Orchestrated Death (7 page)

He disentangled himself with diminishing patience and went upstairs after Slider, to find that his superior had already opened
the flat door and gone in.

‘Who needs keys,’ he said aloud. ‘What was it this time – Barclaycard or Our Flexible Friend?’ He examined the lock. It was
a very old Yale, and the door had shrunk in its frame, leaving it loose, so that the tongue of the lock was barely retained
by the keeper. He shook his head.
Morceau de gateau,
opening that.

The door opened directly into a large attic room furnished both as living-room and bedroom. It was indecently tidy, the bed
neatly made. Slider was sitting on it playing back the answering machine, which stood with the telephone on a bedside table.

He looked up as Atherton came in. ‘Three clicks, and a female called Only Me saying she’d call back. Get anything from the
old lady?’

‘Nothing, again nothing. The girl went out in the morning and didn’t come back. The rest is silence.’

Slider shook his head. ‘She must have come back at some point – there’s her violin in the corner.’

Atherton looked. ‘Unless she had a spare.’

‘Oh. Yes.’

The violin case was propped on its end in the corner of the room nearest the window. In front of it there was a music stand
adjusted to standing height, on which stood open a book of practice studies. From a distance the music looked like an army
of caterpillars crawling over the page. On the floor was other music scattered as if it had been dropped,
and on a low table under the window was yet more, together with a metronome, a box containing a block of resin, two yellow
dusters and a large silk handkerchief patterned in shades of brown and purple, three pencils of varying length, a glass ashtray
containing an India rubber, six paper clips and a pencil-sharpener, and an octavo-sized manuscript book with nothing written
in it at all It was the only untidy, living, lived-in corner of the flat.

Apart from the bedsitting room there was a kitchen and a bathroom. Together they went over every inch and found nothing. There
were clothes in the wardrobe and in drawers, including three black, full-length evening dresses – her working clothes, Atherton
explained. There were a few books and a lot of records, and even more audio-tapes, some commercial, some home-made. There
were odds and ends and ornaments, a cheap quartz carriage clock, a plaster model of the leaning tower of Pisa, some interesting
sea-shells, a nightdress case in the shape of a rabbit, a sugar bowl full of potpourri – but there were no papers. Diary,
address book, letters, bills, personal documents, old cheque books – anything that might have given any clue to Anne-Marie’s
life had been taken.

‘He got the lot,’ Atherton said, slamming an empty drawer shut. ‘Bastard.’

‘He was very thorough,’ Slider said, ‘and yet Mrs Gostyn said he was only here five or ten minutes. I wonder if he knew his
way around?’

The bathroom revealed soap, face cloth, towels, spare toilet rolls, bath essence – she seemed to have had a preference for
The Body Shop – and no secrets. The medicine cabinet at first appeared cheeringly full, but it turned out to contain only
aspirin, insect repellent, Diocalm, a very large bottle of kaolin and morphia, travel-sickness pills, half a packet of Coldrex,
a packet of ten Tampax with one missing, a bottle of Optrex, four different sorts of suntan lotion, and three opened packets
of Elastoplast. On the top of the cupboard stood a bottle of TCP, another of Listerine, a spare tube of Mentadent toothpaste,
unopened, and right at the back and rather dusty, another packet of Elastoplast.

‘No mysterious packages of white powder,’ Slider said
sadly. ‘No syringe. Not even a tell-tale packet of cigarette papers.’

‘But at least we have established some facts,’ Atherton said, dusting off his hands. ‘We know now that she was female, below
menopausal age, travelled abroad, and cut herself a lot.’

‘Don’t be misled by appearances,’ Slider said darkly.

The kitchen was long and narrow, with the usual sort of built-in units along one wall, sink under the window, fridge and gas
stove. ‘No washing machine,’ Atherton said. ‘I suppose she used the launderette.’

‘Look in the cupboards.’

‘I’m looking. Sometimes I dig for buttered rolls. Does it occur to you that we’ve nothing to go on in this case, nothing at
all?’

‘It occurs to me.’

There was a good stock of dry goods, herbs and spices, tea and coffee, rice and sugar, but little in the way of fresh food.
A bottle of milk in the fridge was open and part-used but still fresh. There were five eggs, two packs of unsalted butter,
a wrapped sliced loaf, and a piece of hard cheese wrapped in tin foil.

