Died and Gone to Devon

by TP Fielden

  ‘’Ello, Sherlock!’

  ‘Found your way back from the North Pole, Terry? Dog-sled drawn by the hounds of the Baskervilles?’

  Shopping done, the newsroom had filled up again just ahead of opening time. Most would be taking their Christmas cheer with them down to the Fortescue Arms, and Betty promised she’d come to join them as soon as she’d got the Con Club drinks party out of the way.

  ‘Don’t wear that if you’re coming with me,’ she sniped at Terry. ‘It looks daft.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d just been where I’ve been,’ snipped the snapper. ‘Three-foot drifts. Had to leave Judy behind – she’s snowed in.’

  Betty was unimpressed. She rarely left Temple Regis, whose Riviera climate seldom permitted snow to fall on its rooftops; indeed it would be fair to say she never willingly exposed herself to the wilder elements – a tropical umbrella in her cocktail was more her idea of wet-weather gear.

  ‘Bet she could have got back if she wanted,’ she sniffed, cross at having to deputise for Judy. ‘Come on!’

  They walked over to the Con Club in silence. Terry was marvelling at the new lens he’d bought for his Leica, which promised to do some amazing things with snowflakes – he couldn’t wait to get into the darkroom to see how well it’d done. Betty meanwhile was thinking about Graham Platt, who’d chucked her last week, saying he was thinking of taking holy orders.

  Holy orders! If the bishop only knew what Graham…

  ‘Let’s make this snappy,’ said Terry. With Betty on a job, it was he who issued the orders; with Miss Dimont things were a bit different. ‘Friday Night Is Music Night’s on the wireless.’

  ‘Not half,’ she agreed, ‘fifteen minutes, tops. Then home for your programme.’

  She knew Terry had a tin ear and couldn’t even whistle the national anthem in tune, so obviously there was a girl waiting. You knew very little about Terry’s private life – altogether a Mystery, as Betty labelled them when they didn’t make a pass.

  ‘Got a date, Ter?’

  ‘Over there,’ he rapped, heading through the crowd to where the sitting Member of Parliament for Temple Regis was, indeed, sitting.

  Around Sir Frederick Hungerford were gathered the simple and the sycophantic of his party workers; everyone else with any sense had herded round the bar. A small but polite audience, they sat with vacant looks on their faces as the parliamentarian recalled a wartime exploit by which he’d single-handedly cut short the conflict by at least five years.

  The old boy was looking tired, but then who could blame him? There’d been the lengthy business of being introduced to a lot of people he didn’t know because his visits to the constituency were so severely rationed, and the tiresome ritual of shaking everybody’s hand. Despite this, he put on a good show – well-practised in the art of flattery, he would repeat their names as if drinking in their identity, and then offer a whispered word. They went away on Cloud Nine.

  ‘Don’t think we’ve seen you here since last year,’ challenged Betty; she voted Labour when she could be bothered. ‘Of course, under your government, rail fares have increased so much people can’t afford to travel down to Temple Regis like they used to. I expect you have the same difficulty – affording it, I mean.’

  ‘Come over here and sit down,’ smarmed Sir Frederick, ‘I do like a woman with an independent mind.’ He reached out and tickled her knee. ‘Featherstone, you say? Related to the Featherstonehaughs of Arundel, by any chance?’ He knew how to patronise a person all right – he could tell by her shoes that Betty had gone to the local secondary.

  ‘How does it feel to be giving your last party?’ riposted Betty, notebook flapping and eyes blazing. ‘And don’t do that, Sir Frederick. If you don’t mind.’

  The old boy settled back and eyed her with amusement.

  ‘Must be a relief to be retiring,’ went on Betty. ‘So many calls on your time in London, so many people to see. You missed the annual fête back in the summer, I recall – they had to get Sam Brough to make the speech. You were very much missed.’

  Sir Frederick’s eyes were on Betty’s knees. ‘I think you must play tennis rather well,’ he smiled, as if this were a compliment.

  ‘Are you making the speech tonight? Or will it be Mrs Clifford? We’ve only got a moment,’ she said, nodding towards her photographer, ‘then we’re off on a real story.’

