Orchestrated Death (28 page)

‘Do you know where this is?’ he asked, proffering the address of the flat where Anne-Marie had lived while a member of the
Birmingham Orchestra. Martin Cutts had wrenched it out of his memory, and Slider now proposed having a look at it, and if
possible a chat with some of the other residents.

‘Oh yes. That’s part of the new development in the centre. Quite swanky, a bit like the Barbican when it was fashionable.
Expensive, but very convenient for the city types.’

It turned out to be a steel-and-glass pillar which reflected the cloudy sky impassively. Slider squinted up at it. ‘I should
think the views from the top would be magnificent. I wonder where the entrance is?’

‘Well hidden,’ Norma said as they turned a second corner. ‘I wonder if they ever get any mail delivered?’

They found it at last round the third side, a tinted glass door with a security button. When the buzzer sounded they pushed
in to find themselves in a foyer which would not have disgraced the headquarters of a multinational consortium. It was four
storeys high, fitted out with acres of quiet grey carpet, and the walls which were not sheer glass were panelled in wood.
There were glassy displays of rubber plants in chromium tubs, and in the centre of the hall the largest tub of all contained
a real, growing, and embarrassed-looking tree.

‘Blimey,’ Norma breathed in heartfelt tribute. ‘Cop this lot!’

They waded their way through the deep pile towards the uniformed security guard who was standing behind an enormous mahogany-veneered
desk which was a very irregular trapezoid in shape to prove it was not just functional. The opulence of it all made them feel
faintly depressed, as perhaps it was meant to.

‘Think of the rents!’ Norma whispered.

‘And the rates. And the maintenance charges.’

‘You’d need a fair amount of naughtiness to pay for that lot,’ Norma agreed.

The security guard was looking at them alertly as they completed the long haul to his desk, and before Slider could present
his ID, he straightened himself perceptibly and said, ‘Police, sir? Thought so. Which one is it you’re interested in?’

Slider was amused. ‘You have a lot of trouble here?’

‘No sir, not a bit. No trouble. A lot of enquiries, though,’ His left eyelid flickered.

‘We’re enquiring about a young lady who lived here about eighteen months ago, a Miss Austen.’

‘Miss Austen? Oh yes, sir, she’s in 15D, one of the penthouses. Very nice.’

Miss Austen or the flat? Slider thought. So the news of her death hadn’t penetrated this far; and also she didn’t seem to
have given up the flat when she left Birmingham. ‘Penthouse, eh?’ he said. ‘That must cost a bit. Any idea what the rent is?’

With a curious access of discretion, the guard wrote a figure down on his desk-pad and pushed it across with an arms-length
gesture. Slider looked, and his eyes watered. Norma, looking over his shoulder, murmured ‘Ouch!’

‘How long has she lived here?’ Slider asked.

‘About, oh, four years I suppose. I could look it up for you.’

‘Ever any trouble about the rent?’

‘Not my department, sir, but I doubt it. The developers would be down on anything like that like a shot. What’s she done,
then?’

‘I’m afraid she’s dead.’

Oh. I thought I hadn’t seen her around for a while,’ said the guard, and it wasn’t even a joke. Such, Slider thought, was
her epitaph, this enigmatic girl.

‘Do you remember when you last saw her?’

The guard shook his head. ‘Must have been a few weeks ago. I never saw much of her anyway, but it’s like that in these flats.
People don’t draw attention to themselves. Besides, there’s nothing to notice in a resident coming in or out. Strangers I’d
notice – you know how it is.’

‘What happens about visitors?’

‘Anyone who comes in comes to the desk, and we make a note of it before we ring up to the flat, for security reasons. You
can have a look at the books if you like. But of course if a resident brings in a guest themselves, there’s no note kept.’

‘I see. Well, I’d like to have a look at those books afterwards, but for the moment I’d like to see the flat. You have a key,
I suppose?’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll get the pass key. I’ll have to come up with you, though, and let you in. Regulations.’

‘Are you allowed to leave your desk?’

For five minutes, yes, sir. I lock the outer door, then anyone who comes has to ring and I hear them on this.’ He patted the
portable phone on his hip.

‘Very security-conscious, aren’t they?’

‘Well, sir, there’s a lot of influential people in these apartments.’

‘Was Miss Austen an influential person?’

‘I don’t know exactly, sir. She didn’t look it. I thought at first she was someone’s mistress, but then she didn’t seem the
type. I suppose she must have been somebody’s daughter.’

