by Jilly Cooper
Tristan raised his eyes to heaven. ‘They drag clothes off me — Rozzy too. They ’ave millions of clothes to wash, how can they remember the days?’
‘You didn’t drop into Paradise to change?’
‘Certainly not.’ He daren’t light a cigarette in case his hand shook.
But just as Betty and Sally had lovingly chronicled the progress of his clothes, so two village groupies with binoculars had seen his dark blue Aston parked in a secluded field down Rannaldini’s drive. Wheelmarks had been found here. Traces of similar plants, hemlock, water dropwort and lesser rosewort, had been found on Tristan’s wheels.
‘They probably flower in Dean Forest,’ said Tristan vaguely, as he started to sketch Karen. The damson bloom of her skin, even under the fluorescent light, was exquisite.
‘The lesser rosewort is only indigenous to Rutshire,’ snapped Gablecross.
Round and round went the wheels of the tape, taking down evidence to be used against him. Underneath the outward languor he’s shit-scared, thought Gablecross.
Tristan expressed no surprise that his prints were all over the murder weapon. ‘I was unhappy with the scene I’d shot. Earlier we use knife. While everyone sleep on Thursday afternoon, I took gun from Props, and try out hand movements in front of big mirror in my room. Having replaced it and the key, I type memo on Production writing paper saying I need.22 as well as Carlos’s important papers for reshoot on Friday night and leave it in Jessica’s in-tray.’
At first Tristan deflected every question coolly. He was enchanted by the recovery of his Lalique lily-patterned lighter which, he explained, had been a present from the crew after The Lily in the Valley, and which had vanished from his desk last week, and his signet ring, which he’d lost on the night of the auto da fe. ‘I lose weight. It must have slipped off.’
He’s lying, thought Gablecross. There was no way that shiny ring had been exposed to the elements for nearly three weeks.
‘Both lighter and ring were found near Rannaldini’s body in Hangman’s Wood,’ he said.
Careful, thought Tristan, for the hundredth time.
‘I must ’ave dropped them when I went to see Rannaldini previous.’
‘You often walk in the woods?’
‘Of course. I am man in love with the dark. I spent my childhood in cinemas or watching videos with curtains drawn.’
‘Your crème-de-menthe-flavoured chewing-gum was also found near the body.’
‘Anyone could have peenched that. I leave packs everywhere. My dear Detective Sergeant,’ Tristan yawned so hard he nearly put his jaw out, ‘I have been working on film about murder for nearly a year. I am not so stupid I litter possessions round Rannaldini’s body like Millais’ Sower and leave my prints all over murder weapon. Someone is framing me.’
‘Any idea who?’
‘Probably Rannaldini from the grave.’
At one moment, he nearly fell asleep. ‘I am bored talking about myself. Can’t we talk about you, Sergeant, or more excitingly you?’ He smiled at Karen, who blushed.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, she kept praying Tristan hadn’t done it. He was so glamorous — she admired the flawless bone structure beneath the smooth olive skin, the curls dark as winter dusk, the greyhound grace exaggerated by the ten-pound weight-loss. And he was so polite, opening doors when she went out, leaping to his feet when she came back. When he wasn’t pacing up and down, he was drawing or scribbling. ‘Why d’you keep making notes?’ she asked.
‘To stop me going crazy. I am in last stage of making film. It’s like a marathon winner being dragged away ten yards from the tape. Worst still, greatest scene in Don Carlos takes place in prison. Eef only I had had these experiences to draw on when I direct it. The claustrophobia, moths concussing themselves against overhead light, the tiny cell that makes Carlos’s dungeon look like Trafalgar Square. How much more realistic would I have made the Grand Inquisitor?’ He glared at Gablecross, who, refusing to rise, proceeded to take Tristan in minute detail through the early hours of Friday the thirteenth.
‘What did you do during the break?’
‘Caught between Hermione and Rupert, with everyone rowing and running off on wild-ghost chase, I have ’orrible migraine and need strong pills to zap it. I go back to the house. Even more ’orrible I see Eulalia ’Arrison approach down south-wing landing. Since she arrive she hassle me for interview and plus, so I leap behind big cupboard.’
‘You should have told her you had a migraine,’ said Gablecross sardonically.
Tristan almost smiled. ‘She goes into her room. I hide in mine and take pills. They were called Imogram.’