  This was unlike Betty – sharp, rude, insubordinate – maybe she was hoping there’d be a complaint and she wouldn’t have to cover politics any more. After all, they were still talking about what Judy Dimont said and did at the Annual Conservative Ball two years ago!

  ‘Clifford?’ pondered Sir Frederick. ‘That name seems familiar. Could swear I’ve heard it before somewhere.’

  Betty fell for it. ‘She’s your successor, Sir Frederick! You’re retiring, she’s the new candidate. A much-respected figure…’

  The MP’s gaze turned to scorn. It said, of course I know who the woman is, I’m not a complete idiot. But one does not, in the presence of an honourable Member who has served his community loyally, unflinchingly, tirelessly, for thirty years mention some pipsqueak piece of fluff who’s only been selected because she has nice curly hair and wears a skirt.

  FLASH! Terry got a nice one in, Sir Fred’s face a death-mask tinged with contempt. Of course the editor wouldn’t put it in the paper – no chance. But it would make a nice addition to the Thank Heavens! board, usually reserved for the photos of less attractive bridal couples (as in ‘Thank Heavens they found each other – nobody else would have them’).

  A pretty girl wandered by, heading for the bar. ‘Over here!’ ordered the MP. ‘Just the sort!’ The girl smiled vaguely but walked on.

  ‘Over here!’ he repeated, louder. ‘Sit down, put your arm round my shoulder, smile at the camera!’ The girl blushed timidly and tried to say something, but the MP was edging forward in his seat and sticking a fiendish grin on his face. ‘Want your picture in the paper, don’t you, sweetie?’ he said through his practised smile. ‘Look at the camera now. Young adoring party worker looks up to her hero Member!’

  His victim did not directly respond but said to Terry. ‘I… I… shouldn’t be here. Don’t put my picture in the paper, please!’

  ‘Why ever not!’ roared Sir Frederick.

  ‘I’m not one of your party workers,’ she said, getting up. ‘I work behind the bar. And I vote Liberal.’

  Unabashed, the old boy managed to get a tickle to the back of her knees before she scooted away.

  ‘We’ve got all we need,’ said Terry, who always maintained a cheerful demeanour no matter the circumstances – good photographers never sulk on duty.

  ‘Can’t stay for the speech,’ said Betty to Sir Freddy. ‘But I’ll write that our outgoing MP hasn’t a clue who his successor will be.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ replied Sir Frederick with confidence. ‘I’ve got your editor’s home number.’

  Good, thought Betty. No more politics for me, then.

  ‘So you see,’ Mrs Phipps was drawing on a Player’s Navy Cut and her quite astonishing memory, both at the same time, ‘Eglantine’s only ambition was to marry a moat.’

  Miss Dimont shook her head slightly, as if to clear it. They were sitting in the coffee room after breakfast, and her old friend’s endless flood of reminiscence gushed on like a mountain stream.

  ‘She had a thing about castles – there were one or two in her family, you know – and she thought the only way to show you’d married well was if, when you went home, you were surrounded by a moat. Preferably with a drawbridge to pull up.

  ‘So she did – marry a moat, that is. She collared Sir Jefrye Waterford, but little did she know that in the wink of an eye he’d lose the lot – too many wagers, too much crème de menthe. Too many popsies.’

  And were you one of those, thought Judy, and would that have been while he was married to Eglantine? She changed the subject.

  ‘You were going to tell me,
last night, your royal story.’

  ‘I wonder how that particular tale escaped,’ said Mrs Phipps, her eye travelling around the room to check if the drinks waiter was out of bed yet. ‘We got talking about other things, I suppose. You really are terribly good company, Judy, it’s such a pleasure to have the time to chat.’

  ‘Why don’t you call me Hugue, Geraldine? My close friends do.’

  ‘Hugue?’

  ‘Short for Huguette. I stopped using it at school because they used to call me Huge – I wasn’t! Well, just a little bit, and only then sometimes… Judy’s really a work name.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ asked Mrs Phipps. ‘We’ve known each other for years.’

