Resort to Murder Read online

  ‘Where did the girl – the one who had to borrow her train fare – where did she come from?’

  ‘Only over Tavistock way.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Topham and subsided over his pint glass. A flame had flickered alive for a moment, but just as quickly it was extinguished.

  Sid looked down from his elevated position behind the bar and saw the hunched figure utterly lost and at sea.

  ‘Drink that up and have one on the ’ouse, Frank,’ he said kindly. ‘Mebbe a short.’

  ‘Can’t get it straight,’ came the reply. ‘Can’t see the reason. Can’t see the point. She was very pretty, you see. What was left of her.’

  Sid, with a lifetime’s experience of hearing the woes of others, knew when to shut up. Pretty soon Frank Topham got up, lifted his hat, and returned his still-full glass to the bar.

  ‘Nothing wrong with the beer,’ he said to Sid. ‘Something wrong with me.’

  He walked out into the hotel and slowed as he came to the entrance to the Cocktail Bar. In there stood suave Cyril Normandy, who had made the place his own and didn’t mind who knew it. ‘Here’s another, here’s another!’ he shouted commandingly, and the champagne-swillers turned to see Topham’s mournful figure standing in the doorway. ‘Come in, come in!’

  A portly matron with a cottage-loaf hairdo came over and linked her arm through his. ‘Come on, handsome, come in and join the party. Cyril’s buying!’

  If he had one prevailing virtue, Frank Topham liked to know what was going on in his town. In these post-war days, there were right ones and there were wrong ones. The conflict had thrown everything up in the air and society had come down with a bump and you didn’t know who was who any more. Now, people seemed to have money for no good reason. What’s more they were spending it like there was no tomorrow. Who were they, where had they come from, where would they go when all the money had gone?

  The detective sniffed suspiciously, but allowed himself to be dragged in.

  ‘Cyril Normandy,’ said the beauty queen king by way of introduction.

  ‘Inspector Topham, Temple Regis CID.’

  ‘Wooooooaaaaah, we could have used YOU on Tuesday!’ yodelled Normandy, pinging his braces on his fat belly. ‘To hold the crowds back at the Lido. They wanted to eat my girls, Inspector! EAT them!’

  ‘I heard from the uniform branch everyone was very well behaved.’

  ‘Yes but you should see the look in the eyes of some of ’em ! ’ave some shampoo! You see someone like a Lord Mayor, with his chain of office round his neck and his eyes out on stalks – that’s what makes Riviera Queen such a smash hit – it brings out the beast in a man!’ Normandy rolled his eyes and his followers burst into cascades of laughter.

  ‘I think you came down here last year as well, Mr Normandy.’

  ‘And I will do for every year in the foreseeable future.’ The entrepreneur splashed champagne into a glass and forced it into the policeman’s hand. ‘You can say this for Temple Regis, dead-and-alive hole it may be – it provides a wonderful turnout when my girls get into their cozzies! We got a record box office, and it isn’t even high season yet.’

  Topham masked his distaste and smiled insincerely at Normandy, a man blind to insincerity.

  ‘So tell me,’ he said, ‘how does it work, this pageant process?’

  Normandy was delighted to have someone new to listen to his success story. ‘It’s a pyramid,’ he said, proudly.

  ‘At the top is the title Miss Great British Summer 1959. And above that, Miss Great Britain. A beautiful tiara, to keep for ever. At the bottom are a load of shop girls desperate to escape their humdrum lives and crummy lodgings who’ll crawl over hot coals to be given a sash to wear.

  ‘Their boyfriends tell them they’re beautiful – guess why! – and they believe it. We turn them into royalty. They see the red carpets and the thrones, the fabulous make-up and the hair, and now, the television cameras – it’s like a drug. Think of where they come from, Inspector – the gutter!’ he guffawed. ‘I hose the mud off ’em and make ’em famous!’

  Topham put down his glass untouched. ‘Well, very interesting, Mr Normandy. And are you staying here for long?’

