by Janet Neel
Bruce Davidson looked, then looked again, checking back. ‘The latest is dated six months before she died.’
‘Brian Rubin wrote one two months ago, so there may be others from someone else.’
Bruce Davidson considered him severely. ‘Running two of them at the same time, ye mean?’
‘Perhaps not?’ McLeish said, meekly.
‘Not impossible,’ Davidson allowed. ‘I had a lass once had me and another lad on the go at the same time. Neither of us knew. Found out over a drink, years later.’ He shook his head, sombrely. ‘Married now with four kids, the lass, I mean.’
‘We need to find that letter from Rubin,’ McLeish said, soberly. ‘And to be sure there aren’t any more. She’d surely have been keeping them at the office too.’
‘But why keep them separate?’ Davidson asked.
‘Maybe she kept them all together but someone else extracted a few of them.’
‘Like Mr Marsh-Hayden?’ Davidson uncrossed his legs, knocking the unstable little table, and cursed at the remains of his tea distributing itself over his pastry.
‘He was off his face with drink,’ McLeish said, slowly. ‘Everyone agrees about that. But he was not too shocked or too drunk not to hide the file. So he may well have taken some out and put them somewhere else. But, of course, the next day he was dying in St Stephen’s.’ McLeish stopped, deciding he wasn’t being any more convincing than when he had first thought about it.
‘And it wasn’t him breaking in to look for them either, because he was cold by then, God rest him. And it wasn’t Rubin, because he was playing footsie with the local mayor.’ Bruce Davidson was a patient and methodical thinker who followed a thought to its conclusion.
‘No.’ McLeish sat up. ‘But it could have been the man who wrote the missing letters. Took them out, was disturbed by Tony Gallagher, clouted him and ran like hell. If there were any letters. If there was a man,’ he added, wearily.
‘No one to ask, is there?’ Davidson pointed out.
‘No. Do you want another tea?’
‘I’m all right.’ He caught his superior’s eye. ‘You mebbe want one, John?’
‘No. I want … well, I want just to talk something else through. It’s quite simple, but it’s worrying me. It’s the usual question of who benefits? Who is better off because Selina and Richard Marsh- Hayden are dead?’
‘Mr Rubin, surely? He has Richard’s shares and mebbe Selina’s.’
‘Mm. Do we think Richard was going to be able to pay Mr Rubin back? No? Well, then Mr Rubin would have got them anyway in another six months. And we know that Selina’s death actually delayed the sale.’
Bruce Davidson plodded his way through the sequence. ‘You’re saying anyone who wanted to buy or sell was in practice screwed by Selina’s death.’
‘I suppose they might not have realised that in advance,’ McLeish said, stirring in sugar. ‘But what about the one who didn’t want to sell? She’s got her way, as it turns out.’
‘Judith Delves. Aye, but now Brian Rubin has Richard’s shares, the enemy is through the gates.’
‘True,’ McLeish conceded. ‘But she didn’t know Rubin would get Richard’s shares on his death. Go back to Selina’s death. That delayed the sale to no one’s advantage except Judith’s. And she got £100,000 out of it as well to keep the business going. She couldn’t have foreseen the fire, but she did know the business was in trouble because Selina hadn’t been doing her job and Gallagher had been robbing them. With Selina dead, the sale is delayed and she’s got the cash to go on.’
‘Now you say it …’ Davidson said, slowly, ‘… it’s no’ a bad case to argue.’
‘Indeed not. And Judith only increased the insurance on Selina two months ago.’
‘I’d not quite seen that. But where does that put Mr Owens? You saw him, he’s not best pleased.’
‘No, but he can’t actually force a sale. Or not now, maybe in a few months’ time. And I am reminded that Frannie advised Miss Delves to delay by all means possible on the basis that something might change.’
Bruce looked at him, appalled. ‘Before Selina died, she advised this?’
‘No, no, thank heavens – this conversation happened after Selina’s body had been found. It’s an analysis Judith Delves could have managed for herself in any case, I just wish my lovely wife hadn’t helped her to it, if only because I can’t get it out of my head. Look at it, Bruce, everyone else is worse off after the killings. Rubin can’t buy, Owens and Gallagher can’t sell.’
