Died and Gone to Devon

by TP Fielden

  ‘You said.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t work. I did my best to implicate him but I failed. But I did succeed in what I set out to do – I killed the man who killed my mother. There’s a price to pay for that, I suppose.

  ‘But,’ he added, ‘since I got hold of Sirraway’s dossier I’ve gathered even more evidence about Hungerford fleecing innocent people, and I know the judge will take that into account when we get to the end of the trial. Really, Judy, I’ve amassed hundreds of documents, you’d be amazed!’

  His eyes were twitching from side to side. ‘She may have made the latter part of my childhood wretched,’ he went on. ‘She may have broken my heart by abandoning me. But my mother was a wonderful woman, unique – and nobody had the right to do what they did to her. Nobody!’

  ‘I’m going to go and call Inspector Topham, David,’ said Judy gently. ‘Terry will stay with you, won’t you, Terry? And Lovely Mary.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Renishaw in an exhausted voice. ‘I think I’ll just go and lie down.’

  Miss Dimont stole out into the hall and picked up the phone.

  ‘Inspector Topham? If you come quickly, you can beat Interpol at their own game!’

  Twenty-Eight

  ‘So you see,’ said Judy, ‘if Hamish Madden’s trial goes ahead first, it’ll help David Renishaw no end. Just think – a long-standing Member of Parliament ordering the murder of his successor! Plus he was an embezzler, a fraud, a thief! Just think of the waves of sympathy that’ll come wafting David’s way!’

  ‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ said Terry grimly, ‘the man’s still a murderer.’ He hadn’t got over the reporter’s disgraceful behaviour at the Con Club – in Terry’s book, damaging the good name of the Riviera Express was a far graver crime than topping Freddy Hungerford.

  Not everyone shared his bleak view. Athene was making her special this morning, and her aura was positively golden. ‘I have the feeling,’ she said dreamily, making circles in the air with her hands, ‘they’ll treat him leniently. Once they see what a positive avalanche of troubles his stars lined up for him.’

  They’d all gathered in the editor’s office, though the great eminence himself was absent; he’d gone off somewhere, probably to get his bad temper trimmed.

  ‘Is there any gin?’ croaked Mrs Phipps, who’d been invited in to celebrate but was never terribly keen on a plain cup of tea.

  ‘No,’ said Judy, ‘but I think I can find some whisky, will that do?’ She made in the direction of John Ross’s desk – he’d never open that bottle again – and returned triumphant. Mrs Phipps poured a hefty belt into her teacup.

  Auriol, sitting close by, lifted an eyebrow and turned away.

  ‘Go on, then,’ urged Peter Pomeroy. ‘The best bits are always the ones that don’t get into print.’

  ‘I hardly know how to say this,’ said Judy, abashed. ‘But I was sitting on the evidence all the time.’

  ‘What?’ said Auriol, shocked. ‘And you let these things happen? Judy! I can’t believe it of you!’

  ‘There’s nothing I could have done. It’s just that when Mirabel Clifford handed me that folder of Sirraway’s, I didn’t read it thoroughly – I was looking for recent events, not something that had happened pre-war. So there, inside, was a full report on Hungerford’s relationship with Pansy Westerham, and it passed me by.

  ‘When it comes to the murders, Sirraway had done a magnificent research job on our MP, but he wasn’t blessed with second sight – he couldn’t foretell that Hungerford was going to have his rival killed. Or that David would kill him. Nobody could.’

  Except Athene, thought Auriol starchily. Isn’t that her job, what she’s paid to do by the Express?

  ‘If I’d read Sirraway’s report, maybe something would have come to me – maybe I could have worked out the link between Pansy and David, but still I wouldn’t have been able to see he intended to kill Hungerford.’

  ‘Well, I think you did a magnificent job,’ said Mrs Phipps, approvingly. ‘Even if you aren’t able to say whether Freddy Hungerford killed Pansy.’

  ‘Oh, I think he did, no question. I telephoned Bobbety Thurloe last night to let him know about Pansy – he made me promise – and he told me something he’d learned from his cousin. Apparently, it was well known by some – though obviously not Bobbety – that in her last weeks alive, Pansy had become something of a nuisance. She threatened to go to the newspapers if Freddy Hungerford didn’t pay her back some of her money.

