The Shooting in the Shop

Forty-One

The lunch which the two women had in a pub in Grafton Way was not a relaxed occasion. Neither really noticed what they were eating – which was just as well because it wasn’t very nice. Jude had one glass of wine, Carole stuck to black coffee. And, meanwhile, they both trawled through different sections of Polly Le Bonnier’s manuscript.

They were about to enter Warren Street tube station when Carole suddenly noticed a PC World on the other side of Tottenham Court Road. Since her much-delayed introduction to computers, she had, with the fervour of a convert, become something of a devotee of PC World.

“Had an idea,” she announced. “Just going to buy something.”

Flora Le Bonnier’s flat in St John’s Wood was as punctiliously maintained as the old lady herself. She had made no demur when Jude had rung, suggesting they pay her a visit, and she looked the model of elegance when she opened the door to them. But neither had the feeling she had dressed up specially. She always looked like that. Flora Le Bonnier was one of those women who didn’t possess any casual clothes. The idea that her wardrobe might contain jeans, T-shirts or jogging bottoms was as unthinkable as the idea that her upper-class accent might ever slip.

When she closed the front door, they noticed that there was an extension on the inside handle so that she could manipulate it with her crippled hands. No doubt there were other devices in the flat which had been tailored to her disability.

She ushered them into a sitting room whose dark green walls set off the numerous silver-framed photographs that they bore. All were movie stills or production photographs of Flora Le Bonnier in her greatest roles. Interestingly, none of the pictures featured anyone else. Though she had acted with many of the great theatrical names of her generation, apparently Flora had not wished for any of them to share the limelight in the gallery she had selected for display.

The only other ornaments in the room were a collection of glass walking sticks – multicoloured, twisted and intricately wrought. They, too, graced the walls between the photographs.

The room was very overheated, but neither Carole nor Jude removed her coat. Flora Le Bonnier, ever the magnanimous grand dame, gestured her two visitors to chairs and then took her place in a winged armchair not dissimilar to the one they had last seen her in at Fedingham Court House. She seemed to favour thrones. “I would offer you some tea or something, but with my hands…” She waved the incurling fingers eloquently. “There is a woman who comes every morning, helps me dress, does a few chores, prepares my lunch and a cold plate for my supper. Sadly, she is not here now, so unless you feel like making a drink for yourself in the kitchen…”

“No, thank you. We’ve just had lunch,” said Carole.

“Any more trouble from your back or neck?” asked Jude.

“No. Oh, the usual aches and pains attendant on my great age, but nothing worse, thank goodness. I’m so grateful to you for the way in which you eased the pain I had down in Sussex.”

“It was no problem.”

“And we, erm,” Carole began awkwardly, “we should offer you our condolences for the loss of your son.”

“Yes.” But the old lady did not seem unduly afflicted by grief. Her eyes were fixed in the middle distance as she said, “He was a foolish boy, dabbling with drugs. Taking drugs, like drinking too much, is a sign of indiscipline. Discipline is important in all walks of life, but particularly in the arts. Mine is a hard profession and I would not have survived in it so long if I had not had rigid self-discipline.”

“So rigid that you can control all of your emotions?” asked Jude.

“Controlling emotion is inevitably something you have to learn in the acting profession. You have to build up, as it were, a repertoire of emotions within yourself, so that you can summon up the required one for the part that you happen to be playing at any given time.”

“But you lost control of your emotions over Christmas, didn’t you?”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Jude.”

“According to Ricky and Lola, after Polly’s death you virtually cracked up. You were in a terrible state of nerves.”

“To lose a granddaughter is a powerfully traumatic experience.”

“Was it, though, for you?” asked Carole. “You hadn’t seen much of Polly since she was a child. She was no blood relation of yours. Did her death really leave that much of a hole in your life?”

“You could not possibly understand the sufferings of a grandmother if you have not been one.”

“I am one,” Carole asserted with some pride.

Jude sat forward in her chair. “Flora, you know that Polly wrote a book…”

“I believe she mentioned that she had at some point. I didn’t take much notice of it at the time.”

“I think you know rather more about her book that that.”

“What do you mean?”

Carole took over the prosecuting role. “I think you had read at least some of Polly’s manuscript. You read the bit about her grandmother, about her pretentious grandmother, who’s an opera singer in the novel rather than an actress, and who prides herself on a family name supposed to date back to the Norman Conquest, whereas in fact the grandmother has no connection with the family whose name she stole. The name the character in the novel invented wasn’t Le Bonnier, but the story’s the same.”

