Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

‘Was it brought in a cup? Or a pot?’

  She looked puzzled. ‘Just a cup of espresso, that’s all. Why?’

  ‘And when did you start feeling ill?’

  ‘I11? Oh, it was just a touch of the Montezumas – rather a bad one, though. I couldn’t do the concert – just couldn’t get off the pan.’

  ‘That was back at the concert hall?’

  ‘I felt a bit queasy as we were walking back. Then just as I was changing it struck. It must have been what I had for supper, I suppose. I had been a bit stupid and eaten some figs.’ He didn’t reply, and, watching his face she said, ‘What are you saying? You don’t mean –? Oh no! Come on, that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Is it? I think you were deliberately put out of action for the concert.’

  ‘But she couldn’t have put anything in my coffee without my knowing it.’

  ‘She chose the restaurant. That was all she needed to do.’

  ‘Dear God!’ She broke away from him and walked a few steps as though trying to distance herself from the unpleasant idea. ‘But what was it all in aid of? Why should she want me out of the way?’

  ‘It may be that was the night she swapped violins. She played the Strad in the concert, and you were the one person who would notice.’ She only looked at him, still disbelieving. ‘Did you notice at any time that she had a large carpet bag with her?’

  ‘Only the one she brought her dress clothes in. It was under her chair during the rehearsal.’

  ‘And what did she do with it after the rehearsal?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I suppose she took it back to the dressing-room.’

  ‘Try to remember. It’s important.’

  ‘Let me think. Let me think. What did we do? Wait, I remember now! We had to put our fiddles in a lock-up, because the dressing-rooms didn’t lock. She asked me to take her fiddle for her while she took her bag to the dressing-room, and then we met again outside at the stage door.’

  ‘So you didn’t actually see what she did with the bag? Did she have it with her later?’

  Joanna shrugged. ‘I didn’t notice. Once the Montezumas struck, I wasn’t noticing anything.’

  ‘So she might have given it to someone, or left it somewhere for someone to collect, while you were putting her fiddle away.’

  She looked carefully at his thoughtful face. ‘You really think she was mixed up with some smuggling racket? Some big organisation?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

  ‘I just can’t believe it. Not Anne-Marie.’

  ‘Well, it’s only one possible theory. We’ve really nothing to go on yet.’ She still looked unhappy and a little anxious, and so he took her into his arms, and said simply, ‘Can I make love to you?’

  In the bedroom, she undressed and lay on the bed waiting while he struggled with his own more complicated clothes, and she looked flat and white in the unfiltered streetlight, and when he was ready and she lifted her arms to him, they seemed to rise almost disembodied from a great depth, white arms lifting from a dark sea in supplication, like Helle drowning.

  His flesh was cold against hers, starting into warmth where it touched her. He took her face in his hands and kissed her, for once the protector, not the supplicant. Just now she needed him for comfort and reassurance as much as he needed her. It was done between them quickly, not hurriedly but in silence, a thing of great need and great kindness, and no great moment. Afterwards she pulled the covers over him and eased him over onto his side, his head on her shoulder. She kissed him once and folded her arms round him, and feeling at once the blissful heat of her flesh start up all around him, he passed without knowledge into a deep, quiet sleep.

  CHAPTER 12

  Guilt Edged

  The shriek of the phone woke him so violently that he could feel his heartbeat pounding all over his body, and a sour, tight ball of panic in his throat. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, and then almost immediately the panic resolved into the fear that he had slept the whole night through again, and had been missed at home, and was in trouble.

  Cold air trickled down his body as Joanna sat up and reached for the receiver.

  ‘Hullo? Yes. Yes he is. Just a minute.’

  Slider sat up too, and sought out the green devil-eyes of the digital clock, and found it was half past two. The air in the bedroom was evilly cold. The weather must be changing. Joanna gave him the receiver and he took it back under the covers with him.

  It was O’Flaherty, of course. ‘Are you never goin’ to go home at all?’

  ‘What’s up, Pat?’

  ‘Trouble. You’d better get back here quick – I’ll fill you in on the details when you get here. Your little pal Thompson has bought it.’

