by Jilly Cooper
‘For Christ’s sake, it’s not the same. My grandfather was a psychopath who raped my sixteen-year-old mother, so I’m three-quarters his mad, tainted blood.’ Tristan had wanted to hit her, but had shaken her instead.
‘Stop it, you’re hurting me,’ she had cried.
And what the fuck d’you imagine you’re doing to me? thought Tristan.
‘I cannot have children,’ he said bleakly.
Claudine had shrugged.
‘There are too many children in the world. They’re nothing but trouble. Marie-Claire is threatening to marry a pied-noir. Patrice is divorcing. Béatrice is pregnant by her Egyptian boyfriend. Jean-Louis is out of his mind with worry.’ Then, seeing Tristan’s blackening face, ‘Anyway, chéri, you have elder brothers, it is not as if there’s any need to carry on the Montigny line.’
When he tried to explain, he knew he was boring her. He would have liked to have left then, but he had drunk too much brandy, and was too tired so instead he had crashed out on her bed. She had shaken him awake at three thirty. It would soon be light.
‘I’m so terrified of the English press – they’re everywhere.’
It wouldn’t do to forfeit being the Most Admired Woman in France, thought Tristan savagely.
As he had driven away from Llandrogan into the desolation of dawn, and pulled into a field to sleep, he had been reminded of the time he had broken the news of Maxim being his father to Lucy and how she’d given him black coffee, laced with Drambuie, wrapped him in her duvet, held him shuddering in her arms and listened and listened, and how her hair was the same soft brown as rain-soaked winter trees.
Coming back to earth, still pacing his cell, he remembered how on the day after the murder, for the first time in months, Claudine had actually slipped into a telephone box in Llandrogan to ring him, pleading with him not to use her as an alibi. She must know he’d been arrested, but she was clearly not coming forward to save him. There was no light in the little frosted window. And no dawn for him.
As Karen walked into the Pearly Gates with Ogborne after the cinema, Jessica dragged her outside into the drizzle.
‘I found this in my bag. I wrote Oscar’s mobile number on the back of it on Thursday. It’s a memo from Tristan to Bernard and the props department, saying he was planning to reshoot part of Posa and Carlos’s pistol scene in the Unicorn Glade on Friday night, and he would need the .22 out of the props cupboard. Is it important?’
Karen didn’t even notice the drizzle become a downpour.
‘Yes, it is,’ she said joyfully.
‘And, by the way, Mikhail’s looking for you,’ said a relieved Jessica. ‘He’s in the production office.’
Karen found Mikhail utterly despondent about his crocus-yellow Range Rover.
‘I telephone ten garage today and ask how much they charge for bottle-green blow-job. They all shout ’orrible things and hang up.’
‘I think you mean respray.’ Karen had only just contained her laughter, when Mikhail said he wished to make a statement.
‘I took the Montigny from the votch-tower and I borrow lighter with lilies from Tristan two or three days earlier. I must have dropped it in the wood. I went there to kill Rannaldini about ten forty-five, but he was already dead, strangled and shot. I also must confess I actually make friends again with my wife, Lara, on night before murder. When Rannaldini took her to votch-tower for bonk, he boast Montigny painting on wall was vorth three million. Finding Rannaldini dead, I took painting instead.’
‘What did you do with it?’ Karen’s pen would hardly write for excitement.
‘Hid it under Tristan’s mattress for safe-kipping.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Tristan wasn’t bonker like Sylvestre or Alpheus and wouldn’t squash painting. But when I go to remove it on Friday morning it had vanish . . .’
Mikhail was amazed but greatly cheered when Karen gave him an ecstatic hug. Gablecross was never going to speak to her again, but she was more and more convinced Tristan was innocent.
The Llandrogan Badger Action Group held their monthly meetings at the Leek and Grasshopper hotel on Sunday nights. The badger setts along Chantry Wood were the pride of the area, and at least forty badgers were known to travel nightly through the wood, over Jackson’s Meadow, skirting Catmint Cottage, down to the stream which divided the valley.
In summer months, the Action Group (or BAG, as they liked to be known), anxious to observe the badgers’ habits and protect them from baiters, fierce dogs and even fiercer farmers concerned about bovine tuberculosis, set up a camera to record these nocturnal perambulations and their time and date.
On Sunday, 15 July, Gareth Stacey, BAG’s bearded secretary, who spent a lot of time in the field and who stank worse than any badger sett after a rhubarb raid, was about to give a slide show of this month’s findings.
