Funeral Music (7 page)

‘I don’t charge him,’ Sara said, staring defensively at James, who was sipping smugly from his glass. It was hardly the point. Andrew had written again. And then telephoned. By this time he was being so reliably surprising that she, ridiculously flattered, had relented. The thought had entered her mind that she would much rather that this amusing, insistent man with his gentle way of getting exactly what he wanted were in her life, rather than out of it.

‘Look, it’s only once a fortnight or so. And I like him and I like teaching him, so you can stop looking at me like that. If he is on the case, he’ll probably have made an arrest by now. How complicated can it be? Give me another drink. Didn’t you get any cheese?’

‘Of course I did,’ said James, still looking smug.

CHAPTER 5

THE NEXT MORNING, despite a slight hangover, Sara drove out along the London Road between the high walls of the Batheaston town houses. She stopped for a paper at Dennis and Maureen’s shop where, to her surprise, news of the corpse in the water and her involvement in its discovery had not yet arrived. Then she turned left up towards Bannerdown, where the Roman road ran straight along the top of the hill towards Colerne and the sanctuary of the health club at Fortune Park.

As Sara came through the double doors into the club she saw that Sue was on the desk and that her happy mood of two days ago had flown. It was almost an achievement, the way she managed to look so depressed in her sharp little up-and-at-’em fitness-instructor outfits, although this job was often combined with being the club receptionist and waitress. Her perfect athletic body was dressed and immaculately accessorised today in expensive aerobics kit, yet her face betrayed a life again quite devoid of fun.

‘Hello there,’ Sara said, annoyingly bright.

Sue tried to raise a smile.

‘Oh, dear. Paul?’ Sara asked.

Sue nodded. ‘Not what you think – not a row or anything.’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘He’s being questioned about...oh, God, it’s awful...about...oh, God, a murder! At the Pump Room. The police rang up here. He’s gone into Bath police station, and the whole game’s up! He’s been found out and it’s over. He won’t be able to work here any more!’

Sara wanted to say several things at once, one of which was that if Paul had committed the murder then there were surely going to be more pressing and serious consequences than the loss of his job. Instead, she deferred her exercise without complaint, took a stool at the bar among the potted palms and old copies of
Country Life
and sipped coffee while she listened. She managed with a little difficulty to tell Sue that she had been there, that she had actually been the one to find the body. Sue was suitably aghast but the news deflected her only momentarily from her own woes.

‘No! God! Ugh! Ghastly! Really,
poor
you. Ghastly! So anyway...’

As she carried on, things began to make sense. Paul had been working at the Assembly Rooms on Friday afternoon and evening, preparing and serving the vegetarian buffet. And that was the problem. Paul should not have been there, because moonlighting was strictly against his contract at Fortune Park. The management’s line was that they paid their staff to be alert and on the ball and they did not want anyone going off doing functions in their off-duty hours and then showing up the next day to serve breakfast, half dead with fatigue. So their contracts forbade it. Sue had once pleaded for special permission to run an aerobics class outside the health club and been turned down.

‘He was only doing it to get on a bit,’ Sue said. Sara murmured understandingly. ‘He’s wasted as a waiter, you see. He’s a chef really. He’s really good, he’s half French, his mother was French, he trained over there at his uncle’s restaurant. He wants to be a chef, only he hasn’t got any formal qualifications and he could only get taken on here as a waiter. It’s practically impossible to move up in the kitchens here, not from being a waiter. It’s like the army, everyone in the kitchen’s got a rank, and even the juniors have got to have degrees, just to slice the vegetables. He’ll never get a start here. So he’s been doing a bit for Coldstreams, you know, the people that do the food at the Pump Room and the Assembly Rooms and wherever. The Guildhall as well, I think. He’s been assistant chef sometimes, at some of the functions. It’s vegetables mainly. He did meringues the other week. But it’s proper cooking. And he’s careful, he only takes on the hours he can manage on top. Now he’ll get the sack. It’s so unfair! We need the money. He’s trying to save so we can get a flat together.’ Her face crumpled.

‘Look, don’t assume the worst. You never know, maybe the management will be sympathetic. They might even help when they know why he was doing it. Maybe they’ll even help him with training. Or maybe Oliver Coldstream will put in a good word for him with his boss here, explain it all.’

‘Paul’s hardly ever seen Mr Coldstream. And he’d never even seen Matthew Sawyer at all, and just because he was
there
he’s got the police asking him questions, and he’ll probably lose his job. It’s so
unfair
.’

