by R. N. Morris
The officer guarding the door drew himself up, bristling.
‘It’s all right,’ said the other. ‘They’re from the Yard.’ He turned to Quinn. ‘This is where it happened. Naturally, we ain’t taking any chances. The guv’nor said not to let anyone in.’
Quinn pushed open the door without knocking, just as an explosion of flash powder froze the room in a glare of brilliance. The photographer was hunched over a Brownie camera mounted on a tripod and directed towards the dead man at the piano.
Two plainclothes detectives looked up from a hushed conference. Quinn felt himself appraised, every detail of his appearance weighed and assessed, from his favoured herringbone ulster to the bowler on his head.
One of the men dwarfed his companion, and in fact everyone in the room. He was a clear six foot seven, with a build that would have stood him in good stead as a prop forward. He stepped forward with his right hand outstretched. ‘DCI Quinn, is it?’ He had a deep, booming voice to match his imposing physique.
Quinn’s hand was engulfed in the other man’s and shaken.
‘We were told to expect you. I’m Pool. This is Sergeant Kennedy.’
The smaller man contented himself with a nod of acknowledgement and a sniff that gave little away.
Quinn introduced his own men. He was eager to get down to business. ‘Who found him?’
‘The wife, or should I say widow, of the deceased. Lady Emma Fonthill. She has also identified the body. Sir Aidan Fonthill, of 63 Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead. She raised the alarm and one,’ Inspector Pool broke off to consult his notebook, ‘Paul Seddon found her here.’
‘Cause of death?’
‘Well, the medical examiner is yet to make his report, of course. But I should say it’s something to do with that thing sticking out of his left ear.’
Quinn glanced over to the corpse as another flash went off. ‘What is that?’
‘It appears to be a tuning fork, but we won’t know for sure until the ME has extracted it.’
‘Any prints on it?’
‘We haven’t dusted it yet, but again, we will as soon as the ME has finished.’ Pool allowed a touch of impatience to enter his voice. ‘I’m sure you have your own way of doing things in the Special Crimes Department, but we go by the book in CID.’
Quinn looked around the room briefly, taking in the clutter. ‘What’s his connection with the school?’
‘He is choirmaster of a local amateur choir.’ Pool consulted his notebook. ‘The Hampstead Voices. The choir hires the school hall for rehearsals and concerts. There was a rehearsal going on here today when this happened.’
‘Someone must have seen something?’
‘There were a lot of people on the premises at the time. Choir members. Musicians. A couple of dancers. But they were all in the Great Hall.’
‘All? Someone wasn’t.’ Quinn allowed that observation to settle. ‘Do you have an approximate time of death? I know the medical examiner hasn’t made his pronouncement yet. But have you been able to construct a timeline?’
‘The choir broke for lunch at twelve thirty. That was the last time Sir Aidan was seen alive. It was around two o’clock when Lady Emma raised the alarm.’
‘Where was Lady Emma for the whole of that time?’
‘She went for a walk. Into Hampstead.’
‘She wasn’t with her husband?’
‘He likes to be left alone when the choir is rehearsing. So that he can gather his thoughts.’
‘Who told you that? Him?’ Quinn pointed at the corpse.
‘No, Lady Emma.’
‘Ah, Lady Emma, yes.’
Pool and Kennedy exchanged an alarmed glance. ‘I would invite you to examine the fatal trauma, sir.’ Inspector Pool gestured over to the body.
Quinn felt his heart quicken. At the same time, his mouth filled with saliva, as if he was about to be sick. He swallowed back the impulse and waited for the nausea to pass.
He had confronted death in many forms, all of them violent. He had seen young men drained of blood; female victims of strangulation and ritual murder; one body mauled by a bear, another charred in a bomb blast; he had even been forced to examine the mutilated bodies of children.
Why should this particular body provoke such a reaction now? Was it something to do with the war? he wondered. With so many young men heading off to the Front to kill and be killed on behalf of their country, did it make the act of civilian murder – whoever the victim was – seem all the more unnecessary and, yes, obscene?
