by Morag Joss
NUMBNESS DESCENDED over the next few hours. Sara could recall people running, raised voices, and George practically holding her up and leading her kindly away, back up the stairs and across the high, echoing Concert Room. She had no idea how much time had passed, but she was recovering from the nausea and giddiness that had first swept over her, and had been able to field the anxious enquiries. Yes, she would be all right just sitting here. No, there was no one at home they could contact. She was now sitting in the Smoking Room, one of a number of smaller rooms off a corridor which ran alongside the Concert Room. The room was steadily filling up. The three Japanese girls were there, as well as a dozen or so people who must have come into the baths after them. One or two were still holding guidebooks and they sat on the chairs round the walls, talking in a dismayed kind of way. The door opened and George came in again, followed by three of the junior attendants, the two souvenir shop assistants and two entrance desk ladies. Sara watched in silence as the sight of people in uniform inspired one of the tourists to ask what on earth was going on. George shook his head. He hardly knew. A fatality appeared to have occurred. He had telephoned for the police, who had arrived almost immediately and gone straight to the corpse. They had ordered a cordon round the building and had stationed officers on all four sides of it. No member of the public was to be admitted, and no person inside the building was to leave. George had been instructed by a police officer to find a suitable room in which an enquiry and preliminary interviews could begin. Having shown them into the Drawing Room next door, George had then been sent to round up any remaining visitors and escort them, with all the staff, to the Smoking Room. That was all he knew.
More police cars had drawn up; from the Smoking Room windows they could see out to Abbey Churchyard, where one stood with its blue light circling and flashing and from whose open front doors the on-off, whish-crackle of the radio could be heard. A woman detective constable came in and all conversation stopped. For the time being, everyone was being asked to wait. The detective constable apologised for the inconvenience and hoped that it would not be for too long. They waited.
The WDC returned shortly afterwards and asked if there was a kitchen where tea could be made. The two shop ladies left with her, glad to have something to do. They came back with two trays. It seemed slightly profane to give a welcome smile to a cup of tea under the circumstances, but most people did, and the low hum of conversation resumed as the cups went round. George brought a cup to Sara and sat down beside her.
‘All right now, love?’
‘That man in the water. It was the man who did the speech last night at the Assembly Rooms, wasn’t it? Matthew Sawyer.’
George nodded solemnly and Sara groaned. ‘I feel awful. I laughed at him. We both did, my friend and me. Last night it all seemed funny. I just thought he was embarrassing, didn’t know what he was dealing with. I can’t believe he’s dead.’
The door opened and the WDC returned.
‘We have to interview everyone who was in the building when the body was found. For most of you, all we’ll need from you today is your personal details and a statement saying where exactly you were in the building when the alarm was raised. I’m sorry you’ve had a wait, but we shouldn’t have to keep you much longer.’
More tea. Another officer came and took names and addresses. Sara sat on, white and quiet, relieved that nothing except sitting there seemed to be expected of her. She watched as gradually the numbers dwindled, as the tourists were ushered next door to give their innocuous details and peripheral knowledge of events, and then allowed to go. She realised that some of them would eventually look back on the day as a faintly enjoyable one, that for some of them, like those two Americans in lemon cashmere sweaters, the episode would become no more than an extra bit of spice in their travellers’ tales. Boy, is England ever violent! Did we ever tell you what happened on our trip in ’97? Sara was envious, for she felt changed, once again caught off-guard by events, by death. Without meaning or wanting to, she had once again strayed into that different territory, where simple pleasures and unambitious hopes for a good day seemed not just slightly indecent, but ludicrous.
‘The poor sod,’ George was saying, ‘probably just got up this morning as usual. Thinking he’s going to have another perfectly ordinary day, and it turns out to be his last, his last ever. The last day of his life. Probably just toppled over the railing, hit his head and that’s that. It’s a thought, innit? Unbelievable.’
As he spoke Sara saw again the Assembly Rooms, the audience of women, the platform and the tall man of the night before, floundering through his disastrous speech.
