Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Slider nodded his thanks, but felt curiously unsatisfied. There was something about the way Dickson agreed that made him feel it had been decided beforehand by someone else. Something was going on. Cautiously, he slid a toe into the water. ‘What about the Italian end, sir? This Cousin Mario? Can we get any cooperation on him or the house in Paradise Alley?’

  Dickson’s face grew redder with anger. ‘I think you’ve got quite enough to be going on with already, finding out where she was killed, where the drug came from, what they did with her clothes, just for starters. And who’s this bloke O’Flaherty says has been hanging around the station? Has he got anything to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know –’ Slider began, and Dickson roared like a bull.

  ‘You don’t know bloody much, and that’s a fact. I’m telling you, all of you, that there are certain people who are not at all happy about the way this case is going, so let’s get to it, and get something concrete down.’ He rose to his feet like the Andes, glowered around them for an instant, and then transformed his features grotesquely into a fatherly grin. ‘And be careful, all right? You’re not in this job to get your bloody heads blown off.’

  He power-surged out of the room, leaving Slider feeling more than ever convinced that something was going on that they were not allowed to know about. Dickson had manufactured his rage to prevent the questions being asked that he was not prepared to answer. The others, however, were just shifting in their seats and muttering as if the headmaster had been in a nasty bate and given the whole school a detention.

  ‘The mushroom syndrome,’ Beevers said as if he had just thought of it. ‘Keep us in the dark and shovel shit over us.’

  ‘Very original, Alec,’ Norma said kindly.

  He turned his hairy lips upward and smiled graciously at her. ‘There’s one theory that no-one’s thought of, though.’

  ‘Except you, I suppose?’

  ‘Right! Thompson was murdered by a left-handed surgeon, wasn’t he? And John Brown, the Orchestra personnel manager, is a raving bender and living with this bloke Trevor Byers, who just happens to be a surgeon at St Mary’s. Suppose Austen was blackmailing them, and they got fed up with it and killed her. And Thompson somehow found out about it, and so they did him as well?’

  He gazed around his audience triumphantly. Norma clasped her hands to her breast and whispered, ‘Brilliant!’

  Beevers accepted the tribute. ‘This Mafia bullshit!’ he went on kindly. ‘Now the girl may or may not have smuggled a Stradivarius into the country, but there’s no evidence she didn’t just do it for herself, or that she ever did it more than once. And, with all due respect to you, guv, it’s too clumsy to have been the work of a professional. This is a typical amateur setup, to me.’

  ‘Brains and originality,’ Norma remarked. ‘You can’t do without ’em.’

  ‘Beevers can,’ Atherton said.

  ‘We had better leave no stone unturned, I suppose,’ Slider said. ‘But for God’s sake be careful. Don’t go blundering about and getting complaints laid against us.’

  ‘Leave it to me, guv,’ Beevers said, pleased. ‘Softly softly.’ He rose and headed for the door. ‘Well, I’ll love you and leave you. I’m going to –’

  ‘Grin like a dog and run about the city,’ Atherton suggested.

  Beevers paused. ‘Come again?’

  ‘That’s a quotation from Psalm 59,’ Atherton told him.

  Beevers gave him a superior smile. ‘We’re Chapel,’ he said unassailably.

  Slider was surprised to have Norma assigned to him for the trip to Birmingham, until she revealed that she knew Birmingham quite well, having lived there for many years. Since he could not take Joanna, both for professional reasons and because she was working, Slider was glad to have Swilley with him. He found her company restful, and he also considered her to be the best policeman in ‘F’ district, and nicer to look at than an A to Z.

  ‘Do you know where this is?’ he asked, proffering the address of the flat where Anne-Marie had lived while a member of the Birmingham Orchestra. Martin Cutts had wrenched it out of his memory, and Slider now proposed having a look at it, and if possible a chat with some of the other residents.

  ‘Oh yes. That’s part of the new development in the centre. Quite swanky, a bit like the Barbican when it was fashionable. Expensive, but very convenient for the city types.’

  It turned out to be a steel-and-glass pillar which reflected the cloudy sky impassively. Slider squinted up at it. ‘I should think the views from the top would be magnificent. I wonder where the entrance is?’

