by Morag Joss
‘So were we,’ Sara said. ‘Our friend’s asleep, too.’
‘Oh. I mean … what I mean is, I’m waiting for that woman—you know—the old stick who does the music. I want her to play something for Mummy, I think it might bring her round.’
‘Oh? Does she like music?’
‘Well, you know, the classics. Actually, I think mainly she likes to be a little difficult. When I visit. You know, suddenly decides she needs a sleep or she’s ill or something. But if your friend’s asleep, well, perhaps they’ve given all the old dears a nap. Don’t you think? Rather sweet! Like children.’
‘Our friend’s not an old dear.’
‘Oh. It does bring people round though, sometimes, hearing music, doesn’t it? Hugh thinks I’m silly but I’m sure it can. Well, anyway, I’m Petronella, by the way.’
Sara smiled, not with any warmth at the introduction, but with genuine sympathy. Anyone quite as stupid as this and so unguarded as to be willing to expose the fact to strangers really had to be pitied.
‘Actually,’ Petronella was saying now, in mock-confessional tones, ‘you gave me a fright, if anything. I’d nodded off, when you came in. I do get awfully tired, it’s because I’m pregnant, actually. Number three. It’s say hot in here.’
‘It is,’ Andrew said. ‘Actually, we were just taking a look at the pool. There are dozens of benches in the garden,’ he now told Sara. ‘Shall we go and sit outside?’
‘Oh, good idea!’ cried Petronella. ‘I’m on my own today, and it is a bore waiting on one’s own. Hugh—that’s my other half—usually comes too. We were here practically all day yesterday. He’s marvellous with Mummy. I’m too close, you see. One often is, isn’t one, and really one needs to be detached. Hugh’s terribly good at standing back.’
They reached a bench on the edge of the broad grass walk that led from the house down to the pool. Behind them, a wall of thick shrubbery shielded them from the sun. Petronella looked at her watch. ‘If Hugh was here he’d get something done about that old bird who does the music. She was quite rude. I only wanted Mummy to hear her favourite tune, you’d think she’d be pleased to be asked, wouldn’t you? Especially after yesterday. Hugh thinks it’s ridiculous. We might complain.’
‘What is her favourite tune?’ Andrew asked, not giving a damn.
‘I only asked if the woman could play it, and you’d think I’d insulted her. “The Dying Swan”, is it? She just said no because she had to go out. Quite abruptly.’
‘ “The Swan”,’ Sara said.
‘I mean I just asked. She said she wasn’t here to give concerts. Quite rude.’
Petronella looked wanly into the trees on the other side of the walk. Sara said, to fill the silence, ‘She likes “The Swan”, does she, your mother?’
‘Oh, loves it, yes. I do, too. She took me to Swan Lake once, when I was quite little. I can still remember that bit where the swan dies. Well, you do, don’t you, at that age.’
Sara and Andrew exchanged a look of amusement. Neither was about to oust Petronella’s cherished memory of hearing a piece of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals in the middle of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
‘Haven’t you got it on a CD? Couldn’t you play it to her on a CD?’
Before Petronella could get her head round that one Andrew said, ‘Sara plays that piece. You’d play it for Petronella’s mother, wouldn’t you?’ Sara gave him a dig with her elbow that nearly sent him off the bench. But he was squeezing her arm in order to draw her attention, and one look at him told her that his mind was working faster than hers. Sara sighed, trapped. Andrew, not being part of the enquiry, could not engineer a meeting with Bunny Fernandez. But Sara, if she were to answer the summons to play Saint-Saëns for the spoilt old trout, might be able to find out something about Bunny’s experience yesterday. At the very least she could make an assessment of Bunny’s condition and report back.
‘Sara’s a cellist,’ Andrew told Petronella. ‘In fact she’s off to Salzburg tomorrow, to the festival.’
‘Gosh! Salzburg! You are lucky!’ Petronella exclaimed. ‘How lovely, if you like that sort of thing.’
‘Yes, isn’t she! But I’m sure she’d play “The Swan” for your mother, wouldn’t you, darling?’ He was already on his feet. ‘Come along. Joyce’s cello will be in the music studio, won’t it?’