‘Yes, but Gallagher’s been bought out, as much as he needs to be.’
‘True. But Owens wanted to sell, and now he can’t. Mind you, we know he doesn’t need the money, for all he’s lost his job.’
‘No indeed. We’re in the wrong business, John, when a man younger than us turns out to be worth the thick end of £3m.’
They finished their tea in contemplative silence.
‘I’m not getting anywhere, Bruce. You go off to the pub, or whatever single blokes do these days, and I’ll go and eat humble pie and dried-up supper, and read the same book over and over again to the kid.’
15
‘Frannie? Are you sitting down?’
‘Yes. I’m in the kitchen where I always sit down. What’s happened?’
‘Don’t panic. It’s a good news day. Guess who is going to be rich and famous?’
‘Tristram. You’ve not … you aren’t …’
‘Yes, I am. Poor old Alan – God bless him and keep him safely tucked up in bed – has a temperature of 103 and can’t do more than croak. So I’m singing Cavaradossi tonight and Monday.’
‘But couldn’t they have got someone else?’
‘There is absolutely no support in the world like one gets from devoted family. Who could be better than lovely moi?’
He was sounding wildly overexcited, as well he might, but she was still dazed. ‘But, darling, you always said they wouldn’t use you, that you were only rehearsed in case Alan dropped dead in Act One. You always assumed they’d borrow a tenor from somewhere.’
Her brother laughed; she could hear conversation and people passing. ‘Oh, they tried,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Absolutely everywhere – I can’t tell you what yesterday was like, but I wasn’t even going to hint to any of you until I knew they’d drawn a blank everywhere. The big names are either working or far too grand, you see, to come and do a couple of nights for the ENO at the end of a run. The money isn’t that good. Then all those who are a couple of steps ahead of me are either ill – there’s a sort of Eastern European flu about, bless it – or working, or totally unable to manage the job in English. So in the end Management had to confess they’d called all over Europe yesterday, as well as up and down the East Coast, and ask me to do it. I graciously said I would.’
‘Wonderfully decent of you,’ his sister agreed. ‘Are you nervous?’
‘Not particularly. Or not yet.’ Tristram, unlike the nerveless Perry, had occasionally suffered from crippling stage fright. ‘I’ve sung it a lot before.’
Indeed, she agreed, reserving to herself the thought that singing the lead at the ENO was not quite the same as doing it when touring Eastern Europe.
‘We’re rehearsing all morning, or at least Elena and I are. You want tickets?’
‘How many can we have?’
‘Six. A box. So that’s you and Mum. Will John come?’
‘Of course he will. Who else are you asking? What are you doing for women?’
‘She’s in the chorus.’
‘Then she doesn’t need a ticket. What about Perry? He must be on his way home – yes, he’s landing this morning.’
‘Perry then. He’ll enjoy it.’
Not necessarily, she thought, but let that pass.
‘And your nice friend Matthew, perhaps? Or is it awkward with John?’
‘Good heavens, not in the slightest,’ she lied, promptly. ‘But he’s seen it very recently.’
‘Not with m
e as Cavaradossi. I’ll ask him. I must go, Fran, they’re calling me.’
‘Oh, darling, good luck. I’m sure you’re going to be a smash hit, I really am. Just stay calm.’
The two people in the Café de la Paix office were not talking but were very much aware of each other. Judith Delves was quietly determined to stay at the Café to work on the insurance claim and to deal with questions from the small group of electricians and tilers who were working – at double rates – to stay ahead of the decorators also at double rates, who were racing through the front half of the restaurant. She had been at her desk since leaving Michael’s flat at 9 a.m. and he had been in twice, once to insist on taking her out to lunch and now to try to get her to agree to leave at 5.30 p.m. to go back to her flat and get into something more formal than a navy boiler suit to accompany him to Tosca at the Coliseum. And he was apparently prepared to sit without as much as a newspaper until she yielded the point. She was finding herself unable to keep up her end of the hostile silence and cast around mentally for something to occupy him and break the tension.
‘I had a call from John McLeish. He wants a team to come in tomorrow.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Michael was sounding irritated but not ungrateful for a break in the silence. ‘Why? What’s their problem?’