‘She wasn’t intending to eat at home that night, at any rate,’ said Slider.

As he straightened up the word VIRGIN caught his eye, and he turned towards it. Behind the bread bin in the far corner of
the work surface were two tins of olive oil, like diminutive petrol cans. They were brightly, not to say gaudily, decorated
in primary colours depicting a rustic scene: goitrous peasants with manic grins were gathering improbable olives the size
of avocados, from trees which, if trees could smile, would have been positively hilarious with good health and good will towards
the gatherers.

Atherton, following his gaze, read the words on the face of the front tin. ‘VIRGIN GREEN – Premium Olive Oil – First Pressing
– Produce of Italy.’ He pushed the bread bin out of the way. ‘Two tins? She must have been fond of Italian food.’

The words set up echoes in Slider’s mind of his lunchtime fantasy about her. Coincidence.

‘She was,’ he said. ‘Packets of dried pasta and tubes of tomato purée in the cupboard.’

Atherton gave an admiring look. ‘What a detective you’d have made, sir.’

Slider smiled kindly. ‘And a lump of Parmesan cheese in the fridge.’

Atherton lifted the second tin and hefted it; unscrewed the lid and peered in, tilting it this way and that, and then applied
a nostril to the opening and sniffed. ‘Empty. Looks as though it’s been washed out, too, or never used. I wonder why she kept
it?’

‘Perhaps she thought it was pretty.’

‘You jest, of course.’ He turned it round. ‘Virgin Green, indeed. It sounds like a film title. Science fiction, maybe. Or
pornography – but we know she wasn’t interested in pornography.’

‘Do we?’ Slider said incautiously.

‘Of course. She didn’t have a pornograph.’

Slider wandered back into the living-room and stared about him, his usual anxious frown deepening between his brows. Atherton
stood in the doorway and watched him. ‘I don’t think we’re going to find anything. It all looks very professional’

‘Somebody went to a lot of trouble,’ Slider said. ‘There must have been something very important they didn’t want us to know
about. But what?’

‘Drugs,’ said Atherton, and when Slider looked at him, he shrugged. ‘Well, it always is these days, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. But I don’t think so. This doesn’t smell that way to me.’

Atherton waited for enlightenment and didn’t get it. ‘Have you got a hunch, guv?’ he asked. No answer. ‘Or is it just the
way you stand?’

But Slider merely grunted. He walked across to the music corner, the only place with any trace of Anne-Marie’s personality
about it, and picked up the violin case, sat down on the bed with it across his knees, opened it. The violin glowed darkly
against the electric-blue plush of the lining with the unmistakable patina of age. It looked warm and somehow alive, inviting
to the touch, like the rump of a well-groomed
bay horse. In the rests of the lid were slung two violin bows, and behind them was tucked a snapshot. Slider pulled it out
and turned it to the light to examine it.

It was taken on a beach in some place where the sun was hot enough to make the shadows very short and underfoot. A typical
amateur holiday snapshot, featuring the shoulder and flank of a lean young man in bathing-trunks disappearing out of the edge
of the picture, and Anne-Marie in the centre in a red bikini, one hand resting on the anonymous shoulder. She was laughing,
her eyes screwed up with amusement and sea-dazzle, her head tilted back so that her dark bob of hair fell back from her throat.
Her other hand was flung out – to balance her, perhaps – and was silhouetted sharply against the dark-blue sea in the background
like a small, white starfish. She looked as though she hadn’t a care in the world; her youthful innocence seemed the epitome
of what being young ought to be like, and so seldom was.

Slider stared at it hungrily, trying to blot out the memory of her small abandoned body lying dead in that grim and dingy,
empty flat.
Murdered
But why? The white starfish hand, pinned for ever against time in that casual snapshot, had rested finally against the old
and splintered wood of those dusty floorboards. She was so young and pretty. What could she possibly have known or done to
warrant her death? Not fair, not fair. She laughed at him out of the photograph, and he had only ever known her dead.

