The Killer in the Choir

by Simon Brett

  ‘I am not “all and sundry”,’ said Jude, uncharacteristically riled. ‘Alice told me in confidence, and I can assure you I will never breathe a word about it to another living soul!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ The silence stretched between them. ‘Alice does want to see you, you know.’

  ‘Oh, so she’s mad too, is she?’

  For the first time, Jude thought there might have been a hint of gallows humour in his words. But the idea was abruptly crushed as Roddy roared out, ‘Well, I never want to see her again!’

  And Jude felt unreasoning fury at the destruction that Leonard Mallett had unleashed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jude called her friendly cab driver and got him to take her straight to the Shorelands Estate. The Alice who opened the door of Sorrento looked even worse than she had last time they met. Her plump face had hollowed out, there were purple rings beneath her eyes, and her hair had lost touch with a brush for some days. The increased untidiness of the house matched her state.

  She drew back listlessly from the doorway to let Jude in.

  ‘I’ve been to see Roddy.’

  ‘Ah.’ The girl didn’t seem interested as she drooped her way into the sitting room.

  ‘You did know he’d come back?’

  ‘Yes, his dad called me.’ Alice flopped down on to a sofa.

  ‘Well, aren’t you pleased?’ asked Jude, lowering herself into an armchair.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He disappeared. Now he’s reappeared. Nothing ghastly had happened to him. He’s alive. He’s safe.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘We are talking about your husband, Alice.’

  ‘Oh yes. We’re married.’ She sounded surprised by the fact. ‘We’ll have to get that undone, won’t we? I wonder if there’s an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the shortest ever marriage. We might be in with a chance for that.’

  ‘Alice,’ said Jude with a rare edge of asperity, ‘you can’t be so negative.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘Look, you’ve loved Roddy for a long time. And he loves you. All that emotion can’t just evaporate in a moment.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. All right, at the moment you’re both traumatized. Neither of you is in any state to make rational decisions. But that will pass. You’ll get better. When you’re less stressed, your true feelings will return.’

  ‘“True feelings”? I don’t think I’ve got any true feelings. For the last few months I’ve been kidding myself that I have, that I was capable of genuine emotion, that I could even be in love. Now I know I was just kidding myself. My true feelings were killed a long time ago. Dad killed them. And he killed my capacity for love.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘How do you know? Oh, of course, you understand human emotions, don’t you?’ the girl sneered. ‘From the lofty heights of your healing?’

  ‘No, that’s not how I see it. But from the humble perspective of my healing, I know that people can get better, I know that psychological damage can be undone. I’m not saying it’s easy. But it’s possible.’

  ‘Huh,’ Alice grunted with weary cynicism. ‘When Roddy’s dad rang, for a moment I might have believed that. I got excited. Roddy was OK. Maybe we could pick up again, maybe we could sort ourselves out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that was before I knew Roddy didn’t want to see me again.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not—’

  Alice cut through, with a cold hard edge to her voice. ‘I asked Mr Skelton if Roddy wanted to see me. He said no. All right, I’ve done some humiliating things in my time, but I’m not going on bended knee to beg someone to see me, when they’ve made it perfectly clear they don’t want to.’

  ‘Alice, you just need time.’

  ‘Oh yes? I’ve always been told I need time. Time to train to become a better actress. Time for singing lessons to make me a better singer. But there isn’t enough time in the world to prevent me from being what I always have been. A total failure. Someone so broken that I can never be repaired.’

  ‘Just give it a little time, Alice, and—’

  ‘“Time” again! Oh, that’s great, coming from you. A healer, and what’s the best you can come up with? “Time is a great healer”? Huh.’

  ‘Alice, I’m sure I could persuade Roddy to see you.’