There was a long silence, then Flora said in her even, beautifully modulated voice, “I am a Le Bonnier. The world knows me as a Le Bonnier. My autobiography is about being a Le Bonnier. I cannot have that taken away from me.”

“Even if it’s not true?”

The old actress turned on Carole a look of pure malevolence. “True? What do you know about truth? Most people never find real truth. I have been blessed to find it through my professional work. I have been nearer to pure truth on stage than you ever have been in your entire miserable life. People with my talent don’t have to obey the rules created by ordinary people. I am Flora Le Bonnier. That is my name. That is true.”

“But it’s not your name.”

“I cannot expect someone like you to understand.” The line was spoken with enormous dignity, and Jude felt sure Flora was quoting from some play she had once been in. That was really the trouble. The old actress could no longer distinguish between reality and the parts she had played.

“I can understand this much,” said Carole. “That you killed Polly down at Gallimaufry and then persuaded your son to torch the premises in the hope of covering up your crime.”

Flora Le Bonnier offered her clawlike hands. “I shot someone? These hands were able to hold a gun and pull its trigger? I wish that were true. I wish I were capable of shooting someone. Because then I would also be capable of doing a lot of other things which these hands will not allow me to do.”

Jude tried another tack. “Do you deny that you have read any of Polly’s book?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Do you know where there are copies of the book now?”

A sly smile crept across the old lady’s patrician features. “Polly was, I believe, carrying a copy of the manuscript in the haversack she brought down to Fedborough. It was destroyed in the fire at that ridiculous shop of Lola’s.”

“And that was the only copy?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“But in these days of computers,” said Carole, “copies of any text are ten-a-penny. The original stays on the writer’s computer.”

“It is my belief that Polly also had her laptop computer in the same haversack. That, too, was burnt beyond recognition or repair.”

“How fortunate then that I have this,” said Carole, producing the flash drive that she had just bought at PC World.

“What on earth is that?”

“A miracle of miniaturization, Flora. This tiny object, called a flash drive or a memory stick, is a wonderful device for storing data. You can put an enormous amount of text on a little thing like this. A whole book, if you want to. And that’s what Polly used this one for. The whole text of her book is retrievable from this tiny little rectangle of plastic.” As she spoke, Carole placed the flash drive casually on the table next to Flora Le Bonnier.

Then she looked glumly across to Jude. “Sorry, it looks as if we’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

“Oh?” Jude wasn’t quite sure what her neighbour was up to, but was happy to play along until an explanation arrived.

“Our clever theory about Polly having been killed by her grandmother looks a bit threadbare now, doesn’t it, Jude? With her hands in that condition, Flora wouldn’t have been capable of holding a gun, let alone pulling its trigger. And she certainly wouldn’t have been capable of sending the text message from Ricky’s phone that summoned Polly back to Gallimaufry. I’m sorry, Flora, I think we owe you an apology,” Carole concluded, standing up as she did so.

“Apology accepted,” said the old lady gracefully. “I’m afraid the shock of tragic events has a tendency to stop people from thinking straight.”

“Well, goodbye,” said Jude, also rising from her seat. She still didn’t know what Carole’s plan was; she just hoped her friend had one.

“Excuse me if I don’t see you out, but movement is getting increasingly difficult for me.”

“No, of course. That’s fine,” said Jude, looking enquiringly at Carole in hope of some elucidation of what the hell was going on.

But she got nothing. Dutifully, she led the way into the hall and reached up to open the front door. Just at that moment, Carole said, “Oh, good heavens, I forgot the memory stick!”

Both women turned back towards the sitting room. And both women saw Flora Le Bonnier’s hand reach instinctively forward to grab the memory stick. Between her fingers. Which, though their knuckles were swollen, were otherwise straight and fully functional.

“…and none of us likes losing power,” said Flora, “particularly when one has been powerful, when one has been the centre of attention. And for most of my life I had certainly been the centre of attention.” She sighed. “Anyway, the acting work just wasn’t there anymore. Enquiries to my agent were getting more and more infrequent.” Carole remembered Rupert Sonning describing the same experience – death by a thousand silent telephones.

“And I didn’t want to announce my retirement, because something might still have come up, and one must never say never. And my hands, which had once been one of my great beauties…” she stretched them out to look at them – “were getting misshapen with arthritis, and so I thought why not exaggerate that a bit more? Why not pretend I can’t use them at all? And it seemed to work.”

“You mean it got you attention?” asked Jude, not very sympathetically.

“Yes. It didn’t quite get me back centre stage – nothing was going to do that – but it did mean that people took more notice of me, felt sympathetic towards me because of my disability, helped me out. And with the autobiography written – ”

“Did you have a ghost-writer for that?”

