Resort to Murder Read online

  ‘It happens from time to time,’ said Miss Dimont, recalling among others the Vicar’s Longboat Party, the Temple Regis Tennis Scandal and the Football Pools Farrago – Rudyard Rhys hated printing the really good stories. ‘More often than you might think.’

  Later, filched by an underhanded sub-editor, such tales would often turn up in one of the murkier Sunday papers and the residents of Temple Regis would agree, yet again, that the Riviera Express was nice enough, but it never really had its finger on the pulse.

  ‘I mean,’ said Valentine, firing up the car’s tinny engine, ‘surely the Bickingtons were a good story?’

  ‘You have the right instincts,’ agreed Judy. ‘But I must warn you the editor will not always share them. Anything for a quiet life is his motto. Though it wasn’t always the case.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Valentine, expertly rounding the harbour wall and gauging whether the old bubble had enough puff to get them both up the hill, or whether Judy might have to get out and walk.

  ‘Yes. We worked together during the War.’

  ‘Doing?’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Dimont cagily, ‘based in Whitehall. Royal Navy. A bit complicated.’

  The young reporter looked sideways at her with interest. He looked a bit too long.

  ‘Look where you’re going!’ cried Judy. ‘The dust cart!’

  ‘Cloak and dagger?’ Valentine asked, slowing behind a refuse lorry which was inching at snail’s pace up the hill.

  ‘I don’t recall anyone ever wearing a cloak.’

  ‘Then you may have known Admiral Godfrey, sort of relation of mine.’

  ‘Ah yes, the Waterfords. Old family, rather a lot of them,’ said Judy with only the mildest sprinkle of sarcasm. ‘Yes, I knew him quite well. We were in the same quarters.’

  ‘Got you now,’ said Valentine, swerving out to overtake the lorry. As a traffic manoeuvre it was brave, but with such a feeble engine, not a great success. Conceding defeat, he slid back into his original position. ‘Pretty hairy stuff, I imagine.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Judy, ‘the lady I’ve just been to see – Auriol Hedley, at the café – worked in the same unit.’

  ‘Small world.’

  ‘Too small. I came down here because she told me there was an opening on the Riviera Express. I’d only been here five minutes when they appointed a new editor. Blow me down if it didn’t turn out to be Richard Rhys.’

  ‘I thought his name was Rudyard.’

  ‘Hah!’ snapped Miss Dimont. ‘That only came later when he tried to become a novelist.’

  ‘So you worked for him in the War Office?’

  ‘Other way round, Valentine.’

  ‘But he’s older than you!’

  Judy Dimont sighed. The boy was young. He may have served his time in the armed services but he clearly had no idea of what it was like in the days of war, where talent led seniority, and bright young people were put in charge of the nation’s defences while their so-called olders and betters pottered obediently along behind.

  ‘Auriol was the boss, I was her deputy. We were a small unit. Richard Rhys – Rusty, we used to call him – was given, ah, certain tasks. He was good at some and … not good at others. But it’s all a long time ago.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Valentine, who was still in short trousers when the war ended. He ruffled his blond locks and changed gear.

  ‘I’m going to see a Miss de Mauny,’ said Judy, changing the subject. ‘Horologist. Know what that is?’

  ‘“Had we but world enough and . . . time”,’ quoted Valentine without hesitation.

  ‘Very clever. Bet you don’t know how the rest of it goes, or its meaning.’

  ‘I do, actually.’

  Miss Dimont gave him a look, and changed the subject. ‘She gave a lecture the other day on the origins of the women’s movement and I’m going to talk to her to see how she views the position of women in the West Country today. So if you’ll just drop me off at the top of Tuppenny Row …’

  ‘No, I’m coming with you.’

  ‘You’ll find it awfully dreary.’

  ‘The editor told me to. Said you’re a wonderful interviewer and I should pick up some tips.’

  ‘Did he really? Strange he never bothers to say that to me.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m simply nutty about mechanical things. That’s why I went in the cavalry, you can spend an awful lot of time there tinkering around with your head under the bonnet. I’d like to see what sort of clocks she’s repairing, how they work, sort of thing.’

