18. A SUDDEN LIGHT

THE FANCY DRESS BALL (18)

Sitting across from Detective Inspector McManus in the interview room at Brumpton Police Station, I was meant to feel at home and comfortable, a cooperative member of the public helping the police with enquiries that may have had little to do with me. But in fact I felt like a criminal under investigation and had the uncomfortable idea that some chickens may shortly be coming home to roost.

I was there, I was told, voluntarily, but I had been in no position to refuse. It was only days since I’d been discharged from hospital having been shot at on the back lawn of the manor House and as a consequence suffered from a major heart attack that had, I was told, been close to being terminal. The actual bullet had missed me by a yard but the trauma I had gone through as a consequence had left me in hospital for the best part of a week, and that was at a time when there was a pandemic still raging and hospital accommodation was in short supply.

“I won’t keep you long,” began McManus, “just a few odds and ends to clear up.”

“I doubt I can cope with long,” I replied, “I’ve not been out of hospital for long and it seems everything went topsy turvy while I was being treated for my heart condition.”

“You were shot at,” he reminded me.

“I’m pretty sure she meant to miss,” I said, still c**k-a-hoop that she had because I’m still in no frame of mind to want to be dead.

“But, be as it may, you were hospitalised,” he pointed out to me, “do you have any idea why the young woman would want you dead?”

“She didn’t. She missed from a point blank range,” I told him, “I can still see he with my mind’s eye, the poor confused child.”

“Confused, was she?” Anyway, she was shot and is dead because your girlfriend shot her just in time to throw her aim,” he murmured, “Miss Bywater,” he added no doubt to indicate exactly who he meant by calling her my girlfriend, as if I had an assortment of women at my beck and call and crawling into my bed at nights.

“Millie,” I said, “and t would seem that she saved my life, for which I will be eternally grateful.”

“With a gun. She had a gun,” he said, “do you usually move in circles where everyone’s got a gun? There were quite a lot around on the night of the fancy dress ball.”

So that was to be his tack. I’d been shot a so I must know where the weapons came from and why they were there. And I didn’t.

“I’ve had my moments,” I replied obliquely, not liking the man nor his assumption that there might be something in my life that involved criminal activities and firearms. The truth is I loathe the very word gun and wish the damned things had never been invented.

“Meaning what?” he asked.

“In my past, years ago, I was a journalist...”

I knew when I used the word journalist I lost him. There are some people who think that everyone working in journalism is a cheap hack who is after nothing but a cheap story no matter what trouble I might cause, and Detective Inspector McManus gave every indication of being one of those.

“I worked in the same field as some very important people,” I said, “some of them well known in the legal profession. High court judges. You know the kind of people...”

“And they had guns?” he asked, incredulously.

“Of course not. But there are always shadowy corners of their world where nothing would surprise me,” I told him, being deliberately obscure because, quite frankly, the man was annoying me before he actually began his questions.

“I see.” He frowned. “Then why do you think Miss Bywater was armed?” he asked.

“Millie? She wasn’t. But it had been a strange night, what with people dressed in weird costumes and a couple of heavies disguised as disc jockeys.” I said,

“And a naked lady on a horse? What was that all about?” He had obviously researched details of what the fancy dress ball had entailed and was trying to trip me up over the details. Well let him try.

“She was meant to be wearing a body stocking but somehow the heavies I mentioned disrupted things and she had to sally forth before she got dressed,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about it while recovering in hospital and I reckon the whole evening was devised so that I could be killed.”

I said it like that, quite brazenly, but then my time in hospital had truly been spent with me trying to make sense of everything.

“Why you?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t know whether you can remember the Tiffany affair,” I began.

“I know all about that!” he interrupted me. “some idiot thought it was a good idea to use the image of an abducted child to gain sympathy for some very dangerous criminals.”

I stared at him. If that’s what he thought then my work back then had been in vain.

“You’re quite wrong,” I told him, “it involved a schoolgirl figure, quite fictitious but based on a real and anonymous child, in order to convince the general public that there was nothing clever about the things that an international group of criminals was up to and that the child’s life would be the true cost of supporting them.

“In particular I was concerned that they had a great number of fingers in the government pie and if you remember a couple of government ministers were prosecuted as a result of the Tiffany promotion, and the prime minister was even sacked in shame when the public found out where some of his influence was going and into whose pockets the profits went. That was what Tiffany did and I was the idiot you mentioned who had the good idea, though in reality no child was abducted and Tiffany was inspired by my own daughter who, by then, was unhappily residing in a cemetery not a thousand miles from here. But by changing the nature of the publicity the police were able to investigate the activities of some pretty unsavoury characters and eventually prosecute them, and I’m proud of that!”

“Oh. I see,” he mumbled and something inside me grinned because it was clear that his research, after all, had been far from thorough. To me recent events had always been a result of the Tiffany prosecutions. Some dangerous people were ding their damnedest to get back at me after a period of incarceration.

Then McManus tried to pierce me with his eyes, no doubt in an attempt to regain ascendency.

“And Sir Jeffery Absinthe?” he asked, “the dead girl’s father? Where did he come into it?”

And suddenly, as if a long dimmed light had been turned on, the question shone brightly onto its own answer inside my head, and I could see in that instant what I should have seen years before.

© Peter Rogerson 04.08.20