The Lady of the Lake

by Peter Guttridge

  Watts and Tingley were sharing a big room. ‘I’m going for a recce,’ Tingley said.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Watts said.

  Tingley shook his head. ‘I’m damned. You’re still on the side of Light.’

  ‘So are you, Jimmy,’ Watts called after him as Tingley walked out the door.

  Tingley watched Bosanquet at the bar for an hour. Saw him go to the bathroom a couple of times. The second time he hadn’t cleaned himself up very well – the plug of cocaine hanging from his nose was visible from where Tingley was sitting. Tingley nursed his beer, his cigarette packet and lighter, as always, set out in a neat line on the table by his drink.

  The guy was tall and Tingley could see that he had once been well muscled but now it was mostly lard. Clearly it had been vanity muscle, not real muscle, punching bag or no punching bag. The guy had a supercilious, self-satisfied look about him which Tingley despised. Tingley noted that he favoured his right leg, just a tiny bit. But it was the tiny bits with which men like Tingley operated most effectively.

  The guy downed a few beers with a changing roster of people. He was trying it on with a couple of women. One was interested, the other not. Tingley nursed a second beer, smoked another cigarette. When the big guy excused himself to go to the bathroom for a third time, Tingley followed.

  Tingley waited outside the bathroom in the wide corridor. A huge, fake Egyptian throne was placed a few yards away and giant posters of Italian biblical epics he’d never heard of were framed along the walls. He was looking at a David e Golia poster featuring a chubby Goliath and a camp-looking David when Bosanquet came back out of the bathroom, wiping his nose.

  ‘Hey, big man,’ Tingley called after him. ‘You are that big man from Netflix, aren’t you?’

  Bosanquet turned and looked Tingley up and down.

  ‘I’m a Netflix star, yeah.’

  ‘I heard you always travel with a boxing bag – hang it up wherever you are. You a keen boxer then?’

  ‘Can I help you with something?’ Bosanquet said. ‘Only I’m kind of busy here. Lot of people outside want autographs. Is that what you want?’

  ‘No, thanks. I just want a moment of your time to confirm or deny that when you don’t have your boxing bag to punch you punch women. Or arrange to have acid thrown at them.’

  Bosanquet frowned. ‘Say what?’

  ‘I wondered if you knew what it was like to try to punch a man.’

  ‘Hey,’ Bosanquet called down the corridor. ‘Can we get security along here?’

  ‘Me, for instance.’

  Bosanquet put on the sneering, supercilious look of the stupidly arrogant.

  ‘You? I fart in your face and you’d blow over.’

  Tingley laughed. ‘I must remember that one. But, yes, I mean me. Are you ready? I mean that left knee is looking a bit wonky. Probably all that blubber you’re carrying. Self-satisfaction fat we call it back home. But I think your days of being self-satisfied are over.’

  Bosanquet gave him a hard stare.

  ‘Ha!’ Tingley said. ‘Actors can’t do the thousand yard stare because, well, they’re acting. You should really put your hands up by the way because I’m not a punching bag or a defenceless woman.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about but you’re really asking for it—’

  ‘I really am.’ Tingley held out his hands. ‘See, I’ve even put my gloves on so I can hit you harder without hurting my knuckles. Although mostly I’m going to be using my feet to mess you up.’ He pointed down at his shoes. ‘Steel-toe caps. It’s a bugger getting through airport security but great for teaching bad, bad men a lesson. So why don’t you try to give me what you gave to Nimue Grace and no doubt others?’

  ‘Nimue? That bitch? She set you up for this? She murders a child and thinks I’m the bad guy?’

  Tingley let that last remark pass, largely because he didn’t understand it. ‘No, this is all me. Nimue doesn’t give you another thought except when she’s scraping shit off her shoe.’

  Tingley kicked Bosanquet hard on the right shin and followed it with a tight roundhouse kick to the side of his left knee. The bad knee. That’s all it took. Bosanquet was jerking back in pain on his stiff right leg when his left leg collapsed underneath him and he went down. Heavily. Tingley looked at the stupid David e Golia poster facing him, trying to decide whether to finish Bosanquet off with a kick to the head.

  ‘No,’ Bob Watts said, coming out of the shadows behind the fake throne.

  Tingley looked from him to Bosanquet, lying unmoving on the floor. ‘OK,’ he said, stamping down hard on the actor’s right knee. Tingley shrugged. ‘If they ever remake Ironside in the next year he’s in clover.’

  ‘That was a bit harsh,’ Watts said as they walked away.

  ‘Oh, come on. He deserved cutting down to size just for travelling with a punching bag. Any guy who travels with a punching bag who isn’t a professional boxer is a first-class dick and major poser. He deserved much more than he got for that alone. Just call me soft-hearted.’

  ‘I’ll try. Here we go: Jimmy Tingley is soft-hearted.’ Watts shook his head. ‘No. Doesn’t sound right.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Permission to disobey and pour you another drink back in the room.’

  ‘Bosanquet said an odd thing though. He said Nimue Grace murdered a child.’

  ‘That’s something to investigate when we get back,’ Watts said. ‘By the way – CCTV?’

  ‘Disabled on that corridor and from the terrace a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘OK. Let’s go and see if the boys from Henfield have located Said Farzi. Where he’s concerned, I won’t try to pull you back from doing whatever you want to do.’

  Nimue Grace walked with Gilchrist and Heap to the edge of the lake opposite the island as dusk was moving in. The evenings were getting chilly now. She looked out over the placid waters.

  ‘I had such plans for this place for my children. I wanted to make it an idyll for them.’

  ‘It already is,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘No, I know, but tree houses and canoes and camping.’