“Yes, but it’s mostly me. I talked into tape machines at great length, then this little chap typed it all out, and I went through it and cut out all the extra stuff he’d added.”

“Personal stuff?” Carole suggested.

“Most of it was. Stuff that I didn’t want made public, anyway.”

“By the way, who was Ricky’s father?” asked Jude.

“Do you know,” said Flora Le Bonnier with a winsome smile, “I really can’t remember.” And it might even have been true.

“And do you feel any guilt about having murdered Polly?”

Flora gave Carole’s question a moment of thought before answering, “No, I really don’t. She was not a happy child. She never really recovered from her mother’s death. And, anyway, that book she had written, it was a complete betrayal of her family.”

“One could argue that it was simply telling the truth about her family.”

“One could argue that, but for me it would always be a betrayal.”

“When did you decide to kill Polly?” asked Jude.

“A couple of weeks before Christmas. Well, I didn’t decide to kill her. I decided to offer her the opportunity to destroy all copies of the book. Had she done as I requested, the girl would still be alive.” Flora Le Bonnier’s tone made it sound as if Polly’s intransigence was responsible for her own death.

“How did you come to know the book’s contents?”

“The girl actually came round here to see me. She gave me a copy. She was proud of what she’d done, she wanted me to read all the cruel things she had written about me.”

“And did you read the whole manuscript?”

“I did. Then, of course, I had that copy destroyed. And I contacted Polly to find out how manymore copies there were. But she refused to suppress the work. It was then that I thought more drastic action might be required.”

“Where did you get the gun from?” asked Carole.

“It was used in a film I made in the late fifties. Called, perhaps not surprisingly, The Lady with the Gun. One of my rare forays into the contemporary thriller. At the end of the filming I was given the gun as a souvenir. I showed it once to a close friend, who told me, to my surprise, that it was in full working order. There was rather more laxity about safety issues on film sets in those days. I kept the gun and tracked down some ammunition for it. Having it gave me a sense of security. I never knew when I might need it.”

“So you took the gun down to Fedingham Court House with you?”

“Of course.”

“And,” said Jude, “you cold-bloodedly planned to kill your own granddaughter?”

“No. And I wish you would stop calling her my ‘granddaughter’. She was my step granddaughter. Anyway, if she had destroyed the book as I requested, nothing would have happened to her.” Again she made the murder sound as though it had been caused by Polly’s unreasonable behaviour.

“Did you tell her you might want to meet before you sent the text from Ricky’s phone?”

“I had prepared her for the possibility.”

“And why did you fix to meet in Gallimaufry?” asked Carole.

“It had to be somewhere that could be burnt down. Then, when the girl’s body was found, it would be assumed by the police that she had died in the fire.”

“But it wouldn’t work like that. The police forensic examination would be bound to find the bullet in her body and the real cause of death.”

“It worked like that in The Lady with the Gun,” Flora Le Bonnier asserted.

So she had based her homicidal plan on the plot of a fifties thriller movie.

“How did you get from Fedingham Court House to Fethering?” asked Carole.

“I got Ricky to take me there. I rang him when he was in the shop with his latest bit of skirt.”

Which explained the call he had taken while he was with Anna. “How did you know about that?” asked Jude.

The old actress smiled complacently. “Ricky always tells me everything.” And only then did Carole and Jude realize the strength of the hold Flora Le Bonnier had exercised over her son.

“Was he with you when you confronted Polly?”

“No, I told him to wait outside.”

“Did he even know it was she that you were meeting in the shop?”

“No.”

“So when you told him to torch the place, he didn’t know his stepdaughter’s body was inside?”

“No.”

“Why did you do it, Flora?” asked Jude.

“Because I had to defend the Le Bonnier name. I couldn’t have lies told about my family. It would have upset my public.”

The full extent of Flora Le Bonnier’s selfishness, and the delusions which fed that selfishness, became clear. According to her priorities, even a murder was justified in the cause of maintaining the old lies about her family history. Lies which had been long discredited. Lies which, if she’d read the newspapers, she would have known scarcely anyone believed in. Flora Le Bonnier and reality had parted company a long time ago.

There was a silence in the little, overheated flat. Then Carole said, quite gently, “You realize we’ll have to tell all this to the police.”

“Yes, I suppose you will. And I will have to submit myself to the due processes of the law.” But she spoke calmly, there was even a hint of pleasure in her voice. She was, after all, being offered another role to play. And Flora Le Bonnier had always been good in courtroom dramas.