Play Dead

by Anne Penketh

  “To be honest,” he shrugged, laying particular emphasis on the ‘h’ in ‘honest,’ “I cannot say I know the players very well. Not personally. These people are amateur musicians,” he said with a wave of the hand. “Do not mistake what I mean, they are very good players. They play music because they enjoy it. But they have jobs. We meet only once a week for the rehearsals.”

  “But did you notice whether she was friends with her colleagues? People in her section? The principal cello, for example?” Clayton asked.

  “Why should I know? I don’t think so. He was much older. She sat next to him. But I already told you, I conduct them and that is all. I’ve only been in Norwich about two months and I am preparing a full programme.” Romano made more expansive hand gestures. Clayton imagined him twirling spaghetti on a fork.

  “OK,” said Clayton. “We’ll need a full list of the orchestra members, Signor Romano.”

  “Of course.”

  “And also the names of everyone in the chorus, just in case,” Clayton added.

  “Can’t you ask the choir’s musical director for their list? I’m afraid I don’t have relations with their administration. I have enough to do,” Romano said, picking up his sunglasses from the table.

  “I’ll see you again,” said Clayton. “I’m planning on coming along to the Mendelssohn next week.”

  “So you are — how you say — a musical buff, Detective?”

  Clayton smiled and pushed back his chair. “You could say that,” he said.

  Watching the conductor depart with a flick of his scarf, he said to Julie, “We’ve got to get to grips with the dynamics of this orchestra. Let’s get hold of the other conductor. If he was there for thirty years, he must know where all the bodies are buried.”

  * * *

  The address on Newmarket Road had a sweeping gravel drive which culminated outside a gabled house.

  “Posho,” said Clayton under his breath.

  “It’s flats, I think,” Julie said. He noticed the three buzzers at the main entrance.

  Proctor buzzed them into the hallway and opened his ground-floor front door. His sparse white hair was styled in a comb-over, but his bushy eyebrows made up for the lack of hair on his scalp. Clayton smiled to himself. He could conduct an orchestra with those. He remembered Melissa warning him not to be taken in by the affable grandad look. He held up his warrant card and made the necessary introductions.

  “Come in, come in,” said Proctor, shuffling ahead of them in leather slippers. He led the way into a high-ceilinged living room, where a grand piano had pride of place, and gestured for them to sit down. Clayton noticed a record player and a case stacked high with vinyl. Two large loudspeakers stood facing them on each side of a pair of French windows, which looked out onto a lawn stained by autumn leaves.

  “Marian!” Proctor called out. “We’ve got company.”

  A dark-haired woman came into the room, wiping her hands on a tea towel.

  “We’ve come to see you about the orchestra,” said Clayton. “We’re following up after the murder of one of the cellists.”

  “Oh yes. Terrible,” said Mrs Proctor. “It was in the paper, wasn’t it, darling?”

  “So how can we help you, Inspector?” Proctor asked, sitting down beside them.

  “We’re trying to build up a picture of the NFO. Any insights you could give us into the people you worked with would be a help,” said Clayton.

  “Insights. Hmm. What sort of insights?” Proctor’s eyebrows twitched. “Well, I can tell you that Kristina Manning was an excellent cellist. It was a privilege to conduct her. She was a serious and studious player. Not like certain others I could mention,” he added in a low voice.

  “You retired a couple of months ago. Is that correct?” Clayton asked.

  “Retired? Forced out, more like,” he said bitterly.

  “So it wasn’t your choice?” Julie ventured.

  “Of course not,” he said. “I built that orchestra up from scratch, I did. Why would I let go just when I’d got them where I wanted them? It was about raising standards, you know.” As though talking to himself, he added, “Waste of space, some of them.”

  Clayton noticed Marian Proctor standing at the kitchen door, listening and watching her husband closely.

  “So, who forced you out?” Clayton asked.

  “Oh,” he waved his hand, “they had a vote. Ridiculous. It was democratic, they said.”

