The Riviera Express Read online

  ‘The phone!’ barked Terry.

  Miss Dimont started, then, recovering herself, raced to the nearby telephone box, pushed four pennies urgently into the slot and dialled the news desk. To her surprise she was met with the grim tones of Rudyard Rhys himself. It was rare for the editor to answer a phone – or do anything else useful around the office, thought Miss Dimont in a fleeting aperçu.

  ‘Mr Rhys,’ she hicupped, ‘Mr Rhys! Gerald Hennessy . . . the . . . dead . . .’ Then she realised she had forgotten to press Button A to connect the call. That technicality righted, she repeated her message with rather more coherence, only to be greeted by a lion-like roar from her editor.

  ‘Rrr-rrr-rrrr . . .’

  ‘What’s that, Mr Rhys?’

  ‘Damn fellow! Damn him, damn the man. Damn damn damn!’

  ‘Well, Mr Rhys, I don’t really think you can speak like that. He’s . . . dead . . . Gerald Hennessy – the actor, you know – he is dead.’

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ bellowed Rudyard. ‘You’ll have to come away. Something more important.’

  Just for the moment Miss Dim lived up to her soubriquet, her brilliant brain grinding to a halt. What did he mean? Was she missing something? What could be more important than the country’s number-one matinée idol sitting dead in a railway carriage, here in Temple Regis?

  Had Rudyard Rhys done it again? The old Vicar’s Longboat Party tale all over again? Walking away from the biggest story to come the Express’s way in a decade? How typical of the man!

  She glanced over her shoulder to see Terry, now out of the compartment of death and standing on the platform, talking to the porter. That’s my job, she thought, hotly. In a second she had dropped the phone and raced to Terry’s side, her flapping notebook ready to soak up every detail of the poor man’s testimony.

  The extraordinary thing about death is it makes you repeat things, thought Miss Dimont calmly. You say it once, then you say it again – you go on saying it until you have run out of people to say it to. So though technically Terry had the scoop (a) he wasn’t taking notes and (b) he wasn’t going to be writing the tale so (c) the story would still be hers. In the sharply competitive world of Devon journalism, ownership of a scoop was all and everything.

  ‘There ’e was,’ said the porter, whose name was Mudge. ‘There ’e was.’

  So far so good, thought Miss Dimont. This one’s a talker.

  ‘So then you . . .?’

  ‘I told ’im,’ said Mudge, pointing at Terry. ‘I already told ’im.’ And with that he clamped his uneven jaws together.

  Oh Lord, thought Miss Dimont, this one’s not a talker.

  But not for nothing was the Express’s corkscrew-haired reporter renowned for charming the birds out of the trees. ‘He doesn’t listen,’ she said, nodding towards the photographer. ‘Deaf to anything but praise. You’ll need to tell me. The train came in and . . .’

  ‘I told ’im.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Mr Mudge,’ responded Miss Dimont slowly and perfectly reasonably, ‘if you’re unable to assist me, I shall have to ask Mrs Mudge when I see her at choir practice this evening.’

  This surprisingly bland statement came down on the ancient porter as if a Damoclean sword had slipped its fastenings and pierced his bald head.

  ‘You’m no need botherin’ her,’ he said fiercely, but you could see he was on the turn. Mrs Mudge’s soprano, an eldritch screech whether in the church hall or at home, had weakened the poor man’s resolve over half a century. All he asked now was a quiet life.

  ‘The 4.30 come in,’ he conceded swiftly.

  ‘Always full,’ said Miss Dimont, jollying the old bore along. ‘Keeping you busy.’

  ‘People got out.’

  Oh, come on, Mudge!

  ‘Missus Charteris arsk me to take ’er bags to the car. Gave me thruppence.’

  ‘That chauffeur of hers is so idle,’ observed Miss Dimont serenely. Things were moving along. ‘So then . . .?’

  ‘I come back to furs clars see if anyone else wanted porterin’. That’s when I saw ’im. Just like lookin’ at a photograph of ’im in the paper.’ Mr Mudge was warming to his theme. ‘’E wasn’t movin’.’