‘Come on, buck up,’ grumbled Major Holmes, the village bully, who didn’t care much for badgers but longed to get stuck into the wine and light refreshments that followed.
‘It’s like magic,’ said pretty Tracey Birkett, who taught at the local primary, ‘that the brocks don’t know we can see them all lit up.’
Out went the lights. Click, click, went Stinker Stacey. On the screen a stout female badger appeared, looping the loop.
‘Upside-down,’ barked Major Holmes.
Click, click, the right-way-up badger was followed by a barn owl, Lady Wade-Williams’s Burmese cat, a couple of cubs, then a huge bull badger, who produced roars of applause.
This woke up Keith, the junior reporter on the Llandrogan Echo, furious at having to cover the event when he could be in the pub, and who in the dark couldn’t keep himself awake gazing at pretty Tracey Birkett.
Click, click, click, click.
‘Look you, Gareth,’ said Merv the milkman, ‘we have an intruder.’
‘By Jove, we do,’ said Major Holmes.
As Stinker Stacey repeated the slide, everyone could see a tall dark man in a peacock-blue shirt, jeans and loafers coming out of the wood.
‘He’s yummy,’ sighed Tracey.
‘Wouldn’t mind having a teddy bears’ picnic with him,’ said Mrs Jones, the local baker, with a cackle.
‘Looks familiar,’ said the Vicar, cleaning his glasses.
‘It’s Lady Wade-Williams’s handyman – he’s always on the poach,’ said Merv the Milk.
The handsome intruder was followed by several rabbits, a fox, more badgers – two of them humping to loud cheers – and Mrs Owen’s Jack Russell on a late-night spree.
‘There he is again,’ said Jones the baker, in excitement.
‘Got one of them greyhounds on his back pocket,’ said Merv the Milk.
‘Lovely bum,’ sighed Tracey Birkett, earning a look of reproach from the Vicar.
‘He’s some actor chappie,’ said Major Holmes. ‘Seen him before.’
‘No, he isn’t.’ Keith the reporter snatched up the evening paper and thrust it into the beam of the projector. ‘It’s that Froggy they’ve arrested for murdering Rannaldini.’
‘The time was three forty a.m., ninth of the seventh, ninety-six,’ read out Tracey Birkett.
‘The murder’s supposed to have taken place between ten and eleven,’ said Keith, who was now leaping up and down in excitement. ‘Turn back to the first slide of him.’
Click, click, click, click, went Stinker Stacey.
Everyone peered forward in excitement.
‘Ten fifty p.m. on the eighth of July. Bingo!’ yelled Keith in jubilation. ‘He couldn’t have done it. It’s a good hundred and fifty miles from here to Paradise. Bloody hell! What a scoop.’
Even the Vicar forgave such language.
‘Golly,’ said Tracey Birkett. ‘He must have been going into the back gate of Catmint Cottage to see Claudine Lauzerte. Didn’t they make a film together?’
‘It’s him, all right,’ said Stinker Stacey. ‘We’d better go to the police.’
‘It’s him all right,’
said DC Beddoes of North Wales CID. ‘Must have nipped into Catmint Cottage, given Madame Lauzerte un, deux et trois, and nipped out again. Puts him in the clear. Couldn’t have strangled Rannaldini. You told anyone else?’
‘Only the Daily Mail, but it’s too late for tomorrow’s paper. Story’ll break with a bang on Tuesday.’
‘Madame Lauzerte’s not going to like it,’ said DC Beddoes, disapprovingly. ‘Terrible thing. She’d have let him do life.’
‘Must love her not to squeal,’ sighed Keith. ‘What a story. Froggy would a-wooing go.’
Even when Gablecross and Karen confronted him with the evidence of the Badger Action Group, Tristan still defended Claudine.
‘There was no affaire. I worry about film. She and her husband were friends of my father. She was like mother to me, we just talked last Sunday.’
‘At eleven at night?’ chided Gablecross. ‘And five hours later you’re seen coming out – long time to read the meter. Anyway, the French police have blown your safe and found Madame Lauzerte’s letters, which are not those you’d write to a son.’
Even the news he was free to go didn’t cheer Tristan.
‘Her name must be kept out of the papers,’ he pleaded.
‘Might have been if you’d levelled with us in the first place. Migraine on Thursday night indeed! When you were nearly three-quarters of an hour on the phone to her.’
