by TP Fielden
On each occasion the editor’s decision had been final – and wrong. But Judy was no saint either, and the cat’s cradle of complaint triggered by her coverage of the Regis Conservative Ball last winter still made for a chuckle or two in the sub-editors’ room on wet Thursday afternoons.
With her raffia bag swinging furiously, she stalked out to the car park, for Judy Dimont was resolute in almost everything she did, and her walk was merely the outer manifestation of that doughty inner being – a purposeful march which sent out radar-like warnings to flag-day sellers, tin-can rattlers, and other such supplicants and cleared her path as if by miracle. It was not manly, for Miss Dimont was nothing if not feminine, but it was no-nonsense.
She took no nonsense, either, from Herbert, her trusty moped, who sat expectantly, awaiting her arrival. With one cough, Herbert was kicked into life and the magnificent Miss Dimont flew away towards Temple Regis railway station, corkscrew hair flapping in the wind, a happy smile upon her lips. For there was nothing she liked more than to go in search of new adventures – whether they were to be found in the Magistrates’ Court, the Horticultural Society, or the railway station.
Her favourite route took in Tuppenny Row, the elegant terrace of Regency cottages whose brickwork had turned a pale pink with the passage of time, bleached by Temple Regis sun and washed by its soft rains. She turned into Cable Street, then came down the long run to the station, whose yellow-and-chocolate bargeboard frontage you could glimpse from the top of the hill, and Miss Dimont, with practice born of long experience, started her descent just as the sooty, steamy clouds of vapour from the Riviera Express slowed in preparation for its arrival at Regis Junction.
She had done her homework on Gerald Hennessy and, despite her misgivings about missing the choir practice, she was looking forward to their encounter, for Miss Dimont was far from immune to the charms of the opposite sex. Since the War, Hennessy had become the perfect English hero in the nation’s collective imagination – square-jawed, crinkle-eyed, wavy-haired and fair. He spoke so nicely when asked to deliver his lines, and there was always about him an air of amused self-deprecation which made the nation’s mothers wish him for their daughters, if not secretly for themselves.
Miss Dimont brought Herbert to a halt, his final splutter of complaint lost in the clanking, wheezing riot of sooty chaos which signals the arrival of every self-regarding Pullman Express. Across the station courtyard she spotted Terry Eagleton, the Express’s photographer, and made towards him as she pulled the purple gloves from her hands.
‘Anyone apart from Hennessy?’
‘Just ’im, Miss Dim.’
‘I’ve told you before, call me Judy,’ she said stuffily. The dreaded nickname had been born out of an angry tussle with Rudyard Rhys, long ago, over a front-page story which had gone wrong. Somehow it stuck, and the editor took a fiendish delight in roaring it out in times of stress. Bad enough having to put up with it from him – though invariably she rose above – but no need to be cheeked by this impertinent snapper. She had mixed feelings about Terry Eagleton.
‘Call me Judy,’ she repeated sternly, and got out her notebook.
‘Ain’t your handle, anyways,’ parried Terry swiftly, and he was right – for Miss Dimont had a far more euphonious name, one she kept very quiet and for a number of good reasons.
Terry busily shifted his camera bag from one shoulder to the other. Employed by his newspaper as a trained observer, he could see before him a bespectacled woman of a certain age – heading towards fifty, surely – raffia bag slung over one shoulder, notebook flapping out of its top, with a distinctly harassed air and a permanently peppery riposte. Though she was much loved by all who knew her, Terry sometimes found it difficult to see why. It made him sigh for Doreen, the sweet young blonde newly employed on the front desk, who had difficulty remembering people’s names but was indeed an adornment to life.
Miss Dimont led the way on to Platform 1.
‘Pics first,’ said Terry.
‘No, Terry,’ countered Miss Dim. ‘You take so long there’s never time left for the interview.’
‘Picture’s worth a thousand words, they always say. How many words are you goin’ to write – two hundred?’
