The Sound of Broken Glass

by Deborah Crombie

  His face went still, his expression suddenly unreadable. His eyes, she thought, were blue, made darker by his black T-shirt. And the knuckles of his right hand, which still rested on the body of the guitar, were bruised and swollen. There was no doubt that this was the guitarist that Reg had described.

  “Hello,” said the girl, with friendly interest. “Are we taking up your space? I’m afraid we’ve gone a bit over.”

  The two older men turned to her, looking slightly puzzled. Melody couldn’t imagine that she, in her tailored suit and coat, could look less like an artist in need of rehearsal space. She crossed the room, her heels clicking like gunshots on the hard floor, until she stood before the guitarist.

  “My name’s Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot,” she said, pulling her ID from her bag. “The barman at the White Stag said I might find you here, if I could have a moment of your time. I’m sorry, but I don’t know your name,” she added in a rush, feeling idiotic.

  “Look here, lass,” said the small man, bristling, “you can see we’re in the middle of a recording session—”

  “Tam,” broke in the guitarist, his voice easy. “I don’t think you want to go calling a detective sergeant ‘lass.’ She might clap the cuffs on you. I’m Andy,” he added, meeting Melody’s gaze. “Andy Monahan. What can I do for you?”

  “It’s about an incident at the pub last night.” Melody saw that the girl looked curious, the Scot, wary. “Is there somewhere we could talk?” she asked Monahan, thinking he might be more forthcoming without an audience.

  “No, this is fine,” he answered, but there had been a flicker of a glance towards the Scot. “This is my manager—”

  “Michael Moran. But everyone calls me Tam.” Tam reached out and gave her hand a hearty shake.

  “Caleb Hart,” said the bearded man. “Reg at the White Stag is a mate. I told him we’d be doing a session here today.”

  “You’re the producer?” asked Melody.

  Hart nodded. “And this is Poppy Jones.”

  “Poppy,” repeated Melody, taking the girl’s offered hand. “Nice name for a singer.” She saw that the girl was older than she’d first thought, and Poppy confirmed it by saying, “About time it came in useful. I’ve been cursing my parents over it for twenty years.” Her accent, unlike Andy Monahan’s, was as middle class as Melody’s own.

  “What’s this about, then?” said Monahan, making it clear that they’d covered the social niceties.

  Melody tucked her ID back into her bag, giving herself a moment to frame her response. “We’re investigating the suspicious death of a man found in the Belvedere Hotel this morning. According to Reg at the White Stag, you had an altercation with the gentleman in the pub last night.”

  She saw the instant of shock in Monahan’s eyes, and the convulsive tightening of the fingers of his right hand.

  “Don’t know what you’re on about,” he began, but Tam was already shaking his head.

  “An altercation?” said Tam. He put an exaggerated emphasis on the next to last syllable. “Is that what you call some pompous geezer complaining that the lad here had a bit of a row with a punter? Is it him that’s dead?”

  “The pompous geezer’s name was Vincent Arnott. And Reg said Mr. Monahan hit someone. I’d call that more than a row.” She glanced at Monahan’s bruised hand.

  “Well, I didn’t hit him, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Monahan dismissively, but Melody could have sworn it was relief that had washed across his face and left it pale.

  “Did you see Mr. Arnott after that?” she asked. “Maybe he sought you out to further his grievance.”

  Monahan shrugged. “Maybe he picked a fight with someone else. I didn’t see him again. I played the second set, then I went home. I certainly didn’t go to the Belvedere, and from what I saw of that bloke, I can’t imagine he did, either. Stuffed-up prick.”

  He was watching her carefully, and there was, thought Melody, curiosity mixed in with the relief. And something else. She felt her throat go dry and swallowed before she asked, “Is there anyone who can vouch for you?”

  “Me, lassie,” said Tam, ignoring Monahan’s earlier admonishment. “I was with the band the whole evening. After we broke down the equipment, I ran Andy home in my Mini.”

  Melody didn’t intend to let Tam Moran answer for Monahan. “Where’s home, Mr. Monahan?”

