by Janet Neel
‘The merchant banking community,’ Francesca said, nodding towards the front stalls. ‘They all have a deal whereby you can book twice a week in exchange for a vast subscription.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I am Bursar of Gladstone still. I invest our funds, such as they are. Or rather I don’t, but I am part of the mechanism for choosing those who do. Our current lot of advisers brought us here.’
‘Does John like opera?’
‘He’s only been to two. But he would have come to hear Tristram, ‘course he would, given notice.’
‘I’m sure he would.’ He was aware he was sounding distracted.
‘Matt?’ She had always been quick, of course, to read your mind. ‘Your client OK, is he?’
‘I hope so. Yes. Well, it’s a difficult time.’
‘Not like you to resort to generalities.’
‘All I can do at the moment. Your policeman friend making any progress on the murder, is he?’
‘I have no idea, he wouldn’t tell me. But he sounds different when things are moving.’ He felt her head turn as he stared down at the stalls. ‘Do you want to tell me anything? Or tell John?’
‘Don’t know yet.’
‘If in doubt, speak, I know that’s what he would say,’ she said, warningly. ‘I talk to Judith Delves, you know.’
‘Do you now? When?’
‘She came and talked to me after the murder about how to hang on to her restaurant when her boyfriend really didn’t want her to. I didn’t think her chances were that good, but counselled procrastination on the basis that on the whole delay caused a deal to go away. Rotten advice, given what has happened. She’d have been better out of it.’
Matthew thought about it, slowly. ‘Rich bloke, Mr Owens, or isn’t he?’
‘Oh, must be. Directors in banks like that make hundreds of thousands. Every year. We’re in the wrong trades, Matt, you, me, and John. Good-looking too – I saw him at the restaurant. Quite a hunk. I quite see why Judith fancies him. She says his taste used to run to dazzling blondes, like the late Selina. I hope I was right to reassure her that chaps grew out of that.’
‘Oh absolutely,’ Matt said, promptly. ‘You might want to fuck a Selina, but they give you trouble. The less flashy ones don’t. There’s an English type – no, get off, Fran, we have them where I come from – good sports, do anything for you, don’t fuss, keep the firm running. Judith’s one of those.’
‘No, she isn’t.’ He grinned affectionately at the familiar profile. ‘She’s one of the other sort of troublesome ones. The ones who want their own careers, eccentric things like that. Like me.’
‘Not like you,’ he said, quietly. ‘Doesn’t look like you do.’
‘That’s not the point.’ She was blushing and resolutely not looking at him. ‘First time round I was married into a merchant bank. You’re right, they want women who, like crusaders’ wives, keep the roof on the castle and the swine in the pens and the passing strangers out of their beds. They absolutely do not want raving beauties with wandering tendencies and they equally do not want bloody-minded women who want their own castle. So Michael cannot have understood quite what Judith is like. She fancies him rotten and can’t quite see how she’s been so lucky, with one part of her mind. With the other she’s tackling the real issue.’
‘Which is?’
‘Like Trollope said of one of his heroes: “It is the internal qualities of a man that make a marriage.” Not whether he earns enough for any six people.’
He sat watching her, but she would not turn to look at him, and leaned out further to look at something.
‘Here we go.’
The house lights faded and a single light brightened at the front of the curtains which opened a crack to reveal a man in evening dress. The circle and balcony groaned and the stalls buzzed. Francesca scowled in disapproval and the man explained, deprecatingly, that a bug had finally felled one Rumanian bass baritone Scarpia, but that they had been fortunate enough to be able to replace him with another, similar. A scatter of polite applause followed, and Francesca nodded, smiling, to the larger of the two women in their box.
