by Morag Joss
‘No! You mean she actually poured all that...inside?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He sighed. ‘And after tea, what do we do? Well, we have our bath, of course. So in went two milk bottles full of water and most of her My Little Pony bathtime bubbles. And three Dewberry bath beads from the Body Shop.’ He sounded half strangled. ‘And then it all lay there soaking in until I found it. Valerie was watching a cookery video in the kitchen with headphones on. Says it was my own fault for leaving the case open.’
Sara considered that it would be both heartless and pointless to suggest that there was some truth in this, and it was anyway out of the question that she would ever side with the unspeakable Valerie over anything.
‘Don’t worry. Get it over to Avon Strings in Bristol, they’re in Yellow Pages. They’ll do a good job. You can use my Peresson till yours is ready,’ Sara said, still anxious to make amends for their row. ‘You’ll love the sound, it’ll blow your head off. Andrew?’
She hesitated. ‘Can you come this evening? I have to talk to you about the case again. No, nothing to do with James, something else. And I know I should stop you discussing it and actually it is none of my business, but I feel involved now, in a way. And I’d like to help. Help you, I mean.’
EARLY THE same evening, with no cello to carry, Andrew rode his bike up to Medlar Cottage. There was precious little time in ordinary circumstances to get a bit of exercise, and with the Sawyer case refusing to break he had been working late most nights. They had interviewed everyone who had been at the Pump Room and Assembly Rooms, close to five hundred people now, and scanned over thirty hours of closed-circuit television pictures from the only two shops in Stall Street that had security cameras. They showed only the shop doorways and a few metres of pavement and had so far turned up nothing of significance. Then there was the new information about the alarm which wasn’t exactly helping. James Ballantyne had turned out to have an alibi that he hadn’t even known about. Bridger was being petulant, trying to fly in the face of the facts, claiming that they should have put more pressure on Ballantyne. Bridger was pitifully inexperienced. He was only gradually realising that this enquiry was par for the course: unexciting, filled with dogged, repetitive routine and, so far anyway, yielding nothing. They were just going to have to interview people all over again, check alibis, look at security footage again, and just keep at it until something broke. There would be something. And as long as this weather held he would use the bike to get to Sara’s. After what Natalie had done (and with something horribly close to sly approval from Valerie) he was not going to risk taking the Peresson home with him. It was so like Sara to offer to lend it to him, and it would be wonderful just to play it. It was the Peresson she was playing on that recording of the Dvořák concerto he had, the big, modern, steel-stringed instrument that she used for the big romantic repertoire. He did not understand why she did not seem interested in playing in public anymore. When he thought about it, it worried him, but then so did the thought that she might at any moment resume her concert career and ditch the lessons. He hoped she would not mind his still coming to play without practising in between. It still helped him improve. And now she was even offering to help with the case. Of course he shouldn’t be discussing it with her, but someone in his job needed a sounding board, that was understood. And if it couldn’t be your wife, why shouldn’t it be someone else you could trust, like Sara? She was an amazing woman.
Even more amazing than he had realised, after she had told him about her conversation with George. They were sitting in the shade in front of the hut ready to play, but had not yet sounded a note. As he listened he gazed out, noticing that the lime trees and hedgerows in the valley opposite were darkening into a deeper green and the dark purple buddleia that overhung the path to the pond at the other side of the garden was now in full flower and surrounded in a flicker of butterflies. His bow rested on his knee.
‘And you see it’s quite awkward,’ she was saying earnestly. ‘Olivia on the one hand asking if I can winkle out of George anything that he knows, then he goes and tells me all this, probably needing to tell someone who’s not one of his colleagues. It might be the end of him if Olivia finds out, and on the other hand, it’s quite important for the case that you know all about it. So here I am, shopping George. Matthew Sawyer was going to discipline him, perhaps even sack him over the security breach, and Olivia was meant to have been told about it. And you see anyone, just about anyone who went in that room, could have memorised an alarm code. And then there’s the thing about his alibi.’
