The Nightingale Sings

by Charlotte Bingham

  At least that is what she had told herself before she instructed her secretary to make the necessary arrangements. She was going for her own peace of mind. That was the real reason for her journey. It had nothing to do with anything or anybody else, least of all the tall, dishevelled man beside her or anything he might have to say.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve heard anything I’ve said,’ he was telling her now.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cassie replied. ‘I didn’t sleep very well last night. Go on with what you were saying.’

  ‘The police have made no connection between the so-called suicide of the gate man and your horse,’ Joel said. ‘At least not publicly.’

  ‘But you know something they don’t know.’

  ‘A friend of mine’s a reporter.’ Joel adjusted his rear view mirror which promptly came away in his hand. He sighed and chucked the mirror over his shoulder onto the back seat as he continued. ‘He told me there was a note. Said something about taking money to turn a blind eye, how ashamed this guy was, blah blah. And that the horse had been stolen by some totally unheard-of Middle Eastern terrorist group.’

  Joel glanced at Cassie and then leaned across her to get at a Cellophane bag of jelly beans in the half-open glove compartment. ‘You eat these things?’ he asked. ‘Help yourself.’

  He dumped the bag on Cassie’s knee as he returned his gaze to the road ahead.

  ‘That’s hokum,’ Cassie said, carefully picking out two or three light green beans. ‘If it was some terrorist group we’d all have heard about it. They don’t kidnap horses just for the hell of it.’

  ‘Good,’ Joel said, blindly rifling the bag of sweets. ‘That’s what I meant by ‘apparently’. If there’s no Middle Eastern terrorist group, then why did this chap kill himself? And why do I always manage to pick the banana ones?’

  Joel cranked down his window and consigned the unwanted sweet to the elements, signalling at the same time his intention to turn off the motorway.

  ‘I’m going to take you to see his bungalow,’ he announced. ‘I went there myself this morning. Before I came to meet you at the airport.’

  It was a small yellow pebbledashed bungalow on the outskirts of Windsor, in a quiet nondescript road near the racecourse. In contrast to the ordinariness of the ugly, one-storey house the front garden had been lovingly tended and was a riot of summer colour, bright red salvias, yellow marigolds and multicoloured pansies precisely arranged in rows at the front of beds planted out with carefully shaped standard roses. After he had stopped the car, Joel got out, stretched slowly and then came round to sit on the nearside wing while he stared at the bungalow. Cassie got out and stood beside him, looking where he was looking but without knowing the reason why.

  Joel nodded at a wooden garage attached to one side of the house. ‘Scene of the crime,’ he said. ‘Carbon monoxide poisoning. Tube from exhaust to driver’s window, usual scenario. Suicide note in his pocket. End of story. Apparently.’

  ‘And you don’t believe one word of it,’ Cassie stated.

  ‘I believe a man is dead,’ Joel replied, carefully selecting another jelly bean now that he had full charge of the bag. ‘But we don’t know he killed himself. Police think he did, but I don’t. Not necessarily.’

  ‘You as keen an amateur gumshoe as you were an amateur jockey?’ Cassie enquired with a smile.

  Joel glanced at her, popping a couple of red jelly beans in his mouth. ‘Hmm,’ he said before pushing himself up off the wing of the car and wandering towards the garage. For want of anything else to do Cassie followed him.

  ‘When did this happen?’ she asked as he bent down to peer through the keyhole of the locked garage.

  ‘Day before yesterday.’ Joel straightened up and ambled on round the side of the garage into the back garden. Again Cassie followed him. ‘You won’t have read about it in the papers because it didn’t make ’em. And why should it? Some insignificant old bloke decides to end it all – story for the local rag I’d say, rather than the tabloids. Particularly since no details of what was in the suicide note were released.’

  ‘So how do you know there was a suicide note?’

  Joel just smiled and tapped the side of his nose a couple of times.

