The Riviera Express Page 9

  Mrs March dismissed this evident truth with a sniff.

  ‘He—’ she tossed her head in her husband’s direction without actually bothering to look at him ‘—has a lot of love to give. He has been waiting all his life to give that love. He told me he wanted a son to pass on his estate to. Once we had become acquainted he thought that we could . . . you know . . .’

  ‘But Mrs Symington, you are sixty-three!’

  ‘You’re as old as you feel,’ snapped back the accused. This was something of a non sequitur, since in its lengthy and colourful history Temple Regis had not so far recorded a case of a woman achieving the miracle of childbirth after the official retirement age. But it did not diminish by one iota Mrs Symington’s delusional self-belief.

  Miss Dimont watched this fascinating verbal tennis match as if from the umpire’s seat. Mrs March had the law on her side but Mrs Symington seemed to have the upper hand.

  ‘So, if I have this correctly, Mrs Symington, you fooled Mr Symington into believing that you could bear him a son and heir.’

  ‘I can and probably will.’

  Mr Symington gave a chimpanzee’s grin at the Bench.

  ‘You broke the law and, if I may say so, you made a fool of a man who took pity on you and took you in,’ said Mrs Marchbank, her own rigorous personal standards in danger of getting the better of her legal judgement. ‘You applied womanly guile and, no doubt, have gained pecuniary advantage from the use of that guile. There is a word for that,’ said Mrs Marchbank, simmering up to boiling point.

  Mrs Symington smirked and patted her comfortable form.

  ‘I therefore sentence you to six months. Take her down.’

  And the Bench rattled as Mrs Marchbank brought down her gavel with terrifying force to signify the end of the case and a suitable termination to Mrs Symington’s liberty.

  Mr Thurlestone jumped up, his dirty old wig bouncing on his head. He turned to face Mrs March and spoke urgently in an undertone. His head was so close to hers it was impossible to hear what he was saying, or her reaction, but after a minute or so he bobbed down again and Mrs Marchbank with a face like stone spoke once again to the accused.

  ‘I am advised that in this case, a custodial sentence would be inappropriate,’ she snarled. (Too right, thought Miss Dimont, three months maximum and as a first offender it would be probation – she knew her law.)

  ‘Therefore on the charge before me I sentence you to one year’s probation. I further sentence you to one year’s probation for contempt of court.’

  Mrs Symington, who had woken to the possibility she might be spared her nightly duties with old Mr Symington and get a good night’s sleep for a few months, looked somewhat disappointed. But Mrs March had not finished.

  ‘I have had the privilege to sit on this Bench for twenty-five years,’ she said, her pince-nez wobbling on the end of her nose. ‘In that time I do not think I have seen such a flagrant or depressing example of moral turpitude.

  ‘You have lied,’ she thundered. ‘You have lied to your husband and you have lied to the court. You have deliberately sought to bury the truth. Your actions are morally indefensible and they bring shame and disgrace upon you and upon the good people of Temple Regis.’

  This is going a bit far, thought Miss Dimont, her pencil scrubbing furiously at the page before her.

  But the Honourable lady had not finished. ‘It would be fair to say we have a duty, all we women, to set an example in our dealings with the opposite sex in order to maintain our right to the privileges we have earned in recent times.’ (Does she mean the vote? thought Miss Dimont. That was years ago!)

  The magistrate, robbed of her opportunity to jail Mrs Symington, was not going to let her go without a taste of fire and brimstone. But it was water off a duck’s back, for the hotter the fusillade from the Bench, the cooler became the accused’s demeanour.

  Miss Dimont had seen nothing like this before. Mrs Marchbank was the town’s idol – the very synthesis of aristocratic allure, modest elegance, moral compass and general good feeling that all towns with a modicum of pride wish for. It was extraordinary that such a trifling offence could bring out this torrent of anger and rectitude, and curiously it suddenly reminded Miss Dimont of Prudence Aubrey’s outburst the previous day – outspoken, irrational. But just then Mr Thurlestone jumped up, adjourned the court, Mrs Symington strode out with her pathetic husband trailing behind, and everybody headed for lunch.