‘This may help,’ he said. ‘Sort of. Because I’ve got news for you, too. I’ve heard back from the electronics people. The code that was used to set the alarm that night was Matthew Sawyer’s own, and it was set at two forty-five a.m. Two forty-five fits in more or less with what the PM report gives for time of death: between midnight and five o’clock. We have to suppose that he was killed at, say, half past two or minutes after. I had been puzzling over how the murderer could have got Sawyer’s code out of him. Coercion sounds obvious, but there was no sign of any struggle, no sign that suggested Sawyer wasn’t taken completely by surprise. And if Sawyer hadn’t been forced to tell his murderer the code, that seemed to offer us a choice between a corpse or a ghost setting the burglar alarm. If we now know that his code was not as confidential as it was supposed to be, it’s more plausible that someone else was able to use it. But of course the problem of who becomes more difficult.’
‘And you’ve got another problem, haven’t you? You said he could have been killed between midnight and five o’clock. Supposing he was killed just before the alarm was set, at around half past two. What then was Matthew Sawyer doing all that time between twenty to twelve when the last person left the Pump Room and the time he was killed? Chatting with the murderer? It doesn’t take three hours to lock up. So, suppose instead he was killed nearer to midnight. Why then would the murderer hang about until quarter to three? Why, in any case, did the killer bother to lock up at all? Why not just nip out of the door, or climb over the balustrade of the terrace and jump down onto Kingston Parade? Forget about the keys and locking up altogether. If you think about it, locking up and setting the alarm gained nothing.’
‘I know. Nobody was going to discover anything before the morning, in any case. It’s not as if anyone would be likely to try the doors in the middle of the night, not for any legitimate purpose at any rate. But George’s story is interesting. I’ll have to talk to him about it, you know, and I’ll have to find out a bit more about his er...viewing material. I expect it’ll turn out to be top-shelf stuff. If it was anything really hard-core I can’t see him telling you about it. I’ll have to see Olivia Passmore as well. It’s pretty unlikely Sawyer told her about George. She would have told Bridger, wouldn’t she, at the very beginning of the enquiry. He went into all the building details – doors, locks, alarms and all that – right at the start. And I doubt very much that she’ll do anything about it now. I’ll recommend she gets the crime prevention lot over and she can go through the whole security management issue with them, without making a scapegoat out of George. Even though,’ he added with a smile, ‘he probably deserves it.’
He went on. ‘It’s a pretty safe bet that the murder took place nearer three o’clock than midnight, although the problem of the hours in between remains a problem. What we’ve been doing, of course, since we found out that the alarm was set around three in the morning, is going over everybody’s statements again and concentrating on what people were doing not around midnight, but three hours later. Although, of course, every single one of them says that they were safely tucked up in beddy-byes.’
He suddenly looked terribly tired, as if he’d like to be tucked up there himself.
‘Andrew, when did you last eat?’
‘Oh, I had breakfast. Well, a banana in the car. And someone got me a sandwich about two,’ he said absently, ‘but come to think of it, I didn’t get a chance to eat it. I’m okay though.’
He pulled the cello back against his shoulder and checked the tuning dolefully.
‘Come on,’ said Sara. ‘Food first, art second. It’ll wait.’
They left their instruments in their cases in the cool of the hut and made their way back down to the cottage. Sara heated an iron skillet and pushed the langoustines around in blackened butter, into which she squeezed the sizzling juice of a lime. Andrew, following her directions to the fridge and larder, brought bread and salad to the table, found garlic, oil and vinegar and made a dressing. They sat opposite each other and ate with their fingers. The effect of food on Andrew was immediate and visible. As he pulled the shells off and sucked on the meat, he went on talking. The cat cruised the legs of their stools and dived greedily on the tail ends Sara dropped for him.
‘I’ve been working on piecing together Matthew Sawyer’s movements before he died. Quite a busy bloke. You never think of people in that sort of job being rushed, do you? Seems all very calm and sedate on the outside, a museum.’
‘As in, “Is that a proper full-time job?” ’ asked Sara, pulling off a piece of shell and licking her fingers languorously.
