by Morag Joss
Olivia Passmore’s office in the Assembly Rooms managed to be very full without quite being untidy. There was too much in it: a large desk overlooking the high window, two heavy breakfront bookcases, one with books and files, the other with numerous small grey boxes, and a grey filing cabinet. It was a dark room. On this June morning a green-shaded library lamp on the desk was switched on, casting a yellow, studious rectangle of light on numerous papers on the crowded desktop. In an attempt to create a quieter, informal space for discussion, two very low upholstered chairs and a small coffee table had been placed in one corner. Olivia waved Andrew to one of these, while Bridger stationed himself on a hard chair against the wall.
Sunk in one of the low chairs, Andrew felt as though he were sitting in a sports car much too small for his long legs. He said, looking round, ‘The office of a busy person, I see. I won’t take up too much of your time.’
Olivia gave him a faint, gracious smile. Her chair fitted her much better; her sitting posture even flattered her legs and slim knees. ‘Things are busier,’ she said. ‘Taking over as acting director again, and in the circumstances; it’s much worse than before, as it was all so sudden. It’s rather cramped in here now but I decided to stay put. I couldn’t bring myself to move back over to Matthew’s office.’
‘Why not?’ Andrew asked, raising his voice and speaking directly. ‘It must be rather awkward, as you’ve got Mrs Trowels over at the Circus. Don’t you need her here?’
‘It would be easier, but we manage. She comes over every morning and afternoon. And there’s the telephone. No E-mail yet, unfortunately.’ Olivia gave a faint, disappointed smile. ‘Now,’ she went on smoothly, ‘how can I help you?’
‘I’d like to go over some points again. Let’s start with the Terry Trust. I gather you had an application in. Would you talk me through that?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Olivia. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, how rude of me, would you like some coffee?’
Without waiting for his answer she got up and picked up the telephone on the desk. For the next few moments she absorbed herself in the business of arranging for coffee to be made and brought to them. Andrew looked at the hand that held the receiver, noticing how slender was the wrist revealed by the elegant falling back of her cream silk sleeve. It was a smooth, long hand, but was it quite steady?
‘The Terry Trust,’ she began, when she had replaced the receiver and sat down. ‘Well, my father is over eighty, and not very mobile. He has emphysema, the result of childhood tuberculosis. Other problems too, his stomach isn’t good. We converted the top of the house for him a few years ago and since then he’s got much worse and can hardly manage the stairs. I applied to the Terry Trust for help with a stairlift. They turned us down.’
‘That was recently, wasn’t it?’ Andrew said smoothly, wondering if it was a little odd that the half smile had not moved.
‘Yes, it was, very. I’m sure you know that Matthew was a trustee. The Friday morning before he died he was at the trustees’ meeting when my application was being considered, so that afternoon I asked him about the decision. He was reluctant to tell me at first, he said that I really should wait to get the board’s letter. Then I knew, of course, and he had to confirm it. They weren’t going to give a penny.’
‘Did he say why?’ Andrew asked, still watching her face.
‘I got it out of him, although he would much rather have left me to find out by letter. They had taken the view’ – Olivia took a deep breath – ‘that my father’s condition made him an “inappropriate recipient” of help from the trust. And when I asked Matthew what that meant he told me that going by the medical reports my father’s prognosis was so poor that the outlay on a stairlift couldn’t be justified. He pointed out that my father needed a full-time day carer, and now a night nurse as well, and said that he would be better off in a nursing home, and it was “unrealistic” to carry on keeping him at home. We have to pay for all his nursing care privately, you see. There’s nothing on the NHS unless he goes into one of those awful care homes and sells the house. And he suggested that the burden of having him at home was already too great.’
She paused. ‘He wasn’t being sympathetic. And he didn’t mean financially. He was warning me.’ She hesitated and looked directly at Andrew, her eyes calm and candid.
‘Please, do go on,’ said Andrew. Her face still had not changed. She was still wearing the studied, serene half-smile with which she had greeted him when he arrived.
‘The day before, the Thursday, I’d had to take the day off because the day carer was ill and the agency took till lunchtime to find a replacement. So Matthew had had to cancel a meeting he’d set up with me and the council’s director of personnel for the morning. Matthew was rather annoyed.’