  The red bubble car reached the summit of Bedlington Hill and they made their way, sedately, past Mudford Cliffs. Women were out walking their dogs, but the warning signs about the cliff fall had been taken away.

  Angela de Mauny’s pink-painted cottage stood at the end of Tuppenny Row, facing away from its neighbours in an offhand fashion, but occupying a spot where you could see the whole of Nelson’s Bay. Miss Dimont had seen the view many times but as she staggered inelegantly out of Valentine’s infernal machine its broad sweep caught her gaze once more, and for a moment she stood quite still on the pavement.

  ‘Look,’ she said.

  It was late in the afternoon and, though the heat had gone out of the day, the sun still shone brilliantly on the water. The piercing blue of the sky was beginning to give way to a more complex colour, purple and grey and yellow, and Athene Madrigale’s clouds were starting to put in their appearance – the altostratus, the cumulonimbus, and especially the cirrus which looked like so much candy floss hanging gently in the sky. Wide-eyed guillemots patrolled the air above, while far beneath a pair of gannets flew off the headland, occasionally slicing into the water to collect their dinner.

  Valentine came up behind her. ‘Fabulous,’ he murmured, adding after a moment’s pause, ‘is it always like this in Temple Regis?’

  ‘My dear boy,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You don’t know it, but you’ve arrived in Heaven.’

  There was no St Peter, however, to answer Miss de Mauny’s green-painted front door, instead an angular lady with steel-grey hair and complexion to match who seemed startled, not to say frightened, to see the two reporters.

  ‘Yes?’

  Having shrugged her disapproval after learning their identities, she was on the point of shutting the door again when Valentine stepped forward and said, ‘Margaret Plantagenet.’ Miss de Mauny stepped back and looked more closely at the young reporter. ‘Yes?’ she said again, but her tone was different this time – interested almost.

  ‘Just a guess,’ offered Valentine cheerfully. ‘She married into your family in the fourteenth century. I’m on the other side. My—’

  ‘—ancient family, lots of them,’ interrupted Miss Dimont starchily, but a dubious family connection stretching back five hundred years, if that’s what it was, looked as though it might at least get them into the house. First two rules of journalism – (i) knock on the door, (ii) get inside.

  What they found, once inside, was breathtaking.

  Ancient timepieces glistened as if made of gold. They chattered and clicked and donged, and on a workbench the innards of a large hall clock were laid out in regimented lines as if they were the parts of a firearm.

  ‘…thought they had called to warn you I was coming,’ Miss Dimont was saying disingenuously. ‘Your speech the other day, you know, attracted a great deal of interest. So sorry if this is an intrusion, we can go if you’d prefer.’

  The apology was less than sincere. Miss Dimont had heard that Miss de Mauny was known to be prickly, to say the least, and took the decision not to telephone ahead in the hope she could sweet-talk her way through the door.

  As it turned out, it was this very new, very junior cub reporter who’d pulled it off. She’d have to have a word with him later!

  ‘…though we did the article on your lecture on Lady Rhondda – fascinating,’ she added encouragingly. ‘I wanted to do something for the women’s interest pages, expanding on the role of women toda
y.’

  ‘I’m no expert,’ said Angela de Mauny scratchily, sitting down at her bench and pointedly turning her back to her visitors.

  ‘Well, let’s say you know more than most,’ said Miss Dimont soothingly. ‘I’d like to write a piece talking about where women are, fourteen years after the War has ended.’

  ‘Why?’ said Miss de Mauny, but you could tell she was listening.

  ‘In your speech you made the point that the War was a time when women finally came into their own, were recognised for the skills which had been waiting to be utilised ever since … ever since the Vote, ever since they were allowed to take their university degrees, ever since they were accepted as doctors and lawyers and factory workers. The First War broke down some of those barriers, but this one finally gave us true emancipation.’

  ‘Well, yes, yes, yes!’ said Miss de Mauny irritably. ‘My very point!’

  Miss Dimont had used the old journalistic trick of getting a reluctant interviewee to talk by repeating back her own words – words with which she would be forced to agree, and would want to expand on. As a subterfuge, it worked as well on members of the public as it did on politicians.

