by Jilly Cooper
‘You’ll never guess,’ hissed Flora to Baby, ‘Grisel and Simone are an item.’
‘Good God, d’you think she takes her turban off in bed?’
‘“You’re lovely to look at, delightful to know and heaven to kiss,”’ sang Alpheus, as he foxtrotted past with Serena.
‘“He said that he loved ’er, but, oh, ’ow he lie, oh, ’ow he lie, oh, ’ow he lie,”’ sang Giuseppe in Granny’s ear. ‘Serena is so boring. I want to come back, I miss you.’
‘Well, you can’t,’ said Granny, with decreasing conviction.
‘Howie get me Don Giovanni at La Scala,’ murmured Giuseppe, ‘so I can take you on long holiday and pay for all things. Please, Granville.’
‘Oh, my dear boy.’
‘Excuse me, Granville.’ Hermione was scrabbling like a terrier in Lucy’s pile of presents. ‘I’ve forgotten Maria. D’you think Lucy’ll mind awfully if she didn’t get one of my calendars?’
‘I expect she’ll live,’ said Granny.
Tristan shivered. ‘I’m not sure she will. I am bloody worried, Granny.’
‘Monsieur de Montigny,’ said the editor of Classical Music, who’d disguised himself as a waiter, ‘about Claudine Lauzerte?’
‘Who?’ said Tristan, as though he was dredging up some long-abandoned wreckage from the bottom of the sea.
‘Could we have a word?’
‘The word is “Non”,’ snapped Tristan, shoving dancers aside, until he reached Bernard. ‘For Christ’s sake, try Rozzy again. Ask her if she’s seen Lucy.’
‘Where’s Mikhail?’ grumbled Baby. ‘I want to sing the Friendship Duet with him.’
‘Perhaps he’s eloped with Rozzy,’ giggled Simone.
It was Mikhail’s last night in the capitalist sweet shop. As a going-home present for Lara, he had decided to remove the Murillo Madonna from the chapel. But finding Valhalla awash with police when he returned home after the final wrap, he decided to sleep until things quietened down.
Waking just after eleven, he took a considerable swig from his hip flask and set out. The house was sculptured grey in the moonlight, a sudden chill wind sent the cypresses hissing like snakes. Sliding through the shadows, Mikhail passed two nervously patrolling uniformed policemen and wished he had had slightly more to drink.
He froze at the sound of more footsteps. Slow, lonely, then quickening, coming relentlessly towards him, from the swirling mists emerged a black-cloaked figure gliding down the cloisters, then disappearing through the chapel door. Frantic for company, Mikhail fled in terror back to the production office, but found it totally deserted – everyone must have left for the party. Deciding this was very unPosa-like behaviour and ghosts couldn’t produce footsteps, he crept back again.
The chapel was unlocked, no-one appeared to be inside. Feeling his way along the smooth edges of the pews and then the choir stalls, guided by the light of the rising moon now spilling like milk, then like royal blue ink, now like red wine through the stained-glass windows, he reached the Madonna. How beautiful she was, more radiant than any moon. How she would enjoy an exciting jaunt to Moscow.
Mikhail got out his screwdriver and pliers. Somehow she must come off the wall. But as he started to tap and feel round her gilded frame, he nearly jumped through the vaulted roof.
The panel to which she was attached had swung open, revealing utter darkness, a horrible smell of Maestro and footsteps echoing far in the distance. Climbing inside, running a shaking hand round to the left, Mikhail found a key. Someone had been stupid or careless enough to leave it in a lock. Turning it, he felt a door open; groping inside, he found a light switch, and nearly fainted.
He was in a tiny cubby-hole. All round the walls were grotesquely graffiti’d photographs of Tabitha, Flora, Claudine Lauzerte, Granny, Beattie, Hermione and Rannaldini. Ears had been lopped off, squints and beards added, and everything smeared with blood and excrement. But interspersed with these horrors, beautiful and immaculate, were pictures of Tristan at all ages.
Also hanging from hooks were wigs, pewter grey, blond, dark and light brown, and Hermione’s apple-green cloak with the pink rose-lined hood, except bloodstains were now rose-patterning the green as well. The table was piled high with body-paints, knives, ammunition, huge, cruel scissors, a half-full bottle of Maestro, videos, tapes, tape-recorders, Rannaldini’s cigars, bottles marked ‘poison’ and cans of petrol. On top lay a ripped-open brown-paper parcel marked ‘Tristan de Montigny, Private and Confidential’. And against the table, a going-home present for Lara for the taking, was the Montigny Snake Charmer. Beside it, the floor was littered with fragments of cut-up photograph.
