Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

‘Not particularly. But all the same, just for argument’s sake, I suppose the Pentathol came from your surgery? Your records are all carefully kept, and all drugs fully accounted for, I imagine?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘You arranged to meet her at the pub after her session at the Television Centre. You’d stolen her diary, so you knew she wouldn’t be missed for several days. You went in her car. I suppose you’d left yours somewhere so it wouldn’t be recognised?’

  Hildyard gave a curious little seated bow. ‘The trains from Oxford are very good, and frequent,’ he said casually, not as if it were an answer to any question.

  Slider nodded, accepting the point. ‘Yes, Oxford. You had her drive you to the flat Ronnie Brenner had prepared for you. You took her in. You -’ He stopped and swallowed. He couldn’t say the next bit. ‘Afterwards you took her clothes away and drove in her car to Oxford, transferred to your own car and drove home, and disposed of the clothes. I wonder how?’ He though for a moment. ‘I wonder, do you have a furnace of some kind? What about the bodies of animals you have to put down? I don’t suppose everyone wants to bury their own pet.’

  ‘There is a furnace at the back of the surgery,’ Hildyard assented. There was an odd gleam in his eye. ‘Very similar to the sort used in crematoria. Vaporises everything most efficiently.’

  Slider nodded. ‘Then you had to go back and clear out her flat, remove all her personal papers so that there could be no possibility she had left anything incriminating. But you forgot the violin – the Stradivarius. So you had to go back a second time. You must have thought, the way things were, that you had plenty of time. It must have been a shock to see in the paper that she’d been identified so soon. You panicked and killed the old lady –’

  Suddenly Hildyard looked annoyed. ‘My dear sir, do I look like the sort of man who panics? It was not I who killed the old lady, as you put it. That was a piece of bungled work. There was no necessity for it at all.’

  ‘It may even have been an accident,’ Slider said in fairness. ‘Even we weren’t sure about that. But it was you who dealt with Thompson, wasn’t it? He was becoming a threat, getting too close to the truth; and in any case, it was a way to tie up all the loose ends. So you dumped Anne-Marie’s car near his house, hijacked him somehow, forced him to write the suicide note, and cut his throat with one of your scalpels. It was clever of you to notice that he wrote left-handed and make the cut left-handed too. A friend of mine says that surgeons have to be able to cut with either hand. Is that true?’

  ‘Oh yes. There are times when the angle of an operation is not accessible to a right-handed cut. Some of the best men operate with both hands simultaneously, holding several instruments in their fingers for quickness’ sake.’

  Slider was silent, thinking, and after a while Hildyard interrupted with a question of his own.

  ‘I’ve been wondering how you did manage to identify Anne-Marie’s body so quickly. I read in the newspaper report that she was stripped entirely naked and that there were no belongings with her to identify her; nor had she been missed by anyone.’

  ‘The mark on her neck,’ Slider said. He was very tired indeed, and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘One of my men recognised it as a violinist’s mark, so we went round all the orchestras with a photograph.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘But there would have been no way to disguise that in any case.’

  Slider opened his eyes. ‘No. But why the cuts on the foot? Why didn’t you make the death look natural, like suicide?’

  Something of Hildyard’s self-possession left him. His expression wavered, his eyes narrowed with some emotion -anger perhaps? He pressed his lips together as though to prevent himself from speaking unwisely, but after a moment the words escaped him. ‘I loved Anne-Marie. You can have no idea! She was my creation. She was my neophyte. I nursed and nurtured what there was in her -’ He broke off just as abruptly, and the light in his eyes went cold. He turned his head away and said indifferently, Orders from the top must always be obeyed, whatever the individual thinks of them. Unquestioningly. Chaos otherwise. In business as in the services.’

  ‘Business,’ Slider said, struggling with the warm grip of the armchair, trying to get more upright to express his outrage. ‘How can you call it business? If you really did know her all her life, how could you just murder her in cold blood, and feel nothing, and call it business?’