  ‘A nuisance – I think we all know what that means when it comes to Sir Frederick.’

  ‘Oh, Judy,’ cooed Athene, ‘you’re so brilliant!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Judy. ‘Everybody had a hand in this one. It’s our joint success.’

  But the laurel leaves were all hers this morning. ‘Dashed good show,’ wheezed Ray Bennett, the bow-tied arts editor, who wouldn’t know a crime story if it came and cracked him over the head.

  ‘Will David be allowed visitors in prison? A hot water bottle? Time alone with those who wish to comfort him?’ said Betty, who would do anything for a lame dog. ‘Oh, congrats, by the way.’

  ‘Don’t let this success run away with your expenses claims,’ warned Rhys, putting his head round the door. ‘I’ll be keeping a close eye.’

  Judy was pleased with her victory, if surprised that so far there’d been no word from Inspector Topham, to whom she’d handed not one but two murderers on a plate. On the other hand, the paperwork involved, and the meddlesome interference of Interpol, make a copper far busier than when he’s merely hunting down killers.

  Mrs Phipps, who found she liked the taste of whisky more than she realised, helped herself to more. She was especially pleased that her ancient cobwebbed mystery had played such an important part in the whole drama.

  ‘When I look back on those days… the fun we had,’ she sighed.

  ‘Can’t have been much fun for Pansy Westerham. Married to a bad ’un, intrigued by another. Abandoned her child, her money all gone. Her house taken away from her,’ reminded Auriol. ‘And then…’

  ‘My dear, all of that is true. But think of the excitement we’ve had – almost as thrilling as being back on the stage! You are a bit of a genius, Judy! And I talked to Bobbety, too – he says come for dinner and stay the night. White tie and tiaras!’

  ‘Just tell me this,’ said Terry. ‘Because I didn’t like that Renishaw, I’ll be frank. I see what his problem was, but what I can’t understand is why he attacked that man Sirraway so viciously. Why he tried to set him up.’

  ‘I think he’d gone a bit mad by that stage,’ said Judy. ‘We thought Sirraway was mad when he was sane. We thought David was sane when clearly he wasn’t.

  ‘There’s no excuse for what he did to a perfectly innocent man. But he knew Interpol was closing in, and he only had a very short time to achieve what he’d set out to do. When you went up to Hatherleigh that first time, Terry, he suddenly saw he could paint Sirraway as a likely murder suspect because the man behaved so oddly.

  ‘By the time he tackled him at the hustings, shouting he’d got a knife, he’d got the plan clear in his mind. He saw Sirraway as his means of escape – Sirraway would get arrested and he could make his getaway.’

  ‘Well, like I said, I don’t like him. I’m glad Mr Rhys fired him.’

  ‘Oh no, Terry, don’t you see? He made the editor fire him! By that stage he’d decided he would lead Interpol a merry dance – I like living dangerously he told me – and he wanted to get back to Canada to his daughter. So he engineered a row – a row he would lose – with Mr Rhys. So Rhys fires him, and David has a legitimate excuse to leave town.’

  ‘Ur,’ said Terry. He hadn’t seen that one. It made him grumpy.

  ‘Anyway, Terry, if anyone’s the star of this show, it’s you. Your gut instinct told you that Renishaw had gone back to Lovely Mary’s and we got there just at the right moment. I didn’t like the look of that gun.’

  ‘It was
loaded all right, five rounds.’

  ‘You never told me that! He has mood swings, you can see that. The only place he felt safe was with Lovely Mary, but I worried about the way he was looking at her when we walked in the room. Not in control. And the way you took the gun away from him, faultless. So brave.’

  Terry slurped his tea.

  ‘The people that come to work here, how strange they can be,’ said Athene, not realising she was perhaps the strangest of them all. ‘I’m thinking of David, but all the others too – I wonder where they all are now?’

  Perhaps she was thinking of Valentine Waterford, the lovely young reporter who got in his bubble car one day and drove off over the horizon. But there had been so many, using the Express as their staging post or springboard – some remembered for years to come, others forgotten instantly.

  ‘Wherever they are, they’re not in a better place than here,’ said loyal Peter Pomeroy, who’d been on the paper since the Dark Ages.

