Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  The applause when it came cascaded like a cataract down the tiers of the hall. It flooded round orchestra and pianist, whilst the sweating conductor smiled, mopped his brow, beamed his own delight at his role in the occasion, turned, and motioned to his players. The orchestra rose as one, their instruments set aside or held awkwardly to allow their hands to applaud.

  Musicians are a cynical lot, especially where conductors and soloists are involved. They are sometimes asked to rise in acknowledgements of soloists which are more theatrical than genuine, and they usually resent that. But they identify greatness more readily than any other artists, and when they recognize it, they are delighted to be involved in it.

  The players were genuine in their applause for the young virtuoso. Most of them had begun their lives by playing the piano as children before they progressed to other instruments, and many of them had attained a fair degree of expertise at the keyboard. That was what enabled them to estimate the prowess of this man. And they had no doubt that they were in the presence of a huge talent.

  Once he had left his instrument, the pianist looked ill at ease in the tailed evening suit which he had worn so little; he was embarrassed now as the applause built to a tumult, and he was called back for repeated bows. His career was still in bud; it took time to establish an international reputation. But his fellow musicians had no doubt that this slight, gauche young man would be a household name within the next generation.

  Outside the main concert hall, in the deserted corridors leading to the dressing rooms, two figures were challenged, for the third time since they had entered the building. It was over a decade now since the IRA had devastated the centre of Manchester, but new terrorist threats had appeared since then, and security in public places remained very tight. The man here had his orders, and even policemen could not be allowed to penetrate the inner sanctum he patrolled.

  When the Chief Inspector produced his warrant card, the official examined it carefully and shook his head sadly. ‘It’s in order, but you can’t come past here. Not during the concert.’

  DCI Peach surveyed the man, who was fiftyish, overweight, swelling pompously with the burden of his authority. DS Lucy Blake felt suddenly quite sorry for him.

  Peach said with ominous clarity, ‘We can, sir. You’ll find that you’ve done the right thing, letting us through. Dressing rooms down here, are they?’ He peered past the formidable figure, who seemed to be trying to enlarge himself like an animated drawing to block the width of the ten-foot-wide corridor.

  ‘This area is reserved for the major artistes.’

  ‘Good. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ The self-appointed security man listened to the applause in the distance, bursting towards a fortissimo as a door opened from the auditorium, and felt the beginnings of panic. The great men would be here soon, with these obstinate policemen still waiting to upset them. He said as patiently as he could, ‘These are the rooms where the major performers relax after a performance. Wind down, you see. Receive their privileged visitors.’

  Peach smiled the smile which any Brunton copper could have told the man was very dangerous. ‘That’s us, sunshine. Privileged visitors. We have things to discuss with Matty Hayward.’

  ‘Matthew.’ The portly man could not keep the outrage at this lese-majesty out of his voice. ‘It’s Matthew Hayward. It’s usual to afford the major soloists their full titles, you know.’

  ‘I’ll afford you a boot up the backside if you don’t get out of the way,’ said Peach calmly.

  There was no malice in his delivery, but that made it somehow more frightening to a man who had not been threatened like that in thirty years. It sounded like a simple statement of fact. He eyed Percy Peach’s brightly polished shoe apprehensively. ‘This is most irregular.’

  It was a sign of weakness, and Peach was past him like an eager whippet, with his Sergeant slipping easily into his considerable wake. ‘Just what it is, sunshine. Most irregular. I wouldn’t be working at this time, wouldn’t be swanning around Manchester like this, if it wasn’t irregular. Just show us young Matty’s dressing room, and then you can be on your way. It’s private this, as you might imagine. So don’t you go telling other people that young Matty is involved with the fuzz, will you?’ He passed rapidly down the corridor, inspecting the doors as he went.

