Star Fall

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Publicity doesn’t work if nobody knows you’re there,’ Atherton pointed out.

  ‘He’s biding his time,’ Connolly said, undeterred. ‘He’ll not want to get burned too soon. Get the lie of the land and work out the best way to flaunt himself.’

  ‘It’s odd,’ said Slider thoughtfully. ‘Why him, of all the people on the show?’

  ‘Perhaps he just couldn’t stand being told what he could and couldn’t do,’ Atherton suggested.

  ‘Wait’ll I tell ya,’ Connolly went on eagerly. ‘There’s more. This one’s even better.’

  She brought up another picture. It wasn’t much changed, still the informal groups lingering and talking, though some were moving away and others had gone. But right behind them all, to the side of the church, was the figure of Egerton, now wearing the hat, holding it on with one hand as though it was going to get blown away. Another man, bareheaded, was facing him, standing very close as though they were having a confidential discussion.

  ‘Who is that?’ Atherton asked, peering over Connolly’s shoulder. ‘He looks familiar.’

  ‘It’s the Rabbet’s husband. Philip Masterson. He’s something to do with the government, apparently,’ Connolly said.

  ‘Philip Masterson! Yes, of course,’ Atherton said. ‘He was Minister for the Arts. One of the new Bright Boys. But he got downgraded in the last shuffle to Minister for Climate Change. Not so bright after all.’

  ‘You mean he blotted his copybook?’ Slider asked. He didn’t keep up with politics the way Atherton did. Never seemed to have the time.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Atherton. ‘Just didn’t exactly shine in his previous job, one gathers. Climate Change is the dog’s job. They always keep a few Cabinet posts for the seat-moisteners, the dim but loyal. Every government needs them.’

  ‘I wonder what he’s saying to your man Egerton,’ Connolly said.

  ‘Probably asking if his intentions are honourable,’ Atherton said. ‘I don’t know, you plan a private, media-free funeral for your beloved spouse, and the biggest self-publicist in her circle turns up uninvited! I’d have thrown a brick at him.’

  ‘They’re just talking,’ Slider said. ‘Can’t deduce any hostile intent from that. Still, we’re looking for anyone with a beef against Egerton.’

  ‘I can’t see party-crashing as a hanging offence,’ said Atherton. ‘It’s hardly even a beeflet.’

  ‘Of course not. But perhaps there’s more to it – a history between them.’

  ‘Boss,’ said Connolly, ‘the photographer’s the one at a wedding or a funeral that sees everything. He’s facing the other way from everybody else. I’ve got his name here, David Palgrave. Studio in Islington. Will I have a lash at him?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Slider. ‘When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.’

  NINE

  The Peasants are Revolting

  David Palgrave didn’t live above the studio. Connolly located him at home in Denham, but when she told him what she wanted he agreed to come in and meet her at the studio. She was sitting outside in her car when his drew up – a handsome grey Jaguar. She wasn’t too surprised. His website had made him out as photographer to Society, and his boasting-list was heavy on the titled people, celebrities and the upper reaches of government. He wasn’t your typical kids-parties-and-meringue-brides sort of snapper-merchant.

  He was a compact young man – you can’t call someone in that income bracket ‘short’, Connolly thought – and solid, though not at all fat. More sort of muscular and springy under that navy cashmere coat. He had thick dark hair worn en brosse, brown eyes and a number of charming brown moles, and teeth straightened and whitened to film-star standards. She supposed they were one of his professional tools. He flashed them at her in a smile that seemed more dutiful than warming, but could still have had an oncoming motorist swerving into a lamp-post. Not that there were many. This part of Islington was not a tourist haunt and was sunk in Sunday somnolence, just the occasional bored kid doodling along the pavements on a Christmas bike that hadn’t yet lost its allure. She guessed his shop was not the important part of his business. Probably not much walk-in trade round here, except for passport photos. Duchesses were thin on the ground in N1.

