The Killer in the Choir

by Simon Brett

  So, Jude recognized that she could never cure his pain, only offer him ways to manage it.

  Jonny knew the routine. He took off his jacket and shoes, removed the cravat from around his neck and lay face down on the treatment bed which Jude had put up in her sitting room. On first moving into Woodside Cottage, she had contemplated having a dedicated area for her healing work, but decided – rightly, as it turned out – that her clients would be more relaxed in the charming disorder of her living space. Jude’s style of décor reflected the clothes she wore. Just as a variety of floaty garments blurred the exact outline of her plumpness, so a range of rugs, throws and floppy cushions disguised the contours of her furniture. Carole had never actually vocalized her views on the organized chaos in which her neighbour lived, but Jude knew full well what she thought. She gloried in the contrast between the soft confusion of Woodside Cottage and the sharp edges of High Tor’s immaculate interior.

  The interest in crime-solving that she and Carole shared had occasionally presented Jude with ethical dilemmas in relation to her work. More than once it had happened that a client had been deeply involved in an investigation, either as a research source, a witness or, on occasion, a perpetrator. Jude tried not to use her confidential healer role as a means of eliciting information, but sometimes the strain told. And, after what Carole had reported from Leonard Mallett’s wake, the temptation to pick Jonny Virgo’s brains was strong.

  She needn’t have worried, though. As she moved her hands slowly up and down, a few inches above his body, focusing her concentration on its messages, with absolutely no prompting the organist went straight to the subject that interested her.

  ‘Very strange,’ he confided. ‘Obviously I’ve done a lot of funerals in my time, and I’m not sure that they’re occasions when you necessarily see the best of human behaviour, particularly after everyone’s had a few drinks, but what happened today was completely unprecedented.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Jude, as if just making conversation.

  ‘The deceased was a Fethering resident called Leonard Mallett … don’t know if you knew him?’

  ‘I’ve heard the name,’ she replied with complete honesty.

  ‘Lived in one of those big houses over on the Shorelands Estate.’

  ‘Ah. Did you know him?’

  ‘Not really. His wife – widow I have to say now – sings in the church choir. I’d seen him once or twice coming to pick her up, that’s all. She’s a soprano,’ he added randomly.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And one strange thing that happened today was that, during the service, rather than sitting with the congregation, she sat in the choir stalls and sang along with the rest of them.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that was her choice,’ said Jude, wondering if there was going to come a point when Jonny added more to the narrative than she’d already heard from Carole.

  ‘Oh yes, yes. And I was very happy about it. Quite honestly, we’re so pushed for numbers in the choir that I worry about anyone’s absence – even if they’ve got the excuse of it being their husband’s funeral. Some of the more traditional members of the All Saints congregation might have seen it as a little lacking in respect, but as you say, it was her choice. And she’s got a strong voice, so she bolsters the choir’s volume.

  ‘Not sure how the vicar felt, though. From the little I’ve seen of him, I’d say Bob’s a traditionalist, but he’s very worried about keeping up numbers – so many churches are having to give up their choirs from lack of support. Perhaps he’d have welcomed Heather’s decision. I’m not sure what he felt about the cremation, though.’

  ‘What about the cremation?’

  ‘Well, it happened straight after the service. The hearse took the coffin straight to the crematorium.’

  ‘That’s not unusual, is it?’

  ‘I’d have thought it was unusual for the widow not to attend the cremation.’

  ‘Happens quite often, I think,’ said Jude. She had a friend who worked as a funeral celebrant and they had discussed such matters. ‘You know, if she feels her duty is to be at the wake, to greet and talk to the guests, some of whom may have come a very long way to the funeral.’

  ‘Maybe. Not sure how Bob would have felt about that. Maybe he would have welcomed it too. I don’t know him well enough to be sure of his views. But I’m certain he didn’t welcome the scene at the wake, though.’

  ‘“Scene”?’

