Music Macabre

by Sarah Rayne

  He had expected Mother to be pleased for him, ready to welcome Loretta as a daughter-in-law, interested in what might be ahead. He thought, later, that he should have known better. What had happened was that she had looked at him for a long time, without speaking. Her eyes were like hard little pebbles, and her lips had puckered into the drawstring line that Roland had always found so ugly.

  Then she said, ‘So that little bitch will find a housekeeper for me, will she? The impudence of the creature! She’s after the money, Roland, that’s all she’s after.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ said Roland, stung.

  ‘No? I didn’t want to tell you this, but twice now I’ve caught her snooping around. Prying into private family papers – bank statements and suchlike. As for all that rubbish about helping with old photographs – that was a ruse to get at details about my money.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ She leaned forward, jabbing the air with a bony finger. ‘After I caught her the second time, I made discreet enquiries with the hotel chain she works for. They didn’t disclose any actual information – I suppose data protection or whatever it’s called prevented them. But they hinted very strongly that your precious Loretta has attempted to – to form relationships with gentlemen guests known to be comfortably off. I knew what that meant, of course.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘There were complaints,’ said Mother, as if he had not spoken. ‘That’s why she was moved around – transferred to different hotels. Three separate occasions that happened.’

  ‘Those were promotions,’ said Roland, at once.

  ‘Don’t be naïve,’ said Wynne, scornfully. ‘We don’t know anything about her – where does she come from? Who were her family?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t care. Nobody cares about that kind of thing any longer.’

  ‘There’s a wrongness about her. She’s as false as she can be, and she’s certainly out for your money – I know she is. Well, she won’t get it. I won’t see you ruin your life and end up broke, because that’s what’ll happen. If you marry her I’ll …’ She paused, her brows drawn down in a frown, and then a look of such triumph came over her face that Roland flinched. ‘I’ll make a new will leaving everything away from you,’ she said. ‘It can all go to charity – all the bonds and the investments your father left. This house. I’ll cancel the insurance policies on my own life, as well. And I’ll tell her what I’m doing, make no mistake about that, Roland. Then you’ll see what happens. The minute she knows there’s no money ahead, she’ll be off faster than greased lightning.’

  She sat back, breathing slightly fast, one hand pressed to her left breast, as if forcing a pain back. Roland reached automatically for the GTN spray and handed it to her.

  After she had used it, he said, in as reasonable a voice as he could manage, ‘You’ve got it all wrong, you know. Why don’t you try to get to know her a bit better?’

  ‘I’m not wrong and I don’t want to get to know her. I’ll phone the solicitor tomorrow morning and get it all in hand. And now go away. I don’t know you any more. You’re not the son I thought you were.’

  Roland had looked at her, then had gone, without a word.

  One of the really terrible things was that after she died, he had felt no sadness, no remorse whatsoever. His mother had been mean and selfish and controlling and joyless. His main emotion at her death had been relief, and an astonishing sense of finally being free.

  Closing the door on the empty bedroom, preparing to leave the house for the last time, Roland had the feeling that he was finally closing off the memory of that last conversation. He would lock the main door, and take the keys along to the estate agent’s office, as arranged. The past would be sealed off.

  He paused on the small landing immediately outside the door, and stamped the carpet more securely into place. The purchasers were taking all the stair carpets with the house, and Roland did not want them telling one another that it was no wonder that poor Mrs Farrant had tripped down the stairs with that carpet all rucked and uneven. As he bent down to smooth the corners out, a small object lying under the carpet’s edge caught the afternoon sunlight coming through the narrow window.

  It was an earring. A smooth oval of jet, with a disc of amber set into the centre. It was distinctive and Roland recognized it at once. The last time he had seen it was the night before Mother had died – the night Loretta came to supper. She had worn these earrings then – Roland remembered how he had commented on them, saying the amber made her eyes almost golden. She had laughed and said they were brand new – bought that very day, so she was pleased he had noticed them.

  But Loretta had not come up here that night; she had deliberately stayed downstairs after Mother came up to bed, knowing Roland was going to break the news about their marriage, giving him space to do it. And she had only come to the house once since then, when she had brought the borrowed car to collect the things for the charity shop. She had not even come into the house that time; she had parked in the drive, and they had carried everything out and put it in the boot.

  Then how had the earring got up here? Because they had been new – that evening had been the first time she had worn them. A pulse of apprehension began to tap against his mind, because it was beginning to seem as if Loretta could only have lost this earring on that night. She might have come up the stairs without Roland knowing, wanting to know how the marriage news was being received. If she had heard what Mother had said about her – about how she was supposed to have seduced, or tried to seduce, well-off hotel guests, she would have been furious and hurt. If she had heard Mother say she would make sure the money did not reach Loretta, she would have been even more furious. Was it possible that she had crept back up there while Roland was outside trying to flag down a taxi? That she had deliberately arranged the carpet so that it could be tripped over?