The same old story. In Fleet Street, always the old battle between monkeys and blunts, and even here in sweetest Devon the same old manoeuvring based on jealousy, rivalry and the belief that pictures counted more than words or, conversely, words enhanced pictures and gave them the meaning and substance they otherwise lacked.
And so this warring pair went to work, arriving on the platform just as the doors started to swing open and the holidaymakers began to alight. It was always a joyous moment, thought Miss Dimont, this happy release from confinement into sunshine, the promise of uncountable pleasures ahead. A small girl raced past, her face a picture of joy, pigtails given an extra bounce by the skip in her step.
The routine on these occasions was always the same – if a single celebrity was to be interviewed, he or she would be ushered into the first-class waiting room in order to be relieved of their innermost secrets. If more than one, the likeliest candidate would be pushed in by Terry, while Judy quickly handed the others her card, enquiring discreetly where they were staying and arranging a suitable time for their interrogation.
This manoeuvring took some skill and required a deftness of touch in which Miss Dimont excelled. On a day like today, no such juggling was required – just an invitation to old Gerald to step inside for a moment and explain away his presence in Devon’s prettiest town.
The late holiday crowds swiftly dispersed, the guard completed the task of unloading from his van the precious goods entrusted to his care – a basket of somnolent homing pigeons, another of chicks tweeting furiously, the usual assortment of brown paper parcels. Then the engine driver climbed aboard to prepare for his next destination, Exbridge.
A moment of stillness descended. A blackbird sang. Dust settled in gentle folds and the reporter and photographer looked at each other.
‘No ruddy Hennessy,’ said Terry Eagleton.
Miss Dimont screwed up her pretty features into a scowl. In her mind was the lost scoop of Church v. Law, the clerical challenge to the authority of the redoubtable Mrs Marchbank. The uncomfortable explanation to Rudyard Rhys of how she had missed not one, but two stories in an afternoon – and with press day only two days away.
Mr Rhys was unforgiving about such things.
Just then, a shout was heard from the other end of Platform 1 up by the first-class carriages. A porter was waving his hands. Inarticulate shouts spewed forth from his shaking face. He appeared, for a moment, to be running on the spot. It was as if a small tornado had descended and hit the platform where he stood.
Terry had it in an instant. Without a word he launched himself down the platform, past the bewildered guard, racing towards the porter. The urgency with which he took off sprang in Miss Dimont an inner terror and the certain knowledge that she must run too – run like the wind …
By the time she reached the other end of the platform Terry was already on board. She could see him racing through the first-class corridor, checking each compartment, moving swiftly on. As fast as she could, she followed alongside him on the platform.
They reached the last compartment almost simultaneously, but Terry was a pace or two ahead of Judy. There, perfectly composed, immaculately clad in country tweeds, his oxblood brogues twinkling in the sunlight, sat their interviewee, Gerald Hennessy.
You did not have to be an expert to know he was dead.
Two
You had to hand it to Terry – no Einstein he, but in an emergency as cool as ice. He was photographing the lifeless form of a famous man barely before the reality of the situation hit home. Miss Dimont watched through the carriage window, momentarily rooted to the spot, as he went about his work efficiently, quickly, dextrously. But then, as Terry switched positions to get another angle, his eye caught her immobile form.
�
�Call the office,’ he snapped through the window. ‘Call the police. In that order.’
But Judy could not take her eyes off the man who so recently had graced the Picturedrome’s silver screen. His hair, now restored to a more conventional length, flopped forward across his brow. The tweed suit was immaculate. The foulard tie lay gently across what looked like a cream silk shirt, pink socks disappeared into those twinkling brogues. She had to admit that in death Gerald Hennessy, when viewed this close, looked almost more gorgeous than in life …
‘The phone!’ barked Terry.
Miss Dimont started, then, recovering herself, raced to the nearby telephone box, pushed four pennies urgently into the slot and dialled the news desk. To her surprise she was met with the grim tones of Rudyard Rhys himself. It was rare for the editor to answer a phone – or do anything else useful around the office, thought Miss Dimont in a fleeting aperçu.
