by Janet Neel
‘Well, he had finished with the police, hadn’t he?’ Francesca observed, reasonably. ‘And he was obviously cheered by the fact that the police saw no connection between the murder and the company. I mean, the poor chap wasn’t killed on duty, or as an industrial accident for which managers must blame themselves.’
‘I suppose that’s it,’ Henry acknowledged. ‘All the same, I was only quite impressed, so I will ask around in the trade to get a crossbearing.’
‘He was cheered up by having Francesca around, too,’ Martin said, grudgingly, and she eyed him thoughtfully.
‘I don’t suppose he meets many women running a factory in Yorkshire. Or not many women who don’t work for him. Makes a change.’ She spoke entirely dispassionately and without false modesty, and Henry considered her with respect.
‘Any road,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose I need say it but it would be unwise to mix socially in this situation because it could compromise us.’
‘If you mean me, I know that,’ Francesca said, amused. ‘It’s just the same as leading them on to believe we are going to rescue them if we aren’t.’
‘We’ll have to think very carefully about this lot,’ Henry confirmed. ‘I’m going to drop you two at the Department and go on and try to talk to an old mate at Allied, see if I can clear my mind. I’ll be back later.’
9
John McLeish was a conspicuous figure in any surroundings, but standing in the entrance hall at Lime Grove he was something else, Francesca thought, pausing at the door. He was not watching the door but someone in the crowd of performers, editors, technicians and their friends. She admired his absolute concentration for a moment, then went over to him and touched his sleeve. He smiled down at her, coming out of his trance.
‘Someone over there you know?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I’ll worry about him later. How are you?’
‘Just fine, thank you,’ Francesca replied demurely, basking in his obvious admiration. She had found time to bath and to wash her hair which was indeed still damp behind her ears. Her calf-length black coat with its high stand-up collar was smart without being oppressively so, and she was justifiably confident about the long-sleeved blue silk dress underneath as well. He was still looking down at her, and she felt a sharp thump of excitement.
‘Have you found the others?’ she asked. ‘No, how could you, you haven’t met the rest of us.’
‘That has to be your family over there, doesn’t it?’
She followed his nod, and indeed there they were, Charlie, his dark blond hair falling into his eyes as usual because he was worried that his hairline at the front was receding, and Jeremy, dark and olive-skinned like Peregrine but a bit taller, both flanking her mother who was looking very prosperous in a fur coat.
‘Come on, then.’ They threaded their way through the crowd, and Fran’s family greeted her with kisses and McLeish with obviously habitual friendliness. McLeish, who had been watching Francesca’s mother with particular interest, looked down into Francesca’s blue eyes set in a plump, square face, totally unlike Francesca’s and Perry’s Norman bones. He exchanged courtesies, distracted by Francesca who was stroking her mother’s coat and teasing her about it, as her mother confessed that Perry had bought it for her.
‘I suppose you have the television and a bungalow already,’ she observed sardonically. ‘Did you go to the Probation Officers’ Committee in it? They’ll know what to think, won’t they?’
Mrs Wilson rose magisterially above this, and said easily to McLeish that she rather thought she had seen him at Edgware Road, could that be? She was the probation officer for the Halligan boys and thought that she had seen him on that case. McLeish agreed that the Halligan boys were also customers of his. A dreadful pair, he thought silently, considering this pleasant middle-aged lady; how did she cope?
‘Almost the definition of incorrigible.’ An amused voice, pitched higher than Francesca’s.
‘All of that. And dangerous.’ McLeish spoke soberly, and noticed the three Wilson children prick up their ears.
‘Darlings,’ Mrs Wilson had noticed them too, ‘they visit me at an office next door to the police station. If anything happened to me they would be the first suspects. And anyway, they think I am a harmless old fool.’ She beamed at her children, the blue eyes alight with amused malice, and they considered her with something between pride and exasperation.