  ‘Dead?’ So soon? Slider felt an undersea confusion working about in his brain. How could it be so soon?

  ‘As mutton. So would you please, sir, very kindly get your for Chrissakes arse over here?’

  The Alfa Spyder was parked outside a derelict house in a disagreeably neglected side street about a quarter of a mile from where Thompson lived. A late-night reveller, reeling home, had noticed something odd about the car and taken a closer look. Then, public-spirited despite his terror, he had telephoned the local police before declining to have anything more to do with it and heading rapidly and anonymously into oblivion.

  Slider stared down at what had quite recently been Simon Thompson. He was lying across the front seats of his car, his legs doubled up, one arm hanging, and his throat was so deeply and thoroughly cut that only the spinal column was keeping his head on at all. There was blood everywhere. The seat and carpet were soaked with it, as were his left sleeve and the upper part of his clothing. With the tilting of his head, it had even run back into his hair and ears. His eyes were open and staring, his lips were parted, and his cosmetically white teeth had a brown crust around them.

  On the floor of the car, under his trailing hand, there was a short-bladed surgical scalpel, presumably the murder weapon, though this was obviously meant to look like a suicide. Slider looked once more at those dark love-locks, dense and sticky with blood, and turned away, sick with anger and remorse.

  They hadn’t wasted any time. They had got to Thompson before Slider had even begun to be properly worried. He should have been more cautious. He should have worried, knowing what he thought they were. He might have prevented this.

  The detective constable from ‘N’ District who had accompanied him, now handed him a small piece of paper. He was very young, one of the new coloured intake, and he looked very sick. Slider was interested to note with the professional part of his mind that a West Indian could be visibly pale, on the verge of greenness.

  ‘We found this, sir, in his right hand. It was what put us on to you.’

  Slider opened it out. It had been crushed rather than folded. In horribly uneven writing, speaking eloquently of great fear, it said, Tell Inspector Slider. I did it. I can’t stand it any more.

  The green young detective constable watched him, curiosity restoring some of the blood to his head. ‘Do you know what it means, sir? Did you know him?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Slider. ‘I know all about him.’

  Slider didn’t get home at all. At seven o’clock he had an enormous breakfast in the Highbury station canteen – fried egg, bacon, two sausages, tomatoes, fried bread, and several cups of tea – surprising himself with his own appetite until he remembered he had not eaten the night before. The food warmed him and started his blood running and his brain working, and the period before began to take on a comforting flavour of unreality. He almost stopped remembering that Simon Thompson had blood in his open eyes, that his eyelashes were stiff with it, like some weird punk mascara. At least he stopped minding about it.

  Freddie Cameron, grumbling routinely, did the examination.

  ‘What can I tell you?’ he said to Slider on the phone. ‘Cause of death asphyxiation of course. The windpipe was completely severed. I’ve sent the internal organs for anal
ysis, but there’s no indication of poisoning. Still, you never know. Suicides are notorious for liking a belt as well as braces.’

  ‘Was it suicide?’

  Cameron whistled a little phrase. ‘You tell me. You’re the detective. The wound was equally consistent with suicidal throat-cutting by a left-handed man, or homicidal throat-cutting by ditto standing behind the victim. Was your man left-handed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He would also have had to be extremely determined. One never knows how difficult it is to cut a human throat until one tries, and there are usually a number of superficial, preliminary cuts in a case of suicide. It’s quite unusual for a suicide to cut so deeply at the first attempt. The edges aren’t haggled at all.’

  ‘I suppose the weapon was the weapon?’

  ‘No reason to suppose it wasn’t.’

  ‘I was surprised at the amount of blood.’

  ‘Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? Well, it was a mighty cut, let’s say. The heart would have gone on pumping for a moment or two. And alcohol expands the blood vessels.’

  ‘Alcohol?’

  ‘As in Dutch courage. Or Scotch courage in this case. I was nearly gassed when I opened the stomach. There must have been better than a quarter bottle of whisky, only just consumed. You want it not to be suicide, I gather.’

