Score!

60

Gablecross was profoundly depressed. Karen had bawled him out for bullying Tab, Rupert Campbell-Black had lodged a ferocious complaint with the Chief Constable, Gerry Portland was threatening to take him off the case altogether, and he had absolutely no idea who had killed Rannaldini.

It was nearly dark. Walking towards the Valhalla car park he nearly had a fit as he saw a young boy sobbing in Rupert’s arms. Then he realized it was Flora, back for a brief appearance as Elisabetta’s bodyguard, who’d just been subjected to another short back and sides for the sake of continuity.

‘George is a ghastly bore and a pleb, darling,’ Rupert was saying, ‘and far too old for you.’

‘You’re older than Taggie, and you’re happy,’ wept Flora.

‘We’re not talking about me and I’m certainly not a pleb. George is so insanely jealous, no-one as gorgeous as you stands a chance. If he’s kneecapped old biddies in the past, he’s quite capable of doing you a mischief and putting a contract on Rannaldini.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ sobbed Flora. ‘I love him so much.’

Passing Wardrobe, Gablecross saw Rozzy Pringle getting dress shirts ready for the extras in the ball scene. Looking at the big hot iron in her hand, the scissors and pinking shears hanging from the walls and the safety-pins and needles spilling out of boxes, he thought there were plenty of murder weapons here.

‘Sergeant Gablecross,’ called Rozzy, blushing slightly, ‘you’ve been working so hard, I thought you might have forgotten your wedding anniversary on Sunday so I got a card and wrapped up some presents.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ Gablecross spoke roughly to hide the lump in his throat. ‘How much do I owe you?’

‘It’s a present — or presents.’ She laughed. ‘You’ve been so sweet to us.’

‘Not what Rupert Campbell-Black thinks.’

‘He’s a brute.’

‘You’ve saved my bacon. I had forgotten,’ said Gablecross gratefully, as he scribbled, ‘All my love, Tim,’ in a Happy Anniversary card. ‘Thanks so much. Every man should have a woman like you.’

‘I wish my husband thought so,’ sighed Rozzy.

It was a highwayman’s night, with racing black clouds and the stars making only cameo appearances, except for blazing Jupiter, still pursuing a glittering yellow half-grapefruit of a moon.

Gablecross couldn’t wait to get home to Margaret. He needed to run his latest suspicions past her and have a moan about Karen getting on his nerves. Approaching the Greenview estate, passing the waiters wearily closing up the Chinese restaurant, he reached in the glove compartment for Hermione’s CD, saw Brian Chambers’s blue Volvo coming the other way, and nearly drove into a wall. Passing his house he saw Margaret in the kitchen in her dressing-gown. She didn’t look glammed up. Maybe they’d just had sex, or she knew Brian well enough not to bother too much. Swinging the car round, Gablecross drove over to Rutminster Hall.

He knew, having got away with a solo raid on Clive, and having received a warning from Portland this afternoon, he was putting his career on the line. But, like a junkie needing a fix, he had to follow his hunch. If George Hungerford had experienced a quarter of the murderous rage he himself had just felt towards Brian Chambers… And he was not taking Karen. A tough, uncommunicative businessman would never open up in front of a woman.

Rutminster Hall lay on the other side of town, as far as possible from the Greenview estate. George wouldn’t spoil his own rolling hillside with eczema rashes of little houses, thought Gablecross savagely. No lights were on, but music was pouring so loudly out of the speakers that George didn’t hear the car coming up the drive. Only people who lived in magnificent parks could get away with playing music that loudly. Only when Gablecross banged the car door did George come racing round the side of the house.

‘Flora!’ For a second he seemed to disintegrate with disappointment, then seeing Gablecross’s ID card, he brusquely invited him in.

‘I haven’t got long.’ It was a lie; he had all eternity to long for Flora.

Gablecross knew George was a mate of the Chief Constable, so he’d better tread carefully. He was also aware that George was a major player in the world property market who had often sailed too close to the wind, but who had shown a softer side as managing director of the Rutminster Symphony Orchestra, where he had fallen in love with its youngest player, Flora Seymour.

This was the man who had ruined Gablecross’s view and made the value of his house plummet, but he couldn’t hate him because George looked so desolate. Thin, unshaven, black beneath the eyes, he hadn’t slept since his row with Flora, and was now, like Citizen Kane, dying of loneliness inside his vast ugly castle.

They sat on the terrace, George with an untouched whisky, Gablecross with a Perrier. Below them lay new-mown hay like a choppy pale grey sea. Through a gap in the trees, as if mocking them, stood a moonlit temple of Flora.

