Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘You said his girlfriend was dark,’ Slider said.

  ‘Short and curly,’ Joanna supplied, muted.

  ‘Where was the car found?’

  Atherton’s triumphant smile widened a millimetre. ‘In a back street in Islington, about half a mile from where Thompson lives. Within walking distance, as you might say.’

  ‘But surely,’ Joanna protested, ‘no-one would be so stupid as to abandon the car of someone they’ve just murdered so close to their own home?’

  ‘You’d be surprised just how stupid most people really are.’

  ‘Who’s on duty – Hunt, isn’t it?’ said Slider. ‘Do you mind if I give him a ring?’

  ‘Use the one in the kitchen,’ Atherton said. Left alone, he and Joanna eyed each other cautiously, and then Atherton cleared his throat. Joanna’s eyes narrowed in amusement.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to warn me off. You’re very protective of him, aren’t you?’

  ‘You know he’s married, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know.’

  ‘Very married. He’s never had an affair before – he’s just not the type.’

  ‘Is there a type?’

  ‘He’s got two kids and a mortgage and a career. He’s not going to leave all that for you.’

  ‘Did I expect him to?’

  ‘I’m just warning you for your own good.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ she said evenly.

  He squared up to her. ‘Look, any man can get carried away, and if he did leave home in the heat of the moment, it would be disastrous for him. It would ruin him, and I don’t just mean materially. He’s one of the few really honest men I know, he has a conscience, and the worry and guilt he’d feel about leaving his wife and family would ruin any happiness he might have with you.’

  She suppressed a smile. ‘You’re going very far, very fast. Isn’t that what’s called jumping to conclusions?’

  ‘The fact that he’s done it at all means it’s pretty serious. You don’t know him like I do. He’s not like us – he’s from a different generation. He can’t take things lightly. And he’s very – innocent – about some things.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, and looked away, and then back again. ‘I think he’s old enough to make up his own mind, don’t you?’

  Atherton rubbed the back of one hand with the fingers of the other, a nervous gesture of which he was unaware. ‘I don’t want you to put him in a position where he has to decide. Don’t you see, once that happens he’ll be unhappy whichever way he chooses.’

  ‘I don’t see that I can help that,’ she said seriously.

  Atherton felt anger rising, that she took it all so lightly. ‘You could break if off, now, before it goes any further.’

  ‘So could he.’

  ‘But he won’t. You know that. If you would just leave him alone –’

  Now she smiled. ‘Ah, but he’d have to leave me alone, too. Have you thought of that?’

  Atherton jerked away from her and walked to the fireplace, beat his fist softly on the mantelpiece. ‘You could discourage him,’ he said at last, his back to her. He was afraid he would lose his temper if he looked at her. ‘You could do that.’

  ‘I could,’ she conceded. She looked at his tense back thoughtfully. ‘I still think, however, that it’s his business to decide for himself, not yours or mine.’

  He returned. ‘It just shows how much you really care for him! You have no scruples about destroying his life, do you?’

  She looked at him carefully, as if wondering whether it was worth trying to make him understand. Then she said, ‘I don’t believe that the status quo is the only workable configuration, or that maintaining it is necessarily the primary purpose of life. Life is rich in possibilities, and on the law of averages alone, some of them are bound to be an improvement.’

  Atherton said sharply, ‘You’ll make a lot of people very unhappy.’

  ‘I don’t happen to believe that happiness is the primary purpose of life, either.’

  ‘Crap!’ Atherton said explosively. She shrugged and said no more.

  In a moment Slider came back. ‘I think I’d better take you home,’ he said. ‘Things are about to hot up.’ He glanced from her to Atherton. ‘Were you two quarrelling?’

  ‘Discussing,’ Atherton said carefully. ‘Our views on a number of things are very different.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Joanna smiled. ‘We were quarrelling over you – trying to see which of us loves you best.’

  Slider grinned, not believing her. ‘Who won?’