Sara did not know what comfort to offer. More people had come in and the pool was now busy, relatively speaking, with three or four children and their dad and a couple of ladies. Sue had to be on hand to do lunches. Sara changed a little reluctantly into her running kit and jogged off alone out of the back door of the club. Circling her arms as she went, she trotted sedately round the outside of the walled garden that separated the club from the hotel, and joined the narrow service road that led down the side and round to the front of the hotel, which had originally been an exquisitely pretty manor house. It was homely but imposing, with its gabled upper windows, pillared entrance and semicircular apron of lawn. But the guests’ BMWs parked directly in front of the long windows did nothing to enhance the façade, and presumably also impeded the view from the public rooms down the avenue, a straight road between high beeches, which ran for more than a quarter of a mile from the lawn in front of the house down to the main gate. Sara plodded along under the trees, her legs heavy. Yesterday’s events had taken more out of her than she had thought and she was not yet enjoying the run. There would be no stopwatch today, just the two-mile circuit down the drive, out and round by the edge of Colerne and back in to Fortune Park by the rear entrance.

The even pace of running always helped her to think. So he was stabbed. How is it that such a tall man, probably quite strong, could end up in the water? She concentrated on getting her breathing to come evenly as she thought about this. He could not easily have been overpowered and pushed over the railing, unless his attacker were stronger than he was. But if he were hurt, or already dead, his body could have been tipped in easily.
Was he stabbed in the back, then, and tipped over into the water? Those long legs would have acted like a lever. Perhaps ‘not thought to be selfinflicted’ is police code for stab wounds in the back. She had seen no knife, but perhaps it had been under the water, or lying around somewhere. The police would want to find that. Her legs were getting warmer now. Don’t murderers always get rid of the weapon? Sawyer’s body must have been there all night. Perhaps he wasn’t married, then, because his wife would have contacted the police when he didn’t come home after the dinner, surely? Probably divorced. She had reached the end of the avenue now and she turned left out onto the pavement towards the crossroads on the edge of the village. The way ahead rose slightly with an angle of incline that was practically imperceptible if you were walking, but running, even at this gentle pace, you felt every contour. She ran on the spot for a few paces and again circled her arms extravagantly in an effort to loosen up her breathing. She set off again, lifting her knees more deliberately. Now the pace was coming more easily. She quickened her stride and felt her body relax into an easy rhythm of breathing and moving that she knew she could keep up for an hour or more. Wonderful.

Out of the shelter of the avenue the landscape opened up too. In the fields on either side of the high road along which she was running, the new wheat was sighing and soughing in the breeze which blew out of a huge, exhilarating sky. The sun came and went with the clouds but the wind itself seemed to carry light. As she ran on with her hair whipping her face, Sara recalled the ploughing and sowing of the black fields on a squally March day, when grit had been blown into her eyes and mouth by gusts which had lifted the seagulls away like paper bags. And months before that, when she had ventured out heavily track-suited one winter morning, out of a solid sky the wind had suddenly begun to throw out fistfuls of sleet which had rattled around her on the empty road, across the iron topsoil and swirled into the dark field corners. Today there was such brightness in the silky wheat, the banks of cow parsley and the far-off glinting, low roofs of Colerne. In another few weeks the air would be sharp with wheat dust and stray chaff and the fields brittle with stubble. She had lived for months like this now. Months of being patient, allowing her fatigue to lift, developing her stamina, reclaiming her energy, practising and practising, hoping for some change in her playing that still had not come and that she could not force. And as she was waiting, practising, running round and round, things were planted, they grew and they were reaped. If nothing changed she might be plodding between these fields in her tracksuit next time round, watching the snow and waiting for the spring.

As she breathed and ran steadily, she thought back to the events of Friday and Saturday. At the Assembly Rooms I saw Matthew Sawyer, Olivia, Sue, of course, and Cecily and her odd man in the foyer. Derek something. I left there just before seven, got to the Pump Room maybe twenty minutes later. Saw James, then changed, warmed-up, had a drink. Played at eight for twenty-five minutes, well, thirty with the encores. Who was at the Pump Room? Olivia, she turned up about quarter to eight, left early, almost before dinner was over. I chatted to her before she left. I didn’t dare mention the scene at the Assembly Rooms. Don’t even know if she saw me there. She left a minute or two after ten; she said she had to get back to say good night to her dad before he was settled for the night. He’s housebound with a nurse now, and Matthew was in charge of locking up, she was just a guest. ‘I’m off duty,’ Olivia said. ‘Being deputy has its compensations.’ He was covering the Pump Room, George was due to lock up at the Assembly Rooms. I didn’t notice Matthew Sawyer until almost after dinner, about quarter to ten. I suppose he was behind the scenes somewhere, or still at the Assembly Rooms till then. He didn’t have a table, just went round and chatted to people, with puddings and coffee. I left at half past ten. Pissing with rain. Said good night to George, on the door. Plenty people still there, James included. He stayed till very near the end, he said. Forgot to ask him last night when he did leave, and who was still there. Who
was
last, before Matthew Sawyer? Maybe the murderer just waited till he was the only one left. Maybe he was hiding. And what was it George said: ‘Last out, first in’? Well, I wasn’t the last out. Whoever
was
last must have done the murder. No, could have done it. Where have I got to? Nowhere. Just been running round and round and round, story of my life.