  Hildyard rose abruptly and towered over him, but Slider was too far gone to feel any menace. His glass was taken from him by strong fingers and he heard the vet say, ‘Damn it, I shouldn’t have given you such a big one. I suppose you’d already been drinking before you came here. Come on, pull yourself together, you drunken fool! Can’t have you passing out here. You shouldn’t have come here anyway. Damn it, I shouldn’t have let you in.’

  And he still hadn’t admitted anything, Slider thought. Not denied, but not admitted. He had no doubt that Hildyard was guilty; but even if the case hadn’t been closed, none of this was admissible anyway. No witnesses. No witnesses? The strong hands were on his shoulders now, gripping like steel, and Slider tried to flinch away from them, belatedly alarmed. He loathed the touch which had so recently tightened the wire round Ronnie Brenner’s neck.

  ‘You aren’t even worried, are you?’ he said in bleared outrage. ‘You’re not human at all, you’re a monster. You say you loved Anne-Marie, but you murdered her just because they told you to. And you killed Ronnie Brenner and then just came back here and lit the fire, as if it was all in a day’s work.’

  The hands were suddenly gone. Hildyard straightened upright and looked at Slider with sudden alertness. ‘Killed Ronnie Brenner? What are you talking about?’

  ‘You followed me to his house this afternoon, and when I came out you went in and killed him.’

  The vet looked strange. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve been here all day.’

  Slider struggled. ‘Then what –’

  ‘Listen!’ Hildyard was suddenly tense, his whole body rigid, his head cocked in a listening attitude. ‘Did you hear that?’ he whispered. Slider shook his head, meeting the vet’s eyes at last, and witnessed a curious phenomenon: the vet’s yellowish face seemed to drain completely of blood, turning first white, and then almost greenish, waxy. His eyes seemed to bulge slightly in their sockets, his lips drew back involuntarily off his long teeth. Slider had never seen such terror in a man’s face. It was not a pleasant sight.

  ‘They followed you here,’ Hildyard whispered. ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Who? How?’ Slider said, but the vet waved him to silence.

  ‘Wait here. Keep quiet,’ he whispered. He put down the glass he was holding and went to the door, opened it a crack and listened a moment, and then slipped out, moving on the balls of his feet, as soundlessly as a cat.

  Slider waited. The fire crackled unimportantly. After a while he heaved himself out of the chair and went to the door which Hildyard had left open a crack. The air in the hallway was colder than in the room, and whistled unpleasantly into his ear as he applied it to the gap. He heard the slow, heavy tick of the longcase clock in the hall, and behind that the soft black silence of an empty house.

  And then, distantly, a muted thud. It was a tumbling sort of thud, such as might be made by a stack of heavy, soft objects falling over. Slider opened the door wider, and then heard quite clearly from the other end of the house, the surgery end, the loud crash of breaking glass.

  His mind was instantly stripped clean of lethargy and fumes. Adrenaline pumped through him as he shot across the hall, flinging open doors, understanding without words what that thud and crash meant. Dickson’s voice, ‘They don’t tolerate failures’, was with him as he raced across a dining-room, crashing his shins against a chair that got in his way, through the further door, and into the new part of the house, the extension, which still smelled of plaster. He crossed another small hallway, through a door into the waiting room, which smelled of that
disinfectant that vets use, and through the final door into the surgery itself.

  Stink of petrol, broken glass, a fierce blaze, dense smoke already building up. On the floor the fallen stack of Hildyard, sprawled face down, the back of his skull smashed by an expert blow to a pink pulp, shards of bone and strands of hair all mashed together. All this Slider gathered in a split second, and already the heat and smoke were too much. His eyes were streaming, he could hear himself coughing and feel the pain in his chest as he dropped to his knees. Must get out.

  He took hold of the collar and shoulder of the vet’s jacket and tried to drag him backwards towards the door; but the man was an immense weight, and the door seemed an impossible distance away. Slider’s mind stepped away from it all, away from the fire and the fear and all the multitude of agonies it had been suffering, and looked down on the scene from a great height, from a cool, dark, impenetrable distance. He was vaguely aware that this was a bad thing to do, but he couldn’t now remember why, and he was so tired, and the darkness was too inviting for him to want to try.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Stray Dog Syndrome

  ‘Hullo?’