  “Hanway Place. Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. And I don’t have a car, if that’s what you’re wondering. I didn’t go back to Crystal Palace.” He thought for a moment, absently plucking a few strings on the guitar, but didn’t take his eyes from Melody. “You said ‘suspicious death.’ What happened to this bloke?”

  “I’m afraid that’s confidential for the moment,” she answered, in her primmest police-speak. It wouldn’t be confidential for long, once the press got hold of the details. “Had you ever seen Mr. Arnott before? Reg at the White Stag said he was a regular there.”

  Monahan shook his head, frowning. “Don’t think so. And we’d never played that pub before.” The twist of his lips told her that it was not an experience he’d care to repeat.

  “But you did hit someone last night, Mr. Monahan,” Melody persisted. “Was it someone who might have known the victim? Was that why Mr. Arnott was so upset?”

  “No. I don’t see how—” Monahan seemed to stop himself. “It was just some guy who’d had too much to drink and objected to our covers.”

  Melody studied him. “Do you always beat up the audience, Mr. Monahan? Not the best practice for someone who lives by their hands, I would think.”

  He flushed and looked away for the first time. “I don’t like being shoved. And I don’t like people putting their mitts on my guitar.”

  “Sergeant.” It was Caleb Hart, who had carefully put down his video camera and now approached her, glancing at his watch. A Rolex, if she wasn’t mistaken. “If there’s nothing else we can help you with, our time here is fleeting. And expensive.”

  Melody felt a flash of irritation at being so summarily dismissed. But remembering the music they’d been making, she felt a stab of regret as well for the bubble she’d burst. She somehow doubted that they would all come together again in the same way, at least on this day.

  “If you could just give me your contact information, Mr. Monahan and Mr. Moran. I think that will be all for now.” She was brusque, determined to put herself back in charge, but the harder she tried for authority, the more she felt she was making a fool of herself.

  Monahan patted his jeans pockets, then, looking around, said, “Tam, have you got a card?”

  His manager took a slightly weathered business card from a case in his jacket and passed it to him, along with a pen. Monahan slipped off the guitar and placed it on its stand, then walked over to the piano and used the flat surface of its top to scrawl on the back of the card. He brought it to Melody with a flourish.

  “Name. Address. Mobile,” he said, and there was a hint of challenge in his look as he handed it to her.

  She gave her own card to Tam, then Monahan, and told herself it was an accident when his fingers brushed hers. “Thanks. You’ll let me know if you think of anything else,” she added, making it a statement. “Thanks for your time.”

  Turning, she walked to the door, very aware of the clickety-clack of her heels on the floor and of four pairs of eyes on her back.

  She let herself out onto the platform, took a gulp of cold air, then started carefully down the stairs. Halfway, she stopped, hoping to hear the music start again, but there was not a sound from above.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Locally the place name is often [used] as an alternative to Upper Norwood or the postcode area of SE19. If you ask a London taxi driver to take you to Crystal Palace he will usually assume to take you to the end of Crystal Palace Parade at the top of Anerley Hill, which used to have a roundabout and was the former location of the Vicar’s Oak.

  —www.crystalpalace.co.uk

  “It wa
s huge, the Crystal Palace.” Andy threw his arms wide in demonstration, and Nadine, sitting on the far side of the step, ducked away, laughing.

  “I believe you,” she said. “Really. I do. Be careful with that guitar,” she admonished. “You might actually be good at playing it, one of these days.”

  Flushing, Andy settled the Höfner more firmly across his knees. It was the first time anyone had given him the least bit of encouragement, and coming from Nadine it meant more than anything. He practiced every day, and had taken to playing on the front steps when he knew Nadine would be home soon. A lame excuse for keeping his observation post, but she didn’t seem to mind him being there.

  They’d developed an unspoken routine. When Nadine had parked her rattletrap of a Volkswagen, she’d put her handbag and work things in her flat before coming out again with lemonade or fizzy drinks for them both. Sometimes she changed from her dress into shorts, and pulled her hair up into a ponytail. She looked even younger then.

