67
Gerald Portland had been determined to fight off any takeover by Scotland Yard. ‘They hear the West Country burr’, he said furiously, ‘and think we’re turnip-heads down here.’
Pressure from the media and the public, not to mention those viragos in their newly printed ‘I loved Rannaldini’ T-shirts who were doorstepping Rutminster police station, had been so intense that Portland had rushed Gablecross into making an arrest before he had sufficiently gathered his evidence.
Fortunately, by the time Tristan had been booked in and his clothes, including his beloved peacock-blue shirt, had been whisked off to Forensic, and he’d been forcibly DNA-tested, by having a cotton bud rammed under his tongue, and strip-searched — ‘Christ, did you theenk I had Beattie’s floppy deesks shoved up my ass?’ — it was too late to start questioning him.
Tristan, meanwhile, had been transformed into a snarling wild animal. The final indignity was when he was forced to re-dress himself in the nadir of chic — a papery white boiler-suit.
‘I am totally eenocent of murder, but not for much longer,’ he yelled, as the custody officer rammed him in a tiny cell with only a single mattress on a low, flat board for a bed and one small frosted-glass window. But at least it had its own bog, and he was so exhausted and so relieved not to have to brief Hermione that not even the arrival of a caterwauling drunk at three in the morning — which he thought, for a hideous moment, might be Mikhail — roused him for long from the best night’s sleep he’d had in months.
Prisoners must be checked every twenty minutes. The hatch on Tristan’s door was going up every twenty seconds, as women officers and secretaries made flimsy excuses to visit the cells. Winnie, the Polish cleaner, only four foot ten, who had once cornered an escaping serial killer with her Squeegee mop, was continually standing on top of her upturned bucket to peer in.
‘He’s getting better viewing figures than Four Weddings and a Funeral,’ grumbled DS Fanshawe.
All this at least gave Gablecross a chance to work out his line of questioning, and gain three hours’ sleep beside a tight-lipped Margaret before a quick briefing of the Inner Cabinet.
‘We think we’ve got our man,’ announced Portland. ‘Application has been made to the French justices to search Montigny’s flat in Paris. Police have already raided his rooms in Valhalla, where they found a packed case so he may have been going to do a runner.’
Then, turning to Gablecross and Karen, he said sternly, ‘Just remember Montigny’s got to cope with what he’s done. Don’t try to traumatize him any further. You’re not there to trick him, just unlock his memory. Never underestimate the blackest villain’s longing to be thought well of so don’t be judgemental or hostile. Are you hearing me, Tim? All you want to know is what happened and how it came about.’
‘Let me get at him,’ muttered Gablecross.
‘Get us a curl of his hair, Karen,’ whispered Debbie Miller.
Karen was terribly nervous. It was the first time she’d had to interrogate a murderer. The minute they’d exhausted a forty-five-minute tape, Gerry Portland would seize a copy for a listen. It was suddenly so set in stone. It scared her that, as the interviewing officers, she and Gablecross had priority and could order members of the investigating team to follow up leads for them.
But Karen was not as nervous as Tristan when he woke up and reality kicked in. It was not just backs-to-the-wall but shoulders rammed against the skeleton cupboard, the lock of which Gablecross would soon be relentlessly picking. Christ, he had so much to hide. How could he hold together a brain disintegrating like a paper handkerchief in the bath?
He had refused a lawyer. There was no way he wanted grey, desiccated Dupont jetting over at thousands of francs an hour, crying crocodile tears, then telling his brothers, and all Paris, ‘Now I know why Étienne rejected the boy…’
All Tristan wanted, for the moment, was a telephone, nearly giving the duty officer monitoring his call a coronary as he broke into rapid French to find out how last night’s shoot had gone.
Surprisingly well, according to Bernard. They’d finished all the cover shots and Rupert’s briefing of Hermione — ‘Walk up the sodding aisle and kneel down beside that American dickhead’ — had been terse but effective.
Bernard admired Rupert more and more, particularly when this piece of information made Tristan laugh, but only until he’d asked for news of Hortense.
‘Drifting in and out of consciousness, but sinking fast, I’m afraid.’
‘I’ve gotta get out of here,’ raged Tristan.
‘Don’t worry. Rupert’s been on to the French Ambassador and the Home Secretary half the night. Are you OK, mon enfant?’
‘Well, no-one’s tugging out my toenails or threatening to burn me at the stake.’
He had regained his cool by the time he entered the interview room, which was windowless, oblong, furnished with only a square black table and chairs and, he remarked, almost as minimalist as his flat in Paris.
Karen giggled, Gablecross rolled up his sleeves, loosened his tie and switched on the tape-machine, which clung to one of the cracked walls like a leech.
To relax him, Karen at first asked him about his childhood, drawing him out on hoary old Hortense, on the hostility of his father, on his admiration for Laurent, the freedom fighter, who never squealed under torture, and on Rannaldini’s affection, which had done so much to dispel Tristan’s sense of failure as a son.
Then, making sterling efforts not to sound hostile, Gablecross switched to the day of Rannaldini’s murder, and Tristan told the same story, how he’d returned in the middle of Sunday, driven round the Forest of Dean looking for locations.
‘In particular the final scene, when Hercules rip up enough oak trees to build his own funeral pyre.’
‘Like films about fires, do you?’ asked Gablecross casually. ‘Have you any idea how Rannaldini’s watchtower caught fire?’
‘I tell you, I was miles away in Dean Forest.’
He had bought a half-bottle of brandy at an off-licence, he added, but had lost the tab, and had slept in a field.
‘I need peace. For three months, to avoid importuning courtiers, I scuttle down passages like Louis XIV. I was unhappy with Rannaldini’s opening and ending. They were too self-indulgent. I needed to plot my campaign.’
‘What was the field like?’
Tristan shrugged. ‘Just a field.’
‘What were you wearing when you came through the Channel Tunnel on Sunday?’
Careful, thought Tristan. ‘A blue shirt and jeans.’
‘How d’you explain this, then?’
Karen produced an Evening Standard photograph, obviously snapped by some fan, of Tristan in a bottle-green polo shirt and off-white chinos outside his car in Dover.
‘Maybe I was wearing that. I don’t notice clothes. I search for trouser for five minutes yesterday morning before I find I had them on.’ Tristan smiled helplessly — the lovable eccentric.
Gablecross wasn’t beguiled.
‘Betty says before you left for Paris on Saturday you were looking everywhere for that blue shirt, which Sally, knowing it was a favourite, had whipped to mend a rip in the shoulder and sew on more buttons. She left the shirt washed and ironed on your bed on Sunday morning. On Monday morning before you got back it had gone, and both Sally and Betty found your white chinos and green polo shirt in the dirty-clothes basket.’
Tristan raised his eyes to heaven. ‘They drag clothes off me — Rozzy too. They ’ave millions of clothes to wash, how can they remember the days?’