Resort to Murder: A must-read vintage crime mystery

The red bubble car reached the summit of Bedlington Hill and they made their way, sedately, past Mudford Cliffs. Women were out walking their dogs, but the warning signs about the cliff fall had been taken away.

Angela de Mauny’s pink-painted cottage stood at the end of Tuppenny Row, facing away from its neighbours in an offhand fashion, but occupying a spot where you could see the whole of Nelson’s Bay. Miss Dimont had seen the view many times but as she staggered inelegantly out of Valentine’s infernal machine its broad sweep caught her gaze once more, and for a moment she stood quite still on the pavement.

‘Look,’ she said.

It was late in the afternoon and, though the heat had gone out of the day, the sun still shone brilliantly on the water. The piercing blue of the sky was beginning to give way to a more complex colour, purple and grey and yellow, and Athene Madrigale’s clouds were starting to put in their appearance – the altostratus, the cumulonimbus, and especially the cirrus which looked like so much candy floss hanging gently in the sky. Wide-eyed guillemots patrolled the air above, while far beneath a pair of gannets flew off the headland, occasionally slicing into the water to collect their dinner.

Valentine came up behind her. ‘Fabulous,’ he murmured, adding after a moment’s pause, ‘is it always like this in Temple Regis?’

‘My dear boy,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You don’t know it, but you’ve arrived in Heaven.’

There was no St Peter, however, to answer Miss de Mauny’s green-painted front door, instead an angular lady with steel-grey hair and complexion to match who seemed startled, not to say frightened, to see the two reporters.

‘Yes?’

Having shrugged her disapproval after learning their identities, she was on the point of shutting the door again when Valentine stepped forward and said, ‘Margaret Plantagenet.’ Miss de Mauny stepped back and looked more closely at the young reporter. ‘Yes?’ she said again, but her tone was different this time – interested almost.

‘Just a guess,’ offered Valentine cheerfully. ‘She married into your family in the fourteenth century. I’m on the other side. My—’

‘—ancient family, lots of them,’ interrupted Miss Dimont starchily, but a dubious family connection stretching back five hundred years, if that’s what it was, looked as though it might at least get them into the house. First two rules of journalism – (i) knock on the door, (ii) get inside.

What they found, once inside, was breathtaking.

Ancient timepieces glistened as if made of gold. They chattered and clicked and donged, and on a workbench the innards of a large hall clock were laid out in regimented lines as if they were the parts of a firearm.

‘…thought they had called to warn you I was coming,’ Miss Dimont was saying disingenuously. ‘Your speech the other day, you know, attracted a great deal of interest. So sorry if this is an intrusion, we can go if you’d prefer.’

The apology was less than sincere. Miss Dimont had heard that Miss de Mauny was known to be prickly, to say the least, and took the decision not to telephone ahead in the hope she could sweet-talk her way through the door.

As it turned out, it was this very new, very junior cub reporter who’d pulled it off. She’d have to have a word with him later!

‘…though we did the article on your lecture on Lady Rhondda – fascinating,’ she added encouragingly. ‘I wanted to do something for the women’s interest pages, expanding on the role of women today.’

‘I’m no expert,’ said Angela de Mauny scratchily, sitting down at her bench and pointedly turning her back to her visitors.

‘Well, let’s say you know more than most,’ said Miss Dimont soothingly. ‘I’d like to write a piece talking about where women are, fourteen years after the War has ended.’

‘Why?’ said Miss de Mauny, but you could tell she was listening.

‘In your speech you made the point that the War was a time when women finally came into their own, were recognised for the skills which had been waiting to be utilised ever since … ever since the Vote, ever since they were allowed to take their university degrees, ever since they were accepted as doctors and lawyers and factory workers. The First War broke down some of those barriers, but this one finally gave us true emancipation.’

‘Well, yes, yes, yes!’ said Miss de Mauny irritably. ‘My very point!’

Miss Dimont had used the old journalistic trick of getting a reluctant interviewee to talk by repeating back her own words – words with which she would be forced to agree, and would want to expand on. As a subterfuge, it worked as well on members of the public as it did on politicians.

The clock woman fell for it.