  ‘I think it was a draw,’ she said, and was rewarded by a brief and quirky smile from Atherton.

  * * *

  In the car he said, ‘What were you talking about while I was on the phone?’

  ‘He was trying to persuade me to give you up.’

  ‘Oh!’ He sounded dismayed. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That you were old enough to make up your own mind.’ It was not entirely what he wanted to hear, as she knew very well.

  He sighed. ‘Why do things have to be so complicated?’ he said helplessly, like so many before him.

  ‘That’s how life is. Easy, but not simple.’

  ‘All right for you to say it’s easy,’ he said resentfully.

  ‘But it is. One always knows what the alternatives are.’

  ‘Perhaps I haven’t got your courage.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of courage.’

  They stopped at the lights. ‘Don’t be so tough. What is it a matter of?’

  ‘Approach, I suppose. Like pulling off a plaster. There’s the inch-by-inch approach. Or you can give one good rip and have done. You always know at the beginning what the end will be, so I always think you might as well – just jump.’

  He looked at her, feeling so much and so complicatedly that he couldn’t articulate it. The lights went green, and he started off again automatically, without being aware of it.

  ‘All the same,’ she said after a moment, ‘don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can’t cope and I can.’

  He glanced at her, perplexed. ‘But you can cope with anything,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes, I know,’ she said wryly. ‘That’s the trouble. That’s what will finish me in the end.’

  He wanted to protest that he was not Atherton, that he did not understand riddles; but he found that – and of course – he did. The love he felt for her, knowing its way better than he did, was fierce and tender in such mingled proportions – a cross between ravishing and cherishing – that he felt scoured, shaken, emptied out; and, with that, curiously strong, like a man who had been on a fast. Forty days and forty nights. Stronger than her – and how was that possible?

  They arrived at the house. He wanted to make love to her, to sink into her and never surface again. She was the warm precinct of the cheerful day that he never wanted to leave.

  ‘Will you come in?’ she asked when he didn’t move.

  ‘No, I must go home.’

  ‘And you said you didn’t have courage.’

  She sat quite still for a moment or two, and then as she began to move he said, ‘You know it’s Anne-Marie’s funeral tomorrow.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know. Are you going to it?’

  ‘Privately, not officially. Would you like to come with me?’

  ‘Yes. I’d like to go. In all this it’s so easy to forget about her.’

  She looked at him seriously to see if he understood what she meant, and of course he did. He touched her face with the tips of his fingers, and then kissed her – on the mouth, but like a benediction.

  ‘I’ll pick you up,’ he said.

  But even forewarned, he hadn’t expected the funeral to be so depressing. It turned warm during the night and began to rain, and it went on raining dismally all day, and was so dark that eleven in the morning seemed like four in the afternoon. Added to that there were hardly any mourners, which made everything seem somehow worse. Of course, she had had no relatives apart fro
m the aunt, but Slider had expected there to be friends, people from her past life, though he could not have said who they might be. As it was, Anne-Marie Austen’s home life was represented by Mrs Ringwood, attended by her housekeeper and Captain Hildyard, the solicitor, and an old man who seemed to be Mrs Ringwood’s gardener; from her working life there was only Joanna, and Martin Cutts.

  ‘I expect others would have come if it hadn’t been short notice,’ Joanna said without conviction.

  ‘Sue Bernstein phoned Ruth Chisholm in case anyone from up there wanted to come, but it looks as though no-one could make it,’ Martin Cutts said.

  ‘I suppose it’s too far for them,’ Joanna said.

  ‘Nonsense. Birmingham is closer to here than London.’

  ‘Oh. Well, probably they’re working today,’ Joanna said unconvincingly.

  The service was distressingly bald and devoid of spiritual uplift to Slider, who liked his church High or not at all, and could never get over the feeling that the modern translation of the Prayer Book, by being so ugly, was sacrilegious. There was nothing, in fact, to take his mind off the fact that Joanna was seated on the further side of Martin Cutts, and that when she started crying Cutts put his arm round her and she rested her cheek on his shoulder. Slider hated him, with his ready, slippery ease of showing physical affection. Why couldn’t I ever have been like that? he wondered resentfully. What Cutts gave and received so easily cost him so much pain and effort.

