Gently Instrumental
Page 3
‘Not like that!’
He stormed over to the piano stool. His large hands spread over the keyboard and for an instant were quite still. Then they struck. From another world the theme came tumbling in a poised rhapsody, an electrifying fabric which the hands seemed to conduct rather than play. They stilled again. ‘Thus.’
‘But I don’t play,’ Gently admitted.
‘You don’t listen,’ Hozeley retorted. ‘You haven’t heard it. Perhaps you never will.’
‘Could Virtue hear it?’ Gently said.
Hozeley glared for a space at the keyboard. He raised and let fall his hands, but without striking a note. ‘Yes.’
‘Virtue really had talent?’
‘Yes.’
‘He just lacked the discipline to go with it.’
‘When he wished he had it.’
‘But is that good enough?’
Hozeley said nothing and his hands stayed still.
‘I think Virtue was a failure,’ Gently said. ‘He didn’t have the character to be an artist. You tried to give it to him but you couldn’t. He belonged where you found him – in someone’s Palm Court.’
‘That is unfair!’
Gently grunted. ‘We know a bit about him, too.’
‘If I could have kept him long enough—’
‘But that’s the point, isn’t it? He would never have stayed with you until then.’
Hozeley pressed hard on the edge of the keyboard. ‘Terry had his failings and I wasn’t blind to them. First they had to be overcome, and that was a task that called for patience. But Terry was worth it. He had a wonderful ear and his fingering was quite exceptional. Those are two things that rarely come together. I couldn’t let him throw such potential away.’
‘But by Tuesday you knew it was useless.’
‘What happened on Tuesday was just one more hurdle.’
Gently shook his head. ‘Tuesday was the end. You knew that Virtue was a dud, that you were going to lose him.’
Hozeley slammed a chord. ‘I deny that.’
Gently shrugged. He turned away into the room.
It was a cool room: between it and the sun lay eighteen inches of fragrant thatch. Also it smelled of potpourri and another scent, less easy to identify. Gently prowled around it. The potpourri was contained in two Chinese jars on a teak stand. The keener odour he traced to a deeply carved camphor-wood chest. Then there was other Chinese bric-a-brac and a Chinese carpet, the colour of jade. The furniture however was conventional, with loose covers of flowered cretonne.
Hozeley had begun to play again: Chopin that sounded like tears. Leyston stood by with a gloomy expression – no doubt he preferred the hard-shooting game. Gently came back to the piano.
‘Tell me about Tuesday.’
Hozeley didn’t stop playing. ‘I gave the Inspector an exhaustive statement.’
‘Not the air. The orchestration.’
Hozeley played the Chopin to a close. ‘Terry was . . . fretting.’
‘Go on.’
‘The young are restless – impatient. Terry was a London boy. Of course, he would find Shinglebourne dull.’
‘Had there been other rows?’
Hozeley struck a note. ‘Terry would have liked me to have given him money. A substantial sum, I mean. Naturally, I saw he had pocket money.’
‘Did he ever threaten you?’
‘He could be excitable, saying things he didn’t mean.’
‘He had a record of attempted blackmail.’
Hozeley played softly a succession of melodic phrases. ‘I promised him a holiday after the Festival. A fortnight’s touring in France.’
‘What was his response?’
‘He spoke wildly, pretended I was trying to keep him a prisoner.’
‘And were you?’
Hozeley played a phrase. ‘To him, I may have seemed repressive. But it was necessary. He was too susceptible. I had to protect his developing talent.’
‘But he was . . . susceptible.’
‘I said so.’
‘That was the true cause of the friction?’
Hozeley shrugged. ‘Yes.’
‘Whom did you suspect?’
Hozeley played.
‘Can we put it this way,’ Gently said. ‘What happened at the rehearsal was no surprise. You were expecting a crisis. Perhaps Virtue had told you his intentions in so many words.’
Hozeley struck a chord harshly. ‘No.’
‘You had no idea he was planning to break with you?’