‘Come the peace, everything went backwards,’ she said. ‘It’s continuing to go backwards. We women represent half the population, but only have twenty-four Members of Parliament to speak for us – the laws of this country are made by men. And while I am fond of the male of the species, he seems to have taken it upon himself to grab hold of the steering wheel of life on the foolish assumption that women can’t drive.’

Judy Dimont nodded vigorously in agreement. Her notebook was in hand, the strange curlicues thought up by Mr Pitman a century before magically spiralling their way across the page. Miss de Mauny looked nervously down at their progress and eyed her interlocutor with caution. ‘Who runs your paper, male or female?’ she asked sharply.

‘Male.’

‘Well, we know how this’ll end up. “Weepy old woman bewails her wage packet woes”, that sort of thing. I think I’d rather not go any further.’

She turned to Valentine, deliberately changing the subject. ‘Which family are you? An awful lot of people married into the de Maunys. Most seem to have lost their bloodline while we’ve managed to hang on to ours.’

‘Actually,’ said Valentine, ‘we also—’

‘Let’s talk about that later,’ said Miss Dimont snippily. ‘There’s no room in the paper to write about family trees. Tell me, Miss de Mauny, how many men are there in your distinguished profession?’

It’s what made her such a brilliant interviewer. She had done her homework. Horology was a closed shop to that gender.

‘All men, no women,’ snapped Miss de Mauny.

‘Then how come …?’

‘I’m fortunate enough to come from a wealthy family. After university, I wanted to do something no other woman had done, and for a while I seriously considered climbing Mount Everest – I’ve done a bit of mountaineering – but in the end it came down to this. I paid for my apprenticeship, bought my own tools and premises, and weathered the storm while people got used to having a woman go up the church steeple or the town hall.

‘I was helped by the death of old Fred Shallowford, who’d been here forty years. There wasn’t anybody else, so gradually I was granted—’ she used the word quite bitterly ‘—his work.’

‘I wonder what Lady Rhondda would have to say about that.’

‘She was a marvellous woman. Without her, without the Six Point Group, women would be in a far worse position than they are now.’

The conversation flowed on like this for some time. Valentine quietly let himself out of the front door and wandered down Tuppenny Row, drinking in its pink-bricked cottages which were really more like rich men’s houses.

He returned a quarter of an hour later to hear Miss de Mauny’s voice raised almost to a screech.

‘Just so degrading – appalling!’ she was saying agitatedly. ‘After all we’ve been through – that women allow this to be done to them, while the public sits by and lets the men take advantage like that!’

‘To be fair,’ interjected Judy, ‘it is a passport to another world. Or it can be. There’s the money to consider. And the fact they’re not qualified for anything else. Yes, they may be exploited and the whole process, frankly, is pretty tawdry, but it’s only a fashion. It’ll pass.’

‘And meantime, meantime … it brings women to their lowest common denominator.’

‘There’s worse,’ said Judy, smiling.

‘Well, yes,’ agreed Miss de Mauny, the hysteria in her voice abating somewhat, ‘I suppose that’s true. But what those women do, they’ve done since the dawn of time. Beauty parades – pageants—’ she spat the word out ‘—these things are man-made, and man-made now and today.

‘Frankly I’m appalled Temple Regis should lower itself in this way. But I don’t suppose your male editor would agree with that view – probably rubbing his hands at all the photographs he can print of girls in bathing costumes. Hence my reluctance to talk when you came to the door. Nothing will change.’

‘Yes, it will,’ said Judy, calmly. ‘There will come a time, and you mustn’t give up hope.’

‘You’re wrong. The only way any of this will change is if something radical is done.’

‘Parliamentary reform?’

‘Direct action,’ said Angela de Mauny fiercely. ‘That’s the only way to get things done. Sometimes men only stop to think when they see blood spilled on the ground.’

The journey back to the office was a difficult one. First, Valentine insisted Judy take the controls of the bubble car. Though it was called a car it was more like a motorcycle, but much more difficult to handle than dear Herbert. But it seemed only appropriate, given the tenor of the recent conversation, that a woman should take her turn at the wheel and so the couple made their halting way back to the Riviera Express.

They talked over the barely veiled violence in Miss de Mauny’s closing remarks.

‘Extraordinary woman,’ said Valentine. ‘I’d say barking mad.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, but she’s certainly unusual. How many more colourful relations have you got up your sleeve? Gilbert Drury, the Admiral, now Miss de Mauny.’

