Funeral Music

by Morag Joss

  Since Andrew had arrived he had said not one word about the murder or the enquiry. He had postponed his usual Monday lesson until Tuesday ‘owing to pressure of work’, and from a brief factual report of the Pump Room murder in Monday’s Chronicle Sara had learned that he was indeed working on the case. And now here he was, saying little and playing so atrociously that Sara felt something close to alarm. She had regained her own equilibrium since the events of Saturday mainly by convincing herself that the killer would quickly be arrested. She had expected Andrew to bound in today metaphorically wagging his tail, and instead he was carrying in his jaws a bloodied offering of unresolved, unexpected death, and dropping it at her feet. An atmosphere of threat eddied all around them. He was so pointedly not talking about the murder that he was managing to do not much of anything else either.

  He sighed, put down his bow and leaned his cheek against the wood. He loved it up here at the very top of Sara’s garden. They were in the hut, Sara’s summer music room, a little garden house made of dark green painted wood with windows on either side and large double doors which opened right back, allowing you to sit either in the hut looking out, or on the little gravelled space in front with its low wooden balustrade. As well as two chairs for playing on and a rather disgraceful chaise longue, there was a rickety table and some spidery wicker basket seats, with faded green cushions, for collapsing into. Hanging from chains in the pitched roof were two storm lanterns. The hut stood camouflaged in the shade of a huge pine tree and was as private as an eyrie. Up here you were invisible, untouchable. Andrew looked down through the mass of lavender bushes to the old climbing roses which twisted in full flower through the fruit trees, over the roof of Medlar Cottage and across to the valley and the lime tree meadow.

  ‘I know. Sorry,’ he said, without moving his gaze from the hillside. ‘I know I’m playing badly. I was determined not to bring it up, but I’m in charge of the Pump Room case. And I know that you got caught up in it.’

  He paused, still staring out. At seven o’clock on this evening in June, the valley was lit in bright sunshine. Black and white cows idled under the trees in fields that were wrinkled with the ridges trodden by generations of their hoofed ancestors. The new grass was washed in a chalky, early summer green. You half expected Bo-Peep to skip into view.

  ‘Valerie doesn’t think I’ll be up to it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she does,’ Sara said casually. ‘Is it, er, going well?’

  ‘No, it isn’t, as a matter of fact,’ he said.

  ‘But don’t you know most of these people? Your yobs and vandals, I mean. The regulars. Surely it’s one of them you’re looking for?’

  Andrew pored over the Fauré on the music stand with apparent absorption, but he was a poor actor.

  ‘What does Valerie think?’

  ‘I don’t discuss these things with Valerie.’ He started the piece again and his tone brought to mind a cat whose tail has been stood on.

  ‘Stop, stop! God, stop that noise. Look, you’ll probably reel in the lout who did this in no time.’ She added softly, ‘I hope you will. The whole thing’s making me feel...unsafe. You will, won’t you?’

  Andrew put down his bow again. ‘I’m sorry. I really can’t discuss the enquiry. But it’s not one of our regulars, I can tell you that.’

  ‘All right then,’ Sara said deliberately. ‘I understand. But if you just told me how you knew it wasn’t, that wouldn’t be discussing it, would it?’

  Andrew played a little, considering. ‘All right then, in complete confidence. Matthew Sawyer was lying dead in a locked building, with the alarms set. The person, or people, who left him dead must have locked the building and set the alarm after them. Still, not your problem. Sorry. Shall I try this again?’

  ‘Start again from the beginning. Breathe with the phrases. Think about where you want them to go. And listen.’

  ‘Sounds easy, doesn’t it? The music, I mean,’ he added, frowning over the Fauré.

  As he played Sara said, ‘But isn’t it easy? You just round up all the people who know about the alarm and eliminate them till you find the one who could have done it.’

  ‘Done that. Nothing. Look, Sara, I’m really not supposed to discuss this.’

