Funeral Music (23 page)

She tipped back her head and drained the last of her chocolate. ‘And consequently, Derek, none of the foregoing is negotiable. Understand?’

As far as Sara could tell, he did seem to.

CHAPTER 27

WHEN HE WAS able to sit up he looked round the room and saw that most things had been broken. He believed he remembered them both falling hard against the shelves, scattering all the books and papers and the boxes and pots which now littered the floor. A table had been overturned and two of its legs broken, and the television set lay screen-side down with a deep crack where the back was now coming away. Water spread across the carpet from a smashed vase. The curtains had been ripped down from the wall and were strewn in a heap with their poles, knocked from their hooks, lying across. He noticed the small dark drops that had been sprayed up the wall from his own nose, where one of the man’s first blows had landed. He touched his nose gingerly and satisfied himself that it was not broken. Looking down at his chest he saw that there was a lot of blood, his own blood, on his clothes. But his jacket was dark, and nobody, even if they noticed the stains, would guess they were blood.

Looking around once more in the strange silence his eyes took in the man lying on his back on the crumpled bed. Lie there, pig, it’s your own fault. He had had to struggle hard. He had not known what strength he possessed until he had had to stop him, until saving his own life had meant ending his, as it had turned out. But he had been right to defend what was his. He had been right to be angry with the man for pretending to help him and then trying to strip him of everything he had. But he had killed him. And then there were all the other things that would catch up with him now. All the other things. He must cover everything up, at least get everything covered up for long enough to get away. The only thing was to get away. He must get away now, even though it was daylight outside. He was surprised at how clearly he could think, and how separate and remote he felt from the events of the past few days, separate even from the pain that he was now feeling mainly in his ribs, his raw hands and his swollen face. He stretched his body carefully as he gathered up the curtains. The poles were not broken and he replaced them easily on the wall brackets. Then he draped the curtains over the poles and pulled the material across to conceal the destruction from the outside. Next he went into the kitchen to clean the blood from his face. It was when he heard the splash of water from the tap that he realised he had a raging thirst. He turned his face up and drank greedily from the flow. The water hitting his dry throat helped him control the shaking of his hands. Back in the room he picked out his things from the wreckage. He would take only his one bag. He would take only his own stuff and leave the rest; he would leave the gun. Lock the door. Keep the curtains pulled across. Walk. Think. The van would be no use. Walk past the van. Stop shaking. Keep walking. Get to the edge of the trees. Keep down, keep calm and think.

CHAPTER 28

AN ANSWER TO Sara’s enquiry, the junior assistant at the health spa declared that Sue had not come in. ‘Mever so sorry, Miss Selkirk. I think she must be ill.’

‘Oh. It’s just that I was meant to be running with her this morning. Did she leave a message?’

But she had not left a message; in fact she had not phoned at all.

‘Mind you,
I’d
of rung if it was me,’ he said primly. ‘Definitely. Doesn’t take much to ring, does it? Just to let you know.’

‘She must have forgotten about the run. Does Paul know how she is?’ Sara asked.

‘Mever so sorry, can’t ask Paul. ’S’Paul’s long weekend off. Don’t think he’s on again till tomorrow breakfast. Sorry. I would definitely of rung, if it was me.’

Remembering Sue’s suspicion about things being stolen at Fortune Park, Sara thought better of leaving the sunglasses at the desk. They could easily be lifted from behind the counter when the staff were busy.

In the early evening she telephoned Olivia. ‘It’s nothing urgent, but I’ve got Sue’s sunglasses. She left them in the Pump Room on Saturday and I was going to give her them today. Anyway, could you tell her I’ve got them safe? Is she better? And how’s Edwin?’

Olivia hadn’t seen her niece since Saturday. ‘I did think she’d be staying for a bit but I really only ever half expect her. She tends to come and go. I thought it was all off with Paul, at least it looked that way on Saturday morning. Obviously I picked up the wrong end of the stick. If she’s not with him, she’ll be at Larkhall. And Edwin’s fine.’

‘Yes, all right, I’ll try her there. Oh, by the way,’ Sara said. ‘Who’s Churchill? When we had tea together, Edwin said something about Churchill and I couldn’t work out what he meant. I don’t think it was Winston. Do you know what he meant?’

‘Churchill?’ Olivia thought for a few moments. ‘Oh,
Churchill
. Churchill is the firm that installed his stairlift. Churchill’s Stairlifts, as endorsed by Dame Thora Hird, I think I remember. That’s all. He loved your visit, by the way. Would you come again? Could you perhaps manage lunch on Wednesday? He usually has a sandwich around one.’

