Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘What do you mean, no less reliable? Less reliable than whom?’

  ‘Oh, they’re always wanting releases to do outside work. With her it was wanting to go back and play for her old orchestra. They’re all like that these days – greedy. No loyalty. Never think about how much work it makes for everyone else. She used to go up there at least once a month, and frankly I’m surprised they wanted her. I mean there must have been plenty of other extras they could have used, locally. She wasn’t so wonderful no-one else would do.’

  Atherton let this sink in, unable yet to make anything of it. ‘Did she have a boyfriend? Someone in the Orchestra, perhaps?’ he asked next.

  Brown shrugged again. ‘I imagine so. They all have the morals of alley cats.’

  ‘What, musicians?’

  ‘Women,’ he spat, his face darkening. ‘I don’t like females in the Orchestra, I’ll tell you that for nothing. They’re troublemakers. They go round making factions and setting one against the other, whispering behind people’s backs. And if you say anything to them, they start crying, and you have to lay off them. Discipline goes to pieces. We never had any of that kind of trouble before we started taking in females. But of course,’ he sneered, ‘it’s the law now. We’re not allowed to keep them out.’

  Atherton’s expression was schooled to impassivity. ‘But wasn’t there someone in particular?’ he insisted. ‘Some man in her section?’

  The eyes slid away sideways. ‘I suppose you mean Simon Thompson? They were together on tour, once. You should ask him about that, not me. It’s not my business.’

  ‘Thanks, I will.’ Doesn’t like women, Atherton thought. What else? ‘When did you last see Miss Austen?’

  ‘At the Centre on Monday of course. You know that.’

  ‘Yes, but exactly when? Did you see her leave, for instance?’

  ‘I didn’t see her leave the building, if that’s what you mean. I was standing at the door of the studio handing out payslips. I gave her hers, and that’s the last I saw of her. By the time I’d left the building they’d all gone.’

  ‘How are they paid? Direct into the bank?’

  ‘Yes – I just give out the notifications.’

  ‘How much did she earn? I suppose you’d know that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I have the computer read-out, if you want to look at it. I wouldn’t know offhand. They’re all self-employed, and paid by the session, so it varies in any case from month to month, depending on how much work there is.’

  ‘So if it was a quiet month, they’d all be a bit short?’

  ‘Not necessarily. They all do work outside, for other orchestras. They might get other dates if we have no work.’

  Brown brought forth the green striped paper, put it down on the table and flicked through it rapidly and efficiently.

  ‘Here you are – Austen, A. Last month she grossed £812.33.’

  ‘Was that about average?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. We were fairly busy last month, but it wasn’t the best month of the year. There are always gaps around Christmas.’

  Atherton calculated. So she was earning between ten and twelve thousand a year – not enough to have bought a Stradivarius, anyway, not even on the lay-away plan. It looked as though she must have been into some pretty big shit to have come by it. Over Brown’s shoulder he took down the details of Anne-Marie’s bank account and, watching his face from the corner of his eye, asked casually, ‘Do you know what sort of violin she played?’

  The reaction was one of simple, mild surprise. ‘I’ve no idea. Joanna Marshall would probably know, if it’s important to you.’

  Well, if the Strad was the key to all this, Brown didn’t know about it. ‘Okay – so you gave Miss Austen her pay-slip, and that’s the last time you ever saw her?’

  The sulkiness returned. ‘I’ve told you so.’

  ‘And what did you do afterwards, as a matter of routine?’

  ‘I went home and went to bed.’

  ‘Is there anyone who can confirm that? Do you live here alone?’

  The sulkiness was replaced by a dull anger – or was it apprehension? ‘I share the flat, as it happens. My flatmate can tell you what time I got in.’

  ‘Your flatmate?’

  ‘Yes.’ He spat the word. ‘Trevor Byers is his name. You might have heard of him – he’s the consultant orthopaedic surgeon at St Mary’s. Is that respectable enough for you?’