  Three yards behind him, the man’s voice became a wail of protest. ‘This is the dressing room reserved for this evening’s soloist, but I really must protest in the strongest terms—’

  ‘That’s the idea, sir. Protest away. And in the strongest terms, as you suggest. I’ll give you the full names and titles of my senior officers, if you require them. On the way out, that will be. When DS Blake and I have finished with young Matty Hayward. In the meantime, if you have his interests at heart, you’ll make sure we’re not disturbed.’

  Peach had somehow managed to secure the position of advantage with his back to the door, which he now opened behind him. He surveyed the empty room with the chair in front of the mirror and the other seats around the wall, and apparently found it satisfactory. He ushered Lucy Blake into the room and said, ‘I should get back to your post now, sir. There might be unauthorized persons trying to get into these rooms. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’

  The man said through the door which was slowly closing upon him, ‘It’s my job, you see. I have to—’

  ‘For the next twenty minutes or so, your job is to see that we’re not disturbed with Matty, see?’

  This formidable guardian could hardly believe it. He found himself saying to the closed door, ‘I’ll make sure you aren’t disturbed, Chief Inspector.’

  The man knew he was dying.

  In a hospice, most people knew. They went there to spend their last days with people who were experts in death, and they went tranquilly into that long good night. It was a triumph of the hospice movement that the humble, industrious experts who worked in places like this had restored the dignity to death. They had also taken a lot of the fear away from it for most of the people who spent their final days and nights in hospices.

  A lot of the fear, but not all. This man, despite the drugs which had dulled the pain, was not going quietly into the great unknown. He held hard to the hand of the woman who sat at his bedside and said in a voice which had declined now to a croak, ‘Why me?’

  ‘None of us knows why, Gerry. There’s no rhyme or reason in it, and it’s no use us even asking why.’ She stroked the brown skin on the back of the hand which was little more than bones now, whilst the seconds stretched out in the silent room. There was never any hurry here, even when most of the people in the beds and the chairs had so little time left. ‘Perhaps it will make more sense to us in the next life. Perhaps we shall see things more clearly then.’

  The lips twisted briefly in scorn; she was glad to see that tiny burst of energy in what might otherwise have been a cadaver. ‘It’s always “perhaps”, with you people. You call it faith, but I call it stupidity.’ She carried on holding his hand, feeling the fingers tighten a little in response. At least a minute later, when she thought he had drifted off again, he said, ‘It’s all right for you, sister. You have beliefs. Some of us know there’s nothing after this.’

  She was surprised that he had remembered she was a nun. They didn’t wear uniforms in here, and religious trappings least of all. It was one of the rules that no one preached at these people in their last days. If they wanted a clergyman or last religious rites, they would ask for them, and it would be arranged.

  She was amazed once again at the odd things which stuck in minds that were mortally sick, when more obvious things disappeared. But perhaps he thought she was a hospital sister, a nurse in charge of his treatment, not a religious one. It mattered little, so long as she could ease his suffering. She eased the sheets gently away from the emaciated body. He was lying on his back, and she took the opportunity to smooth a little cream on to the bedsores she was trying to control on ea
ch of the hips. The skin felt as thin and smooth as cling-film; it seemed impossible that it did not split and peel away from the bone beneath it.

  She reached over and eased off the earphones from ears delicate as paper, catching the applause from the Hallé broadcast at the end of the concerto. He’d asked to listen to the concert earlier; but she wondered how much of it he had heard through the haze of drugs and pain. As if he registered her thought, he said without opening his eyes, ‘Tremendous performance. He’s going to be one of the greats, that chap. Pity I won’t be around to see it.’

  She smiled, smoothing down the sparse white hair, wondering if she could get him to take a drink. ‘It was the Hallé, wasn’t it? I haven’t heard them for a long time. Not since they used to play in the Free Trade Hall.’

