Murder Fortissimo (17 page)

He looked hopefully at her, through narrowed eyes, measuring her. Surely the stupid old bat wasn’t that gullible?

She watched him with amusement as she read his expression though his mental description of her was probably a lot less ladylike than ‘bat’. Or ‘stupid’, come to that.

A happy thought struck her and she went to her suitcase, packed and almost ready for tomorrow’s departure. She rummaged inside it. ‘Photos; of course. Now where…? Ah, here we are.’ In her hand she held her mobile phone which she switched on as she walked back to where he lay trussed on the rug. ‘Let’s see now. Smile. Ryan! Lovely. And again?’ She took half a dozen photographs of him from different angles, smiling as she showed Tim her favourite. which clearly illustrated Ryan and his predicament.

‘Well, Ryan?’ She grinned maliciously at him. ‘I’m sure Kieran and Gemma would have a good laugh if they saw these pictures, don’t you think? And I imagine the police would think it was even more amusing. Come to think of it, I could post it on You Tube for the whole world to see – that’d give everyone a laugh. So be a good little thug and stay away. Now, where will you go?’

Sulkily, he gave the matter some thought.

‘My mum’s sister lives in Taunton,’ he offered. ‘My Aunty Maureen. I could go and stay with her I expect. She hasn’t got any kids of her own so she always used to like buying me sweets and treats and stuff like that.’

‘Poor misguided woman,’ Harriet said dispassionately. ‘Still,
that ought to get you out of the way for a while. You can say you thought it would be nice to go and see her at Christmas. Now, what about your mum?’

‘She always goes to stay with Aunty Maureen anyway, every Christmas.’ He was still sulking but Harriet paid no attention.

‘There you are then.’ She gave a triumphant little laugh. ‘You go home, right now, and tell your mum you’ve decided you want a proper family Christmas, I’m sure she’ll be thrilled – once she gets over the shock. You’re to get going tomorrow, all right?’

The look he gave her was pure vitriol but he was defeated and resigned to his fate. He nodded reluctantly.

‘Very well, let me have your Aunty Maureen’s phone number.’ She took a pen out of her bag and picked up a notepad from the bedside table. ‘That’s good. Ryan, just be thankful that you’ve made the right decision.’ Her expression was forbidding and the boy squirmed, clearly wondering what the wrong decision would have merited. Harriet looked down her nose at him. ‘Don’t think about coming back here yet awhile, will you? I shall be mentioning this little episode to the police in a day or so and I’m sure they’ll keep a lookout for you. Ever been in trouble before?’

His sullen silence was eloquent.

‘I thought so. This time it would mean jail, I should think. Didn’t Gemma mention that it’s your eighteenth birthday any time now? Dear me, that means you’re a Capricorn and they’re usually such solid, upright citizens, I wonder what went wrong in your stars? Anyway, I doubt if you’d really enjoy prison. For one thing there are lots of lonely men there and you’re quite pretty in a weasel-faced kind of way.’

It took a moment for her meaning to sink in, he really wasn’t very bright, she reflected; then he recoiled in horror, staring at her wide-eyed.

She stooped to untie his bonds. ‘Just you bear that in mind whenever you think about coming back to this neck of the woods.’ she cooed as he staggered to his feet, rubbing his ankles and wrists. ‘Now get out. You can climb out of my window and down the drainpipe, it should just about hold you. It’s quite nasty out there, getting icy, but if I don’t mind, I don’t see why you should.’

The logic of her last remark puzzled him, she could tell, but the threat implicit in her attitude was unmistakable. He departed, climbing awkwardly but rapidly, out of the window and to Harriet’s intense pleasure they heard a ripping, a hastily smothered howl and the noise of a body slithering downwards at great speed.

‘Goodness, but you’re a hard-hearted, intrepid woman, Harriet,’ offered Tim with a nod of admiration.

‘Maybe,’ she said, gesturing towards the armchair. ‘Take a seat, Tim. I’ll put the kettle on. I don’t know about you but I’m quite desperate for a cup of tea after that little adventure.’

He sat down and stretched his legs. ‘Do you think he’ll go straight?’ he wondered.

