by TP Fielden
‘We all saw a lot of each other in those days. It was just after the War and there was a sense of, I don’t know, liberation. That we had got through it all intact and now was the time to make hay. We were young – ish’ she added after a brief pause, ‘and we had the West End at our feet.
‘Naturally, Gerry took the opportunity to run around with Gloria Westerby, who was playing opposite me in Lives – she was Amanda – it made me furious the way they would sit there at lunch saying “Sollocks” to each other all the time. Utterly infuriating! So I retaliated with Ray Cattermole.
‘It was hideous, my dear – a torment I would not wish to put anyone through. As lovers go it would be hard to give him even a one-star rating – he was ugly, inconsiderate, and . . . a beast.’ Her voice lowered dramatically and Miss Dimont could not even begin to imagine what indignities this beauteous flower of the silver screen had undergone at Cattermole’s hands.
‘It lasted a very short space of time and it was the last time I was unfaithful to Gerry. He carried on in his own sweet way, of course, but I really didn’t have the heart for all the subterfuge and the lies. Frankly, my dear, I would rather press dried flowers.’
This took time to sink in. As with most fans, if Miss Dimont pictured him at all in her dreams it would be as the craggy-jawed soldier/sailor/airman who against all odds battled through and came home to his one true love. The notion that Gerald Hennessy could be a womaniser jarred, and jarred badly – though she was quite worldly enough to know that these things happen. Especially in the acting profession.
Miss Dimont gathered together the threads of the conversation and decided to plough on. Miss Aubrey did not seem to mind.
‘So I take it that your husband and Mr Cattermole really thoroughly disliked each other?’
‘My dear, the understatement of the year.’
‘It’s difficult, then, to understand why Mr Hennessy would want to meet Mr Cattermole, and vice versa. What was the purpose of their meeting?’
Miss Aubrey stood up. Her manner had changed abruptly.
‘What’s this all about?’ she asked sharply. ‘My husband is dead. It would appear he died of a heart attack. A very sad occurrence – and quite apart from that, I have to say with some regret that it comes at the wrong moment. We were going to do the The Magnificent Ambersons together, an opportunity to revive . . . my . . .’
She was close to tears. She would probably never make a film again. All that was left of her future now was wretched television.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Miss Dimont, ‘you’re quite right. Sometimes one can read too much into things.’
‘What was the purpose of your question?’ The tears were drying and, Miss Dimont slowly realised, Miss Aubrey was rather enjoying the drama of it all.
‘I’ll be frank,’ said Miss Dimont, taking a chance. ‘I have been speaking to Geraldine Phipps, who—’
‘Geraldine Phipps? I thought she died years ago!’
‘No, she lives here in Temple Regis.’
‘Good Lord! She must be ninety!’
‘Well, not quite. She is actually the, ah, close friend of Mr Cattermole.’
‘Ray . . . and Geraldine Phipps?’ The thought appeared hilarious to Prudence. ‘Old enough to be his mother! Ha! Ha!’
‘Well,’ said Miss Dimont rather primly, because despite the gin and the cigarette extinguished in the filthy tea, she had rather liked Mrs Phipps. ‘She told me something interesting. But I wouldn’t want to upset you over Gerald, er, Mr Hennessy.’
Miss Aubrey looked at her evenly. ‘Nothing you could say about Gerald would upset me,’ she said, and paused. ‘Our marriage was over.’
It took a moment for this to register. It would explain the delayed arrival of the widow Hennessy in Temple Regis, and her slightly odd behaviour ever since. It also meant that some of the assumptions Miss Dimont had previously made were probably wide of the mark. Most importantly, though, it meant that she could plough on with the torrent of questions which kept rising to her lips without the fear of hurting her interviewee.
‘Let me put it like this,’ said Miss Dimont, still not quite sure whether she could trust Miss Aubrey, but taking a chance. ‘I believe that the death of your husband and Arthur Shrimsley, and the disappearance of Raymond Cattermole, could all in some way be linked.
‘And,’ she added, ‘if I am correct, your husband did not die of a heart attack. Mr Shrimsley did not fall by accident. And it may well be that Mr Cattermole is also dead.’