  ‘Hullo, Joanna.’

  ‘Bill! I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you again.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ He sounded genuinely surprised.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ she said.

  ‘I did phone once or twice before, but I got your answering machine, and I didn’t want to talk to that.’

  ‘I wish you had. At least I’d have known –’

  ‘Known what?’

  ‘That you – that you were still around.’

  ‘I’m not really. Around, I mean. I’m away.’

  ‘Oh.’ She was determined not to ask questions. For three weeks she had waited with diminishing hope, feeling only that she must not be the one to ask.

  After a silence he said, ‘You aren’t angry with me, are you?’

  ‘No, not angry. Why should I be?’

  ‘Did Atherton phone you?’

  ‘He told me that you were in hospital but that it wasn’t serious.’

  ‘Is that all? Nothing else?’

  ‘No. Was he supposed to?’

  ‘I asked him to let you know what was going on. I suppose he forgot. There must have been a hell of a lot to do, especially with me away and Raisbrook not coming back.’

  Forgot my arse! Joanna thought. She said, ‘Where are you, then?’

  ‘I’m staying with my father in Essex. They gave me long leave.’

  ‘Upper Hawksey,’ she remembered.

  That’s where I’m calling from now. The thing is – I wondered if you were going to have any time off in the next couple of days? I wondered if you’d like to come out here for the day? It’s quite nice – country and all that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t your father mind?’ She meant, ‘what about your wife’, and he understood that and answered all parts of the question.

  ‘Irene’s not here. She’s at home with the children. I didn’t want them to miss school. In any case, I’m supposed to be having peace and quiet. I’ve told Dad about you.’

  Joanna’s heart gave an unruly, unreasonable leap. ‘Oh?’

  ‘He’s a good bloke.’ He said it like a justification. ‘I value his advice. I told him I wanted to ask you to come out, and he said he didn’t mind. I think he wants to meet you, though he didn’t say so out loud. Well, it’s his generation, you know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Joanna, you’re not saying much.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I feel as if I’ve been going through a nightmare.’

  ‘Yes, me too.’ Understatement of the decade, she thought. ‘Will you come, then? I’d like to have a chance to talk to you. But if you don’t feel like coming out I shall quite understand.’

  No you won’t understand, you diffident bastard, she thought. ‘Yes, I’ll come, if you want me to. I could come tomorrow.’

  ‘That would be perfect.’

  ‘You’d better give me instructions, then.’

  He was waiting for her at the end of the lane, and signalled for her to pull over onto the mud-strip lay-by. She obeyed and got out and stood looking at him, her heart in her mouth. His eyebrows had gone, and his front hair was stubbly, and across the top of his forehead the skin had a shiny, plastic look. His hands were still bandaged. Otherwise, there was no sign of what he had gone through.

  But he had a skinned look, as though he had had too close a haircut. His face seemed to have lost flesh, so that his nose and ears were too prominent, and it made him look curiously young. He was wearing a shabby sweater, a pair of baggy cords, and Wellingtons too big for him, and she saw how these suited him much better than town clothes. He was a country boy by birth and blood, and he looked at home here against the bare hedges and the wide, flat, soggy brown fields.

  The lack of eyebrows made him look surprised, and his smile was hesitant and shy. She loved him consumingly, and didn’t know what to say, how to approach him, even if it were permitted to cross the gap between them.

  He said, ‘I think it would be best if you were to leave it here. It’ll be quite safe, but with mine and Dad’s down there already, the lane’s getting a bit churned up. Dad’s out at the moment. He’s usually out all day. We’ve got the place to ourselves until teatime. Shall we go and have a drink and some lunch? I wasn’t sure if you’d be hungry or not.’

