Authors: Elizabeth Corley
Requiem Mass (48 page)
‘A small accident. It looks more dramatic than it is. Where’s your maid?’
‘I gave her a holiday until Monday. She only moped around getting on our nerves. It’s a small house, we really didn’t need her.’
Nightingale, hurriedly dressed in jeans and cotton shirt, came in with a tray of tea. There were three mugs, one with a Snoopy cartoon on the side – the little yellow bird was twittering in the dog’s water bowl. She stirred the light brown liquid and handed it to Octavia. The singer grinned.
‘My mug,’ she said, lifting it vaguely in Fenwick’s direction. ‘Rather different from my bone china at home. We thought the singing bird appropriate.’
‘I would’ve thought that should have been Nightingale’s.’
Neither of the women appeared to see the joke. There was silence.
‘I want to talk to you about Monday.’
‘We’ve been through this before, Andrew. I’m going to sing.’
‘Yes, I know.’ He was irritated by her use of his Christian name in front of the policewoman. ‘We need to discuss safety measures.’
‘You think he’s still going to make an attempt? I had heard differently.’
The ACC’s wife must have been talking to the organising committee.
‘Yes I do.’
She stared moodily at the glowing electric bar. ‘I agree with you. He won’t give up.’
‘Which is why we must discuss security. Firstly, I want you to wear a vest.’
Anderson burst out laughing, her body quivering gently beneath the thin robe.
‘I mean a bullet-proof vest.’
‘I know what you mean, Andrew, but I can’t do that. I’m there to sing, to perform. My voice has to fill the cathedral, reach into their hearts. I can’t have it trapped inside a vest!’ She laughed again.
‘You must reconsider. You have to realise, there is no way we can guarantee your safety.’
‘I know that.’ There was no laughter now. ‘I know you can’t. But – and I don’t mean this as a burden, Andrew – I trust you. If anyone can stop this man, you can.’
Fenwick’s stomach twisted painfully even as he admired her ability to manipulate. They talked for another half-hour, touching on security arrangements, how they would handle the rehearsal and her journey to the cathedral. Fenwick felt a fraud. He was not even in charge any more. They had only accepted him back in an ‘advisory capacity’ and here he was making commitments, planning, giving reassurances. He would have to pass it all on to Cooper to follow up.
‘He was planning on using the triforium, the gallery over the nave. We’ll have people up there all the time. Cooper, Nightingale and I will all be there.’
‘Sir, I’ve been thinking about my role, where I should be. I could sit close by Octavia, just below the platform or even in the choir. I could be looking out over the audience and be right on hand if anything starts to happen.’
Octavia reached over and touched Nightingale’s hand gently.
‘It should be an armed officer, not you.’
‘There will be AFOs around too; I’m talking about acting like a personal assistant or something.’
Fenwick thought hard. Wherever she was there could be danger and she was right, there would be plenty of firepower around.
‘Very well then, but you wear a vest.’
The long Sunday passed in a blur of activity. Police weaving among contractors and tourists were taken aback by the religious services and dedicated worshippers in the cathedral, surprised to see the historical monument assume an older purpose.
Airport-style security gates were being set up at the main entrances; other doors were locked and guarded. A tiny office was turned over to the police. The ACC visited, conferred and went, leaving behind Inspector Blite as his local ‘anchorman’. Fenwick stayed, tacking large-scale plans of the cathedral and close to the walls of the office. Constant supplies of good coffee and fruit cake were delivered to the police team by a small army of ladies, ‘friends’ of the cathedral, all of whom seemed to share the common expression of an old, anxious hamster startled out of a comfy snooze.
Rehearsals started in the afternoon; first choirs and orchestra separately, and then together. The air crackled with tension, the sounds distorted and marred by the occasional barks of sniffer dogs or calls from the police. There were tears in the youth choir sopranos and a highly uncharacteristic expletive from the leader.
Fenwick left for home late in the evening. He was hungry and tired, and his stomach growled from an excess of strong coffee and sweet cake. He missed Bess and Chris; wanted more than anything to cuddle them and enjoy their simple health and innocence. Chris was so much better and Bess, as always, a treasure.
