The Nightingale Sings

by Charlotte Bingham

  Cassie talked about everything and anything until before she even realized it she found herself telling him all about Josephine and her sudden marriage. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this,’ she confided, but Joel just grunted that it was hardly an official secret and poured them both some more wine. Encouraged, she told him more, about her three children, how Mattie and Padraig had been adopted although for very different reasons, and finally about how in light of losing her second baby Josephine had become so especially precious. Joel said nothing here, but simply looked at Cassie and nodded to show his understanding, and so after a short silence while they both stared at the half dozen or so couples still dancing in front of them she began to talk about her missing horse and wonder to him why anyone should steal him and keep him without a word and without placing any demand before her.

  ‘You believe it’s out of jealousy,’ Joel suggested. ‘That green-eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds on. Being a man I say money’s behind it. Someone who stood to make or lose did it. With things like this, money’s always the root cause.’

  That wasn’t necessarily the reason behind the other famous horsenapping case, Cassie argued. Some said the other Derby winner that disappeared was stolen as vendetta, a revenge for a wrong done to someone’s woman, and although it was never proved it had to be given serious consideration since just as in her case there had been no word of the horse and no demand from its captors.

  ‘But you haven’t crossed anyone in love, have you?’ Joel wondered, lighting a cigarette as the waiter poured them coffee. ‘Or have you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Cassie said, reminding him that he knew her theory was not based on that sort of need for revenge and he stood corrected, agreeing out loud that if indeed it was revenge, then it stemmed not from the theft of someone’s husband or lover but from the result of a teenage tennis match that had taken place about thirty years earlier.

  ‘Let’s dance again,’ he suggested after they’d drunk their coffee. ‘We’ve done enough talking for a while.’

  Cassie agreed, but no sooner had she stood up than she sat back down again. ‘I’d rather not dance to this,’ she said quietly, looking up at him. The band was playing ‘Stardust’, Tyrone’s favourite tune.

  ‘Yes you can,’ Joel said, taking her hand and pulling her gently but firmly to her feet. ‘According to the motto in the cracker, it takes time to heal the heart but that is all it takes. And I’d say nearly twenty years should just about do it for anyone.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Cassie asked as he led her back onto the dance floor.

  ‘From the look in your eyes,’ Joel replied. ‘It would have been impossible not to know.’

  One of Joel’s studios was above the club, the one he used for doing his smaller work, heads, racing trophies, people’s children and pets and so on. Cassie couldn’t remember how it came about he took her up there for one minute it seemed they were downstairs dancing and the next he was unlocking the door at the top of the second flight of stairs and letting them both in. He’d knocked two rooms into one, he explained, as well as putting in a large window in the roof for extra light, and the result was a decent sized and airy studio. Off it was a small kitchen which was a mess of clutter, a bathroom and a small room which from the visible jumble of papers and notebooks spread over an old rolltop desk looked as though it was used as an office while above was a large gallery bedroom dominated by a king size old brass bed covered in a multicoloured patchwork quilt.

  ‘It used to be a sweatshop apparently,’ Joel told her as she shut the kitchen door. ‘Twenty or thirty women crammed into these two rooms. Hardly bears thinking about.’

  Cassie was less interested in past history than in the work she could see all around her, in particular an absolutely stunning head of a young girl in bronze.

  ‘I do all my big stuff in an old coachhouse I rent out in Barnes,’ he said. ‘And I use a foundry down in Basingstoke.’

  ‘This is so beautiful,’ Cassie said, unable to take her eyes off the bronze head. ‘Really so fine. So beautiful. I thought you did mostly horses. And animals.’

  ‘That’s my niece. My brother’s daughter by his second marriage. His first wife ran off with his drummer.’

  ‘With the guy I take it who used to be his drummer,’ Cassie said, smiling, but still looking at the bronze.

  ‘Nope,’ Joel replied. ‘With the guy who still is his drummer. Bro says it’s a lot easier finding a wife than it is a decent drummer.’

  ‘I wish I’d known about you before,’ Cassie said.

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘I meant—’ Cassie broke off and went to look at another of Joel’s works, this one a small carving of a foal lying asleep. ‘What I meant was I’d have loved you to do my children’s heads. Mattie and Josephine. For some reason I only have watercolours of them when they were small. I’d have loved a couple of bronzes.’

  ‘It’s not too late,’ Joel murmured, picking up a notepad to check some agenda or other. ‘I’ve been asked the same sort of thing before. As long as you’ve got plenty of photographs and the subjects are available for a couple of sittings, I can do it.’

  ‘You’re on,’ Cassie said, looking at him. ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Good.’ Joel chucked the notepad down and pulled a half-full whisky bottle out of a drawer in a sideboard covered in sketches and small rough plaster models. ‘Be warned though. I’m not cheap.’

  He held the bottle up towards Cassie, who shook her head.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve had quite enough to drink.’

  ‘You can never have enough to drink,’ he corrected her. ‘You can either have too little or too much, but there’s no such thing as enough.’ He poured himself a shot and then collapsed on an old sofa along the wall behind him.

  ‘I should go home,’ Cassie said. ‘I had no idea of the time.’

