The Second Strain

by John Burke

  She was right. Rutherford said: ‘Not again! Les, you’re getting punch-drunk on this music. It’s affecting your brain.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But not the way you mean.’

  ‘What the hell do you expect to find in London?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But there’s something waiting there. Erskine and the vanishing Czech, and these hidden messages in Erskine’s compositions. Was there a corresponding code at the other end? And somehow there has to be a link with all the grudges that folk around here hold — grudges that last the way Border blood feuds used to last.’

  ‘You’re really hooked on this, aren’t you?’

  ‘You used to boast to me about your hunches. Why shouldn’t I have a few hunches every now and then?’

  ‘There are times when your memory’s too damn sharp.’ His right eyebrow and right shoulder twitched in unison. ‘Oh, all right. Elliot and I have a lot of calls to deal with. A lot of folk have started ringing in. We can weed out the sensation seekers from the useful witnesses, if any. And then I want another session with Forensics. So clear off in the morning.’

  ‘You won’t regret it.’

  ‘Huh. But it’s strictly off the record. We don’t want the Met to complain about us treading on their sensitive toecaps. So this will count as your statutory day off. If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll report that you’ve been under stress and needed some time off.’

  ‘I’m not under stress. I —’

  ‘Don’t bloody argue, Les. I’m looking the other way. Until’ — he grinned his typical greedy Rutherford grin — ‘you come up with the goods. And then I’ll say we worked it out between us and we share the credit, right?’

  Chapter Eight

  Nora Lowther took a final glance at her face in the oval glass at the foot of the stairs, and made a gentle curve of her right index finger to flick a strand of eyelash upwards. She had to open the door into the pend before Adam could step down the last two stairs to stand beside her.

  He kissed her a dry kiss.

  ‘You do understand?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I hope it all goes well.’

  She managed a thin smile. ‘You haven’t pulled the shop blinds down just so that Deirdre can sneak in for the afternoon?’

  ‘Deirdre? Oh, not again. Anyway, she’ll be at your recital to hear you and her husband, won’t she?’

  ‘She says she’s not interested in that sort of thing. We do know the sort of thing she is interested in, don’t we? And anyway, you’re not coming to hear your wife sing, either.’

  ‘But that . . . well, you know it’s different. You do realize, after what’s happened, I’m just not in the mood for . . . You do understand?’ he said again.

  ‘Yes, I do. It’s all right, I understand all right.’

  He stood in the doorway until she had reached the street, in case she turned round to wave. She did not turn. In the distance, the open back door of the Buccleuch Arms gushed a brassy blast of folksy blues from what advertised itself in Adam’s window as The Unbeatable Band from the Debatable Land. He shut the sound out and went through the inner door into his shop.

  It was in deep twilight. The heavy blinds which he rarely used, except for the occasional summer afternoon when the sun on his window display was so intense that he had to lower them halfway, were now fully down. The face of Daniel Erskine frowning out of a poster was no more than a dark ghost — really a ghost, now.

  There might be a profitable trade if he kept the place open today and for the rest of the week, as planned. After last night’s memorial concert, there might well be a number of people wanting to buy discs of Erskine’s music, or the booklet produced by Lowther and Galbraith, or even a cassette of the Unbeatable Band. But he hadn’t the heart to open for business and the breathless chatter that would go with it. Or the heart to go and listen to the recital of trivial ballads by his wife, to the accompaniment of Duncan Maxwell’s thumping. Not after Erskine.

  He tidied a few things that didn’t need tidying, knocked his shin against a stack of cassettes, shifted them to one side, and shuffled round the edge of the screen to lift the lid of the piano, only to let it fall again.

  Somebody tried the shop door. Then rattled the knob impatiently. ‘Adam, I’ve got to talk to you.’

  He slid down on to the piano stool and kept very still.

  ‘Adam, I know you’re in there. I know how you must feel. Do let me in.’

  Deirdre rattled the door again, and he could see enough of her shadow through the blind to see that she was trying to peer round the edge of it. He didn’t make a move; and at last she swore and went away.