Andrew watched her thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, well. Anyway, I saw his wife. And I spent a long time with his secretary. He had a busy day that Friday. I can’t help admiring the bloke, working that hard when he probably didn’t need to.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Loaded, on the wife’s side. She is a Bowman. Old man Bowman was in property. Made a packet in the eighties, sold out and retired to Dorset. The Sawyer family do very well out of it: children in private schools, lovely big house on Sion Hill, bought outright. She doesn’t work, she does lunch, swans about. They couldn’t live like that on a museum director’s salary – “Matthew’s pittance”, she called it.’
‘What about the secretary?’
‘Oh, a gem. She took his death very hard, apparently, couldn’t come in to work for three days after she heard the news. She rated him very highly.’
‘Aha, a whisper of intrigue? A jealous mistress?’ Sara said. ‘Have we got a crime passionel here?’
‘Trust you. You meet Mrs Trowels in the flesh and see if you still think so.’ He paused to finish his langoustine before taking another. ‘She’s in her late fifties, weighs at least fifteen stone. All right, all right, I’m not saying only young thin people have affairs. But her desk’s covered with pictures of her cats. She knits for Mr Trowels. She refused to go to a hen party for one of the girls in the museum shop because they were going to some “disgusting” show in Bristol. What did she call it – the Chesterfields, would it have been?’
‘Chippendales?’
‘Right. And for her, loyalty to the boss is part of the creed. But it does seem that Sawyer could be difficult to work for. A gentleman, but inclined to overreact, Mrs Trowels said.’
‘So what about that Friday then; what was he doing?’
‘Morning taken up with a meeting; some local charity he was a trustee of. We’ve looked into it. Nothing to do with the museum at all. The Terry Trust. It’s to do with the disabled – mobility grants, that kind of thing. According to the trust secretary it was a routine meeting, nothing unusual, but I’ve asked for the minutes. Sawyer gets to his office in the Circus about one o’clock, has a sandwich at his desk with a cup of coffee, made by Mrs Trowels. Looks at the post, answers a couple of letters, then he goes round to the archives at the Victoria Art Gallery. Something he was working on. All the museum’s archives, records of acquisitions, provenance, storage, display details and so on are kept there. All on paper, outgrown their space by miles, apparently. I went to see it. Sawyer was trying to make sense of it all, trying to get to grips with exactly what was in the collections. I’ve found out, you know, that there are acres of boxed artefacts belonging to the museum stored all over the place. This archive is the only way of finding out what is where, if you’re new. Part of Sawyer’s remit, when he was appointed, was to get some of these things out of storage and on display, things that nobody has seen for years, possibly ever.’
‘I’d heard that,’ Sara said. ‘Olivia told me. The councillors on the museums board tried to bully her about it years ago, when she was in charge. They criticised the museums service for withholding all these so-called treasures from the gaze of the local taxpayers. The Chron took it up – remember?’ She slipped off her stool and went to the larder and returned with more beer and a dish of tiny tomatoes.
‘Well, haven’t they got a point?’ Andrew said, opening two of the bottles and decanting them into their glasses.
‘Well, except that the council kept very quiet about the fact that they’d squeezed the museums so tight that there was no money to employ extra curators to research new exhibitions and build new displays. Olivia came straight back at them with that. And she told me that the stuff in storage is a pretty mixed bag. Laundry lists, quite literally, and a collection of button hooks. Dreary watercolours by Bath ladies. Enough fans to start a hurricane. Hardly the hidden treasures of the nation.’
‘Anyway, Sawyer was going through the archive gradually, getting to know what there was. Rationalising, he called it. He was very keen on order, according to Mrs Trowels. She approved of that.’
‘So did he make much progress that afternoon, “rationalising”?’
‘It seems he did. He sent a handwritten memo to Olivia Passmore’s office at the costume museum from the art gallery, via the internal mail system. He was very methodical; he photocopied it and had the copy sent back to Mrs Trowels at the Circus for filing. I made a copy of the copy for you – here.’
He stood up, reached into his back pocket and pushed a piece of paper across the table to Sara. ‘Brisk,’ she said. ‘Shocking writing. Not even clear what he means. Wrote it in a hurry, I’d say. What does it mean?’
