Murder Fortissimo (11 page)

‘What?’ She was almost amused at his astonishment at this unexpected rejection, and she pressed it home. ‘I mean it, Ryan, I’m dumping you. I don’t like the way you act; my mum was right about you.’

She swiftly shut the door before he could pull himself together but not before she spotted Kieran’s broad beam of approval, hastily wiped off his face when Ryan turned round in a fury and kicked off down the path towards the pub.

Gemma leaned against the door, her breathing steadying, her pounding heart slowing its beat. I did it, she triumphed. I really did it. I dumped him. Somewhere deep inside she felt a tiny warm glow, the spark lit when she had spoken earlier to Miss Quigley. Kieran had been pleased with her, glad she’d done it. Kieran liked her, she knew, and maybe now he might say something to her, ask her out or something. I’d like that, she realized, with a hopeful lift of her spirits.

At eight o’clock that night Neil yawned and looked at the remains of the take-away he had picked up earlier. ‘Let’s call it a day, Alice,’ he suggested. ‘We’ve been sorting out this house all day, d’you fancy a quick drink? I could do with a breath of air and it’s stopped drizzling now.’ He swept the foil containers into the kitchen bin and looked at her. ‘What do you think? Are you game for a gentle stagger up to the pub?’

As she shrugged herself into the coat he held out for her, she turned to him with anxious eyes. ‘You don’t think people will think I’m awful, do you?’ she wondered. ‘I mean, going out for a drink when my mother’s only just.…’

Her voice, which had started to tail off as she fretted, was suddenly stifled completely as he took her in his arms and
kissed her soundly. ‘Don’t be daft,’ was all he said but she was comforted.

The brisk walk did her good, blowing the cobwebs away, and when they reached the brow of the hill and the beginnings of the village, she felt almost human again. To reach the White Boar they had to walk past Firstone Grange and as they did so they spotted Sam Hathaway just parking his Volvo estate. He waved at them but made no attempt to join them until Alice, who had grown fond of the rangy clergyman, called out to him.

‘Sam! Sam?’ When he came up to them, greeting them with beaming pleasure, Alice held out her hand on a friendly impulse. ‘We’re going to the pub for a drink,’ she explained. ‘Why don’t you spring Harriet again, if you think she’d like it, and come and join us for a drink?’

She glanced quickly at Neil for confirmation and was glad to see him smile and nod. Sam, too, looked delighted and agreed to pick up Harriet and meet them shortly in the White Boar.

Harriet smiled when she saw the pair of them tucked in beside the inglenook, already presenting a united front to the world, a couple, a twosome. There was a flurry of greeting, including a warm kiss from Harriet on Alice’s cheek which clearly surprised but touched the younger woman, followed by desultory chit-chat while the men made a business out of ordering a round of drinks, arguing over payment and eventually settling at a larger table in the corner.

While the others talked Harriet fell silent, gazing steadfastly at her hands.

‘Harriet?’ asked Alice, who looked surprised at Harriet’s air of distraction.

‘What? Oh, I’m sorry, my dear.’ Harriet stopped studying her hands and looked gravely at Alice. ‘I’m really sorry but I have
to ask you about this, I think it might be important. Why was it that your mother was so – so difficult? So much disliked by so many people?’

Neil made a movement of protest which was brushed aside by Alice with an impatient gesture. Sam sat waiting, pint in hand, his eyes flicking from Alice to Harriet and back again, watching and waiting.

‘It’s hard to say,’ Alice began slowly, almost speaking to herself as she looked down the years. ‘I suppose it all goes back to her youth in Brittany. I don’t know what happened; she would never speak of it, but Daddy told me the bare bones, to make sure I didn’t put my foot in it.’

She took a reflective sip at her gin and tonic. ‘It’s really odd, you know. I’d completely forgotten until now what it was that Daddy told me; I wasn’t very old at the time and he didn’t dwell on it. He was just concerned that Mother mustn’t be reminded.’ Her eyes darkened at the memory. ‘She always made him pay, you see, if anything upset her, and that was her weapon, reminding him of her terrible ordeal. They were in Occupied France, you know, and it was very hard. The Bretons have a reputation as fierce fighters; they were strongly royalist during and after the French revolution and there’s a tradition of fighting hard and dying hard. I don’t know, I told you, I’ve never known exactly what it was that happened; what it was that was so terrible but I know, because my father told me, that there was some dreadful, unimaginable tragedy. It was the Germans, of course, in retaliation for some Resistance exploit.’

