Score!

‘He’s innocent, you stupid asshole, Tristan wouldn’t hurt a fly. You just need a conviction. Yesterday you thought I’d killed Rannaldini.’

‘With some justification,’ murmured Chloe.

‘Once you get him into that horrible place,’ went on Tab hysterically, ‘you’ll trick him into a confession.’

‘Bébé, bébé, stop it, please.’ Tristan turned back in anguish and pulled Tab off Gablecross. A second later she had fallen against him, sobbing pitifully.

‘It’s all right.’ His arms closed round her. ‘I didn’t do it, I promise.’ For a second, he laid his ashen face against her pale hair and they clung to each other, like souls in torment.

‘Mr de Montigny,’ said Gablecross, not unkindly.

Tristan searched the appalled, often weeping, faces for one he could trust.

‘Lucy, please look after her.’

But as he was led away, Tab had to be prised off by Wolfie.

‘He’ll be OK.’ Lucy made heroic attempts to sound convincing.

‘How d’you know?’ screamed Tab.

‘It’s all a terrible mistake,’ reassured Wolfie.

‘How d’you bloody know either?’ Tab was about to fly at him, when she caught sight of the photograph of Beattie and her father.

‘Stop reading that shit.’ She snatched Rozzy’s newspaper and tore it to shreds, before storming, like Eboli, out of the maze.

She found her father heaping abuse on Gablecross: ‘Tim-Dim-But-Not-At-All-Nice strikes again,’ he yelled, then, turning to Tristan, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll bail you first thing tomorrow.’

Having poured so much money into Don Carlos, there was no way Rupert was going to lose his director before filming was completed.

‘Poor, poor Tristan but also poor me,’ sighed Sexton.

They were insured against violent death but not against the director murdering the producer, although it must be a fairly frequent occurrence. He had better get on to the backers to reassure them.

As Tristan vanished into a police car, which in turn vanished under a black tidal wave of press, Hermione could be heard complaining, ‘It’s very inconsiderate of Timothy. My last night on the set, a most taxing scene. Who will now give me direction?’

‘The wrong man’s been arrested,’ screamed Tab. ‘Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?’ She picked up Valentin’s discarded plate of porridge and was about to ram it in Hermione’s perfectly made-up face when Wolfie grabbed her wrist.

‘Pack it in. You’re behaving like a stupid child.’

‘I’m not stupid. Why don’t you do something to help Tristan rather than standing round like a stuck pig?’

After that Rupert took her home.

There was no time to think then until Alpheus and Hermione’s little scene in the chapel was safely in the can, but as dawn broke on Tristan’s first morning behind bars Wolfie realized Lucy was missing. He found her sobbing in Make Up.

‘It was my fault he was arrested. I let out his terrible secret.’

She didn’t want to hurt Wolfie by revealing his father’s part in it, but she had to tell someone she could trust.

Wolfie was totally practical.

‘As soon as we get away tomorrow, we’re going to France to track down Aunt Hortense and the truth. We’ll take the Gulf and leave before anyone finds we’ve gone.’

67

Gerald Portland had been determined to fight off any takeover by Scotland Yard. ‘They hear the West Country burr’, he said furiously, ‘and think we’re turnip-heads down here.’

Pressure from the media and the public, not to mention those viragos in their newly printed ‘I loved Rannaldini’ T-shirts who were doorstepping Rutminster police station, had been so intense that Portland had rushed Gablecross into making an arrest before he had sufficiently gathered his evidence.

Fortunately, by the time Tristan had been booked in and his clothes, including his beloved peacock-blue shirt, had been whisked off to Forensic, and he’d been forcibly DNA-tested, by having a cotton bud rammed under his tongue, and strip-searched — ‘Christ, did you theenk I had Beattie’s floppy deesks shoved up my ass?’ — it was too late to start questioning him.

Tristan, meanwhile, had been transformed into a snarling wild animal. The final indignity was when he was forced to re-dress himself in the nadir of chic — a papery white boiler-suit.

‘I am totally eenocent of murder, but not for much longer,’ he yelled, as the custody officer rammed him in a tiny cell with only a single mattress on a low, flat board for a bed and one small frosted-glass window. But at least it had its own bog, and he was so exhausted and so relieved not to have to brief Hermione that not even the arrival of a caterwauling drunk at three in the morning — which he thought, for a hideous moment, might be Mikhail — roused him for long from the best night’s sleep he’d had in months.