  ‘So you’re interested in the Rabbet-Masterson funeral,’ he said briskly, hoicking out a vast bunch of keys. He rolled up the metal shutters, let them in, turned on the lights and locked the door behind them. ‘Can’t be too careful round here,’ he commented.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. The peasants are revolting, she thought. The shop which sprang into view was an oblong of white walls and wood-strip flooring, with a modern desk and chairs at the far end, and enormously-blown-up unframed portraits on the wall in black-and-white. Halfway down one side was a white back-screen with a tall stool in front of it – where the passport photos were taken, she supposed. He unlocked and led her through a further door, into a tiny lobby of filing cabinets, beyond which she caught a glimpse of what was obviously the dark room and processing lab.

  He opened one filing cabinet drawer, flicked through the contents, and withdrew a ziplock bag with a memory stick in it and a white label on the outside. ‘Rabbet-Masterson. This is it. Come through.’

  He put on the lab lights and led her over to a computer on a bench on one side. He fired it up, inserted the memory stick, and drummed his fingers impatiently while it loaded. ‘I suppose you’re not going to tell me why this is important?’ he said, frowning at the screen.

  ‘You’re dead right,’ she said. ‘I can’t, anyway – nobody tells me anything. Lowest of the low, that’s me. Just a drone.’

  He flicked her a look that said he didn’t believe her. ‘It must be something to do with Rowland Egerton,’ he said. ‘He and Bunny were on the same show.’

  ‘Did you know her?’ Connolly asked, to deflect him.

  ‘Bunny? Of course. I’ve known her family all my life. Her father was John Rabbet, the racehorse owner. Had a string of Derby winners. Whisky Zulu. Bright Morning. Arcturus. You remember them? Bright Morning won the triple crown. Photographing his horses was how I got started, as a matter of fact.’

  She nodded to keep him happy. What she didn’t know about racehorses could be written on the back of a football pitch. So, he’d grown up among the nobs, Connolly thought. Accounted for a lot.

  The file was up on the screen, and he paused with his hands over the keys. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘these people are my valued clients, a lot of them are my friends. You’re not going to go and ask them a lot of rude and intrusive questions, are you?’

  ‘Me? I’m not doing anything.’

  ‘You know what I mean. I don’t want to be the cause of them being put to a lot of trouble and upset. I have my business to consider.’

  ‘Nobody wants to upset anyone. I’m just looking for information.’

  ‘You think somebody at the funeral was involved in some way?’ he pursued.

  ‘Well, they’re your friends – what do you think?’

  ‘Nobody I know would do anything like that.’

  ‘Then you’ve nothing to worry about, have you?’ she said. ‘Let’s see the pictures, so.’

  She watched as he brought them up one by one, until they came to the shot with Egerton coming out of the church door. She stopped him and asked him to enlarge that part of the photograph.

  ‘Yes, I saw him,’ Palgrave said. ‘I didn’t think anything of it, really – just assumed he was another guest. I mean, he’s very well connected. But he didn’t join any of the groups, or come up to pay his condolences to Philip. He just sort of crept round the back and seemed to be heading for the side gate when Philip spotted him.’

  ‘How’d he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was looking round for someone, I think, and when he saw him he hurried straight over. I’ve got quite a bit of the sequence in the background. Watch.’

  He flicked through. In little jerky bites of memory, Connolly saw Masterson slip free of th
e crowd as Egerton was going down the side of the church, close in on him, saw them turn to face each other. A conversation was evidently had.

  ‘Any idea what they were talking about?’ Connolly asked.

  ‘Of course not. I was too far away. But it didn’t look very friendly.’

  It didn’t. Masterson seemed to lean forward and Egerton to lean backwards in compensation. At one point a Masterson hand was up and a finger seemed to be wagging, either sternly or aggressively.

  ‘Look at your man giving out to him,’ Connolly admired. ‘It’s a gas!’

  ‘But it wasn’t all one-sided,’ said Palgrave. ‘Watch.’

  Egerton had stopped leaning backwards. He was standing straight, and Masterson seemed to be shrinking. His chin was down. He’d folded his arms – the classic defensive pose. Then Egerton was away, back view, heading for the gate, and Masterson was rejoining his guests.

  ‘Has Mr Masterson seen these pictures?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. He hasn’t asked for any copies, but there are a couple on the Internet.’