Miss Aubrey’s face showed no sign of emotion. ‘Go on,’ she said, with just the shade of a tremor.
‘Let’s start with Mr Shrimsley. It would appear that he encouraged Cattermole in the idea that he could blackmail somebody – I thought it must be you.’
‘Good Lord!’ said Prudence. ‘What on earth would he have to blackmail me about? I’ve certainly got a few things on him – I could earn a mint blackmailing Ray Cattermole! But not the other way round, I do assure you.’
‘I wondered whether . . . maybe something to do with all those escorts you were seen in the papers with?’
Miss Aubrey erupted in laughter. ‘More interested in each other!’ she trilled, flouncing her hand. ‘Safe in taxis! Safe as houses!’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Dimont, momentarily deflated.
Out beyond the balcony the sun sprinkled its last dazzling rays into the aquamarine blue. The songbirds, such as remained at this time of year, had exhausted their repertoire for the day. A chill wind ruffled the curtains of the long windows and Prudence Aubrey rose to shut them, draw the curtains, and turn on a succession of low lamps which cast a muted glow across the pastel-shaded boudoir.
This small domestic task she acquitted with grace and neatness, as if the actions were borrowed from some drawing-room drama she once starred in. It was clear she used the moment to collect her thoughts and consider what to say next.
Finally, she returned to the couch, tucked up her legs, sipped the last of her sherry and set her head at an angle.
‘I am going to tell you some things which I do not want repeated in your newspaper. Do I have your agreement that you will keep this private?’
Miss Dimont groaned inwardly. It was not the first time someone had asked her that question. The dilemma which faces all reporters in a similar situation is whether to agree, and consign to history’s dustbin the best story they would ever have; or agree, only to break that promise later. No self-respecting reporter would take the third option – to say ‘either you tell this to me on the record or not at all’ – for all reporters are nosy and cannot resist the sharing of a confidence. The more they are told a secret, the more they want to share that secret.
Miss Dimont paused before answering.
‘Yee . . . ees,’ she said. In the way her reply was intoned you did not know which of the options she had plumped for, but her nuanced response passed the film star by. As far as she was concerned they had an agreement.
‘If there was any blackmailer, it was Gerald,’ she began. ‘At least, that’s the way it felt to me.’
‘What?’
‘You know, Miss Dimont, times are changing. There is new drama in the air – all this kitchen-sink stuff. There’s new music in the air. The world is changing fast. It would seem that for the first few years after the War all people wanted to do was look backwards to pre-war days – “pre-war” seemed to be the byword for all that was good and great. So it was a good time for actresses like me, playing for Noël Coward and Terry Rattigan.
‘People didn’t want change, they wanted to revisit the past and live there. But then, around the time of the Coronation, things started to shift – you got the beatniks and the Teddy boys, and jazz and poets and coffee bars. Things are moving on, Miss Dimont, and I don’t mind telling you it’s not something I like. My kind of acting is probably over – it’s those dolls like Marion Lake who are leading the way now.’
She pointed to the sherry decanter and the reporter obliged.
‘I can tell you were a fan of Gerry,’ she said sympathetically. Miss Dimont nodded. ‘Then you will have seen the metamorphosis he underwent in the past seven years. Once upon a time he was like all the others – Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier. He would give those enigmatic, clipped interviews which said very little and were designed to preserve what he thought was a god-like status.
‘But then he sensed the change – he used to talk to me about it all the time. I find change frightening, but he seemed to thrive on it. Slowly he began to let his hair down – he would start out interviews by lying on the floor, repeating the reporter’s questions, interviewing the reporter – any trick that would draw attention to the fact that he was part of the new wave. He would dress all in black or appear drunk – anything.’
Miss Dimont nodded. It was all part of Gerald’s fascination for her – the fact that he continued to play stiff-upper-lip parts and yet appear to be so deliciously unconventional.
‘It drew him a whole new raft of fans. He enjoyed the extra publicity it brought. And,’ said Miss Aubrey in chilly tones, ‘it encouraged him.’