The sleek, silent lift smelled of wealth, and the door to the penthouse flat was solid wood with brass fittings and an impressive
array of locks and bolts and chains.

‘We needn’t keep you,’ Slider said kindly as the guard hesitated. ‘You can trust us to leave everything as we find it.’

‘Yes sir. When you’re ready to leave, if you wouldn’t mind ringing down to me, and I’ll come up and lock the door again. That’s
the house phone over there, the white one. And if you need anything else, of course.’

When he had gone, Norma padded further in and let out a soundless whistle. ‘Boy oh boy, it’s like a set off
Dallas.
Where did she get the money for a setup like this?’

‘Thompson thought smuggling. Beevers thinks blackmail.’

‘Impossible. It must have been something bigger – and more secure – than that. Dope distribution or something?’ Slider shrugged.
‘And why did she keep it on once she’d left the Orchestra?’

‘Perhaps,’ Slider said absently, ‘it was her home.’

Home. Something Anne-Marie had never known much about; a word you would find it hard to apply to this place. Norma had got
it right when she said
Dallas –
it was like a filmset, not like real life at all. It was furnished with the great expense, but with no individuality, and
it was cold, impersonal. He wandered about, looking, touching, feeling faintly sick with distress. Thick pale carpets – skyscraper
views over Birmingham through the huge, plate-glass windows – white leather sofas. A giant bed with a slippery quilted satin
bedspread – teak and brass furniture – a huge, heavy, smoked glass coffee-table. A cocktail cabinet, for God’s sake, and expensive,
amorphous modern pictures on the walls.

It was like nothing in real life. It was utterly bogus. It was, he realised in a flash, the sort of thing a person with no
experience might imagine they would like if they were very rich – a child’s dream of a Hollywood Home. His mouth began to
turn down bitterly.

‘Sir?’ Norma was standing by a bookcase in the corner of the living-room. He went over, and she handed him
A Woman of Substance by
Barbara Taylor Bradford. ‘It was on television a while back, d’you remember?’

‘Yes,’ Slider said. ‘Irene used to watch it.’

‘It’s about a kitchenmaid who rises to be head of a business empire. They used the real Harrods in the film as the department
store she ended up owning.’

‘Yes, I heard about it.’

‘Rags to riches,’ Normal went on. ‘And look at these others – all the same kind of thing – sagas about wealthy, powerful women.
It’s the modern escapist fiction for women: luxurious settings, jetsetting heroines who are as ruthless and
ambitious as men, and make fortunes and manipulate the lives of their minions.’

‘Yes,’ Slider said, looking around the room again. ‘It fits.’

He saw it now. He stared at the row of crudely coloured, mental boiled sweets on the bookshelf before him and saw Anne-Marie,
orphaned as a young child, brought up by an aunt who resented her, sent off to boarding school to get her out of the way,
foisted off on a governess during school holidays. He saw her as a child with no friends, horribly lonely, perhaps dogged
by a sense of failure because she could not make people love her, turning to books as a refuge, entering a world where things
could go the way she wanted them to: a world where the unpopular girl scored the vital goal at hockey and became the school’s
heroine; where the poor girl saved someone’s life and was given a pony of her own. Then in adolescence, perhaps she turned
to the stronger meat of romances, where the hero took off the plain girl’s glasses and murmured, ‘God, but you’re lovely!’;
and in young womanhood to the candyfloss of the Eighties, the power-woman sagas.

Somehow temptation had come her way, a chance to enter a life of excitement and intrigue and make large sums of money; to
be, as she probably saw it, rich, successful and powerful. Why should she refuse? It was illegal, but then who cared about
her? Who would be hurt by her failure to be honest? Perhaps she even relished the idea of getting back at the law-abiding
people of her childhood who had failed to love her.

He turned from the bookshelves, and imagined her alone here in this shiny, sterile apartment, feeding her vanity of riches
and her illusions on pulp fiction, and fighting back the growing conviction that it was all a lie, that her new ‘friends’
were only using her and cared nothing for her. Was that why she had suddenly tried to marry Thompson, to get hold of her inheritance
so that she could escape from the trap she had stepped into so willingly?

