On the other hand, she couldn’t quite believe the lawyers’ assurances that the last will was unsigned and Tab’s naked photos danced slyly before her eyes. Then Gerald Portland had telephoned yesterday, asking her to appeal for information in a press conference. Helen had panicked. Faced with a barrage of questions, she’d break down and the truth would come out.
Yesterday, Tuesday the tenth, had also been a terrible day for Wolfie. The cast and most of the crew had taken refuge in their beds, but he, Bernard and the production office had had to work flat out all day in preparation for Rupert’s first night on the set.
In the middle of the afternoon, Wolfie had just realized the dustman he’d tipped twenty pounds to take away the empties had been none other than Nigel Dempster in disguise. He was also thinking that if Mr Brimscombe didn’t stop moaning about his missing petrol can there would certainly be a second murder, when he was summoned to the house to find his stepmother in hysterics. Perhaps shock had worn off and the loss of his father had kicked in. Despite the heat, he drew her into her study, shutting the door and all the windows.
‘Oh, Wolfie, I’ve done such a wicked thing.’
‘It can’t be that bad.’ Even if she’d killed his father, she’d had enough provocation.
‘I burnt down the watchtower,’ then, at Wolfie’s look of thunderstruck amazement, ‘with paraffin from Teddy Brimscombe’s petrol can. The memoirs were so hideous and in the new will he hadn’t left me a cent.’
‘I’m sure it isn’t valid.’ Wolfie was amazed Helen had had the nerve. ‘The lawyers will sort it out. Papa wasn’t ungenerous.’
‘Don’t you stick up for him! He cut you out too.’
Wolfie winced. ‘Did anyone see you?’
‘I don’t know, I heard Hermione singing, and I ran away. The memoirs were
‘He said such humiliating things about me, he’d taken nude photographs of me, I looked like a skeleton. I had to stop them being published. Everyone was in them, Chloe, Hermione, Gloria, Serena, who I thought was my friend, that slut Flora!’ Her voice rose shrilly.
‘I’m sure he loved you best.’ Wolfie patted her jagged shoulder.
Like a cat reacting to human warmth, Helen pressed against him. Wolfie longed to pull away; he could feel her rubbery breasts and bony pelvis against him. Her freckles on her deathly white disintegrating face were like flecks of blood on the snow.
‘Even Tab,’ she hissed, ‘naked, whole rolls of film, and she was tarted up in a black G-string in some of them.’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Wolfie leapt away with clenched fists. It was as though she was branding the words on his heart with a red-hot poker.
He wanted to shout that his father had never left Tab alone, but ringing in his ears were Tab’s anguished pleas not to tell Helen about the rape.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he groaned, slumping on the sofa, his head in his hands.
‘She led him on,’ said Helen spitefully, ‘even at our wedding. Look!’ She thrust a photograph, which Wolfie had so often admired of late, of a sixteen-year-old Tab smiling into Rannaldini’s admiring eyes.
‘He’d just bought her a fucking horse,’ snarled Wolfie.
‘And soon she got a socking great allowance, a cottage and a Sèvres vase, which she smashed. You’ve no idea how they both tormented me.’ Then, when Wolfie didn’t answer, ‘Please, don’t tell anyone I set fire to the watchtower.’
‘I’ll sort it out,’ said Wolfie wearily.
Knowing that Gablecross and Karen were due to see Lady Rannaldini, Fanshawe, having relayed the dramatic findings of his interview with Pushy to Gerald Portland, then magnanimously and patronizingly passed those relevant to Helen on to his rivals.
Thus armed, on Wednesday afternoon Gablecross and Karen found Helen in her little study, painting a not very good picture of the valley. Was it Freudian, Karen wondered, that she’d left out Magpie Cottage? Gablecross noticed her skeletal thinness, the staring eyes, the deathly pallor, the spread of grey in the fox-red hair, and thought how much she must have suffered. As before, she didn’t offer them even a cup of tea.
Two other officers, DC Smithson and DC Lightfoot, he began, had spoken to Mrs Brimscombe.
‘She told them’, Karen continued gently, ‘that you had two dresses made up from the mauve silk, patterned with lilac and honeysuckle. The second one was the one handed in to the police. The first must have been the one you wore earlier.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ stammered Helen.
Mrs Brimscombe says she came down to the utility room after putting you to bed on Sunday night and found the first dress in the washing-machine with all the colours run. “Lady Rannaldini’s so particular,” she told DC Smithson. “She always insists silks are hand-washed.”’
