Murder, Mystery, and Magic

by John Burke

  The Mozart went jubilantly on its way without much need of his intervention. He caught her eye several times, but did no more than nod encouragement.

  In the interval he left his seat as the applause was dying away, and tried to follow her out through the door between the towering bookshelves.

  The death’s-head face of the quartet’s leader stooped towards him, and the lean body came between him and the doorway.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but the public are not allowed beyond this point.”

  “I just want a word with your violist. Put her mind at rest. A few suggestions about certain aspects of—”

  “We all appreciate having devoted followers in the audience.” The smile was skeletal. “We’re grateful for your continued support. But to put it tactfully, sir, we really would appreciate it if you didnae stare quite so intently at our Kirstie.”

  Our Kirstie, indeed! Did the man not realize she wasn’t his, or anybody else’s. Save for the one she needed, the one she would have to turn to in the end. He said: “I’m trying to help. She needs a sort of sympathetic sounding-board, you know.”

  “Not from you, sir. You’d be doing her a favour by leaving her alone. Not staring quite so hard. It does put her off.”

  That Saturday he bought a CD of the quartet, plus a second viola, playing two of the Mozart string quintets. He was sure he could hear which viola was Kirstie’s, shimmering through the texture of the piece.

  His wife was getting uneasy. “What on earth are you getting into your head? That look of yours. Going to get into trouble again, are you?”

  Trouble? That belonged in the past.

  He had been music master at an academy in Fife. As well as teaching, it was expected of him that he should take part in school concerts and parents’ days. Malicious blockheads had forced his dismissal after accusing him of relations with a fifteen-year-old when he was simply teaching her the fingering of the second piano part in the Milhaud duet, Scaramouche. It was hushed up, yet wherever he turned for employment somebody seemed to know about it.

  No more academic posts, then. At last he found a job as a piano tuner. Not many people had pianos to tune nowadays, but there was just enough work in an instrument supplier’s showrooms, follow-ups after a sale, and the occasional preparation for some minor celebrity’s solo recital or concert performance.

  Even then the lies followed him around.

  A girl came into the sitting room one day while he was tuning the new upright her parents had bought for her. She watched, edged closer, and tempted him into letting her try playing a simple duet with him.. He had his arm round her shoulder, trying to direct her left-hand fingering, when the mother came into the room.

  “That’s enough of that. Get out of this house.”

  From then on his work was confined to part-time employment in the showroom.

  Now, inspired by the secret rapport he felt building up between Kirstie and himself, he took to playing the piano for himself again.

  “What’s come over you?” The woman’s usual timid whine was growing ugly, jarring with its false harmonics. “You’d do better learning some proper pop music, go out to some gigs or ceilidhs or whatever, make us some decent money.” Then, rasping: “You’re wanting to be at it again, aren’t you? At the young lasses again?”

  Why had he married this person? Proximity, when she was working as a dinner lady at the school. Ignoring the jokes about her and about her exploits with boys in the sixth form. Yet she was the one who’d had the bloody nerve to sneer at him because of the lies they all told about his attitude to young, uncontaminated, virginal girls.

  He practised feverishly to leave no room for her in his mind. Room only for a radiant girl with talent, with understanding, edging shyly and then more boldly into his dreams and planning the duets they would play when they appeared together.

  He spotted an announcement about a charity recital at which she was to play three Schumann pieces and the F-minor sonata by Brahms, in the viola version rather than the original for clarinet. This was surely an omen. He bought a copy of the Brahms and practised even more devotedly than before, wrestling with the problems the composer seemed to be maliciously posing, marking some awkward moments of fingering with a red pencil until the piano score seemed to be covered with erratic bloodstains. At night Kirstie came to him in dreams in which they were both real and awake, and they rehearsed together until they had achieved perfection.

  The night before the recital he went to bed early, making sure he got a good rest before tackling the challenging task ahead.

  The forecast was for snow. And so it turned out.

  He had known all along what would happen. The pianist booked for the recital phoned through from her mobile to say she was stuck in the snow on the way to the art gallery where the recital was to take place. The charity organisers were about to apologise to the audience and refund their money when he stepped forward and offered to partner Kirstie in the Brahms, of which he assured them he knew every note and nuance.

  Of course she was shy and uncertain at first. A blush ran down her neck and faintly tinged that exquisite left shoulder. But when the organisers appealed to her, she warily agreed to let him join her. And the two of them knew that this was what she had really been waiting for. Her face gave nothing away as she tuned up, but he could sense from deep inside her the eagerness to be with him and release the passion they shared.

  They carried off the challenging first movement with a fine flourish, so that the audience defied convention and applauded. In the second they had become two lovers, united in the languorous beauty of it, her body swaying towards him and back again, lilting into a new provocative rhythm when they reached the viola’s threes over the piano’s twos, then a switch of the configurations between the instruments, like an erotic reversal of sexual positions. They were making love, not in the way other vulgar folk made what they called love. Making love in music, wedded to it, pulsing with it until the hair fell away from her shoulder and all the rest of her naked body was radiant with desire.

  Nothing could go wrong now.