  ‘Well, try to concentrate on what you’re doing with that cello, then. What do you mean, nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. They’re transparent. Decent, respected museum employees, and nothing that even begins to suggest a motive. And they’ve all got alibis.’

  To Sara’s irritation, Andrew’s playing became momentarily convincing. Then he put down his bow again.

  ‘All right, in confidence. Two of the attendants were off duty. One of them, Jack, was taking part in a pub quiz at the Centurion in Twerton. He was there all night and dozens of people can vouch for him. Colin was at home with his wife. They’ve got a new baby. And all that evening and most of the night it was ill, so Colin rang their GP at ten o’clock for advice and again at half past twelve, when he called him out; they couldn’t get its temperature down. George Townsend, the senior chap, was on duty, of course. He did door duty at the Pump Room until ten to eleven, then he went over to the Assembly Rooms to lock up and relieve Andy, who was there on his own after Matthew Sawyer left the Assembly Rooms to check out the event at the Pump Room. Andy’s new, he’s not an authorised key-holder yet. George relieved him just after eleven. Andy lives with his mother and she had a friend round. He got home at quarter past eleven and drove the friend home at half past. He came straight back home and locked up at ten to twelve, made a cup of tea for his mother as usual and brought it to her in bed. Then he went to his own room. George locked up the Assembly Rooms at about ten past eleven and was home at about twenty to midnight. He went straight up to bed. His wife was there already.’

  Suddenly he seemed to remember himself. ‘I shouldn’t have told you all that. Forget I did.’

  ‘You’re welcome to tell me things if it helps.’

  Andrew gave her a meltingly grateful smile, but said nothing.

  She went on, ‘Well, since it’s clearly out of the question to expect you to think seriously about Fauré today, do you know exactly when Matthew Sawyer died?’

  ‘That’s another problem. The time of death is never easy to establish exactly, as you probably know. We do know he didn’t drown. There was no water in the lungs. He had stopped breathing before he fell in the water.’

  ‘What about rigor mortis? Can’t you tell by that?’

  ‘Not with any precision.’ He paused. ‘What is it about this view?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just old-fashioned,’ Sara said. ‘There’s no big road, no pylons. The fields are all different shapes, and they’ve left the trees. I keep expecting to see a young John Betjeman in grey flannel shorts swinging on a gate, catapulting pigeons, don’t you?’

  Andrew didn’t answer. ‘Rigor mortis,’ he went on, ‘is really a chemical reaction in the body after death. The temperature surrounding the body can affect how quickly it happens. There isn’t, I’m afraid, a great deal of precedent which helps us establish the onset and progress of rigor in a body left in hot running water, but it could have speeded it up. In any event, it doesn’t wear off completely for several hours after that, sometimes even a couple of days.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘What do you mean, John Betjeman? Certainly not John Betjeman. William and the Outlaws, maybe.’

  ‘Okay, William and the Outlaws, pursued by Violet-Elizabeth Bott. So what have you decided about the time of death?’

  ‘Well, rigor had almost completely set in when the body was examined, which was shortly before ten o’clock. Which was, as you’d be aware,’ he said ruefully, ‘about forty minutes after you first discovered him. Sawyer was seen alive at eleven forty-five the night before, when the last of the catering staff left. Two lads, who left together and were both home within half an hour. Given that, the pathologist says death could have occurred any time from about midnight to five in the morning. Rather a w
ide margin. He reckons that the body lying in the water the way it did could have accelerated the onset of rigor by several hours, but it’s a guess as to how much. Supposing the water did speed up rigor, but only minimally, he could have been killed within minutes of the last people seeing him alive. If on the other hand the hot water accelerated it significantly, which is possible, he could have been killed as late as five o’clock in the morning. The stomach contents don’t help either: in this instance, they were well digested. Metabolic rates are too variable for us to conclude anything. The water doesn’t exactly wash away the evidence, but it obscures it. It’s a real curse.’

