the road to the entrance of seventy-three River Road. Stepping over the flood defence, she found herself faced by two identical black doors, both with well-polished brass knockers. She raised the one belonging to Flat Two and heard the reverberations of her summons echo through the cottage.
There was a long silence, so long that she thought maybe her quarry had been given instructions to lie low. But then she heard the creaking thud of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. The door opened and Old Garge stood facing her.
“Carole, we meet again. Am I to assume that you want our conversation to pick up from when we were so rudely interrupted?”
“If that’s agreeable to you, Rupert,” she said, deciding that she’d had enough of the Old Garge business.
“That would rather depend, Carole, on the reason for your interest.”
“What do you mean?”
“I would be breaking the terms of my residence here if you were anything to do with the police.”
“I can assure you I have nothing to do with the police.”
“I was assuming that was the case, but I had to be certain.” He backed away from the small doorway, through which he could not have passed without stooping, and gestured to Carole to precede him on the way upstairs.
Going through the open door of the flat and a small hall, she found herself in a low, black-raftered room which seemed to be a shrine to Ricky Le Bonnier. The walls were covered with blown-up photographs of him, but not of the Ricky Le Bonnier of recent years. All of them dated back to the late sixties, the time when he had been married to Kath, the time of her greatest happiness, the time in which she had been stuck ever since. For the first time, as she looked around that room, Carole thought her joking reference to Miss Havisham might not be so far from the truth.
Her entrance into the room was greeted by a low growl, followed by ferocious barking from Rupert Sonning’s Jack Russell.
“Be quiet, Petrarch,” said his owner as he closed the door behind him. “I’m sorry, Carole. He doesn’t like being cooped up in here, with only Kath’s handkerchief-sized bit of garden to roam around. He misses the freedom of Fethering Beach.”
Carole’s first impression of the room had been of all the Ricky Le Bonnier memorabilia, but now she realized that Rupert Sonning had adapted Kath’s space to recreate as nearly as possible the interior of his hut. On the table next to where he had been sitting stood a pile of poetry books, on top of which an open copy of Dryden’s
He offered her a cup, and she accepted. When they were settled down with their drinks, Rupert Sonning asked how she’d tracked him down. “Did Ricky tell you I was here? Or Kath?”
“I found you through Kath,” said Carole, congratulating herself on not quite adding to her list of lies. “Presumably it was Ricky who organized your being here?”
“Oh yes, Mr Fixit himself. He saw I was in a spot and he offered to help me out.”
“In what way were you in a spot?”
“Oh, come on, Carole, you were there when Piers came in and told me.”
She felt she was being very obtuse. “Told you what?”
“Told me that the police wanted to interview me. Well, I couldn’t be having that, obviously.”
“Because you knew too much about the murder?”
The old actor gave her a curious look before replying. “No, not because I knew too much about the murder. Because I wanted to avoid enquiries about whether I’d been living illegally in Pequod, in my beach hut.”
“What?”
“I mentioned this when we spoke before. The Fether District Council are very hot on their Fethering Beach regulations. You’re not allowed to stay in a caravan overnight in the Promenade car park, nor are you allowed to sleep overnight in a beach hut. The good folks at the Fedborough offices get very worried about the dangers of Fethering turning into a ‘shanty town’. They say there is insufficient water supply and toilet facilities for people to live in beach huts.”
“And that’s what you thought the police wanted to talk to you about?”
“Of course. Why else would they have wanted to see me?”
“They might have wanted to ask you about what you witnessed the night Gallimaufry burnt down.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Ricky said he was sure it was about my residency of Pequod. So he arranged for me to be put safely out of the way up here for a while. Just for a few days, until the police lose interest in what hours I spend in my beach hut.”
Carole’s opinion of Ricky Le Bonnier plumbed new depths. Was there any lie the man wasn’t capable of telling?
Rupert Sonning, however, didn’t share her opinion. “He’s a good man, Ricky,” he said. “Generous to a fault.”
Carole knew it was the moment for her to take a leap into the unknown. “And do you think he gets that characteristic from you?”
“From me? Why on earth do you think he should get anything from me?”
“Because,” said Carole coolly, “you are his father.”
The one reaction she hadn’t been expecting was riotous laughter, but that was what she got. Waves of hilarity shuddered through Rupert Sonning’s great frame till he was choking and incoherent. Eventually, he managed to gasp out, “His father? Where on earth did you get that idea from?”
Carole was disquieted, but not completely abashed. “You don’t deny that you worked with Flora Le Bonnier in Gainsborough films after the war?”
“No, I don’t, but the theatrical myth that all leading men sleep with all their leading ladies, though perhaps flattering, is just an invention of the gutter press. I can assure you I have never been to bed with Flora Le Bonnier. She may be one of the most beautiful women of her generation, but she’s too much like a piece of Dresden china for my taste. I have always gone for something rather earthier in my women. Dirty knickers, I’m afraid, are my thing. So Flora Le Bonnier has never ticked any boxes for me.”
“So you never even went out together?”
“Oh, we did a bit of that. For the benefit of the press.”
“What do you mean?”
“Flora and I first met at the Rank Charm School. Being trained up to become film stars. The publicity department there was always dreaming up romances for their stars. So Flora and I might be photographed leaving a restaurant together, but it was only to increase our public profiles, not because either of us had any genuine interest in the other.
“They were notorious, that publicity lot. They’d invent anything to get a few column inches about their embryonic stars. I mean, that’s where the nonsense started about Flora having a connection with the Le Bonnier family.”
“You mean there never was any truth in it?”
“No, complete fabrication from beginning to end. But she looked the part – and sounded it. Her very boring solicitor father had sent her to the right schools, so the cut-glass accent was there. She looked like an aristocrat, sounded like and aristocrat, so the Rank publicity boys thought: ‘Why not make her into an aristocrat?’”
“But people believed it?”
“The general public did, yes. In ‘the business’ nobody had any illusions but, equally, nobody cared that much either. We’d all had our past lives reshaped in the cause of publicity. If Flora Le Bonnier wanted to claim an aristocratic lineage, good luck to her.”
“I’m surprised the press didn’t expose her.”
“The press was different in those days, Carole. They were genuinely in love with the British film industry. Nothing they liked better than printing out word for word whatever press releases the publicity departments sent them. They knew it was mostly hokum, but they played along. They actually became part of the conspiracy.”
“But you’d have thought, in more recent times, when the nature of reporting has changed so much, somebody would have exposed Flora Le Bonnier’s real background.”
“Maybe.” Rupert Sonning shrugged. “But by then she had become a national treasure. And the public don’t
