Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Atherton rose and smiled graciously at the irony. He was not displeased with the interview. Someone intelligent and determined – and she was both – could overcome the problem of falsifying the drugs record; and he had established to his own satisfaction that she was not as sure of Thompson as she claimed to be. She knew he was a shit; she was also nervous and worried. She had by no means told Atherton everything. Perhaps she knew where Thompson had been that evening. Or perhaps she didn’t know, and wondered.

  Out in the clear air of the morning, Slider found himself ravenously hungry. He had declined breakfast at home in the company of his grieving son, his self-righteous daughter and his tight-lipped wife. Consequently he had a little time in hand; enough to drive to a coffee-stall he knew in Hammersmith Grove where they made bacon sandwiches with thick, white crusty bread of the sort he remembered from his childhood, before everyone went wholemeal. The other early workers made room for him in companionable silence, and they all sipped their dark-brown tea out of thick white mugs like shaving-pots and blinked at nothing through the comforting steam.

  Restored, he drove to Joanna’s house. She opened the door as he was parking the car and stood watching him until he came up the path. Discovering her again was a series of delightful shocks which registered all over his body. She had on a pair of soft and faded grey cord trousers, tucked into ankle-boots, and a buttercup yellow vyella shirt which seemed to glow in the colourlessness of a winter morning. She looked wonderful, but best of all, so approachable, so accessible. He put his arms round her and she turned her face up to him, smiling, and she seemed both familiar and dear. He caught the scent of her skin, and it seemed so surprising and exciting that he already knew the smell of her so well, that it gave him an erection.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘Like the dead. And you?’ It didn’t matter what they said. He felt suddenly safe and optimistic.

  They went into the house and she shut the door behind them with a practised flick of one foot. In his arms again, she pressed against him and felt his condition. ‘Have we time?’ she asked simply.

  His stomach tightened. He was not yet used to such directness. ‘What time is he coming?’

  She cocked his watch towards her. Twenty minutes.’

  ‘Then we’ve time,’ he said, taking her face in his hands and kissing her. With one hand on the wall to guide her, she backed with him down the passage to the bedroom.

  Martin Cutts turned out to be about forty-five, a small, almost delicate man with the very black hair and very white skin of the Far North, and the carefully upright gait of the back-sufferer. He had an alert face and an engaging smile, and was as jewel-bright as a bluetit – in a sapphire suede jacket over a canary-yellow roll-neck sweater. Slider was regarding with some suspicion and even contempt a man of that age who would dress so brightly, until it occurred to him depressingly that he was merely jealous of a man who he suspected might once have been Joanna’s lover, and then he laid himself out to be affable.

  Joanna had arranged the interview for Slider at her house, since there were things Cutts would not be able to say at home in front of his wife, as Slider, newly sensitive on that score, had appreciated. Joanna now left them tactfully alone and went and had her bath, and the thought of her naked and soapy in the steam beckoned distractingly from the corner of Slider’s mind.

  He cleared his throat determinedly and said, ‘It was good of you to give me your time like this.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Cutts said, seating himself carefully on the arm of the chesterfield. ‘It was good of you to let me answer your questions here rather than at home.’ He crinkled his eyes in what Slider realised with a start was a conspiratorial grin. It brought home to him all over again his new status as a Man of the World, a Man with a Bit on the Side, and he wasn’t sure he liked it.

  ‘Perhaps you’d tell me how you got to know Miss Austen,’ he asked, poising his pen above his pad in the manner which laid obligation on the interviewee to give one something to write down.

  Cutts was not unwilling. ‘Well of course I knew her in Birmingham,’ he began, and Slider hid his surprise and nodded safely instead.

  ‘You were in the same orchestra?’

  ‘For a short time. She joined just before I left to come to London.’

  ‘Did you have an affair with her while you were both in Birmingham?’

  Martin Cutts did not seem at all put out by the question. He answered as if it were as natural a thing as having his hair cut. ‘I went to bed with her, yes, but it wasn’t really what you’d call an affair. I had to be more careful up there, of course, because I was between wives.’

