by Jilly Cooper
There was a scream from Rozzy, and a rumble of horror that rose to a roar. No, thought Lucy, in dread, I shopped him. Only the people hemming her in kept her from fainting. As chests were thrust out in outrage and the moon went in again, the maze seemed even more terrifyingly claustrophobic.
‘You cannot arrest me,’ said Tristan haughtily, ‘I am making a film, and I have to fly out first thing tomorrow to Toulouse where my aunt is seriously ill.’
And that’s the last we’d see of you, matey, thought Gablecross.
‘Unfortunately that’s irrelevant,’ he said. ‘You’ve been arrested on suspicion of murder.’
‘At least we finish the scene’ said Bernard firmly.
There was a murmur of assent. Gablecross looked round at the solid phalanx of crew, muscular arms folded like a rugger team, blocking any escape, and felt there was no way an English lorry could get through a French blockade.
‘Stand by to shoot. Nice and quiet behind the camera,’ called Bernard.
Up started the strings, out sailed the moon. Gablecross had to admire the professionalism, particularly Tristan’s.
‘Roll sound, turn camera,’ he said quietly, standing there, as if without a care in the world, never taking his eyes off his singers.
Eboli, with heavy sarcasm, was now attacking Elisabetta’s hypocrisy for posing as a virtuous wife when she was all the time having an affaire with Carlos, until Mikhail whipped out his .22, spinning it over and over like a hired killer.
The yew walls seemed to expand as people flattened themselves against them. Suppose the gun was loaded? Then Baby leapt forward, squeezing Mikhail’s hand like a dog’s muzzle.
‘Why d’you hesitate?’ taunted Chloe, yellow eye flashing.
Everyone jumped as the .22 clattered to the ground.
Lucy felt her eyes filling with tears of despair, as Mikhail begged Baby to hand over to him any incriminating papers he might be carrying to stop them falling into the hands of the Inquisition.
‘To you? The favourite of the King?’ sang Baby, in bitter irony.
It is the only moment in the opera when Carlos doubts Posa’s loyalty. Mercifully, no helicopters interrupted the long, long pause. Then, puppy-like, Carlos became all apology, handing over his ‘important papers’, not realizing he was fatally incriminating his friend, before falling into his arms.
The acting had been so wonderful that for those few moments people had forgotten the murders. As the entire orchestra pounded out the friendship theme, Lucy frantically mopped her eyes.
‘I have betrayed my friend,’ she thought in agony.
‘Cut. That was perfect,’ Tristan told everyone. ‘Well done. If the gate’s clear, print.’
‘We’ll wrap now, call a weekend break,’ said Bernard, who was quivering with rage, ‘and by then you’ll be bailed.’
‘I may not. You, Oscar and Valentin know exactly what to do.’ Taking off his director’s cap, Tristan plonked it on Bernard’s head. ‘Now’s your chance to play Truffaut.’ Then he kissed Bernard on both cheeks, handed him his shooting script and added, with a break in his voice, ‘Here are my important papers.’
Finally he turned to Gablecross, mockingly holding out two clenched fists.
‘Put on the handcuffs.’
Ogborne and the crew closed in menacingly, but when Tristan shook his head they fell back.
All this was too much for Tab. With a scream of rage, she flew at Gablecross, hammering him with her fists.
‘He’s innocent, you stupid asshole, Tristan wouldn’t hurt a fly. You just need a conviction. Yesterday you thought I’d killed Rannaldini.’
‘With some justification,’ murmured Chloe.
‘Once you get him into that horrible place,’ went on Tab hysterically, ‘you’ll trick him into a confession.’
‘Bébé, bébé, stop it, please.’ Tristan turned back in anguish and pulled Tab off Gablecross. A second later she had fallen against him, sobbing pitifully.
‘It’s all right.’ His arms closed round her. ‘I didn’t do it, I promise.’ For a second, he laid his ashen face against her pale hair and they clung to each other, like souls in torment.
‘Mr de Montigny,’ said Gablecross, not unkindly.
Tristan searched the appalled, often weeping, faces for one he could trust.
‘Lucy, please look after her.’
But as he was led away, Tab had to be prised off by Wolfie.
‘He’ll be OK.’ Lucy made heroic attempts to sound convincing.
