The Second Strain

by John Burke

  ‘What are you really hoping for from DNA testing?’

  ‘Can’t we have five minutes without feeding our headaches?’ Rutherford downed another long swig, then peered at her across the top of his glass: ‘All right, what did you hope for when you started on this case?’

  ‘I’d hoped some shreds of clothing round that first corpse would have helped us identify her. But she was naked. And the bacteria didn’t leave much of her. What we’d thought might be shreds of skin lifted from the bone turned out to be sacking fibres. The body must have been wrapped in a sack.’

  ‘For ease of handling, you might say?’

  ‘You might.’

  ‘You think there’s a possibility that this Adam Lowther’s father murdered the woman and then cleared off quickly?’

  ‘It was about the right time, but I can’t see a motive. More likely story, Erskine wanting to get her out of the way. And that doesn’t fit in with our calendar. Erskine had been long gone. And we don’t have any evidence that he came back around the probable date of that woman’s murder, do we?’

  ‘No. And still no idea about her identity. But you still think Erskine was somehow involved — and that’s why he came back for a sniff round? I’d have thought he’d have preferred to stay away.’

  Lesley summoned up all her courage. ‘I’m still convinced this is all wrapped up with the music business, somehow.’

  Rutherford groaned. ‘I thought paintings and pretty knick-knacks were your line, Les. Since when have you been doing the old tonic sol-fa?’

  ‘Music is an art form, too.’

  ‘Not the sort my kids blast out, it’s not.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s something in all this — Erkine’s music, even that disappearing Czech friend of his, Adam Lowther’s passion for music, that McLeod woman . . . it all has to come together somehow. Like a perfect cadence at the end.’

  ‘For crying out loud . . .’

  ‘The McLeod woman will be at the concert this evening. It’ll be a memorial concert now. Interesting to see how some folk will react.’

  ‘Oh, I get you. You want to go out for the evening.’

  ‘One of us ought to be there.’

  ‘Soft lights and sweet music? Probably send you to sleep.’

  ‘No. It’s the discords I’ll be listening for.’

  ‘Christ. Give me a butch policewoman who spends her spare time on a touchline rather than this.’ Rutherford drained his glass. ‘Just for ruining the taste of that last pint, you can buy me another.’ When she got back, he said: ‘All right. Go to that concert, and keep your eyes open. They’ll all be there, won’t they — everybody who’s anybody in this grand opera?’

  ‘That’s the point I was making.’

  ‘OK. But don’t enjoy yourself. I’m not giving you a briefing to enjoy yourself.’

  *

  That evening the streets ran with rippling streams of people flowing towards the Academy, chattering like water over rocks. Some of the men remained silent, dragged by their womenfolk to a function they had no wish to attend.

  Inside the entrance lobby, Mrs Scott-Fraser presided at a table, flanked by two timid women who kept glancing at her for approval or instructions. All three of them waited for Lesley to produce a ticket. Before she had uttered three or four words to say that she hadn’t had time to book, Mrs Scott-Fraser shook her head regally.

  ‘No sales at the door, I’m afraid. A late sell-out of tickets. Once the news of this dreadful business got out.’ She looked Lesley up and down with increasing disdain. ‘Really, people’s ghoulish tastes are deplorable.’

  Lesley produced her warrant card.

  ‘Ah. On duty, officer?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. I —’

  ‘We have covered all safety aspects, and we have a paramedic in attendance in case of over-excitement anywhere. What do we need the police for? My husband’s on the Police Committee, you know, and we’re not aware of our having made any request for a plain clothes officer to be present. Since you appear to be here in a civilian capacity, I’m afraid I must repeat that there are no seats available. I’m so sorry.’

  Which she clearly was not.

  Chapter Seven

  A fat man and two fluttering women with turquoise silk wraps over their shoulders pushed past Lesley. The man thrust a clutch of tickets under Mrs Scott-Fraser’s nose and tried to walk on. Mrs Scott-Fraser said: ‘Just a moment, please, just a moment, I didn’t see them properly.’ The man snorted and tried to press on, but his way into the hall was blocked by Sir Nicholas Torrance coming out.