‘Oh well, useless to argue, but do remember we five would be orphans if you were taken.’ Francesca turned away momentarily to talk to Jeremy, leaving McLeish to observe that Mrs Wilson was the source of Francesca’s elegant legs though otherwise none of the children looked like her. It must have been the late Mr Wilson who had the long nose and the high cheekbones and the high rounded arch above the brows. And presumably he had treated his wife with just the same gently amused and patronizing affection which the children used to her. In which, he thought, they were wholly mistaken, but for reasons of her own Mrs Wilson was playing it that way.
‘Hello, Sheena.’ Jeremy was beaming as Sheena Roberts, spectacular in red silk, came towards them, turning every head in the hall. Jeremy was openly adoring, and McLeish could feel Francesa bristle. Charlie’s admiration was obviously sincere, but McLeish noticed that he was not in fact attracted to her at all.
‘Where’s Perry?’
All the Wilsons looked at her blankly, but Mrs Wilson recovered first. ‘He has to sit down and think about what he is going to do when he sings. He needs at least half an hour to himself before he performs. I’m so sorry you’ve just missed him.’
The explanation plainly struck Sheena as unsatisfactory but she accepted it. ‘Who’s ’is backing group tonight, then?’ she enquired.
‘The Bach Choir,’ said Francesca, unsmiling and with each syllable perfectly placed. McLeish kept his face straight with a horrendous effort but Charlie had to blow his nose. Jeremy gave his sister a look of deep reproach, and proceeded to bore Sheena with an explanation of the origin and make-up of the Bach Choir. Mercifully the bell rang to summon them to their places in the hall.
‘Have you been to a recording like this before?’ Francesca asked McLeish, who shook his head, reflecting that while a five-act play in Urdu would be fine with him, providing Francesca was beside him, the scene was intrinsically interesting. The small audience — probably not more than 400 people — was seated on a steeply sloping tier of seats looking down on a large, brightly lit stage, occupied mostly by the Bach Choir, also arranged in tiers. In front of them, and also brightly lit, was a smaller area containing a piano, two chairs and a flight of steps. To the left of the stage a small orchestra was assembled, whose personnel were mostly engaged in tuning up. The lights over the audience went down, and a comfortable, bearded man walked purposefully on the stage, introduced himself as the floor manager, and welcomed them all to ‘Songs for a Sunday’, offering a brisk outline of the programme’s history and a description of tonight’s guests.
‘We may have to stop at any point to get a retake of some small part of the programme, but we try not to do that too much. We do ask you to save your applause till the end of each song, or piece of music, but then we’d like you to applaud so every one at home can hear. And now, I would like to introduce you to the youngest of the performers tonight, Perry Wilson, who has shot to fame with his recording of “Wrong Road” which has just earned him a Golden Disc.’
He extended a hand and Perry walked from behind a flat at the side of the stage, moving neatly to avoid a coil of cable. He was dressed in a plain grey suit, very much like a school suit but with an elegance of cut that no school suit in the world could have achieved. He wore a pale blue shirt — McLeish remembered that white photographs badly on television — and a mid-blue, plain tie, and looked like the middleaged housewife’s dream young man, serious but sexy. He was greeted, unexpectedly, by shrieks of ‘Perry, Perry’ from the right-hand side of the audience, and Francesca leaned forward, scowling, to look. McLeish had already noticed a
row of peacock hairstyles towards the front of the audience, and it was towards this row that two large men were purposefully moving. Perry wisely ignored the demonstration altogether and directed his sudden dazzling smile to the row where his family and Sheena were sitting. He accepted the microphone, welcomed the audience again, and spoke briefly about the two songs he would be singing. The audience blatantly adored him, and there was a collective sigh as he left.
‘They ought not to ask singers to talk to audiences first,’ Francesca observed irritably. ‘You can’t do that if you are going to sing.’
McLeish courteously expressed interest, hoping he was not sounding sardonic. He realized however that Francesca’s whole attention was concentrated on the stage where the rest of the cast was being introduced, ending with the hostess, Mary Sheen, a fading blonde in her fifties possessed of an astonishingly powerful soprano voice, who was received with real warmth by the audience.