  Giving her a good five minutes in case she was still hanging about, waiting for a move, he got up at last and wondered whether to go and make himself a cup of coffee. There was nothing useful he could do in the shop, yet there was even less upstairs. He might just as well have gone to listen to Nora singing. But that was unthinkable.

  In his head he went over and over an eight-bar phrase from Erskine’s ballad, Canobie Dick. It clung to him with all the tenacity of a popular song, refusing to be dislodged.

  Another rattle at the shop door. He froze.

  ‘Adam? Adam Lowther?’

  It was the husky voice of Mairi McLeod.

  He called: ‘Sorry, I’m not opening today.’

  ‘I’ve brought you something. A very special souvenir. Please let me in.’

  He opened the door.

  She was dressed in a black sheath of a dress. Her arms and legs were bare, and there were dark crimson sandals on her feet. When he closed the door behind her, she walked into an even darker darkness, but she was no shadow: he was conscious of her whole being, the heat she was giving out even when she stood quite still.

  ‘Could we have some light on the scene?’

  He didn’t fancy putting all the shop lights on. He went back round the screen to the piano, and switched on the tall angle-poise tilted beside it.

  She held out a stiff card folder. ‘I want you to have this. Daniel would be glad for me to give it you. He was so glad to have met you. And his music does mean so much to you, doesn’t it?’

  Adam opened the folder. Inside were sheets of music. An original manuscript score. He recognized immediately the solo line and harmonies of The Mormaer’s Strathspey and Reel for Fiddle and Piano. It had always appealed to him that Erskine should have specified ‘fiddle’ rather than ‘violin’.

  He found it difficult to speak. ‘This is your transcription, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s . . .’ His eyes wandered down the page, marvelling at the time it must have taken her to work out Erskine’s intentions, play them over to him, revise them, and finally get it all down on the staves. ‘You and Sir Nicholas are performing this on Friday evening, right?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe that’s one recital that’ll have to be cancelled.’

  ‘You don’t feel up to it?’

  ‘Not without more incentive. Nick can be pretty good, but he’s got so many things on his plate right now. And we ought to be rehearsing right now, but he’s gone off somewhere for the day. And Daniel’s music isn’t really in his blood. I was wondering if you . . . do you think you could play it?’

  He knew it off by heart. He opened the piano, set the handwritten score in place, and adjusted the anglepoise lamp.

  Mairi prowled through the twilight of the shop and opened the glass cabinet with two violins, bows and sets of strings in it. Tuning had to be perfunctory. She was all at once in a hurry. She came and stood behind Adam, and just the sensation of her being there was like an embrace.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what you’re made of.’

  He had tried playing the piano part before, from one of the printed copies he kept for sale. So far he had sold only one copy in the past three years, in spite of pointing out its beauties to customers.

  They started raggedly, and he tried to mumble an apology for
a spate of wrong notes; but Mairi McLeod was laughing, and scraping through an out-of-tune passage as if it were the greatest joke in the world. She was adapting to the strings’ faults in the way a gipsy fiddler adapts, plucking the sagging flat note up into something that became more than the original written notation could ever have hoped to be. Halfway down the first page they were not separate performers but a duo. The music came alive under their fingers. The rhythm drove them both. With the woman setting the tempo and urging them on, Adam realized for the first time that the so-called reel had more the elements of a polka. Then the steady, middle tempo swing of it began to quicken. Mairi’s attack on the strings became more incisive and insistent. She said nothing, but her bowing urged them into a new fury, and he could hear her breathing wildly.

  When they finished, he stared at the last few bars without any longer seeing them. Getting up from the piano stool would mean their performance was at an end. He didn’t want to repeat that piece — but wanted something to continue it, carry it along into another wild duet.

  Mairi spoke in little more than a whisper. ‘You really do feel it, don’t you? It’s in your blood.’

