The Shooting in the Shop (19 page)

As a result, by the time she made it back to Woodside
Cottage she was totally washed out. She cooked
a self-indulgent fry-up for supper, had a couple of
glasses of wine and contemplated watching something
mindless on television before falling into bed.
But, as she reached for the remote, she noticed and
picked up the copy of
One Classy Lady
that Flora Le
Bonnier had given her.

Jude looked first at the title page. No ghost writer
was acknowledged, which possibly (though by no
means definitely) meant that Flora had written the
book herself.

She flicked through the first chapter, which made
much of Flora’s connection with the aristocratic Le
Bonnier family. Without positively stating that she
was the illegitimate daughter of the Graham Le
Bonnier who was killed in the Western Desert, the
implication was definitely there. It was also implied
that Flora had been unaware of her ancestry during
her girlhood. Only when she joined the Rank
Charm School did she become interested in her
family background, and it was then that her connection
with the Le Bonniers was proved. Though what
the nature of that proof was, the autobiography did
not specify.

Jude moved on to the pages of photographs, of
which, given the range of their subject’s career, there
were many. Jude was struck, as Carole had been
when watching
Her Wicked Heart
, by how stunningly
beautiful Flora Le Bonnier had been in her prime.
Most of the photographs were either posed studio
portraits, official production publicity shots or movie
stills. Almost none of them gave any insight into Flora
Le Bonnier’s private life.

There was just one, showing her with a two-year-old Ricky and that, too, was a highly professional
piece of work in black and white, mother and child
artfully displayed on a metal bench in some lavish
garden. That was it; nothing else of a personal nature.
There were no family album snaps, none which
might show their subject in an unguarded moment.
Having spent the morning with Flora, Jude concluded
that the actress’s life had contained very few
unguarded moments.

Moving to the index, she found a mere half-dozen
references to ‘Ricky’. None to ‘Richard’, so maybe the
child had been christened with the shortened name,
or maybe he had just always been called that. The
mentions of him in the book were all similar in tone.
Ricky was ‘a delightful child’, ‘the greatest joy that life
had brought me’, ‘a prodigiously talented musician’.
Like the photograph in the garden, there was something
posed and sanitized about the references.

Only on one occasion did what could have been
genuine emotion break through the carefully written
text. Flora Le Bonnier was about to begin a six-month
tour to Australia, playing Mrs Erlynne in
Lady Windermere’s
Fan
. She wrote:

The thought of leaving three-year-old Ricky for
such a long time stabbed through my heart like
a sliver of ice. No amount of public adulation
from antipodean audiences could make up for
the sense of bleak bereavement I felt at that
moment.

It sounded heartfelt, but the extravagance of the language
still made Jude ambivalent about the sincerity
of the sentiments expressed.

She tried to analyse what she knew about the relationship
between Ricky and his mother. The only
time she had seen them together, at her open house,
Flora had seemed almost to worship her son. But
then, when she’d talked to Kath, she’d been told:
‘Ricky was looked after by his aunt, because his
mother was always off acting all over the world.’
Given the fact that Ricky and Kath had gone to the
same village school, that aunt must have lived near to
Fethering. Jude wondered idly whether she’d been
Flora’s sister. Or indeed whether she was still alive.
And, if so, where?

She scoured the index and flicked through the
text, but could find no reference in
One Classy Lady
to Polly Le Bonnier. There was no mention of any of
Ricky’s marriages. All Jude could find in the book
which related to his adult career was the one sentence:
‘My son’s artistic talents developed in a
different way from my own, and he made a huge
success developing new talents in the heady “pop
music” scene of the late sixties and early seventies.’

More interesting, from Jude’s point of view, was
the fact that there was no mention at all of who
Ricky’s father had been. No reference, so far as a
fairly exhaustive flick through the pages of
One Classy
Lady
could establish, to any husbands or lovers in the
life of Flora Le Bonnier.

Carole Seddon woke early the following morning,
denying to herself that she was feeling the absence
of Gulliver from his usual base in front of the Aga.
She washed and dressed briskly, determined to put
into action her revolutionary plan of taking a walk on
Fethering Beach without the excuse of a dog.