The actress went on. ‘He decided to do his memoirs. I think Radford, the agent, encouraged him. But unlike those actors who create their character in life and then live by it for the rest of their days, he decided he wanted to do a warts-and-all portrait, telling ghastly true stories that really should be consigned to the wastepaper basket.
‘He wanted to talk about his failures as well as his successes. And,’ added Miss Aubrey bitterly, ‘he wanted to write about me.’
‘Well,’ said Miss Dimont, clearing her throat, ‘I would think that must be—’
‘Cheek!’ snapped the actress. ‘That’s what it must be. He decided that since we were seen always as British cinema’s happiest couple, it would be wrong to leave my story out of it. So he wanted to write up where I came from, how I struggled and . . .’ here she paused and caught her breath ‘. . . and what I had to do to get parts. And all my successes and failures too. Especially, for some reason, the failures.
‘I tell you, Miss Dimont, we had row after row about it. I told him my life was my own property, not his.’ Miss Aubrey’s voice was now rising to fever pitch and its timbre reminded Miss Dimont of her earlier, hysterical, outburst.
‘It was not his story to tell!’ she shouted, and swilled back her sherry. ‘Not his to tell!’
And with that she burst into tears. Miss Dimont recognised in that instant that The Magnificent Ambersons would never have been remade, that either Miss Aubrey would have won the day and Britain’s most adored couple would part – or Gerald Hennessy would win, with the same result.
‘He blackmailed me,’ sobbed Prudence Aubrey. ‘He said, let me write it my way. You can have the house. You can have the money. I’m off on a new adventure and you aren’t part of it. Agree, and you can have the money. Disagree, and I’ll make it worse for you.
‘Oh yes,’ sobbed Miss Aubrey. ‘I was ready to kill him. I’d worked it all out.’
FOURTEEN
‘Just in time, dear,’ said Athene Madrigale as Miss Dimont, with one glass more of sherry on board than was strictly necessary, plumped her raffia bag down on the desk with a thud.
‘It’s late,’ said the reporter absently.
‘Just my time of day,’ said Athene sweetly. ‘You don’t know how hard it is to connect with the spirit world when the office is full of . . .’ she nodded vaguely towards the editor’s office ‘. . . hooligans.’
It was late, and as Miss Dimont had tramped back from the Grand Hotel, her head buzzing with thoughts, the streets echoed to her footsteps. Out of season, Temple Regis put itself to bed early and with decorum: they may still be dancing and drinking in the Palm Court, but as the mist swept up slowly from the sea, the rest of the town was quiet as the grave.
The tea Athene made contained a magic ingredient. Drink it in her company, and you felt a different person. Maybe it was Athene’s soothing clucks which went with the consumption of it, for after all what was it? Merely an infusion of dried leaves from some far-flung place, with a splash of Devon milk added. Yet it restored and invigorated in a way that no cup of tea which Miss Dimont made could ever do. That was the miracle of Athene.
The horoscope column was complete, so the two sat and chatted as the great newsroom clock clicked on towards midnight. There was something eerily dramatic about being alone in a newspaper office which had ceased its business for the day: in the mornings and afternoons there was a sense of perpetual motion, that this well-oiled piece of machinery was too restless, too energetic, ever to sleep. Copy-boys ran, sub-editors demanded, executives conferred, photographers splashed happily in their darkroom, and everywhere there was the tumultuous clatter of typewriters and the ringing of telephones.
At night, to sit in this abandoned room gave one the feeling of being in the eye of a storm. The tumult had passed, but it would come again. And meanwhile the electrical energy generated during the day still hung in the air, as if waiting to expend itself at any moment in a lightning flash.
Both women, as if aware of this, talked in lowered tones. Judy brought Athene up to date with the latest from the Grand, but curiously Prudence Aubrey’s murderous words left the clairvoyant unmoved.
‘It’s not her, dear.’
‘What?’ said Miss Dimont. She needed more tea.
‘Not Prudence Aubrey. I know, I can tell.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s unlikely. How could she have murdered two men while she was apparently in London at the time? But how can you be so certain? You haven’t even met her.’
