Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I have done business with her,’ Saloman said at last, returning the picture with an air of finality as if the last word had been said on that subject. It put Atherton on the wrong foot, as it was meant to, and he had to think out the next question.

  ‘Would you mind telling me what the business was and when it took place?’

  It was not meant as a question. Saloman smiled the smile of a reasonable man. He almost shrugged. ‘Would I mind? Why should I not mind? Who asks me? Young man, you have not told me who you are.’

  It was a game as they both knew, for Atherton was perfectly well aware that he looked like a policeman. He brought out his ID, and Saloman took it and subjected it to such lengthy scrutiny that he might have been mentally setting it to music. At last he returned it and said, ‘So. The young lady.’

  ‘Yes. You did business with her, you said.’

  ‘So, she brought me a violin one day, another day two bows. I valued them for her, and she asked if I would buy them. I bought them, and later I sold them at a profit. That is how my business supports itself –I hope it is not yet a crime? And now will you tell me why you want to know. Has the young lady got herself into trouble at last?’

  ‘Why should you think so?’

  Saloman smiled gently. ‘Because she was very pretty and very young. In the end, life must catch up with the pretty and young, otherwise how could the old and ugly bear the injustice? What has she done, this one?’

  ‘Nothing illegal, I assure you,’ Atherton said, smiling in spite of himself. ‘Can you remember when these transactions took place?’

  Saloman shrugged. ‘Remember? No.’

  ‘But perhaps you keep records of purchases and sales?’

  ‘Of course I do. I am a businessman. I pay tax, VAT. What do you think?’

  Atherton, driven, said very precisely, ‘Will you please look up in your records, and tell me when these transactions took place?’

  Saloman smiled the smile of the tiger and brought out a large ledger and began to go through it from the back towards the front, slowly. Atherton could only abide in his breeches. His training, he told himself, must be at least as good as Saloman’s.

  It was a long wait. When he had been all through that ledger Saloman closed it and brought out another, and began again. Atherton gritted his teeth. At the end of something near half an hour, Saloman finally shut the book with a slam that raised an interesting cloud of dust, and said, ‘In October 1987 she sold me a Guarnerius. In March 1988 violin bows, a Peccatte and a gold-mounted Tourte. So, this is what you want to know?’

  ‘Did she give you her name?’

  ‘It is here in the daybook, Miss A. Austen.’

  ‘When she came in with the fiddle, in October 1987, did she know what it was, how much it was worth?’

  ‘If she knew these things, why should she ask me to value it?’

  Atherton ground his teeth. ‘How did she react when you told her the value?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who can remember? Some are glad, some are not. I don’t remember.’

  ‘But you remember her?’

  ‘She was a pretty young woman with a valuable violin.’

  ‘How valuable? What did you give her for it?’

  Saloman bent his head to the book again, though he must have known the figure already. ‘Three hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘And the bows?’

  ‘One hundred thousand for the two.’

  ‘And you later sold these items at a profit?’

  ‘Of course. That is my business.’

  ‘Did she ever bring you a Stradivarius?’ Atherton looked directly into Saloman’s eyes. Was there a flicker? He couldn’t be sure.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am sure.’

  ‘Did you ask her where she got the Guarnerius and the bows?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t ask? You didn’t require any proof of ownership from her?’

  Now he sighed with faint reproach. ‘People own things. Why should they have proof of ownership? They are family heirlooms, perhaps. A violin is not like a Rolex watch, my dear young man. I have from the police a list of stolen instruments, and these I look out for, always. What is not on the list I am free to buy and sell. Is it so?’

  Saloman inclined his head at a helpful angle, but Atherton could hear the laughter in the air. The eight brown fingers, hooked over the rim of the counter, were grinning triumphantly at him. You have nothing on us, they said. You can’t touch us.

  ‘You’ve been most helpful,’ Atherton said at last.

  ‘I am always happy to help the police.’

  ‘There is one more thing – can you lend me those daybooks for a while?’