‘Gosh, really? Oh I say, you wouldn’t, would you? I know it would help her pick up.’
‘I don’t think I should just use Joyce’s instrument without asking …’
‘Oh please! If you saw Mummy …’
‘I’m sure Joyce wouldn’t mind. It’s not as if you don’t know how to play it properly, is it, darling?’ Andrew said smoothly. Sara’s glare at him over Petronella’s head told Andrew that her revenge was going to be unpredictable, as well as unspeakable and prolonged.
Sister Yvonne was coming out of Bunny’s room on the top floor, quietly closing the door behind her, just as Petronella and Sara, carrying Joyce’s cello, reached the top of the main stairs. Andrew had decided to wait in the hall, perhaps guessing that up here there would be police officers: two of them were sitting on hard chairs on the landing, a discreet distance from the door. Their embarrassment at having to hover there on the off-chance of interviewing, perhaps cautioning and arresting a sick old lady, was palpable. Yvonne mouthed a few words in their direction with a single movement of the head. They did not rise.
‘Hellay! Is Mummy awake yet?’ Petronella’s voice boomed. If Mummy were capable of waking, that would surely do it, Sara thought.
Yvonne shook her head. She took a breath, looked uncertainly at Petronella’s eager face and hesitated. ‘I was just coming to find you. She’s very peaceful,’ she almost whispered. ‘I’ve plumped her pillows up, and she’s quite peaceful.’ She did not suggest that they might disturb her by going in, but shook her head again in sympathy and said, ‘Call me if you need me, won’t you.’
‘Mummy, it’s me!’ Petronella entered the room and walked swiftly over to the bed. She bent to kiss her mother, then straightened up and turned to where Sara hovered, a little distance off. The silly eyes were filling with tears.
‘Oh, she is sleepy!’ she said desperately, waving an arm towards the still figure under the covers. Sara steered Petronella, who seemed in danger of falling, to a chair at the bedside.
‘Would you like to be alone with her? Shall I go?’
Petronella still had hold of her arm. ‘No, stay! Oh please, if you don’t mind.’ Tears now ran down her cheeks. ‘I’m no good at this kind of thing. Please stay and play her tune. Please. You never know’—she glanced at her mother—‘you never know, it might bring her round … mightn’t it? She just had a little turn. It might wake her up.’
Sara nodded quietly, fetched a chair to sit on and placed it a few feet from the end of the bed. She took the cello case to the side of the room and brought the instrument out. As she tuned it she glanced towards the bed, finding that she was shaking slightly, wondering why she was agreeing to this. Just before she drew her bow for the first notes of ‘The Swan’ she looked up and stared at Bunny, as if she had to impress upon herself the full—what? obscenity, pointlessness, pathos, hilarity?—of what she was about to do.
Bunny was not having a little afternoon nap, being less in the Land of Nod than in a deep coma. The skin of her face was already tightening to reveal the bones beneath the flesh and her hands, like blue roots, lay still on the bedspread. Her barely perceptible breathing was silent, yet before Sara reached the end of the piece, which she played as softly as she could and with more tenderness than she had believed she possessed, she sensed that it had stopped altogether. And, resting the bow gently across her knee as she looked with pity at the weeping Petronella, she felt also a slight sting of bitterness towards Andrew, for whose curiosity’s sake she had just serenaded a cadaver.
CHAPTER 34
THAT NIGHT ANDREW slept badly, rising at around four and taking himself up to the hut at the top of the garden, th
e place where he could think best. Lying on the chaise longue, staring out across the valley but hardly seeing it, he ran over in his mind the few facts about the Warwick Jones case that were coming to light. There had been no widow to break the news to, in fact no family at all except for two nephews, both rather priggishly preoccupied with being good husbands and daddies in the Midlands, who had not seen their uncle since their own father had died. Several things about their uncle had been a mystery to them, chiefly the source of his largely unearned income and the phoney military accent. For it was their father, they confirmed, who had been the regular soldier and the prisoner of war for four years, not the older Warwick who they thought had been doing something in a factory near Birmingham during the war. Not that these small mysteries in themselves constituted a reason why he had been killed, for if every elderly gent who assumed a more honourable persona for the purpose of impressing old women were to be murdered for it, Bath would be all but empty of elderly gents.