‘That file of letters they found. They’re obviously wanting to check there aren’t any more.’
‘Any more? Weren’t those enough? I understand there were a few letters suggesting Selina had been, well, a bit free with her favours.’
‘They weren’t all love letters, I gather,’ she said, stiffly. ‘Anyway, he sounded as if it was a routine thing, and I reminded him that the police had taken everything out of the inner office. I offered to look through all the cabinets, but I really didn’t think there was anything but accounts and old conveyancing files and so on. They either don’t believe me or they don’t think I’ll bother to look.’
‘Nor you should. You’ve more than enough to do, let them do their own dirty work.’ He got up. ‘I fancy a coffee.’
He made them both a cup and she looked up at him gratefully. It was a perfect October day outside; a lime tree, its leaves tinged brown, blew in the wind against a background of faded blue sky, like a poster for the Fall in New England. He looked down at her. ‘Actually, I could look, couldn’t I? Can we make a deal? I’ll do this chore for the police, save you being harassed tomorrow, or as much as I can, and you go home and change in an hour. I’ll wait for you here and get on.’
She was already a little ashamed of herself and accepted the compromise eagerly.
‘Where is the best, or the most likely place to start?’ he asked, gazing around him. ‘Did Selina ever go near any of these?’
‘Of course she did. All of them.’ There were ten heavy fourdrawer cabinets arranged in a bank. ‘Or try the bookcases, or the cupboard where the bank statements are. I mean, if she was keeping anything else here it could be anywhere, except her desk because the police cleared that. Keys are in the safe.’ She nodded towards the big safe, which sat half open.
‘Did you change the combination?’
Her pen stilled in her hands and she looked up aghast. ‘I forgot. I’d better do it now.’
‘No need, don’t stop now. I’ll remind you.’ He unlocked a filing cabinet and looked into the top drawer. ‘This isn’t filing as I know it,’ he observed, and she got up wearily and peered over his shoulder.
‘Oh dear. I think it’s just old Visa receipts, but they ought to have been thrown away. I’ll do it.’
‘No, for heaven’s sake.’
She sat down guiltily and forced herself back to the insurance claim, very conscious of him as he sighed and banged his way through drawers. He was disturbing her, but equally he wanted to help and it was really not reasonable to refuse to go to the opera when he had got tickets as a treat for them.
She sat up and stretched her back and found he was watching her.
‘It is five thirty,’ he said, firmly.
‘And a good time to stop,’ she assured him. ‘I’ll go and come back here.’ She peered, dismayed, into the chaos of a filing drawer. ‘I’m sorry, it’s awful, I never realised. Mary and I will have a go.’
‘I could attempt a tidy-up. Throw some of it away – I don’t have anything much better to do.’
‘Absolutely not,’ she said, firmly. ‘It’s our mess, we’ll clear it. I’m ashamed of us.’
‘Never mind that. Do we have a shredder hidden away?’
‘A what? Oh, I see. No, we’ve never thought of it, perhaps we should.’ She stood, irresolute, and he turned her round gently and pointed her towards the door.
‘Darling. Go.’
She went, taking the stairs for exercise, and stopped off just to see how the work was progressing. Half an hour later she looked at her watch and fled, hoping against hope for a passing taxi. She was standing, anxiously peering up the street, when a big dark red station wagon, which seemed familiar, came past her and parked outside the Café’s boarded-up frontage. She looked but no one seemed to be getting out and then, blessedly, there was a taxi, his light illuminated, and in the press of telling him where she was going she forgot to look again, and it was not until she reached her own front door that she remembered that Brian Rubin drove a dark red Volvo Estate.
‘If it’s dinner jacket, I’m not going,’ John McLeish warned, over the head of his small son. ‘I can’t, my shirt’s not back after the Bramshill party this week.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ Francesca assured him. ‘It’s not a first night for anyone but Tristram. I just hope people aren’t going to be terribly disappointed to miss Alan, but I understand Tris may be rather a draw. Being fashionable and happening and now, as he is. No, Will, the fashionable, happening now outing for you is a bath full of warm water, come on.’
