Jilly Cooper - Score!

‘Never thought Tristan was into SM,’ muttered Betty, as they hastily remade the bed.

At lunchtime, Betty had a drink with Fanshawe in the Pearly Gates, and after the second vodka and bitter lemon confessed their finding.

‘Blimey!’ Fanshawe had never downed a St Clement’s faster. Belting back to the house, gathering up Sally on the way, up in Tristan’s bedroom, they found the Montigny had vanished.

‘I know it was here,’ panted Sally. ‘We saw the horrible thing.’

‘Tristan must’ve come back, seen you’d cleaned the room, and whipped — pardon the pun — the evidence,’ said Fanshawe.

But all was not lost: his eyes lit on a pair of off-white chinos and a bottle-green polo shirt lying newly ironed on the bed.

‘When were those washed?’

‘First thing Monday morning,’ replied Sally. ‘We always go round the rooms gathering up the washing. Even on the morning after he was murdered, and everyone was flapping around because Tristan hadn’t come back, Wolfie said it’d be better if we kept to our routine.’

Gablecross and Karen were both dreading their next interview. It coincided with an unexpected hailstorm, which had sent the press racing for shelter. Lucy’s caravan was empty. They found her rescuing a meadow brown from the stony deluge and setting it down under the protection of a hawthorn bush. Her day’s sleep had been wrecked by flickering nightmares of Rannaldini, by a restless James barking at prowling police and paparazzi, and by her churning misery that Tristan, as never before, had not apologized for bitching at her.

Her eyes were red and swollen, her skin shiny and unhealthily sallow, her dark brown curls in need of a wash, but her smile was welcoming and she was still, thought Gablecross, easily the most attractive woman on the unit. He and Karen accepted cups of tea, but neither had the stomach for Battenburg cake.

‘James hates marzipan too,’ said Lucy, going back to sticking Polaroids into a scrapbook with toupee tape.

Initially the questions were innocuous. What had she been doing in the break? Had she noticed anything odd?

‘I didn’t really have time to notice anything.’

‘Sweet little kids.’ Karen admired Lucy’s nieces round the mirror, as she took out her notebook.

At first when it spun glittering gold on the table, Lucy thought Gablecross had thrown down a coin. Then she realized it was a signet ring. Had she seen it before?

‘Of course, it’s Tristan’s.’

‘Motto’s in French, know what it means?’

For a second, Lucy looked at the chained, hissing serpent, peering at the tiny words beneath. ‘“If you disturb the Montigny snake,”’ she said slowly, ‘“the Montigny snake will come looking for you,” i.e. “Leave us alone, and we won’t hassle you.”’

‘Rannaldini didn’t leave Tristan alone, did he?’

Careful, thought Lucy, not realizing she had stuck Hermione in upside down.

‘Take a look at this,’ said Gablecross. ‘We found it in Rannaldini’s safe.’

The same snake crest headed the yellowing sheet of writing paper. Beneath was an exquisite little drawing of two entwined lovers. The writing was so beautiful you were inclined to believe anything it told you.

‘My French is hopeless,’ she mumbled.

‘Here’s a translation,’ said Karen.

‘“My dear Rannaldini,”’ read Lucy. As the colour drained slowly out of her face, she forced her other hand to grab and ground the frantically shaking hand holding the letter. ‘So it was true,’ she whispered, before she could stop herself.

‘What?’ said Gablecross sharply.

‘Nothing,’ stammered Lucy. ‘That Étienne confided in Rannaldini so much.’

‘Come, come. Those two were friends for thirty years, Étienne’s paintings are all over the house. You can do better than that. “Obscene incestuous union… I can never bring myself to love him.” Étienne clearly wasn’t Tristan’s dad. Was that why Tristan killed Rannaldini?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Lucy glanced up at Gablecross’s square, bullying, ruthless face.

‘Why did he lie that he wasn’t back in Valhalla on Sunday night? Why’s he refusing a DNA test? He was clearly in shock when he finally rolled up on Monday.’

‘That was something else.’

‘We believe he killed Rannaldini and then Beattie because he was terrified of the truth coming out. His fingerprints are all over the gun that killed Beattie.’

‘They can’t be,’ whimpered Lucy in terror. ‘Oh, please, he was in shock not because he killed Rannaldini but because, when he reeled home rapturous, goofy from making love for the first time to Tab,’ her voice broke, ‘Rannaldini sent for him and told him this horrific thing, that he wasn’t a Montigny at all, and far, far worse, that his mad brute of a grandfather on the other side, had raped Delphine, his mother, because he was so wildly jealous that she’d married Étienne. The result was Tristan.’

There, it was out.

Karen winced. Gablecross whistled.

‘Wow, so that was it. Thank you , Miss Latimer.’

‘Please don’t tell anyone. You forced it out of me,’ gabbled Lucy, in desperate agitation. Oh, God, what had she done?

‘You know how proud Tristan is of being a Montigny, how naturally aristocratic. He had no mother to bring him up, Étienne was so cold and dismissive, his great arrogant family of brothers all got preferential treatment. Unlike them, Tristan got nothing personal in the will. Being a Montigny was all he had to cling on to.’

She picked up the signet ring.

‘Maxim, Delphine’s father, was sectioned and a violent psychopath, according to Rannaldini. Tristan’s so honourable he felt that as a result he shouldn’t have children.’

The hailstorm had turned to rain weeping down the windows. There was such a long pause that Lucy stumbled into more revelations. ‘I’m sure Rannaldini made the whole thing up, probably forged this letter. He was crawlingly obsessed with Tab. He couldn’t bear Tristan near her — he’d have made up anything to stop him.’

‘Probably why Tristan killed him. Why did he lie about bottling out of his favourite auntie’s eighty-sixth birthday party?’

‘Can’t you understand?’ pleaded Lucy. ‘She wasn’t his auntie if he was no longer a Montigny, any more than Simone was his niece, or his brothers his brothers. He’d have felt a fraud at that party.’

‘And he claimed to have spent all night in his car.’

‘I’ve told you about that.’ Lucy’s voice was rising. ‘He was exhausted, everyone drains him. This film has been so awful. The next one, now his roots have been severed, was all he had.’

An embarrassed, upset James had curled up almost as small as Tristan’s signet ring, which Gablecross was holding up to the light.

‘He dropped this beside Rannaldini’s body.’

‘I don’t believe it. He hadn’t worn that ring for ages. It was so loose it kept falling off.’

‘Beside Rannaldini’s dead body,’ intoned Gablecross. ‘The Montigny snake went looking for Rannaldini and coiled itself round his neck until it squeezed the life out of him.’

‘No, no!’ Lucy clapped her hands over her ears.

‘Same reason he stole The Snake Charmer .’

‘Course he didn’t.’

‘Betty and Sally found it under his mattress on Thursday. By the time they’d alerted a police officer, he’d whipped it. Rannaldini was going to publish a copy of the painting in his memoirs. Tristan couldn’t cope with a pornographic photograph of his mum being on display so he killed Rannaldini and Beattie.’

‘No, no.’ Lucy burst into tears, head on the table, clenching and unclenching her hands.