  The clock woman fell for it.

  ‘Come the peace, everything went backwards,’ she said. ‘It’s continuing to go backwards. We women represent half the population, but only have twenty-four Members of Parliament to speak for us – the laws of this country are made by men. And while I am fond of the male of the species, he seems to have taken it upon himself to grab hold of the steering wheel of life on the foolish assumption that women can’t drive.’

  Judy Dimont nodded vigorously in agreement. Her notebook was in hand, the strange curlicues thought up by Mr Pitman a century before magically spiralling their way across the page. Miss de Mauny looked nervously down at their progress and eyed her interlocutor with caution. ‘Who runs your paper, male or female?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘Male.’

  ‘Well, we know how this’ll end up. “Weepy old woman bewails her wage packet woes”, that sort of thing. I think I’d rather not go any further.’

  She turned to Valentine, deliberately changing the subject. ‘Which family are you? An awful lot of people married into the de Maunys. Most seem to have lost their bloodline while we’ve managed to hang on to ours.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Valentine, ‘we also—’

  ‘Let’s talk about that later,’ said Miss Dimont snippily. ‘There’s no room in the paper to write about family trees. Tell me, Miss de Mauny, how many men are there in your distinguished profession?’

  It’s what made her such a brilliant interviewer. She had done her homework. Horology was a closed shop to that gender.

  ‘All men, no women,’ snapped Miss de Mauny.

  ‘Then how come …?’

  ‘I’m fortunate enough to come from a wealthy family. After university, I wanted to do something no other woman had done, and for a while I seriously considered climbing Mount Everest – I’ve done a bit of mountaineering – but in the end it came down to this. I paid for my apprenticeship, bought my own tools and premises, and weathered the storm while people got used to having a woman go up the church steeple or the town hall.

  ‘I was helped by the death of old Fred Shallowford, who’d been here forty years. There wasn’t anybody else, so gradually I was granted—’ she used the word quite bitterly ‘—his work.’

  ‘I wonder what Lady Rhondda would have to say about that.’

  ‘She was a marvellous woman. Without her, without the Six Point Group, women would be in a far worse position than they are now.’

  The conversation flowed on like this for some time. Valentine quietly let himself out of the front door and wandered down Tuppenny Row, drinking in its pink-bricked cottages which were really more like rich men’s houses.

  He returned a quarter of an hour later to hear Miss de Mauny’s voice raised almost to a screech.

  ‘Just so degrading – appalling!’ she was saying agitatedly. ‘After all we’ve been through – that women allow this to be done to them, while the public sits by and lets the men take advantage like that!’

  ‘To be fair,’ interjected Judy, ‘it is a passport to another world. Or it can be. There’s the money to consider. And the fact they’re not qualified for anything else. Yes, they may be exploited and the whole process, frankly, is pretty tawdry, but it’s only a fashion. It’ll pass.’

  ‘And meantime, meantime … it brings women to their lowest common denominator.’

  ‘There’s worse,’ said Judy, smiling.

  ‘Well, yes,’ agreed Miss de Mauny, the hysteria in her voice abating somewhat, ‘I suppose that’s true. But what those women do, they’ve done since the dawn of time. Beauty parades – pageants—’ she spat the word out ‘—these things are man-made, and man-made now and today.

  ‘Frankly I’m appalled Temple Regis should lower itself in this way. But I don’t suppose your male editor would agree with that view – probably rubbing his hands at all the photographs he can print of girls in bathing costumes. Hence my reluctance to talk when you came to the door. Nothing will change.’

  ‘Yes, it will,’ said Judy, calmly. ‘There will come a time, and you mustn’t give up hope.’

  ‘You’re wrong. The only way any of this will change is if something radical is done.’

  ‘Parliamentary reform?’

  ‘Direct action,’ said Angela de Mauny fiercely. ‘That’s the only way to get things done. Sometimes men only stop to think when they see blood spilled on the ground.’