‘He was . . . too much of an artist.’
‘How?’
‘The Quintet was written to provide him with a vehicle.’
‘And that would influence him?’
‘Yes.’ Hozeley ruffled a trill and closed it. ‘The Quintet was to launch him as a soloist before the top national critics. Terry wanted that. You assess him as a failure, but after the Quintet he would have arrived. It would have stiffened his character, given him reputation. He wanted that beyond anything.’
‘Yet he ruined the rehearsal?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘To humiliate me, I think.’
‘Only that . . . ?’
Hozeley played some stabbing notes. ‘That was the weak side of Terry’s character.’
‘And it came out of the blue.’
His head bowed. ‘I didn’t think he would hazard his great chance. And I still don’t believe he meant it, that he wouldn’t have come round later.’
‘But the other man . . . ?’
‘He didn’t exist. That was simply Terry trying to hurt me.’
Hozeley leaned over the keyboard and played a long, sonorous passage, a complete statement. When it ended he sat back, breathing faster.
‘Yet you must have thought differently . . . at the time.’
Gently had strayed to one of the windows. Beyond a lawn and flower beds one could see a summerhouse, fruit trees, a kitchen garden and an old brick wall. Further still was the distance of marshes and the southward gleam of a river. Down the garden a sunbrowned youngster was hoeing, his denim jacket hanging from a spade.
‘I admit that I was shocked.’
‘You were bowled over. You couldn’t face coming back here that night. I suggest that you did believe in the existence of the other man. What other motive could there have been for Virtue’s behaviour?’
Behind him Hozeley played a note. ‘My humiliation.’
‘But why?’
Hozeley played.
‘Yes – you believed it,’ Gently said. ‘That he was casting you off for a rival. Your honeymoon with him was over, his ambition wasn’t strong enough to hold him. Virtue was a mistake. In your infatuation you had taken him for what he wasn’t. And Tuesday’s rehearsal brought it home to you – all Virtue wanted from you was money.’
‘No.’ A sudden discord.
‘Wasn’t that why you were so upset? Now, you’d like to hide your head in the sand, but then – for that moment – you were staring at the truth.’
‘It wasn’t the truth.’
‘What was, then?’
Fingers dragged across the keyboard.
‘That was the truth you had in your mind when you left the rehearsal, so soon after Virtue.’
‘I was – shocked.’
‘Shocked and humiliated.’
‘Yes . . . I needed time to think.’
‘To think how to settle up with Virtue.’
Hozeley struck some clashing chords.
‘Listen . . . please! All you are saying was certainly going through my mind. He had been so brutal that I had to think it, he made certain that I would. But I knew something that you can’t know. I knew that Terry’s talent was real. Infatuation couldn’t blind me to that – the talent was there. And it would have prevailed.’
‘So the row was mere artistic temperament?’
‘No – I’m not saying that! But it wasn’t final, and perhaps if I’d gone after him I could have
found out the reason. But I didn’t, I was too upset, I simply had to be alone. Only this I insist on: Terry’s behaviour was false. And now we can never know why he did it.’
‘Do you honestly think we can accept that?’
Hozeley played stabbing notes.
‘You must know what we’re thinking. The killer was a man with motive, opportunity and knowledge of where to put his hand on the weapon. Who could that be?’
Hozeley played.
‘Don’t you realize you’re close to being arrested?’
The playing stopped. Gently turned. Hozeley’s hands were burrowing in his hair.
‘Well?’
‘You must understand! I could never have offered Terry violence.’
‘Because you loved him?’
Hozeley groaned. ‘Because of his talent. It was real.’
Leyston jiffled; his opinion was written large on his mournful face. He’d done his homework, and Hozeley was vulnerable; they had all they needed to take him in. Yet Gently was hesitating – perhaps under orders to bend the rules for the old queen . . .
Now he came back to the piano.
‘Play me a passage from the new Quintet.’
‘But that has no bearing—’
‘The clarinet part. Something to illustrate the scope of the instrument.’