She looked at them sadly. ‘It all seems such a long time ago to us, ancient history.’ She turned to Harriet and Sam who were listening intently, Sam looking sympathetic but Harriet wore an unreadable expression. ‘You two can only have been small babies then,’ she said reflectively then she continued. ‘The village where mother lived was right out at the back of beyond,
on a little peninsula, nowhere important; just a skinny granite neck sticking out into the Atlantic on the wild west coast of Brittany. By the time the outside world found out what had happened it was all too late.’

She flicked her fingers in exasperation. ‘The trouble is I’ve absolutely no idea what it was that actually happened. Anyway, whatever it was, all of her family were killed: the men, that is. I think her mother was already dead but she had four brothers aged between twelve and about twenty-five; Mother was the only girl and she came somewhere in the middle of the boys but she was always cagey about her age. Said it was a woman’s prerogative to lie about such things.’

Alice’s smile, through sudden tears, touched Harriet’s heart. ‘I did try to love Mother, you know,’ she said simply. ‘But she was so difficult. I – I feel awful saying that I just didn’t
like
her at all. If I could only have believed she loved me, even just a little, in her own peculiar way, but it was only Daddy who … and after he died Mother and I had nothing in common.’ She paused, running her tongue over dry lips. ‘I’ve tried and tried to work out why she was like she was and all I can think is that – if the worst has happened to you – as it did to her, nothing else can touch you very much. I’ve an idea she might have been raped at that time too, from something she once said, about my arrival being a shock, something she’d thought could never happen.’

Her voice died away and she took another sip from her glass in the silence, smiling faintly when Neil reached out for her hand and tucked it between his own warm ones. ‘I know that doesn’t excuse the way she was, but she did like to have power over people. I think it all went back to the war when you used whatever weapons came to hand.’

Harriet’s eyes narrowed and she gave a thoughtful nod; Alice shot her a quick look of enquiry. ‘Why did you want to
know, Harriet?’ she asked, with a sharply intelligent gaze. ‘Do you think there could be something – irregular, perhaps, about Mother’s death?’

Sam interrupted abruptly. ‘Time for another drink, everyone? My round this time.’ His breezy smile earned him a troubled frown from Alice but a surreptitious nod of thanks from his cousin.

In the ensuing activity Alice’s question was allowed to drop but Harriet was uneasily conscious of that level, measuring look and that Alice was, now and then, preoccupied with some sort of internal appraisal.

‘Oh, by the way, Harriet.’ It was Neil, looking up from his pint of Ringwood bitter. ‘I rang Mike, you know, the horn player?’

Harriet was all attention. ‘Did you indeed. And…?’

Neil wore a puzzled frown. ‘Yes, how did you know, Harriet? That there might be some black thread tied on to the euphonium?’

Harriet gave a little sigh and Sam paused, his beer glass in mid journey to his lips, his eyes eager and acute, waiting for Harriet’s reply.

She disappointed him by shrugging her shoulders and making a non-committal sound.

‘You were quite right,’ continued Neil. ‘Mike said he assumed it was left over from where they were all decorating the horns with tinsel. Did you notice? I even had a little bit on my clarinet though of course it doesn’t lend itself to fancy trimming, not like the bigger horns.’

‘Think carefully, Neil,’ Harriet was leaning forward now, very earnest. ‘Did your friend say whether he himself had used thread to tie the tinsel on to the euphonium?’

‘No,’ Neil was quite definite. ‘He just twisted it round but when he spotted the thread it was actually tied, but as it was
when he was cleaning up.…’ Their eyes all swivelled towards Alice but she seemed lost in thought and hadn’t picked up the reference. Neil went on, ‘Anyway, he just assumed one of the others had decided to make it more secure. However, when he put the horn away the black thread was gone and now he’s not even sure it was there in the first place.’

Harriet jerked her head up and stared at him, not speaking. Neil looked across at her, a frown creasing his brow. ‘What
is
this, Harriet? I checked with the rest of the band – I thought that would be the next job you set me. Nobody had done anything at all with any black thread.’