  ‘“Persuade”? That’s great. I do have some pride, Jude. I don’t want to see my husband simply because someone has persuaded him that it’s a good idea.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’ Jude decided she wasn’t getting anywhere on this particular tack. ‘Did you get back to Blake Woodruff?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I was last here, Blake Woodruff left a message on the machine. I wondered if you’d got back to him.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because he knew Heather well. He might know something that would help to reveal why someone would want to kill her.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ Alice responded with complete indifference. ‘Does it really matter who killed her?’

  ‘I would have thought it very definitely did matter.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter to me. Not now I know that it wasn’t Roddy.’

  ‘How do you know it wasn’t Roddy?’

  ‘A couple of the policemen came to see me this morning. To ask more questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Mostly about Mum’s singing lessons with KK Rosser.’

  ‘Oh?’ So maybe they were beginning to be suspicions about his alibi. But Jude didn’t want to go off in that direction. ‘And they told you they didn’t think Roddy was involved in the murder?’

  ‘Exactly that. They said they had “eliminated him from their enquiries”. And that gave me a lift. I immediately rang Roddy’s dad … only to get the repeated message that Roddy didn’t want to see me.’ Tears now flowed unchecked over the girl’s smudged mascara.

  ‘And it hasn’t occurred to you that Roddy might just be embarrassed at the thought of seeing you … given the circumstances under which you last met?’

  ‘No, I’m sure that’s not it.’ But, even as the words were said, Jude thought she could detect in them a tiny glimmer of hope.

  ‘Alice … if you’re not going to contact Blake Woodruff, would you mind if I did?’

  ‘I had no arguments with Heather Mallett about anything,’ said Bet Harrison. ‘When I said I was going to leave the church choir and just concentrate on the Crown & Anchor one, she didn’t try to persuade me otherwise, like some of the rest did. She said she thought she might do the same, once the wedding was over. I didn’t know her well, but there was certainly no animosity between us. Anyway,’ she asked curiously, ‘who started you off on this idea, that Heather and I had argued? It sounds to me like it was just someone who wanted to make mischief.’

  For the first time, Carole wondered whether this assessment might be right. Elizabeth Browning was such a strange woman, with such a quirky sense of humour, that she might well feel diverting Carole’s suspicions towards another choir member was a good joke.

  ‘Go on, who was it?’ Bet repeated.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. They’d clearly got the wrong end of the stick.’

  ‘I’ll say they had.’

  They were sitting in Starbucks, the venue where Bet had agreed to meet before her shift there started. Against her better judgement, Carole had been persuaded by the barista to abandon filter coffee and order a black Americano. Against her better judgement, she found she was rather enjoying it.

  ‘I hadn’t realized until I moved here,’ Bet Harrison observed, ‘the level of gossip you get in a place like Fethering. I mean, obviously there was a lot in Evesham, which is where I used to live, but not on this scale. It seems to me that gossip proliferates in inverse proportion to the size of the place where it originated.’

  ‘I think there’s a lot of truth in that,’ said Carole.

  �
��Whereas there is not a lot of truth in the gossip.’

  ‘Probably not,’ she conceded. ‘Mind you, a murder on our doorstep is bound to set tongues wagging.’

  ‘So long as they don’t wag about the idea that I might have had anything to do with Heather Mallett’s death …’

  ‘No, obviously not,’ said Carole, feeling a little guilty about having followed up on Elizabeth Browning’s – probably malicious – hint. But now she’d got Bet Harrison here, she might as well find out what she could from the woman. ‘So,’ she asked, ‘you didn’t really know Heather at all, outside the choir context?’

  ‘No. She was perfectly pleasant to me and, when I first moved here, I was glad of any kind of social contact. It’s difficult starting from scratch in a new place, which was why I joined the church choir, you know, to meet some people. Then the same with the Crown & Anchor one, which I found worked better for me … you know, with my commitments to Rory.’

  ‘Yes. Was he part of the pub choir too?’

  ‘No. I wanted him to join, but his voice has just started breaking and he’s very embarrassed about it. I do want him to keep up his singing when his voice has settled down, though. I’m very worried about him not having a social group down here … with us having moved so recently. You know we moved after my marriage broke up?’

