The Riviera Express

by TP Fielden

  Miss Dimont didn’t mind if she did.

  ‘He sometimes goes missing for the night but he’s always at the theatre – that’s one thing you can say about him, he loves that place almost as much as he loves himself.’ Mrs Phipps gazed down with pride at a photograph of herself in her heyday, placed on a side table next to the ashtray. It may not have been covered in dust but it showed what hot stuff she must once have been.

  ‘Sugar, dear?’

  ‘Mrs Phipps, there’s something missing. I came to see Mr Cattermole the other day. He told me that when Gerald Hennessy came to Temple Regis, the two were due to meet.’

  This was not strictly true – Cattermole had not confirmed the arrangement, but it is a reporter’s trick to make a statement of fact in the expectation that the interviewee will assume its content is already general knowledge and, in answering, confirm what until then was mere hypothesis. Not strictly ethical, but it cut corners when a deadline was looming.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Phipps, falling for it, ‘Raymond and Gerry—’ Gerry? thought Miss Dimont, how vulgarly theatrical . . . if ever there was a Gerald in this world, it was the dear departed ‘—Raymond and Gerry were to meet at the Pavilion to discuss a little business proposition.’

  ‘What sort of . . .?’ asked Miss Dimont, her spirits rising. The tea was filthy.

  ‘I don’t know, he always blethered on. I never knew anybody use the first person singular more than Ray. I this and I that – you tend to think of other things, nicer things, when he starts off like that. Did you ever see me on stage, dear?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘Too young I suppose. I made my departure from the West End in 1936. A terrible show called Transatlantic Rhythm. My dear, the unspeakable things Lupe Vélez did on stage! The woman was just an animal, pools of water everywhere!’

  ‘Is that where you met Ray – Mr Cattermole?’ asked Miss Dimont, trying deftly to steer back the conversation.

  ‘He was in a show next door, we were at the Adelphi. The orchestra walked out because they didn’t get paid. Some frightful young whippersnapper of an American was the producer – Jimmy Donahue was his name, I think. Woolworth money, darling – we thought he had oodles. But it was all his mother’s.’

  ‘Ray, er, Raymond and Gerald would have been contemporaries then?’

  ‘Yes, I think Gerry was doing three short Coward plays at the Phoenix at the time. Brave soul – not that he was particularly brave.’

  At last we are back on terra firma, thought Miss Dimont, with Gerald Hennessy. ‘What do you mean, exactly?’

  ‘Well, Ray used to say what a coward he was. All that business during the War.’

  The reporter started to listen rather more intently. ‘What business was that, exactly?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’

  ‘Well, no, I don’t.’

  ‘About how he avoided call-up and was generally lily-livered over the whole war business. I mean,’ said Mrs Phipps, gasping as she lit her third Navy Cut, ‘it’s a jolly little joke, isn’t it, that Gerry Hennessy – our so-called great hero actor – dodged the column?’

  ‘I thought he was in ENSA.’

  ‘That was later, dear. He was eligible for call-up at the outbreak, but he wriggled and he squiggled and somehow – I don’t know how, but Ray does – managed to avoid going into uniform. I think he spent the first three years hobbling round Pitlochry on a stick pretending he’d been wounded. That was before the theatre opened up there, dear – they’d never seen an actor then, they were all taken in. I think he worked in the hotel.’

  ‘But then he did ENSA?’

  ‘They gave you a uniform to travel about in. Somehow Gerry’s was more magnificent than a general’s. It was ghastly behaviour. Really ghastly. I never really liked him after that, though he was gorgeous to look at, I will grant you that.’

  This, if true, was shattering news to Miss Dimont, who’d sat through many a war epic starring the craggy-jawed Hennessy. She was far too clever to believe that the man had actually done the things he acted out on screen, but in the dark, with a nice ice cream, harbouring memories of her own part in the conflict, it was enjoyable to suspend one’s disbelief.

  ‘More tea, dear?’ Miss Dimont blanched as Mrs Phipps dropped a cigarette end into her cup with a fizzle.

  ‘No thank you, Mrs Phipps . . . but do tell me more about Raymond and, er, Gerry.’

