Dying Fall

by Judith Cutler

  If the orchestra had any idea, no one was letting on, any more than my students would have snitched on a colleague for playing hooky.

  ‘Traffic’s very bad today.’

  ‘Nowhere to park.’

  But the principal horn forgot the rules. ‘No, he’s here somewhere. His bassoon case was on the bench next to mine.’

  ‘He’ll be on the bog,’ said Bass Trombone.

  ‘Must have bloody diarrhoea, then.’

  ‘Fags: he could have slipped out to buy some fags.’

  Everyone knew this was a joke. If you could buy personal fire extinguishers, George would have had one. And used it.

  Stobbard Mayou did not find it amusing.

  He swung off the stool and stalked off the stage. He rather spoiled the effect by stopping to pick up the collection of paper tissues that had fallen from his lap.

  I’d seen conductors have screaming, yelling tantrums before, but never one make a theatrical exit. Like everyone else, I suppose, I felt uneasy, embarrassed.

  And I was worried about George.

  ‘Well,’ said the woman sitting next to me, a dentist when she’s not singing, called Mo. ‘How irresponsible!’

  I wouldn’t have put it as strongly as that.

  ‘Fancy missing such an important rehearsal!’ she continued. ‘I hope they can fine him, or something.’

  I bit my lip.

  ‘Mayou’s so attractive, isn’t he? He must have had a wonderful orthodontist.’

  I nodded.

  ‘When you think about it,’ she pursued, ‘there aren’t many attractive classical musicians about.’

  I considered. Apart from the thinking woman’s Mick Jagger, Peter Cropper of the Lindsay Quartet, music doesn’t seem to generate sexy men.

  ‘How about Michael Tilson Thomas?’ I said at last. I ought to make some effort.

  ‘Yes! And he’s got exactly the same smile. So warm, so friendly.’

  So absent from the auditorium.

  Meanwhile there was activity on the platform. After a whispered consultation with her desk partner, a wizened gnome of a man old enough to be her grandfather, Aberlene had slipped off the platform too. We all knew what she’d be trying to do – to smooth the ruffled Mayou ego. Backstage Tony Rossiter, the orchestral manager, would be tapping away at his portable phone trying to raise a substiute. You can’t keep two hundred and fifty assorted musicians and singers waiting. Not to mention Stobbard Mayou.

  Aberlene strode back: we could take a fifteen-minute break.

  ‘So where do we get coffee?’ Mo demanded.

  ‘No idea. But you can share my flask.’

  ‘Thanks. But first I’d better find the ladies’.’

  Perhaps some coffee would make me feel better, even if it was too strong after an hour in the flask. I sipped it, looking round. No sign of Mo. And then I too went in search of a loo.

  Some of the complex still relied on scaffolding. Outsize yellow Sellotape held down cables thicker than your thumb. Orange twine secured doors. For no apparent reason, orange plastic netting enclosed areas of marble floor.

  It didn’t take long to discover a sin of omission in this cultural heaven: lavatories. Those set aside for the women in the orchestra might just have been sufficient. But they certainly couldn’t cater for the additional forces of the choir. So, rather than queue dismally, several braver souls set off through the unknown corridors.

  Despite the soundproofing and the buzz of conversation, we all heard the scream.

  It felt like half a minute before anyone moved. Then everyone did.

  I had not been teaching ten years for nothing: everyone miraculously gave way to what sounded like the voice of authority.

  I found Mo crouching on the landing by the Grand Circle – roughly halfway up the building. She was gibbering with hysteria, pointing wildly.

  ‘The doors to the loo?’ I prompted.

  She nodded, then shook her head frantically. I approached with caution.

  Mo must be the sort of person who peers round doors before going through them. It’s fortunate for her she is: behind the door marked LADIES CLOAKROOM there was nothing but a forty-foot drop to the floor of the auditorium.

  It was almost an anticlimax to have to return to our seats. But by now Aberlene would have soothed Mayou back into working order, and there was nothing anyone could do except register loud complaints. My niggling worry about George developed into a painful ache. I tried to tell myself that there was no reason for him to have gone wandering round in search of nonexistent loos. But I thought of Mo, now being taxied home at the MSO’s expense, and felt sick with fear.