  Andrew went on. ‘You saw the body in the water, under the floodlights. You told Bridger he looked sort of yellow, like the colour of the water. There’s a gold filter in those lights, you know. I saw him in the mortuary, afterwards. The stab blows were mainly to the back, eight of them, made with a knife at least ten inches long. One in the right shoulder and another on the right upper arm. He was stabbed from behind and almost certainly swung round to try to defend himself. The one that punctured the left lung was the fatal one. But I’ve never seen anything like it. The blood had been washing out of him all night, with the water just running over and over him. It all just...pulsed away. Like raw meat under a tap. It’s so nice here,’ he said, breathing in the warm mixture of old wood, sun-baked cushions and lavender, before adding sadly, ‘Valerie’s after a patio.’

  Sara was silent for a moment. Neither the warm hut, the flowers nor the view would provide safety from the picture that Andrew was holding up before her. ‘Have you found the knife?’ she asked.

  ‘Nope. It was most likely a kitchen knife. There’s no sign of it, and the keys that Matthew Sawyer had are missing, of course. There’s more than one set, naturally. George Townsend had the other set on Friday night, and there’s a master set in the Guildhall safe. Each set of keys contains the keys for all the museum buildings. It’s reckoned to be easier to keep track of three big sets than several separate ones for different buildings.’

  Andrew had been speaking quietly and carefully, plotting aloud all the known events of the night. Up in the creosoty, scented peace of the hut, he was talking and simultaneously searching in his words for the bit that was not quite right, the bit that could not be right, the single little thing that would give him a start in the enquiry. He dug his feet hard against the wooden floor and drew his bow in a single discordant swipe across all the strings of his cello.

  ‘Damn it, there’s nothing to get hold of in this case. George Townsend took his set of keys with him to the Assembly Rooms and locked up there at about ten past eleven. And then he took them to the Museums Service general office in the Circus and put them in the safe there. He says sometimes he takes the keys home with him if he’s back on first thing in the morning, but on Friday he didn’t because Mr Sawyer was locking up the Pump Room and bringing his set of keys back to the Circus too, and he would have noticed if George’s keys hadn’t been in the safe, so he played it by the book. Only of course Sawyer didn’t deposit his keys. They’re still missing. On Saturday morning Colin had to take the master set from the safe to open up the Assembly Rooms. He said he assumed Mr Sawyer had gone off home the night before with the bunch of keys still in his pocket, and that he would be bringing them back later. Wasn’t for him to complain, Sawyer was the boss.’

  ‘The murderer wouldn’t hang on to the keys, surely?’ Sara murmured. ‘Or the knife either. I mean, you’d get rid of anything that associated you with what you’d done, wouldn’t you? Now, can we play some Fauré, please?’

  She began quietly to play the Élégie in C Minor. Andrew watched and then lifted his bow and joined in. His tuning was less certain, his phrasing half-hearted. It was a depressing sound.

  ‘Try to breathe through these phrases. Right through, don’t be mean with them. Make it sing, Andrew, not whine. That’s better.’

  She stopped playing and looked out across the garden as Andrew carried on.

  He said, ‘It would still be helpful to find them.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to discuss it? Listen, listen. Your pitch is slipping under. Brighten it. That’s it.’

  Andrew played to the end of the phrase. ‘We’ve done the routine search of the drains. Nothing there, which is no surprise – keys and knives would be too heavy to get carried along. Naturally I want to drain the whole place, but do you think I can get permission? Oh, no, up pop the council’s heritage committee. “Unacceptable risk to this unique and irreplaceable monument, to upset the flow of the spring and divert the water.” The boss, the District Commander, had to agree we won’t do it unless we have a “sound reason to suspect” that the search would yield something. And I haven’t, not yet.’

  ‘Mind you, if it was me, that’s where I’d chuck them.’ Sara was scrutinising his fingering. ‘The keys. They might never be found. And they’d be close to the body. In a locked building. Not that I’m interested.’

