by Simon Brett
“And, Anna, you don’t have an idea why anyone might have wanted to murder Polly Le Bonnier?”
“No idea at all.”
Carole thought it was probably the truth. She had found out everything relevant to the investigation that she was going to find out from Anna Carter. The natural moment had arrived for them to collect their dogs and go their separate ways. But there was still something that was intriguing Carole.
“You keep talking about having come to Fethering to make a new start. What was it you were trying to get away from? A divorce?”
“Something rather more permanent than that,” Anna replied quietly. “My husband died.”
“Oh, I am sorry.”
“Don’t worry. It was nearly four years ago. I’ve…I don’t know what the best expression is…Not ‘got over it’ – well, you don’t get over it – ‘I’ve come to terms with it.’ Yes, that’s probably right. So I’d rather it hadn’t happened, but I can cope with the rest of my life. Or at least cope with most of it. The bit I couldn’t cope with was being treated like a widow. My husband and I had quite a close circle of friends, and of course they all knew…and it wasn’t that they weren’t kind to me, but whatever they did, I got the feeling they could never forget that ‘poor old Jo’s a widow’.”
“Jo?”
“Yes. Another part of the makeover. The hair, the make-up, the name. I was Joanna Carter-Fulbright. So I chopped off the ends of my old name and made myself into ‘Anna Carter’. And I moved down from Carlisle to Fethering, and I cut off all communication with my old friends. To start a new life. And then the first thing I do in that new life…” tears threatened again – “is to begin having an affair with Ricky Bloody Le Bonnier.”
“I’ll be seeing him tonight,” said Carole. She felt calmer now; the flames of anger had subsided to glowing embers. “I’ve been invited to their New Year’s Eve party.”
“Oh, so have I!” The thought seemed to excite Anna.
“But will you be going?”
“Yes, I must.” She turned her tired, tear-washed face to Carole as she murmured intensely, “I can’t not see him.”
∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧
Twenty-Eight
That New Year’s Eve you would not have known that Fedingham Court House was a place of mourning. The display of Christmas decorations which Jude had observed on her last visit had been doubled in size, and black-dressed waitresses worked assiduously to see that no one spent a moment without food or drink. From the huge sitting room music blared, and through the door could be seen the live band who were playing.
There was also a huge number of people. A few familiar Fethering and Fedborough faces, but not many. There was a good scattering of older men with gorgeously attired younger wives or girlfriends, who somehow looked as if they must be Ricky’s contacts from the music industry. There were even stars from the world of rock whom Carole could recognize from the media but not put names to. It was clearly a very glamorous party. Carole was glad they’d agreed to leave their coats in the Renault; that made a quick getaway possible if required. All her insecurities about being somewhere where she didn’t know anyone rose immediately to the surface. Her atavistic instinct was to stay very close to her neighbour.
Jude intuitively sensed her unease, and whispered as they entered the hall. “Don’t think of it as a social occasion. Think of it as a stage in our investigation. There’s a lot of information we need to get from the various Le Bonniers.”
Though at that stage finding a Le Bonnier looked like being something of a challenge. No sign of Ricky or Lola. There were so many guests that they must have been off somewhere in the noisy throng doing their hostly duty. The party wasn’t going to offer the most conducive atmosphere for interrogation of murder suspects.
Looking around at the milling guests, Carole also felt sure she’d got the dress code wrong. All the other women were so colourful and flamboyant that she feared her trusty Marks & Spencer’s little black number looked absurdly dingy by comparison. Its eternal aim – to make her look anonymous and invisible – might be having the opposite effect of making her look conspicuous. Even the sparkly snowflake brooch Gaby had given her felt cheap and inappropriate in this environment.
Jude, needless to say, had got her ensemble just right. Without changing her habitual style of a long skirt and wafty tops, she had added a sparkling stole and shimmering glass beads to give the overall impression that she had dressed for a special occasion.
Both women took the proffered glasses of champagne, and Jude sailed boldly forward towards a room where there wasn’t music playing. “Let’s look for somewhere with seats.”
“Why do you want to sit down?”
“I don’t, Carole, but I know there’s one person in this household who will be sitting down.”
“Flora. Of course.”
Through the crush they did manage to find the old lady. She was sitting in a high-winged armchair which, with her in it, looked like a throne. Her hair had been expertly remoulded into shape and she wore a dress of glittering silver. The diamonds round her neck and hanging from her ears were undoubtedly the real thing (making Carole feel that her brooch was even more tawdry). If ever there was an illustration for ageing gracefully, Flora Le Bonnier was providing it. Only her crippled hands, immobile fingers pressed together as she lifted a champagne glass to her lips, let down the image.
When the two women reached her chair, she was alone, surveying the scene with all the grandeur of a monarch reviewing her troops. She recognized Jude instantly and inclined her head graciously to Carole.
“You’re looking magnificent,” said Jude. “I do hope this means that you’re feeling better.”
“My dear girl,” Flora Le Bonnier trilled, “I cannot thank you enough for what you have done for me. From the moment you finished your healing, the pain disappeared and, thank the Lord, has stayed away. No professional doctor, however many letters he might have after his name, could have begun to do what you did for me.”