  Because most of the time we’re talking about you, and there never seems to be the opportunity, Miss Dimont thought, but not unkindly. Mrs Phipps’ stories were worth a guinea a minute and anyway, she was an actress – and who else do actresses talk about but themselves?

  ‘I like it,’ opined Mrs Phipps. ‘French, of course.’

  ‘Actually Belgian. My father was a diamond merchant in Antwerp, though my mother’s English. I grew up there until I was four but what with the war… we moved to England when my father was imprisoned by the Germans.’

  ‘Did he escape?’

  ‘No, he couldn’t. He was treated very badly and was never quite the same again. I did a year or two at university but then I took over a lot of the business from him – travelling around Europe, buying and selling. The diamond business is like a club for men – they think you know nothing. As a result I was quite successful.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Mrs Phipps. ‘Then you must be quite well off.’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Dimont, reflecting. ‘There’s a nice house in the Essex marshes, and we still have a tiny home in Ellezelles – that’s where we come from – but I’m very happy down here.’ And a million miles away from my overbearing mother, she thought with relief.

  ‘So you…?’

  ‘Let’s talk about you. You were going to tell me a royal story.’

  ‘It’s rather a long one.’

  ‘That’s all right, it’s my Saturday off. I’ll get the bus back to Temple Regis after lunch, if the snow allows. What’s it all about?’

  A petite breakfast waitress was clearing away the coffee things, and Mrs Phipps fixed her with a commanding gaze, borrowed from when she played Lady Bracknell in, oh, 1934, was it? The Adelphi. And wonderful reviews, naturally…

  ‘Would you kindly bring me a large Plymouth gin?’ she said. It didn’t sound like a request. The girl blinked, looked at the clock over the mantelpiece and the lifting morning light through the window, then bobbed and moved away.

  Just look at her, thought Miss Dimont. She’s eighty but her eyes are clear, her voice is strong, she carries herself in a commanding manner, and she oozes charm. What an extraordinary woman!

  ‘I was too tall for the Prince of Wales,’ began Mrs Phipps. ‘He could be quite charming but he was such a pipsqueak. And he bleated if he didn’t get his way – very unattractive in a man, don’t you know.

  ‘We were at the Embassy Club – it’s where we all used to go, everyone knew everyone, of course. And I could see he’d been eyeing me up. His popsy at the time was Thelma Furness, though she wasn’t there that night.

  ‘He sent someone over to ask me to dance, which really is not the way to go about things, but he was the future king so I suppose he could please himself. We both got up and moved towards the dance floor but the moment we met, you could tell it would be a humiliation for him – I was nearly a foot taller, or so it seemed. We managed to scrape around the floor but he was very unhappy – never liked people showing up how short he was.’

  ‘Did you lead, or did he?’ asked Miss Dimont mischievously.

  ‘Ha! Ha! I will say this, he had the grace to ask me back to his table and that’s when it all began.’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘Well, there was a group there, possibly ten, can’t remember them all but Prince George was there – you know, the Duke of Kent, the one killed in the war – and he had some American girl in tow. There was Diana Cooper and her husband, as well as Lord Dudley, Lord Sefton, a few others and this girl Pansy Westerham.’

  Mrs Phipps looked around the room but so far there was no sign of the gin. She plunged on.

  ‘Pansy and I hit it off immediately – she raised one eyebrow as if to say, who’s your short friend? We both started laughing and that was it. She was wonderful company, didn’t care a hoot about anybody or anything – big blue eyes, wonderful figure, and funny as all get-out. We had lunch the next day and we were best friends from the word go.

  ‘She was having a fling with one of the men at that table but wouldn’t say who – she said it was complicated. But she told me everything else, I even knew his inside-leg measurement, dear!

  ‘After we’d known each other a few weeks she confessed there was someone else – someone she didn’t even like but was drawn to, fascinated by – he sounded quite nasty, actually. We’d meet most nights at the Embassy and she’d tell me little bits and pieces but actually, darling, I was only half listening – that nightclub was the most dazzling place on earth. Everybody who was anybody was there, and slap bang in the middle of it all were the Prince of Wales and Prince George and their côterie. Your eyes were out on stalks and of course, you were on the qui vive – I was between husbands at the time and you never knew who might come over and ask you to dance.’