‘Trying to reassure her the story wouldn’t come out,’ said Tristan despairingly.
‘Terrific for her street cred she’s been pulling such a gorgeous young guy,’ sighed Karen.
Over at Valhalla, a devastated Baby had, like Tristan, paced his room most of the night. How could Isa have stood him up for someone as two-faced and trivial as Chloe? Monday’s dawn and his heart were breaking simultaneously as he went out into the park. Torrential rain washed away his tears and the remnants of Rozzy’s make-up, which hadn’t been nearly as flattering as Lucy’s. Having caught and loaded his three horses into one of Rannaldini’s lorries, he set off very slowly, stopping every few minutes in case rage and shock made him drive into a wall.
Rupert’s house was ash blond in the early-morning sunshine. His dark woods lay as still as possible, like shaggy dogs knowing their coats will be too hot later in the day. As Baby rumbled into the yard, Rupert had just flown in from France. He was talking to a ravishing youth and to Dizzy, his comely head groom, who were both about to ride out. One beautiful horse after another, like a conjuror’s silk handkerchiefs, was emerging from the boxes.
Still in his polo gear, his face grey against his crimson shirt, Baby jumped down from the lorry.
‘D’you want to train my horses?’
‘I’d be delighted,’ said Rupert. Then, as he gave the ravishing youth a leg up, ‘I don’t think you’ve met my assistant, Lysander Hawkley.’
‘Hi,’ said Baby, looking Lysander up and down. ‘Paradise was in Rutshire, but it appears to have moved.’
‘Let’s unload your horses,’ said Rupert, ‘and then come and have breakfast.’
This latest development enraged Isa. How dare Baby team up with Rupert! Had he neatly forgotten he owed Isa for the last quarter?
‘I owe you nothing, you little toad. If you breathe a word of complaint, I’ll tell your father-in-law you were shagging Chloe the night of Rannaldini’s murder. Then I’ll tell the world how white you bled me.’
Gerald Portland’s gameplan was in tatters. A mob of reporters had fought their way through the deluge into the Rutminster courtroom, or failing that had ringed the building, spilling down adjacent lanes like the water hurtling down gutter and pavement. They had already written their intros about the Fall of the House of Montigny and the most deadly snake of them all. When news leaked out that Tristan had been freed, they immediately charged off to write bitchy pieces about utterly incompetent West Country police wasting public money and being no nearer to finding the killer. The Scorpion, who’d already set the headline ‘Beattie’s Butcher’ over a snarling photograph of Tristan, changed it to ‘Thickos’ in even larger type and decided to launch their poll asking readers, ‘Who Killed Beattie and Rannaldini?’
Only the Daily Mail rubbed their hands over Tristan’s secret tryst with Claudine and pored over copy and headlines for tomorrow’s paper in a security block. The rest of the media took off like starlings to Rutminster Hall to harass the polo shoot, where they were furious to find that George’s security guards kept them outside the front gates and that Rupert, still a chief suspect, had gone racing.
‘We’ve become a laughing stock,’ shouted Gerald Portland, who’d specially put on a new lilac-striped shirt to wow the press and felt it was utterly wasted on his Inner Cabinet. They would have to re-examine all the suspects.
A terrible weariness came over his utterly weary team.
Even people who’d covered for each other, like Tab and George Hungerford, or Rupert and Lysander, or Griselda, Granny and Bernard, who’d all claimed to be searching for balls together in Hangman’s Wood, could be lying. Chloe claimed to have seen both Alpheus and Isa, but neither of them had seen her. Hermione was still sticking to the story that she’d been in bed with Sexton. Meredith, Simone and Pushy had no-one to vouch for them at all, neither did Wolfie and Lucy, who’d pushed off abroad and, so far, neatly evaded Interpol. Even those with cast-iron alibis away from Valhalla, like Rozzy, Oscar and Valentin, would have to be checked out again.
There was a lot of money on Lady Rannaldini, who none of the investigating team liked very much. Bearing in mind that she claimed to have seen Rupert around ten twenty-five, but Lysander had sworn that he and Rupert didn’t discover Rannaldini’s dead body until they first approached the watch-tower as late as ten forty, meant someone was lying.
‘If Rannaldini was happy and excited at the moment of death, as the PM revealed,’ mused Karen, ‘the murderer must be someone he was thrilled to see.’