The timing was, of course, pivotal and, being
Carole, she reached the Promenade at seven-twenty,
even though she knew there was no chance of Anna
appearing with her Black-Watch-clad Westie until half
past. Risking the ever-present danger of looking like
a sad old pensioner, Carole sat in one of the seafront
shelters and waited.

It was a cold day, the weather seeming to reflect
the general feeling that everyone had had enough of
Christmas jollity, and couldn’t wait to get back to the
normality of the forthcoming year.

Seven-thirty came and went, and there was no
sign of Anna or her dog. Carole recognized that not
everyone was such a fetishist about punctuality as
she was and gave the woman the benefit of the doubt.
She sat waiting in the shelter, willing herself not to
look lonely and decrepit, wishing she had brought
the
Times
crossword with her, both to while away the
time and also to give the illusion of purpose.

She let eight o’clock pass, but by a quarter past
reconciled herself to the fact that she wasn’t going to
see Anna that morning. Her first thought was that
maybe the woman realized she and Jude were on to
her and had taken evasive action, but she soon
realized what a ridiculous idea that was. Anna was
probably unaware of any interest they might have in
her and had changed her morning routine for reasons
that they could not begin to guess at.

Carole stood up and stretched her frozen limbs,
about to go straight back to High Tor. It would soon
be time to get in the Renault and drive to Fedborough.
The thought of having Gulliver back brought
her a disproportionally warm glow which she tried
unsuccessfully to suppress.

But as she started back along the Promenade, she
saw coming towards her a woman with a dog. Not
Anna, the dog-walker she had been hoping to meet,
but a dog-walker nonetheless. The words of Saira
Sherjan came back to her. ‘I know for a fact that dog-walkers
constitute one of the most efficient gossip
grapevines in the world. Members of the Fethering
Beach Dog-walking Mafia exchange all kinds of
secrets on their early morning walks.’ Carole changed
direction and advanced towards the woman.

Her luck was in. The dog the woman was walking
– and had just let off the lead – was a Labrador.
Younger than Gulliver, but definitely a Labrador.
Conversational opening gambits did not come better
gift-wrapped than this.

‘Good morning. She’s a lovely girl, isn’t she?’

Nothing could go wrong that morning – Carole
had got the gender right. ‘Yes, she’s adorable,’ said the
woman. ‘But where’s yours?’

So much for Carole’s image of herself surrounded
in a carapace of anonymity. Someone had noticed
that she was in the habit of taking Gulliver on to
Fethering Beach for a walk every day for the last
God-knew-how-many years. Now she looked at the
woman, Carole realized that they had passed most
mornings with no more than a ‘Fethering nod’.

‘Oh, I’m afraid he’s had an accident.’ And with
no difficulty at all, Carole found herself relating
Gulliver’s encounter with the rusty staple, and his
hasty removal to the vet’s in Fedborough.

‘Saira looked after him, did she? Well, he’s in good
hands there. She’s easily the most sympathetic in that
surgery. She sorted out Kerry when she had a growth
on her leg.’

‘My name’s Carole Seddon, by the way.’

‘Oh, yes, I know.’ Another proof that it was impossible
to be anonymous in a village the size of
Fethering.

‘But I’m afraid I don’t know yours.’

‘Ruby. Ruby Tallis. Me and my husband Derek live
up on Sea Road.’

‘Oh, I’m in the High Street.’

‘Yes. High Tor, isn’t it?’

To Carole’s surprise, the fact that everything about
her seemed to be public property did not feel like an
invasion of privacy. On the contrary, it felt rather
comforting, almost as though she were something
she never thought she would be – ‘part of the community’.
In no time at all, she and Ruby were having
quite a voluble conversation about canine ailments
and the vagaries of vets. Neither woman suggested
sitting down. While Kerry the Labrador snuffled
amongst the smells of the shoreline, they just stood
and chatted. Yes, chatted. Carole Seddon was actually
chatting
.

Moving the subject on from vets to recent events
at Gallimaufry required no effort at all. Like everyone
else in Fethering, Ruby Tallis had plenty of views and
opinions about the death of Polly Le Bonnier. Or it
might be more accurate to say that her husband
Derek had plenty of views and opinions about the
death of Polly Le Bonnier, and Ruby just parroted
them.

