Death of a Gossip (7 page)

Alice was only sorry the estate car was big enough to take their rods lying down flat in the back. It would have been jolly to have them poking upright out of the open window, advertising to the
world at large that she was a professional fisher of salmon.

They parked in a disused quarry and climbed out to meet the others. Lady Jane was wearing a Greek fisherman’s hat that gave her fleshy face with its curved beak of a nose an oddly
hermaphroditic appearance.

John spread out the map on the bonnet of the car and sorted them out into pairs. Daphne and Lady Jane were to fish the Calm Pool, a good holding pool, and were told that the streamy water at the
top was best. The major and Jeremy were to try their chances at the Slow Pool; the Roths at the Silver Bank; and Alice and Charlie at the Sheiling. Heather would go with Alice and Charlie and John
with the major and Jeremy.

Alice fished diligently until Heather announced they should break for lunch. Fishing fever had her in its grip and she had not thought of Jeremy once.

At lunch it transpired that Lady Jane and the major were missing. Jeremy said the local ghillie from Lochdubh had taken him aside and begun talking to him, and the major had packed up and left
with him. Daphne said crossly that Lady Jane had thrashed her line about the water enough to scare away a whale and then had mercifully disappeared.

The absence of Lady Jane acted on the spirits of the party like champagne. Heather had augmented the hotel lunch with homemade sausage rolls, potato scones, and fruit bread covered in lashings
of butter and strawberry jam. Alice was dreamily happy to see that Daphne’s skin was turning an ugly red in the sun while her own was turning to pale gold. A little breeze fanned their hot
cheeks and Jeremy made Alice’s day perfect by opting to fish with her for the rest of the afternoon.

After some time, Jeremy suggested they should take a rest. Alice lay back on the springy heather by the water’s edge and stared dreamily up into the blue sky.

‘What do you think of Lady Jane?’ asked Jeremy abruptly. Alice propped herself up on one elbow. ‘I dunno,’ she said cautiously. ‘I think she’s learned the
knack of fishing of a different sort. I think she knows everyone’s got some sort of skeleton in the cupboard and she throws out remarks at random and watches until she sees she’s caught
someone. Like with you and Daphne this morning. Whatever she meant by that servant and Spanish waiter remark, it upset you and Daphne no end.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Jeremy quickly. ‘I was upset for Daphne’s sake. I could see the remark had got home.’ But you were upset
before,
thought Alice. ‘I
think the woman’s plain mad. All that talk about her having power is pure rot. She’s nothing but the widow of some obscure Labour peer. She’s not even good class. I phoned my
father about her the other night. He says she’s the daughter of old Marie Phipps, who was secretary to and mistress of Lord Chalcont, and Marie forced his lordship into sending Jane to a
finishing school in Switzerland. There never was a Mr Phipps, you know.’

‘You mean, she’s
illegitimate,’
gasped Alice. ‘How splendid. I’d like to throw that in her face.’

‘Don’t, for God’s sake,’ said Jeremy harshly. ‘She’d bite back like a viper.’

‘But you said she’s got no power.’

‘Hasn’t any power,’ corrected Jeremy automatically, and Alice hated him for that brief moment. ‘It’s just that I’m thinking of standing for Parliament and
I’m very careful about avoiding enemies.’

‘You’d be marvellous,’ breathed Alice. Why, he could be Prime Minister! Maggie Thatcher couldn’t live forever.

‘You’re a funny, intense little thing,’ said Jeremy. He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, a firm but schoolboyish embrace. ‘Now, let’s go fish.’ He
grinned.

Alice waded dizzily into the Sheiling, her legs trembling, a sick feeling of excitement churning in her stomach. The future Prime Minister of Britain had just kissed her! ‘No
comment,’ she said to the clamouring press as she swept into Number Ten. Where did Princess Di get her hats? She must find out.

Sunshine, physical exercise, and dreams of glory. Alice was often to look back on that afternoon as the last golden period of her existence.

The sun burned down behind the mountains, making them two-dimensional cardboard mountains from a stage set. The clear air was scented with thyme and sage and pine.

To Alice’s joy, Daphne had been suffering from mild sunstroke and had been taken back to the hotel by Heather. So she was allowed to ride home with Jeremy.

There is nothing more sensuous than a rich fast car driven by a rich slow man through a Highland evening.

Alice felt languorous and sexy. The setting sun flashed between the trees and bushes as they drove along with the pale gold brilliance of the far north.

