The Shooting in the Shop (34 page)

‘. . . and none of us likes losing power,’ said Flora,
‘particularly when one has been powerful, when one
has been the centre of attention. And for most of my
life I had certainly been the centre of attention.’ She
sighed. ‘Anyway, the acting work just wasn’t there
any more. Enquiries to my agent were getting more
and more infrequent.’ Carole remembered Rupert
Sonning describing the same experience – death by a
thousand silent telephones.

‘And I didn’t want to announce my retirement,
because something might still have come up, and one
must never say never. And my hands, which had
once been one of my great beauties . . .’ she stretched
them out to look at them – ‘were getting misshapen
with arthritis, and so I thought why not exaggerate
that a bit more? Why not pretend I can’t use them at
all? And it seemed to work.’

‘You mean it got you attention?’ asked Jude, not
very sympathetically.

‘Yes. It didn’t quite get me back centre stage – nothing was going to do that – but it did mean that
people took more notice of me, felt sympathetic
towards me because of my disability, helped me out.
And with the autobiography written—’

‘Did you have a ghost-writer for that?’

‘Yes, but it’s mostly me. I talked into tape
machines at great length, then this little chap typed
it all out, and I went through it and cut out all the
extra stuff he’d added.’

‘Personal stuff?’ Carole suggested.

‘Most of it was. Stuff that I didn’t want made
public, anyway.’

‘By the way, who was Ricky’s father?’ asked Jude.

‘Do you know,’ said Flora Le Bonnier with a winsome
smile, ‘I really can’t remember.’ And it might
even have been true.

‘And do you feel any guilt about having murdered
Polly?’

Flora gave Carole’s question a moment of thought
before answering, ‘No, I really don’t. She was not a
happy child. She never really recovered from her
mother’s death. And, anyway, that book she had
written, it was a complete betrayal of her family.’

‘One could argue that it was simply telling the
truth about her family.’

‘One could argue that, but for me it would always
be a betrayal.’

‘When did you decide to kill Polly?’ asked Jude.

‘A couple of weeks before Christmas. Well, I didn’t
decide to kill her. I decided to offer her the opportunity
to destroy all copies of the book. Had she done as I requested, the girl would still be alive.’ Flora
Le Bonnier’s tone made it sound as if Polly’s intransigence
was responsible for her own death.

‘How did you come to know the book’s contents?’

‘The girl actually came round here to see me. She
gave me a copy. She was proud of what she’d done,
she wanted me to read all the cruel things she had
written about me.’

‘And did you read the whole manuscript?’

‘I did. Then, of course, I had that copy destroyed.
And I contacted Polly to find out how many more
copies there were. But she refused to suppress the
work. It was then that I thought more drastic action
might be required.’

‘Where did you get the gun from?’ asked Carole.

‘It was used in a film I made in the late fifties.
Called, perhaps not surprisingly,
The Lady with the
Gun.
One of my rare forays into the contemporary
thriller. At the end of the filming I was given the gun
as a souvenir. I showed it once to a close friend, who
told me, to my surprise, that it was in full working
order. There was rather more laxity about safety issues
on film sets in those days. I kept the gun and tracked
down some ammunition for it. Having it gave me a
sense of security. I never knew when I might need it.’

‘So you took the gun down to Fedingham Court
House with you?’

‘Of course.’

‘And,’ said Jude, ‘you cold-bloodedly planned to
kill your own granddaughter?’

‘No. And I wish you would stop calling her my “granddaughter”. She was my
step
granddaughter.
Anyway, if she had destroyed the book as I requested,
nothing would have happened to her.’ Again she made
the murder sound as though it had been caused by
Polly’s unreasonable behaviour.

‘Did you tell her you might want to meet before
you sent the text from Ricky’s phone?’

‘I had prepared her for the possibility.’

‘And why did you fix to meet in Gallimaufry?’
asked Carole.

‘It had to be somewhere that could be burnt down.
Then, when the girl’s body was found, it would be
assumed by the police that she had died in the fire.’