‘George, he didn’t get up this morning as usual,’ she said quietly. Involuntarily, she saw again the gangly, soaked body and the dead face. ‘George, he was still in black tie. He must have been there all night.’
DETECTIVE SERGEANT Bridger did not get up when the WDC opened the door and showed Sara next door into the Drawing Room. He gestured her to a chair and, unaware of the irony, asked if she minded if he smoked. Or rather, he waved his packet of Silk Cut at her and said, because he was dealing with a member of the general public and was obliged to ask, ‘Don’t mind, do you?’
‘Actually, I do.’
She did not care what he thought. He was quite unforgivably unattractive. He was wearing, presumably in pursuit of the hard cop effect, a pair of Gap chinos, a dark blue militaristic bomber jacket, definitely of mixed fibres, and a slightly loosened thin tie of brown suede. Sara was sure that the strain showing on his face owed less to a tense all-night stakeout than to the fact that he’d had to forgo his doughnut down at the station that morning. Bridger knew her type too. Educated cow, one of them lippy, neurotic manhaters.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said with mock concern, consulting his list. ‘Right then. Well, Miss – oh, I beg your pardon, I see it’s Muzz – Selkirk is that, let’s hope we won’t be too long then. I’m afraid I’m gasping. Terrible habit, I do realise.’
He put away his fags and produced a Snickers bar from his pocket. Unwrapping it and taking a bite, he then made his second mistake.
With his mouth half full he said, ‘So, with a name like that, would I be right in thinking you hail from north of the border, then? Cold up there, isn’t it? Never been, myself. Prefer the sun.’
Sara stared back steadily with a look which she hoped conveyed her exasperated boredom with the subject of Scottish weather. Bridger decided to abandon any attempt to be friendly, and instead went into his highly trained professional, got-a-job-to-get-on-with-here mode, running yellowish fingers through his pale hair as if he expected to find something interesting in it. Sara tried to work out why she felt so antagonistic towards this man, who was a policeman, after all. He did look young and she couldn’t exactly blame him for that, but he had one of those ratty faces and the kind of slight and probably hairless white body that she found revolting. Whippets had the same effect on her. Looking round, she felt a surge of annoyance at what he had already managed to do to this once tranquil and elegant room. Various flower arrangements had been lifted from their proper places and stacked with obvious impatience on a long Regency bench along the wall. The deep windowsills and three semicircular side tables were already filling up with police detritus: folders and papers, a laptop, a mobile telephone and a box of computer discs. A desk, surely borrowed from one of the other offices, had been shoved under the windows. The room was already more chaotic and grubbier than it need have been. Sara was willing to bet that Bridger expected the WDC to keep things tidy, wash up discarded teacups and so on, and that the WDC, all power to her, steadfastly didn’t.
Now he was being brusque and efficient. She related, in answer to his questions, what she had done since her arrival at the Pump Room that morning. He quizzed her about the evening before and she went through it all in detail, beginning with her afternoon rehearsal, right up until when she had left the Pump Room, in the rain, at ten thirty. She told him about Matthew Sawyer’s speech.
>
‘It was disastrous. He was so rude and dismissive, as if he had no idea of what was important to those people. He must have upset them very badly. He certainly embarrassed me.’
‘And you’re saying that more or less the whole audience was annoyed? Did you see anyone who seemed particularly upset?’
‘How could I tell? Anyway, I left just after that.’ She paused. ‘I only saw one person speak to him afterwards. A colleague of his, Olivia Passmore, the deputy director. No, I didn’t hear what was said. I suppose you can find that out from Olivia, can’t you?’
She was damned if she was going to give any more help than that. Olivia would be sure to be on the list of people to be interviewed. Anyway, it was none of her business to speculate on what they might have been talking about. It was their business or, more accurately now, Olivia’s. She felt a sudden, tender pity for poor, clumsy Matthew Sawyer, whom she had never even properly met. Bridger was drawing her back to the finding of the body. Why? Why go over it again? He is doing this to torment me, the little reptile, she thought. She answered mechanically.
