your handle, anyways,’ parried Terry swiftly, and he was right – for Miss Dimont had a far more euphonious name, one she kept very quiet and for a number of good reasons.
Terry busily shifted his camera bag from one shoulder to the other. Employed by his newspaper as a trained observer, he could see before him a bespectacled woman of a certain age – heading towards fifty, surely – raffia bag slung over one shoulder, notebook flapping out of its top, with a distinctly harassed air and a permanently peppery riposte. Though she was much loved by all who knew her, Terry sometimes found it difficult to see why. It made him sigh for Doreen, the sweet young blonde newly employed on the front desk, who had difficulty remembering people’s names but was indeed an adornment to life.
Miss Dimont led the way on to Platform 1.
‘Pics first,’ said Terry.
‘No, Terry,’ countered Miss Dim. ‘You take so long there’s never time left for the interview.’
‘Picture’s worth a thousand words, they always say. How many words are you goin’ to write – two hundred?’
The same old story. In Fleet Street, always the old battle between monkeys and blunts, and even here in sweetest Devon the same old manoeuvring based on jealousy, rivalry and the belief that pictures counted more than words or, conversely, words enhanced pictures and gave them the meaning and substance they otherwise lacked.
And so this warring pair went to work, arriving on the platform just as the doors started to swing open and the holidaymakers began to alight. It was always a joyous moment, thought Miss Dimont, this happy release from confinement into sunshine, the promise of uncountable pleasures ahead. A small girl raced past, her face a picture of joy, pigtails given an extra bounce by the skip in her step.
The routine on these occasions was always the same – if a single celebrity was to be interviewed, he or she would be ushered into the first-class waiting room in order to be relieved of their innermost secrets. If more than one, the likeliest candidate would be pushed in by Terry, while Judy quickly handed the others her card, enquiring discreetly where they were staying and arranging a suitable time for their interrogation.
This manoeuvring took some skill and required a deftness of touch in which Miss Dimont excelled. On a day like today, no such juggling was required – just an invitation to old Gerald to step inside for a moment and explain away his presence in Devon’s prettiest town.
The late holiday crowds swiftly dispersed, the guard completed the task of unloading from his van the precious goods entrusted to his care – a basket of somnolent homing pigeons, another of chicks tweeting furiously, the usual assortment of brown paper parcels. Then the engine driver climbed aboard to prepare for his next destination, Exbridge.
A moment of stillness descended. A blackbird sang. Dust settled in gentle folds and the reporter and photographer looked at each other.
‘No ruddy Hennessy,’ said Terry Eagleton.
Miss Dimont screwed up her pretty features into a scowl. In her mind was the lost scoop of Church v. Law, the clerical challenge to the authority of the redoubtable Mrs March-bank. The uncomfortable explanation to Rudyard Rhys of how she had missed not one, but two stories in an afternoon – and with press day only two days away.
Mr Rhys was unforgiving about such things.
Just then, a shout was heard from the other end of Platform 1 up by the first-class carriages. A porter was waving his hands. Inarticulate shouts spewed forth from his shaking face. He appeared, for a moment, to be running on the spot. It was as if a small tornado had descended and hit the platform where he stood.
Terry had it in an instant. Without a word he launched himself down the platform, past the bewildered guard, racing towards the porter. The urgency with which he took off sprang in Miss Dimont an inner terror and the certain knowledge that she must run too – run like the wind . . .
By the time she reached the other end of the platform Terry was already on board. She could see him racing through the first-class corridor, checking each compartment, moving swiftly on. As fast as she could, she followed alongside him on the platform.
They reached the last compartment almost simultaneously, but Terry was a pace or two ahead of Judy. There, perfectly composed, immaculately clad in country tweeds, his oxblood brogues twinkling in the sunlight, sat their interviewee, Gerald Hennessy.
You did not have to be an expert to know he was dead.
You had to hand it to Terry – no Einstein he, but in an emergency as cool as ice. He was photographing the lifeless form of a famous man barely before the reality of the situation hit home. Miss Dimont watched through the carriage window, momentarily rooted to the spot, as he went about his work efficiently, quickly, dextrously. But then, as Terry switched positions to get another angle, his eye caught her immobile form.
‘Call the office,’ he snapped through the window. ‘Call the police. In that order.’
But Judy could not take her eyes off the man who so recently had graced the Picturedrome’s silver screen. His hair, now restored to a more conventional length, flopped forward across his brow. The tweed suit was immaculate. The foulard tie lay gently across what looked like a cream silk shirt, pink socks disappeared into those twinkling brogues. She had to admit that in death Gerald Hennessy, when viewed this close, looked almost more gorgeous than in life . . .
‘The phone!’ barked Terry.
Miss Dimont started, then, recovering herself, raced to the nearby telephone box, pushed four pennies urgently into the slot and dialled the news desk. To her surprise she was met with the grim tones of Rudyard Rhys himself. It was rare for the editor to answer a phone – or do anything else useful around the office, thought Miss Dimont in a fleeting aperçu.
‘Mr Rhys,’ she hicupped, ‘Mr Rhys! Gerald Hennessy . . . the . . . dead . . .’ Then she realised she had forgotten to press Button A to connect the call. That technicality righted, she repeated her message with rather more coherence, only to be greeted by a lion-like roar from her editor.
‘Rrr-rrr-rrrr . . .’
‘What’s that, Mr Rhys?’
‘Damn fellow! Damn him, damn the man. Damn damn damn!’
‘Well, Mr Rhys, I don’t really think you can speak like that. He’s . . . dead . . . Gerald Hennessy – the actor, you know – he is dead.’
‘He’s not the only one,’ bellowed Rudyard. ‘You’ll have to come away. Something more important.’
Just for the moment Miss Dim lived up to her soubriquet, her brilliant brain grinding to a halt. What did he mean? Was she missing something? What could be more important than the country’s number-one matinée idol sitting dead in a railway carriage, here in Temple Regis?
Had Rudyard Rhys done it again? The old Vicar’s Longboat Party tale all over again? Walking away from the biggest story to come the Express’s way in a decade? How typical of the man!
She glanced over her shoulder to see Terry, now out of the compartment of death and standing on the platform, talking to the porter. That’s my job, she thought, hotly. In a second she had dropped the phone and raced to Terry’s side, her flapping notebook ready to soak up every detail of the poor man’s testimony.
The extraordinary thing about death is it makes you repeat things, thought Miss Dimont calmly. You say it once, then you say it again – you go on saying it until you have run out of people to say it to. So though technically Terry had the scoop (a) he wasn’t taking notes and (b) he wasn’t going to be writing the tale so (c) the story would still be hers. In the sharply competitive world of Devon journalism, ownership of a scoop was all and everything.
‘There ’e was,’ said the porter, whose name was Mudge.