‘I don’t think you would enjoy the Love-Inn,’ said Paul. ‘They don’t really cater for women customers –’
‘If you think you’re going to enjoy it alone,’ said Steve, ‘you’re wrong. I’m coming with you.’
Paul shrugged in agreement and drove on past their house in Vincent Mews. It was early afternoon, so there wouldn’t be any riotous football crowds in the club.
‘We’ll just pop in with Betty for a few minutes,’ he said, ‘and clear up the last few details of the case. It shouldn’t take fifteen minutes.’ He drove slowly across Chester Square in case Steve should change her mind. ‘You could wait in the car –’
‘I’ll come with you.’
Betty sat in the back seat as she had done on Saturday evening, only three days ago. It seemed longer. She was glumly silent, unappreciative of Steve’s suggestion that she join a tennis club and meet a few nice insurance brokers and articled clerks. ‘It isn’t so bad being a dull little housewife,’ Steve assured her.
‘Des would have got away with it,’ she muttered, ‘if I hadn’t hitched a lift from you.’
‘And at this precise moment you would have been stranded in Dublin.’ Paul spoke with what he hoped was brutal kindness. ‘If that telephone box hadn’t been out of order you would have taken the plane by yourself and gone to Dublin with a hundred thousand pounds.’
‘Why is everybody so obsessed with money?’ Betty asked wearily.
She had spent the night at Random Cottage and slept until eleven this morning. Her head no longer ached and the horror of Red Trees Farm was already becoming as remote as a nightmare. It was over, and she had to go on living in Belsize Park.
Betty watched Steve Temple with envy, because she had and took for granted all of the happily married things which Betty had wanted so much from Des. It wasn’t only the home and enough money, it was the self assurance. Betty wondered how people could be so self assured. Even after they had nearly been killed Steve Temple had gone home and made them all cups of cocoa. She asked how Paul had known where to find them, as if it were unthinkable that he shouldn’t have known.
‘I knew because of something Rita Fletcher said,’ he had explained. ‘She said that Arnold Cookson was an estate agent. She wouldn’t have known that he was an old con, and obviously when he went to the Love-Inn on New Year’s Eve it must have been in his professional capacity. I wondered whether it was to sell a large piece of farmland.’
‘I thought you had missed the point –’
‘I had. But when I came to think about it I realised that the robbers using the caravan site couldn’t be wholly coincidental. I realised that was what you had meant, and of course I panicked.’ Which seemed improbable, Betty thought resentfully. ‘I knew that you would be pottering about at the farm getting into a scrape. I don’t think I’ve ever driven so fast in England.’
They had laughed together and gone up to bed. Betty had stared at the stars for more than an hour in the clear night sky, and then the cocoa and the sleeping tablets had begun to work.
Betty hadn’t wanted to go back to the Love-Inn, but what she wanted didn’t seem very important. Steve Temple had arranged it all, and here they were.
Paul parked behind the Love-Inn, fed the meter, and walked through to the stage door. That way at least Steve missed the photographs of pink bosoms and ecstatic smiles, the ambiguous advertisements and the queue of men in shabby raincoats waiting to see somebody else’s fantasies enacted.
Paul said good afternoon to the toothless old stage door keeper. ‘Is Mr Coley about?’ he asked. ‘We’re returning one of his absconding girls.’
‘If you’d like to wait in the office, Mr Temple,’ he said with a disconcerting three fingered salute. ‘I’ll tell Mr Coley you’re here.’
‘Thanks. I’ve also arranged to meet Inspector Vosper –’
‘No, he hasn’t arrived. Are we being raided?’
They went into Rita Fletcher’s office and waited. Steve wandered round examining the photographs on the walls while Paul tried to be reassuring to Betty. The brassy blare of the band close at hand indicated that the afternoon show was in progress, and eventually Steve went off to stand in the wings. Paul shrugged his shoulders. She was over twenty-one.
‘When you see the inspector this time he’ll want to know all about a bank clerk called Tony Sampson. He’ll ask you –’
‘Tony Sampson?’ Betty repeated in surprise.
‘Yes. Tell him the truth, Betty, tell him everything you know about Tony Sampson.’
Betty was disbelieving. ‘I don’t know anything about him.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, I know he’s Gloria’s boyfriend. But I’ve only spoken to him half a dozen times. I don’t even like him.’ She considered for a moment. ‘Why should the inspector be interested in him?’
‘Because he’s dead,’ said Paul. ‘He was the inside tip-off for the bank robberies.’
‘You mean Des killed –?’ But she broke off in confusion.
Rita Fletcher was standing in the doorway. ‘Hello, Betty,’ she said softly. ‘We’ve been worried about you.’ She put an arm round Betty’s shoulders. ‘You’d better get changed, darling, you’re on in fifteen minutes.’
Betty nodded and went off to join the other girls.
Rita watched her go. ‘She’ll be all right in a few days, Mr Temple.’ She turned to him. ‘Well, I gather I have to congratulate you.’
‘Really?’
She smiled mockingly. ‘Don’t you read the newspapers? They’re giving you the credit for what happened at that farm yesterday evening. It all reads rather excitingly. They say that if it hadn’t been for you the police wouldn’t have caught up with Des Blane or retrieved the money.’
Paul spread out his hands in modesty. ‘That’s not strictly true. The police would have caught up with them, but it might have taken them slightly longer to catch up with everybody else, and the Love-Inn would have been a dancer short.’
‘I hope I wasn’t too much of a bore last night,’ she said.
‘You were charming company, and you were very helpful. I’m only sorry that your business career has to end like this.’
‘Like what?’ The cold shrewdness which Paul had noticed several times last night was in her eyes again. ‘Des was killed, wasn’t he? So you’ll never have the evidence to convict Tam.’