  It was Tony Rossiter, not Mayou, who came on to the expectant stage. His smile tried to convey both distress at what had happened and confidence that all was now well.

  ‘I do assure you that Ms Morgan is now absolutely fine, and that on Monday I’ll complain,’ he was saying, ‘to the Building Inspectorate, the Health and Safety Executive and, of course, to the contractors in charge of the site. I did warn you – yes, I did specifically ask you all not to stray off limits,’ he added. ‘We must all use our common sense. Please. Oh, and I’ve found –’

  George. Please let him have found George.

  ‘– a bassoon player. He was heading for Manchester for a gig. He’ll be here as soon as he’s escaped from the road-works on the M6. Shame about the Halle.’

  ‘Surely he can’t just do that? Just cut a contract like that? This is only a rehearsal, after all. Jools could have taken over, just for now?’

  Tony hesitated. We were standing side by side in the covered piazza outside the auditorium, watching the up escalator chugging smoothly downwards. So, as it happens, was the down one.

  ‘Don’t worry: he’ll be up in Manchester in time for the concert.’

  ‘With no rehearsal,’ I expostulated.

  ‘It used to be like that all the time. And Mayou’s important. It was quite a coup getting him for so much of the season at such short notice. Don’t want to lose him.’

  Tony’s coup, of course. A rising managerial star, our Tony. A far cry now from the Black Country council estate where we’d both been reared. We’d been friends on and off for thirty years, from our first weepy days at infants’ school together. We’d always competed for prizes – I guess we used to score about even, but in recent years he’d far outstripped me. Sometimes I minded more than others, especially when he paraded his trappings – the cell phone, the yearly new car, the new flat, the superb holidays. Mostly when he used the sort of tone he’d used to dismiss the claims of the Halle.

  ‘Tony, is there any news of George?’ Management Tony might even have heard bad news but suppressed it to prevent another Mayou exit.

  ‘You’re not worried about him, are you? He’s always rambling off when we go on tour. Talking to people. Phoning you. Damn it, when we were in Sheffield, we found him at the Crucible, watching the bloody snooker. He’d forgotten we’d changed the concerto and needed him.’

  ‘But I bet you found him clutching his bassoon case.’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did.’ His tone was getting offhand: I was becoming an irritant to be dismissed.

  ‘Are you sure it was his instrument in the band room?’

  ‘I checked when I locked it in my office. It’s still got the transit stickers from the US tour.’ Decidedly cool now.

  ‘In that case, Tony,’ I said, ‘I’m worried. Very worried.’

  Aberlene joined me for the quickest of sandwich lunches at the Duke of Clarence, and then dropped me off at home. Before I took my jacket off, I had jabbed the replay pad on the answering machine. All I got was the library telling me a book had come through.

  I told myself firmly that there was simply no point in sitting by the phone like the HMV dog. The weather was fine and dry, if cold, and I should go for a run. When I got back I could reward myself with another try at George’s number. I took myself the long way round the Beech Lanes estate, dodging dogs and t
heir deposits, round Queen’s Park, and back up the road. I forced myself to shower and dry my hair. Then I looked at the phone. A message.

  Ian Dale’s voice.

  I could have been sick with disappointment.

  I had to listen to it twice to take it in. And it was good news, too. Aftab had been found, safe and well. Dale would tell me all about it on Monday.

  That was all.

  I sat on the stairs. Now what?

  In practical terms there was only one answer. Safeway’s. If I didn’t shop now I wouldn’t eat this weekend.

  I was just going to bed when I remembered Aggie’s plants. It wouldn’t do any harm to go round closing a few curtains, switching lights on and off. Anything to deter burglars. I suppose that was what gave me the idea. First thing tomorrow I would burgle George’s house.

  I did it the easy way, of course. I waited till it was light, and cycled round. I knew he kept a key somewhere in his garden. He was always afraid of coming home at one in the morning only to find he’d dropped his keys in a band room somewhere in the sticks.

