by David Linzee
One Fell Swoop
A Renata Radleigh Opera Mystery
David Linzee
Coffeetown Press
PO Box 70515
Seattle, WA 98127
For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com
www.davidlinzee.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Sabrina Sun
One Fell Swoop
Copyright © 2017 by David Linzee
ISBN: 978-1-60381-577-2 (Trade Paper)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-578-9 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961917
Produced in the United States of America
* * *
For Pippa Bellasis
“In your house, as in a golden dream.”
—Eugene Onegin
* * *
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Mike Giger, a real-life neighborhood savior, who gave me the job of editor of the real-life equivalent of the Parkdale Neighbor News.
Thanks also to Catherine Treadgold and Jennifer McCord, editors extraordinary at Coffeetown Press.
* * *
Prologue
Renata Radleigh was panting when she reached the top of the hill. This was the highest point in London, and a strong wind had been blowing every time she’d been here. Tonight it was bitter cold. Her eyes were tearing up and her nose starting to run as she turned in a circle, looking for Neal. The lights of the city glittered to the south, but on Hampstead Heath there was only a faint glow reflected from the overcast sky.
It was a stupid choice for a rendezvous. She would have argued with Neal the dog walker if he’d given her a chance. The hill was a wide expanse and she couldn’t see very far into the darkness. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and took out her phone. Since Neal had called her, it had his number. She tried it but there was no answer. She kept the phone in hand, hoping he’d ring her.
She wandered on, turning in a circle, seeing only darkness. It was all very well for Neal; he had a borzoi to protect him. But this was no place for a lone woman, especially one who had two hundred pounds in her pocket. She was thinking of trying Neal again when her foot was yanked out from under her and she fell on her face.
Heart pounding, she twisted round to see who had tripped her. But there was no one. She got to her feet. She had fallen over a body. She bent over it, putting a hand down to brace herself. The face was turned to the side. It was Neal. A trail of blood crossed his cheek from his ear. His cap was gone and there was something pallid showing through his dark hair. She bent close, then recoiled as she realized it was the broken edge of his skull. The palm of the hand she had put to the ground felt warm. She turned it over to see that it was covered in blood. The grass all around his head was bloody. He was dead.
Renata cried out feebly against the wind and staggered away. She must call the police immediately. But she’d dropped her phone. She had to return to the body and bend over it to pick up the phone. It was slick with blood and she had to fight not to be sick.
* * *
Chapter One
Five days earlier
Renata was the last singer of the evening. She was confident in her appearance, having worn her long black hair down so that it fell in glossy waves to her shoulders. The shimmering blue silk of her gown, along with the exaggerated eyeliner and false lashes expected of opera singers, made her eyes an almost startling shade of aqua. She felt the slow, lilting music flowing into her, relaxing her upright recital pose, making her supple-waisted. About half of her thirty-six years seemed to fall away as she became the character singing the aria, the light-hearted teenager Olga.
She was performing in the London home of Maestro Vladimir Grinevich. Brand new, it had been described in the Sunday newspapers as costing fifteen million pounds. Its interior was the work of a fashionable designer. The papers had run pictures of it, and she’d thought it couldn’t look that vulgar in reality, but it did: white walls and carpets, purple furniture, steel and mirrors everywhere. Maestro had a superb ear, but not much of an eye.
Her stage was a semicircle of twenty-foot tall French windows that gave on what was called a garden, though it was mostly stone and steel. Ribbons of steam escaped from the glass lid that covered the underground swimming pool. Stairs of pure-white stone widened and narrowed in sensuous curves as they climbed the hillside behind the house. While waiting her turn to sing, Renata had been wondering what was the point of them, since they didn’t seem to lead anywhere. The staircase looked like a Las Vegas stage set, and was just as brilliantly lit. It would have been appropriate for dancing girls to descend the stairs making high kicks, and many of the audience would have been grateful if they had.
This was a fundraising event to which Maestro had invited his neighbors. Since the neighborhood was Billionaires’ Row near Hampstead Heath, that meant she was singing to a group of London’s wealthiest residents. She’d had more attentive audiences in primary schools. Coughing was more or less continuous. Whenever the music softened, she heard the chirps of incoming calls and texts. The less inhibited were checking the screens of their mobiles, and the even less inhibited were whispering on them. Some people were waving to attract the attention of the waiters, who circulated with champagne and appetizers. Others were dozing, eyes closed and heads askew.
The rows of faces before her were Arab, East Asian, South Asian, Latin, as well as white, for the rich of all the world settled in London. But the front row was solidly Russian. The oligarchs were bulky men with knobby noses whose hair had turned gray but was still luxuriant. They were flanked on one side by their trophy wives or mistresses, who were sleepily blinking their thick eyelashes, checking their gold and diamond watches, and crossing and re-crossing their long bare legs. On the other side of each man sat his bodyguard, fashionably tight suit bulging over his shoulder holster.