‘But it wouldn’t work like that. The police forensic
examination would be bound to find the bullet in her
body and the real cause of death.’

‘It worked like that in
The Lady with the Gun
,’
Flora Le Bonnier asserted.

So she had based her homicidal plan on the plot of
a fifties thriller movie.

‘How did you get from Fedingham Court House to
Fethering?’ asked Carole.

‘I got Ricky to take me there. I rang him when he
was in the shop with his latest bit of skirt.’

Which explained the call he had taken while he
was with Anna. ‘How did you know about that?’ asked
Jude.

The old actress smiled complacently. ‘Ricky
always tells me everything.’ And only then did Carole
and Jude realize the strength of the hold Flora Le
Bonnier had exercised over her son.

‘Was he with you when you confronted Polly?’

‘No, I told him to wait outside.’

‘Did he even know it was she that you were meeting
in the shop?’

‘No.’

‘So when you told him to torch the place, he didn’t
know his stepdaughter’s body was inside?’

‘No.’

‘Why did you do it, Flora?’ asked Jude.

‘Because I had to defend the Le Bonnier name. I
couldn’t have lies told about my family. It would have
upset my public.’

The full extent of Flora Le Bonnier’s selfishness,
and the delusions which fed that selfishness, became
clear. According to her priorities, even a murder was
justified in the cause of maintaining the old lies about
her family history. Lies which had been long discredited.
Lies which, if she’d read the newspapers,
she would have known scarcely anyone believed in.
Flora Le Bonnier and reality had parted company a
long time ago.

There was a silence in the little, overheated flat.
Then Carole said, quite gently, ‘You realize we’ll have
to tell all this to the police.’

‘Yes, I suppose you will. And I will have to submit
myself to the due processes of the law.’ But she spoke
calmly, there was even a hint of pleasure in her voice.
She was, after all, being offered another role to play.
And Flora Le Bonnier had always been good in courtroom
dramas.

In the event, Flora didn’t get her day in court. A few
days after Carole and Jude’s visit, her home help
came in one morning to find the old lady dead in
her bed. The newspaper obituaries were effusive, on
television and radio elderly thespians vied with each
other to say how ‘wonderful’ she had been, ‘what
heaven to work with’. In some of the papers there
were hints about her true origins. One was blatant
enough to assert that she ‘supposedly came from an
aristocratic family, but that was a stunt dreamed up
by some publicist at the Rank Charm School’. So,
as Carole and Jude had deduced, the secret she had
gone to such vicious lengths to keep had been one
that was common knowledge anyway.

Some of the press played along, still under the
influence of her charm. Flora Le Bonnier was
described by
The Times
as ‘an aristocrat of the theatre,
and one of the few who was actually also an aristocrat
in real life.’

No one mentioned the fact that she was a
murderer, but then, of course, no one knew. Except
for Carole and Jude, and Lola and Rupert Sonning, whom they had told. Oh, and the police, who now had
assembled enough information to secure a conviction
– or, as it turned out, to close the file on the murder
of Polly Le Bonnier.

Lola’s recovery from her husband’s death was a
long, slow process. At times she was overwhelmed
by hopelessness and depression, and remembering
Jude’s offer, turned to her for help and encouragement.
Though healing could never reconstruct the
past, it could over time do something to ease the
pains of bereavement.

In fact, Lola’s rehabilitation came ultimately from
adversity. When investigated, Ricky Le Bonnier’s
affairs turned out to be in a terrible state. His flamboyance
had been achieved at the cost of living way
beyond his income for years. Fedingham Court House
had to be sold and, when all the outstanding mortgages
and other debts had been settled, Lola was left
with very little. She had no alternative but to start up
her own retail business to provide for her family, and
it was through the success of that enterprise that she
found her salvation.

Her children grew up healthy, and Henry, taking
after Ricky, showed a considerable talent for music.
Mabel, who had been deeply affected by the loss of
her father, developed into a quiet, serious, lonely
little girl.

