Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Who’s Ronnie Brenner?’

  He hadn’t told her that part yet, but he shook the question away – no time now. ‘Hildyard must have met Anne-Marie before Christmas – in London, I suppose. That was when he stole her diary, so he knew her movements, and knew she had a free period in January when no-one would miss her. Ronnie found the empty flat for him and watched it to see when there was no-one going in or out on a regular basis. Then Hildyard arranged to meet Anne-Marie at the pub that evening. I don’t know how, but I imagine it was a prearranged signal. Something to do with her car – a note under the windscreen or something. She’d been resigned to her fate, but now suddenly she took fright. I suppose she guessed something was up, and now it was upon her she realised she didn’t want to die.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joanna whispered. She was very pale.

  ‘She ran back to try to get her friends to come with her, thinking that if she turned up at the pub with a group, he’d have to call it off. It would look like something she couldn’t have helped, to have a bunch of friends tagging along. But of course, when it came to it, she found she hadn’t any friends. She had to go alone.’

  Joanna could see that he had forgotten that she was one of the ‘friends’ in question. She felt a little sick now, and kept her lips tightly closed. He was looking stretched and exhausted, but he went on.

  ‘He met her in the car park, well muffled up, wearing a racing man’s brown trilby – a hat like Lord Oaksey wears on the television. They didn’t see Paul Ringham sitting in his car with his lights off, waiting for his wife. They left together in her car, with Anne-Marie driving. Perhaps she hoped then that she’d been mistaken. She’d known him all her life -maybe she persuaded herself that he really just wanted to talk.

  He finished his drink at a gulp and leaned back in the chair, rubbing his eyes. ‘It all fits. But I could never prove it. No proof at all. And anyway, the case is closed – that’s official.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they reopen it, if you told them what you’ve just told me?’

  ‘No. I’ve no evidence. Besides, they aren’t interested in Hildyard. They want the men at the top, and they don’t want anything to disturb the setup until they’re ready. Going after Hildyard would probably lead to them closing down the whole network and starting up again somewhere else. Anne-Marie simply isn’t important enough. Oh God, what a world it is. What a bloody awful world.’

  He rubbed and rubbed at his face, as if he might rub away his thoughts. There was more here, she could see, than Anne-Marie. This was the culmination of a long, long story of disappointment and disillusion, frustration and personal conflict. She put up her hands carefully to stop him rubbing, afraid he might hurt himself, and his hands closed like steel traps around hers, making her gasp with fear and pain.

  ‘Hold on to me,’ he said, staring at her fiercely. She could feel the unendurable tension through the contact of their hands. ‘Hold on to me. I need you. Oh God.’

  ‘You’ve got me,’ she said. But she was afraid. She had never been this close to someone so near the breaking point, and she didn’t know what to do. He was so overwound he might snap at any moment.

  Instinct took over. He slid forward out of the chair, still holding her hands, and pushed her down onto the carpet. Then he made love to her, not even waiting to take off his clothes, merely undoing and parting them sufficiently for the act. He was not rough with her – he was even kind, but in an impersonal way which came from his character, a kindness which was ingrained in him and nothing to do with her. But she took him, accepted his need, and forgave him for being -as she knew he was – unaware of her as a person just then. She loved him, and knew that it was a kind of love which had made him turn to her to exercise the healing frenzy. All the same it was the beginning of sadness. When it was over he fell against her exhausted, and began to cry, and she held him while he said over and over, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I love you.’ But she knew it was not to her that he was apologising.

  When she had gone to work, leaving him reluctantly, he got into his car and drove slowly around the streets. He couldn’t rest. The idea of going home to Ruislip, of talking to ordinary people who didn’t know what had happened, nauseated him. He couldn’t have endured to explain anything to anyone. His mind threshed at the problem; and somehow the other problem, of Irene and Joanna, had become tangled up in it, so that it was both emotional and intellectual, and he felt he couldn’t resolve the one without the other.

