The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “I see him very little,” said Mr Cazalet neutrally.

  “Just so long as he lasts long enough to complete the great work,” came Mr Pickles’s voice fading down the long corridor. Then I heard him laugh – a silly, childish laugh. I stayed in the privy, frozen to the spot, looking at my reflection in the glass.

  I was not looking ill, not “increasingly ill” every time I came to the Pickleses. If I was, the Princess would have noticed and been concerned. She is very conscious of the great gap between my great age and her little one. She has so few congenial souls around her that she is desperate not to lose one of them. No, I was not looking more and more sickly.

  On the other hand, there was the bowel trouble that had taken me to the privy in the first place.

  There was another thing that troubled me: the foolish laugh as the pair disappeared from earshot. It sounded not just silly, but less than sane. Senile. And I thought of the fearsome mother now apparently sunk into imbecility for many years. Was senility heritable? Did that explain the multitude of reasons given for the Requiem’s composition? To me it was for his wife; to his wife it was for his mother; to his thoughtless and senseless sons he gave the least likely explanation of all – that it was for his librarian. It all sounded like a foolish jape. It suggested softening of the brain.

  I told all this to the Princess Victoria at the beginning of her next lesson. Her performances that day were more than usually inaccurate and insensitive, and I drew her attention to this several times. Finally, as the lesson ended, she pulled down the piano lid and said: “I’m sorry to play so badly, Mr Mozart. The truth is, I am worried.”

  “Oh dear. Your mother and Sir John again?”

  “Not at all. Well, yes, they are at it, but it’s you I am worried about, and what you told me about Mr Pickles. Has it occurred to you that, if he is so concerned to hide the authorship of this Requiem, the most convenient death for him would be your own?”

  I fear I was so surprised that I could make no adequate response. I took my leave, made for the door, and turned to bow my farewells. The Princess had not finished with me.

  “What was the nature of this little room from which you overheard this interesting conversation, Mr Mozart?”

  My mouth opened and shut and I scurried out to make my escape.

  Arsenic. That’s what it was. I wondered at the Princess’s knowledge of the ways of the criminal world, but then I remembered she had grown up surrounded by plots and conspiracies. Threats on her life (usually involving the Duke of Cumberland, the next in line to the throne) had been the staple of society and newspaper gossip. Arsenic, the poison that is best administered first in small doses, leading up to a fatal dose. Illness of an internal kind is first established, than accepted as the cause of death. Simple.

  And who, after all, questions the cause of death of a seventy-nine-year-old man? I was a sitting duck. And my murderer, insultingly enough, was a brain-softened vulgarian from the North of England!

  On the next occasion, later that same week, that Mr Pickles came to hear my latest inspirations I put into action a cunning but simple plan. Standing by the small table, with the chocolate already poured out, I remarked to Mr Pickles that the magnificent proportions of the room were remarkably similar to those of St Margaret on the Square, one of the churches we had considered for the first performance of the Requiem. I suggested he go to the far end of the room to hear how my latest extracts, from the Benedictus, would sound. He was childishly delighted with my proposal. As he walked the length of the room I changed our cups around. The biter bit! I played some of the Benedictus and Mr Pickles expressed his delight: the music penetrated to the far end of the room and was wonderful. We resumed our discussion over chocolate and I looked closely to see if a grimace came over the Pickles face when he tasted it, but I could see nothing.

  My next conversation with a member of the Pickles family came two days later. I was sketching a crucial moment in the Rex Tremendae when the door to my little anteroom opened and the younger son, Seymour, put his head in.

  “I say, Mr Mo-zart.”

  “Yes?”

  “This Requiem you’re writing and pretending my Dad did it all – who is it supposed to be for? I mean, who is it commemorating, if that’s the right word? Eh? Who is dead?”

  “I believe it is to commemorate your mother.”

