Dead End (10 page)

‘He was a hateful old man,’ she said suddenly, fiercely. ‘He knew how I felt, but he liked tormenting people. I’m glad he’s dead. Whoever killed him did a public service.’

Back in his car, Atherton consulted a copy of the orchestra’s schedule which Tony Whittam had given him and reckoned there was just time to catch one of the orchestra members before she left for an evening session at Abbey Road. He drove to Joanna’s flat in Turnham Green, and found her in, but not alone.

‘I’m giving Sue a lift to the studio. You know Sue Caversham, don’t you?’

‘We have met,’ Atherton said, accepting the offered hand of the principal second violin. She was a nice-looking, strongly built woman in her forties with very shiny brown hair and a wide mouth and an air of being secretly amused by everything, which some might have found daunting, but which Atherton found inviting.

‘Briefly,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t you who took my statement, more’s the pity.’

‘We’ve just finished a late lunch,’ Joanna said, ‘but I can get you some cheese and biscuits if you’re hungry. Policemen are always hungry,’ she added to Sue. ‘It’s all that brain activity.’

‘No thanks,’ Atherton said, and then, ‘What sort of cheese?’

‘Dolcelatte.’

‘And Carr’s water biscuits? Yes please, then.’

‘Not another foodie!’ Sue laughed as Joanna departed to get the cheese. ‘I’m always so impressed with Jo, all the cooking she does. We just had the most marvellous pasta, and the sauce wasn’t even ready-made. Me, I have difficulty opening a tin.’

‘Don’t you
like
food?’ Atherton boggled in horror.

‘Love it, but when I get home from work, if it doesn’t get on the plate of its own accord, it’s too much effort. I get a piece of bread out of the fridge, or if I’m in unexpectedly good shape I pour out a bowl of cereal.’

‘Is playing the violin really so exhausting?’ Atherton asked disapprovingly.

‘No, I’m just bone lazy,’ Sue said comfortably. ‘Also it depends what you’re playing and who for. Some conductors make life harder than others.’

‘Like the late unlamented?’ Atherton asked. ‘Can a conductor make that much difference?’

‘He can if he’s a nasty, self-obsessed, vindictive old sod, and I use the word advisedly, like Radek,’ Sue said. Joanna, returning, looked amused.

Atherton caught her eye and said,
‘De mortuis?’

‘Non est disputandum,’
she finished for him. ‘Here we are. Cheese, biscuits, and I’ve even found you a glass of wine. Left over from last night, so it’s not too old.’

‘Ah, Château Hot Tin Roof,’ Atherton said, holding it up to the light. ‘Were you going to use it for cooking?’

‘Snob,’ said Joanna. ‘You don’t have to drink it.’

‘I’m sure it’s delightful,’ he said hastily. ‘Reverting to the subject, are all conductors hated?’

‘Oh no,’ Sue said quickly. ‘Barbirolli, for instance, was a lovely old geezer. He used to share his sandwiches on the coach. And Pritchard
never
forgot to thank you, or to stand you up if you’d had something tricky to do.’

‘But then there are those like Lupton – when he gets lost he just bottles out and stops conducting. Gets you into a mess and expects you to get him out of it,’ Joanna offered. ‘And Farnese, who’s so convinced he’s a genius he takes the parts home and
rewrites
them. I mean, actually changes notes, never mind annotations.’

Sue put in, ‘You know the old saying, don’t you: what’s the difference between a bull and an orchestra?’

‘Tell me.’

‘A bull has the horns at the front and the arse at the back.’

Atherton snorted crumbs. ‘You’re my sort of woman. Tell me, didn’t you have a blow-up recently with the arse in question?’

‘Yes, and very nasty it was.’ She made a face. ‘Six point six on the Sphincter scale. I thought I’d had it, actually. Our management is as wet as a fortnight in Cardiff, they never stick up for us – as poor old Bob Preston found out.’

‘Who’s he?’