More lights flickered out, the Bach Choir fell silent and still, as did the small orchestra, and powerful spotlights directed themselves on to the small area containing the chairs and the piano. Mary Sheen sat down in one of the chairs, a make-up girl hastily powdered her forehead, and she nodded to the floor manager. Cameras turned and swooped towards her, each one apparently in the custody of at least four men. The floor manager, behind the nearest of the cameras, held up his arm, and swept it down definitely, and Mary Sheen began to speak, addressing the camera as easily as if it were an old friend. She was introducing Perry, describing his early career as a treble and his recent successes, and as she stretched out a hand in welcome, McLeish felt rather than saw the teenagers sit up as one woman. But under the severe survey of the BBC’s security guards they managed to avoid any demonstration other than an instantly suppressed squeal of excitement.
Perry, acknowledging the introduction, was positioning himself by the piano, and unostentatiously sucking air into his diaphragm. McLeish felt Francesca next to him breathe in sympathy. As the orchestra started up, she relaxed suddenly, and when he glanced at her he saw her intent on the stage, waiting in confident expectation.
As well she might, he realized about a minute later. Perry was singing ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’ from Handel’s Messiah, and singing magnificently. It was a true, powerful, high tenor, superbly used. A musician, McLeish thought, listening to the beautiful, clean phrasing, who sang with real passion and the unmistakable urgent need to communicate the sense of what he sang. The audience was listening in a frozen, intent silence, hearing the command to take comfort, to believe, to understand that salvation would come, as a personal message.
‘Every valley shall be exalted,’ Perry sang, and the world brightened and the sun shone, and for McLeish the hall and the audience vanished as he returned to a childhood holiday on a cousin’s farm in the Borders, and smelt again the grass in the sun, and felt the wind blowing cold on the tops. He was just conscious of Francesca beside him, unmoving, watching Perry as the golden voice, effortless and clear, sang on. ‘And the rough places plain.’ He finished in a shower of grace notes, each separate and distinct. The orchestra played the final four bars and there was a full ten-second pause before ragged applause started and swelled to a crescendo as the audience woke from its trance.
‘Fantastic,’ McLeish said quietly to Francesca under cover of the applause.
‘He’s always like that.’ She blew her nose and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. ‘I never believe he is going to do it, but he does every time. In all other respects he is barely intelligent.’ She spoke with an elder sister’s resentful but total love.
On stage Mary Sheen was speaking warmly of Perry’s talent, throwing in a graceful tribute to Handel in passing. Since they had been rehearsing all day, McLeish reflected that she was probably less amazed than the audience, but she was, endearingly, obviously moved by the performance.
The audience sat courteously through the Bach Choir and the ageing contralto singing hymns, and Mary Sheen singing ‘Bless this House’ with a slight but perceptible stretch on the top note at the end, but when Perry was once more announced they sat up, and bristled with anticipation. What, McLeish wondered, in the words of the old tag, was he going to do as an encore after his stunning first solo? The pianist with some relish broke into the massed chords that constitute the introduction to Sir Arthur Sullivan’s deeply felt piece of Victorian sentimentality, ‘The Lost Chord’, and Perry’s golden voice came in quietly, every word perfectly articulated and distinct, the Bach Choir behind him, quietly ‘aahing’ in harmony. McLeish, less involved with the singing this time, reflected that actually Sheena had it right; the mighty Bach Choir was indeed acting as Perry’s backing group on this occasion. Perry was enjoying himself, he thought, telling the audience the old fable of the composer who had once found a harmony so complete and so magical that it had seemed to encompass everything, but had lost it and had in the end concluded he would not find it again in this life. As they approached the last quatrain, the Bach Choir ‘aahed’ more loudly, working towards a crescendo; Perry’s head went back as he sucked in air, and a truly astonishing amount of sound came out, as if an invisible volume control had been turned up. The clear high tenor rose effortlessly above the Bach Choir’s best efforts, unforced and unstrained, every word audible.
‘It may be that Death’s bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in heaven
I shall hear that grand amen.’