  ‘Not much to say, really. They appeared together in The Importance of Being Earnest. Edith Evans. Great success – eventually. In the dressing room one night, Ray made the mistake of ribbing Gerry about his part in the War and how ironic it was that he now was a greater hero than most of the people who’d taken part in the fighting.

  ‘There was a fight and Gerry broke Ray’s arm. It took him out of the show and gave Gerry the better part. A film director was in that night – and that’s when Gerry’s career took off.

  ‘Meantime poor Ray found it difficult with a wonky arm to get the young-juve parts he’d specialised in and, really, that was the end of that. I will say this for him – instead of hanging around in the Stage Door Club getting drunk every lunchtime he hightailed it down here and saved your theatre.’ These last words were delivered in quotation marks, a message from the great actor-manager himself, though not meant to be taken seriously between two grown women of the world.

  Miss Dimont smiled. ‘So, I don’t really understand this,’ she said, using her pencil to scratch her head. ‘These two men disliked each other intensely and yet they were going to meet when Mr Hennessy came down to Temple Regis. In fact,’ she added, ‘it would appear to be the only reason why he came down here. Are you sure they hadn’t patched things up and that Raymond was going to offer Gerald a summer season?’

  Mrs Phipps’s eyes popped open. ‘You can’t be serious!’ she cackled. ‘Ray despised Gerry – despised him! Don’t forget, whatever you think of him, Ray did his bit during the War.’

  ‘Army Pay Corps, wasn’t it?’

  ‘They also serve who stand and hand out the wages,’ misquoted Mrs Phipps, not without irony. ‘Ray is very proud of his General Service Medal.’

  ‘So there was some business between them, then.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know what. It all blew up after he bumped into that wretched little man – colleague of yours, I think – nasty piece of work.’

  Miss Dimont racked her brains. ‘Mr Rhys?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Shrimp, or something like that.’

  It took a moment for the penny to drop. ‘Do you mean,’ said Miss Dimont quite slowly, ‘Arthur Shrimsley?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Mrs Phipps, who was bored now and thinking about a glass of gin. ‘What I want to know is what are the police doing about finding Ray? I mean, if the theatre stays dark another night we’ll all be in trouble. You don’t know what a fuss there was last night at the box office when they had to turn everybody away.’

  ‘He was doing My West End Life, wasn’t he? His one-man show?’

  ‘Yes, it fills the gap at the end of the season until we shut down for the winter.’

  There’ll hardly have been chaos at the box office, thought Miss Dimont. Word had got around the show was better than a cup of Horlicks for insomniacs. If more than a handful were in for the night, it would have been a miracle.

  She walked back, slowly. The delicious smell of malting from Gardner’s, the next-door brewery, wafted out to greet her and helped liven her steps back to the office, and as she walked, Miss Dimont pieced together the quite extraordinary scenario presented to her by Mrs Phipps.

  Hennessy and Cattermole hated each other, yet they had planned to meet. Apparently the catalyst to this meeting – if Mrs Phipps’s testimony was to be trusted – was a visit to Cattermole by Arthur Shrimsley.

  Three men.

  Two dead.

  And one missing.

  ELEVEN

  Terry was such a mine of information, it was irritating. Miss Dimont could not tell one end o
f a camera from another and certainly the intricate settings, apertures and exposures Terry was apt to reel off in any conversation you had would blind you with science if you hadn’t already died of boredom.

  But though one might view Terry, in other circumstances, as something which had just jumped down from the trees – such was his rudimentary command of language, of domestic habit, and of knife and of fork – he really was very, very good at his job. Moreover, he was pretty good at Judy Dimont’s job too.

  ‘Shrimsley,’ he said brightly by way of greeting, once the reporter had made her way along the corridor to the newsroom.

  ‘Yes?’ came the snippy reply, for Miss Dimont was deep in her own thoughts. ‘Inquest on Friday. Nothing more till then.’

  Some might take this as a snub but to Terry it was water off the proverbial. ‘Bit of a mystery,’ he confided, forefinger touching nose. ‘He wasn’t where he should have been.’

  Miss D blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Shrimsley.’