‘How d’you know?’ screamed Tab.
‘It’s all a terrible mistake,’ reassured Wolfie.
‘How d’you bloody know either?’ Tab was about to fly at him, when she caught sight of the photograph of Beattie and her father.
‘Stop reading that shit.’ She snatched Rozzy’s newspaper and tore it to shreds, before storming, like Eboli, out of the maze.
She found her father heaping abuse on Gablecross: ‘Tim-Dim-But-Not-At-All-Nice strikes again,’ he yelled, then, turning to Tristan, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll bail you first thing tomorrow.’
Having poured so much money into Don Carlos, there was no way Rupert was going to lose his director before filming was completed.
‘Poor, poor Tristan but also poor me,’ sighed Sexton.
They were insured against violent death but not against the director murdering the producer, although it must be a fairly frequent occurrence. He had better get on to the backers to reassure them.
As Tristan vanished into a police car, which in turn vanished under a black tidal wave of press, Hermione could be heard complaining, ‘It’s very inconsiderate of Timothy. My last night on the set, a most taxing scene. Who will now give me direction?’
‘The wrong man’s been arrested,’ screamed Tab. ‘Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?’ She picked up Valentin’s discarded plate of porridge and was about to ram it in Hermione’s perfectly made-up face when Wolfie grabbed her wrist.
‘Pack it in. You’re behaving like a stupid child.’
‘I’m not stupid. Why don’t you do something to help Tristan rather than standing round like a stuck pig?’
After that Rupert took her home.
There was no time to think then until Alpheus and Hermione’s little scene in the chapel was safely in the can, but as dawn broke on Tristan’s first morning behind bars Wolfie realized Lucy was missing. He found her sobbing in Make Up.
‘It was my fault he was arrested. I let out his terrible secret.’
She didn’t want to hurt Wolfie by revealing his father’s part in it, but she had to tell someone she could trust.
Wolfie was totally practical.
‘As soon as we get away tomorrow, we’re going to France to track down Aunt Hortense and the truth. We’ll take the Gulf and leave before anyone finds we’ve gone.’
Gerald Portland had been determined to fight off any takeover by Scotland Yard. ‘They hear the West Country burr’, he said furiously, ‘and think we’re turnip-heads down here.’
Pressure from the media and the public, not to mention those viragos in their newly printed ‘I loved Rannaldini’ T-shirts who were doorstepping Rutminster police station, had been so intense that Portland had rushed Gablecross into making an arrest before he had sufficiently gathered his evidence.
Fortunately, by the time Tristan had been booked in and his clothes, including his beloved peacock-blue shirt, had been whisked off to Forensic, and he’d been forcibly DNA-tested, by having a cotton bud rammed under his tongue, and strip-searched – ‘Christ, did you theenk I had Beattie’s floppy deesks shoved up my ass?’ – it was too late to start questioning him.
Tristan, meanwhile, had been transformed into a snarling wild animal. The final indignity was when he was forced to re-dress himself in the nadir of chic – a papery white boiler-suit.
‘I am totally eenocent of murder, but not for much longer,’ he yelled, as the custody officer rammed him in a tiny cell with only a single mattress on a
low, flat board for a bed and one small frosted-glass window. But at least it had its own bog, and he was so exhausted and so relieved not to have to brief Hermione that not even the arrival of a caterwauling drunk at three in the morning – which he thought, for a hideous moment, might be Mikhail – roused him for long from the best night’s sleep he’d had in months.
Prisoners must be checked every twenty minutes. The hatch on Tristan’s door was going up every twenty seconds, as women officers and secretaries made flimsy excuses to visit the cells. Winnie, the Polish cleaner, only four foot ten, who had once cornered an escaping serial killer with her Squeegee mop, was continually standing on top of her upturned bucket to peer in.
‘He’s getting better viewing figures than Four Weddings and a Funeral,’ grumbled DS Fanshawe.
All this at least gave Gablecross a chance to work out his line of questioning, and gain three hours’ sleep beside a tight-lipped Margaret before a quick briefing of the Inner Cabinet.
‘We think we’ve got our man,’ announced Portland. ‘Application has been made to the French justices to search Montigny’s flat in Paris. Police have already raided his rooms in Valhalla, where they found a packed case so he may have been going to do a runner.’
