Funeral Music (14 page)

‘Good one,’ Sara said. ‘Thanks. God, I’m hot. You swimming?’

‘No, I’ll have a shower at Paul’s in a bit,’ Sue said, nodding towards the detached stone house under the trees on the far side of the car park. A covered walk of about sixty yards through its front garden led to double doors with the sign ‘Fortune Park Spa Hair and Beauty’ above. She prised her key out of her shorts pocket.

‘Is that where he lives? I thought that was the beauty salon and hairdressing place.’

‘It is. They’ve got the two main rooms on the ground floor and one room upstairs. But round the back it’s converted. Paul’s room is downstairs and there are outside stairs up to the two other staff rooms. He’s got his own little bathroom. It’s nice. No proper kitchen, but it’s not bad. Come and see. Fancy a coffee?’

Sara, her face resplendently pink, knowing that her legs needed waxing, accepted, reassuring herself that there was no chance of running into Paul. Sue led the way past a line of rhododendrons round to the back of the house where French windows and a solid back door gave on to a square of grass under the chestnuts. Round the far side of the house a wooden staircase stretched up to a small door at first-floor level. They went in by the main back door into a small square hallway which was almost filled by Paul’s bike and a line of laden coathooks with an assortment of trainers and wellies underneath. The door on their left was Paul’s room and next to it a doorway led into a small basic galley kitchen. Sue pointed at one of the two doors opposite.

‘That’s the way into the salon. The girls used to make coffee in the kitchen, before it was converted, but they’ve got their own place now. That door’s kept locked. That other one’s the bathroom.’

They took their coffee into the large bed-sitting room and sat in the two rattan armchairs.

Sue waved an arm. ‘I’ve just rearranged it all. I read this thing about feng shui and realised at once why Paul and me kept going wrong. The energies in here were
completely
blocked.’ She frowned. ‘Course, it takes a while for the new energies to flow. But it’s a bit better. Although he shouldn’t have the flowers. And I keep telling him about the blue. Still.’

Sara looked round. Although some of Sue’s clothes (and none of his) were draped over a chair at the bedside, it was definitely Paul’s room and not Paul’s and Sue’s. It was essentially simple and orderly. A portable television stood on a low black circular table in one corner. There was a double bed in the other corner, covered with a dark blue heavy cotton bedspread. The shelves which ran along one wall above a long, built-in chest of drawers contained mainly books: food and cookery classics – Larousse, Escoffier, Michel Guérard, Elizabeth David – but also many others, the drawings of Degas, one on the Incas, another on the cave paintings at Lascaux. The bookends were simple cubes of black marble. There was a modern clock with no numerals and two or three ethnic sculptures. Instead of proper curtains, several dozen yards of striped ticking had been ingeniously draped and stapled to a pole that ran almost the length of the wall, and were now pushed behind two heavy iron hooks that had been set into the wall at the sides of the French windows. In front of the window was a small square table with a cloth of the same ticking on which stood a tall glass jug of deep ultramarine containing several sprigs of philadelphus. It was grown-up and male and altogether consistent with Sara’s impression of Paul, yet there was something else, something that, although familiar, she could not quite identify.

‘Oooo, look at the time!’ Sue suddenly squealed and got to her feet. ‘And I said I’d be back at four. Look, I’m just getting under the shower for a second. No, don’t go.’ She had already picked up a towel and was on her way out the door. ‘You stay and finish your coffee. Shan’t be a tic.’

A few seconds later Sara heard the noise of the shower. She got up and went over to the bookshelves, and picking a book almost at random opened it, not out of interest in its contents but to see if there were some inscription or some other little tantalising insight into its owner. But there was nothing, not even his name. As she replaced the book she wondered idly what his handwriting was like. It was just as she was reaching up to the top shelf for the book of Degas drawings that she heard the voice say, almost in a whisper, ‘How’s the finger?’

She spun round to see Paul laughing in the doorway of the French windows. Before she could say anything he had crossed the threshold, slung his black denim jacket on the bed and stopped in front of her, his thumbs hooked over the front pockets of his jeans.

‘What an
honneur, madame
,’ he said, bowing slightly, his green eyes not leaving her face.

‘Sue’s in the shower,’ Sara blurted. ‘We were running together. She asked me for coffee. She’s just had to dash off and have a shower.’

Paul took in the background shshsh and his face broke into a sarcastic smile of disappointment. ‘Tcha! And I thought perhaps you had come to see me. For a consultation and possibly even . . . further treatment.’ He was laughing at her embarrassment. And without being in the least furtive, he was looking steadily and thoughtfully at her body.