  ‘I need them for my daily business,’ Saloman protested, but without emphasis.

  ‘I can return them to you tomorrow. I’m sure you can manage for one day.’

  Saloman inclined his head in consent and passed the books across the counter, but the brown fingers gripped them until the last moment before relinquishing them.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Atherton said. He turned away with reluctance, feeling strangely unwilling to have Saloman unseen behind him on the short walk to the door. Outside, Bond Street had never seemed so light and airy and lovely. He had the rest of the day to go through these damned ledgers to find something, but whatever he found, he knew it would at best only suggest, not prove. Saloman was a downy bird, if ever there was one. He had not even made the mistake of denying all knowledge of Anne-Marie, which was what convinced Atherton more than anything that he had been dealing with a very professional criminal.

  CHAPTER 14

  Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy they First Make Rich

  The personnel manager of the Birmingham Orchestra – what Slider had come to know was called ‘the fixer’ – was one Ruth Chisholm, a strong, handsome girl with foxy hair, bright cheeks, and pale, piercing eyes. She gave Slider the answer he was growing to expect about Anne-Marie Austen.

  ‘I didn’t know her very well. I don’t think anyone did. She kept herself very much to herself. In fact –’ she hesitated ‘– I don’t think she was much liked in the Orchestra.’

  ‘Why was that?’ Norma asked.

  ‘Well, to begin with, it was said she’d got the job in the first place through influence – someone had had a word with the powers that be and got her in. I don’t know if that was true or not, but it’s certainly true that she never auditioned for the part, which is unusual for a string player, and that got up people’s noses a bit.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘Musicians are a funny lot. They’d jump at the chance to get their friends in, but if anyone else does it, they snap at them like piranha fish. In theory they like people to get on by ability alone, but it never works that way, and they know it.’

  ‘Was she not good enough for the job?’ Norma asked.

  ‘Oh, she was a good player all right – and a good section player, what’s more, which is rare. Nowadays they all want to be soloists, and that’s no good when there are sixteen of you supposed to sound like one. Anne-Marie fitted in –musically, that is.’

  ‘But not socially?’

  ‘Well – I’ll give you an example. She had a flat near the centre of town, which should have made her very popular. People need somewhere close to go, sometimes, between rehearsal and concert. But she never invited anyone back there. That’s one of the things people said about her, that she was tight. And standoffish.’

  ‘Was she well off?’ Slider asked.

  ‘I musician? You’re kidding!’

  ‘I thought she came from a wealthy family?’

  She shook her head to signify that she knew nothing about that.

  ‘Do you know who Anne-Marie’s special friends were?’ Norma asked next. ‘Who she went around with?’

  Before Ruth Chisholm could answer they were interrupted by an old man in porter’s uniform, who sidled up to them and gave a conspiratorial cough into his fist.

&nb
sp; ‘’Scuse me sir, but would you be Inspector Slider, sir? Telephone call for you. If you’d like to come this way, sir, I’ll put it through to you in the box.’ He lowered his voice still further and gave a ghastly wink. ‘That way it’d be more private, see.’

  Slider gave Norma a glance and a nod, to tell her to get on with it, and followed the old man. A moment later he was easing himself distastefully into the booth in which someone had recently smoked a cigar – one of the things for which he often though the death penalty ought to be brought back. The bell rang, and he picked up the receiver and found Nicholls on the line.

  ‘Hullo, Bill? Ah, I’ve got a nurrgent message for you from your burrd.’ He put so much roll into the last word that Slider couldn’t identify it for a moment.

  ‘Oh, you mean Miss Marshall?’ he said superbly, and Nicholls chuckled.

  ‘Well if her face is as gorgeous as her voice, you’re a lucky man. Anyway, this is it: apparently she’s been working today with a guy called Martin Cutts – mean anything to you?’ Slider felt the familiar spasm of jealousy and grunted ungraciously. One day, just one day! ‘They were talking about the Austen girl, and it seems that he knows where she used to go to in Birmingham. Is this making sense to you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, go on.’