  ‘They’ll beg, borrow, steal and scratch each other’s eyes out to win,’ chattered the fat man happily, not yet ready to be deflected. There was a wildness about him which had nothing to do with the drink. He seemed, thought Topham, to take a savage glee in manipulating the lives of innocents. And getting rich in the process.

  ‘Each year since 1951 – ever since I created the Miss Festival of Great Britain title – the beauty pageant business has grown. We make so much money we even give some to charity – that brings us in more, because it persuades old fools like your Lord Mayor that it’s all innocent fun, it’s all above board.

  ‘Which, of course, it is,’ added the fat man with a wink. ‘No silly nonsense, no hanky-panky, that’s my first rule.’

  ‘Relieved to hear it,’ said Topham. ‘Well, goodnight.’

  ‘Have some more shampoo! ’Ere, you haven’t even touched that one!’

  ‘I have a funny taste in my mouth,’ said Topham.

  It was Auriol Hedley who’d sent her reporter friend knocking again on the green-painted door in Tuppenny Row. She had an extraordinary power to see where others cannot; or, more possibly, it was because she was a trained observer, with the right amounts of intuition and suspicion, to look at a problem from the other end of the telescope. Miss Dimont, who prided herself on a swift and deductive brain, did not always agree with Auriol’s conclusions – her friend was often too swift to answer a question without considering its wider ramifications – and this had led to occasional disagreements in their wartime service together.

  But at their lunchtime chat Auriol had made a statement of the obvious: the dead girl on the sands at Todhempstead had fallen to her death from the Pullman train, or she’d been struck by it, or she had deliberately thrown herself at it. In each of these cases her body would have flown or toppled from the Todhempstead embankment onto the beach below.

  ‘It had to be something else, though,’ said Auriol. ‘Was the body anywhere near the railway embankment?’

  ‘I see your point. It wasn’t too far away, but I don’t think, judging from the markers that were left in the sand by the police, that it could be to do with the train. Unless, of course, once she’d been struck, some person or persons dragged the body and left it further out to sea, maybe hoping the tide would wash it away.’ ‘I wonder how many people would have been on the beach on that morning.’

  ‘Very few, most people can’t afford it. You know it’s privately owned, by a friend of someone very important. He bought the sands a couple of years ago and now charges people to walk their dogs or put up a deckchair – over a shilling it costs! “One an’ three,” the old boy at the gate said to me. I had a word in his ear.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I can use the 1/3d to pay for my tea here.’

  ‘Never in a lifetime of lifetimes, my dear.’

  ‘I know.’ The two were the closest of companions, though their lives were very different. Since she came to Temple Regis Miss Dimont had joined the choir, submitted her best efforts to the annual flower show, and plunged herself deep into the joys and occasional anguishes of life in a seaside town.

  Auriol, Judy’s senior by a couple of years, had done the opposite. War service, and the loss of her brother Eric, together with the extraordinary discovery that a woman of her gifts could be so valuable in war and so dispensable in peace, had driven her to Devon and to the opening of the Seagull Café in Bedlington-on-Sea. She bore no grudges, she smiled benignly upon her customers and insisted they had another slice of cake, and lived a very private life. Judy sometimes wondered if she were Auriol’s only friend.

  ‘So the answer is, she wasn’t killed on the beach – her body was planted there. Though why anyone should want to do that, and how, I cannot think.’

  The lack of motive was infu
riating. That the woman had been unlawfully killed seemed now beyond doubt, but who? As well as why?

  According to the police, she wasn’t local and must have been a holidaymaker. But Judy had another theory: Valentine had counted the contestants at the Lido and, if his sums were correct, there was one missing. He was sent off to find Cyril Normandy while Miss Dimont sat on a bench in Tuppenny Row and thought about what she was going to do next.

  If it was a missing beauty queen, and this was only the merest supposition, who would want to kill her? She then recalled Athene talking about the Sisters of Reason, the small group of activists who talked big about emancipation and who’d made such a big fuss at the Paignton eliminator. They’d come close to violence on that occasion – they had tried to storm the stage and pull the girls off – could one of them have gone a step too far this time and actually killed the woman on the beach?

