Funeral Music (17 page)

‘Not from him, certainly,’ murmured Andrew. ‘One last thing. Did you by any chance discuss a security matter? A security matter that concerned a member of staff and a serious breach of procedure?’

Olivia scanned Andrew’s face for a clue as to what he was talking about. ‘No. Do you mind telling me what you mean?’

‘George Townsend?’

‘George? No, we didn’t discuss George. Why should we?’

‘So George wasn’t discussed at all?’

‘No. Look, is George in trouble? He was one of the last people off the premises that night. He was locking up here. He didn’t . . . surely . . .? Has he said anything?’

‘Nothing, at this stage, that leads to the murderer. We’ve had to double-check his alibi. There was a minor problem with it, to do with a little clandestine home entertainment that he went in for; I won’t go into it. It didn’t get us any further forward with the case. That’s what we’d all like, isn’t it, something that leads us to whoever did this.’

‘Of course. It’s an awful business. ’The silence which followed signalled to them both that the meeting was over.

‘Well, thank you.’ Andrew rose to go, wondering if the slight brightening in Olivia Passmore’s eyes was a sign of relief. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful,’ he said, and had nearly reached the end of the dim corridor that led to the front entrance before he asked himself if he really meant it, and just who, in the end, had been handling whom.

PART 2

CHAPTER 17

IN THE CITY the freshness of June thickened charmlessly into full summer. Privets and cotoneasters in the parks I and gardens darkened into the menacing opaque green of old nettles, and grass underfoot whispered like sand. Tall nameless weeds that thrived by being copiously peed on by dogs and cats sprouted along cracked walls and at the feet of lampposts, proffering seed heads weighted with clusters of succulent black aphids. Rubbish bins were overflowing by midmorning and by early afternoon stank and buzzed with wasps. Daytripping senior citizens from Wales ambled along the pavements three abreast in lightweight cardies and wide shoes at a pace that was fractionally faster than glacial. Back-packers as sedate as camels shed their loads on every crossing and street corner, pausing to read maps, check the contents of their bum bags and say wow at buildings. Normally unaggressive Bathonians banked up in scores behind on the pavements and trained their burning eyes into their backs, willing them telepathically and unsuccessfully to shift. Judging it too hot to negotiate passage in either Welsh or Dutch they would then smile insincerely as they stepped around them into the melted ice-cream slicks which shared the gutters and doorways with dropped cones, wooden forks, polystyrene trays and homeless people. Car parks were clogged from early morning. Lorries, delivery vans, cars, tour coaches, roof-racked campers and open-top buses hissed, squealed, started and stopped through town in a grey shimmering film of hot diesel exhaust, juddering forward at the whim of traffic lights whose changing colours were almost invisible in the glare of the sun on their filthy bulbs.

By mid-July no one pretended any longer to be enjoying the weather. Everyone was too hot, sick of strawberries and bored with barbecues; people imagined themselves asthmatic and grew animated about the pollen count and the ozone layer. They exchanged remarks such as ‘Warm again today,’ in tones of mutual pity. A toddler went missing from Victoria Park and turned up fourteen miles away wandering, mute and covered with cigarette burns. Two boys of eleven who had gone fishing by the canal disappeared and eight days later their bodies were unearthed from a shallow grave by a dog called Rhona. The
Bath Chronicle
ranted about communities torn apart and launched appeals for information. It ran updates on the stories daily, along with bulletins on air quality and features on inexpensive summer cocktails, alfresco dining and skin cancer. On the inside pages it reported briefly that Matthew Sawyer’s inquest had been opened and adjourned. Andrew was no further forward with the case and considered it a small and ironic mercy that most people seemed to have forgotten about it. The combination of summer diversions, worse mysteries and the deaths of children had driven it from their overheated minds.

