Melody of Murder

by Stella Cameron

  ‘I’d been saying asinine things to her ever since. Then I saw her on the bike. I just wanted to give her a scare. Didn’t even know she’d taken a tumble till the next day. But it was wrong. Got to turn myself in.’

  Like a marionette on broken strings, Tony let his head and hands hang between his knees. How would Alex know the difference between Range Rovers in the dark, and when she was trying not to fall off the damned bike?

  He got up, scuffed to the door and outside. The major’s vehicle was badly parked on the verge opposite the hall, just one of many in this place. More time wasted.

  When he got to his own Range Rover he was too numb to jump at a tap on the shoulder. ‘I’ve been all over,’ Hugh Rhys told him. ‘No one even heard of a railway graveyard anywhere near Moreton-in-Marsh.’

  ‘Get in,’ Tony said. ‘I’m going up that way again. We’ve missed something. Do you think Elyan Quillam would be capable of doing something to Alex? I don’t know what else to think but I don’t see it, I just don’t see it. Why would he?’

  Hugh looked over his shoulder as Tony backed up. ‘What do any of us know? How do we know what we’re capable of? I talked to his mother and she thinks they’re both badly injured somewhere. Hysterical. Doc James gave her a shot. It’s a house filled with silent shock. Sebastian’s back and apart from he and Daisy, the place might as well be empty. Wells went off to check every pub with a piano – like someone wouldn’t have noticed Elyan playing in some bar. I’ve called all over.’

  Rather than respond, Tony concentrated on getting back to the High and heading for Hillop Road.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘The last place I heard her voice from. Then toward Moreton. Shit, I don’t know where to go but I can’t sit around.’

  Rain sent a fine mist across the windshield. Tony put the wipers on low and peered ahead through the headlight beams.

  Hugh alternately peered around and put his face in his hands. Tony glanced at him repeatedly. ‘You care about Alex, don’t you?’ It occurred to him that the other man could take that wrong. ‘I mean, you feel really badly about this.’

  ‘She’s a special lady,’ Hugh said. ‘Sometimes she tries too hard to look out for other people and gets herself into trouble. But you know that. You shouldn’t be punished for being decent. What’s that? Over there?’

  Tony followed Hugh’s pointing finger and saw what looked like the top of a car in a ditch. They were only a couple of miles from Moreton-in-Marsh but he had to stop and pull over.

  Out of the ditch climbed a couple and for an instant his breath wouldn’t go in or out of his lungs. ‘Is it them?’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s … Tony, we’ve got to keep it steady or we could miss the chance we need. It’s Elyan. But that’s Annie with him.’

  Hugh was out of the car before it fully stopped and running toward Elyan and his girlfriend. ‘Where have you been?’ he yelled. ‘Where’s Alex?’

  ‘Wait.’ Tony scrambled after him and grabbed Elyan by his shoulders. He began to shake him. ‘Where’s Alex, you little shit? Where is she?’ Elyan’s eyes kept closing. He slumped against Annie and would have fallen if she hadn’t held him around the waist.

  ‘Please,’ Annie said. ‘We should go now. Leave him. He’s not himself – I’m not sure who he is anymore. I know where Alex is. We can’t waste time. She … I don’t know what could happen to her. Elyan only said she was in a railway carriage. I made him come back.’

  ‘From where?’ Tony said, dragging Elyan to the Range Rover and opening a back door. ‘You sit with him, Hugh. Make sure he doesn’t try to get away.’

  ‘He wanted us to run away together,’ Annie said. She cried quietly and steadily. ‘We were in London by the time he told me what he’d done. He has to have help. Please just drive on.’

  Before they’d gone three miles, a police car screeched up behind them, lights flashing, and pulled them over.

  Tony recognized the policewoman at the wheel as Constable Bishop. Wicks was with her. He gave them a message for Dan, looked at Elyan’s condition and asked that he be transported back to Folly where the detectives could detain them.

  When they all but lifted Elyan from the Range Rover, Annie said, ‘I know exactly where to go. Elyan took Laura and me there.’ She made a visible effort to pull herself together. ‘They won’t hurt Elyan, will they?’

  Tony opened his mouth to say that as far as he was concerned they could do what they liked to him, but Hugh leaned from the back seat to pat the girl’s shoulder. ‘They’re very careful about things like that,’ he said.

  They drove too fast for the narrow roads but had to slow down when they finally turned onto the even smaller tracks Annie led them to. ‘Bishop’s Nob is where we turn right,’ she told them. ‘It comes up suddenly. Oh, Elyan.’ She cried louder.

  Tony met Hugh’s eyes in the mirror.