  Perhaps if he could get Ronnie Brenner definitely to identify Hildyard as the man who had paid him to find the flat, they would let him take up the vet quietly and nail the murder to him without mentioning the organisation at all. It would be easy to impute some other motive to him, without mentioning the Family. If only he could do that, perhaps he would be able to go and live with Joanna, and then everything would be all right.

  He must get a statement out of Ronnie straight away. He’d take him in to the station now, and then discuss some way of getting a tape recording of Hildyard’s voice. He drove back to Cathnor Road and left the car parked outside The Crown and Sceptre where it was hidden amongst the customers’ cars. He walked back to the house, and it was still dark and quiet; the street seemed deserted, too. He went quickly and quietly down the area steps and stood in the shadow under the railings a moment, listening, but everything was still.

  And then he saw that the door to Brenner’s flat was not completely closed. He stepped closer and saw the dented and splintered wood of the frame where the jemmy had been inserted next to the Yale lock. His scalp began to crawl with a cold dread which worked its way down his body and settled in his feet and legs, weighting them. He pushed the door with a knuckle and it swung inwards into the dark hall, and the abused lock fell off with a thump and clatter that made him jump as though he had touched a live wire. The opening looked like a gaping mouth, and he shivered as he stepped into it. His hair had risen on his scalp so far that he could feel the cold air against the skin. Without realising it, he rose involuntarily on tiptoe as he started down the narrow, black passage.

  Half way along his foot struck something that was blocking his way – something large, heavy and soft, a bundle on the passage floor. He drew out his pencil-torch and squatted down and shone it. Brenner’s face leapt out of the darkness at him, contused and bulging, the eyes gleaming dully white like hard-boiled eggs stuffed into the sockets. The tip of a tongue, dark blue like a chow’s, protruded from between clenched teeth, and there was a smear of blood at the corner of the mouth where he had bitten it. Around Brenner’s neck was a length of plastic-coated wire, the sort you might use in a garden to support climbers. It was drawn so tight that it had disappeared into the concentric rings of swollen flesh to either side of it.

  Slider heard himself whimper. He stood up, and his legs were trembling so much that he had to rest his hand against the wall to support himself until he regained control.

  After a moment he made himself squat down again and touch Brenner’s skin. He felt cold. The murderer must have entered as soon as Slider left, he thought. He must have been watching. Was it Hildyard, or one of the organisation clearing up after him? Well, it hardly mattered now, to him or to Brenner. The only chance of linking Hildyard to the case was now gone. Slider stood up again, felt the blood leaving his head, and had to bend over for a moment until the ringing stopped. Then he walked away quickly, out of the flat, up the area steps, and across the road to his car.

  CHAPTER 16

  Bogus is as Bogus Does

  Outside the magic heat-ring of London a cold rain was falling, and in the wet darkness there was nothing to detract from his sense of nightmare. He got lost twice, and another time had to stop and find a phone box with a directory to look up the address. In between whiles, he drove fast. His reasoning mind had shut down, the circuits blown, leaving him in peace. The simple act of driving gave him a spurious sense of achievement, as if he really were getting somewher
e at last.

  In the village there were only streetlights outside the pub and the post-office stores, and beyond that all was in darkness. Country addresses in any case were always pretty esoteric – you had to be born there to know which was Church Lane, Back Lane, London Road. He drove around, wandering down dark, narrow lanes where unbroken hedges reared at him from the oblivion beyond the headlights, having to backtrack when he snubbed his nose against a dead end, and he found the place in the end completely by chance.

  Neats Cottage. Was that a joke? he wondered. It was a pleasant, long, low cottage in the local grey stone with a lichen-gilded roof, typically Cotswold; but it had been horribly quaintified with lattice-paned windows, a front door with a bottle-glass peephole, and olde-worlde ironwork. And one end of the cottage had been bastardised with a hideous redbrick, flat-roofed extension with aluminium-framed windows. Slider presumed this must be the surgery.