  Oho, thought Atherton, writing it down, is that how the milk got into the coconut? ‘Eminently so,’ he said, trying to goad him a little more. He decided to try the old by-the-way ploy. ‘By the way, wasn’t there some sort of trouble between you and Miss Austen? A quarrel, or something?’

  Brown shoved his fists down onto the table and leaned on them, his red and angry face thrust forward.

  ‘What are you trying to suggest? I didn’t like her, I make no bones about it. She was a troublemaker. They’re all troublemakers. There’s no place for women in orchestras -I’ve said that. They’re all trollops, and their minds are never on their jobs.’

  ‘You disapproved of her relationship with Thompson.’

  He controlled himself, straightening up and breathing hard. ‘I’ve told you, that was none of my business. It was she who caused the trouble, talking about people behind their backs – telling lies -’

  ‘About you?’

  ‘No!’ He took a breath. ‘I couldn’t care less about anything she said. And if you think I murdered her you’re barking up the wrong tree – I wouldn’t soil my hands. As far as her being a troublemaker’s concerned, ask Simon Thompson about it. He’ll tell you.’

  ‘This is all purely routine, sir,’ Atherton said soothingly. ‘We have to ask about everything, however unlikely, and check up on everyone – all simply routine, you know.’

  Back in his car he wondered about it. Brown a homosexual – Austen with too much money? Was she blackmailing him, perhaps? It’s not illegal to be bent, but an eminent surgeon might perhaps not like it to come out. On the other hand— He sighed. Check everybody, he’d said, and there were a hell of a lot of them to check. Why couldn’t the damned woman be a lighthouse keeper or something agreeably solitary, instead of a member of a hundred-piece orchestra of irregular habits?

  And Bill’s pure and perfect woman was beginning to sound a little tarnished. Making all possible allowance for Brown’s prejudice, there must have been something unlike-able about Anne-Marie Austen. A faint frown drew down his fair brows. What was going on with old Bill? First he got a thing about the Austen girl, and now he had stepped right out of character and screwed a witness – a man who had never been unfaithful to his wife in however many years it was of marriage. It was all very worrying.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Last Furnished Flat in the World

  Slider drove at first as though he and the car were made of glass, breathing with enormous, drunken care, sometimes even holding his breath, as if to see whether anything would change, whether Joanna would disappear and he would find himself alone in his car in a traffic jam in Perivale again. His mind felt hugely, spuriously expanded, like candyfloss, blown out of its normal dimensions with the effort of encompassing the impossible along with the familiar. The new knowledge of Joanna was laid alongside his ingrained experience of Irene and the children, both occupying the space one had occupied before – an affront to physics, as he had learned at school.

  He had never felt like this before. The trite words of every love song – but it was literally true. This was not just the intensification of a previously charted emotion, it was something entirely new, and he hardly knew what to do with it. In his life there had been one or two tentative teenage fumblings, and then there had been Irene, and he had never felt like this with Irene.

  He didn’t remember ever having felt anything intense about Irene. He had proposed to her as the next, the correct thing to do: you left school, you got a job, then you got married. He had admired her for his mother’s reasons, as the goal
to attain, and had naturally assumed, since he was going to marry her, that he must love her.

  Once married to her, he had behaved well by her because it was the right thing to do, and also, perhaps, because it was in his nature to sympathise. You’ve made your bed, his mother might have said if she’d ever known about his disappointment, and now you must lie on it. Well, so he had thought. But now he had to grapple with the possibility, wounding to the self-esteem, that he had dealt justly with Irene only because he had experienced no temptation to do otherwise.

  But no, that was not the whole story. He had been married to Irene for fifteen years, and he had never known her, except in the sense that he recognised her and could predict pretty well what she would say or do in any situation. Joanna he had only just met, and he could not in the least predict her, and yet he felt as though he knew her absolutely, right to the bones. He felt that while anything she might do or say would probably astonish, it would never really surprise him.