‘You didn’t call anyone?’
‘Certainly not.’ Tristan steeled himself to look Gablecross in the eyes.
Making a note to check the lack of calls with his mobile company, Karen asked what had happened to the rest of the Imogram.
‘In my room, or maybe I put them in jeans pocket. I heard Eulalia leave room some time after one, then I must have dropped off, because a crash wake me, like medicine cupboard falling off wall. I looked at my watch, realized to my horror it was two o’clock less twenty-five minutes and race back to the set.’
‘There is evidence, intercourse took place before Beattie died. Did you give her one?’
Like James emerging from the lake, Tristan gave an exaggerated shudder: ‘It would have been easier to kill than fuck her.’
The tape ran out.
Every time there was a break, one tape was sealed, untouched, in case it was needed in court. Knowing Portland would be listening acutely to the other, Karen was relieved she wasn’t interviewing Tristan alone. Hearing his heartbreakingly husky voice, she increasingly couldn’t concentrate for wondering what he would be like in bed. Imagining that wonderful sulky mouth kissing hers, the long powerful body crushing her own: violent images. God, she must pull herself together.
His body language told her nothing. He sat very still, never pulled faces, fiddled with his hair, licked his lips or blinked. Even in that white paper boiler-suit, he looked like a hopelessly glamorous intern in a hospital soap. He had drawn a beautiful picture, turning her into a fawn, and was working on a cross-looking warthog.
‘What were you asking me?’ he drawled insolently.
Was he really so tired that he forgot a question before he could answer it, she wondered, or was he playing for time?
68
At mid-morning on Saturday, Wolfie popped into Rutminster Police Station, bringing Tristan a running order for Monday’s polo shoot and a sprig of honeysuckle from Lucy.
Hearing, during a break in interrogations, that he’d been in, Gablecross had huge delight in ordering Fanshawe and Debbie Miller to drive out to Valhalla and check a few of Tristan’s statements with Wolfie.
Rolling up at Valhalla, however, a fuming Fanshawe and Debbie were greeted by Rozzy, devastated about Tristan’s arrest, and begging them to take a posy of gentians, a picnic of quiche, chicken breasts, peaches and a Thermos of ‘proper’ coffee back to the station for his lunch.
‘I can’t get away, Sergeant Fanshawe, I have to dog-sit for Lucy.’
James, looking unbelievably boot-faced, was taking up Wardrobe’s entire sofa.
‘Where’s Lucy gone?’ demanded Fanshawe.
‘Away with Wolfie,’ said Rozzy, in a worried voice. ‘She wouldn’t tell me where but she’s taken her passport.’
‘Everyone on the unit has been ordered not to leave the country,’ said Fanshawe, in outrage.
Even a furious Oscar and Valentin had had to forgo their Bastille Day jaunt.
‘I begged her,’ wailed Rozzy. ‘Oh, when are they going to let poor Tristan out?’
‘When he starts levelling with us,’ said Fanshawe. ‘You’ve no idea where Lucy’s gone?’
‘To have a nice break with that yummy Wolfgang,’ giggled Debbie. ‘Gablecross will be choked — he thinks she’s gorgeous.’
Outside Rutminster Police Station, television
vans and the cars of the press, desperate for news, clogged up the weekend traffic like autumn leaves. Time had ceased to have any meaning. Tapes and breaks came and went. Antagonism intensified between Gablecross and Tristan, who had drawn a whole family of bullying warthogs. In the airless room the shadows deepened beneath all their eyes. Gerald Portland, still listening to the tapes, was stepping up the pressure.
‘Show him his dad’s letter, ask him about the Montigny. Tell him we can’t find any migraine pills or memos about pistols in anyone’s out-tray, and if that doesn’t work, tell him they’ve trashed his flat in Paris and found some interesting stuff.’
Karen switched on the tape again.
‘Have you seen this painting before?’ She waved the photograph of The Snake Charmer.
‘Just beautiful.’ Gablecross examined Delphine’s naked body.
‘Give me that!’ howled Tristan. But as he dived across the desk Gablecross’s pudgy fingers closed over the photograph. ‘Not so fast, baby boy. Betty and Sally found the original under your mattress on Thursday.’
