Singing the Sadness

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Have you indeed?’ said Penty-Hooser, with the weary politeness of a man who’s enjoying a good night out and doesn’t relish the intrusion of work. ‘Well, that’s good.’

  The silence that followed stretched long enough to be noticeable. Ursell showed no sign of being about to break it. He’s leaving it to Pantyhose to say whether he should speak here or somewhere more private, thought Joe.

  He looked at Lewis, whose face wore an expression of polite curiosity perfectly fitted to the situation.

  Sample said, ‘Get myself another drink, shall I?’ and moved away with the look of a man glad to be elsewhere.

  Lewis said, ‘If you two are going to talk police business, we’d better make ourselves scarce. Joe, I don’t believe you’ve met our judges yet. I know they’re dying to meet our festival hero, though I fear they are musically too incorruptible to let your absence affect their judgement of the Boyling Corner Choir’s performance.’

  He put his arm through Joe’s and drew him away towards the dais at the head of the hall by which stood a group of people whom Joe recognized as the occupants of the front row in the competition field. Joe was introduced and received politely enough, but he didn’t get the impression that he’d made their night. Over their shoulders, or rather, as they were generally somewhat taller than him, under their armpits, he saw the two policemen in close conversation. He surprised himself by feeling really resentful, like he had some earned right to be the first to know who the burnt woman was. He could see that whatever Ursell was telling Pantyhose wasn’t to his comfort. Whatever he’s hearing is changing the way he sees things, thought Joe. He’s either going to have to face up to something or cut and run.

  How he could be so sure of this, he didn’t know and didn’t try to know. Happiness lay in being grateful for what you’d got and not being resentful over what you hadn’t got. And not wasting time trying to analyse either.

  Pantyhose had made up his mind. He was speaking authoritatively to Ursell. The perfect picture of a man taking control. But Joe knew better.

  He’s running, he thought. Or maybe swimming was closer. The ship was scraping along the reef and suddenly elsewhere seemed a safer place to be.

  The DCC had turned and was heading for the exit, like a man with important business in the next county. Electricity Sample got in his way. There was a brief interchange, then Pantyhose resumed his progress with Sample in his wake. Lewis had noticed all this too and didn’t like it, though the easy flow of his conversation continued unchecked. Ursell watched Pantyhose and Electricity out of the room, then turned towards the dais and began to approach. His was a much more leisurely progress. If people spoke to him in passing, he paused, smiled and replied.

  This is for the High Master’s sake, thought Joe. He knows Lewis knows he’s on his way, so he’s spinning it out, making him suffer. But how? And why?

  At last he was there, standing deferentially just outside the group. This time it was Lewis he was forcing to make the move. Patience. Joe was beginning to appreciate this quality in the inspector. He was still far from clear what made Ursell tick, but he recognized something very single-minded in the man. Like that guy in the white hat in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he wasn’t a guy you wanted chasing after you.

  Finally Lewis broke off and turned to him.

  ‘Ah, Inspector. Duty done? Then let me get you a drink.’

  ‘Very kind of you, sir. Just an orange juice. Duty may be over, but driving isn’t. Setting a good example is half the battle, in policing as in education, wouldn’t you agree, sir?’

  ‘No argument there,’ said Lewis, raising a finger to one of the NYTs and taking a glass of orange from her tray. ‘I don’t see your boss any more. I hope he’s not setting a bad example by leaving early.’

  He stressed the word boss almost imperceptibly.

  Ursell said, ‘Mr Penty-Hooser presents his compliments and says that he’s sorry to have to steal away, but duty calls.’

  ‘And duty as we all know is the stern daughter of the voice of God,’ said Lewis. ‘So, tell me, Inspector, are we all to be let into the secret of the unfortunate woman’s name, or is there some embargo upon it till her family have been informed?’

  ‘In a way, sir. There is some difficulty in tracing her family.’

  ‘Why’s that? Can’t she give you names and addresses?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. Still not in a position to give us anything, the poor creature. In fact, it’s only thanks to the sharp eyes of Mr Sixsmith here that we’ve got a line on her at all.’