It seemed to Renata that the bodyguards were more attentive than the rest of the audience. Maybe Maestro had had them in mind when he suggested that she sing Olga’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, one of the classics of the mezzo-soprano repertoire. It reminded them of home. Or maybe they were simply used to keeping still and looking alert.
Impatient applause swallowed her final notes. She extended an arm to acknowledge the accompanist, then lifted both arms to invite the other singers to join her. Maestro Grinevich, notoriously impatient of ovations that were not for him, allowed them only one bow before lumbering to the front of the room.
“Beautiful aria, wonderfully performed, some of you are thinking. Others are thinking, last number! It’s over! Whew!” He made the gesture of flicking sweat from his forehead, but in fact there was real sweat to flick away. Maestro perspired a lot, even when he was not conducting.
The audience laughed heartily. Grinevich was renowned for his outrageous and charming candor, which in a non-celebrity would have been called rudeness. He was a tall man in his late fifties with a deep chest and big belly. Graying dark hair fell over his forehead and ears, and a beard that had gone entirely gray covered the lower part of his face. His deep-set brown eyes, which Renata knew from experience could be very intimidating when he was in the pit and you were on the stage, raked the audience as he delivered his pitch. He was raising funds for his new charity, the Fidelio Foundation, which would perform operas in prisons and young offender institutions. No one in the audience would be
allowed to leave without handing over a check. That got a laugh, too.
After another round of applause, in which the singers joined, Grinevich waded into the audience to begin shaking hands and collecting checks. The singers stood silently in a row, unsure what to do next. They were in a bad mood, though they covered it well. Most, like Renata, were obscure old pros. Maestro’s assistants had coaxed them into performing for free with hints that the Fidelio Foundation, once it got on its feet, would employ them. Then there’d been the audience. Maintaining one’s concentration amid all that coughing and texting drained one’s energy. Finally, there’d been the security. Grinevich’s political problems in his native Russia had followed him over here, and his house had its own team of men in tight suits with bulges under their arms. It even had a gatehouse, where the arriving singers had been detained while their papers were checked. Once in the house, they’d been escorted down corridors and watched over as they waited to perform. A baritone had muttered to Renata that he felt like a circus tiger.
Now the minders reappeared to escort them to the bedroom where they could change back into their street clothes. Renata was last in line. When a waiter passed her with a tray of champagne flutes, she surrendered to a rebellious urge. Stepping out of line, she took a glass, turned to face the room, and waited to see if anything would happen.
The guests were on their feet, making up for lost time with the hors d’oeuvres and wine, and chatting in a mélange of languages. She had read that London had more billionaires than any other city in the world, and almost all of them were foreign-born. The city offered advantages over their homes. They came from Beijing because the air was breathable, from Moscow because they could not be thrown in jail at Putin’s pleasure, from Delhi because the roads were in good repair and the traffic did move—if slowly, from Sao Paolo because the lower classes were content and less likely to rob or kidnap them. And there was a good supply of beautiful houses and flats to swap among themselves, at ever-increasing prices, as well as high-toned shops and restaurants in which to fritter away surplus cash. No doubt the shopkeepers and restaurateurs were happy, but the ordinary Londoners were a bit surly about the rising prices, including Renata. She wondered if she was the only English person here.
But no: there was a blond man in a gray suit, back to her. His pose, one hand in his trouser pocket, other holding his glass by the stem, displayed that unmistakably English attitude of self-consciousness striving for nonchalance. This man seemed familiar. He threw back his head and laughed, and she recognized her brother.
“Don!”
He turned and waved. She gathered he had seen her perform, which meant he would have had time to recover from any surprise he might feel at seeing her. She was certainly surprised to see him. He came over.
“I didn’t know you were in England.” She breathed in enough expensive Jermyn Street toiletries to make her cough as he leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.
“Just popped over on business. Flying back tomorrow.”
“Business?” The last she’d heard, he was selling houses in the suburbs of St. Louis, which didn’t seem to require a trip to London. “But what are you doing here? I mean tonight.”
His sandy eyebrows rose, disappearing under his blond forelock. She realized that she’d sounded suspicious rather than pleased. “Sorry. It’s lovely to see you, but such a surprise. I mean what an extraordinary coincidence.”
“Not a bit of it. I got you the job.”
“Tosh! Maestro Grinevich wouldn’t accept a recommendation from you.”
“He would from my boss.”
“Your boss?”
“My investor, more properly. My backer.”
“Well … thanks.”
“I enjoyed your number. Always liked ‘Akh, Tanya, Tanya.’ Bright spot in such a mopey opera. Near as Tchaikovsky ever got to writing, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.’ ”
It was unusual for him to compliment her. She recalled what she had been about to ask. “Is your backer here?”