  I tried his rockery. I must have heaved aside every single piece. I cleared out a great deal of dead convolvulus and an incipient crop of enchanter’s nightshade. But I didn’t find the key. And then I sensed that I was being watched.

  I turned. George’s neighbour, in a bathrobe so short that at any other time I should have found him amusing, was staring at me from his front doorstep. It was simplest to tell the truth. I wanted to check that George hadn’t been taken ill. He hesitated, but I persisted: we’d met, hadn’t we, at George’s Guy Fawkes barbecue? Hadn’t he been the one letting off the rockets?

  He had. But plainly he didn’t remember me.

  At last he produced the key, and paused to watch me. He gathered up a pile of Sunday papers from his porch, quite forgetting that in all modesty he ought to bend at the knees, and eventually grunted that I should push the key through the letter box when I’d finished.

  George’s house was appallingly empty. I knew as soon as I stepped into the hall. His kitchen: there was no washing-up left in the sink, nothing on the draining board – but then, there wouldn’t be. His living room was equally immaculate. He’d left a couple of scores open on the piano in his music room, and a pencil had dropped on the floor. I tutted and picked it up.

  There was no point in going upstairs.

  I went.

  The bathroom. The toothpaste squeezed from the end of the tube, not the middle. Towels hung neatly to dry.

  Two spare bedrooms, one with the ironing board folded against the wall. In a wicker basket a pile of neatly folded washing waited to be pressed.

  His own bedroom. The smell of George which was not quite the right smell because it was stale, not newly showered. If he’d been here, he’d have thrown open the window to air the duvet he’d pulled back.

  It seemed easier to cycle round to the police station and tell them what I feared than to try and explain over the phone. I was just locking my cycle to the railing when a Cavalier pulled up beside me. The driver wound down his window, smiling pleasantly. DCI Groom – Chris.

  ‘You’ve come about your body, have you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Another one.’

  All the time he was escorting me through the corridors to his room I was wondering why I’d made such an inane quip. From time to time, I could catch him glancing sideways at me.

  We sat down on opposite sides of his tidy desk. He wrote down the facts as I gave them. He was taking me seriously.

  I wonder how much he’d have told me about Aftab’s return if he hadn’t been filling in time while his colleagues busied themselves with the inquiries he’d set in train. He plied me with coffee while he talked – he’d just acquired a percolator, which bubbled irritatingly on the windowsill. Biscuits or cake? All this talk. Then at least the hard facts about Aftab. A PC in Bradford had found him sicking his guts up outside the Photography Museum.

  I shook my head; I wanted to laugh in disbelief, and I fancy that Groom might, in other circumstances.

  ‘Why Bradford?’

  ‘He’s got family up there. And the museum because he’d always wanted to go. That giant cinema screen, with all those special effects. He’d stayed in so long he’d got something like travel sickness.’

  ‘Not kidnapped?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem like it.’

  ‘So why did his cousin –’

  ‘We’ll find out. But Iqbal’s in Amsterdam at the moment.’

  ‘Amsterdam!’

  ‘Amsterdam. Flew out yesterday, as soon as they’d had the funeral. Oh, he cleared it with us first. Said it was essential, even with the family in mourning. And since he had an unbeatable alibi for the time, we couldn’t argue.’

  ‘Alibi?’

  ‘In Erdington nick. He’d cheeked a constable who booked him for playing silly buggers in that XR3 of his. So we pulled him in for a couple of hours.’

  ‘When you talk to him,’ I said, ‘I suppose you couldn’t ask him why he told you people Aftab had been kidnapped before he even told the family.’

  I went through the motions of living for the rest of the day – I ate because I knew I ought, pushed on through my pile of marking because it had to be done. When I saw Chris Groom’s Cavalier pull up outside my house at about five, I knew why he had come, even before I saw his face.

  I made coffee automatically. Made my mouth open to ask the right questions.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the back of the Music Centre, Sophie. Where they’re still working.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘A blow to the head. A scaffolding pole, probably.’