But his mind wouldn’t settle. Everything that could have been done in preparation had been done. There had been no sightings of Rowland. The ACC was working the search teams twenty-four hours a day with no results. Rowland had simply disappeared.
Fenwick knew that his mother, refreshed from her holiday, would have a meal ready, and that the children would still be up awaiting his return, but even so, for some reason he could not face home. As he drove his car like a robot back from the cathedral, his mind worried through endless lists of things that had or had not been done. He felt guilty for leaving the cathedral, sure that his place should be there, but logic told him he was a spare part, kidding himself. His head ached badly and his joints and back had stiffened as bruises came out. His wrist had been bandaged by one of the old ladies and it throbbed intolerably. He needed a break. It would be more important to be thinking straight in the morning, and anyway, the team at the cathedral only had so much tolerance for an ‘adviser’ and he had exhausted it all.
Anderson’s words came back to him: ‘I trust you. If anyone can stop this man, you can.’ He saw her calm face, oval eyes looking at him with complete trust, with none of the shadows that had aged and haunted her the week before. He felt sick.
He drew up in front of the towering limes. Their dense shadows screened the streetlamps’ light from the tiny house. Nightingale answered the door. He had forgotten she would be there.
‘Have you been cooped up here all day?’
‘Er, yes … of course.’
‘How do you expect to be at your best tomorrow? Go out and get some fresh air, go to the pub, have a drink.’
‘What?’ Her eyes narrowed in anger at his implied criticism and pre-emptory advice; he was too tense for it to sound avuncular. She felt like telling him that thanks to his investigation, she had no one to go out for a drink with that evening. Her fiancé was still away on what should have been their shared vacation. He hadn’t called and there had been no card. She felt
sick whenever she thought about what he might be doing, and with whom, and even worse when she contemplated his return. No one knew about her automatic sacrifice but suddenly, childishly, she wanted them to and to make a fuss of her about it. She swallowed the thought but couldn’t prevent her reply being made bitter by its taste.
‘I’m fine; I don’t need fresh air. I’m perfectly relaxed and rested.’
‘You need a change of scene. I’m telling you.’
‘But—’
‘No buts. Go and get a jacket. I’ll hang on here for a couple of hours. Off you go.’
Nightingale opened her mouth to speak but bit down hard on the inside of her bottom lip instead. Her jacket was hanging on a hook in the hall; she grabbed it and was gone.
‘What was all that about?’ Octavia appeared at the door to the tiny lounge, lamplight behind her. She was wearing a black cashmere sweater and leopard-print leggings. Fenwick caught his breath.
‘I’ve sent young Nightingale out for a breath of fresh air.’
‘Oh.’
He stood stupidly in the hall, waiting for her move. She just stared back, an unfathomable smile on her face. The urge that had driven him to her became caught up in a mixture of embarrassment and resentment. Struggling free he turned to go.
‘This is stupid. I don’t know why I came … I’ll see myself out.’
‘Wait, you can’t. I’m on my own. Where’s my protection?’ She laughed.
His arms were around her, his lips bruising hers, his tongue searched her mouth desperately. She responded at once, a low gurgle in her throat that could have been passion or triumph. He didn’t care. Her hands were running painfully down his back, moving from a trace of fingertips on his neck to kneading, urgent palms, pushing their hips together. She was tall. They stood almost shoulder to shoulder, chest to breast, thigh to thigh.
In her bedroom they kept the light off and the curtains open. A half-moon had risen over the trees to show fitfully between high clouds, throwing a silver-blue twilight on to the bed. Her skin shone pure white, blood-red nipples black in the moon’s fire, counterpoints to the rich luxuriously curling hair between her thighs. He stood above her, fixed by her beauty again, as he had been in France.
Thoughts of her body and their love-making had filled his dreams since the high summer. Now he could not escape the feeling of being caught up in another hopeless dream – Octavia transformed from the glowing queen of Mediterranean suns to an ice maiden, pure, deadly and utterly desirable. In his confusion he expected to wake up sweating, so painfully erect that the ache would last into the day.