Sara cursed herself for being caught in her clinging, sweaty running clothes and with a greasy face. Just how hairy were they, her legs? And she knew, without looking down, that the coolness of the room had made her nipples stand out under her thin vest. Oh, please, God, please let them be level, she prayed.

‘So, we’ll have to find a more convenient time, won’t we?’ he said, still amused.

She knew better than to reply. She stared straight back at him and with one hand slowly moved her damp fringe off her forehead with a gesture of dignified disdain. At that moment the shower stopped abruptly and Paul moved over to the door.

‘I’m back!’ he called, which brought a muffled ‘Ooooh’ from the bathroom and a moment later a drenched and delighted Sue skipped into the room, wrapped in a very short towel. Sara made her excuses and went back to the changing room at the club, blazing.

CHAPTER 14

THE NEXT DAY, unable to put it off any longer, Sara telephoned Andrew to apologise. He apologised back and admitted it had been difficult to detain the friend of ‘someone he felt close to’. But now, if she had a moment to listen, he had other things to worry about.

‘What?
What
happened to your instrument?’ asked Sara eventually.

‘Natalie,’ said Andrew dully at the other end of the telephone. ‘Natalie happened to it.’

It was the drained voice of a man whose anger is spent.

‘Our youngest; she’s five. She decided to post all her Polly Pockets into my cello.
What? Oh, they’re little miniature plastic doll things. Then she couldn’t get them out, so she decided that the cello was their own little house with a funny curly door. So to make it prettier, she decorated it with felt tips and wrote POOLY POCIT LIVS HER on the front. Then she gave them their tea. Half a packet of crisps, a Milky Way and a carton of Ribena. And a yoghurt. Blackcurrant. Straight in.’

‘No! You mean she actually poured all that...inside?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He sighed. ‘And after tea, what do we do? Well, we have our bath, of course. So in went two milk bottles full of water and most of her My Little Pony bathtime bubbles. And three Dewberry bath beads from the Body Shop.’ He sounded half strangled. ‘And then it all lay there soaking in until I found it. Valerie was watching a cookery video in the kitchen with headphones on. Says it was my own fault for leaving the case open.’

Sara considered that it would be both heartless and pointless to suggest that there was some truth in this, and it was anyway out of the question that she would ever side with the unspeakable Valerie over anything.

‘Don’t worry. Get it over to Avon Strings in Bristol, they’re in Yellow Pages. They’ll do a good job. You can use my Peresson till yours is ready,’ Sara said, still anxious to make amends for their row. ‘You’ll love the sound, it’ll blow your head off. Andrew?’

She hesitated. ‘Can you come this evening? I have to talk to you about the case again. No, nothing to do with James, something else. And I know I should stop you discussing it and actually it
is
none of my business, but I
feel
involved now, in a way. And I’d like to help. Help you, I mean.’

EARLY THE same evening, with no cello to carry, Andrew rode his bike up to Medlar Cottage. There was precious little time in ordinary circumstances to get a bit of exercise, and with the Sawyer case refusing to break he had been working late most nights. They had interviewed everyone who had been at the Pump Room and Assembly Rooms, close to five hundred people now, and scanned over thirty hours of closed-circuit television pictures from the only two shops in Stall Street that had security cameras. They showed only the shop doorways and a few metres of pavement and had so far turned up nothing of significance. Then there was the new information about the alarm which wasn’t exactly helping. James Ballantyne had turned out to have an alibi that he hadn’t even known about. Bridger was being petulant, trying to fly in the face of the facts, claiming that they should have put more pressure on Ballantyne. Bridger was pitifully inexperienced. He was only gradually realising that this enquiry was par for the course: unexciting, filled with dogged, repetitive routine and, so far anyway, yielding nothing. They were just going to have to interview people all over again, check alibis, look at security footage again, and just keep at it until something broke. There would be something. And as long as this weather held he would use the bike to get to Sara’s. After what Natalie had done (and with something horribly close to sly approval from Valerie) he was not going to risk taking the Peresson home with him. It was so like Sara to offer to lend it to him, and it would be wonderful just to play it. It was the Peresson she was playing on that recording of the Dvořák concerto he had, the big, modern, steel-stringed instrument that she used for the big romantic repertoire. He did not understand why she did not seem interested in playing in public anymore.
When he thought about it, it worried him, but then so did the thought that she might at any moment resume her concert career and ditch the lessons. He hoped she would not mind his still coming to play without practising in between. It still helped him improve. And now she was even offering to help with the case. Of course he shouldn’t be discussing it with her, but someone in his job needed a sounding board, that was understood. And if it couldn’t be your wife, why shouldn’t it be someone else you could trust, like Sara? She was an amazing woman.