  He nodded appreciatively at Joe who was momentarily bewildered.

  ‘I don’t recall … hey, you don’t mean that bracelet thing?’

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Ursell.

  ‘And what bracelet thing is that?’ enquired Lewis, who didn’t look like he was ready to give Joe a good-citizen award.

  ‘This thing I found up at Copa this morning. Don’t know what made me pick it up,’ said Joe. ‘But it was all scorched and buckled. How’d you get anything useful off that?’

  ‘We live in a hi-tech world,’ said Ursell. ‘At our police lab we have technology to read serial numbers that have been ground off engine blocks to a depth of several millimetres. This was fairly easy meat to them. You were right, Mr Sixsmith. This was an accident bracelet to alert anyone giving medical treatment that the wearer was allergic to certain antibiotics. Happily its absence was not important medically here, as these particular drugs were not among those used upon her at Caerlindys Hospital. But our technical boys were able to make out the personal reference code plus the telephone number of the organization doctors were asked to ring to get full details of the patient’s allergy. After that, it was easy.’

  ‘So it looks like once again you are the person we should all feel grateful to, Mr Sixsmith,’ said Lewis. ‘Clearly the gods were smiling the day we decided to invite the Boyling Corner Choir to our festival.’

  He didn’t sound like he shared this divine good humour.

  ‘Well, Inspector,’ he went on. ‘May we now hear this poor woman’s name, so that we have something positive to call her in our prayers?’

  ‘Of course, though presumably the Almighty already knows her name,’ said Ursell, his gaze fixed on Lewis like a darts player’s on the treble twenty. ‘And I think you may recognize it too.’

  He paused dramatically. They were all actors at heart, Joe told himself again. But while dramatic pauses are OK in drama, in real life they’re like safe braking distances in motorway traffic – there’s usually some plonker who will slide himself into it.

  ‘Time for my little outline of tomorrow’s procedures, I think, High Master.’

  It was the Reverend David Davies, looking very important.

  ‘Yes, of course. Excuse me, Inspector. Back in a tick.’

  Ursell glanced at Joe and gave him what felt like an inclusive smile, as if to say, Don’t worry. We’ll have him back in a while.

  Lewis mounted what was during term the staff dais at one end of the hall and tapped on a live microphone till he reduced the guests to relative silence. He didn’t look worried and he certainly didn’t sound it.

  ‘Honoured judges, distinguished guests, ladies, gentlemen, songsters out on a spree, though none of you doomed, I feel certain, from here to eternity, you are most welcome. I would like to thank you all for the fortitude and good humour with which you have faced all the vicissitudes of the day, and to assure you that with God’s help and a fair wind, which is to say no wind at all, we hope that our final day tomorrow will pass with no interruption at all, save that of applause for songs well sung. And to bring you fully abreast with the order of events tomorrow, let me now hand you over to one who needs no introduction, our much loved pastor, our much honoured poet, and our superbly efficient festival organizer, David Davies.’

  There was the kind of pattery applause people make with drinks in their hands and Lewis stepped down and rejoined Joe and Ursell.

  ‘Now, where
were we? Oh yes. The mystery woman’s identity. Do spell it out, I beg you, Inspector.’

  And Ursell took his revenge for the spoilt dramatic pause by now taking him quite literally.

  ‘Ess eye ell ell sea are oh eff tee,’ he said. ‘Which spells Sillcroft.’

  Again the dramatic pause, this time uninterrupted.

  ‘Her name is Angela Maria Sillcroft.’

  Chapter 24

  Truth is a well-stacked blonde in a Turkish bath, says Endo Venera in one of his more poetic passages. For a second you see everything clearly, then the steam swirls round those gorgeous curves, and all you can do is take a bearing and plunge right on in.

  Only he didn’t go on to say that sometimes you may find you’re grappling with a monster.

  Angela Maria Sillcroft.

  Who had to be related to that other Sillcroft.

  Simon Sillcroft, sadness.

  The boy at the centre of the hushed-up scandal which had cost Matthias his job.

  The Reverend David Davies, Dai Bard, was getting into his stride on the dais. Joe wasn’t listening. He was too busy trying to get a clear line of sight before the steam curtain fell.