The grass was so very green in this evening light, this gloaming. Green as the fairy stories, green and gold as Never-Never Land. Alice could well understand now why the Highlanders believed in
fairies. Jeremy slowed the car outside the village as the tall blonde Alice had seen with Constable Macbeth came striding along the side of the road with two Irish wolfhounds on the leash.

‘That’s the love of Constable Macbeth’s life,’ said Alice, delighted to have a piece of gossip.

‘No hope there,’ said Jeremy, cheerfully and unconsciously quoting Lady Jane. ‘That’s Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, daughter of Colonel James Halburton-Smythe. Her
photograph was in
Country Life
the other week. The Halburton-Smythes own most of the land around here.’

‘Oh,’ said Alice, feeling a certain kinship with the village constable. ‘Perhaps she loves him too.’

‘She wouldn’t be so silly,’ said Jeremy. ‘
I
wouldn’t even have a chance there.’

‘Do people’s backgrounds matter a great deal to you?’ asked Alice in a low voice.

Jeremy reminded himself of his future as a politician. ‘No,’ he said stoutly. ‘I think all that sort of thing is rot. A lady is a lady no matter what her background.’

Alice gave him a brilliant smile, and he smiled back, thinking she really was a very pretty little thing.

The sun disappeared as they plunged down to Lochdubh. Alice prayed that Jeremy would stop the car and kiss her again, but he seemed to have become immersed in his own thoughts.

When they arrived at the hotel, it was to find the rest of the fishing party surrounding Major Peter Frame. He was proudly holding up a large salmon while Heather took his photograph. Two more
giants lay in plastic bags on the ground at his feet.

‘How on earth did you do it?’ said Jeremy, slapping the major on the back. ‘Hey, that fellow’s got a chunk out the side.’

‘’Fraid that’s where I wrenched the hook out, old man,’ said the major. ‘Got too excited.’

‘Gosh, I wish I had stayed with you,’ said Jeremy. ‘But I thought you went off somewhere else. Did you?’

The major laid his finger alongside his nose. ‘Mum’s the word, and talking about mum, the filthy Iron Curtain champers is on me tonight.’

‘Let’s take them to the scales and log your catch in the book,’ said John, his face radiant. The photograph would go to the local papers and the fishing magazines. He loved it
when one of his pupils made a good catch. And no one had ever had such luck as this before.

They all were now looking forward to the evening, reminding themselves that that was the time when Lady Jane could be guaranteed to be at her best. They were to meet in the bar at eight to toast
the major’s catch.

Alice slaved over her appearance. She had bought one good dinner gown at an elegant Help the Aged shop in Mayfair. Although the clothes were secondhand, most of them had barely been worn and the
dinner gown was as good as new. It was made of black silk velvet, very severe, cut low in the front and slit up to mid-thigh on either side of the narrow skirt.

She was ready at last, half an hour too early. This was one time Alice was determined to make an appearance. Her high-heeled black sandals with thin straps gave her extra height and extra
confidence. In the shaded light of the hotel room, her reflection looked poised and sophisticated.

Alice was just turning away from the mirror when all the barbed remarks Lady Jane had made seemed to clamour in her brain. It was no use pretending otherwise; Lady Jane had set out to find out
something about each one of them. Jeremy must never know. The future Prime Minister of Britain could not have a wife with a criminal record. But then, Lady Jane knew something about Jeremy. Had he
seduced a servant? But that was an upper-class sin and therefore forgivable, thought Alice miserably. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked about her with bleak eyes.

How perfectly splendid it would be to go back to Mr Patterson-James and hand in her notice, and say she was going to be married to Jeremy Blythe – ‘one of the Somerset Blythes, you
know.’ There was Mum and Dad in Liverpool to cope with. Alice thought of her small, poky, shabby, comfortable home. Jeremy must never be allowed to go there. Mum and Dad would just have to
travel to London for the wedding.

But between Alice and all those dreams stood Lady Jane. A wave of hate for Jane Winters engulfed Alice; primitive, naked hate.

Ten past eight! Alice leapt to her feet with an anguished look at her travel alarm.

The bar was crowded when she made her entrance. ‘Dear me, the Merry Widow,’ remarked Lady Jane, casting a pale look over Alice’s black velvet gown. The fishing party had taken
a table by the window where the major was cheerfully dispensing champagne. Alice’s entrance had fallen flat because the major was describing how he had landed his first salmon, and everyone
was hanging on his every word. ‘It’s almost a good enough story to be true,’ said Lady Jane.