  “Well, she’s alive and blooming and if she’s ill she’s quite unaware of it. And we’d – that’s Jimmy and me – heard it was for Cazalet the book johnnie. Damned unlikely, what? And now I’ve heard it is for Gran, who is alive but not so you’d notice and there won’t be much difference when she finally goes over the finishing line.”

  “I couldn’t comment. Maybe your father is confused. Many people who have lived exceptionally active lives do get … brain-tired earlier than most of us. Or perhaps he has just been joking.”

  “Pater doesn’t joke. And a Requiem’s a pretty funny thing to joke about. But you think senility, maybe? I think I ought to talk to a lawyer. He could be declared non compos. Stop him throwing his money around.”

  “I doubt it. I have seen no signs of it except for the stories about the Requiem. His condition would have to be much further advanced before you could start trying to jump into his shoes.”

  “I say, you make it sound unpleasant. I mean, I’m deuced concerned—”

  I got up and shut the door on him.

  A crisis in an affair such as this should not be too long delayed. In a comedy it would come in the third act, with the outcome in the last. Two days after my conversation with Seymour, Isaac Pickles and I had one of our afternoon meetings. We talked first, I explained my aims in the Tuba Mirum, he got up of his own accord and by the time he reached the end of the room the jugs had been shifted round and I was at the piano ready to play and add a sketchy vocal performance as well.

  “Enthralling, Mr Mozart,” he said, when he returned to the table. “You have excelled yourself – as I always say because you always do.” He took up his little jug of chocolate, poured it into his cup, added sugar, stirred, and then took a great, almost a theatrical gulp at it.

  It was as if his eyes were trying to pop out of his face with astonishment – he let out a great, flabbergasted yell, then cried out in fear and outrage. As he weakened he bellowed something – a command, a query, a protestation of innocence. I could only assume he had put a hefty dose of arsenic in my chocolate jug, and was now really getting the taste of it for the first time. I ran to the door, but before I got there Seymour had appeared through the door at the room’s other end, and before I could shout servants were running into the room from all quarters. When I got back to the table the butler was trying to induce vomiting, others were banging him on the shoulders or trying to put their fingers down his throat. Soon two footmen came with a stretcher and said the doctor had been sent for. He was taken, crying out and retching, to his bedroom. The family physician arrived twenty minutes later. By six o’clock in the evening he was dead. The doctor, though he had not been consulted recently, heard from servants and family Isaac Pickles’s complaints about an upset stomach. The lower footman who serviced the privies gave more specific evidence. The doctor signed the certificate. I was left to ponder what in fact had happened.

  On the long walk back to my house in Covent Garden I subjected my assumption to detailed scrutiny. Would a man who had just popped a hefty dose of arsenic into my chocolate jug take a first taste of his own chocolate in the form of a massive gulp? I would have thought that, however confident he was of having got the right cup, some primitive form of self-protection would ensure he took a modest sip.

  Then again, why would he try to poison me now? The Requiem was barely half complete in rough form. If he had waited a few months it could have been in the sort of shape that would mean it could be completed by one of my pupils – the dutiful but uninspired Frank Sussman sprang to mind. Certainly Isaac Pickles couldn’t complete it himself. By poisoning me at this point he was sp
oiling all his own plans, mad as they were, by killing the goose that was laying the golden egg. If senility was setting in – and I rather thought it was – it was strongly affecting his judgement and his logic and causing him to act in his own worst interests.

  Was there an alternative explanation? The chocolate, on days when Mr Pickles intended honouring me with his company, was put outside the drawing room on an occasional table, the jugs protected by their padded cosies. When Pickles arrived the chocolate was brought in by the footman if one was around, or by the Great Man himself if one was not. Either outside the drawing room or once he’d got in Mr Pickles added a small amount of arsenic to my jug or my cup. His plan was a very small increase in amount so that my death could be timed to coincide with the completion (or the as-near-as-makes-no-difference completion) of the Requiem. He was already anxiously scrutinizing my appearance and convincing himself I was looking ill, as in the early stages of the operation I must have been.