  ‘Well hidden,’ Norma said as they turned a second corner. ‘I wonder if they ever get any mail delivered?’

  They found it at last round the third side, a tinted glass door with a security button. When the buzzer sounded they pushed in to find themselves in a foyer which would not have disgraced the headquarters of a multinational consortium. It was four storeys high, fitted out with acres of quiet grey carpet, and the walls which were not sheer glass were panelled in wood. There were glassy displays of rubber plants in chromium tubs, and in the centre of the hall the largest tub of all contained a real, growing, and embarrassed-looking tree.

  ‘Blimey,’ Norma breathed in heartfelt tribute. ‘Cop this lot!’

  They waded their way through the deep pile towards the uniformed security guard who was standing behind an enormous mahogany-veneered desk which was a very irregular trapezoid in shape to prove it was not just functional. The opulence of it all made them feel faintly depressed, as perhaps it was meant to.

  ‘Think of the rents!’ Norma whispered.

  ‘And the rates. And the maintenance charges.’

  ‘You’d need a fair amount of naughtiness to pay for that lot,’ Norma agreed.

  The security guard was looking at them alertly as they completed the long haul to his desk, and before Slider could present his ID, he straightened himself perceptibly and said, ‘Police, sir? Thought so. Which one is it you’re interested in?’

  Slider was amused. ‘You have a lot of trouble here?’

  ‘No sir, not a bit. No trouble. A lot of enquiries, though,’ His left eyelid flickered.

  ‘We’re enquiring about a young lady who lived here about eighteen months ago, a Miss Austen.’

  ‘Miss Austen? Oh yes, sir, she’s in 15D, one of the penthouses. Very nice.’

  Miss Austen or the flat? Slider thought. So the news of her death hadn’t penetrated this far; and also she didn’t seem to have given up the flat when she left Birmingham. ‘Penthouse, eh?’ he said. ‘That must cost a bit. Any idea what the rent is?’

  With a curious access of discretion, the guard wrote a figure down on his desk-pad and pushed it across with an arms-length gesture. Slider looked, and his eyes watered. Norma, looking over his shoulder, murmured ‘Ouch!’

  ‘How long has she lived here?’ Slider asked.

  ‘About, oh, four years I suppose. I could look it up for you.’

  ‘Ever any trouble about the rent?’

  ‘Not my department, sir, but I doubt it. The developers would be down on anything like that like a shot. What’s she done, then?’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s dead.’

  Oh. I thought I hadn’t seen her around for a while,’ said the guard, and it wasn’t even a joke. Such, Slider thought, was her epitaph, this enigmatic girl.

  ‘Do you remember when you last saw her?’

  The guard shook his head. ‘Must have been a few weeks ago. I never saw much of her anyway, but it’s like that in these flats. People don’t draw attention to themselves. Besides, there’s nothing to notice in a resident coming in or out. Strangers I’d notice – you know how it is.’

  ‘What happens about visitors?’

  ‘Anyone who comes in comes to the desk, and we make a note of it before we ring up to the flat, for security reasons. You can have a look at the books if you like. But of course if a resident brings in a guest themselves, there’s no note kept.’

 
‘I see. Well, I’d like to have a look at those books afterwards, but for the moment I’d like to see the flat. You have a key, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll get the pass key. I’ll have to come up with you, though, and let you in. Regulations.’

  ‘Are you allowed to leave your desk?’

  For five minutes, yes, sir. I lock the outer door, then anyone who comes has to ring and I hear them on this.’ He patted the portable phone on his hip.

  ‘Very security-conscious, aren’t they?’

  ‘Well, sir, there’s a lot of influential people in these apartments.’

  ‘Was Miss Austen an influential person?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, sir. She didn’t look it. I thought at first she was someone’s mistress, but then she didn’t seem the type. I suppose she must have been somebody’s daughter.’

  The sleek, silent lift smelled of wealth, and the door to the penthouse flat was solid wood with brass fittings and an impressive array of locks and bolts and chains.

  ‘We needn’t keep you,’ Slider said kindly as the guard hesitated. ‘You can trust us to leave everything as we find it.’