  Or was that just too fanciful an idea? Surely nobody would be fanatical enough to kill a girl for taking part in a beauty pageant? Could they?

  All this she had discussed with Auriol, who’d urged prompt action. She rose from the bench and walked across the street to knock on the green front door.

  ‘Miss de Mauny,’ she said, taking off her gloves as the horologist cautiously answered the door, ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not a bit,’ came the reply. After a sticky start they had got on well, and Miss de Mauny had enjoyed the article on Lady Rhondda and her plan to explode a Post Office letter box in the name of women’s equality. ‘Come in.’

  ‘I thought you could help me with a related matter,’ said Miss Dimont, feeling her way carefully. ‘After all we talked about, I imagine you know quite a lot about the Sisters of Reason?’

  The atmosphere in the sun-filled cottage changed sharply. ‘Why are you asking me that?’ snapped Angela de Mauny. ‘They’re nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Just something I’m following up. We’ve never written about them in the Express, but I’ve heard quite a bit about them. Very vocal campaigners on behalf of our gender. They succeeded in disrupting the Paignton beauty pageant a couple of weeks ago, and I just thought …’

  ‘Well you thought wrong,’ snapped Miss de Mauny.

  ‘But from what you were saying only the other day, you agree with their views on beauty pageants.’

  ‘They’re a bit of a fringe group,’ said Miss de Mauny, dropping her guard slightly. ‘Some people think they’re rather extreme – not in their views, which are wholly sound, but in their means of action. They’re, well … disruptive. For myself, I belong to the National Council of Women, a very well-established organisation which seeks the same ends but by democratic means.’

  ‘But you know members of the Sisters of Reason?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But, Miss de Mauny … I don’t wish to embarrass you, but you were there with them at Paignton.’

  ‘Who said that?’ flashed the clockmaker. Her hand dropped to the workbench and her fingers closed on a heavy brass pendulum.

  ‘One of the contestants. She said she recognised you from the work you did on the town hall clock.’

  ‘Complete nonsense.’

  ‘She said she used to bring you tea while you were doing the job.’

  Angela de Mauny’s hand tightened on the pendulum. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Not saying anything,’ said Miss Dimont, suddenly alarmed at the unexpected reaction her questions had triggered and calculating the distance to the front door. ‘Just that, you were there. With the Sisters. They seem quite a violent lot. I wondered if any of them could have had anything to do with this missing girl who was in the paper this week.’

  ‘Didn’t she fall out of the train?’

  ‘I don’t know where you heard that. It’s more likely she was killed by somebody.’

  ‘Are you saying she was … murdered?’ Miss de Mauny’s face had gone white beneath its early summer tan.

  ‘Very likely.’

  ‘Why are you asking this? You’re not the police.’

  ‘Look,’ said Miss Dimont, trying to soothe a woman who suddenly seemed very agitated indeed. ‘If she was murdered there has to be a motive. Theft is usually one, the victim being interfered with another, but neither applies in this case. These beauty pageants seem to cause as much offence to a certain sector as they give pleasure to others. I’m just interested in the Sisters of Reason, and clearly you know a lot about them, that’s all.’

  ‘Your questions seem to imply the Sisters had a hand in this girl’s murder and that in some way I might be involved.’ Miss de Mauny’s eyes were flashing in the oddest way and she was turning the heavy pendulum over in her hand.

  ‘I said nothing of the kind,’ said Miss Dimont sharply. ‘Look, please put that thing down and let’s talk sensibly.’

  Miss de Mauny did not relax her grip.

  ‘The Sisters did their best to disrupt the Paignton heat of Miss Great British Summer. You were among them. One of the contestants, who should have gone on into the Temple Regis round, has disappeared. And now we have a body on the beach. These two facts could be connected.’

  Miss de Mauny used her free hand to adjust her glasses. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I gave a speech the other day about Lady Rhondda. She died last year. I was a close friend of hers and admired her very much. That’s the level of interest I have in this subject.’

  ‘From what you tell me, Lady Rhondda believed in direct action to get what she wanted.’