‘You will be able to see for yourself that the brute force required to insert the murder weapon into the victim’s ear to such a depth as to cause death is well beyond the capacity of a lady. This implement, if it is what it appears to be, is, I believe, blunt at its other end.’
‘I once moved a fully laden wardrobe in my sleep,’ said Macadam. ‘In the morning, when I was awake, I was unable to restore it to its original position.’
‘The mind,’ added Quinn, ‘is an extraordinary thing.’ He bent down to follow the promptings of his subconscious mind. He focused his attention on the wound. And then it came to him, the most salient detail of the crime. He experienced a lightening of his spirit. All his self-doubt and self-disgust evaporated. This was what he was meant to do. He was good at it.
The blood. Or rather, lack of it. The simple fact was there was not as much blood as there ought to have been. What blood there was ran in a narrow streak down the back of the victim’s neck. The curious thing about this streak was that one side of it appeared sharply defined, almost as if a line had been drawn and coloured up to.
Quinn frowned, stood up and took a step back to weigh up the configuration of the body as a whole. The dead man was sitting upright at the piano. His hands lay on top of the lid of the instrument. Quinn noticed that there was blood on one of the hands – the right.
‘He was not expecting this.’ There was more he could have said, but for now that would do.
‘What is SCD’s interest in this case?’ DS Kennedy had a high, aggrieved voice that sounded as though he had laryngitis.
‘We just go where we’re told,’ said DI Leversedge. He could not resist, however, flashing a resentful look in Quinn’s direction.
Quinn nodded in agreement. ‘We’re here to help.’ With that he took out a magnifying glass from the inside pocket of his ulster and began to scan along the surface of the piano. His attention became focused on one particular area of the front of the instrument. He tracked down rapidly, settling at last on the piano lid. A long brass hinge ran the length of it, and it was a section of this that seemed to interest Quinn especially.
‘Macadam, do you see this?’
He handed his magnifying glass to his sergeant, who bent down to examine the hinge himself. ‘Yes, I see it.’
‘What is it?’ asked Leversedge impatiently.
Quinn took out a pair of tweezers, which he handed to Macadam. ‘Can you get it?’
After a moment, Macadam held up the tweezers with a single hair pincered in their pointed grip. Quinn took the tweezers carefully from his sergeant and held the hair next to the dead man’s head.
‘It’s not his,’ observed Leversedge.
It was true. The hair in the tweezers was significantly redder than Sir Aidan’s.
‘You see how the surface of the piano is quite dusty, like everything else in this room? And yet here …’ Quinn indicated the area of the piano that had first caught his attention.
‘It’s clean,’ observed Leversedge.
‘It has been cleaned,’ corrected Quinn. ‘Wiped clean. Polished, you might say. And see, here, how the clean sweep continues down to this point here …’
‘Where the hair was,’ finished Macadam.
‘Exactly.’
‘Whose hair is it?’ asked Constable Willoughby.
Quinn turned to the young policeman. ‘That’s a very good question. Whose do you think?’
‘The murderer’s?’
Quinn
gave a non-committal eyebrow ripple.
Inspector Pool pushed his considerable bulk forward and held out a giant hand for the magnifying glass. ‘May I look?’ His tone was belligerent, despite the formal politeness of his request. The piano seemed to shrink as he bent down to scrutinize its surface. He stood up to his full imposing height and thrust the magnifying glass back at Quinn. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means things are not as they seem.’
Pool looked at the dead man at the piano and nodded his head briskly. Whether he was agreeing with Quinn or confirming some private thought that had just occurred to him was not clear.
TWENTY
There was no mistaking it. A baby was crying.
Quinn frowned and looked to Inspector Pool for an explanation. The other detective heaved his shoulders in a massive shrug.
And then that sound was joined by one even more extraordinary. One that immediately had the hairs on the back of Quinn’s neck standing on end.
