Score! (45 page)

‘What’s in it for Rupert?’

‘Money, and Tabiffa sobbing her little heart out if we cut out the polo scenes. She’s persuaded all Rupe’s toff friends to appear for a crate of bubbly apiece or some-fink.’ Sexton turned the screw blithely. ‘Tab knew how much you wanted polo.’

‘We can’t have Rupert involved,’ said Tristan mutinously, ‘not after what happened with Tab and me. He must want to kill me.’

‘You wasn’t mentioned. I don’t fink he knows. You wanted your flick saved, you ungriteful bastard.’

The row was interrupted by Griselda barging in, brick red with hangover but in tearing spirits. ‘Hello, Tristan, isn’t it awful and a relief about Rannaldini? How was
The Lily in the Valley
?’

‘OK,’ said Tristan, in a surprised voice. It was as if she were asking about some event that had happened centuries ago.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ went on Griselda. ‘Hermione’s in the first set-up this evening, and her pale green cloak’s missing from Wardrobe. Her maid swears Madam didn’t take it to Milan.’

‘Since Meester Campbell-Black is bankrolling us, you better send Rannaldini’s Gulf to Paris to fetch another,’ said Tristan bitchily.

‘They’ll have to make a new one,’ protested Griselda.

‘And I don’t fink Rupert will like us squandering his dosh,’ said Sexton, in alarm.

‘You sort it out, Grizel,’ said Tristan. ‘Hermione won’t be fit to work tonight, we’ll shoot her later in the week and concentrate on Chloe, Mikhail and Baby in the maze this evening. I’d better go and see Hermione.’ He leapt up restlessly. ‘How’s Wolfie taking it?’

‘Immaculate, coping wiv everyfing,’ said Sexton admiringly. ‘Helen’s in a bad way, can’t stop crying.’

‘Probably suspects she’s been cut out of the will,’ said Meredith, protecting his curls with a pale blue umbrella as he scuttled in to discuss the evening’s sets. ‘Hi, Tristan, you missed all the fun last night. The rain’s stripped off all the rose petals in the centre of the maze. We’ll have to use potted ones. Have you met butch Sergeant Gablecross yet?’

‘All
flics
are pigs,’ said Tristan bleakly.

All over the unit, people gathered, whispering in sodden huddles. Alpheus was incensed that, owing to Hermione’s compassionate leave and the scrapping of the scenes in the Great Hall, he and Flora had been told to push off until the end of the week.

‘I’ve never known such lousy scheduling,’ he fumed. ‘I’m never working for Montigny again.’

‘He could hardly have foreseen Rannaldini’s murder,’ snapped Bernard.

‘He threatened to kill the guy on Friday night,’ snapped back Alpheus, and stalked off to grumble to Sexton about his totalled Jaguar.

‘Don Carless,’ giggled Flora.

Out of his caravan window, Tristan watched the deluge lay waste to Rannaldini’s domain. Once proud delphiniums prostrated themselves on the paths, their petals swept away by the racing muddy water. Torrential rain was bouncing a foot off the hard ground, rattling on the caravan roof like a firing squad.

Could Rannaldini really be dead? Tristan had visions of his godfather hobnobbing with Wagner and taking the heavenly choir apart. Perhaps Étienne was already introducing his old friend to the sexiest angels.

‘Can we have a word, sir?’

It was Gablecross and the ravishing Karen Needham.

‘I’m busy,’ snapped Tristan, as he dialled Oscar’s number. ‘Can you and Valentin film the bashed-down delphiniums?’

‘How was your screening?’ asked Karen, perching on the window-seat, and picking up Saturday night’s glossy brochure of
The Lily in the Valley
. ‘I think Claudine Lauzerte is the most beautiful woman in the world.’

‘I also. Now, if you’d excuse me…’

‘Could you tell us where you were last night?’ Gablecross sat down beside Karen.

‘I have no time now.’

Exhausted, shocked, obsessive or just plain arrogant, thought Gablecross. Bloody Frogs! They were just like public-school boys, not in any way superior, just assumed they were.

‘With such a high profile,’ said Karen sympathetically, ‘you must get really twitchy before a film comes out. Not just about the critics savaging it, but because the journalists get the opportunity to pick over your private life.’

Tristan looked into her kind, beautiful eyes, longing to lay his head on her trenchcoated breast and sleep for a thousand years.

‘I have to rise above the parapet,’ he confessed, ‘and geeve interview because so much money and people’s careers are involved. My father was well known in France.’

