Funeral Music

by Morag Joss

  She ran some hot water into the sink, tied on an apron and carried her breakfast things over to the draining-board. As she mopped at her egg cup, she planned further. After luncheon she would rest with the Telegraph crossword for half an hour. Then she would telephone the cleaning contractors again, since there had been no response to the message she had left on Friday. It was all very well, she had told the answering machine, just putting a shine on the hall floor and rubbing the door furniture, but when she had had to stoop down to pick up the post (she was always first there) she had seen the state of the skirting boards. And they need not think that they could just flick a broom round when they came next Friday. She and her fellow residents at number 11 paid for a cleaning service for the common areas and she expected them round at once to do a proper job. There had been no response, but what could one expect from these people? She would leave another message this afternoon and call again first thing on Tuesday morning.

  Had she really said ‘fellow residents’? she wondered, sniffing. She had taken a tea towel with acorns on it and was now drying her saucer. A slip of the tongue, for she certainly could have no fellow feelings towards those homosexuals on the first floor. She supposed that what they got up to was their business, and simultaneously assumed the right to condemn it. And they seemed to have no qualms whatsoever. If she ran into one of them going in or out she would have to suffer the most breezy greeting, as if it were quite normal that they should be on proper neighbourly terms. She didn’t welcome friendliness from that sort of person. Their flat was empty again. All the coming and going between Bath, London and Brussels because of work, so-called. Treating her like an ignoramus. She took a plate and wiped it vigorously. She followed the news. The foreign news reporting in the Telegraph was second to none and readers had not been spared the details of that disguisting Belgian business. The country was overrun by homosexuals, paedophiles and pornographers. Those two upstairs could even be dealers in that sort of filth; she had always been dubious about what they claimed to do for a living.

  Now she was drying the cutlery, which had of course been properly rinsed. After her telephone call to the cleaners she had a letter to write to the spineless chairman of the Camden Crescent Residents’ Association, to press upon him again the need for action about the nasturtiums in the window box of number 21, and to report again that the Londoners who had number 9a had brought their cat for the weekend again, in breach of the lease. That might take her up to teatime (Earl Grey). After that she would tidy up the plants and water the tomatoes on her back patio. Beyond that, there was an evening to fill with a little television, a lamb noisette and vegetables, some lemon mousse, a blouse to iron for the morning, and her bath. Very satisfactory, she thought, putting away the cutlery and thinking (incredulously, for it was the bank holiday) that she had just heard the postman.

  She mounted the stairs from her flat up to the ground-floor hall. It was empty and echoing, its bare white walls and chequered floor almost chilly. She picked the package off the mat. She could tell by the size and weight that the plain Jiffy bag contained a videotape. She turned it over in her hands. Hand-delivered, of course, no postmark. Plain white label, name and address handwritten in black capitals. Sealed down, not just held with those clips you can get. Miss Bevan’s heart began to beat faster. This would be just the way that kind of thing would start, one at a time. It would start so slowly you might not even notice it and then it would gather momentum and lead heaven knew where. She looked round the empty hall, and back at the package in her hand. She would know within seconds if it was something innocent, or not. If necessary she could reseal it with some tape of her own and just leave it on the post table. Nobody would know. That’s if it were harmless, which it wouldn’t be, and of course she wouldn’t watch it, she would take it straight to the police. Really, it was her duty to open it. With a last look around the hall she tucked the Jiffy bag under her apron and made for the door down to her basement flat.

  When she first held the package over the steam pouring from the kettle she almost scalded her hand. Then, turning the package over too late, she saw that it was the address label which was peeling away, while the seal remained perfectly intact. Worse, the lettering had not been done in fast ink, and had run into grey illegible streaks. She began to wish that she had never embarked on her private crackdown on crime. Rousing herself, she whipped the soggy label right off and tore it into grey shreds. She rolled the pieces into a damp little nugget and pushed it in among a mass of tea leaves and eggshell in the waste bin. It would be an easy matter to write out another label in anonymous-looking capitals. She held the package over the kettle once more. The kitchen was filling with steam and still the seal would not budge. Obviously something much stronger than any standard envelope sealing had been used, and why would that be, unless to keep the vile contents secret while in transit? Certain of what she would find, she took the package in both hands and, with the strength of a holy warrior, tore at the wrapping.

  SO NO, it was not convenient, it being not only the August bank holiday Monday but also the anniversary of Diana’s death. The crowd, although smaller than expected, had been building up all weekend. A persistent swarm of thirty or so were intent on sleeping out in Parade Gardens, and there were bye-laws against that sort of thing. Others were encamped on benches in Abbey Churchyard. There were already twenty extra uniformed officers policing the abbey environs who expected that, among the many flocking to Bath intent on lighting candles, leaving flowers and praying prayers, there would be several dozen others who would manage to overcome their grief sufficiently to concentrate on parking illegally, thieving from cars, stealing from shops or drinking themselves to disorderliness.

  Not a convenient day either for the Accident and Emergency Department of the Royal United Hospital, where the staff were waiting with weary fatalism for the admissions of keening girls, legs buckling from the combined effects of lager, sun and standing too long in sweaty crowds united in mourning. The poor air quality would bring in one or two emergency asthmatics and the temperature alone guaranteed a few heatstroke candidates as well. They could expect the heat to add to the domestic incident tally this year. There would, depressingly, be the usual bank holiday traffic victims. Then there would be the botched suicides, people too lonely and depressed to go out and get stung by swarms of bees, bitten by their neighbours’ dogs or electrocuted by their lawnmowers.

