The Riviera Express

by TP Fielden

  Her serene countenance often graced the pages of the Riviera Express, whether as chairman of this, a subscriber to that, or simply for being an Honourable. A lacklustre fashion show, staged by the Women’s Institute in a determined bid to hold down the town’s hemlines, would be sure of coverage if the smiling Mrs March were to grace the front row (though – poor models! – the photograph which accompanied the article would invariably feature the magistrate, not the matrons).

  But Miss Dimont found it hard to like her.

  And Mrs March did not much like Miss Dimont.

  There was something scholarly about the corkscrew-haired reporter, something passionate, something humane – qualities Mrs March, as she peered down into the court, recognised that she herself did not possess. Apogee of correctness and charm though she was, the steely inner core which made her a most excellent magistrate (if too firm on occasion) disallowed her the luxury of these finer attributes.

  For her part Miss Dimont hardly helped matters; she did not care for the unquestioning submission to privilege. On a number of occasions, she had pointed out in print where the Bench, under the leadership of Mrs March, had forgotten that old Gilbertian thing of letting the punishment fit the crime. Handing down a week’s custodial sentence simply for having supped too deep in the Cap’n Fortescue did not find favour with this fair-minded reporter, and she did not mind saying so on the Opinion page.

  For some reason Mrs March took these lightly worded criticisms badly. Were she less the Queen of Temple Regis, one might almost suppose that she felt threatened, but that could not be – her position in the town outranked the mayor, the rector, the chairman of Rotary, even the chief constable. A lowly reporter on the local rag presented no threat to her standing, no matter what appeared in print, and yet the unfinished business between the pair often had the power to lower the temperature in court by a good few degrees.

  ‘All rise,’ barked Mr Thurlestone. ‘The court is in session.’

  This morning there were usual crop of licensee applications – a form of morning prayers during which one could allow one’s mind to wander – before the main business of the day began. Miss Dimont’s eyes ran down the charge sheet automatically registering the petty thefts, drunken misdemeanours, traffic infringements and insults to civic pride which did nothing to diminish Temple Regis in the eyes of the world, but did not exactly shore up her faith in man’s capacity to find that higher path.

  ‘Call Albert Lamb!’

  A furtive-looking fellow stepped forward, eyeing the court suspiciously as if one of them had stolen his bicycle clips.

  ‘Are you Albert John Walker Lamb?’

  ‘Yus.’

  ‘Albert Lamb, you are charged with drunkenness in a public place. How do you plead?’

  ‘Just a shmall one, shank you.’

  Miss Dimont found, with her combination of immaculate shorthand and a sense of when to rest her pencil, that court reporting was a bit like lying on a lumpy sofa with a box of chocolates – the seating was uncomfortable but the work largely enjoyable. Gradually, as one traffic accident after another resolved itself, she allowed her mind to wander back to the events of the previous day.

  All in all, it had been rather wonderful, snatching success as she had from the jaws of defeat – one moment no stories, the next, two – on Page One!

  ‘Call Ezra Poundale.’

  ‘Call Gloria Monday.’

  ‘Call . . .’

  What kept coming back to her, however, was the startling discovery she had made with Terry’s magnifying glass. The pointed finger blackened by dust, the secret message left by the dying actor! The thrill of an even better story!! But what seemed certain at first examination seemed less so at second glance, and despite Terry obligingly putting another print through the bath to see if it came up more clearly, it was impossible to say that what was scrawled in the window-dust really was M . . . U . . . R . . .

  She had ridden the trusty Herbert back to the railway station this morning in the hope of examining the carriage more closely, but the Pullman coach had been detached from the rest of the train and shunted into a siding where the Temple Regis police had thrown a barrier around it. She was forcefully reminded she was not allowed anywhere near – Hernaford’s revenge for yesterday’s small triumph in Bedlington.

  There was no sense, she felt, that the police were treating this as anything other than a routine inquiry. She wondered, not for the first time in her eventful life, whether she wasn’t reading too much into it all, jumping at shadows.