Perry concluded, and for a minute everyone in the audience felt the presence of the bright angel, so clearly did Perry see him. The applause cracked out more easily this time, but it could not be stopped. Mary Sheen gestured, helpless but smiling, to the director who signalled to the cameras to stop, and McLeish sat back, watching Francesca and remembering her singing with the tape of her brother’s voice when he and Davidson had first met her, incredibly only four days ago. She felt him watching her, and grinned at him, indicating the floor manager, who had his right elbow crooked and hand held close to his face so he could see his watch in the half darkness while his left arm circled in a signal to unseen beings.
‘Overtime coming up,’ she murmured in his ear. ‘If everyone doesn’t get off the stage fast they’ll be in trouble. All the lights will go out in about thirty seconds. I have been privileged, on a similar occasion, to witness the plug being pulled, leaving half the LSO and their instruments stranded centre stage in pitch darkness.’
McLeish saw that indeed the cast was leaving as rapidly as possible, Perry escorting Mary Sheen with that courteous undergraduate air. It must be the suit McLeish thought, darkly, remembering the dazzling creature in leather casuals and all the trimmings of the pop star whom he had first encountered. The Wilsons stood up, groping for coats and bags. Francesca looked past him at her mother and he saw them smile at each other with the dazzled pride of two parents. Of course, he thought, she must have taken her father’s place.
‘I wish I could sing like that,’ blond Charlie observed amicably. ‘He is extraordinary, isn’t he?’ His sister nodded, smiling, but McLeish noted that Jeremy was treating the whole occasion with some reserve.
‘Jeremy and Tristram are also tenors,’ his mother observed, drily. ‘Charlie is a baritone, Francesca and I are altos.’
‘Where are we having supper, darling?’ Jeremy had obviously decided to change the subject. McLeish decided he had better assert himself quickly and said that he and Francesca had a table booked for 8.30, on the assumption that they would just have time to congratulate Perry. He observed that both the boys and Mrs Wilson looked disappointed, but decided to stand his ground. He glanced cautiously at Francesca to see if she was going to sabotage the plan, but she was beaming across the hall at Perry who was surrounded by teenagers for whom he was good-temperedly signing autographs. He grinned back at his sister, and then turned to kiss Sheena who had appeared from nowhere and was clinging prettily to his arm. Francesca scowled. McLeish touched her
arm in reproach and she looked at him, surprised. He looked back at her, suddenly unable to speak or look away. How extraordinary, he thought, this is the girl I’m going to marry, this is how people feel and it’s how they get married, and there she is. She looked back at him, seriously, frowning slightly.
‘I must see Perry, then we can go,’ she said, tentatively.
‘Of course.’ McLeish recovered, and the natural force of his personality reasserted itself. ‘Follow me, lady.’
‘Yes, well,’ Perry observed as they arrived at his side, ‘there must be advantages in being a foot taller than anyone else. How are you, Inspector?’
Every head in the crowd surrounding Perry turned to observe McLeish, who said imperturbably that he was well, and offered his congratulations. Francesca kissed her brother. ‘Lovely,’ she said, adding courteously, ‘Didn’t you think so, Sheena?’ Sheena replied that she thought Perry had sung wonderful but that he was tired and needed to go home. Both Perry and Francesca looked surprised.
‘But you’re having dinner with Mum, aren’t you? She is just over there with Charlie and Jeremy.’
‘Perry.’ Sheena pressed herself close to him. ‘Can’t we have an evening to ourselves? Can’t the boys take your mum to dinner?’ Perry glanced swiftly at Francesca who was looking grim, and then hopefully at McLeish who decided it was not for him to get Perry off the hook on which he had impaled himself.
‘Mum.’ Perry kissed his parent who had arrived, beaming with pleasure. ‘How nice to see you. Would it be all right if we ate rather quickly, it’s my fifth late night in succession.’ Mrs Wilson’s gaze swept comprehensively over the group and rested on Sheena.
‘But of course, Perry. Why don’t you just join us for a drink, and then you can go home and have a sandwich?’
So his mother lets him off hooks, McLeish noted. He touched Francesca’s arm warningly, she was tense and obviously seething. She nodded to him, then reached up and kissed Charlie, saying something quietly in his ear.
