‘Can you reverse the charges to my father at Penscombe?’

Gertrude’s body was losing its warmth and growing heavy.

‘I have a reversed-charge call from Tabitha Campbell-Black. Will you pay for the call?’ asked the operator.

There was a pause, then she could hear Rupert’s light, clipped drawl. ‘Yes, of course. Hello.’

‘Oh, Daddy,’ howled Tab. ‘I’ve got Gertrude and it’s a thunderstorm, but she can’t hear it any more because she’s dead. I’m so sorry, Daddy, Rannaldini kidnapped her and raped me. Gertrude bit him and saved my life, so he threw her against the wall and killed her. Oh, Daddy.’

It was so heartbreaking, for a second Rupert couldn’t speak. Then he said, ‘It’s all right, darling. Where are you?’

‘I’m not sure. In a telephone box on the edge of Rannaldini’s woods, about a mile out of Paradise. Oh, Daddy, I’m sorry I didn’t save her.’

‘If Gertrude saved you,’ Rupert tried to keep his voice steady, ‘that was the best possible way for her to go. Look, stay where you are. I’ll be with you in a trice. But, angel, you’re too conspicuous in a telephone box.’ He didn’t want to terrify her that Rannaldini would soon be after her. ‘Hide behind a tree until someone turns up.’

‘I’ll kill him if he comes anywhere near me.’

Rannaldini fingered the bump on his head where Tab had pushed him against the table, and rubbed his leg, which was still bleeding. Fucking dog. Tab would calm down. He’d buy her stepmother a new puppy. He’d better find her before she caused trouble. Picking up her glass of vodka, he went outside. The wood was very dark. Not a star pierced the leafy ceiling. There was no sign of Tab. As he wandered northwards, blackberry fronds clawed at his dressing-gown, like women always wanting things.

Helen had spent most of the day packing. Everything was such an effort these days. She was off to London first thing and, to her heartfelt relief, Rannaldini appeared to be cooling off the appalling Pushy and had even offered her his helicopter.

For years, Helen had boycotted Rannaldini’s watchtower as a ghastly phallic example of Pandora’s box but, overcome by restlessness and curiosity as to whether Rannaldini had really dumped Pushy, she decided to take a late-night walk through the woods. Drawn irrevocably towards the tower, she was amazed to find the door open and lights blazing. On the first floor, she found a glass knocked over, a bronze of Wagner on the floor, a chair on its side, and tidied automatically.

Seeing nothing of interest, except one of Étienne de Montigny’s revolting paintings, she retreated to Rannaldini’s edit suite on the ground floor where he had been watching the rushes. Here, with pounding heart, she discovered Rannaldini’s memoirs: diaries bound in red leather with crimson endpapers and, in a huge scrapbook on the table, beautiful obscene photographs of her husband’s women.

There was that slut Flora, and Serena Westwood. Helen gasped with horror. She had trusted and made a friend of Serena. And look at Pushy straddling a sofa in a London flat! No wonder the little tart had treated Valhalla as though she owned it.

As if she were watching some horror film, Helen flicked over the pages faster and faster. Oh, heavens, there was Bussage roped to a bed, like an elephant being airlifted to another safari park. She’d been right all along about her and— Oh, God! Blood seemed to explode in her head. There was Tabitha, naked and, in her lean beauty and her arrogance, hideously reminiscent of Rupert.

But there was worse to come: a photograph of Helen herself across the gatefold, pitifully thin, her hips hardly holding up a suspender belt, her silicone breasts jutting obscenely from a skeletal ribcage.

‘I’m going mad,’ sobbed Helen.

As if in slow-motion nightmare, she turned to the diaries, fumbling for the entries where Rannaldini had first met her. ‘Prudish, pretentious, silly,’ she read numbly. Then on the night he had first made love to her in Prague: ‘Used wicked doctor/shy young patient routine. Helen a pushover.’

Reading on she realized that, throughout their courtship, Rannaldini had not only despised her but had been making love to other women, recording conquests even on their honeymoon, and interspersed with all this was his craving for Tabitha.

‘She smiled at me today. She was wearing a sawn-off shirt and when she raised her arm I saw the underside of her breast like a gull’s egg.’

With a howl of anguish, Helen went on the rampage. Tugging a drawer until it fell out, she found a draft will, dated 8 July. Bussage must have typed it that afternoon. Rannaldini was leaving everything to Cecilia, his second wife, to all his children by her and to that monster, Little Cosmo. Not a cent to Helen or Wolfie.

