by Simon Brett
“She actually emailed it to me.”
“So you never had a hard copy?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. When she sent it to me I had a problem with my laptop – it was being repaired – so I did a printout at the office and took it home to read over that weekend.”
“Have you still got the printour?”
“Yes.”
Matching involuntary sighs of relief emanated from Carole and Jude, as Serena reached into her capacious leather briefcase and pulled out a dog-eared pile of typing paper held together by a red rubber band.
“Would it be possible for us to have a look at it? Get a copy made, if you like? We would look after it.”
“Yes,” said Serena ruefully, “in fact, you can have it. Sadly, it’s of no use to me.”
Carole looked confused. “But I thought you said it was publishable.”
“Yes, it very definitely is. Even in this state. Polly wanted to make more changes, but that was only because she had a perfectionist streak in her. All this manuscript needs is a little copy-editing and it could go straight to the printers tomorrow.”
“Then why do you say it’s of no use to you?”
“Because,” the agent replied, “amongst the many emails I came back to on Saturday, was one from Piers. He said the Le Bonniers had had a family conference, and they’d decided they didn’t want Polly’s book ever to be published.”
“He said that, did he?” Carole looked beadily across at her neighbour. Unusually, there was a beadiness in Jude’s eyes too.
∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧
Forty
The moment Serena Fincham had gone back to her office, Jude rang through on her mobile to Fedingham Court House. It was some time before Lola answered the phone. She sounded weary to the marrow of her bones.
“I’m still alive,” she replied to Jude’s solicitous enquiries. “Mabel asked where Daddy was this morning, and when he was coming back. I only just stopped myself from bursting into tears in front of her. God knows how I’ll break the news.”
“You’ll find a way,” said Jude, not for the first time.
“Hope so.” Lola made an attempt to pull herself together. “Anyway, what can I do for you?”
“I wonder…is Piers still there with you?”
“No, he isn’t.”
There was a harshness in Lola’s tone that made Jude ask, “Has he been causing any trouble?”
“You could say that. If you call coming on to a woman who’s been widowed little more than twenty-four hours causing trouble.”
“Piers?”
“Yes. He had the nerve to come into my bedroom last night. I didn’t have much prospect of sleeping anyway, but he ensured my night was completely ruined.”
“What did he do?”
“Oh, he sat on my bed, and he started pawing at me, and he said our time in Edinburgh together was the best bit of his life, and he’d always really loved me, and now Polly and Ricky were out of the way there was no reason why we couldn’t become an item and…It was horrible. I couldn’t believe anyone could be so insensitive, least of all someone who I’ve always thought of as one of my closest friends. It took me hours to persuade him that I didn’t love him, that Ricky was the only man I’d really loved and…and then Piers started hitting me. I actually had to call for Varya and physically push him out of my bedroom.” She sounded perilously close to tears.
“So where is Piers now?” asked Jude.
“At his flat in London, I assume. I sent him off this morning with a flea in his ear.”
“You wouldn’t have his address to hand, would you?”
“Yes, I know it off by heart. Near Warren Street tube. He’s been there a while. I used to spend a lot of time with them there before I met Ricky.” She gave the details.
“What time did Piers leave this morning?”
“Varya drove him to Fedborough Station to catch an early train, the seven-forty-two…leaving me to somehow get across to my children that their father’s dead, let alone start organizing his funeral…”
“You’re allowed to do that, are you? The police have released the body?”
“Yes, they said they’ve had a preliminary report from the surgeon who did Ricky’s post mortem.” She hurried over the words, not wanting to dwell on them. “And I can start making funeral arrangements. Ricky died a natural death.”
♦
In the teeth of the evidence, Carole and Jude were still not convinced about that.
“There’s something I’ve just remembered,” said Jude.
“What?”
“The morning after we heard that a woman’s body had been found in the ashes of Gallimaufry I spoke to Lola on the phone. I asked her if she had any idea who the victim might be. She said she’d checked that Anna and Bex were all right, and that Ricky had checked that Polly was safely in London with Piers…”
“Are you saying that Ricky was lying?”
“No. I’m saying that Piers was.”
♦
The flat off Tottenham Court Road which Piers and Polly had shared showed little signs of a feminine touch. Its aggressive tidiness suggested more the hand of a masculine control freak. Framed on the walls were posters going back to Piers’s Footlights days, and more recent stills for television shows he’d contributed to. Posters of plays that Polly Le Bonnier might have been in did not feature. A smell of Piers’s cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air.
He had sounded unsurprised when Jude had rung to ask if he minded her and Carole coming to see him. They had stayed in the coffee shop flicking through the manuscript for half an hour or so, which had been long enough to form a pretty clear picture of the hatchet job Polly had done on her boyfriend. Then they’d rung Piers.
On arrival at the flat, they were greeted with the minimum of courtesy, no offer of a drink but instead the immediate question, “What’s all this about?”
“We were hoping you might be able to tell us that,” replied Carole.
“We’re interested in the deaths of Polly and Ricky,” said Jude.