  Andy had found an old strap for the Höfner at a charity shop on Westow Hill, and although he thought he probably looked a right prat wearing it sitting down, he did it anyway. It made him feel more like a real guitar player. While he and Nadine drank their lemonade, he played little snippets for her. New chords, a bit of a picking pattern. Never a whole song—that would have been totally naff.

  She listened, and then they’d talk. That’s how he’d learned that she liked history, and that she didn’t know much about Crystal Palace.

  “Wasn’t it just taken down in Hyde Park and put up again here, on Sydenham Hill?” she asked now.

  “No, look,” he protested, pulling carefully folded papers from the back pocket of his jeans. He’d made copies at the library of some of the old black-and-white photos in the reference books. Smoothing them out, he handed them to Nadine and she took them, studying the pictures intently. That was one of the things he liked about her. She listened, and she looked at things, really looked, not just glancing at something and saying, “Oh, that’s nice, dear,” like most adults. Or his mum.

  Not that he could think about her being anything like his mum. His mum was thirty-five, and he couldn’t imagine Nadine being nearly that old, even though he knew she’d been married. But when he’d got up the nerve to ask her, she’d just laughed, and told him not to be cheeky.

  Pointing at the top photo, he said, “It was bigger than the original Crystal Palace, the one they built in Hyde Park.”

  “You’ve been swotting,” she said. “It was for the Great Exhibition, wasn’t it? The original one. In—”

  “In 1851. But when they rebuilt it, it had twice as much glass as the first one. And it took twenty-three months to build,” he ventured, glancing at her to see if she looked bored. “It was 1,608 feet long, 315 feet wide, and 108 feet high.”

  A little crease appeared between Nadine’s brows as she frowned. The bridge of her nose was slightly pink and there was a dusting of freckles across it. Even Andy, with his fair coloring, had gone brown as a nut in the past few weeks.

  “I thought they just took it down and put it back up again,” she said. “Like one of those conservatory kits people buy for their gardens, only bigger.” She was teasing him a bit, he could tell by the tone of her voice, but he liked it. “Did you learn all that in school?” she asked.

  “No.” When she waited for him to say more, he made a G chord on the neck of the Höfner and ran his thumb over the strings ever so lightly. “The library,” he admitted, a little reluctantly. Then, having confessed, he owned up to worse. “I like it there.”

  “Hmm. I like libraries, too.” She smiled, and from her voice he could tell she meant it. “They’re quiet,” she added. “And nobody bothers you.”

  He relaxed, feeling that she understood, but he still couldn’t bring himself to tell her that it was the one place he felt free from the worry about his mother. They never talked about personal things—he didn’t even know where Nadine worked—and he somehow sensed that there were boundaries he shouldn’t cross.

  Nadine turned to the second photo, this one of the palace’s interior, showing the great arched dome filled with fountains and pools, statues, even trees. She traced the pool in the photo with a fingertip, then said softly, “‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree: where Alph, the sacred river, ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to the sunless sea.’”

  A cloud passed over the sun and Andy felt a cooler breath of air lift the damp hair on his forehead. “What is that? Did you make it up?”

  “No, it’s Coleridge. You won’t have had that in school yet, will you?” said Nadine, shaking her head. “Not until secondary school. But that’s what it made me think of, this great crystal palace—Coleridge’s poem. As if they tried to enclose paradise, like Kubla Khan.” She handed the papers back to him. “I wish I could have seen it, the Crystal Palace. What happened to it?”

  “It burned. In 1936.” Although he knew that perfectly well, saying it aloud made him feel funny inside. Hollow. For a moment he wasn’t sure he trusted himself to say more without his voice going wobbly. Then, gripping the Höfner a little more tightly, he added, “You could see the fire from eight counties. And when the sun rose the next morning, the palace was gone, all of it. There was nothing left but rubble.”

  After talking to the SOCOs, Gemma left the basement and found an irritable and frustrated Shara MacNicols in the hotel reception area.