  “Yes, but there must have been a ringleader,” Clayton said. “Who was behind it?”

  “The wind,” said Proctor. Julie, who was taking notes, looked puzzled. She turned her head towards the garden.

  “You mean the woodwind section?” said Clayton.

  Proctor nodded. “They’d cooked something up with the percussion. It was all personal, of course. Did anyone ever tell you that an orchestra’s a snake pit? Even an amateur one like ours. I got rid of a couple of players who weren’t pulling their weight and after that all hell broke loose.”

  He threw a stern look at Clayton, as though defying him to contradict his words.

  “And who were those players?” Julie asked.

  “Does it matter?” He waved a hand in the air again. Mrs Proctor walked over and patted him on the arm.

  “Now, now, dear. Don’t get upset again,” she said gently, then stood back.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked.

  “No thanks, Mrs Proctor. We won’t be keeping you much longer,” said Clayton.

  “What instruments did they play?” Julie asked. “It might shed some light on what happened to Kristina Manning.”

  “Oh yes.” Proctor got up and stood looking out of the window. The garden was ringed by tall trees whose leaves were turning gold. “The devil finds work for idle hands,” he murmured.

  “What do you mean? They had plenty of time to plot against you because they didn’t have much else to do?” asked Clayton.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” said Proctor. “Take the bassoonist. He only had to play a couple of notes in the whole concert. And he was always messing about with his reeds, so you can imagine how disruptive he was. He’d show up late, claiming that he’d had to work overtime or got stuck in a traffic jam, but I knew it was because he was a lazy sod who was only interested in whether his horse came in first.”

  “So, what sort of people are in the orchestra anyway?” Clayton asked.

  “Now, that’s a good question,” said Proctor. “An orchestra is a microcosm of society. Are you aware of that?”

  “I can imagine,” said Clayton, stroking his chin. “Cliques?”

  “That’s it exactly. Cliques. Young versus old, brass versus violins, that sort of thing. The brass go to the pub and the violins prefer wine bars. But to come back to your question, it’s solid middle class if that’s what you mean. Quite a few teachers. Some do private music classes. We’ve even got a couple of former professional players.”

  “And does that help?” asked Clayton.

  “Not necessarily.” Proctor frowned. “They tend to look down on the others, if you see what I mean.”

  “Was that what happened in the cello section? The principal cello was professional, wasn’t he?”

  The eyebrows twitched again. “Precisely, Inspector,” said Proctor. “But the relationships are quite complex, you know. As I say, all human life is there, within a single orchestra. And actually that’s another challenge for the conductor. For example, it’s good to mix up the better players with the less experienced ones, I find, and the aggressive with the passive. It’s all about the mix.”

  Clayton looked across at Julie, who was still waiting for an answer to her question. She asked again, “Mr Proctor, do you remember which players you fired? Was the bassoonist one of them?”

  Proctor shook his head.

  “No. He got away with it. Norwich doesn’t have a glut of bassoonists, as you can imagine. No. It was a clarinet and a flute. They sat next to each other. The flute kept missin
g rehearsals, so he was asking for it. The rules are perfectly clear for anyone to see. Unprofessional, if you ask me. Poor little rich kid. Son of a stockbroker, somebody said.”

  “And what about the other one?” Julie ventured.

  “Oh, her. She was off her head.”

  “What do you mean? On drugs?” Julie asked.

  “Something of the sort. She was definitely spaced out in rehearsals. You can’t have someone like that in an orchestra. Not if you have standards.”

  “Could you give us their names, Mr Proctor?” Julie asked.

  Proctor shook his head. “Names? No, I can’t remember offhand, I’m afraid.”

  Julie looked at Clayton, frowning. “Did you enjoy your job, Mr Proctor?”

  “Loved it,” he said. “There’s nothing like it, the feeling that you get when you bring all of them together, uniting a hundred people under your baton. You’ve got them in the palm of your hand. It’s magic.”

