A Quarter Past Dead

‘Shouldn’t you be gettin’ the story?’

‘Tell me!’

‘If you want to know,’ said Terry, ‘it was that look on your face back in the Fort. I came in the door and started telling you about this new Tri-X film and you just rolled your eyes up to the ceiling in that way of yours and…’

‘Heavens, Terry, it’s like me talking about buying a new typewriter ribbon! Tools of the trade! It was boring!’

Terry gave her a look. ‘Let’s see if Herbert can get you back to the office in one piece,’ he replied, meaning the spark-plug. ‘Lucky for you it’s downhill most of the way.’

‘No, wait!’

‘Bye.’ He clunked the door of the Minor shut with a complacent thud and sped off back to civilisation, leaving Miss Dimont with no clue as to where to start.

They’d met at the entrance to the Ruggleswick Camp – Terry on his way out, Judy coming in – so now it was her turn to make her way towards what had been, in its army days, the guardhouse. Nowadays it was the camp’s reception, brightly lit with neon tubes and festooned with posters advertising Bobby Bunton’s other holiday resorts, but even now you wouldn’t be surprised to find a platoon of armed soldiers tumbling out of the doors to stop your escape.

‘Are the police still here?’ she asked a pimply youth reading a comic.

‘’Oo wants to know?’ said the fellow without raising his eyes. Clearly Bobby Bunton had yet to include the rudiments of etiquette in his staff training.

‘Miss Dimont, Riviera Express.’ She didn’t want to make it sound too important – people had a habit of saying, ‘No Press!’ at the slightest provocation – on the other hand, she wanted to jerk the youth out of his torpor. There were only twelve minutes left to find the body, discover what had happened, parry the stonewall response of the police, parlay a fact or two out of them in return for who knows what promises, find a phone, and file copy to the impatient Peter Pomeroy.

‘Inspector Topham’s expecting me,’ she said, without the slightest clue whether the old warhorse was on the case this evening, or out dancing with Princess Margaret.

The lad looked up. ‘Row Seven,’ he said, ‘only they call it Curzon Street now. Last ’ut on the left.’

Bearing no resemblance whatever to its Mayfair namesake, Curzon Street had dismally failed to shake off its resemblance to an army barracks. The best that could be said was its hutlike appearance softened in the growing dusk and the purple clouds which backlit it gave a glow, an allure, which would last until nightfall and dissolve with the morning light.

Down the end, where a Londoner might expect Park Lane to be, she could see the red tail-lights of the police car, and a pool of light spilling from a couple of brightly lit windows.

‘Not now, Miss Dimont, if you please.’ Inspector Topham must have turned down the Princess’s invitation to dance this evening. He was never very helpful in such circumstances but at least Judy knew where she stood with him.

‘Dead woman,’ she said authoritatively, maximising in two words the extent of her knowledge of the case. She hoped Topham thought she knew more.

‘Shot,’ she added after a brief pause – just that little extra bit of info, held back for maximum effect, to help do the trick.

‘Mm,’ said Topham in a stonewall sort of way.

‘Murder,’ asked Miss Dimont, her voice rising now, ‘suicide? Or was it just an accident?’ The sarcasm was lost on the policeman, whose way of sweeping unwelcome deaths under the carpet was all too familiar.

‘A shooting fatality,’ came the stolid response. ‘Woman of middle age, guest of the camp who had been here four days. That’s it.’

It was enough, the rest of the drama would be in the writing. All Miss Dimont had to do now was find a telephone.

Herbert sensed the urgency of the moment and did not attempt a repetition of his earlier, most disagreeable, behaviour. Instead he took Miss Dimont, curls flying, on a roundabout trip through Knightsbridge, Regent Street and The Mall before arriving at a large well-lit building which clearly had been the officers’ mess and now housed the camp’s senior staff.

‘. . . phone?’ she said breathlessly to a vague-looking gentleman who poked his nose out of the door. ‘Because… emergency!’

The man smiled non-committally and his eyes clouded in concentration. Finally the penny dropped, and he meandered down the hall to a cubbyhole under the stairs and within five minutes Miss Dimont had filed her story.

‘Thank you so much,’ she said to her host, whom she discovered sitting at a small cocktail bar in an adjoining lounge. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. Judy Dimont, Riviera Express.’

‘Oh,’ said the man, ‘you’ll be here for the murder.’