Jude decided that when it came to investigation, there was no time like the present. “I’ve been reading your book, Flora,” she said, “which I found absolutely riveting.”
“Oh, it’s just a pot-boiler.” In spite of her modest words, Flora was clearly very pleased by the compliment.
“One thing that really interested me,” Jude went on, “was about Ricky.”
“Oh?” There was a new alertness in the old woman’s eyes.
“For a start, there doesn’t seem to be a lot about him in the book.”
Flora sighed. “I know. I so wanted to put in more about my dear boy – I’d even written a lot of it – but I had this very stubborn editor at the publisher’s. She kept saying, ‘The book is about you, your career, not your family life.’ So, I’m afraid, if I wanted to get the book published, I had to go along with her recommendations. I kept telling her that Ricky was famous in his own right, that his involvement in pop music might spread the potential readership for the book, but she wouldn’t budge.”
“Oh well, maybe he’ll write his own biography in time.”
A gracious smile greeted this. Flora clearly had no objection to the idea. She looked at Carole. “And have you read the book?”
The expression was so imperious that Carole felt as if she was up in front of a headmistress for not having done her homework. “No, I haven’t yet, but I’m looking forward to borrowing it from Jude and reading it.” She was, too. A second mind applied to the text might deduce more about the Le Bonnier family secrets.
Jude was still in investigative mode. “There was something in the book which I found rather strange…”
“Oh?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought about it before, but I found I was suddenly asking myself why Ricky’s surname was Le Bonnier.”
“Why shouldn’t it be? It’s my surname. It’s a name with a great deal of history.”
“Yes, I’m not questioning that, but there is a tradition in this co
untry that children take the surname of their father.”
“Traditions,” Flora Le Bonnier announced magisterially, “are there to be broken. Ricky’s father had no relevance in his life.”
“But who was – ?”
That was as far as Jude was allowed to get. “My dear girl, you are not the first person to have asked me that question. Over the decades many journalists have tried by various means to winkle a name out of me. None has been successful, and I’m afraid you won’t be either. Le Bonnier is a fine and time-honoured name. My son has always been proud to bear it.”
“If that’s the case,” Carole chipped in, “why did he go to school under the name of Ricky Brown?”
The look that travelled down Flora Le Bonnier’s finely sculpted nose was very nearly a glare. Then, remembering her manners, she converted it into a cold smile. “I would gather,” she said, “that you have never been troubled by the inconveniences of celebrity.” Carole was forced to admit that she hadn’t. “Well, let me explain to you. When Ricky was young, I was – there’s no point in false modesty – very famous indeed. The media make a great fuss nowadays about the hounding of celebrities by the paparazzi, by door-stepping journalists, by stalkers even, but let me tell you that kind of thing was very much up and running in the post-war years. Before the major expansion of television, the cinema played an even more important role in people’s lives, and its stars were subjects of intense popular speculation. For my son to have gone to a local school down here in Fethering under the name of Ricky Le Bonnier would have been to condemn him to a nightmare of intrusive interest and teasing. For that reason he was known as Ricky Brown.”
“So Brown wasn’t his father’s surname?”
Carole’s suggestion was greeted by a sardonic smile. “A nice try, but I think you’ll have to be a bit subtler than that. As I said, the identity of Ricky’s father is something I have never revealed and I firmly intend to take that secret with me to the grave.”
“So when did he start calling himself Ricky Le Bonnier?” asked Jude.
“That was when he began to work in the music business. His feeling was – and it was one with which I heartily agreed – that having a famous name might help to get his career under way. Which is exactly what happened.” She smiled complacently, as if her words had ended that particular topic of conversation.
But Jude persisted. “When he was a boy down here in Fethering, he was looked after by someone called ‘Auntie Vi’. I was wondering – ”
But wondering was as far as she got. With a flamboyant squeal of “Flora – darling!” an elderly man with a rather beautiful younger one in tow swooped down on the actress to initiate an exchange of scurrilous theatrical gossip. After a few minutes Carole and Jude drifted away, their departure unacknowledged by the grande dame of British theatre.
∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧
Twenty-Nine
Their champagne glasses recharged and delicious nibbles supplied by the black-clad waitresses, the two women wandered towards the source of the music. In the hall Ricky Le Bonnier, his arm round Lola’s waist, was, as ever, the centre of attention, regaling the group around him with more of his stories. Seeing him there and seeing the look of adoration in his wife’s eyes, Carole felt another surge of anger. She thought of her conversation with Anna, the details of which she had told Jude on the drive over to Fedborough. What was it with men, particularly men of Ricky’s age, that stopped them from being content with what they had? Why would men like him betray a beautiful, intelligent girl like Lola with a sad, neurotic widow like Anna? Was it the galloping approach of death that motivated them? Was it a feeling that in some conjectural heaven their score would be marked down for not having bedded enough women? Carole Seddon would never understand men.
From what Ricky was saying, the band performing in his sitting room were extremely famous. Carole hadn’t heard of them, but Jude had and was suitably impressed to find them playing in a private house. Their host was talking about the band as the two women joined the circle around him.