‘As I’ve told you, I was looking round the museum. I was just waiting till George could open up the office where I’d left my belt. I was the first visitor in. I simply walked up to the railing in front of the overflow. I saw the body lying in the water. I realised who it was. The water was running over his face. The mouth was open. His legs and arms seemed all... all over the place. I must have screamed. George grabbed me. That’s all I remember. It was very upsetting.... Matthew Sawyer was like someone else I... I once knew.’
She stopped. She did not think she was going to be able to say any more without crying, but she had to know.
‘How did he die?’ she asked.
Bridger paused. The press would be told in a couple of hours anyway; the statement had already been prepared. He picked up the sheet of paper from the desk. He shouldn’t say anything, but it would be a pleasure to watch her take it.
‘Pending the forensic pathologist’s full report, a preliminary examination suggests that the deceased sustained fatal stab wounds which are not thought to have been selfinflicted,’ read Bridger, running his tongue over his caramelly teeth, well satisfied.
CHAPTER 4
SARA COULD NOT free her mind from the grip of the day’s events. It had started to rain by the time she left the building, refusing offers of help, and drove home, forgetting all her plans, intent only on getting back to the comforting privacy of the cottage’s thick walls. She rang James.
‘So you see, because of all this, I haven’t bought a thing. I’m so sorry. I was going to go to the fish market. I’ve got salad. There’s nothing for pud. It was going to be a treat. Oh, James, I’m really sorry. What about cheese? What are we to do?’ she babbled, transferring her anxious need for the restoration of some sort of order to the state of the larder, where it could at least be acted upon.
James interrupted. ‘Will you stop that? I will tell you what we are going to do. I am going to do some shopping, then I am coming straight over. You are to do nothing until I get there, except perhaps make yourself some tea. Hold on.’
And although he thought it would probably do her good, he reflected that it would not be quite the thing to suggest that she soak in a long, hot bath.
In the lateness of the afternoon the wind rose and it turned cold. Sara gathered some of the fallen peony heads and floated them in a wide glass bowl. She brought in a few logs and lit the fire, and then made tea. Afterwards, she coaxed herself upstairs. In her oversized bathroom, she ran a deep hot bath, pouring in most of the tea tree bath gel, and stepped in, gasping in the intense heat. She groaned and slid under the water, then surfaced, reached for her Floris bath oil and tipped in a decadent quantity, enough to extinguish the scent of tea tree. For a long time she lay absolutely still in the hot, aromatic water and felt some of the day’s taint wash from her. Much later, wrapped in a bathrobe, she rested for a moment in the large cane rocking chair where she sat to dry her feet. She thought of Matthew Sawyer’s widow and children, assuming that he would be married and a father. Her own experience of his death was now effectively over. She had nothing to do now but recover from a momentary shock. For Mrs Sawyer, it was only beginning: the pain, fury and bitterness, followed by loneliness and long, long sorrow. Sara covered her face with her warm and water-wrinkled hands.
James arrived in perfect time to make large kirs for them both. He let himself into the kitchen and by way of announcing his arrival launched into ‘Ma in Espana’, just as Sara was coming downstairs in a cloud of stephanotis, bare-foot and dressed in grey silk Indian trousers and a man’s collarless white shirt. She was pink and extremely shiny and James, thinking that she looked like a very large baby, judged that this was how she might need to be treated. He saw that a damaged look had returned to her beautiful eyes.
‘In da capo mode, I hear,’ she said. ‘Leporello has landed. Don’t you ever get tired to Don Giovanni?’
‘Probably not as tired as everyone else does. Come here, honeybun.’ James kissed her forehead and wrapped his arms round her. ‘Poor baby. You know you shouldn’t really leave the door unlocked like that,’ he said, rocking her gently.