  He raised his hand, fist slightly clenched, as if to illustrate what he was saying. Then, with a sigh, he turned away from them to stare into the garden. They got up to go.

  Mrs Proctor accompanied them to the front door. “He was heartbroken by what happened. That orchestra was his whole life, you know,” she whispered.

  Clayton nodded. “We understand.” He handed her his card. “Please ask your husband to ring us if he thinks of anything else that might help us find Ms Manning’s killer.”

  The two detectives went out to the car. Clayton tapped his fingers on the steering wheel while he waited for Julie to close her door.

  “Right,” he said. “I’m going to a concert featuring that orchestra, and I’ll take some pictures of them. You can find out which pubs and wine bars they hang out in. It’ll be easy enough to identify the musicians, once we get the full list from Romano.”

  She nodded. “It’s funny that Proctor couldn’t remember the names of the ones he’d fired, isn’t it? He seemed to call them all by the name of their instruments.”

  “I’ve heard that conductors do that,” said Clayton. “They’re in a world of their own. I heard somewhere else that in professional orchestras, the violinists are known as ‘pond life.’”

  Julie burst out laughing. “How rude!”

  “And you should hear the jokes about viola players,” said Clayton.

  “Why?”

  “They’re supposed to be thickos. How about this? What’s the difference between a viola and a vacuum cleaner?”

  “What? Give in.”

  “You have to plug in a vacuum cleaner before it sucks.”

  “Oh, God, that’s horrible,” said Julie. “But why violas?”

  “Beats me. Maybe because a viola is heavier than a violin, so the violists look a bit awkward sometimes. But you could say the same about a cello or a double bass. And yet in any orchestra, it’s the violas who are always the butt of jokes.”

  “But that’s so unfair.”

  “Welcome to the orchestra, Julie,” said Clayton. “Fear and loathing. Even in Norwich.”

  Chapter Five

  Clayton’s phone rang. He checked the name of the caller and smiled. Oh, good. He’d been meaning to ring Claire ever since the press reported the discovery of Kristina Manning’s body.

  “Hiya. Aw reet?” he asked.

  “Not so bad. Bit busy. I see that you’ve got a musical murder to solve,” she said.

  “Did you know her? She was involved with the hospital, I believe.”

  “That’s why I’m ringing. She spent a lot of time with us. She was a lovely woman.”

  “Was she in your department?” he asked.

  “She used to play for some of our dementia patients. The visits seemed to affect their mood. It’s interesting how music can reach across time, deep into the past, even with people who can remember nothing else. I’ve seen patients of ours who are normally unresponsive singing along or tapping their feet to a tune. Kristina went to other departments as well, the children’s wards in particular, I think.”

  “Was she on her own?”

  “No, not in neurology. There were usually two or three of them. I presume they were friends from the orchestra. They brought their instruments with them.”

  “Can you get me the names? That would be really helpful,” Clayton said.

  “Of course. How’s your dad?” she asked.

  “Not seen him for a bit. I should really go up soon. The last time I saw him, he was coughing his guts up and complaining about the smoking ban at the care home.”

  She laughed. “He’s still smoking, is he? Not good.”

  Claire was the first woman he’d felt truly comfortable with. At home, he’d had to submit to the bullying inflicted by his mother and his sister, Mel. The latter had briefly resurfaced in his life before disappearing for ever. His mother was gone too. He knew that suffering the loss of both his wife and his daughter had been tough for his father. But was that reason enough to become a crotchety old man, a sort of Alf Garnett with a northern accent?

  “Everything else OK?” Claire asked.

  He answered evasively. He didn’t usually discuss Melissa with Claire, unless she specifically asked. It made him feel awkward.

  “Those boxes upstairs are still waiting to be unpacked,” he said, with a forced laugh. “I’ve had too much work on since the move. What about you?”

