TP FIELDEN is a leading author, broadcaster and journalist. This is the third novel in the Miss Dimont Mystery series.

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © TP Fielden 2018

TP Fielden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008193799

Version: 2018-09-13

PRAISE FOR TP FIELDEN

‘Peak comfort read has been achieved’

Red

‘One of the best in the genre’

The Sun

‘This is a fabulously satisfying addition to the canon of vintage crime. No wonder the author has already been signed up to produce more adventures starring the indefatigable Miss Dimont’

Daily Express

‘Unashamedly cosy, with gentle humour and a pleasingly eccentric amateur sleuth, this solid old-fashioned whodunit is the first in what promises to be an entertaining series’

The Guardian

‘Highly amusing’

Evening Standard

‘TP Fielden is a fabulous new voice and his dignified, clever heroine is a compelling new character. This delicious adventure is the first of a series and I can’t wait for the next one’ Wendy Holden, Daily Mail

‘A golden age mystery’

Sunday Express

‘Tremendous fun’

The Independent

For

Bo Wilson

Of every creature’s best

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

Extract

About the Publisher

ONE

The trouble with Betty was she could never say no.

‘Oh, Betty,’ sighed Miss Dimont, looking over her Remington Quiet-Riter and pushing the spectacles back up her nose. ‘Who was it this time?’

‘Dudley Fensome.’ Betty was sobbing into a creased handkerchief and was clearly not going to do much reporting this morning.

‘But you know his reputation,’ said Miss Dimont, who’d met the brute at the Constitutional Club. ‘And a Freemason as well – what were you thinking of?’

‘He said he wanted it that way and I did it to please him.’

‘Surely not!’

‘He made me.’

‘It’s a woman’s right to decide for herself!’

‘You don’t know what it’s like when they ask.’

You’re right, thought Miss Dimont, I don’t. The chief reporter pushed her notebook aside and got up to make the tea.

‘I don’t know, Betty,’ she said, ‘there was Derek. Then Claud Hannaford in that revolting pink Rolls-Royce – now Dudley Fensome. All in the last few weeks. None of them seems to show you any respect.’

‘I know,’ wailed Betty, ‘sometimes I’m just like putty in their hands…’ Not just sometimes, thought Miss D. But it was true – the burning desire of a bachelor Freemason had got the better of Betty. It might have been better if she’d got a professional to take care of the problem straight away, but Betty had to go and do it herself.

She looked wretched.

‘Platinum’s not so bad,’ said Miss Dimont finally, looking down at the disaster from above, teapot in hand. ‘There are a couple of green patches over your ears, granted, but I’ve got that nice crochet hat the Mothers’ Union gave me last winter – you can have that.’

Betty Featherstone wailed even louder.

Nobody else in the newsroom of the Riviera Express took much notice. It was press day, the usual hubbub of a busy newsroom augmented by the occasional bellow of anguish from the editor’s office. Rudyard Rhys may once have been a naval officer, but these days he was not entirely the captain of his own ship.

‘No, no, no!’ his voice echoed out of the door, sounding as agitated as if he were trying to avoid an iceberg. ‘Not Sam Brough again, I simply won’t have it!’

‘The first mayor of Temple Regis to go to Buckingham Palace,’ argued Peter Pomeroy, his deputy, perfectly reasonably, ‘to be made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. That’s a feather in the town’s cap. The readers will expect a good show on that.’

‘You mean His Worship will. Page Seven,’ said Mr Rhys dismissively, who hated Brough and his snobbish wife. He may dither about what to put on his front page, but when it came to pushy self-aggrandising town officials the editor’s decision was final.

‘There’s always Bobby Bunton,’ said Miss Dimont, who’d put her head round the door to see what the fuss was about. ‘By the way, Betty’s going to take the rest of the day off, d’you mind?’

‘Rr… rrrr,’ growled the editor, shuffling the page proofs in front of him.

‘Bunton,’ said Miss Dimont, who knew how to get a decision out of her procrastinating leader. ‘He’s in murderous mood.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Peter, whose responsibility it was to make sure the paper went to bed on time, and by now didn’t care much what was on Page One as long as the story fitted the gaping hole in the page.

‘Remind me,’ sighed Mr Rhys, swivelling in his chair and eyeing the seagulls circling like vultures outside his window. One of these days he’d walk out on press day and never come back. That would show them.

‘It’s the latest round in his battle with Hugh Radipole. Bunton brought in a new funfair attraction and now Mr Radipole has banned him from the Marine Hotel. It’s all-out war!’

‘Rr… rrr,’ replied Rhys and did what he always did at times of indecision. It could take a good three or four minutes for him to clean out his filthy briar pipe and load it with tobacco – precious minutes, with the newsroom clock ticking towards deadline.

Peter Pomeroy nodded urgently to Miss Dimont. ‘Do it,’ he said. ‘Four hundred words.’

‘It’s written,’ said Miss Dimont cheerily. ‘And Betty?’

‘Yes,’ nodded Peter understandingly. He’d clocked the disaster on top of her head.

‘Just don’t sensationalise it,’ said Rhys anxiously. ‘We don’t want Fleet Street picking up the story and making a mockery of this town. Bunton may be a well-known figure, but he’s hardly representative of the virtues of Temple Regis – I don’t want outsiders thinking we’re Blackpool.’

Heaven forbid, thought Miss Dimont as she whisked back to her desk. Demure, discreet, desirable – these were the watchwords which attached to any story describing their adorable town. If it wanted to get into the Riviera Express.

In truth Temple Regis was all of those d-words. What’s more it was the prettiest town in Devon; people always said that. From the palm trees which welcomed you on the railway station platform to the winding narrow streets with their interesting shops to the soothing ice-creams, the donkey-rides on the broad and beautiful beach, and the never-ending sunshine – nothing could be nearer paradise.

In the late 1950s, with the nation back on its feet at last, it was the ideal place for people to come on holiday – but Rudyard Rhys wanted to make sure only the right people came.

Indeed, the two people his chief reporter had just mentioned somehow summed up what was both right and wrong about the place. Hugh Radipole had bought the Marine Hotel after the war, put a not inconsiderable amount of money into refurbishing it, and to its smooth Art Deco halls welcomed some of the most distinguished people in the land. Their presence added tone and culture to the town.

But then somehow someone had allowed Bobby Bunton in, and with him he’d dragged the knotted-handkerchief brigade. The wrong people.

If that wasn’t bad enough Bunton also brought with him Fluffles Janetti, that well-known courtesan whose shapely form was never far from a headline and whose pot-pourri of a love life kept the Sunday newspapers very busy indeed. She loved the bar in the Marine, though apparently it no longer loved her, despite her impressive consumption of its many liquid offerings. There’d been a bit of a dust-up, with bottles smashed and a quantity of blood spilt.

NEIGHBOURHOOD DISPUTE OVER FUN FAIR RIDE

by Judy Dimont, Chief Reporter

ran the headline.

Police were called after a dispute at the Marine Hotel ended in violence on Tuesday night.

The well-known entrepreneur Bobby Bunton, owner of the Buntorama Holiday Camp, has demanded an apology after he was requested to leave the building. He and a companion have threatened to sue the management of the Marine. Mr Bunton says he had been enjoying a quiet drink in the Primrose Bar when he was suddenly asked to leave the premises and not return. His companion’s garments were torn and disarranged.

‘I take this as a personal insult,’ said Mr Bunton. ‘I can think of no reason why I should be subjected to such vile treatment.’

A spokesman for the Marine Hotel declined to comment.

Buntorama, the fifth in Mr Bunton’s nationwide chain of holiday camps, opened last year on the site of the old Ruggleswick army camp. The camp is situated on land abutting the grounds of the Marine Hotel and there have been reports of disputes between the two companies running the businesses.

Since establishing Buntorama in 1948 Mr Bunton claims to have provided cheap holidays for over eight million people and has become a familiar figure on radio and television.

‘People are entitled to have fun,’ he told the Express, ‘whatever they earn. My guests mean a great deal to me and I don’t see why (continued on p 3)

Wary of infuriating her editor further by putting in the bit about Fluffles losing her clothes, Miss Dimont put the story back in her Quiet-Riter and xxxx’d out this rather delicious detail. She also refrained from mentioning that Bobby Bunton had deliberately placed his new helter-skelter ride right next to the boundary of the Marine Hotel, so that shrieks and cries from his punters would shatter the calm and sobriety of the guests on the posher side of the fence.

‘All done,’ she said, handing over the copy-paper to Peter Pomeroy with a smile, and in that moment her face lit up until she looked quite beautiful. Peter often remarked to his wife how Judy could seem so plain one minute and so dazzling the next, and Mrs P agreed. They sometimes wondered why someone so worldly and so accomplished had come to Temple Regis to be a reporter on the local rag.

It remained an unanswered mystery.

Over in the darkroom Terry Eagleton was busy sloshing developer fluid into a tray, happy to be back in Temple Regis after a boring stint in the Plymouth head office. Sooner or later the images painstakingly captured from the top of a schooner’s mast would appear, as if through the fog, and he would hang them up to dry. He was tough, efficient, handsome, and occupied that parallel universe where photographers exist – linked to humanity, but not quite part of it.

‘I suppose it’s all that time you spend peering down a lens,’ Judy Dimont once observed as they sat in the Minor in the drumming rain, waiting for the Regis lifeboat to come in. ‘Separates you from the real world.’

‘If you want the real world,’ grunted Terry, who did not squander precious time pondering the human condition, ‘just look at my pictures. Pictures of real people doing real things.’

‘Very fine they are too, Terry,’ said Judy, and let the matter drop. Oil and water, water and oil – they’d worked together as a successful team for five years, yet neither could see inside the other’s head. She admired his courage and tenacity and undeniable skill with a camera, but couldn’t understand why he never read a book. Terry felt protective about Judy but when the editor called her ‘Miss Dim’ he could see what the old boy was getting at. She had a brilliant mind but was not altogether trustworthy in polite company.

After all, hadn’t there been that extraordinary incident at the Regis Conservative Party ball? Apologies were offered all round afterwards, and everybody pretended they’d forgotten it ever happened, but you’d never catch a photographer behaving like that!

Just then the maverick in question popped her head round the darkroom door. ‘All done for the week,’ she said.

‘My Buckingham Palace pic?’ said Terry, washing the developer off his hands under the cold tap.

‘Seven.’

‘Ridiculous. Should be on One – the readers’ll expect a good show on that. First Mayor of Temple Regis to get a gong!’

‘Don’t worry. Sam Brough will be wearing that medal everywhere, even on his pyjamas, I shouldn’t wonder. Word will soon get about he’s met the Queen, no need for the photographic evidence.’

Terry turned and looked disparagingly at Miss Dimont. She just didn’t get it – didn’t even try. The lighting in the Palace courtyard that day had been very tricky – up and down like a yo-yo – the trouble he’d had with his aperture!

‘Coming to the Fort?’

There was only one place in Temple Regis on an early Thursday evening if you had any connection with local newspapers and that was the Fortescue Arms, just round the corner from the Express offices and handily placed if you needed to be called back. As with all newspapers, things had a habit of going wrong at the last moment and there was an unwritten rule you did not stray far, even though your working day was over.

‘Don’t know,’ said Terry. He was cross about the MBE and wanted to blame Judy.

‘They’ve got cribbage tonight.’

‘Ur.’

The pair made their way down the stairs and out through the grand-looking front hall. Upstairs the newsroom looked its usual mess – paper strewn over the floor, glue pots everywhere, overflowing ashtrays and discarded cups of tea, the cleaners as usual having failed to take away the overnight mousetraps. But down here it looked as if they were expecting a visit from the Queen Mother herself – all polished wood, copies of Express front pages lining the walls in oak frames, and an impressive oil portrait of the newspaper’s founder above the fireplace.

Keeping guard over this shrine to the fourth estate was Joyce, the new girl who looked nice but irritatingly could never remember a single person’s name.

‘G’night, Terry!’

Well, thought Miss Dimont crossly, could never remember a person’s name – except Terry’s. The darling boy lingered, delighted to exchange a bit of banter, but Judy strode on.