  ‘Yes, I know Shrimsley. What about him?’

  ‘Apparently he took his dog for a walk up on Mudford Cliffs and for some reason walked out beyond the safety barrier.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You remember we ran a story, two to three weeks ago, about that cliff fall. Barriers put up to stop the public snooping around and finding themselves on the rocks two hundred and fifty feet down. Plenty of warnings from the fire brigade to keep back because of an unstable cliff edge.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, old Shrimsley somehow got beyond the barrier and – you know the rest.’

  ‘Yes.’ Miss Dimont really was finding it hard to concentrate. What Mrs Phipps had told her was weighing heavily on her mind.

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ said Terry, waxing philosophical for a moment, ‘was what he was doing there. Mudford Cliffs are a long way to take your dog for a walk from Exbridge. It’s a fifteen-minute car ride or thirty minutes by bus. Did he come to follow up our front-page story about a cliff fall? Did he think he could sell it to Fleet Street? Nah,’ said Terry. ‘All a bit comical really.’

  Miss Dimont usually thought Terry a bit comical too – heavens, he’d never even tried the Daily Telegraph crossword – but slowly, like a great Leviathan, she awoke to what he was telling her. No reason for Shrimsley to be on a cliff top so far from home. His death would remain, until the inquest, a mystery, but clearly the circumstances in which he fell suddenly seemed that much more mysterious.

  Her senses sharpened. ‘What happened to the dog?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The dog, Terry. He was walking his dog. We saw him, you and I, where he ended up at the bottom of the cliff – there wasn’t a dog. Where was the dog?’

  ‘No dog that I saw,’ said Terry, and in truth if there had been one, he’d not only have seen it but got a shot of it at f3.5.

  ‘Police haven’t said anything about a missing dog?’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘Not to me, either. Who saw him up there?’

  ‘Mabel Attwell, you know, she works in the circulation department.’

  Typical, thought Miss Dimont crossly. All those people who work in a newspaper office who have no idea they’re sitting on a story. Just wander about keeping the news to themselves. Selfish. Short-sighted. They should be . . .

  Aloud she said, ‘Old Mrs Attwell? How would she recognise Arthur Shrimsley?’

  ‘She lives in Exbridge too. Apparently he’s a bit of a square peg in the village.’

  And not only the village, muttered Miss Dimont, thinking ill of the dead.

  There was nothing else for it. She checked the diary and saw that nothing was expected of her until a meeting of the Council of Social Service at 6.30. ‘I’m going over to Exbridge,’ she said. ‘Want to come?’

  Terry nodded without much enthusiasm. He picked up the keys to the Minor and they walked out of the office together.

  The road to Exbridge skirted Dartmoor and plunged between hill and vale in a sinuous thin ribbon. On either side, behind massive Devon banks, rose huge fields whose green made you gasp, or whose red earth made you believe there must be some great god who once came to visit this corner of a wonderful land and spilled his blood in tribute to its beauty. White farmhouses stood importantly upon hilltops while scattered about were the reason they were there in the first place – herds of rust-coloured South Devon cattle, their coats catching the sunlight.

  Terry drove efficiently but not fast. Once, Miss Dimont had made the mistake of thinking that, being a photographer, he had no soul, but in his own way Terry was enjoying the journey every bit as much as she; just in a different way.

  ‘That ridge.’

  Judy was looking at a new-born calf nuzzling its mother as they drove slowly by. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hard edge of sunlight coming over the top. I’d need my Leica for that.’

  His companion was not sure whether this was a camera or a cookbook. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘It would be wonderful just to stop for a moment and drink all this in.’

  ‘The technical challenges which you face when—’

  ‘Oh, Terry, do shut up. Is this beautiful, or is it beautiful?’

  Terry turned and smiled, very slowly, at her. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said.

  Exbridge itself was little to write home about, or even to send a postcard from – a clutch of once-handsome dwellings which had weathered the worst of Devon winters over countless centuries and were now showing their age, not in a nice way. In summertime open-top tourist buses, en route to somewhere more attractive, jammed the streets and, when winter came, it would seem that every major haulier had instructed his drivers to take a short cut through the town.