It happens like that sometimes in journalism. You spend all day knocking on doors and people won’t even be able to remember which day of the week it is, let alone their mother’s maiden name, then suddenly you bump into someone who knows everything.

This could be he.

‘Yes,’ Judy said encouragingly. It always pays to appear to know more than you do on such occasions and her conspiratorial nod, she thought, spoke volumes.

‘Our first stiff,’ the man said, laconically. ‘Of course, there’ve been a few at the other camps, but this is a first for Ruggleswick. Drink?’

‘Erm, that would be…’

‘I usually have a gin about this time of day,’ he said, though the bottom of his glass looked as though it had more recently contained an amber liquid. He was looking more than a little pink-cheeked but that could just have been the lighting.

‘Lovely,’ said Judy, who generally didn’t trust Herbert to behave after a drink or two and usually refrained in case he took a wrong turning on the way home. ‘She’d been here for less than a week.’

This reworking of Topham’s bleak statement made it sound like she knew what she was talking about.

‘Came on Sunday,’ agreed the man, sloshing a prodigious amount into each glass.

‘And should have been going home at the weekend.’ It made it sound as though she had the whole story already. She hadn’t a clue but it pushed the narrative to the next page.

‘Never saw her. She arrived, parked her bags and disappeared. Of the four nights she was here, her bed was slept in only the once.’

Ah, thought Miss Dimont, the moral turpitude which everyone enjoys gossiping about back in town. Clearly the lady had a friend who…

‘. . . must have had a friend who…’ said the man, nodding in agreement. ‘Only problem is there’s no single blokes booked into the camp. I checked because the copper asked me to.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Miss Dimont, suddenly collecting her thoughts, ‘I don’t know who you are.’

‘Baggs. Under-manager. I served with Bobby Bunton in the Catering Corps. Actually not strictly true – he managed to escape with a gammy knee after six weeks while I was in for the duration, worse luck. But we remained mates and he gave me this job.’ His hand shook slightly as he took another sip of gin; evidently war service in catering was not the breeze most assume it to be.

‘How nice. I haven’t met him but he sounds a wonderful man.’

‘Mm,’ said Mr Baggs.

‘So who was this lady in… Curzon Street?’ It never hurt to ask the extra question.

‘Oh,’ said Baggs, brightening, ‘are you interviewing me?’

‘Only if you want me to,’ replied Miss Dimont. She could tell he was dying to talk.

‘A strange one, that. Went by the name of Patsy Rouchos – South American by the sound of it. Interesting really. She had a cheap suitcase and cheap clothes but the rings she wore and her hair, her make-up, sort of said to me this wasn’t her usual kind of place. Come down in the world, perhaps. Or found herself a boyfriend from a different walk of life and was chasing after him.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘Very strong-looking, almost like a bloke, but handsome. Nice manners but distant. Nothing in the way she spoke to tell where she came from, but a cut above our usual campers, I’d say.’

‘So what actually happened?’ This was the crucial question which had been on the tip of her tongue from the start, but long ago she had learned to choose her moment. Get them talking is the first rule in journalism, and don’t ask awkward questions till you’ve managed to prise the door open a little.

‘One shot, through the heart. Or the chest – never quite sure if the ladies have a heart on the same side as us mere males. Or at all, ha ha!’

Miss Dimont looked into her glass and let this pass.

‘Elsie, the cleaner, found her late this afternoon, but I got a good look before the police arrived. She was sitting on the bed, completely dressed, full make-up, very well turned out. Almost as if she’d prepared herself for it.’

‘No gun?’

‘No gun.’

‘Signs of forced entry?’

‘Door was open.’

‘Could have been a burglary?’

Mr Baggs’ jovial tone suddenly deserted him. ‘Here?’ he said. ‘Here? Look Mrs, er,…’

‘Miss Dimont.’

‘People who come here have saved up all year. They haven’t got pots of money. Not likely, miss, to have expensive possessions worth taking a life for.’

The reporter felt embarrassed – Baggs was right. Suddenly she saw Buntorama for what it was, a sunny haven for working people who prized their few moments in this beauteous corner of Devon just as much as the posh collar-and-tie lot next door at the Marine.

‘My apologies, Mr Baggs, I’m just trying to find out why this should have happened. Who this Patsy Rouchos was. It’s unusual, don’t you agree?’