Sue and Joanna exchanged glances, and Joanna shrugged and took up the story. ‘He’s – or he was – our co-principal trumpet. We did a
Messiah
with Radek a couple of months ago, and Bob always does the solo in “The Trumpet Shall Sound” because the principal, Les, doesn’t like playing D trumpet parts. Everyone who conducts us knows that, and Bob’s very good –
Messiah’s
his specialty. But that wouldn’t do for bloody old Radek. He said he wasn’t having any mere co-principal doing a solo under his magnificent direction.’

‘The fact was that he wanted to promote one of his little protégés,’ Sue put in. ‘He’s always got some wunderkind he’s discovered tucked up his sleeve, and when they get famous, he’s there hovering in the background taking half the glory. Anyway, there was this boy-wonder trumpeter, Lev Polowski—’

‘Polish, or Russian of Polish extraction, so he felt entitled,’ Joanna explained.

‘So he said Bob was off the case. There was a big row, and Bob stood up to Radek, the twonk.’

‘Brave but foolish,’ Atherton commented.

‘The upshot was that Radek said he wouldn’t have Bob in the orchestra any more,’ Sue finished. ‘He told the management if they didn’t chuck Bob he’d take his contracts elsewhere, so poor old Bob got the big E.’

‘Do you think Radek would have carried out his threat?’ Atherton asked.

Joanna looked at him. ‘Nice point. I think he just might have – he was megalomaniac enough. And besides, he’d never want for work. He could command any fees he liked, and any orchestra in the world would fight to have him. So the management had no leverage. Couldn’t take the chance.’

‘What’s happened to Bob now?’ Atherton asked.

Sue shrugged. ‘He’s freelancing when he can get work, but it’s hard for trumpeters. You don’t need many of them per orchestra, and there’s hardly any solo work. I’ve seen him once or twice. He’s very depressed.’

‘So he has a real grudge against Radek?’ Atherton said.

The two women gave the impression of suddenly sitting bolt upright. ‘Oh hang on,’ Sue protested, ‘you can’t think Bob would murder the old bastard because of that?’

‘I’m not thinking it, I’m canvassing possibilities,’ Atherton said blandly.

‘It’s not a possibility. If I’d thought you’d suspect him, I’d never have told you about it,’ Sue said angrily.

Joanna was watching her with faint amusement, having gone down this path herself long before. ‘I should have known these questions weren’t all random,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter, Sue. They’d find out anyway. Better he hears it from someone who can give them a balanced picture.’

‘All the same—’

‘And if Bob had murdered Radek, you wouldn’t want him to get away with it, would you?’

‘Yes, but Bob—’

‘I know. The idea’s ludicrous. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘You might as well suspect me,’ Sue said, looking defiantly at Atherton. ‘After all, I had a row with Radek just the day before he was killed.’

‘I have taken that into account,’ Atherton said smoothly. Sue went scarlet, and Joanna stepped in.

‘What he means is he doesn’t think that would be enough motive for you to actually want to kill Radek,’ she said firmly. ‘Isn’t that right, Jim?’

‘Oh, I think I can eliminate you,’ Atherton said generously. ‘After all, you wouldn’t have had time to hire the killer.’

Sue stared for a moment, and then burst into laughter.

‘You rotten sod. I’m keeping score now. You’ll pay for that.’

‘I do hope so,’ Atherton said warmly. ‘You must let me cook for you some time. Joanna will tell you I’m a noted cook.’

‘That sounds good to me,’ Sue said. ‘What about tonight, after the session?’

‘Brilliant idea! If I can get off early enough, I could do you a
boeuf en croûte.
It’s what I call casing the joint.’

‘Oh God!’ Sue groaned in protest. ‘What am I getting myself into?’

Joanna looked from her face to his and back, and suddenly felt rather left out of things.

Slider finally ran Radek’s daughter to earth in Hampstead, in a house she was redecorating. Her little van, painted ecology green with a nice curly Fenella in crimson lettering edged with black on the side, was parked on the paved hardstanding (what had once been the front garden) behind a Volvo estate and a dark blue Jaguar XJ which made Slider whimper. He’d always wanted one. He parked his own shabby Vauxhall across the front, blocking them all in, since there wasn’t anywhere else to put it: the streets here were only about one car wide. The tall, narrow, eighteenth-century house would have made him whimper too, if it had been anywhere else, but Hampstead was one of those places, like Greenwich Village, you either adored or didn’t.