Then, turning to Gablecross and Karen, he said sternly, ‘Just remember Montigny’s got to cope with what he’s done. Don’t try to traumatize him any further. You’re not there to trick him, just unlock his memory. Never underestimate the blackest villain’s longing to be thought well of so don’t be judgemental or hostile. Are you hearing me, Tim? All you want to know is what happened and how it came about.’
‘Let me get at him,’ muttered Gablecross.
‘Get us a curl of his hair, Karen,’ whispered Debbie Miller.
Karen was terribly nervous. It was the first time she’d had to interrogate a murderer. The minute they’d exhausted a forty-five-minute tape, Gerry Portland would seize a copy for a listen. It was suddenly so set in stone. It scared her that, as the interviewing officers, she and Gablecross had priority and could order members of the investigating team to follow up leads for them.
But Karen was not as nervous as Tristan when he woke up and reality kicked in. It was not just backs-to-the-wall but shoulders rammed against the skeleton cupboard, the lock of which Gablecross would soon be relentlessly picking. Christ, he had so much to hide. How could he hold together a brain disintegrating like a paper handkerchief in the bath?
He had refused a lawyer. There was no way he wanted grey, desiccated Dupont jetting over at thousands of francs an hour, crying crocodile tears, then telling his brothers, and all Paris, ‘Now I know why Étienne rejected the boy . . .’
All Tristan wanted, for the moment, was a telephone, nearly giving the duty officer monitoring his call a coronary as he broke into rapid French to find out how last night’s shoot had gone.
Surprisingly well, according to Bernard. They’d finished all the cover shots and Rupert’s briefing of Hermione – ‘Walk up the sodding aisle and kneel down beside that American dickhead’ – had been terse but effective.
Bernard admired Rupert more and more, particularly when this piece of information made Tristan laugh, but only until he’d asked for news of Hortense.
‘Drifting in and out of consciousness, but sinking fast, I’m afraid.’
‘I’ve gotta get out of here,’ raged Tristan.
‘Don’t worry. Rupert’s been on to the French Ambassador and the Home Secretary half the night. Are you OK, mon enfant?’
‘Well, no-one’s tugging out my toenails or threatening to burn me at the stake.’
He had regained his cool by the time he entered the interview room, which was windowless, oblong, furnished with only a square black table and chairs and, he remarked, almost as minimalist as his flat in Paris.
Karen giggled, Gablecross rolled up his sleeves, loosened his tie and switched on the tape-machine, which clung to one of the cracked walls like a leech.
To relax him, Karen at first asked him about his childhood, drawing him out on hoary old Hortense, on the hostility of his father, on his admiration for Laurent, the freedom fighter, who never squealed under torture, and on Rannaldini’s affection, which had done so much to dispel Tristan’s sense of failure as a son.
Then, making sterling efforts not to sound hostile, Gablecross switched to the day of Rannaldini’s murder, and Tristan told the same story, how he’d returned in the middle of Sunday, driven round the Forest of Dean looking for locations.
‘In particular the final scene, when Hercules rip up enough oak trees to build his own funeral pyre.’
‘Like films about fires, do you?’ asked Gablecross casually. ‘Have you any idea how Rannaldini’s watchtower caught fire?’
‘I tell you, I was miles away in Dean Forest.’
He had bought a half-bottle of brandy at an off-licence, he added, but had lost the tab, and had slept in a field.
‘I need peace. For three months, to avoid importuning courtiers, I scuttle down passages like Louis XIV. I was unhappy with Rannaldini’s opening and ending. They were too self-indulgent. I needed to plot my campaign.’
‘What was the field like?’
Tristan shrugged. ‘Just a field.’
‘What were you wearing when you came through the Channel Tunnel on Sunday?’
Careful, thought Tristan. ‘A blue shirt and jeans.’
‘How d’you explain this, then?’
Karen produced an Evening Standard photograph, obviously snapped by some fan, of Tristan in a bottle-green polo shirt and off-white chinos outside his car in Dover.
‘Maybe I was wearing that. I don’t notice clothes. I search for trouser for five minutes yesterday morning before I find I had them on.’ Tristan smiled helplessly – the lovable eccentric.
