Score!

‘With such a high profile,’ said Karen sympathetically, ‘you must get really twitchy before a film comes out. Not just about the critics savaging it, but because the journalists get the opportunity to pick over your private life.’

Tristan looked into her kind, beautiful eyes, longing to lay his head on her trenchcoated breast and sleep for a thousand years.

‘I have to rise above the parapet,’ he confessed, ‘and geeve interview because so much money and people’s careers are involved. My father was well known in France.’

‘I loved his early paintings,’ said Karen, ‘the ones of the Garonne.’

Gablecross looked at his running mate with reluctant respect. Tristan was thawing by the second, but froze up instantly when Gablecross asked him when he had returned from Paris. ‘I drive through Channel Tunnel yesterday.’

‘At what time?’

‘Mid-afternoon.’

‘If you could let us have your ticket? Then what did you do?’

‘Always, as film is ending, I need to psych myself into next one, which will be story about Hercules. At the end, he is given poison shirt by jealous wife and, in his agony, tears up forests and builds his own funeral pyre. I need woodland location so I go to Forest of Dean and drive around for hours, thinking, and sleep in my car.’

Gablecross, if he lost a couple of stone, would make a good Hercules, thought Tristan idly. As he talked, he had been opening his post, systematically binning the letters and even a new cheque-book, and smoothing out envelopes on his blotter.

‘Can you tell us exactly where you spent the night?’ asked Gablecross.

Tristan ignored him. ‘Did you study my father’s paintings at school?’ he asked Karen, as she retrieved his letters and cheque-book from the bin.

But when she said she had, he gazed at her dumbly, unable to remember what he’d asked. Then his mobile rang.

‘’Ello, si?’ Having jumped on it, he immediately shoved Karen and Gablecross out of the caravan, slamming the door in their faces.

Resourceful Karen, however, who had attained A levels in French as well as English and Art, had deliberately left her notebook behind.

‘What was he saying?’ asked Gablecross, after she’d retrieved it.

‘He was talking very fast, but the general gist was that he wouldn’t say anything, and no-one had seen him arrive or leave and he’d speak to whoever the person was later.’

‘Well done,’ said Gablecross grudgingly.

43

Spirals of white mist drifted across the valley, like ghost priests hurrying to welcome Rannaldini to the other side. On the steps outside the house, Gablecross was assuring Wolfie that his father’s body would soon be off to the morgue, when a convoy of Fleet Water Board lorries came splashing up the drive. Instantly, like a malignant crow in her black suit, Miss Bussage swooped out of the front door down the path flanked by lavender bushes.

‘Take it away,’ she hissed at the first driver. ‘You’re too bloody late. The Maestro wanted his ponds and lake filled up, but he’s dead, so we don’t need you any more.’

‘Yes, we do,’ shouted Wolfie, following her out through the omnia vincit amor arch. ‘Forecast says the heatwave’s coming back. I’m head of the house now,’ he added coolly, ‘and no ponds are drying up on me.’

Then, turning to Mr Brimscombe, who was rubbing his green fingers in glee that at last someone was taking on Bussage:

‘Please show the drivers where we need the water.’

‘You’re not the head of the house,’ Bussage exploded with rage. ‘I typed his last will. He left everything to Cecilia, and her family. She was the one he loved, who got the part of Delilah. Not a penny to you or your boring mother, or that gold-digging Helen or her slut of a daughter.’

In daylight, Wolfie could see the scurfy grey roots of Bussage’s oily dark hair, her malevolent little eyes, her open pores.

‘You’re fired, you disgusting bitch,’ he said furiously.

‘You can’t fire me!’

‘I bloody can!’

Dialling the car pool, he ordered a driver to take Miss Bussage to her sister’s house in an hour.

‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ lisped Clive.

‘That’ll give you time to pack,’ Wolfie told her. ‘We’ll send the rest of your stuff on later.’

Reaching inside his blazer pocket, resting his cheque book on his knee, he wrote her a cheque.

‘That’s six months’ salary. Consider yourself lucky.’

‘I’ll fight you through the courts.’

‘Feel free.’

Short of chaining herself to the balustrade, there was not much Bussage could do. Returning to her office, where she had reigned supreme and, for a while, experienced true love, she took the disks of Rannaldini memoirs and envelopes containing the most salacious photographs out of a filing cabinet and locked them into her briefcase, then went down to the cottage to pack.

‘Surely my father should go in an ambulance,’ protested Wolfie, as Rannaldini’s body was carried on a stretcher across yellowing lawns to a black mortuary van.

‘It’s considered unlucky to carry a body,’ said Gablecross gently. ‘Ambulances only take the living.’