  ‘Do you gather? No, really, I’d sooner it was, but I don’t think it was.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘Opinions, Freddie? That’s not like my cautious old medico,’ Slider said with a faint smile.

  ‘Firstly, I don’t believe in that first-time cut. And secondly there was a fresh chip out of one of his front teeth. The sort of thing that might happen if someone forced you to drink whisky straight out of a bottle, and you struggled.’

  Slider was silent, feeling cold at this new image to add to the scenario. ‘To render him passive, I suppose,’ he muttered.

  ‘Or to add colour to the suicide motif, I don’t know. So you’ll be looking for your left-handed murderer again, like any Agatha Christie gumshoe?’

  ‘Mixed metaphor,’ Slider warned. ‘Or at least, mixed media. Anyway, by the evidence of the scalpel, we’re looking for a left-handed surgeon.’

  ‘Surgeons can cut with either hand, you ignoramus.’

  ‘Can they?’

  ‘Of course. I can myself. Surely you knew that? Was the note any help, by the way?’

  ‘None at all. Very Agatha Christie, in fact.’ Slider was glad to change the subject. ‘Though I suppose anyone theatrical enough to commit suicide might easily have the bad taste to leave a melodramatic note. But would a left-handed murderer be clever enough to try a double bluff like that? There wasn’t any bruising. I suppose?’ he asked wistfully. ‘After all, he must have been forced to write that note. You couldn’t get up a bruised wrist for me?’

  ‘Unless he was very courageous, the threat of a sharp blade at his throat would probably have been enough to make him write anything he was told to,’ Cameron pointed out.

  ‘He wasn’t very courageous,’ Slider said, thinking of Thompson bunched over his drink with the pain of his fear. The brave die once, he thought, but the frightened die many times over.

  Atherton went with WDC Swilley to interview Helen Morris, and returned a sadder and wiser man.

  ‘She was a little upset,’ he told Slider, not meeting his eyes.

  ‘Sit down,’ Slider said. ‘You look whacked.’

  ‘So do you,’ Atherton countered, and opened his mouth to offer his superior comfort, before wisely closing it again. He folded himself down into a chair and laid his long-boned hands on the edge of Slider’s desk. ‘Well, she identified the writing as Thompson’s all right. His left-handed writing, she said.’

  Slider’s brows went up.

  Atherton grimaced. ‘Simon Thompson was ambidextrous. Apparently he was left-handed as a child, but playing the violin forced him to become right-handed. You can’t play the fiddle back to front because the strings come out in the wrong order and you’d be bowing up when everyone else was bowing down.’

  ‘Is that wrong?’

  ‘Untidy. Anyway, Morris said he could write with either hand, but more usually wrote with his right hand, though for most other purposes he was completely ambidextrous.’

  ‘Is nothing in this damned case ever going to be straightforward?’

  ‘It seems straightforward enough to me, guv. In the emotional stress of his contemplated suicide, he reverted to his ingrained childhood habits, his natural left-handedness.’

  ‘And the chipped tooth?’

  ‘Suppose his hands were shaking? He could easily have done that himself.’

  Slider shook his head. ‘I wish I could go along with you. But I have an image of that human rabbit threatened by a very inhuman stoat with a sharp blade; so terrified, he writes the note, but in a last desperate attempt to tell the world all is not as it seems, he writes with his left hand, which Helen Morris at least will know is not usual.’

  ‘But he cut his throat left-handed.’

  ‘The murderer, who is very clever, as we know, notices that his victim is left-handed and proceeds to cut his throat for him in a consistent manner.’

  Atherton lifted his hands and dropped them. ‘That’s pure Hans Andersen. The whole cloth. If the murderer was so very clever, why didn’t he make the cut look more like suicide?’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t know his own strength. More likely Thompson wouldn’t sit still for a nice artistic haggling. One quick, hard slash, and it was all over.’

  ‘Well, I dunno,’ Atherton said, sighing. He rubbed the back of his left hand with the fingers of his right. ‘It all seems a bit tenuous. If Thompson murdered Anne-Marie Austen, and then committed suicide, it would all make sense, and be so much simpler.