Baggs was quite a clever man, she could see, even if he had the weakness. And she wasn’t quite sure about his eyes. He poured himself another slug of gin but seemed too concerned with getting the measure correct to remember to refill Judy’s glass.

‘I was on the desk when she came through the gate that first day,’ he said. ‘Arrived on foot – that struck me as odd, usually the campers come by bus from the station. Carried her suitcase as if she was used to somebody doing it for her. Smiled politely when most of the campers are worn out from the journey and looking for a bit of a squabble. Her clothes were ordinary, but she stood out.’

‘That’s why you remember her.’

‘Look, we get hundreds of new faces every week, no reason to remember an individual over all the others. But she just struck me as a bit of a fish out of water.’

‘Do people have to sign a register?’

‘The Inspector asked me that. She gave her address as 11a Milcomb Street, London.’

‘And did she take part in camp life?’

‘What, you mean the sing-songs and the gym classes? No. I didn’t see her at the talent show, but she did go to church the day she arrived – I saw her there when I was rounding up the collection.’

‘Church?’ said Miss Dimont, startled. ‘I didn’t know you had one of those!’

‘The last hut in what we call Knightsbridge. Looks like all the others on the outside, but it’s been done up all proper inside. A nice little earner.’

‘Sorry?’

Mr Baggs tapped the side of his nose.

‘The collection? You don’t mean you…!’

‘Helps keep the cost of the holiday down. Better than sending it all to some missionary in Africa to squander on beads and bells.’

Miss Dimont did not care for this and changed the subject. ‘Was there anything else that struck you before the police got there? It just seems so odd she was sitting there, almost waiting for her killer to call.’

‘Police said there was nothing in her handbag to give her a name. Purse and hankies, make-up, that sort of thing, but no driving licence or identity card. They did find a small photo album though. I expect that’ll help them find her relatives.’

‘If it had her relatives in it.’

‘Ah yes.’

‘Did you look inside it?’

‘No.’

That appeared to have exhausted the extent of Mr Baggs’ knowledge and there seemed little left to say. He eyed Judy’s unfinished glass with interest as she gathered up her notebook and prepared her departure.

‘Mr Bunton – where can I find him?’

‘He’ll be with Fluffles, I expect.’

Judy turned at the door. Writing that Page One lead on Fluffles being thrown out of the Marine Hotel seemed a lifetime ago. Was it really only an hour?

‘I suppose you know about that incident in the Marine?’

Mr Baggs had got up, wandered over, and absently helped himself to her glass. The action appeared to ease a momentary stress in his features.

‘Par for the course,’ he said, serene again. ‘Fluffles likes her presence to be felt.’

‘What actually happened?’ It’s amazing how you can write a newspaper story and appear to know so much when actually all you’ve done is thrown some random facts together at top speed and crashed them out on your Remington.

‘Well, you know Bobby and that stuffed-shirt Radipole are at loggerheads.’

‘Evidently.’

‘Yers, well, when we opened up the camp here last year, Bobby went out of his way to be nice to him – sent a bottle of champagne, wrote and offered him a free holiday, even. That man is such a snob he didn’t even bother to answer.

‘Now Bobby don’t give up easily. So he started going into the Primrose Bar when he come down here, just to make friends like. That seemed to work OK – they didn’t mind taking his money, and Bobby can splash it around when he wants.’

‘Mr Radipole, I seem to remember, tried very hard to stop Buntorama opening.’

‘Nothing he could do. He may run a stuck-up hotel with fancy customers and write-ups in all the glossy magazines, but Bobby has given more pleasure to more people than that stuffed-shirt could ever dream of. Eight million workers – eight million – spend all year waiting for their annual holiday, Miss Dimmum, and we give ’em the best they could wish for. Not just some lousy cocktail in a glass – we give ’em the works!’

‘You were talking about Fluffles.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Baggs, nodding happily. ‘She’s a one!’

‘I thought Mr Bunton was married.’

‘Several times, ha ha! But this is one’s different – she’s gorgeous, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t think I’ve…’

‘You should, you should! Like a film-star, only she’s never been in films. I guess she’s just famous for being famous.’

‘Or because of the famous people she’s been photographed with.’

‘Well, think how much nicer they look in the paper when they’ve got Fluffles by their side – I mean, that figure! Those curves! And every man loves a platinum blonde!’