  Suddenly the truth had dawned – first, who the well-dressed figure was; second, that he was very dead. The shocking combination had caused him to dance his tarantella on the platform edge.

  The rest of the story was down to Terry Eagleton. ‘Yep, looks like a heart attack. What was he – forty-five? Bit young for that sort of thing.’

  As Judy turned this over in her mind Terry started quizzing Mudge again – they seemed to share an arcane lingo which mistrusted verbs, adjectives, and many of the finer adornments which make the English language the envy of the civilised world. It was a wonder to listen to.

  ‘Werm coddit?’

  ‘Ur, nemmer be.’

  ‘C’rubble.’

  Miss Dimont was too absorbed by the drama to pay much attention to these linguistic dinosaurs and their game of semantic shove-ha’penny; she sidled back to the railway carriage and then, pausing for a moment, heart in mouth, stepped aboard.

  The silent Pullman coach was the dernier cri in luxury, a handsome relic of pre-war days and a reassuring memory of antebellum prosperity. Heavily carpeted and lined with exotic African woods, it smelt of leather and beeswax and smoke, its surfaces uniformly coated in a layer of dust so fine it was impossible to see: only by rubbing her sleeve on the corridor’s handrail did the house-proud reporter discover what all seasoned railway passengers know – that travelling by steam locomotive is a dirty business.

  She cautiously advanced from the far end of the carriage towards the dead man’s compartment, her journalist’s eye taking in the debris common to the end of all long-distance journeys – discarded newspapers, old wrappers, a teacup or two, an abandoned novel. On she stepped, her eyes a camera, recording each detail; her heart may be pounding but her head was clear.

  Gerald Hennessy sat in the corner seat with his back to the engine. He looked pretty relaxed for a dead man – she wondered briefly if, called on to play a corpse by his director, Gerald would have done such a convincing job in life. One arm was extended, a finger pointing towards who knows what, as if the star was himself directing a scene. He looked rather heroic.

  Above him in the luggage rack sat an important-looking suitcase, by his side a copy of The Times. The compartment smelt of . . . limes? Lemons? Something both sweet and sharp – presumably the actor’s eau de cologne. But unlike Terry Eagleton Miss Dimont did not cross the threshold, for this was not the first death scene she had encountered in her lengthy and unusual career, and from long experience she knew better than to interfere.

  She looked around, she didn’t know why, for signs of violence – ridiculous, really, given Terry’s confident reading of the cause of death – but Gerald’s untroubled features offered nothing by way of fear or hurt.

  And yet something was not quite right.

  As her eyes took in the finer detail of the compartment, she spotted something near the doorway beneath another seat – it looked like a sandwich wrapper or a piece of litter of some kind. Just then Terry’s angry face appeared at the compartment window and his fist knocked hard on the pane. She could hear him through the thick glass ordering her out on to the platform and she guessed that the police were about to arrive.

  Without pausing to think why, she whisked up the litter from the floor – somehow it made the place look tidier, more dignified. It was how she would recall seeing the last of Gerald Hennessy, and how she would describe to her readers his final scene – the matinée idol as elegant in death as in life. Her introductory paragraph was already forming itself in her mind.

  Terry stood on the platform, red-faced and hopping from foot to foot. ‘Thought I told you to call the police.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Miss Dimont, downcast, ‘I . . . oh . . . I’ll go and do it now but then we’ve got another—’

&
nbsp; ‘Done it,’ he snapped back. ‘And, yes we’ve got another fatality. I’ve talked to the desk. Come on.’

  That was what was so irritating about Terry. You wanted to call him a know-it-all, but know-it-alls, by virtue of their irritating natures, do not know it all and frequently get things wrong. But Terry rarely did – it was what made him so infuriating.

  ‘You know,’ he said, as he slung his heavy camera bag over his shoulder and headed towards his car, ‘sometimes you really can be quite dim.’

  *

  Bedlington-on-Sea was the exclusive end of Temple Regis, more formal and less engagingly pretty than its big sister. Here houses of substance stood on improbably small plots, with large Edwardian rooms giving on to pocket-handkerchief gardens and huge windows looking out over a small bay.

