beach, almost nobody there,’ he replied. ‘Only a couple of markers where presumably they found the body, but the tide was in and so you couldn’t see the sand. What else was there to see?’
Miss Dimont considered this.
‘Your story, the one you wrote this morning, said “mystery death”’ she said. ‘If you’re going to be a reporter and you’re going to write about mysteries, don’t you think it’s part of your job to try to get to the bottom of them?’
‘I see what you’re getting at,’ replied Valentine, ‘in a way. But surely that’s the police’s job? We just sit back and report what they find, don’t we, and if they mess it up we tell the public how useless they are?’
He certainly has got a relative in the business, thought Miss Dimont. A lazy one.
‘Tell me, Valentine, who’s your uncle, the one who’s in newspapers?’
‘Gilbert Drury.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Dimont, wrinkling her nose. ‘The gossip columnist. That makes sense.’
‘Well,’ said Valentine, beating a hasty retreat, ‘not really my uncle. More married to a cousin of my mother’s.’
A wave of applause drowned Miss Dimont’s reply as the contestants for the title of Queen of the English Riviera 1959 were introduced one by one.
The master of ceremonies introduced his menagerie. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he boomed into the microphone, ‘you do us a very great honour in being here today to help select our next queen from this wondrous array of Devon’s beauty.’
Something in his tone implied however that he, Cyril Normandy, was the one conferring the honour, not the paying public. The hot June sunlight was gradually melting the Brylcreem which held down his thinning hair and at the same time it highlighted the dandruff sprinkled across the shoulders of his navy blazer.
‘As you know, it has fallen to Temple Regis to host these important finals this year, and let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen, the winner of today’s crown will go on to compete in Miss Great Britain in the autumn. So this is a huge stepping stone for one of these fine young ladies, on their way to fame and fortune, and, ladies and gentlemen, it will be you who is to be responsible for their future happiness!
‘Just take a very close look at all these gorgeous girls, because, ladies and gentlemen, it is your vote that counts!’
‘Are you taking notes?’ said Miss Dimont crisply from behind the dark glasses.
‘I, er …’
‘You’ll find it an enormous help as you go along to have a pencil and notebook about your person. Sort of aide-memoire,’ she added with more than a hint of acid. ‘For when you’re back at the office searching your memory for people’s names. You’ll find they come in handy.’ Maybe the hot sun was reacting badly to the lost sleep and the early-morning rum, not to mention the force nine. This was not like Miss Dimont!
The well-padded MC had a microphone in his hand now and was interviewing the girls by the pool’s edge, apparently astonished by the wisdom of their answers. But while he debriefed them on how proud they were to be an ambassador for Britain’s most-favoured county, about their ambitions to do well for themselves and the world, and, most importantly, what a thrill it was to support the town whose sash they had the honour to wear, they were thinking of the free cosmetics and underwear, the trips to London, the boys they might yet meet, and how their feet hurt.
‘Don’t seem to have the full complement,’ puzzled Valentine, looking down the flimsy programme.
‘What was going on back at the police station,’ pondered Miss Dimont, ignoring this and returning to her earlier theme, ‘about whether it was murder or misadventure?’
‘One missing. Erm, what?’
‘Inspector Topham.’
‘He was definite it was accidental.’
‘Something has to account for the fact that Sergeant Gull told you it was murder. I’ve never known him wrong.’
‘But the Inspector outranks him. It was the Inspector who went out to view the scene. So it must be the inspector who’s right.’
‘Never that simple in Temple Regis,’ murmured Miss Dimont, thinking of Dr Rudkin, the coroner, and how he always liked to sweep things under the carpet. ‘No, for the word to have got back to the sergeant that it could be murder must mean that’s what the first call back to the station said.’
‘But why were the body markers so far away from the railway embankment?’ Valentine was suddenly more interested in this conversation than he was in the girls who were parading up and down the pool edge. ‘She couldn’t have fallen, or been pushed, that far away from the railway line.’
‘There you have it—’ Miss Dimont smiled and, lifting her dark glasses, turned to face the trainee reporter ‘—in a nutshell. A mystery death. Needs looking into, wouldn’t you say?’
Valentine Waterford smiled back. He had no idea what a time he was in for.
Perched high on the cliffs at the tip of the estuary, Ransome’s Retreat boasted the most beautiful gardens in the west of England, its terraces tumbling over the rocks into apparent infinity and its borders filled with a dazzling year-round display.
Palm trees wafted. Magnolias, a century old, lined the paths between terraces and from the branches above hung heavy Angel’s Trumpets. The glasshouses were filled with ripening peaches and pineapples, and the newly shaved lawns gave off a honeyed scent which made visitors feel they had arrived at the gates of Eden.
‘Some more tea, Mr Larsson?’ ‘I’m exhausted.’
‘No more visitors today, sir,’ the manservant said soothingly. ‘All gone now.’
‘Just too tiring,’ complained the old man. ‘Debilitating. And such a bore.’
The world-famous inventor of Larsson’s Life Rejuvenator looked as if he could use a touch of his own medicine. Though the contraption had made him a rich man, keeping it before the public eye these days sapped his energy. His hand fluttered slightly as he reached for the teacup.
There was a time, before the War, when his factory could not make enough of them. The little leather-covered boxes containing a complex electrical device had been shipped all over the world. Larsson’s clients included royalty, film stars, cabinet ministers, and a wide range of society figures, especially ladies of a certain age. It was guaranteed to put a spring back in everyone’s step.
Post-war, however, when most people felt lucky just to be alive, there seemed to be less of a thirst to have one’s life rejuvenated – maybe just waking up and finding one was breathing was enough. And certainly, in these straitened times, even the rich were finding better things to do with their money.
‘No more phone calls, Lamb,’ he said. ‘I’m going to take a nap.’ Bengt Larsson – Ben to that small circle who called themselves his friends – was rich. Very. But his estate in Argentina bled money, the Cote d’Azur mansion similarly, and his two private airplanes – one in Deauville, one in Devon – cost a packet to keep going. Fame is a furnace which needs constant stoking.
Fame can also be a fickle friend: left half-hidden among the pillows on the terrace bench the great man had just vacated was a crumpled copy of the Daily Herald the dutiful Lamb had tried his best to hide at breakfast. Larsson’s face, still handsome after all these years, stared out from a page whose headline screamed:
THE LARSSON LEGACY:
DEATH, DEPRESSION, DEGRADATION
– this