Though it was still early the saloon bar of the Fort was crowded, mostly with muscular types in need of a shave and a new wardrobe. They smelt clean, though, and the racket they made was joyful: clinking and shouting and gurgling and laughing.

These ruffians were the reminder that Temple Regis was not just a holiday resort, but a fishing port too. And tonight the sailors, fishermen and ferrymen, Customs men and life-boatmen, were here in force, bringing an energy to the place which no crowd of summertime holidaymakers could ever match.

Across the bar Miss Dimont spotted the Viking-like skipper of the Lass O’Doune, Cran Conybeer, and waved. His beard tilted upward in salute and as he raised his glass to her he looked even more magnificent in his shaggy, unkempt way. There had been a moment when… but somehow nothing had come of it and the two were no more now than smiling acquaintances.

As she plonked down her raffia bag on a wet table Terry meandered through the door and instantly started droning on about some new high-speed film he was going to try out – really, his idea of conversation! Severely in need of an overhaul! Miss Dimont left him boring a couple of subeditors about Tri-X and push-processing while she made her way to the bar to order him a brown ale.

‘What you doin’ ’ere?’ said a familiar figure from the crew of the Lass. It was Old Jacky, a man for whom a day was wasted if he were not at sea. He must have been all of seventy-five.

‘Every Thursday,’ shouted Miss Dimont, gesticulating at the barman. ‘Press night. What are you lot doing here? Not your usual haunt.’

‘The William and Mary,’ replied Old Jacky, though he pronounced it ‘Willummaree’.

‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Dimont.

‘Fifty yars agoo nex Sa’day.’

It remained Temple Regis’ greatest tragedy, the loss of the lifeboat and a dozen souls who’d braved gale-force winds to save the crew of a merchant ship, grounded on the rocks beyond the point and breaking up in mountainous seas. What made the event such a bitter memory, even today, was that by the time the lifeboat reached its goal, the merchantmen had already been lifted off and were safe. They lived, while their saviours died.

‘We’ll be putting a big piece in the paper next week,’ promised Miss Dimont earnestly, though she had no idea whether Mr Rhys was even aware of the anniversary. But it was the sort of thing you always said to the public when it looked like you’d missed the most obvious story in town. She backed away quickly in case Old Jacky wanted more details, the brown ale and her ginger beer slopping gently over her shoes as she went.

When she got back to the far corner there were a handful of familiar faces but no Terry.

‘Where’d he go?’ she shouted to one of the sub-editors above the din.

‘Shot out back to the office. Someone came and told him to get up there in a hurry.’

‘Why?’ yelled Judy. ‘Too late to change any of the pictures now, the presses are rolling.’

‘No, it’s a story, I think. Someone found dead over at Buntorama – you know, the place where…’

‘I know the place!’ rasped Miss Dimont. ‘Why did he go without me?’

‘Dunno,’ said the sub, edging towards the door, more interested in getting home for Hancock’s Half Hour on the radio. They worked in newspapers, these people, thought Miss D – but would they know a story if they tripped over one on the promenade?

‘Here,’ she said, brusquely, ‘drink these!’ and pushing her way back out of the door, she was just in time to see Terry behind the wheel of the Minor, gunning the motor while impatiently waiting for a couple of pedestrians to get out of his way.

‘Terry!’ she shouted, but the office car veered away, the photographer bent forward with a look of steely determination on his face.

Just then Peter Pomeroy hove into view. ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you over at Buntorama? For heaven’s sake, Judy, I do expect more from the chief reporter!’

It was unlike sweet Peter to say a harsh word, and it hurt.

‘What’s going on?’ said Miss Dimont, for once in a fluster.

‘Woman found dead, for heaven’s sake,’ said Peter urgently. ‘Shot. Surely you know? For heaven’s sake, why aren’t you with Terry?’

‘He went without me.’ It sounded so lame.

‘Well, get over there as fast as you can. There’s just time to re-plate the front page for the last edition. Five hundred words. In half an hour, not a moment later. Get going!’

TWO

Ruggleswick was the part of Temple Regis most people preferred to ignore. Just as townsfolk rarely discussed the snooty enclave of Bedlington-on-Sea, hiding behind the headland and pinching its nose in case a bad smell wafted its way, so too it was for Ruggleswick – people didn’t want to be reminded of Buntorama and the type of people it attracted.

The feeling was mutual. The camp’s guests had to clamber aboard a bus in order to get into a town which, on arrival, perplexed them with its prettiness. Instead they mostly idled their days away at Ruggleswick, being bullied by Redcoats and indulging in unsavoury practices.

At least that’s what most Temple Regents thought. There was almost no visible evidence of moral turpitude, however, when Miss Dimont finally arrived at the holiday camp aboard Herbert, her trusty moped. Dressed in an undistinguished livery of grey-blue paint and with a gaping pannier-bag contributing an ungainly lopsided look, Herbert nevertheless was a trustworthy aide and companion – one who could be guaranteed to get her to a story far more nippily than others, like Terry, burdened with an office car.

Except tonight.

‘You promised!’ hissed Judy when she finally caught up with the runaway lensman. ‘You absolutely promised!’

‘All finished now,’ said Terry, with a smarmy smile. ‘I’m off back to the office. Not much to see, I wouldn’t waste your time if I was you.’

This only compounded the fury she felt.

‘Never mind the dead body, Terry,’ she said tartly, ‘what about the spark-plug? You promised me you’d put a new one in Herbert this morning. I could’ve got the garage to do it but you said you’d…’

‘Ooops,’ said Terry, carefully winding the wiggly cable of his flashgun into his camera bag, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow, Judy.’

‘I couldn’t get the engine started! And while we’re on the subject of negligence, Terry,’ went on the reporter, standing in his way with hands on hips so he couldn’t leave, ‘why did you just shoot off like that? Couldn’t you wait just a moment for me? For heaven’s sake, it was me who went to get you a drink!’

‘It was an emergency.’

‘You knew I’d have to come up here to get the words to go with your picture.’

‘Picture’s worth a thousand words,’ said Terry. He often said this, and it got more infuriating each time. ‘Pictures sell newspapers, not words.’

Miss Dimont shook her head so hard some of her corkscrew curls came out of their pinnings. She was lovely when she was angry, thought Terry, and he levelled his Leica at her.

‘Put that down! Tell me why you shot off like that!’

‘Shouldn’t you be gettin’ the story?’

‘Tell me!’

‘If you want to know,’ said Terry, ‘it was that look on your face back in the Fort. I came in the door and started telling you about this new Tri-X film and you just rolled your eyes up to the ceiling in that way of yours and…’

‘Heavens, Terry, it’s like me talking about buying a new typewriter ribbon! Tools of the trade! It was boring!’

Terry gave her a look. ‘Let’s see if Herbert can get you back to the office in one piece,’ he replied, meaning the spark-plug. ‘Lucky for you it’s downhill most of the way.’

‘No, wait!’

‘Bye.’ He clunked the door of the Minor shut with a complacent thud and sped off back to civilisation, leaving Miss Dimont with no clue as to where to start.

They’d met at the entrance to the Ruggleswick Camp – Terry on his way out, Judy coming in – so now it was her turn to make her way towards what had been, in its army days, the guardhouse. Nowadays it was the camp’s reception, brightly lit with neon tubes and festooned with posters advertising Bobby Bunton’s other holiday resorts, but even now you wouldn’t be surprised to find a platoon of armed soldiers tumbling out of the doors to stop your escape.

‘Are the police still here?’ she asked a pimply youth reading a comic.

‘’Oo wants to know?’ said the fellow without raising his eyes. Clearly Bobby Bunton had yet to include the rudiments of etiquette in his staff training.

‘Miss Dimont, Riviera Express.’ She didn’t want to make it sound too important – people had a habit of saying, ‘No Press!’ at the slightest provocation – on the other hand, she wanted to jerk the youth out of his torpor. There were only twelve minutes left to find the body, discover what had happened, parry the stonewall response of the police, parlay a fact or two out of them in return for who knows what promises, find a phone, and file copy to the impatient Peter Pomeroy.

‘Inspector Topham’s expecting me,’ she said, without the slightest clue whether the old warhorse was on the case this evening, or out dancing with Princess Margaret.

The lad looked up. ‘Row Seven,’ he said, ‘only they call it Curzon Street now. Last ’ut on the left.’

Bearing no resemblance whatever to its Mayfair namesake, Curzon Street had dismally failed to shake off its resemblance to an army barracks. The best that could be said was its hutlike appearance softened in the growing dusk and the purple clouds which backlit it gave a glow, an allure, which would last until nightfall and dissolve with the morning light.

Down the end, where a Londoner might expect Park Lane to be, she could see the red tail-lights of the police car, and a pool of light spilling from a couple of brightly lit windows.

‘Not now, Miss Dimont, if you please.’ Inspector Topham must have turned down the Princess’s invitation to dance this evening. He was never very helpful in such circumstances but at least Judy knew where she stood with him.

‘Dead woman,’ she said authoritatively, maximising in two words the extent of her knowledge of the case. She hoped Topham thought she knew more.

‘Shot,’ she added after a brief pause – just that little extra bit of info, held back for maximum effect, to help do the trick.

‘Mm,’ said Topham in a stonewall sort of way.

‘Murder,’ asked Miss Dimont, her voice rising now, ‘suicide? Or was it just an accident?’ The sarcasm was lost on the policeman, whose way of sweeping unwelcome deaths under the carpet was all too familiar.

‘A shooting fatality,’ came the stolid response. ‘Woman of middle age, guest of the camp who had been here four days. That’s it.’

It was enough, the rest of the drama would be in the writing. All Miss Dimont had to do now was find a telephone.

Herbert sensed the urgency of the moment and did not attempt a repetition of his earlier, most disagreeable, behaviour. Instead he took Miss Dimont, curls flying, on a roundabout trip through Knightsbridge, Regent Street and The Mall before arriving at a large well-lit building which clearly had been the officers’ mess and now housed the camp’s senior staff.

‘. . . phone?’ she said breathlessly to a vague-looking gentleman who poked his nose out of the door. ‘Because… emergency!’

The man smiled non-committally and his eyes clouded in concentration. Finally the penny dropped, and he meandered down the hall to a cubbyhole under the stairs and within five minutes Miss Dimont had filed her story.

‘Thank you so much,’ she said to her host, whom she discovered sitting at a small cocktail bar in an adjoining lounge. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. Judy Dimont, Riviera Express.’

‘Oh,’ said the man, ‘you’ll be here for the murder.’

It happens like that sometimes in journalism. You spend all day knocking on doors and people won’t even be able to remember which day of the week it is, let alone their mother’s maiden name, then suddenly you bump into someone who knows everything.

This could be he.

‘Yes,’ Judy said encouragingly. It always pays to appear to know more than you do on such occasions and her conspiratorial nod, she thought, spoke volumes.

‘Our first stiff,’ the man said, laconically. ‘Of course, there’ve been a few at the other camps, but this is a first for Ruggleswick. Drink?’

‘Erm, that would be…’

‘I usually have a gin about this time of day,’ he said, though the bottom of his glass looked as though it had more recently contained an amber liquid. He was looking more than a little pink-cheeked but that could just have been the lighting.

‘Lovely,’ said Judy, who generally didn’t trust Herbert to behave after a drink or two and usually refrained in case he took a wrong turning on the way home. ‘She’d been here for less than a week.’

This reworking of Topham’s bleak statement made it sound like she knew what she was talking about.

‘Came on Sunday,’ agreed the man, sloshing a prodigious amount into each glass.

‘And should have been going home at the weekend.’ It made it sound as though she had the whole story already. She hadn’t a clue but it pushed the narrative to the next page.

‘Never saw her. She arrived, parked her bags and disappeared. Of the four nights she was here, her bed was slept in only the once.’

Ah, thought Miss Dimont, the moral turpitude which everyone enjoys gossiping about back in town. Clearly the lady had a friend who…

‘. . . must have had a friend who…’ said the man, nodding in agreement. ‘Only problem is there’s no single blokes booked into the camp. I checked because the copper asked me to.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Miss Dimont, suddenly collecting her thoughts, ‘I don’t know who you are.’