  He forced himself to stand up and turn round.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘You and Erskine. In that music, the two of you —’

  ‘Ah, the two of us.’ She ran her fingers through her tangled hair. ‘Me and Daniel. Oh, you’re on the right track. But still only halfway along it.’ She carefully put the violin aside. ‘The way you played that piece, you knew what it was all about. The pulse of it — you knew. You recognized me, didn’t you?’

  ‘He certainly captured you in it, yes.’

  ‘Nobody ever captured me. I’m the one who does the capturing.’

  She put her arms round his neck. Her breath was as warm and fierce as her music had been. Her lips and tongue were greedy, but not for talking.

  When she stepped back, it was only to stoop and lift the hem of her dress. She had got it only just above her hips when Adam was helping her, and she was laughing and making a grab at his shirt buttons.

  Naked, they impatiently turned the piano stool towards the wall, and Mairi first straddled it, taunting him, fending him off, until at last he had his hands on her shoulders and forced her round, splayed across the prickly tapestry of the stool. The pulse of the music was still beating through his body — in the blood, as she had said. And as he pounded the rhythm of it into her, her convulsions answered with jolting spasms in the same rhythm. At her writhing climax, his left arm thrashed wildly and his elbow struck a discordant cluster of notes from the keyboard, and Mairi shrieked in harsh ecstasy.

  When it was over they were silent apart from their breathing — Adam’s gasping, Mairi’s slow and satisfied, almost a purr.

  She pulled her dress back on. ‘I needed that. God, how I needed it.’ As her head emerged through the dress, she ran her tongue along her lower lip. ‘We really must have another rehearsal tomorrow afternoon, before the recital.’

  ‘A rehearsal?’ He was laughing uncontrollably. ‘If that was a rehearsal . . .’

  ‘There’s another longer piece in the programme. We’ll have to tackle it before we go on stage. Too much to hope that you already know Variations in a Dorian Mode?’

  ‘I’ve gone through them over and over again. I’ve got the music in that top drawer over there. I’ll spend the rest of the day going through it.’

  ‘Another session tomorrow morning, then?’

  For the first time he thought of Nora, and said awkwardly: ‘Here?’

  ‘Nick’ll probably be back sometime tomorrow. He can play the chaperon, I’m afraid. But he’ll be relieved not to have to accompany me. He was never really at ease with those pieces.’

  Adam showed her out through the side door. As she was about to step out into the pend, she said: ‘You’re nearly as good as your father.’

  Before he could ask her what on earth she meant, she was gone.

  And as she vanished from the daylit arch at the end of the passage, he saw a woman on the far side of the street. She stared a moment, then she too had moved away.

  He felt an uneasy certainty that it had been Deirdre Maxwell.

  Chapter Nine

  The Cultural Attaché turned over the top sheets from a bulging folder on the desk before him. ‘Strepka, yes. We do indeed have records of his movements. My predecessors kept a very substantial dossier on Jan Strepka.’ He managed something between a rueful smile and an apology. ‘We have not yet got round to examining all the documents we inherited from the old régime, and deciding which to discard.’

  Dr Ladislav Hykisch had put on weight since Nick had last met him while travelling with his parents, and had acquired the status of Dr instead of plain Mr. There was a glint of gold in one of his teeth, and a gold pen lay in a Bohemian cut glass tray. The major change was in his attitude. In the past he had been very reserved, literally keeping his head down, but now he was enjoying the privileged comforts of his Embassy office, and looked one straight in the eye. Also he no longer spoke broken English, as if then it had been politic to deny any suspicious fluency, but now one could be openly at ease with the language.

  Nick said: ‘What exactly happened to McCabe — Strepka, that is — when he returned to Czechoslovakia?’

  ‘The same thing that unfortunately happened to many people connected with wartime allies. Airmen who had risked their lives in the RAF battling against the Nazis were regarded by my superiors as outcasts — contaminated by their time in the West. Their children also. Many were sent to work in the mines in Silesia. No academic or administrative post was open to them. Excuses were found to send many to prison.’