‘I shouldn’t think it’s at all likely,’ she said with a cynical grin as she boiled the water. The idea at the back of her mind was somehow beginning to crystallize into a certainty and she was only too glad of a distraction. ‘As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter, to be honest, whether he goes straight or not – apart from the general principle of the thing, I should say. I was just concerned to get him away from here just now and particularly to give young Gemma a chance to recover from him. I gather the lumpy henchman, Kieran, is making overtures of a romantic nature and he’s much more suitable as a long term romantic prospect. I don’t altogether care what young Ryan does as long as he does it somewhere a long way away from here.’’

Harriet handed Tim a mug of tea and sat down on her bed, watching as he fished a couple of pills from his jacket pocket and washed them down with his drink. ‘Sleeping pills,’ he answered her raised eyebrow. ‘An old prescription but they still work. Had ’em for years, since Jane.…’ He said the beloved name with only a slight twitch of an eyelid. ‘I only take them when I get wound up. I reckon I’ll need them after all this excitement.’

She nodded and took a deep breath that was half a sigh. ‘Tell me about Christiane Marchant, Tim,’ she suggested gently.

His eyes flickered and for a moment she thought he was going to shut down the system and deliberately retreat into his other world, but he straightened his shoulders and made a slight face at her.

‘I told your cousin, Canon Hathaway, about her. I expect he told you?’

She nodded.

‘Well then, what more do you want me to tell you? I told him everything.’

‘No you didn’t.’ She put her mug down on the bedside cabinet, carefully positioning it on a mat so that the polished surface wasn’t marked. Melamine would be a lot more practical, she thought inconsequentially, but the wood is much nicer. ‘Not everything. You could try telling me why you killed her?’

She gazed straight into his eyes and saw that her hunch was right. She wondered whether he would try the vanishing trick with her, either real or assumed, if she confronted him with her suspicions. There would be nothing she could do if he did, she knew that, but no, he blinked rapidly once or twice, then heaved a sigh of what sounded very like relief.

‘Why? Because she filled me with an all-consuming blind hatred, that’s why.’

It was Harriet’s turn to blink and she stared at him in astonishment.

‘Because of your wife, Tim?’ she prompted.

‘Because of Jane,’ he nodded wearily. ‘And because of Tony, my son, and his wife and the grandchildren.’

‘She threatened to tell them about Jane?’ Harriet’s eyes showed only sympathy when she looked at him.

‘Of course she did, but it wasn’t only that. It was the way she … she somehow smirched my memories of Jane, she left a trail of slime so that I couldn’t remember her clearly.’

His eyes were tragic as he looked across at Harriet. ‘It’s hard enough for me to remember what she looked like at the best of times,’ he confessed, with a tremor of distress in his voice.

‘Oh, Tim.’ Her voice held warmth and understanding but sadness too.

‘I can’t begin to tell you how dreadfully Jane felt the shame. Nowadays I don’t suppose the case would even have gone to court, she was suffering very badly from … with, with the … Change.’

He muttered the word awkwardly, eyes averted and Harriet heaved a sigh of exasperation mingled with pity. Poor Jane, she thought, trapped in a body full of rogue hormones at war, at a time when few enough doctors, let alone lay people, were sympathetic to the idea of a hormonal deficiency. And stuck with a husband like Tim, loving and kind but unbearably squeamish. I bet he never told her he loved her, either, she thought suddenly. Not after they were married. Why would he? He’s a typical Englishman of his generation: said it once, when he proposed, why should he say it again? Of course he loved her, he’d married her, hadn’t he?

A sudden vision of her cousin Sam flashed into her mind. Sam with his passionate and enduring love for his beloved Avril. Sam had often told his wife that he loved her and Harriet
remembered Avril, managing to summon up a faint smile, that last evening at the hospice as she whispered, ‘Take care of him for me, please, darling Harriet. He’ll be so dreadfully lonely without me, and you’ve always been his next dearest love.’

Remembering Avril, Harriet swallowed once or twice and waited for Tim to go on.

‘I saw the reel of button thread on the table,’ he was saying. ‘And I overheard Mrs Turner mention it to somebody – that old army chap, I believe – could have been him, I don’t remember. That woman, you know the one … she had been simpering and hinting at me just before the concert started. She said how handsome Tony was and what did he think about his mother and – and what she had done. Like a fool I said he didn’t know, that he’d been at college when it happened and just took the move down south in his stride, assumed it was promotion for me, that kind of thing.’ He shrugged. ‘Played right into her hands, of course. She smiled at me and said, oh dear what a pity, and I’d have to be so careful that he didn’t find out. Boys always put their mothers on a pedestal, she said.’