  ‘There was a terrible set-to between Heather and her daughter.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, I say “daughter”. Stepdaughter, actually. Alice. You haven’t … er …?’

  ‘As I said, I haven’t met any of them.’

  ‘Anyway, the girl must have been drinking heavily. I can’t understand how young people manage to drink so much. How anyone does, come to that. With me, alcohol wreaks absolute havoc with my IBS.’

  Jude was reminded that, along with worries about his blood-sugar levels, Jonny Virgo was also troubled by Irritable Bowel Syndrome. And a few other Syndromes, too. In fact, she sometimes suspected that he only had to read the name of a Syndrome to develop it.

  ‘But, apart from that,’ he went on, ‘I can never understand why people enjoy drinking too much. I’ve been on foreign trips with a choir I used to play for, and some of them … the amount they put away … it was frankly disgusting. The basses were always the worst, they were constantly having to be pulled out of bars. And other behaviour was pretty appalling too. You know, extramarital affairs going on. And none of them seemed to feel any guilt about it. They’d just giggle and say: “What happens on tour stays on tour.” Which I don’t think is a very responsible attitude.’ There was quite a prudish side to Jonny Virgo.

  ‘Could you just turn over?’ asked Jude.

  Jonny did as instructed and allowed her to start her ministrations to the front of his body. Still her hands didn’t touch, just outlining his contours, feeling the tensions, easing the knots. He continued his narrative. ‘So far as I could gather, there weren’t meant to be any speeches in the church hall. Everything appropriate had been said in the church. But if that was the intention … well, Alice Mallett clearly hadn’t got the message.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It was most embarrassing. She was carrying an empty champagne bottle … and from the way she behaved, she might well have drunk all its contents … Anyway, she banged it on the table and announced that she wanted to say a few words. And dear oh dear, the “few words” she said were entirely inappropriate to the occasion.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘What she said was, basically, that her stepmother, Heather, had ruined her father’s life. She implied that Heather had seduced him away from his first wife, which was totally untrue.’

  ‘How do you know that, Jonny?’

  ‘Because Heather and Leonard actually got married at All Saints, and I played the organ at their wedding. I remember it well, because I woke up that morning with a particularly bad migraine, and my mother said I should call in sick, but I said I couldn’t let them down. So, I did play for them, though I was feeling pretty terrible throughout the whole ceremony. And I’d discussed with both Heather and Leonard what hymns they would have, and so I got to know the pair of them a bit. And Leonard told me that his first wife had died some ten years before, and he’d only known Heather for eight months.’

  ‘So, Alice was lying?’

  ‘Well … obviously.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jude was thoughtful. ‘Of course, it is possible that they’d had a secret relationship before, which nobody else knew about, and Alice found out and—’

  ‘No, Jude. Out of the question.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You don’t know Heather, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, she’s the most prim and proper person you could ever meet. The idea of her having a secret relationship with a married man … it just wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘If you say so. Which means that Alice was ly
ing.’

  ‘Must have been. But that wasn’t all she said in the church hall this morning.’ Jude didn’t need to prompt Jonny further; he was caught up in the momentum of his narrative. ‘She said that Heather had made her father’s life a complete misery. Alice said she had only married him for his money – he was quite high up in the insurance world, you know. And Heather had made him change his will, so that she – Alice – was completely cut out of it. Then, as soon as the will had been changed, Heather had no further use for Leonard.’

  ‘And what sort of state was Alice in while she said all this?’

  ‘Drunk, like I said. And totally hysterical.’

  ‘If she’d lied about her father having a relationship with Heather before her mother did, then the rest might all have been lies as well.’

  ‘Oh, I agree. Alice is a most unreliable witness.’

  ‘And do we know how Leonard Mallett actually died?’

  ‘He had a fall, apparently. Fell downstairs.’

  ‘And he was how old?’

  ‘Late seventies, I’d say. Maybe early eighties.’

  ‘So not an unlikely age for him to have had a fall.’