‘There are more, many more, believe me. No, I found it quite frightening at one point, actually. When she was talking about blood, it was if she meant it.’

‘You see her point.’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘I do,’ said Miss Dimont, ‘and if you were a woman you might understand things a bit better.’

‘I’m a quick learner,’ said Valentine, and turned his dazzling smile on her. He meant well, but what did he know? Boys’ public school, a stint of National Service, no experience of the world.

‘It’s a man’s world. You’re a man.’

‘I was brought up by an aunt,’ he said, as if by way of exoneration. He started to say something else, but they had reached their destination.

The reporters made their way through the front hall and trudged up the dusty stairs and along the corridor into the newsroom. People were still hard at work and the place was buzzing with activity. They just walking to their shared desk when …

‘Miss D-I-I-I-M-M-M-M!’

‘Action stations,’ said Judy, and pushed Valentine into his chair.

‘Yes, Mr Rhys?’

‘In my office, Miss Dim! Be quick about it!’

The door slammed shut, but Valentine could still hear above the office kerfuffle the sounds of voices raised in what seemed to be accusation and counter-accusation. It startled him, since he could tell Miss Dimont gave no ground to her employer, rather that she seemed to have the upper hand.

A few moments later, she emerged and returned to her desk, a little tense perhaps, but otherwise perfectly calm. She did not sit down.

‘Here’s a question to which you should be able to answer yes,’ she began, in a tense tone. ‘Have you heard of Danny Trouble and The Urge?’

‘Well, that sounds rather like … I’m not awfully musical, you know.’

‘No matter, Mr Ford. They’re on stage at the Pavilion Theatre, or just about to be,’ said Miss Dimont tersely, ‘and there’s a riot going on. Get going!’

SEVEN

Geraldine Phipps had seen many West End successes in a long and glittering career, but never anything like this. The chaos and excitement even outweighed anything she’d witnessed at the Coronation – and this was Temple Regis, not The Mall!

Screaming girls with thick sweaters and clumpy shoes had invaded the foyer of the Pavilion Theatre and were raiding the snack counter; the green-eyed pansy in charge had taken one look when they broke through the door and scarpered. Here and there a greasy-haired lout in a leather jacket and jeans ducked between the knots of girls, egging them on by shouting ‘Danny! DANNY!!’ and the screams would come again and again, thick and fast.

‘Stop that immediately, Gavin!’ ordered Mrs Phipps severely, for underneath the disreputable disguise she recognised her grandson, once the young man of great promise.

‘Danny! DANNY!!’ he yodelled, oblivious to the dowager’s cry, and the girls took up their screaming once again. ‘DANN … EEEEEE!!!!’

The singer and his mates felt less enthusiastic about Temple Regis than its inhabitants felt about them. The band’s ancient Bedford van had broken down outside Torquay and nobody had the money to pay for repairs. Eventually, they’d been offered a tow down to the town and had arrived long after the fans had settled themselves in. A service road at the back of the theatre had obscured this ignominious arrival and now they were hastily unloading their heavy equipment and hauling it backstage.

‘That Gavin,’ panted Danny Trouble, whose real name was Derek, ‘what a way to start a gig – I’m going to kill ’im.’

‘You hold him an’ I’ll hit ’im,’ offered Boots McGuigan, the bass guitarist.

‘Crazy, man, crazy’ said Taz, who played the drums. ‘What’s happening to us? We’re Number One in the Top Ten and we have to be towed here.’

‘Well, we aren’t going anywhere now. Not for the next six weeks,’ said Boots. ‘Someone’ll fix it.’

‘If it don’t get ripped apart by the fans.’

‘That’s another thing,’ said Danny, picking up a heavy amplifier. ‘Number One, and we’re stuck in this dead-and-alive hole for the next six weeks. We should be in London! If anyone’s doing the killing it’ll be me.’

‘Where’s Tommy?’

‘Where d’you think?’

Britain’s No 1 beat group had paused for a quick cigarette in the wings but their guitarist, a red-haired Irishman, was already onstage, guitar plugged in. He was noisily experimenting with various catlike cries he could squeeze from the instrument, fully aware that the racket he was making was filtering through the locked auditorium doors to the fans beyond, driving the girls to even greater ecstasy. He moved his body unnecessarily to the sounds he made, deeply in love with himself.