Gablecross wasn’t beguiled.
‘Betty says before you left for Paris on Saturday you were looking everywhere for that blue shirt, which Sally, knowing it was a favourite, had whipped to mend a rip in the shoulder and sew on more buttons. She left the shirt washed and ironed on your bed on Sunday morning. On Monday morning before you got back it had gone, and both Sally and Betty found your white chinos and green polo shirt in the dirty-clothes basket.’
Tristan raised his eyes to heaven. ‘They drag clothes off me – Rozzy too. They ’ave millions of clothes to wash, how can they remember the days?’
‘You didn’t drop into Paradise to change?’
‘Certainly not.’ He daren’t light a cigarette in case his hand shook.
But just as Betty and Sally had lovingly chronicled the progress of his clothes, so two village groupies with binoculars had seen his dark blue Aston parked in a secluded field down Rannaldini’s drive. Wheelmarks had been found here. Traces of similar plants, hemlock, water dropwort and lesser rosewort, had been found on Tristan’s wheels.
‘They probably flower in Dean Forest,’ said Tristan vaguely, as he started to sketch Karen. The damson bloom of her skin, even under the fluorescent light, was exquisite.
‘The lesser rosewort is only indigenous to Rutshire,’ snapped Gablecross.
Round and round went the wheels of the tape, taking down evidence to be used against him. Underneath the outward languor he’s shit-scared, thought Gablecross.
Tristan expressed no surprise that his prints were all over the murder weapon. ‘I was unhappy with the scene I’d shot. Earlier we use knife. While everyone sleep on Thursday afternoon, I took gun from Props, and try out hand movements in front of big mirror in my room. Having replaced it and the key, I type memo on Production writing paper saying I need .22 as well as Carlos’s important papers for reshoot on Friday night and leave it in Jessica’s in-tray.’
At first Tristan deflected every question coolly. He was enchanted by the recovery of his Lalique lily-patterned lighter which, he explained, had been a present from the crew after The Lily in the Valley, and which had vanished from his desk last week, and his signet ring, which he’d lost on the
night of the auto da fe. ‘I lose weight. It must have slipped off.’
He’s lying, thought Gablecross. There was no way that shiny ring had been exposed to the elements for nearly three weeks.
‘Both lighter and ring were found near Rannaldini’s body in Hangman’s Wood,’ he said.
Careful, thought Tristan, for the hundredth time.
‘I must ’ave dropped them when I went to see Rannaldini previous.’
‘You often walk in the woods?’
‘Of course. I am man in love with the dark. I spent my childhood in cinemas or watching videos with curtains drawn.’
‘Your crème-de-menthe-flavoured chewing-gum was also found near the body.’
‘Anyone could have peenched that. I leave packs everywhere. My dear Detective Sergeant,’ Tristan yawned so hard he nearly put his jaw out, ‘I have been working on film about murder for nearly a year. I am not so stupid I litter possessions round Rannaldini’s body like Millais’ Sower and leave my prints all over murder weapon. Someone is framing me.’
‘Any idea who?’
‘Probably Rannaldini from the grave.’
At one moment, he nearly fell asleep. ‘I am bored talking about myself. Can’t we talk about you, Sergeant, or more excitingly you?’ He smiled at Karen, who blushed.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, she kept praying Tristan hadn’t done it. He was so glamorous – she admired the flawless bone structure beneath the smooth olive skin, the curls dark as winter dusk, the greyhound grace exaggerated by the ten-pound weight-loss. And he was so polite, opening doors when she went out, leaping to his feet when she came back. When he wasn’t pacing up and down, he was drawing or scribbling. ‘Why d’you keep making notes?’ she asked.
‘To stop me going crazy. I am in last stage of making film. It’s like a marathon winner being dragged away ten yards from the tape. Worst still, greatest scene in Don Carlos takes place in prison. Eef only I had had these experiences to draw on when I direct it. The claustrophobia, moths concussing themselves against overhead light, the tiny cell that makes Carlos’s dungeon look like Trafalgar Square. How much more realistic would I have made the Grand Inquisitor?’ He glared at Gablecross, who, refusing to rise, proceeded to take Tristan in minute detail through the early hours of Friday the thirteenth.