Score! by Jilly Cooper
‘What did you do during the break?’
‘Caught between Hermione and Rupert, with everyone rowing and running off on wild-ghost chase, I have ’orrible migraine and need strong pills to zap it. I go back to the house. Even more ’orrible I see Eulalia ’Arrison approach down south-wing landing. Since she arrive she hassle me for interview and plus, so I leap behind big cupboard.’
‘You should have told her you had a migraine,’ said Gablecross sardonically.
Tristan almost smiled. ‘She goes into her room. I hide in mine and take pills. They were called Imogram.’
‘You didn’t call anyone?’
‘Certainly not.’ Tristan steeled himself to look Gablecross in the eyes.
Making a note to check the lack of calls with his mobile company, Karen asked what had happened to the rest of the Imogram.
‘In my room, or maybe I put them in jeans pocket. I heard Eulalia leave room some time after one, then I must have dropped off, because a crash wake me, like medicine cupboard falling off wall. I looked at my watch, realized to my horror it was two o’clock less twenty-five minutes and race back to the set.’
‘There is evidence, intercourse took place before Beattie died. Did you give her one?’
Like James emerging from the lake, Tristan gave an exaggerated shudder: ‘It would have been easier to kill than fuck her.’
The tape ran out.
Every time there was a break, one tape was sealed, untouched, in case it was needed in court. Knowing Portland would be listening acutely to the other, Karen was relieved she wasn’t interviewing Tristan alone. Hearing his heartbreakingly husky voice, she increasingly couldn’t concentrate for wondering what he would be like in bed. Imagining that wonderful sulky mouth kissing hers, the long powerful body crushing her own: violent images. God, she must pull herself together.
His body language told her nothing. He sat very still, never pulled faces, fiddled with his hair, licked his lips or blinked. Even in that white paper boiler-suit, he looked like a hopelessly glamorous intern in a hospital soap. He had drawn a beautiful picture, turning her into a fawn, and was working on a cross-looking warthog.
‘What were you asking me?’ he drawled insolently.
Was he really so tired that he forgot a question before he could answer it, she wondered, or was he playing for time?
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 beec
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.
Lucy was speechless with admiration for the way Wolfie calmly hijacked Rannaldini’s Gulf and, ignoring furiously waving policemen and ground staff, flew off to the south-west of France.
‘I learnt to fly before I could walk,’ he explained. ‘Grisel saw us leaving so the whole unit will think we’ve sloped off for a dirty weekend.’
‘Cause a lot of gossip.’
‘Let it,’ said Wolfie cheerfully. ‘Might make Tabitha jealous.’
Valhalla had been hot, but the Midi seemed a hundred times hotter. The wind, blowing like a hair-dryer about to fuse, whipped Lucy’s curls into a frenzy.
‘Now I know how a frozen chicken feels when it’s shoved into the microwave,’ she grumbled.
Stupid from lack of sleep, she was passionately grateful for the cool efficiency with which Wolfie hired a car, located the village of Montvert and booked into its best hotel, appropriately named La Reconnaissance.
Having departed in such haste, Lucy was dismayed she hadn’t packed deodorant, a hairbrush, or base to tone down her shiny, increasingly flushed face.
‘At least we’ll get a decent dinner this evening,’ said the ever-practical Wolfie, who was consulting the menu and the wine list as she came down. ‘And there’s the château,’ he added, pointing up at the disdainful back of a large grey house nestling in woodland on top of the hill.
‘The Montigny family never forgave the villagers for burning the place down during the French Revolution,’ said Lucy, as they got back into the hired car, and she eased her bare legs gingerly on to the scorching leather seat. ‘When the family returned from exile, they pointedly built the new château facing away from the village and overlooking the Pyrenees. Oh, what a sweet dog. Can I ring Rozzy to ask if James is OK?’
‘Certainly not. She’d want to know where we were and promptly grass to her friend Gablecross. We don’t want Interpol muscling in. Anyway, we’ll be back tomorrow.’
As Wolfie swung off the main road and headed for the mountains, Lucy groped for her dark glasses to ward off the dazzling golden glare of the sunflower fields.
‘Am I too under-dressed?’ she asked nervously, glancing down at her orange T-shirt and grey shorts. ‘Hortense sounds a martinet. Tristan says she’s been having little heart-attacks for ages, growing more and more eccentric. She used to play golf with the Duke of Windsor and once smashed a Louis XIV chandelier demonstrating some iron shot. Evidently she cuts up Le Monde every morning and lays all the stories she wants to read on chairs so no-one can sit down.’
‘She’ll need a fleet of sofas to accommodate the coverage of Tristan’s arrest,’ said Wolfie.
‘Probably been kept away from her, if she’s so ill. I do hope she’ll see us. Tristan also said she was terribly mean. The estate’s next to a golf course, and she rushes out, grabs any lost balls and wraps them up for her nieces and nephews for Christmas. Tristan realized she was losing it last birthday when she sent him a blackboard with the letters of the alphabet round the frame.’