  ‘Apart from the Prince of Wales.’

  ‘Ha! We never danced again – but I did have a go with Prince George – a lovely dancer and very manly with it. But he knew it, my dear, always a bit of a put-off.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘No, not always.’

  There was a pause as they pursued their separate, pleasurable thoughts.

  ‘So,’ said Miss Dimont after a moment or two, ‘was it Pansy you wanted to talk to me about?’

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ said Mrs Phipps, beaming as the waitress slid into view with a glass on a silver salver. ‘Won’t you have one?’ The question was rhetorical.

  ‘After a bit Pansy got very down. It was man-trouble all right, you can always tell, but she didn’t want to discuss it. She just looked very strained and talked about the weather, that sort of thing.

  ‘Then one day she wasn’t there – pouf! Disappeared like I don’t know what. She had a little house off Knightsbridge, and I called round a couple of times but there was never an answer. I telephoned, left messages, but nothing.

  ‘I wondered if she’d run away with her bad man, but gossip soon got around our circle and nobody that we knew had left their wife, or absconded, done a bunk, so we were up a gumtree.’

  ‘I think I know what’s coming,’ said Miss Dimont, leaning forward with interest.

  ‘I expect you do, dear, what with your background in sleuthing. Anyway, they found her a fortnight later – dead in the street. She’d fallen from the top of her house – just behind Harrods, you know – and it was all very distressing. It turned out she had a husband who loved her dearly, she never told me about him, who lived in Paris. And there was a child she never mentioned either.’

  ‘Sounds like you never knew her after all.’

  ‘You’re right, of course. Later I discovered she developed pashes on people but after a bit got bored and moved on. When I thought about it afterwards, I realised she must have been running away in her mind from something – the abandoned husband and child, I suppose. And what she wanted to do was to live inside other people’s worlds. She wanted to open the door and take refuge in your house, as it were. She was delightful company, adorable, but all it covered up was unhappiness.’

  ‘You think she killed herself?’

  ‘Well, people took quite a lot of drugs back then – not like today, dear.’ Mrs Phipps looked ruminatively into her gin glass. ‘Morphine and cocaine and so on. Quite a lot of people killed themselves back
then – but no.

  ‘No, that’s why I wanted to talk to you about her, Huguette – shall I call you that? I think she was murdered, and something inside me – even thirty years later – wants to find out what exactly happened.’

  There were tears in her eyes. ‘Will you help me? Do you think you could get to the bottom of it? Find out the truth?’

  ‘Geraldine, think about it – how could I find anything out after all these years? There’s been a world war, an atom bomb, who knows what.’

  ‘But my dear, you’re so clever! All those things you’ve seen and done!’

  Judy Dimont got up. ‘After all this time?’ she repeated, gathering up her raffia bag. ‘Geraldine, I would love to, but there’s not a chance. Too much water under the bridge.’

  The old woman looked forlornly into her gin.

  ‘But now you’ve told me, I won’t be able to think about anything else.’

  Four

  Monday morning was always unnerving at the Riviera Express. The weekend had gone by in a flash, and now there were only four days left to press day. An ancient accounts book, importantly renamed ‘the diary’, sat on a rickety table outside the editor’s office and its entries were a strong indicator of the excitements ahead for the newspaper’s readers on Friday.

  MONDAY Townswomen’s Guild rededication

  TR rent Tribunal

  Bell-ringers’ AGM, St Margaret’s

  TUESDAY Mag Court

  Highways Committee

  Rural District Council

  WEDNESDAY

  THURSDAY Mag Court

  Mothers Union jumble sale Lifeboat lift-out

  The blank space against Wednesday was not unusual – it was early closing day and probably for that reason alone the world came to a halt in Temple Regis. Maybe it was the day people stayed at home for Ray’s A Laugh on the wireless, but whatever the reason, it was unnerving to see how little news there was to harvest in the coming days – hence the nervous 11 a.m. weekly assembly over which the editor, Rudyard Rhys, grumpily presided.