by Morag Joss
‘But what sort of hassle?’ Sara asked. George ignored the question and leaned forward.
‘Not that anybody can back me up on that, strictly speaking. My missus had gone to bed when I got back; she was asleep. So I took a bit of an opportunity, know what I mean? Stayed up watching a video. You know?’
He gave her a watery look. ‘Not the sort of video the missus would care for. She’s not a broad-minded woman. She woke up when I went up later, quarter to one, and she says, “What time is it?” and I says to her, “It’s the usual time, time I was in bed; go back to sleep.” So when the police come round and ask her when I got home she says usual time, half eleven or just after. I just left it, you see? Because I was home by the usual time, see? Saves hassle.’ He gave a guilty snigger.
‘But what sort of hassle were you getting from Matthew Sawyer? He hadn’t been here all that long, had he?’
George breathed in slowly and sighed. In the few seconds this took, his features fell a little and she saw that in repose he had the face of a troubled tortoise.
‘I suppose I don’t mind telling you. You’re not really staff, are you? Won’t make no difference telling you. See that notice-board? See where there’s a clean patch? Well, there was an important sheet of paper there one time, put up there years ago. By me.’
Sara looked to where he was pointing, and saw the patch where something had been on the board so long that the hardboard had darkened uniformly around it.
‘What was it?’
‘Hold on, I’m getting to that. About a month ago, that sheet went missing. None of the lads took it; well, they wouldn’t. I was very, very upset. No one had the right to come in here and help themselves like that.’
George leaned forward in his chair, held out the palm of his left hand and stabbed at it with the forefinger of his right, emphasising his next words.
‘That sheet was important. That sheet had all the names of all the people that does lock-up duty or is allowed to hold keys, that’s from the director down to my lads, and next to the names it had all the codes on it, for the alarm. Six-figure numbers.’
‘On the notice-board?’
‘Yes. We got this new system put in, oh, must be six years ago. And we all get a different code, so there’s no passing on the number and the wrong person getting hold of it.’
‘Quite sensible.’
‘Sensible! Bloody daft. First off, there’s people forgetting their codes right, left and centre, and every time they have to go off down the office at the Circus and ask to have the safe opened for the master sheet so they can check it again, ’cos they’re not meant to write it down. The people we get here, they’re good at the job but they’re not intellectuals, know what I mean? So the whole thing’s a pain.’
‘Well, yes, a right pain. But it would only be like remembering a phone number, wouldn’t it? Couldn’t they do that?’
George snorted. ‘With a different code for each building? I’m not saying it was impossible, I’m saying it was a right bloody pain. No consultation, nothing. Just here’s your numbers, memorise them, get on with it. We didn’t even get to choose our own numbers, so’s you could put in your birthday or something, to remember it. Got up my nose, that did. Unfair on my lads.’
‘So you wrote all the numbers down?’
‘Yeah, I wrote them down for my own benefit, because after a while they’re all coming to me to help them, because the Circus doesn’t like it, them all trooping in there. So I get the lads and I say, right, the numbers are going up here and you sort yourselves out. After a while of course we all get used to the system; no one’s looked at that sheet for years. So they’re all up there, the lads’ numbers, the director’s, the deputy’s, and it goes missing.’
‘God, how worrying. What did you do?’
‘I didn’t do nothing. What’s the point? I don’t hold with these alarm systems anyhow. I know plenty people that’s got alarms, they get burgled same as everyone else. In my time there’s never been a break-in here anyway, alarms or no alarms. Waste of time.’
George paused while Sara drained the teapot into their mugs and brought him the bag of sugar.
‘But, George, if all the numbers have been here all that time, dozens of people could have memorised a code, couldn’t they? I mean, I’m here. You must have other visitors.’
‘Well, not often. No one else comes in here much, just the lads. I mean, look at the place. But it wouldn’t make no difference. See, us and some of the Coldstreams blokes, we’ll do each other a favour now and then. On a late shift, sometimes one of them’ll lock up for us, if one of us wants to get off. You have to give them your code for that, get the key back off them next day. Only now and then, mind. And then we’ll slip their kids into the museum for nothing. Anyway. So, weeks after this thing goes missing, Mr Sawyer summons me to see him. And guess what?’