“You’re not alone in that. Everyone seems to think it’s their business to speculate on the subject.”
“We particularly wanted to talk to you, Piers, because we’ve just been reading the manuscript of Polly’s book.”
He went pale as he demanded, “Where the hell did you get that?”
“From Serena Fincham.”
“Damn! I should have rung her and told her not to talk to anyone about it.”
“What?” said Carole. “And then you would have suppressed every copy of it, wouldn’t you? Did you know, incidentally, that Ricky had Polly’s flash drive with a copy of the book on it?”
“Ricky’s dead. He’s not going to pass it on to anyone now.”
“Perhaps not. But if it was in his possession when he died – and we have reason to believe it was – then it’s probably now in the hands of the police. They’re going to be very interested in its contents, I would imagine, given that they’re still investigating Polly’s death.”
If he’d looked pale before, a new adjective was required to describe the pallor with which he reacted to this news. He fumbled for a cigarette and lit up.
“Anyway,” said Jude easily, “that character of Edwin in the book doesn’t seem very pleasant, does he? Domestic violence is never very pretty, is it? You always wonder about the personality of someone who gets a thrill out of beating up a woman. If he’s capable of that, what other crime might he be capable of? And of course, if every copy of Polly’s manuscript had been destroyed, the story of your violent behaviour would have died with her, wouldn’t it?”
Piers had by now recovered himself sufficiently to say, “You can’t prove anything. And if there were anything to prove, the one witness who might have testified is sadly dead.”
“Sadly…or conveniently…?” suggested Carole.
“Are you accusing me of killing Polly?”
“Not necessarily. But we would lik
e to know your arguments for why we shouldn’t accuse you of killing Polly.”
“My arguments remain exactly the same as they have always been. I wasn’t in Fethering on the night that Polly died. I was with a woman.”
“Oh yes, the actress from the sitcom.”
“Exactly. And just so’s you know, she has been approached by the police investigating Polly’s death. They wanted to check my alibi. An intrusion into her privacy of which she took a pretty dim view, let me tell you. In fact, it may have ruined what promised to be a very good relationship.”
“Or a good relationship until you started hitting her?” suggested Carole.
“Listen, I don’t care what you say. You’re just two nosy old women who have no authority at all. If the police are satisfied my alibi is true, then I think you should accept it as well.”
“You mean you’re not going to give us a contact for your new girlfriend, so that we can check for ourselves?”
“You are bloody right, Jude. I am not.”
The two women looked at each other. Of course, Piers could be lying – he was quite capable of it – but both had a depressing feeling that he was telling the truth.
“So did you have any contact with Fethering during that time?” asked Carole.
“I spoke to Lola probably about eight.”
“About what?”
“I just told her about the date I’d got set up for the evening. The restaurant we were going to, that kind of stuff.”
“This would be your sitcom actress?”
“Yes. Lola and I always used to confide in each other about our dates…well, we did until she met Ricky. Thereafter, there wasn’t much to say on her side, but I’d still keep her up to date with whom I was seeing.”
“I thought you were cohabiting with Polly, I thought you’d been with her since before Cambridge. So what dates are you talking about?”
He looked only slightly discomfited by Jude’s words; he was more interested in his self-image as the great lover. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of his previous one, and there was pride in his voice as he said, “There were a few skirmishes with other women.”
“All of which conquests you described in detail to Lola?”
“I don’t know about ‘in detail’, but I’d keep her up to date.”
“Telling her every time that none of them were more than ‘second best’, and that she was the one for whom you would always hold a candle?”
He looked so embarrassed that Jude knew she’d hit the bull’s eye.
“So, apart from having to listen to you crowing about your latest potential conquest, did Lola say anything of interest to you?”
“Not much. She was having a difficult evening. Mabel had got an ear infection, and the dog was having puppies, and Lola was trying to get everything ready for Christmas, and her mother-in-law would soon be back being as demanding as ever and – ”
“‘Soon be back’?” Carole repeated. “Did Lola say that that Flora Le Bonnier had gone out that evening?”
“Yes,” Piers Duncton replied.
∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧
Forty-One
The lunch which the two women had in a pub in Grafton Way was not a relaxed occasion. Neither really noticed what they were eating – which was just as well because it wasn’t very nice. Jude had one glass of wine, Carole stuck to black coffee. And, meanwhile, they both trawled through different sections of Polly Le Bonnier’s manuscript.
They were about to enter Warren Street tube station when Carole suddenly noticed a PC World on the other side of Tottenham Court Road. Since her much-delayed introduction to computers, she had, with the fervour of a convert, become something of a devotee of PC World.
“Had an idea,” she announced. “Just going to buy something.”
♦
Flora Le Bonnier’s flat in St John’s Wood was as punctiliously maintained as the old lady herself. She had made no demur when Jude had rung, suggesting they pay her a visit, and she looked the model of elegance when she opened the door to them. But neither had the feeling she had dressed up specially. She always looked like that. Flora Le Bonnier was one of those women who didn’t possess any casual clothes. The idea that her wardrobe might contain jeans, T-shirts or jogging bottoms was as unthinkable as the idea that her upper-class accent might ever slip.