  ‘Yes sir. When you’re ready to leave, if you wouldn’t mind ringing down to me, and I’ll come up and lock the door again. That’s the house phone over there, the white one. And if you need anything else, of course.’

  When he had gone, Norma padded further in and let out a soundless whistle. ‘Boy oh boy, it’s like a set off Dallas. Where did she get the money for a setup like this?’

  ‘Thompson thought smuggling. Beevers thinks blackmail.’

  ‘Impossible. It must have been something bigger – and more secure – than that. Dope distribution or something?’ Slider shrugged. ‘And why did she keep it on once she’d left the Orchestra?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Slider said absently, ‘it was her home.’

  Home. Something Anne-Marie had never known much about; a word you would find it hard to apply to this place. Norma had got it right when she said Dallas – it was like a filmset, not like real life at all. It was furnished with the great expense, but with no individuality, and it was cold, impersonal. He wandered about, looking, touching, feeling faintly sick with distress. Thick pale carpets – skyscraper views over Birmingham through the huge, plate-glass windows – white leather sofas. A giant bed with a slippery quilted satin bedspread – teak and brass furniture – a huge, heavy, smoked glass coffee-table. A cocktail cabinet, for God’s sake, and expensive, amorphous modern pictures on the walls.

  It was like nothing in real life. It was utterly bogus. It was, he realised in a flash, the sort of thing a person with no experience might imagine they would like if they were very rich – a child’s dream of a Hollywood Home. His mouth began to turn down bitterly.

  ‘Sir?’ Norma was standing by a bookcase in the corner of the living-room. He went over, and she handed him A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford. ‘It was on television a while back, d’you remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ Slider said. ‘Irene used to watch it.’

  ‘It’s about a kitchenmaid who rises to be head of a business empire. They used the real Harrods in the film as the department store she ended up owning.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about it.’

  ‘Rags to riches,’ Normal went on. ‘And look at these others – all the same kind of thing – sagas about wealthy, powerful women. It’s the modern escapist fiction for women: luxurious settings, jetsetting heroines who are as ruthless and ambitious as men, and make fortunes and manipulate the lives of their minions.’

  ‘Yes,’ Slider said, looking around the room again. ‘It fits.’

  He saw it now. He stared at the row of crudely coloured, mental boiled sweets on the bookshelf before him and saw Anne-Marie, orphaned as a young child, brought up by an aunt who resented her, sent off to boarding school to get her out of the way, foisted off on a governess during school holidays. He saw her as a child with no friends, horribly lonely, perhaps dogged by a sense of failure because she could not make people love her, turning to books as a refuge, entering a world where things could go the way she wanted them to: a world where the unpopular girl scored the vital goal at hockey and became the school’s heroine; where the poor girl saved someone’s life and was given a pony of her own. Then in adolescence, perhaps she turned to the stronger meat of romances, where the hero took off the plain girl’s glasses and murmured, ‘God, but you’re lovely!’; and in young womanhood to the candyfloss of the Eighties, the power-woman sagas.

  Somehow temptation had come her way, a chance to enter a life of excitement and intrigue and make large sums of money; to be, as she probably saw it, rich, successful and powerful. Why should she refuse? It was illegal, but then who cared about her? Who would be hurt by her failure to be honest? Perhaps she even relished the idea of getting back at the law-abiding people of her childhood who had failed to love her.

  He turned from the bookshelves, and imagined her alone here in this shiny, sterile apartment, feeding her vanity of riches and her illusions on pulp fiction, and fighting back the growing conviction that it was all a lie, that her new ‘friends’ were only using her and cared nothing for her. Was that why she had suddenly tried to marry Thompson, to get hold of her inheritance so that she could escape from the trap she had stepped into so willingly?

  Pathetic attempt. The people she was involved with would be ruthless as no fictional characters were. They would not allow her to defect; and at the last moment, he thought, shehad realised that. He remembered Martin Cutts’s description of the last time he had seen her alone, and of her ‘resignation’ afterwards. Perhaps, until the very last moment, she had not minded the thought of dying, since life held so little for her.