‘He’s got the list?’
‘Right. He’s been in here, seen it, rips it down and then waits to see if I’m going to go confessing to him. That’s what annoys me. “I’m very disappointed in you, George,” he goes, “as a key member of the team, that this was on the board in the first place and that you did nothing about it when it disappeared.” Oh, all very formal.’
‘Oh, George, that must have been ghastly. After all the years you’ve been here.’
‘Well, right, him half my age and here ten minutes. Waving the bit of paper in my face. And then he says he’ll give the matter further thought. Says he’ll consult with colleagues and decide whether he will start the disciplinary procedure. That means Miss Passmore. He asks her about everything, seeing she was in charge before; she knows more than he does. And he will inform me of the new code changes that will be necessary. And that’s it.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Well, I says nothing. I reckon all I can do is just go by the book, keep smiling, show willing, until he comes back to me. I’m thinking I might weather it, I’ve been here so long. And that was on the Wednesday.’
‘The eleventh? Before he was murdered? Oh, how awful.’
‘Yeah. Then two days later; boom, he’s dead.’
‘Have you heard anything since?’
‘No. But I don’t know if that’s because he didn’t get round to doing anything about it or if Passmore’s going to do it and is just too busy since the murder. I keep thinking she’s going to spring it on me, the old dragon.’
‘I’d have thought, though, George, if Sawyer had told her about it she’d at least have done something about the codes by now, wouldn’t she?’
‘Maybe. I can’t very well ask, though, can I?’ He smiled weakly, optimistically. ‘Oh, it’ll come out in the wash. Forget I told you. Fancy another biscuit?’
SARA LEFT the Roman Baths unrefreshed by George’s hospitality. Making her way mechanically through the pigeons, buskers and visitors in Abbey Churchyard, she went into the abbey without letting herself think. She needed to sit down first. The cool of the abbey made her pause to breathe in deliberately, and slowed her pace down the long central aisle. She entered one of the front pews, sidled along to where it met the stone pillar and sat down, feeling its solid chill against her side.
Well, thank you, God, she thought, looking up, thank you for that. Thank you for showing me that someone I thought was a nice, friendly man with a kind word for everyone, always happy to do a person a good turn, is actually a resentful, unreliable and heartless idiot who watches porn videos on the quiet. Makes me feel a whole lot better, that does. Was there any limit to the extent that she could be wrong about people? It must always have been there, George’s cheerful cruelty towards others, like the pathetic young girl and her baby, and his disappointing, broken daughter. She continued to stare upwards. At the top of the stone trunk against which she was leaning the branches of the fan vaulting radiated up and outwards into the roof where they joined, stretched across and then closed into the tops of the pillars opposite, the struggle between lift and gravity held in resolution by their
exuberant, virtuosic symmetry. Some phrase about architecture being frozen music came back to her. Her eyes followed the arching pattern which was repeated with glorious effortlessness down the length of the nave. She felt duller still. In their many exchanges of pleasantries she had picked up snatches of George’s opinions on a number of subjects, from Pakistani cricket to monetary union, and she could now see the style of smiling bigotry in them all. His reasoning faculties were a set of keys with which he locked out all points of view which were at variance with his own and he no doubt set great store by never changing his mind. And he could be a murderer.