The door was opened to him by a maid, and that was something you couldn’t often say nowadays. She was foreign, of course – something east of Clacton, he surmised – and, smiling as if she hadn’t understood a word he said, she invited him to wait in the hall with a gesture as graceful as part of a temple dance, and disappeared upstairs. The house was very quiet: all he could hear was the measured sound of a long-case clock ticking somewhere out of sight, and once a creak of a floorboard from upstairs. It gave him the feeling that he had sometimes had as a child, when he had been ill in bed on a schoolday: that everyone in the whole world had gone away somewhere, to another planet, perhaps, leaving him absolutely alone.

To distract himself he examined the letters on the hall table and discovered that the house belonged to a Famous Writer (of the Booker as opposed to the Airport type), so famous even he had heard of her. A quick poke about in the mental files
suggested that she was married to an almost equally famous Historian who was now Arts Editor of one of the serious newspapers. That accounted for the money, at least. What they could want with redecorating he couldn’t imagine – everything looked immaculate – unless it was somehow deductible.

At last the maid came downstairs again, and with another uncomprehending smile and lovely gesture said, ‘Please,’ and led him upstairs. She showed him into a beautiful double drawing-room, where Mrs Coleraine and the Famous Writer were standing at the window examining fabric samples. The writer was tall and rangey with big teeth and big hair and a large, jolly voice which left her eyes untouched by humour or humanity. Slider had been abused, insulted and even spat at by many a potential interviewee, but it was a long time since he had been made to feel that he ought to have gone round by the tradesman’s entrance.

‘Ah yes, Inspector,’ she said witheringly, like a heart surgeon looking down at the nit nurse, ‘come in. You want to see Mrs Coleraine, I understand. I can’t imagine why you couldn’t have waited until this evening when she’s at home, but I dare say you have your reasons. Something tremendously urgent, I suppose?’

Slider declined to be drawn, and merely gave her a humble smile. She turned to her companion.

‘Fay, my dear, I suppose I had better leave you to it, but I shall only be upstairs in my bedroom.’ In case I attack her, Slider thought. ‘I am beginning to incline towards the green. The raw silk is so lovely I can’t resist it. Can we think along those lines? What I’m looking for is a sort of
underwater
feeling. We can talk about textures later.’ When this horrid little man has gone, said her glance, and she bestowed a gigantic smile on Mrs Coleraine, large enough to last her till she came back, and went out of the room.

Fay Coleraine turned to Slider. She was a tall woman, but being much more lightly made than the Famous Writer had appeared small in her company. She had a sweet, worn face in which he could find no likeness to Radek except for the height of the cheekbones and the heaviness of the eyelids; on her they looked beautiful rather than menacing. Her hair was strawberry blonde, short and set in the sweeping waves
that women of a certain age always seem to adopt, revealing her ear-lobes in which small pearls were set. She was wearing black slacks and a black silk blouse, with a black and white scarf in the neckline which was twisted in and under a string of very good pearls. Slider couldn’t tell if it were a uniform for her work, a concession to mourning, or merely a random choice of clothes, but she looked smart, attractive and expensive.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt you at your work,’ he said, and she smiled a kind smile that made him want to take her out to tea and tell her not to worry about anything.

‘Don’t mind Maggie. She doesn’t mean to trample. Was it something urgent?’

‘Not urgent, in that sense, but trails do get cold, and the sooner we ask our questions the better. I did call your house, but they told me you were working today.’

She almost shrugged. ‘I thought it better to keep busy. There didn’t seem any reason to stay at home; and Maggie’s hard to pin down.’

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Slider said, and she gestured towards a brocaded chaise longue.

‘Oh, don’t worry, take whatever time you need. Shall we sit down? Though I’m not sure what help I can be. I simply can’t imagine who would do such a dreadful thing. I’ve racked my brains, but I can’t think of anyone who hated my father that badly. You’re sure it wasn’t just one of those random things, like the Hungerford massacre?’