by TP Fielden
‘Come in, Miss Dim.’
He would call her that, and really there was no need – especially on such a fine day, so full of promise.
‘Please don’t.’
‘Miss Dimont. What are you doing this morning?’
‘In court,’ said his chief reporter. ‘Do you want me to take along Mr, er, Ford?’
‘Ford? Who’s Ford?’
‘The new recruit. Wants to shorten his name for byline purposes.’
‘There’ll be no bylines round here,’ snorted the editor, ‘until he starts pulling in some stories. Anyway that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.’
Uninvited, Miss Dimont sat down opposite her employer. There was, after all, a time when he’d stood before her desk while she sat and issued instructions, but that had been long ago. It was one of life’s ironies that the War had a way of changing things for the better and the peace, for the worse. Life was peculiar that way.
‘Ben Larsson,’ said the editor. ‘You saw the piece in the national press yesterday.’
‘Well deserved. The man’s a mountebank,’ said Miss Dimont firmly. ‘A fraud. I thought they treated him with kid gloves, considering.’
‘He is – without doubt Miss Dimont, without a shadow of a doubt – the most famous resident of Temple Regis,’ hissed the editor. ‘While he remains at Ransome’s Retreat we treat him with the respect that position demands.’
Miss Dimont laughed aloud. ‘Oh yes!’ she hooted, ‘just think of the number of complaints we’ve had in the past couple of years about the Rejuvenator – how it claims to do everything, and manages to do nothing! How people have been diddled out of their money. That’s quite apart from all those sad souls who make their pilgrimage to the Retreat because they believe Larsson is somehow skippering the advance party of the Second Coming. They make Temple Regis a laughing stock.’
‘That’s not the point.’ If Rhys sought a quiet life, sheltered from controversy, he really had chosen the wrong profession, thought Miss Dimont. ‘I don’t want anything about Larsson in the paper, d’you understand, and if the Daily Herald calls again asking for more details, as they did just now, just say we are not at home to sensationalism.’
‘It was a perfectly legitimate story. They did an investigation and it proved beyond all doubt that …’
‘I know what the paper did,’ snapped Rhys. ‘I can read, Miss Dim! I just don’t want that rubbish in my pages so I called you in here – because you can stir up trouble, once you get going – to tell you to leave this one alone. No stories about Larsson in the paper, and no help to Fleet Street.’
‘They’ll come down here anyway and camp in your office, like they always do when there’s a big story.’
Her words hit home. When in the past the national press had paid a call, they invariably left the good people of Temple Regis thinking what a weak and flabby offering they had for a weekly newspaper – even if it did have Athene Madrigale as its star columnist. Rhys hated the Fleet Street pressmen with their trilby hats and big coats and lingering cologne and expense accounts taking up the desks in his newsroom, a privilege he could not deny them if he were still to call himself a newspaperman. They came like cuckoos to the nest, sucking up the nourishment, making a nuisance, and destroying the sense of calm and harmony Mr Rhys tried hard to maintain throughout the year. He really should have chosen another job, but there it was; a failed novelist doesn’t have that many career choices.
The windows in his office were wide open and you could hear the swooping seagulls mocking him outside.
‘Stay away from the Retreat and get on with what you’re supposed to be doing,’ warned the editor. ‘Hear me?’
‘This murder,’ Judy said, artfully changing tack. ‘The girl on the beach.’
‘Rr … rrrr. Accident, the police are saying. Don’t go mucking about in things. You know what people will say.’
Indeed Miss Dimont did know. On the one hand the townsfolk lapped up anything a bit unusual in their weekly newspaper, and a murder certainly made a nice change, on the other, the city fathers hated it: bad for business. If Temple Regis was to maintain its claim to being the handsomest resort in Devon, the last thing they wanted was holidaymakers thinking they might trip over a body or two on the beach. Rudyard Rhys unequivocally sided with this position.
