Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  It was taken on a beach in some place where the sun was hot enough to make the shadows very short and underfoot. A typical amateur holiday snapshot, featuring the shoulder and flank of a lean young man in bathing-trunks disappearing out of the edge of the picture, and Anne-Marie in the centre in a red bikini, one hand resting on the anonymous shoulder. She was laughing, her eyes screwed up with amusement and sea-dazzle, her head tilted back so that her dark bob of hair fell back from her throat. Her other hand was flung out – to balance her, perhaps – and was silhouetted sharply against the dark-blue sea in the background like a small, white starfish. She looked as though she hadn’t a care in the world; her youthful innocence seemed the epitome of what being young ought to be like, and so seldom was.

  Slider stared at it hungrily, trying to blot out the memory of her small abandoned body lying dead in that grim and dingy, empty flat. Murdered But why? The white starfish hand, pinned for ever against time in that casual snapshot, had rested finally against the old and splintered wood of those dusty floorboards. She was so young and pretty. What could she possibly have known or done to warrant her death? Not fair, not fair. She laughed at him out of the photograph, and he had only ever known her dead.

  One thing he was sure about – there was an organisation behind her death. That was bad news for him: if they were good, they’d have second-guessed him all the way along the line. But however good they were, they would have made one mistake. A benign God saw to that – one mistake, to give the good guys a chance, that was the rule. There was a good sensible reason for it, of course – that the criminals were working to a finite time-scale, and the investigators had for ever more to investigate – but Slider believed in a benign God anyway. He had to, to make sense of his world at all.

  Atherton had evinced no interest in the photograph, but was staring intently at the violin. He took it from the case and turned it over carefully, and then said hesitantly, ‘Guv?’ Slider looked up. ‘I think this violin might be something rather special.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m no expert, but it’s got A. Stradivarius written on it.’

  Slider stared. ‘You mean it’s a Stradivarius?’

  Atherton shrugged. ‘I said I’m no expert.’

  ‘It might be a fake.’

  ‘It might. But if it were genuine –’

  Slider noticed, as he had noticed before, how even under stress Atherton’s grammar did not desert him. ‘Yes, if it were,’ he agreed.

  One mistake. Could this be it?

  ‘Take it. Find out,’ he said. ‘Find out what it’s worth. But for God’s sake be careful with it.’

  ‘Tell your grandmother,’ Atherton said, replacing it with awed hands. ‘What now?’

  ‘I’m going to see her best friend. You realise we still don’t have a next of kin, thanks to Inspector Petrie? So it’s the Barbican for me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like me to go for you? Concert halls are more my province than yours.’

  ‘It’ll be good for me to widen my experience,’ Slider said. ‘Rôle reversal.’

  ‘That’s dangerous,’ said Atherton. ‘The filling might fall out.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Utterly Barbicanned

  Slider left his car in the Barbican car park and immediately got lost. He had heard tales of how impossible it was to find your way around in there, and had assumed they were exaggerated: He found a security guard and asked directions, was sent through some swing doors and got lost again. He entered a lift which had been designed, disconcertingly, only to stop at alternate floors, and eventually, with a sense of profound relief, emerged into the car park where he had begun. At least now I know where I am, he thought, even if I don’t know where I’ve just been.

  He was contemplating his next move when the sound of footsteps made him turn, and he saw a woman coming towards him carrying a violin case. His heart lifted, and he went towards her like an American tourist in London who has just spotted the Savoy Hotel.

  ‘Are you a member of the Orchestra? Can you tell me how to get to the backstage area from here?’

  She stopped and looked at him – looked up at him in fact, for she was about six inches shorter than him, which made Slider, who was not a tall man, feel agreeably large and powerful.

  ‘I can’t tell you, but I can take you,’ she said pleasantly. ‘It is a rabbit warren, isn’t it? Did you know it’s even given rise to a new verb – to be Barbicanned?’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Slider said, falling in beside her as she set off with brisk steps.

  ‘They ought to issue us with balls of thread really. I only know one route, and I stick to it. One diversion, and I’d never be found again.’ She glanced sideways at him. ‘I’m not actually a member of the Orchestra, but I’m playing with them today. You’re not a musician, are you.’

  It was plainly a statement, not a question. Slider merely said no, without elaborating, and continued to examine her covertly. Though small she had a real figure, proper womanly curves which he knew were not fashionable but which, being married to a thin and uncommodious woman, he liked the look of. She was dressed in white trousers, pale blue plimsolls, a blue velvet bomber jacket, and a teeshirt horizontally striped in pale – and dark-blue. Her clothes were attractive on her, but seemed somehow eccentric, though he couldn’t quite decide why. It made it difficult to deduce anything about her.

  She led him through a steel door in the concrete wall and down a flight of stairs of streaked and dimly lit desolation. On the landing she suddenly stopped and looked up at him.

  ‘I say, I’ve just realised – I bet you’re looking for me anyway. Are you Inspector Slider?’

