A murderer, here?’
‘I think it’s a wild goose chase, Sid. Chap from the News Chronicle with nothing better to do with his expenses sheet than get away from the office and loll around here for a few days. He could be in Cornwall, he says to me. Could be in Timbuktu, Sid!’
‘Yers.’
‘Even offered me money.’
‘They’re all bent,’ replied Sid disloyally, for Fleet Street’s finest had boosted his takings to record levels in the past couple of years.
‘Yes – but that’s not what he wants. He’s looking for something else.’
‘Yers.’
And I wish I knew what the hell it was.
The crisis meeting over the arrival of Mme Grace Dimont hadn’t gone well. Auriol Hedley had made a delicious supper of chicken fricassée, Uncle Arthur had brought in some exceptionally fine wine. Both were looking forward to the arrival of Judy, whom they loved dearly, but it was all a bit of a disaster.
Grumpy, evasive, unco-operative, the reporter was at her very worst. She arrived in a rainstorm and spent a disproportionate amount of time drying her hair and shaking out her mackintosh. She knew what was coming.
‘Here’s your Whisky Mac,’ said Auriol, all too aware what these signals meant.
‘Why you live all the way out here by the dockside I really don’t know,’ grumbled her old friend. ‘If you lived in town it’d be so much drier. So much more convenient.’
She’s looking for a fight, thought Auriol. ‘Let’s get this over with, then we can relax. Christmas – with your mother.’
The rest of the evening went badly. Auriol heard Judy’s arguments, but using the superior firepower of a brain which had launched a dozen successful wartime sorties, outgunned her friend’s objections. Arthur, under the thumb of his sister, pleaded her case with eloquence.
‘This is an ambush,’ said Judy after an hour. ‘No point in my saying no – you can’t hear me! Why not just let sleeping dogs lie? You know that if she comes down here she’ll only find fault, it’s in her nature!’
And so the arguments swirled: the widow, grieving the loss of her only child against the grown woman, still treated like a child. The old lady, alone in the wastes of East Anglia, versus the younger woman liberated by the freedom that only the English Riviera – and a distance of two hundred and fifty miles – could provide. Irritation pitted against deep contentment.
Next morning, with Judy back at work, Auriol and Arthur faced each other over a late breakfast.
‘It’s not going to work. They’ll be at each other’s throats from the get-go.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, old thing,’ said Arthur, ever the peacemaker. ‘Give ’em time and a nice Christmas lunch and I’m sure all will be well.’
‘Don’t you see? That’s just when things turn turtle – a heavy meal, several glasses of wine, and out come the recriminations!’
‘Six of one and half a dozen of the other,’ sighed Arthur. He looked wonderfully elegant in his brogues and flannels.
‘What she said last night about her mother! Really doesn’t bear repeating!’
‘You have to remember, her father locked up in a German prison camp, Grace still a young girl struggling to bring up her small child and everything else! She did her best – she just found it easier to order every aspect of Hugue’s life rather than allow her to make choices. And as a formula it worked so well she never saw any reason to change it.’
‘Those letters she sends her – nothing short of harassment!’
‘She’s getting old,’ said Arthur, smiling lazily, ‘we’re all getting old. She wants Hugue back at home, looking after the place. After all, what’s to be done with it when Grace goes?’
Auriol took off her apron and smoothed back her fine black hair. ‘Arthur, she’s fifty. Young enough to enjoy a long life ahead, old enough to know what she wants to do with it. She loves it here in Temple Regis and doesn’t want any more – she’s got her job, her cottage, her cat and that pestilential moped Herbert.’
‘No husband, though.’
‘Neither have I, Arthur – do I look the worse for it?’
‘My dear, the very opposite – if I were young again! But Huguette…’
‘Still loves my brother. Hero-worships him, even though he was a bit of a fool. Too devil-may-care, too Johnny-head-in-the air.’
‘She’s had her admirers.’
‘We all have, Arthur, our lives are what we choose them to be.’
The old boy looked at his hostess and smiled. If ever there was a woman in her prime it was Auriol – she was secretive about her life, but can never have been short of admirers.
‘So then, Grace,’ he said. ‘What are we to do?’
‘Christmas at the Grand,’ said Auriol firmly. ‘Then if there’s the need to escape, it can be done.’
‘Very well then,’ said Arthur, ‘and now I’m going to see a man about a dog. Back this evening.’
‘Glad you said that, I have work to do. Have a lovely day, Arthur!’
Betty hated it when Judy found an excuse to skip Magistrates Court. The chief reporter’s shorthand was better, her concentration sharper, her ability to sift the contents of grey interminable proceedings and find a nugget of interest somewhere in the debris, all seemed so effortless. But for Betty, it was a penance.
Every Tuesday and Thursday since time immemorial, the duty reporter from the Express put on hat and coat and trudged across Fore Street and round the corner to the pretty redbrick Edwardian building, adorned with its nicely stained glass and rash of oak panelling – the same old journey, taken so often, you wondered why there wasn’t a groove in the pavement.
But this moment of freedom – the joy of exercise and window-shopping and bumping into friends and acquaintances – was cut short once you entered the building. There, slumped in the featureless front hall, was the menu of the day: a collection of drunks, petty thieves and nuisances – men too free with their fists and women too free with their wares (though the Express studiously ignored the latter, however fruity the case). Their misdeeds would be judged and, if only Betty could stay awake, reported in print next Friday.
The editor, Mr Rhys, had a difficult battle on his hands. Often a story of great national interest would emerge from these proceedings, but any article which suggested in some way that Temple Regis had lost its moral compass was instantly strangled to death, consigned to an obscure corner of the Express somewhere below the gardening column.
This led some, his staff included, to protest that Rudyard Rhys had no right to call himself a journalist, and should have stuck to his previous career as a failed novelist. But in fairness to the bewhiskered old procrastinator, he was subject to the desire of the city fathers and especially their sovereign, the Mayor Sam Brough, to keep things clean. This was a view shared by his proprietor, who owned a lot of property in Temple Regis and didn’t wish to see its value fall through injurious headlines. If men fought in the streets, if ladies of the night beckoned you into the murky depths of Bosun’s Alley, these were matters for municipal self-regulation – not national fascination.
It made life difficult for Miss Dimont who, since her arrival fresh from secret Cold War duties a few years back, had seen journalism as a refreshing way of shedding light on a community, good or bad. In Temple Regis there’d been a number of questionable deaths – but the Coroner, Dr