  ‘Okay. Well, it seems Austen bummed a lift offa this Cutts guy once, when he was coming up to Birmingham and her car had broken down, and she asked him to drop her off at the end of Tutman Street.’

  ‘Tutman,’ Slider said, writing.

  ‘Aye. And Cutts says that he was at the kerb a while trying to get out into the traffic, and he saw her in his rear-view mirror as she walked away, going down Tutman Street briskly as if she knew where she was going.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Aye, that’s it. Any use?’

  ‘Could be. It’s better than what I’ve got so far, which is nothing. Sweet eff ay.’

  ‘You dear old-fashioned thing,’ Nicholls chuckled. ‘Nobody says that any more. Any message to send back to your woman?’

  ‘Is she there?’ Slider asked eagerly, feeling his heart leap about in his stomach in a disconcertingly adolescent way.

  ‘No, she’s at work. She phoned during the tea-break, as soon as she could, so that we could relay this to you while you were still on the scene. Smart woman, eh?’

  ‘She’s wonderful. Okay Nutty, thanks. I’ll phone her later myself and thank her properly.’

  ‘I bet you will. I’ll tell her that if she rings again.’

  ‘Don’t scare her off. How’s your mum, by the way?’

  ‘Much better thanks. She’s coming out of hospital tomorrow, thank God. I’m sick of looking after Onan – he smells.’

  ‘Onan?’ Slider asked, but with the feeling he was letting himself in for it.

  ‘Her budgie. Cheeroh, then, Bill. Happy hunting. Love to Norma.’

  Slider stepped gratefully out into the fresh air of the musty backstage corridor, and returned to where Norma was chatting animatedly with Ruth Chisholm. Her technique was terrific, as he had had occasion to notice before. She raised an eyebrow as he rejoined them, and relinquished the thread to him.

  ‘Wasn’t Anne-Marie friendly with Martin Cutts for a while?’ he asked Ruth Chisholm.

  ‘Friendly?’ She grimaced. ‘Well, I wouldn’t call it that, exactly. They went around together for a while, until Martin left to go to London, but it wasn’t anything serious. It never is with Martin. He has a different woman every few weeks.’

  From which Slider gathered that she had been taken in herself at some point, and resented it.

  ‘Do you know where Tutman Street is?’

  ‘It’s about five minutes’ walk from here. One of the old back streets in the centre that hasn’t been developed yet.’

  ‘Is there a music shop there, or anything a musician might visit?’

  ‘Not that I know of. There are lots of shops there, groceries and that sort of thing. Anyone might go there, really.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’ He wound up the interview, and a few minutes later he was out in the street with Norma, and telling her about Joanna’s message.

  ‘She might not have stopped in Tutman Street,’ Norma said. ‘She might have gone through it to somewhere else.’

  ‘Yes, I know. It’s a slender thread, but it’s all we’ve got.’

  Norma looked a little smug. ‘Especially since Ruth told me that Anne-Marie hasn’t played for that Orchestra since last July.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes – she lied about that. Ruth said why on earth would they book her when they had plenty of good players locally. So whatever she came back to Birmingham for, it wasn’t to play in the Orchestra.’

  ‘We’d better hope that it was Tutman Street she was visiting. Oh, by the way,’ he remembered suddenly, ‘why would anyone call a budgie Onan?’

  Norma’s face broke into a slow, spreading grin.

  ‘Presumably because he keeps spilling his seed.’

  Slider’s benevolent deity had seen to it on his behalf that Tutman Street was only a short one. Even so, there would be a period of long and tedious labour involved in making their door-to-door investigation.

  ‘You do that side, and I’ll do this,’ he said. It was a narrow street of early Victorian shops and houses, very run down and shabby, and the sort of thing that was being renovated and preserved like mad in King’s Cross and east of Islington. Here it was simply suffering from the proximity of the new Centre development, and general urban deprivation.

  At two he caught Norma between doors and took her round the corner to a greasy spoon for lunch.