  Slider was puzzled. ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘I’d just divorced my first wife, and hadn’t yet married my second,’ he explained obligingly.

  ‘Yes, but why did that mean you had to be more careful? Surely -’

  ‘Well, obviously,’ Cutts said as if it were, indeed, obvious, ‘if you’re not married and you go about with a single girl, she’s bound to take you more seriously and try to pin you down. If you’ve got a current wife, you’re safe. She knows she can’t have you. That’s the beauty of it.’

  Slider nodded unemphatically at this remarkable philosophy. ‘Do you think Miss Austen was on the look-out for a husband?’

  ‘Well they all are underneath, aren’t they? Mind you, she didn’t particularly show it in those days, not like later. She was pretty chipper, and it was all quite light-hearted. We had a lot of fun, and no hard feelings on either side when we parted.’

  ‘She struck you as being happy – contented with life?’

  ‘Oh yes. She’d got her own place, and she’d just bought a car, and I think she was enjoying being away from home and having her freedom. I don’t think she’d been happy as a child.’

  ‘Did she talk to you about her childhood?’

  ‘Not in detail, but I gathered she was an orphan, and she’d been brought up by an aunt who hated her and wanted her out of the way. Am I telling you things you already know?’

  ‘I’d like to have your impressions,’ Slider said. ‘It all helps to build up the picture. Did she tell you why the aunt hated her?’

  ‘Personality clash, I think,’ he said vaguely. ‘She was always being shoved out of the way, sent to boarding school and so on. And apparently the aunt kept her short of money while she was at college, even though she was pretty well-off – the aunt, I mean.’

  ‘Did Miss Austen ever intimate to you that she might have expectations? A legacy or something of that sort?’

  He watched Cutts under his eyebrows for some reaction, but the other man only smiled to himself.

  ‘Expectations. Nice old-fashioned expression. No, she never said anything of that sort. But she did live in a pretty swanky flat, so perhaps she had come into some money. Or it might have belonged to the aunt, I suppose. It wasn’t like a young person’s flat, now I come to think of it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It was one of those luxury service flats, you know, with a porter in the hall and everything laid on. More the kind of place you’d expect to find rich old ladies with Pekineses. And it struck me -’

  He stopped, as if it had only just struck him. Slider made a helpfully interrogative sound.

  ‘Well,’ Martin Cutts went on, ‘it never struck me as being very cosy or homelike. There was never anything lying around. It didn’t look as though anyone lived there – it was more like one of those company flats, where all the furniture and decorations have been done by a firm. Everything coordinated, like a luxury hotel. Awful, really.’

  Slider thought of the shabby bedsitter and then, involuntarily, of the bare council flat, and the anomaly threatened to overload the circuits. He needed to move on, to let the subconscious get to work on it.

  ‘After you left Birmingham, did you keep in touch with each other?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Cutts, and the words ‘of course not’ hung on the air.r />
  ‘As far as you were concerned, you never expected to see her again?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’d married my present wife, you see, and Anne-Marie and I were only ever a bit of fun. She understood that all right.’

  But did she, Slider thought. He considered her childhood, the impersonal luxury flat, the desperate attempt to persuade Simon Thompson to marry her, the number of people who had said ‘I didn’t really know her’. No-one, he thought, had ever wanted her. She had never been more than used and rejected, and Joanna, casual and incurious, was the nearest that poor child had ever had to a friend. The loneliness of her life and death appalled him. He wanted to shake this self-satisfied rat by the neck, and hoped for a whole new set of reasons that he had never been in Joanna’s bed.

  ‘But when she joined your present orchestra, you took up with her again?’ he managed to say evenly.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t really like that. We were friendly, of course, and I think we may have gone to bed a couple of times, but there was nothing between us. She was perfectly all right until she had this bust-up with Simon Thompson.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  He looked away. ‘She – approached me.’

  ‘Why do you think she did that?’