  ‘I wonder, though,’ said Judy. ‘Aren’t the best journalists the gypsies among us, the ones with a pebble in their shoe, the ones who always have to move on?’ Maybe she was thinking of Valentine too.

  ‘Don’t start that,’ advised Auriol. ‘The next thing we’ll hear is that you’re packing it in – rolling up your tent, moving on.’

  ‘Maybe one day soon. I sat in the garden last night with the church bells tolling and the blackbirds singing and asked myself whether there wasn’t something else I should be doing. Another newspaper, a fresh start. We all need a change in life. What should I do next?

  ‘And then I realised what it was.

  ‘I have to find out who killed Miss Greenway.’

  THE END

  (for now…)

  If you enjoyed this Miss Dimont mystery, then read on for an extract from her first adventure, The Riviera Express…

  One

  When Miss Dimont smiled, which she did a lot, she was beautiful. There was something mystical about the arrangement of her face-furniture – the grey eyes, the broad forehead, the thin lips wide spread, her dainty perfect teeth. In that smile was a joie de vivre which encouraged people to believe that good must be just around the corner.

  But there were two faces to Miss Dimont. When hunched over her typewriter, rattling out the latest episode of life in Temple Regis, she seemed not so sunny. Her corkscrew hair fell out of its makeshift pinnings, her glasses slipped down the convex nose, those self-same lips pinched themselves into a tight little knot and a general air of mild chaos and discontent emanated like puffs of smoke from her desk.

  Life on the Riviera Express was no party. The newspaper’s offices, situated at the bottom of the hill next door to the brewery, maintained their dreary pre-war combination of uprightness and formality. The front hall, the only area of access permitted to townsfolk, spoke with its oak panelling and heavy desks of decorum, gentility, continuity.

  But the most momentous events in Temple Regis in 1958 – its births, marriages and deaths, its council ordinances, its police court and its occasional encounters with celebrity – were channelled through a less august set of rooms, inadequately lit and peopled by journalism’s flotsam and jetsam, up a back corridor and far from the public gaze.

  Lately there’d been a number of black-and-white ‘B’ features at the Picturedrome, but these always portrayed the heady excitements of Fleet Street. Behind the green baize door, beyond the stout oak panelling, the making of this particular local journal was decidedly less ritzy.

  Far from Miss Dimont lifting an ivory telephone to her ear while partaking of a genteel breakfast in her silk-sheeted bed, the real-life reporter started her day with an apple and ‘The Calls’ – humdrum visits to Temple’s police station, its council offices, fire station, and sundry other sources of bread-and-butter material whose everyday occurrences would, next Friday, fill the heart of the Express.

  Like a laden beachcomber she would return mid-morning to her desk to write up her gleanings before leaving for the Magistrates’ Court, where the bulk of her work, from that bottomless well of human misdeeds and misfortunes, daily bubbled up.

  After luncheon, usually taken alone with her crossword in the Signal Box Café, she would return briefly to court before preparing for an evening meeting of the Town Council, the Townswomen’s Guild, or – light relief – a performance by the Temple Regis Amateur Operatic Society.

  Then it would be home on her moped, corkscrew hair blowing in the wind, to Mulligatawny, whose sleek head would be staring out of the mullioned window awaiting his supper and her pithy account of the day’s events.

  Miss Dimont, now unaccountably beyond the age of forty, had the fastest shorthand note in the West Country. In addition, she could charm the birds out of the trees when she chose – her capacity to get people to talk about themselves, it was said, could make even the dead speak. She was shy but she was shrewd; and if perhaps she was comfortably proportioned she was, everyone agreed, quite lovely.

  Why Betty Featherstone, her so-called friend, got the front-page stories and Miss Dimont did not was lost in the mists of time. Suffice to say that on press day, when everyone’s temper shortened, it was Judy who got it in the neck from her editor. Betty wrote what he wanted, while Judy wrote the truth – and it did not always make comfortable reading. She didn’t mind the fusillades aimed in her direction for having overturned a civic reputation or two, for ever since she had known him, and it had been a long time, Rudyard Rhys had lacked consistency. Furthermore, his ancient socks smelt. Miss Dimont rose above.