The conductor came on, the curtain went up, finally. Matthew had been to operas before, but not with a cast like this, or a stage or a tradition like this. But through it all he still found himself back in the mess that was Café de la Paix, watching his client signing the charge on his shares, seeing again the two dogs and the two brothers from this morning. He did manage to get away from his thoughts for the brief moments while Tristram was on stage; star potential that one, he thought, momentarily painfully jealous of a man who at not much older than he had his feet so securely on the ladder. And who had the devoted Francesca, lost in concentration, unmoving, as a supporter.
The lights went up for the interval, leaving him blinking, guiltily. Francesca leant across to say something in German to the women who both beamed at her, but he managed to extract her after a minute or so.
‘Didn’t know you spoke German.’
‘I don’t really, but then nor do they. They’re Romanian.’ She was relaxed and happy. ‘Good, isn’t it?’
‘Terrific.’
It must have lacked something, because she looked at him, carefully.
‘Did you know Selina’s husband, Richard, is in hospital? Tried to top himself.’ He had not known he was going to say that, he thought.
‘Mr Marsh-Hayden. Ah.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘John says it’s usually the husband in these cases. Or the resident man. And they very often feel terrible when they’ve done it. That must be why he feels progress is being made.’
‘He’s wrong.’ He looked down at her, but she did not seem to feel he had gone barking mad.
‘Why is he wrong? Who do you fancy?’
‘I don’t know.’
She looked back at him, patiently. ‘Are you a bit too close to this? You could try listening to the music, you know.’
‘Fran. Sorry. I was, sort of.’
‘Concentrate. It clears the brain.’ She patted his hand in a sisterly way, nothing sexual there at all, and he laughed.
12
Francesca woke from a stunned sleep as the bed shifted under her. She rolled over to see her husband padding towards the bathroom. It was light, it must be morning. She lay, collecting herself; William had woken at 2 a. m., wet, and she had changed his bed and put a nappy on him, deciding that whatever Susannah thought he wasn’t really ready to be dry at night. But, she remembered, John had not been there, had still been out. She sat up, crossly; true, her husband was under forty and not yet in the heart attack danger zone, but he really could not drink until past two and get up again at 7 a.m. without risking turning her into a widowed mother of two. The Metropolitan Police would have to be forced to understand his limits.
He came back from the bathroom, staggering with sleep and rolled heavily on to his side of the bed. ‘How late were you?’ She sounded like all nagging wives everywhere, she realised, and scuttled over to his side to give him a cuddle.
‘That’s nice.’ He rolled over and gathered her into his arms. ‘Four o’clock. I’m not going to the office yet.’
‘What a party.’
‘No. Or rather it was turning into one, but I was called out of it at eleven thirty.’
‘What happened?’
‘The Café de la Paix case. Richard Marsh-Hayden took an overdose on Monday night and died in hospital early this morning. Liver failure.’
‘How?’
‘Well, he’d taken too much paracetamol, but his liver was shot anyway. They’re doing a PM, but he was a boozer with a history of hepatitis. So it wouldn’t have taken all that much to finish him.’
‘How awful. Or I suppose not, if he killed his wife.’ She moved against him as his hands went under her nightdress. ‘You don’t want me to go on talking about it, right?’
‘Right. Will’s asleep. I looked.’
‘Let me lo
ck the door.’ She slid out of bed, and padded across the room, turning the key silently, holding her breath as she listened for their treasured child who seemed miraculously still to be deeply asleep. She stopped momentarily to watch, with love, the sight of her husband fighting his way out of his pyjamas, enmeshing himself with the duvet, and pulled off her nightie preparatory to burrowing in from the other side. They both fell deeply asleep afterwards and Francesca surfaced to a room full of the autumn sun and the comforting muffled sound-track of William’s nanny, getting him dressed. It must be past eight thirty which was when Susannah came on duty, having got up at about eight twenty-five. She rolled over to find her watch and stared at it unbelievingly. Nine thirty, and she was due at Gladstone College at the very latest for a meeting at eleven o’clock. She looked, irresolute, at her husband, sprawled over two-thirds of the bed, and was just deciding to leave him to sleep, and the hell with the Metropolitan Police Force and all its works, when his eyes opened.
