Score!

62

Beattie Johnson had successfully passed herself off as Eulalia Harrison for nearly a week. Her most pressing problem was what to pack into Sunday’s six-thousand-word spectacular for the Scorpion and what to hold back for the book she intended to rush out, to be entitled With a Thong in My Parts.

The material, based on Rannaldini’s memoirs and the dirt she had picked up in the last few days, was God — or, rather, devil — given. She would have loved more time on the piece, but Valhalla gave her the creeps, she wanted to go back to dressing like a human being, and she was terrified that when Clive discovered that out of the promised million he would only get the already paid two hundred thousand, he would come after her with a bicycle chain.

The police also had a copy of the memoirs and were such frightful gossips they might leak some of the juicier material before Beattie got it into the paper. Finally her boss, Gordon Dillon, was clamouring for copy by early tomorrow and she had to break off tonight to dine with Alpheus who, she hoped, would put icing on the more outrageous cakes.

Sighing with pleasure, Beattie scrolled down potential headlines: ‘How Fun-loving Flora Swapped Her Dreary Developer For A Tasty Tenor.’ ‘How Champion Jockey Isa Lovell Swings Both Ways.’ ‘How Dame Hermione and Alpheus Were Caught In Flagrante.’ ‘How Granny Took a Trip to Parker’s Department Store.’ ‘The Dark Secret of Rosalind Pringle’s Lost Voice.’ ‘How Lust For My Stepdaughter, Tabitha, Consumed Me.’ ‘The Woman Tristan de Montigny Loves and Why He Must Never Have Children.’ (That was a chaud pomme de terre and needed to be checked out on a trip to Paris.) ‘Why Lady Griselda Never Married.’ ‘Why Hermione’s Hubby Encouraged Me To Keep Her Happy In Bed.’ ‘Helen Campbell-Black on Tabitha the Tramp and Taggie the Thicko.’

That would put Rupert into orbit, but not half so much as Rannaldini’s favourite canard: ‘How Rupert, Posing As the Perfect Dad To Adopt Two Kids, Flew to Buenos Aires to Seduce Abigail Rosen.’

Poor saintly Taggie would be very upset.

There were darker secrets: the sado-masochistic lengths to which Rannaldini had gone to titillate his jaded palate, the attempt to murder his stepson, Marcus, during the Appleton piano competition.

‘You were rotten to your rancid core, Roberto,’ crooned Beattie, as she flipped through his photographs of anorexic Helen, Rubenesque Hermione, ravishing Tabitha, and Rannaldini himself with Tristan’s mother, Delphine, more voluptuous than any page-three girl. That was a copy of Étienne de Montigny’s painting The Snake Charmer. Who the hell had stolen the original? The Scorpion had reporters looking for it everywhere.

Beattie’s favourite was Chloe and the goat. Such a shame that her proposed caption, ‘How Public-school Girls Love Their Nannies’, was too hot even for the Scorpion, and would have to wait for the book.

Outside, in the dark, haunted garden, she could see Tristan talking to Oscar. Her one regret was that, despite sleeping down the landing from him all week, she had neither pulled nor interviewed the gorgeous director.

Her mobile rang. It was Gordon Dillon. Had she any idea who killed Rannaldini?

‘None at all, the police are being singularly inept. They think it’s some psychopath who’ll kill again.’

‘Sooner you get that copy filed the better. If you pinpoint the chief suspects, we can run a competition next week asking readers to guess the murderer.’

‘We might market a board game like Cluedo, or, “Haven’t Got a Cluedo”, in Portland’s case.’

‘You sure no-one’s rumbled you?’

‘No-one. They’re all so self-obsessed. I’m having dinner with the worst.’

‘Well, take care of yourself.’

‘I’ve never had a story like this, Gordy.’

Out of the window, she could see the dark rings of the maze and Rannaldini’s Unicorn Glade, both places where, in the old days, Rannaldini had laid her. At the centre of the former she could make out the glimmering silver figure of a pawing, snorting unicorn. Nearer, a fountain and a cascade of white roses were illuminated by huge lights.

‘“Come, Eboli.”’ Hermione’s voice soared gloriously into the darkness. ‘“The feast has but started, and I already tire of its joyful noise.”’

She’d better organize her own feast, reflected Beattie, which included gulls’ eggs, wild salmon, and raspberries and cream. ‘With this web, I will snare such a fly as Alpheus,’ murmured Beattie, as she put an ice-wrapped bottle of Dom Pérignon into the picnic basket.

She always sweated like a pig as she approached a deadline. What a relief, in her role as grotty Eulalia, that she didn’t have to bath or tart up for her date.

Alpheus’s long nose was thoroughly out of joint. Having seen a clip of him riding, Rupert Campbell-Black had pronounced he made a sack of potatoes look like Frankie Dettori and refused to let him participate in the polo shoot.

‘We can’t afford the insurance if you have a fall.’

