The Shooting in the Shop

Thirty-Two

Carole had dropped Jude a little way up the road from the Le Bonniers’ house. She didn’t want to be seen as she delivered their babysitter. Driving back to Fethering in the Renault she was weighed down by a deep sense of frustration. She felt sure the secrets that might unlock the case lay with the inhabitants of Fedingham Court House, and she feared she was being excluded from a vital stage of the investigation.

Back at High Tor Gulliver, the eternal optimist, looked up at her in hope of a walk, but he was unlucky. His mistress didn’t seem even to see him as she sat with a coffee at the kitchen table, her brows furrowed with concentration.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have another lead to follow up. Jude’s conjecture in the car meant that the next port of call had to be Kath. The idea that Ricky’s loopy ex-wife was harbouring Old Garge in her flat might be nonsense, but all other investigative routes passed through Fedingham Court House. Jude might well be making great advances there, but, for Carole, Kath offered the only way forward.

Short of sitting in the Crown and Anchor every lunchtime on the off-chance that the woman might turn up, the only potential contact they had was through Kath’s work at Ayland’s. And was there anyone in this idle and benighted country, thought Carole, who still worked on New Year’s Day?

On the other hand, though very few people worked between Christmas and New Year, Ayland’s bookkeeper had been there on the Monday. Keen sailors would need access to the boatyard on New Year’s Day – indeed, it might be quite busy on a public holiday – so there was a reasonable chance that Kath might be on duty again. The problem was: what cover story could Carole invent to justify her enquiries? This worried her, because the only solutions she could think of involved lying, and Carole Seddon didn’t have her neighbour’s glib facility in that dark art.

Still, if it came to a choice between lying and making no further progress on the case…All she needed was the woman’s address. Carole picked up the phone.

Her luck was in, at first. The phone at Ayland’s was answered, and it was answered by a woman. We haven’t talked to each other, so she won’t recognize my voice, Carole reassured herself. A ‘Kath’ must be short for Katherine, mustn’t it? But it might not be, so safer not to take the risk. From Jude’s reports of the woman’s continuing attachment to her ex-husband, she was bound to have kept his surname. Carole took a deep breath and went into unfamiliar lying mode.

“Is that Mrs Le Bonnier?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to trouble you on a public holiday…”

“Don’t worry. As you can gather, I’m in at work.”

“Yes.” Time for the big lie (though it was something that had once been true). “I’m from the Home Office…” Time for the even bigger lie – “and I’m running a check on an asylum seeker.”

“I don’t know any asylum seekers.”

“No, I thought you probably wouldn’t, but I’m running this check because the man in question, who comes from Somalia, has given your address as where he will be staying in the UK.”

“That’s absurd. I’ve never met anyone from Somalia. How on earth would he have got my name and address?”

“From the phone book. It’s quite a common trick. They just pick a name and address in the area where they hope to settle. Some chancers got away with it a few years back, but we’re wise to them now.” Carole sighed wearily. “But we still have to run these checks. Even on public holidays.”

“Well, as I say, I have never offered shelter to an asylum seeker – from Somalia or anywhere else. Is that all you need me to say?”

“Yes, thank you. All I have to do now is confirm your address.”

“Flat two, seventy-three River Road, Fethering. I can never remember the post code.”

“Don’t worry. I can check that out to complete the paperwork. Well, thank you very much for your co-operation, Mrs Le Bonnier. And may I wish you a happy New Year.”

She’d done it! She’d lied at least as successfully as Jude would have done. Now a trip to River Road was in order.

Ignoring Gulliver’s pathetic pleas to be taken with her, Carole went into the hall to get her coat. Replacing the handset on the telephone table, she had a thought. If a fictional Somalian asylum seeker could find Kath’s address in the phonebook…

‘K Le Bonnier’ and her address were listed in the Worthing telephone directory. As she left High Tor Carole Seddon felt rather sheepish.

River Road, as its name might suggest, ran along the side of the Fether. Though defended by a highly embanked towpath, the roadway occasionally got flooded at times of heavy rain and freak tides. Acknowledging this danger, some of the houses had protective low stone barriers across their front gateways.