  The white garden gate gleamed preternaturally, and on it was a notice painted in black letters on white with the name of the cottage and then simply ‘B. HILDYARD, MRCVS’. Surprisingly restrained, he thought, for a man who had given himself away by unnecessary embroidery. The cottage appeared to be completely dark, but as Slider walked down the garden path he saw that in fact one window in the residential end was lit, but glowing only faintly behind thick red curtains. The man was still up. Well, no reason why not. There had been people in the pub, still. It couldn’t be so very late.

  Slider had no idea what he meant to do. He had come here simply on instinct, a very physical, unthinking instinct; and now, faced with the overwhelming normality of the place, he could think of nothing to do but to go up to the door and knock on it. The elaborate iron knocker did not seem to make much of a noise, and now he was closer he could hear music from within, too muted to identify. Good thick doors and walls, he thought. Then a light went on, a shadow fell across the square glass porthole, and it was flung abruptly wide. And there was the bogus vet, as Slider continued to think of him, towering over him like the Demon King in a pantomime, backed by the light and hard to see.

  There was a moment of silence during which Slider had time to appreciate the folly of his being here at all, as well as the remarkable fact that he felt no fear. Indeed, he was aware of an insane desire to say something completely frivolous.

  Then Hildyard said, ‘You’d better come in.’

  He looked past Slider’s shoulder into the darkness, and then stepped back and to the side, blocking the way to the left, so that as he stepped over the threshold Slider had no choice but to turn right. Light and music were ahead of him. He obeyed the silent urging and entered a large and comfortable room. It was decorated in the chintz, brass and polished parquet tradition – Irene would have loved it, he thought. Even so, it was warm, pleasantly lit by shaded lamps, and made welcoming by a good log fire in the grate. Music issued from a stereo stack, turned low as for background. It was a classical symphony, Slider recognised, but he didn’t know which one.

  ‘Brahms – Symphony Number One,’ Hildyard said, following the direction of his eyes. ‘Do you like music? Or shall I turn it off?’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Slider said. His voice seemed to come out with an effort, as though he hadn’t used it for years.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ There was nothing in Hildyard’s voice or manner to suggest that this was anything but an ordinary social visit. Slider sat in the chintz-covered wing-back by the fire. The dented cushions of its opposite number suggested the vet had been sitting there. Doing what? Slider’s roving gaze saw no paper, book, nor even drink to hand. He had just been sitting there, then, listening to the music. Waiting. For what?

  Hildyard surveyed his visitor’s face for a long moment and then said, as if he had just come to a conclusion, ‘What will you have to drink? Whisky? Gin? A beer? I was just going to have one myself.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Slider said absently. The warmth, the easy chair, the music were all acting on his aching exhaustion, lulling him, soothing him. He didn’t notice that he had made no choice, and his eyes followed Hildyard almost drowsily as he crossed to the table under the window and poured two stiff whiskies from an extremely cut-glass decanter into massive, heavy-bottomed tumblers. There was something about the cut glass that went with the chintz and brass, Slider thought vaguely. It was what Irene though of as Good Taste, and it struck him that it was as bogus as the ideal homes illustrated in the colour supplements – instant decor, everything coordinated, the taste that money could buy. Image without substance, slick, ready-made. Like Anne-Marie’s flat in Birmingham. That’s what’s wrong with me, he thought: I’ve swallowed the Modern World, and it’s made me sick.

  He received the glass from the vet in a bemused way, his sense of unreality reaching a peak. He had no idea what he was doing here, what he could possibly achieve, even what he expected to happen. He felt that if he waited long enough he would hear his own voice, but that until he heard it he would not know what he was going to say. Hildyard sat down opposite him with his drink, watching him impassively, and probably assessing pretty accurately the state of his visitor’s mind, Slider thought.

  This isn’t an official visit,’ was what Slider did eventually say.

  ‘So I imagined. You’ve been taken off the case -grounded, as we used to say.’