  ‘And we could all go home to tea,’ Slider finished for him. He could see that even Atherton had his moments of wanting to run away from reality. ‘All the same, life is never that symmetrical.’

  ‘And all the same again, there’s actually no evidence that it wasn’t suicide,’ Atherton pointed out. ‘Only your artistic sensibilities.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Any luck at The Dog and Scrotum?’

  ‘Nothing yet. But I’m not finished there, and I’m pretty sure Hilda knows something. I’m going to have another crack at her tonight.’

  ‘Hilda always looks as if she’s hiding something,’ Slider said. ‘Don’t fall into that old trap.’

  ‘We’ve got to have something to show up at the meeting, though. The Super’s going to be asking questions about what we do all day.’

  ‘Work our balls off.’

  ‘Yes, but an oeuvre’s not an oeuf.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Skip it. Pearls before swine,’ Atherton said loftily.

  ‘Eggsactly,’ Slider said with a quiet smile.

  The young man was quietly spoken, neatly dressed, sensible – every policeman’s dream of a witness.

  ‘I noticed the car because it was an MGB roadster. I love MGs. I used to have one myself, but now we’ve got a kid it isn’t practical.’

  Married, with child, Atherton noted. Better and better.

  ‘You didn’t notice the registration number, I suppose?’

  ‘ ’Fraid not. Only that it was a Y registration.’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘Bright red. I think they call it vermilion.’

  He told his story. He had been waiting in the car park of The Dog and Sportsman for his wife, who was working the back shift at United Dairies in Scrubs Lane. They were both working every hour they could, to get together the deposit for a house. Now they had the baby, they wanted to get settled in a place of their own.

  Who looked after the baby? – Denise’s mum, who lived in the council flats in North Pole Road. That’s why they met at The Dog and Sportsman. A bloke from the Dairies dropped Denise off there, Paul picked her up, and they drove round to c
ollect the baby and then home to Latimer Road.

  That particular evening he had got there a bit early, so he was just sitting in his car watching the traffic for Denise to turn up, when the roadster had come along. The girl was driving it very fast and flashily, screaming her tyres as she whipped into the car park, breaking hard, and backing into the space opposite him in one movement. When she got out of the car, he’d thought to himself that she was a pretty girl playing tough. She was dressed in a donkey jacket and jeans and short boots, which with a girl as pretty as that made you look twice all right.

  What time was that? – About twenty to ten, more or less. He hadn’t looked at his watch, but Denise usually got there about a quarter to, and it wasn’t more than five minutes before she arrived. Maybe less.

  Well, so this girl got out of the car and went towards the pub, and then this man appeared in front of her. No, he didn’t see where he came from – he’d been looking at the car. He just sort of stepped out of the shadows between the parked cars. She stopped at once and they spoke a few words, and then they went back to her car and got in and drove away. That was all.

  What did the man look like? – Well, he didn’t get a close look at him. He was tall, and wearing an overcoat, a scarf, and one of those brown hats like Lord Oaksey wears on the television. What do you call them, trilbies? Not a young man. How did he know? Well, it was just a sort of impression. Besides, young men didn’t wear hats, did they? He didn’t see his face, because the hat and scarf sort of overshadowed it. He didn’t think he’d recognise him again. Just a well-to-do, middle-aged man in a dark coat and hat.

  Did she seem to know the man? What was her reaction to him?

  The young man frowned in thought.

  Yes, she knew him. She didn’t seem to be surprised to see him there. Wait a minute, though – when she first saw him, she turned her head and looked quickly round the car park as if to check if anyone were watching. No, he was sure neither of them saw him. His lights were off and they didn’t even glance his way. Just for the first minute he’d thought the man had stepped out to rob her, snatch her handbag or something, and that she’d looked around for help. But that wasn’t it. And it was all over in a second. The man said something; she answered; he said something else; and they went back to her car and got in and drove back the way she had come, down Wood Lane towards Shepherd’s Bush.