  *

  There was such pleasure, such freedom, in working on the Riviera Express, thought Miss Dimont as she made her way back to the office. Rudyard Rhys was a bit of a nightmare, but wasn’t that true of all editors, everywhere? Didn’t they always make jokes about ‘the editor’s indecision is final’? It was certainly true in old Rudyard’s case.

  Those years when they knew each other during the War – hadn’t he always been like that? A good brain, but irresolute? She could never imagine that one day their roles would be reversed and she would be working for him. It had taken some getting used to.

  But truth to tell, Mr Rhys gave Miss Dimont a free hand in the way she wrote up her stories, and though he liked to see the Betty Featherstone byline decorate his front page, the newspaper’s reputation relied heavily upon the output and integrity its senior reporter brought to the job. And when it came to an account of this morning’s standoff in the Magistrates’ Court, the editor was in Miss Dimont’s hands.

  All too conscious of this, she mulled over the possibilities as she entered the Express’s front hall. She edged her way through the usual gaggle of complainants, advertisers, junior councillors hoping for a mention and future brides waving their green forms, and walked up the uncarpeted stairs to the office. It was lunchtime, and though she thought she caught a glimpse of Athene wisping out of the door she could not be sure and, in any event, though she would have enjoyed a cup of Athene’s tea and some soothing words about her aura, she wanted to get the story written while it was fresh in her mind.

  She plumped down her raffia bag, took out her notebook and an apple, pushed back the sea of paper around her, and threaded the traditional sandwich of copy and carbon paper into her Quiet-Riter. She flipped back through her notebook without seeking to interpret the immaculate shorthand before her, looking for the key for introducing her story to the readers.

  The ‘intro’ was, after all, what drew them in. Should she start by describing Mrs Marchbank’s rant at the bovine Symington? Or entice them in by describing how a woman who plainly looked sixty-three (Terry’s accompanying photograph was not kind) could have convinced her husband she was of childbearing age?

  Or lead off on the fact that a magistrate of twenty-five years’ standing – Chairman of the Bench, no less – had issued a term of imprisonment she was not entitled to hand down? That, yet again, she had overstepped the mark?

  To Miss Dimont, who did not like Mrs Marchbank, this would have been the favoured first paragraph. But she was shrewd enough to realise that a tale of a lumpy sexagenarian using her waning charms to bamboozle a sweet old boy into believing he was about to procreate a longed-for son and heir was what would capture popular attention best.

  There was always the Comment page, where a few sharp words rapping Mrs Marchbank’s elegant knuckles for her vindictive incompetence might do the deed. Sad to say, few people actually read the Comment section because in Temple Regis people were all too ready with a Comment of their own – they needed nobody to tell them what to think. But at least Miss Dimont’s considered opinion would become a matter of record – something, perhaps, for historians to linger over a century hence.

  Miss Dimont had rattled off four hundred words of crisply paragraphed prose, thankful for the emptiness of the office, when Betty breezed in and plumped herself down noisily.

  ‘How goes the Hennessy investigation?’ she asked disingenuously, once the matter of who made the tea was tidied away.

  ‘What investigation?’ responded Miss Dimont, genuinely surprised. ‘There’s
nothing more now till the inquest on Friday. I saw Mrs Hennessy last night and I might get a par out of it—’ ‘par’ always being easier on the overworked tongue than the more sensible ‘paragraph’ ‘—but she’s behaving oddly. For an actress, she doesn’t seem to want to talk.’

  ‘I wonder why,’ said Betty, encouragingly.

  Miss Dimont was not fooled. ‘Been looking at my notes, Betty?’ she asked sweetly.

  The woman across the desk had the grace to blush. ‘Reporter’s nosiness,’ she said lamely. Her attempt at spying on Judy was not going well but she pressed on: ‘Looks like you’ve had some thoughts about this Hennessy business,’ she said. ‘I wonder what it’s all about.’

  Miss Dimont pushed her spectacles up her nose, finished her last par on the Symington case with a crash and turned her attention to Betty.

  ‘Well, Betty,’ she said. ‘It does seem extraordinary that Miss Aubrey, the grieving widow, should take three days to arrive in Temple Regis. It does seem extraordinary that when I asked her when she’d last seen her husband she flew into a mad rage.

