Score!

‘It couldn’t matter less, chéri, we’re both exhausted. I have lines to learn and I’ve got to get up at six. I’m not as young as I was.’

It was a far cry from The Lily in the Valley when they had made love all night, and the violet shadows beneath eyes softened by happiness had only enhanced her haunting beauty.

Claudine herself, that Sunday evening in Llandrogan, had suddenly felt too old and set in her ways. Reason has reasons the heart knows nothing about. She didn’t want him to stay the night. She longed to take off her make-up and cover her face with skin food. Worry about the lurking paparazzi would keep her awake when she needed to look good on the set, and if she fell asleep she might snore.

When Tristan told her about the problems with Rannaldini, she had been unsympathetic. All directors became increasingly twitchy as the end of a shoot approached. Unable to bear it any longer, he had dropped the bombshell that Maxim was his father. To his amazement, she wasn’t very interested.

‘The aristocracy have always been irregularly conceived, chéri. My sister wasn’t my father’s daughter. I’m not sure I was either. Jean-Louis’s father was a naughty old boy too. Whenever we go shooting on the estate I notice how the beaters all look like Jean-Louis.’

‘For Christ’s sake, it’s not the same. My grandfather was a psychopath who raped my sixteen-year-old mother, so I’m three-quarters his mad, tainted blood.’ Tristan had wanted to hit her, but had shaken her instead.

‘Stop it, you’re hurting me,’ she had cried.

And what the fuck d’you imagine you’re doing to me? thought Tristan.

‘I cannot have children,’ he said bleakly.

Claudine had shrugged.

‘There are too many children in the world. They’re nothing but trouble. Marie-Claire is threatening to marry a pied-noir. Patrice is divorcing. Béatrice is pregnant by her Egyptian boyfriend. Jean-Louis is out of his mind with worry.’ Then, seeing Tristan’s blackening face, ‘Anyway, chéri, you have elder brothers, it is not as if there’s any need to carry on the Montigny line.’

When he tried to explain, he knew he was boring her. He would have liked to have left then, but he had drunk too much brandy, and was too tired so instead he had crashed out on her bed. She had shaken him awake at three thirty. It would soon be light.

‘I’m so terrified of the English press — they’re everywhere.’

It wouldn’t do to forfeit being the Most Admired Woman in France, thought Tristan savagely.

As he had driven away from Llandrogan into the desolation of dawn, and pulled into a field to sleep, he had been reminded of the time he had broken the news of Maxim being his father to Lucy and how she’d given him black coffee, laced with Drambuie, wrapped him in her duvet, held him shuddering in her arms and listened and listened, and how her hair was the same soft brown as rain-soaked winter trees.

Coming back to earth, still pacing his cell, he remembered how on the day after the murder, for the first time in months, Claudine had actually slipped into a telephone box in Llandrogan to ring him, pleading with him not to use her as an alibi. She must know he’d been arrested, but she was clearly not coming forward to save him. There was no light in the little frosted window. And no dawn for him.

As Karen walked into the Pearly Gates with Ogborne after the cinema, Jessica dragged her outside into the drizzle.

‘I found this in my bag. I wrote Oscar’s mobile number on the back of it on Thursday. It’s a memo from Tristan to Bernard and the props department, saying he was planning to reshoot part of Posa and Carlos’s pistol scene in the Unicorn Glade on Friday night, and he would need the.22 out of the props cupboard. Is it important?’

Karen didn’t even notice the drizzle become a downpour.

‘Yes, it is,’ she said joyfully.

‘And, by the way, Mikhail’s looking for you,’ said a relieved Jessica. ‘He’s in the production office.’

Karen found Mikhail utterly despondent about his crocus-yellow Range Rover.

‘I telephone ten garage today and ask how much they charge for bottle-green blow-job. They all shout ’orrible things and hang up.’

‘I think you mean respray.’ Karen had only just contained her laughter, when Mikhail said he wished to make a statement.

‘I took the Montigny from the votch-tower and I borrow lighter with lilies from Tristan two or three days earlier. I must have dropped it in the wood. I went there to kill Rannaldini about ten forty-five, but he was already dead, strangled and shot. I also must confess I actually make friends again with my wife, Lara, on night before murder. When Rannaldini took her to votch-tower for bonk, he boast Montigny painting on wall was vorth three million. Finding Rannaldini dead, I took painting instead.’

‘What did you do with it?’ Karen’s pen would hardly write for excitement.

‘Hid it under Tristan’s mattress for safe-kipping.’

‘Whatever for?’