  Until the woman erupted, flinging herself through the audience, screaming obscenities, snatching the viola from Kirstie’s hand and waving it above her husband’s head.

  He was reaching out for her throat, to stifle that voice once and for all, when he woke up.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” she was squawking. “All that shouting and thrashing about. You filthy weirdo—treating yourself to wet dreams now?”

  It was blasphemy. To be dragged back from euphoria to find all that beauty contaminated by the presence of this creature in his bed….

  “You’ve interrupted our performance.” A great sob burst from him. “Have you no taste at all?”

  He put his hands round her throat again, finding it real and fleshy this time, and began squeezing; but then found he couldn’t go on with it, and let her drag herself away, spluttering. “You’re pathetic.” She was almost jubilant in her anger. “Really pathetic.”

  When it was light he left the resentful, mumbling lump in the bed, showered, went downstairs, put the kettle on, and switched the portable from Radio 1 to the local station. There were warnings of gale force winds off the Irish Sea, and dangerous driving conditions over high ground. The northbound M74 was blocked by a three-car accident near Junction 12, with a ten-mile tailback.

  And news had just come in that the talented Lanark viola player, Kirstie Kinnear, had died suddenly while rehearsing for a charity recital which she was to have given this evening, but which must now be cancelled. No cause of death had yet been established, but it was possible she had had a stroke as a result of recent overwork. An appreciation of her playing would be given in a programme later in the week.

  He sat for a long while on the kitchen chair, letting the tears come. He was the only one who could possibly understand what had happened. He had been torn away from her just as they were reaching the peak of their ecstasy, and she had die
d of a broken heart.

  When the tears had ceased, he dried his eyes and then closed them, waiting. If he kept his eyes closed, Kirstie would come to him. She needed him more than ever now. From now on there would be no interruptions. They would be unashamed lovers, in love with music, while her bronze hair fell over her naked shoulder, the thrust of her bow intensified, and she smiled radiantly at him as they successfully tackled a tricky passage in one of the Mozart sonatas.

  With his eyes still closed, he urged Kirstie to come into the room. Out of this frowsty kitchen, into a shared dream of their own snug little rehearsal room where they would be together forever. Somehow that was how it had all been meant to turn out. Nobody else would understand; but then, there didn’t have to be anybody else. No audience would ever be needed. It was to be their own wonderful, eternal secret.

  “I suppose it’d be too much to expect you to bring me a cup of tea?”

  He tried to shut out the voice from above, tried to shut out the expression he knew all too well would be on her face.

  He switched over to Radio 3, and at once, as if it were a personal message, the rich nostalgia of Martinu’s Viola Rhapsody-Concerto engulfed him. And now there was another face, forming in the shadows of the cold morning. The one he had been waiting for. He smiled, knowing that she’d had to come to him.

  But it was a distorted face. Some shapes in the light were playing tricks on both of them. She was staring at him with hatred. And when she spoke, her thin voice was out of tune, rasping a perverse discord against the Martinu theme, a mockery as twisted as her lips and her hunched left shoulder.

  Why couldn’t you have left me alone?

  He held out imploring arms to her, trying to bring her into focus and into the harmony that had to exist between them.

  You killed me.

  And now there was the other woman, halfway into the room, still in her crumpled nightdress.

  “What are you staring at? Seen a ghost?”

  He had longed for the ethereal Kirstie to be with him, close to him, for ever. But not this foul parody of her. And not with the flesh and blood creature between them, always between them.

  This time when he reached out and got his grip, it was real. This time his hands closed on the real thing, this time squeezed and squeezed and did not let go until the foul, fleshy creature was sagging and slumping to the floor.

  Dead now. Eliminated.

  The discords clashed and shrieked in his head. He had silenced the worst of them but still there was this howl of lamentation.

  Kirsty, denouncing him....

  He had longed for their music never to stop.

  Why couldn’t you have left me alone?

  It wasn’t ever going to stop.

  THE LORELEI HUNGER

  He went through the magazine page by page, but this time couldn’t find her. He blew against the sides of the pages in case two had stuck together. Still she refused to appear.

  They must have dropped the campaign. How long did they run such promotions before changing the model, or changing the whole approach?

  How did one set about finding her again?

  If Edwin Blackett had been a thrusting businessman with top city connections, he could presumably have contacted the firm behind the product, and through them tracked down the advertising agency, and found some roundabout way of arranging a meeting with the woman in the picture and playing it from there. But he wasn’t. Edwin was a stooped, middle-aged dealer in second-hand books, knowing more about the market for valuable limited editions than about the mass production, circulation and advertising revenues of lavishly coloured magazines.

  He waited an anxious fortnight for his wife to collect the next colour supplement, and when she was out of the room flipped through it to the section where the picture usually appeared—the beginning of the fashion pages, just after the food articles. Again she was missing.

  Silly to get worked up about it. Silly to become obsessed with a picture of some woman he could never hope to meet, and would not be able to cope with even if they should run across one another: a warm-skinned, sweet-smelling woman with shoulders rising exquisitely from a sleek wave of fine blue silk nightdress, with her casque of deep bronze hair and those dark green eyes staring out of the page not at the reader but into some remote dream

  And how could he know from that two-dimensional glossy page that she would be sweet-smelling?