‘This is the country,’ Sara retorted. ‘Don’t be so Londony.’ She gave a shuddering sigh. ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she muttered into his chest. After a moment’s silence she drew away and said, ‘You saw him last night, didn’t you? At the dinner, in the Pump Room. He did look a bit like Matteo, didn’t he?’
‘A bit. Only a bit. Come on, here’s a drink. Do you want ice in that?’
He wanted only to make her feel better after her horrible experience and like all unconsciously charming people he did not realise how much this was accomplished merely by his presence. He stationed her at the table with her glass and a bowl of olives while he worked happily in the big high kitchen. He enjoyed moving around in its generous space, reaching for the spoons and herbs hanging from butcher’s hooks, putting things he had finished with out of his way. Sara watched, recognising the same impeccable, technical ease that he brought to the keyboard. His movements were simple. There was none of the impassioned throwing around that so many musicians went in for, believing the audience expected it. He directed his energy straight into what he was doing, and focused only on that. Consequently, whatever it was, whether a piece of music, a story he was telling or even, as now, a salad, it contained no jarring element or empty gesture but had a kind of honest life that arose from the deep concentration he gave it. He used his hands perfectly. He seemed to establish a harmony with the things he touched; he got out chopping boards without banging them about, he did not drop and then tread on peeled cloves of garlic and he did not rip the skins off onions as if he were tearing brown paper off a parcel. As he started on the potatoes, Sara thought he was the only person she could happily watch using a knife. The kirs went down quickly and James made more. Partly from the wine, partly from James camping things up and partly from a need to relieve the day’s tension, they got a bit giggly. They took in trays of food to the drawing room and ate off the low table round the fire, while the cat lay on the hearth, stoned on Whiskas.
‘Want mustard? It’s got beer in it,’ James said, helping himself. ‘I say, isn’t this frightfully Famous Five? Look, heaps of lettuce, pommes savoyarde, wild boar sausages, some olives and yummy French bread, lashings of Cabernet Sauvignon. Not to mention a murder. Rather a gruesome puzzle, what? Of course it’s not funny,’ he added, answering Sara’s look, ‘but I wonder what it’s all about? The speech got anything to do with it?’
Sara snorted that Sawyer had certainly upset people very badly, but nobody could be driven to murder because of it.
‘Ah, but,’ James intoned portentously, ‘it seems impossible, but all kinds of things seem impossible, don’t they? Ancient echoes. What about those curses that people used to throw into the bath? Chuck us the guidebook.’
He leafed through it.
‘Listen t
o this. “May the person who has stolen from me become as liquid as water.” No, listen. “May my enemy sink like lead.” “May the goddess Sulis afflict him with maximum death.” See?’
Sara stared with mocking goggle-eyes and went, ‘Ooohoooh!’
‘No, listen, it’s all very powerful stuff. It is. Don’t you think there could be a link?’
‘Well, Watson, there could be, but I’m not sure Bath CID will go for it,’ Sara said.
She regaled him with a scurrilous account of Detective Sergeant Bridger, and James, suddenly an expert on police procedure, said, ‘Oh, but he’s very junior. He certainly won’t be in charge. They’ll have to interview all the museum staff, at the Assembly Rooms as well as the Pump Room, and the caterers, as well as everyone who was at the do last night. That’s well over five hundred people, for a start.’
‘But why?’ asked Sara. Suddenly it seemed serious again. ‘Surely they’ll find whoever broke in without going through all that? They must have surveillance cameras. Or someone may have seen him get in, or heard him. He would probably be drunk, about to trash the place. I bet it was just some drunken yob with one of those combat knives.’
‘Think so? I mean, you arrived first thing and George was opening up as usual. He obviously hadn’t come across a break-in or any malicious damage. He must have found everything just as he expected it.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose so. Including the alarms,’ Sara said. ‘The alarm is set every night by the person locking up. George, or whoever’s opening up, switches it off. If it hadn’t been set, he would have been in a bit of a state this morning. But he was perfectly relaxed.’