  The threatened crisis was here. He had deceived his wife. He had been unfaithful to her, slept with another woman, and told lies to cover up for it. Worse than that, he intended to go on doing it, as long and as often as possible. Broken things might be mended, but they could never be quite right again, he knew that: thus he had begun something that would change his whole life. There was peril implicit in it, and unhappiness for Irene and the children, and that peril was minutely perceived and understood. What he couldn’t understand was why it entirely failed to alarm him; why, knowing that what he was doing was both wrong and dangerous to all concerned, he could feel only this huge and expanding joy, as though his life were at last unrolling before him.

  Joanna, looking sideways at him, saw only a faint smile. ‘What are you thinking about, dear Inspector?’

  Happiness bubbled over into laughter. ‘You really can’t go on calling me Inspector!’

  ‘Well, what then? Ridiculous though it seems, I don’t know your first name.’

  ‘It was on my identity card.’

  ‘I didn’t notice it at the time.’

  ‘George William Slider. But I’ve always been called Bill, because my father’s a George as well.’ Saying his own name aloud made him feel ridiculously shy, as though he were sixteen and on his first date.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. -’Now I know, I can see it suits you. Do you like to be called Bill?’

  ‘Well, hardly anyone does these days. There’s still a lot of surname-calling in the force. The quasi-military setup, you see. I suppose it makes it seem a bit like public school. I always called Atherton by his surname, for instance. I simply can’t think of him as Jim, though the younger ones do.’

  ‘Did you go to public school?’

  He laughed at the thought. ‘Good Lord, no! Timberlog Lane Secondary Modern, that was me.’

  ‘What a pretty name,’ she teased. ‘Where’s Timberlog Lane?’

  ‘In Essex, Upper Hawksey. It was a brand new school in those days, one of those Prides of the Fifties, knocked up to cope with the post-war bulge.’

  ‘Where’s Upper Hawksey?’

  ‘Near Colchester. It used to be just a little village, and then they built a housing estate onto it – hence the school – and now it’s practically an urban overspill. You know the sort of thing.’

  ‘Yes, I know – there’s the village green and the old blacksmith’s forge, carefully preserved, and backed up against it streets and streets of modern open-plan houses with a Volvo parked in front of each.’

  ‘Sort of. And further back there’s an older council estate -that was there when I was a child.’

  ‘The rot had set in even then?’

  ‘Mmm. It’s funny – we lived in the old village, so we thought ourselves a cut above the estate people, the newcomers. But they thought themselves above us, because we had no bathrooms and only outside privies. But my father had nearly an acre of garden, and grew all our own vegetables. And he kept rabbits. And a donkey.’

  ‘A donkey?’

  ‘For the manure.’

  ‘Ah. Messy, but practical. So you’re a real country boy, then?’

  ‘Original hayseed. Dad used to take me out into the woods and fields and sit me down somewhere and say, “Now, lad, keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, and you’ll learn what there is to be learnt”. I’ve always thought that was a very good training for a detective.’

  ‘So you always meant to be a detective?’

  ‘I suppose so. Once I’d got past the engine-driver stage. Reading all those Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake stories must have turned my brain.’

  She smiled. ‘I bet they’re proud of you. Do they still live in Upper Whatsit, your parents?’

  ‘Hawksey. Dad does – in the same cottage, still with the outside lavvy. Mum’s – Mum died.’ He still hated to say she was dead. The verb seemed somehow less destructive. ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘They’re both alive. They live in Eastbourne.’

  ‘Is that where you come from?’

  ‘No, they retired there. I was brought up in London -Willesden, in fact. You see I’ve never strayed very far.’

  ‘And are they proud of you?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she shrugged, and then caught his eye and smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t mean they don’t care about me or anything like that, but there were an awful lot of us – I was seventh of ten. I don’t think you can care so intensely about each when you’ve got so many. And I left home so long ago I don’t think of myself in relation to them any more. I expect they’re glad I earn an honest crust and haven’t ended up in Holloway or Shepherds’ Market, but beyond that -’ She let the sentence go. ‘Are you an only child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. Do you still visit your father?’