  ‘OK,’ Cassie said, accepting another sweet as Joel waved the bag at her. ‘So what makes you suspicious?’

  ‘I often get the feeling there’s more to things than meets the eye, don’t you?’ Joel wondered. ‘Maybe it’s just artists. I don’t know. But I get this feeling sometimes. That there are layers. Beneath layers.’ Joel carefully pulled a fine rose towards him and bent down to sniff it. ‘Bit too much smell for my taste, but even so.’ He stood up again and looked round the garden.

  ‘Even so what, Mr Benson?’

  ‘He obviously lived for his garden, the late Mr Waldron,’ he said. ‘And these roses. They don’t look like the roses of someone of suicidal bent. Not unless that someone had sudden good reason. Won’t you come into the garden? I should like my roses to see you. OK – now let’s go and have some lunch.’

  * * *

  He took her to a pub in Eton where he insisted she drank a double Bloody Mary while he had a pint of beer and ordered a large portion of sausages and mash.

  ‘How can you eat food like that on a hot day like this?’ Cassie wondered, ordering herself a brown bread chicken sandwich.

  ‘Because I’m hungry,’ Joel replied. ‘The suicide note was typed, by the way.’

  ‘By the way of what?’

  ‘I just think it’s odd,’ Joel replied, as he lit another Gauloise. ‘Would you sit down and type your farewell to the world? I wouldn’t. Makes me think he was possibly killed rather than topped himself, gassed somewhere else then driven back to his house and shut in his own car with the engine running. He’d been dead for some time when they found him.’

  Cassie said nothing. She just sat and sipped her drink and wondered whether Leonora was capable of organizing such complex villainy. But then such now was the depth of her own paranoia that it took very little time to convince herself that Leonora was entirely capable. As far as she was concerned, Leonora could easily be the Godmother of the entire Mafia.

  ‘You know, you’re ridiculously beautiful, Mrs Rosse,’ Joel said, snapping Cassie out of her reverie. ‘Your pictures don’t really do you justice.’

  ‘I take that as a compliment.’

  ‘It’s hardly an insult. You’ve got very good colouring and wonderful bones.’

  ‘Next thing you’ll be holding a pencil up in front of me – you know, the way artists do?’

  ‘I’m not talking as an artist. I’m talking as the man sitting here opposite you.’ He said it quite factually, without any flirtation. In fact he barely looked at her as he spoke, turning his concentration instead to trying to remove the ash from his Gauloise which had fallen in his beer. Even so, Cassie found herself blushing, and to disguise the fact she pulled her compact from her purse and pretended to check her lipstick.

  ‘How long has your husband been dead now, Mrs Rosse?’ Joel asked out of the blue, startling Cassie so much she dropped her compact onto the floor. Joel bent down to pick it up at the same time as she did and their hands touched.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Joel said, slapping it back into her hand much the way someone would return something to a child. ‘It’s not broken.’

  Cassie straightened up, brushed her hair back from her eyes and took another sip of her drink.

  ‘I was asking you how long your husband had been dead,’ Joel repeated, waving to a waiter who was trying to locate the owner of a plate of steaming sausages and mash. ‘It must be twenty years, yes?’

  ‘If you know, don’t ask,’ Cassie replied, trying to control the anger she suddenly felt. Joel caught the tone of her voice and looked back at her.

  ‘I didn’t intend to be impertinent,’ he said.

  ‘So what did you intend?’

  The waiter put down Joel’s lunch in front of him and Cassie’s in front of
her, but this didn’t deter Joel from continuing.

  ‘I just wondered if you’d ever thought of remarrying.’

  ‘You don’t know me well enough to ask me such a thing.’

  ‘It’s because I don’t know you well enough that I’m asking.’

  Seeing the waiter was listening to their exchange Cassie fell silent until he had gone, taking the opportunity to finish her drink.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said once they were alone, ‘I think I’ll wait for you in the car. I really didn’t sleep at all last night and I’m feeling a little lightheaded.’