  ‘It does seem extraordinary that Mr Cattermole had arranged to meet Gerald Hennessy though he quite clearly hates him. It seems inexplicable that, just in the run-up to starting a new film such a prominent actor should travel all the way down here to spend a couple of nights in the Grand Hotel.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’ interjected Betty keenly, displaying all that feminine intuition so beloved of the editor and so extraordinarily absent in Miss Dim.

  ‘Hadn’t thought of that. But d’you know, then there’s the whole business about Shrimsley which we seem to have forgotten about. Did he leave a suicide note?’

  Betty’s eyes, not her most attractive feature, popped wide open. ‘Suicide note?’ she parroted. Mr Rhys would surely want to hear about this!

  ‘There was something in his hand when he died. By the time I saw the body it was covered up with a blanket but Terry got a shot of it – but nobody seems to have said anything more about that. Mudford Cliffs was such a strange place for him to be. What was he doing there?

  ‘It’s odd, the whole thing is odd,’ said Miss Dimont, and disappeared into a brown study as she tried once again to juggle the known facts on these two deaths and make sense of them.

  Betty got up, ostensibly to refill their teacups, but as she glimpsed how deep Miss Dimont had plunged into her own thoughts she slipped away down the corridor, past the subs’ table, where Peter Pomeroy was completing his heron-like stabs at his luncheon sandwich, and nipped into the editor’s office.

  Before she could vouchsafe her precious news – Prudence Aubrey, Ray Cattermole, Mr Shrimsley’s suicide – Rudyard Rhys stopped her with a stare. ‘You know Raymond Cattermole, don’t you?’

  Indeed she did. When first she arrived in Temple Regis the old ham had walked her out a few times, dazzled her with tales from the West End stage, and sat late with her in the Green Room drinking brandy and heavily embroidering his scant knowledge of some of the day’s most famous stars. Whether it went any further nobody ever said, but it all came to an abrupt halt one day when Betty was asked to pop down to the Pavilion on some story or other and refused point-blank to go. ‘Never! Never!’ she said in a shocked voice, so shocked nobody pressed her. Cattermole was known to be a bit of an old goat.

  Now the editor was bringing painful memories back. ‘Cattermole?’ said Betty. ‘Barely at all. In fact I’d go so far as to say—’

  ‘Terry tells me he’s gone missing. I want you to go down to the theatre and see what you can find out.’

  Betty looked dismayed. Asking people awkward questions wasn’t her forte, and anyway she didn’t want the theatre staff looking at her and giggling and recalling the day when Cattermole set up the spotlights, put her on a box in the centre of the stage and made her read from a script, telling her what a star she could be – with a little guidance, of course . . .

  The reporter quickly reordered her thoughts. She could usually wriggle out of things with Rudyard when she wanted, and now she wanted it very much.

  ‘Mr Cattermole,’ she said slowly but with authority, ‘hated Gerald Hennessy.’

  ‘Yes?’ said the editor, unmoved.

  ‘Don’t you see? Gerald Hennessy was going to meet him when he got here. There was a postcard in his pocket from Mr Cattermole confirming their meeting.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’ asked the editor, though he could not see where this was leading.

  ‘Judy told me.’

  ‘How does she know?’

  ‘She didn’t say. But she’s got some theory about Mr Hennessy’s death – and Mr Shrimsley’s, too, come to that.’

  Though the editor had asked Betty to spy on her coworker, the intelligence she brought back was unwelcome. He was not such an incompetent journalist that he wanted to ignore news when it bubbled to the surface, but he preferred a quiet life. The Riviera Express was his ticket to retirement and he wanted the ride to be as comfortable and trouble-free as it could be. Why, oh why, was Miss Dim turning two perfectly explicable deaths into a riddle? And what would be the outcome of her unwelcome enquiries?

  ‘Nothing we can do before the inquest,’ he said with lordly decision. ‘We must not pre-empt the workings of the courts and their officers.’

  Betty didn’t mind either way.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘old Cattermole going missing – that’s a story. Get along down to the Pavilion and see what you can rustle up.’