‘For Christ’s sake, what more lies are they going to tell? I never saw that painting except in Rannaldini’s watch-tower. In film we are making, Philip search for letters under Elisabetta’s mattress. If I was going to steal painting, I would hide it somewhere more subtle.’
‘Rannaldini was going to publish the photo. It says “Chapter Four, Myself When Young” on the back. Wonder if he gave her one. You didn’t want a porn pickie of your mum doing the rounds, did you?’
‘Of course I fucking didn’t,’ shouted Tristan, draining a paper cup of black coffee as if it were whisky, and fumbling for a Gauloise.
‘Tabitha Campbell-Black was distraught when you were arrested. Why did you blow her out the morning after you got off with her? Was this anything to do with it?’
As Gablecross threw down a copy of Étienne’s letter with the crest of the chained serpent, Tristan let out a hiss far deeper and more venomously fearful than any snake.
‘Rannaldini disturbed the Montigny snake, didn’t he?’ persisted Gablecross. ‘Was that why you went looking for him? There were signet-ring marks on his neck.’
‘I told you I lost it ages ago.’
‘D’you know what this is?’
‘A letter from my father to Rannaldini.’
‘But was he your father? What does he mean about your being the product of an “obscene incestuous union”?’ Gablecross lingered brutally on the words. ‘And saying as a result he could never love you.’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Shaking violently, Tristan stubbed out his hardly smoked cigarette. His face was fog-grey, his eyes darting with terror. Karen longed to take his hand.
‘Was that why you cut Auntie Hortense’s party — because you weren’t a Montigny any more?’
‘No!’
‘Was your mad granddad your father? Was that the secret Rannaldini had discovered?’
‘Who told you that?’ Tristan went berserk, lunging across the table, catching Gablecross by the shoulders, shaking him. ‘Who fucking told you?’
The duty officer would have intervened at this juncture if he hadn’t gone flat on his back, slipping on Winnie’s over-polished floor outside the interview room.
‘Stop it,’ shouted Karen. ‘She didn’t mean to blurt it out.’
‘She?’ For a second Tristan froze, then releasing Gablecross’s shoulders, he turned on Karen. ‘Which she?’
‘We don’t reveal our sources,’ she mumbled, jolted by the horror and incredulity in Tristan’s eyes.
‘It was Lucy. She was the only one who knew.’
‘She was only trying to explain why you were so traumatized,’ stammered Karen.
‘You stupid bitch,’ sighed Gablecross.
Tristan slumped on his chair. ‘How could Lucy?’ he repeated dully.
It was as though Horatio had betrayed Hamlet, or Posa his beloved friend Carlos. After that the fight went out of Tristan.
‘Rannaldini showed me the letter,’ he told Gablecross, ‘and I lose everything. I look at great beech trees posed like divers on edge of Cotswold bank. I ask myself how they stand so towering and beautiful they can hold up the sky. It is because their roots like steel pipes go deep into the earth. Rannaldini sawed through my roots that night.’
Putting his head in his hands, he groaned. ‘He wreck my picture, he wreck any hope with Tabitha, he want to publish disgusting painting of my mother. For God’s sake, I thought he loved me.’
Karen fought back the tears.
‘He was jealous,’ said Gablecross gently, echoing the words he had said to Wolfie. ‘He treated you appallingly.’
Glancing up in anguish, Tristan noticed for the first time the understanding and compassion in Gablecross’s eyes: the ‘long-headed legend’.
‘You were doing a public service, lad, ridding the world of Rannaldini,’ went on Gablecross, almost caressingly.
There was a long pause, just the faint whisper of the turning tapes and the sound of a late-night drunk kicking a beer can along a pavement. Then Tristan realized he was being set up.
‘I am not that public-spirited,’ he said flatly, and continued to deny everything.
‘If you’re not prepared to help yourself…’ snarled Gablecross.
As his cell door banged and he was left alone with the script of Hercule, which he would never now make, Tristan was kneed in the groin by desolation. He thought of Aunt Hortense gasping her last, of sunflowers, cicadas, frogs and tractors, their lights going back and forth like low shooting stars in the night. He’d never see her or France again.
The honeysuckle was filling his cell with sweetness, like Lucy’s slow, shy, warm smile. Since he had been in prison, the thought of her had kept drifting into his brain like an aria. Now he couldn’t trust her any more. With a sob of despair, he picked up the sprig of honeysuckle and ripped it to pieces.
