the haze she could see fishing boats sliding out to meet the incoming tide while wise old seagulls circled in the heat, lazily awaiting their opportunity.
‘This is why I am here,’ said Miss Dimont, only half to herself. ‘This is paradise.’
When compared to the fusty atmosphere of the Magistrates’ Court, she was right. The irritants which go with any seaside town – late holidaymakers fussing over the price of an ice cream, Teddy boys with nothing better to do than comb their greasy hair and hang about with intent, or the eternal scourge of bottles abandoned on the beach – these things Miss Dimont did not see. The air was still, the only sound that eternal two-part harmony of surf and gulls.
She sat quite still on a bench and dragooned the various components of her considerable intellect into focusing on the events of the past twenty-four hours.
Last night there had been the shock, still with her, of confronting one of the most famous faces in the land so close upon the moment of his death. What she saw, what she had not seen . . . what did it amount to? In the bright hot sun it was hard to believe that in the darkroom with Terry by her side, both with magnifying glasses to their noses, she could smell murder. Apart from anything else there were no signs of violence, nothing to disturb the pristine tranquillity of that Pullman coach compartment – nothing sinister in the atmosphere, nothing disturbed.
But she had seen bodies like that before, and they hadn’t died from a heart attack.
And yet her suspicions no longer seemed quite real, and so she turned instead to the question of Arthur Shrimsley. The fleeting glimpse of the note in his hand gave more than a hint that something was amiss. Miss Dimont had second sight about such things, as in when she found old Mrs Bradley’s lost diamond ring in the clothes-peg basket. It had been a magpie, she deduced. Missing for a fortnight, but Miss Dimont intuited.
She had the same feeling now.
If there was a note, it meant something – the difficulty being, what? Mr Shrimsley, as Terry crisply summarised, loved himself far too much to contemplate self-destruction. What did strike as odd was that Sergeant Hernaford appeared to have done nothing about it. Shrimsley must have fallen down the cliff a good ninety minutes before she and Terry arrived on the scene – wouldn’t he, while searching the man’s wallet to establish his identity, have plucked the note from the man’s lifeless fingers? Was police procedure so strict these days he would leave it to the detectives to pick up the paper and digest its contents? She didn’t think so, in fact if anything the opposite.
Miss Dimont closed her eyes and let the sun do its work.
‘Judy, there you are!’
Miss Dimont struggled for a moment and blinked. She had fallen asleep. There before her was Betty Featherstone, her friend and enemy – the one who was given the best stories, the one whose byline generally graced the front page of the Express. There was little animosity between the two over this – both knew that when it came to ferreting out stories, getting interviewees to confess, or even just how fast one could type or take shorthand, there was no competition. Yet Betty retained her competitive edge by doing no wrong in the eyes of Rudyard Rhys, whereas Miss Dim . . .
‘Where were you last night?’ quizzed the excitable Betty. ‘We had the devil’s own job with the Agnus Dei.’
Miss Dimont was shaken out of her somnolent meditation. ‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘I don’t know if you heard, Betty, but we had two deaths yesterday. I was quite busy with the—’
‘I know, I know,’ trilled Betty, her blonde bob dancing a tango on top of her head. ‘What a day for all of us! That planning committee went on interminably, and I almost didn’t make the—’
‘Choir practice,’ remembered Miss Dimont. ‘Lord, I forgot all about it! You see, we were late in the office and—’
‘Yes, Rudyard said you left the window open,’ said Betty accusingly. She liked to be in the right, or was it she liked Judy to be in the wrong? ‘You know it’s against regulations. He went on for quite some time about it. I told him it wasn’t my fault when he complained to me, and then Terry said—’
‘Terry could have shut it just as easily as me,’ said Miss Dimont, now thoroughly awake and feeling peppery.
‘Anyway,’ said Betty, smoothing her pink sundress, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you. The court, the Signal Box, everywhere . . . you have to come back to the office.’
‘I’ve half-a-dozen cases to cover this afternoon.’
‘Mr Rhys wants you back in the office,’ said Betty smugly. ‘Something about those dead bodies.’
The way she said ‘dead bodies’, you knew Betty had never seen one. Betty didn’t care to think about death.
‘Come on, then,’ she said. And the two set off companionably enough – for in Temple Regis it was not easy to find a friend in their line of work.
Everywhere there were still signs of the conflict whose name populated every other sentence uttered in Temple Regis. Though ‘the War’ had largely passed the town by, its effects had not. Bereaved families were still accorded a special respect, the services held around the War Memorial were well attended, the town’s British Legion club was a thriving concern – and though its brightly lit bar turned out its fair share of over-lubricated fellows on a Friday and Saturday night, they were by common consent not to be subject to the attentions of the police or the Bench.
On the beach, at the far end of the promenade, rolls of rusty barbed wire bore witness to the town’s long-ago preparations for invasion. Since the declaration of peace the gorgeous white sands had been swept again and again in case a defensive mine still lurked below the surface. Fire hydrants, their red paint peeling, dotted the pavements here and there. And military pillboxes, overgrown with buddleia and cracking at the corners, still stood on forlorn sentry duty – tired, overlooked, perceived now as an eyesore where once they had been the very bastions of liberty.
The walk back to the office took in all this, but Judy and Betty were deep into the politics of their choir – Jane Overbeck’s too-strident soprano, how Mabel Attwater came in late at the beginning of every line (‘well, dear, she is eighty-three’), why the tea was always cold when they stopped for a break. Their conductor Geraldine Brent was a short, energetic woman with eyes that burnt like blazing coals – she instilled in her flock such a sense of urgency and importance in their delivery of Gabriel Fauré’s sublime work that the composer himself would have left off his rehearsals with the cherubim and seraphim to smile down, especially upon their forthcoming performance at St Margaret’s Church.
No summons from Rudyard Rhys was so urgent that it could not wait until Judy and Betty had bought their ice-cream from John, the one-armed ‘Stop Me and Buy One’ vendor who strategically placed his tricycle-tub on the corner where the promenade ended and the town proper started – only fourpence-ha’penny a brick. Then a quick dash into the Home and Colonial Stores.
‘Three slices of ham, please.’
‘One and six, madam.’
‘Pound of sugar – can you pour it specially? You never know how long those bags have been sitting there.’
‘Got a new bag of broken biscuits. Fresh in, thruppence to you.’
And then the air filled with the sound and smell of that most glorious luxury – coffee beans being ground – a recent innovation now that rationing was over. Both women sighed over their rough blue-paper prizes with their precious contents.
Fortified by these invigorating delays they arrived at the Riviera Express in excellent spirits, but one sight of Rudyard Rhys striding down the newsroom towards them sent Betty scuttling away.
‘About time,’ rasped Rudyard. ‘I won’t ask where you’ve been,’ he added, eyeing the Home and Colonial bag.
Miss Dimont was unbowed by the glowering presence – she’d seen it too often before.