  He was talking too much, he knew, but he couldn’t stop himself, and her silence was unnerving him. He had been thinking about her for so long, and it had made her unreal in his mind. Now seeing her again he didn’t know what he was feeling, what he was going to do, whether asking her here had been brave or stupid or right or selfish. They stared at each other awkwardly, out of reach.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked at last, and nodded towards his bandages. ‘Those look a bit fearsome.’

  He waved them. ‘Oh, they’re not as bad as they look. They’re nearly healed now, but I wear the bandages to keep them clean. Practically everything I do here seems to involve getting filthy. It’s very enjoyable.’ He smiled tentatively, but she was still studying him.

  ‘You look thinner. Or is it just the haircut?’

  ‘Both. I had to have the haircut because I’d got singed in a couple of places. You see the old eyebrows are gone. They’ll grow back, of course, probably thicker than before. I’ll end up looking like Dennis Healey.’ She didn’t smile at his attempted joke, and he grew serious in his turn. ‘Atherton got me out just in time. If it hadn’t been for him – and you, raising the alarm … You saved my life between you.’

  She turned her head away. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘For God’s sake, no gratitude. I couldn’t stand that.’ She was suddenly nervous. ‘That isn’t what you asked me here for?’

  ‘No. I – No. I wanted to see you. I had to talk to you.’ He bit his lip. ‘Let’s get comfortable first. Come on, there’s no sense standing about here.’

  She fell in beside him and they walked up the muddy, rutted lane to the house. He led her into the kitchen where they shed their muddied footwear and he sat her at the table– wooden, and scrubbed, like a children’s story, she thought– and gave her a gin and tonic.

  ‘I had to send out for supplies for this,’ he said, bringing her glass to her between bandaged palms. ‘Dad only drinks beer, and homemade wine, and I wouldn’t inflict that on you.’

  ‘You didn’t have to go to all that trouble. I could have drunk beer,’ she said.

  ‘I wanted you to have what you like.’ He put the glass down in front of her, and their eyes met. He wanted to touch her, but he didn’t know how to cross the space between them. He didn’t know what she was thinking. She might not welcome the gesture. But she had come here, hadn’t she? Or was that just curiosity?

  The silence had gone on too long now. He turned away and fetched his own drink.

  ‘Da
d likes to have his tea when he gets in,’ he said, ‘so I thought we’d just have a light lunch, if that’s all right?’

  ‘Anything you like. Yes, that’s fine.’

  ‘Can you eat mushrooms on toast? I do them rather nicely.’

  ‘That would be lovely. Can you manage, with your hands?’

  ‘Oh yes. They don’t hurt. Don’t you do anything – just sit there. I’ve never had the chance to cook for you yet.’

  The words pleased and pained her with their innocence. It was tender, and rather gauche, and she loved him all over again, and was afraid she was going to be asked to pay a second time. She watched him as he moved with assurance around the kitchen where he had grown up. He looked so much younger here, and it wasn’t just the effect of the haircut. It was something to do with being back in the parental home. She had noticed before that people shed years when they were once more in the situation of being child to a father or mother.

  As the gin eased the tension, he began to talk more naturally, about neutral subjects, and she listened, her eyes following him, her body relaxed. It was when they were sitting opposite each other with food to occupy their hands that he finally turned to the case.

  ‘It seems incredible that I haven’t spoken to you since the night Ronnie Brenner was killed. I don’t really know how much you know. What made you ring the station, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking inward, her eyes dark. ‘I just had a bad feeling about it: you seemed so strange. So I stopped at the first phone box and rang the station and asked to speak to your friend O’Flaherty, and when he said you weren’t there, I told him everything. Of course, you might have gone home, but I couldn’t check up on that. I expected him to tell me there was nothing to worry about, but he took it seriously, thank God. He told me he’d find out where you were and ring me straight back.’

  She looked to see if he knew all this, but he nodded and said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, apparently he sent a radio car round to whatsis-name’s house, Brenner, and then of course it was red alert. O’Flaherty and Atherton put their heads together and decided the most likely thing was that you’d gone off to see the bogus vet, and Atherton just got in his car and drove like a mad thing.’ She looked at him. ‘He does care about you, you know.’