He fell on her with a groan, penetrating her at once. She cried out briefly in pain and surprise but was immediately carried on by his remorseless rhythm.
Her long red fingernails dug into his back, leaving deep welts. Slim elastic legs wrapped around his hips, locking him in a compulsive embrace. They fused into one pulsing animal, cries, grunts, gasps for breath forced out as their passion became intense. Fenwick could not stop; a tiny pinpoint in his brain was trying to shout at him that this was wrong – she was wrong – but it was drowned out by his own cries and her crude shouts of encouragement.
A pressure was building inside him, starting at the base of his spine, pushing into all his muscles, squeezing his heart, filling his head as it grew, culminating in an urgent, incessant swelling in his groin. He felt the explosion as it happened, travelling up, through, out of him into her at the same time as her own climax rushed to meet him, overflow him. He looked down into her wide-eyed staring face as she howled silently at the moon.
They remained locked, rocking for long moments, bodies impossibly entwined. Fenwick looked into Octavia’s face, so close to his own that he could feel her breath tickle his cheek. Her eyes had closed, the lids pure white, fringed by dark
hemispheres of lashes. Her mouth was open, a black hole in the flatness of her face. The cloud in front of the moon shifted suddenly, its light creating a ghost of the warm, living flesh beneath him. The effect was enough to make him shudder.
‘Cold?’ She was looking at him again steadily from dark, expressionless pools.
‘Just a little. How about you?’
‘Mmm, a bit.’ She unwrapped endless limbs from around him and stretched. They were still joined firmly at the hips and she raised hers suggestively against his. He winced from the pain in his back.
‘You needed that.’
‘Didn’t you?’ His voice was husky, broken.
The sphinx looked back at him and smiled.
Nightingale returned as the late news was finishing, banging the front door and bringing with her the seductive aroma of fish and chips.
‘Supper?’
‘Mmm, yummy; I’m starved.’ Octavia jumped up and switched off the television. She followed Nightingale into the fluorescence of the kitchen, their joint laughter echoing back into the room.
‘Do you want some, Andrew? There’s plenty,’ she called out above the clink of cutlery, the sounds of a table being laid.
‘No, thank you. I’ll be going.’
‘Are you sure?’ She returned to find him in the hall.
‘Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He tried to make the words sound normal.
She gave him her everyday smile as she showed him out. As he walked down the sticky, gloomy path, he could still hear their laughter from the kitchen and wondered if he was their subject.
Monday, September 6th was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Downside School. A charity school, it had been established in a burst of optimistic determination by Counsellor De Weir, a local businessman too old to have been sent to war but too young not to fear the consequences for the nation of the destruction of so many gifted adolescents.
The school originally had one teacher, one class of fourteen pupils of mixed ages, and met in a converted coach house. Miss Saunders, the first teacher, had been in her early thirties. Like many of her age and class, she faced a future of spinsterhood brightly and bravely, having lost her fiancé in 1916. School became her family, the class her children, and she devoted to their general and specific education a determination and imagination that won over the largely agricultural parents and pupils it was her lot to improve.
By chance, Miss Saunders was a proficient pianist whose skill had become increasingly accomplished in long hours of practice since the August of 1916. It was also coincidence that two of her pupils, the Mason twins, turned out to have perfect pitch and delightful tenor voices. Thus the Christmas school concerts attracted audiences well beyond the village. Mr De Weir, not a musical man, was happy to accept the congratulations and his career in local politics blossomed. When he became mayor he bestowed a musical endowment on the school, and a further award to be made available to support the artistic development of any truly exceptional pupil. The school’s place
in local musical education was secured.
The school had a heritage and one of which the governors were both jealous and proud. Octavia Anderson was their greatest achievement and on their anniversary they had been determined to show, or rather show off to, the world. Selecting Verdi’s
Requiem
was daring, a few said foolhardy. It was a challenging work for orchestra, choir and all the four soloists – soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor and bass. Attracting Octavia Anderson to sing had been a coup, worth all the uncertainty of whether she would, finally, turn up.