  ‘Shoulder to cry on, I suppose.’ The eyes returned. ‘She really was cut up about it, poor kid. She said Simon had proposed marriage to her, and then backed out. I didn’t believe that – I mean Simon may be a prize pratt, but he isn’t stupid – but she evidently believed it, so it was all the same as far as she was concerned.’

  ‘What form did this “approach” take?’

  ‘She asked me to go for a drink with her after a concert one night, and when we’d had a couple, she asked me back to her flat.’

  ‘And you went to bed with her?’ Slider concealed his fury, he thought, very well.

  ‘Yes. But I don’t think it was me she really wanted. Her heart didn’t really seem in it. I suppose she was still hankering after Simon.’

  ‘Was it just the one occasion?’

  ‘No, a few times. I can’t remember – four or five perhaps.’

  ‘And when was the last time?’

  ‘Just before Christmas. After our last date – the Orchestra’s last date, I mean – before the Christmas break.’

  Slider nodded. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Martin Cutts looked helpless, as if he didn’t know what he was being asked. ‘We had a few drinks, and went back to her flat. Like before.’

  ‘And went to bed together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how did she seem to you? Happy? Sad? Worried?’

  ‘Depressed, I’d say. Well, she was worried, for a start, because she’d lost her diary. That may sound silly to you, but it’s a major disaster for a musician. And she was worried that Simon was going to make trouble for her in the Orchestra -that phone-call business. Do you know about that? Oh, right. But there was more than that.’ He paused, evidently marshalling his thoughts. His eyes were a very bright blue, but small and rather round, which made him look more than ever like a bird with its head on one side. ‘After we’d made love, she started to cry, and went on about how nobody cared about her, and that she hadn’t got a boyfriend and so on. I was a bit pissed off about that – I mean, nobody likes being wept over – so I tried to jolly her up a bit, and then I thought I’d slope off. But when I tried to get up, she clung to me, and started really crying, and saying she was frightened.’

  ‘Frightened? Of what?’

  ‘She didn’t say. She just kept saying “I’m so afraid. I’m so afraid” over and over, just like that. And sobbing fit to choke. Got herself really worked up.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘Well, what could I do? I held her and patted her a bit, and when she quietened down, I made love to her again, just to cheer her up.’

  ‘I see,’ Slider said remotely.

  Martin Cutts eyed him unhappily. ‘What could I do?’ he said again. ‘People on their own do get depressed around Christmas. It’s not nice being on your own when everyone else is with their families, but I couldn’t take her home with me, could I? And she wouldn’t go back to her aunt. I felt rotten leaving her, but I had to get home.’

  ‘How was she when you left her?’

  ‘Quiet, she wasn’t crying any more, but she seemed very depressed. She said something like “I can’t go on any longer”. I said of course you can, don’t be silly, and she said, “No, it’s all over for me”.’

  ‘Were those her actual words?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. Well, you can imagine how I felt, leaving her like that. But then, when we met again in January, she seemed to be all right again – quiet, you know, as if she’d resigned herself. Then when I heard she was dead, I naturally thought she must have killed herself, and I felt terrible all over again. But she didn’t, did she?’

  ‘It wasn’t suicide,’ Slider acknowledged.

  ‘So there was nothing I could have done, was there?’ he appealed.

  Slider had no wish to let him off the hook of responsibility, since what he had done must have added to Anne-Marie’s overall misery, but he could hardly blame Cutts for her murder. Quiet, he thought, as if she’d resigned herself. But to what? Had she foreseen her death? What had she done to bring it upon herself? Perhaps, lonely and unwanted as she was, she had really ceased to care if she lived or died – until, of course, that last moment in the car park when the realisation had come upon her (how?) that it was going to happen, and she made the one last futile effort to escape, one last pathetic flutter of a bird in a trap.

  Joanna came in cautiously, pink and scented, and looked from one to the other. ‘The voices had stopped, so I thought you’d finished.’

