La's Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

  La showed Percy Brown the door, which she had shut and locked before fetching him. He opened it, and as she did so, more splinters came away.

  “You see,” she said. “It looks as if it’s been pushed from the inside.” She was less sure, though, and the doubt showed in her voice.

  Percy Brown made a non-committal noise and bent down to examine the door. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and La noticed sweat-stained patches under his arms; it had been a hot afternoon and they were now damp. There was something very masculine about him, she thought; he was beefy; he was like a bull.

  He straightened up and ran his finger down the inside of the jamb. “Yes,” he said. “Here, and … and here.”

  La peered at the place where his fingers had stopped.

  “You see?” he said. “Can you see the marks? That’s where they’ve prised at the door. A screwdriver, maybe. Something of the sort.”

  “From the inside?”

  Percy Brown sniffed. “Looks like it.”

  SHE MADE HIM A CUP OF TEA, and they sat together at the kitchen table. He drummed his fingers lightly on the surface, which irritated her. He noticed the direction of her gaze and checked himself.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Mrs. Brown says that’s my worst habit. But it helps me to think.”

  “I don’t mind,” said La. She did. “And I don’t want to stop you thinking.” She did not.

  He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. “Let’s go over this again. You went to Bury and may or may not have left one of your doors unlocked. Correct?”

  “Yes. I think I locked up, but maybe I didn’t. I don’t know.” She was aware that she was worrying away at the edge of a table napkin that she had left on the table, pulling at the threads. “My neighbour says that nobody locks their doors round here.”

  Percy Brown nodded. “No, they don’t. And most of the time that’s fine. But let’s assume that you didn’t lock up. If somebody came in, then he would have had to do so while you was … you were in Bury. Then you came back and noticed that somebody had interfered with things in the kitchen. The business with the tea caddy.”

  La, who was sitting facing the window, looked beyond Percy Brown’s shoulder into the garden outside. She had left a long-sleeved blouse on the line, and its arms were flapping in the breeze. One of the wind-filled arms came into view at the edge of the window performing a frantic piece of semaphore that caught her eye and held it for a moment while Percy Brown drew breath. He had more to say.

  “So,” he continued. “That means that the intruder was probably in the house when you searched. You must have walked right past him. Not a nice thought, Mrs….”

  “Stone. La.”

  “Not a nice thought, Mrs. Stone, is it? That worries me, you know.”

  La was silent. She had wanted reassurance; she had even hoped that he might come up with some explanation, but instead she was receiving what amounted to a warning. She waited for him to say something. He looked at her, and unfolded his hands.

  “Sometimes we get gypsies,” he said. “They camp down by Foster’s Fields, a few miles away. They can be trouble, as you’ll know. Stealing. Even theft of livestock. Sheep aren’t safe when they’re around. They end up inside a gypsy belly pretty smartly.” He paused. “But they don’t go in for house-breaking. That’s not really their style. They’re outside thieves, that bunch.”

  She felt that she had to say something. “Not gypsies?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So?”

  “I think I’ll just have to report this as an unknown intruder. We get cases like that. Somebody sees a door left open and goes into a house to take a look round, to see if there’s anything that can be easily taken. We call them opportunistic thieves. But what I don’t like about this is the fact that he was fiddling. Fiddling with the tea, of all things. That tells me something.”

  She waited. He was looking at her now, with an eyebrow slightly raised; the look of an avuncular older man about to issue a warning.

  “What does it tell you, Mr. Brown?”

  He looked away for a moment—to examine his fingernails. Then he folded his hands again. “It tells me that he might be interested in you. If people are snooping around a house and nothing’s stolen, then it sometimes means that somebody has too close an interest in another person. Watching them, so to speak.”

  Eight

  THAT NIGHT, or at least the earlier part of that night, was difficult. La left it as late as possible before she went upstairs to bed. She switched on all the lights downstairs, and turned the wireless up as high as she could. She chose Radio Normandie, which was playing dance music. There was a cheerfulness about that, an optimism, which was what she wanted. When she went from the sitting room into the kitchen, the sound of the radio followed her. From the kitchen it sounded almost as if somebody was having a party at the other end of the house; all that was missing was the hum of voices. Perhaps she would have a party some time; but where, she suddenly thought, would the guests come from? Dr. Price might be invited over from Cambridge—it was not too far away. But then she did not like men to be at parties, whereas La did; so that would not work. Perhaps Mr. Thorn, the author of the book on roses. If he lived in Ipswich, he might be able to motor over. She stopped herself; there could be no party for a long time yet.

  There was no curtain in the kitchen, and so when she stood by the sink, filling the kettle, she was looking out upon darkness. Suddenly she noticed a shape a few feet into the dark, at the limits of the light that came from the window. She gave a start, putting the kettle down quickly, spilling water from the spout. But then she realised what it was, and her heart, which had raced, resumed its proper rhythm. The long-sleeved blouse she had seen earlier in the day was still hanging on the line; she had meant to retrieve it, but had forgotten to do so.