‘Nice place.’

‘Morgue without Flora.’

When asked what he had been up to on Sunday, George claimed he had stayed in to watch a video of the orchestra’s recent tour of Switzerland. They had played Britten’s piano concerto and Glazunov Three. His staff had Sunday night off, so there were no witnesses.

‘A helicopter landed in Valhalla.’

‘Wasn’t mine. Never left its hangar.’

It was no secret, said Gablecross, that George had hated Rannaldini, and had intended to slap a bypass or even a motorway through his land.

‘Bastard hated me back. Tried to take over my orchestra, furious that Flora preferred me. Should never have let her get into his clutches. Look what happened! Rannaldini cut her hair, forced her into a man’s suit and onto some dyke. No wonder she ricocheted into the arms of that Aussie poofter. Rannaldini set the whole thing up.’

George knew the world was swarming with gays, that it was cool for girls to get into passionate friendships with them. Flora had adored Campbell-Black’s son, Marcus. Gays understood women, were more sympathetic. He knew he was hamfisted. Shyness made him inarticulate.

‘In theory,’ he confessed, ‘I shouldn’t deprive the world of such a beautiful voice. In practice, I want her home where I can look after her.’

‘Same with my wife,’ agreed Gablecross. ‘All I can say is there’s a very, very unhappy young lady at Valhalla.’

‘I’ve been preoccupied,’ admitted George. ‘I owed forty million to German banks.’

Gablecross agreed it made his two-hundred-pound overdraft seem rather paltry.

‘I’m out of the woods now, but I wasn’t nice to live with. I even grumbled about her little dog — miss him like hell, he’s so clever. If I came down to breakfast in a tie, he knew I was going to the office and there was no point in getting his lead for a walk.’

‘This is Don Carlos, isn’t it?’ said Gablecross, recognizing the music as Philip launched into his great soliloquy.

George nodded. He’d got hooked on it when he was helping Flora learn her part and had identified increasingly with Philip.

But having found a jewel, would he kill someone who’d pushed her into infidelity? wondered Gablecross.

‘I’ll have that drink after all,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you call her?’

George said he’d been going to ring her on Sunday when a courier had arrived with an envelope: ‘Photographs — Do Not Bend.’ Heart — Do Not Break.

Inside had been pictures of an ecstatic Flora on the lawn at Angels’ Reach with a ridiculously handsome youth with no double chin, beer gut, or grey hairs.

‘Shouldn’t deprive her of happiness with someone younger.’

‘Baby’s a charmer but he’s very queer,’ said Gablecross gently.

‘“If you have betrayed me,”’ Philip II’s voice reverberated round the park, ‘“by Almighty God, tremble, I shall have blood.”’

‘What were you really up to on Sunday night?’ asked Gablecross.

‘I stayed at home.’

‘Come off it, Mr Hungerford. You were seen driving through Paradise around ten twenty-five.’

George looked down at the temple of Flora, no longer floodlit, as the moon crept behind a cloud.

‘I drove over to Paradise,’ he took a slug of whisky, ‘saw a light on in Rannaldini’s watch-tower. I was going to park my car in the woods above Valhalla and beat Rannaldini to a pulp. Without Flora, I already had a life sentence. But by the telephone box, around ten twenty-five, I saw this young girl, so ghostly I crossed myself. She had blood on her face and all over her dress and she carried a little dog. For a terrible moment, as she ran into my headlights like a moth, I thought it was Flora and Trevor. I just braked in time.’

Gablecross felt a lurch of excitement.

‘She wanted me to drop her on the Cotchester Road, but I took her all the way to Penscombe. The dog was dead. I wrapped it in an old tartan rug of Trevor’s — poor little thing still bled all over my car.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘Blonde, about five eight. From her profile I twigged she was Campbell-Black’s daughter. I rang the house and said I was bringing her home. She had no idea who I or anyone was. Didn’t address a word to me, except to thank me when I dropped her off at around half eleven. I waited till Rupert came out, and folded her in his arms… never felt lonelier in my life.’

‘See anything else odd on the way?’

‘Only a man in a light-coloured bloodstained suit crossing the Cotchester Road, as we drove out of Paradise, but I reckoned by then I was just seeing things.’

The helicopter that landed on Sunday night must have been Rupert’s. Christ, what a break! Gablecross knew it was unprofessional but when he’d taken George’s statement, he rang Taggie to say they’d identified the man who had brought Tabitha home and it was unlikely that either of them had murdered Rannaldini.