Hozeley’s fingers combed his locks; then he straightened himself and played. Liquid trills of rapid notes chased each other through several octaves. They combined to shape a melody, never quite seeming complete, until surprisingly, with one subdued note, the pattern was made.
The resonance died. Gently, straight-faced, took a slow turn through the room, the room so cool and quiet under the fathoms of its thatch. At the French doors he paused.
‘Was your gardener here on Tuesday?’
‘David . . . ? No.’
‘Call him.’
Sweating, the youngster came to the door. His name was Crag; he had limp fair hair and rustic good looks, scorched by sun. But he had nothing to offer, Leyston knew, and he was alibied for Tuesday by his grandfather . . .
But still Gently hesitated, pondered, went to stare at fresh objects: books, pictures, kakemonos, a dusty violin that lay on a shelf. Hozeley, who’d risen to call Crag, had seated himself again. Out in the hall a clock chimed . . . did it take so long to make up one’s mind?
‘Very well.’
Hozeley stood up. ‘Are you taking me into custody?’
‘Not yet.’
Behind his back, Leyston’s hands grappled tight.
‘I would prefer to get it over.’
‘First, we have other inquiries to make. But I must ask you to hold yourself available. You are not to leave Shinglebourne.’
And Leyston knew, then: knew that someone had bought and sold him; knew that the old boy network was operating to get Hozeley off the hook. He said nothing, looked nothing as they returned to the sizzling Marina. An incandescent door handle burned his hand and the plastic seat well-nigh skinned him.
CHAPTER THREE
GENTLY TINKERED THE car back down Saxton Road and found a part-shaded pitch with a view of the Front. The Front was narrow and a little crooked, being squeezed between seaside villas and shingle. Fish smells drifted through the Marina’s windows from stalls on the shady side of huts; gulls wheeled and trotted in the offing, bathers came and went over the shingle. But what dominated the Front was the royal blue hull and white coamings and bilges of the town’s lifeboat, which reared high over the shingle banks as though caught in a plunge towards the sea and Holland.
‘This is the way Hozeley would have come.’
‘The way he says he did,’ Leyston prompted.
Across a small plain where cars were parked rose the bland front of The White Hart hotel. Its style was Regency, but a marked rigidity in the details gave it away; the recession of the windows was too emphatic, the ornate plasterwork mechanical and glib. Before it, and equally suspect, stood Shinglebourne’s gift to postcard publishers: the Moot House, a Tudor fantasy that might well have had origins in a jotting of Ruskin’s.
‘Which is the Music Room?’
‘The bit that’s added on, sir. There’s a separate entrance round the corner.’
‘With access to the hotel?’
‘Yes, sir. But along a corridor from the public rooms.’ Gently brooded over the scene. From that corner the distracted figure would have stumbled; across the plain, around the Moot House and up steps to the shingle. The pubs hadn’t turned out, cars waited unattended, scanty street lights threw long shadows . . . the clash and crunch of his feet in the shingle would merge with the faint hoarseness of the surf. He’d have been a shadow, his identity uncertain, vanishing quickly over the banks. From the Front, you couldn’t see the tideline. An army of Hozeleys might have squatted there.
‘His statement is credible.’
‘Up to a point, sir.’ Leyston sounded less than convinced. Plainly the interview with Hozeley hadn’t changed the local man’s mind.
‘What’s your thinking, then?’
‘Well – this, sir. You’ve fitted him up with a better motive.’
‘You mean the money?’
‘Exactly, sir. I’d say that Virtue had him over a barrel.’
Gently grunted and felt for his pipe: a seasoned weapon with a bent stem. Leyston watched impatiently while he filled it from a yellow tin.
‘Spell it out for me.’
‘I see it like this, sir. That performance was only four nights away. I don’t reckon Hozeley could have found an understudy for a solo part in that time. So he was screwed. Unless he coughed up, there wasn’t going to be a performance.’
‘You don’t go much on Virtue’s artistic integrity.’