Lola deliberately lost touch with Piers Duncton,
not initiating any contact with him herself and not
replying to his messages or texts. His television
sitcom ran for a couple of series, but was then pulled because it wasn’t getting good enough viewing
figures. He continued to work as a jobbing comedy
writer, providing gags and links for a variety of shows
and growing increasingly bitter as he saw younger
and, to his mind, less talented writers become more
successful than he was. What made things worse in
his view was that quite a lot of them hadn’t even
come up through the Cambridge Footlights.

As for his love-life, the affair with the sitcom
actress turned out to be very brief and it was followed
by a great many equally brief affairs with other
women on the periphery of show business. In his
cups, Piers would frequently tell the decreasing
number of people who would listen to him about
how he’d tragically lost the great love of his life to a
murderer’s bullet.

Saira Sherjan continued to enjoy her life as a vet.
She completed the London Marathon, raising a great
deal of money for animal charities.

And Rupert Sonning, entirely happy in his chosen
role as Old Garge, continued to read poetry and listen
to Radio 3 in Pequod, only returning to his rented
room when warned of a local council inspection.
He still spent long hours walking his Jack Russell
Petrarch along the shoreline, and in maintaining his
role as ‘the eyes and ears of Fethering Beach’.

Occasionally he ran into Ruby Tallis, who would
never fail to bring him the latest opinions of her
husband Derek.

Anna Carter left the village early in the New Year. Perhaps she went off to reinvent herself somewhere
else, but if so, nobody knew where.

In the Crown and Anchor Ted and Zosia ran a
tight ship and, as spring approached and the fame
of Ed Pollack’s cuisine spread, business started to
pick up.

Kath Le Bonnier continued to do the books for
Ayland’s boatyard for the rest of her life. And she was
very happy that, having been rescued from the Devil
Women, Ricky was hers for ever. Though not, of
course, in this dimension.

Jude had a couple more meetings with the man
with whom she’d spent New Year’s Eve, but she didn’t
find him that interesting and the affair soon petered
out. Her appointments book for healing was healthily
full and, though occasionally afflicted by feverish
wanderlust, she was content most of the time with
her life at Woodside Cottage.

Next door at High Tor, with the zeal of a convert,
Carole found she was spending more and more time
exploring the Internet. Always upstairs in the same
room, though. It still didn’t seem quite right to her
that a laptop should be moved about the house.

And her son Stephen, with Gaby’s prompting, did
stick his Glow-in-the-dark Computer Angel on his
office laptop. It didn’t do much in the way of staving
off viruses, but it did make some of his colleagues
think that perhaps old Stephen Seddon wasn’t such a
humourless nerd, after all.

Gaby put off going back to work at the agency, and Carole waited hopefully for the news of another
Seddon pregnancy.

And Lily, in the eyes of her grandmother, just
grew gorgeouser and gorgeouser.

Also by Simon Brett

A Shock to the System    Dead Romantic    Singled Out

The Fethering Mysteries

The Body on the Beach    Death on the Downs

The Torso in the Town    Murder in the Museum

The Hanging in the Hotel    The Witness at the Wedding

The Stabbing in the Stables    Death Under the Dryer

Blood at the Bookies    The Poisoning in the Pub

Mrs Pargeter novels

A Nice Class of Corpse    Mrs, Presumed Dead

Mrs Pargeter’s Package    Mrs Pargeter’s Pound of Flesh

Mrs Pargeter’s Plot    Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour

Charles Paris novels

Cast, in Order of Disappearance    So Much Blood

Star Trap    An Amateur Corpse    A Comedian Dies

The Dead Side of Mike    Situation Tragedy

Murder Unprompted    Murder in the Title

Not Dead, Only Resting    Dead Giveaway

What Bloody Man Is That?    A Series of Murders

Corporate Bodies    A Reconstructed Corpse

Sicken and So Die    Dead Room Farce

Short Stories

A Box of Tricks   Crime Writers and Other Animals

To Isla,

who hasn’t had a book dedicated to her yet

and

to Saira Sherjan,

whose partner Deborah Sherry won,

in a fund-raising auction for St John’s Ambulance,