The Second Strain (DI Lesley Gunn Book 2)

by John Burke

  ‘For a start, you and I ought to sit down together, Sir Nicholas,’ he was booming on, ‘to make sure that that committee doesn’t squander all our resources and never get a squeak out of the orchestra or whatever. Pretty slipshod lot, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘We’re not running a military band festival,’ said Nick mildly.

  ‘More’s the pity.’ When no further response was forthcoming, Scott-Fraser harrumphed twice and said: ‘Well, I can see you’re busy. Can’t cope with two problems at a time, right? Won’t keep you. Get together later, hey?’

  When he had gone, Lesley began a long, slow, almost silent laugh, and gestured towards the piano. ‘Not quite in the same class as what I heard on my way here. Under your window.’

  ‘Oh. The Bach.’

  ‘There was a vapour trail up in the sky. And then I thought I saw another one, nearly parallel with it. Crazy, but they seemed to match what you were playing — a curve like a rainbow, with an echo underneath that . . . well, it sort of turned itself upside-down. Oh dear, I’m talking rubbish, aren’t I?’

  ‘No.’ He moved to the piano stool and began to play. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Yes, that was it.’

  ‘The inversus’ — his fingers moved over the keys with all the joys of a lively dance — ‘and the rectus. And then the stretto — doubling up so that the second subject overlaps.’ He stopped at the dal segno bar-line. ‘You can hear what the old man is up to?’

  ‘Weird. I don’t just hear it. I can see it.’

  Her eyes were no longer cool and calculating, but sparkling with enjoyment. Anxious to keep that expression in her face, he went on: ‘You know so many tricks of the trade when it comes to works of art. Maybe it’s time you moved into the musical world, and learned some composers’ tricks.’ He picked out four notes on the piano. ‘Our recent friend. Bach. He used to like playing around with a fugue on the notes of his own name. B-A-C-H. In German, B stands for B-flat, while H is B-natural. Lots of composers played jokes with the letters of their own name, or of a beloved. Alban Berg played some complex tricks in his Lyric Suite: he introduced his own initials A and B along with F and H — that is, B natural in German — in contorted sequences. His wife never suspected they were paragraphs in a passionate love letter to his mistress, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Would a good detective have spotted the clue?’

  ‘A musical detective.’ The idea seemed to amuse her. But then she got up. ‘This won’t do. I’ve got a corpse on my mind, and I’d better go ahead with analysing local variations on that matter.’

  ‘Better things? Do remember, like the man said, that all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’

  It came out sounding absurdly solemn. But she was still smiling as she made for the door.

  The movement of her hips and shoulders as she left were music in themselves. Not the wild inchoate music of someone like Mairi McLeod or the conflicts of a Daniel Erskine, but something as confident as a firmly grounded passacaglia above which lilting variations danced confidently onwards.

  The sooner he got back to the keyboard and cleared his mind with a particularly austere piece by Bach, the better.

  Chapter Seven

  At the weekend DI Gunn drove home to spend a couple of days being plain Miss Lesley Gunn in her Kelso flat after days and nights of discomfort in the spartan flatlet behind Kilstane police station. She had brought no homework with her. She had every intention of spending some leisurely time in the bath, thinking of nothing whatsoever, and going for several walks along the river and round through the Knowes to the abbey grounds. It was a route which she had always found wonderfully soothing.

  It proved difficult to keep her mind entirely blank. Sprawled out in the hot water, she found herself obsessively drawing imaginary lines between the corners of the white tiles on the bathroom wall, trying to make a complete diagonal from the top left-hand corner to the bottom right-hand corner. But the number of tiles was uneven, and she finished up on the first row from the bottom. To shut it all out, she closed her eyes. Immediately she had a blurred vision of that embedded corpse, with the echo of voices to accompany it — the voices of Buchanan, Kerr, Adam Lowther.

  And Nick Torrance.