Miss Dimont sat back and said nothing more. To a large extent Rhys had to rely on what he was given, editorially, by his staff – and if his chief reporter came up with something newsworthy, it would inevitably find its way into the paper. Newspapers are like that: they don’t want you doing things but when you do them, they’re grateful.
Only they never say so.
‘However,’ said Rhys, for he felt he had to show initiative as a leader, ‘this piece of Betty’s, about the woman and the Six Point Group.’
‘Yes, Mr Rhys?’
‘I think we can do better than that. Go and see this Miss de Mauny. For heaven’s sake, how many women do you know who fix clocks for a living?’
‘None,’ said Miss Dimont frostily. For heaven’s sake, a nice article on clock-mending when you could have a murder? And a national scandal about old Ben Larsson as well? Had he lost all sense?
Valentine was waiting when she got back to her desk. ‘I’m with you again today,’ he said shyly. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’
‘Magistrates’ court,’ said Judy, as if it were a punishment. ‘That’ll mean a notebook. And a pencil. How’s your shorthand?’ She knew he didn’t have any.
‘Erm, well …’
‘I’d get some classes if I were you. Lovely Mary will help you out.’
‘Lovely …?’
‘Runs the Signal Box Café. Used to be secretary on her father’s dairy farm.’ They walked out of the office together. ‘How went the obituary?’
‘I discover I have led a fascinating life. I hadn’t realised quite what a remarkable chap I am. And my death, such a loss to Temple Regis. “The town mourned at the sudden departure …”.’
‘You didn’t finish it?’
‘I was there till midnight. Whichever way I wrote it, it looked wrong. You start a sentence and by the time you get to the other end you’ve forgotten why you started it that way. So you undo it and start again. You put the front at the back and the back at the front. That seems to work. Then you realise that actually the story starts in the third paragraph, so you tear out the first two and are happily tapping along when you realise that paras one and two have some bearing on the new first paragraph and without the nourishment they provide to the narrative, you’re sunk.
‘So then you amalgamate all three paragraphs into one – you’ve got all the story there now. But then there’s nothing left to say. You’re supposed to write three hundred words and it’s all been said in a fraction of that.’
Well, clearly he has some linguistic ability, thought Miss Dimont, if no discernible writing talent.
‘But there’s another way of looking at it,’ went on Valentine, striding manfully forward towards the courthouse, blond hair flapping in the warm breeze. ‘I discovered that at about 11.15. You start with the family history and, as you know … ’
‘Ancient family. Lots of them. None in journalism except for the one we don’t mention.’ Miss Dimont’s recall, and sharp gift for precis, were second to none.
‘It was no good. When I wrote about them I realised nobody cares about your folks. Not sure I do myself. So after about half an hour I chucked that away and started again. Suddenly it all started to come together. I realised what had to be said, and I said it. D’you want to take a look?’ He delved into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled twist of copy paper.
‘No thanks,’ said Judy briskly. ‘I’ll read it when you’re dead.’
The gloomy cathedral-like room which dispensed what passed for justice in Temple Regis looked even drearier this morning. It was probably the joyous June light piercing through the unwashed stained-glass windows that did it.
Th
e Magistrates’ Clerk, Mr Thurlestone, was his usual distant self. He resented the sparkling fabric Miss Dimont wove from the mundane and plodding proceedings over which he presided – almost as if it were another world she was describing!
Furthermore, the things she chose to write about! A complicated two-day fraud case, through which the Clerk had to guide his somnolent magistrates before telling them what their opinion was of the accused, what should be said to him in summing up, and what his sentence should be – uphill work indeed for Mr Thurlestone – was dismissed in a paragraph or two.
On the other hand, the matter of the curate cycling without lights! Miss Dimont had made banner headlines out of that, yet all it had been was a minor transgression rewarded with a five-shilling fine. But oh, the fuss she made about it! It made a mockery of the justice handed down by his court.
Miss Dimont indicated to her junior reporter where he should sit, and wandered over to the Clerk’s bench to collect the charge sheet. It was handed over with Thurlestone’s customary disdain.