Mikhail was nearly gagging on the stench. Who could do these sick things? Grabbing the painting, he nearly dropped it, as a voice snapped, ‘What in hell are you doing here? I wouldn’t do anything silly, sir,’ as Mikhail lunged forward to grab a knife.
Mikhail had never dreamt he’d be pleased to see a policeman. Karen, who was following Gablecross, thought Mikhail looked like a bear raiding a larder. Then she saw the walls behind him and had to clap her hands over her mouth.
‘I find vicar’s hole full of interest,’ announced Mikhail.
‘How the fuck did you get in here?’ Shoving him out of the way, Gablecross took in the contents of the table. ‘Jesus!’
‘I enter chapel to pray my vife will return,’ said Mikhail piously, ‘I just examine vork of art when wall open.’
Lying bastard, thought Gablecross.
‘Look, Sarge, here’s a parcel addressed to Tristan – in Lucy’s handwriting,’ said Karen, in excitement. ‘And there’s a wig exactly like Rozzy’s hair and one like Hermione’s. Why should anyone want to pass themselves off as Rozzy?’
They had been unable to track her down in Make Up, and she wasn’t answering her mobile.
‘She must be on the way to the party, unless the murderer’s got her too . . . Oh, God.’
Crouching down on the floor, Karen gathered up fragments of photographs, horribly reminiscent of Rozzy’s cut-up dress.
‘Let’s go,’ said Gablecross. ‘Put that painting down, Mr Pezcherov.’
Outside, having alerted two of the uniformed officers to keep an eye on the cache, Gablecross took the wheel and they set out for the wrap party.
No wonder he complains about my slow driving, thought Karen, as they hurtled through overgrown tree tunnels, down narrow lanes where great banks of elder and wild rose obscured any views of things coming the other way. Black trees and telegraph poles flew past the window.
Karen was being thrown from one side of the back seat to the other, as with the light on and a road map on her knees as a table, she tried to piece together the shreds of photograph.
‘It still points to Lucy,’ she said sadly, as they shot past a sign saying four miles to Rutminster.
‘Why?’ snapped Gablecross.
‘These cut-up photographs are all of Rozzy. Perhaps Lucy couldn’t stand Tristan giving Rozzy all that money for a new wrap-party dress.’
Lucy regained consciousness into darker nightmare. She was trapped in a chair, her wrists clamped to its arms by what felt like iron manacles padded with velvet, her ankles and knees similarly secured to the chair legs so her thighs were forced humiliatingly apart. This must be the debtor’s chair in which Rannaldini had once imprisoned Tab. The room was cold and dreadfully airless. It smelled like a slaughter-house, of blood, sweat and fear.
As her eyes grew used to the dark, she realized she was in a large steel container. She and the debtor’s chair were on a lower level in a kind of pit. Up some steps, on a higher level, stood an imposing carved armchair – like a bishop’s throne – a bed and a dressing-table pushed against the wall. From the only wall that wasn’t mirror, dully gleamed a highly sophisticated collection of whips and knives.
Then she heard hoarse, unearthly screaming. It was several seconds before she realized it was coming from herself. Shuddering with horror, she pieced together earlier events, Trista
n firing her, the police arresting her, Rozzy hiding her in the priest-hole, then Rannaldini’s utterly terrifying ghost, or had it been Rannaldini himself? Thank God, Rozzy would seek help and could be trusted to give Tristan his important papers.
Then she remembered James’s cries growing more and more piteous. Someone must have tortured him. She started to cry, but as her eyes and nose streamed she had nothing on which to wipe them. Her ankle ached where she’d twisted it, her legs throbbed with nettle stings and, in the mirror opposite, her dim reflection showed her face, arms and legs cut even more to pieces from stumbling down the stony secret passage. She looked like a victim of Third World brutality.
Glancing at the whips and knives, she knew the churning fear Carlos and Elisabetta must have felt, aware that torture awaited them. The light was too faint to read her watch. She tried to pray. Rozzy wouldn’t let her down. But as the hours crawled by, and she grew colder and more dehydrated, her legs racked by agonizing cramps, hope faded.
She must have nodded off. She was woken by terror beyond imagination. Instead of her own reflection, glaring evilly back from the mirror was Rannaldini. Maybe she had died, or her mind was slowly unravelling. Then he was gone, and her blanched, bloodstained, lacerated reflection gazed back at her again.