‘Baggs. Under-manager. I served with Bobby Bunton in the Catering Corps. Actually not strictly true – he managed to escape with a gammy knee after six weeks while I was in for the duration, worse luck. But we remained mates and he gave me this job.’ His hand shook slightly as he took another sip of gin; evidently war service in catering was not the breeze most assume it to be.

‘How nice. I haven’t met him but he sounds a wonderful man.’

‘Mm,’ said Mr Baggs.

‘So who was this lady in… Curzon Street?’ It never hurt to ask the extra question.

‘Oh,’ said Baggs, brightening, ‘are you interviewing me?’

‘Only if you want me to,’ replied Miss Dimont. She could tell he was dying to talk.

‘A strange one, that. Went by the name of Patsy Rouchos – South American by the sound of it. Interesting really. She had a cheap suitcase and cheap clothes but the rings she wore and her hair, her make-up, sort of said to me this wasn’t her usual kind of place. Come down in the world, perhaps. Or found herself a boyfriend from a different walk of life and was chasing after him.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘Very strong-looking, almost like a bloke, but handsome. Nice manners but distant. Nothing in the way she spoke to tell where she came from, but a cut above our usual campers, I’d say.’

‘So what actually happened?’ This was the crucial question which had been on the tip of her tongue from the start, but long ago she had learned to choose her moment. Get them talking is the first rule in journalism, and don’t ask awkward questions till you’ve managed to prise the door open a little.

‘One shot, through the heart. Or the chest – never quite sure if the ladies have a heart on the same side as us mere males. Or at all, ha ha!’

Miss Dimont looked into her glass and let this pass.

‘Elsie, the cleaner, found her late this afternoon, but I got a good look before the police arrived. She was sitting on the bed, completely dressed, full make-up, very well turned out. Almost as if she’d prepared herself for it.’

‘No gun?’

‘No gun.’

‘Signs of forced entry?’

‘Door was open.’

‘Could have been a burglary?’

Mr Baggs’ jovial tone suddenly deserted him. ‘Here?’ he said. ‘Here? Look Mrs, er,…’

‘Miss Dimont.’

‘People who come here have saved up all year. They haven’t got pots of money. Not likely, miss, to have expensive possessions worth taking a life for.’

The reporter felt embarrassed – Baggs was right. Suddenly she saw Buntorama for what it was, a sunny haven for working people who prized their few moments in this beauteous corner of Devon just as much as the posh collar-and-tie lot next door at the Marine.

‘My apologies, Mr Baggs, I’m just trying to find out why this should have happened. Who this Patsy Rouchos was. It’s unusual, don’t you agree?’

Baggs was quite a clever man, she could see, even if he had the weakness. And she wasn’t quite sure about his eyes. He poured himself another slug of gin but seemed too concerned with getting the measure correct to remember to refill Judy’s glass.

‘I was on the desk when she came through the gate that first day,’ he said. ‘Arrived on foot – that struck me as odd, usually the campers come by bus from the station. Carried her suitcase as if she was used to somebody doing it for her. Smiled politely when most of the campers are worn out from the journey and looking for a bit of a squabble. Her clothes were ordinary, but she stood out.’

‘That’s why you remember her.’

‘Look, we get hundreds of new faces every week, no reason to remember an individual over all the others. But she just struck me as a bit of a fish out of water.’

‘Do people have to sign a register?’

‘The Inspector asked me that. She gave her address as 11a Milcomb Street, London.’

‘And did she take part in camp life?’

‘What, you mean the sing-songs and the gym classes? No. I didn’t see her at the talent show, but she did go to church the day she arrived – I saw her there when I was rounding up the collection.’

‘Church?’ said Miss Dimont, startled. ‘I didn’t know you had one of those!’

‘The last hut in what we call Knightsbridge. Looks like all the others on the outside, but it’s been done up all proper inside. A nice little earner.’

‘Sorry?’

Mr Baggs tapped the side of his nose.

‘The collection? You don’t mean you…!’

‘Helps keep the cost of the holiday down. Better than sending it all to some missionary in Africa to squander on beads and bells.’

Miss Dimont did not care for this and changed the subject. ‘Was there anything else that struck you before the police got there? It just seems so odd she was sitting there, almost waiting for her killer to call.’

‘Police said there was nothing in her handbag to give her a name. Purse and hankies, make-up, that sort of thing, but no driving licence or identity card. They did find a small photo album though. I expect that’ll help them find her relatives.’

‘If it had her relatives in it.’

‘Ah yes.’

‘Did you look inside it?’

‘No.’

That appeared to have exhausted the extent of Mr Baggs’ knowledge and there seemed little left to say. He eyed Judy’s unfinished glass with interest as she gathered up her notebook and prepared her departure.

‘Mr Bunton – where can I find him?’

‘He’ll be with Fluffles, I expect.’

Judy turned at the door. Writing that Page One lead on Fluffles being thrown out of the Marine Hotel seemed a lifetime ago. Was it really only an hour?

‘I suppose you know about that incident in the Marine?’

Mr Baggs had got up, wandered over, and absently helped himself to her glass. The action appeared to ease a momentary stress in his features.

‘Par for the course,’ he said, serene again. ‘Fluffles likes her presence to be felt.’

‘What actually happened?’ It’s amazing how you can write a newspaper story and appear to know so much when actually all you’ve done is thrown some random facts together at top speed and crashed them out on your Remington.

‘Well, you know Bobby and that stuffed-shirt Radipole are at loggerheads.’

‘Evidently.’

‘Yers, well, when we opened up the camp here last year, Bobby went out of his way to be nice to him – sent a bottle of champagne, wrote and offered him a free holiday, even. That man is such a snob he didn’t even bother to answer.

‘Now Bobby don’t give up easily. So he started going into the Primrose Bar when he come down here, just to make friends like. That seemed to work OK – they didn’t mind taking his money, and Bobby can splash it around when he wants.’

‘Mr Radipole, I seem to remember, tried very hard to stop Buntorama opening.’

‘Nothing he could do. He may run a stuck-up hotel with fancy customers and write-ups in all the glossy magazines, but Bobby has given more pleasure to more people than that stuffed-shirt could ever dream of. Eight million workers – eight million – spend all year waiting for their annual holiday, Miss Dimmum, and we give ’em the best they could wish for. Not just some lousy cocktail in a glass – we give ’em the works!’

‘You were talking about Fluffles.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Baggs, nodding happily. ‘She’s a one!’

‘I thought Mr Bunton was married.’

‘Several times, ha ha! But this is one’s different – she’s gorgeous, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t think I’ve…’

‘You should, you should! Like a film-star, only she’s never been in films. I guess she’s just famous for being famous.’

‘Or because of the famous people she’s been photographed with.’

‘Well, think how much nicer they look in the paper when they’ve got Fluffles by their side – I mean, that figure! Those curves! And every man loves a platinum blonde!’

I can certainly think of one, thought Miss D. And look what he did to poor Betty…

‘Only sometimes she gets a little excitable after a drinkie or two. And she always wears those high high heels which she falls off.’

‘I was told her clothes were torn.’

‘Well,’ said Baggs, enjoying himself now, ‘she likes her dresses so tight she’s been known to be sewn into ’em – oh, she’s the one! – and you can guess what happened. A drink too many, a little arse-over-tip, her dress splits, she bashes her nose – hey presto!’

‘So nobody manhandled her? Roughed her up? Kicked her out of the hotel?’

‘Not likely, not her. Self-inflicted wounds, I’d say.’

Thank heavens that woman died in Curzon Street, she thought selfishly, and the Fluffles story got pulled as a result. The editor does hate a complaint.

THREE

‘We’re supposed to be in this together, Terry. Thanks so much!’

It was next morning and the dust kicked up by the sparkplug incident had yet to settle – or was it the heaven-raised eyes that had done the damage? Either way, the pair greeted each other with the bare minimum of civility.

Normally Friday was a day for writing up expenses, sending off letters to loved ones, planning holidays or phoning distant mothers, for the editor rarely put in an appearance until after lunch. But this was no ordinary Friday – the murder at Buntorama had changed everything.

‘Better get over there,’ said Judy. Terry looked unconvinced, he had plans to strip down his Leica and do something unfathomable with it.

‘Bobby Bunton,’ insisted Judy. ‘The man Baggs told me he was coming down to visit the camp today, we should try for an interview. I want to get some words out of him before Fleet Street comes nosing around. Get to the bottom of him and Miss Janetti being chucked out of the Marine at the same time.’

‘Yeah, but I’ve just got the new A-36 Infra-red filter.’

‘Many congratulations, Terry.’

‘That’ll take me all morning to get sorted.’

‘Not now it won’t.’

‘You don’t know what it can do. Why, I guarantee…’

‘For heaven’s sake, Terry, toys for boys!’

Terry looked at her steadily. This was, after all, the reporter who nearly missed the scoop last night. The arch of his shoulder against the library counter inferred the superiority he felt this morning, but Miss Dimont knew her man.

She tossed out the bait.

‘You always wanted to meet Fluffles, you told me so.’

This altered things. ‘I could try out the Tri X!’

‘Oh, do shut up about the Tri X,’ said Judy. ‘Let’s just get over there.’

The Marine Hotel was all its rival, the Grand, was not. The Grand looked like a cake whipped up by an excitable Italian pastry-chef, smothered in icing and promising a sweet interior. Its colonnaded halls and fussy décor appealed to the traditionalist, and it was true that in its time it had attracted more than its share of the rich and famous.

After all, when the celebrated actor Gerald Hennessy decided to grace Temple Regis with his glorious presence, hadn’t he chosen the Grand as his watering-hole of choice? It was a shame he had to get murdered before he could set foot in the place, but as a result of his unexpected demise the Grand’s public profile took a significant upswing when his wife, Prudence Aubrey, came to stay instead, trailing behind her widow’s weeds the assembled multitude of Fleet Street’s finest.

And then, to top it all, it had emerged that Marion Lake – the Marion Lake! – turned out to be Hennessy’s secret love-child. And she was staying at the Grand as well! No wonder the iced cake looked down on its smoother rival, the Marine.

The Marine didn’t care. An art deco edifice of immensely elegant proportions, it looked like an ocean liner. Its rectilinear windows were painted a seafoam green, as snooty a colour as you will see anywhere, its vast entrance hall was dotted with sculpture which may or may not have been by Henry Moore. Its staff wore boxy clothes and angular haircuts which made them look as though they’d stepped out of a portrait by Tamara de Lempicka, and if you asked for a cocktail it came in a triangular glass.

Its clientele were urbane sophisticates and, not to put too fine a point on it, rich. They didn’t mind paying 5/6d for a pot of tea when you could get the same in Lovely Mary’s for 1/3d, and as for the price of a bottle of Moët & Chandon!

Despite the discarded front-page splash detailing the ejection of Bobby Bunton and his companion from the Primrose Bar, Judy guessed the King of Holiday Camps would be back for a drink sooner or later.

‘The man has never allowed anybody to dictate anything to him, any time, ever,’ she said to Terry. They were trundling in the Minor out past Ruggles Point, the stately piece of headland from which the Marine stared imperiously back at the lesser folk of Temple Regis.

‘’E’s very short,’ said Terry. ‘A titch.’

‘What difference does that make?’ asked Judy, more interested in the flight of a cormorant, like a low-flying aircraft on a bombing-raid, dodging the wave-tops and searching for fish. The water was a dazzling shade of turquoise this morning, the sun crisping the edges of the wavelets and giving it sparkling life.

Terry, though far from immune to such beauty, was thinking ahead. ‘She’s much taller,’ he said. ‘You can tell.’ Judy turned and glanced at his rugged profile hunched over the steering wheel: in his mind he was composing his picture.

‘He stands, she sits,’ they said simultaneously – the problem was not exactly a new one.

Finally, with this joint decision, harmony was restored. It was hateful when the competing priorities of reporter and photographer drove them apart, for they had long been a remarkable team. Terry turned and smiled at her, his gaze perhaps lingering just a shade too long as the sunlight caught her profile.

‘Watch out!’

But Terry neatly swerved round the donkey being led down to the beach, and they safely turned the corner into the Marine’s front drive.