  Unquestionably Devon’s prettiest town, Temple Regis took itself very seriously. Its beaches, giving out on to the turquoise and indigo waters which inspired some wily publicist to coin the phrase ‘England’s Riviera’, were white and pristine. Broad lawns encircling the bandstand and flowing down towards the pier were scrupulously shaved, immaculately edged. Out in the estuary, the water was an impossible shade of aquamarine, its colour a magical invention of the gods – and since everyone in Temple agreed their little town was the sunniest spot in England, it really was very beautiful.

  It was far too nice a place to be murdered.

  Confusingly, the Riviera Express was both newspaper and railway train. Which came first was occasionally the cause for heated debate down in the snug of the Cap’n Fortescue, but the laws of copyright had not yet been invented when the two rivals were born; and an ambitious rail company serving the dreams of holidaymakers heading for the South West was certainly not giving way to a tinpot local rag when it came to claiming the title. Similarly, with a rock-solid local readership and a justifiable claim to both ‘Riviera’ and ‘Express’ – a popular newspaper title – the weekly journal snootily tolerated its more famous namesake. If neither would admit it, each benefited from the other’s existence.

  Before the war successive editors lived in constant turmoil, sometimes printing glowing lists of the visitors from another world who spilled from the brown and cream liveried railway carriages (‘The Hon. Mrs Gerald Legge and her mother, the novelist Barbara Cartland, are here for the week’). At other times, Princess Margaret Rose herself could have puffed into town and the old codgers would have ignored it. Rudyard Rhys saw both points of view so there was no telling what he would think one week to the next – to greet the afternoon arrival? Or not to bother?

  ‘Mr Rhys, we could go to meet the 4.30,’ warned his chief reporter on this particular Tuesday. ‘But – also – there’s a cycling-without-lights case in court which could turn nasty. The curate from St Margaret’s. He told me he’s going to challenge his prosecution on the grounds that British Summer Time has no substantive legal basis. It could be very interesting.’

  ‘Rrrr.’

  ‘Don’t you see? The Chairman of the Bench is one of his parishioners! Sure to be an almighty dust-up!’

  ‘Rrrr … rrr.’

  ‘A clash between the Church and the Law, Mr Rhys! We haven’t had one of those for a while!’

  Rudyard Rhys
lit his pipe. An unpleasant smell filled the room. Miss Dimont stepped back but otherwise held her ground. She was all too familiar with this fence-sitting by her editor.

  ‘Bit of a waste going to meet the 4.30,’ she persisted. ‘There’s only Gerald Hennessy on board …’ (and an encounter with a garrulous, prosy, self-obsessed matinée idol might make me late for my choir practice, she might have added).

  ‘Hennessy?’ The editor put down his pipe with a clunk. ‘Now that’s news!’

  ‘Oh?’ snipped Miss Dimont. ‘You said you hated The Conqueror and the Conquered. “Not very manly for a VC”, I think were your words. You objected to the length of his hair.’

  ‘Rrrr.’

  ‘Even though he had been lost in the Burmese jungle for three years.’

  Mr Rhys performed his usual backflip. ‘Hennessy,’ he ordered.

  It was enough. Miss Dimont noted that, once again, the editor had deserted his journalistic principles in favour of celebrity worship. Rhys enjoyed the perquisite accorded him by the Picturedrome of two back stalls seats each week. He had actually enjoyed The Conqueror and the Conquered so much he sat through it twice.

  Miss Dimont did not know this, but anyone who had played as many square-jawed warriors as Gerald Hennessy was always likely to find space in the pages of the Riviera Express. Something about heroism by association, she had noted in the past, was at the root of her editor’s lofty decisions. That all went back to the War, of course.

  ‘Four-thirty it is, then,’ she said a trifle bitterly. ‘But Church v. Law – now there’s a story that might have been followed up by the nationals,’ and with that she swept out, notebook flapping from her raffia bag.

  This parting shot was a reference to the long-standing feud between the editor and his senior reporter. After all, Rudyard Rhys had made the wrong call on not only the Hamilton Biscuit Case, but the Vicar’s Longboat Party, the Temple Regis Tennis Scandal and the Football Pools Farrago. Each of these exclusives from the pen of Judy Dimont had been picked up by the repulsive Arthur Shrimsley, an out-to-grass former Fleet Street type who made a killing by selling them on to the national papers, at the same time showing up the Riviera Express for the newspaper it was – hesitant, and slow to spot its own scoops when it had them.