Nor did Alpheus feel remotely compensated by the beautiful £3000 suit Griselda had hired for him to wear as a kingly spectator.

Going into the production office on Thursday night, he found it deserted except for Mikhail, four forks sticking out of a dinner jacket pocket, gabbling endearments into the telephone.

‘It will not be much longer, my darlink.’

Alpheus, who had picked up enough Russian while singing Boris, pursed his lips. Mikhail was clearly getting over Lara very quickly. Realizing he’d been clocked, Mikhail hastily hung up and clanked off. This left Alpheus to conduct a long telephonic interview with Le Monde, until he had made sure that Rozzy had departed carrying Mikhail and Baby’s dress shirts, and was able to nip into Wardrobe and appropriate his new three-thousand-pound suit.

Alpheus was pleased about his dinner with Eulalia. A double-page spread in the Sentinel would be most useful, particularly if it could be held over until September when he had a Wigmore recital and a new solo album, which would need every help to knock Rannaldini off the number-one spot.

‘You must be the handsomest man in opera. If you didn’t sing, you could make a fortune modelling,’ sighed Eulalia, putting in another roll of film. ‘So few men can carry off white suits.’

Having embarked on a rare third glass of Dom Pérignon, Alpheus was feeling romantic and manly. In the dusk at Jasmine Cottage, the dog daisies glowed like little moons. Down in the valley, tractors with headlamps were cutting Rannaldini’s hay, blotting out the din made by Hermione and Chloe.

‘Turn your head slightly, you’ve got such an imposing profile,’ went on Eulalia, ‘I’m sure when the Independent described you as wooden last year it was only in the context of a great tree sheltering the whole production.’

She was probably right, reflected Alpheus.

Eulalia, he decided, looked like a fashion model in a left-wing paper, with granny specs dominating a pale, set face, leg and armpit hair marginally longer than the hair on her head and a long floating black dress giving no advance information about the figure underneath. Pushing her on the swing earlier, he had deduced from the dark shadow between her hairy legs that she wasn’t wearing any panties.

Unfortunately, from Eulalia’s point of view, Alpheus was far more interested in analysing himself and his art and singing snatches of Don Giovanni with an engaging smile than in dishing the dirt. He had no idea who Tristan was screwing or who might have killed Rannaldini.

Having spent a further half-hour relaying how he sang his first Philip II, Alpheus leant forward, removed Eulalia’s spectacles, told her she had lovely eyes and suggested they try some of that delicious picnic to mop up the Dom Pérignon.

‘What a nurturing young woman,’ said Alpheus, selecting a gull’s egg. ‘You’ve even remembered the celery salt.’

Alas, the totally undomesticated Eulalia had not realized gulls’ eggs needed boiling, and the first one Alpheus cracked went all over his new white suit. Eulalia was unfazed.

‘Elderflower boiled with hemlock and comfrey will get egg yolk out of anything,’ she said and, next moment, had pushed Alpheus back on to the damp grass, released his cock, spread it with celery salt and had her incomparably wicked way with him.

Alpheus had never encountered such vaginal muscles: they were like the strong fingers of some pink-cheeked milkmaid. What couldn’t he do with a helpmate of such intellect, who could also cater so deliciously to his physical needs? Under those ethnic clothes and all that hair, Eulalia had a surprisingly lovely body. If she flossed and showered a bit more and wore the right clothes…

‘Oooooh, oooohooo.’ Looking up at the newly emerged stars, Alpheus felt himself ejaculate with all the splendour of the Milky Way. ‘That was tremendous,’ he said graciously.

Then Eulalia spoilt it all by asking if she was a better lay than Chloe, or Dame Hermione, or Pushy, and if he were screwing her to get his own back on Cheryl for going to bed with Rannaldini.

It is difficult to hit the roof when one is lying under a woman journalist. Who had told her such monstrous untruths? spluttered Alpheus.

‘I don’t figure the Sentinel would be interested in such sleaze.’

He had never cheated on Cheryl. Anyone who implied differently was jealous, probably Chloe, who had become overly possessive when he’d formed a working partnership with Dame Hermione.

‘Bollocks, you lying old hypocrite.’ Eulalia jumped to her feet.

In her floating black dress, her spectacles glinting evilly in the starlight, she suddenly looked like the Grand Inquisitor. Snatching up a handful of grass and wildflowers, shoving them between her legs, she ran down the mossy steps to her car.

Going inside, Alpheus discovered his lovely suit was covered in grass stains as well as egg yolk. He was not hunting for comfrey and hemlock at this hour. The grandfather clock in the hall was striking half twelve. Checking the kitchen calendar, which featured a guillemot with a fish hanging from its beak, rather like Bernard’s moustache, Alpheus realized it was now Friday, the thirteenth, and shivered.

The only answer was to burn the suit and blame its disappearance on Mikhail, who had admired it hugely. Then he remembered all the photographs Eulalia had taken. Somehow he’d got to stop her using them.