  ‘Yes, I had heard that.’

  ‘You’re divorced too, aren’t you, Carole?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the reply, in a tone that prohibited further discussion of the subject. Carole moved swiftly on. ‘Has Rory always been musical?’

  The ploy of getting a mother to talk about the talents of her offspring worked, as it always does. ‘Oh yes, from a child,’ said Bet. ‘He can pick up a tune after one hearing. I think he really could have a future as a professional singer, with the proper training. I asked Jonny Virgo if he would consider giving Rory private lessons, but he said absolutely not. He said he’d taught quite enough singing lessons during his career as a schoolmaster, and he didn’t want to do any more of it. He was surprisingly vehement on the subject.

  ‘So, then I asked Heather whether she would recommend KK as a teacher. She said yes, he’d be very good, but the more I saw of him at the Crown & Anchor Choir sessions, the less keen I felt on the idea of Rory spending time with him.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘There’s something very shifty about KK. I don’t trust him. I wouldn’t want to spend time alone with him. And I’m sure there was something going on between him and Heather.’

  ‘Hard to know,’ suggested Carole, who hadn’t seen the pair together as much as Bet had. But the idea of reviving suspicions of KK in the role of murderer was not an unattractive one.

  Bet went on, ‘Rory’s at a very susceptible age. I don’t want him to get into bad habits.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that KK might have molested him?’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ Bet almost laughed at the idea, then said, more seriously, ‘I just don’t want Rory to get into drugs.’

  ‘Brian, it’s Jude.’

  ‘Oh, good afternoon,’ said the clipped military tones.

  ‘It was good to see you this morning.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  ‘Any change with Roddy?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I’ve a horrible feeling he’s going to be like this for ever. Like a vegetable – or “traumatized” is probably the word you’d use. He’s a real mess. And how he’ll manage when I pop my clogs, I daren’t begin to imagine. Stuck in some dreadful care home, it doesn’t bear thinking of.’

  ‘You mustn’t think like that.’

  ‘Damned hard not to, with my son just sitting there like a vegetable.’

  ‘Listen, Brian, I’ve talked to Alice.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘She’s in a terrible state too.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t help, does it? Thank God it looks unlikely they’ll have children. Any those two produced would be barking, wouldn’t they?’

  Jude ignored this, and pressed on. ‘Alice says that, every time she’s rung your house, you’ve told her Roddy doesn’t want to speak to her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Yes, every time she’s rung that’s what I told her.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant, Brian. As you know full well. I meant: has he really said that, or have you been trying to protect him?’

  There was a silence from the other end of the line. Then he said, ‘All right. Roddy hasn’t actually said that. I haven’t wanted to worry him with Alice’s messages. Quite honestly, I think she’s the cause of all his troubles. Getting mixed up with a neurotic little madam like that … well, if people start having mental problems … “he that toucheth pitch shall be defiled.” You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t agree with you, but I know what you mean. Anyway, what I’m asking is that next time Alice rings, let her speak to Roddy.’

  ‘I can’t do that. He’s already in a bad enough state. Talking to her might just push him over the edge.’

  ‘It might also help pull him back from the edge. Please,’ said Jude. ‘Please let him talk to her.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was the following morning when Jude had a call from Alice Mallett. From the first words, she knew that the girl had been totally transformed.

  ‘I spoke to Roddy,’ she said.

  ‘Good. I knew it would help.’

  ‘Oh God, you’ve no idea just how much it helps! I know there are still huge problems ahead of us, but I think we do have a future.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  There was a manic note in the girl’s voice as she went on, ‘So I’ve picked myself up and I’m really going to embrace that future. I looked at myself in the mirror after I’d come off the phone from Roddy, and I couldn’t believe the state I was in. I’ve showered and changed and put on some make-up, and I look like a human being again. And the house – I couldn’t believe the mess there either. I’ve cleaned it all over, and opened the windows to let some fresh air in. I’m starting a new life, Jude, as of today. I’ve even organized a singing lesson for myself, here at the house. He’s coming at three this afternoon.’