One thing he was sure about – there was an organisation behind her death. That was bad news for him: if they were good, they’d
have second-guessed him all the way along the line. But however good they were, they would have made one mistake. A benign
God saw to that – one mistake, to give the good guys a chance, that was the rule. There was a good sensible reason for it,
of course – that the criminals were working to a finite time-scale, and the investigators had for ever more to investigate
– but Slider believed in a benign God anyway. He had to, to make sense of his world at all.

Atherton had evinced no interest in the photograph, but was staring intently at the violin. He took it from the case and turned
it over carefully, and then said hesitantly, ‘Guv?’
Slider looked up. ‘I think this violin might be something rather special.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m no expert, but it’s got A. Stradivarius written on it.’

Slider stared. ‘You mean it’s a Stradivarius?’

Atherton shrugged. ‘I said I’m no expert.’

‘It might be a fake.’

‘It might. But if it were genuine –’

Slider noticed, as he had noticed before, how even under stress Atherton’s grammar did not desert him. ‘Yes, if it were,’
he agreed.

One mistake. Could this be it?

‘Take it. Find out,’ he said. ‘Find out what it’s worth. But for God’s sake be careful with it.’

‘Tell your grandmother,’ Atherton said, replacing it with awed hands. ‘What now?’

‘I’m going to see her best friend. You realise we still don’t have a next of kin, thanks to Inspector Petrie? So it’s the
Barbican for me.’

‘Wouldn’t you like me to go for you? Concert halls are more my province than yours.’

‘It’ll be good for me to widen my experience,’ Slider said. ‘Rôle reversal.’

‘That’s dangerous,’ said Atherton. ‘The filling might fall out.’

Slider left his car in the Barbican car park and immediately got lost. He had heard tales of how impossible it was to find
your way around in there, and had assumed they were exaggerated: He found a security guard and asked directions, was sent
through some swing doors and got lost again. He entered a lift which had been designed, disconcertingly, only to stop at alternate
floors, and eventually, with a sense of profound relief, emerged into the car park where he had begun. At least now I know
where I am, he thought, even if I don’t know where I’ve just been.

He was contemplating his next move when the sound of footsteps made him turn, and he saw a woman coming towards him carrying
a violin case. His heart lifted, and he went towards her like an American tourist in London who has just spotted the Savoy
Hotel.

‘Are you a member of the Orchestra? Can you tell me how to get to the backstage area from here?’

She stopped and looked at him – looked up at him in fact, for she was about six inches shorter than him, which made Slider,
who was not a tall man, feel agreeably large and powerful.

‘I can’t tell you, but I can take you,’ she said pleasantly. ‘It is a rabbit warren, isn’t it? Did you know it’s even given
rise to a new verb – to be Barbicanned?’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Slider said, falling in beside her as she set off with brisk steps.

‘They ought to issue us with balls of thread really. I only
know one route, and I stick to it. One diversion, and I’d never be found again.’ She glanced sideways at him. ‘I’m not actually
a member of the Orchestra, but I’m playing with them today. You’re not a musician, are you.’

It was plainly a statement, not a question. Slider merely said no, without elaborating, and continued to examine her covertly.
Though small she had a real figure, proper womanly curves which he knew were not fashionable but which, being married to a
thin and uncommodious woman, he liked the look of. She was dressed in white trousers, pale blue plimsolls, a blue velvet bomber
jacket, and a teeshirt horizontally striped in pale – and dark-blue. Her clothes were attractive on her, but seemed somehow
eccentric, though he couldn’t quite decide why. It made it difficult to deduce anything about her.

She led him through a steel door in the concrete wall and down a flight of stairs of streaked and dimly lit desolation. On
the landing she suddenly stopped and looked up at him.

‘I say, I’ve just realised – I bet you’re looking for me anyway. Are you Inspector Slider?’

She regarded him with bright-eyed and unaffected friendliness, something he had rarely come across since becoming a policeman.
Her face was framed with heavy, rough-cut gold hair which looked as though it might have been trimmed with hedge-cutters,
and he suddenly realised what it was about her that made her seem eccentric. Her clothes were youthful, her face innocent
of make-up, her whole appearance casual and easy and confident, and yet she was not young. He had never seen a woman of her
age less disguised or protected against the critical eyes of the world. And framed by a background of as much squalor as modern
building techniques could devise, she gazed at him without hostility or even reserve, with the calm candour of a child, as
if she simply wanted to know what he was like.