  The committal at the graveside was brief, and as soon as was decently possible everyone hurried away to seek shelter. Slider found himself accosted by Mrs Ringwood, with Captain Hildyard looming supportively at her shoulder.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you here, Inspector,’ she said. ‘Are you the official police presence?’

  ‘No, ma’am. I’m here in my private capacity.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Private capacity? What could that be? You weren’t a friend of my niece, were you?’

  ‘No, ma’am. But I do feel very much involved in the case – enough so to wish to pay my respects.’

  ‘How refreshing to learn that you chaps have room for human feelings,’ Hildyard put in, smiling yellowly behind his moustache to show that it was a joke, though his eyes were as boiled and glassy as ever. They swivelled round to stare at Joanna. ‘And you, young lady – were you a friend of our poor, dear Anne-Marie?’

  Joanna seemed upset, almost angered by the look and the words. She stared at his tie, avoiding his eyes, and said brusquely, ‘I shared a desk with her in the Orchestra. What about you? I never heard her mention you as a friend of hers.’

  It sounded rude, challenging, and Hildyard’s eyes seemed hostile, though he spoke evenly enough. ‘I’ve known the poor child since she was tiny. Being so much of another generation from her, I hardly like to claim I was a friend, but I know she looked on me with trust and affection. It’s the privilege, perhaps, of my profession to win a place in the hearts of our young clients. Many’s the time I’ve popped in to attend to her pony’s colic or her puppy’s worms, and believe me there’s no surer way to win a child’s love.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to come back to the house for a glass of sherry,’ Mrs Ringwood said abruptly to the air in general. Slider was reminded of his Latin lessons at school, when he had learned to construct a sentence that ‘expects the answer no.’ Mrs Ringwood’s inflection had just the same effect.

  ‘No thank you, ma’am. I have to be getting back to London,’ Slider said, and by a turn of his body managed to place himself alongside Mrs Ringwood on the gravel path, which was only wide enough for two. Hildyard was forced to drop back beside Joanna. ‘By the way, Mrs Ringwood,’ he went on, lowering his voice and approaching her ear under the umbrella, ‘did you ever visit Anne-Marie in Birmingham, after she joined the Orchestra there?’

  ‘Certainly not. Why should I want to visit her?’

  ‘You never went to her flat?’

  ‘I had no reason to.’

  ‘So you’ve no idea what sort of place it was? Whether she rented it? Whether she shared it with anyone?’

  She evinced impatience. ‘None at all. I’ve told you before, Inspector, I knew nothing about her personal life. I suggest you ask some of her musician friends.’

  Slider thanked her, and collected Joanna and escaped by a side-path. So it hadn’t been the aunt’s flat – that disposed of that possibility. But something had been said today – something, sometime, by somebody – that was important, and he just couldn’t bring to mind what it was. A bell had been rung in the back of his mind, but it was too far back to be of any help. He left it alone, knowing his subconscious would throw it back to him sooner or later, and returned his attention to Joanna.

  Martin Cutts had just asked her if she would go with him to the nearest pub for a pint. She replied with a shake of the head and a single graphic glance towards Slider; at which he grinned, kissed her easily on the lips, said ‘See you Wednesday, then,’ and left.

  ‘It’s half past two closing out here,’ she said. Her voice sounded so strange that Slider glanced at her, to find that she was grey with cold and misery and within an inch of tears. He hurried her to the car, wanting to get them away from this place, wanting, absurdly, to take Anne-Marie with them too. She had been a musician as well, and even if no-one had loved her, she had once known the companionship of pubs and the easy kisses of Martin Cutts. The contrast was too harsh – it seemed cruel to leave her behind.

  In the car he put on the heater and the blower and drove as fast as the rain would allow back towards the sanity of London. As the car warmed up, Joanna revived.