  Sick horror washed over him, because he suddenly had a very clear image of Loretta creeping up the stairs, and kneeling down outside Mother’s room. Her face would have been twisted and sly – it would not have been the face of his Loretta, the lively, sexy, loving companion of these last weeks and months.

  The sick feeling increased, and he took several deep breaths, then had to run back into the bedroom, and across to the little bathroom, where he hung over the sink, retching helplessly.

  Presently he managed to wash his face, and he made a shaky way downstairs. He sat for a while on the wide window ledge overlooking the garden. The earring was still in his pocket; after a moment he put it in the little zip compartment of his wallet.

  Loretta had not mentioned losing the earring. Possibly she had thought she had lost it in the taxi. And the following day had come Mother’s death, and all the flurry about the inquest, and then sorting out the money and the will and everything else. A missing earring would not have been worth mentioning.

  Was any of this likely? Could Loretta really have heard Roland’s mother threatening to disinherit him, like some ridiculous Victorian parent in a melodrama? Had she set a trap by ridging the carpet, trusting to luck that Roland’s mother would trip over it and fall down the stairs?

  Had Mother been right, and Loretta had been after his money?

  That was a terrible thought, but a far worse thought was that Roland might have married a murderess.

  Linklighters had been open for about four months and Roland had managed to push the suspicions of Loretta to the deepest level of his mind. They did not quite vanish, but he thought he had them in check.

  But if his mind coped with what he had found, his body did not. It began to let him down in the most embarrassing of ways.

  ‘I believe there are pills you can take for this,’ Loretta said one night, after even her most diligent endeavours had still ended in flaccid failure. ‘I’d come with you to see a doctor.’

  ‘I’m just tired,’ said Roland, who was certainly not going to discuss such a thing with a doctor, and who knew quite well
that the reason for his inability to make love was because he had found out that his wife might have killed his mother.

  After a while he got into the habit of pretending to be deeply asleep when Loretta got into bed. They did not discuss it again. In any case, she was too busy at Linklighters, which Roland would admit seemed to be doing well. A small regular clientele was building up, and people were booking large tables for late supper parties after a theatre visit. Two flattering reviews had appeared in a couple of well-regarded food magazines.

  It’s going to be all right, he thought. It really is going to succeed. And I’ll be able to stop thinking about what Loretta might have done that night. It will all be fine.

  And then Phineas Fox came to the restaurant, and nothing was fine at all.

  ‘He came in for dinner,’ said Loretta, over breakfast, as she poured muesli into a dish. ‘As a matter of fact I think it was his second visit. I’m sure he was there a week or so ago.’

  ‘Is he so memorable?’ said Roland.

  ‘Not at first, but then you find afterwards that you’re remembering him – and for longer than you’d expect. He’s quite ordinary looking really, although he has remarkable eyes. Very clear grey, with black rims.’ Roland had the impression that Loretta was remembering Mr Fox’s eyes with pleasure. What had Mother said, about her trying to form relationships with men she believed were well off? Was this Phineas Fox well off?

  Loretta said, ‘Anyway, he wants permission to delve into the restaurant’s history. It’s on account of a book being written about Liszt – I mean the composer. Franz Liszt.’

  ‘I have heard of Liszt,’ said Roland, a touch tartly, because he was not much liking the sound of this Phineas Fox, nor did he like Loretta so patronizingly assuming he had not heard of Liszt.

  ‘Of course you have,’ she said, comfortingly. ‘But Phineas Fox has been asked to research his life for a book, and he thinks he’s found a link between him and Scaramel. The Scaramel who was a regular performer at Linklighters, you remember? We’ve got a couple of old playbills.’

  ‘I remember perfectly well.’

  ‘This Phineas Fox wants to follow up this link.’

  ‘That’s a bit unlikely, isn’t it?’ said Roland. ‘Classical composer and music hall artiste.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’d be the prince-and-showgirl thing, I expect. Think about Charles II and his actresses. And Edward VII and his.’

  Roland did not want to be fed details about promiscuous monarchs over his breakfast. He said, ‘What kind of link does Phineas Fox think he’s found?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ said Loretta. ‘He might tell me more this afternoon. He’s coming to the restaurant. There’s no need for you to be there, though. It would mean you taking a long lunch hour and getting across London, and I can easily cope.’ She paused, then said, ‘I got the impression that he thinks if there was a link between Liszt and Scaramel, there might have been some kind of scandal at the heart of it.’

  ‘What kind of scandal?’

  ‘He didn’t say. But he’s asked if there are any old documents – records – relating to the past. I told him about those boxes of stuff I found during the renovations. He was very interested, so I’ve looked them out, and put them in the downstairs office for him to see.’

  ‘You mean the old cellar.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop calling it a cellar. It’s an office.’

  ‘Whatever it is, we aren’t supposed to let the public go down there,’ said Roland.

  ‘It doesn’t matter for one person just for an hour or so, and not if one of us is there.’

  ‘Those boxes have only got old accounts from the supper room days, and a few tattered programmes,’ said Roland. He frowned, then said, ‘Might a scandal about Scaramel really be unearthed? Because if so – well, we wouldn’t want to be associated with it, would we? I mean, we wouldn’t want Linklighters mentioned?’