  ‘I’d rather you stayed here,’ Joel said, not looking at her but lighting a Gauloise Blonde instead.

  ‘Do you think I’ll pick up a cab outside? Or should you call me one?’ Cassie asked, pretending she hadn’t heard him. ‘I think probably you should call one, don’t you?’

  Joel took a deep draw on his cigarette, then exhaled the smoke upwards. ‘If that’s what you’d rather,’ he said, reaching for the telephone. As he called, Cassie said nothing further. Instead she walked round the studio looking again at his work.

  ‘It’ll be about ten minutes,’ Joel said, draping his long legs over the arm of the sofa and picking his drink back up.

  Cassie continued to prowl around the room examining all Joel’s wonderful work in detail, with the result that by the time the cab finally arrived Joel was fast asleep. Cassie picked up the intercom as soon as it buzzed and told the driver she was on her way down. Then she let herself out, closing the door quietly and carefully behind her.

  Once again the telephone woke her early. Once again it was Joel.

  ‘I know it’s early,’ he said. ‘But I’m sorry about last night.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Cassie said, closing her eyes and lying wearily back on her pillow. ‘We both had too much to drink.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m sorry about,’ Joel said. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t stay.’

  ‘I had a lovely evening,’ Cassie said carefully, after a moment. ‘I really enjoyed myself.’

  ‘What are you doing today?’

  ‘I have to see my daughter. If she’ll let me.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘You don’t have my number. Here it is.’

  He gave her two numbers, the studio above the club and the number of his house and workplace in Barnes. Then he rang off.

  Mark said she couldn’t speak to Josephine since she’d gone off to the hairdresser’s. Cassie asked for that number only to hear Mark laugh and say that he hadn’t an idea where his wife had her hair done. But he’d give her any message she liked when he picked her up on their way to the station. It appeared th
ey were off to Paris for a belated honeymoon and wouldn’t be back for ten days. Cassie said there was no message but just to send her love, then she hung up.

  Her telephone rang just as she was running her bath. She hurried to answer it, hoping that it was her daughter.

  ‘Mrs Rosse,’ a man’s voice said factually. ‘You should return home at once. And tell that friend of yours to stop snooping.’

  ‘Hello?’ Cassie asked hopelessly. ‘Hello? Hello?’ But the line was long dead.

  Joel was still at his studio in Covent Garden. When Cassie rang and told him about the anonymous call he said he’d take her to the airport as soon as she’d booked a flight. The hotel got her on the first plane in the afternoon and Joel picked her up from the hotel in his terrible old car. As she walked towards it she noticed a sticker in the back window which read My other car is a Lada. She smiled to herself and got in, Joel having leaned over from the driving seat and pushed the passenger door open.

  ‘The age of chivalry is not dead,’ she remarked.

  The car had stalled, but after another bout of groaning and coughing from the engine Joel finally got it to start.

  ‘You look as though you’d just come from a health farm,’ he muttered.

  ‘I don’t feel it,’ Cassie replied.

  Joel gave a sigh and without paying much attention swung the car out into the road, causing a taxi to brake sharply and practically run up on the kerb.

  ‘I remember when hangovers used to make me feel sexy,’ he said. ‘Now they just make me feel hungover.’

  ‘Maybe you should cut down on your drinking.’

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

  ‘And you don’t know me well enough to suggest that I should spend the night with you.’

  ‘Hmmm. Touché.’

  As they drove out of town they discussed what the meaning of the anonymous telephone call might be. Cassie said she didn’t know but rather than take any risks she’d rung her staff at Claremore to alert them and also the detective from Special Branch who had been assigned to the case. She had taken particular care to speak to Mattie to make sure he was aware of the latest threat.

  ‘Maybe it’s good news,’ Joel suggested, dumping a fresh bag of jelly bellies on Cassie’s lap.

  ‘No chance. I gave up believing in fairies long ago.’

  ‘I booked a seat on your flight,’ Joel said after they had driven in silence for some five minutes. ‘Only provisionally.’ He looked round at her. Cassie stayed looking ahead.

  ‘There was no need,’ she said.

  ‘You never know. If something did happen you might be glad of some dispassionate company.’

  ‘Dispassionate?’

  ‘All right – disinterested. I’m not involved like you are. I can still see the wood in spite of the trees.’

  ‘There’s really no need,’ Cassie said, but there was now a weakening in her voice and she turned to look at him. He was looking back at her and when he saw her looking at him, he smiled.

  ‘I packed my toothbrush,’ he said. ‘On the off chance.’

  As always, the sight of Claremore filled Cassie’s heart with happiness. The moment the car her secretary Rosemary Corcoran had arranged to meet her turned into the long drive, even though she had only been away a matter of days she felt such a sense of homecoming that for a moment her breath caught in her throat.

  Joel, too, had been talking quite animatedly until faced with Claremore he had fallen into silence. Together they both looked out of the windows at the late autumn landscape, the beeches gone to copper, the acers to deep red, and the huge oaks to a papery pale gold while behind the woods and finally the house the great Wicklow mountains rose to view, clothed in a pale swirl of grey mist.