  Halfway through cutting all his sausages into four identically sized pieces Joel glanced up at her. ‘Don’t take offence,’ he said. ‘I really can’t see how enquiring after someone who’s been dead that long can be construed as offensive.’

  ‘You’re not sitting where I’m sitting. Is your car open?’

  ‘There’s little point in locking it.’ He watched her as she got to her feet. ‘Come on,’ he said finally as she pushed her chair back. ‘Have another drink.’

  ‘I don’t want another drink.’

  ‘Then sit down. I really don’t like eating on my own.’

  ‘I’d have thought you were well used to it.’

  ‘Just sit down. Please? You haven’t touched your sandwich.’

  Cassie glared at the top of his head and then sat slowly back down.

  ‘People who have interviewed you,’ he said, pushing a quarter of sausage round his plate in the gravy. ‘They ask you all sorts of leading questions. Speculate whether or not you might ever remarry.’

  ‘That’s their job. It isn’t yours.’

  ‘All right, it’s not my job, but it is of interest.’

  Cassie idly opened one of her sandwiches and stared at the thin and unappetizing slice of chicken within.

  ‘Let’s just stick to the matter in hand,’ she suggested. ‘Whether or not this poor man who killed himself—’

  ‘Or who was killed.’

  ‘Whatever. What matters is whether or not he really did have any connection with the disappearance of The Nightingale.’

  ‘I don’t know. He could be a red herring.’

  Cassie said nothing. She just closed her unwanted sandwich up and wearily pushed away the plate.

  ‘Don’t you have any theories?’ Joel suddenly wondered. ‘Or beliefs? You must have.’

  ‘If I do, why should I tell you?’ she asked in return. But all the same Cassie did.

  Joel hardly said a thing until he had practically driven into London. After he had listened to everything Cassie had to say in the pub and on the journey up the motorway he had just grunted a couple of times, rubbed his stubble and then put on a Joe Cocker tape while he worked through what he had heard. Twice Cassie asked him if he thought she was being absurd, and twice he assured her that she was not, even though he doubted that if her friend Leonora was involved she was in it alone.

  ‘All things are possible,’ he said suddenly as he drove off the Hammersmith flyover to join the long line of traffic making its slow way into town. ‘It is perfectly possible for someone like your friend—’

  ‘She’s not a friend.’

  ‘For someone like whatever she’s called with her money and connections to arrange the kidnapping of your horse. After all she’s an alcoholic and she’s been addicted to drugs and people like that – they get these ideas. But murder.’ He petered off into silence.

  ‘That’s your theory,’ Cassie reminded him. ‘The murder thing. You don’t really know what happened to that man. It’s all surmise.’

  ‘So’s your theory about whatsername. Is she really bad enough to arrange or agree to the killing of someone?’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t know about it.’

  ‘But say she did.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cassie sighed. ‘I guess I really don’t know anything any more.’ She looked round and now the traffic had come to a standstill she saw he was already looking at her, looking at her in that particular way of his with a deep frown creasing his high forehead and a strange light in his big dark eyes.

  ‘You know more than you think,’ he said without taking his eyes off her. ‘More than you’ll ever know you know.’

  There were two policemen waiting to see her when she arrived at the Dorchester, having been told by her secretary when they had rung Claremore where Mrs Rosse would be staying. One of them, a short squat man with glasses, introduced himself as Detective Inspector Bristol and his confederate, a tall balding man who was sweating profusely, as Detective Sergeant Wentworth. In the privacy of Cassie’s suite of rooms DI Bristol told her of the latest developments of which Cassie pretended she knew nothing while watching out of the corner of her eye the trembling and sweating Sergeant Wentworth who seemed about to pass out. When she got the chance she asked if there was anything she could get him and he asked for some coffee, explaining that it had been his night off the evening before and he’d probably stayed out longer than he should. While they waited for room service to answer Cassie’s call, DI Bristol droned on about the possible Middle Eastern connection while Cassie idly wondered how he ever managed to squeeze his oversize thighs into the trousers of his badly made suit.