  The burnt woman – Angela, though somehow knowing her name didn’t make thinking about her easier – Angela’s presence in Llanffugiol must have something to do with what had happened to her brother. Investigation? Revenge? Blackmail even? If it was Lewis who put her in the cottage, that made sense … But then there was the sighting of Wain’s car, and the traces of Decorax in her system … So Wain must have a connection … But the fire, could Wain really have set the fire? Why? To protect his father? Didn’t seem likely, considering their attitude to each other. Blood thicker than water though. Maybe by protecting his father, he thought he was protecting his mother?

  And there was something else. Either Leon Lewis had all the acting ability Electricity Sample lacked plus a whole lot more, or the burnt woman’s identity came as a complete surprise to him.

  Maybe more than surprise, though. Maybe shock, rapidly disguised as the natural surprise of recognizing the name.

  One advantage of Dai Bard’s electrically magnified voice was that it provided plenty of noise cover for any number of private conversations.

  ‘Sillcroft?’ said Lewis. ‘We had a boy here of that name, a rather troubled, indeed disturbed child. You may recall the business, Inspector? A coincidence, perhaps. But again, perhaps not. Perhaps that was what brought her to Branddreth. Though if that were the case, and to save you the embarrassment of asking, she never made her presence known to me, Inspector.’

  ‘Thank you for that courtesy, sir,’ said Ursell, who to Joe’s eyes didn’t look as if he’d be embarrassed by having to ask the Pope to blow into a Breathalyzer.

  ‘Have her family been informed?’ asked Lewis. ‘If I recall right, there was only the father, whose job kept him more or less permanently occupied out in the wilds of Patagonia. Oil exploration, I think. Young Simon was looked after during the vacations by an aunt in Bexhill.’

  ‘That’s right, sir. The daughter, Angela, went to boarding school too, few years older than her brother, finished last year. Nineteen, she is. Took a year off before university to look after her aunt who’s not been in good health. And her brother too.’

  ‘So what on earth was she doing up here?’ demanded Lewis.

  ‘Entitled to go where she likes, isn’t she, sir?’ said Ursell.

  ‘Yes, of course. All I meant was, with the responsibility of looking after her family …’

  ‘Ah yes, sir. Pastoral responsibility sort of thing. Very much your line. Well, the thing is, the aunt went into a retirement home in the New Year. The accident knocked her back, see. Well, it would, thing like that. Plus the damage to the house …’

  Lewis was looking as puzzled as Joe felt.

  ‘What accident? What damage?’ the High Master asked with some irritation.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Just like me, getting things in a tangle, all about-face, like,’ said the precise Ursell unconvincingly. ‘No reason you should know about the accident, pastoral responsibility being finished, and all.’

  ‘I wish you’d make yourself clear, Inspector,’ said Lewis icily.

  Ursell lowered his voice to the level and timbre favoured by the doorstep bearers of bad news. Only this time it wasn’t an act.

  ‘It was the boy, something happened, Bexhill police aren’t quite sure what. But there was a fire started in his room. Lot of damage. And he died, poor kid. Quite ironic, really, seeing how his sister’s ended up.’

  The news hit Joe hard, like it concerned a member of his own family. Which, given the way he felt about the burnt woman – sorry, Angela Maria – it did, sort of.

  Simon Sillcroft, sadness. What had been a schoolboy scratching was now an epitaph.

  Who is it calls the shots up there in that heaven Rev. Pot and Mirabelle so firmly believe in? wondered Joe bitterly.

  But there was another question of more immediate, less metaphysical import knocking at his mind’s door.

  How had Glyn Matthias known about the boy’s death?

  That he had known, Joe was now sure. There was no other explanation for those comments this morning which Joe had found vaguely puzzling but which were now quite clear … sadness all the way for him … a better place …

  Not Bexhill after all.

  Something else to pass on to Ursell.

  Dai Bard was still droning on – no, not droning, that was quite the wrong word for the oceanic undulations of words which were surging over them like a spring tide – mainly in English but with a fair flotsam and jetsam of Welsh.