  ‘And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame,’ Cassie heard Tyrone’s voice singing, as Joel murmured, ‘This is one hell of a lovely place, Mrs Rosse.’

  ‘I always mean to plant more late colour,’ Cassie said thoughtfully, studying the landscape. ‘And then when autumn comes, it seems it’s all there anyway.’

  Joel stopped and looked up at the house when he got out of the car, and for a moment Cassie stopped too, afraid that he had seen something wrong, but when she turned to look at his face she realized he just wanted to look at the house. While he gazed she looked again at the place where she lived, her handsome stone Georgian house with the lights already on in most of its long sashed windows, and the smoke from the many fires curling slowly up to the misty sky. Then as she began to walk up the stone steps the front doors were opened and Wilkie her devoted lurcher, escaping from the clutches of Erin, leaped out of the house and bee-lined for his mistress who caught him just in time to prevent him from jumping up all over her best suede overcoat.

  ‘Wilkie, you sausage,’ she said, bending down to hug the dog’s head to her. ‘You’re a right old Houdini, aren’t you?’

  Glancing over her shoulder she saw Joel was still standing with a deep frown on his face as he surveyed the rest of the house, so she went on in ahead of him while Dick hurtled out past her to go and collect the bags from the car.

  ‘And what sort of journey did you have?’ Erin asked automatically as she took her mistress’s coat, her eyes already well and truly fixed on the tall man still standing on the steps outside. ‘And who’s this you’ve brought back with you? An architect or a builder I’d say from the way he’s surveying the place.’

  ‘This is Mr Benson, Erin,’ Cassie said as Joel finally wandered backwards into the hall. ‘He’s been to Claremore before. He came over to take pictures of – of Nightie. For a sculpture.’

  ‘But not in the front way,’ Joel said, slowly turning round and taking in every detail of the lovely hallway. ‘Strictly through the tradesmen’s gate and up the back drive straight to the yard. I never really saw the house at all.’

  ‘Well you wouldn’t from the yard,’ Erin said curtly, beginning to pull the coat from Joel’s shoulders as if he was one of her charges. ‘This would be some sort of place if you could see the old stables from the front winders, now, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Joel said, submitting to Erin’s nanny-like tactics as she half turned him round to get his overcoat off. ‘It’s some sort of place anyway.’

  At that moment Dick crashed back in through the front doors still in his stockinged feet even though he’d been out and down the steps to collect the baggage, only to be collared by Erin’s free hand and pushed back to wipe the leaves off his socks on the doormat.

  ‘Come on,’ Cassie said to Joel, unwrapping her cashmere scarf from round her neck and draping it on one of the fine Hepplewhite hall chairs. ‘Let’s go through and Erin will bring us some tea.’

  ‘Erin will do nothing of the sort,’ Erin called from the cloakroom where she was busy hanging the coats. ‘What I will do is bring you in the champagne I have in the fridge for you.’

  ‘Champagne?’ Cassie wondered, as if she’d never heard the word before.

  ‘I thought you might like to celebrate,’ Erin said with a sniff and another odd look at Cassie’s dishevelled guest. ‘Mattie rang to say you had a twelve to one double at Punchestown.’

  Cassie settled into the chair by the roaring log fire while Joel prowled around the drawing room inspecting everything from the photographs of The Nightingale winning his great races to the paintings which hung on the walls, very much as Cassie had inspected his studio the night before. Neither of them said anything while the tour of inspection was made, Cassie sitting with her hands held out to the flames and Joel making his way slowly and thoughtfully around the room.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he said as he finally came to a stop in front of the portrait of Tyrone which hung above the fireplace. ‘That’s a Sumner, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘You’re not mistaken,’ Cassie assured him.

  ‘Don’t usually much like his work,’ Joel mused, pulling his mouth to one side and chewing the inside of his cheek as he examined the portrait first
from afar and then close to. ‘But this isn’t half bad. For once his subject’s every bit as well painted as the horse.’

  A moment later the door burst open and Dick charged in, somehow managing to keep the unopened bottle of champagne and the two glasses on the silver tray he was carrying despite both the speed of his entrance and the deliberate attentions of Wilkie, who was busy trying to pull off one of the wretched young man’s socks.

  ‘Leave that down there, Dick, there’s a good fellow,’ Cassie asked the now red-faced lad. ‘If you just put the tray on the desk I’m sure Mr Benson can manage the bottle.’

  ‘Ah yes, yes, very good, Mrs Rosse,’ Dick gasped. ‘I shall do precisely that.’

  Having safely deposited the tray, Dick then rushed back out of the room but now with only one sock left on his huge feet, Wilkie having triumphantly purloined the other which he now took round the drawing room shaking dead like a rabbit.

  Joel collected the champagne and proceeded to open it without incident. He poured it into the two glasses while seemingly never taking his eyes off the portrait.

  ‘It would appear from the look of him Mr Rosse enjoyed laughing,’ he remarked. ‘He bears the expression of one who sees life as a pleasure.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cassie agreed, glancing up at the painting of her dead husband. ‘The last thing I remember about him was the sound of his laughter behind me.’