Pathetic attempt. The people she was involved with would be ruthless as no fictional characters were. They would not allow
her to defect; and at the last moment, he thought, she
had realised that. He remembered Martin Cutts’s description of the last time he had seen her alone, and of her ‘resignation’
afterwards. Perhaps, until the very last moment, she had not minded the thought of dying, since life held so little for her.

He had been standing with the book in his hand staring ahead of him at nothing, but now he became aware that something was
calling his attention, nagging at the periphery of his mind. He stood still and let it seep in. He was facing the open door
into the kitchen, a showroom affair of antiqued pine cupboards and white marble surfaces and overhead units with leaded-light
doors, and through the glass of the end cupboard, the one in his line of vision, he could see a vague shape and colour that
were naggingly familiar.

‘Yes,’ he said abruptly, thrust the book into Norma’s hand, crossed to the cupboard and snatched open the door. There it was
in the corner: the familiar shape of the tin and haunting depiction of the goitrous peasants and the caring, sharing olive
trees, and the large and gaudy letters VIRGIN GREEN. He picked up the tin triumphantly and turned with it in his hands.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Virgin Green.’

‘What is it, sir?’ Norma asked, but without much hope of reply. She knew these moods of his, when a lot was going in and nothing
much coming out.

‘Virgin Green. There’s got to be a connection.’ And then he saw what he had not noticed before, or at least had not taken
in, which was the name and address of the manufacturer, in truly tiny letters at the bottom of the back of the tin: Olio d’ltalia,
9 Calle le Paradiso, Firenze.

Slider began to laugh.

Atherton paused outside Vincey’s of Bond Street and allowed himself to be impressed. It was either very old, or very well
faked, all mahogany and curly gold lettering, and the window display was austere. A heavy, blue velvet curtain hung from a
wooden rail half way up at the back of the window, preventing anyone from seeing inside the shop, and its lower end was folded
forward in elegant swathes to make
a bed for the single article on display – a sixteenth-century lute on a mahogany stand.

Inside the shop was dark, and smelled dusty but expensive. An old Turkish carpet in dim shades of wine-red and brown covered
the floor between the door and the old-fashioned high counter which ran the width of the shop. Around the walls were a few
heavy, old-fashioned display cases containing a few curiously uninteresting ancient instruments. The atmosphere was arcane,
fusty, and eminently respectable. Atherton supposed that ancient instruments must be of interest to somebody, or how could
Vincey’s continue to function? But the setup seemed precarious in the extreme, considering what rents and rates must be like
in Bond Street.

The door had chimed musically when he opened and closed it, and by the time he reached the counter a man had come through
the curtained door that led to the nether regions and was regarding him politely. He was small and shrunken and looked about
sixty-five, though his face was sharpened by the brightness of his dark eyes behind gold-rimmed half-glasses, and distinguished
by an impressive beak of a nose. He had a little straggly grey hair and a great deal of bare pink pate, on the extremity of
which he wore an embroidered Jewish skullcap. The rest of his clothes were shabby and shapeless and no-coloured so that, given
his surroundings, one might suppose he wore them as a sort of protective colouring. If he kept still, Atherton thought, only
his eyes would give away his whereabouts.

‘Mr Saloman?’ Atherton was not really in any doubt. If ever a man looked like a Mr Saloman, it was he.

‘Saloman of Vincey’s,’ said the man, as if it were a title, like Nelson of Burnham Thorpe. His hands, which had been down
at his sides, came up and rested side by side on the edge of the counter on their fingertips. He had the ridged and chalky
fingernails of an old man, and his fingers were pointed and the skin shiny and brown, as if they had been rubbed to a patina
by years of handling old wood. As they rested there, Atherton had the curious feeling that they had climbed up of their own
accord to have a look at him. It unnerved him, and made him draw an extra breath before beginning.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said as cheerfully as his normally cheerful face could contrive. ‘I wonder if you could tell me if you
have ever had any dealings with this young lady.’

Saloman did not at once take the proffered photograph. First he subjected Atherton’s face to a prolonged examination; and
when at last one of his hands relinquished its fingertip grip of the counter and came towards him, Atherton found his own
hand shrinking back in reluctance to come into contact with those pointed, brown, animal fingers. Saloman took the photograph
and studied it in silence for some moments, while Atherton watched him and formed the opinion that behind the old, hooknosed,
impassive façade a very sharp mind was rapidly turning over the possibilities and wondering whether it would be better to
know or not to know. Yes, I’m on to something, Atherton thought, with that rapid process of association and deduction which
he thought was instinct.