  ‘Barbirolli.’ The dry, thin lips beneath her enunciated the syllables as clearly as if they had been fulfilling an elocution exercise. ‘Sir John Barbirolli was the conductor of the Hallé when I used to go. Those were the great days. His wife was Evelyn Rothwell. Played the oboe in the orchestra. I used to live near them in those days. In Fallowfield, in Manchester.’ It had been a long speech for a dying man. The bloodless lips managed a thin, exhausted smile, and she hoped his mind was back reliving those blissful days.

  She wasn’t at all surprised by the detail. Fifty years ago was often much more vivid than yesterday, as you approached the end. She said, ‘Everyone says the Barbirolli days were the best for the Hallé. “Glorious John” they called him, didn’t they?’

  But he had gone from her now, drifting off into some peaceful oblivion. She felt suddenly weary, realized for the first time that she had been working for over twelve hours, with minimal breaks for food and drink. When people needed you, you gave, and you scarcely noticed fatigue creeping up on you, because you were needed. It was at moments like this, when the work was suddenly switched off, that you found that the weariness seemed to have crept into your very bones.

  She would spend a few minutes in the chapel before she went to the sparsely furnished room she loved so much. Probably she’d say her night prayers there, letting that warm, dark silence envelop her like an insulating cocoon. Then she’d be able to hop straight between the cool, welcoming sheets, without kneeling with her elbows on the sides of the bed. She’d take a hot drink to her bed, and try to read a few pages of her book before she fell asleep and let it crash to the floor.

  Sometimes she missed the communal worship the nuns had conducted together in the priory, with the thin, high singing rising to the vaulted stone ceiling, the ritual of the service, the togetherness of the sisterhood, and God looking down upon them from the altar.

  But not often. She liked the work here. She knew she was needed, and she knew that she was good at the work, at the combination of nursing and listening and sheer hard, grinding toil, which was so necessary if people were to have dignity and consolation in death. She would sleep deep and easy tonight.

  Sister Josephine looked down at the still, wasted face which would be dead by the weekend. He might even die tonight; the doctor had increased his morphine again today. She placed both of her hands on top of his single, pitifully bony one for an instant and said a prayer for him. Then she put the headphones back on their hook above the unconscious man, holding one of them to her ear for a moment to hear the announcer wrapping up the live broadcast.

  It was then that she caught the name of the soloist. Matthew Hayward. She told herself that it needn’t necessarily be her Matthew Hayward, that it was a common enough name, that her Matt surely wouldn’t have been good enough to scale pianistic heights like this.

  But even as she told herself these things, she knew that she was wrong. And with that knowledge, she was back in a world she thought she had put behind her for ever. An alien, dangerous world, where evil had lurked and she had been a very different person. A world where Sister Josephine, servant of God and comforter of the sick, had not even existed.

  And suddenly she knew that she would not sleep soundly after all through this night.

  Seven

  Matthew Hayward took his final bow, held out his arms towards the audience in genuine, astonished appreciation of their reception, and left the platform.

  His own part in the evening was finished, but the orchestra had still got Beethoven’s seventh symphony to play to conclude the concert. It would take the audience a little while to settle again, after the excitement of his performance in the Emperor concerto. He felt a selfish pleasure in the thought of the whole of the Hallé orchestra having to wait because of the excitement he had caused.

  Matthew was beginning to settle into the role of virtuoso.

  Whilst he was performing and receiving his applause, he had been borne along effortlessly on wings of adrenalin. He could have played on for hours, could have risen from the stool and beamed and bowed and held out his arms appreciatively towards his listeners indefinitely. Now he was alone in the corridor, with the sounds of an audience settling and the orchestra retuning beyond the double doors through which he had made his final exit. He felt suddenly very tired.

  He had been tense all day as he waited for this concert, his first concerto with the Hallé. The Emperor: that was starting at the top all right! And he’d brought it off, there was no use dousing what he had done with false modesty. The reactions of the audience and the musicians had been there to prove it. But he realized now how much his performance had taken out of him. He was still on a high, would need to sit and wind down slowly in his dressing room. He certainly needed a rest. It would be only prudent to take it easy for a while before he drove the forty miles back to his house on the edge of the Ribble Valley.