She absolutely would not speculate any more. She would put the whole thing right out of her mind. She jogged back to the health club entrance feeling invigorated if not enlightened. In the gym she stretched out her legs and back and spent ten minutes whirring back and forth on the rowing machine. Most of the rest of the club’s clientele had abandoned themselves to lunch by the time she was ready to swim, so she had the pool almost to herself and drifted up and down, hypnotically slow, stretching and floating between strokes. At last, physically tired, she gave herself up to a pleasant weariness and read her paper on a lounger by the side of the pool.

CHAPTER 6

ANDREW, A HORSE could play that better.’ Sara had not meant to sound quite so brutal, but since the only point of Andrew Poole’s lessons was to help him achieve a half-decent standard, she had resolved to keep him up to the mark. She could safely dismiss James’s suggestion of an ulterior motive for taking him on, because it was of no relevance at all that Andrew’s body had struck her again as exceptionally finely made. She could hardly be expected not to
notice
how long and muscular were his thighs, straddling the cello. Of course she was aware of how intelligent and strong was his face, but she was unmoved. It was central to her role as his teacher to notice these things; they were part of the visual information that she relied on to help him improve his technique or concentration. James should know that, but next time she saw him she would tell him anyway.

Since Andrew had arrived he had said not one word about the murder or the enquiry. He had postponed his usual Monday lesson until Tuesday ‘owing to pressure of work’, and from a brief factual report of the Pump Room murder in Monday’s
Chronicle
Sara had learned that he was indeed working on the case. And now here he was, saying little and playing so atrociously that Sara felt something close to alarm. She had regained her own equilibrium since the events of Saturday mainly by convincing herself that the killer would quickly be arrested. She had expected Andrew to bound in today metaphorically wagging his tail, and instead he was carrying in his jaws a bloodied offering of unresolved, unexpected death, and dropping it at her feet. An atmosphere of threat eddied all around them. He was so pointedly
not
talking about the murder that he was managing to do not much of anything else either.

He sighed, put down his bow and leaned his cheek against the wood. He loved it up here at the very top of Sara’s garden. They were in the hut, Sara’s summer music room, a little garden house made of dark green painted wood with windows on either side and large double doors which opened right back, allowing you to sit either in the hut looking out, or on the little gravelled space in front with its low wooden balustrade. As well as two chairs for playing on and a rather disgraceful chaise longue, there was a rickety table and some spidery wicker basket seats, with faded green cushions, for collapsing into. Hanging from chains in the pitched roof were two storm lanterns. The hut stood camouflaged in the shade of a huge pine tree and was as private as an eyrie. Up here you were invisible, untouchable. Andrew looked down through the mass of lavender bushes to the old climbing roses which twisted in full flower through the fruit trees, over the roof of Medlar Cottage and across to the valley and the lime tree meadow.

‘I know. Sorry,’ he said, without moving his gaze from the hillside. ‘I know I’m playing badly. I was determined not to bring it up, but I’m in charge of the Pump Room case. And I know that you got caught up in it.’

He paused, still staring out. At seven o’clock on this evening in June, the valley was lit in bright sunshine. Black and white cows idled under the trees in fields that were wrinkled with the ridges trodden by generations of their hoofed ancestors. The new grass was washed in a chalky, early summer green. You half expected Bo-Peep to skip into view.

‘Valerie doesn’t think I’ll be up to it.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she does,’ Sara said casually. ‘Is it, er, going well?’

‘No, it isn’t, as a matter of fact,’ he said.

‘But don’t you know most of these people? Your yobs and vandals, I mean. The regulars. Surely it’s one of them you’re looking for?’

Andrew pored over the Fauré on the music stand with apparent absorption, but he was a poor actor.

‘What does Valerie think?’