‘The point about being here,’ Miss Dimont said, returning to the reporters’ bench, ‘is not to be overawed by the weight of the law – that’s what Mr Thurlestone and the magistrates expect from you. And that is precisely what you are not going to give them. ‘They’re just as full of foible and weakness as the people they sit in judgement on. They may never have done a wrong thing in their life, but that doesn’t make them right.’
Valentine nervously fished out his notebook. It was clear he had mislaid his pencil.
‘The only thing that’s right is the law,’ Judy went on, lowering her voice to a whisper as proceedings commenced. ‘And that’s why we’re here, to watch out on behalf of the public. Make sure it’s administered correctly. And report back.’ She handed the young man a spare pencil she’d fished from her corkscrew curls.
The young reporter had yet to discover there was what might be termed ‘previous’ between his senior and the Clerk. Thurlestone quite often allowed the hangers and floggers who sat behind him on the bench to overprescribe the medication. Some of them had a taste for sweeping all miscreants into jail, especially the knicker snatchers and sheep molesters, and sometimes he felt powerless to resist their lust for retribution. Miss Dimont often had to remind the town, in the Comment page, of their frailty.
Not this morning, though.
‘Oh, look!’ she exclaimed with delight, ‘what have we here?’ She had been reading the charge sheet.
‘Call Mrs Phyllis Bickington.’
A small woman of startling beauty stepped into the dock to confirm her name and to swear that, by God, she would indeed tell the truth.
‘Phyllis Ada Bickington, you are charged with assault on your uncle, also described as your husband, Adam Porrit Bickington. How do you plead?’
‘Not guilty.’
‘Sit down.’
The events in the Bickingtons’ turbulent domestic life were slowly laid bare. Miss Dimont lay down her pen and watched as Valentine struggled to keep up with what was turning into a ripsnorter of a case. Reuben Bickington had fallen in love with his brother’s daughter, and secretly married her though there was an age gap of nearly thirty years between them. All three lived on a farm hidden in a valley some five miles from Temple Regis, a place where no tourist ever went, and precious few locals dared either.
As the story slowly unravelled, Valentine’s eyebrows crept up his forehead. The court was told that in the Bickington valley, such marriages were not uncommon – ‘though they do stop short at allowing brother and sister,’ whispered Judy. ‘Mostly.’
That there was a culture gap between uncle and niece – she had been to school, he had not – became evident early in the proceedings. Certainly there had been disagreements over his unusual treatment of farm animals. But the case ground to a halt when it emerged that Phyllis was covering up for her father, her husband’s brother, who had come round to their cottage and delivered a fraternal thrashing over an aspect of the couple’s personal life which was not allowed to be mentioned verbally but had to be written down.
This did not please Colonel de Saumarez, the Chairman of the Bench, who was itching to deliver a homily on arcane vices in rural communities before sending the woman away for a well-deserved spell in the cooler. Instead, after consulting Mr Thurlestone, he was obliged to let Mrs Bickington walk free without, he added through gritted teeth, a stain on her character.
‘Poor thing,’ said Miss Dimont as she was led away, ‘she can only be seventeen.’
‘Doesn’t seem possible,’ said Valentine who, despite his National Service, had evidently led a sheltered life.
‘You can write it up,’ said Miss Dimont, picking up her raffia bag. ‘I’m off to Bedlington.’
‘Erm …’ said Valentine, hesitantly, ‘can I give you a lift?’
It took two minutes for Judy Dimont to regret her decision to say yes, for there in the car park was Valentine’s pride and joy, a Heinkel bubble car. It was red. And very prominent.
‘I’m afraid there’s no elegant way to step into this,’ said Valentine, energetically throwing open the door which comprised the whole of the front of the vehicle. ‘You basically have to wish for good fortune and throw yourself in.’
Miss Dimont did as she was told but vowed it was an experiment she would not repeat. As they drove through the town and down Tuppenny Row into adjacent Bedlington-on-Sea, she gave the reporter what he wanted – his intro for the Bickington case.