There was a creak. Jerking her head round as far as it would go she saw a steel panel on the upper level slide back and there was Rannaldini, a monstrous black vulture, poised to swoop down and tear her apart.
‘No, no, please not.’ Her screams echoed round the chamber, then died on her lips. As the steel door clanged shut, off came the cloak, the pewter wig, the mask. Lucy breathed in a heavenly waft of Femme and wept with relief.
‘Oh, you angel, thank God.’ Then the questions poured out in a hoarse gasping rush. ‘Are the police still looking for me? Have you found James? Did you give Tristan the parcel? What a brilliant disguise! You fooled everyone.’
As Rozzy flicked on a side light, and arranged her newly washed hair, Lucy saw she was wearing a beautiful dove-grey chiffon dress and long grey gloves.
‘Please unlock this horrible chair,’ she begged. ‘What time is it? Where am I?’
‘Nearly midnight. You’re in Rannaldini’s torture chamber.’ Rozzy’s voice was strangely high and hard. ‘Quite the Grand Inquisitor’s adventure playground, isn’t it? Soundproofed like a recording studio, so no-one can hear the screams.’
‘What d’you mean?’
Little by little, terror was taking over again.
‘Rannaldini brought the pretty ones down here,’ mocked Rozzy.
‘I don’t understand.’
Both of them jumped as the telephone rang. In an instant Rozzy had grabbed her mobile, whipped a gun out of her bag, and running down the steps, rammed the muzzle against Lucy’s temple.
‘Don’t make a sound,’ she hissed.
Rigid with horror, Lucy could hear Bernard’s bray so close she could have reached out and stroked his glossy black moustache.
‘I’ve been delayed again, Bernie darling.’ Rozzy’s voice was caressing. ‘Lucy? I haven’t seen her.’ As Lucy gasped, the gun was rammed harder into her head. ‘She must have pushed off home to Cumbria. One more pressie to wrap, then I’ll be over. No, no, dearest, you’ve been drinking – at least, I hope you have. I’ll make my own way. Keep the champagne on ice.’
Flicking off her mobile, Rozzy peered at the buttons for a second before pressing one. ‘I’ll turn it off altogether,’ she said chattily. ‘We don’t want to be disturbed.’
Retracing her steps up the stairs, she placed the gun and the mobile on the dressing-table. ‘That was Bernard. The silly old fart was looking for you.’
‘You’re the murderer,’ whispered Lucy.
‘I thought you’d never guess,’ said Rozzy acidly. ‘The whole world is searching but no-one has a clue.’
‘And I gave you Tristan’s papers.’
Lucy’s chattering teeth became a terrible shaking, jolting her body like an earthquake. ‘Please let me have your cloak for a second. I’m so cold.’
‘Poor child,’ said Rozzy sympathetically, then suddenly burst into maniacal laughter. ‘You’ll be burning hot where you’re going. Where were we? Oh, yes, in Rannaldini’s torture chamber. He strapped them just where you are, in the debtor’s chair.’
What had Gablecross told her? Lucy tried to marshal her crazed thoughts. With psychopaths you had to be passive, respectful, admiring.
‘I can’t believe you killed Rannaldini.’ Every word had to be forced out. ‘You’re far too slight and, anyway, you were in Mallowfield.’
‘Since I’m going to kill you in a minute I’ll tell you while I do my face. Now, are you sitting comfortably?’
Settling down on the bed, Rozzy calmly took a tube of moisturiser out of her make-up bag.
‘I killed Rannaldini,’ she said dreamily. ‘He put me down so much he deserved it. It was so easy to slip away from Glyn’s party, I pretended I had a migraine. The land slopes up steeply behind our house – such a small drop on to the lawn from the spare-room window. Everyone was too drunk to notice my car had gone. I drove to Valhalla and parked up a little pebbled track in Paradise woods. Then I climbed over the west gate into Hangman’s Wood.’
‘So James did see you. He wagged his tail and peered into the gloom. Oh, Rozzy, where is he?’
‘Don’t interrupt,’ hissed Rozzy. Then, giving a mirthless laugh, even more sinister than her mad cackle, she went on, ‘I saw that tramp Tabitha staggering out of Rannaldini’s watch-tower. Got her comeuppance at last. No-one heard her screams. They were too busy cheering on the finalists. I wore Hermione’s green cloak. Pretending it was Granny’s cut-up quilt, I’d smuggled it out of Wardrobe on Saturday.’ With an adoring smile, Rozzy was smoothing base into her face and neck. ‘Wandering up one of those rides like the rays of the sun, I saw Rannaldini wearing Alpheus’s smart dressing-gown. He was out looking for Tab. So I launched into Elisabetta’s last duet.’