It was barely human, so raw was the suffering it expressed. A woman’s voice, he would hazard, raised in anger, anguish, or some other heightened emotion: an extended shriek of denial, the sound a spirit makes when it is turned through itself. It was strangely impressive. Quinn had the sense that he was not the only one of those hardened coppers who desperately wanted it to stop.
At last the cry gave way to a demand: ‘Let me see him!’
Another female voice, calmer, but still fierce in its resolution answered, ‘No!’
‘You can’t stop me!’
‘Oh, yes, I can.’
It was difficult to tell for sure, but there now seemed to be the sounds of a scuffle coming from the corridor. All the time, the baby kept up its crying.
Leversedge made a move towards the door, but Quinn held out a restraining hand.
‘Get out of my way!’
‘You’re not going in there.’
‘I have a right to see him!’
‘It’s for your own good, Anna.’
‘What do you care about that? What do any of you care about that?’
There was some release now. Sobbing. A sense of collapse.
Quinn gave a decisive nod. It was as if a spell had been broken.
Out in the corridor, the baby’s crying was irrefutably loud. It was an appalling sound, because it seemed to suggest that life begins with an inconsolable existential howl.
A young woman, presumably the baby’s mother, was slumped to the floor, her back against the wall. She was wearing a long, fawn-coloured overcoat trimmed with fur and a simple black hat.
Streaks of black cosmetic ran from her eyes. Her hair – how long had she laboured to get her hair just right? – was pulled out in unruly frizzes from under her hat, which sat askew on the crown of her head.
Bent over her was a slightly older woman, somewhere in her thirties, Quinn would have guessed. She straightened in some embarrassment at the sudden bursting out of all these men. There was something awkward, Quinn might even have said unnatural, in her manner. Her hands went towards the other woman, but not so far as to touch her. She was either putting on a show of comforting her friend (if ‘friend’ was the right term) or was genuinely conflicted.
It was not long before her gaze back at them settled into a commanding defiance.
‘Ah, Lady Fonthill,’ said Inspector Pool. Somehow it did not surprise Quinn to learn the identity of the woman. She had an intelligent, practical face, devoid of sentiment. ‘This is Chief Inspector Quinn, who has come to help us discover your husband’s murderer.’
‘Can we not do something about that … noise?’ wondered Quinn with a distracted grimace.
Lady Fonthill turned to the woman on the floor. ‘Anna?’
But the younger woman’s expression was glazed with grief. She was beyond reach. Lady Fonthill arched an eyebrow at Quinn, in which was expressed the precise impossibility of his request.
But Quinn was wilfully immune to such signals. ‘Can’t you …?’ And when Lady Fonthill’s face registered her horror at what he seemed to be suggesting, he added, ‘Madam,’ as if that would be enough to persuade her.
‘I …?’
Quinn glanced quickly about at the male police surrounding him, as if to say, Well, we obviously can’t.
‘That child …’ But Lady Fonthill closed her eyes and shuddered, unable to bring herself to finish what she had been about to say.
‘Couldn’t you … at least pick it up?’
‘Do you have any idea what you are asking?’
Suddenly the woman on the floor began to laugh. It was the most extraordinarily bitter laughter. ‘Yes, Inspector … Do you?’ Anna smiled mockingly. Quinn did not understand the joke. But he sensed that it was at the other woman’s expense.
Lady Fonthill sniffed distastefully.
At that moment there were hurried footsteps along the corridor and a man’s voice cried out, ‘Anna! What are you doing here?’
A tweedily dressed man of around thirty was rushing towards them. His face was darkened by a full black beard and an intense, angry expression.
Quinn cast a quick enquiring glance at Inspector Pool, who answered with a muttered aside: ‘Paul Seddon. Anna Seddon’s brother.’
‘This is the fellow who …?’
Pool nodded.
‘Good God, Anna! What on earth were you thinking? And to bring the baby here, too!’ The balance of anger and concern in Seddon’s voice tipped decisively towards the former.
And now a wholly unexpected thing happened. At least, to judge by the look of amazement on Anna Seddon’s face, she had not expected it.
Paul Seddon went over to the pram and picked the baby up.