  If the place had been unappealing that morning, it was now considerably less so. The cheap tables were littered with plates of drying sandwich crusts, glasses, and scummy half-drunk cups of tea. The staff were no longer huddled together, but had migrated to different parts of the room, as though fearing contagion.

  Shara MacNicols, studying an antiquated hotel register at the reception desk, looked up in surprise when Gemma entered through the interior door. “Guv. Where did you come from?”

  “Downstairs. I came in through the fire door. Mike and Sharon have almost finished processing the scene. Any progress up here?”

  “We’ve taken details from the guests and let them go. There were a couple of commercial travelers, and a few unlucky tourists. No one else had a room in the basement. Apparently ‘Mr. Smith’ asked for that room particularly when he stayed here. That’s why the cleaner assumed it would be empty first thing this morning, because he never stayed the entire night.”

  “Did he ask for that room because of the fire door?” Gemma wondered aloud. “And if so, did he know the latch was defective, or did he just have the women wait outside until he could open the door and let them in?”

  Shara nodded towards the staff in the reception area. “You won’t get this lot to admit it if they knew the fire door was wonky.” Raymond, the young, spotty-faced clerk, was hunched over his mobile, texting as if his life depended on it. Mrs. Dusek, the manager, was chewing a cuticle as she watched them anxiously. The cleaner, still in her smock, stared vacantly into space. “They’ve all gone completely dumb,” Shara added, sounding disgusted. “There is a handyman, but it seems it’s his day off. Very convenient. I’ve put that green constable—Gleason—on tracking him down, but I suspect he’ll have been warned.”

  “You’ve been watching conspiracy theories on the telly,” said Gemma, and was rewarded with a faint smile. She started to say, “Good work, Shara,” but stopped herself, knowing that her detective constable would take it as patronizing. Instead, she thought for a moment, then said, “Let’s see if we can find any other guests who’ve stayed in one of the basement rooms recently—assuming that they’ve actually given their real names and details. Someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in lying about the door.”

  “Do you think it really makes a difference, guv?” asked Shara, eyeing the hotel register with distaste.

  “I don’t think we should just assume that Arnott’s killer came to the hotel with him.”

  “What?” Shara gave her a look that said she thought Gemma was daft. “You mean yo
u think some random nutter might have walked in the fire door, tied Arnott up, and strangled him? And Arnott just said, ‘Well, have a go, then’?”

  Gemma shrugged. “It’s possible. Anything is possible at this point.” Seeing that Mrs. Dusek was straining to hear her and that the spotty clerk had looked up from his texting, Gemma turned away from them and lowered her voice. “Say Arnott brought a woman here. Say the woman had a jealous husband who followed them. The husband—or boyfriend—could have waited until the woman left, then surprised Arnott. Maybe he threatened him with a knife or a gun. Maybe he hit him over the back of the head and the wound wasn’t visible. Just don’t theorize in advance of the facts.”

  “La-di-da,” Shara muttered, turning back to the register with a scowl.

  Gemma bit back a retort. She knew from experience that a reprimand would make Shara go silent and sulky, but it wouldn’t change her mind. And that was the thing that was likely to keep Shara MacNicols from ever being a really good detective, no matter how hard she worked and how badly she wanted to get ahead in the job. Shara wanted things to be black and white and she got stroppy when you tried to get her to see past the obvious, because she felt you were wasting her time.

  “Just do it,” said Gemma with a sigh. “Have the other basement rooms been searched, just in case our killer took advantage of the vacancy? He—or she”—she put in before Shara could correct her—“could have left something behind.”

  Having told Shara that once the SOCOs were finished and the other basement rooms searched, she could seal off the downstairs and let the hotel return to normal business, she walked back along Church Road, intending to meet Melody at the Arnotts’ house.

  But as she neared the White Stag, she saw Melody standing in front of the pub, phone to her ear.

  Disconnecting as Gemma reached her, Melody said, “Boss, I’ve requested all the CCTV footage for the area. I had another word with Reg”—she nodded towards the pub—“and he says the whole of Crystal Palace was blanketed with fog last night, so I don’t know how much good it will do us.”