  ‘Of course we would!’ said Loretta at once. ‘And the juicier the scandal, the better it’d be for the restaurant.’ She leaned forward. ‘Think about it. If Scaramel was tangled up with Franz Liszt – if they had one of those raunchy nineteenth-century affairs and something illegal or even criminal happened, it’d make a terrific story. We’d be booked out for months. There’d be all kinds of publicity. Reviews for the book itself and articles about the whole thing, and Linklighters would be part of it. Can’t you imagine the quotes? “Composer of ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’ and ‘Liebestraum number 3’, and bawdy music hall dancer from London restaurant”.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew so much about classical music.’

  ‘Everyone knows those pieces,’ said Loretta, carelessly. ‘And anyway, “Liebestraum number 3” is very well known. It was even vamped up for an Elvis Presley song years ago. He sang it in a film. I thought everyone knew that.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘All right then, how about this for a headline, “Liszt’s lover and the stage where he first saw her”?’

  ‘The stage rotted away years ago.’

  ‘God, you’re so pedantic.’

  ‘I think you’re getting carried away,’ said Roland. ‘How do we know this book’s actually going to be published anyway? It’s probably some wild idea that won’t get anywhere. It most likely won’t ever reach a bookshop.’

  ‘It will,’ said Loretta. ‘It’s not just something that Phineas Fox is doing on the off-chance. He’s got a publisher and an agent and there are a couple of university lecturers involved – one’s from Cambridge as a matter of fact – so it’s all quite scholarly. Mr Fox is quite scholarly as well, although I have the impression that he might be capable of being rather unscholarly at times.’ Again there was that speculative, pleasurable note in her voice. ‘Anyway, people like hearing shocking things about famous people from the past. All those books and TV programmes about whether all the Romanovs really died, and how Edward VII’s supposed to have shut a mistress away in a madhouse. Can’t you see that this might be the same kind of thing – and that we can turn it to our advantage? We could have a launch party at Linklighters for the book – we’d have Liszt’s music piped in, of course, and we can use the old photos and posters of Scaramel. The restaurant will be at the centre of it, and we’ll be at the centre of the restaurant. Probably they’d want to interview us. Good thing I bought that Stella McCartney suit.’

  She reached for his hand, and Roland hoped she was not about to try to initiate one of her hectic, fast-paced love-making sessions over the breakfast table. He pretended not to have seen the gesture, and said he had better be getting off to the office, because he had a lot to do today.

  By the time he reached his office he had managed to quell the slight apprehension. It was not very likely that this Phineas Fox would find anything of much interest about Linklighters. There would not be anything to make him delve deeper, or to result in Roland’s private life being pulled into the spotlight.

  There was certainly no reason to suppose that any of this might result in anyone suspecting that Loretta might be a murderess.

  TEN

  As Phin walked towards Harlequin Court, he could almost believe that those long-ago performers from Scaramel’s time walked with him, ephemeral and indistinct, like ghost reflections seen in the window of a late-night train.

  It was extraordinarily easy to believe he was seeing flickering gas-lit shapes, glimpses of opera-cloaked and top-hatted gentlemen making a leisurely way back from the nearby theatres. Silken-clad ladies, stepping daintily over the cobblestones …

  Except that those images were entirely wrong, because any fragments of Harlequin Court’s past would not be silk- or velvet-clad. This had been the haunt of the ordinary working people – men and women from the factories and the docks and the street markets. They would have dressed up in their cheap finery for their evening out, and they would have been cheerful and lively, singing snatches of the songs of the day as they came down the alleyway. But they would not have worn silk.

&
nbsp; He crossed the court and went down the carpeted stairs. As he stepped out into the restaurant he saw that there were only a few people at the tables, and that Loretta Farrant was seated near the door, looking towards the stairs, as if she had been watching for him. She was wearing a black suit with a white silk shirt under it, and large silver and jet earrings.

  ‘It’s very nice to see you again,’ she said, coming over to him. ‘Let’s go straight down to the office.’ She led the way to a door near the staircase. ‘Twelve steps down,’ she said, indicating. ‘And they’re a bit steep, so be careful. I’ve left a light on, though, and there’s a handrail.’

  The steps were not carpeted, and their footsteps rang out in the enclosed space. But Loretta – or her interior designer – had made a fair attempt at sprucing up the stair. The walls were smoothly whitewashed, and several framed prints of old street scenes were hung at intervals. They’ve tried to conceal what this really is, thought Phin, but it’s still unmistakably a cellar.

  ‘These are the boxes,’ said Loretta, and indicated two large battered cardboard boxes standing on the floor. ‘Take as long as you want sorting through them, and feel free to photocopy anything. The copier’s in the corner there.’

  ‘I suppose we can’t carry them upstairs?’ said Phin, not very hopefully.

  ‘Bit difficult. The restaurant’s still open.’

  ‘Fair enough.’