‘Yes and no,’ said Paul. He offered his cigarette case. ‘Would you like a cigarette?’
She raised an eyebrow as she hesitated, then she took one.
‘You’ll hardly believe this,’ he continued, ‘but you’ve been very helpful on both occasions that I’ve met you.’
‘Me?’ She lit her cigarette from the book of matches which Paul had produced. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You remember when you left me in Betty’s dressing room? You were looking for her, and in fact she was out front with Mr Coley?’ He gave her the book of matches. ‘That was when I found these matches in the ashtray.’
Rita stared at the matches. ‘Well?’ she asked blankly.
‘The Gateway Motel, Banbury,’ he indicated. ‘Not unnaturally I jumped to the conclusion that Betty had picked up the matches when she’d visited the motel. I assumed she had spent Saturday night there with Desmond Blane.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘I went to the motel and questioned the manager, and I was wrong. He had never seen Betty Stanway.’
‘Go on,’ Rita said flatly.
‘Fortunately just as we were leaving, my wife Steve forgot her handbag. It was then that I realised what had happened.’
Rita nodded. ‘They were my matches. Betty had taken them from my handbag.’
‘That’s right,’ said Paul. ‘I went back to the manager, and this time instead of describing Betty I described you. He knew you immediately.’
‘Angus Lomax is pretty observant,’ she said. ‘I met Desmond there when it became too risky to meet here at the club.’ She stared at Paul for a moment as she stubbed out her cigarette, then she smiled. ‘Thank you for being so frank, Mr Temple, although you could have mentioned this last night.’
‘I don’t like eating alone. And I needed to find out where Blane had taken Betty. I knew you were only trying to keep me occupied so that they could escape. But you did so with great panache. Perhaps when you are a very old lady you’ll be able to retire to Red Trees Farm. It will still be there.’
She sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have bought it. I was greedy. Who needs a big farm like that?’
She began gathering together the oddments and personal belongings from the desk. She looked at the pictures on the wall and said what the hell? It was time to go.
‘I’m glad you didn’t arrest Tam,’ she said. ‘He would have been very upset.’ She laughed briefly. ‘All those things I told you about Tam, they were all true. Except that it was me.’
‘I know.’
Suddenly the door to the office was thrown open by Tam Coley. He was looking wild and nervous. ‘Rita, where have you been? The police are here, swarming all over the place.’ He hurried over to the drinks cabinet, paused to look at his watch and turned severely away. ‘What the hell do they want?’
She smiled at him for a moment. ‘I rather think they want me, Tam.’
Steve was standing in the wings watching The Melody Girls enacting a dance ritual called, plagiaristically, Desire Under the Elms. There was much frenzied removal of clothes as the girls combined death and fertility symbolism in their worship of trees.
‘Betty is a good dancer,’ she murmured. ‘Very expressive.’ But she seemed more absorbed by the men in the audience. ‘It’s the perspiration on their bald heads that is so fascinating,’ she continued. ‘Do you notice the way it catches the light?’
‘Let’s go,’ said Paul.
‘I expected from the nervous way you tried to stop me from coming,’ Steve said regretfully, ‘that I might find the show more enjoyable. Why don’t they –?
‘They probably didn’t think of it.’
Paul led her through the private door and out into the foyer where she laughed at the advertisements. Several solitary males looked round at her in alarm.
‘By the way, the stage door keeper gave me a message for you,’ Steve said as she followed him into the street. ‘Brian Clay telephoned and wants you to ring him back at the television studio. Something about appearing on his programme to discuss the master minds of crime.’
Paul perceptibly increased his pace, through the side street and back to the car. He glanced apprehensively at the loungers in case they should be reporters.
‘We won’t hang around in London,’ he said. ‘Let’s go straight back to Broadway. We were going for a long weekend, or was it a month?’
Steve slipped contentedly into the Rolls. ‘I’m relieved,’ she said. ‘It’s too much of a strain when you go on the box. You can put all that nervous tension into the novel about masterminds of crime.’
Paul drove in silence for a while, then he answered, ‘I don’t think I’ll write that novel after all.’
‘Darling, don’t be silly, it was a marvellous idea. I can already see that grammar school boy with his two A levels moving in on the traditional crime syndicates, he’s a perfect character. I see him as somebody like Tony Sampson.’
Paul nodded. ‘That’s what is wrong with the idea. Tony Sampson was an unimaginative fool, and faced with people like Desmond Blane he was a dead duck. I was lucky to solve this case. Dammit, I ought to have known right at the beginning that Rita was behind it all.’
‘No, darling,’ Steve said soothingly, ‘you couldn’t have. Don’t blame yourself –’
‘The coincidence of Desmond Blane picking up Betty after we dropped her at the end of her road! Obviously that wouldn’t have been a coincidence. So who would have told Desmond Blane when and where to pick her up? It could only have been Rita!’
Steve nodded slowly and said no more.
Rita had combined high intelligence with an intuitive understanding of the people she was dealing with, but what had made her so redoubtable was a savage ruthlessness. Paul wondered as they left London behind whether ruthlessness wasn’t still the principal characteristic of a successful criminal, as with a successful anything else.
‘She seemed so successful already,’ said Steve, ‘with all those photographs on the wall of her office. Everybody seemed to love her. Even you weren’t exactly unfriendly.’
‘I think she just wanted to play the lead,’ said Paul.
They sped on through the warm summer afternoon, along the Western Avenue and then right, on towards Oxford.
‘Well,’ said Steve, ‘at least there’ll be a welcome when we reach Random Cottage. Jackson will be pleased to see us.’