  Betty did not like it. She crossed her legs and smiled winningly – that worked sometimes – then referred in some detail to a drive they had taken in Mr Rhys’ car one day to no apparent purpose. That usually did the trick, especially if she suggested they go again to look at the Start Point lighthouse.

  But the editor’s decision was final. To the theatre Betty must go.

  As she gathered up her handbag and notebook, Rhys brushed past her, stuck his head of his office door and bellowed, uncharitably,

  ‘Miss Dim!’

  TEN

  Despite his undeniable charm Perce, the telegram boy, was an equivocal figure in the life of Temple Regis. When weddings and christenings were in the offing he was welcomed as if a family member, but at other times the scrape of his bicycle bell accompanied by a heavy knock could bring terror to townsfolk. The War was not so far distant that the sight of a small buff envelope could not still trigger feelings of horror, or sometimes the desire to rip the ominous article to shreds, sight unseen.

  Like his fabled predecessor the benign god Hermes, Perce often knew what his messages contained though he always pretended not. Like Hermes he had curly hair, a noble profile and was clever; but unlike Hermes he could do nothing to change the fortunes of those whose doorsteps his duties attended.

  He liked to hang around when he knew the recipient had won the football pools – there was always a drink or a tip in it – similarly a greetings telegram, sometimes lavishly wrapped up in a golden envelope, might be worth chancing a delayed exit while fiddling with his bicycle clips or his trusty steed’s troublesome dynamo.

  Other times, he skedaddled. Injury, death, divorce – you had to have a rhinoceros hide to withstand your customers’ reaction if you hung around.

  ‘One for you, Miss Featherstone,’ Perce sang, as he waylaid his blonde-haired quarry departing the Riviera Express offices. He had delivered a number of billets-doux to Betty and had been rewarded, thanks to their content, with the occasional ecstatic kiss on the cheek. Not always, though.

  This one was probably a skedaddler.

  ‘Me?’ said Betty, blushing. ‘Oh, I . . .’ and she turned as if to make off down the street. Perce politely stepped to one side, but thrust out his arm so she could not pass without appearing rude. Betty queasily took the telegram, dug in her pocket to give him a threepenny bit, then tore the flimsy envelope open.

  Though still only nineteen, Perce was sufficient a student of human nature to have predicted it was curtains again for Betty. Last time it was F
rank. This time, Derek. He wasn’t quite sure whether to offer the threepence back again. His quarry went white and rushed back into the building whence she had stepped so daintily just a moment ago.

  Upstairs, Rudyard Rhys had just concluded his tête-à-tête with Miss Dimont and both were looking slightly flushed around the gills, but whatever had passed between them was finished by the time Betty flew back into the office.

  She waved her telegram at Mr Rhys and, white-faced, told a downright lie. ‘D-death in the family,’ she stuttered, and in that instant believed it. ‘I have two days’ overtime owing, Mr Rhys, and I will have to take them. Now.’

  Despite his granite-like exterior, the editor caved in immediately. ‘Off you go,’ he said and turned to Miss Dim. ‘Pavilion Theatre for you,’ he ordered.

  ‘Yes?’ asked his chief reporter, who did not know of Cattermole’s disappearance.

  Soon, however, she did and, having overcome her disbelief, for it was only yesterday (or was it the day before?) she had been talking to the old poodlefaker, she strode off towards the pier.

  It was perhaps an exaggeration to say Cattermole had disappeared. What was more strictly accurate was that he had not been seen since his uncomfortable encounter with Miss Dimont two days earlier. His lady friend Mrs Phipps, a Gaiety Girl type who these days expected little of her ageing Lochinvar, was nonetheless upset when he failed to show up for dinner that night and called the police.

  This may have been from feelings of revenge rather than anxiety, for Mrs Phipps, who’d spent her career in the belief she would one day become a Lady Poulett, a Lady Drogheda, or a Lady Orkney, as Gaiety Girls were apt to do, but had instead ended up in mouldy old Temple Regis in a flat off the seafront where seagulls bred their young on the roof and her most frequent caller dyed his eyebrows and wore a tragic toupee.

  Mrs Phipps did not like being abandoned.

  ‘A worthless sort of fellow,’ she spluttered between gasps of her Player’s Navy Cut. ‘Have a cup of tea, dear.’