  When she heaved about in the water, vigorously soaping herself and making an effort to muffle those voices, the only thing that worked was a memory of music. And that could prove even more exasperating. Bad enough to be haunted by some cheap popular tune that you couldn’t drive out; but even more frustrating to find yourself grasping at a shred of something richer, just beyond your reach, luring you on, like a sliver of soap evading your clutches under the surface of the bathwater.

  Instead of the promised walk along the river, on Saturday afternoon she went to the library. Vaguely she was looking for something about Bach. But the only music volumes they had on the shelves were a biography of Beethoven as heavy as the composer himself, the score of a Broadway musical, and a study of Schumann. She decided Schumann would have to do.

  On the way home she sinfully bought a slice of millionaire’s shortbread to go with the remains of breakfast coffee waiting to be heated up. Careful not to spray crumbs of chocolate or shortbread on the pages, she began reading at random.

  The story of the composer’s life was interesting enough in itself. But after half an hour, something leapt off one page at her.

  She had been given piano lessons when she was little, but hadn’t persevered. There was no piano here in the flat, but even after all this time she found she could still interpret the notes on the page and hear them in her head. In a cockeyed way she remembered that the rising and falling shapes of a theme over the lines of the stave were as captivating as the sounds themselves. And, even with her eyes closed, she could still see them just as she had seen those provocative formations in the sky above Black Knowe.

  Damn Nick Torrance. Why the hell should he have implanted this new irritant in her brain?

  Among the musical examples in the biography was a stave on which the author demonstrated what he called one of the composer’s ‘motto themes’. Early on, Schumann had fallen in love with a girl from the town of Asch, and extracted from his own name those four letters which in German notation could be made into notes — A-S-C-H, playable as A-flat, E-flat, C and B.

  It was the sort of puzzle you could find visually in Leonardo’s sketches or a Poussin painting, but here in musical terms.

  And Schumann was at it again in several variations round the ‘Clara theme’ of his wife’s name, coming out as C-B-A-G#-A.

  In the afternoon she tried listening to Radio 3 — to improve my mind? she mocked herself — but the concert was of what the announcer described in hushed tones as aleatory experiments, with so many gratuitous squeaks and thuds that she did not realize for a while that one of them was actually her phone ringing.

  From his disgruntled voice one might guess that Superintendent Maitland was peeved at having his afternoon’s golf interrupted, and intended everyone else to suffer as well.

  ‘Took your time to answer the phone, didn’t you? Sorry if I’ve dragged you off the bog.’

  ‘I was listening to the radio, sir.’

  ‘Really?’ It was plain that he considered this as outrageous self-indulgence when compared with the austerities of golf. ‘Well, anyway. First thing Monday morning, Gunn, I want you to present yourself at Blaikie and Lamont’s, the auctioneers in Dalspie. There’s a picture there for you to evaluate. Right up your street.’

  ‘Which street would that be, sir?’

  ‘You are our expert on paintings. That’s what we pay you for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. This picture . . .?’

  ‘Apparently there’s an auction scheduled for next Wednesday, but Arts and Antiques Squad have had a last-minute tip-off that one of the items could have been stolen from one of those stately homes you’re so keen on wandering around. They can’t spare one of their top boys, but they think you’re qualified to handle it. The auctioneers a
re being told not to let that item into the sale until you’ve assessed it. They won’t be best pleased to see you,’ added the Super with malicious relish.

  ‘But the Kilstane inquiry, sir?’

  ‘Until forensic have dragged that stiff’s tin overcoat off and chopped away its concrete underpants, there’s not much you can do in Kilstane. Let Elliot have a watching brief. He’s a good, competent lad.’

  A different setting, but still up her street. No need for her to hang about Kilstane. Take your time . . . Wasn’t that what he had said? Now it was Get out of there when you’re told.

  *

  What might be called the first scout paid an exploratory visit on the Sunday afternoon. Jolted out of listening to a Shostakovitch quartet, Adam was called down to the shop door by a persistent jangling on the bell, to be greeted by a man in his early thirties with dreadlocks, a greasy black jacket, and what was not so much a beard as a tangled hedge sprouting out of control.