  It was not convenient for the police. It was not convenient for the hospital. Nor was it convenient for Mrs Maupesson or her granddaughter in the pushchair, whose progress along Camden Crescent was interrupted shortly after nine o’clock that morning by the appearance of Miss Bevan from the basement flat of number 11. She emerged from the area steps behind the railings, unusual in itself, because she generally came and went by the main front door to number 11 and thence by the door at the end of the hall which led down into her flat. Mrs Maupesson, coming out of number 27 without her glasses on, had at first thought it also unusual that Miss Bevan, normally reserved, seemed so animated. Really, the woman was babbling, and although Mrs Maupesson was too far away to hear clearly what she was saying, she seemed to be insisting with some urgency that Mrs Maupesson stop and accept, what were they? Handfuls of tomatoes? No, it was two rather limp bunches of flowers that she was holding out. She had one in each hand, twin nosegays of bright red, shiny, drooping peonies, petals falling and splashing everywhere. But then Mrs Maupesson drew nearer and saw that what Miss Bevan was waving at her were not bunches of flowers at all, but the remains of her hands.

  ALL INCONVENIENCE to Miss Bevan came to an end at two thirty-five p. m. when her heart, affronted by the demands made upon it by the trauma, anaesthesia and a sedated three-hour wait for an operating room, stopped. Its determined resisitance to all resuscitation attempts somewhat inconvenienced the surgical team. They had, having removed several bone shards, just succeeded in re-establishing a blood supply to the scant remaining muscle and tendon tissue, so that after furth
er restorative surgery Miss Bevan might have had a chance of continuing her life with the aid of two quite servicable claws.

  DETECTIVE CHIEF Inspector Andrew Poole took the call from DC Heaton and afterwards sat on at his desk, leaning across it with his chin cupped in one hand. He hoped he’d rung off with the kind of weary but purposeful authority that junior officers needed.

  ‘Right, thank you, Constable. No point you hanging on there any longer. Still no relatives shown up? Better get on down to the woman’s flat, then. DS Bridger’s freezing the scene but we’ll need to establish who’s to be informed. Bound to be some family or friends of the deceased somewhere or other. And Heaton, when they’ve been tracked down: “cause of explosion not yet known”. Same thing if there’s any press there. All right?’

  DCI Poole was sorry Imogen Bevan had died, for her own sake. But he was almost sorry on his own behalf because, having posted DC Heaton at the hospital to await the remote possibility that Miss Bevan might be interviewed, while he organised the setting-up of an enquiry here in the Manvers Street station, there was now no excuse for him not to go back home, even though he was now in all probability investigating a murder. And he did not want to go home. The call informing him of the suspected letter-bomb explosion had interrupted the first turning of the meat on the barbecue and given him the satisfaction of handing over to Valerie the long tongs and the butcher’s apron, with an insincere frown at having to leave. Now that Miss Bevan had died and he had officers at the scene of the explosion, there was nothing more, for the present, that he could do.

  Lifting his head from his hand, he leaned back in his chair and looked round the empty Major Incident Room. Imogen Bevan would never know that hers would be the first murder dealt with here and she could hardly appreciate the honour, but it was progress. The last murder case he’d worked on, the death of the director of Bath Museums, had begun with the usual scramble to commandeer an empty room and purloin telephones, equipment and furniture from all over the building, wasting the better part of the first day. After that, he had made a case to the District Commander for a permanent room. Now he had his Major Incident Room, with telephones, computer screens and consoles on a continuous line of desks which stretched round two sides, pinboards and large-scale maps on the walls, and even a microwave and kettle. Tomorrow morning they could get straight down to it, as soon as they had the PM report.

  For now, he was free to return home to Oldfield Park where all three kids would probably be lying inside with the curtains drawn, glued to the bank holiday feature film. His three carelessly beautiful, maddening children, Benji, Dan and Natalie, whom he had discovered he could not leave. Outside, Valerie would be banging around in a penumbra of charcoal smoke, picking up from the scuffed grass the dirty skewers, knives, trodden bones, half-raw, discarded ropes of meat and ketchup-soaked napkins that reduced their semi-detached garden, post-barbecue, to something more like an abandoned field hospital. She would look up at him, her furious face face smeared with sooty exertion, before barging past him with another bin-liner, pointedly saying nothing about the seventy concrete paving slabs and half-ton pile of sand that had been lying at one side of the garden for over a year, and that Andrew had still not built into Valerie’s dream patio on which they could have proper civilised barbecues that would be rather less Crimean in their aftermath.

  He should go back home. But instead, he allowed his chin to sink into the cup of his other hand and he leaned forward again, staring at his desk and trying, although not very hard, not to think about Sara, because that only made him feel worse.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Morag Joss left Scotland to study singing at Guildhall; she now lives in Bath and writes full time. She is the author of Funeral Music, Fearful Symmetry, and Fruitful Bodies, three Sara Selkirk mysteries; Half Broken Things, her fourth novel, won the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award.

  ALSO BY MORAG JOSS

  Fearful Symmetry

  Fruitful Bodies

  Half Broken Things

  Coming soon from Dell

  FUNERAL MUSIC

  A Dell Book

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  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is

  entirely coincidental.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-42293-4

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