  ‘He just wanted us to get away. He’s been so poorly treated. On the outside it all looked rosy, but I’ve known. I knew how poor Laura suffered. I have to tell it all now, don’t I?’

  Tony wanted to insist she did and right now but he said, ‘You should try to settle down and let’s concentrate on finding Alex.’

  ‘Elyan and Laura were going to pretend she attempted suicide,’ Annie said. ‘They had it all worked out but got it all wrong.’

  Tony almost slammed on the brakes.

  ‘Then it all got worse and worse and the church was taped off and guarded so he couldn’t get the thermos back. It would have been all right if the police never found it.’

  In the space of a few minutes, while they made the right turn at Bishop’s Nob and threaded through tall, very dark trees, Annie told an extraordinary story so bizarre it had to be true.

  ‘They won’t put him in jail, will they?’ she said. ‘He isn’t himself. He’s not the Elyan I know. He needs to be helped.’

  ‘Right,’ Tony said, not trusting himself to say anything else.

  Through a gap Annie pointed out between trees on the right, they slithered into a field. Tony couldn’t see how big it was or where they were supposed to be going, but went in the direction Annie pointed out. The rain was heavier and he had the wipers on full.

  When the headlights picked up a large wrecked wooden building, he knew what was meant by having your heart in your throat. He couldn’t swallow.

  ‘It’s in there,’ Annie said. ‘The carriage on the right, he said. The one with no windows. I forget what it was for. Please, please let Alex be all right. Elyan said she tried to be kind to him. He didn’t think she understood.’

  ‘You can bet your boots she didn’t understand and if—’

  ‘Tony,’ Hugh interrupted. ‘Let’s go.’

  The outside doors were hard to open since they’d dropped down on their hinges, but soon enough there was space for them to squeeze inside. Tony and Hugh shone torches around and picking out the right carriage was easy. Tony put a finger to his lips and they all listened, but heard nothing.

  In the distance came the sound of sirens. Tony didn’t know if he was glad. If they needed help, he’d be pleased to see them, but he didn’t want to need help.

  A heavy, well-oiled and jointed closure on the back of the carriage opened under several well placed thumps.

  Hugh looked at Tony.

  Annie withdrew to the doors of the shed.

  Using both hands, Tony pulled the door open, and howled. He received a solid crack over the head from a hard object.

  ‘Hold up,’ Hugh cried. ‘Alex, stop.’

  He was too late to save Tony from a second blow, this one to his shoulder, but Alex’s pale face, illuminated in the ghostly uplight from the torch with which she was assaulting Tony, went lax. Her mouth opened and closed before she threw herself into a slightly staggering Tony’s arms.

  They clung together, rocking, laughing and crying, while Alex spilled the horrors of the darkness in the carriage and how she’d tried to pick a hole through rott
ing boards in the floor. To demonstrate, she held up broken and bleeding nails and fingertips.

  Annie had asked, piteously, to be taken back to Green Friday. She wanted to tell Elyan’s family how much she loved him and would always love him. And she wanted, if she was allowed, to stay there till morning and they all knew what the next steps would be with Elyan.

  Tony capitulated, but only because Alex insisted. ‘Unless you want me to start spouting about the quality of mercy, you’ll drive there now. Those poor people have suffered so much.’

  The police who arrived in the field too late to help or hinder followed them back to Folly and up the hill to Green Friday.

  ‘No,’ Alex said as they drove toward the house. ‘Has something else happened here?’ Official vehicles were parked on both sides of the driveway and in front of the house. No emergency lights showed but the dark shapes of police stood around.

  It wasn’t until Tony opened his door that they heard the sound of music coming from the house, piano music.

  Annie climbed out to stand with Alex and the two men and they went inside together, but Dan, just inside the front door, put a finger to his lips. With his mouth close to Alex’s ear, he whispered. ‘They brought him because I was already here. He’s no threat, except to himself. We’re waiting for specialists to get here.’

  Before they could stop her, Annie darted away to the open door of the music room. Dan went quietly to stand behind her and the other three followed suit.

  At the piano sat Elyan, playing as if possessed, transported far away from the moment. Sebastian stood beside the piano and gave the group in the doorway a thin smile. Daisy sat, cross-legged, on the floor and put a finger to her lips when she saw them.

  ‘Rachmaninoff,’ Dan said quietly, impressing Alex.

  She didn’t remember feeling so very sad other than when she lost her baby girl.

  Tony put an arm around her and said, very low, ‘This is the only piece of classical music O’Reilly could name and that’s only because Harriet Burke told him. Please could we leave now?’

  Dan heard and nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ Alex said.