‘That’s a lot of hot air, sir, between you and me. We’ve met chummies like Virtue before. They don’t let that sort of thing stand in their way.’
‘But if Hozeley believed it?’
‘You’ve only his word, sir. I’ll bet he wasn’t pinning much on it on Tuesday. And then there was this jealousy bit thrown in, just to put on a bit more pressure.’
Gently lit and puffed. ‘We can’t overlook this: that Hozeley would recognize talent when he saw it. He’s a man who’s mixed with it, understands it, is in some way an authority. And he’s saying Virtue wouldn’t have thrown the performance, that his threat didn’t ring true.’
‘That’s what he would say, sir.’
‘You don’t accept it?’
‘With all due respect, sir, it sounds like a con.’
‘But suppose it was true?’
Leyston stared at the lifeboat: man of sternness, who’d heard it all before.
‘Sir, I reckon it adds up to this, how far we bend over backwards for Hozeley. He can talk, sir, I’ll give him that, and he’d be a tricky man in the box. But I don’t buy it. We’ve too much on him, and there’s no one else in the picture. If you don’t mind, sir, I’d like to go back there and have him amend his statement.’
Gently breathed smoke. ‘No harm in that.’
‘But I’d sooner we took him in, sir.’
More smoke, curling greyly in the torrid air.
‘No.’
He drove Leyston to the police station and, over a beer, leafed through the statements. Then he climbed back into the Marina and set it drifting again through the heat. Opposite the church a gateless entry offered parking in the shade of beeches along with the prospect of a red-brick house with impressive bays and interesting roofs. Gently drove in. A red Volvo Estate and a blue Rover 2000 stood on the gravel, the former dusty and ticketed: doctor, the latter freshly washed and leathered. He parked and got out. An elderly man who’d been raking the gravel paused to stare.
‘You want the doctor?’
‘Police.’
The man polished sweat from his forehead.
‘Like that you won’t need an appointment, will you?’
‘Where shall I find him?’
‘Try the surgery.’
The surgery was an annex. Though a green door one entered a bright, polished room, furnished with padded chairs and with a table strewn with magazines. At one end a window was signed: Reception. Gently approached it. A girl appeared.
‘Yes . . . ?’
She too had her spell of hesitation: a honey blonde of not more than twenty, with smooth features and firm eyes.
‘Is it about Terry Virtue?’
‘Did you know him?’
‘No, of course not!’ She flushed. ‘I’ll see if the doctor’s free.’
‘Just take me to him, please.’
She hastened ahead of him along a glassed passage where cacti ranged on metal shelves, rapped on a panelled door and, without waiting, pushed her head round it.
‘Sir . . .’ A low mumble was answered at once with a terse word. Haughtily, she withdrew her head again to announce:
‘The doctor will see you.’
The man who rose from behind the desk was probably an inch taller than Gently, but he was lean, large-boned and angular, with a lean, angular face. He was about fifty. He had straight, grey hair sleeked back from a slanting forehead, a nose as straight as a rule and a long jaw and protrusive chin. His eyes were blue-grey. He smiled as he rose, the eyes flickering amusement. He put out a bony hand with a grip that left Gently’s numbed.
‘Henry Capel. I know who you are.’
‘Oh . . . ?’
‘Old Walt has been on the phone. He’s still sleeping here, you know. I thought it wisest to hang on to him. What do you think?’
‘I think it’s wise.’
‘Yes, the old lad has taken a knock. I keep him under mild sedation, naturally – just enough to blur the edges.’
He let go of Gently’s hand, still smiling, and folded himself back on his chair. Despite the grey hair he had a strange air of youthfulness, of being somebody’s big brother. Yet his dress was formal. It included the monogrammed tie of a yacht club.
‘You’ll be a sailing man, then . . . ?’
‘Oh yes – we all are here. Raised on Arthur Ransome and Uffa . . . that’s my little ship, hanging on the wall. Called Yin.’ His eyes rested on Gently’s.