‘Turd,’ said Danny. Nobody bothered to respond because the singer had voiced the collective thought.

Boots McGuigan was sorting out the cat’s cradle of wires without which the magic and the mystery of their latest hit Please Me Baby Please would be inaudible. Each member of the band had a different responsibility beyond their musical role, and Boots’ was to make sure the sound equipment worked. Danny made the tea, Taz made sure they got paid. The exception was Tommy – who never did anything except play his guitar and waggle his hips in a most unpleasant fashion.

A curious rumbling, not unlike an earthquake, now gripped the building. The fans were drumming their heels hard on the floorboards, unaware the building was long past its best and a continuation of this heavy-booted tap dance might result in a complete collapse. A safety warning over the loudspeakers would have made no difference because by now delirium had set in.

Meanwhile, the grandmother of popular music’s most unpopular manager had scurried into the calm of the manager’s office and was lifting her Plymouth gin from the filing cabinet. There was a knock at the door and Judy popped her head round. ‘Can we come in? It’s terrifying what’s going on out there.’

‘Quick and shut the door.’ Geraldine Phipps knew Miss Dimont well, and liked her. She’d even got out her scrapbook once to show her the snaps from when she was a Gaiety Girl.

‘What on earth is going on?’ Judy shouted as she introduced Valentine. ‘It sounds like the Blitz.’

‘Strange how potent cheap music is,’ quoted Mrs Phipps, who had entirely ditched her reservations about Danny and the boys now she could see they were box-office gold. ‘According to Gavin, when the fans are finally let through the doors they will tear the seats out. Thank the Lord I renewed the insurance.’

‘It’s a terrible din,’ said Valentine.

‘You’re supposed to like it,’ said Judy crisply. ‘It’s your age group. Myself, I prefer Michael Holliday.’

Mrs Phipps was lighting a cigarette to help the gin down. ‘Heaven knows what the town will make of it,’ she said happily. ‘We had Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson the year before last. All very sophisticated – and look, they’re in the Top Ten now! Why can’t these greasy-haired fellows be more like them?’

‘I think that’s the point about them,’ said Miss Dimont, and another wave of joyous squealing erupted as the auditorium doors burst open and the Gadarene horde swept in.

‘So, Geraldine,’ said Miss Dimont, ‘I have to write something for the paper. Obviously, we can’t ignore this mass hysteria – I mean, Temple Regis can never have seen anything like it. Where have they all come from?’

‘St Saviour’s Convent, a lot of them.’

‘But … that’s a boarding school. For young ladies!’

‘Precisely,’ said Geraldine Phipps. ‘I sent a nicely worded invitation to Mother Superior – an old friend, don’t you know – and here they are. Shocking, isn’t it?’ But the smile on her lips suggested a remarkable absence of shock, convent girls being what they are.

‘So you probably “condemn this unbridled behaviour”,’ said Miss Dimont, using that old journalist’s trick of putting words into the interviewee’s mouth (Mrs Phipps said, I really have to condemn this unbridled behaviour when in fact all she’d done was answer the question with a simple yes).

‘Not a bit, my dear. In fact, I have come to the view that I positively encourage it.’

‘Can I say that?’

‘But of course. Gavin has assured me that all over the country the floodgates have opened to allow in this rock and roll, as they call it, and they are unlikely to shut any time soon. I want to encourage more of this bad behaviour.’

Miss Dimont was scribbling in her notebook.

‘My dear, I first set foot on the stage nearly fifty years ago,’ she went on, waving her gin glass gently. ‘We wore long dresses and frilly underpinnings. We smiled coyly and threw as many double-entendres as we could at the audience.

‘In those days, such things could drive men wild, and when I was a Gaiety Girl they would do the most extraordinary things – one climbed in my dressing-room window. On the third floor! One sent fourteen wedding rings, one each day for a fortnight, in the hope of getting me into bed if not into church. One did a thing far too rude for me to describe. And quite often, too.

‘Is this so very different? They’re noisier, yes. And it’s the girls now, not the boys, making the running. But the young have always craved sensation, and this is what we have today.’

