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.”