  ‘Do I – will I have –’ I made an effort: I’d known since Friday evening, after all. ‘Do you need me to identify him?’

  Groom shook his head.

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Mr Rossiter, is it? The manager?’

  Poor Tony.

  ‘Death was instantaneous. He wouldn’t have felt anything. Though why he should want to wander round a building site, in the dark, in a force-ten gale, entirely defeats me. Asking for trouble, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But George wouldn’t do anything like that. He was an orderly man. He always used to tidy my kitchen when he came here. Books, records. Couldn’t stop himself putting them in order.’

  He shook his head. ‘The evidence we have so far points to his having tried to take a short cut. “No Access” signs everywhere. Just ignored them. Going to meet someone, perhaps.’

  ‘I told you. He was going to meet me.’

  I thought he’d never leave. He found cake for me to eat, then the whiskey bottle. He offered to phone friends or relatives. What about a neighbour? Finally, in desperation, almost, he mentioned a counselling scheme staffed by trained police officers. But I shook my head to that, too. I didn’t want anyone, not yet. I had lost someone I loved more than I’d ever loved anyone. I thought of him on that slab, peered at by Tony and gently covered. I felt guilty. It was I who should have done him that last service.

  Chapter Six

  When you’ve been at it for ten years, you can teach on a sort of automatic pilot, so my classes went as normal. One or two of my colleagues remarked how pale I looked, but attributed it to incipient flu. It wasn’t until I started getting a little stream of sympathetic phone calls from people in the orchestra that someone realised there might be something wrong, and Shahida cornered me in the staff loo.

  ‘Why on earth did you come in?’ she asked.

  ‘The students –’

  ‘– could have taken care of themselves, for once. You’re allowed time off for a bereavement, for goodness’ sake.’

  I shook my head.

  She looked at me shrewdly. ‘You’d rather be here? Company? But you’ll have to mourn some time, Sophie. Have you had a good cry yet?’

  I shook my head. I’d sat at the piano playing Schubert till about three when the whiskey and I had fallen asleep on the sofa. I’d woken at six, a
nd made sense of my aching head and body with a long shower.

  ‘Is Aftab back?’ I asked, retiring to the cubicle.

  ‘Talking to the police, I gather. They mentioned charging him with wasting police time. But I had a long talk with the nice sergeant – Mr Dale, is it?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said they were still thinking about it. The point is, they think he’s hiding something, Sophie, and no one knows how to persuade him to say anything. I’ve tried. Nothing.’ She paused.

  I flushed the loo and emerged to wash my hands. The water was cold and brown. So was the water from the cold tap. Preferring not to use the towel, I shook my hands dry and waited. I sensed there was something else she wanted to say.

  ‘He – Mr Dale – says he wants to talk to you. He said he’d be here about six if you could wait that long.’

  Six! But I had nothing to go home for, nothing but an empty house and the knowledge that George would not be phoning.

  Dale met me in the foyer, full of students coming in for evening classes. Two lifts were now out of order. He passed me an expensive-looking white envelope addressed in an elegant italic script.

  He turned aside to scan the noticeboard while I read the letter. If I glanced up, I could see him making the occasional note.

  Groom wondered if I might want to lay a few flowers where they had found George’s body. Would I care to meet him at the Music Centre? He’d already spoken to the Music Centre’s security service.

  I was touched. The human face of the police once again. I found myself grinning: all those preconceptions I was having to revise. And perhaps Groom was right. Seeing the place the accident happened might help.

  ‘I’ll drop you off, shall I, Sophie?’ asked Dale, appearing at my elbow. ‘You know,’ he continued as we left the building, ‘I’d have expected the college to be making more fuss about this poor kid. A collection or something.’

  I nodded. “Panic but emptiness”,’ I misquoted.

  He laughed. ‘Better try that on Chris. Great reader is Chris. But as it happens I know that one. Forster. One of my girls did him for A level.’

  We talked about his family as he drove the two or three hundred yards to Tesco’s so I could buy some flowers. White roses. Sentimental white bloody roses.