  Nick said: ‘Any problems, Mrs Scott-Fraser?’

  ‘Nothing that I can’t handle, Sir Nicholas.’

  Grumpily the man turned back to the table and jabbed his tickets under her nose. After separating them and inspecting each one suspiciously, Mrs Scott-Fraser at last gave him a lofty nod.

  Nick took Lesley’s arm and drew her back against the wall. ‘Coming here to pick up any false notes in the orchestra?’

  ‘I thought I’d relax for a couple of hours,’ she hedged. ‘But I might have known the place would be booked solid.’

  ‘Only because of the extra bit of drama. Word soon got round. Sudden rush of bookings from ghouls rather than concertgoers.’

  He was still holding her arm. She was in no hurry to make him let go. She let herself be steered through the doorway into the hall. There was a constant squeaking and scraping of chairs as new arrivals squinted down at the ends of rows and then pushed their way along past the knees of those already in place.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Lesley asked as she was led to the fourth row.

  ‘We reserved some seats for music critics. One has just notified us that he can’t make it. Probably calculates that he’ll get more free booze in Wexford than he’s likely to get here. So there’s an empty seat.’

  His hand released her as he pointed along the row. It was Lesley’s turn to edge past feet and knees, mumbling apologies until she reached the empty chair.

  The Westermarch Sinfonia was assembling on the platform, and the repeated A from the oboe was sounding.

  Her neighbour was a man with improbably flaxen curls and pouting lips, who eyed her with unashamed curiosity that had nothing sexual in it. He introduced himself at once. ‘Colin Baird from the Scottish Musical Quarterly. What paper are you from? Don’t recollect seeing you before.’

  She wondered whether to say something about being just one of the audience, but then said: ‘I’m a police officer.’

  ‘Gracious me. Waiting for the orchestra to murder the music?’

  It showed signs of being the running gag of the evening.

  ‘Not at this very moment,’ she said. ‘I’ve just come to listen.’

  ‘For your own pleasure? Goodness. I have to listen, of course. But frankly, if you folk do catch up with Daniel Erskine’s murderer, I think you ought to shove a bouquet into his hands rather than put the cuffs on him. No more of those dreadful Erskine outpourings, Never could stand the man.’

  ‘But you’ve come, just the same?’

  ‘That’s what I’m paid for, my dear.’

  The orchestra fell silent as Sir Nicholas Torrance came on stage. The audience muttered and whispered until a few louder voices said: ‘Shh. Shh.’

  Nick’s voice was clear and decisive. Lesley could see that he had no intention of meandering on. ‘There is very little we can say this evening. What should have been a great musical tribute to our outstanding local composer is now unfortunately a memorial concert. But that will not detract from the musical achievement. Saddened as we may be by the tragic death of Daniel Erskine, we can best pay our respects by celebrating what he achieved while he was alive.’

  ‘Celebrating?’ muttered Baird. ‘Well, that’s one word for it.’

  There was a spattering of respectful applause as Nick walked off the stage. The orchestra resumed its tuning-up.

  Lesley had a quick glance round at the audience. At the last minute,
Mrs Scott-Fraser was fussing at the end of a row, making it clear that she was on the committee and everything might fall apart if she did not continue checking on every last little detail before edging her way past a long selection of knees to her place in the centre.

  Mairi McLeod had a place of honour at the front. Would she stand up to the strain without dissolving in tears? It might have been better not to expose her so prominently.

  The first violin took his place. Louder applause greeted the conductor. He was a tall young Glaswegian already developing a shiny bald patch in the middle of straggly, sandy hair. There was just enough of that hair to be tossed as he swung his head towards the orchestra and raised his baton.

  Within five minutes Colin Baird was scribbling notes in the margins of his programme.

  The first piece was a tone poem, The Eildon Tree. It told the story of Thomas the Rhymer, presented with a faery harp and the gift of telling the truth though, like Cassandra, he was rarely believed. Throughout the three linked sections the ‘truth’ theme was played by the harp, but subjected to a repeated counterpoint of attacks distorting it and trying to pull it apart.