  He was startled to discover two people in his dressing room. He found himself fumbling for the words which would dismiss them. ‘You shouldn’t be here, you know. It’s not your fault, I’m sure, but you shouldn’t have been allowed to get into the dressing rooms. There’s a strict—’

  ‘It’s all right, sir. Our presence here is quite in order.’ Peach held out his warrant card, saw that the man was still too excited to focus upon it, and said, ‘We’re not journalists. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Peach and this is Detective Sergeant Blake. We’re here to speak to you about a non-musical matter.’

  Matthew’s brain reeled. He was in no condition to deal with this. Not now. He needed to savour his triumph, to shut his eyes and think of what he had done, to come back to this dull earth slowly, like a man descending from a light aeroplane after a flight in the clear skies over Everest.

  He couldn’t direct his mind back to the mundane concerns of a stocky, bald-headed policeman now. Not in this precious hour of his triumph. Matthew Hayward said, ‘Can’t this wait until tomorrow? I’m really in no state now to give you accurate information.’

  ‘I’m afraid it won’t wait, no, sir. That’s why we’ve made the journey over here from Brunton at this hour. Had it not been urgent, we would have seen you at your own house in the morning.’

  Matthew registered dimly that they were from his own area, that they knew where he lived. The first shiver of apprehension troubled his elation. ‘I – I can’t think what you can want with me. I think you must have the wrong person.’ He looked round the bare, rectangular room as if seeing it for the first time, trying to convey what he was still too modest to put into words, the idea that the dressing room of a virtuoso was not the context for police activity.

  Lucy Blake said patiently, ‘You mentioned information, Mr Hayward. That is why we are here. We think you are very probably in a position to give us certain information. Information that we think might be quite vital to an important investigation.’

  Matthew looked wonderingly into the young, attractive face with its frame of rich chestnut hair. She didn’t look like a policewoman to him, with that open, unlined face, and the crisp white blouse and straight maroon skirt emphasizing her curves. He realized that he had hoped when he saw her in his dressing room that she was a fan. He said, ‘I think this must b
e a case of mistaken identity. I can’t think that I have any information that can be of any possible use to the police.’

  Peach said, ‘Do you drive a silver Vauxhall Vectra saloon, registration number MZ51 CBV?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve had it for several months. Look, if this is a motoring offence, there was scarcely any need to come—’

  ‘No offence, sir. No motoring offence, at any rate.’ Peach let the suggestion of something ominous hang in the air, watching the face above the winged collar and the evening suit as if it was of absorbing interest to him.

  ‘If it isn’t motoring, I can’t think what on earth it could be. I’ve been preparing for this concert pretty intensively for the last week or two, as you can perhaps imagine. I can’t think that—’

  ‘It isn’t recent, sir, this information we need from you.’ Peach managed to make that news sound very sinister indeed.

  Matthew Hayward could hear the rhythms of Beethoven beginning to thunder, majestic but muffled, from the concert hall, which seemed suddenly very far away. He said, ‘How – how long ago are we talking about? The period of this information which you keep mentioning, I mean.’

  Peach nodded, as if confirming something to himself, choosing a more oblique angle of attack now that he had the man’s attention. It was in his nature to conduct most interviews as attacks, even those with perfectly innocent people. And this man might be very guilty indeed, if they were lucky. ‘This silver Vauxhall Vectra, registration number MZ51 CBV. You’ve now admitted to ownership of the vehicle. Were you driving it last night, sir?’

  ‘I really can’t remember.’ Matthew realized as soon as he’d said it that it was a mistake.

  ‘I see. We’ll wait until the recollection returns to you, then, shall we?’ Peach looked at his watch. ‘We’re talking about twenty-four hours ago. It shouldn’t take very long.’