  The journey back to the office was a difficult one. First, Valentine insisted Judy take the controls of the bubble car. Though it was called a car it was more like a motorcycle, but much more difficult to handle than dear Herbert. But it seemed only appropriate, given the tenor of the recent conversation, that a woman should take her turn at the wheel and so the couple made their halting way back to the Riviera Express.

  They talked over the barely veiled violence in Miss de Mauny’s closing remarks.

  ‘Extraordinary woman,’ said Valentine. ‘I’d say barking mad.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, but she’s certainly unusual. How many more colourful relations have you got up your sleeve? Gilbert Drury, the Admiral, now Miss de Mauny.’

  ‘There are more, many more, believe me. No, I found it quite frightening at one point, actually. When she was talking about blood, it was if she meant it.’

  ‘You see her point.’

  ‘Well, sort of.’

  ‘I do,’ said Miss Dimont, ‘and if you were a woman you might understand things a bit better.’

  ‘I’m a quick learner,’ said Valentine, and turned his dazzling smile on her. He meant well, but what did he know? Boys’ public school, a stint of National Service, no experience of the world.

  ‘It’s a man’s world. You’re a man.’

  ‘I was brought up by an aunt,’ he said, as if by way of exoneration. He started to say something else, but they had reached their destination.

  The reporters made their way through the front hall and trudged up the dusty stairs and along the corridor into the newsroom. People were still hard at work and the place was buzzing with activity. They just walking to their shared desk when …

  ‘Miss D-I-I-I-M-M-M-M!’

  ‘Action stations,’ said Judy, and pushed Valentine into his chair.

  ‘Yes, Mr Rhys?’

  ‘In my office, Miss Dim! Be quick about it!’

  The door slammed shut, but Valentine could still hear above the office kerfuffle the sounds of voices raised in what seemed to be accusation and counter-accusation. It startled him, since he could tell Miss Dimont gave no ground to her employer, rather that she seemed to have the upper hand.

  A few moments later, she emerged and returned to her desk, a little tense perhaps, but otherwise perfectly calm. She did not sit down.

  ‘Here’s a question to which you should be able to answer yes,’ she began, i
n a tense tone. ‘Have you heard of Danny Trouble and The Urge?’

  ‘Well, that sounds rather like … I’m not awfully musical, you know.’

  ‘No matter, Mr Ford. They’re on stage at the Pavilion Theatre, or just about to be,’ said Miss Dimont tersely, ‘and there’s a riot going on. Get going!’

  SEVEN

  Geraldine Phipps had seen many West End successes in a long and glittering career, but never anything like this. The chaos and excitement even outweighed anything she’d witnessed at the Coronation – and this was Temple Regis, not The Mall!

  Screaming girls with thick sweaters and clumpy shoes had invaded the foyer of the Pavilion Theatre and were raiding the snack counter; the green-eyed pansy in charge had taken one look when they broke through the door and scarpered. Here and there a greasy-haired lout in a leather jacket and jeans ducked between the knots of girls, egging them on by shouting ‘Danny! DANNY!!’ and the screams would come again and again, thick and fast.

  ‘Stop that immediately, Gavin!’ ordered Mrs Phipps severely, for underneath the disreputable disguise she recognised her grandson, once the young man of great promise.

  ‘Danny! DANNY!!’ he yodelled, oblivious to the dowager’s cry, and the girls took up their screaming once again. ‘DANN … EEEEEE!!!!’

  The singer and his mates felt less enthusiastic about Temple Regis than its inhabitants felt about them. The band’s ancient Bedford van had broken down outside Torquay and nobody had the money to pay for repairs. Eventually, they’d been offered a tow down to the town and had arrived long after the fans had settled themselves in. A service road at the back of the theatre had obscured this ignominious arrival and now they were hastily unloading their heavy equipment and hauling it backstage.

  ‘That Gavin,’ panted Danny Trouble, whose real name was Derek, ‘what a way to start a gig – I’m going to kill ’im.’

  ‘You hold him an’ I’ll hit ’im,’ offered Boots McGuigan, the bass guitarist.

  ‘Crazy, man, crazy’ said Taz, who played the drums. ‘What’s happening to us? We’re Number One in the Top Ten and we have to be towed here.’