Murder to Music

by Margaret Newman

  He slammed out of the door. Simon made no effort to detain him.

  ‘He takes offence easily, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Well, darling, I think you were pretty offensive,’ Delia said warmly. ‘And you must admit that his story was reasonable.’

  ‘Well,’ said Simon mildly, ‘I didn’t expect him to come here especially to confess to murder. He’s had time to think about it; there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be able to produce something that hangs together. He’s answered my questions, but the answers don’t change any of my reasons for needing to ask. So what is a bloody impertinent policeman to do?’

  ‘Well, he could decide that he hasn’t had any lunch and that the question could be equally well discussed over dinner.’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ said Simon. ‘Case dismissed. In the ordinary course of events murderers wait until we catch up with them. This case is only disturbing because one wonders who’s going to be eliminated from the scene next. However, we should have a few days before the next elimination, judging by progress so far. Dinner ho! I’ll take the first course here, if I may.’

  He came over to kiss her, pushing the murder of Owen Burr to the back of his mind. And although Delia applied a good many epithets to her escort during the course of the evening, she did not remember again to tell him exactly why he had been a fool.

  Chapter Nineteen

  At ten o’clock next morning Simon stood on the edge of the fifth dene-hole. It had been emptied of the earth which had completely filled the top three feet and now two men were working with ropes and hooks to dislodge a large piece of wood, presumably resting on a natural ledge, which still blocked their view of the bottom.

  ‘I see what happened.’ Simon turned to the police doctor who stood next to him, a slim figure dressed at the moment in a fireman’s overalls. ‘It must be another of these hourglass holes. He pushes Cassati down, either dead or alive, blocks the opening with a piece of tree trunk and shovels earth on top so that we don’t notice—and so that nothing will be heard, presumably. That means there must have been a certain amount of air down there. If he was alive when he went in, do you think there’s any hope for him now?’

  The doctor hardly paused to consider.

  ‘Five days and six nights without food, water, light or fresh air—or hope; a professional escapologist might just survive it, but not an ordinary man. Certainly he wouldn’t be sane, and I shall be very surprised if he’s been dead for less than three days. But I’ll go down before he’s moved, just in case.’

  The wood came away suddenly, pitching one of the two workers flat on his back. There was a scampering of earth falling to the bottom of the deep narrow hole and then silence. Simon called down, but there was no reply. Torches were lowered. Everything seemed brown and earthy, but suddenly Simon drew in his breath, almost certain that he had caught a glimpse of black and white. He nodded to the doctor, who had already slipped into a wire cradle. There was another slip-fall of earth while the men on the surface strained against the pull of the wire rope; then a few minutes’ silence and at last a shout.

  ‘All right. Pull up carefully.’

  It seemed to Simon hours before the body of Cassati finally lay on the ground. To the doctor, waiting in the darkness with earth cascading down on top of him as the heavy load was eased with difficulty through the narrowest part of the opening, the time must have appeared endless. While he waited for the second ascent, Simon had time to study the unpleasant sight before him.

  Cassati was not only dead but messily dead. His clothes were covered with dirt, but this did not hide the expression on his face. His left arm was fastened tightly to his body by thin wire which encircled him ten or eleven times; clearly, he had struggled against it, for it had cut through his clothes to the flesh. The right arm was also pinned down by the wire, but in this case the encircling bands stopped above the elbow. For some reason he had been free to move the lower part of the arm and the right hand and wrist. More surprisingly still, the right hand clasped a dagger, the point broken and the remaining part of the blade covered with dried blood. Cassati’s legs had also been tied together with the same cutting thin wire, but only as far as the knee, so that he would still presumably have been able to take short steps.

  With a pant of exertion the doctor reached the surface and freed himself of the line. He came straight over to join Simon.

  ‘I can tell you one thing at once,’ he said. ‘This man was not only alive but conscious when he fell. For one thing, he’s broken his hip in a way which would be less likely if he were inert and, for another, he seems to have clung for a moment with his right hand to a bit of root, until it broke away. There are definite marks where he kicked into the sides of the hole in an effort to push himself up again. In that position they couldn’t have been caused by anything else.’

  ‘Cause of death?’ asked Simon, as a matter of routine.

  The doctor continued his examination of the body for several minutes before he answered.

  ‘Here,’ he said at last. Simon leaned across to see. Beneath the dirt on Cassati’s left side, his clothes were heavily stained with blood. It had flowed from a gash in the left wrist. The doctor slipped his finger between the wrist and the body.

  ‘The artery was cut after he’d been fastened like this; otherwise the cut would certainly have been made right across the wrist instead of from one side to the middle, which is all that could be reached in this position. It was almost certainly self-inflicted, with this dagger, after the point had broken. It broke while he was down there; I found the other piece and it’s pretty plain how it snapped and what it was used for. Even with a broken hip he must have been conscious while he was down there and quite aware of what was going to happen. It looks as though he started off by trying to carve steps in the wall. The slope was against him for that, though; the walls bulge outwards for about six feet from the bottom. Then he tried to hack out a tunnel—or perhaps the idea was that by cutting earth away from the wall he could raise his standing level. Perhaps the frost stopped that, or just general weakness. Anyway, my guess is that he realised he was finished and decided to speed the process up a little. To answer your question, I can’t say exactly until I’ve made a proper examination, but loss of blood is the most likely reason.’