‘Love to,’ Sara said. ‘Actually our last conversation got interrupted and there are things I want to talk to him about. Wednesday’s fine. Give him my love.’

She tried the Larkhall number and got no reply, so it was likely that Sue was with Paul, making the most of one of their doomed new starts. They might even have slipped off somewhere for a day or two in the glow of reconciliation, Sue simply sneaking a day off work because she was, for once, having a lovely time.

CHAPTER 29

THE NEXT DAY Andrew pedalled up through Northend feeling the heat of his row with Valerie cool as he went higher. The row had come on unexpectedly, and he was still feeling a mild surprise, not just at the way it had arisen but at its unprecedented conclusion. If anything, things had been going just marginally better, probably because work had been keeping him away from home. And Valerie had actually encouraged him to make love to her last weekend, had quite actively given him to understand that she would allow it, and he had begun to imagine the start of a new and happier phase for them. He had understood, although as a man he accepted that he could never completely understand, that motherhood was the most demanding, difficult, exhausting and debilitating thing that any woman could undertake. Valerie had not only told him this but amply demonstrated the truth of it as well. But on Saturday night she had actually suggested that if he wanted to ‘get physical’ then that would be acceptable to her. It had been such a long time since she had used the phrase that he had almost forgotten how much he disliked it.

In the event, the knowledge that Valerie was not the woman he wanted to make love with had made it unthinkable that he ‘got physical’, but it had led him to wonder, with the youngest approaching her sixth birthday, if Valerie might now be getting over the postnatal depression that she said her GP, a
man
, had failed to diagnose, and to hope that after more than five years of uninterrupted nights she might be starting to feel less permanently fatigued. Most of all he had hoped that he might soon be allowed to come out from under the cloud of reproach that had hung over him ever since he had first begun to oblige Valerie by reliably impregnating her with the children she had insisted she wanted. She always referred to them as ‘her’ children, and they were, all three of them. Andrew was sometimes not sure if he quite liked them, with their adept pleading for things, although he loved them with his whole heart.

But the real reason for Valerie’s offer of compliance on Saturday night had become clear first thing this morning, when the lorry had rolled up. He had gone out and told the driver that there was a mistake. But the driver had his delivery address and delivery time, and would not be deflected.

‘I’ve got it down here, so I’m obligated, see? You’ll have to ring them up if you want to query it. Office opens at ten. I’m not authorised, see?’

So he had been unable to prevent the driver from dumping seventy concrete paving slabs, three hundredweight of cement and half a ton of sharp sand in their back garden. Valerie had been taking the children to school and when she got back he had already been on the telephone to arrange for the whole lot to be picked up again, reloaded onto the lorry and taken back to Homebase. With an unctuous smile that had instantly made him wary, Valerie had explained that it was she who had placed the order. Materials, patio, for the building of, the task she had allotted him for August, designating all his leave, his free weekends and his evenings for its completion. Without asking him. Because she wanted a patio.

He pedalled on. ‘
But I don’t want a patio
,’ he had said. ‘
I
don’t want a concrete, suburban patio with white plastic tubs of patio roses and floral patio furniture and all this pathetic pretence
that we are a happy, spontaneous, nice little nuclear patio family.
’

She hadn’t understood, or had pretended not to. She had given him that condescending oh-men-what-do-they-know smile. ‘It’ll be lovely for barbecues,’ she’d said, in her that’s settled-then voice.

‘
For fuck’s sake
,’ he had shouted. ‘
Why won’t you listen? Do you
think that what is wrong with us is going to be fixed by a fucking patio? With a barbecue and a few burgers from fucking Sainsburys?
’

‘Oh, you snob. You disgusting
snob
,’ she had screamed.

And that was when it had got really ugly. But somewhere in the midst of the torrent of her enraged abuse, which had ranged from his coldness, his snobby tastes, his stupid job, his horrible cello and that smug snobby bitch in St Catherine, he had realised, with a sensation that made him half believe he was floating, that she was probably right, and that he did not care what she thought of him. He had been smiling when she finally stopped shouting, and then he had simply left the house to go to his lesson. Cycling up Northend, he was a happy man. He knew he shouldn’t be, that he should not be able to walk out of fourteen years of marriage and, when it came to it, would not do so unscathed. But the guilt and pain could wait. They would come, no doubt, with the logistics and operational difficulties of splitting the household, but the decision to leave, the decision itself had a kind of clarity which was making him happy. He realised now that he had been living for a long time with the vague knowledge that the thing with Valerie could not go on indefinitely. There would be no more rows of today’s sort because he had left her, although, of course, he still had to move out.