I can certainly think of one, thought Miss D. And look what he did to poor Betty…

‘Only sometimes she gets a little excitable after a drinkie or two. And she always wears those high high heels which she falls off.’

‘I was told her clothes were torn.’

‘Well,’ said Baggs, enjoying himself now, ‘she likes her dresses so tight she’s been known to be sewn into ’em – oh, she’s the one! – and you can guess what happened. A drink too many, a little arse-over-tip, her dress splits, she bashes her nose – hey presto!’

‘So nobody manhandled her? Roughed her up? Kicked her out of the hotel?’

‘Not likely, not her. Self-inflicted wounds, I’d say.’

Thank heavens that woman died in Curzon Street, she thought selfishly, and the Fluffles story got pulled as a result. The editor does hate a complaint.

THREE

‘We’re supposed to be in this together, Terry. Thanks so much!’

It was next morning and the dust kicked up by the sparkplug incident had yet to settle – or was it the heaven-raised eyes that had done the damage? Either way, the pair greeted each other with the bare minimum of civility.

Normally Friday was a day for writing up expenses, sending off letters to loved ones, planning holidays or phoning distant mothers, for the editor rarely put in an appearance until after lunch. But this was no ordinary Friday – the murder at Buntorama had changed everything.

‘Better get over there,’ said Judy. Terry looked unconvinced, he had plans to strip down his Leica and do something unfathomable with it.

‘Bobby Bunton,’ insisted Judy. ‘The man Baggs told me he was coming down to visit the camp today, we should try for an interview. I want to get some words out of him before Fleet Street comes nosing around. Get to the bottom of him and Miss Janetti being chucked out of the Marine at the same time.’

‘Yeah, but I’ve just got the new A-36 Infra-red filter.’

‘Many congratulations, Terry.’

‘That’ll take me all morning to get sorted.’

‘Not now it won’t.’

‘You don’t know what it can do. Why, I guarantee…’

‘For heaven’s sake, Terry, toys for boys!’

Terry looked at her steadily. This was, after all, the reporter who nearly missed the scoop last night. The arch of his shoulder against the library counter inferred the superiority he felt this morning, but Miss Dimont knew her man.

She tossed out the bait.

‘You always wanted to meet Fluffles, you told me so.’

This altered things. ‘I could try out the Tri X!’

‘Oh, do shut up about the Tri X,’ said Judy. ‘Let’s just get over there.’

The Marine Hotel was all its rival, the Grand, was not. The Grand looked like a cake whipped up by an excitable Italian pastry-chef, smothered in icing and promising a sweet interior. Its colonnaded halls and fussy décor appealed to the traditionalist, and it was true that in its time it had attracted more than its share of the rich and famous.

After all, when the celebrated actor Gerald Hennessy decided to grace Temple Regis with his glorious presence, hadn’t he chosen the Grand as his watering-hole of choice? It was a shame he had to get murdered before he could set foot in the place, but as a result of his unexpected demise the Grand’s public profile took a significant upswing when his wife, Prudence Aubrey, came to stay instead, trailing behind her widow’s weeds the assembled multitude of Fleet Street’s finest.

And then, to top it all, it had emerged that Marion Lake – the Marion Lake! – turned out to be Hennessy’s secret love-child. And she was staying at the Grand as well! No wonder the iced cake looked down on its smoother rival, the Marine.

The Marine didn’t care. An art deco edifice of immensely elegant proportions, it looked like an ocean liner. Its rectilinear windows were painted a seafoam green, as snooty a colour as you will see anywhere, its vast entrance hall was dotted with sculpture which may or may not have been by Henry Moore. Its staff wore boxy clothes and angular haircuts which made them look as though they’d stepped out of a portrait by Tamara de Lempicka, and if you asked for a cocktail it came in a triangular glass.

Its clientele were urbane sophisticates and, not to put too fine a point on it, rich. They didn’t mind paying 5/6d for a pot of tea when you could get the same in Lovely Mary’s for 1/3d, and as for the price of a bottle of Moët & Chandon!

Despite the discarded front-page splash detailing the ejection of Bobby Bunton and his companion from the Primrose Bar, Judy guessed the King of Holiday Camps would be back for a drink sooner or later.

‘The man has never allowed anybody to dictate anything to him, any time, ever,’ she said to Terry. They were trundling in the Minor out past Ruggles Point, the stately piece of headland from which the Marine stared imperiously back at the lesser folk of Temple Regis.