‘What did you do with the button thread. Tim?’ Harriet nudged him gently back on track, picturing with reluctant clarity Tim, the last one down from the gallery. Tim hovering close to the body.

‘I still can’t believe nobody noticed me,’ he said. His voice was beginning to falter and the look of exhaustion aged his face but he kept going, still surprisingly alert. ‘Nor that it actually worked. It was when Matron stuck her away in that corner that I had the idea. I looked up and there was the horn balanced above her like the sword of Damocles, the light from the candle bulbs glinting off it. At first I just wished it would fall down on her and smash her to pieces. Then when you went to see about some drinks, I remembered the tinsel I’d seen on the euphonium and it gave me the idea. I simply picked up the
cotton reel and wandered across the room and up the stairs, tying a loop in the end of the thread as I went. There were several other people who had gone up for a look so there was nothing out of the ordinary about me being there.

‘I saw the euphonium balanced on the rail and thought again that it looked like – what do they say? An accident waiting to happen, so I slipped the loop of thread that I’d already tied, over those brass things, keys, or whatever they’re called, and shoved it even closer to the edge. It was quite dark up there so nobody noticed what I was up to in the crowd, then I went back downstairs carefully paying out the black cotton behind me, making sure I kept it loose.’

He took a sip of tea, swallowed it and drew a deep breath. Harriet remained quiet, waiting. She thought he looked as if he had gone beyond exhaustion.

‘I’d left it very late.’ It was clearly an effort but he managed to go on. ‘The interval was almost over; in fact I passed a couple of musicians on their way back to their places.’ He rubbed a hand across his eyes. ‘I don’t know if I was really planning to do it, it was just a kind of game at that stage. A kind of, “I know something you don’t know”, directed at Christiane Marchant, the kind of thing she specialized in on her own account. It was only when the band started up again and she gave me such a malicious, knowing smirk across the table that I knew what I had to do. It was as though everyone else was in a conspiracy with me, to force her out into the open where she would be vulnerable. Where I could take my revenge.’

Tim leaned back in his chair, his eyelids drooping and Harriet held her breath. Please, she prayed silently, please let him tell me, don’t let him lose the plot completely. I have to know.

‘If the euphonium player had picked up his instrument I would simply have dropped the reel of cotton and abandoned it and it would just have been a puzzle for them later on. But he
didn’t, he left it balanced there and I felt like the Angel of Death then, that it was up to me; that I had a kind of duty to preserve the rest of humanity from such evil. I did a rough calculation of the trajectory of the horn if I tugged it from where I was standing and then there was that terrific roll of drums and she was grinning at me again, she even gave me a little wink. Something must have snapped in my head because the next thing I knew, all hell had broken loose and there was this bloody awful mess everywhere.’

Harriet moistened her lips, feeling her way carefully. ‘But what about the black thread?’ she asked. ‘Weren’t you afraid someone would notice it? And cry foul?’ she added.

‘I don’t think I cared two hoots at that moment, not when I pulled the thread,’ he replied simply. ‘I remember trying to pull the thread tightly across and round the stops, or keys, or whatever those knobs are, so that there’d be something for the cotton to tighten against and snap in mid air, but I had my pocket knife in my hand just to make sure. It’s my old Scout knife,’ he said casually. ‘I’ve carried it on me for more than seventy years. Anyway, I simply surged forward with the throng after the euphonium fell, rubber-necking with the rest of them, and under cover of all the fuss and panic, I bent down and snipped the thread off short. I’d have cut through the lot if you hadn’t sent Sam over to rescue me but I managed to do that a little later and rolled up the loose thread and chucked it on the fire. Then when no one was looking I tucked the cotton reel away on the mantelpiece, behind a sprig of holly.’

He set his cup down and rose stiffly, looking at her very kindly.

‘Well, there you are. Harriet. The murderer’s confession. What would you like me to do about it? I suppose I ought to tell someone in authority about it but do you think anyone would believe me?’

She was startled. It was an aspect of the situation that had not occurred to her but she could see his point.

‘Don’t worry.’ His smile held warmth and affection and a measure of resolution. ‘They won’t do much to me, should you think? After all, what can they possibly do to me that is worse than what nature is doing already?’