Sara had tidied up the hut in preparation for Andrew’s arrival, but was unprepared for him and the way he seemed to be glowing. They exchanged the usual commiserations about the heat, which privately each of them enjoyed rather than otherwise and then Andrew assumed control of the lesson. He wanted to play something right through before Sara commented. Today he was not in any mood, he said, laughing, to be interrupted. He was in the mood to make a statement.

‘Right,’ she said, a little taken aback. ‘I won’t even bring the Strad up. You’re on your own.’ With Sara following, he carried the Peresson up to the hut and settled himself on a chair on the gravel in the shade. She, finding him so unafraid musically and every other way, realised that he could probably, at this moment, lead her anywhere. She could not take her eyes off him. Was it to do with the four-square boldness of the music, Beethoven’s Variations on Handel’s ‘See the Conqu’ring Hero Comes’, that made him seem taller and stronger? As he played she sang in the missing piano part where it was needed, watching his face and acknowledging properly for the first time that when animated and well, Andrew had a brilliance that outshone his conventional handsomeness, and that his brilliance was becoming hard to resist. Today he was as unstoppable as the music itself, attacking the wonderful allegretto theme as if it were the music which was to be conqu’red, which of course in a way it was. Or perhaps it was she he was setting out to conquer, in which case, at any rate today, there would be no struggle. She found herself wondering how long he could stay.

From the pocket of Andrew’s jacket on the ground, the mobile phone blurted insultingly through the music.

‘Poole,’ Andrew said brusquely. They looked at each other, unsmiling, as he listened. Sara got up and gently lifted the cello and bow away from him. The person at the other end had a lot to say. Andrew continued his gaze, betraying nothing, then rose and walked away a little distance, still listening.

Eventually he said, ‘Right. I’ll get over there now,’ and snapped down the aerial. He looked across the valley for a brief second before turning to speak. He had gone rather white.

‘I have to get over to Fortune Park and I’ve only got the bike. A body’s been found. Can you give me a lift?’

SARA TURNED left at the crossroads on the edge of Colerne to take the main entrance to Fortune Park. Nearing the hotel at the end of the long avenue she saw the fluttering orange tape of a police cordon and a single police officer, who ushered them past the hotel front, past the greenhouses and the walled garden, round to the rear car park which served the health spa and the beauty salon. There were many more police officers here and as she swung the car to a clumsy stop she could see that their attention was concentrated on the grass in front of Paul’s French window. With a cry she sprang from the car and ran towards it across the gravel. Andrew caught up with her easily and took a painful hold of her upper arm. He led her into the shade of one of the massive chestnut trees.

‘I know who it is, I know him,’ was all she could say. ‘I know him, I do, I
know
him,’ she repeated. Andrew took hold of her other arm and turned her to face him.

‘Wait here,’ he said harshly. ‘Don’t come any closer. Wait here.’

She watched him stride off through the sharp stripes of light and shadow cast across the lawn by the high trees, and pushed her knuckles against her teeth to try to stop the shivering. Andrew stopped by the white screen that had already been erected over the French window. An earnest conversation began between Andrew, a uniformed policeman, another man in ordinary clothes and someone else, the scene of crime officer or the pathologist, in white overalls and boots. Sara waited until it was unbearable. With a sudden, almost involuntary movement she made off towards the unattended other door, the main back door that led into the hallway of Paul’s little flat. She walked slowly by on the other side of the trees, assuming that she would at any moment be stopped by an imperious Oi! or that the door, when she got there, would be locked. She lifted the latch, walked straight into the empty hall and seeing that the door on the left into Paul’s room was closed, she simply turned the handle and opened it, almost hoping that a grown-up would come and put a stop to what she was doing.

She stopped on the threshold as if she had walked into a wall. The smell hit her stomach like a punch. She was swamped like a baby under a fur coat of putrefaction. She stared, gulping dumbly, taking in the tumbled boxes, the strewn and broken objects, the bedclothes on the floor and finally the astonished, angry faces of Andrew and God knew how many other people, before she had to turn and stumble back out into the sunlight. But even as she was being copiously sick on the gravel she realised with relief that the grey-haired, heavy corpse sprawled on the bed, with cheeks like burst fruit, was not Paul.