“Of course, I knew them when they were just five pimply-faced lads from Droitwich. Sent a demo and I summoned them up to my office in…I think it was Chrysalis I was working for then. Anyway, I could see they had potential, and I could see that Jed was going to be one hell of a charismatic front man…as soon as he had run a brush through his hair and done a major bombardment of his mush with Clearasil. The girls in the office were drooling at him even with the state he in was then. So I gave the lads a bit of advice on their repertoire. They were still too much folk-influenced then to chart in a major way, but I got them to move more into the soft-rock world. I also had the disagreeable task of telling them their keyboard player wasn’t up to the job. Always nasty doing that, particularly when you’ve got a group who’ve been together since school. But if you want to hit the top, you can’t carry passengers. Just the same with the Beatles. I remember telling my old mate Ringo that he was the luckiest bugger in the entire world and, you know, he said…”
So Ricky Le Bonnier continued his routine. From his demeanour no one would ever have known that he’d lost a stepdaughter only ten days before. Jude looked at Carole, who immediately understood her rueful grimace. It wasn’t going to be easy to get Ricky on his own that evening. So far as grilling him was concerned, their investigation might have to be put on hold.
The same would probably be true of Lola, but just as Carole and Jude were edging away from Ricky’s circle, she detached herself from her husband and hurried up to them. “Jude, you know I talked to you about possibly babysitting Mabel and Henry one day…”
“Sure.”
“Well, it might be sooner rather than later.”
“When?”
Lola grimaced apologetically. “Tomorrow afternoon. It may not happen, but Flora’s suddenly announcing that she has to go back to her flat tomorrow. I hope we’ll be able to persuade her to stay a little longer, but she can be stubborn and if she insists, Ricky’ll have to drive her back up to London and I may have to go too…and Varya’s seeing in the New Year with some Russians and copious amounts of vodka in Southampton and I’m not sure when she’ll be back…”
“I’d be happy to do it.”
“As I say, it may not happen.”
“Call me on the mobile in the morning if you need me.”
“OK. Bless you, Jude.” And Lola slipped back to join her husband, whose arm instinctively once again encircled her waist.
Jude announced she wanted to see the famous group at closer quarters, so they drifted into the sitting room. There were people dancing. A lot of young people and, to Carole’s distaste, a lot of old people too. She didn’t enjoy seeing her contemporaries gyrating and waving their arms about in the air, it was undignified. Beside her, Jude’s body was already swaying to the heavy rock beat. Carole, who was too inhibited ever to have ventured on to a dance floor, felt even more envious of her neighbour’s instinctive responses.
A tall man with long grey hair in a ponytail moved towards Jude and grinned at her. She grinned back and without any words they started dancing together. They didn’t actually touch, but the way their bodies mirrored each other’s movements seemed somehow more intimate than touching. Carole edged her way back to the hall. A waitress offered to top up her glass, but she put her hand over it. She had to navigate the Renault safely back to Fethering, and the Sussex police were notoriously vigilant on New Year’s Eve.
From long experience, Carole knew there were two available options at a party where you didn’t know anyone. One was to stand alone with your drink, possibly showing excessive interest in the contents of your host’s bookshelves, but still looking like a social outcast. The other was to stride purposely about the place, as if you were looking for someone. The larger the gathering and the more rooms it took place in, the better this second approach worked. Because if you kept doing circuits of the entire party, you didn’t keep walking past the same people, and when you did see them a second ti
me you could pretend that you’d just finished talking to one very interesting person you knew, and you were making your way to talk to another even more interesting person you knew.
There was no contest. Carole Seddon opted for the second approach. Wearing a look of intense intellectual concentration, she sallied forth through the throng in the hall to a room which she had not yet explored. There was a considerable crush inside, which suited her purposes admirably. Squeezing past people reinforced the false impression of having somewhere to go to. And apologizing to them as she squeezed past produced the illusion of conversation.
At the end of the room an archway led into another, equally heaving with guests, and from this one glass doors opened on to a garden terrace. In spite of the winter cold, there were a few people standing there, so Carole, arguing to herself that the fictional person she was looking for was as likely to be on the terrace as anywhere else, went out to join them.
And, contrary to her expectation, she saw someone she did know: Piers Duncton. No great surprise that he should have gone out into the open air to have a cigarette. He was on his own, his angular figure propped against the terrace railings, looking into the garden. Out there strings of fairy lights cascaded from tall trees, lending an aura of magic to the scene.
Carole had no hesitation in going straight up to him and saying, “Good evening, Piers.”
He turned, squinting against the light from the room she had just left, and it took him a moment to identify her. “Ah, Carole,” he said eventually.
“How are you, Piers?”
“Oh, you know.” He took a swig from the wine glass in his hand and looked disappointed to find it was already empty. There was something glassy about his stare, and Carole realized that he was very drunk.
“I suppose I should say: Happy New Year,” she said conventionally.
“Happy New Year?” He thought about it. “I don’t see much happiness in this New Year, I must say.” He raised his empty glass. “Look, I’ve got to find some more booze.”