  ‘You Adam Lowther?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m Zak Runcorn. Drummer with the Hard Thrust group. Wanted to take a look at the site we’ll be playing on, just to make sure it’s fit for use.’

  ‘If you’d got in touch and made an appointment, I could have had things ready for you to —’

  ‘Look, man, we have one hell of a schedule. If you’ve booked us, you do things our way. OK? I don’t have long. Just show me the pitch for the gig, and I’ll know how to space the amplification.’

  ‘We have all the facilities for setting up —’

  ‘We do things our way. OK?’

  There was nothing for it. Adam led the way down to the haughs below Black Knowe and showed Runcorn where Kerr had staked out the lines of power cables with small white markers like those for a flower bed.

  Zak Runcorn stared around disapprovingly at the countryside as if there was far too much of it for comfort.

  ‘And the stage?’

  Adam indicated where it would stand, with its back to the tower house and facing down the slope.

  ‘Huh. Look, man, you’ve got a guarantee of a good crowd?’

  ‘We’ve done our best to publicize it. Selling plenty of tickets.’

  ‘I don’t want to show up here just for some crummy gig with only a few sheep-shaggers off the hills gawping at us. I have been on Top of the Pops, you know. And on Desert Island Discs.’

  Yes, Adam did know. He had never been offered the chance of choosing the greatest Daniel Erskine pieces as his favourite listening, and explaining why. Runcorn’s choices, he seemed to remember, had been all his own performances.

  ‘I mean, this is going to make some impact. A great revival. And it’ll put your little place on the map.’

  In fact it was obvious that Runcorn’s fame had been on the decline for quite a while, otherwise he would not have deigned to come to a way-out venue like this.

  Struggling to be sociable, Adam said: ‘Any special features we can look forward to? A few years ago, in Leeds, you were making quite a thing of reggae.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, man. How ancient can you get? We’ve gone through hip-hop and gangsta rap since then. You’ll hear where we’re at now once we’ve got the gear set up. And hey, what’s this about some dead meat being found in your school? Read something about it in some paper or other.’

  ‘Rather an ancient mystery. The police are still investigating.’

  ‘Could make a new number out of it. Dead bodies, living bodies — y’know, significant social comment.’

  ‘Sounds a bit kinky.’

  ‘Aim for their guts, that’s what I say.’ When Adam did not respond, he went on: ‘Next thing, the question of accommodation, right? Let’s get that settled before I go on my way.’

  They began walking back towards the town. Adam tried to sound confident about the high quality of the digs which had been arranged for visiting players. One room in Kilstane’s main hotel had been booked for the conductor of the Westermarch Orchestra, while the instrumentalists had been divided up for two nights among a number of bed-and-breakfast houses and a cluster of caravans on the site north of the town. The four Hard Thrust players were allocated to rooms in the Buccleuch Arms.

  It wasn’t in Zak Runcorn’s nature to show approval or gratitude, but as they reached the pub he allowed himself a condescending grin. ‘I had a kind of hunch we might finish up at this joint. That’s why I left the wagon right here.’ He patted the bull-bars on a rust-pocked Range Rover as they passed it and went into the pub.

  In the quiet afternoon hours, Sid Carleton believed in what he called subdued lighting. Some of his customers called it downright dim, but there were usually so few of them in this lull between lunchtime and the early evening that Carleton saw no reason to pander to them. When his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, Adam saw that the one shape huddled on a stool against the bar was Deirdre.

  ‘Sid, this is Zak Runcorn. Leader of the group who’ll be staying here. And maybe you can persuade him to join in one of the jazz sessions in the back there.’

  ‘Jazz?’ said Runcorn contemptuously. ‘We don’t play jazz. What century d’you think you’re in?’ His own eyes were getting used to his surroundings. He looked Deirdre appreciatively up and down. ‘Well, could be this’ll be a good place to stay. Like to show me where I can give the rooms the once-over?’

  Sid Carleton lifted the flap and came out, leading the way to the door marked Residents Only at the end of the bar and the flight of stairs beyond. Runcorn swung his left arm casually as he followed, so that his hand brushed Deirdre’s bottom.