  Someone knew I was switching the jugs or the cups. Someone knew that, after a certain time, the arsenic was going not to me but to the master of the house instead.

  Two days after Pickles’s death I received a note from Mr Cazalet “written at the request of Mrs Pickles” expressing the hope that I would continue with the Requiem “so that it may be ready in the course of time to commemorate the melancholy passing of her husband.” The note did not say that the old conditions no longer applied and I could compose the remaining movements in the comfort of my own house, so I was entitled to assume that the conditions were still in force. I hoped by returning to Pickles Palace I could be in a position to solve the mysteries of its master’s death.

  The éclaircissement was not slow coming. After three hours spent in composing (initial uneasiness being settled by the glorious business of creation) I went to the drawing room to play through the near-complete section of the Kyrie – with occasional contributions from my own fallible voice. As I drew to a close, the far door was opened and the figure of Mrs Pickles wafted towards me.

  “Ah, Mr Mozart. Still gloriously in full flood, I’m glad to hear.”

  I bowed.

  “You do me too much honour.”

  “The tenor solo you sang yourself reminded me of the soprano solo in the Benedictus. I suppose that is intentional?”

  She looked at me as she spoke. I held her gaze.

  “Intentional of course … So you have heard some of my compositions for the Requiem already – perhaps from the far door?”

  “Retreating when my husband came down to test the acoustics – yes.”

  “And perhaps at other times taking peeps through the keyhole?”

  “Yes. It’s rather a large one, conveniently. I could not see you at the piano but I had a good view of the little table and chairs. And of course of the tray, with the jugs under the cosies.”

  “I see,” I said, unusually stuck for words.

  “As soon as I saw your little manoeuvres with the jugs or the cups I knew that my warning had at last got through to you. My husband was in the grip of vast senile fantasies in which he was recognized as a great composer. I feared the logical outcome of these delusions, and of all the silly games he played in the household over the person to whom it was to be a memorial, would have to be your death … But arsenic is a slow-working poison in small doses, and when my husband became your intended victim – because I knew that is what he would have become – I decided to hurry the process up, for reasons I will not go into.”

  She looked at me.

  “It has worked very well,” I said. “For both of us.”

  “For both of us indeed,” she said. “I will leave you to your great work. Please remember that if any of this gets out, the first victim of the authorities’ suspicions will be yourself. Farewell, Mr Mozart. We shall doubtless meet when the Requiem is performed. You will – what do they call this new trick? – conduct, will you not? I shall play the afflicted widow to the best of my abilities.”

  And that was how my involvement with the Pickleses ended. When, four months later, the Requiem was performed at St Margaret’s (a church whose vicar went in for the newfangled business of Catholic ritual and costuming), the glorious work was attributed to me, as all would have known in any case, and Mr Pickles’s only look-in was as the “commissioner and dedicatee of the Requiem who tragically only lived to hear the first-written movements of the score”. The Princess Victoria was present with her adulterous mother, and though she said she was “quite prepared to be bored” she had insisted on a place from where she could see the Pickles family, those whom I described in my introduction to the performance as “his grieving widow and his inconsolable sons” (one of whom had a racing journal hidden inside his word sheet). I also saw the family, both when I spoke at the beginning and at the end of the performance, acknowledging the silent (idiotic English habit in a church) expression of enthusiasm. I saw in one of the walled-off family pews a footman put around Mrs Pickles’s shoulders a capacious black shawl, preparatory to attending her out to her carriage. There was on his thick-necked, rather brutal face something close to a leer.

  Eight months after her husband’s death Mrs Pickles was delivered of what was universally accepted to be a daughter of the late Isaac. The London house had been closed up and sold, and Mrs Pickles – in charge of all family affairs until her sons (uncontrollably angry) reached the age of thirty – had moved up North. A year after my last sight of her she had married one of her one-time footmen, now her steward. I hope this time she married for love, though my brief sight of him with her did not suggest it was a wise one.