‘It’s nine thirty,’ she said, anticipating the question, ‘and I have to get up. Stay there.’
‘No. Can’t do it. Lots to fix. That was nice.’
‘Wasn’t it? I feel human again, not just cross and pregnant.’
‘I never asked. How was the show?’
‘They had a substitute Scarpia who did well. Much rapturous applause, dressing-room full of excitable people in four languages. The tenor lead, Alan, wasn’t singing nearly as well as he did on Saturday; he’s got a throat and he was terribly constricted at the top of the range. Forcing it. And the orchestra was all over the shop, particularly the woodwind. Clarinettist kept going sharp. But Tris was OK, bang in tune unlike most of them.’
John McLeish, after six years with the Wilson family, was still disconcerted by the detachment with which they assessed all music. Indeed, he was regularly brought up short by the amount they knew instinctively, the appalling ease with which any of them could perform, even the ones like his wife, who had not made their career in music. He looked across at her; she was standing in a patch of sunshine bent over, shaking her breasts down into the cups of her brassiere. She straightened up and caught his appreciative eye.
‘Yes, well, I know you like it, but I don’t feel I need all this extra presence. It’s only a couple of months but already I can’t get it all in comfortably.’
‘That’s what I like.’
She laughed and came over to kiss him, and he padded off contentedly to the shower, while she unlocked the bedroom door to let in William who had finished breakfast and realised he was being excluded from his parents’ room.
‘So is that it, with the case?’ she asked as her husband came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. William rushed at him and he scooped him up, effortlessly.
‘It’s certainly the prime suspect gone.’
‘Is that policemanly caution, or nagging doubt?’
‘Oh, he was certainly favourite. By some way. No, it’s just loose ends. Bits that don’t fit. You get those in any case. That should be it, we’ll tidy up and do the next one. And the next. Are you planning to go to Gladstone? Because you’ll need a bit more on than that.’
Michael Owens sat at his desk in the large, air-conditioned office, with the echo of the conversation he had just had in his ears. He had rung St Stephen’s Hospital at nine thirty, after the morning meeting, and the response he had got had alerted him. He had rung the Café de la Paix where no one had any better information and persevered until he had run Detective Chief Superintendent McLeish to earth, in a car, on the way to Scotland Yard.
‘That’s the strength of it, I’m sorry to say. He died about three this morning.’
‘Why didn’t you get to me before?’ he had asked, outraged on discovering that Richard had died almost seven hours earlier.
‘I didn’t leave the hospital till 3.30 a.m. and neither did his parents and sister. I expect they got up late too.’ McLeish was sounding just this side of tart, and Michael mentally acknowledged the point.
‘Did he … was he able to … to say goodbye?’
‘He never recovered consciousness at all. Acute liver failure, nothing to be done, in the end. That tends to be what happens with a paracetamol overdose. And a not very good liver anyway, I understand.’
‘He’d had hepatitis. In Cyprus.’
And he drank, in excess, which no hepatitis survivor should do, as neither of them said.
‘Chief Superintendent, is that … I mean … are you still investigating Selina Marsh-Hayden’s murder?’
‘We have not yet reviewed all the evidence.’
Michael had opened his mouth to try another question, but understood that he was not going to get an answer.
*
Francesca surfaced from her morning meeting – a review of the domestic bursar’s management accounts – to find two messages, both from Judith Delves.
‘She really wants to talk to you,’ the secretary who looked after the whole of her department observed.
‘Yes, I see.’ She sat at her desk, but it did not take long to decide that everything from common charity to duty to a Gladstone Old Girl required her to return Judith’s call. The Café de la Paix statistically probable murderer was dead, by his own hand, and her husband’s interest in the case presumably therefore over, except for his usual conscientious job of tidying up. And Judith, who was her own age and had appealed to her for help, had an impossible job to do, her principal place of business ravaged by fire and her all-male shareholders in fundamental disagreement with her. It was the duty of all good women to come to the aid of this particular party.