  ‘Sometimes. Not so much now. There never seems to be time, and he never got on with -’ He checked himself, and she glanced at him.

  ‘With your wife? Well, I suppose you’ll have to mention her sometime. What’s her name?’

  ‘Irene,’ he said reluctantly. He didn’t want to talk about her to Joanna. On the other hand, when he said no more the silence seemed to grow ominous and unnatural, and at last he said in a sort of desperation, ‘Mum liked her very much. She was always glad we got married. But Dad couldn’t get on with her, and after Mum died it got to be a bit of a strain going down there with Irene, and it looked rather pointed to go without her.’

  ‘I suppose it is rather a long way,’ Joanna said neutrally.

  Another silence fell. Slider drove on, and the whole ugly, familiar, unnecessary edifice of in-law trouble crowded into his mind; cluttering the view, like those wartime prefabs that somehow never got taken down. Mum had been so proud when he’d married Irene. She saw it as a step-up – for her only son to marry a girl from the Estate, a girl who came from a house with a bathroom. Irene was ‘superior’. She came from a ‘superior’ family, people who had a car and a television and went abroad for their holidays. Irene’s mother didn’t go to work, and had a washing-machine. Irene’s father worked in an office, not with his hands.

  Mum’s perceptions and her ambitions were equally uncomplicated. Her Bill had got a good education and a good job, and now he was marrying a superior girl, and might one day own his own house. He thought with a familiar spasm of hatred of Catatonia, and how Mum would have loved it. Well, they said men always married women like their mothers.

  Dad, on the other hand, had somehow managed to avoid the standardisation of state education. He could read and write and his general knowledge was extensive, but his approach to life had not been moulded. He lived close to the earth, and on his own terms, clear-sighted and sharp-witted as wild animals were. Stubborn, too, like his donkey. He had said Irene wouldn’t do, and he had stuck by that. To be fair, he had never really given her a chance, or made allowances for her youth and inexperience. What had been nervousness on her side, Dad saw as ‘being stuck up’. Slider, seeing both sides, as was his wont, had been una
ble to reconcile them.

  But they had gone on putting up with each other as people will, rather than risk open breach. Slider remembered with muted horror those Sunday visits. Oh the High Tea, complete with tinned salmon and salad and a fruit cake and trifle with hundreds-and-thousands on the top! The polite, monotonous conversation; the photograph album and the walk round the garden and the glass of sweet sherry ‘for the road’. It was a pattern which might have endured to this day, had Mum not died and ended the necessity for dissembling.

  ‘What did he do, your father?’ Joanna asked suddenly. ‘Are you from a long line of policemen?’

  ‘God, no, I’m the first. Dad was a farm-worker.’ Even after all these years he still said it with a touch of defiant pride, legacy of the days when Irene, ashamed, would tell people her father-in-law was a farmer, or sometimes an estate-manager. ‘The cottage we lived in was a tied cottage, but by the time Dad retired things had changed, and the new generation of estate workers wouldn’t have wanted to live there, so they let him stay on. He’ll die there, and then I suppose they’ll gut it and modernise it and put in central heating, and let it to some account executive as a weekend cottage.’

  He knew he sounded bitter, and tried to lighten his tone. ‘You wouldn’t recognise the farm Dad worked on now. When I was a kid, it used to have a bit of everything – a few dairy cows, some pigs, a bit of arable, chickens and ducks and geese wandering about everywhere. Now it’s all down to fruit. Acres and acres of little stunted fruit trees, all in straight rows. They grubbed up all the hedges and filled in all the ditches and planted thousands of those dwarf trees, in regiments, right up to the road. It’s like a desert.’

  How could fruit trees be like a desert? his logic challenged him as he lapsed into silence. But they gave the impression of desolation, all the same. Joanna laid a hand on his knee for an instant and said as if to comfort him, ‘Things are changing now. They’re beginning to realise their mistake and replant the hedgerows -’