  She regarded him with bright-eyed and unaffected friendliness, something he had rarely come across since becoming a policeman. Her face was framed with heavy, rough-cut gold hair which looked as though it might have been trimmed with hedge-cutters, and he suddenly realised what it was about her that made her seem eccentric. Her clothes were youthful, her face innocent of make-up, her whole appearance casual and easy and confident, and yet she was not young. He had never seen a woman of her age less disguised or protected against the critical eyes of the world. And framed by a background of as much squalor as modern building techniques could devise, she gazed at him without hostility or even reserve, with the calm candour of a child, as if she simply wanted to know what he was like.

  ‘You’re Joanna Marshall,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, as if it were very much of course, and held out her hand with such an air of being ready to give him all possible credit that he took it and held it as though this were a social meeting. Warmth came back to him along the line of contact, and pleasure; their eyes met with that particular meeting which is never arrived at by design, and which changes everything that comes afterwards.

  As simple as that? he thought with a distant but profound sense of shock. The moment seemed scaffolded with the awareness of possibility – or, well, to be honest, of probability, which was infinitely more disturbing. Like the blind stirring of something under the earth at the first approach of the change of season, he felt all sorts of sensations in him turning towards her, and he let go of her hand hastily. At once the staircase seemed more dank and dreary than ever.

  She resumed the downward trot and he hurried after her. ‘How did you know who I was?’ he asked.

  ‘Sue Bernstein phoned me. She said you’d probably want to talk to me. I knew you weren’t a musician of course. Come to think of it, I suppose you do look like a detective.’

  ‘What does a detective look like?’ he asked, amused.

  She flicked a glance at him over her shoulder, smiling. ‘Oh, I hadn’t any preconceived ideas about it. It’s just that now I see you, I know.’

  She shouldered through another pair of steel doors, and then another, and suddenly they were back in civilization: lights, sounds, and the smell of indoors.

  She stopped and rounded on him again.
‘It’s so terrible about Anne-Marie. I suppose there’s no doubt that it is her? I simply can’t believe she’s dead.’

  ‘There’s no doubt,’ he said, and showed her one of the mugshots. She took it flinchingly, fearing God-knew-what sketch of carnage. Her first glance registered relief, her second a deeper distress. Few people in this modern, organised world ever see a corpse, or even the picture of a corpse. After a moment she drew a sigh.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Sue said it was murder. Is that true?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  She frowned. ‘Look, I want to help you, of course, but I’ve got to get changed and warm up, and I’ve only just got time. But I’m only on in the first piece – can you wait? Or come back a bit later? I should be finished by a quarter past eight – then I’ll be free and I can talk to you for as long as you like.’

  As long as you like. She looked up at him again, straight into the eyes. This directness of hers, he thought, was very disturbing. It was childlike, though there was nothing childish about her. It was something outside the range of his normal experience, and made him feel both exposed and off-balance – as if she were of a different species, or from a parallel universe where, despite appearance, the laws of physics were unnervingly different.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I could take you to supper afterwards,’ he heard himself add. What in God’s name was he doing?

  ‘Oh, that would be lovely,’ she said warmly. ‘Look, I must dash. Why don’t you go in and listen? The auditorium’s through that door there.’

  ‘Won’t I need a ticket?’

  ‘No, it won’t be full, and no-one ever checks. Just slip through and sit somewhere near the side, and then at the end of the first piece come back through here, and I’ll meet you here when I’ve changed again.’

  She was a quick changer; and at half past eight they were sitting down in an Italian restaurant nearby. The tablecloths and napkins were pale pink, and there were huge parlour palms everywhere, one of which shielded them nicely from the other diners as they sat opposite each other at a corner table. She moved the little lamp to one side to leave the space clear between them, put her elbows on the table, and waited for his questions.

  Close to her, he wondered again about her age. Clearly she was quite a bit older than Anne-Marie: there were lines about her eyes, and the moulding of experience in her face. Yet because she wore no make-up and no disguise, she seemed younger; or, well, perhaps not really younger, but without age – ageless. It troubled him, and he took a moment to ask himself why, but he could only think it was because if she asked him a question about himself, he would feel obliged to tell her the truth – the real truth, as opposed to the social truth. And then, this immediacy of hers made him feel as though there were no barrier between them and that touching her, which he was beginning to want very much to do, was not only possible, but inevitable.

  He had better not follow that train of thought. He got a grip on himself.

  ‘I suppose we must make a start somewhere. Do you know of anyone who would have reason to want to kill your friend Anne-Marie?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that, of course, and I honestly don’t. Actually, I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to kill anyone. Death is so surprising, isn’t it? And murder doubly so.’

  ‘Would you have found suicide less surprising?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said at once. ‘Not because I had any reason to think she was contemplating it, but one can always find reasons to hate oneself. And one’s own life is so much more accessible. Murder, though –’ she paused. ‘It’s such an affront, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’d never really thought of it like that.’

  ‘It must be awful for you,’ she said suddenly, and he was surprised.