  This morning the cases seemed to drag on, and the luncheon recess came as a merciful release. Normally, Miss Dimont joined like-minded members of the court proceedings for lunch in their unofficial canteen, the Signal Box Café, but she needed time to think. She boarded one of Temple’s green and cream tourist buses and took a threepenny ride down to the promenade.

  She alighted at her favourite spot by the bandstand and walked towards the shore. Bathed now in late summer sunlight, the turquoise sea stretched out to infinity, its wave-tops like glass beads glittering and cascading over the horizon. The sky was cloudless and a shade of innocent blue. Through the haze she could see fishing boats sliding out to meet the incoming tide while wise old seagulls circled in the heat, lazily awaiting their opportunity.

  ‘This is why I am here,’ said Miss Dimont, only half to herself. ‘This is paradise.’

  When compared to the fusty atmosphere of the Magistrates’ Court, she was right. The irritants which go with any seaside town – late holidaymakers fussing over the price of an ice cream, Teddy boys with nothing better to do than comb their greasy hair and hang about with intent, or the eternal scourge of bottles abandoned on the beach – these things Miss Dimont did not see. The air was still, the only sound that eternal two-part harmony of surf and gulls.

  She sat quite still on a bench and dragooned the various components of her considerable intellect into focusing on the events of the past twenty-four hours.

  Last night there had been the shock, still with her, of confronting one of the most famous faces in the land so close upon the moment of his death. What she saw, what she had not seen . . . what did it amount to? In the bright hot sun it was hard to believe that in the darkroom with Terry by her side, both with magnifying glasses to their noses, she could smell murder. Apart from anything else there were no signs of violence, nothing to disturb the pristine tranquillity of that Pullman coach compartment – nothing sinister in the atmosphere, nothing disturbed.

  But she had seen bodies like that before, and they hadn’t died from a heart attack.

  And yet her suspicions no longer seemed quite real, and so she turned instead to the question of Arthur Shrimsley. The fleeting glimpse of the note in his hand gave more than a hint that something was amiss. Miss Dimont had second sight about such things, as in when she found old Mrs Bradley’s lost diamond ring in the clothes-peg basket. It had been a magpie, she deduced. Missing for a fortnight, but Miss Dimont intuited.

  She had the same feeling now.

  If there was a note, it meant something – the difficulty being, what? Mr Shrimsley, as Terry crisply summarised, loved himself far too much to contemplate self-destruction. What did strike as odd was that Sergeant Hernaford appeared to have done nothing about it. Shrimsley must have fallen down the cliff a good ninety minutes before she and Terry arrived on the scene – wouldn’t he, while searching the man’s wallet to establish his identity, have plucked the note from the man’s lifeless fingers? Was police procedure so strict these days he would leave it to the detectives to pick up the paper and digest its contents? She didn’t think so, in fact if anything the opposite.

  Miss Dimont closed her eyes and let the sun do its work.

  ‘Judy, there you are!’

  Miss Dimont struggled for a moment and blinked. She had fallen asleep. There before her was Betty Featherstone, her friend and enemy – the one who was given the best stories, the one whose byline generally graced the front p
age of the Express. There was little animosity between the two over this – both knew that when it came to ferreting out stories, getting interviewees to confess, or even just how fast one could type or take shorthand, there was no competition. Yet Betty retained her competitive edge by doing no wrong in the eyes of Rudyard Rhys, whereas Miss Dim . . .

  ‘Where were you last night?’ quizzed the excitable Betty. ‘We had the devil’s own job with the Agnus Dei.’

  Miss Dimont was shaken out of her somnolent meditation. ‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘I don’t know if you heard, Betty, but we had two deaths yesterday. I was quite busy with the—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ trilled Betty, her blonde bob dancing a tango on top of her head. ‘What a day for all of us! That planning committee went on interminably, and I almost didn’t make the—’

  ‘Choir practice,’ remembered Miss Dimont. ‘Lord, I forgot all about it! You see, we were late in the office and—’

  ‘Yes, Rudyard said you left the window open,’ said Betty accusingly. She liked to be in the right, or was it she liked Judy to be in the wrong? ‘You know it’s against regulations. He went on for quite some time about it. I told him it wasn’t my fault when he complained to me, and then Terry said—’

  ‘Terry could have shut it just as easily as me,’ said Miss Dimont, now thoroughly awake and feeling peppery.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Betty, smoothing her pink sundress, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you. The court, the Signal Box, everywhere . . . you have to come back to the office.’