‘Ahhh.’ It was a sigh of pure content, then Harriet hastily pulled herself together with an appalled shiver. For a moment she had actually revelled in her own brilliant deduction, forgetting completely the horrific circumstances. This wasn’t an academic puzzle.

Aloud she said, ‘I don’t know. It’s odd that he thought he saw it but then it was gone. I just don’t know.’

To herself she added, if I’m correct, and she shivered in the warmth of the pub – if I’ve got it right we could definitely be talking murder.

Half an hour or so later Harriet poured herself and Sam a snort of Laphroaig and sat back cradling her glass.

‘Do you think they bought it?’ she asked, giving Sam a worried look as she sat on the bed.

‘What, your explanation that you had been afraid the tinsel could have caught in the railing somehow and brought the euphonium tumbling down?’ He wrinkled his nose in thought. ‘I think they did, actually, it’s a daft idea but it seemed to fit well with your sudden impersonation of a frail old lady who needed to go to bed right then. Besides, somebody
could
be keeping quiet about decorating it, because they feel guilty. And
the same person could have nipped in a little later on after the initial fuss and cut off the thread, again because they felt guilty. You have to admit it would be a difficult thing to own up to and as there’s been no mention of any thread, it would be easier to keep your mouth shut.’

She grinned and raised her glass in a toast. ‘Very true. And as for the “poor old Harriet” act, well, I had to get out of there some way or other, and I really did feel tired. It seemed as good an excuse as any.’ She sobered quickly. ‘You’re right, of course. It
could
be the way you describe or it could have been quite deliberate. But still, I think they bought it.’

‘Yes.’ He sniffed the malt appreciatively. ‘I, on the other hand, am not taken in by the daft old biddy syndrome, so let’s have the truth, Harriet.’

‘It’s hard to know where to start.’ She made no pretence of not understanding him, and then, as he shifted restlessly in the room’s sole armchair, she told him about Mrs Turner and her missing reel of thread.

He listened carefully, nodding once or twice; then, when she stopped speaking, he thought it over. ‘Let me get this right,’ he mused. ‘Your theory is that somebody picked up the reel of black thread during the interval, sneaked upstairs to the minstrels’ gallery and, inspired by the tinsel, tied the thread to the euphonium?’ He gave her an old-fashioned look but she said nothing, merely nodding, so he went on. ‘Then, you believe, the perpetrator snuck back downstairs, carrying the cotton reel concealed about his or her person, still quite undetected and, at the appropriate moment, whatever that might have been, gave the thread a tug and down came the euphonium. And then he, or she, skipped back and disposed of the thread?’

He snorted with scorn. ‘Bollocks!’

‘Really, Canon Hathaway,’ she countered swiftly. ‘Such
unbecoming language from a man of the cloth.’ She subsided and shot him a look of resignation, she had expected no less. This was yet another reason why she had insisted on coming back to her room at Firstone Grange, though she had also preferred not to air her theories in Alice’s hearing. Any such discussion would be bound to be upsetting.

Harriet topped up her modest nightcap from the flask Sam had donated earlier. There was only one glass so she sipped her whisky from her coffee mug, knowing that her continued silence would infuriate Sam.

Sure enough, here he was, rising to the bait. ‘Well, honestly, Harriet. You have to admit it’s a bit rich, as theories go. I mean, look at the facts; for a start you’d have to be completely round the twist to take that kind of risk. The thread could be spotted or it could have snapped earlier and rendered the whole exercise pointless, or the damned euphonium could have killed half a dozen people at the same time as Christiane Marchant. It could even have killed other people and missed her completely.’

He looked down his nose with a dismissive shake of his head, then came up with another objection. ‘And what about the actual thread, if that’s really the way it happened? I mean, a long trailing thread leading to the killer, standing there with the reel in his or her hand?’

She maintained her irritating silence and his kindly, patronizing air began to dissipate.

‘For God’s sake, Harriet, say something. Don’t just sit there with that smug Sphinx smile on your face, you’ve obviously thought about this. What makes you so sure?’

‘I don’t know that I
am
sure.’ She ducked her head in apology and waved her flask at him with a grin. At his nod she topped up his drink with a very small dollop of Scotch, then rummaged in her bedside table and brought out some stem
ginger cookies. ‘Here, nibble on his and see if it brings any inspiration.’