  ‘That’s where I saw them. You didn’t take them for him, then?’

  ‘No, I did them freelance for a society magazine. He gave me permission to take some shots in the churchyard because I was an old family friend. No other photographers were allowed in. There were a couple of bouncers keeping the press back at the gate. It wasn’t a big affair, though. A couple of local reporters, one photographer from the Telegraph. He put out a press release asking for privacy and saying there’d be a public memorial service. The big guns were holding back for that.’

  ‘More celebrities,’ Connolly suggested.

  ‘You can bank on it,’ Palgrave said with professional relish. ‘Bunny knew everyone.’

  ‘Can you make me some prints of one or two of these?’ Connolly asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  She pointed out what she wanted, and he printed them off efficiently and put them into an envelope for her.

  ‘Is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Keep that memory stick somewhere safe.’

  ‘I keep them all safe,’ he said huffily. ‘It’s my job. Can I go home, now?’

  She looked at him steadily for a moment, then said, ‘You don’t like Philip Masterson very much.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘You talked about protecting your friends and clients, but you didn’t mind giving him up.’

  ‘I didn’t “give up” anything – you asked to see the shots, and I showed you them.’

  ‘But you made a point of photographing that little tiff between him and Egerton,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘Just photographer’s instinct. You naturally look at anything that’s out of the ordinary.’

  ‘But you don’t like him, do you?’

  ‘I don’t dislike him. He’s just – not quite one of us. None of us really knew why Bunny married him.’

  ‘A bit of a culchie, is he?’

  ‘I have no idea what that means,’ Palgrave said, a touch frostily.

  ‘A bit of a bounder,’ she said in her best English accent. ‘A pleb.’

  A spot of colour appeared on his cheeks. ‘That’s not a word I have ever used.’

  Connolly grinned. ‘But it’s what you think, all the same.’

  He was offended and didn’t answer. She took her leave, pleased with the result. It was growing dusk, and freezing hard, and the snow on the pavement, worn to slush, had now turned to ice, bumpy, grey and unappetizing. She picked her way carefully to the car, clutching the envelope, and thinking longingly of a cup of tea.

  McLaren, back with the others from canvassing, had gone down to Mike’s and come back with a bag of cakes to go with the brew-up: a couple of rather tough Danish pastries (it was the end of the day, after all), some currant buns, and those strange jobs made of flaky pastry and jam, topped with icing and coconut strands, known confusingly in London as cheesecakes. There was a bit of a cult for them in the department just now (recently replacing the fad for Tunnock’s Teacakes), and you had to be quick to nab one. Fortunately for Slider, Connolly went in hard and presented him with one on a plate.

  Unfortunately, before he could put proprietary toothmarks in it, Mr Porson came in and appropriated it, by the simple method of taking the plate out of his hand with an: ‘Ah, thanks! Rather partial to these. Very nice.’ He settled on the edge of a desk and said, ‘Right, fill me in. Let’s hear what you’ve got.’

  For everybody’s sake, Slider went over everything from the beginning, with Hollis from the back dutifully filling in details where necessary.

  Porson listened attentively, munching his way through Slider’s cheesecake, a stray strand of coconut wagging on his lips until a quick swipe of his tongue dealt with it, to Slider’s relief. ‘So,’ he concluded, pressing the last flakes from the plate with a forefinger and licking them off, ‘Lavender’s still pretty much your best boy. Though I can see problems with him. Being the one to find the body cuts both ways, as the Chinaman said when he gave his father a two-edged knife. He’s either got to be clever as a fox or a congenial idiot.’

  Mackay said, ‘About the sightings we’ve got so far, sir. I was thinking – that briefcase. You glance at a bloke, smartly dressed, with something square and flat under his arm, all right, you’re going to assume it’s a briefcase. But what if it isn’t?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking the same thing,’ said Atherton. ‘The malachite box could be slipped into a man’s overcoat pocket. But how would you naturally carry a picture, to leave your hands free to get out your car key?’

  ‘You’d tuck it under your oxter,’ said Connolly.

  ‘That was a rhetorical question,’ Atherton said, pained.