  Lesley concentrated not so much on the music as on what it might tell her about the man behind it, Daniel Erskine. She made an effort not to be distracted by the fidgetings of a couple in the second row, nodding complacently at each other every few minutes in order to display their critical acuity.

  As soon as the last bars faded and the applause began, Baird was ready to pontificate. ‘The scordatura in the second movement was fairly predictable. Tuning up the strings just to make a heightened impression. Old tricks, wouldn’t one say?’ He pouted condescendingly, sure she wouldn’t understand a word, but enjoying the resonance of his own opinions. ‘I’ll grant you, though, that the configurations in the last piece have a certain provocative charm. Those clusters of repeated notes, unaccentuated. In the context of the title, one would have thought the rhythm is meant to be that of a Scotch snap — semiquaver first, then dotted quaver. Of course one does also find it in some Eastern European music, but in Erskine’s muddled way he seems to have combined it with the repeated curves of demotic speech patterns one finds in Janáček’s music. Derived from Moravian dialect, of course.’

  She was saved from having to contrive some response by the return of the conductor, the obligatory bow, and the clearing of throats as players and audience waited again for the rise of the baton.

  In the next piece, Fantasia on Three Hebridean Melodies, Lesley found she didn’t need to concentrate. The music itself was seizing her attention. One insistent theme began to beat in her head, shouldering its way through the harmonic complexities. She could see other members of the audience, but they were shapes from a dream, transparent against a startling reality. Colin Baird’s lips twitched in self-satisfied derision. In the middle of her row, Mrs Scott-Fraser was jabbing an elbow into her husband’s side as he threatened to fall asleep against the shoulder of his other neighbour. And all the time a repetitive pattern struggled to shape itself between Lesley’s eyes and those irrelevant shapes.

  At the end, just before the interval, Baird said: ‘A pretty dismal theme for that final fugue, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I was trying to work it out. It did start on C, didn’t it?’

  ‘Aha! You evidently have a well-tuned ear.’ It might have been a sneer or just a condescending encouragement.

  ‘But then . . . well, another C, and . . . would it have been an A?’

  ‘Nice work, officer. And then a B-flat, and . . . but really, how can anyone be expected to develop anything from a tone row that just wobbles to and fro around semitones? It was almost as dreary as that tune Frederick the Great handed over to poor old Bach. Only Bach was at least a genius.’

  Chairs were scraping and clashing again as people drifted towards the bar in the cramped room next door which had once been the staff common room and then a stores office.

  ‘You fancy a drink?’ said Baird.

  ‘Thank you, but no. I’ll just catch a breath of fresh air.’

  ‘Mustn’t drink on duty, what?’

  Lesley headed for the exit. At the table in the entrance, Mrs Scott-Fraser had buttonholed Nick Torrance and was holding forth. Nick greeted Lesley’s appearance with relief, striding towards her on the pretence of something important having just occurred to him.

  She said: ‘I’ve heard something in that music. I can’t quite believe it.’

  ‘Some of it’s pretty congested.’

  ‘What I mean is, there’s a message there. Or a joke. A sort of nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Could we go out in the yard for a moment?’

  A few other concertgoers were strolling around the edge of the yard. One or two took the opportunity of staring over the fencing at the tidily heaped remains of what had been the school tower. From a far corner, Captain Scott-Fraser’s voice rose in protest. ‘Not a bloody tune anywhere. What sort of music d’ye call that?’

  ‘Well?’ said Nick. ‘What’s this sudden revelation?’

  ‘There’s this recurring theme.’ She tried to produce a subdued whistle. When Nick bent towards her, she did it again, more boldly. ‘What are those notes?’

  ‘Assuming you have perfect pitch, which does seem to be the case, they would be . . .’ He whistled faintly to himself. ‘C . . . C . . . A . . . B . . . or is that B-flat? You wavered a bit over that semitone. And then it’s E, or could be E-flat.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Actually, in the piece itself, I remember getting the theme in the major and then in the minor.’