‘Well, obviously it’s true,’ said the major, his good humour unimpaired. ‘Here I am and there are my fish, all waiting in the hotel freezer to be smoked. By the way,
Alice, your trout’s still there. You forgot to have it for breakfast.’

‘You and Alice have a lot in common,’ said Lady Jane sweetly. ‘I can see that by the end of the week that hotel freezer will be
packed
with fish that neither of you
caught.’

The rest of the group tried to ignore Lady Jane’s remark. ‘Tell us where exactly you caught those salmon, Major,’ asked Jeremy.

‘Yes, do tell,’ echoed Daphne. ‘It isn’t fair to keep such a prize place to yourself.’

The major laughed and shook his head.

‘Oh,
I’ll
tell you,’ said Lady Jane. She was wearing a sort of flowered pyjama suit of the type that used to be in vogue in the thirties. Vermillion lipstick accentuated
the petulant droop of her mouth. ‘I was talking to Ian Morrison, the ghillie, a little while ago and the dear man was in his cups and told me
exactly
how you caught them.’

An awful silence fell on the group. The major stood with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a glass in the other and a silly smile pasted on his face.

‘I think we should go in to dinner,’ said Heather loudly and clearly.

‘I say, yes, let’s,’ said the major eagerly.

They all rose to their feet. Lady Jane remained seated, a gilt sandal swinging from one plump foot as she looked up at them.

‘Major Frame didn’t catch those fish at all,’ she said with hideous clarity. ‘Ian Morrison took him up to the high pools on the Anstey. In one of those pools, three
salmon had been trapped because of the river dwindling suddenly in the heat. They were dying from lack of oxygen. One was half out of the water and a seagull had torn a gash in its side,
not
the dear major’s fictitious hook!’

One by one they filed into the dining room, not looking at each other, not looking at the major. Alice couldn’t bear it any longer. She took a seat by the major. ‘I don’t
believe a word of it,’ she said, patting his hand. ‘That terrible woman made it all up.’

The major smiled at her in a rigid sort of way and drank steadily from his champagne glass.

Charlie Baxter had been invited to join them for dinner. He had not been in the bar and therefore did not know about the major’s humiliation. But he looked from face to face and then
settled down to eat his food so that he could escape as quickly as possible.

Lady Jane launched into her usual evening flow of anecdotes while the rest stared at her with hate-filled eyes.

What the major had done was not so bad. Alice thought he had been very clever. She herself, she was sure, would have sworn blind she had caught them.

Heather Cartwright was miserable. She had already posted off the photographs, developed quickly by John in their own darkroom, to the local papers and fishing magazines. Heather didn’t
know which one she wanted to kill – Lady Jane or the major. When it had seemed as if the major had landed that splendid catch, Heather and John had heaved a sigh of relief. Surely nothing
Lady Jane said could touch them now. It was the most marvellous piece of publicity for the fishing school. But the silly, vain major had now played right into Lady Jane’s hands. Well
I
can just about bear it, thought Heather, but if anything happens to this fishing school, it will kill John.

‘I always think those silly beanpole women who model clothes are a hoot,’ Lady Jane was saying. ‘I remember going to Hartnell’s collection and there were the usual
pan-faced lot of mannequins modelling clothes for the Season and the salon was so hot and stuffy and we were all half asleep. They were marching on saying in those awful sort of Putney deb voices,
“For Goodwood, For Ascot”, and things like that, and then this one marches on and says, “For Cowes”, and we all laughed fit to burst.’ Lady Jane herself laughed in a
fat, jolly way.

Marvin Roth was gloomily longing for the appearance of that village constable with the red hair. No one else seemed to have the courage to be rude to Lady Jane. If she did know something about
him, Marvin Roth, then good luck to her. But that remark of hers to the constable about ‘having power’ was worrying. What sort of power?

Blackmail, thought Marvin Roth suddenly. That’s it. And there was nothing he could do about it. Had they been in New York, then things might have been different. There was always someone
who could be hired to clear away people like Lady Jane . . . although he had heard that even in old New York things were not what they were in the early seventies, say, when a thousand dollars to
the local Mafia could get someone wasted. If only he could do it himself. Maybe he should just try to pay her off before she approached him. Amy must never know. Amy was the prize. In order to get
divorced from that little whore of a first wife, he had paid an arm and a leg, but gaining Amy Blanchard had been worth it. He knew Amy hoped he would make it big on the political scene. Of course,
Amy either knew or had guessed about his unsavoury past, but any approach to Lady Jane must be kept secret. There was a vein of steel running through Amy, and he was sure she would despise him for
trying to conciliate Lady Jane.