  “He reminds me of Sir John,” said the Princess with a shiver. She was on the whole a forgiving little thing, but she never was able to reconcile herself to her mother’s lover. I wondered whether, when she came to be our queen, her reign was going to be a lot less fun than most people were expecting.

  BEASTLY PLEASURES

  Ann Cleeves

  * * *

  WHEN I FAILED my A levels my parents weren’t sure what to do with me. But then they’ve never been quite sure what to do with me. I emerged into the world yelling, fighting to make my presence felt, an alien creature to them, and so I’ve remained. They are gentle souls, considerate and unworldly, and they consider me a monster. I tell myself that it isn’t entirely my fault: my parents were older than most when I was conceived and I am an only child, carrying the weight of their expectations. In a different family, in a freer, less ordered household, I might have been respected, even admired. As it is they regard me with dismay and anxiety. How could someone so unconventional, so physically lovely, belong to them? I am the dark-eyed, shapely cuckoo in their nest.

  Of course I set out to fail the exams. It was a challenge: to complete the paper and still achieve so few marks that I’d fail. Almost impossible these days. And harder, I might say, than getting the four As for which the dears had been hoping. All my life I’ve been bored. I have only survived by playing games. I don’t intend to hurt people.

  But of course I had hurt them. We sat in the garden discussing my future. They looked grey and disappointed and for a very brief moment I wished I’d passed the bloody things so that for once they’d have something to celebrate in me. It was very hot. There was a smell of cut grass and melted tar. In the distance the sound of a hosepipe running and a wood pigeon calling.

  “You do realize,” I said, “that I could have passed them if I’d wanted.”

  “Of course.” My father looked at me over his glasses. He was a senior social worker and thought he should understand me.

  “You’ve always been a bright girl.” My mother wore floral print dresses, which might have been fashionable when she was a student in the seventies. She illustrated children’s books – cats were her speciality, though I’d never been allowed pets because she was allergic to their fur.

  “We’ve decided,” she said, “that you should go and work for Uncle George.”

  George wasn’t a real uncle, but
a distant cousin of my father’s. I’d only met him once at my grandmother’s funeral and remember him as a rather glamorous figure, with the look of a thirties movie star. During the service he shot several admiring glances in my direction, but even then I was used to men staring at my body and I took no notice. Vanessa, his wife, was pale, draped in purple chiffon. My parents spoke of the couple occasionally but in no detail. George was a businessman and of course they disapproved of that; I had been brought up to believe that money was grubby and something to be ignored. George and Vanessa lived in London and that alone gave me a frisson of excitement. In the big city there would surely be scope for new adventures and I’d find a way to keep boredom at bay.

  It seemed anyway that I would have no say in the matter. With an uncharacteristic decisiveness my parents told me that everything had been arranged. I would leave by train the following morning. I would become Uncle George’s assistant and return at the end of the year to re-sit my A levels. Working for a living might give me a sense of responsibility. The next day they took me to the station. They stood on the platform waving me off, looking at once sad, guilty and very relieved.

  Uncle George had a house in Camden, between King’s Cross and Regent’s Canal. He was waiting for me at Paddington and in the cab he talked, not expecting any reply.

  “Our neck of the woods has certainly gone up in the world. One time you’d only find whores and bag ladies here. Now we live next door to the Guardian and a major publishing house.”

  I said nothing. I was aware of him sitting beside me. He smelled of sandalwood and something else I couldn’t recognize: a chemical, almost medical scent. It occurred to me that for the first time in my life I was nervous. We stopped in a street that seemed industrial rather than domestic in character. George took my hand to help me out and held it for a little longer than necessary. I recognized him as a kindred spirit then, someone for whom the normal boundaries, the conventional rules of everyday life had no meaning.