She bore their son, protesting, from the room while McLeish unloaded the dishwasher and loaded it up again, marvelling that any two of his in-laws could use so many plates. Perry was on the sofa, sleeping off jet-lag, and his mother-in-law, bless her, was assisting in bathing William, preparatory to leaving him with Susannah, who was in a sulk because she had hoped to be invited to the opera. He had tried to volunteer to babysit instead, but this suggestion had been poorly received, and Susannah consoled to some extent by a load of autographed CDs and a cuddle from Perry had been called to the colours.
Francesca was still distractedly doing her eyes as they all piled into the studio’s Rolls, with Perry drowsing in a corner. His body-guard prodded him and enquired whether he needed an upper or what, and McLeish bent his most forbidding scowl on the man. They had had to wait a couple of minutes outside the Coliseum to let an even bigger Rolls disgorge its cargo, but the waiting photographers wasted very little film on the two emerging minor royals, devoting their attention to Perry, who emerged from his latest nap smiling and pleasant, exuding gracious confidence in his younger brother. McLeish, blinking in the flashlights behind Francesca, could only be relieved that Tristram was safely immured inside and couldn’t hear any of it.
‘Matt,’ he heard her call joyfully and saw that, indeed, young Sutherland, wearing a suit and tie, was grinning at them from their box.
‘Tristram invited him. He’s taken rather a fancy,’ Mary Wilson explained, watching his face anxiously.
‘He’s a good lad for a solicitor,’ McLeish assured her, remembering Matt’s efficient tenderness with Tony Gallagher, and greeted him civilly. In a lull in the cries of greeting, he managed to ask if Matt had any later news and was unsurprised to hear that Gallagher was still away rather than present much of the time.
‘Doctors are pleased, though,’ Matt assured him. ‘But they’ve no idea when he’ll be fit to work. There’s the rest of the team.’ He pointed out Judith Delves and Michael Owens in the middle of the stalls, Michael’s head bent in conversation with a large man in the next seat, and Judith looking tired and reading her programme. McLeish scanned further back
and saw Brian Rubin with a pretty blonde whom he was treating with anxious deference.
‘If Tony were here, we’d have all the extant shareholders and the Principal Suitor,’ Matt pointed out, and on that thought the lights went down.
A small man in a dinner jacket appeared in front of the curtain, and Matthew was this time not surprised when the audience groaned. Francesca, he saw, was furious, looking like a ruffled eagle, and he watched as John McLeish patted her hand. The man on the stage was embarked on a more elaborate apology, starting with the news that the substitute Scarpia was still in place – this news received in silence – and going on to explain the disaster that had befallen Cavaradossi. Matthew waited, with real interest, for him to describe the frenzied telephonings which, as, he knew from Tristram, had occupied two entire days, but he did none of that. Management had evidently decided to take a bold line and to make a virtue of necessity, so that their spokesman was explaining that they had been greatly and peculiarly fortunate in having among the existing cast the brilliant young tenor Tristram Wilson who had sung Cavaradossi in major opera houses in Europe. A sporting round of applause, led from the gallery, broke out at this point and he saw Francesca breathe again. ‘Spoletta,’ Management added, conscientiously, ‘will be sung tonight by Giles Raven,’ and the audience, reminded of its manners, applauded that too.
Management retired, and the overture started and, after what seemed to John McLeish quite a lot of that, the curtain went up on an old man – or rather, he realised, quite a young man doing his best to simulate the slow, careful movements of old age. Then Tristram bounced in, and set up, elaborately, an easel and a painting, dropping a brush as he did and bending awkwardly, stiff-legged, to pick it up. Stricken by nerves, McLeish realised, and glanced at Tristram’s siblings, both of whom were staring at the stage, their backs rigid with tension. He took his wife’s hand, seeing her lips move in prayer, but plainly she did not even notice, her whole heart and mind fixed on the brother struggling on stage. Tristram had got his mouth open and he was singing, but McLeish could hear that it was stiff and constrained, quite unlike the clear, high, effortless tenor he was used to hearing. He found he was tense too; if Tristram could not take this God-given chance, no member of the Wilson family would be tolerable to live with, except possibly his mother-in-law, who was sitting calmly and quietly, watching her youngest with love but without anxiety. It was to be hoped that his own Francesca, who was looking like a model for a tragic mask, would manage, with age, to feel with less intensity.