  ‘But the times are all wrong for Lavender, sir,’ said Gascoyne. ‘He says he got there at two twenty-five and the shout was at two thirty. All the sightings are earlier than that.’

  ‘The sightings so far,’ Mackay warned.

  ‘Anyway, we don’t want him coming out, we want him going in,’ said Connolly.

  ‘And that’s a problem,’ said Atherton. ‘If he left the shop at one thirty he could hardly get to Waitrose for the shopping and still be the man seen going in at one forty.’

  Hollis spoke up from the back. ‘Guv, I’ve got the notes on Hedley-Somerton’s interview. It says she got back from lunch at one. Lavender said one thirty.’

  Atherton and Slider looked at each other. ‘She did say one. How did we miss that?’

  ‘Even if she came back at one, he might not have left until one thirty,’ Slider said. ‘What with pottering and chatting. But if he did leave at one, he could be the one forty man. We have to check up on his movements. Gascoyne: Waitrose. They can give you the time of the till transaction. If he paid by credit card it’s straightforward enough, but even if he paid by cash you can check it by the purchases in the shopping bag. They were all logged by SOCO.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Gascoyne.

  ‘And Fathom – traffic cameras between the shop and Egerton’s house.’

  Porson waited for this to be concluded. ‘If he was One Forty Man, what was he doing in there all that time?’ he asked, and answered himself. ‘Killing Egerton, then waiting to call the police to make it look as if he’d arrived later.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s a risky saterjee. Far better to get right away and try and establish an alibi.’

  ‘He had blood on his clothes,’ Slider pointed out.

  ‘Didn’t you say he lived there? Then he’d have other clothes upstairs. He could have changed, taken the soiled clothes with him and dumped them. That’s the way they’d think,’ he added, they meaning criminals.

  Slider nodded. Porson wasn’t wrong. ‘But on the other hand, he could have been paralysed with fright over what he’d done. Just stood around wondering what the hell to do next.’

  And Porson nodded. They also did that, as often as not.

  ‘Then who were the past two o’clock an
d two twenty geezers seen leaving?’ McLaren asked.

  ‘If they weren’t false sightings,’ Slider said, ‘they bring us to hypothesis number two. That Lavender’s telling the truth, and it was someone else going in at one forty, possibly the murderer.’

  ‘Possibly?’ Swilley queried.

  ‘Death could have been earlier than that,’ Slider said. ‘Doc Cameron gives us from around twelve thirty.’

  ‘Not much comfort there,’ Porson grunted. ‘All right, if not Lavender, who’ve you got? The daughter and her husband, I suppose? The old cui bono?’

  ‘Dale and Jeremy Sholto,’ Slider supplied. ‘But they were out of the country.’

  ‘I checked with the airline, boss,’ Swilley affirmed. ‘They were definitely on the plane.’

  ‘They could’ve hired a hit man,’ said Fathom excitedly. He was still young enough to confuse fiction with reality.

  ‘You’d better hope they didn’t,’ Porson said quellingly, ‘or we’ll be here till Christmas. You can do a background check, see if they’ve got money troubles, find out exactly how much they stood to get from Egerton. Did they have a key?’

  ‘She said not,’ Connolly answered. ‘But who knows?’

  ‘Well,’ Slider said, ‘if the murderer didn’t let himself in – and it’s a wide field: there’s no knowing who might have managed to make a copy of the key at some time – it looks as though Egerton let him in. And that’s also a wide field. He knew a lot of people.’

  ‘Any suspects?’ Porson asked.

  ‘Nobody leaps out,’ Slider said. ‘He had a rather public row with one of the bods on the TV show, Rupert Melling, but it doesn’t look like grounds for murder, and he seems to have a solid alibi, though we’ve still to check all the details. Egerton apparently wasn’t much liked on the show, but again, disliked enough for murder? It seems unlikely. And now there’s this apparent quarrel between Egerton and Philip Masterson—’

  ‘That name sounds familiar,’ Porson said.

  ‘Minister for Climate Change,’ said Atherton.

  Connolly explained about the photographs and her interview with Palgrave.