‘We have a place at the end of the newsroom called Curse Corner,’ she then added. ‘Why d’you think it’s called that?’
‘No idea. I suppose …’
‘People sit there cursing and swearing because they can’t get started. They know how the story should go, but they can never find the first sentence. You had the same problem last night, but you thought it was stage fright.
‘Let me tell you, Valentine, it’s a curse which will stay with you the rest of your journalistic career. You can always tell someone else what the intro to their story should be, but you’ll almost never be able to think of one for yourself.’
The young man swung the wheel. ‘D’you know, I was really looking forward to starting on the Express,’ he replied slowly. ‘I never realised how difficult it would be.’
‘Fun though,’ said Judy, ‘sometimes! You can drop me here.’
While Waterford’s fashionable but feeble conveyance struggled its way back up the hill Miss Dimont turned and made for the Seagull Café where her dearest friend Auriol Hedley held sway, dispensing delicious home-made lemonade and oven-warm rock cakes.
‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ was Auriol’s cheery welcome. ‘How was your mother’s visit?’
‘Managed to put it off,’ said Judy, who only liked her mother in small doses.
‘She sent that letter saying she was coming down on the Pullman.’
‘I sent back a telegram.’
‘Very naughty. She treasures you.’
Miss Dimont took off her glasses and polished them. ‘She’s not your mother,’ she replied, wearily. ‘I get a letter a week and I always feel guilty after I’ve read them.’
‘You might feel less guilty if you bothered to reply,’ said Auriol, who knew her friend very well indeed. They’d worked together during the War and knew most things about each other.
‘Anyway, she’s going back to Belgium for a bit,’ said Judy with relief. ‘Catching up with the family.’
‘Ah yes, the Dimonts of Ellezelles,’ said Auriol in mock deference. ‘A distinguished lot.’
‘Instead, I’ve got Uncle Arthur coming to stay.’
‘Oh, now,’ said Auriol, ‘that will be a treat.’ The old boy was the sweetest man in the world, one of life’s true gentlemen, but he spent most of his time in South America.
‘Now look,’ said Judy, ‘I want to talk to you about this dead girl.’
‘I thought you might,’ said Auriol with satisfaction. ‘Let me just shut up shop and w
e can have a nice cup of tea and chat about it. I have a theory.’
Sure to be wrong, thought Judy disloyally, as they went inside.
SIX
It was a surprise, and not altogether a pleasant one, to find Valentine waiting when she emerged an hour later. He was leaning negligently against the red bubble car, head thrown back to catch the sun. The borrowed suit he wore neither fitted nor did it do his rake-thin frame any favours. He looked a bit like an unmade bed.
‘Hello,’ said Miss Dimont in a not wholly friendly way. She’d done enough nannying for one day.
‘Thought you might like a lift back into town,’ said the young man with a beguiling smile. ‘Hop in.’
‘Not sure I want to,’ said Judy, disobligingly. ‘“Hop” being the operative word. What on earth persuaded you to buy this thing?’
‘A dear friend misled me.’
Miss Dimont sniffed. ‘How long can it possibly have taken you to drive down from London in it?’
‘Did my National Service in the cavalry,’ he replied. ‘No horses any more – well, only sometimes – most of the time it was tanks so I’m used to slow progress.’
He was charming, of that there could be no doubt. Handsome too, though of course a mere child.
‘Have you written up the Bickington assault case?’
‘When I left you I went straight back to the office. It was wonderful – I used the intro you suggested and guess what – no curses! The story started to flow and I would have finished it in no time but …’
‘…your typewriter ran out of ribbon.’
‘Aha. You have identified a certain disorganisation in the Waterford way of doing things.’
‘Far be it from me to point out, Valentine, that one of your shoelaces is undone as well. So what happened, why didn’t you finish?’
‘The editor told me to stop.’
‘Why?’
‘Said he didn’t want interbreeding stories in the paper – bad for the town’s image. Ridiculous, he was only her uncle for heaven’s sake! Not as if …’