‘I don’t discuss these things with Valerie.’ He started the piece again and his tone brought to mind a cat whose tail has been stood on.

‘Stop,
stop
! God, stop that noise. Look, you’ll probably reel in the lout who did this in no time.’ She added softly, ‘I hope you will. The whole thing’s making me feel...unsafe. You will, won’t you?’

Andrew put down his bow again. ‘I’m sorry. I really can’t discuss the enquiry. But it’s not one of our regulars, I can tell you that.’

‘All right then,’ Sara said deliberately. ‘I understand. But if you just told me how you knew it wasn’t, that wouldn’t be
discussing
it, would it?’

Andrew played a little, considering. ‘All right then, in complete confidence. Matthew Sawyer was lying dead in a locked building, with the alarms set. The person, or people, who left him dead must have locked the building and set the alarm after them. Still, not your problem. Sorry. Shall I try this again?’

‘Start again from the beginning. Breathe with the phrases. Think about where you want them to go. And listen.’

‘Sounds easy, doesn’t it? The music, I mean,’ he added, frowning over the Fauré.

As he played Sara said, ‘But isn’t it easy? You just round up all the people who know about the alarm and eliminate them till you find the one who could have done it.’

‘Done that. Nothing. Look, Sara, I’m really not supposed to discuss this.’

‘Well, try to concentrate on what you’re doing with that cello, then. What do you mean, nothing?’

‘Nothing. They’re transparent. Decent, respected museum employees, and nothing that even begins to suggest a motive. And they’ve all got alibis.’

To Sara’s irritation, Andrew’s playing became momentarily convincing. Then he put down his bow again.

‘All right, in
confidence
. Two of the attendants were off duty. One of them, Jack, was taking part in a pub quiz at the Centurion in Twerton. He was there all night and dozens of people can vouch for him. Colin was at home with his wife. They’ve got a new baby. And all that evening and most of the night it was ill, so Colin rang their GP at ten o’clock for advice and again at half past twelve, when he called him out; they couldn’t get its temperature down. George Townsend, the senior chap, was on duty, of course. He did door duty at the Pump Room until ten to eleven, then he went over to the Assembly Rooms to lock up and relieve Andy, who was there on his own after Matthew Sawyer left the Assembly Rooms to check out the event at the Pump Room. Andy’s new, he’s not an authorised key-holder yet. George relieved him just after eleven. Andy lives with his mother and she had a friend round. He got home at quarter past eleven and drove the friend home at half past. He came straight back home and locked up at ten to twelve, made a cup of tea for his mother as usual and brought it to her in bed. Then he went to his own room. George locked up the Assembly Rooms at about ten past eleven and was home at about twenty to midnight. He went straight up to bed. His wife was there already.’

Suddenly he seemed to remember himself. ‘I shouldn’t have told you all that. Forget I did.’

‘You’re welcome to tell me things if it helps.’

Andrew gave her a meltingly grateful smile, but said nothing.

She went on, ‘Well, since it’s clearly out of the question to expect you to think seriously about Fauré today, do you know exactly when Matthew Sawyer died?’

‘That’s another problem. The time of death is never easy to establish exactly, as you probably know. We do know he didn’t drown. There was no water in the lungs. He had stopped breathing before he fell in the water.’

‘What about rigor mortis? Can’t you tell by that?’

‘Not with any precision.’ He paused. ‘What
is
it about this view?’

‘Oh, it’s just old-fashioned,’ Sara said. ‘There’s no big road, no pylons. The fields are all different shapes, and they’ve left the trees. I keep expecting to see a young John Betjeman in grey flannel shorts swinging on a gate, catapulting pigeons, don’t you?’

Andrew didn’t answer. ‘Rigor mortis,’ he went on, ‘is really a chemical reaction in the body after death. The temperature surrounding the body can affect how quickly it happens. There isn’t, I’m afraid, a great deal of precedent which helps us establish the onset and progress of rigor in a body left in hot running water, but it could have speeded it up. In any event, it doesn’t wear off completely for several hours after that, sometimes even a couple of days.’

He turned to look at her. ‘What do you mean, John Betjeman? Certainly not John Betjeman. William and the Outlaws, maybe.’

‘Okay, William and the Outlaws, pursued by Violet-Elizabeth Bott. So what have you decided about the time of death?’