Setting aside the why, Andrew turned fretfully to the how of the case. It was certain that the short-sighted and slightly confused Bunny had tottered into the studio at the usual time, for two or three people had seen her on her way there from her bedroom shortly before three o’clock. It was possible, then, that she had noticed that Warwick was in his usual place but not the state he was in, perhaps the same trick of light beguiling her as it had James, and had got herself into her chair before a proper look at him had induced the first of the series of strokes. Warwick himself had had lunch in his room, a slightly chaotic affair that day because of the Open Day visitors, but his empty tray had been among those cleared and washed before the catering assistant Donna had gone off sink duty at two. Ivan had taken his tray up, Hilary had gone up with his dessert and Yvonne had brought his tray down. All members of staff had been helping with the service, except for Dr Golightly, who had been hosting the table of guests, and Joyce, who was considered too unreliable with trays. Everyone else had been busy either in the kitchen, the dining room or up and down stairs, going to and from bedrooms. Any one of them could have been absent for as long as it took quietly to throttle Warwick in his chair. And of course, a complete stranger could have wandered on to the premises at any time that day and done the same thing. The main question in Andrew’s mind was the uncomfortable one that he and Sara had been discussing last night over supper (his very successful bouillabaisse, he recalled, swallowing a garlicky belch). There’s got to be a connection, hasn’t there? Two stranglings in Bath, days apart? You can’t think they’ve been done by two different people, she had said. There was the obvious connection, of course, the B&B in Limpley Stoke and the Sulis Clinic, but Andrew was not at all sure that this was not a red herring.
‘A red herring?’ she had said then, with something not unlike one on the end of her fork.
‘All right, suppose we say there is a connection. Suppose we forget motive because we don’t know what that is. Takahashi remains the main suspect for the first murder. He can’t have committed the second because he was sitting all Friday afternoon with twenty-four other people, listening to the closing session of the seminar. Oh and by the way, your idea about the films hasn’t helped. It was smart of you, though, to think that she would have taken more pictures, her being a photographer. But we’ve checked the places that do developing and Photo-Kwik doesn’t keep records by name, only numbers. So unless films are paid for by cheque or card there’s no record of names. Boots does it by name, though. There was a Takahashi.’ Sara’s face had brightened. ‘But not ours. Another Takahashi, a student. We’ve seen him. No connection. Nice idea, though.’
When Sara had looked rather crestfallen Andrew had simply shaken his head. ‘We just have to plough on. I still have my doubts that we’re looking at motiveless murders, but that’s the line that Askew’s taking on the Jones enquiry. That’s why he wants to bring in Leech for questioning, only I gather he’s gone AWOL. He hasn’t been seen since Thursday. The Golightlys say he may have been upset because they told him he couldn’t stay on beyond the summer. We’ll track him down in one of his haunts, he hasn’t the wit to go missing. But please, don’t go down to the towpath again, and certainly not at night.’
At seven o’clock in the morning Andrew closed the hut, made his way down through the garden and returned to bed where he woke Sara up accidentally on purpose, by sliding one ice-cold foot against her leg. To stop him shivering, she turned, still half-asleep, wrapped her arms and legs around him and held him, without speaking, until he moved gently against her and into her, nudging his way slowly, without energy and almost sadly until he climaxed with a sigh and a tightening little shudder of his limbs. It was after nine when they woke again, still wrapped together, Sara with a crick in her shoulder, Andrew with a dead arm.
‘Oh Christ,’ she said, furious and tearful. ‘Oh Christ, my shoulder! How the hell am I going to play like this? How can I play Dvořák like this! I must get a massage. I’ll have to get a later flight. I’ll need some physio. I’m supposed to be playing the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and you’ve mucked up my shoulder! You’re an idiot—it’s all your fault. Why did you do that!’