Wolfie stopped Lucy’s rattling by asking her irritably if she remembered everything Tristan had ever told her.
‘Probably.’ Lucy flushed an even more unbecoming shade of red.
Wolfie noticed the anguished way she glanced at every farm-building they passed as if she was expecting some horrific content of battery hen or veal calf.
‘Oh, no,’ she wailed, as he slowed down behind a lorry, ‘they’ve got lambs in there. I bet they haven’t been watered for yonks.’
Nearly removing the side of the hired car, as he shortened her misery by overtaking the lorry, Wolfie snapped that she’d got to toughen up.
‘You can’t suffer for every squashed earwig in this world.’
‘Hortense suffered,’ protested Lucy. ‘She claimed that the best years of her life were spent fighting for the Resistance, despite being captured and tortured by the bloody Krauts— Oh, Wolfie, I’m sorry.’
‘I’m used to it,’ said Wolfie calmly. Then, catching sight of two fat men towing trolleys and sweating in plus-fours, ‘Here’s the golf course, and there’s the château.’
To repel intruders, two hissing stone Montigny snakes were chained to the pillars on either side of the big iron gates. Ahead at the end of an avenue of limes and flanked by ancient arthritic oaks stood a grey, square house with its pale grey shutters closed against prying eyes and the afternoon sun.
The good news was that all Hortense’s greedy relations had temporarily pushed off to another family house in Brittany to celebrate the sixty-fifth birthday of Tristan’s eldest brother Alexandre, the judge. With them, leaving the coast even clearer, had gone the even greedier Dupont, who was already carrion-crowing at the prospect of a large cut of Hortense’s estate.
The bad news was that Hortense, who’d kept such iron control of her life, was now lying upstairs under a mosquito net, morphinised up to the eyeballs, recognizing no-one.
‘Yesterday, she was convinced the Bolsheviks had taken over the château,’ sighed Florence, the kind, plump housekeeper, who was almost as old as her mistress. ‘Today the Nazis have moved in, and she’s back in the Resistance. So I’m afraid you won’t be very welcome,’ she added apologetically to Wolfie.
‘But Tristan could be in prison for life,’ begged Lucy. ‘The police think he killed Rannaldini to stop him spreading some vicious tale about his parentage.’ If she hadn’t seen a flicker of fear in Florence’s faded grey eyes, Lucy might not have persisted. ‘Hortense is the only person who might know the truth,’ she went on. ‘Please let me stay in case she regains consciousness.’
Florence was wavering when there was an imperious skidding crunch in the gravel and Rupert, resplendent in a pale yellow suit and grey striped shirt, emerged from a cloud of dust and a hired Mercedes. Apparently unaffected by the heat, he made Lucy feel plainer and hotter than ever.
‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped.
‘Resisting arrest, disobeying the orders of Gablecross, casing the joint. Bonjour, Madame.’ Slipping into effortless French, Rupert turned all his charm on Florence.
Absolutely bloody typical, fumed Lucy. She’ll take one look and roll over. But fortunately it
Lucy, who was allowed to stay on for a little while, couldn’t hide a suspicion that both men were glad of an excuse to escape.
‘We’ll go back to La Reconnaissance and chivvy ambassadors,’ said Rupert, sauntering towards the Mercedes. ‘Join us for dinner if you can get away.’
‘We’ll leave everything in “your loyal hands”,’ quoted the ever-pragmatic Wolfie, clearly delighted at a chance to ingratiate himself with Tabitha’s father.
Frantic with thirst, Lucy gulped down a whole jug of orange pressé. Heat was coming in great waves through the kitchen window. Only endless sprinklers kept the garden green. Beyond, like purple shagpile, stretched fields of lavender.
Once the maid had disappeared to shop in Montvert, Florence relented and got out the family scrapbooks she’d kept since Tristan was a little boy. It wrung Lucy’s heart to see him always hovering at the edge of family groups, like an outfielder desperate not to miss a smile that miraculously Étienne might one day throw him.
At least the later scrapbooks were crowded with Tristan’s cuttings. Florence had already pasted in the marvellous reviews of The Lily in the Valley, dominated by the luminous beauty of Claudine Lauzerte.
To stop herself falling asleep, Lucy begged to be given a tour of the house. Downstairs big high rooms papered in cranberry reds, Prussian blues and deep snuff browns were the ideal setting for the Impressionist collection, acquired ahead of fashion in the late nineteenth century, and for Étienne’s great powerful oils, but not to lighten the heart of a little boy. Everywhere frayed tapestries of hunting scenes hung above cabinets lovingly painted with fruit, flowers and birds. Leggy gold tables and chairs seemed poised to race through the french windows into a park shimmering with heat-haze. You couldn’t see the mountains for dust.