  ‘I’ve half-a-dozen cases to cover this afternoon.’

  ‘Mr Rhys wants you back in the office,’ said Betty smugly. ‘Something about those dead bodies.’

  The way she said ‘dead bodies’, you knew Betty had never seen one. Betty didn’t care to think about death.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she said. And the two set off companionably enough – for in Temple Regis it was not easy to find a friend in their line of work.

  Everywhere there were still signs of the conflict whose name populated every other sentence uttered in Temple Regis. Though ‘the War’ had largely passed the town by, its effects had not. Bereaved families were still accorded a special respect, the services held around the War Memorial were well attended, the town’s British Legion club was a thriving concern – and though its brightly lit bar turned out its fair share of over-lubricated fellows on a Friday and Saturday night, they were by common consent not to be subject to the attentions of the police or the Bench.

  On the beach, at the far end of the promenade, rolls of rusty barbed wire bore witness to the town’s long-ago preparations for invasion. Since the declaration of peace the gorgeous white sands had been swept again and again in case a defensive mine still lurked below the surface. Fire hydrants, their red paint peeling, dotted the pavements here and there. And military pillboxes, overgrown with buddleia and cracking at the corners, still stood on forlorn sentry duty – tired, overlooked, perceived now as an eyesore where once they had been the very bastions of liberty.

  The walk back to the office took in all this, but Judy and Betty were deep into the politics of their choir – Jane Overbeck’s too-strident soprano, how Mabel Attwater came in late at the beginning of every line (‘well, dear, she is eighty-three’), why the tea was always cold when they stopped for a break. Their conductor Geraldine Brent was a short, energetic woman with eyes that burnt like blazing coals – she instilled in her flock such a sense of urgency and importance in their delivery of Gabriel Fauré’s sublime work that the composer himself would have left off his rehearsals with the cherubim and seraphim to smile down, especially upon their forthcoming performance at St Margaret’s Church.

  No summons from Rudyard Rhys was so urgent that it could not wait until Judy and Betty had bought their ice-cream from John, the one-armed ‘Stop Me and Buy One’ vendor who strategically placed his tricycle-tub on the corner where the promenade ended and the town proper started – only fourpence-ha’penny a brick. Then a quick dash into the Home and Colonial Stores.

  ‘Three slices of ham, please.’

  ‘One and six, madam.’

  ‘Pound of sugar – can you pour it specially? You never know how long those bags have been sitting there.’

  ‘Got a new bag of broken biscuits. Fresh in, thruppence to you.’

  And then the air filled with the sound and smell of that most glorious luxury – coffee beans being ground – a recent innovation now that rationing was over. Both women sighed over their rough blue-paper prizes with their precious contents.

  Fortified by these invigorating delays they arrived at the Riviera Express in excellent spirits, but one sight of Rudyard Rhys striding down the newsroom towards them sent Betty scuttling away.

  ‘About time,’ rasped Rudyard. ‘I won’t ask where you’ve been,’ he added, eyeing the Home and Colonial bag.

  Miss Dimont was unbowed by the glowering presence – she’d seen it too often before.

  ‘Yes, Mr Rhys? You know there are six cases in court this afternoon? ‘Three traffic, but then there’s—’

  ‘Inquests!’ snapped Rudyard. ‘Inquests!’

  ‘Yes, Mr Rhys?’

  ‘You forgot, Miss Dim—’ he dwelt heavily upon these words ‘—to mention anything in your reports about the inquests on Hennessy and Shrimsley.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Miss Dimont, colouring visibly.