Even more amazing than he had realised, after she had told him about her conversation with George. They were sitting in the shade in front of the hut ready to play, but had not yet sounded a note. As he listened he gazed out, noticing that the lime trees and hedgerows in the valley opposite were darkening into a deeper green and the dark purple buddleia that overhung the path to the pond at the other side of the garden was now in full flower and surrounded in a flicker of butterflies. His bow rested on his knee.

‘And you see it’s quite awkward,’ she was saying earnestly. ‘Olivia on the one hand asking if I can winkle out of George anything that he knows, then he goes and tells me all this, probably needing to tell someone who’s not one of his colleagues. It might be the end of him if Olivia finds out, and on the other hand, it’s quite important for the case that
you
know all about it. So here I am, shopping George. Matthew Sawyer was going to discipline him, perhaps even sack him over the security breach, and Olivia was meant to have been told about it. And you see anyone, just about anyone who went in that room, could have memorised an alarm code. And then there’s the thing about his alibi.’

‘This may help,’ he said. ‘Sort of. Because I’ve got news for you, too. I’ve heard back from the electronics people. The code that was used to set the alarm that night was Matthew Sawyer’s own, and it was set at two forty-five a.m. Two forty-five fits in more or less with what the PM report gives for time of death: between midnight and five o’clock. We have to suppose that he was killed at, say, half past two or minutes after. I had been puzzling over how the murderer could have got Sawyer’s code out of him. Coercion sounds obvious, but there was no sign of any struggle, no sign that suggested Sawyer wasn’t taken completely by surprise. And if Sawyer hadn’t been forced to tell his murderer the code, that seemed to offer us a choice between a corpse or a ghost setting the burglar alarm. If we now know that his code was not as confidential as it was supposed to be, it’s more plausible that someone else was able to use it. But of course the problem of who becomes
more
difficult.’

‘And you’ve got another problem, haven’t you? You said he could have been killed between midnight and five o’clock. Supposing he
was
killed just before the alarm was set, at around half past two. What then was Matthew Sawyer doing all that time between twenty to twelve when the last person left the Pump Room and the time he was killed? Chatting with the murderer? It doesn’t take three hours to lock up. So, suppose instead he was killed nearer to midnight.
Why then would the murderer hang about until quarter to three? Why, in any case, did the killer bother to lock up at all? Why not just nip out of the door, or climb over the balustrade of the terrace and jump down onto Kingston Parade? Forget about the keys and locking up altogether. If you think about it, locking up and setting the alarm gained nothing.’

‘I know. Nobody was going to discover anything before the morning, in any case. It’s not as if anyone would be likely to try the doors in the middle of the night, not for any legitimate purpose at any rate. But George’s story is interesting. I’ll have to talk to him about it, you know, and I’ll have to find out a bit more about his er...viewing material. I expect it’ll turn out to be top-shelf stuff. If it was anything really hard-core I can’t see him telling you about it. I’ll have to see Olivia Passmore as well. It’s pretty unlikely Sawyer told her about George. She would have told Bridger, wouldn’t she, at the very beginning of the enquiry. He went into all the building details – doors, locks, alarms and all that – right at the start. And I doubt very much that she’ll do anything about it now. I’ll recommend she gets the crime prevention lot over and she can go through the whole security management issue with them, without making a scapegoat out of George. Even though,’ he added with a smile, ‘he probably deserves it.’

He went on. ‘It’s a pretty safe bet that the murder took place nearer three o’clock than midnight, although the problem of the hours in between remains a problem.
What we’ve been doing, of course, since we found out that the alarm was set around three in the morning, is going over everybody’s statements again and concentrating on what people were doing not around midnight, but three hours later. Although, of course, every single one of them says that they were safely tucked up in beddy-byes.’

He suddenly looked terribly tired, as if he’d like to be tucked up there himself.

‘Andrew, when did you last eat?’

‘Oh, I had breakfast. Well, a banana in the car. And someone got me a sandwich about two,’ he said absently, ‘but come to think of it, I didn’t get a chance to eat it. I’m okay though.’

He pulled the cello back against his shoulder and checked the tuning dolefully.