‘I loved his early paintings,’ said Karen, ‘the ones of the Garonne.’

Gablecross looked at his running mate with reluctant respect. Tristan was thawing by the second, but froze up instantly when Gablecross asked him when he had returned from Paris. ‘I drive through Channel Tunnel yesterday.’

‘At what time?’

‘Mid-afternoon.’

‘If you could let us have your ticket? Then what did you do?’

‘Always, as film is ending, I need to psych myself into next one, which will be story about Hercules. At the end, he is given poison shirt by jealous wife and, in his agony, tears up forests and builds his own funeral pyre. I need woodland location so I go to Forest of Dean and drive around for hours, thinking, and sleep in my car.’

Gablecross, if he lost a couple of stone, would make a good Hercules, thought Tristan idly. As he talked, he had been opening his post, systematically binning the letters and even a new cheque-book, and smoothing out envelopes on his blotter.

‘Can you tell us exactly where you spent the night?’ asked Gablecross.

Tristan ignored him. ‘Did you study my father’s paintings at school?’ he asked Karen, as she retrieved his letters and cheque-book from the bin.

But when she said she had, he gazed at her dumbly, unable to remember what he’d asked. Then his mobile rang.

‘’Ello,
si
?’ Having jumped on it, he immediately shoved Karen and Gablecross out of the caravan, slamming the door in their faces.

Resourceful Karen, however, who had attained A levels in French as well as English and Art, had deliberately left her notebook behind.

‘What was he saying?’ asked Gablecross, after she’d retrieved it.

‘He was talking very fast, but the general gist was that he wouldn’t say anything, and no-one had seen him arrive or leave and he’d speak to whoever the person was later.’

‘Well done,’ said Gablecross grudgingly.

Spirals of white mist drifted across the valley, like ghost priests hurrying to welcome Rannaldini to the other side. On the steps outside the house, Gablecross was assuring Wolfie that his father’s body would soon be off to the morgue, when a convoy of Fleet Water Board lorries came splashing up the drive. Instantly, like a malignant crow in her black suit, Miss Bussage swooped out of the front door down the path flanked by lavender bushes.

‘Take it away,’ she hissed at the first driver. ‘You’re too bloody late. The Maestro wanted his ponds and lake filled up, but he’s dead, so we don’t need you any more.’

‘Yes, we do,’ shouted Wolfie, following her out through the
omnia vincit amor
arch. ‘Forecast says the heatwave’s coming back. I’m head of the house now,’ he added coolly, ‘and no ponds are drying up on me.’

Then, turning to Mr Brimscombe, who was rubbing his green fingers in glee that at last someone was taking on Bussage:

‘Please show the drivers where we need the water.’

‘You’re not the head of the house,’ Bussage exploded with rage. ‘I typed his last will. He left everything to Cecilia, and her family. She was the one he loved, who got the part of Delilah. Not a penny to you or your boring mother, or that gold-digging Helen or her slut of a daughter.’

In daylight, Wolfie could see the scurfy grey roots of Bussage’s oily dark hair, her malevolent little eyes, her open pores.

‘You’re fired, you
disgusting
bitch,’ he said furiously.

‘You can’t fire me!’

‘I bloody can!’

Dialling the car pool, he ordered a driver to take Miss Bussage to her sister’s house in an hour.

‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ lisped Clive.

‘That’ll give you time to pack,’ Wolfie told her. ‘We’ll send the rest of your stuff on later.’

Reaching inside his blazer pocket, resting his cheque book on his knee, he wrote her a cheque.

‘That’s six months’ salary. Consider yourself lucky.’

‘I’ll fight you through the courts.’

‘Feel free.’

Short of chaining herself to the balustrade, there was not much Bussage could do. Returning to her office, where she had reigned supreme and, for a while, experienced true love, she took the disks of Rannaldini memoirs and envelopes containing the most salacious photographs out of a filing cabinet and locked them into her briefcase, then went down to the cottage to pack.

‘Surely my father should go in an ambulance,’ protested Wolfie, as Rannaldini’s body was carried on a stretcher across yellowing lawns to a black mortuary van.

‘It’s considered unlucky to carry a body,’ said Gablecross gently. ‘Ambulances only take the living.’

As the mortuary van doors opened, Miss Bussage came out of Valhalla. Having loaded up her bags, Clive waited, smirking, by the limo. Saying goodbye to no-one, Bussage handed her card to Gablecross. ‘I’ll be at this address, I’d like to set the record straight.’

‘I’ll be in touch.’

