Score!

‘I ’ate Rannaldini,’ he said, dragging Karen and Gablecross into the Heavenly Host for a late breakfast. ‘Whoever kill heem is an ’ero. Eef people think me drunk they leave me alone. After Rannaldini take my Lara, I do not sleep for twice nights. Of course I drop off under whipping ash.’

‘Why was your vodka bottle lying near Rannaldini?’ said Gablecross sternly. ‘I suppose it sleepwalked.’

Karen, who was deboning Mikhail’s kipper, got the giggles.

‘You realize you have no alibi.’

‘I have no vife either. Vot is life without her? She says I am piss artist, next day I go on vagon.’

‘So why was your bottle…?’ began Gablecross.

‘I go to votch-tower to kill Rannaldini for making me cockhold, but forest fire stop me getting hands on heem. I hope fire does my vork. And now, perhaps, someone will believe I only spend five minutes with screeching beetch Chloe on Sunday night and that I saw Tristan in Valhalla around nine thirty.’

Suspicion, in fact, was hardening on Tristan, who was flatly refusing to have a DNA test.

To stop Rupert throwing his weight around and demoralizing Tristan even further, Sexton had arranged for him to see a rough cut of the film so far, which Rupert had reluctantly adored. He loved Sharon eating Alpheus’s slippers, he loved the hunting and all Tab’s horses. He cried buckets when Posa died and, after a long silence at the end, said in a disappointed voice, ‘Isn’t there any more? Montigny’s a shit,’ he added, as an afterthought, ‘but an extremely clever one. I even forgot they were singing and he’s made Valhalla look almost as good as Penscombe.’

Being tone-deaf, however, and unable to appreciate Alpheus’s heavenly deep voice, Rupert thought he was the weak link:

‘More like the chairman of the local Rotary Club than a king.’

In fact, poor Alpheus had just arrived back from a masterly Boris in Vienna, where he had taken twelve curtain calls. Why wasn’t he treated with more reverence at Valhalla? He’d only popped back, anyway, for a tiny scene praying in the chapel before his coronation, and intended to push off and sing in New York on Friday and Saturday, returning in time for the polo shoot on Monday. But Sexton, on Rupert’s orders, refused to let him go.

‘You’ve been overpaid for these extra days, Alphie, so stay ’ere in case we need you.’

Alpheus was hopping, particularly as he’d just read Hermione’s interview in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Now Rannaldini has passed away, it is my duty to shine more brightly as the only star in Don Carlos.’

Alpheus was also brooding over the loss of his Jaguar, which a newly steely Sexton was refusing to replace.

At ten thirty on Thursday morning, therefore, Alpheus drew Fanshawe and Debbie into his caravan and confessed he had been withholding information because he wanted to protect his colleagues. After wrestling with his conscience since Monday, he felt he must reveal that, on his jog through the dusk to Jasmine Cottage on Sunday night around ten thirty, he had seen Sexton’s maroon Roller parked under Dame Hermione’s Judas tree.

Having taken a statement, trying not to betray their glee that they were about to rush in where Gablecrosspatch had failed to dent, Fanshawe and Debbie also, at long last, found a chink in Simone’s frantic schedule.

As she stuck Polaroids of Mikhail, Baby and Chloe into a huge scrapbook, she said how furious she was with Chloe.

‘How dare she tell flics I had said my uncle Tristan never went to Aunt Hortense’s birthday party. She eaves-drip my private conversation with Lucy. No-one appreciate pressure in making this movie. Tristan’s head was too much in it to go to a party. Can you imagine Beethoven stopping composing Ninth symphony to go to aunt’s bunfight?’

Furiously Simone drew a black Pentel moustache on Chloe’s Polaroid.

She was very young, Fanshawe told Simone, to have such a responsible job.

‘I am Tristan’s niece. Everyone theenk favori du roi so I must be better than everyone.’

‘You notice things?’

‘It is my job.’

‘Bet you didn’t notice ten things out of the ordinary on Sunday night,’ said Debbie Miller.

‘Bet I did.’ Simone covered Chloe’s dimpled chin with a black beard. ‘Mikhail change his shoes and put on loafers before he finally come into house. And I notice lots about Chloe. For first time she come in without lipstick — always she wears bright crimson colour and she look much better without it. She had also changed her clothes. She still wore tennis skirt… but… folds?’

‘Pleats?’ suggested Debbie.

‘Oui, oui, but the pleats were bigger, and on her T-shirt the blue stripes were paler and wider, but look same.’

‘Why?’

‘She must have change for a man,’ said Simone darkly, ‘but didn’t want to show it.’

‘Well done. Who d’you think it was?’

‘Probably Alpheus — they leave at same time.’

‘That’s six things,’ said a counting Fanshawe.

‘And Sexton,’ Simone giggled, ‘he had reine de pré in his hair and steeking out of the back of his trousers, and gaillet in the buckle of his Guccis and in his medallion.’