‘Oh, Christ,’ he groaned, slumping on the sofa, his head in his hands.
‘She led him on,’ said Helen spitefully, ‘even at our wedding. Look!’ She thrust a photograph, which Wolfie had so often admired of late, of a sixteen-year-old Tab smiling into Rannaldini’s admiring eyes.
‘He’d just bought her a fucking horse,’ snarled Wolfie.
‘And soon she got a socking great allowance, a cottage and a Sèvres vase, which she smashed. You’ve no idea how they both tormented me.’ Then, when Wolfie didn’t answer, ‘Please, don’t tell anyone I set fire to the watchtower.’
‘I’ll sort it out,’ said Wolfie wearily.
Knowing that Gablecross and Karen were due to see Lady Rannaldini, Fanshawe, having relayed the dramatic findings of his interview with Pushy to Gerald Portland, then magnanimously and patronizingly passed those relevant to Helen on to his rivals.
Thus armed, on Wednesday afternoon Gablecross and Karen found Helen in her little study, painting a not very good picture of the valley. Was it Freudian, Karen wondered, that she’d left out Magpie Cottage? Gablecross noticed her skeletal thinness, the staring eyes, the deathly pallor, the spread of grey in the fox-red hair, and thought how much she must have suffered. As before, she didn’t offer them even a cup of tea.
Two other officers, DC Smithson and DC Lightfoot, he began, had spoken to Mrs Brimscombe.
‘She told them’, Karen continued gently, ‘that you had two dresses made up from the mauve silk, patterned with lilac and honeysuckle. The second one was the one handed in to the police. The first must have been the one you wore earlier.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ stammered Helen.
Mrs Brimscombe says she came down to the utility room after putting you to bed on Sunday night and found the first dress in the washing-machine with all the colours run. “Lady Rannaldini’s so particular,” she told DC Smithson. “She always insists silks are hand-washed.”’
‘She must have put the machine on herself.’ Helen was frantically straightening paperweights. ‘She was off-the-wall that night. She told Wolfie she’d seen a purple will-o’-the-wisp bobbing through hedges towards the cemetery. It’s supposed to mean death at Valhalla.
‘The truth is, Detective Sergeant, when I put on my first mauve silk dress on Sunday afternoon I noticed a rip in the other one.’ Helen was talking carefully now, as though she was reciting a poem she hadn’t quite memorized. ‘So I left it in the utility room for Mrs B to mend. She’s so on the blink she obviously thought it needed washing, then panicked because she’d put it on the wrong wash. She was probably terrified,’ her voice hardened fractionally, ‘thinking I wouldn’t keep her and Teddy, now Rannaldini’s gone.’
She seemed calmer, but when Gablecross told her Pushy claimed to have smelt paraffin on her ripped dress as she rushed upstairs at eleven fifteen, she lost her temper.
‘That evil creature!’ she hissed. ‘She tried to destroy my marriage, now my husband’s gone she’s trying to destroy me. She humiliated me in every way, using my phone and my bathroom, pinching the cars and the helicopter when I needed them. How could she think I’d burn down the watchtower’ — her voice rose to a shriek — ‘destroying all my husband’s precious compositions?’
‘Of course not.’ Karen jumped to her feet and putting an arm round Helen’s shoulders, settled her back in her chair. ‘Let me get you a glass of water.’
‘They’re both lying,’ moaned Helen, ‘Brimscombe because she’s old and confused, Gloria because she’s a vindictive bitch.’
‘Mrs Brimscombe’, Gablecross flipped back a few pages, ‘confirms she made you a sweetcorn and smoked-salmon omelette for your tea, the vomit of which was found ten yards from your husband’s watchtower.’
‘I never!’ gasped Helen. ‘I told you, I chucked my omelette down the john. She must have made a second for someone else. Film people are always demanding things.’
But when Gablecross pointed out that they would be able to check Helen’s DNA profile, which had been taken that morning, with the saliva in the vomit, Helen caved in and burst into tears.
‘I did go into the woods. I so prayed my husband’s passion for Gloria was dying out and I wanted to check if they were together. I found myself drawn to the watchtower around half past ten. The door was open.’ Helen was rocking back and forth, clutching herself. ‘On his table I found this l-l-loathsome photograph of Gloria with nothing on. I tore it up. Then I heard a noise — I was so upset and so terrified it might be my husband, furious with me for destroying the photo, that I rushed into the wood, and threw up. Then I ran home. It was horrible.’ She raised streaming eyes to Gablecross, who grunted sympathetically.
‘Did you notice any keys anywhere?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’ Helen wrinkled her freckled forehead. ‘They were on my husband’s table.’
‘That’s very useful information,’ said Karen, returning with a brimming glass, which she placed on the table beside Helen’s chair. ‘Try to remember,’ she added soothingly, as Helen leapt to her feet and shoved a little flowered mat under the glass. ‘You were in such a state, Lady Rannaldini, one often blocks these things out. Did you strangle your husband?’
‘Oh, no, no,’ Helen licked her lips in terror, ‘he’d have been far too strong. And I’d never set fire to his watchtower. Bussage may have taken copies, but all the originals of his compositions and memoirs were there. I admired him so much as a composer. He used to write beautiful letters.’ Helen had moved to another table, straightening, lining up, picking up a little ivory fan. ‘I remember him quoting Donne: ‘“No spring or summer beauty has such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face.”’
‘“Young beauties force our love and there’s a rape,”’ Karen continued the poem, then raised an eyebrow at Gablecross who nodded.
‘Did you know Rannaldini is alleged to have raped Tabitha just before he was murdered?’ she asked softly.
There was a crack as the little fan broke.
‘She must have led him on,’ said Helen, quite unable to control her venom. ‘She was always flaunting herself. Omigod,’ she looked at them appalled, ‘she’s got a fiendish temper. You don’t think she killed him?’
When Helen had calmed down a little, Gablecross asked if she’d seen anyone else in the wood.
‘Promise you won’t say who told you.’ Helen’s eyes were rolling crazily again.
‘Of course not,’ said Gablecross cosily. ‘You’ve been a marvellous witness.’
‘I saw my ex-husband, Rupert,’ whispered Helen, ‘in the wood with a gun in his hand.’
56
‘Jesus, Sarge!’ Karen was jumping up and down in excitement as they emerged out of the dark panelled hall into the lavender, yellow roses and falling sunlight of the forecourt. ‘Hadn’t we better tip off Gerry and go and nail Rupert?’
‘Too early, he’s at Newmarket, and we’ll need far more evidence than a crazy ex-wife’s terrified impressions in a pitch-dark wood. She may well have wanted it to be Rupert.’
‘Do you think she hates him enough to shop him?’
‘Possibly. I think she’s pathological where he and Tab are concerned, particularly now she knows Rannaldini raped Tab. I certainly wouldn’t rule her out as the killer. Let’s go and talk to another side of the triangle, Isaac Lovell, who hates Rupert even more than she does.’
‘I’m expecting Isa within the hour,’ Janice, the head groom, told Karen and Gablecross when they walked into Rannaldini’s yard.
Slim, foxy, knowing, a goer in the sack, Janice was soon confiding that she would happily have murdered her late boss for the way he treated his horses.
‘That was his torture chamber,’ she added, pointing the yard brush at the indoor school. ‘He used to lock himself in with a green young horse, and do terrible things to make them go the way he wanted.’