‘Mrs Trowels explained it to me. In the archive there’s part of a catalogue of a collection called the Hackett Bequest. Sewing boxes and what-not. Needlework tools, silver scissors, thimbles and such. Only the bit of catalogue survives. The actual collection was destroyed in 1941 when a bomb hit the back of the museum offices in the Circus. Everything in the basement was destroyed, either by the bomb or by water, including the Hackett Bequest. The original handwritten catalogue survived. I think it was kept somewhere else. Obviously Matthew Sawyer had tracked it down in the archive, and found it in a bad way. He wanted to get some conservation work done on it, that’s all.’
‘And Olivia saw the memo on the Friday afternoon?’
‘Yes. She confirms the Hackett Bequest details – that was common knowledge. It was nothing new to her, this story about the lost bequest, but she wasn’t sure if Sawyer had heard it. Presumably he had, or had got part of it. He was obviously quite excited about coming across the catalogue fragment. And the catalogue did need rebinding, she said. It would have been done within the next six months anyway; they have a system for checking the state of things in the archives. The memo seems to have been pretty unimportant, to her at any rate. She didn’t even keep the original. Anyway, after he’d finished in the archives and sent the memo, he went over to the Roman Baths and Pump Room – he often did that, just looked in on staff, “walking the job”, he called it – and then went back to the Circus.’
‘And I bet the sainted Mrs Trowels made him his tea?’
‘She did. He got back at about half past four. He asked Mrs Trowels to ring to see if Miss Passmore would be free at quarter to six for a short discussion, and she said she would. And he was at his desk at quarter past five when Mrs Trowels went home. She popped in to take away his cup and say good night. She says his DJ was hanging on the back of the door. He must have changed soon after and gone over to the Assembly Rooms for his meeting with Olivia Passmore. She says he was there just after quarter to, and the kiosk staff saw him come in too.’
‘And I saw him a little while after that. He came out of an office – Olivia’s, I suppose – and talked to some people in the vestibule. A man
and a woman. I met her later on; the man went off.’
‘Yes, I’m sure we’ve got the names of everyone he spoke to from then on, until the last of the staff left the Pump Room at twenty to midnight. He saw them off at the Stall Street door. In all that time he was never alone, except for some time back at his office, and walking between there and the Pump Room.’
‘When was that?’
‘Can’t be precise to the minute about that. But he left the Assembly Rooms about half an hour after he’d made his welcome speech. He was in the Tea Room all that time, talking to delegates. We know he chatted to a group of three or four of them and said something about going back to his office, it was a great time to catch up because it was completely empty then.’
‘Do you think it could have been someone at the convention, you know, prepared to kill him for what he said about natural healing? Only if it was, following him back to the office and doing it there would have been simpler, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, if the murderer knew that that was where he was going. But it’s stretching it a bit far, isn’t it?’
‘Probably, but some of them take it very seriously. And there are people who are capable of anything if they’re sufficiently worked up.’
‘Yes, but don’t forget the weapon. A kitchen knife. You wouldn’t keep one on you, just in case you felt the need to kill someone.’
‘Have you found out where the knife came from?’
‘We’ve found out all we can. German-made, sold widely, department stores, specialist kitchen shops, singly and in sets. Yes, they’re sold here. And in Bristol, of course. The kitchen shop in Quiet Street does its sales totals by the week and we know that four knives of that type and make were sold in the week before the murder, and three in the week following. The murderer may have bought a knife in advance, you see, knowing what he, or she, was going to do with it, or, more likely I think, gone out afterwards and bought a replacement for the knife they used, so that it wouldn’t be missed. Most were card transactions and we’ve checked them all out. As you’d expect, nothing of interest to us, because the murderer would almost certainly use cash. A total of four were paid for by cash, two in each of the two weeks, but there’s no way of following them up. The staff don’t remember who bought the knives. It’s a busy shop. None of the Coldstreams staff, either at the Pump Room or the Assembly Rooms, has replaced a knife or missed one. Not one of them specifically recognises the actual knife that was used, it’s too familiar a type. No help there. So, we know that Matthew Sawyer rang his wife from the office at seven fifteen, told her where he was and said he was staying for an hour or so. She says that he always used to say “an hour or so” and it could mean anything from an hour to nearer two. But Sawyer was at the Pump Room at nine, after dinner had started.’