  ‘Swallows and Amazons?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Never read those books,’ Grace said. She pointed to a small inlet a few yards away. ‘I wanted a short pier here to dock the canoes. I wanted rope ladders between trees. Everything.’ She shook her head. ‘But none of it happened except for that shitty tree house on the island.’

  ‘It’s still beautiful for you without your children,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Grace said. She looked up at the darkening sky. ‘The moon, the stars, the night clouds drifting by disdain all that we are.’

  ‘That’s bleak,’ Gilchrist said, shivering slightly.

  ‘I am bleak,’ Grace said. ‘Haven’t you realized? What’s there for me not to be bleak about?’

  ‘Pretty much everything,’ Heap said quietly.

  Grace gave him a look that kind of flared. Had it been a fantasy movie there would have been lightning bolts shooting from her eyes. Then: ‘I had a child. I mean inside me. Bosanquet’s. I aborted it. I don’t regret it. But there isn’t a day I don’t think about what might have been.’ She gave them her brilliant smile but it faltered. ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ was all she said.

  The Half Moon was quiet so they had the pick of the tables. Gilchrist and Heap went up to the bar. Grace took three tries to be satisfied with a table. She finally sat with her back to the room facing the wall. She caught Gilchrist’s puzzled look. ‘I know you’re thinking I’m a diva but downlighting isn’t flattering for anybody and, when the paps can pop up at any time or anyone with a mobile phone can be an amateur pap, people like me have to be careful. “Nimue’s misery” or “Time for a facelift Nimue?” or whatever crap headline they’ll slap on a crap photo of me looking haggard because of the lighting.

  ‘I hardly ever come to pubs – very sad as I love a country pub, but it’s just too much. I was in the Bull in Ditchli
ng not so long ago with Francis and a gay friend and this bloke was really giving me weird looks. Freaked me out.’

  ‘Different worlds,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Where is Francis, by the way? We haven’t seen her – him? – since our first visit.’

  ‘I couldn’t afford Francis. I really do struggle financially, unbelievable as that might sound.’

  ‘Jimmy Page used to play acoustic sets in this pub way back,’ Heap said, carrying drinks from the bar. ‘He had the house down the road here – the one with the moat? – and would bob in here every now and then with his guitar.’

  ‘I was going to buy that house,’ Grace said. ‘When I was looking for somewhere here to buy. The actress who taught me to play chess told me how wonderful this area was. Some mega-selling American romantic novelist owned that Jimmy Page house at the time. I decided against because it seemed too vulnerable – too near the road and so on.’

  ‘Your privacy is important to you,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘The most important thing,’ Grace said. ‘Isn’t it for you?’

  Gilchrist laughed. ‘I don’t have much to be private about.’

  ‘Well, I’m the same but when you’re under tabloid scrutiny – and judgement – all the time it becomes a rather different story. It becomes their story, not the truth. Scum that they are.’

  ‘I can only imagine,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘There’s a painting on the wall by the bar from the 1970s,’ Heap continued. ‘All the regulars. Jimmy Page is in it.’

  ‘Are you a heavy metal fan, Detective Sergeant Heap?’ Grace said. ‘Do you play air guitar when you’re alone?’

  ‘Neither of those things, Ms Grace. Just interested in cultural history.’

  ‘Then did you know that James Wilby used to live nearby – across the road from here, I think. Camilla used to live here too. I think her family had the house James eventually bought. I met her once. Very engaging. She said that in her privileged childhood she regarded that bridleway across the road as part of the family garden, she went riding there so often.’

  ‘You’ve worked with James Wilby?’ Heap said.

  Grace shook her head. ‘I was never offered a Merchant Ivory film – oh, I know he’s done other stuff but that’s what I most think of him doing. I was busy earning wheelbarrow loads of money doing crap, big-budget Americana.’ Grace sighed as she looked out of the window at Plumpton Hill. ‘There’s something about the Downs that is quite magical.’

  ‘Like your lake, Ms Grace,’ Heap said.

  Grace laughed and raised her glass. ‘To my lake. And new friends.’

  EPILOGUE

  Gilchrist and Heap gave Nimue Grace a lift home from the pub. She waved them off, her heart-melting grin on her face, as they drove back down her drive. New friends? Maybe – she liked them well enough – but only if she hung around. She flicked on the lights in her cottage and took a big key from a hook by the front door. She unlocked the stripped wooden door Sarah Gilchrist had thought was for the loo at Grace’s party.

  That had been careless of Grace, leaving it unlocked. She opened it now and flicked on the light switch just inside the door. She walked gingerly down the rickety steps. She loved the smell of apples down here, even the sickly sweet smell of apples that had rotted.

  She looked at the chute and the broad barrel full of apples beneath it. She looked at the three white containers against the far wall. She looked at the huge pile of money on the table in the middle of the room.

  She thought about Joe Jackson. When he’d been filming and come across the containers, he’d seen immediately that three of them were full of money. Honest lad that he was (dim lad that he was), he’d brought them to Grace, assuming they were hers.

  She had known immediately where the money had come from. She’d already read the pamphlet she’d been given about the Hassocks blockade.

  She persuaded Jackson that he should see what the procedure was for getting the money converted into usable currency in return for a cut of the money big enough to fund his short film and one more after. She’d promised she’d star in that second one, if she liked the script.

  She’d been relieved to hear that his death was nothing to do with that. Just coincidence. Abbas getting carried away as he tried to persuade Jackson to move out of the flat in Said Farzi’s apartment block.

  But now she had to figure out a way to get the money converted without drawing attention to herself if the Bank of England was now alerted about the old money from those Hassocks robberies.

  But she was confident. She was on a roll. After all, two people who had been horrible to her were dead and others were about to get their comeuppance. She was confident that before she had to sell this place because she was skint she would have figured out a way to access these two million pounds. She was a wizard with that sort of thing. She was, after all, the Lady of the Lake.