  ‘There are inquests to be held, Miss Dim,’ snarled Rhys. ‘Were you thinking these two gentlemen were happy now they were reunited with their Maker? That that was the end of the story?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Because I have heard from the coroner’s clerk, via Miss Featherstone,’ growled Rhys, ‘that there may be evidence of foul play.’

  Now why didn’t she tell me THAT? fumed Miss Dimont.

  FIVE

  The weekend was not your own when you worked for the Riviera Express. Saturday mornings were devoted to writing up next week’s wedding reports (and deciding who’d feature in the ‘Thank Heavens!’ board), and turning out the more run-of-the-mill obituaries of the town’s great and good.

  Quite often these careless and unthinking citizens would shuffle off the mortal coil without bothering to warn the Express beforehand, which could be irksome when it came to press day. Each new edition of the paper brought with it complaints from readers that their beloved one’s journey to the Other Side had gone unmarked.

  Rudyard Rhys did not like complaints. He drummed into Judy and Betty and the other members of staff – Terry, even – how they must keep eyes open and ears firmly to the ground on this fundamental point. Miss Dimont had once asked him, mid-tirade, if her job now was to walk about the town centre stopping people and asking, ‘Know anyone about to die round your way?’ But though this raised a snort of laughter in morning conference, Rudyard simply ordered her to add the town’s undertakers to her lengthy list of morning calls.

  Truth to tell, Miss Dimont was rather good at obituaries. Why, only the other month she had written a corker about William Pithers, one of the town’s roughest diamonds, who’d risen from obscurity during the War to become one of its most prominent citizens. His cerise Rolls-Royce, yellow tweed suits and the fat Havana sticking out of his breast pocket did not denote a man of breeding, perhaps, nor yet of great intellect, but Bill Pithers had made his mark all right. His fat-rendering business, though noisy, smelly, and hardly the town’s greatest visual attraction, had made him richer than most. Money allowed him a voice in the community far louder than if he’d been elected to the Town Council or the Bench.

  Pithers threw his money around (‘noted for his extraordinary generosity’, typed Miss Dimont pertly) and lorded it down at the golf club (‘a sporting enthusiast’). After a lucrative week’s work rendering fat, he would sit in the bar dishing out drink and opinion in equal measure to a befoozled audience made up of the thirsty, the hard-up, the deaf and the occasional owner of a rhinoceros skin.

  ‘An enthusiastic co
nversationalist,’ tapped Miss Dimont, who had bumped into the ancient Pithers when the Ladies’ Inner Wheel invited her to their annual nine-hole tournament dinner, ‘he often encouraged others into lively debate.’ Indeed so; that night the lard-like entrepreneur had treated his audience to a twenty-minute peroration on how Herr Hitler was a much misunderstood man; it led, regrettably, to fisticuffs.

  ‘Indeed his love of life’ (barmaids) ‘and the Turf’ (he rarely paid his bookies) ‘set him aside in the community’ (he had no friends) ‘and will make him a much-missed figure’ (three people went to his funeral, all of them to make sure he was dead).

  Weaving such barbed encomiums was Miss Dimont’s consolation, for through the office window she could see across the red rooftops to the promenade, the beach and the glorious turquoise sea, which this morning was like glass. Young lovers strolled hand-in-hand, children built their dreams in the sand, the Temple Silver Band parped joyfully in the Victorian bandstand.

  Miss Dimont sighed and picked up another green wedding form.

  ‘It was love at first sight in the Palm Court of the Grand,’ she rattled. ‘Waiter Peter Potts and cleaner Avril Smedley met under a glittering chandelier and . . .’

  This was an inspired introduction to the lives of two very nice but humdrum Temple Regents employed by the town’s grandest hotel. The rest of her report – the guipure lace, the bouquet of white roses, stephanotis and lily of the valley, the honeymoon spent at a secret location – was standard pie-filling, but Miss Dimont adorned the crust with a little more care because she happened to know Peter. She was often in the Grand on business, and he was always most attentive. She was happy that he had found love with Avril for he was rather a sad boy. She would insist that their picture was not added to the Thank Heavens! board, but in truth it was a prime contender.