‘Come on,’ said Sara. ‘Food first, art second. It’ll wait.’

They left their instruments in their cases in the cool of the hut and made their way back down to the cottage. Sara heated an iron skillet and pushed the langoustines around in blackened butter, into which she squeezed the sizzling juice of a lime. Andrew, following her directions to the fridge and larder, brought bread and salad to the table, found garlic, oil and vinegar and made a dressing. They sat opposite each other and ate with their fingers. The effect of food on Andrew was immediate and visible. As he pulled the shells off and sucked on the meat, he went on talking. The cat cruised the legs of their stools and dived greedily on the tail ends Sara dropped for him.

‘I’ve been working on piecing together Matthew Sawyer’s movements before he died. Quite a busy bloke. You never think of people in that sort of job being rushed, do you? Seems all very calm and sedate on the outside, a museum.’

‘As in, “Is that a proper full-time job?” ’ asked Sara, pulling off a piece of shell and licking her fingers languorously.

Andrew watched her thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, well. Anyway, I saw his wife. And I spent a long time with his secretary. He had a busy day that Friday. I can’t help admiring the bloke, working that hard when he probably didn’t need to.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Loaded, on the wife’s side. She is a Bowman. Old man Bowman was in property. Made a packet in the eighties, sold out and retired to Dorset. The Sawyer family do very well out of it: children in private schools, lovely big house on Sion Hill, bought outright. She doesn’t work, she does lunch, swans about. They couldn’t live like that on a museum director’s salary – “Matthew’s pittance”, she called it.’

‘What about the secretary?’

‘Oh, a gem. She took his death very hard, apparently, couldn’t come in to work for three days after she heard the news. She rated him very highly.’

‘Aha, a whisper of intrigue? A jealous mistress?’ Sara said. ‘Have we got a
crime passionel
here?’

‘Trust you. You meet Mrs Trowels in the flesh and see if you still think so.’ He paused to finish his langoustine before taking another. ‘She’s in her late fifties, weighs at least fifteen stone. All right, all right, I’m
not
saying only young thin people have affairs. But her desk’s covered with pictures of her cats. She knits for Mr Trowels. She refused to go to a hen party for one of the girls in the museum shop because they were going to some “disgusting” show in Bristol. What did she call it – the Chesterfields, would it have been?’

‘Chippendales?’

‘Right. And for her, loyalty to the boss is part of the creed. But it does seem that Sawyer could be difficult to work for. A gentleman, but inclined to overreact, Mrs Trowels said.’

‘So what about that Friday then; what was he doing?’

‘Morning taken up with a meeting; some local charity he was a trustee of. We’ve looked into it. Nothing to do with the museum at all. The Terry Trust. It’s to do with the disabled – mobility grants, that kind of thing. According to the trust secretary it was a routine meeting, nothing unusual, but I’ve asked for the minutes. Sawyer gets to his office in the Circus about one o’clock, has a sandwich at his desk with a cup of coffee, made by Mrs Trowels. Looks at the post, answers a couple of letters, then he goes round to the archives at the Victoria Art Gallery. Something he was working on. All the museum’s archives, records of acquisitions, provenance, storage, display details and so on are kept there. All on paper, outgrown their space by miles, apparently. I went to see it. Sawyer was trying to make sense of it all, trying to get to grips with exactly what was in the collections. I’ve found out, you know, that there are acres of boxed artefacts belonging to the museum stored all over the place. This archive is the only way of finding out what is where, if you’re new. Part of Sawyer’s remit, when he was appointed, was to get some of these things out of storage and on display, things that nobody has seen for years, possibly ever.’

‘I’d heard that,’ Sara said. ‘Olivia told me. The councillors on the museums board tried to bully her about it years ago, when she was in charge. They criticised the museums service for withholding all these so-called treasures from the gaze of the local taxpayers. The
Chron
took it up – remember?’ She slipped off her stool and went to the larder and returned with more beer and a dish of tiny tomatoes.

‘Well, haven’t they got a point?’ Andrew said, opening two of the bottles and decanting them into their glasses.

‘Well, except that the council kept very quiet about the fact that they’d squeezed the museums so tight that there was no money to employ extra curators to research new exhibitions and build new displays. Olivia came straight back at them with that. And she told me that the stuff in storage is a pretty mixed bag. Laundry lists, quite literally, and a collection of button hooks. Dreary watercolours by Bath ladies. Enough fans to start a hurricane. Hardly the hidden treasures of the nation.’