Annabel Sawyer took her children out of school a week early and rang Detective Sergeant Bridger. ‘We’re going to Umbria at the end of the week. I’ve taken a villa. I can’t hang about all summer waiting for a date for the inquest to reopen. You can let me know, I suppose. I
suppose
you’ll want the address, just in case you get any further forward. Although you haven’t done too well so far, have you?’

At the other end of the telephone Bridger was finishing his Mars bar as the widow went on, ‘There’s no telephone. My parents are coming too, and the nanny. We all need a proper break; we’ll be away at least six weeks.’

It was Bridger’s first day back after a fortnight in Malta with his mates and he was still relaxed. ‘That sounds just the ticket, madam,’ he said,
‘but I’d like to just pop round for an update before you go.’

There was an exasperated silence.

‘I’ve been away myself. Need to get through the pile of stuff on this desk. Not worth going on holiday really, is it, it’s all waiting for you when you get back. Anyway, Thursday morning suit you, Mrs Sawyer? The seventeenth? Just like to go over where we’re up to, see if we can see the way ahead and work backwards from there. See you about half eleven then, madam?’ he added jovially, certain that he was great with widows.

Thank God, anyway, for a reason to get out at least once from this baking office and away from those useless security tapes from Littlewoods. As if endlessly watching footage of two teenagers snogging in a doorway, two staggering drunks, both regulars, holding each other up, and a manic nocturnal jogger going round and round was going to get them anywhere. Andrew Poole just kept saying that he wanted them found and brought in, they had to have seen
something
. Well, it had been easy enough to question the two drunks and, of course, useless. Bridger could have told Poole that in the first place. And if he ever managed to identify these other characters they’d turn out to be useless too, and that would be another God knew how many hours wasted and nothing to show for it. And that farce with Olivia Passmore, going over the stuff all over again. ‘
Use
your eyes, not your mouth
.’ Oh, yes, sir, three bags full, sir. All that rubbish about something being wrong with her legs. He’d got a proper eyeful (use your eyes, right?) and they’d looked all right to him, not half bad in fact. Well, fuck it. He was going to do some proper police work. She was quite attractive, that Annabel Sawyer, for her age. She might offer him lunch.

CHAPTER 18

TETCHY WAS NOT the word, but it was the one Sue used to excuse herself. ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m a bit tetchy today. Sorry. Of course you can change your order. Bagel instead of baguette, cream cheese and smoked salmon with dill dressing, not the beef, but you do still want the mayonnaise, sorry, the horseradish. No butter. And salad. With tortilla chips but no dip. Right. No problem.’

She could have ground her back teeth into powder, fed up with them as she was. The lady who had suffered such indecision over her lunch had now strolled over to the poolside and was blandly piling her hair into a swimming hat covered with rubber dahlias. In a few minutes she would be swimming up and down with pursed lips, keeping her earrings dry, while Sue argued with the hotel kitchen about the changed order and failed to convince them it wasn’t her mistake.

It was Paul again, of course. He had been to Bristol again on Sunday. He had not said a word about what he’d been doing there but she knew it would be the antiques again. Honestly, they were taking over. His room and hallway were filling up with horrible things, chairs, mirrors, a washstand, all dark and really
old
, and playing havoc with the energy rhythms. Feng shui was right out the window now. It was Tuesday, and so far this week he had already worked a double shift and despite the trouble he had got into last time had taken on another job for Coldstreams. And why? Why was he working so hard and what was he doing with all the money? He never spent much on her and they never went anywhere really nice. He had always agreed with her that they should both save ‘for the future’, only when she came to think of it, he had never quite said what he thought that future was.
With this last row, she feared that it might not even include her. At one time, months ago now, he’d more or less gone along with her plans. He’d let her believe they were his plans too. A flat together. Moving away to get jobs. There had been a bit of talk at one time about wanting to start a restaurant, which had subsided into just running one and lately had not been mentioned at all. She had even suggested that he use some of his savings to do a degree in catering, which, along with her promise to help support him while he did it, had been greeted with polite scorn. She was beginning to suspect he hadn’t saved a penny. If he would only talk to her, but he seemed to be, if anything, even more remote.
Was there someone else?