  ‘Singing lessons? Just like your stepmother.’

  ‘Yes. Just like Mum.’

  ‘That sounds really good,’ said Jude, unaware of the renewed suspicion that Bet Harrison had ignited about the activities of KK Rosser.

  ‘Hello, is that Blake Woodruff?’

  ‘Who is this speaking?’

  ‘My name is Jude. You don’t know me, but—’

  ‘If I don’t know you, get off the line! I don’t know how you got this number, but—’

  ‘I’m a friend of Heather Mallett,’ said Jude quickly, before he could slam the phone down. ‘And of her stepdaughter Alice.’

  ‘Oh. Oh.’ The internationally famous tenor took a moment to adjust his tone from anger to sympathy. ‘I was desperately sorry to hear about … what happened.’

  ‘Yes. You haven’t heard from Alice, have you?’ Jude was wondering whether the girl’s transformed mood might have encouraged her to catch up on such calls.

  ‘No. No, I left a message at the house. I’d just come back from a tour in Australia.’

  ‘The reason I’m calling you is that Alice is in rather a state.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. I’m still pretty shaken up by the news. And to hear that Heather was murdered … Well, you just don’t expect that kind of thing to happen to people who, you know, people you’ve been close to.’

  ‘You met at university, I gather?’

  ‘Right, Manchester. Mutual interest in music brought us together. Sang together in university choirs. We did have a bit of a thing in our last year. I don’t know whether it would have gone the distance, but … it was very pleasant while it lasted. And then, after we graduated, we went our separate ways. I got increasingly caught up in my career as a professional singer, and Heather … We kept in touch, letters, the occas
ional phone call, email and Facebook weren’t around back then. I’d bring her up to date on my latest disastrous romance, and she … well, she always was quite reserved, and she seemed to become more, sort of, turned in on herself. Then, after she got married … I wasn’t, by the way, invited to the ceremony … Anyway, all communication from her ceased. I guess she wanted to make a completely fresh start …’

  He sounded a bit wistful about the breaking-off of contact. Jude knew it wasn’t the moment to say that its cause was probably not Heather’s decision, but that of her controlling husband.

  ‘Incidentally …’ he said, ‘… sorry, what was your name?’

  ‘Jude.’

  ‘Jude, right.’ There was a new note of caution in his voice. ‘I don’t want any of this to get out to the press. They hound me all the bloody time, and if they got hold of the news that I’d once had an affair with a woman who’s been murdered …’

  ‘I can assure you I have nothing to do with the press. I’m only phoning you on behalf of Alice Mallett. I’m sure she will give you a call herself when she’s in a better state.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, fine. Sorry to have sounded so suspicious, but someone in my position has to be bloody careful.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. I fully understand.’

  ‘Good. Yes. You haven’t heard about the funeral details yet, have you? If the press can be kept at bay, I’d like to put in an appearance then.’

  ‘There’s no news about that yet. I think in the case of a murder, it takes a while for the police to release the body.’ Jude didn’t know that for sure, but she thought she was probably right.

  ‘Yes, of course. Well, when you do hear something …’

  ‘Either Alice or I will let you know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Incidentally, Blake, did you hear that Heather’s husband had died?’

  ‘I heard that, yes. From Heather. She got back in touch with me. She didn’t talk much about it, but I got the impression that it may not have been a marriage made in heaven.’ Something of an understatement, thought Jude. ‘But she suggested meeting up, for old times’ sake. Which I would have been happy to do, but my bloody schedule, what with concerts here, and the occasional opera and foreign tours … I get booked more than a year ahead, would you believe, so making social arrangements can be a nightmare.’ He didn’t speak in a boastful way, he was just describing one of the hazards of his profession.