  ‘Not to the extent of murdering a beauty queen!’ shouted Miss de Mauny angrily. ‘She was a distinguished suffragette. Her work has inspired generations of women – women who’ve struggled to get proper recognition for their role in society and their contribution to the wealth of the nation.’

  ‘Do the Sisters believe in Lady Rhondda’s more extreme actions? Blowing things up?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ thundered Miss de Mauny, putting the pendulum down. It was very heavy. ‘Can you, a woman, honestly blame them if they become impatient? Look at the state of things in this country, Miss Dimont – a nation of fifty-two million, half of them women. How many of them are cabinet ministers? Company chairmen? Bishops?’ She spat out the thought in disgust. ‘Honestly, can you blame them?’

  ‘But this girl,’ said Miss Dimont quietly, ‘I don’t see it. Surely if the Sisters wanted to cause damage to Miss Great British Summer, they’d pick on that odious fish who runs it? The man called Normandy?’

  A cunning look crept across Miss de Mauny’s face. ‘I should have thought a woman of your advanced intelligence should be able to work that one out,’ she said. ‘Were they to wish to do something like that, though it seems pretty far-fetched, wouldn’t they allow the police to believe that it was Mr Normandy who did it?

  ‘A criminal trial for murder by the organiser of the nation’s so-called number one beauty pageant – wouldn’t that put paid to beauty pageants all over Britain, all over the globe?’

  Miss Dimont had to confess the clock-mender had a point.

  TEN

  Valentine Waterford finished his home-made lemonade and chased the last crumbs of rock cake around the plate.

  ‘Delicious,’ he smiled.

  ‘Have another,’ said Auriol Hedley sweetly, her perennial response to hungry customers.

  ‘I didn’t want to bother you earlier because you were busy,’ said Valentine, picking up his plate and glass and bringing them over to the counter. ‘But you are Miss Dimont’s friend. I came and picked her up here the other day. I live just round the corner.’

  ‘Really,’ said Auriol, taking off her apron. ‘Then welcome, neighbour! You couldn’t have picked anywhere lovelier.’

  ‘I’ve just joined the Express. Junior reporter,’ he said with undisguised pride.

  ‘She told me about you,’ said Auriol. ‘You’re related to Admiral Godfrey?’

  ‘I gather you both worked with him in the war.’

  ‘For him,’ corrected Auriol. ‘A wonderful m
an.’

  ‘Miss Dimont’s pretty wonderful too,’ said Valentine. ‘Extraordinary in fact. Could be a leader of men.’

  ‘She’d take that as a compliment,’ said Auriol. ‘I gather you were in the cavalry.’ Clearly Miss Dimont had passed on quite a bit about Devon journalism’s newest recruit.

  ‘In the ranks.’

  ‘That’s surprising given your family history. The Admiral and so on.’

  ‘Actually, it was Miss Dimont’s family history I was interested in.’

  ‘Oh ho! You didn’t come here for my lemonade and rock cakes, then!’

  ‘I gather their fame goes well beyond the Devon borders, and of course they’re delicious,’ parried Valentine. ‘No, I’m starting out on what I hope will be a lifetime’s career, and I hoped to learn a bit more about the person I share a desk with. I’ve never met anyone quite like her.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Auriol, ‘you sound like a journalist already. Asking personal questions.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Valentine, ‘the thing is I have a peculiar family myself and my guess is, so does she. I just wondered …’

  ‘You want to know what to ask her about her people and what not.’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘Well, you know you can’t ask about what she used to do before she came here. That’s secret.’

  ‘The War seems so very far away now.’

  ‘But the secrets stay secret for eternity – to the grave!’ Auriol brought two more glasses of lemonade to the table. She was enjoying this, he seemed a very nice boy. ‘Go on, then, ask away.’

  ‘Her name, so unusual, what’s her background?’

  ‘Well, she’d tell you in time herself. She’s had a very remarkable life.’

  ‘Go on.’ The sun was shining brilliantly outside on the dock but the café was empty. People had better things to do on a Saturday morning than sit around with glasses of lemonade going over past history. They were the poorer for it.

  ‘Well, you know her family come from Belgium, very distinguished people.’