‘’E’s very short,’ said Terry. ‘A titch.’

‘What difference does that make?’ asked Judy, more interested in the flight of a cormorant, like a low-flying aircraft on a bombing-raid, dodging the wave-tops and searching for fish. The water was a dazzling shade of turquoise this morning, the sun crisping the edges of the wavelets and giving it sparkling life.

Terry, though far from immune to such beauty, was thinking ahead. ‘She’s much taller,’ he said. ‘You can tell.’ Judy turned and glanced at his rugged profile hunched over the steering wheel: in his mind he was composing his picture.

‘He stands, she sits,’ they said simultaneously – the problem was not exactly a new one.

Finally, with this joint decision, harmony was restored. It was hateful when the competing priorities of reporter and photographer drove them apart, for they had long been a remarkable team. Terry turned and smiled at her, his gaze perhaps lingering just a shade too long as the sunlight caught her profile.

‘Watch out!’

But Terry neatly swerved round the donkey being led down to the beach, and they safely turned the corner into the Marine’s front drive.

As they entered the vast entrance lobby a wondrous sound came to them from somewhere deep in the heart of the building. A low, sweeping voice somersaulted over itself and performed some agile gymnastics before rising in a slow portamento up towards a thrillingly high note. Then silence.

‘Moomie,’ said Terry, enthusiastically.

‘Mm?’

‘That’s the new singer you can hear – they’ve got her in for the season. Press call next Monday.’

‘That’ll be Betty with the notebook then,’ snipped Miss Dimont. She didn’t do showbiz.

‘She’s amazing – all the way from Chicago. Wonder how they got her? Normally she does West End only.’

‘Everyone loves a summer season,’ said Judy absently but her thoughts were on the story ahead as she strode purposefully towards the Primrose Bar. It was barely midday but there were already sounds of activity within.

Sure enough in a corner, shrouded by wafting palmettos, sat a short fat man with a pencil-thin moustache and shiny shoes. Next to him, leaning forward, sat one of the most notorious figures of the day, the platinum-haired Fluffles Janetti. Fluffles! Her rise to fame had been unstoppable, partly on account of her impossibly-proportioned figure, but also because of the number of men it had been draped around, from politicians to financiers to actors and now, the King of Holiday Camps, Bobby Bunton.

‘Mr Bunton. I hope you don’t mind,’ started Miss Dimont. ‘Judy Dimont, Riviera Express.’

‘Get yourself a drink,’ replied Bunton without glancing in her direction. He had eyes only for Fluffles.

‘Thank you,’ said Judy, used to such snubs. It was extraordinary how famous people treated the Press like serfs when their very fame depended on nice things being written about them.

‘Miss Janetti?’ pressed on Judy. The famous blonde locks bobbed and turned but did not wave, frozen in time as they were by a lavish dowsing of hairspray. Its noxious aroma just about won the battle with her perfume, thick and syrupy and speaking profoundly (so the manufacturers boasted) of yearning.

‘Yes.’ The voice, far from fluffy, was pure gravel. The eyes were hard and watchful. A tricky piece of work, thought Miss Dimont instantly; how can so many famous men have made fools of themselves over her?

Terry was already focusing on the answer to that question. With the unspoken compact which exists between professional photographers and famous women – of a certain sort – Miss Janetti straightened up and very slowly arched her back. For a moment her famous proportions seemed to acquire almost impossible dimensions.

‘That’s enough!’ snapped Bunton, who hated the spotlight being turned away, even if only for a minute. ‘’Ere you are,’ he said to Terry, straightening his tie-knot and brushing cigar-ash from his lapel. ‘Local rag, is it?’

Several thoughts flew simultaneously into Miss Dimont’s mind. First, why was it that reporters could be ignored, blackballed, shoved aside and generally made to feel like pariahs, while photographers were given a golden key into every rich man’s drawing-room? Second, why was it that everyone referred so dismissively to the ‘local rag’? Their Fleet Street equivalents were never known as ‘national rags’ yet they served the same purpose.

And third, Bobby Bunton had built-up heels on his shoes.

‘Nice,’ Terry was saying in the ingratiating tone reserved for the victims of his lens, ‘now one of the two of you together. Fluffles, can you just go round behind Mr Bunton, lean over the chair, like…’