Score!

68

At mid-morning on Saturday, Wolfie popped into Rutminster Police Station, bringing Tristan a running order for Monday’s polo shoot and a sprig of honeysuckle from Lucy.

Hearing, during a break in interrogations, that he’d been in, Gablecross had huge delight in ordering Fanshawe and Debbie Miller to drive out to Valhalla and check a few of Tristan’s statements with Wolfie.

Rolling up at Valhalla, however, a fuming Fanshawe and Debbie were greeted by Rozzy, devastated about Tristan’s arrest, and begging them to take a posy of gentians, a picnic of quiche, chicken breasts, peaches and a Thermos of ‘proper’ coffee back to the station for his lunch.

‘I can’t get away, Sergeant Fanshawe, I have to dog-sit for Lucy.’

James, looking unbelievably boot-faced, was taking up Wardrobe’s entire sofa.

‘Where’s Lucy gone?’ demanded Fanshawe.

‘Away with Wolfie,’ said Rozzy, in a worried voice. ‘She wouldn’t tell me where but she’s taken her passport.’

‘Everyone on the unit has been ordered not to leave the country,’ said Fanshawe, in outrage.

Even a furious Oscar and Valentin had had to forgo their Bastille Day jaunt.

‘I begged her,’ wailed Rozzy. ‘Oh, when are they going to let poor Tristan out?’

‘When he starts levelling with us,’ said Fanshawe. ‘You’ve no idea where Lucy’s gone?’

‘To have a nice break with that yummy Wolfgang,’ giggled Debbie. ‘Gablecross will be choked — he thinks she’s gorgeous.’

Outside Rutminster Police Station, television vans and the cars of the press, desperate for news, clogged up the weekend traffic like autumn leaves. Time had ceased to have any meaning. Tapes and breaks came and went. Antagonism intensified between Gablecross and Tristan, who had drawn a whole family of bullying warthogs. In the airless room the shadows deepened beneath all their eyes. Gerald Portland, still listening to the tapes, was stepping up the pressure.

‘Show him his dad’s letter, ask him about the Montigny. Tell him we can’t find any migraine pills or memos about pistols in anyone’s out-tray, and if that doesn’t work, tell him they’ve trashed his flat in Paris and found some interesting stuff.’

Karen switched on the tape again.

‘Have you seen this painting before?’ She waved the photograph of The Snake Charmer.

‘Just beautiful.’ Gablecross examined Delphine’s naked body.

‘Give me that!’ howled Tristan. But as he dived across the desk Gablecross’s pudgy fingers closed over the photograph. ‘Not so fast, baby boy. Betty and Sally found the original under your mattress on Thursday.’

‘For Christ’s sake, what more lies are they going to tell? I never saw that painting except in Rannaldini’s watch-tower. In film we are making, Philip search for letters under Elisabetta’s mattress. If I was going to steal painting, I would hide it somewhere more subtle.’

‘Rannaldini was going to publish the photo. It says “Chapter Four, Myself When Young” on the back. Wonder if he gave her one. You didn’t want a porn pickie of your mum doing the rounds, did you?’

‘Of course I fucking didn’t,’ shouted Tristan, draining a paper cup of black coffee as if it were whisky, and fumbling for a Gauloise.

‘Tabitha Campbell-Black was distraught when you were arrested. Why did you blow her out the morning after you got off with her? Was this anything to do with it?’

As Gablecross threw down a copy of Étienne’s letter with the crest of the chained serpent, Tristan let out a hiss far deeper and more venomously fearful than any snake.

‘Rannaldini disturbed the Montigny snake, didn’t he?’ persisted Gablecross. ‘Was that why you went looking for him? There were signet-ring marks on his neck.’

‘I told you I lost it ages ago.’

‘D’you know what this is?’

‘A letter from my father to Rannaldini.’

‘But was he your father? What does he mean about your being the product of an “obscene incestuous union”?’ Gablecross lingered brutally on the words. ‘And saying as a result he could never love you.’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Shaking violently, Tristan stubbed out his hardly smoked cigarette. His face was fog-grey, his eyes darting with terror. Karen longed to take his hand.

‘Was that why you cut Auntie Hortense’s party — because you weren’t a Montigny any more?’

‘No!’

‘Was your mad granddad your father? Was that the secret Rannaldini had discovered?’

‘Who told you that?’ Tristan went berserk, lunging across the table, catching Gablecross by the shoulders, shaking him. ‘Who fucking told you?’

The duty officer would have intervened at this juncture if he hadn’t gone flat on his back, slipping on Winnie’s over-polished floor outside the interview room.

‘Stop it,’ shouted Karen. ‘She didn’t mean to blurt it out.’

‘She?’ For a second Tristan froze, then releasing Gablecross’s shoulders, he turned on Karen. ‘Which she?’

‘We don’t reveal our sources,’ she mumbled, jolted by the horror and incredulity in Tristan’s eyes.

‘It was Lucy. She was the only one who knew.’

‘She was only trying to explain why you were so traumatized,’ stammered Karen.

‘You stupid bitch,’ sighed Gablecross.

Tristan slumped on his chair. ‘How could Lucy?’ he repeated dully.

It was as though Horatio had betrayed Hamlet, or Posa his beloved friend Carlos. After that the fight went out of Tristan.

‘Rannaldini showed me the letter,’ he told Gablecross, ‘and I lose everything. I look at great beech trees posed like divers on edge of Cotswold bank. I ask myself how they stand so towering and beautiful they can hold up the sky. It is because their roots like steel pipes go deep into the earth. Rannaldini sawed through my roots that night.’

Putting his head in his hands, he groaned. ‘He wreck my picture, he wreck any hope with Tabitha, he want to publish disgusting painting of my mother. For God’s sake, I thought he loved me.’

Karen fought back the tears.

‘He was jealous,’ said Gablecross gently, echoing the words he had said to Wolfie. ‘He treated you appallingly.’

Glancing up in anguish, Tristan noticed for the first time the understanding and compassion in Gablecross’s eyes: the ‘long-headed legend’.

‘You were doing a public service, lad, ridding the world of Rannaldini,’ went on Gablecross, almost caressingly.

There was a long pause, just the faint whisper of the turning tapes and the sound of a late-night drunk kicking a beer can along a pavement. Then Tristan realized he was being set up.

‘I am not that public-spirited,’ he said flatly, and continued to deny everything.

‘If you’re not prepared to help yourself…’ snarled Gablecross.

As his cell door banged and he was left alone with the script of Hercule, which he would never now make, Tristan was kneed in the groin by desolation. He thought of Aunt Hortense gasping her last, of sunflowers, cicadas, frogs and tractors, their lights going back and forth like low shooting stars in the night. He’d never see her or France again.

The honeysuckle was filling his cell with sweetness, like Lucy’s slow, shy, warm smile. Since he had been in prison, the thought of her had kept drifting into his brain like an aria. Now he couldn’t trust her any more. With a sob of despair, he picked up the sprig of honeysuckle and ripped it to pieces.