On the steps outside the
omnia vincit amor
gates, Baby, Flora, Granny and an ashen Wolfie watched, with mixed emotions, the black van rumbling down the drive.

‘He was charismatic, glamorous, fearless,’ began Flora slowly, ‘a brilliant musician and the greatest conductor in the world.’ Her voice broke.

Wolfie’s face wobbled for a moment, then he put an arm round Flora’s shoulders. ‘Thank you,’ he mumbled.

And instinctively Baby launched into the heartbreakingly beautiful lament which he and Alpheus had sung over Posa’s body.

A few seconds later, Granny had joined in, singing Alpheus’s part, his clear voice ringing out less powerfully than Alpheus’s but with far more feeling. ‘“I have cast this man of pride and passion into the tomb,”’ he sang.

‘You should have played Philip,’ whispered Flora taking his hand.

Bernard had tried to persuade Rozzy to join him for a late lunch, but she wanted to pray for Rannaldini in the chapel. Gablecross found Bernard tucking into a large steak,
pomme frites
and half a bottle of
rouge
in the canteen, and started grumbling about Tristan’s lack of co-operation.

‘He’s only a boy,’ protested Bernard. ‘He’s had a bloody awful life, but the last six months have been the worst. Rannaldini was a monster. Tristan doesn’t mean to be rude, but the film comes first.’

‘How long have you known him?’

‘I’ve known the family for thirty years.’

Breaking up a French loaf with those big red hands, which would have no difficulty strangling anyone, Bernard told Gablecross about being in the army with Tristan’s brother Laurent.

‘Tell me about the tennis match.’

‘Stormy.’ Bernard smiled, showing his rocking-horse teeth. ‘Women at the end of a shoot, all probably having their periods at the same time, all crying. Chloe and Gloria furious a part had gone to Rannaldini’s second wife, Lucy missing Tristan, Flora missing George — they’d had some row. Mikhail upset about his wife, Griselda and Meredith upset Rannaldini had sacked them. Alpheus cross Wolfie had smashed his Jaguar and Rannaldini wouldn’t give him another. Granville Hastings upset his boyfriend was on some troop ship. Wolfie in love with Tabitha, Simone mad about Wolfie.’

‘No-one very happy,’ said Gablecross who, without realizing it, was steadily eating Bernard’s chips. ‘Rannaldini was wearing Alpheus’s dressing-gown. Could someone have meant to kill him?’

‘Possible.’ Bernard tugged his moustache. ‘Nice guy, Alpheus, but somehow more unpopular than Rannaldini.’

‘Think any of them could have killed Rannaldini?’

‘All of them. It was the worst shoot I’ve ever been on, something had to give. Rannaldini needled Tristan crazy. Tristan adores that little madam, Tabitha. Rannaldini put the boot in there.’

‘Tell me more,’ said Gablecross.

Having averaged a couple of hours’ sleep and half a bottle of gin a day over the past week, Baby looked frightful.

‘You could drive to Rutminster on my red veins,’ he told Lucy, as she got to work with her paintbrushes and pencils, smudging, moulding, embellishing, only half listening to the interminable news bulletins and the chat between Baby and Flora, who had sought refuge in her caravan.

‘Hermione, Helen and Gloria are all seeing bereavement counsellors,’ said Flora.

‘Then why can’t I?’ grumbled Baby.

‘You loathed Rannaldini,’ chided Lucy.

‘I know. But I adore talking about myself.’

Noticing Flora was trembling again, Baby put a hand on hers.

‘It’s OK, sweetheart. Rannaldini was murdered for revenge or to stop him doing something even more unspeakable. Now he’s out of the way there’s no need to murder anyone else.’

‘There is, if someone’s still got the memoirs and the photos,’ shivered Flora.

Next moment, they were distracted by John Dunne’s voice on the wireless. ‘The music world is in shock and mourning today for Sir Roberto Rannaldini,’ he was saying. ‘We have on the line someone who worked with Sir Roberto for many years, the great diva Dame Hermione Harefield.’

‘Turn it up,’ beseeched Baby.

‘Roberto Rannaldini was a great conductor, a father figure, and the closest possible personal friend.’ Hermione’s voice throbbed with emotion. ‘He had an amazing gift for recognizing genius in the young. Nearly twenty years ago he cast me as Elisabetta in
Don Carlos
, the part I am singing at the moment. After that first night I well remember Rannaldini saying, “You have the loveliest voice I have ever heard, Dame Hermione.” No, I tell a lie, I wasn’t a dame in those days.’