  ‘No, certainly not. I do worry about something like that happening to me. It’s an issue of balance, I think my internal gyroscope is not working quite as it should. I do sometimes feel very unsteady when I’ve been sitting somewhere for a long time, you know, at the piano or—’

  Jude cut through the hypochondria. ‘Do you know if the fall killed him, or if he died in hospital?’

  ‘Oh, the fall did it. Apparently, Heather came back to the house, from wherever she’d been – shopping, I think – and found his body at the foot of the stairs.’

  Jude didn’t think it was the moment to comment that in most crime novels – and many real-life crime scenarios – the person who discovers the body is always the first suspect. Instead, she asked, ‘What did Alice say this afternoon, about the actual death?’

  ‘She said it wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘That he was pushed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The oldest question in crime – and in crime fiction, too: “Did he fall or was he pushed?”’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘And the pusher was presumably said to be Heather?’

  ‘Oh yes. Alice said there was no doubt about it. Heather killed her husband for his money. It was definitely murder.’

  THREE

  After Jonny had left, it was characteristic of Jude that she went straight round to High Tor to propose that, having turned down her neighbour’s suggestion of going to the Crown & Anchor at lunchtime, they should go early evening instead. And it was characteristic of Carole that she hummed and hawed a great deal, as if evaluating other pressing demands on her time, before she agreed to go. And when Jude proposed they go at five, Carole felt a disapproving flutter at the thought of having a drink before the end of the working day (though it was some time since she last had a conventional working day, since she had retired from the Home Office).

  At five, they walked together past the parade of shops to Fethering’s only pub.

  Ted Crisp, the landlord, was still dressed in his winter uniform of faded sweatshirt and grubby jeans, rather than his summer ensemble of faded T-shirt and grubby jeans. He greeted them with his customary gruffness. ‘So, would I be jumping the gun to pour out two large New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs?’

  ‘No,’ Jude replied. ‘You would be doing absolutely the right thing, and making us feel like regulars. Which is exactly what we like to think we are.’

  ‘Good.’ He looked at Carole. ‘You know, I dreamt about you last night.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t let me.’

  Jude giggled. Ted could never quite get away from his past as a stand-up comedian, though the quality of his jokes, as in this case, demonstrated why he never made a go of it.

  Carole’s reaction was more complex than her neighbour’s. Though she understood the joke – which was not always the case with her and jokes – the innuendo couldn’t fail to remind her of the unlikely truth that she and the landlord had once had a brief affair. She coloured and looked away.

  Serendipitously, further conversation was interrupted by a burst of riotous laughter from the back of the pub near the French windows which, in the summer, were opened out on to the beach. Jude looked at her big round watch. ‘A bit early for that kind of raucousness, isn’t it?’

  Ted tutted and raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘That lot’ve been here all afternoon …’

  ‘Then I think we’ll sit up this end,’ said Carole, whose entire life had been devoted to the avoidance of ‘scenes’.

  ‘They came on here from some post-funeral drinks do in the church hall,’ he went on.

  ‘Oh, I think we’ll sit down there,’ said Jude.

  In the residual afternoon sunlight, Carole recognized all of the group sitting at a wooden table in the alcove as members of the church choir. The bearded Ruskin Dewitt and the thin-faced woman were there, along with a couple of ladies (definitely, in Fethering, ‘ladies’ rather than ‘women’) in their sixties. These Carole knew to be sisters, called Shirley and Veronica Tattersall, who lived together in a flat near the Fethering Yacht Club. She also knew the name of a tall, thin woman with unlikely long red hair. Elizabeth Browning, who only lacked the ‘Barrett’ to make herself the full Romantic Heroine. She was often to be seen, gliding soulfully along the streets of Fethering, like a lady from Chekhov who’d lost her lapdog. In fine weather during the summer, she frequently leaned against the stone wall which guarded the mouth of the River Fether, gazing soulfully out to sea, and generally doing an impression of the French Lieutenant’s Woman.