  ‘What?’ Slider said stupidly.

  ‘During the war. Air force,’ Hildyard told him kindly. ‘What a picnic that was! Never a dull moment. A lot of us never got over the peace, you know.’ He glanced at Slider’s hand. ‘Drink your drink,’ he urged pleasantly. Slider looked at the glass, suddenly wondering, and reading his thoughts, Hildyard said, ‘It’s just whisky. I’ve nothing to fear from you. I knew you’d been grounded before you did. Your Commissioner plays golf, you see.’

  So he did. Slider remembered. ‘And bridge,’ he said vaguely. He sipped cautiously. The hot, wheaten taste flooded his mouth, burned pleasantly all the way down and settled in a warm glow in his stomach. The vapours rose instantly inside him, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten all day.

  ‘All the same,’ Hildyard went on conversationally, ‘I was half expecting you. Your presence at the funeral, for one thing. You’ve been behaving very oddly, you know. There’s been talk – there may even be an investigation into your behaviour before very long. “Cracking up”, isn’t that what you chaps say? Too much pressure, too much work, not enough time off. Trouble at home, too. What are you doing here, at this very moment, for instance? I doubt whether you even really know yourself.’

  Slider took a grip on his mind and dragged it away from the fire and the music and the irrelevancies of warmth and comfort.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you. There are some questions I want to ask you, just for my own satisfaction.’

  ‘And what makes you think I will answer any of your questions?’ Hildyard leaned back comfortably in his chair and moved one long, bony finger gently to the music. It was the slow movement. ‘Lovely piece this, don’t you think? Did you know it was through my representatives that Anne-Marie was able to develop her musical talents? Her aunt wanted her to devote herself to something more reliable, especially given the trouble her parents’ marriage had caused. But I persuaded her to let Anne-Marie study, and when she came out of the college, I dropped the right words in the right ears to get her into the Orchestra. She never knew that part, of course – but even talent needs a helping hand. Don’t you think that was kind of me? But we all wanted Anne-Marie to stay close to home. It was a great blow when she moved to London. That, I think, showed ingratitude.’ His smile was unpleasant.

  ‘I should think her aunt would have been pleased,’ Slider said with an effort.

  ‘Well, perhaps. She didn’t like Anne-Marie. Also she is a musical cretin. I hate to have to say such a harsh thing of my fiancée, but it’s the truth. Oh, you didn’t know I was going to marry Mrs Ringwood? A lady of mature charms, but none the worse for that; and if she is no friend to the muse, she will at least be very, ve
ry rich, especially as you people have had the kindness to wind up the investigation of her late niece. And I can always listen to my music in the privacy of my surgery. One can’t have everything.’

  ‘I suppose Mrs Ringwood will live only just long enough to make a new will,’ Slider heard himself say. He was appalled, but Hildyard didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, he chuckled.

  ‘Come, come, am I so unsubtle? Rest assured, Inspector, that when Mrs Ringwood dies, be it soon or late, there will be nothing suspicious about her death. The doctor will have no hesitation in giving the certificate.’

  ‘Then why did you kill Anne-Marie in that particular way? You could have made it look like a natural death, or even a convincing suicide.’

  The vet’s face darkened briefly, but he said in a normal-sounding voice, ‘One has to award you points for frankness, at all events. Why on earth should you think I killed Anne-Marie?’

  It was persuasively natural, and Slider made himself remember Anne-Marie’s nakedness, Ronnie Brenner’s blue tongue, the fact that Thompson had blood under his eyelids. He felt very tired. He wondered for a moment whether the whisky had been laced with something after all, and then dismissed the idea. Perhaps he really was just cracking up. If so, he had nothing to lose.

  ‘Let’s pretend,’ he said thickly. ‘Just a sort of parlour game. Just for my own satisfaction. I think I’ve worked it all out, almost everything, but there are one or two points –’

  ‘Do I owe you satisfaction?’