  ‘Strepka went to prison?’

  ‘For two years, yes. Because he had been caught smuggling records of decadent Western music into the country. Even worse, he tried to compose music and have it performed in public. It was music not to the taste of the authorities. Far too adventurous. Contaminated by the West,’ Hykisch repeated.

  ‘So he stopped composing?’

  ‘No. One might say that he learned to change his tune.’

  ‘Churning out proletarian anthems?’ said Lesley.

  ‘Not even that. In any case that would have been regarded with suspicion. One had to be a devoted party member to be trusted with commissions of that kind. No, he ingratiated himself by writing uncontroversial musical comedies and soundtracks for films of no consequence. A few less humorous, but still based on subjects supposedly from Slav history. Moscow insisted that we were all one great big Slav family. Strepka made a tolerable living by dressing up folklorist legends in tinkling little melodies, with much bucolic humour and sturdy peasants singing of life on the land. He was skilful. He could capture the essence of a genuine old melody, transform it, make it acceptable. Oh, and he had a great popular success with a banal theatre piece set in the Little Quarter of Prague.’

  ‘Yet all the time,’ said Nick, ‘if he’d had any integrity whatsoever, he must have longed to write music worthy of him. Music for its own sake. But you don’t think he ever composed any serious music again?’

  ‘Not that we know of. Or knew of officially.’

  ‘Just a minute, sir,’ said Lesley. ‘Was there any chance of him smuggling his real music out and having it played abroad?’

  Hykisch’s smile became almost demure. ‘That thought has occurred to me from time to time.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It could not have been done openly. That would have been too risky. Our people in Prague could have been very severe about that.’

  ‘But performed,’ Lesley persisted, ‘in some guise or other. Under another composer’s name?’

  Nick could not take his eyes off her tilted half-profile and the creamy beauty of her neck. The tight sweep of hair over her ear was entrancing. For the last few minutes she had been still and thoughtful, but now her lips had parted and she was a sleek animal poised for the kill.

  ‘He never sneaked back to Britain eve
ry now and then?’

  ‘There is no record of it. And’ — Hykisch was grimly sardonic — ‘there would certainly have been a record.’

  ‘So he and Erskine never met again.’

  ‘Not in England, no. Or Scotland.’

  ‘Just a minute. Are you saying —’

  ‘Sir Nicholas will remember that it was possible for Westerners to visit our country under certain conditions. His father and mother, for example, were allowed to attend musical events — the Prague Spring festival, the Hodonin folk song and dance festivals, and so on. More people were allowed in,’ he added dryly, ‘than were allowed out.’

  ‘And Erskine visited?’

  Hykisch turned over another sheet of paper. From where he sat, Nick could see the purple blotches of official stamps at the top of each page.

  ‘More than once. When he was still active, he conducted one of his compositions at the Dvořák Hall.’

  ‘Not too adventurous for the authorities?’

  ‘An innocuous piece, as I recall.’

  Lesley was unstoppable. ‘And did Mairi McLeod ever accompany him?’

  ‘It would have been before that business about his hands,’ said Nick. ‘The two of them couldn’t have met by then.’

  Hykisch detached a sheet of notes from the clip inside the folder. ‘We know, of course, about Erskine’s misfortune. But he did visit a number of times after that. And we have records of visa applications from a young Miss Mairi McLeod. She appears to have been a violinist. What I believe is called folk pop. Performing at folk festivals. Our cultural chaperons were very keen on folklorist occasions.’

  Lesley said: ‘I didn’t know that she —’

  ‘That’s her, all right,’ said Nick. ‘That’s how she started. She must have been very young then. That’s how I met her, when I was supervising recordings. Once at Glastonbury, and then . . .’ He tried to dismiss the sudden surge of memories. ‘Before I became . . . well . . .’

  ‘Sir Nicholas Torrance.’

  ‘Exactly. Quite a while before.’

  He wished he could avoid Lesley’s questioning appraisal. But her real prey was elsewhere. She swung back to her inquisition.