  Deirdre smirked. Then she dragged a stool closer to her own and patted it with much the same movement. ‘Fancy seeing you out at this time of day, Adam. Nora not with you?’

  ‘She’s lying down. She often does on a Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘All on her own? No Sunday afternoon love-ins?’

  He had no intention of telling her how few of those there were nowadays. It wasn’t that Nora ever pushed him away or mumbled some excuse; just that she didn’t seem to mind one way or the other, and that blunted his own appetite. He had got used to it.

  He tried his own challenge. ‘Duncan not in drinking mood? That’s unusual.’

  ‘I think he’s in The Globe.’ It was the scruffiest bar in Kilstane, open at all hours and featuring regularly in sheriff’s court appearances by patrons accused of various breaches of the peace. ‘At least he can get pissed there without me watching him and making him feel guilty.’

  ‘He holds it pretty well, considering the competition round here.’

  ‘It’s about the only thing he can get hold of nowadays. He’s not up to anything else. Unless your Nora is getting her rations from him.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Deirdre.’

  ‘Those sessions of sickly romantic music — don’t you think they might start acting it out?’

  ‘Come off it.’

  That poky little Sunday School room where they practised behind the Episcopalian church, with its piano and spare cassocks, was hardly conducive to unbridled passion.

  Adam realized that he had let Sid go off with the visitor without first getting a drink from him. He propped his elbows on the bar and studied the long line of malt whiskies on the top shelf.

  Deirdre drained her own glass and banged it down as if to summon Sid. Her hand strayed along the counter towards his. ‘It’s a pretty lousy situation, isn’t it? For both of us. I can think of better ways to pass a Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Me too. I was listening to some music when that character showed up.’

  ‘You were? Oh, well . . . Not that Duncan’s ever been really up to much anyway.’

  ‘Why did you marry him, then?’

  He knew right away that it was a question he shouldn’t have risked asking. ‘Because you weren’t around, were you? He was the best of the bunch that was left. Well, the least grotty, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, now, look. When I left I was only a kid.’

 
; ‘Old enough to know what to do with me when you got the chance. And what I wanted you to do.’

  Footsteps clumped down the stairs. Sid Carleton and Zak Runcorn came back into the bar. Runcorn wasted no time. ‘Right, that’s settled. Time for a drink, eh? And you, darlin’ — what’s yours?’

  Deirdre didn’t hesitate. ‘A large vodka and Irn-Bru. Very kind of you.’

  ‘And you, squire?’

  It struck Adam that, in spite of his sneers at out-of-date forms of pop music, Zak Runcorn was still using a very clumsy out-of-date jargon. Definitely past it, on the skids. His real name was probably Charlie Slaithwaite.

  ‘A pint, thanks.’

  ‘A pint of what?’

  ‘Sid knows my tipple.’

  ‘And me,’ said Runcorn, ‘I’ll have a quick half. Don’t want to get done for drink-driving.’

  He was staring greedily at Deirdre. She knew just the right response. There was no giggling, no looking away and playing coy or hard to get. She tipped her glass back very slowly and widened her eyes at him over the rim.

  Adam felt an uncomfortable stirring in the pit of his stomach. And a bit lower down than that. All right, then, Deirdre was sexy. Yes, there might have been a time . . . once upon a time. But those times had gone by, and now, looking at her, you knew what living with her would be like. Always bristling, unable to let a day go by without at least some big scenes, big resentments, something to get her adrenaline flowing at top speed. Not what you wanted around when you were absorbed in music.

  Runcorn knocked his half pint back, tapped Adam amiably on the shoulder, and let his hand stray in a leisurely sweep down Deirdre’s back. ‘This could turn out to be quite a gig,’ he said.

  When he had gone, Sid sauntered back to his office behind the bar. After a moment when Adam wondered what to say before making an excuse to leave, Deirdre abruptly took up where she had left off. ‘And what happens? You come back with Nora. And don’t tell me she’s up to it. How the hell did you come to marry someone like that?’