When she closed the front door, they noticed that there was an extension on the inside handle so that she could manipulate it with her crippled hands. No doubt there were other devices in the flat which had been tailored to her disability.
She ushered them into a sitting room whose dark green walls set off the numerous silver-framed photographs that they bore. All were movie stills or production photographs of Flora Le Bonnier in her greatest roles. Interestingly, none of the pictures featured anyone else. Though she had acted with many of the great theatrical names of her generation, apparently Flora had not wished for any of them to share the limelight in the gallery she had selected for display.
The only other ornaments in the room were a collection of glass walking sticks – multicoloured, twisted and intricately wrought. They, too, graced the walls between the photographs.
The room was very overheated, but neither Carole nor Jude removed her coat. Flora Le Bonnier, ever the magnanimous grand dame, gestured her two visitors to chairs and then took her place in a winged armchair not dissimilar to the one they had last seen her in at Fedingham Court House. She seemed to favour thrones. “I would offer you some tea or something, but with my hands…” She waved the incurling fingers eloquently. “There is a woman who comes every morning, helps me dress, does a few chores, prepares my lunch and a cold plate for my supper. Sadly, she is not here now, so unless you feel like making a drink for yourself in the kitchen…”
“No, thank you. We’ve just had lunch,” said Carole.
“Any more trouble from your back or neck?” asked Jude.
“No. Oh, the usual aches and pains attendant on my great age, but nothing worse, thank goodness. I’m so grateful to you for the way in which you eased the pain I had down in Sussex.”
“It was no problem.”
“And we, erm,” Carole began awkwardly, “we should offer you our condolences for the loss of your son.”
“Yes.” But the old lady did not seem unduly afflicted by grief. Her eyes were fixed in the middle distance as she said, “He was a foolish boy, dabbling with drugs. Taking drugs, like drinking too much, is a sign of indiscipline. Discipline is important in all walks of life, but particularly in the arts. Mine is a hard profession and I would not have survived in it so long if I had not had rigid self-discipline.”
“So rigid that you can control all of your emotions?” asked Jude.
“Controlling emotion is inevitably something you have to learn in the acting profession. You have to build up, as it were, a repertoire of emotions within yourself, so that you can summon up the required one for the part that you happen to be playing at any given time.”
“But you lost control of your emotions over Christmas, didn’t you?”
“I don’t understand what you mean, Jude.”
“According to Ricky and Lola, after Polly’s death you virtually cracked up. You were in a terrible state of nerves.”
“To lose a granddaughter is a powerfully traumatic experience.”
“Was it, though, for you?” asked Carole. “You hadn’t seen much of Polly since she was a child. She was no blood relation of yours. Did her death really leave that much of a hole in your life?”
“You could not possibly understand the sufferings of a grandmother if you have not been one.”
“I am one,” Carole asserted with some pride.
Jude sat forward in her chair. “Flora, you know that Polly wrote a book…”
“I believe she mentioned that she had at some point. I didn’t take much notice of it at the time.”
“I think you know rather more about her book that that.”
“What
do you mean?”
Carole took over the prosecuting role. “I think you had read at least some of Polly’s manuscript. You read the bit about her grandmother, about her pretentious grandmother, who’s an opera singer in the novel rather than an actress, and who prides herself on a family name supposed to date back to the Norman Conquest, whereas in fact the grandmother has no connection with the family whose name she stole. The name the character in the novel invented wasn’t Le Bonnier, but the story’s the same.”
There was a long silence, then Flora said in her even, beautifully modulated voice, “I am a Le Bonnier. The world knows me as a Le Bonnier. My autobiography is about being a Le Bonnier. I cannot have that taken away from me.”
“Even if it’s not true?”
The old actress turned on Carole a look of pure malevolence. “True? What do you know about truth? Most people never find real truth. I have been blessed to find it through my professional work. I have been nearer to pure truth on stage than you ever have been in your entire miserable life. People with my talent don’t have to obey the rules created by ordinary people. I am Flora Le Bonnier. That is my name. That is true.”
“But it’s not your name.”
“I cannot expect someone like you to understand.” The line was spoken with enormous dignity, and Jude felt sure Flora was quoting from some play she had once been in. That was really the trouble. The old actress could no longer distinguish between reality and the parts she had played.
“I can understand this much,” said Carole. “That you killed Polly down at Gallimaufry and then persuaded your son to torch the premises in the hope of covering up your crime.”
Flora Le Bonnier offered her clawlike hands. “I shot someone? These hands were able to hold a gun and pull its trigger? I wish that were true. I wish I were capable of shooting someone. Because then I would also be capable of doing a lot of other things which these hands will not allow me to do.”
Jude tried another tack. “Do you deny that you have read any of Polly’s book?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
“Do you know where there are copies of the book now?”
A sly smile crept across the old lady’s patrician features. “Polly was, I believe, carrying a copy of the manuscript in the haversack she brought down to Fedborough. It was destroyed in the fire at that ridiculous shop of Lola’s.”