A light tap on the door was followed by the arrival of coffee, brought on a tray by a woman in glasses. As she set it down some coffee slopped from the pot onto the tray and the woman gave a terrified gasp.
‘Oh! Oh, I’m ever so sorry, Miss Passmore.’
She was dismissed with a glare and an irritated ‘That’ll do, thank you,’ from Olivia. She poured. As Bridger lumbered across and helped himself to three biscuits, she recomposed her face.
‘What he didn’t understand’ – even through the restored half-smile, Olivia sounded quite fierce – ‘is that my father will never, ever go into a nursing home. Have you seen those places? Do you think Matthew Sawyer would ever have any of his family in one? Not, of course, that money would be any obstacle in his case.’
She paused, and went on quietly. ‘I have given my father my promise that he will stay at home for as long as he wants to, and that we’ll manage the expense. And we do. Please do help yourself to sugar.’
Andrew swallowed some coffee. ‘It must have been quite a blow, not getting the stairlift?’
‘Actually, no. A grant would have been a great help, obviously. We do get whatever help we can. The Musicians’ Benevolent Fund have been wonderful in the past, and there are other bits of help available. But in fact we’re going ahead with the stairlift anyway. In fact we had the men in at the weekend. The grant wouldn’t have made the difference between getting it and not; it would just have made it easier.’
‘But you must have been rather angry and upset with Matthew Sawyer that afternoon, Miss Passmore?’ Andrew said neutrally.
‘Oh, I was,’ Olivia replied, a little brightly. ‘Of course I was. I wouldn’t try to deny it. But I didn’t have a reason for wanting him dead. I had nothing to gain by it. The Terry Trust’s decision was already made, and as I said, the grant wasn’t essential anyhow. Matthew was rather ungenerous about my having to take time off, but I wasn’t particularly worried about that. I’ve been employed by the local authority for over twenty years and they can’t go getting rid of people because they have frail relatives, you know.’
A slight frown appeared on her face. ‘I liked Matthew. And you know, I’m a little too mature to go stabbing someone in the back out of pique, just because they’ve upset me.’
‘And the meeting that you were meant to have on the Thursday – the one that was cancelled because you had to take the day off. What was that to have been about? Was it mentioned when you met here on the Friday afternoon before he died?’
‘No, it was some personnel matter and we were going to reschedule. But on the Friday he came to talk about other things. The Hackett Bequest, which you heard about from Mrs Trowels, and to be briefed for the welcome speech he was giving.’
‘Ah, yes, the Hackett Bequest. Would you just remind me?’
‘The Hackett Bequest,’ Olivia said patiently, ‘was a collection of sewing aids. Boxes, needlecases, pincushions, bobbins, tape measures, scissors, that kind of thing. There were three or four châtelaines as well. There were about five hundred objects in all, some of them extremely rare. As you know, the collection was lost in 1941.’
She paused, as if she hoped that were enough, and Andrew’s silence indicated that it was not.
&n
bsp; ‘Lots of the museum’s collections were taken out of Bath during the war for safekeeping, but some had to be left. The bomb in 1941 in the Circus destroyed the basement and all the records and objects in it, including the Hackett Bequest. A copy of the catalogue was housed in the Guildhall archive though, and that survived, except for the five end pages. So we know exactly what the objects were. These things do happen sometimes. There wasn’t much anyone could do. So after the war the collection was quietly de-accessioned.’
‘What does that mean, exactly?’ Andrew asked.
‘It’s to do with the way a museum manages its collections. The bequest was made in 1910 and the museum accepted it as a gift, rather than on permanent loan, which is commoner now. In 1910 they obviously weren’t worried about having the money to carry on curating things indefinitely, in perpetuity. So the bequest was accessioned: given an accession number which means that the museum would always be able to locate it, identify it and so on. And there is an obligation to have accessioned items properly described, recorded and conserved to professional standards and not sold or otherwise disposed of. A museum can de-accession things – reverse the process, in other words – if for example something is destroyed. De-accessioning removes the accession number from the record. It’s a legal proceeding, and is always minuted; a museum can’t just get rid of things it doesn’t want anymore, not easily. In the case of the Hackett Bequest, it was the only thing to do. The collection had been destroyed by enemy action, so there was no point in keeping the Hackett Bequest accession number open when the collection no longer existed. It was tidier to write it off by de-accessioning it. The catalogue was conserved of course, for the purposes of scholarship.’
