The Shooting in the Shop

Twenty-Two

“But Saira had no reason to lie,” protested Carole, irritated to find Jude in one of her rare nit-picking devil’s advocate moods.

“No reason that we know of.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Simply that neither of us knows Saira that well. She may have history with the Le Bonniers about which we have no idea. She could have been another of Lola’s Cambridge contemporaries…or one of Ricky’s many flings with younger women.”

“Well, the way she talked about the birth of those Dalmatian puppies, I believed every word she said.”

Jude grinned. “You’re probably right.”

“I’m sure I am.” Carole was feeling irritable. Partly she was hungry. In the panic of Gulliver’s injury and the rush to the vet’s, she’d missed lunch and the sugar from the buttered teacake she was eating in the sitting room of High Tor hadn’t yet got into her system. Also, though she would never have admitted it even to Jude, she was uncomfortably aware of Gulliver’s absence. More than that, she was actually worried about him. However minor the operation, he was having a general anaesthetic. And anaesthetics could go wrong with dogs just as they could with humans. She couldn’t wait till ten o’clock tomorrow morning when she was due to go back into Fedborough to collect him.

“So…” Jude mused, “if Saira was telling the truth…” she caught the look in Carole’s eye – “which I’m sure she was, Lola could not possibly have been in the Mercedes 4×4 near Fethering Yacht Club around eight o’clock on that Sunday evening.”

“Whereas Ricky very definitely could have been.”

“Yes, but Kath said he was with Lola. So either Kath’s lying or – ”

“From the account you gave of her conversation, I’d be disinclined to trust a single word she said.”

“Yes, all right, Carole, she was sounding extremely loopy, but there seemed to be a logic – albeit a strange one – in most of what she told me.”

“Think back to her exact words, Jude. Did Kath actually mention Lola by name?”

“No, she said she wasn’t interested in the names of Ricky’s Devil Women.”

Carole snorted. “And you describe her as someone capable of logic.”

“But she must have been talking about Lola. Kath said she was the latest Devil Woman to seduce Ricky away from her.”

“Well, maybe, given his reputation as a philanderer, he’s moved on to another Devil Woman since he’s been married to Lola.” Carole sniffed contemptuously; she’d made the suggestion as a bitter joke against the male gender. But when she thought about what she’d said…Carole’s blue eyes fixed on her friend’s brown ones and she came to the realization first. “Do you think he might have started up an affair with someone else?”

“It’s possible, I suppose. But who…?”

“I think I know,” said Carole with quiet confidence.

“Who?”

“Anna.”

“What do you base that on?”

“The way she behaved, things she said when I talked to her on the beach on Boxing Day. I didn’t really notice at the time, but she kept defending Ricky. She said he had talked to her about Polly. Somehow, the way she said it implied she talked to him quite a lot. And then when her mobile rang, she grabbed it like she was desperate for a call. And when I told her about Polly having been shot, she said that must have got Ricky very preoccupied. She seemed obscurely pleased about that…maybe because it explained why he hadn’t called her.”

Jude looked sceptical. “You’re making a few rather big leaps of logic, Carole.”

“No, I’m convinced I’m on the right track.”

“I wonder if there’s any way of confirming your thesis…” Jude tapped her chin as she tried to think of something.

“You don’t have a phone number for Kath?” asked Carole suddenly. “She’d be able to tell us who was with Ricky in the car, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes, but I don’t have a number for her.”

“Might Ted have one?”

“I doubt it. Can’t think of any reason why he should. I suppose I could ask him to alert me again next time she’s in the Crown and Anchor, but I think she’s mostly there at lunchtime, so there’s no chance till tomorrow.”

“What about contacting her at work?”

“Well, I know she does the books for Ayland’s, the boatyard. But they would shut up for the full Christmas break, wouldn’t they, Carole?”

“I don’t know. A lot of people keep their boats there, people who don’t like all the snobbery attached to the Fethering Yacht Club, so there must be someone on duty over the holiday.”

Carole found the number of Ayland’s and passed the handset to Jude. They were in luck. The call was answered by Kath herself. She seemed unsurprised by the enquiry, and confirmed that the Devil Woman she had seen with Ricky in his car at the relevant time had heavy lipstick and peroxide blond hair. Jude asked whether she knew if the two of them were having an affair, but all Kath would say was, “She’s his latest Devil Woman, the one from the shop.”

As soon as Jude switched the phone off, Carole, who had pieced the conversation together from her end, announced triumphantly, “I knew it. That Anna is far too glammed up for her age.”

“Are you suggesting that a woman who makes herself look like that deserves everything that’s coming to her?” suggested Jude mischievously.

“Yes,” said Carole, unaware of any irony. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” She rubbed her thin hands up and down against each other. “Hm…well, I know a fairly foolproof way of making sure my path crosses with Anna’s.” An expression of irritation crossed her face. “Or I would if had Gulliver with me. I’ll have to wait till he’s back from the vet’s.”

“Carole,” said Jude gently, “it is possible for a person to take a walk on Fethering Beach without a dog, you know.”

“Oh, is it?”

“Yes, I’ve done it many times myself.”

“Have you really?” said Carole, bemused by the alien concept.

When she got back to Woodside Cottage Jude found a couple of messages on her answering machine from clients who needed her services. In both cases a back problem had recurred, and in both cases Jude felt pretty confident that the relapse had the same cause. The tensions of family Christmases were reflected by increases not only in consultations with lawyers about divorce, but also in stress-related illness.

Knowing the level of neurosis in the two clients who’d left messages, Jude realized that the sessions would be long and arduous, and she would have to expend at least as much energy in listening as she did in healing.

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.