Guns in the Gallery

Of course, she was delighted and had no hesitation in accepting. Jude was going to be there and Carole would much rather share the occasion than rely on a report from her neighbour. And any opportunity to snoop round the environs of Butterwyke House could only be helpful in their ongoing investigation.

But the invitation still sounded a strange chord with her. After all, she had already had ‘a look at the facilities on offer.’ Chervil Whittaker herself had shown Carole and Jude round the weekend before last. Surely the girl would have remembered that. She had registered that they’d already met when they’d spoken on the telephone about the potential Walden booking.

Carole got the uneasy feeling that, however much she was keen to snoop on Chervil Whittaker, the girl was at least as keen to snoop on her.

SEVENTEEN

The weather couldn’t have been better for the press launch of Walden on the Saturday. A perfect West Sussex early-May day, not a cloud in the sky, the Downs rolling opulently to the north, and the other way the glint of the English Channel. Maybe perfect weather was just another luxury service laid on by Gale Mostyn.

They certainly seemed to have arranged everything else with exemplary efficiency. Their greatest achievement – given how loath local reporters usually are to attend any function, least of all at a weekend – was the number of press representatives they had managed to drum up. There were some very young ones, presumably working on local papers, who looked tentative and nervous, perhaps wondering how much longer there would be any local papers for them to work on. But there were also some older, hard-bitten-looking journalists from the nationals, with matching older, hard-bitten-looking photographers.

It was soon obvious to Carole and Jude that the press hadn’t just come to look at yurts, however well appointed they might be. They had come for the famous faces.

Clearly Gale Mostyn had pulled out all the stops for the launch. A few of the famous faces were familiar to Carole, though she couldn’t put names to them. Jude recognized more and, chatting to other people (how was it she always started so easily chatting to other people, Carole wondered plaintively for the millionth time), managed to get the identities of the others. Though Walden hadn’t justified the appearance of any A-list celebrities, those who had turned up were definitely towards the beginning of the alphabet and would deserve inclusion in most of the national gossip columns.

They included, Carole was informed, a lingerie model who had just dumped a Premiership footballer after tabloid ‘love rat’ allegations, a singer predicted to go Top Hundred on iTunes within the next week, a stand-up comic who had recently become the voice of a smoothie-maker in a new ad campaign, and a girl from Rochdale whose dance act with her Siamese cat was tipped to win a major television talent show. It may not have been the Great and Good of West Sussex, but then the Great and Good of West Sussex wouldn’t even have got the local newspapers to turn out at a weekend. Gale Mostyn had, however, produced a guest list to set contemporary journalists slavering.

And there was one person there whom even Carole Seddon recognized. Sam Torino. Well over six foot tall, leggy, long black hair, hazel eyes with glints of green in them. Canadian by birth, international model, former lover of a good few of rock’s royalty, she was present with the three children born of her three most famous liaisons. She and they were dressed in the kind of casual wear which looked wonderful on them, but which would never look the same on ordinary people who bought the identical garments.

Sam Torino was a woman with a Teflon reputation. Affairs, marriages and divorces came and went, but her serenity seemed undiminished. In spite of her jet-set lifestyle, she had a core of domestic ordinariness which earned her the respect of the wives whose husbands fancied her, both in her adopted British home and in the States, where she still frequently flew for her most lucrative fashion shoots. To have got Sam Torino to Chervil Whittaker’s launch, Gale Mostyn must have had considerable muscle.

And it soon became clear that she wasn’t just there for the Saturday. She and her family were tasting the Walden experience to the full, staying overnight in one of the yurts, and going to be photographed over breakfast the following morning. The column inches for Butterwyke House’s new venture would be gratifyingly long. Carole and Jude wondered whether Sam Torino had been lined up for the previous weekend and then agreed to the postponement following Fennel’s death. Somehow they thought not. They got the impression Chervil and Giles had been telling the truth and the initiative for the launch had been conceived within the last few days.