A flash of lightning lit up the wood as though it were day. A deafening clap of thunder ripped open the valley. Running outside, Helen threw up and up and up. Rannaldini must be stopped from publishing his memoirs, particularly if that fiendish Beattie Johnson had any say in it. Suddenly she heard singing: ‘These tears are from my soul.’

Hermione must be on her way to the watchtower. Jumping behind a huge sycamore, Helen didn’t notice at first the dancing fireflies of a helicopter landing in a nearby field, and men jumping out like an SAS raid and running across the grass.

Rannaldini had found no sign of Tabitha, but the voltage of the vodka he’d drunk and the bump on his head, which was still seeping blood into his hair, were making him dizzy. Wandering back in the direction of the watchtower, surprised to hear sheep bleating, he was suddenly distracted by someone singing Elisabetta’s part in the final duet: ‘These tears are from my soul,’ soared the voice.


‘You can see how pure are the tears women weep for heroes.

But we shall meet again in a better world.’

He was still a hero in Hermione’s eyes. She was showing him that no-one could sing the part better, and that she had forgiven him. Her top notes sounded as pure and lovely as they had in Paris, eighteen years ago. Hermione, who had given him more pleasure than any other woman. Why was he squandering his energy on silly young girls? Smiling, he walked down the ride and held out his arms.

‘My little darling,’ he called out.


38


Despite noisy encouragement from the spectators, Granny and Griselda lost 6–3, 6–4 to Wolfie and Simone. Leaving the others down at the court with plenty of drink, Wolfie loped back to the house to organize supper. In the larder he found a big plate of chicken à l’estragon, a ham, an asparagus and avocado salad, a chocolate roulade, a large blue bowl of raspberries, and was just thanking God for Mrs Brimscombe when she hobbled, white-faced and gibbering, into the kitchen. She refused a stiff drink and it was several minutes before she made any sense. She had seen a pale mauve light, she said. ‘It came bobbing out of Hangman’s Wood, across the big lawn, past the chapel and disappeared into the graveyard.’

‘Must have been someone with a torch.’

‘There was no footsteps, it went straight through the big yew hedge and a wall. Bobbing and pale mauve it was, Wolfie.’ Mrs Brimscombe put gnarled hands, shaking like windswept twigs, to her face. ‘Lights like that have been seen in Paradise before, come to guide the dead soul to his grave,’ she whispered.

Despite the stifling heat, Wolfie felt icy fingers on his heart.

‘It means there’s been a death, Wolfie.’

Refusing a lift home, she stumbled into the dark.

Wolfie was terrified. His father never allowed servants to sleep in the house although, to Helen’s distress, Clive and Bussage drifted in at all hours. For once, he was relieved to hear old bag Bussage tapping away on the keyboard in her office, and singing, probably on the radio, coming from Helen’s little study down the passage.

He must pull himself together and open some bottles. Grabbing a corkscrew from a kitchen drawer, he idly flipped on the answering-machine, and received the full horror of Tab’s message, that she’d been raped and Gertrude murdered.

‘This time I am going to kill my father!’ he yelled.

Oh, God, where was Tab? He must find her before Rannaldini caught up with her. The bastard! Wolfie dialled 1471 to discover where she’d rung from, then found out from directory inquiries that it was the call-box on the edge of Hangman’s Wood. No-one answered when he rang. It was so dark now, between flashes of lightning. He decided it would be quicker to drive, and found himself trying to open the BMW’s door with the corkscrew. But when he screeched to a halt beside the call-box, Tab had gone. There was blood all over the floor and the telephone. A terrible fear gripped him. Had that pale mauve light been guiding Tab?

Thunderclouds had blotted out the russet glare of Rutminster, the tiny sliver of new moon had gone gratefully to bed behind the wood. Down at the court, the conscientious, frugal Bernard suggested everyone look for balls, whereupon most people sloped off claiming the need to make urgent telephone calls. Lucy, who had returned after her storm of tears in time to watch the last game and give back Wolfie’s signet ring, set off with James clinging to her heels for a last run round the south side of Hangman’s Wood.

She soon regretted it. The wood exuded such evil. At any moment she expected dark branches to grab her, or the Hanging Blacksmith to thunder by. She was glad when the path curved and she could see the comfortingly twinkling lights of Paradise village. She was just wondering wistfully how Tristan had coped, knowing he was no longer a Montigny at such a tribal gathering as Aunt Hortense’s party, when James bounded forward, wagging his long tail, giving excited little squeaks.