  ‘Because we must keep your strength up.’

  ‘Tell me honestly, sir,’ she said over hamburger, chips and beans, ‘do you think there’s any hope?’

  ‘You sound like a Revivalist.’

  ‘No, but really.’

  ‘But really, no, I don’t think there’s any hope. These people make very few mistakes. But that isn’t the point, is it? We just do what we can, and it has to do.’

  ‘Slow and steady wins the race?’

  ‘Only if the hare lies down for a kip, and frankly I’ve always thought that was a very unlikely story.’

  She dabbled a chip in a puddle of tomato sauce. ‘I think she was probably just passing through Tutman Street. It’s quite close to Marlborough Towers, you know, where she lived. She was probably taking a short cut home.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But we have to go through the motions.’

  Late in the afternoon, Norma got a bite. She met with Slider out of sight round the corner, and said breathlessly. ‘The owner of that paper shop recognised the mugshot. He said she often used to go to the grocer’s shop further down on the other side, and his wife says they sell a special kind of olive oil that’s imported in barrels, and you bring your own tin and they fill it up from the tap. They used to see Anne-Marie go past quite often with a tin.’

  Slider was silent, his brow drawn with thought.

  ‘I thought you’d be turning cartwheels.’ Norma said reproachfully.

  ‘I never know whether to cheer or sob whenever that damned olive oil comes into the picture,’ he sighed. ‘Come on then, let’s go and see.’

  The grocery shop was one of those tiny food stores turned into a supermarket by dint of adding a double-sided display down the centre and a cash register by the door. There was nothing unusual about it at first sight: there was the stack of battered wire baskets; the moth-eaten vegetables and brown-spotted apples in cardboard boxes; the freezer cabinet long overdue for defrosting piled high with Lean Cuisine, French-bread pizza and frozen chilli con carne; the cold cabinet sporting sticky, dribbling yoghurt tubs and packets of rubber ham; the chipped lino tiles on the floor and the film of dust over the less popular lines of tins and bottles.

  Slider went in alone and wandered along the aisles, pretending to search for something. When he turned the end of the row and looked back towards the cash desk he saw something t
hat alerted his instincts, something that was unusual about this shop. The owner had appeared from somewhere and was standing by the till watching him, and he was not an Asian. He was white and middle-aged, and among the enduring stereotypes of Slider’s childhood he would have been put down unerringly as good old Mr Baldergammon who runs the village shop. He was stoutish, pinkish, baldish, and respectable-looking, in a neat brown overall-coat. Had this been a television sitcom he would have been wearing a spotless white grocer’s apron, and his eyes would have twinkled benevolently from behind gold-rimmed half-glasses.

  Slider moved towards him, his senses alert, and the man said, ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  He fell a long way short of his stereotype. Unaided by props, his eyes did not twinkle, but glared with muted hostility. He did not smile benevolently, and despite his words, he did not seem at all to want to help Slider, unless it was to help him out of the shop, and pronto.

  ‘I’m looking for olive oil,’ Slider said, meeting the eyes at the last moment. The grocer’s remained stony.

  ‘You passed it. Top shelf, right-hand side, down the end,’ he said curtly.

  Slider smiled an amiable smile and cocked an eyebrow at a quizzical angle, expressions he did well and convincingly. ‘Oh, well, actually, I’m looking for a special sort. A friend of mine cooked me an Italian meal and she says the olive oil you use makes all the difference. So naturally I asked her what sort she uses and she said it was called Virgin Green. Silly name, isn’t it?’

  ‘All we’ve got is what’s on the shelf,’ the grocer said coldly.

  Slider smiled a little more ingratiatingly. ‘But she told me you sell it here, only not in tins, in a barrel, like draught beer, so I thought as I was passing I’d call in and see if I could get some.’

  ‘We don’t sell it any more,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Oh, but I’m sure it wasn’t very long ago she last got some from you. Are you sure you haven’t got any, out the back, perhaps?’