The abbey had grown quiet. Sara looked round and saw that there were only a few visitors left and two women kneeling at prayer. A verger was pottering about in one of the side aisles, shifting prayerbooks. She could hear footsteps somewhere ahead and above her; someone was climbing up to the organ loft. Papers were shuffled. Then a few ragged chords parped out, followed by a silence in which the harmonies sagged and died. Someone coughed. Then, after a fraction’s pause, from the high loft the opening Allegro of Bach’s Trio Sonata in C Major splashed out and down in a shower of weightless drops into the open lap of the abbey nave. Sara felt a sudden rush of excitement that made her want to laugh, or applaud. Only Bach could do this, make you feel you had been only half alive until this moment, pull you into the dance, lift you and take you as high as the roof, right up to where you could drink from the music’s spring and be filled with a few bubbles of his crazy joy. Yet the sonata, requiring total independence between the hands and feet and revealing instantly any faltering of rhythm or fingering, was one of four that had been written by Bach with the deadly serious intention of furthering his son’s organ studies. It was impertinent, that much brilliance. And this organist was playing well enough to bring the music to life, thereby concealing its true difficulty. It flowed on, the little sounds dancing out across the transept like drops of light, darting through the melodic web that the organist’s feet and fingers were spinning to and fro on which to catch them. Sara had the sensation that she had unknowingly been suffering from some sort of deafness and that with this glorious noise she had suddenly woken up to find that her ears were working properly. She knew she had a recording of this somewhere; she must dig it out. Andrew would love it.
Then, without warning, the organist began to lose it. One note slipped, the one behind it tripped and then all the little fluting drops slowed into solidity, took weight and form and were finally caught and held swinging like a necklace of rare, trapped insects. The music stopped. For a moment the whole shimmering construction hung in the air before the fragile web, the clinging drops and all their brightness dropped away into nothing and evaporated into the dark of the empty choir stalls. Above in the organ loft the organist blew his nose with a hoot like a trombone, conveying the message that he was just practising and not to expect him to play the rest; the next bit was really difficult. Sara’s dismay deepened as she remembered that there would be no more shared pleasures with Andrew, over Bach’s trio sonatas or indeed anything else, unless she patched up her row with him. She had not spoken to him since Sunday night in the police station, and the longer it went on the harder it would become. Her thoughts returned to George.
This crass behaviour over the security codes. She pictured Matthew Sawyer finding George’s list of numbers on the notice board. The new director, still finding his feet, discovering that the whole system had actually been vulnerable for years and years, because the long-serving, trusted chief security attendant didn’t hold with alarms. Alarms which must have cost thousands to install, and which he, by his stupidity and almost single-handed, had rendered laughably useless. On balance, she admired Sawyer’s restraint. It was decent of him not to have sacked George on the spot. Could he have been such a bad boss? George seemed even now to have no qualms about what he had done. His reaction had been one of simple annoyance at what he saw as interference. Sara wondered if George’s sacking were still a possibility. Had Matthew Sawyer had time to discuss it with Olivia before he died and was she planning, when time permitted, to throw the switch on the disciplinary procedure? It seemed unlikely. Olivia’s concern over George’s behaviour since the murder had been real enough; she had been genuinely mystified and worried by it. She could not have been told. Sara rested her cheek against the pillar and breathed in a resinous, damp smell as heavy as all her grounded prayers. She thought about George’s alibi. Before this afternoon she would have dismissed the possibility of George, kindly old George, ever committing a murder, but now, having seen another side of him, could she be sure he was incapable of such a thing? He might be not only capable of it but also a supple and convincing liar.
But if his story were true, it explained his shifty behaviour towards Olivia since the murder. George had just told her the very thing that Olivia had wanted to know, and which she had refused to help her find out. Did that mean that she should now tell Olivia what George had confided? George had not sworn her to secrecy. But he would certainly land in trouble, would possibly be sacked if she did, and he could have only a few years to go before retirement. He would not get another job, and what about his pension, his lump sum and all that? On the other hand, this question of the security codes would surely help Andrew with the case. He still had not been able to explain conclusively how Matthew Sawyer had come to be lying dead in a locked building with a set alarm and the keys inside, or, more importantly, to draw from that anything that led him nearer to finding the murderer. The alarm box was being analysed by the ‘electronics people’, but Andrew was dubious about what, if anything, they would be able to discover from it. Sara saw clearly for the first time that Andrew’s apparent zeal in detaining James was probably a sign of desperation to get somewhere with the case, rather than the blind stupidity she had taken it for. And James had anyway been released without charge and was today going off with Tom to recover for a couple of weeks, so really, that whole episode seemed to be over. In all fairness, she could not go on blaming Andrew for it. He was, after all, trying to find a murderer. And he was unlikely to welcome the news that almost anyone connected with George’s team or with Coldstreams in the past six years could have casually got to know a security code, or could, without being noticed, have made it their business to find one out. But she would have to tell him. Dammit, she was going to have to apologise.