  Of course she must be. The sort of wife he longed to have. Making love to her would be so much easier, so sweet and gentle and satisfying, and afterwards she would slip back into her unruffled blue nightdress and go to sleep beside him. And she wouldn’t snore and gulp spasmodically the way Marjorie did.

  So unlike those other models cluttering up the pages of all the magazines nowadays in what they called the Season’s Collections. ‘Collections’ at any rate was the right word: assemblies of unrelated bits and pieces, a strip of orange material hanging from one shoulder, snarled up in a wide belt above a dangling skirt which looked like a length of discarded sacking. Skinny legs sticking out beneath as the scrawny creatures minced towards the camera, scowling. Why were none of them ever allowed to smile; or were they physically incapable of it?

  The beautiful, poised, mature woman in the blue nightdress was always smiling. Caught on camera with a smile that you just had to believe as genuine, always there.

  And now she had escaped.

  Perhaps they were going to run the nightdress advertisement only alternate fortnights from now on.

  He reached yet again for the latest issue and turned the pages for the tenth—or fifteenth? time. She was always here, just at the end of the foodstuffs....

  All at once it struck him. The page numbers didn’t match up. Page 52 should be followed by page 53. Instead, it was page 55. He fingered the edge again, blew again; and still found himself with a gap. One leaf had been very carefully torn out, leaving not a mark—but loosening another page further on in the binding.

  Someone had removed that very special pose.

  It was inconceivable that Marjorie should have torn it out. Suspecting him of gloating over that picture, and taking it on herself to deprive him of it? No, she would have gone about it much more clumsily than that. Wouldn’t have been able to resist confronting him with her knowing little leer and starting a silly little row. She had a habit of letting fly at random, interrupting whatever he might be doing or thinking—any peg giving her an excuse to blunder across his unspoken thoughts—and then pretending to be sorry, she hadn’t known he was thinking how could she have been expected to know he was thinking?

  “Getting distracted from your stuffy old catalogues?” He could almost hear her voice now. “Something with pretty pictures in it for a change? Better watch your blood pressure, at your age.”

  All right, so he preferred his neat little unfussy black-and-white catalogues and the accumulation of book lore that lay behind them. The special language and shared mysteries of the antiquarian book trade enchanted him. The very first time he had come across the word ‘incunabula’ he had fallen under its spell. That was music in itself, representing all the mystery and yet reliability that he craved.

  It was pure chance that he had idly picked up one of those very different magazines and skimmed dismissively through it—dismissive, until he first came across that one advertisement.

  Marjorie and her friend Beryl swapped magazines and Sunday colour supplements once a fortnight. Marjorie’s regular contribution was a consumer magazine. Its articles about the way people got fleeced by unscrupulous salesmen and shopkeepers confirmed her general suspicions of everybody in the world around her. She was always accusing the local corner shop of cheating her, of the gas people deliberately misreading the meter, and everybody in local and national government taking bribes and fiddling expenses.

  The periodical frequently featured travel sections. “Why do we never go on holiday to somewhere like Lanzarote?” She would squeeze a little fold into the top of each page
ready to snap it over to new desirable destinations. “They’re doing these special flights. We could afford one of these, don’t say we couldn’t. I mean, look, only five pounds to get to Venice.”

  “Five pounds one way,” Edwin would point out, “and it doesn’t say what it’ll cost you to get back.”

  Beryl Darby’s main contribution to their swap was this glossy home magazine, which aroused more of Marjorie’s longings. And aroused something unexpected within Edwin Blackett. What excuse could he find for getting his hands on an issue before that page got ripped out?

  Mrs. Darby usually dropped in late on Saturday mornings on her way back from the weekend’s shopping. He made a bold decision.

  “Got to take this package to the post.”

  “I’ll take it when I go to the Co-op,” Marjorie called from the kitchen.

  “A fussy customer, this one. The post goes early on a Saturday. Don’t want to risk missing it.”

  He picked up Marjorie’s magazine from the hall table along with some of her letters to be posted—letters ordering, no doubt, all sorts of household discount catalogues and holiday brochures—and was out of the house before she could ask any awkward questions.

  * * * *

  Beryl Darby was a large woman, with a surface not so much brassy as over-glossy. Her eyes were slightly protuberant, her teeth very bright and even, and her voice not exactly bossy yet unvaryingly loud. Three different ropes of brassy jewellery clanked together round her neck, over the puckered skin of her throat, and down over her lumpy bosom.

  “Well I never. To what do I owe the pleasure? I’m afraid we don’t have any valuable old editions of Shakespeare or whoever for sale.”

  He held the magazine out awkwardly. “Just thought as I was passing I’d save you or Marjorie the trip.”

  “Well, come in. Fancy a cup of coffee?”

  “Er, no. Not really. No thanks. I was just passing, and—”

  “Yes, you’ve just said that.” She cocked her head sideways and looked at Edwin with what he supposed was known as an arch expression. “But come in anyway. I’ll have to go and fetch the other mag. Exchange no robbery, isn’t that what they say?”