Don glanced over his shoulder. A general drift toward the door was beginning. Guests were handing their glasses to servants, shaking hands or embracing. “Don’t see him. Probably left, or stepped out to take a call.” He turned back to her. “I’ve already asked for my car to be brought round. Can I give you a lift?”
“Mind if I change first?”
“Must you?”
“This dress marks horribly if I sit down in it. And I’m hoping to get two more recitals out of it before it goes to the cleaner’s.”
He reached into his pocket and pressed something into her hand. “Never mind about that. Get your bag and let’s be off.”
She looked down. It was a £20 note, presumably for the dry cleaner. She wanted to give it back to him, but he had turned away to say good night to someone. This bit of high-handedness was more like the usual Don. She headed for the bedroom where she had left her bag.
She and Don, three years her junior, had had a long and bitter sibling rivalry, exacerbated by the fact that they were in the same field. He had been director of development for the Saint Louis Opera, one of America’s best regional companies. But he had lost the job the previous spring in scandalous circumstances. No one else would come to his aid, so Renata had, not without mixed feelings, but with surprising effectiveness.
He had never thanked her—her psychotherapist suggested that he was too deep in denial about the whole ordeal to do that—and seldom rang or texted her. But getting her tonight’s gig was a good deed, as was the offer of a ride home, sparing her a long Underground journey, holding up her dress in its garment bag the whole way, trying not to wrinkle it.
The spacious bedroom was full of singers in their underwear, complaining about the audience. She found a dog—a rangy, elegant borzoi—sprawled across her overcoat on the bed. She crooned and nudged him until he moved, then collected coat and bag and returned to Don.
They followed other guests through the house and out to the tall columns of the portico. The car valets were hustling to ensure that the guests didn’t have to wait too long. Don took her arm as he spotted his car arriving at the foot of the steps. She knew nothing about cars, but this was some sort of expensive sports coupe. The light from the windows seemed to flow over its curves like liquid mercury. She complimented him on it as he opened the door for her. Hiding his pleasure, he said that it was hired.
The night was cold, but the car valet had turned the heater on full blast and the interior was already comfortable. Don tipped him and got in beside her. They were off with a roar before she had her lap-strap fastened.
“I’m starving,” he said. “The little amuse-bouches they serve at do’s like this only make me hungrier. Care for a nosh?”
“Well … all right.”
“There’s a place in the Strand I’ve been wanting to try out.”
“But that’s miles out of the way to my flat.”
“Not a problem.”
And it wasn’t. Renata traveled mostly on foot or by bus, and she forgot how quickly one could get about London in a car at night. Especially with Don at the wheel, jumping yellow lights, passing slower cars whether there was a passing lane or not, turning corners with squeaking tires. She knew from experience it was no good asking him to slow down, so she let him give his full attention to his driving. When they were stopped at a red signal, she asked, “What is your job, Don?”
“I’m buying real estate.”
“In St. Louis?”
“Yes.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Better not say, sorry.”
“Well, for whom, then?”
“Again, better not say. He has a name to conjure with, and if it gets about that he’s buying, prices will go up.”
A few minutes later, he pulled over to the curb, where another car valet was waiting. They were at their destination already. The theaters must have just let out, because the broad sidewalks were thronged. Their car vanished as if by magic as they threaded their
way through the crowd to the door of a restaurant. The queue formed immediately inside it. She took her place at the back, but Don oozed through to speak to the headwaiter. Negotiations were brief. Don waved her forward. Seeing people’s expressions as she passed, she was glad the place was too noisy to hear what they were saying.
There was worse to come. Don might or might not enjoy being with her, depending on his mood, but he always enjoyed being seen with her. As the waiter pulled out a chair, he stepped behind her to remove her coat, taking his time about it, watching the people in the restaurant glance at her. Reviewers used to write all manner of nonsense about Renata, saying she was the loveliest Musetta or Dorabella ever to grace the local stage and so forth. Several years had passed since then. But tonight, when she was wearing enough makeup to cover her wrinkles and had her best recital gown on, she supposed she looked all right. Don handed her coat to the waiter and came around the table to sit down with a gratified smile on his face. It made Renata want to clatter her knife against a glass and announce to the room, “I’m his sister.”
He was trying to catch the eye of the sommelier. “Shall we split a bottle?”
“Just water for me.”
“Oh. Still on the antidepressants?”
“A different one, but they still warn you of dreadful side effects if you drink too much.”
“Hate to think of you taking a happy pill every day. In addition to the fortnightly weep-fest with your shrink. What’s it all doing for you? You seem much the same.”
“Let’s make a deal, Don. If you’ll drop the subject of my antidepressants, I won’t say anything about the bottle of wine you’re going to put away on your own.”