She interpreted Andrew’s silent absorption of this information as a reproach and again her face assumed the pleasant half-smile.
‘It wasn’t a cover-up, or anything like that. It’s all in the minutes. There were no surviving members of the Hackett family to take any interest, and there was no public objection; the bequest had never, as far as I know, been on display anyway. So it was never missed.’
‘And you said, I think, that the whole story was more or less common knowledge within the museum. Then why was Matthew Sawyer so excited about finding the catalogue in the archive? Excited enough to send you a memo from there, rather than wait till he got back to his office?’
Olivia’s slight smile did not waver. ‘Well, I’ve always assumed it’s common knowledge. Most people who’ve been here any length of time know about it. Matthew did “find” the catalogue in the archive, but it’s not as if it were lost or anything, he just came across it in the course of one of his afternoons. He’s been in there regularly since he arrived, getting to grips with the collections. He wanted to computerise the whole thing eventually. It’s possible Matthew hadn’t heard the story, but that would surprise me. He was very good at finding out things. Very thorough. But he wasn’t excited about finding it, he simply wanted to get the paper conservator on to it as soon as possible, I suppose. I’m in charge of the conservation departments, so he wrote the memo to me.’
‘And you discussed the conservation work when he came to see you at the end of that afternoon?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Although the murder put it right out of my head. I didn’t get down to speaking to the paper conservator until this week, I’m afraid.’ Her smile became a shade apologetic.
‘Well, better late than never, I’m sure,’ Andrew said. ‘Did you discuss any other matter with Matthew Sawyer that afternoon?’
‘No. Except that I briefed him about the group he was going to address at six thirty. The natural healers. They’ve had their convention here three years running, now.’
‘And is it your impression they’ll be booking again next year?’ Andrew asked impassively. ‘I gather his speech didn’t go down too well. And you’d briefed him?’
‘Poor Matthew. I’ll never know what possessed him. You’ll have heard from all those irate delegates, I suppose. He did say some silly things. Yes, I had briefed him, but he didn’t seem to have taken anything in. Sudden stage fright, perhaps. We’ll never know.’ Again the smile of polite disappointment crossed her face.
‘Not from him, certainly,’ murmured Andrew. ‘One last thing. Did you by any chance discuss a security matter? A security matter that concerned a member of staff and a serious breach of procedure?’
Olivia scanned Andrew’s face for a clue as to what he was talking about. ‘No. Do you mind telling me what you mean?’
‘George Townsend?’
‘George? No, we didn’t discuss George. Why should we?’
‘So George wasn’t discussed at all?’
‘No. Look, is George in trouble? He was one of the last people off the premises that night. He was locking up here. He didn’t . . . surely . . .? Has he said anything?’
‘Nothing, at this stage, that leads to the murderer. We’ve had to double-check his alibi. There was a minor problem with it, to do with a little clandestine home entertainment that he went in for; I won’t go into it. It didn’t get us any further forward with the case. That’s what we’d all like, isn’t it, something that leads us to whoever did this.’
‘Of course. It’s an awful business. ’The silence which followed signalled to them both that the meeting was over.
‘Well, thank you.’ Andrew rose to go, wondering if the slight brightening in Olivia Passmore’s eyes was a sign of relief. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful,’ he said, and had nearly reached the end of the dim corridor that led to the front entrance before he asked himself if he really meant it, and just who, in the end, had been handling whom.