  Simon was feeling slightly sick; he nodded without speaking and went to give instructions to the driver of the ambulance which was already waiting. There was one more unpleasant task to be done first, however; with distaste Simon emptied the dead man’s pockets. A first glance suggested that most of the papers in them would be in Italian, a language with which he was unacquainted, and he put them away for the moment. The wire would almost certainly be untraceable, but the dagger might provide a clue; before he levered open Cassati’s stiff fingers, however, he tried some experiments with his own right arm, holding the elbow closely to his side. The doctor watched curiously.

  ‘I was wondering where the dagger came from,’ Simon explained. ‘Unless he kept it in his breast pocket—which seems a curious habit—I don’t see that he could have reached it after he was tied up, do you? Yet if he had managed to get it free before he was tied, he would have been able to protect himself. In any case, why did his attacker leave one hand free, and why not take the dagger away?’

  He ran his fingers round inside the breast pocket. It contained no sheath, but there was no cut in the cloth to suggest that a sharp weapon had been clumsily drawn from it.

  ‘Perhaps he found the dagger at the bottom of the hole,’ suggested the doctor helpfully.

  ‘Then why should his right hand have been left so considerately free to pick it up? I can understand the legs; presumably he was made to go from the car to here under his own steam. But the hand?’

  ‘Doesn’t it suggest that the murderer made him a present of the dagger and gave him the opportunity to use it—hoping perhaps that if he was caught, he could claim the death to be a suicide and not murder.’

  ‘He’d surely ha
ve untied his victim in that case before pushing him down. Anyway, I can’t imagine that anyone who was subtle enough to think of that as a possible defence would be sufficiently half-witted to believe it.’

  ‘Well, luckily that’s the sort of thing I don’t have to worry about. I’ll do the post-mortem this afternoon and let you have a report at once.’

  He nodded in a friendly way and went off to the ambulance. Simon, returning by car in less gruesome company, studied the papers which he had taken from Cassati’s pockets. There was more than he would have expected a man to carry about in evening dress, but he was chiefly interested in one thing—the name of Owen Burr—so he was able to skim through the Italian, hoping that those two words would stand out to cheer him; somewhere, surely, there must be a link between the two deaths. The only reference, however, to Owen was contained in a cutting from The Times, whose musical critic considered at length the merits of Evan Tredegar’s composition and welcomed the tenor’s contribution in glowing terms. The notice ended:

  ‘The performance was ably and, in the faster passages, brilliantly conducted by Mr Owen Burr, whose tragic death at its conclusion is a great loss to the musical world of the future.’

  News Report: Page 6.

  ‘Not much there,’ thought Simon, and continued his search. At the bottom of the pile was a folded sheet of paper which, he remembered, he had found alone in a trouser pocket. It was a letter, and the address at its head was familiar; so too, fortunately, was the language in which it was written.

  Dear Sr Cassati (it read),

  I am anxious to speak to you before you leave England on a matter of some personal importance to you. I shall therefore call at your dressing-room after the performance tonight and hope that you may be able to give me a few moments of your attention. I think that my name—or rather, that of my late son—may not be unfamiliar to you.

  Yours faithfully,

  Janet Sheraton-Smith.

  Simon leaned forward and gave his driver new instructions. Ten minutes later the car drew up outside Mrs Sheraton-Smith’s house in Kensington and was dismissed. Mary opened the door in her working clothes, looking a little more untidy than her afternoon self but no less pretty.

  ‘Mrs Sheraton-Smith doesn’t usually see visitors in the morning,’ she said doubtfully. ‘She is in, though, and I suppose you’re different. Will you wait a minute?’

  He waited longer but at last he was shown into a smaller room than the over-decorated drawing-room. Mrs Sheraton-Smith was sitting at a small writing desk. She motioned Simon to a chair but made no pretence of being pleased to see him. He wondered for a moment how to begin and his first question was intended to startle.

  ‘Mrs Sheraton-Smith,’ he said. ‘Why did you hate Owen Burr so much?’

  He had failed. The heavy, over-powdered face stared at him impassively.

  ‘I think you have made a mistake, Superintendent. I did not hate Owen Burr at all.’

  He tried for a moment to out-stare her, to call her bluff, and then like a revelation there came to him the enormity of his own stupidity, the significance of his own diagram, the importance of the remark which Delia had forgotten to repeat.

  Of course, he realised incredulously, Owen was only a mistake. He turned at the wrong time and suddenly, but it was Cassati all the time.

  Relief flooded over him, relief that the impossible link need no longer be found, together with indignation that he should have wasted so much time on people who were no longer of any importance. He looked up, almost smiling at the comparative simplicity of his present task Mrs. Sheraton-Smith was watching him unemotionally and waiting.

  ‘Is that all you wanted to ask me?’ she said at last.

  ‘I’m sorry. It was the wrong question. What I should have said was this: why did you hate Cassati so much?’