  He had been standing with the book in his hand staring ahead of him at nothing, but now he became aware that something was calling his attention, nagging at the periphery of his mind. He stood still and let it seep in. He was facing the open door into the kitchen, a showroom affair of antiqued pine cupboards and white marble surfaces and overhead units with leaded-light doors, and through the glass of the end cupboard, the one in his line of vision, he could see a vague shape and colour that were naggingly familiar.

  ‘Yes,’ he said abruptly, thrust the book into Norma’s hand, crossed to the cupboard and snatched open the door. There it was in the corner: the familiar shape of the tin and haunting depiction of the goitrous peasants and the caring, sharing olive trees, and the large and gaudy letters VIRGIN GREEN. He picked up the tin triumphantly and turned with it in his hands.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Virgin Green.’

  ‘What is it, sir?’ Norma asked, but without much hope of reply. She knew these moods of his, when a lot was going in and nothing much coming out.

  ‘Virgin Green. There’s got to be a connection.’ And then he saw what he had not noticed before, or at least had not taken in, which was the name and address of the manufacturer, in truly tiny letters at the bottom of the back of the tin: Olio d’ltalia, 9 Calle le Paradiso, Firenze.

  Slider began to laugh.

  Atherton paused outside Vincey’s of Bond Street and allowed himself to be impressed. It was either very old, or very well faked, all mahogany and curly gold lettering, and the window display was austere. A heavy, blue velvet curtain hung from a wooden rail half way up at the back of the window, preventing anyone from seeing inside the shop, and its lower end was folded forward in elegant swathes to make a bed for the single article on display – a sixteenth-century lute on a mahogany stand.

  Inside the shop was dark, and smelled dusty but expensive. An old Turkish carpet in dim shades of wine-red and brown covered the floor between the door and the old-fashioned high counter which ran the width of the shop. Around the walls were a few heavy, old-fashioned display cases containing a few curiously uninteresting ancient instruments. The atmosphere was arcane, fusty, and eminently respectable. Atherton supposed that ancient instruments must be of interest to somebody, or how could
Vincey’s continue to function? But the setup seemed precarious in the extreme, considering what rents and rates must be like in Bond Street.

  The door had chimed musically when he opened and closed it, and by the time he reached the counter a man had come through the curtained door that led to the nether regions and was regarding him politely. He was small and shrunken and looked about sixty-five, though his face was sharpened by the brightness of his dark eyes behind gold-rimmed half-glasses, and distinguished by an impressive beak of a nose. He had a little straggly grey hair and a great deal of bare pink pate, on the extremity of which he wore an embroidered Jewish skullcap. The rest of his clothes were shabby and shapeless and no-coloured so that, given his surroundings, one might suppose he wore them as a sort of protective colouring. If he kept still, Atherton thought, only his eyes would give away his whereabouts.

  ‘Mr Saloman?’ Atherton was not really in any doubt. If ever a man looked like a Mr Saloman, it was he.

  ‘Saloman of Vincey’s,’ said the man, as if it were a title, like Nelson of Burnham Thorpe. His hands, which had been down at his sides, came up and rested side by side on the edge of the counter on their fingertips. He had the ridged and chalky fingernails of an old man, and his fingers were pointed and the skin shiny and brown, as if they had been rubbed to a patina by years of handling old wood. As they rested there, Atherton had the curious feeling that they had climbed up of their own accord to have a look at him. It unnerved him, and made him draw an extra breath before beginning.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said as cheerfully as his normally cheerful face could contrive. ‘I wonder if you could tell me if you have ever had any dealings with this young lady.’

  Saloman did not at once take the proffered photograph. First he subjected Atherton’s face to a prolonged examination; and when at last one of his hands relinquished its fingertip grip of the counter and came towards him, Atherton found his own hand shrinking back in reluctance to come into contact with those pointed, brown, animal fingers. Saloman took the photograph and studied it in silence for some moments, while Atherton watched him and formed the opinion that behind the old, hooknosed, impassive façade a very sharp mind was rapidly turning over the possibilities and wondering whether it would be better to know or not to know. Yes, I’m on to something, Atherton thought, with that rapid process of association and deduction which he thought was instinct.