As they entered the vast entrance lobby a wondrous sound came to them from somewhere deep in the heart of the building. A low, sweeping voice somersaulted over itself and performed some agile gymnastics before rising in a slow portamento up towards a thrillingly high note. Then silence.

‘Moomie,’ said Terry, enthusiastically.

‘Mm?’

‘That’s the new singer you can hear – they’ve got her in for the season. Press call next Monday.’

‘That’ll be Betty with the notebook then,’ snipped Miss Dimont. She didn’t do showbiz.

‘She’s amazing – all the way from Chicago. Wonder how they got her? Normally she does West End only.’

‘Everyone loves a summer season,’ said Judy absently but her thoughts were on the story ahead as she strode purposefully towards the Primrose Bar. It was barely midday but there were already sounds of activity within.

Sure enough in a corner, shrouded by wafting palmettos, sat a short fat man with a pencil-thin moustache and shiny shoes. Next to him, leaning forward, sat one of the most notorious figures of the day, the platinum-haired Fluffles Janetti. Fluffles! Her rise to fame had been unstoppable, partly on account of her impossibly-proportioned figure, but also because of the number of men it had been draped around, from politicians to financiers to actors and now, the King of Holiday Camps, Bobby Bunton.

‘Mr Bunton. I hope you don’t mind,’ started Miss Dimont. ‘Judy Dimont, Riviera Express.’

‘Get yourself a drink,’ replied Bunton without glancing in her direction. He had eyes only for Fluffles.

‘Thank you,’ said Judy, used to such snubs. It was extraordinary how famous people treated the Press like serfs when their very fame depended on nice things being written about them.

‘Miss Janetti?’ pressed on Judy. The famous blonde locks bobbed and turned but did not wave, frozen in time as they were by a lavish dowsing of hairspray. Its noxious aroma just about won the battle with her perfume, thick and syrupy and speaking profoundly (so the manufacturers boasted) of yearning.

‘Yes.’ The voice, far from fluffy, was pure gravel. The eyes were hard and watchful. A tricky piece of work, thought Miss Dimont instantly; how can so many famous men have made fools of themselves over her?

Terry was already focusing on the answer to that question. With the unspoken compact which exists between professional photographers and famous women – of a certain sort – Miss Janetti straightened up and very slowly arched her back. For a moment her famous proportions seemed to acquire almost impossible dimensions.

‘That’s enough!’ snapped Bunton, who hated the spotlight being turned away, even if only for a minute. ‘’Ere you are,’ he said to Terry, straightening his tie-knot and brushing cigar-ash from his lapel. ‘Local rag, is it?’

Several thoughts flew simultaneously into Miss Dimont’s mind. First, why was it that reporters could be ignored, blackballed, shoved aside and generally made to feel like pariahs, while photographers were given a golden key into every rich man’s drawing-room? Second, why was it that everyone referred so dismissively to the ‘local rag’? Their Fleet Street equivalents were never known as ‘national rags’ yet they served the same purpose.

And third, Bobby Bunton had built-up heels on his shoes.

‘Nice,’ Terry was saying in the ingratiating tone reserved for the victims of his lens, ‘now one of the two of you together. Fluffles, can you just go round behind Mr Bunton, lean over the chair, like…’

Fluffles obliged, her considerable expanse threatening to envelop the King’s small head. It was an absurd pose, but one guaranteed to find space in the paper. Terry knew what he was doing all right.

Did Miss Dimont? She wasn’t quite sure where to start. The small man in front of her – even at first glance – was arrogant, manipulative, a liar, a cheat, an adulterer, and a rapacious exploiter of the small incomes and high hopes of millions of working-class families.

‘How lovely to meet you,’ she said sweetly, and sat down.

‘Everyone is so thrilled you chose Temple Regis for your holiday camp,’ she lied.

‘It has done wonders for the town.’ Another stinker.

‘All that silly opposition last year.’ We nearly saw you off, but for the whopping great bribes you paid a couple of councillors.

‘And look at the success of it all!’ One dead body, unexplained.

‘I want to write something nice about Buntorama,’ not necessarily, ‘so maybe we can clear up this shooting business with your help, Mr Bunton.’

For some reason the King chose not to look Miss Dimont in the eye. Instead he fixed his gaze on Fluffles.

‘People get excitable when they go on holiday,’ he sighed, as if having someone shot on the premises was a weekly event. ‘They’ve been saving up all year, it’s going to be the best fortnight they’ve ever had, then they come down here and don’t know what to do with themselves. That’s why I provide so many distractions – the funfair rides, the keep-fit classes, the dance competitions. These people work hard all year, they never have a moment to themselves.’

He took a swig from a heavy goblet. ‘Suddenly their time’s their own and after a few days they go a bit nuts. Some take to drink, some go off with other men’s wives, and a hell of a lot of them just sit down and have an out-and-out row. Men and women – the age-old story.’

He got up as if to signal the interview was over. A famous man, a rich man, he had generously given of his time and his wisdom to the local rag, and now it was time to get back to the business of making money.

Miss Dimont remained in her seat and elaborately turned over a page in her notebook, her signal to Bunton the interview was far from over. She could see him watching her out of the corner of his eye, even though he appeared to be summoning the wine-waiter.

‘So that’s what it was,’ said Judy, ‘just a domestic argument?’

‘Yup.’ Bunton was flapping his hand at some far-distant minion.

‘Man shot his wife dead?’

‘What else,’ came the dead-ball reply. ‘The clock ticks. He can’t stand her a moment longer, it’s driving him crazy. Clock chimes the quarter-hour and – bam! He’s glad it’s over.’

Fluffles was too busy with her powder-compact to pay attention to this shockingly arbitrary supposition. She stretched her lips and grinned in ghastly fashion back at her reflection.

‘She wasn’t married.’

The King spared his interlocutor a look. ‘How do you know?’

‘No wedding ring.’

‘Proves nothing.’

‘Had registered on her own,’ insisted Judy. ‘Had not been seen with anyone. Her neighbours in the chalets either side confirmed that.’

This was not strictly true, in fact it wasn’t true at all, but when interviewees are nasty or unhelpful or contemptuous, it does no harm to give them a prod. Bobby Bunton wouldn’t know what Patsy Rouchos’ neighbours had seen or hadn’t but he did know something, and Miss Dimont was determined to get it from him.

‘She wasn’t a holidaymaker in the ordinary sense of the word,’ she said, half-guessing. ‘Could she have been here on business? Or waiting for a boyfriend who didn’t turn up – is that what it is?’

Bobby Bunton stared hard at her, as if for the first time. ‘It. Really. Doesn’t. Matter,’ he said through yellow, oversized front teeth. ‘She’s. Dead. A. Tragedy. Our. Hearts. Go. Out. To. Her. Family.’ The effort from issuing these words seemed to have exhausted him and he leaned against Fluffles’ pillows. Fluffles looked at Miss Dimont with hatred.

‘Ah,’ said Judy, ‘so you do know who her family is, and therefore presumably you know what she was doing here.’

She paused. ‘You see, Mr Bunton, Temple Regis is thrilled to have Buntorama here but it would be a concern to townsfolk to think that people come down here with guns. And then shoot people with them. It’s just not that kind of place, you know – we have a reputation as being one of the safest resorts in the West of England.

‘So, you see, a simple explanation is so much better for them than a mystery. “MYSTERY DEATH” is an unsettling thing to read in a headline, whereas “DEATH AS A RESULT OF A DOMESTIC DISPUTE” – or whatever it was that happened – they can swallow much more easily. Less unsettling. So I need your help.’

As Bunton took a swig from his glass Judy reflected, not for the first time, how difficult it was to worm information out of habitual liars. Yes, she had lied herself to wrest information out of the King, but those were white lies, little ones. Bunton’s were of a much deeper hue.

Then again, she thought, looking at the pint-sized individual opposite, how much harder a reporter’s life is than a photographer’s. Terry just ambled in here, didn’t introduce himself, got his camera out and took a picture which would occupy as much space in the paper as her words. Job over and done in a matter of seconds while she, Judy, had to beaver away at screwing information out of this tight-mouthed wide boy. It could take all morning.

It was why she loved the job so much. The challenge!

‘I like to do my best for the local press,’ said Bunton, who’d evidently undertaken a snap re-evaluation of the woman sitting opposite him. ‘We rely on you, at each of our resorts, to maintain a connection between our business and the local folks. Even so, you won’t want this in your paper.’

‘What is it we won’t want?’

‘This woman, the dead woman, she was a prossie. A working girl. She was coming over here to the Marine from the camp, sitting in the bar here, waiting to pick someone up.’

‘Oh.’ Miss Dimont took off her glasses and polished them. Such things were not unknown, but here – in Temple Regis! A lady of the night!

‘I saw her in here the night of the – disturbance,’ said Bunton. ‘You can always spot ’em a mile off.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Dimont, recalling the scrapped front-page article from last night’s paper. ‘I wanted to ask you about that. Seems a little high-handed of the Marine to ask you to leave.’

‘Kick me out, more like. But,’ said the little man proprietorially, ‘as you see, we’re back here buying the Marine’s drinks at their extortionate prices. Always ready to take our money!’ He had more success this time when he beckoned the waiter. ‘What’s yours?’

‘No thank you,’ said Judy. ‘So what exactly happened?’

Bunton threw his thumb at Fluffles’ embonpoint. ‘You tell her, darlin’.’

The courtesan straightened her hair and glanced down at her abundant heritage. ‘Outrageous!’ she squawked. ‘You can still see the bruise if you look closely enough. They were outrageous!

‘We’d been in here for a few hours, Bobs was doing business on the phone and then talking to someone at the bar, I got a bit bored. I do like a man to pay attention!’ she said pointedly and flapped her hand at Bunton’s belly. ‘So yes, I’d had a glass or two and I decided to go over and break it up.’

‘That’ll do,’ said Bunton, with a warning glance. ‘What she’s trying to say, Mrs, er…’

‘Miss Dimont.’

‘Yers. What she’s trying to say is that as she got up she slipped on some liquid on the floor. I mean, they charge so much you’d think they’d have staff looking after you properly if you spill your drink – they should have wiped it up immediately.’

‘Anyway, Bobs,’ intervened Fluffles, not to be denied her moment, ‘it was all your fault. If you hadn’t spent so long chatting to that person I wouldn’t…’

‘What actually happened,’ said Bunton, cutting in, ‘Fluffles got up, slipped on the drink, went over. Someone came over and helped her up…’

‘Split my dress,’ chimed in Fluffles cheerily. ‘That got everybody’s attention – including his!’

‘Hardly needed splitting,’ said Bobs, ‘you was showing everything anyway.’

‘It got him away from her, anyway,’ she said to Miss Dimont. ‘So then I told him off – look at me, I says, covered in drink, my face bashed in from falling over, one of my heels broken, my whatnots falling out – if you’d left her alone none of this would have happened.

‘Then she came over, and I let her have it with my handbag. Bitch. She just stood there looking all superior, kind of looking down her nose at me, one heel on one heel off. I tell you, she’ll remember that handbag!’

‘Er, sorry, can we just go back a moment?’ asked Judy. ‘This lady we’re talking about at the bar. The one your Bobs was talking to all evening.’

‘Bitch!’

‘Yes, I’m sure. But, she was the one from Buntorama, the, er… prossie?’

‘Never seen a cheaper-looking tart.’

‘She was the one who was shot?’

‘A bullet never found a more deserving home,’ said Fluffles magnificently, pushing out her chest as she wiggled out of the chair.

FOUR

They were in the Minor speeding back to the office, and Terry was humming to himself.

‘Take that stupid look off your face. Not as if you haven’t seen a woman before.’

Terry kept up the tuneless noise but now his countenance melted into idiot proportions.

‘Fluffles,’ he breathed to himself, breaking into a crooked smile. The pictures he’d got of the infamous beast were clearly going to be eye-poppers.

‘Where d’you think she got that silly name?’ said Miss Dimont peevishly. ‘Fluffles Janetti?’

‘Come over from Italy,’ said Terry, who’d read up her clippings in the cuttings library before coming out. Actually he hadn’t done much reading – mostly it was looking at other people’s photographs of the minx to see how he could better the shot, for Terry was nothing if not competitive. Some of the caption information must have drizzled into his brain by a process of osmosis, though, the way that most photographers learned things.