‘Mr Rhys,’ she hicupped, ‘Mr Rhys! Gerald Hennessy … the … dead …’ Then she realised she had forgotten to press Button A to connect the call. That technicality righted, she repeated her message with rather more coherence, only to be greeted by a lion-like roar from her editor.
‘Rrr-rrr-rrrr …’
‘What’s that, Mr Rhys?’
‘Damn fellow! Damn him, damn the man. Damn damn damn!’
‘Well, Mr Rhys, I don’t really think you can speak like that. He’s … dead … Gerald Hennessy – the actor, you know – he is dead.’
‘He’s not the only one,’ bellowed Rudyard. ‘You’ll have to come away. Something more important.’
Just for the moment Miss Dim lived up to her soubriquet, her brilliant brain grinding to a halt. What did he mean? Was she missing something? What could be more important than the country’s number-one matinée idol sitting dead in a railway carriage, here in Temple Regis?
Had Rudyard Rhys done it again? The old Vicar’s Longboat Party tale all over again? Walking away from the biggest story to come the Express’s way in a decade? How typical of the man!
She glanced over her shoulder to see Terry, now out of the compartment of death and standing on the platform, talking to the porter. That’s my job, she thought, hotly. In a second she had dropped the phone and raced to Terry’s side, her flapping notebook ready to soak up every detail of the poor man’s testimony.
The extraordinary thing about death is it makes you repeat things, thought Miss Dimont calmly. You say it once, then you say it again – you go on saying it until you have run out of people to say it to. So though technically Terry had the scoop (a) he wasn’t taking notes and (b) he wasn’t going to be writing the tale so (c) the story would still be hers. In the sharply competitive world of Devon journalism, ownership of a scoop was all and everything.
‘There ’e was,’ said the porter, whose name was Mudge. ‘There ’e was.’
So far so good, thought Miss Dimont. This one’s a talker.
‘So then you …?’
‘I told ’im,’ said Mudge, pointing at Terry. ‘I already told ’im.’ And with that he clamped his uneven jaws together.
Oh Lord, thought Miss Dimont, this one’s not a talker.
But not for nothing was the Express’s corkscrew-haired reporter renowned for charming the birds out of the trees. ‘He doesn’t listen,’ she said, nodding towards the photographer. ‘Deaf to anything but praise. You’ll need to tell me. The train came in and …’
‘I told ’im.’
There was a pause.
‘Mr Mudge,’ responded Miss Dimont slowly and perfectly reasonably, ‘if you’re unable to assist me, I shall have to ask Mrs Mudge when I see her at choir practice this evening.’
This surprisingly bland statement came down on the ancient porter as if a Damoclean sword had slipped its fastenings and pierced his bald head.
‘You’m no need botherin’ her,’ he said fiercely, but you could see he was on the turn. Mrs Mudge’s soprano, an eldritch screech whether in the church hall or at home, had weakened the poor man’s resolve over half a century. All he asked now was a quiet life.
‘The 4.30 come in,’ he conceded swiftly.
‘Always full,’ said Miss Dimont, jollying the old bore along. ‘Keeping you busy.’
‘People got out.’
Oh, come on, Mudge!
‘Missus Charteris arsk me to take ’er bags to the car. Gave me thruppence.’
‘That chauffeur of hers is so idle,’ observed Miss Dimont serenely. Things were moving along. ‘So then …?’
‘I come back to furs clars see if anyone else wanted porterin’. That’s when I saw ’im. Just like lookin’ at a photograph of ’im in the paper.’ Mr Mudge was warming to his theme. ‘’E wasn’t movin’.’
Suddenly the truth had dawned – first, who the well-dressed figure was; second, that he was very dead. The shocking combination had caused him to dance his tarantella on the platform edge.
The rest of the story was down to Terry Eagleton. ‘Yep, looks like a heart attack. What was he – forty-five? Bit young for that sort of thing.’