  Given that he’d shown no sign of recognizing her earlier in the day, Carole thought it unlikely that Ruskin Dewitt would suddenly remember who she was. She’d got the impression, from meeting him on the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee, that he lived in a bubble of his own pomposity and didn’t notice other people much. Since she had never been introduced to the choir members whose names she did know, and since she didn’t know the names of the others, she started towards a table as far away from them as possible.

  But she hadn’t reckoned with Jude’s greater openness and conviviality. Inevitably, there was someone there who her neighbour knew.

  It turned out to be Ruskin Dewitt. Of course. Men, Carole had convinced herself, were always suckers for Jude’s rather obvious charms. He had risen immediately he saw her, disengaging himself clumsily from the fixed bench in the alcove. With a flamboyant gesture, he reached for her hand and planted a tickly kiss on to it. Not for the first time, Carole reflected on her low visibility when compared to that of her neighbour.

  ‘Jude! My dear! What more could an old man ask than to have his afternoon animated by such a vision of pulchritude?’

  ‘Nice to see you, Russ.’ Whatever destination she’d had in mind, Carole was hauled back towards the group. ‘Russ, I don’t think you know my neighbour, Carole.’

  ‘I don’t believe I do. Though I have to say, young lady, that you do look familiar.’

  Carole winced, as she always did at compliments.

  ‘She was at the funeral,’ said the sharp-faced woman. ‘And briefly in the church hall afterwards.’

  ‘Oh, that’s where I recognize you from, of course. Carole, was it?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The words contained the frostiness with which she greeted all new acquaintances.

  ‘My name is Ruskin Dewitt,’ he said. (She was right. He’d completely forgotten that the two of them had ever sat on a committee together.) ‘Citizen not of this parish, but of Fedborough, a little further up the River Fether. Formerly a purveyor of education in English Literature to young persons who were unaware of the privilege they were receiving by being taught by me. But, Carole, you will join us?’

  ‘Erm … Well …’

  ‘Of course we will,’ said Jude.
She looked at the table. There were some glasses with dregs of wine in them, and a bottle of white so deep into an ice bucket that it was impossible to see whether it was full or empty. ‘Are you all right for drinks?’

  ‘I think we’re fine, Jude my angel,’ said Ruskin Dewitt, unsteadily reinserting himself into his seat. ‘We were actually talking about leaving.’

  ‘We’ve been talking about leaving all afternoon,’ said the thin-faced woman. She looked at her watch. ‘I should be getting back for Rory.’

  But none of them made any move. Further introductions were made. The names of the older women, Shirley and Veronica Tattersall, were vaguely familiar to Carole and Jude. They were also introduced to the self-appointed Tragedy Queen of Fethering, Elizabeth Browning. ‘Of course, I have seen you both around,’ she trilled, before embarking on an unrequested autobiography. ‘I feel it’s my duty to sing with the church choir. I was professional, you know, Glyndebourne way back, but …’ She brought a hand up to her papery neck ‘… the nodules.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jude.

  ‘Cut my career short at a terribly early age.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Elizabeth Browning left a tragic pause, too long to prevent the younger woman from muscling in and introducing herself as Bet Harrison. ‘Only moved down here a couple of weeks ago,’ she said, providing the instant explanation of why they hadn’t recognized her.

  ‘You didn’t take long to get into the choir,’ said Jude.

  ‘The church community is welcoming wherever you go.’ Somehow Bet managed to avoid making her words sound sanctimonious.

  ‘And we’re always glad of new voices adding their strength to ours,’ said Ruskin. ‘Bob’s particularly pleased. He gets very worried about dwindling numbers.’

  This echo of Jonny Virgo’s words made Jude suspect that the size of the All Saints choir was a real issue for the vicar. Perhaps he saw in it a reflection of declining attendance in the main body of the church. And maybe a reflection on his own competence.