‘So that was an Italian accent she was talking with?’

‘More sort of Birmingham,’ said Terry after a moment’s reflection.

‘Just so,’ said Judy, who’d done the same amount of homework but had concentrated on the words, not pictures. ‘And I suppose you think that’s her name, Fluffles?’

‘“FLUFFLES JANETTI – THE FIRECRACKER FROM FIRENZE,”’ Terry quoted a headline which had stuck in his brain.

‘Janet Fludd – the bosom from Brum. Famous for the wide variety of bedsprings she has tested in her time.’

Terry turned to the reporter with a look of reproval. ‘That’s not like you,’ he said, ‘to be so snooty.’

‘Oh, Terry, you’re such a fool with women,’ she replied, taking off her spectacles and giving them a good wipe.

‘I’m a photographer,’ he said, as if it were explanation enough.

Back at the office Terry parked the car and scuttled away to the darkroom to do what photographers do. Judy entered the newsroom and wandered down to her desk.

Even at a distance she could see that, as usual, it was covered with the typical avalanche of debris which forever tumbled from Betty Featherstone’s workplace opposite – the discarded copy-paper, sheets of carbon, glue pots, cuttings, old notebooks and the copious contents of a handbag.

There was also a dead cat.

Still some yards away Miss Dimont stopped and stared in horror. ‘Betty!’ she called, ‘Betty!’ She loved Mulligatawny more than life itself and could not bear the thought of poor sad corpses. And in the office, too!

The miscreant wandered over from Curse Corner where she’d been chatting to the chief sub-editor, John Ross: ‘Hello, Judy, cup of tea? Your turn.’

‘What on earth is this creature doing on my desk, Betty?’

Betty stepped forward and looked down in a vague sort of way. ‘Oh sorry, the usual debris, Judy, I’ll clear it away in a minute.’

‘Not the debris,’ seethed Miss Dimont through gritted teeth, ‘the dead animal.’

Betty laughed, but it came out bitterly.

‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she said. ‘Try wearing that on your head, Judy, the weight of it, the sense of claustrophobia. I don’t know how people do it.’

‘Do what? Wear dead cats on their heads?’

Betty picked up the offending corpse and draped it over her hair. ‘Honestly, d’you think it makes me look any better?’ she said, and flung down the bedraggled wig with disdain.

‘Gave me quite a shock,’ said Judy, catching up.

‘Not as much as the platinum blonde dye did me. Honestly, when I saw myself in the mirror after I’d done it – I wanted to kill myself. Look, there are still green patches!’

‘You should take a tip or two from Fluffles Janetti,’ said Judy, and described the frozen platinum helmet she’d recently witnessed adorning the nation’s favourite courtesan.

Betty was transfixed: ‘I must meet her!’

‘No, Betty,’ said Judy, ‘I would fear for your moral compass if left alone in Fluffles’ company for more than five minutes. You’re better off with Dud Fensome.’

‘Not any more. I sent him a wire.’

That makes a change, thought Judy. Normally it was Perce, the telegram boy, who waylaid Betty to alert her to the latest failed venture in the marriage stakes. A wire could guarantee an end to the affair without need for the inevitable exchange of recrimination and disappointment. Betty didn’t like getting them, but they were preferable to a confrontation – and always they brought with them the prospect of greener grass. She’d never had much luck in finding Mr Right.

Just then Miss D’s eye was caught by the sight of a woman dressed head to foot in deepest purple, walking across the end of the newsroom as though leading a funeral procession. Her head was bowed, her movements slowed, as if weighted down by the sorrows of the world.

‘Athene!’ Judy called, but the mourner did not hear.

The reporter rose and nipped quickly over to the furthermost corner of the room, where there was a desk secreted behind a Chinese screen, draped with silk scarves and ostrich feathers. This was the lair of Athene Madrigale, the greatest astrologer the county of Devon had ever known, the person to whom every subscriber to the Riviera Express turned first on a Friday morning to discover what the week ahead held in store.

‘Pisces: an event of great joy is about to occur – to you, or your loved ones!’

‘Sagittarius: look around and see new things today! They are glorious!’

‘Cancer: never forget how kind a friend can be to you. Do the same for them and you will be rewarded threefold!’

Athene was, in a county undoubtedly blessed with more sunlight hours than any other, the one ray of sunshine which never hid behind a cloud. People who read her words felt infinitely strengthened, while her page in the newspaper carried more weight than any sensational news from the town council or the magistrates’ court.

Those few who were privileged to meet Athene – and there weren’t many, for their day was her night – saw the astrologer as if through a glass prism infused by the colours of the rainbow. She might wear a lemon top, pink skirt, mauve trousers with plimsolls of differing hues on each foot. Her wispy grey-blonde hair would be pinned back by a blue paper rose, and the glasses suspended on the end of her nose radiated a delectable glow of Seville orange. She was remarkable.

Today, though, her clothing and countenance were the colour of death, and her voice sounded as though it came from beneath the grave.

‘Athene, dear,’ said Judy with concern as she sidled around the screen, ‘what on earth is it?’ She adored Miss Madrigale for all the good things she imparted, and would do anything to spare her even the slightest discomfort.

‘It’s impossible,’ said Athene in a broken voice, ‘I thought by doing this in daylight it might make things better, but it doesn’t.’ She picked up an ostrich feather and fanned the air as if to soothe it, or herself.

‘What is it? Why are you dressed like this? Has someone died?’

‘I have died, dearest. My soul has been thrown overboard.’

‘What can you mean, Athene?’

‘You were away last week. The editor came over to see me and said I had a wonderful new job, one that would bring me even more adoring letters.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Judy suspiciously, ‘did he now.’

‘I do so love an educated hand, don’t you? Look at this lovely letter from Bedlington this morning – what a wonderful person this must be – and she takes the time to write! You should see the delightful things she…’

‘Athene,’ said Judy, ‘what did Mr Rhys ask you to do?’

The astrologer laid her hands palm upwards on the desk and stared wretchedly into their empty wastes.

‘He has made me an agony aunt. And now for the first time I understand the meaning of the phrase for, Judy, I am in agony. The sorrows of the world! All here! On this desk!’

‘He didn’t tell me he was going to do that.’

‘He wanted it to be a secret. He said he had been keeping back letters from readers who had special problems. He said he knew that if anybody could solve their woes it would be me! But I can’t, Judy, I can’t!’

In an instant Miss Dimont had grasped the problem. Agony aunts dispense their wisdom with breezy disdain, exhibiting a dangerous lack of contact with human misery, safe in their comfy chair and with a loving husband in the kitchen making them a cup of tea. They are secure, emotionally and financially, and disengaged from the plights and problems of ordinary folk. It is these very qualities which allow them to issue lifesaving instructions to those pitched into life’s ocean without a hope.

Athene possessed none of these attributes. Gentle, sensitive, the merest shadow of a being, she was too fragile to sustain a marriage, too unsure to issue instructions, too caring to dismiss the cries for help. Her great triumph was her personal joyousness, her upbeat message, told simply, carried from the stars, to every Sagittarian and Capricorn and Piscean in Temple Regis. To ask more of her was to ask too much.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to Mr Rhys,’ said Judy decisively. ‘I can’t have you upset. And for heaven’s sake, Athene, drop the purple – nobody died!’

‘Only me, Judy. Only me.’

The editor was back from lunch and wrestling with his disgusting briar pipe. His wardrobe was particularly ambitious today – rumpled tweed suit, old brogues, grey shirt and woollen tie. The suit was ancient and its exposure to the elements over the years meant the trousers had shrunk and no longer reached his ankles.

Miss Dimont shut the door. An ominous sign, for Rudyard Rhys preferred it left open.

‘Richard, a word about Athene.’

‘Rr… rrr!’ came from behind the briar pipe. The great man did not like to be reminded he’d been born with a less glamorous first name than the one he now bore.

‘She can’t do it. The agony column. It’s making her unwell.’

‘Rr… rrr.’

‘Richard, why didn’t you ask me? I could have told you she’s not up to it – she’s in despair.’

‘We have to move with the times. Everybody’s got an agony column these days. We have to keep up-to-date.’

Miss Dimont looked down at her wartime comrade and wondered whether, in the thirteen years since peace was declared, he’d entertained a single ‘up-to-date’ thought.

‘Well, Athene can’t do it. You’ll make her ill.’

‘Somebody has to.’

‘There’s a crowded newsroom out there brimming with talent. Pick one of your reporters or sub-editors and let them have a go at the column. Any one of them would love to do it.’

Rhys looked out of the window at the circling gulls as if they were waiting for his corpse to be tossed on to the promenade.

‘Betty then.’

Judy blinked. Rhys’s capacity for making the wrong judgement knew no bounds.

‘Well, she’d love it. But consider this – is a woman who’s never been able to sustain a relationship with the opposite sex qualified to tell others how to sort out their love lives? Should someone who never knows what time of day it is tell people how to live a more orderly life? Is a person who wears a dead cat on her head qualified to hand out fashion advice?’

This last question briefly stirred the editor out of his post-prandial torpor. Friday lunch at the Con Club was the high point of the week, a moment when Rhys could sit as an equal with the city fathers while they discussed matters far too important ever to get an airing in next week’s paper. The lunches were heavy and long.

‘Rr… rrr, dead cat? What’re you talking about?’

‘A figure of speech, Richard.’

‘You’d better write it this afternoon for next week’s paper. I’ll get someone else on Monday.’ His body language intimated there was not enough room in his spacious office for two.

‘Another thing, Richard.’

‘Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.’

‘The murder over at Buntorama. I doubt we’ll be able to keep it to ourselves until next Thursday. You’d better prepare yourself for the usual Fleet Street hue and cry.’

Rhys looked desolate. If there was one thing he couldn’t bear it was an invasion of the national press into Temple Regis – shouldering and bullying their way around, noisily filling up the Palm Court at the Grand Hotel, bribing people to tell half-truths which made his own printed version of events seem tame – inaccurate, even – when the versions delivered by the national and local press were compared by the readers.

‘What have you got?’

‘I saw Bobby Bunton this morning and that dreadful woman he tugs around – Fluffles.’

‘The one who was thrown out of the Marine?’

‘Yes. She’s the latest sweetie-pie. That woman who was shot over at Buntorama was part of that incident. There was a dust-up in the Primrose Bar involving her and Bunton and Fluffles. Bunton spent the evening talking to her and ignoring Fluffles, and there was a fight. Then two days later, the woman was dead.’

‘She was a holidaymaker at Buntorama but drinking in the Marine? That’s unheard of. Two different classes of people altogether. The Marine doesn’t allow Buntorama customers inside their doors if they can possibly avoid it.’

‘She was a prostitute, according to Bunton.’

‘A prostitute? And he spent the evening talking to her? We can’t have that in the paper.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Because,’ said the editor wearily, ‘first, he’s an important employer in Temple Regis and we don’t want the town thinking he’s a wrong ’un. They may start questioning why he was allowed to start up the camp in the first place.’

‘Ah, the Express backed those plans, of course.’ The faintest drop of acid in her voice.

The editor ignored this. ‘Second, I want no mention of prostitutes in Temple Regis. It will only encourage the others to flock back. Third, I’m really not keen on suggesting there’s been a fight at the Marine, given its remarkable reputation, and fourth, I think the least said about the dead body in Buntorama the better. It’ll soon go away.’

‘Not if Fleet Street gets hold of it.’

Rudyard Rhys groaned horribly.

‘Look, all I’m saying is – use the soft pedal, Miss Dimont.’ He did not like to use her first name. ‘The summer season’s starting up, and there are those new attractions over in Paignton and Torquay. Heavens, people are even going to Totnes now – and Salcombe! Soon they’ll have deserted Temple Regis altogether!’

If she could, Miss Dimont would have felt pity for her editor. But long experience told her this was a vacillating, fearful man who only made problems for himself by virtue of his nervousness. If there was an important decision to make between two choices, he’d always pick the wrong one.

