gus in the school holidays, you both used to take it out to race round.
‘All such boats have a unique registration number, registered to the nearest port. Mr Larsson’s tender is TR536. And when you took the body of poor Faye Addams from wherever you killed her out to the beach at Todhempstead, you borrowed that tender and dumped her on the sand.
‘You hoped she’d be washed away by the incoming tide and that the current would sweep her round the headland so nobody would know
where she’d come from. If it hadn’t been for the eagle eye that morning of a very distinguished fishing captain—’ she allowed herself a private smile ‘—you probably would have got away with it. He didn’t recognise you, or your “sleeping” girlfriend, but he did recollect the number of the tender.’
Gavin Armstrong looked numb.
‘You killed them both,’ said Miss Dimont. ‘You did it for money, but I think you also did it because it gave you a thrill. You like manipulating people, you like manipulating situations. And you …’
The door opened.
‘OK,’ said Inspector Topham stolidly. ‘Stand back, please. I’ll take it over now.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
The newsroom was almost deserted. The paper had been put to bed and now only the diehards remained, gathered around Miss Dimont’s desk. Athene had put in a surprise appearance and was administering, not her special tea, but a divine summer cordial of mint and lemon.
‘Just for a change—’ she smiled as she handed glasses around ‘—so cool, so soothing.’
It had indeed been a hot day, and the sun still burned fiercely through the upper-storey windows. The musty smell of old copies of the paper lying on a sun-splashed shelf filled the room with an aroma which was reassuring though not altogether pleasant.
‘You’re so good, Athene,’ said Judy, looking up. ‘Always here when we need you. Always such a help.’
‘Not always, dear,’ said Athene.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I knew it was him. Gavin whatever his name is. When I stood on the beach that morning he took shape before my eyes – I just didn’t know who he was at the time. Now I’ve seen his photograph, of course … but even then I knew it was him.’
‘We might have been grateful for that insight a little earlier,’ said Auriol Hedley, with just a drop of acid.
‘Now, now,’ Judy warned, ‘the way Athene sees things is not the way the rest of us do. And you did help, darling, didn’t you, with the business about coming by boat?’
You could tell though that Athene was mortified by what Auriol had said. She didn’t answer but went away to refresh the cordial jug while Judy shot her friend a cautionary glance.
‘Who we really have to thank,’ she began, for her small audience was anxious to hear every detail of the story, ‘is dear Valentine.’
‘Shame he isn’t here,’ said Betty Featherstone comfortably, but you could tell she didn’t mean it, she was thrilled to be occupying her old desk.
‘I must say,’ said Judy in a not entirely friendly fashion, ‘you managed to get back quick-smart from Newton Abbot.’ Instead of the untroubled features of her blond-haired baronet, she would now have to put up with the sight of Betty applying nail polish to the runs in her stockings.
‘When duty calls,’ replied Betty airily. ‘Meanwhile, you’d better have this.’ She passed across the desk an unsealed envelope. ‘He left it in the drawer.’
‘Last will and testament,’ joked someone, but nobody laughed.
Truth to tell, they were all shocked by Valentine’s sudden disappearance.
‘He’ll be back, won’t he?’ asked Auriol.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Judy slowly, as if discovering the truth only as she spoke. ‘I think he got in that bubble car of his and decided to disappear out of our lives. I saw something in his eye just as he was leaving. He didn’t really want to look at me, just told me he’d left a note.’
‘Which brought the whole story together,’ said Auriol.
‘Yes. It did.’ The others were listening and she felt she owed them some explanation.
‘Valentine is a clever young man,’ she began. ‘He’s been here only a short time and seems to have learnt so much – I don’t mean about journalism, I mean about the real art of getting to the bottom of a story. When he went off to see Gavin Armstrong he had no idea he’d end up getting the key piece of information to both murders in a chance aside from that bass player, Boots McGuigan.’
‘Boots,’ said Athene, her ethereal voice lifting as she poured more cordial. ‘Such an unusual name! Conjuring up a lifetime of tramping up, up, up a long hard road, striving to reach the end of his journey, soldiering on to …’
‘The chemist,’ chimed Judy and Auriol in unison. Athene eyed them both uncomprehendingly, and then the penny dropped. She looked crestfallen.
‘Mr Boots told Valentine he’d gone up to Ransome’s Retreat to wreak some kind of revenge on Ben Larsson for the death of his mother. Gavin caught him up there when he should have been rehearsing with the rest of the band and sent him back down to the Pavilion with a flea in his ear. Gavin then slid into Ransome’s Retreat along with those Lazarus League lot – but Valentine rightly sensed there was something more to it than that.