  ‘Well,’ she said first, ‘so that’s that. Not my idea of a funeral. When I go, I want hundreds of people crying their eyes out, and then going off and getting good and drunk and saying what a great person I was.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider comprehensively.

  ‘A proper service in the church, too, with candles and hymns and the real words out of the Prayer Book. Not that second-rate, poor man’s substitute; that New Revised Non-Denominational Series Four People’s Pray-in, or whatever the bloody thing’s called.’ She glared at him, and suddenly cried out, ‘It isn’t fair!’ and of course she wasn’t talking about church services. But he was glad, in a way, that it hadn’t been the old-fashioned service, because the familiar words would have reminded him of Mam’s funeral. They always did, when he heard them on television or in a film, and still they made him cry. Funerals above all reminded you that there was no going back, that every day something was taken from you that you could never have back.

  After a while she said in a small voice, ‘When I die, will you promise to see that I’m buried properly, not like that? And I’ll promise the same thing for you.’

  ‘Oh Joanna,’ he said helplessly, and took her hand into his lap for comfort.

  When they reached Turnham Green, however, she revived with the suddenness of youth. ‘I’m starving. Do you know what I fancy – a hamburger! A proper one, not a McDonald’s. Shall we go to Macarthurs?’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said relunctantly. ‘I’ve got to go to the station. There’s a mass of things to be done, and the meeting to prepare for, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Some love affair this is,’ she said, but jokingly, making it easy for him.

  ‘I’ll try and call in later, on my way home. If I can’t, I’ll phone anyway.’ She looked so forlorn that he offered his own particular foothold of comfort. ‘Don’t worry, we can’t lose each other now. We can’t stop knowing each other.’

  She gave him an impish grin, ‘Count your chickens! Don’t forget once I start working again you’ll have two impossible schedules to coordinate!’

  ‘Look at this, guv,’ Atherton said, bouncing his Viking length through the open door of Slider’s room. ‘Anne-Marie’s bank statement – and very interesting reading it makes.’

  ‘Midland Bank, Gloucester Road branch?’

  ‘I expect she opened it when she was at the Royal College,
’ Atherton said wisely. ‘Though with her swanky connections, you’d think it would have been Coutts from birth.’

  ‘But she never had any money of her own before, did she?’ Slider spread out the pages. ‘Well, the totals are pretty modest. No money here for buying Stradivariuses.’

  ‘No, but look here, last August – see? Sundries, three thousand pounds.’

  ‘Is that her pay from the Orchestra?’

  ‘No, that shows up as salary – look, here, and here. But sundries, bloody sundries, is what they call deposits, cash or cheques, made by post or over the counter. And it’s gone in no time – four big cheques to cash. Spent it. She must have had expensive habits.’

  ‘No sign of the repayments on the bank loan Joanna mentioned?’

  ‘Oh, that was paid off a long time ago. Look, this is more interesting. Go back a bit further, and what do you find. A big sundry here, five K, one for four here, five again, six and a half here. Roughly every month she pays in a big lump sum and then whips it out in cash. Now what do you make of that?’

  ‘Could she have spent it all? Maybe she had a savings account.’

  ‘Nothing’s turned up. Maybe she played the market, or put it on the ponies. But I’m not so interested in where it went as where it came from. Do you know what I think?’

  ‘Tell me,’ Slider said indulgently.

  ‘I think she was blackmailing somebody. Or some bodies.’

  ‘And whoever she was blackmailing got fed up and killed her? Have you gone off your Thompson theory, then?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It could be him she was blackmailing.’

  ‘My Uncle Arthur could stick his wooden leg up his arse and do toffee-apple impressions,’ Slider said mildly.

  Atherton grinned reluctantly. ‘Oh well, you’re not the only one who can have a hunch, you know. There was something very sinister and unloveable about that young woman. I’m going to keep my eyes open.’

  ‘You do that. Here’s something to rest them on – the report on her car.’