“My arguments remain exactly the same as they have always been. I wasn’t in Fethering on the night that Polly died. I was with a woman.”
“Oh yes, the actress from the sitcom.”
“Exactly. And just so’s you know, she has been approached by the police investigating Polly’s death. They wanted to check my alibi. An intrusion into her privacy of which she took a pretty dim view, let me tell you. In fact, it may have ruined what promised to be a very good relationship.”
“Or a good relationship until you started hitting her?” suggested Carole.
“Listen, I don’t care what you say. You’re just two nosy old women who have no authority at all. If the police are satisfied my alibi is true, then I think you should accept it as well.”
“You mean you’re not going to give us a contact for your new girlfriend, so that we can check for ourselves?”
“You are bloody right, Jude. I am not.”
The two women looked at each other. Of course, Piers could be lying – he was quite capable of it – but both had a depressing feeling that he was telling the truth.
“So did you have any contact with Fethering during that time?” asked Carole.
“I spoke to Lola probably about eight.”
“About what?”
“I just told her about the date I’d got set up for the evening. The restaurant we were going to, that kind of stuff.”
“This would be your sitcom actress?”
“Yes. Lola and I always used to confide in each other about our dates…well, we did until she met Ricky. Thereafter, there wasn’t much to say on her side, but I’d still keep her up to date with whom I was seeing.”
“I thought you were cohabiting with Polly, I thought you’d been with her since before Cambridge. So what dates are you talking about?”
He looked only slightly discomfited by Jude’s words; he was more interested in his self-image as the great lover. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of his previous one, and there was pride in his voice as he said, “There were a few skirmishes with other women.”
“All of which conquests you described in detail to Lola?”
“I don’t know about ‘in detail’, but I’d keep her up to date.”
“Telling her every time that none of them were more than ‘second best’, and that she was the one for whom you would always hold a candle?”
He looked so embarrassed that Jude knew she’d hit the bull’s eye.
“So, apart from having to listen to you crowing about your latest potential conquest, did Lola say anything of interest to you?”
“Not much. She was having a difficult evening. Mabel had got an ear infection, and the dog was having puppies, and Lola was trying to get everything ready for Christmas, and her mother-in-law would soon be back being as demanding as ever and – ”
“‘Soon be back’?” Carole repeated. “Did Lola say that that Flora Le Bonnier had gone out that evening?”
“Yes,” Piers Duncton replied.
? The Shooting in the Shop ?
Forty-One
The lunch which the two women had in a pub in Grafton Way was not a relaxed occasion. Neither really noticed what they were eating – which was just as well because it wasn’t very nice. Jude had one glass of wine, Carole stuck to black coffee. And, meanwhile, they both trawled through different sections of Polly Le Bonnier’s manuscript.
They were about to enter Warren Street tube station when Carole suddenly noticed a PC World on the other side of Tottenham Court Road. Since her much-delayed introduction to computers, she had, with the fervour of a convert, become something of a devotee of PC World.
“Had an idea,” she announced. “Just going to buy something.”
¦
Flora Le Bonnier’s flat in St John’s Wood was as punctiliously maintained as the old lady herself. She had made no demur when Jude had rung, suggesting they pay her a visit, and she looked the model of elegance when she opened the door to them. But neither had the feeling she had dressed up specially. She always looked like that. Flora Le Bonnier was one of those women who didn’t possess any casual clothes. The idea that her wardrobe might contain jeans, T-shirts or jogging bottoms was as unthinkable as the idea that her upper-class accent might ever slip.
When she closed the front door, they noticed that there was an extension on the inside handle so that she could manipulate it with her crippled hands. No doubt there were other devices in the flat which had been tailored to her disability.
She ushered them into a sitting room whose dark green walls set off the numerous silver-framed photographs that they bore. All were movie stills or production photographs of Flora Le Bonnier in her greatest roles. Interestingly, none of the pictures featured anyone else. Though she had acted with many of the great theatrical names of her generation, apparently Flora had not wished for any of them to share the limelight in the gallery she had selected for display.
The only other ornaments in the room were a collection of glass walking sticks – multicoloured, twisted and intricately wrought. They, too, graced the walls between the photographs.
The room was very overheated, but neither Carole nor Jude removed her coat. Flora Le Bonnier, ever the magnanimous grand dame, gestured her two visitors to chairs and then took her place in a winged armchair not dissimilar to the one they had last seen her in at Fedingham Court House. She seemed to favour thrones. “I would offer you some tea or something, but with my hands…” She waved the incurling fingers eloquently. “There is a woman who comes every morning, helps me dress, does a few chores, prepares my lunch and a cold plate for my supper. Sadly, she is not here now, so unless you feel like making a drink for yourself in the kitchen…”
“No, thank you. We’ve just had lunch,” said Carole.
“Any more trouble from your back or neck?” asked Jude.
“No. Oh, the usual aches and pains attendant on my great age, but nothing worse, thank goodness. I’m so grateful to you for the way in which you eased the pain I had down in Sussex.”
“It was no problem.”
“And we, erm,” Carole began awkwardly, “we should offer you our condolences for the loss of your son.”
“Yes.” But the old lady did not seem unduly afflicted by grief. Her eyes were fixed in the middle distance as she said, “He was a foolish boy, dabbling with drugs. Taking drugs, like drinking too much, is a sign of indiscipline. Discipline is important in all walks of life, but particularly in the arts. Mine is a hard profession and I would not have survived in it so long if I had not had rigid self-discipline.”
“So rigid that you can control all of your emotions?” asked Jude.
“Controlling emotion is inevitably something you have to learn in the acting profession. You have to build up, as it were, a repertoire of emotions within yourself, so that you can summon up the required one for the part that you happen to be playing at any given time.”
“But you lost control of your emotions over Christmas, didn’t you?”
“I don’t understand what you mean, Jude.”
“According to Ricky and Lola, after Polly’s death you virtually cracked up. You were in a terrible state of nerves.”
“To lose a granddaughter is a powerfully traumatic experience.”
“Was it, though, for you?” asked Carole. “You hadn’t seen much of Polly since she was a child. She was no blood relation of yours. Did her death really leave that much of a hole in your life?”
“You could not possibly understand the sufferings of a grandmother if you have not been one.”
“I am one,” Carole asserted with some pride.
Jude sat forward in her chair. “Flora, you know that Polly wrote a book…”