  Holidaymakers might occasionally spill into Bedlington but despite its apparent charm, they did not stay long. There was no pub and no beach, no ice-cream vendors, no pier, and a general frowning upon people who looked like they might want to have fun. It would be wrong to say that Bedlingtonians were stuffy and self-regarding, but people said it all the same.

  The journey from the railway station took no more than six or seven minutes but it was like entering another world, thought Miss Dimont, as she and Herbert puttered behind the Riviera Express’s smart new Morris Minor. There was never any news in Bedlington – the townsfolk kept whatever they knew to themselves, and did not like publicity of any sort. If indeed there was a dead body on its streets this afternoon, you could put money on its not lying there for more than a few minutes before some civic-minded resident had it swept away. That’s the way Bedlingtonians were.

  And so Miss Dimont rather dreaded the inevitable ‘knocks’ she would have to undertake once the body was located. Usually this was a task at which she excelled – a tap on the door, regrets issued, brief words exchanged, the odd intimacy unveiled, the gradual jigsaw of half-information built up over maybe a dozen or so doorsteps – but in Bedlington she knew the chances of learning anything of use were remote. Snooty wasn’t in it.

  They had been in such a rush she hadn’t been able to get out of Terry where exactly the body was to be found, but as they rounded the bend of Clarenceux Avenue there was no need for further questions. Ahead was the trusty black Wolseley of the Temple Regis police force, a horseshoe of spectators and an atmosphere electric with curiosity.

  At the end of the avenue there rose a cliff of Himalayan proportions, a tower of deep red Devonian soil and rock, at the top of which one could just glimpse the evidence of a recent cliff fall. As one’s eye moved down the sharp slope it was possible to pinpoint the trajectory of the deceased’s involuntary descent; and in an instant it was clear to even the most casual observer that this was a tragic accident, a case of Man Overboard, where rocks and earth had given way under his feet.

  Terry and Miss Dimont parked and made their way through to where Sergeant Hernaford was standing, facing the crowd, urging them hopelessly, pointlessly, that there was nothing to see and that they should move on.

  The sergeant spoke with forked tongue, for there was something to see before they went home to tea – there, under a police blanket, lay a body a-sprawl, as if still in the act of trying to save itself. But it was chillingly still.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Dimont, conversationally, to Sergeant Hernaford, ‘how tragic.’

  ‘’Oo was it?’ said Terry, a bit more to the point.

  Hernaford slowly turned his gaze towards the official representatives of the fourth estate. He had seen them many times before in many different circumstances, and here they were again – these purveyors of truth and of history, these curators of local legend, these nosy parkers.

  ‘Back be’ind the line,’ rasped Hernaford in a most unfriendly manner, for just like the haughty Bedlingtonians he did not like journalists. ‘Get back!’

  ‘Now Sergeant Hernaford,’ said Miss Dimont, stiffening, for she did not like his tone. ‘Here we have a man of late middle age – I can see his shoes, he’s a man of late middle age – who has walked too close to the cliff edge. When I was up there at the top last week there were signs explicitly warning that there had been a rockfall and that people should keep away. So, man of late middle age, tragic accident. Coroner will say he was a BF for ignoring the warnings; the Riviera Express will say what a loss to the community. An extra paragraph listing his bereaved relations, there’s the story.

  ‘All that’s missing,’ she added, magnificently, edging closer to the sergeant, ‘is his name. I expect you know it. I expect he had a wallet or something. Or maybe one of these good people—’ she looked round, smiling at the horseshoe but her words taking on a steely edge ‘—has assisted you in your identification. He has clearly been here for a while – your blanket is damp and it stopped raining an hour ago – so in that time you must have had a chance to find out who he is.’

  She smiled tightly and her voice became quite stern.

  ‘I expect you have already informed your inspector and, rather than drive all the way over to Temple Regis police station and take up his very precious time getting two words out of him – a Christian name and a surname, after all that is all I am asking – I imagine you would rather he did not complain to you about my wasting his very precious time.

  ‘So, Sergeant,’ she said, ‘please spare us all that further pain.’