‘I have been casting about in my mind. I think you should be looking at this another way.’
This was the sort of advice Miss Dimont might welcome from Auriol Hedley who, after all, in another life had considerable experience in the dark arts, but Athene?
‘I’m trying to do that,’ said Miss D with some frustration. ‘But I can’t see anything.
‘Cattermole,’ said Athene with authority. ‘Raymond Cattermole. All this time you have been assuming that Mr Cattermole is somehow the victim of the same horrific mind that has done away with Gerald Hennessy and Arthur Shrimsley. Did it never occur to you that, instead of being in league with them, Cattermole was in fact the architect of their joint ends? That it was he who caused their deaths?’
No, thought Miss Dimont, it had not occurred to me. All the evidence points to the three men involved in some distasteful action together – why would Cattermole kill? And frankly, when you looked at him with his wobbly toupee, who would think him possible of such a definite act?
And not once, but twice?
She cast her mind back to when she last saw the actor-manager. ‘Over my dead body’ is what he said, referring to the idea posited by her that Gerald Hennessy would take centre-stage on the Pavilion Theatre boards in the next summer season.
‘Over my dead body’ didn’t sound like a murderer. Or did it? Wasn’t it just a line from one of the many melodramas he’d staged – actors always like to talk in quotes – or was it something more sinister? Had he, like Perce, skedaddled once his bloody work was done?
Or was it – was it? – that the story or stories which Shrimsley couldn’t use in his memoirs had triggered some insane desire to see both men dead?
And, frankly, was he capable of it?
Miss Dimont didn’t think so.
‘Wasn’t Cattermole,’ she said to Athene, who was gazing into middle distance.
‘You’re right, dear,’ trilled the clairvoyant without a second’s hesitation. ‘Sometimes when I look into the ether I forget to put my specs on. I’ve just been talking to my spirit guide – it’s all right, Judy, I don’t expect you to believe – and he was shaking his head. Saying no, Athene, you’ve got it all wrong.’
These mixed-up thoughts remained with Miss Dimont on the journey home and even accompanied her to bed. Normally she had a good long chat with Mulligatawny and quite often some new thought came from it,
but she was exhausted and could do no more than feed him, cuddle him, put him out and plump up the pillow in his basket.
She almost forgot – but no, she could never forget – to give her last gaze to the young man in his silver photograph frame, and utter some unspoken words to him before turning out the light.
*
Inspector Topham finished the last of his toast and marmalade and bade farewell to Mrs Topham. Theirs was a companionable but monosyllabic partnership as undemonstrative as his choice of necktie.
The coroner’s court was a stiff ten-minute journey and as he walked with measured tread – a sergeant-major’s pace-stick would approve his thirty-inch regulation step – Inspector Topham thought about what evidence he had gathered, and how much of it he would share with the coroner.
The inspector was not a secretive man, rather he was a pragmatist. Too much detail can swing an inquest jury around until it’s pointing in the opposite direction. Anything salacious should be kept back because of the headlines – and the coroner, Dr Rudkin, did not like headlines in his court, any more than he would stand for film stars executing a twirl for the photographers.
The doctor was an old-school GP whose civic pride was barely camouflaged by his crusty exterior. His position allowed him, or so he felt, to exercise a preference for community good over the need to tell the whole truth. Fastidious to a fault, he guarded against the sort of lurid detail which will spawn in a more careless coroner’s court when left to breed unchecked.
Topham had learnt over the years just how much to feed Dr Rudkin, and how much to leave out. The two men had never discussed it because they never met socially, but each understood the other’s needs perfectly. The coroner would ask, the inspector would reply, but many, many facts would remain unspoken. Honesty, truth, transparency, clarity were less important than a respect for the dead – and, more importantly, for those the dead left behind, often in harrowing circumstances.
The inspector therefore discarded much of what he’d been told by Prudence Aubrey, as much for her benefit as for Hennessy’s. The actor’s womanising, Prudence’s falling star, the card from Cattermole to Hennessy – the fact that Cattermole was missing – none of this mattered to the coroner. And as far as Inspector Topham was concerned, that meant it was nobody else’s business either.