‘Well, rigor had almost completely set in when the body was examined, which was shortly before ten o’clock. Which was, as you’d be aware,’ he said ruefully, ‘about forty minutes after you first discovered him. Sawyer was seen alive at eleven forty-five the night before, when the last of the catering staff left. Two lads, who left together and were both home within half an hour. Given that, the pathologist says death could have occurred any time from about midnight to five in the morning. Rather a wide margin. He reckons that the body lying in the water the way it did
could
have accelerated the onset of rigor by several hours, but it’s a guess as to how much. Supposing the water did speed up rigor, but only minimally, he could have been killed within minutes of the last people seeing him alive. If on the other hand the hot water accelerated it significantly, which is possible, he could have been killed as late as five o’clock in the morning. The stomach contents don’t help either: in this instance, they were well digested. Metabolic rates are too variable for us to conclude anything. The water doesn’t exactly wash away the evidence, but it obscures it. It’s a real curse.’

Andrew went on. ‘You saw the body in the water, under the floodlights. You told Bridger he looked sort of yellow, like the colour of the water. There’s a gold filter in those lights, you know. I saw him in the mortuary, afterwards. The stab blows were mainly to the back, eight of them, made with a knife at least ten inches long. One in the right shoulder and another on the right upper arm. He was stabbed from behind and almost certainly swung round to try to defend himself. The one that punctured the left lung was the fatal one. But I’ve never seen anything like it. The blood had been washing out of him all night, with the water just running over and over him. It all just...pulsed away. Like raw meat under a tap. It’s so nice here,’ he said, breathing in the warm mixture of old wood, sun-baked cushions and lavender, before adding sadly, ‘Valerie’s after a patio.’

Sara was silent for a moment. Neither the warm hut, the flowers nor the view would provide safety from the picture that Andrew was holding up before her. ‘Have you found the knife?’ she asked.

‘Nope. It was most likely a kitchen knife. There’s no sign of it, and the keys that Matthew Sawyer had are missing, of course. There’s more than one set, naturally. George Townsend had the other set on Friday night, and there’s a master set in the Guildhall safe. Each set of keys contains the keys for
all
the museum buildings. It’s reckoned to be easier to keep track of three big sets than several separate ones for different buildings.’

Andrew had been speaking quietly and carefully, plotting aloud all the known events of the night. Up in the creosoty, scented peace of the hut, he was talking and simultaneously searching in his words for the bit that was not quite right, the bit that could not be right, the single little thing that would give him a start in the enquiry. He dug his feet hard against the wooden floor and drew his bow in a single discordant swipe across all the strings of his cello.

‘Damn it, there’s nothing to get hold of in this case. George Townsend took his set of keys with him to the Assembly Rooms and locked up there at about ten past eleven. And then he took them to the Museums Service general office in the Circus and put them in the safe there. He says sometimes he takes the keys home with him if he’s back on first thing in the morning, but on Friday he didn’t because Mr Sawyer was locking up the Pump Room and bringing his set of keys back to the Circus too, and he would have noticed if George’s keys hadn’t been in the safe, so he played it by the book. Only of course Sawyer didn’t deposit his keys. They’re still missing. On Saturday morning Colin had to take the master set from the safe to open up the Assembly Rooms. He said he assumed Mr Sawyer had gone off home the night before with the bunch of keys still in his pocket, and that he would be bringing them back later. Wasn’t for him to complain, Sawyer was the boss.’

‘The murderer wouldn’t hang on to the keys, surely?’ Sara murmured. ‘Or the knife either. I mean, you’d get rid of anything that associated you with what you’d done, wouldn’t you? Now, can we play some Fauré, please?’

She began quietly to play the Élégie in C Minor. Andrew watched and then lifted his bow and joined in. His tuning was less certain, his phrasing half-hearted. It was a depressing sound.

‘Try to breathe through these phrases. Right through, don’t be mean with them. Make it
sing
, Andrew, not whine. That’s better.’

She stopped playing and looked out across the garden as Andrew carried on.

He said, ‘It would still be helpful to find them.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to discuss it? Listen,
listen
. Your pitch is slipping under. Brighten it. That’s it.’

Andrew played to the end of the phrase. ‘We’ve done the routine search of the drains. Nothing there, which is no surprise – keys and knives would be too heavy to get carried along. Naturally I want to drain the whole place, but do you think I can get permission? Oh, no, up pop the council’s heritage committee. “Unacceptable risk to this unique and irreplaceable monument, to upset the flow of the spring and divert the water.” The boss, the District Commander, had to agree we won’t do it unless we have a “sound reason to suspect” that the search would yield something. And I haven’t, not yet.’

‘Mind you, if it was me, that’s where I’d chuck them.’ Sara was scrutinising his fingering. ‘The keys. They might never be found. And they’d be close to the body. In a locked building. Not that I’m interested.’