  It was at times like this that Terry had to confess she may be a bit scatty but Miss Dimont could be, well, remarkable. He watched Sergeant Hernaford, a barnacle of the old school, crumble before his very eyes.

  ‘Name, Arthur Shrimsley. Address, Tide Cottage, Exbridge. Now move on. Move on!’

  Judy Dimont gazed owlishly, her spectacles sliding down her convex nose and resting precariously at its tip. ‘Not the Arthur . . .?’ she enquired, but before she could finish, Terry had whisked her away, for Hernaford was not a man to exchange pleasantries with – that was as much as they were going to get. As they retreated, he pushed Miss Dimont aside with his elbow while turning to take snaps of the corpse and its abrasive custodian before pulling open the car door.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he urged. ‘Lots to do.’

  Miss Dimont obliged. Dear Herbert would have to wait. She pulled out her notebook and started to scribble as Terry noisily let in the clutch and they headed for the office.

  Already the complexity of the situation was becoming clear; and no matter what happened next, disaster was about to befall her. Two deaths, two very different sets of journalistic values. And only Judy Dimont to adjudicate between the rival tales as to which served her readers best.

  If she favoured the death of Gerald Hennessy over the sad loss of Arthur Shrimsley, local readers would never forgive her, for Arthur Shrimsley had made a big name for himself in the local community. The Express printed his letters most weeks, even at the moment when he was stealing their stories and selling them to Fleet Street. Rudyard Rhys, in thrall to Shrimsley’s superior journalistic skills, had even allowed him to write a column for a time. But narcissistic and self-regarding it turned out to be, and of late he was permitted merely to see his name in print at the foot of a letter which would excoriate the local council, or the town brass band, or the ladies at the WI for failing to keep his cup full at the local flower show.

  There was nothing nice about Arthur Shrimsley, yet he had invented a persona which his readers were all too ready to believe in and even love. His loss would be a genuine one to the community.

  On the other hand, thought Miss Dimont feverishly, as Terry manoeuvred expertly round the tight corner of Tuppenny Row, we have a story of national importance here. Gerald Hennessy, star of Heroes at Dawn and The First of the Few, husband of the equally famous Prudence Aubrey, has died on our patch. Gerald Hennessy!

  The question was, which sad passing should lead the Express’s front page? And who would take the blame when, as was inevitable, the wrong choice was made?

  THREE

  It is remarkable, thought
Miss Dimont, as her Remington Quiet-Riter rattled, banged, tinged and spat out page after page of immaculately typed copy addressing the recent rise in the death rate of Temple Regis. It really is remarkable . . .

  Her typing came to a halt while she completed the thought. It’s remarkable how when there’s an emergency everybody just melts away. Here I am, writing one of the greatest scoops this newspaper has ever been lucky enough to have, and with press day looming, and everyone’s gone home.

  She was right to feel nettled. The newsroom resembled the foredeck of the Mary Celeste, with all the evidence of apparent occupancy but none of the personnel. It was barely six o’clock but the crew of this ghost ship had jumped over the side, leaving Miss Dimont and Terry Eagleton alone to steer it to safety. Call it cowardice in the face of a major story, call it what you like, they’d all hopped it.

  Around her, tin ashtrays still gave off the malodorous evidence that people once worked here. Teacups were barely cold. Someone had forgotten to put away the milk. Someone else had forgotten to shut the windows – strictly against company regulations – and the soft late summer breeze caused the large sign over the editorial desks to gently undulate, as if a punkah wallah had been employed especially to fan Miss Dimont’s fevered brow.

  This sign was Rudyard Rhys’s urgent imprecation to staff to do their duty. ‘Make It Fast,’ he had written, ‘Make It Accurate.’ To which some wag had added in crayon, ‘Make It Up.’

  There were wags aplenty at the Express. In the corner by Miss Dimont’s desk was a gallery of hand-picked photographs, a rich harvest of the paper’s weekly editorial content, which showed off the town’s newly-weds. For some reason the office jokers had chosen to pick the ugliest and most ill suited of couples – brides with snaggly teeth, grinning grooms recently released from the asylum. It was called the ‘Thank Heavens!’ board – thank heavens they found each other!