PART 2
CHAPTER 17
IN THE CITY the freshness of June thickened charmlessly into full summer. Privets and cotoneasters in the parks I and gardens darkened into the menacing opaque green of old nettles, and grass underfoot whispered like sand. Tall nameless weeds that thrived by being copiously peed on by dogs and cats sprouted along cracked walls and at the feet of lampposts, proffering seed heads weighted with clusters of succulent black aphids. Rubbish bins were overflowing by midmorning and by early afternoon stank and buzzed with wasps. Daytripping senior citizens from Wales ambled along the pavements three abreast in lightweight cardies and wide shoes at a pace that was fractionally faster than glacial. Back-packers as sedate as camels shed their loads on every crossing and street corner, pausing to read maps, check the contents of their bum bags and say wow at buildings. Normally unaggressive Bathonians banked up in scores behind on the pavements and trained their burning eyes into their backs, willing them telepathically and unsuccessfully to shift. Judging it too hot to negotiate passage in either Welsh or Dutch they would then smile insincerely as they stepped around them into the melted ice-cream slicks which shared the gutters and doorways with dropped cones, wooden forks, polystyrene trays and homeless people. Car parks were clogged from early morning. Lorries, delivery vans, cars, tour coaches, roof-racked campers and open-top buses hissed, squealed, started and stopped through town in a grey shimmering film of hot diesel exhaust, juddering forward at the whim of traffic lights whose changing colours were almost invisible in the glare of the sun on their filthy bulbs.
By mid-July no one pretended any longer to be enjoying the weather. Everyone was too hot, sick of strawberries and bored with barbecues; people imagined themselves asthmatic and grew animated about the pollen count and the ozone layer. They exchanged remarks such as ‘Warm again today,’ in tones of mutual pity. A toddler went missing from Victoria Park and turned up fourteen miles away wandering, mute and covered with cigarette burns. Two boys of eleven who had gone fishing by the canal disappeared and eight days later their bodies were unearthed from a shallow grave by a dog called Rhona. The Bath Chronicle ranted about communities torn apart and launched appeals for information. It ran updates on the stories daily, along with bulletins on air quality and features on inexpensive summer cocktails, alfresco dining and skin cancer. On the inside page
s it reported briefly that Matthew Sawyer’s inquest had been opened and adjourned. Andrew was no further forward with the case and considered it a small and ironic mercy that most people seemed to have forgotten about it. The combination of summer diversions, worse mysteries and the deaths of children had driven it from their overheated minds.
Annabel Sawyer took her children out of school a week early and rang Detective Sergeant Bridger. ‘We’re going to Umbria at the end of the week. I’ve taken a villa. I can’t hang about all summer waiting for a date for the inquest to reopen. You can let me know, I suppose. I suppose you’ll want the address, just in case you get any further forward. Although you haven’t done too well so far, have you?’
At the other end of the telephone Bridger was finishing his Mars bar as the widow went on, ‘There’s no telephone. My parents are coming too, and the nanny. We all need a proper break; we’ll be away at least six weeks.’
It was Bridger’s first day back after a fortnight in Malta with his mates and he was still relaxed. ‘That sounds just the ticket, madam,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to just pop round for an update before you go.’
There was an exasperated silence.
‘I’ve been away myself. Need to get through the pile of stuff on this desk. Not worth going on holiday really, is it, it’s all waiting for you when you get back. Anyway, Thursday morning suit you, Mrs Sawyer? The seventeenth? Just like to go over where we’re up to, see if we can see the way ahead and work backwards from there. See you about half eleven then, madam?’ he added jovially, certain that he was great with widows.
Thank God, anyway, for a reason to get out at least once from this baking office and away from those useless security tapes from Littlewoods. As if endlessly watching footage of two teenagers snogging in a doorway, two staggering drunks, both regulars, holding each other up, and a manic nocturnal jogger going round and round was going to get them anywhere. Andrew Poole just kept saying that he wanted them found and brought in, they had to have seen something. Well, it had been easy enough to question the two drunks and, of course, useless. Bridger could have told Poole that in the first place. And if he ever managed to identify these other characters they’d turn out to be useless too, and that would be another God knew how many hours wasted and nothing to show for it. And that farce with Olivia Passmore, going over the stuff all over again. ‘ Use your eyes, not your mouth.’ Oh, yes, sir, three bags full, sir. All that rubbish about something being wrong with her legs. He’d got a proper eyeful (use your eyes, right?) and they’d looked all right to him, not half bad in fact. Well, fuck it. He was going to do some proper police work. She was quite attractive, that Annabel Sawyer, for her age. She might offer him lunch.