  ‘That is a question, I am afraid, which I am not able to answer.’

  ‘I will ask another, then. You told me before that you had no particular memory of your conversation with Cassati on Christmas Eve. But I have a letter here which suggests that the subject you wished to discuss was an important one. Can I persuade you to remember a little more now?’

  ‘I am afraid not. The subject of the intended conversation was a private one and it was never adequately dealt with. I did not realise when I wrote the letter which you are holding how public a singer’s dressing-room is.’

  ‘You mention your son in this letter. In what way was he connected with Cassati?’

  She looked down for a moment before she answered; clearly, she was emotionally affected by the reference. But her voice, when she spoke, was calm and controlled.

  ‘All the questions you have asked are the same question, Superintendent, and the answer to them all is the same. It is one which I am not prepared to give.’

  ‘May I ask why not?’

  ‘I do not wish to cause—embarrassment.’

  ‘To Signor Cassati?’

  She was silent.

  ‘If it is his feelings you are thinking of, then I should tell you that he no longer needs your silence. We found his body this morning. He had been most unpleasantly murdered.’

  ‘I see.’ She was breathing deeply and abruptly she pushed her chair back and rose to stand at the window. ‘I must blame myself very deeply. But it was not an easy thing that I had to do.’

  ‘It is your duty now, Mrs Sheraton-Smith, to answer my questions.’

  ‘I understand that. And now, of course, it can do no harm. The answer to all your questions, Superintendent, is this: I had a son, Geoffrey, who died three days before his twenty-first birthday. He died in Italy during the war, but he was not killed in battle. He was murdered—unpleasantly murdered, I believe your phrase was—by this Signor Cassati.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Mrs Sheraton-Smith’s voice trembled as she spoke, and she raised her hands to her eyes. Her back was still turned to Simon; he waited a moment before he asked his next question.

  ‘If it doesn’t distress you too much, I would be most grateful if you would give me some details. How was your son killed, for example?’

  ‘I cannot be exact. It is possible that he was buried alive. It is also possible that he was flogged to death, or that he died by his own hand to avoid either of these fates.’

  Mrs Sheraton-Smith was near to collapse, but Simon went stolidly on.

  ‘Would he have the means to do that?’

  ‘That is what this Cassati tried to make them do—there were several of them; Geoffrey was not the only one—and so he gave them the means. Each of these boys was made to crawl to his grave and crouch on hands and knees at the bottom, where he was covered first with a plank and then with earth; I suppose there would be enough air to keep him alive for a short while. If he refused to move, he was flogged until he was unconscious and then flogged again as soon as he came to his senses, over and over again. But he was given a knife, with which he could stab himself if he wished to speed his death. What sort of a madness was it, Superintendent, that could inflict on boys of twenty such agony of mind, forcing them to cut off with their own hands the life which was only just beginning for them?’ She broke down completely; Simon rose hurriedly and helped her to a chair, but she refused his suggestion of a drink.

  ‘I must apologise. I thought I had faced this and accepted it, but it is a terrible thing to know about one’s own son, that he should have suffered so much.’

  ‘I am very sorry that I should have to ask you to talk about it. Where did all this take place?’

  ‘In a prisoner-of-war camp in the north of Italy; I can give you the address. It was administered by the German authorities, but the junior officers were Italian. Cassati was one of them. But his behaviour must have been condoned; he had too many victims for it all to go unnoticed.’

  ‘Someone has certainly taken an exact revenge. Cassati must have died, like his victims, in agony of mind.’

  ‘It is tragic. Because you, see, Superintendent, he felt no penitence. Ev
en a week ago, when he had everything the world could offer, he could not spare the time to feel sorrow that he had deprived so many of their world.’

  ‘I can see that you had reason to hate him.’

  ‘I did not hate him.’

  Simon was startled.

  ‘Then why…?’

  ‘I wished to speak to him,’ she went on, not noticing the interruption, ‘to assure him that after a great deal of struggling and of prayer I was able to forgive him his terrible crime if only he could, even at this late time, repent of it. But when I told him my business, he refused to give me his attention. I am hardly surprised that he did not wish to recall and discuss the subject, but, in the circumstances, I deeply regret that I did not force him to do so.’

  Simon sat thoughtfully in silence. All this business about repentance and forgiveness sounded most unlikely, although of course the unlikely had an unpleasant habit of being true. The manner of Cassati’s death, and especially the presence of the dagger, could only be explained by the fact that the murderer knew what Mrs Sheraton-Smith had just described. Yet she could not possibly have been the driver of the Daimler. Had she used her money to hire a murderer? If so, had she herself travelled in the car to assist her employee? Now that the significance of the dagger was known, of course, there was no longer any need to suppose two attackers; the knife could have been thrown down the dene-hole after the victim was already there. It was worth a check, however.

  ‘How did you travel home after you left Cassati on Christmas Eve?’

  ‘By taxi.’

  ‘From the Opera House?’

  ‘Yes. I walked round to the front.’

  Simon made a note to check with all taxi-drivers who normally awaited the end of the opera.