The move seemed to take the baby by surprise too. For a moment it was startled into silence before beginning a new phase of mewling. Seddon held the child to his chest and jogged it gently as he paced about. Before long, the only sounds coming from the baby were the gentle snores of exhausted sleep.
Paul Seddon carried the child over to its mother. ‘Get up.’ His voice softened into a whisper, though his words remained harsh. ‘For once, think of someone other than yourself. This child needs you. He needs his mother.’
Her brother’s words had some effect on her. She picked herself up off the floor, brushed herself down and took her son from Seddon.
As if to make amends for any previous neglect, she made a great show of cuddling the baby, humming a lullaby as she gently rocked him in her arms. From time to time she cast dark, brooding glances at Lady Fonthill.
Her singing was effortless, and something more than a mother’s usual soothing murmurings. In fact, Quinn might have said there was too much performance in it. When a mother sings a lullaby, it is an intense, focused transmission of love and calm, meant for her child alone. Anna Seddon was singing for an audience.
At last, when she was sure that the baby was securely asleep, she laid him back in his pram. She looked up at her brother as she arranged the child’s blankets. Her voice was low but firm as she spoke. ‘Why should I not bring my son to see his father?’
Lady Fonthill glared as if she might be about to say something regrettable. In the end, she contented herself with an emphatic tut.
Paul Seddon took on the role of peacemaker. ‘Can you not see how hurtful this is to Emma?’
‘Hurtful?’ Anna spoke in a harsh whisper, mindful of the sleeping baby but eager at the same time to get across the full force of her bitterness. ‘I never meant to hurt anyone. Love …’
Lady Fonthill groaned. ‘Oh, please! Don’t bring that into it!’
‘Ha! You see! Can you blame him for seeking love? Wherever he could find it.’
‘He didn’t love you, you little fool. He didn’t love anyone. Apart from himself.’
‘Not true. Not true. He loved me.’
‘You think he loved you? Only this week I caught him making love to another woman. Our children’s nanny.’
‘No!’
‘He pretended to aud
ition her for the choir – as your replacement. But he wanted her to replace you in other ways too.’
For a moment, Quinn thought that Anna was about to strike Lady Fonthill. But her counterattack when it came was far more lethal than a mere slap. ‘You killed him!’
Anna’s brother was quick to intercede on Lady Fonthill’s behalf. ‘Now, now, Anna. Be careful what you say – there are policemen here, you know. They might get the wrong end of the stick. They might even take you seriously!’
‘I am serious!’
‘No, no, no. Emma didn’t kill Sir Aidan. It’s quite impossible.’
The conversation having reached this interesting point, Quinn felt compelled to interject. ‘Pardon me, sir, but how can you be so sure?’
‘Because I saw his killer.’
‘Good God!’ This heartfelt cry came from Inspector Pool. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’
‘I did. I told your sergeant about the man I saw running away.’
‘Running away?’ said Quinn. ‘So you didn’t see his face?’
‘Not then. But I did earlier. It was the blind piano tuner, except I don’t think he was blind and I don’t think he was a piano tuner. The same fellow collared me outside the school and gave me a message for Sir Aidan. Now that I think about it, I am convinced it was some kind of threat.’
‘Why didn’t you stop him?’ demanded Leversedge.
‘On what grounds? At that point, I didn’t know Sir Aidan was dead.’
‘You let him go,’ said Quinn dejectedly.
‘I could hear Lady Fonthill’s cry for help. Naturally, I made it my priority to go to her aid.’
‘Why do you suspect he wasn’t blind?’ wondered Quinn.
‘He had a white stick, which he was tapping the ground with. When I spoke to him, he picked it up and ran off.’
‘Can you describe this man?’
‘He had a beard. A large red beard.’
‘I don’t like suspects with beards,’ said Quinn darkly. ‘And the larger the beard, the less I like them.’
‘Why’s that, guv?’ wondered Willoughby.
‘Beards are there to distract. If they are not actually false, they may be easily shaved off. Which would naturally change the appearance of the suspect entirely.’