Carole eased the Renault into a parking space a little way away from number seventy-three, and looked across at the building. It had a thatched roof, and many layers of whitewash had smoothed the irregularities of what were almost definitely flint walls. The building was very low and Carole was struck by how cramped the two flats into which it had been divided must be. Fine, perhaps, for Kath, who was very short, but less comfortable for people of standard size.

As she had this thought, she saw the shadow of someone cross in front of one of the cottage’s tiny upstairs windows.

The question Carole hadn’t considered was, if Old Garge was in Kath’s flat, was he there of his own volition or was he a prisoner? The windows looked too small to let a grown man’s body through, so maybe he was locked in.

Only one way to find out. She got out of the Renault, wrapped her coat firmly round her, and marched across the road to the entrance of seventy-three River Road. Stepping over the flood defence, she found herself faced by two identical black doors, both with well-polished brass knockers. She raised the one belonging to Flat Two and heard the reverberations of her summons echo through the cottage.

There was a long silence, so long that she thought maybe her quarry had been given instructions to lie low. But then she heard the creaking thud of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. The door opened and Old Garge stood facing her.

“Carole, we meet again. Am I to assume that you want our conversation to pick up from when we were so rudely interrupted?”

“If that’s agreeable to you, Rupert,” she said, deciding that she’d had enough of the Old Garge business.

“That would rather depend, Carole, on the reason for your interest.”

“What do you mean?”

“I would be breaking the terms of my residence here if you were anything to do with the police.”

“I can assure you I have nothing to do with the police.”

“I was assuming that was the case, but I had to be certain.” He backed away from the small doorway, through which he could not have passed without stooping, and gestured to Carole to precede him on the way upstairs.

Going through the open door of the flat and a small hall, she found herself in a low, black-raftered room which seemed to be a shrine to Ricky Le Bonnier. The walls were covered with blown-up photographs of him, but not of the Ricky Le Bonnier of recent years. All of them dated back to the late sixties, the time when he had been married to Kath, the time of her greatest happiness, the time in which she had been stuck ever since. For the first time, as she looked around that room, Carole thought her joking reference to Miss Havisham might not be so far from the truth.

Her entrance into the room was greeted by a low growl, followed by ferocious barking from Rupert Sonning’s Jack Russell.

“Be quiet, Petrarch,” said his owner as he closed the door behind him. “I’m sorry, Carole. He doesn’t like being cooped up in here, with only Kath’s handkerchief-sized bit of garden to roam around. He misses the freedom of Fethering Beach.”

Carole’s first impression of the room had been of all the Ricky Le Bonnier memorabilia, but now she realized that Rupert Sonning had adapted Kath’s space to recreate as nearly as possible the interior of his hut. On the table next to where he had been sitting stood a pile of poetry books, on top of which an open copy of Dryden’s Poetical Works lay face-down. He’d brought his radio with him and classical music filled the room. So did the aroma from a coffee pot.

He offered her a cup, and she accepted. When they were settled down with their drinks, Rupert Sonning asked how she’d tracked him down. “Did Ricky tell you I was here? Or Kath?”

“I found you through Kath,” said Carole, congratulating herself on not quite adding to her list of lies. “Presumably it was Ricky who organized your being here?”

“Oh yes, Mr Fixit himself. He saw I was in a spot and he offered to help me out.”

“In what way were you in a spot?”

“Oh, come on, Carole, you were there when Piers came in and told me.”

She felt she was being very obtuse. “Told you what?”

“Told me that the police wanted to interview me. Well, I couldn’t be having that, obviously.”

“Because you knew too much about the murder?”

The old actor gave her a curious look before replying. “No, not because I knew too much about the murder. Because I wanted to avoid enquiries about whether I’d been living illegally in Pequod, in my beach hut.”

“What?”

“I mentioned this when we spoke before. The Fether District Council are very hot on their Fethering Beach regulations. You’re not allowed to stay in a caravan overnight in the Promenade car park, nor are you allowed to sleep overnight in a beach hut. The good folks at the Fedborough offices get very worried about the dangers of Fethering turning into a ‘shanty town’. They say there is insufficient water supply and toilet facilities for people to live in beach huts.”