Judy’s pen sailed across the page. This was supposed to be Valentine’s story, but she couldn’t resist – Mrs Phipps was priceless!

‘Aren’t you worried about them wrecking the theatre?’

‘My dear, if they do, the publicity will pay for it. These fellows are here for six weeks and we are already in profit.’

‘The lads themselves seem so surly,’ said Miss Dimont. ‘I caught a glimpse of them as I came in.’

‘I expect Gavin has got them on short rations. A well-known ploy in our business for keeping your workforce hard at it. They perform much better when they’re hungry.’

‘Good Lord!’ laughed Judy, ‘I didn’t know you had it in you, Geraldine! You’re far better at running this place than old Ray, er, Mr Cattermole.’

‘For continuity’s sake and for the health of my bank balance, I shall be running the Pavilion this season,’ purred the miraculous Mrs P. ‘Of course I have Gavin here to call on should I need assistance.’

And no Ray Cattermole to dip his hand into the takings, thought Miss Dimont. But any subsequent musings were wiped away by a sudden and frightening cacophony not unlike a bull entering a china shop without bothering to knock. It was Danny Trouble and The Urge making their debut in summer season at the Pavilion Theatre, Temple Regis, with their latest offering, ‘Schoolgirl Crush’.

Mrs Phipps poured herself another of Plymouth’s finest and serenely produced some earplugs.

Judy and Valentine were reunited in Beryl’s café just along the promenade. It was late but both were exhilarated by the day’s events.

‘Hoped I’d find you here,’ said Valentine, his face pink with excitement. ‘I went and had a wander backstage but I didn’t want to end the day without thanking you for all your help. I already feel as though I’ve been here for half a lifetime.’

‘Well, quite an interesting day,’ agreed Judy. ‘Heaven knows what Mr Rhys will make of it, but I’d favour writing positively about this beat group thing. No point in denying the future if, indeed, that is what it is.’

‘From what you say he may find that hard to accept.’

‘He’s always had a way of looking backwards rather than forwards. I think it’s because of all those old dinosaurs he mixes with in that club of his. They were all grown men long before the War. They cling to the past, want to turn the clock back to the summer of ’39.’

‘No point in trying to go back,’ said Valentine. ‘Because in life they’re always rolling up the carpet behind you.’

He looked rather sad as he said it, and Judy asked, gently, ‘Yes?’

‘Look, we hardly know each other. On the other hand, we share a desk and I very much hope I shall be on the Riviera Express for a long time to come,’ said Valentine. ‘I may as well come clean.’

Oh dear, thought Miss Dimont, thinking of Mulligatawny and her supper, I hope this isn’t going to take all night. I shouldn’t have inquired.

‘I’m grateful to be here,’ said Valentine, looking out to sea. ‘Very. Life to date has not been entirely kind. I hadn’t realised when I applied for the job that this – this journalism, this local newspaper business – is not just a way of life, it is a life. I can see that these people, the ones you work with, are your family.

‘I have a family – you seem to have met a few already, in conversation anyway – but it’s not the same. They’re all pretty distant. My father was an alcoholic and died when I was four. All he left me was the title and …’

‘Title?’

‘Lowest of the low. Baronet. I don’t use it.’

‘Sir Valentine Waterford?’

‘Bit too much of a mouthful, wouldn’t you say? Got me into all kinds of trouble at school and of course in the army, since I never rose above the rank of Trooper. Though, of course, they wanted me to put in for a commission – but I preferred it where I was.’

He lit a cigarette and went on.

‘That’s not the confession. The confession is, I’ve been here two days and I absolutely adore it. I couldn’t believe that there could be so much … humanity out there to be discovered. You went to sea with the fishermen yesterday, I went to the police station. This morning we were in court, we went and saw that positively creepy woman …’

‘Nothing creepy about her, Valentine. Learn to look below the surface.’

‘OK. Bet you half-a-crown there’s something wrong about her, remember I’ve spent most of my life cooped up with odd-bods and I know one when I see one. Anyway, we saw her and then down here to meet the most important beat group in the country.’

‘You met them?’

‘I went backstage, I told you. More about that in a minute.’

He got up and looked down at Judy. ‘I don’t want to hang on your coat tails,’ he said. ‘You’ve been already more than kind – it’s sink or swim, I know that, I have to make my own way.