  She leaned forward towards the glass pane of the window and looked out again. There was the shape of the elder edge and the trees black against the night sky. There was very little moon—just a sliver—and no other illumination. The Aggs’ farmhouse could not be seen from that vantage point so there was not even a light from that. They would have switched everything off by now, anyway. Farming people went to bed early, to be able to rise at dawn, when there was work to be done.

  La took a deep breath. If I am to live here, she thought, then I cannot let myself be frightened by emptiness and isolation. I shall have to confront my fear.

  She moved towards the door and opened it, trying not to look at the signs of its earlier forcing. She did not wish to be reminded of her conversation earlier that day with Percy Brown—a conversation that had ended with his concluding that there was very little that he could do about her break-in. Now she took a few steps into the dark, and began to remove the wooden pegs that kept the blouse on the line. The garment was dry, and had the fresh smell of cotton that has been left out in the fresh country air, something that her clothing never had in London. Clothing left out in the garden there came in slightly grey, with that vaguely stale smell that could linger in the atmosphere for days when the winds were sluggish.

  She held the cotton of the blouse against her cheeks, and breathed in. She looked about her, her eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the dark. The shapes became more defined now; the woody lavender emerged, the line of box, the large pieris at the edge of the lawn. She took a few steps deeper into the darkness, looking up as she did so, up at the stars, fields of them, it seemed, stretching above in the chambered sky above. As a girl she had known the names and position of the constellations, and some of these were still lodged in memory: Ursa Major, Andromeda, Cassiopeia. She would renew her acquaintance with them now that she was here in a place where the sky was not spoiled by light.

  Suddenly she thought of Richard. She still thought of him every day, but for shorter periods now; he was still there, a stubborn presence, like a scar. Now, at this moment, she missed him sorely. She would give anything, she thought, to have h
im here beside her; to be with him right now, under this sky, in this place. Without him she had nobody to share this with; the experience was half what it could be.

  She put the thought out of her mind. Shortly after Richard had left, a friend in London, to whom the same thing had happened—at the hands of a charming womaniser—had said to her that the trick was to forget the man. “If they’re not there, then we feel much better, you know. So banish him.”

  “But how? How do you stop thinking of somebody when they keep coming back to you? When that person is the only person you want to think about?”

  “You do what monks do when they think about women. You train yourself to think of something else. In their case, the Holy Ghost, I suppose. Or the Devil, I suppose, if they wish to frighten themselves.” She made a face, which indicated that she did not believe in the Devil.

  She had decided to do that; every time he came to mind, she would think of something else, of something very far from Richard. Dr. Price, perhaps, her Cambridge tutor, about whose person there was not the faintest whiff of sulphur, but who could stand in for the Devil. She conjured up an image of Dr. Price, even though her old tutor was no Old English expert, expounding to her on Beowulf in a drowsy supervision, neither of them enjoying the experience, both wanting to talk about Eliot, who was much more to the point than any Scandinavian hero. The dissonance between her memories and Beowulf was sufficient to banish the thought of Richard. And now, out in the garden at night, she thought of Beowulf, and vaguely of Dr. Price, and Richard was gone.

  She walked round towards the front of the house, enjoying the cool evening air. The lawn stretched before her, a dark sward, beyond which the plane trees were a black expanse reaching up to the rather lighter sky. She decided to walk in the direction of the trees; the conquering of her fear made her feel almost giddy and for a few moments she felt as if she might break into song. Once on the lawn, she slipped off her shoes, and felt the grass soft beneath her feet. Somewhere in the distance an owl cried, a sharp sound that she remembered from her childhood; there had been owls in the barn beside the house in Surrey and they were forever screeching.

  She reached the plane trees and stood beneath them for a couple of minutes, relishing the sound of their leaves in the slight breeze that had blown up. Within moments the breeze dropped and the trees were silent again. A leaf dropped, and touched her gently on the cheek as it fell, like the wing of a tiny bird.

  Then she saw the movement. A dark shape on the other side of the lawn detached itself from a shadow and moved, to become another dark shape closer to the house. La caught her breath and stared into the darkness, straining to make out the form of what she had seen. For a few moments it became even darker, though, as a wisp of cloud moved across what little moon there was; La thought she could make out the figure of a man, but then she realised that she was staring at the large wisteria she had been trimming earlier that day. To the right, then, and …

  The man moved suddenly; just a few yards, but enough to make himself distinct against the light that was coming from corner of the large window in the sitting room; the curtains did not meet exactly, and light escaped, enough to silhouette the figure of a man.

  “Boo!”

  It came to her completely spontaneously; so quickly, in fact, that she was unaware of any decision to shout out. And afterwards, when the childish word had been uttered, so loudly that it seemed to fill the night, her breath was gone from her, and she gasped. And the gasp might have been at her own sheer effrontery, or her surprise at what happened next. She saw the man jerk, like a cut-out in a shadow-play, as if invisible strings holding him up had been jerked. Then she heard the thudding of his feet on the gravel as he tore along the path beside the house to make good his escape down the drive.

  She stayed where she was for a few moments. She was shaking, but felt strangely elated, as if she had just run a race and reached the finish line far ahead of the other contestants. She thought she should be feeling frightened, but she did not; she had done exactly what Percy Brown had implied one should do to burglars. You should say boo, and then, exactly as he had predicted, they would run, or scarper, as he put it. He had been talking of a metaphorical boo, but she had taken him at his word and done as advised, with the result that she now saw.