‘This is too difficult to do on the phone,’ Judith Delves said, against a background of shouted conversation, along the lines of ‘Up your end a bit, Mick’ punctuated by crashes and hammer noises. ‘May I come and see you?’
‘Actually, I have a meeting at the Department at three,’ Francesca volunteered. ‘I could pop in afterwards, assuming there is anywhere we can talk. Right?’
She went through a college lunch for their increasing number of women lawyers, most of whom seemed to be hollow-eyed and devoid of friends or lovers as a result of working fifteen hours a day, every day, in prestigious City law firms. This kind of slavery was hardly what the feminist movement had sought to achieve, she reflected, treacherously; in some sense these young women, the most intellectually distinguished and envied of their generation, were not a lot better off than the women locked on to weaving machines in nineteenth-century factories. True, of course, that this was an apprenticeship, that in ten to fifteen years’ time those who survived could be partners, paid astronomically well, but how and when were they going to find husbands and have children? Or were they simply going to decide against all that, as she herself so nearly had, in favour of being captains of their own destinies? It was perfectly possible that these pale girls, whingeing about their conditions of employment, were also mildly sorry for her, on a civil servant’s pay, married and totally earthbound by a toddler and a bump. For everything there is a season, she told herself, maturely, only to be jolted out of her comfort by the cleverest of all the recent graduates’ drawled, mischievous, sharp account of a drafting meeting on a recent high-profile company flotation.
The after-taste stayed with her through a particularly uninspiring meeting with Department for Education officials, and she arrived at the Café de la Paix in a mood to help Judith Delves to keep her own business against all comers if required. Large metallic objects were being carried through the glass door by men whose every movement said that they were on highly bonused piecework and she doubted whether they even saw her as she slipped in between parties. She stopped, daunted; the elegant, cool restaurant, all brightly polished glass and brass, and bright clear colours, had become one big, dusty, dirty, echoing shed. She stood blinking, trying to decide what was happening, and saw that the position was not as hopeless as a first glance had suggested. The last bits of aluminium ducting to replace the ventilation system were being fitted, as
she watched, and yards behind the four-men team came another team; carpenters were sawing narrow planks to replace the false ceiling that covered the bunking. Of course, even once the carpenters were done, varnishing and repainting remained, but Francesca, used to supervising builders, reckoned it could be done in a couple of weeks. She considered the sheer numbers on site and the speed and concentration with which they were working, and reduced her estimate. In ten days, given a following wind, and suitcasefuls of cash, Café de la Paix would be ready to go. Allow another day to get chairs, tables, tablecloths and staff back in, by the week after next the site would be trading again.
She shared her conclusion on timing, tentatively, with Judith Delves, who emerged from a huddle of site management to greet her, and Judith agreed, crossing her fingers. They smiled at each other.
‘So. What can I do?’
‘It’s very good of you to come, Francesca. I’m afraid I was in a panic when I rang. Michael had just rung to say that Richard had died, and that was a shock for both of us. And then he was assuming that this was the final straw, as it were. That we had no choice but to sell, and I just … I just …’
‘Needed another head,’ Francesca supplied, unwilling to cast herself instantly as an ally.
‘Yes. Come up to the office. You can come through the kitchen.’
The kitchen, although in serious need of repainting, was in good shape. The heavy duty stainless steel equipment had all survived, with nothing more expensive or difficult than a good clean-up. The grill and, of course, the extractor duct over it had been replaced in their entirety, and a young man was laboriously washing the spectacularly dirty floor.
‘Ah.’
‘Ah, indeed. I come and look at it to cheer myself up. Tony – Chef – is coming in later. He was here at five thirty to receive the new grill and make quite sure it went in right, so he’s gone home for a sleep.’