“And that’s what you thought the police wanted to talk to you about?”

“Of course. Why else would they have wanted to see me?”

“They might have wanted to ask you about what you witnessed the night Gallimaufry burnt down.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Ricky said he was sure it was about my residency of Pequod. So he arranged for me to be put safely out of the way up here for a while. Just for a few days, until the police lose interest in what hours I spend in my beach hut.”

Carole’s opinion of Ricky Le Bonnier plumbed new depths. Was there any lie the man wasn’t capable of telling?

Rupert Sonning, however, didn’t share her opinion. “He’s a good man, Ricky,” he said. “Generous to a fault.”

Carole knew it was the moment for her to take a leap into the unknown. “And do you think he gets that characteristic from you?”

“From me? Why on earth do you think he should get anything from me?”

“Because,” said Carole coolly, “you are his father.”

The one reaction she hadn’t been expecting was riotous laughter, but that was what she got. Waves of hilarity shuddered through Rupert Sonning’s great frame till he was choking and incoherent. Eventually, he managed to gasp out, “His father? Where on earth did you get that idea from?”

Carole was disquieted, but not completely abashed. “You don’t deny that you worked with Flora Le Bonnier in Gainsborough films after the war?”

“No, I don’t, but the theatrical myth that all leading men sleep with all their leading ladies, though perhaps flattering, is just an invention of the gutter press. I can assure you I have never been to bed with Flora Le Bonnier. She may be one of the most beautiful women of her generation, but she’s too much like a piece of Dresden china for my taste. I have always gone for something rather earthier in my women. Dirty knickers, I’m afraid, are my thing. So Flora Le Bonnier has never ticked any boxes for me.”

“So you never even went out together?”

“Oh, we did a bit of that. For the benefit of the press.”

“What do you mean?”

“Flora and I first met at the Rank Charm School. Being trained up to become film stars. The publicity department there was always dreaming up romances for their stars. So Flora and I might be photographed leaving a restaurant together, but it was only to increase our public profiles, not because either of us had any genuine interest in the other.

“They were notorious, that publicity lot. They’d invent anything to get a few column inches about their embryonic stars. I mean, that’s where the nonsense started about Flora having a connection with the Le Bonnier family.”

“You mean there never was any truth in it?”

“No, complete fabrication from beginning to end. But she looked the part – and sounded it. Her very boring solicitor father had sent her to the right schools, so the cut-glass accent was there. She looked like an aristocrat, sounded like and aristocrat, so the Rank publicity boys thought: ‘Why not make her into an aristocrat?’”

“But people believed it?”

“The general public did, yes. In ‘the business’ nobody had any illusions but, equally, nobody cared that much either. We’d all had our past lives reshaped in the cause of publicity. If Flora Le Bonnier wanted to claim an aristocratic lineage, good luck to her.”

“I’m surprised the press didn’t expose her.”

“The press was different in those days, Carole. They were genuinely in love with the British film industry. Nothing they liked better than printing out word for word whatever press releases the publicity departments sent them. They knew it was mostly hokum, but they played along. They actually became part of the conspiracy.”

“But you’d have thought, in more recent times, when the nature of reporting has changed so much, somebody would have exposed Flora Le Bonnier’s real background.”

“Maybe.” Rupert Sonning shrugged. “But by then she had become a national treasure. And the public don’t like having their national treasures shot down in flames. Anyway, for the tabloid-reading public, Flora’s now way too old to be interesting. All they want to hear about is the doings of drugged-up girl singers or love-rat footballers.”

“So there never was a newspaper exposé of Flora?”

“There was one, actually, now I remember. Early seventies, as I recall. Done by a music journalist called Biff Carpenter. I think it was a hatchet job on Ricky Le Bonnier, actually, but it did bring in the fact that his mother’s background was completely fabricated. There was a bit of a fuss at the time, but it soon blew over. The British public liked to think of their national treasure Flora Le Bonnier as an aristocrat, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like the truth get in the way.”