  La crossed the lawn, back towards the house. Then, following the path round towards the back, she found herself on the drive. She felt no fear now as she walked down to the point where the drive joined the lane; the intruder would be well down the road now, heading back to wherever he came from; which must be, she thought, her village, or possibly the neighbouring village two miles away on the Bury road. That thought unnerved her; the idea that this sleepy little place could conceal somebody given to creeping round—and into—the houses of others was not a comfortable one. And yet criminals had to live somewhere; burglars had their neighbours, as indeed did murderers. Such people also had jobs, in many cases; worked alongside workmates, stood or sat beside them in the pub; passed the time of day with others at the bus-stop. In spite of all this, of course, such people still did the things that they did: looked through windows, forced doors, and worse; even if it must have been more difficult for them than their city equivalents. In the city crime was anonymous; here it was personal.

  From the edge of the drive, La noticed a light at Ingoldsby’s farmhouse in the distance, in spite of the lateness of the hour. Agg was up, or Mrs. Agg, perhaps, baking bread in the kitchen. She toyed with the idea of going over there right away, to tell her that that there was a prowler on the loose. Mrs. Agg was proud of her Aylesbury ducks, and if the prowler was a thief—and he must be—then a duck would be a tempting target. But she decided not to go; she had no torch and the car was put away in the garage. She would go tomorrow.

  She was at the back of the house now—the side that faced the lane—close to the kitchen door, from which she had left the house to go into the garden. She made her way to the door and pushed it open—or was it already open? She stopped. She tried to remember: Had she left it ajar when she had gone into the garden, or had she closed it behind her? She closed her eyes. She had been at the kitchen window when she had seen the flapping of her blouse on the line; she had opened the door—she remembered the light from the door falling across the stone paving outside and then … then she had closed it because she remembered how dark it became when she did so. The paving had been dark. It had.

  And now the door was slightly ajar and she did not have to turn the handle. This meant that the intruder had run round the side of the house and rather than running down the drive, as she had imagined he would do, he had gone into the house. She opened her eyes. She had forgotten that she had left a full kettle on the range and it was boiling vigorously now; its whistle had broken and it now let forth little more than a sigh. In the air there was the smell of onions; she had fried some onions earlier on to have with a piece of liver and there was lingering in the air that sweet, slightly pungent smell that took its time to fade. The thought occurred to her: he would have smelled that smell when he came in; he would have become party to that bit of her domestic life—her choice of dinner.

  She hesitated. She wondered whether she should telephone Percy Brown and tell him that she suspected that the intruder was in the house again. But the policeman would probably be asleep by now, and surely he would ask her why she thought that there was somebody in the house. If she explained that the back door was slightly ajar, then he would be bound to think that she was imagining things. Doors can be blown open by the wind; doors could swing open entirely by themselves if not hung true. There were all sorts of reasons why doors could be thought to have been opened by somebody else—and one of these reasons was the overactive imagination of a woman adjusting to the business of living on her own.

  She could not end up running off to Percy Brown every time she felt nervous, and anyway what had happened outside had shown her that the nervousness was on the other side. Yet, would a nervous man have run into t
he house? Hardly; what refuge would there be for him there?

  La closed the door behind her, slammed it for the noise, and then locked it. Radio Normandie was still playing dance music at the other end of the house. She walked down the corridor and went into the sitting room to turn off the radio. Now there was silence, and she listened to that silence, which is never really complete; there were sounds. She heard her own breathing, and her heart, too, she imagined; you could hear such things in a quiet house, if you listened hard, and were close enough. Now, though, she switched off the lamps in the sitting room, but left the light in the corridor burning, both for reassurance and in order to light her way up the first part of the stairs.

  Upstairs she again went from room to room, and found nothing. She opened the door of a large wardrobe in the spare room and looked inside; she peered into the bathroom cupboard and behind curtains in her room. She said to herself: There is nobody in this house, but me. I am not afraid.

  Nine

  SUCH A BRIGHT LIGHT penetrated La’s bedroom curtain, and so early, as it was mid-summer, and the sun was already above the horizon. The birds had been in full throat from five o’clock, asserting their territory to anybody who cared to listen, announcing the beginning of the rural day. La was not a late riser, but five was too early, even for her, and she lay under her blankets for another forty minutes or so, drifting in and out of sleep, before she eventually slipped out of bed and walked barefoot into the upstairs bathroom. Through the bathroom window, a rectangle of old glass with a vertical fault-line of trapped bubbles, La looked out over the fields on the other side of the lane. The field nearest the house had Agg’s sheep in it, and a couple of his Jersey cows. The cows had been milked already, she could see; Mrs. Agg had told her that Agg got up at four to do this, every day, month in, month out, and had been doing that since he was twelve. That was not uncommon in the country, where everybody seemed to have been in the same place, doing the same thing, for most of their lives. Percy Brown had told her that his father had been a policeman in a small town nearby, and the vicar, whom she had met briefly on the day after her arrival, had been born in a vicarage in Bury.