  Lewis was shaking his head, as at the manifest unjustness of life.

  ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t know. The poor, poor child. And now his sister. Terrible, terrible.’

  Joe was convinced by the ignorance. The man hadn’t known about the boy’s death. But he wasn’t at all convinced by the regret, perfectly pitched though it was. Simon Sillcroft dead, Angela Sillcroft like to die – these could just be loose ends tied up in the High Master’s eyes.

  But that was mere speculation and none of his business anyway. Now that he knew the one thing he’d set himself to find out, the girl’s identity, all he had to do was spill his guts to Ursell, then relax and enjoy the rest of the festival.

  But Ursell was not yet available. He was regarding Lewis with a curious mixture of polite attentiveness, repressed dislike, and underlying bafflement.

  Joe recognized the condition because he’d seen it before. On Sergeant Chivers’s face when he felt he was close to fingering Joe’s collar but knew in his heart that it was still just out of reach of his grasping fingers.

  The greater part of Dai Bard’s audience were now showing something like the same symptoms, this time due to the fact that the flood of words now consisted entirely of Welsh. Very rhythmic Welsh, Joe registered. He guessed that the Reverend poet was taking the chance to give a captive audience a taste of his bardic poetry.

  Suddenly Ursell made up his mind, or perhaps it was simply a turning away from temptation.

  ‘Thank you very much for your time, Mr Lewis,’ he said formally. ‘We may need to talk again later.’

  ‘It will be my pleasure, Inspector,’ said Lewis.

  There was nothing triumphant in his tone but he might as well have been standing on an Olympic podium.

  Ursell moved away so abruptly, Joe was left standing.

  ‘Now this is fine, fine,’ said Lewis, focusing his attention on Dai Bard’s incantation. ‘A pity you do not have the Welsh, Mr Sixsmith. This is quite splendid stuff.’

  He sounded so sincere that Joe bit back the sarcasm rising to his lips and set out after the inspector.

  He caught up with him at the door, talking earnestly to Richard Burton, which was to say, Sergeant Tom Prince in civvies.

  Their conversation ceased, and Prince didn’t look all that happy as Joe joined them.

  “Evening, Tom,’ he said placatingly. />
  ‘Sergeant Prince to you, Sixsmith,’ said the policeman, glowering. ‘I don’t stay on first names with people who muck me about, people I can’t trust.’

  No prizes for guessing what he was referring to.

  ‘You’re narked with me ‘cos I didn’t identify Wain Lewis, right? I’m sorry. Just didn’t seem important at the time. And it made no matter anyway, did it?’

  ‘When I spoke with the DI and showed him that hospital lab report, it made a lot of matter. You’d seen it first, Sixsmith. Maybe it wasn’t important for you to say straight off that the lad in the corridor looked like young Lewis. But the second you made that drug connection between him and the woman in Copa, it was your bounden duty to tell me. In fact, it was a criminal omission not to.’

  ‘So arrest me,’ said Joe, who wasn’t in the mood to be intimidated.

  ‘I might just do that.’

  ‘And I might just shout out to everyone here that you weren’t transferred out of Cardiff CID ‘cos you had your hand in the till, no, that was just the cover story so’s Perry could get you up here to give him some back-up at ground level.’

  Now where did that come from? Shoot, who cared? Again that moment of complete clarity.

  He saw Prince glance at Ursell with something between accusation and threat in his eyes. No time to work that out. When you’re on a roll, roll.

  ‘One thing you both might as well get straight about me, just ‘cos I’m a PI don’t mean I’m in the market to be threatened with the law for not cooperating with you one minute then blacked into breaking the law for you the next. No need for either, anyway. All I’m interested in is the truth. Anything I find out about drugs or dirty movies or anything that hurts innocent people, I’ll tell you open and free, maybe not straight off, but I’ll tell you, OK?’

  It was, he felt, not without embarrassment, the pretty moving statement of a pretty honest man.

  But the reaction, or rather reactions, took him by surprise.

  Prince was frowning in a mixture of puzzlement and suspicion. And Ursell was looking completely blank except for his eyes … there was something in his eyes …