As Judy turned this over in her mind Terry started quizzing Mudge again – they seemed to share an arcane lingo which mistrusted verbs, adjectives, and many of the finer adornments which make the English language the envy of the civilised world. It was a wonder to listen to.
‘Werm coddit?’
‘Ur, nemmer be.’
‘C’rubble.’
Miss Dimont was too absorbed by the drama to pay much attention to these linguistic dinosaurs and their game of semantic shove-ha’penny; she sidled back to the railway carriage and then, pausing for a moment, heart in mouth, stepped aboard.
The silent Pullman coach was the dernier cri in luxury, a handsome relic of pre-war days and a reassuring memory of antebellum prosperity. Heavily carpeted and lined with exotic African woods, it smelt of leather and beeswax and smoke, its surfaces uniformly coated in a layer of dust so fine it was impossible to see: only by rubbing her sleeve on the corridor’s handrail did the house-proud reporter discover what all seasoned railway passengers know – that travelling by steam locomotive is a dirty business.
She cautiously advanced from the far end of the carriage towards the dead man’s compartment, her journalist’s eye taking in the debris common to the end of all long-distance journeys – discarded newspapers, old wrappers, a teacup or two, an abandoned novel. On she stepped, her eyes a camera, recording each detail; her heart may be pounding but her head was clear.
Gerald Hennessy sat in the corner seat with his back to the engine. He looked pretty relaxed for a dead man – she wondered briefly if, called on to play a corpse by his director, Gerald would have done such a convincing job in life. One arm was extended, a finger pointing towards who knows what, as if the star was himself directing a scene. He looked rather heroic.
Above him in the luggage rack sat an important-looking suitcase, by his side a copy of The Times. The compartment smelt of … limes? Lemons? Something both sweet and sharp – presumably the actor’s eau de cologne. But unlike Terry Eagleton Miss Dimont did not cross the threshold, for this was not the first death scene she had encountered in her lengthy and unusual career, and from long experience she knew better than to interfere.
She looked around, she didn’t know why, for signs of violence – ridiculous, really, given Terry’s confident reading of the cause of death – but Gerald’s untroubled features offered nothing by way of fear or hurt.
And yet something was not quite right.
As her eyes took in the finer detail of the compartment, she spotted something near the doorway beneath another seat – it looked like a sandwich wrapper or a piece of litter of some kind. Just then Terry’s angry face appeared at the compartment window and his fist knocked hard on the pane. She could hear him through the thick glass ordering her out on to the platform and she guessed that the police were about to arrive.
Without pausing to think why, she whisked up the litter from the floor – somehow it made the place
look tidier, more dignified. It was how she would recall seeing the last of Gerald Hennessy, and how she would describe to her readers his final scene – the matinée idol as elegant in death as in life. Her introductory paragraph was already forming itself in her mind.
Terry stood on the platform, red-faced and hopping from foot to foot. ‘Thought I told you to call the police.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Dimont, downcast, ‘I … oh … I’ll go and do it now but then we’ve got another—’
‘Done it,’ he snapped back. ‘And, yes we’ve got another fatality. I’ve talked to the desk. Come on.’
That was what was so irritating about Terry. You wanted to call him a know-it-all, but know-it-alls, by virtue of their irritating natures, do not know it all and frequently get things wrong. But Terry rarely did – it was what made him so infuriating.
‘You know,’ he said, as he slung his heavy camera bag over his shoulder and headed towards his car, ‘sometimes you really can be quite dim.’
Bedlington-on-Sea was the exclusive end of Temple Regis, more formal and less engagingly pretty than its big sister. Here houses of substance stood on improbably small plots, with large Edwardian rooms giving on to pocket-handkerchief gardens and huge windows looking out over a small bay.
Holidaymakers might occasionally spill into Bedlington but despite its apparent charm, they did not stay long. There was no pub and no beach, no ice-cream vendors, no pier, and a general frowning upon people who looked like they might want to have fun. It would be wrong to say that Bedlingtonians were stuffy and self-regarding, but people said it all the same.