‘Derek reckons it was a burglary gone wrong.’

‘Oh, does he?’

‘Yes, he reckons it was probably a drug addict,
keen to get some money for his next fix, and the girl
surprised him in the shop and he shot her and then
set the place on fire to cover his tracks.’

‘But why would Polly have gone there?’

Clearly this was not a subject on which Derek had
an opinion. His wife reasserted that he thought the
killing had been done by a drug addict, ‘keen to get
some money for his next fix’. She seemed to relish
saying the phrase.

‘Do you know the Le Bonniers?’ asked Carole.

No, neither Ruby nor Derek actually knew the
family, but that didn’t stop her husband from having
opinions about them. ‘Derek wouldn’t be surprised if
that Ricky didn’t have something to do with it too.’

‘To do with the murder?’

‘Probably not that. But something to do with the
burglary.’

‘What sort of something?’

Ruby Tallis looked around slyly, as if afraid of
being overheard in the empty expanses of Fethering
Beach. Then, touching a gloved finger to her nose,
she whispered, ‘Drugs.’

‘Oh?’

‘That Ricky Le Bonnier works in pop music,’ she
confided, ‘and Derek says that everyone who works
in pop music has a connection to drugs. Hard drugs.’
She nodded sagely to emphasize the point.

‘So, even if he had taken drugs, what would Ricky
Le Bonnier’s connection be to the burglary at his
shop?’

‘Ah well, you see, Derek has this theory . . . he
thinks the drug addict who broke into the shop was
someone Ricky Le Bonnier knew . . . someone he
used to work with in a pop group, and they used to
take drugs together. Derek thinks the man was probably
a groupie.’ Seeing Carole’s curious expression,
Ruby corrected herself. ‘A
roadie
. That’s what Derek
thinks. And he thinks that Ricky Le Bonnier may
have set up this roadie to rob the shop and set fire to
it, because it was doing bad business and he wanted
to claim on the insurance.’

At last, a part of the Tallis theory which Carole
and Jude had also considered.

‘Anyway, that’s what Derek thinks, and he thinks
it was just bad luck that Ricky Le Bonnier’s daughter
was in the shop when the roadie broke in – otherwise
she’d still be alive. And Derek reckons Ricky Le
Bonnier must be feeling absolutely terrible, because,
in a way, it was his fault that his daughter got killed.’

Well . . . Carole couldn’t have asked for a better
demonstration of Saira Sherjan’s concept of the gossip
grapevine amongst dog-walkers. She wondered
whether everything that happened in Fethering was
subjected to the same conjectural analysis – and she
rather feared that it might be. What theories had been
propounded on Fethering Beach about herself and
Jude she didn’t dare to contemplate. No doubt her
Home Office background had been transmogrified
into working as a spy in the Eastern Bloc, Jude’s
theatrical past had converted her into a
Playboy
centrefold, and the two of them were universally
recognized as Fethering’s premier lesbian couple.
Carole would have found the idea funny if she hadn’t
suspected that comparable fanciful elaborations were
actually current in the village.

She felt a bit ungenerous when she asked, ‘And
does Derek have any proof to back up his theories?’

‘Not proof as such,’ Ruby confided knowingly, ‘but
Derek does have a very profound understanding of
human nature.’

Yes, I bet he does, thought Carole. ‘And you yourself
didn’t see anything odd, did you?’

‘Odd? When?’

‘Well, I was just thinking that you walk Kerry
every morning along the beach, don’t you?’ Ruby
admitted that she did. ‘So you would have walked
along here the morning after the fire at Gallimaufry
. . . ?’

‘Certainly. There were still flames at the back of
the building when I walked Kerry that morning.’

‘But you didn’t see anything or anyone doing anything
odd?’

‘What, like a drug addict running from the building
with a gun and throwing it into the sea –
something like that?’

‘Yes,’ said Carole eagerly.

‘No,’ Ruby replied. ‘I didn’t see anything like that.’

‘And have you asked other people in—’ Carole just
stopped herself from saying ‘the dog-walking Mafia’ –
‘any other dog-walkers . . . you know, if they saw anything
unusual?’