Jilly Cooper - Score!

‘Oh, how sweet,’ sobbed Lucy, running off into the park. Tristan wanted to race after her and apologize for being so sarcastic earlier, but he still had so much to do.

‘Why can’t Don Carlos have a happy ending?’ said Griselda, wiping her eyes on a tablecloth.

Even Rupert and Gablecross blew their noses noisily.

‘I’ve always thought Flora a drama queen,’ said Hermione sourly.

‘Now, now, Hermsie,’ said Sexton reprovingly, as he topped up her glass, ‘Flora’s a sweetheart, and didn’t Rupert make a terrific Cupid bringing them togevver?’

Baby, however, who’d been in low spirits all evening, drained his glass of red, turned to Rupert with an expressionless face and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Cupid-Black, for ruining the only chance of happiness I’ve ever had,’ and wandered off unsteadily towards the house.

‘Another drama queen,’ said Chloe scornfully.

‘What’s the stupid queer going on about?’ asked Rupert, in bewilderment.

‘Irrespective of his sexual orientation,’ said Tristan sharply, ‘Baby really loves Flora.’

‘At least George and Flora’s is one relationship Beattie Johnson hasn’t screwed up,’ said Sexton. ‘What’s up for this evening?’

‘We’ll really have to motor,’ Tristan reeled off a punishing list of cover shots, ‘and we’ve got to shoot Alpheus praying before his coronation and Hermione walking up the aisle to join him, and I must reshoot Carlos removing Posa’s knife. I’ve decided it would work better with a gun, and the scene in the centre of the maze didn’t work either, too small and claustrophobic. The Unicorn Glade is ringed with yew hedge. We could fake it as the centre of the maze.’

‘Let’s go and look,’ said Oscar, helping himself to a second plate of scrambled eggs for the journey. A yawning Valentin brought a bottle and glasses as well.

‘See you in ’alf an ’our, Princess,’ whispered Sexton to Hermione, before belting after the others.

A thrush was singing joyfully, ‘Night is over, night is over.’

Had Rannaldini deliberately grown roses up his nymphs to see thorns plunging cruelly into their naked flesh? wondered Rupert. A faun, leering wickedly out of ferns snaking above a water trough, seemed to wink at him.

‘What are we going to do about that Beattie Johnson?’ muttered Sexton in an undertone. If Hermsie found out he hadn’t been to Eton, she’d drop him like an ’ot coal.

‘Take her out,’ said Rupert. ‘George has some ideas, we’ll thrash it out after this.’

Noticing crows circling like vultures above the Unicorn Glade, he quickened his step, admiring the stone rabbits and hounds frolicking peacefully with cats and foxes amid the flowers. But although the sun no longer cast a rosy glow, the little white unicorn snorting and pawing in the centre had become a strawberry roan, and Eulalia in her flowing black robes, resting against his raised head, had become an hermaphrodite.

As the men moved closer, they noticed an expression of terror grotesquely contorting her features. Then they realized it was her blood streaming over the unicorn’s noble head and running in rivulets down his shaggy mane. His grooved horn had pierced through her back and was now rising from her belly like a bloodstained phallus.

‘Jesus.’ Rupert was the first to speak. ‘It’s Beattie. She’s finally stabbed herself in the back.’

‘Are you sure?’ drawled Oscar, hastily refilling his glass, draining it, then filling it for Valentin.

‘Quite,’ said Rupert, lifting her skirt as he had so often in the past. ‘Look, there’s a cat tattooed on the inside of her left thigh. To get into the part she’s even dyed her bush black.’

‘And green,’ said Oscar, pointing to the handful of wild flowers Beattie had earlier stuffed between her legs.

A little tape-recorder had been attached to her thigh, but the tape had been removed.

‘Her spectacles are broken.’ Tristan picked up the buckled, paneless granny glasses.

The resourceful Ogborne, never without a camera, was taking pictures even of the ashen Wolfgang throwing up into some mauve campanula.

‘She’s also been shot,’ said Sexton, walking round the body. ‘There’s an exit wound big as a grapefruit on this side. You all right?’ he asked a returning Wolfie, who, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, looked terrified and absurdly young.

Wolfie nodded. ‘Here’s a note.’ He retrieved a grey crumpled piece of paper from some catmint.

‘Meet me in the Unicorn Glade at one fifteen,’ read Rupert.

‘I’ll have that, if you please, Mr Campbell-Black,’ said Gablecross firmly. ‘No-one is to touch the body. After we’ve searched Miss Johnson’s room, I’d like statements from all you gentlemen.’

As Gablecross and Karen panted up the stairs they were met by Helen in a coffee-coloured silk dressing-gown and a frightful state.

‘I haven’t had a wink of sleep. Every light in the place has been blazing all night. Liberty Productions are damn well going to pick up the bill. Eulalia’s phone’s been ringing all night too, and her room’s locked so I can’t get in to answer it. It’s too bad, after all the hospitality we’ve given her.’

She was even more hysterical after Beattie’s door had been broken down to find drink rings and cigarette burns all over the Jacobean furniture, black coffee spilt on the priceless Persian rugs and scrumpled tissues all over the floor.

Gablecross’s first impression was that Beattie had done a runner. Except for an ashtray brimming over with fag ends, her desk had been cleared. There was no hard copy, notebooks, floppy disks, tapes of interviews or telephone conversations. All the drawers were empty. In the bathroom, however, was a sponge-bag and a bottle of black hair dye.

As they discovered her computer smashed on the floor, her mobile rang. ‘Answer it,’ snapped Gablecross. ‘Pretend you’re Beattie.’

‘Hi, there,’ purred Karen.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ It was the graveyard tones of Gordon Dillon. ‘And where’s the fucking copy?’

‘What copy?’ asked Karen innocently.

‘Stop playing games. Six thousand fucking words. I’ve been trying to get you all night. I hope you locked up the fucking memoirs.’

‘What memoirs?’ Really, reflected Karen. As a journalist Mr Dillon should know not to use the same adjective more than once on the same page.

‘Rannaldini’s, for Christ’s sake. Are you pissed?’

‘There’s nothing here.’

‘Something must have been saved on the machine.’

‘Nothing. I’m afraid the computer’s been dropped and its entrails are spilling all over the floor. You could consult them like the Romans did. They might tell you who killed Rannaldini.’

Karen’s accent had slipped westward.

‘Who the fuck’s that?’

‘Detective Constable Karen Needham of Rutminster CID,’ and ignoring Gablecross’s horrified expression and furiously waving hands, ‘I’m afraid a body has been found, and Miss Beattie Johnson appears to have been spiked like her rotten copy.’

‘You’ll get fired,’ roared Gablecross.

‘No, I won’t,’ said Karen, who could hardly speak for laughing. ‘Gerry utterly loathed Beattie.’

Once again Gerald Portland was absolutely hopping.

‘I put twenty men on night duty at Valhalla,’ he shouted at the emergency meeting, three hours later, ‘and they spend all night drooling over Gloria Prescott, stuffing themselves with roast pork and don’t notice a socking great murder two hundred yards away.

‘We’ll be a laughing stock, and the Scorpion will lynch us. They are alleged to have paid a million for those memoirs. They’re going to bill that fucking bitch as the greatest journalist since Homer. They’re offering fifty thousand for information leading to the capture of her murderer, so no-one will call us any more. Jesus!’