  The Minor found its way to the late Arthur Shrimsley’s cottage without difficulty. Neither Miss Dimont nor Terry knew whether he had been married or what his domestic circumstances were. All that was known was that he once worked in some elevated capacity for The Nation, that cock-a-snook broadsheet paper beloved of chippy people who liked to look down on their betters.

  At a stroke, Miss Dimont knew Shrimsley had lived alone – you only had to look at the state of the front-door mat! At a stroke, she intuited Shrimsley was not a dog owner – not because of physical evidence for or against the proposition, but just because of the feel of the place. It was what made Athene her friend – Judy had an uncanny feel for the unspoken, the unknown, when it came to certain things. After all, wasn’t it she who had found Mrs Sharpham’s cat in the back of the airing cupboard after it had been missing for a fortnight?

  ‘No dog,’ she said to Terry, who was casing the joint.

  ‘Bet there’s a window open round the back,’ he said, as if relieved he wouldn’t have to get the jemmy out of his camera bag.

  ‘No, Terry!’ said Miss Dimont. ‘Certainly not! What would the neighbours think?’

  ‘Flash ’em your press card,’ said Terry, voice of experience. ‘That should do it. You wait here, I’ll let you in the front door.’

  It was at times like this, thought Miss Dimont, that British journalism demonstrates what a broad church it is. Last night as she turned out the light she’d put down her volume of George Eliot, composing her thoughts around the moral dilemmas of Daniel Deronda and poor Gwendolen Harleth. Terry meanwhile had snuggled down dreaming of a chance to break and enter some poor innocent’s property.

  But in their different ways each now brought something to the moment. Terry hopped round the back while Miss Dimont engaged, as only she could, a nice-looking lady in a detailed discussion about the overgrown village green.

  Two minutes later the door was open and Miss Dimont stepped in to the sound of a whistling kettle. ‘They hated him,’ she said to Terry, who was busy doing the honours with cups and saucers.

  ‘Ur,’ he said.

  ‘Busybody. Made himself a nuisance. Couldn’t adjust to country life. Made an ass of himself doing a book-signing in the town hall. Nobody turned up.’

&nb
sp; ‘Books?’ said Terry. ‘You’ll have to do without milk. It’s off.’

  ‘Really, we shouldn’t!’ squeaked Miss D, embarrassed at his sheer brass neck. But she seemed in no hurry to leave.

  She told the photographer of her gleanings: that Shrimsley, who once nearly had an important biography published by the great Victor Gollancz himself, had by now sunk to ghosting memoirs of the not-particularly-rich and often not-very-famous. ‘He called himself an author, but he was just a hack,’ she said unkindly.

  This was opinion, but she had hard fact as well. ‘He was down in the saloon bar of the Silent Whistle every night, boring everybody to death. Said he was writing his memoirs, Headlines All My Life, or some such inflated nonsense. Meanwhile he paid his bills by filching stuff from the Riviera Express and selling it to Fleet Street.’

  ‘Nasty piece of work,’ said Terry.

  ‘Well yes, but did you ever meet him?’

  ‘Just look at that,’ said Terry. It would appear that in the short time it had taken Judy to debrief the nice lady in the beige macintosh as to the nature and character of Arthur Shrimsley – no mean feat from a standing start – Terry had stormed the barricades, opened the front door, produced a cup of tea and no doubt laid a fire and was ready to light it. To that could be added the detection of a piece of paper he now handed his opposite number.

  In Shrimsley’s typewriter was an unfinished letter.

  Dear Ray,

  Good to see you today. I have to admit to being surprised by what you told me – not what I was expecting at all.

  It’s not something for the memoirs. There’s nowhere where a story like that would fit in. On the other hand, what you have is priceless – or, put another way, has a price on it. And a pretty handsome one at that.

  Blackmail is such an ugly word but it has its rewards. You really should . . .

  And that’s where the letter ended. Like Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, the beauty of it lay in what was yet unwritten, and now a theory was starting to form in her mind. She sipped her tea as Terry wandered from room to room, whistling in a decidedly unsympathetic way given the recent occupant’s most unfortunate demise.