The next minute Lucy thought her eardrums would rupture as Rozzy’s voice exploded like an atom bomb in the tiny room.
‘You can sing,’ she gasped.
‘I always could, as soon as I recovered from the laryngitis I had at the recording.’ Rozzy rocked with obscene laughter once more. ‘Pretending to have cancer was such an easy way of milking you. Unfortunately Rannaldini bugged your caravan. The Saturday morning before he died he told me he’d seen James Benson and was going to expose me as not having cancer at all.’
‘But I gave you so much money,’ said a shattered Lucy. Then forgetting for a second not to be judgemental, ‘This ought to be called the creditor’s chair.’
‘Don’t you cheek me,’ screamed Rozzy.
Grabbing one of the knives, she ran down the steps, eyes rolling, teeth clenched, and drew the blade along Lucy’s cheek. ‘It was you who told Tristan I had cancer, you meddling bitch, because you didn’t want him to give me any work. Shut up!’ she yelled, as Lucy tried to protest.
Then sauntering back up the stairs, Rozzy used the knife to sharpen an eye pencil as she continued her story. ‘Catching sight of Hermione’s cloak, enchanted by how much his mistress’s voice had improved, Rannaldini strode down the ride, took me in his arms and kissed me. As he broke away, my hands closed round his neck.’ Rozzy’s voice trembled with excitement. ‘His last words were Carlos’s “Dear God, it’s not the Queen.” I saw the terror in his eyes, and felt his windpipe give. God, I enjoyed that. Hell!’ She had snapped her eye pencil, and began to pare away the wood again.
‘How could you, Rozzy?’ whispered Lucy, then, hastily forcing herself to sound admiring, ‘Rannaldini was as strong as an ox.’
‘I hated him so much and I was wearing Tristan’s signet ring for luck. Tristan had given it to me as a keepsake. My hands are smaller than his – it must have fallen off.’
Lining the knife up carefully beside her mobile and the gun, Rozzy drew a dark line along the top of her lashes with an utterly s
teady hand.
‘It was like Piccadilly Circus in Hangman’s Wood that night. Having killed Rannaldini, I was about to whip the memoirs from the watch-tower, but I only had time to snatch his keys, when a helicopter landed and Rupert Campbell-Bastard came running into the wood, shortly followed by Mikhail, who stole the Montigny. Then I ran back to the west gate, shoved the bloodstained cloak in the boot and called you.’
‘But you were at Glyn’s party,’ protested Lucy. ‘I heard everyone singing “Happy Birthday” and “Glyn’s a Jolly Good Fellow”.’
‘I taped it when Glyn cut his cake much earlier,’ said Rozzy. ‘I only had to slot the cassette into the car stereo. I rang you twice – the second time to remind you about the cloak – and established the perfect alibi. I drove home singing my head off. I didn’t even have to climb back in through the window. I’d put a pillow in my bed, and a melon inside the wig you so caringly made for when my hair fell out from the chemo – “You’ll look just as beautiful, Rozzy”, you patronizing cow.’ The sickening little-girl voice soared to a scream and exploded into gales of terrible laughter.
‘I walked upstairs to the spare room.’ Rozzy clutched her shaking sides. ‘Glyn and Sylvia were having a fuck in the “master bedroom”, as the common little slut insists on calling it. Naturally they didn’t notice my return. There are pluses in having an un-uxorious husband. Ten minutes later, Glyn came out on to the landing to check I was asleep and tripped over the carpet.’
Gradually the laughter ebbed away. More terrifying were the uncharacteristically foul language and the mood-swings. Beth in Little Women one moment, Lady Macbeth the next.
‘Clever to murder Beattie,’ mumbled Lucy. ‘She was such a bitch.’
‘And so short-sighted. Never once asked me for an interview, when I’ve got the most beautiful voice in the world and wonderful stories of all the greats I’ve sung with. And Beattie was gagging for Tristan. Shit.’ Rozzy’s mascara wand had slipped, leaving a blob on her cheekbone. ‘She bought the memoirs from Clive, you know, who stole them from Bussage. Beattie was going to expose Tristan as being Maxim’s incestuous bastard. Why didn’t you tell me about that, Lucy? That wasn’t friendly to have secrets.’ The voice was hard and cruel again. Lucy steeled herself as Rozzy picked up the knife, but for the moment her venom was concentrated on Beattie.