  “Oh, nothing special,” she said. Clayton had no idea of the details of Claire’s social life these days. Like him, she preferred to keep their relationship friendly but at arm’s length. He wondered whether she had flashbacks to the past as he did. They went back a long way, the two of them, with plenty of shared memories waiting to spring up from nowhere, triggered by a sound, a smell or a chance encounter.

  “Well, we should get together and have a drink sometime, if you like,” he said.

  “That would be nice,” she said. They both knew it would never happen. “Anyway, I’ll get back to you about Kristina’s friends,” she added and rang off.

  Chapter Six

  Clayton was shuffling papers at his workstation when Julie came over.

  “I’ve got something that will interest you,” she said.

  He held up the papers. “Well, look what I’ve got. The full list.”

  “All the players?” she asked.

  “Yeah. And we’re in luck. The director assures me it hasn’t been updated since Proctor made those two sackings. Oh — and I also have details for the choir.” He felt slightly embarrassed about that. “But you said you had something that would interest me.”

  “I just spoke to Kristina Manning’s neighbours, the downstairs ones. They said they heard a loud argument and shouting coming from the flat on Sunday morning.”

  “Did they know about the party?” he asked.

  “Yes. She’d let them know she was having people round, and they were out on Saturday night.”

  “Did they say what time they heard the shouting?”

  “They said late morning, but they couldn’t give an exact time. What do you think? Maybe the dishy boyfriend isn’t the grieving Mr Nice Guy that we thought he was,” she said. “The neighbours said it was a man’s voice.”

  Clayton tapped his pen on his desk with a percussive rhythm. “That’s great, Julie. We needed some crumbs to take up to Bligh.”

  * * *

  Bligh swivelled round on her chair and beckoned them in.

  “I’ve received some very interesting information from the pathologist’s office,” she began. “Dr Blackhurst informs me that hair fibre was found on the cello. Unfortunately there’s no follicle attached to provide an identity in case of a DNA match, but it could still be a big help in ruling out suspects.”

  Clayton nodded. “Yes, that’s good. They didn’t get any other samples then, from the struggle between Kristina and her killer? There was plenty of blood around.”

  “Sadly not,” said Bligh. “By the way, there’s nothing to indicate a sexual attack. The cause of death was a blow to the
head. We also know that Kristina Manning had ingested ecstasy some hours before her death, presumably at the party.”

  Clayton looked across at Julie. “Ah. Funnily enough, Henderson denied that Kristina took drugs,” he said.

  “I see,” said Bligh. “So what else did he have to say?”

  “He claims he left the party early. He went back home and was still there on the morning of the murder. But we don’t have independent corroboration,” said Clayton.

  “What else?”

  “We’ve talked to the new conductor, an Italian, and to his long-serving predecessor who was very helpful. Actually, it turns out that the previous conductor was forced out against his will. Apparently, the players passed a vote of no confidence in him after he sacked a couple of them. We’ve still to track them down.”

  “So we’re looking for someone with a personal grudge, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Also, we’re planning to speak to the orchestra members one by one, starting with the cellos. That’s going to take some time. And we’ve got appointments to interview friends of hers who were involved in the music therapy stuff at the hospital.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to get you some help processing all this,” said Bligh.

  Clayton cleared his throat but before he could speak, he felt his phone vibrate. He quickly checked the caller — a number he didn’t recognise — before switching it off.

  Chapter Seven

  Emerging from Bligh’s office, Clayton loosened his tie. “I’ll catch you up,” he told Julie, taking his phone out of his pocket. The caller could have a tip-off.

  “OK. I’ll get onto Henderson,” she said. “We can arrange a swab while he’s here.”

  He dialled the unknown number. It was a woman who answered the phone. She sounded distressed.

  “Oh, Inspector . . . Detective Inspector, is that you?”

  “Who is this, please?”

  “It’s Marian Proctor, Mike Proctor’s wife. We met yesterday. Something terrible has happened!”

  “What? Where are you?” he asked, gripping the phone.

  “I found him when I came back with the shopping. I’d not been out that long, but I couldn’t find a parking space, and—”