  Andrew snorted. ‘Fine detective you’d make. How would you do it? You might chuck the knife in after you’d used it, but not the keys. Either you’ve got the keys from Matthew Sawyer before you stab him, or you stab him and take the keys off him afterwards. You’ve still got to get out of the building, haven’t you? Suppose you lock the door to Stall Street first, from the inside, then you’d have to go across the Pump Room to the main door into the Roman Baths on Abbey Churchyard, right? Then you set the alarm in the box which is inside a panel just inside the doorway, lock the panel, leave and shut the door and lock it behind you. So you’re outside with the keys, aren’t you? So how on earth could you dump them in the bath, Einstein?’

  Sara looked at him witheringly. ‘Easy. After you set the alarm and lock the door behind you, you just walk round the corner on to Kingston Parade and climb up on the wall of the terrace. The street level outside is much higher than the bath, so the wall on the outside up onto the terrace is not high at all. And there are even ridges cut into the stone. Once you’re up there, you just have to throw them up and over, so they clear the terrace and the balustrade. You just lob them over and splash, there you are. You’re still flat, by the way.’

  Andrew went on playing and gave a clever smile. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something? You’ve just set the alarm, right? All the area round the Great Bath is alarmed. You’d have bells going off all over the place.’

  Sara paused. ‘Sure? Is the water alarmed? Sure, someone walking anywhere round the bath would set the alarm off, but what about something just landing in the water? Seagulls don’t set it off. There’s always a seagull or two around there, standing on the statues’ heads. The alarm doesn’t go off every time a bird comes down to the water, does it? So either they’re not big enough to trigger the alarm, or the water is not alarmed at all. And so I’d have thought a bunch of keys could be flung into the bath without bells going off everywhere.’

  Andrew played on to the end of the Élégie without replying, and finished it with eloquent, unhurried musicality. Sara, about to exclaim that he was really getting somewhere with the piece, was interrupted.

  Andrew was grinning. ‘Do you mind if we stop there? I think I can dress that up into “sound reason to suspect”. So must dash, I’ve got a Roman bath to drain.’

  Halfway down the path he turned back towards Sara. ‘You’re wonderful, you know. I can’t thank you enough. I’ll let you know if we find anything.’

  He had turned away, and was anyway too far down the path to notice the movement of her lips as she said, half to herself, ‘Oh, please. Please don’t. Don’t tell me.’

  CHAPTER 7

  DEREK’S AFTERNOON WAS dragging. He had agreed to take Year 8 for geography so that the head of geography, Mrs Higgens, and her sidekick Philips could get an early start with the Year 9 field trip to the Brecon Beacons. As he saw them off at lunchtime he had felt nothing but envy that they were getting three days away from school, even if it did consist of four nights in a youth hostel with a troupe
of hormonally demented teenagers and was beginning with a three-hour drive up the M4 in a packed minibus with testosterone running down the windows.

  He was tired. His groin ached with anticipation at the thought of his forthcoming weekend with Cecily and his head ached at the thought of the two and a half days he still had to get through before it could truly be said to have arrived. He resolved to make it a better weekend than last which, all in all, had been a fiasco. He was still reeling from a sense of relief at having got away with it all. The police had come round to interview Cecily on Monday. They’d said they were interviewing everyone who had been in the place that Friday and they’d got her name from the delegates list. Clever old Cec had convinced them she knew nothing. It was niggling him a little that she had had to mention his name, but then, it was no secret that he’d actually been to the Assembly Rooms. After all, he’d given his name to Sawyer (who would have more than a stiff upper lip by this time, ha-ha, and serve him right), and anyway, at least three other people had seen him (be made to) leave. He could even, if it came to it, admit to Pauline that he’d been there. Just being there didn’t amount to adultery, after all. Not that it would come to it. Nor did he foresee any great difficulty in keeping everything that had happened later in the evening entirely to himself. He was safe. Nevertheless, there would be no more going out in public with Cecily. Really, he should cut down on the visits. In fact, the whole thing would have to be reviewed, when he had time to think, which was not now.