69
Lucy was speechless with admiration for the way Wolfie calmly hijacked Rannaldini’s Gulf and, ignoring furiously waving policemen and ground staff, flew off to the south-west of France.
‘I learnt to fly before I could walk,’ he explained. ‘Grisel saw us leaving so the whole unit will think we’ve sloped off for a dirty weekend.’
‘Cause a lot of gossip.’
‘Let it,’ said Wolfie cheerfully. ‘Might make Tabitha jealous.’
Valhalla had been hot, but the Midi seemed a hundred times hotter. The wind, blowing like a hair-dryer about to fuse, whipped Lucy’s curls into a frenzy.
‘Now I know how a frozen chicken feels when it’s shoved into the microwave,’ she grumbled.
Stupid from lack of sleep, she was passionately grateful for the cool efficiency with which Wolfie hired a car, located the village of Montvert and booked into its best hotel, appropriately named La Reconnaissance.
Having departed in such haste, Lucy was dismayed she hadn’t packed deodorant, a hairbrush, or base to tone down her shiny, increasingly flushed face.
‘At least we’ll get a decent dinner this evening,’ said the ever-practical Wolfie, who was consulting the menu and the wine list as she came down. ‘And there’s the château,’ he added, pointing up at the disdainful back of a large grey house nestling in woodland on top of the hill.
‘The Montigny family never forgave the villagers for burning the place down during the French Revolution,’ said Lucy, as they got back into the hired car, and she eased her bare legs gingerly on to the scorching leather seat. ‘When the family returned from exile, they pointedly built the new château facing away from the village and overlooking the Pyrenees. Oh, what a sweet dog. Can I ring Rozzy to ask if James is OK?’
‘Certainly not. She’d want to know where we were and promptly grass to her friend Gablecross. We don’t want Interpol muscling in. Anyway, we’ll be back tomorrow.’
As Wolfie swung off the main road and headed for the mountains, Lucy groped for her dark glasses to ward off the dazzling golden glare of the sunflowe
r fields.
‘Am I too under-dressed?’ she asked nervously, glancing down at her orange T-shirt and grey shorts. ‘Hortense sounds a martinet. Tristan says she’s been having little heart-attacks for ages, growing more and more eccentric. She used to play golf with the Duke of Windsor and once smashed a Louis XIV chandelier demonstrating some iron shot. Evidently she cuts up Le Monde every morning and lays all the stories she wants to read on chairs so no-one can sit down.’
‘She’ll need a fleet of sofas to accommodate the coverage of Tristan’s arrest,’ said Wolfie.
‘Probably been kept away from her, if she’s so ill. I do hope she’ll see us. Tristan also said she was terribly mean. The estate’s next to a golf course, and she rushes out, grabs any lost balls and wraps them up for her nieces and nephews for Christmas. Tristan realized she was losing it last birthday when she sent him a blackboard with the letters of the alphabet round the frame.’
Wolfie stopped Lucy’s rattling by asking her irritably if she remembered everything Tristan had ever told her.
‘Probably.’ Lucy flushed an even more unbecoming shade of red.
Wolfie noticed the anguished way she glanced at every farm-building they passed as if she was expecting some horrific content of battery hen or veal calf.
‘Oh, no,’ she wailed, as he slowed down behind a lorry, ‘they’ve got lambs in there. I bet they haven’t been watered for yonks.’
Nearly removing the side of the hired car, as he shortened her misery by overtaking the lorry, Wolfie snapped that she’d got to toughen up.
‘You can’t suffer for every squashed earwig in this world.’
‘Hortense suffered,’ protested Lucy. ‘She claimed that the best years of her life were spent fighting for the Resistance, despite being captured and tortured by the bloody Krauts— Oh, Wolfie, I’m sorry.’
‘I’m used to it,’ said Wolfie calmly. Then, catching sight of two fat men towing trolleys and sweating in plus-fours, ‘Here’s the golf course, and there’s the château.’
To repel intruders, two hissing stone Montigny snakes were chained to the pillars on either side of the big iron gates. Ahead at the end of an avenue of limes and flanked by ancient arthritic oaks stood a grey, square house with its pale grey shutters closed against prying eyes and the afternoon sun.