‘Valentine’s note to me of that meeting put everything else into place – Gavin had said to Boots that he had been at school with Gus, and so assumed he was going up to the Retreat to see his old chum – they were supposed to be doing some deal on the Youthenator together.’
Athene had curled her legs round the office chair and was hugging her teacup. She loved these explanations, even if she couldn’t quite follow every detail.
‘But at the time Gus wasn’t up at the Retreat – he’d gone to town to the chemist to buy some aspirin. Made a bit of a fuss, not too much, about having severe headache – the perfect alibi.’
‘So how come Topham arrested him anyway?’ asked Peter Pomeroy.
‘It took time for Gus’s alibi to stand up. When Topham’s men went down the town to check it out they found the pharmacist had taken a few days off for a walking holiday. It was the devil’s own job to track him down and confirm it – but by then I’d pieced together the rest of the story, and Gavin’s connection to Gus was established beyond doubt.’
‘Astonishing,’ said Peter.
‘But we couldn’t have done it without Valentine. He recalled that Boots had told him the only way he could hang on to Faye was to propose marriage, but also that Gavin would stick at nothing to make sure the band’s bachelor status remained intact.’
‘Despicable, both of them,’ said Auriol. ‘But then that’s Harrow for you.’
‘Yes. Gus was arrogant, and thought he could do even better than his stepfather at bamboozling money out of a gullible public. But it’s Gavin who’s the evil one – when I mentioned Faye’s murder to him his attitude was, “what’s the fuss, she’s only a piece of fluff”. He seemed to enjoy the fact that I was shocked.’
‘So both of them are charged with murder?’ asked Peter Pomeroy.
‘They would have to be – doesn’t matter who did it. They both conspired to kill Larsson, even though it was only Gavin who killed Faye.’
‘How?’ It took Athene to ask the really important questions.
‘Gavin sent a telegram to Faye, though apparently from Boots, suggesting they meet in the boathouse at Ransome’s Retreat. That wouldn’t have struck her as unusual because they had to keep their engagement secret. Once she got there, he killed her with a heavy spanner. No question, he’s got the taste for killing.’
‘Just appalling,’ said Peter, shaking his head.
‘At least the veil of suspicion has been lifted from your revered editor,’ said Auriol, nodding towards the far end of the newsroom.
‘He’s such an idiot,’ said Judy. ‘Got himself into a complete tangle over nothing. Made himself into a murder suspect the moment we bumped into him up at the Retreat – all that obsessive secrecy and his pathological hatred of sharing confidences! Then he compounded it all by withholding Faye Addams’ identity when he should have told his reporters the moment he learnt her name.’
‘But what a decent sort he turns out to be!’ said Auriol. ‘And very interesting what Mrs Larsson had to say about her husband’s part in Operation Tailcoat – “Your Mr Rhys took the blame for those dead agents and has lived with the shame of it all these years – when all along he knew it was Larsson who lost those lives
, not him.”’
‘He knew, and the Admiral knew. That was enough for him.’
‘Ah, the Admiral,’ laughed Auriol. ‘That distant cousin of the well-connected Sir Waterford!’
‘Why did he resign?’ asked Betty, who was not altogether following the thread of this conversation, ‘…that sweet boy?’
‘Personal reasons,’ said Judy.
‘Care to share?’ said Auriol.
‘Tell you later.’
‘All the good ones leave,’ said John Ross, who’d strolled over from Curse Corner. ‘Too talented for this place.’
‘Valentine? That’s not what you said to him the other day.’
‘Aye, well.’
Betty was busy now inspecting her split ends. ‘What was in that envelope I gave you?’
‘Valentine’s obituary,’ said Judy sombrely.
‘Aye,’ said John Ross, nodding appreciatively. ‘His first assignment. Any good?’
‘Read it if you want,’ said Judy, and took off her glasses. Athene shot her a glance and saw her friend was close to tears.
‘The death has occurred of Valentine Ford, junior reporter on the Riviera Express,’ he read. ‘He was twenty-three. After National Service in the Army he joined the Express in June this year and …’
Athene stood very still, the cordial jug poised in her hand. Her face had gone white and the jug trembled slightly. Whatever it was she had seen, and it was clear she’d seen something, Miss Dimont did not want to hear it.
‘Come on, Auriol, let’s go,’ she said very quietly. ‘And quick about it.’
*
The stillness and calm which greeted the two women as they walked into the Chinese Singing Teacher made Miss Dimont feel stronger. Mr So greeted them gravely and bowed them to a table.
‘I never knew about this place,’ said Auriol. ‘How strange it is!’
‘It was Athene who introduced me,’ said Judy, ‘and at times of stress and upset it is the best place in Temple Regis to be. Your own establishment notwithstanding,’ she added hastily.
Auriol peered round her but seemed unimpressed. It was not a place that suited everybody.