‘Here’s the story, Richard. The Marine Hotel knowingly allows a prostitute to ply her trade in their bar. It allows its business rival, heaven knows why, to sit drinking in the same bar until his piece of stuff topples off her high heels and exposes herself to the world, then it kicks them both out.’

‘Bunton’s not a rival,’ growled Rhys. ‘Different ends of the business – carriage-trade versus knotted handkerchief brigade.’

‘Precisely my point,’ said Miss Dimont crisply. ‘And do you think that when Fleet Steet gets down here that particular penny isn’t going to drop? The battle between upstairs and downstairs? Class war on the coast?

‘This is only Buntorama’s second season. But already you can see the resentment and rivalry building up between these two establishments – side-by-side and away from the centre of town.

‘Bobby Bunton’s a maverick, and when it suits him he’ll turn his guns on the Marine – accuse them of being snobs. Then we’ll have an all-out battle in Temple Regis, and just when the local economy was picking up nicely.’

The editor picked up a box of matches and turned it over in his hand. The room smelt of old dogs, though it was probably his overcoat which hung on the coat-rack winter and summer. The sun’s heat was coming through the window and Miss Dimont realised why in general it was better to leave the door open.

‘Don’t think I hadn’t considered this,’ he said weightily. ‘It was a mistake letting Bobby Bunton into town and I’ll be frank – but this must go no further – I saw Hugh Radipole at lunch today. He warned there were likely to be severe repercussions if Bunton steps out of line.

‘He was telling me something of Bunton’s past – d’you know he carries a cut-throat razor in his top pocket all the time? – and unless Bunton calms down and stays out of the Marine there’ll be some howitzer-fire going over the fence. Radipole’s not a man to take things lying down.’

‘Good Lord, Richard,’ said Judy happily, ‘I think you’ve got yourself a scoop there!’

FIVE

Auriol Hedley sat waiting for her friend on the back deck of the Princess Evening Tide, an old but beautifully turned-out yacht whose sheets were white, whose brass was polished, and whose prow was sharply elegant.

Evening Tide occupied a space against the harbour wall from where Auriol could see all the way down the estuary to its mouth, while over her shoulder she could keep an eye on her place of business, the Seagull Café. It was her habit in summer to come down here for a gin and tonic, usually in the company of her dear friend, Judy Dimont, on a sunny evening.

‘She’s late,’ said Auriol to the elegant gentleman sitting across the deck, shoes twinkling in the sunlight. His eyes were half-shut.

‘Good Lord!’ said the old boy, stirring from a half-slumber. It was hot. ‘That the time?’

‘Are you going to say something to her before you go?’

‘Not if she doesn’t hurry up. I’ve that train to catch.’

‘It’s been going on too long, Arthur, this campaign to keep her mother at arm’s length. If Madame Dimont finally carries out her threat and pays a visit, we’re all in the soup.’

‘Not me,’ said Arthur, chuckling. ‘I’m off!’

Just then the sputtering and clacking which usually proclaimed the arrival of Herbert pierced the early evening air. Meandering gulls on their evening stroll scattered to make way for man and machine, lifting off into the gathering haze. Miss Dimont clambered aboard.

‘Ginger beer, no ice,’ said Auriol, shuddering as she proffered the customary glass. ‘What kept you?’

‘Tell you later,’ replied Judy, offering a cheek to the old boy. ‘Hello, Arthur, what a surprise, how lovely!’

‘Just passing,’ said her uncle lightly, though this could not conceivably be true. ‘Auriol’s gin fizzes – what a miracle!’

‘Your glass is empty.’

‘Just going.’

‘But I’ve only just got here!’

‘Taking the Pullman to London. Been here all afternoon. Hoped I’d see more of you before I went. Must dash, though.’

He was old but still had a schoolboy bounce about him. ‘I say, Huguette, will you come up to town and have lunch with me at the club? Your mother’s coming. You could help out.’

‘Bit busy at the moment,’ said Judy, guardedly. ‘Been a murder over at Buntorama.’

At the mention of the word ‘murder’, the old man’s face lengthened in a mixture of disbelief and resignation. There was a pause. ‘I do not know,’ he said, slowly, ‘even after all these years I cannot understand, what brings one man to want to do away with another.’

Miss Dimont was hoping he might go on – he usually had something very useful to say after all those years of experience – but he was eager to disembark.

‘Train to catch,’ he said. ‘If you won’t come and have lunch with Grace and me, you know she’ll come down here. I thought you wanted to avoid that.’

‘When she comes, uncle, she straightens up my house. Goes through my drawers. Reads my correspondence. Looks down her nose at the neighbours. Dislikes intensely what I do for a living. But still she comes and sits in the Express front hall every lunchtime expecting to be taken out. She absolutely despises Terry and…’

‘You often have a word or two to say about Terry yourself,’ chipped in Auriol. ‘And not always complimentary, Hugue.’

‘She’s your mother,’ sighed the old man patiently. ‘Be kind, Huguette.’

‘If only she could be kind to me!’

All three stepped onto the quayside and Auriol wandered back to the café, leaving uncle and niece together by the waiting taxi.

‘Auriol sent for you, Arthur.’

‘I say, that sounds a bit accusatory!’

‘To do her dirty work for her. She’s been on at me for months to have Maman come and stay.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better? Get it over and done with?’

Miss Dimont shook her curls impatiently. ‘She’s your sister, uncle, can’t you do something about it?’

‘You know how odd she is. Running away to the Continent all those years ago, insisting even after your father died she should still be addressed as Madame Dimont. Talking in that affected Frenchified way.’

‘Still you named your daughter after her.’

‘She made me,’ said the old boy with a conspiratorial smile – they were in this together. ‘Come to the Club. Get me out of a hole.’

‘Oh – all right then.’

‘Don’t sound so dashed. It’ll save her coming down here and rifling through your things.’

They embraced, and the taxi sped away up Bedlington hill towards the station. The reporter walked slowly back to the Seagull Café to rejoin her friend.

‘A shame you missed him,’ said Auriol, cracking eggs into a bowl. ‘He was on wonderful form, telling me lots of things about the old days. Really, some of his adventures!’

‘Permanent schoolboy,’ said Judy.

‘Your mother has him under her thumb.’

‘Did you get him to come all the way down here just to tell me I must have Maman to stay? That seems a bit steep.’

‘He was passing through on his way from Dartmouth. Bit of a reunion, by the sound of it.’

Auriol turned to face her friend. She was still gloriously attractive, thought Miss Dimont, almost unchanged since their days in the underground corridors of the Admiralty building all those years ago. Everyone from able seaman to Admiral of the Fleet had been stunned by Auriol’s dark hair, coal-black eyes, perfect deportment and beautiful figure. Moreover, in a branch of the armed services almost completely peopled by men, she had the commanding presence to issue orders which they were happy to obey.

More than that, Auriol was the perfect sounding board – you could throw facts at her and she would size them up, turn them round, look at them upside-down and deliver them back to you in such an orderly fashion they were almost unrecognisable. Often when she was stuck with a problem, Miss Dimont would hand a bundle of information over to her friend and watch her go through it like a costermonger feeling up the apples and putting the best ones at the front of the stall.

‘. . . so you see,’ Miss Dimont was saying, ‘Bobby, Fluffles, then this woman Rouchos.’

‘That name sounds familiar.’

‘Does it?’ She was slicing up tomatoes to go in the omelette, their sharp sweet odour pricking her nostrils.

‘Can’t think why. Keep going, it’ll come to me.’

‘I just feel in my bones there’s something very odd about this set-up. Why in the first place did Hugh Radipole allow Bobby Bunton to loll about in the Marine making trouble when, really, his presence was a pain in the proverbial?’

‘His money is as good as anyone else’s. And it sounds like that piece of stuff of his is a thirsty one.’

‘And how! But the point is these two men were at each other’s throats. There’s Radipole on the one hand, urbane and sophisticated, who’s had that end of the beach all to himself ever since he arrived here years ago. Builds up a reputation for his hotel as a rich man’s hideaway – I mean, he doesn’t even want the Express in there to publicise the place, I always get a nasty look when I go in. He’s snooty, his guests are snooty!

‘Then,’ said Judy, laying out the knives and forks and freshly laundered napkins, ‘there’s the King of the Holiday Camps.’ She uttered the words satirically. ‘He’s noisy, he’s brash, he lacks polish and wears horrible clothes. And the way he talks!’

‘Never had you for a snob, Hugue.’

‘I don’t mean that – he talks like a spiv, always slightly threatening in the way he says things. Smarmy one minute, would take a cut-throat razor to you the next. And that frightful woman!’

‘The fancy piece? What did you call her – the courtesan?’

‘I was being polite. She’s the worst kind of advert for our gender you could ever imagine.’

‘Men seem to like her,’ said Auriol evenly, serving on to the plates, ‘a lot. By that I mean, a lot of men like her a lot.’

‘What I feel is that there’s something toxic about her – you could see that men might kill over her, however worthless she may be. Goodness, even Terry…!’

Auriol often heard complaints about Terry. Judy didn’t always mean what she said.

‘What interests me is this other woman, Rouchos,’ said Auriol, switching tack. ‘Clearly not the kind of person you’d normally find in a Buntorama. Disguised herself with her choice of clothes, but the jewellery gave her away, didn’t it? What the devil was she doing there? And more importantly, where was she when she wasn’t in the camp?’

Miss Dimont thought about this. ‘Bunton said she was a prostitute, but I don’t believe it. The clothes she left behind, the make-up, the perfume – all wrong for a woman in that line of business.’

Auriol arched an eyebrow. ‘And you’d know?’

‘I would assume,’ added Judy quickly. ‘OK, she’s sitting on her bed fully dressed, she might have been waiting for a client, but when you think about it she hadn’t been seen around the place all week so she wasn’t using the chalet as a place of work. Why would she suddenly change tack?’

‘According to what you say, Bunton claimed she was going to the Marine Hotel to grab a client or two. Maybe she had a room there.’

‘What, a room in Buntorama and one in the Marine? Why on earth would she do that?’

‘I’d check,’ said Auriol with that sliver of authority which once had junior naval officers scurrying to make her a pot of tea, no sugar, two digestives.

‘I will. Now what about Does the Team Think? – it must almost be time.’

Auriol switched on the radio and they sat with a glass of wine listening to silly jokes from the mouths of Jimmy Edwards, Ted Ray and Arthur Askey, a world away from the sinister doings in Ruggleswick. Both were listening, both were laughing, but both were thinking at the same time.

However, as a rat-tat of audience applause signalled the end of the show, the conversation did not immediately return to murder but to another kind of death. On the wall above the bakelite wireless hung the same photograph each woman displayed in her home, a black-and-white portrait of a man they both had loved – Auriol as a sister, Miss Dimont as his fiancée.

‘Not his kind of humour,’ said Auriol, switching off the radio. ‘Coffee?’

‘I think he’d have enjoyed The Goon Show more.’

‘Yes, madcap. Like Johnny Ramensky.’

It was always painful steering the conversation round to Eric Hedley, almost like picking at a scab, but most times they did. Both bitterly felt his loss, his heroic sacrifice in the last days of war when really he could have been spared. Auriol and Judy were friends, but Eric was what made their friendship eternal.

‘Johnny was a terror.’

‘It’s why Eric adored him so much. And, Hugue, you have to admit, the neatest safe-cracker you ever came across.’

‘To be honest,’ said Miss Dimont, ‘I never knew that many men with a passion for gelignite.’

Back in the office Betty Featherstone was making up for time off prompted by the hair debacle. She was doing the early pages, her desk overflowing with scraps of paper sent in by correspondents with a greater passion for the minutiae of village life than Betty could ever muster.

But her mind was on the colossal sense of entitlement Dud Fensome seemed to have. What Dud wanted, Dud got. The green patches among the platinum were, after all, just the tip of the iceberg when it came to his demands.

She dithered for half-an-hour over the Ashburton Sheep Sale market report, with its complex, interwoven, arcane and utterly boring detail on greyface ewes, whiteface ewes, clun ewes, kerrys, hoggets, wether lambs and registered greyface lambs. To turn into readable prose the pencilled notes scribbled on the back of a sale bill – was that the poor sheep’s last drop of blood tainting the dispatch? – required more concentration than she could cope with at the end of a long day. She lifted the paper to one side but it stuck to her fingers, the blood not quite dry.