Carole made a mental note to google the name of Biff Carpenter as soon as she got back to High Tor. Then she turned the conversation back to the fire at Gallimaufry. “Suppose you’d got it wrong, Rupert? Suppose it wasn’t about your residency at the beach hut that the police wanted to talk to you?”

“Ricky told me it was about my being in the beach hut.”

“But he might have been lying. Your being out of the way here might not be in order to protect you, but to protect Ricky himself.”

“But why?”

“Because, Rupert, you did see Ricky from your beach hut the night Gallimaufry burnt down, didn’t you?”

“Yes, all right, I did, but there was no way I would have told the police that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like authority.”

Carole took a risk and asked, “Is that all?”

“What do you mean?”

“I got the impression, when we last met, that you might have a particular reason for wanting to steer clear of the police.”

His pale blue eyes looked sharply into hers. “How much do you know?”

Carole wasn’t about to answer this truthfully and say, “Nothing.” She shrugged, hoping that her silence would prompt further revelations.

It did. Rupert Sonning’s gaze moved rather shamefacedly down to his battered trainers. “Last summer I had a bit of a set-to with the cops. I hadn’t done anything, but if you live my lifestyle, you open yourself up to certain accusations.”

“How do you mean?”

“As you know, I spend most of my time wandering along the beach and inevitably, during the summer, I walk past lots of families with young kids. Well, some of them don’t like that.”

“You mean they think you have designs on their children?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s exactly what I mean, Carole. The press is so full of hysteria about kids being abducted and paedophiles and…any man who goes for a walk on his own puts himself at risk of that kind of accusation.”

“So somebody did make that accusation against you?”

“Yes, some uptight Yummy Mummy whose daughters had been changing into their bathing costumes as I walked past. She called the police and made a complaint against me. So I was hauled in and…well, let’s say, they didn’t give me a very nice time.”

“Were you charged?”

“No. There was nothing they could charge me with. And that made them even more furious. Anyway, the result of that rather unpleasant experience is that I vowed never to go out of my way to co-operate with the police again.”

“Even if you were a witness to a murder?”

“Even then.” He looked up at her again, an expression of definace now on his face. “I don’t know whether you want to believe me or not – that’s up to you – but I can assure you that I have no interest in small children. The sight of a mature adult female in a bikini can still sometimes get the old juices flowing, but children – no. That has never turned me on. As I say, you don’t have to believe me.”

After a silence, Carole said, “Actually I do.” And she did.

“Anyway, it was an unpleasant experience – and one that’s characteristic of the way things are going these days. I think there are too many people around in this country trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives. What happened to the great British principle of minding your own bloody business? That seems to have gone from contemporary life. We’ve become a nation of busybodies, whistleblowers, informers, sneaks. Like all these officials who’re trying to get me out of Pequod. We’ve lost far too many basic freedoms during my lifetime – particularly since we joined the European Union. I think people should have the right to use their own property as they think fit.”

“Even to the point of burning it down?”

“In Ricky’s case, yes. His wasn’t the first and it certainly won’t be the last insurance fire in the history of the world. Gallimaufry was doing badly – hardly surprising, it was a stupid thing to set up in the first place – money was getting tight, so Ricky burnt it down.”

“Did you see him do that?”

“I saw him go in the back way carrying a can of something. Then I saw him drive away. A few minutes later I could see the flames licking upwards from the downstairs window.”

“What time would that be?”

“Soon after midnight, I think.”

“From what you say, Rupert, you don’t seem to regard lighting an insurance fire as a crime?”

“Not really. Well, if it is, it’s a victimless crime. The only people who suffer from it are some faceless bureaucrats in an insurance company.”

“You say they’re the only people who suffer. You’re forgetting that Ricky’s stepdaughter was inside the shop when it burnt down.”

“Yes, but she must have been already dead. Ricky would never have lit the fire if he’d known she was alive in there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“So who do you think killed Polly?”

“As to that, Carole,” said Rupert Sonning, “I have no idea.”