Bought on a mortgage back in the seventies, a Hungerford house had been every young couple’s dream. Newly painted in pastel colours, with friendly neighbours and the morning sun streaming into a modern kitchen, it had had a genuinely green view across Eldercombe valley to Ricky France-Lynch’s house floating in woods like a grey battleship.
But in no time at all developer George Hungerford had started slapping more and more houses around them, blocking out any view, filling the estate with less friendly neighbours, where children took drugs, heaved bricks through windows and resented having a cop living so near.
The value of Gablecross’s house had plummeted and a move to a larger one, where the children could have rooms of their own and surrounded by fields, was only looking possible with the added boost of Margaret’s income as deputy head.
Tim was proud of his wife’s achievement, but he wished the name of the headmaster, Brian Chambers, a smiling leftie with a brown beard who drove a P-reg Volvo Estate, fell off her tongue a little less often. Chambers and Margaret shared a love of opera and swapped CDs. Tim knew he was getting a taste of his own medicine for spending so much time over the years with comely women witnesses. He knew Margaret longed to hear about the goings-on at Valhalla, how she would have given anything to meet Hermione, Chloe, Alpheus and Granville Hastings, but he was still resentful of Brian.
Gablecross thought the pack at Valhalla were crackers and he needed to mull over them with his wife. He hadn’t sussed Tristan de Montigny or Mikhail at all. Finding her awake last night, he had asked her if she’d ever heard of Baby Spinosissimo, but at the first ‘Brian thinks he’s remarkable’, he felt himself shutting up like a clam, and the signed CD from Hermione had stayed in the glove compartment.
Difficult crimes always pushed away the rest of Gablecross’s life. Over the years, Margaret had learnt to cope with the defensive walls, the pensive silences and the dawn homecomings. Her first pay packet had been spent on a microwave.
Expecting earache, Gablecross was amazed to be greeted by an empty house. Going into the kitchen, he found a tomato salad, a French stick, a quarter of Dutch cheese still in its Cellophane wrapping, and a Tesco’s lasagne awaiting him. Against the lasagne was propped a note: ‘Five minutes in the microwave, gone to a staff meeting.’
No doubt tucked up in some bar, or worse, with Brian Chambers, thought Gablecross savagely. He ignored the lasagne, making do with a pickled onion, a slice of ancient pork pie and the Rutminster Echo, whose first four pages were given over to the murder and, infuriatingly, included excellent photographs of Gerald Portland and fucking Fanshawe, grinning beside Gloria Prescott.
Tomorrow, he must go and see Tabitha, and try to pin down Tristan. He put aside the paper, and tried seriously to work out who might have killed Rannaldini, but he couldn’t concentrate with Margaret still out. It was only when he went into the lounge half an hour later for a large Scotch to calm his rage that he found his wife fast asleep on the sofa, the Independent open at the murder.
Fetching the duvet from their bed, he laid it over her. He mustn’t forget their wedding anniversary on Sunday.
58
The great excitements of Thursday’s Inner Cabinet meeting were, first, that Bob Harefield had been in the air flying to Adelaide on Sunday night when both Hermione and Meredith claimed to have been telephoning him and, second, Mikhail’s two-litre Smirnoff bottle contained traces of H20 but absolutely no alcohol.
‘So the bugger was pretending to be drunk the whole time,’ chuntered Gerald Portland.
Mikhail had also pretended to pass out under the weeping ash for four hours until an Evening Standard reporter tripped over him but, in the meanwhile, could have been quite sober enough to nip into the wood and strangle Rannaldini and, although his English wasn’t good enough to understand the memoirs, he could have burnt down the watch-tower after making off with the Montigny and the Picasso.
Mikhail, who also flatly refused to admit he had nicked Gablecross’s initialled Parker pen, even when he was caught signing autographs with it in Paradise on Thursday morning, was without contrition.
‘I ’ate Rannaldini,’ he said, dragging Karen and Gablecross into the Heavenly Host for a late breakfast. ‘Whoever kill heem is an ’ero. Eef people think me drunk they leave me alone. After Rannaldini take my Lara, I do not sleep for twice nights. Of course I drop off under whipping ash.’
‘Why was your vodka bottle lying near Rannaldini?’ said Gablecross sternly. ‘I suppose it sleepwalked.’
Karen, who was deboning Mikhail’s kipper, got the giggles.
‘You realize you have no alibi.’
‘I have no vife either. Vot is life without her? She says I am piss artist, next day I go on vagon.’
‘So why was your bottle…?’ began Gablecross.
‘I go to votch-tower to kill Rannaldini for making me cockhold, but forest fire stop me getting hands on heem. I hope fire does my vork. And now, perhaps, someone will believe I only spend five minutes with screeching beetch Chloe on Sunday night and that I saw Tristan in Valhalla around nine thirty.’
Suspicion, in fact, was hardening on Tristan, who was flatly refusing to have a DNA test.
To stop Rupert throwing his weight around and demoralizing Tristan even further, Sexton had arranged for him to see a rough cut of the film so far, which Rupert had reluctantly adored. He loved Sharon eating Alpheus’s slippers, he loved the hunting and all Tab’s horses. He cried buckets when Posa died and, after a long silence at the end, said in a disappointed voice, ‘Isn’t there any more? Montigny’s a shit,’ he added, as an afterthought, ‘but an extremely clever one. I even forgot they were singing and he’s made Valhalla look almost as good as Penscombe.’
Being tone-deaf, however, and unable to appreciate Alpheus’s heavenly deep voice, Rupert thought he was the weak link:
‘More like the chairman of the local Rotary Club than a king.’
In fact, poor Alpheus had just arrived back from a masterly Boris in Vienna, where he had taken twelve curtain calls. Why wasn’t he treated with more reverence at Valhalla? He’d only popped back, anyway, for a tiny scene praying in the chapel before his coronation, and intended to push off and sing in New York on Friday and Saturday, returning in time for the polo shoot on Monday. But Sexton, on Rupert’s orders, refused to let him go.
‘You’ve been overpaid for these extra days, Alphie, so stay ’ere in case we need you.’
Alpheus was hopping, particularly as he’d just read Hermione’s interview in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Now Rannaldini has passed away, it is my duty to shine more brightly as the only star in Don Carlos.’
Alpheus was also brooding over the loss of his Jaguar, which a newly steely Sexton was refusing to replace.
At ten thirty on Thursday morning, therefore, Alpheus drew Fanshawe and Debbie into his caravan and confessed he had been withholding information because he wanted to protect his colleagues. After wrestling with his conscience since Monday, he felt he must reveal that, on his jog through the dusk to Jasmine Cottage on Sunday night around ten thirty, he had seen Sexton’s maroon Roller parked under Dame Hermione’s Judas tree.
Having taken a statement, trying not to betray their glee that they were about to rush in where Gablecrosspatch had failed to dent, Fanshawe and Debbie also, at long last, found a chink in Simone’s frantic schedule.