‘Ew!’ Betty squeaked, as John Ross strolled by.

‘Ay, lassie,’ growled the Glaswegian. ‘Ewes indeed – they got you on the early pages, eh? Try to get it right this week.’

‘I simply haven’t the energy,’ said Betty, thinking about cycling home to have another go at her hair.

The chief sub-editor leaned over and started shuffling through the confetti on her desk.

‘Good one here,’ he grunted, voice tinged with venom. ‘Women’s Institute announcing their new competition – “A SALAD FOR ONE.”

‘And look! The winner of last week’s lampshade-making contest! Gloooorious…’ he added bitterly. Once he’d been a football reporter on a Fleet Street newspaper, now he was reduced to inventing headlines for the pitiful scraps of information sent in from the far-flung extremities of the newspaper’s circulation area. Dispatches from places where reporters never trod.

‘Och!’ he said, shaking his ugly head at a missive written in block capitals, ‘WAR DECLARED ON THE RABBIT POPULATION.’

‘And this! “DRAMATIC RESCUE ON MUDFORD CLIFFS”,’ he intoned, adding with heavy irony, ‘“NOT MANY DEAD”.’

One more caught his jaded eye. ‘That old chestnut about no public lavs down at Bedlington. Again. Oh mother Mary, save me now!’

Once upon a time Ross would be consoling himself in the pub by this hour, but since he was sworn off the booze these days he took it out on anybody left in the office after opening-time.

‘You just don’t get the quality of local corr any more,’ he said, churning hopelessly through the paper mountain on Betty’s desk as if panning for gold. ‘The stupidity of the village correspondents. You ask them to give you a story and all they can come up with is – oh, Christ!’

Betty abruptly put down the hand-mirror. She’d given up typing and was inspecting her green and platinum stripes. ‘What is it, Mr Ross?’

‘Girrlie, girrlie, oh girrlie…’ he whispered as if he had struck the mother lode, ‘ye canna believe… look at this week’s Umbrella!’

This was not an invitation to step out into the rain but to scrutinise the cage-droppings of a chum of the editor, a man who once made a half-funny speech at Rotary and was immediately snapped up to do a weekly column.

This half-wit called his column ‘Between Ourselves’ and signed himself ‘Umbrella Man’. Nobody knew why.

‘What’s it about?’ said Betty listlessly.

‘Dog bowls in pubs,’ replied Ross, his voice hoarser than an undertaker’s.

‘Well, look,’ said Betty, trying to break the mood. ‘Just think, next week I’m off to meet Moomie. We’ll get something wonderful out of that!’

The chief sub looked at her suspiciously. ‘Mommie?’

‘No, Moomie – Moomie Etta-Shaw, the jazz singer. She’s doing the summer season at the Marine.’

‘Ay,’ said Ross. ‘I know who you mean now. She and Alma Cogan used to work together at the Blue Lagoon in Soho.’

‘Didn’t she start out as a cloakroom attendant?’ asked Betty, who’d been doing her homework.

‘Nah,’ said Ross caustically, walking away. ‘She only took people’s coats.’

If this was supposed to be a joke it went over Betty’s head and she returned to the fuss over the building of a bus shelter in Exbridge – nobody wanted it outside their house yet everyone agreed it was vital in winter to stop villagers being splashed by passing traffic. Betty’s fingers were flying, the copy-paper was emerging from the top of her machine, but you couldn’t call it writing.

‘Time for a quick one,’ said Terry, who’d emerged from the darkroom and was looking for a drinking partner. Betty touched her hair – she wouldn’t be seen dead in the Fort or the Jawbones in her present state.

Unless, of course, she put the dead cat on her head again.

‘Won’t be a moment,’ she said, nippily pushing her typewriter away.

SIX

Frank Topham sat solidly in his chair at the head of the table while his detectives hunched over their notes, waiting uneasily for the inquisition ahead.

‘So,’ said the Inspector without the slightest hint of hope in his voice, ‘what have we got?’

One of the grey-faced assistants cleared his throat. ‘I checked on Bunton’s movements at the time of the shooting and it couldn’t have been him – he was at the Buntorama in Clacton, just like he said.’

‘Well, you had to ask. But he’s hardly likely to go round shooting his own customers, is he? Not good for business.’

‘You never know, sir.’

‘His piece of Fluff?’

The man managed a weary smile. ‘She was with him when the woman was shot, she’s always with him – she won’t let him out of her sight. She’s going to have that man for breakfast, lunch and dinner.’

‘Bunton’s under the impression she’s just his latest piece of stuff,’ said the other copper. ‘He has no idea that she’s his next wife who’ll take him for every last farthing before she spits him out.’

‘Splits him out,’ said the first, referring to the regrettable incident in the Primrose Bar. They both laughed, in a tired sort of way.

Topham was not so amused. ‘The victim? What new information do we have?’

‘Address in Chelsea she gave to the reception people at Buntorama turned out to be false. It’s a chemist’s shop.’

‘How did she pay?’

‘Cash, they prefer it that way in holiday camps.’

‘I daresay the Inland Revenue might have something to say about that,’ said Topham, a decent man who believed in people paying their taxes. It would be a useful bargaining chip when trying to get more information out of the clamlike Bunton.

‘And you didn’t get any more from any of the punters over at the holiday camp?’

‘One or two of them said they saw her. Posh, is what most of them say, in spite of her cheap clothes – the way she smiled but said nothing. Polite but condescending in that us-and-them sort of way.’

‘But are you saying she spoke to nobody at Buntorama? Didn’t go to the dances, sit in the bar? Wasn’t she missed at mealtimes?’

‘She was single so she was put on the long table where all the odds and sods end up. Everybody moves around – it’s not like being given a table for four in a hotel or on a liner where you know everybody’s business by the end of the fish course. She was on what you might call a moveable feast.’

If that was a joke it fell flat.

‘So,’ said Topham, ‘she was noticeable enough to be noticed, as it were, but nobody’s missed her.’

‘One woman said she didn’t smell right.’

‘And you checked back on her possessions?’

‘You saw yourself, sir, there was almost nothing in her suitcase. Cheap clothes, newly bought. Old suitcase. Two pairs of shoes in the wardrobe, make-up bag but no handbag. Clothes she was wearing when she was killed were the same make as the ones in the suitcase, no clues whatsoever. She was wearing expensive earrings, very yellow gold, no hallmark. Gold bracelet, also no hallmark. Very odd, that. Wedding ring on her third finger, right hand – old.’

‘How old?’

‘Older than her. Could have been her mother’s. Could’ve been a hand-me-down from a marriage which failed.’

‘She could be French,’ hazarded the other detective, but this fell on stony ground. He didn’t have a clue really.

‘No question, then,’ said Topham with conviction. ‘A mystery woman with expensive jewellery and cheap clothes. If that isn’t a disguise I’m a Chinaman’s uncle.’

Not having heard of any oriental relations in the Topham tribe, his men nodded in affirmation.

‘What next, sir?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said the Detective Inspector with finality, gathering his papers and standing up. ‘You just carry on.’

Dear Hermione,

I am known among my friends for having a generous nature but now I feel the milk of human kindness has drained away and may never return. Please help.

Every year I am fortunate enough to have a bumper crop of strawberries. Last year I gave some to my best friend to make jam. She has now won First Prize for her strawberry jam at the Mothers’ Union and has been boasting to everyone how clever she is, without once mentioning that it was my strawberries that done it.

She has been my friend for years but now I feel I hate her. What can I do?

Miss Dimont looked again at the letter, took off her glasses, polished them, and replaced them on her deliciously curved nose. After a pause she got up to make a cup of tea. The letter was waiting when she got back, looking up pleadingly and urgently demanding Hermione’s adjudication. Miss Dimont stared at her Remington Quiet-Riter for quite some time then decided its ribbon needed changing.

A sub-editor wandered by and for a good ten minutes they discussed the latest film starring Dirk Bogarde at the Picturedrome. It turned out neither had seen it, but both had heard good reports.

The letter remained. There was, in fact, no answer to the agonising dilemma it presented and yet the heartfelt plea to Hermione cried out for a response, and Miss Dimont’s sense of duty told her she must answer, truthfully, and to the best of her ability.

She pushed the letter to one side and picked up another.

Dear Hermione,

I am in tears as I write this. I feel my son has been poisoned against me by my daughter-in-law and no longer wishes to see me. I am seventy next birthday and a widow.

I fail to understand why things should be this way when I have always gone out of my way to help my daughter-in-law with her children. I am always on hand to give good advice, even going to the trouble of writing her long letters advising her of better ways of managing things. I pop in at odd times to give the children a surprise – also it gives me a chance to help with the cleaning, going through the cupboards and so on.

I feel for some reason this annoys her, though why I can’t…

Miss Dimont looked up at the big clock down the other end of the newsroom. Almost lunchtime!

Dear Hermione,

I have been happily married for five years, but recently my husband has been suggesting that we…

Instinctively Miss Dimont told herself to read no further. Some problems are best left unexplored, certainly in a family newspaper like the Riviera Express, and without further ado she let the letter float gently into the wicker wastepaper basket by her ankle.

Just then she spotted the ethereal figure of Athene Madrigale flitting through a door and she beckoned her over. Devon’s most celebrated astrologer negotiated her way over to Judy’s desk and sat down.

‘Yes, dear?’

‘I see what you mean,’ said Judy.

‘What’s that?’

‘This wretched agony column, Athene. Since I got you off writing it, I’ve become Hermione.’

Athene blushed. ‘I never meant for that to happen, dear.’

You might have predicted it if you’d looked in your crystal ball, thought Judy unkindly, but aloud she said, ‘It’s impossible to answer these cries for help, isn’t it? Impossible!’

‘They made me quite upset,’ said Athene. ‘I had to go and lie down. There was one from a happily married woman whose husband had been suggesting…’

‘Yes, I threw that one in the bin. But Athene, how tangled people’s lives become! A woman who interferes in her daughter-in-law’s child-rearing, two old friends falling out over a pot of jam…’

‘You see why I couldn’t do it,’ said Athene. She was plaiting her hair into the bright blue paper rose which was her favourite adornment.

‘Well, I can’t do it either,’ said Judy. ‘And anyway what a rotten idea to have an agony column in the first place.’

‘Mr Rhys. His idea. Only a heartless man could wish to expose other people’s misery to the world.’

‘It’s called journalism, Athene,’ sighed Miss Dimont. ‘It’s called journalism.’

SEVEN

It was never quite the same, doing a job with Betty. She was efficient, she asked the right questions, she had a good shorthand note and was usually charming enough to winkle that extra cup of tea out of the grieving widow, football pools winner, or someone whose young Einstein had just won a place at university.

Terry liked her, but that was it – she did not infuriate him like Judy did. She never told an interviewee what to think, which Judy sometimes did. She didn’t make a nuisance of herself by challenging heavy-handed authority, which Judy always did.

She had a lovely smile but often it was spoilt by the wrong choice of lipstick, and the haphazard way it was applied at her desk without the benefit of a mirror did her no favours. And then her clothes! Lime green seemed to be the favourite of the moment, but teaming it with royal blue or pink, as she did, verged on the downright reckless.

Terry snatched a glimpse of her as they drove in the Minor out to the Marine Hotel, Betty looking out at the grey listless sands stretching for miles to the rainy horizon. Temple Regis boasted the most sunshine hours anywhere in Britain, but just a mile or two down the road at Ruggleswick, there seemed to be a micro-climate which favoured grey over blue, wind over stillness, stratified clouds over a clear blue sky.

To the well-heeled patrons of the Marine, this was a bonus – their view of the sands and sea remained largely uncluttered by the human form. For the inmates of Buntorama it was proof, yet again, that British holidays were a washout. They dreamed instead of joining the exodus to Benidorm where they could drink cheap brandy and get a nice all-over sunburn.

‘This makes a change,’ Betty said half-heartedly, but she was not her usual chatty self. Terry didn’t interest himself in her love life, but she’d brought him up to speed on the matter of Dud Fensome and his thing for platinum.