‘Well, excuse me. But you did rather do it, too, I seem to remember,’ Andrew snarled. ‘And now I’ll be late for seeing the kids. I don’t suppose you noticed that, did you?’ Was he ever going to be allowed to forget how important her bloody career was? What about his? What about his children?
‘I was half-asleep!’
‘Were you? I didn’t notice the difference,’ he said bitterly, slamming the door of the shower.
‘That’s an unforgivable thing to say!’ she shouted. It was and he knew it, but Andrew said more unforgivable things as he pulled on his clothes without bothering to dry himself. The last of them was that he had had enough. Sara screamed that so had she and he could get himself and his bloody things out of her house. At that point Andrew dropped his voice to a civilised, hate-filled drawl and said that he would collect them when she was back from Salzburg at a time that did not inconvenience her, and Sara knew that he meant it. Fine, she replied in a voice just like his, so that he would know she meant it too.
After he had left Sara worked rather sheepishly in the music room, trying to ignore the feeling that his absence left behind. Here she was, the first day after the end of her relationship with Andrew, alone again in the house that had become exactly what it was after Matteo had died: a private, comfortable, beautiful mausoleum that she was screaming to be let out of. So, instead of sticking for as long as she should have done to the Dvořák, she decided that she did have time after all to go again to the Sulis to see James. The thought of Stephen Golightly had nothing whatever to do with it.
* * *
AT ROUGHLY the same moment Stephen Golightly was thinking about publicity and in particular how to avoid it. He had taken a nonchalant jog down to the main gate and satisfied himself that the police presence at the clinic entrance was as discreet as possible, reminding the officer to remain out of sight under the porch of the tiny lodge until any car should present itself. He then jogged as loosely as he could, in order to persuade the policeman of his unaltered calm, back up the drive. Stephen followed the curve as it rose around the knot garden on the south side to the almost empty car park. From there he climbed the terraced shrubbery and sat down on a recliner under the gazebo, breathing a fraction harder. As he checked his pulse, mentally giving his cardiovascular fitness a big tick, he surveyed the city stretching out beyond the garden, so apparently still yet seething, he was sure, with thousands of potentially grateful patients. He smiled involuntarily, already hearing accolades, hardly noticing that the imagined conversations were in fact rehearsals for real compliments that he would engineer later.
August could be rather a depressing month, with few patients and those there were being mainly converts and regulars whose adulation no longer carried much thrill for him. He was a good doctor. He knew that by the brisk turnover he did down in town at his
NHS practice, providing relief for the unvarying complaints of infancy, maturity and old age. But these patients came and went as if both his prescriptions (which they took) and his advice (which they ignored) in some way disappointed; as if he were ministering to them inadequately and sending them away with rather less than they felt was their due. He sometimes wondered if they held him somehow to blame for their being ill in the first place, as if they thought that it was in his power to exempt, say, a two-year-old from glue ear, a teenager from acne, a septuagenarian from arthritis. When he saw, by contrast, the quite preposterous gratitude in the eyes of his Sulis patients, he was able then to see himself as they did. Then he also felt that he was good, as well as knowing that he was.
This August had looked no different from half a dozen others, to begin with. It had been no surprise to take Bunny Fernandez’s booking, nor to see Dafydd Broadbent again, and there was always a patient or two of Warwick’s type about the place. But James and Joyce, both ideal patients from the treatability point of view, as well as Jane Valentine in the kind of emotional postdivorce collapse that was usually responsive to lots of sympathetic attention, had been unlooked-for bonuses. So this August should have been gratifying both to his own self-esteem and to the effect on autumn bookings that could be expected when the walking adverts themselves, a new quotient of fit ex-patients, went home and expressed their conversion to naturopathy to their amazed relatives and friends.
So it was not the murder that was the worst of it in Stephen’s view, bad as it was. The proper response, which he had been careful to give, to the death of Warwick was to agree that it was appalling, but his private calculation was that while the murder was regrettable, it was also forgettable. Warwick had not been a regular patient and had put ‘None’ after next-of-kin on his form. The nephews had been unearthed by the police in Solihull or somewhere, he believed, not a region that supplied a flow of Sulis patients in any case, so any word-of-mouth damage to the clinic would be minimal.