  She got rid of them as quickly as she could, once the crapulent and badly hungover Sergeant Wentworth had drunk his coffee, most of which he spilt in his saucer, and DI Bristol had droned on further about the thoroughness of Scotland Yard’s ongoing investigations into the disappearance of her horse. However, before they finally went it was made abundantly clear to Cassie that the police thought it was undoubtedly the work of not Middle Eastern but Irish terrorists and that regardless of the great esteem they all had for the famous horse, further investigation would be a waste of the taxpayers’ money.

  As soon as they were gone Cassie rang Josephine to see if they could meet, and when after a short pause her daughter agreed Cassie hurried off to keep an appointment which was to cause her further heartbreak.

  Josephine had given her an address in Malcolm Square, a pretty house whose bright shiny yellow door was opened by Mark Carter-James.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said with his usual smile. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

  Josephine didn’t come out to welcome her but waited instead in the immaculately furnished drawing room. When Cassie came in they embraced each other, Josephine kissing her mother on both cheeks and taking both of her hands as she did so, but instead of coming to sit beside her as she normally did whenever they saw each other she went and sat instead on a small pink-upholstered button-backed chair opposite, next to where Mark had positioned himself. At that moment for some reason Cassie knew something was wrong.

  ‘Now then, now then,’ Mark said, affecting a mock comic tone. ‘What can I get you, Mrs Rosse? There’s champagne? Or there’s champagne?’

  Cassie agreed to champagne in order that Mark would have to leave the room to fetch it and she might quickly ask her daughter what exactly was the matter, but the wine was sitting already opened in an ice bucket. So instead they all made small talk about Cassie’s journey and the lack of any progress in the search for The Nightingale.

  ‘Pappa is convinced it’s the IRA,’ Mark said, ruffling Josephine’s hair before handing her a drink. In return Josephine smiled back up at him. A lover’s tiff, Cassie thought. That’s all it is. They’ve simply just had one of those overheated arguments lovers go in for. ‘It has all the hallmarks of their usual botched job,’ Mark continued, interrupting Cassie’s thoughts. ‘He reckons if it had been the work of professionals something would have been heard. Right? He says it’s Shergar all over again.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mark,’ Cassie replied. ‘I’ve said all along that I don’t think it has anything to do with the IRA, or any terrorist group come to that.’

  ‘Really?’ Mark frowned at her, as if this was the first he had heard of it. ‘But what else could explain it? Any of these other bastards who like to go round making all our lives a misery wo
uld have sent you a demand ages ago. Surely you don’t think someone had stolen your horse for a prank? Or even in a simple vendetta, do you?’

  ‘Anything is possible,’ Cassie replied, echoing the thoughts of Joel. ‘Don’t you agree, Jo?’

  Cassie’s attempt to bring her usually loquacious daughter into the conversation was met with only the briefest of responses from the chair in which Josephine was sitting with her back to the light from outside. To cover up an awkward silence Mark waved the bottle of champagne over both Cassie’s and Josephine’s untouched glasses and made some more idle talk about the lack of success the police both in Ireland and England seemed to be having in establishing any significant leads.

  ‘This really is a charming house,’ Cassie said after she had allowed that particular conversation to peter out. ‘I take it this is yours, is it, Mark?’

  ‘Ours,’ Mark said. ‘Yes, we’re very pleased with it. It belonged to a chum, and luckily said chum had the sort of taste we like so practically all we had to do was move our few sticks in, as it were, and put on the kettle.’

  ‘I see,’ Cassie said, with a glance towards Josephine who still was giving nothing away. ‘So then this is where you intend to live.’

  Now it was Mark’s turn to glance at Josephine who was looking up at him as if uncertain whether or not to speak.