She sighed and gave herself a trial squeeze in the midriff. She had been practically living on iced tea and exercising like a racehorse for over two weeks to try to make up for that Saturday with Cecily and she was only now able, just, to look down at her stomach without shuddering. It had started with the hot chocolate. Looking back, the rest had more or less crept up on her, and that was why constant vigilance was so important. After their second bottle of wine, with which they’d demolished Cecily’s entire store of crisps and nuts, they’d gone to the fridge and decided that a tiny bone of pecorino cheese, some furry pesto and a few leaves of floppy chervil provided no sort of answer to their need for serious comfort, added to which all that sort of stuff had reminded Cecily of Derek. So they’d rung for pizza and ordered not quite the biggest with as many extra toppings as they could fit on and eaten it all, surprisingly fast, with another bottle of Spanish red. Sue had then fallen asleep on the sofa (she still wasn’t sure how long for) and awoken to a crisis. There was nothing for dessert! She clearly remembered wandering up the street with Cecily soon after this, lurching into JVC News and buying two large tubs of Häagen-Dazs and a frozen pineapple cheesecake. They had both found this funny at the time. On the way back, they had decided to celebrate properly, and anyway, the fresh air had given them an appetite and the pizza, in retrospect, had been rather small and a long time ago. So it had been really funny to stumble back through Cecily’s door bearing three warm brown paper carrier bags with oil-soaked bottoms as well as the ice-cream, the cheesecake, a Goldie Hawn video and two more bottles of wine.

They had been giggling as they unpacked the tubs from the bags, discarding the saffron yellow dripping lids, and stacked up across the coffee table a line of aluminium dishes precariously full of lamb tikka masala, chicken pasanda, beef korma, vindaloo prawns, naan bread, turmeric rice and poppadums. A blob of food landed on Derek’s photograph and gave him a yellow eye-patch and a head bandage. That had been funny. Then it had been a great laugh to sprawl on either side of the table stabbing into the dishes with forks and fingers and swigging the Fitou from tumblers. They had even laughed at the movie. It was some time afterwards, after the cheesecake and the wine but before the ice-cream that Cecily had heaved herself towards the kitchen muttering that the double pecan fudge chocolate ripple needed something to go with it. She had returned waving a brown liqueur bottle.

‘Amaretto,’ she sniggered, ‘under the shink. I knew I had it,’ and uncorked it incompetently, tipping it unsteadily towards Sue’s glass. Nothing had come out at first, and Cecily had peered up it like a pantomime pirate. Then a slug of oily caramel had appeared at the neck of the bottle and dropped with a soft plod into the bottom of the glass, where it sat like a well-sucked toffee.

‘My God,’ said Sue, peering into it and breathing in the vinegary smell of ancient almonds,
‘how long have you had this?’

Cecily replied, swallowing a belch, ‘Oh, a while. Shmeant to keep. Shtoo expensive to drink all in one go.’ Scanning the label, she said,
‘I mean, somebody paid three pounds nineteen and six for thish. Jusht wants diluting.
Where’s the lemonade?’

Sue smiled at the memory. Cecily was so great. She wasn’t letting that Derek walk all over
her
. Sue would take a leaf from Cecily’s book and face up to Paul. She would make him talk to her, get things out in the open. Whatever was going on with Paul, it would be better to know. Be out with it, whatever it was.

For some reason this brought her mind back round to Cecily and the end of that evening, whose shaky closing sequences she viewed as if through a faulty projector. She remembered wondering dimly why Cecily was shouting into the loo – who could be down there at this time of night? – and finding that the soothing tiled wall on which she was just resting her cheek for a moment was the bathroom floor. That was the bit she most hated to dwell on, so it was with mixed feelings that she was interrupted by the dripping return of Dahlia Head because she had not yet, she suddenly realised, rung the kitchen.