‘Which certainly wasn’t Rupert, Wolfie or Alpheus,’ chipped in Debbie, ‘but most likely Hermione, Bussage or Tab.’
‘We’ll wait for the DNA results before we tackle Tab again,’ said Portland, who didn’t want any more earache from Rupert.
DC Lightfoot, who’d fallen asleep with his head on the edge of Portland’s desk, was gently shaken awake and dispatched with DC Smithson to Rutminster Hall to try to find out if Alpheus and Mikhail had been telling porkies. Fanshawe and Debbie were given the task of re-interviewing Hermione and then Lysander on the timing of his and Rupert’s raid on Hangman’s Wood.
Gablecross and Karen, who were right at the bottom of the list for letting Tristan off the hook and hassling Taggie Campbell-Black, were allotted the dreary task of trailing over to Mallowfield to interview Rozzy’s feckless husband. Gablecross was in despair. Only Karen’s enterprise had proved Tristan’s innocence. His loathed rival, Fanshawe, was poised to make a strike and Margaret wasn’t speaking to him because he’d left the anniversary party so early.
As she had also refused to make him any breakfast, Gablecross popped into the Paradise village shop to buy several Yorkie bars to misery-eat on the way to Mallowfield. Ahead in the queue, he saw Little Cosmo Harefield shoving some photographs and a letter into a large brown envelope. As Cosmo stopped to rest the envelope on a pile of Rutminster Echos, Gablecross noticed he was addressing it to the editor of the Sun.
‘Please register and express this on my mother’s account,’ Cosmo told Eve, the proprietor, grandly.
‘What have you got there, sonny?’ demanded Gablecross.
‘Nothing,’ lied Little Cosmo.
‘Let me look.’ Grabbing Little Cosmo by his T-shirt, Gablecross relieved him of the envelope.
‘Gimme that, you bugger,’ hissed Little Cosmo, trying to knee Gablecross in the groin.
Two photographs got slightly torn in the scuffle, but were still clearly discernible as Hermione and Sexton on the job.
In custody, and possession of one of Gablecross’s Yorkie bars and a cup of black coffee, Little
Cosmo thawed a fraction.
‘Obviously you were upset about your dad’s death.’
‘Very,’ sighed Cosmo.
His father, he grumbled, had divided his inheritance between Cecilia, his ex-wife, Cosmo and all his step-siblings, except Wolfie. This meant Little Cosmo only ended up with four million, which was quite insufficient, after estate duty, for a growing lad, particularly one intending to own racehorses. Cosmo had therefore decided to augment his income.
‘Give us a fag,’ he added, looking longingly at Gablecross’s pack.
Gablecross, however, was not going to risk it, in case Cosmo’s mother’s friend, the Chief Constable, walked in. He and Karen then learnt that on the night of Rannaldini’s murder, Hermione’s notion of ‘quality time’ had consisted of shoving Little Cosmo upstairs with 101 Dalmatians and a jar of humbugs. Regarding this as insufficient, Cosmo, who had inherited his father’s specialist interest, had borrowed his mother’s camera and crept across the lawn to the summerhouse. Peering through the windows, he had discovered and photographed his mother and Sexton romping on their carpet of lady’s bedstraw. Cosmo liked Sexton and thought he would suit very well as a stepfather. Luckily for his mother and Sexton, Cosmo had taken a mid-shoot break for sloe gin and smoked salmon, and unintentionally recorded both ten twenty-five and ten forty on the large clock on the summerhouse wall.
Although this gave Hermione a vagina-tight alibi, Gablecross had ticked off Little Cosmo roundly for shopping his mother at a time of mourning.
Hermione, who’d just endured another most unchivalrous grilling from Fanshawe and Debbie, was extremely displeased to see DS Gablecross and Karen.
‘I didn’t do it, Timothy.’ She opened her eyes very wide. ‘Why should I want to murder Little Cosmo’s father?’
She might, however, feel like murdering Little Cosmo, said Gablecross, spreading the photographs on the table in front of her.
For a moment Hermione was lost for words, then her face lit up. ‘But, Timothy, these are quite beautiful. Far more flattering than anything Valentin or Oscar could produce. I never knew my son was so talented. They compare very favourably with the work my good friend Patrick Lichfield did for the Unipart calendar. Such a lovely texture.’ Hermione ran her finger over her naked body. ‘And I look so fragile beside Sexton’s manliness. Even in his birthday suit, Timothy, you can tell an Old Etonian by his commanding air.’
