He would call her that, and really there was no need – especially on such a fine day, so full of promise.
‘Please don’t.’
‘Miss Dimont. What are you doing this morning?’
‘In court,’ said his chief reporter. ‘Do you want me to take along Mr, er, Ford?’
‘Ford? Who’s Ford?’
‘The new recruit. Wants to shorten his name for byline purposes.’
‘There’ll be no bylines round here,’ snorted the editor, ‘until he starts pulling in some stories. Anyway that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.’
Uninvited, Miss Dimont sat down opposite her employer. There was, after all, a time when he’d stood before her desk while she sat and issued instructions, but that had been long ago. It was one of life’s ironies that the War had a way of changing things for the better and the peace, for the worse. Life was peculiar that way.
‘Ben Larsson,’ said the editor. ‘You saw the piece in the national press yesterday.’
‘Well deserved. The man’s a mountebank,’ said Miss Dimont firmly. ‘A fraud. I thought they treated him with kid gloves, considering.’
‘He is – without doubt Miss Dimont, without a shadow of a doubt – the most famous resident of Temple Regis,’ hissed the editor. ‘While he remains at Ransome’s Retreat we treat him with the respect that position demands.’
Miss Dimont laughed aloud. ‘Oh yes!’ she hooted, ‘just think of the number of complaints we’ve had in the past couple of years about the Rejuvenator – how it claims to do everything, and manages to do nothing! How people have been diddled out of their money. That’s quite apart from all those sad souls who make their pilgrimage to the Retreat because they believe Larsson is somehow skippering the advance party of the Second Coming. They make Temple Regis a laughing stock.’
‘That’s not the point.’ If Rhys sought a quiet life, sheltered from controversy, he really had chosen the wrong profession, thought Miss Dimont. ‘I don’t want anything about Larsson in the paper, d’you understand, and if the Daily Herald calls again asking for more details, as they did just now, just say we are not at home to sensationalism.’
‘It was a perfectly legitimate story. They did an investigation and it proved beyond all doubt that …’
‘I know what the paper did,’ snapped Rhys. ‘I can read, Miss Dim! I just don’t want that rubbish in my pages so I called you in here – because you can stir up trouble, once you get going – to tell you to leave this one alone. No stories about Larsson in the paper, and no help to Fleet Street.’
‘They’ll come down here anyway and camp in your office, like they always do when there’s a big story.’
Her words hit home. When in the past the national press had paid a call, they invariably left the good people of Temple Regis thinking what a weak and flabby offering they had for a weekly newspaper – even if it did have Athene Madrigale as its star columnist. Rhys hated the Fleet Street pressmen with their trilby hats and big coats and lingering cologne and expense accounts taking up the desks in his newsroom, a privilege he could not deny them if he were still to call himself a newspaperman. They came like cuckoos to the nest, sucking up the nourishment, making a nuisance, and destroying the sense of calm and harmony Mr Rhys tried hard to maintain throughout the year. He really should have chosen another job, but there it was; a failed novelist doesn’t have that many career choices.
The windows in his office were wide open and you could hear the swooping seagulls mocking him outside.
‘Stay away from the Retreat and get on with what you’re supposed to be doing,’ warned the editor. ‘Hear me?’
‘This murder,’ Judy said, artfully changing tack. ‘The girl on the beach.’
‘Rr … rrrr. Accident, the police are saying. Don’t go mucking about in things. You know what people will say.’
Indeed Miss Dimont did know. On the one hand the townsfolk lapped up anything a bit unusual in their weekly newspaper, and a murder certainly made a nice change, on the other, the city fathers hated it: bad for business. If Temple Regis was to maintain its claim to being the handsomest resort in Devon, the last thing they wanted was holidaymakers thinking they might trip over a body or two on the beach. Rudyard Rhys unequivocally sided with this position.
Miss Dimont sat back and said nothing more. To a large extent Rhys had to rely on what he was given, editorially, by his staff – and if his chief reporter came up with something newsworthy, it would inevitably find its way into the paper. Newspapers are like that: they don’t want you doing things but when you do them, they’re grateful.
Only they never say so.
‘However,’ said Rhys, for he felt he had to show initiative as a leader, ‘this piece of Betty’s, about the woman and the Six Point Group.’
‘Yes, Mr Rhys?’
‘I think we can do better than that. Go and see this Miss de Mauny. For heaven’s sake, how many women do you know who fix clocks for a living?’
‘None,’ said Miss Dimont frostily. For heaven’s sake, a nice article on clock-mending when you could have a murder? And a national scandal about old Ben Larsson as well? Had he lost all sense?
Valentine was waiting when she got back to her desk. ‘I’m with you again today,’ he said shyly. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’
‘Magistrates’ court,’ said Judy, as if it were a punishment. ‘That’ll mean a notebook. And a pencil. How’s your shorthand?’ She knew he didn’t have any.
‘Erm, well …’
‘I’d get some classes if I were you. Lovely Mary will help you out.’
‘Lovely …?’
‘Runs the Signal Box Café. Used to be secretary on her father’s dairy farm.’ They walked out of the office together. ‘How went the obituary?’
‘I discover I have led a fascinating life. I hadn’t realised quite what a remarkable chap I am. And my death, such a loss to Temple Regis. “The town mourned at the sudden departure …”.’
‘You didn’t finish it?’
‘I was there till midnight. Whichever way I wrote it, it looked wrong. You start a sentence and by the time you get to the other end you’ve forgotten why you started it that way. So you undo it and start again. You put the front at the back and the back at the front. That seems to work. Then you realise that actually the story starts in the third paragraph, so you tear out the first two and are happily tapping along when you realise that paras one and two have some bearing on the new first paragraph and without the nourishment they provide to the narrative, you’re sunk.
‘So then you amalgamate all three paragraphs into one – you’ve got all the story there now. But then there’s nothing left to say. You’re supposed to write three hundred words and it’s all been said in a fraction of that.’
Well, clearly he has some linguistic ability, thought Miss Dimont, if no discernible writing talent.
‘But there’s another way of looking at it,’ went on Valentine, striding manfully forward towards the courthouse, blond hair flapping in the warm breeze. ‘I discovered that at about 11.15. You start with the family history and, as you know … ’
‘Ancient family. Lots of them. None in journalism except for the one we don’t mention.’ Miss Dimont’s recall, and sharp gift for precis, were second to none.
‘It was no good. When I wrote about them I realised nobody cares about your folks. Not sure I do myself. So after about half an hour I chucked that away and started again. Suddenly it all started