When Sara was making her way back down the aisle the music began again, but she did not pause. Outside in the late sunshine the pigeons had almost reclaimed Abbey Churchyard and were strutting about, casting long shadows among the plastic and paper carrion of litter. Shops were shutting. The ice-cream parlour staff in their perky hats were hosing down the sticky paving stones around their tables and stacking green plastic chairs and tables. Women from offices crossed the open square of Kingston Parade with food bags from Marks and Spencer. They hurried past exhausted tourists who lolled gratefully on the benches, surrounded by their carriers of fudge, tea caddies, funny mugs and scented candles, feeling their retail fever subside. High in the spire the abbey bells were chiming six, which was when, Sara realised, across town, the sodding dry cleaners closed.
CHAPTER 13
PAUL WATCHED FROM his bed as Sue got dressed. She knew he was watching her. And he knew she knew, because without once looking at him she was moving as if he were filming her. With her back to him she dropped the bath towel and walked with a slow swing over to the sports bag which held her clothes, turned side-on to him and leaned very slightly into it, tilting her bottom outwards and revealing the curve of her spine. One of her best lines. She sat on a chair with her knees together and her legs at a pretty angle in order to pull on her knickers. Stretching both arms behind her to do up her bra, instead of looping it round her waist and first fixing the hook at the front as she would have done if she had been alone, she arched her back just enough to show how redundant the garment was on her high, small breasts. She sat in her gleaming white underwear to brush her hair, knowing she looked like a
lingerie advertisement and hoping that by gazing out of the window as she brushed she also looked touchingly vulnerable. Paul wanted to hit her. It was not just the vacant face. It was the way that she was always contriving some effect on him, staging pathetic little tableaux vivants and succeeding only in infuriating him with her obviousness. Why couldn’t she behave naturally? These days (or had it been always?) every look, every gesture, every statement of hers seemed to be part of some strategy to provoke in him a reaction, the show of feeling that she wanted from him. He knew that at best he demonstrated only the kind of uninvolved affection he might show an engaging cat. How sad it was that she went on sitting there in her broderie anglaise, hoping that her display of herself would move him to love her, not realising that with every premeditated turn of her golden head and swish of the brush she was driving him closer to contempt.
If it were just a matter of looks, of course there would be no contest. But he would never be able to explain it to her; Sue would be absolutely baffled by the idea that there could be any more to the attraction of one person to another than physical beauty. She would wonder how on earth he could be in love with an older woman, and one who didn’t even work out. It would be to her an inexplicable betrayal for him to fall in love with a person whose nipples didn’t stand to attention in preference to her who, in her own phrase, made the best of herself. She would look upon it as a form of blindness, which perhaps it was, or a sort of mistake, which it was not. It was the only real and precious thing that had ever happened to him.
Now her little bits of jewellery were going on. She spent only pocket money on jewellery. He knew she was waiting for him to buy her the serious stuff, the ring. He was still staring in her direction, but thinking of the one he loved, speculating about her body. What would she look like naked? Heavier than Sue, bigger-breasted, older, with none of Sue’s oiled, muscular plasticity. She would be natural, apricoty, French. He remembered seeing her in a vibrant blue-green summer dress with thin straps and he recalled her soft shoulders and the dip just above her collar bone which he had longed to touch. He found it easy to imagine the warm skin of her body, the heavy tilt of her pale breasts and her round stomach. She would smell of cedar. It was a dangerous train of thought with Sue in the room. Beneath the duvet his penis gave a subversive lurch and he rolled over luxuriously as his stomach let out an extravagant rumble. Now Sue was being attentive, standing dressed with her hands on her hips, asking him maddeningly if he would like her to make some coffee, or should she just pop back into bed and they could make something else? Coffee, please, he said, pretending to be sleepier than he was and realising that he would never get the credit for being just honourable enough to turn down her other offer.