This morning she was wearing a silk scarf on her head, so it was difficult to see what had been achieved over the weekend by way of damage-control but Terry, with his photographer’s instinct for the ways of women, guessed it had probably not been a great success. At least she wasn’t wearing the ruddy cat.

‘She’s got an amazing voice,’ Terry was saying. ‘You could hear it all the way down in the lobby when we went to see Bobby Bunton last week.’

Betty wasn’t listening. Instead she said, ‘I wanted to ask her about – well, she’s quite stout, isn’t she? I thought our lady readers would be interested in what she wore, you know, underneath – to keep it all under control.’

Terry looked at her disbelievingly. ‘Woman’s angle, is it? Crikey, Betty, Moomie Etta-Shaw is one of the greatest jazz singers this country has ever been lucky enough to host.’ He sounded a bit like the advertising handout he’d glanced at before leaving the office. ‘She’s had hit records! Been on the Billy Cotton Band Show! You must have heard her singing “Volare” on the radio!

‘Stout! You don’t know the meaning of the word!’

Betty did. Dud had used it quite recently.

‘I prefer a dance band myself,’ she said, quickly changing the subject, but Terry was ahead of her. Maybe she had put on a little weight.

‘Almost there,’ he said. ‘Pictures first, Betty, then you can have as long as you like with her.’

Here was the perennial struggle between snappers and scribblers, as to who went first. Terry usually got his way, but with celebrity set-ups like this one he could take up to half an hour getting what he wanted, leaving little time for the reporter to get to grips with her subject. It was often a point of dispute between Terry and Judy, but Betty was more flexible and didn’t mind much who did what – it was just a relief to be out of the office. And the great thing was that if it was a picture story, she could always get a ride in the photographer’s car rather than catch the bus, which is what reporters were supposed to do.

Again this was something which could elicit a peppery remark or two from Miss Dimont, but Betty was more pliable. The photographer looked at her once more and realised that, whatever else happened over the weekend, she’d been let down again.

‘Good weekend?’ he asked, hoping to draw her out.

‘We’re here,’ sighed Betty with just a touch of tragedy coating her voice. ‘Don’t take too long!’

It probably didn’t improve things that Moomie was singing ‘Lover Come Back To Me’ as they entered the ballroom. Wrapped in a figure-hugging silk dress, she looked ready to entertain a thousand fans at the London Palladium, not rehearse a one-hour set for her debut tonight. Terry thrilled at the colour combination of her dark brown skin, dazzling white teeth and midnight blue wrapping – even though his newspaper still only printed in black and white.

‘Wonderful,’ he breathed, reaching into his bag for his Leica. Just for a moment he shared Betty’s curiosity about the strength of Moomie’s underpinnings – her figure was as huge as her voice – but at that moment the song finished and Betty stepped forward to make the introductions.

‘You must know,’ said Moomie with a serene smile and a wave of her arm, ‘these lovely musicians it is my privilege to work with. Mike Manifold on guitar, Cornish Pete on bass, Sticks Karanikis, drums.’

The trio nodded, absently. Professional musicians rarely look up above their score-sheets and then only to talk to each other – there wasn’t any point in wasting time getting to know them.

‘Gorgeous, Moomie,’ said Terry, seizing the initiative, ‘you put a special dress on for me! You look a million dollars! Harrods, is it?’

He said it ‘’Arrods’.

‘C&A, darling. Cost me five guineas.’

‘Gorgeous,’ burbled Terry. You couldn’t tell whether he meant it, or whether it was the standard snapper-patter to create an early intimacy between lensman and subject. Betty had heard it a million times before and wandered off in search of a cup of coffee.

Terry launched into his routine – flattering, cajoling, instructing, begging – and Moomie happily went along with it, her queen-size laugh and roistering personality turning the event into a lively celebration.

‘You’re a bit gorgeous yourself, Terry,’ she said, pouting her lips and leaning forward.

‘Fantastic!’ panted Terry, as he threw himself onto his back on the dance-floor to get the up-shot.

‘Fabulous! Can you spare a couple of tickets for tonight, Moomie?’

‘Have a dozen, darling!’ she laughed, batting her eyelids. And so the courtly ritual continued for the next twenty minutes. The pair may never meet again, but for this short span they had been lovers in all but fact. Such is the compact between photographer and celebrity – a secret contract which no reporter could ever be part of, since photographers flattered and wooed while the scribblers just asked damned awkward questions.

‘Contessa,’ snapped Moomie in answer to Betty’s first question. ‘Strongest support in the business. I’ll give you the name of my fitter if you want.’

Betty blushed – had her intention been quite so transparent? – and stumbled on into the interview. Meanwhile Terry wandered over to the musicians who were lighting cigarettes and drinking cups of tea.

‘One word from me and she does what she likes,’ said Mike Manifold, the band leader, nodding at Moomie.

‘We don’t normally do requests, unless we’re asked,’ added Cornish Pete.

‘You must understand – our music is far better than it sounds,’ said Karanikis.

Terry grasped that these were musicians’ jokes, a polite way of telling him to shove off. The trio really only wanted to sit there moaning at each other – about the management, the accommodation, the number of encores they were expected to play before going into overtime, and the next recording session. So he dutifully strolled off, back out to the lavish entrance hall, with its wide sweeping staircase and important-looking sculpture. He paused for a moment, then went over to the receptionist.

‘Will you tell the lady reporter I’ll be back in a little while? She’ll be half an hour or more with the band. I won’t be long.’

He loaded his camera bag into the boot and drove off through the gates. It took no more than two minutes to arrive at the entrance to Buntorama where he left the Minor in the car park, and strolled away without any apparent purpose. Over in the distance he could hear the funfair going at full tilt, the screams from the helter-skelter cutting through the still morning air.

Terry had a pocket camera with him – he rarely went anywhere without it – and as if to justify his presence in the camp took a handful of snaps. There were a few pretty girls, a couple of irritable pensioners, and a lively group of teenagers. A man and woman got very cross and swiftly parted when he levelled the camera at them – moral trappitude, thought Terry, and moved on.

Soon he reached the management block and, led by instinct, he walked up the steps. There in a corner sat Bobby Bunton in his braces, and Bert Baggs with a tragic look on his face. He thought he’d wander over and have a word with the King, but His Majesty was too busy holding court. So Terry sat down behind a potted fern and waited his moment, watching the dust particles slide through the bright sunlight in their gradual descent to earth. It would take an f1 at 1/24, he calculated, to capture that.

‘. . . then he said to me, “She died on your property, how’s that going to look?”’ This was Bunton’s voice, though since sitting down Terry could no longer see the two men.

‘What we going to do, boss?’

‘It’s blackmail. Blackmail! And all because I…’

‘It wasn’t you, boss,’ came Baggs’ sycophantic tones, ‘it was ’er.’

‘Hardly matters now. This has never, ever, happened before. And just as I’ve got the Archbishop of York to come and do the Sunday service!’

‘’E won’t know, boss. Not as if this is going to end up in the newspapers.’

‘But it is, Bert, it is! We’ve only had the local rag round so far, but in another twenty-four hours the whole of Fleet Street will be here – soaking up our hospitality, writing innuendoes, behaving in that rotten two-faced way they do.’

‘You’ll win ’em round, you always do. Don’t forget we’ve had dead ’uns before,’ came Baggs’ reply. ‘Remember that couple up in Essex…’

‘That was different! They shouldn’t have tried that out!’

‘Within the privacy of their own bedroom, boss!’

‘Oh, shut up!’ burst out Bunton. ‘This is different, I tell you – this woman, dead in bed, bullet through the chest. We might get away with that but the fact that nobody knows who the devil she is suddenly turns it from routine into Page One. Put mystery in a headline and things turn nasty. Trust me, I know.’

‘Well, what are you going to say to – you know?’ said Baggs.

‘I wouldn’t put it past him to go public. It’ll ruin me – finish the business. The Archbishop of York, Bert, the Archbishop!’

‘We can always cancel him.’

‘How will that look when Fleet Street gets a hold of it?’

‘If only I’d known,’ said Baggs dolefully, ‘I’d never have let her in in the place. She looked an odd ’un, sounded it too. I blame myself.’

‘Go on doing that and you’ll be out of a job. You’ve got to help me think of something – and quick!’

Things suddenly went silent and when Terry looked up, there was Bobby Bunton standing over Terry with a thunderous look on his face. ‘What the fuffin’ fuff are you doing here?’ he demanded.

Eagleton, a cool hand in times of crisis, looked up with a relaxed smile on his face. ‘You know, Mr Bunton, those pictures I took last week of you and Miss Janetti turned out so well I thought I’d drop some prints off. Might look nice in a frame on your desk.’

Bunton eyed him sideways. ‘OK,’ he said suspiciously. ‘Thank you. Where are they?’

‘Back in the car,’ lied Terry with a smile. ‘Just wanted to make sure you were here first.’

‘Well, give them to Baggs. I’m going off for lunch.’

‘I will, sir. And…’

‘Yes?’

‘Miss Janetti, sir. The editor asked if she would do a separate interview, talking about her life as a dancer. A few more nice photos. Wouldn’t take up too much of her time, make a nice Women’s Page feature.’

‘Fix it up with Baggs,’ said Bunton, still uneasy. ‘Were you listening in just now? To our private chat?’

‘Me? Certainly not!’ said Terry. ‘That would be rude, wouldn’t it? My editor Mr Rhys doesn’t like his staff being rude to people.’ The vein of sarcasm in his tone was barely evident.

‘Very well, then,’ said Bunton and strode off.

Terry was in no hurry to leave. He wandered out of the management block into the sunshine and took a deep breath. Everywhere there were smartly blazered staff marching in earnest with fixed smiles on their faces. Given the stiff south-westerly wind which was blowing up, their apparent joy seemed misplaced – but obviously they’d all taken their happy pill with breakfast.

In robust denial of the elements the holidaymakers milled about the sports field, tennis courts and bowling greens dressed as if a tropical heatwave was only just around the corner. Their faces, however, puckered at each new gust of wind, and the ladies hugged their cardigans tighter. None looked as though their spirits would be raised by a visit from an archbishop.

Terry was wandering towards the funfair with no apparent purpose in mind when he felt the back of his jacket being tugged, hard. He turned to see the pink-cheeked Baggs.

‘What’re you doin’?’ said the under-manager, his tone not friendly.

‘Just taking a look around,’ said Terry, ‘it’s a free country.’

‘Not exactly. You have to have a pass. Otherwise we’d have every Tom, Dick and Harry from Temple Regis poking their noses in. People save all year to have their holiday here, you know, it’s not a free show.

‘You come with me,’ said Baggs, and holding on to Terry’s coat pulled him towards a low chalet with a sign hanging outside. It said ‘The Sherwood Forest’.

‘In ’ere,’ ordered Baggs. Terry obliged.

‘Usual,’ said Baggs to the barman. ‘And whatever ’e’s ’avin’.’

‘Now,’ he said, ‘what was you doin’ earwiggin’ my conversation with Mr Bunton? I saw you listenin’ in.’

‘Not me,’ said Terry.

‘Yes you was. I was watchin’ you in the mirror.’

‘I was waiting to give Mr Bunton the prints of him and Fluffles.’

‘Oh, yes? Where are they, then?’

‘In the car. I told him.’

Baggs leaned forward. His breath revealed this was not the first glass of usual he’d swallowed this morning.

‘Listen. This is a very tricky time for Mr Bunton, what with this murder on his property and the Archbishop due any time. Business is good down here in Devon, but it can turn on a sixpence with just the wrong word in the Press. As it is, we’re waiting for the Fleet Street mob to turn up and make a nuisance of theirselves, so we don’t need any more grief from the likes of you.’

Terry just smiled. Baggs saw he was failing to make his point.

‘Look,’ he said aggressively. ‘You’ve had your fun ‘ere. You’ve got all the pictures you need. Mr Bunton has been very generous with his time, and now I want you to scarper, get it?’

‘You’re asking me to leave?’ said Terry.

‘Moochin’ round ’ere, snoopin’.’ A fresh glass of the usual had been put before the under-manager, though nothing for Terry. ‘I want you to ‘oppit, otherwise something nasty might occur.’

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