  ‘Worse for you, surely?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I have no responsibility about it, as you have. And then, because I only knew her alive, I’ll remember her that way. You only ever saw her dead – no comfort there.’

  Why in the world did she think he needed comforting? he thought; and then, more honestly, amended it to how did she know he needed comforting?

  ‘Who were her friends?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I suppose I was her closest friend, though really, I can’t say I knew her very intimately. We shared a desk, so we used to hang about together while we were working. I went to her flat once or twice, and we went to the pictures a couple of times. She hadn’t been with the Orchestra long, and she was a private sort of person. She didn’t make friends easily.’

  ‘What about friends outside the Orchestra?’

  ‘I don’t know. She never mentioned any.’

  ‘Boyfriends?’

  She smiled. ‘I can tell you don’t know about orchestra life. Female players can’t have boyfriends. The hours of work prevent us from mixing with ordinary mortals, and getting together with someone in the Orchestra is fatal.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the talk. You can’t get away from each other, and everyone bitches and gossips, and it’s horribly incestuous. Men are much more spiteful than women, you know – and censorious. If a woman goes out with someone in the Orchestra, everyone knows all about it at once, and then she gets called filthy names, and all the other men think she’s easy meat – just as if women never discriminate at all.’

  ‘But Anne-Marie was very attractive. Surely some of the men must have made passes at her?’

  ‘Yes, of course. They do that with any new woman joining.’

  ‘And she rejected them?’

  ‘She had a thing going with Simon Thompson on tour last year, but tours are a different matter: the normal rules are suspended, and what happens there doesn’t count as real life. And I think she may have gone out with Martin Cutts once or twice, but that doesn’t count either. He’s just something everyone has to go through at some point, like chickenpox.’

  Slider suppressed a smile and wrote the names down. ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’

  He looked into her face, wondering how she had coped with the situation. She had said those things about being a female player without bitterness, merely matter-of-fact, as though it were something like the weather than could not be altered. But did she know those things from first-hand experience?

  She smiled as though she had read his thoughts and said, ‘I have my own way of dealing with things. I’ll tell you one day.’

  The waiter came with their first course, and they waited in silence until he had gone away. Then Slider said, ‘So you were Anne-Marie’s only friend?’

  ‘Mmm.’ She made an equivocal sound through her mouthful, chewed, swallowed, and said, ‘She didn’t confide in me particularly, but I suppose I was the person in the Orchestra who was closest to her.’

  ‘Did you like her?’

  She hesitated. ‘I didn’t dislike her. She was a hard person to get to know. She was quite good company, but of course we talked a lot about work, and that was mostly what we had in common. I felt rather sorry for her, really. She didn’t strike me as a happy person.’

  ‘What were her interests?’

  ‘I don’t know that she had any really, outside of music. Except that she liked to cook. She was a good cook –’

  ‘Italian food?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I was at her flat today. There were packets of pasta, and two enormous tins of olive oil.’

  ‘Oh yes, the dear old green virgins. That was one of her fads – she said you had to have exactly the right kind of olive oil for things to taste right, and she wouldn’t use any other sort. The stuff was lethally expensive, too. I don’t suppose anyone else could’ve told the difference, but she was very knowledgeable about Italian cooking. I think she was part Italian herself,’ she added vaguely.

  ‘Was she? Did you ever meet her parents?’

  ‘Both dead,’ she said succinctly. ‘I think she said they died when she was a baby, and an aunt brought her up. I never met the
aunt. I don’t think they got on. Anne-Marie used to go and visit her once in a while, but I gathered it was a chore rather than a pleasure.’

  ‘Brothers and sisters? Any other relatives?’

  ‘She never mentioned any. I gather she had rather a lonely childhood. She went to boarding school, I think because the aunt didn’t want her around the house. I remember she told me once that she hated school holidays because her aunt would never let her have friends home to play in case they made a mess. Wouldn’t let her have a pet, either. One of those intensely houseproud women, I suppose – hell to live with, especially for a child. Have you spoken to her yet?’

  ‘I didn’t know until this moment that she existed. We asked your Mrs Bernstein, but she didn’t know who the next of kin was.’

  ‘No, I suppose she wouldn’t,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I suppose if it was me instead of Anne-Marie, it would be just the same. So the aunt won’t know yet, even that Anne-Marie’s dead?’

  Slider shook his head. ‘I suppose you don’t know her name and address?’

  ‘Oh dear! Did she ever tell me her aunt’s name? I know she lived in a village called Stourton-on-Fosse, somewhere in the Cotswolds. The house was called something like The Grange or The Manor, I can’t remember exactly. But Anne-Marie said it was a large house, and the village is tiny, so you ought to be able to find it easily enough. Wait a minute,’ she frowned, ‘I think I saw the name on an envelope once. Now what was it? I was going to the post box and she asked me to post it along with mine.’ She thought for a moment, screwing up her eyes. ‘Ringwood. Yes, that was it – Mrs Ringwood.’