  Lesley said: ‘So it spells CCABE. If there were an M . . . only is there a note represented by M?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  The crowd was drawing back respectfully to allow Mairi McLeod to approach, in her black dress looking tragic and sumptuous at the same time.

  ‘Later,’ murmured Nick. ‘We’ll talk later.’

  Back in the hall, Lesley found her head still buzzing with that theme. It made it impossible for her to detect anything else in the pseudo-classical suite which followed. At the end of the performance she hung about near the exit, jostled by people exchanging opinions which suggested they were glad the evening was over. Her pulse quickened as Nick elbowed his way towards her.

  ‘M,’ he said. ‘The German for a minor key is moll. And the theme was continually working its back through various modulations into the minor.’

  ‘The theme of McCabe,’ she said.

  The crush was again edging back to provide a channel through itself for Mairi McLeod to approach Nick as if seeking his protection.

  ‘You’d better come and see me tomorrow morning,’ he said quickly.

  *

  On the Monday morning, Lesley hurried to Black Knowe first thing, before Rutherford returned from a visit to the pathologist to discuss the ramifications of DNA testing.

  A lot of noise was audible several hundred yards away from the tower. A group was rehearsing on the platform. Captain Scott-Fraser, also up and about early, came marching past Lesley towards the side of the stage. He groped under it and pulled a plug. A final squeal from one of the speakers left a few thin voices dying on the morning air.

  ‘Damn racket. And damn bad taste, when a chap’s just been killed. Even if he is no great loss.’

  ‘What the hell d’you think you’re up to, grandpa?’

  ‘Can’t sing without those boosters, hey? Go on, let’s hear you. Pathetic little squeaks without ’em, hey?’

  They showed every sign of assaulting him until Lesley quickened her pace and confronted them.

  ‘Well, now, and where do you fit into this, gorgeous?’

  She showed her warrant card.

  ‘God, that’s terrifying. We’re awestruck. Isn’t our awe mightily struck, fellers? You going to arrest us?’

  ‘If you make it necessary, yes.’

  The young man stared at her, then grinned quite agreeably, ‘Whatever you say, officer.’ He jerked a thumb at Scott-Fraser. ‘Count yourself lucky.
And clear off.’

  ‘I’m not in the habit of being spoken to by —’

  ‘Captain Scott-Fraser,’ said Lesley, ‘I think it would save an unpleasant incident if you were to leave.’

  He went off, muttering about collapse of discipline, police siding with vandals, and raising the matter with the Police Committee. ‘A dose of conscription would do ’em all a world of good . . . a world of good . . .’

  Lesley went into the tower.

  Nick was at the keyboard, and after standing up to greet her was eager to get back to it.

  ‘He’s worked wonders with that motto theme.’ He picked out the notes that had been burning in her brain. ‘Now listen to this.’ Again his fingers stabbed and ran.

  ‘Upside down?’ she hazarded.

  ‘A mirror inversion, yes. And then’ — he bent over the keyboard — ‘retrograde. And then he alters the pace, spreads it out — augmentation.’

  He sat back, beaming at her.

  ‘Somebody’s been playing very complicated games,’ she said. ‘But where do they lead?’

  ‘I’ve been doing a bit of telephoning before you got here. Would you like to come to London with me?’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘My parents were first-rate musicians. Even in the bad old Communist days they were welcome behind the Iron Curtain, provided they just played and didn’t go around fomenting revolution.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Jan Strepka,’ said Nick. ‘Ian McCabe to you. Decided to go back to Czechoslovakia, and that was the last anyone heard of him. Or was it? The Cultural Attaché at the Czech Embassy was a minor functionary under the old regime. Handled my parents’ concert bookings and accommodation — under strict supervision. But he was a nice bloke. Kept his head down, and now he’s been promoted. He’s digging out some files for me by tomorrow. I think you ought to be there.’

  ‘I don’t see the DCI getting very enthusiastic over that.’