  Slider roused himself. ‘Yes, we’ve finished. For the moment, anyway. Thank you, Mr Cutts.’

  ‘Mr Cutts?’ Joanna said in ribald derision. ‘Mr Cutts.’

  And Cutts reached out a hand and grabbed her by the neck, pulling her against his chest in an affectionate death-lock. It was not a lover’s gesture, but it was the more disturbing for that, for Slider could easily imagine what depths of intimacy might have preceded such casual manhandling.

  ‘Don’t chance your arm, woman,’ Cutts said, grinning, and when he released her she slipped an arm round his waist and gave him a brief, hard hug.

  Catching Slider’s eye she said, almost apologetically, ‘Martin and I are old friends, you know.’

  Cutts smiled at Slider disarmingly. ‘Yeah, Jo and I go back a long way. I hope you’re taking good care of her – she’s a remarkable woman.’

  This, Slider knew, was where he was supposed to smirk and say something complacent along the lines of she certainly is or I’m a lucky man, thus accepting gracefully the implied compliment that Cutts knew that he was Joanna’s lover and was assuring him that he had no rival here. But Slider’s feelings were too new and unfamiliar to him, and above all too large and too overwhelmingly important for such social backgammon. He could do no more than mutter something stiff and graceless, and feel a fool, and angry. Joanna gave him a thoughtful look, and led Martin Cutts away to show him out, leaving Slider alone to regain his composure.

  Accustomed to marital warfare, he expected her to reenter the room with a rebuke, and made sure he got his blow in first. ‘You certainly know some really lovely people. Are they all like him in your business, or is he better than most?’

  She stood before him, looking at him without hostility. In fact, there was even a smile lurking under the surface.

  ‘Oh, Martin’s not too bad a bloke, if you don’t take him seriously. He’s like a greedy child let loose in a sweetshop, except that his lollies are women’s bodies. He has to prove himself all the time.’ She put her arms round Slider’s unyielding neck, and her breasts nudged him like two fat, friendly puppies. ‘And you know, about fifty per cent of all men would behave exactly like him, given his opportunities. Why do so few men ever grow up? It’s depressing.’
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  She laid her mouth against his, waiting for him to react, but he struggled with his resentment and would not kiss her back. She drew her head back to look at him enquiringly. ‘What are you so mad about?’

  It was hovering on his lips to demand whether that man had been her lover, but he saw in time the amusement lurking in her dark eyes and knew that she was just waiting for him to ask. He thrust the thought away. It was of no interest to him, he told himself sternly.

  She followed his struggles, recorded minutely in his expression, ‘You’re quite right,’ she said. ‘It’s impossible to be jealous of someone like Martin. He isn’t real. He’s a sort of sexual Yogi Bear, always snitching picnic baskets, and being chased by Mister Ranger.’

  Slider began to laugh, his resentment dissolving. ‘I don’t deserve you,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ she assured him. ‘I’m a remarkable woman.’

  CHAPTER 10

  Through the Dark Glassily

  ‘Are you sure Atherton won’t mind?’ Joanna said as they sped northwards through the blissfully empty streets. It was another clear, sunny day, but there was a small and bitter wind much more in keeping with the bare trees. Joanna was wearing an overlarge and densely woolly white jacket, so that with her dark eyes and pale face she looked like a small, stout polar bear. Slider glanced sideways at her with affection, thinking how natural it seemed already to have her beside him in the car.

  ‘Of course he won’t. Why should he?’

  ‘I can think of lots of reasons. For a start, he may not have enough food for three if he was expecting to feed two. And for another, he might want to have you to himself.’

  ‘He’s my sergeant, not my wife. Anyway, if we’re going to go over the case, we need you there. You were the person closest to Anne-Marie.’

  ‘That sounds perilously thin to me, and I’m not even a detective. He’s bound to see through it.’

  ‘He’s my friend as well as my partner. And I need you.’

  ‘Ah well, there’s no answer to that, is there? Do I call him Atherton as well? Or should I make an attempt at Jim?’