Jilly Cooper - Score!

‘No!’ screamed Tab. ‘Please — not Gertrude!’

Too late, Rannaldini had hurled it, catching the side of the little dog’s head with a crack, but still Gertrude the lionheart clung on. Reaching down, Rannaldini grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and flung her against a big carved cabinet. With a sickening crunch and a faint yelp, Gertrude slid to the ground.

Rage gave Tabitha strength. Catching Rannaldini off balance, she wriggled away from him, at the same time shoving his head very hard against the sharp corner of a marble table.

‘You’ve killed her, you murdering bastard.’

Jumping to her feet, she scooped up Gertrude, who was gushing blood from a cut-open head, and stumbled down the spiral staircase out into the dark wood. She could still hear cheers and yells of excitement. If only she could reach the tennis court, but terror, fury and grief made her lose her bearings. Turning left away from Valhalla, tripping over roots and bramble cables, she reached a little clearing and paused, gasping for breath.

‘Oh, please, don’t be dead,’ she sobbed.

But Gertrude lay motionless in her arms. Frantically Tab tried to distinguish the dog’s heartbeat above the pounding of her own, but there was nothing. Gertrude’s merry, curly tail had wagged its last.

Crying hysterically, Tabitha reached the Paradise— Cheltenham road and a telephone box. Her grey dress was soaked in blood. She had no money and dialled 999.

‘Emergency. Which service, love?’

‘No, I want you to get this number for me.’

Wolfie’s machine was on.

‘Oh, Wolfie, help me! Rannaldini’s just raped me, and he’s killed Gertrude. Oh, please get Sharon from the cottage!’

She heard a deafening crash and swung round in terror but it was only thunder. She clutched Gertrude to comfort her, because the little dog had always been terrified of bangs, but now Gertrude was beyond thunder, shouting, loud music, Christmas crackers, even fireworks. Sobbing and shaking convulsively, Tab jumped in panic as the telephone rang. But it was only the worried operator.

‘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.