Murder Fortissimo (10 page)

Looking increasingly uncertain, and very frail, Fred Buchan allowed Sam to usher him into the entrance to the crypt. The old man took hold of the railing and leaned forward, staring in astonishment.

‘What in God’s name is that?’ The question burst out in spite of his reserve, the hoarse croak echoing in the underground chamber. He indicated the life-sized statue standing a few yards in front of them. It was the figure of a man, very simply made, with his head bent towards hands upheld in front of his chest.

Sam felt his throat constrict as the statue, as always, took him unawares. ‘It’s by the sculptor, Anthony Gormley,’ he explained. ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it? And look, you can see the vaulting of the roof reflected in the water.’

There was no reply, and as Fred seemed rooted to the spot, Sam leaned against the back wall and watched and waited. Five minutes, ten minutes; it was getting very cold and Sam was beginning to feel cramped. Had Fred, in this modern masterpiece in its mediaeval setting, found whatever it was he sought? Did the statue ‘speak’ to him?

Just as Sam realized he could barely feel his feet, and decided that he really had to interrupt the old man’s silent vigil, Fred sighed and straightened his shoulders. As he turned away from the light Sam was yet able to detect the trace of tears on the furrowed cheeks and his kind heart was wrung.

‘We go now,’ was all the other man said but at the door he looked back at the metal man, a kind of longing engraved on his face.

Silently, Sam escorted his passenger back through the great,
echoing building and out to the car. Whatever Fred Buchan had needed, Sam thought he had found
something
, though what it was, Sam had no idea.

‘What?’ At the other end of the line Neil sounded flabbergasted at Harriet’s question, as well he might. She grinned wryly, picturing his expression. He’ll be calling for the men in white coats any day now. She repeated her query with some acerbity to disguise her own qualms.

‘It’s simple enough surely, Neil? All I want you to do is to find out, tactfully, from the euphonium player, whether there were any threads of black cotton attached to his instrument. I think he was the first one on the scene, I seem to remember the poor soul nearly tumbling out of the gallery after the horn, in what must have been a desperate, but forlorn, attempt to catch it.’

‘Well, I’ll try,’ agreed Neil, sounding very doubtful. ‘But I really don’t understand what you’re on about. Care to explain, Harriet?’

‘Certainly not,’ came the sharp reply. ‘But I’d be really grateful, Neil, if you’d do that for me as quickly as possible.’ She was about to switch off her mobile when a thought struck her. ‘Have you thought about Christmas, Neil? I mean, about what Alice is going to do?’

He grunted in surprise and she hastily explained. ‘It’s just that Sam is going to be staying with me, I’m going home on Monday and it occurred to me that Alice might like to come too. Please tell her she’d be very welcome and you could easily see her there.’

She thought he sounded amused as well as touched by her idea. ‘It’s a kind thought, Harriet, but don’t worry, I’ve got everything in hand. I rang the coroner’s office and the
post-mortem’s
been done. It’s as everyone expected, you might call
it Death by Euphonium! Anyway, that being the case, and the insurance people seem disposed to be happy enough, the powers that be have OK’d the cremation to go ahead on Monday morning at nine o’clock. That’ll be the first one of the day, no publicity, no audience, no fuss, just us, which is what Alice wants, with Sam to conduct the service. Once that’s over I’ve booked us both on a flight to Fiji.’

He interrupted her exclamation with a chuckle. ‘I thought the sooner she was out of all this the better and Fiji was the nicest place the travel shop came up with at such short notice. We’ll have a night in San Francisco, lose twenty-four hours crossing the International Date Line over the Pacific and bingo! South seas, palm trees, coral beaches, paradise.’

She began to speak, then faltered, realizing that Neil had misinterpreted her silence as he laughed aloud. ‘It’s all right, Harriet, my intentions are entirely honourable. It’s very early days, I know, but I’m hoping that when all this is behind us Alice will be ready to think about maybe getting married. But just for now I want to take her right away from here. After all, it’s been pretty grim just recently and from what I can gather, Alice hasn’t had any fun since her father died. I think she deserves a treat.’

Harriet summoned up the right amount of enthusiasm and congratulated him on his cleverness. He rang off, leaving her to tuck her mobile into her bag with a heavy heart. The knowledge that Sam, too, had been visited by doubts about Alice somehow made everything so much worse. If I prove to be right about how it could have been done, she thought drearily, that puts Alice right back there with all my other suspects.

They’re all back in the running now.

Christiane Marchant’s room at Firstone Grange had been locked after the concert; nobody was quite sure why but it seemed the right thing to do. When the news had come from the Coroner’s Office Gemma had been sent upstairs to clean the room ready for the next guest. She wasn’t sure whether she was glad or sorry. On the one hand it was a huge relief to know that she would never again be caught unawares by that hated voice with its faint trace of an accent, whispering in her ear. Balancing that knowledge, though, was the fact that death, horrible death at that, had loomed uncomfortably close.

I hated her, Gemma shuddered, and I’m glad she’s dead, but I don’t want to touch her things. Was it her imagination or was there a faint suggestion of perfume and sweat as she whipped the sheets off the bed? Gemma didn’t mind the usual smells, inevitably some of the residents had a little problem, with one or two of the men suffering agonies of embarrassment about their prostate dribbles, while the women were more stoical about their stress incontinence. That was natural enough but this, this was a personal smell that sent shivers down her spine and recalled the sly, smiling menace, in spite of the bliss of knowing that Mrs Marchant could never frighten her again.

But she could, couldn’t she?

Gemma froze for a moment, bent double as she hooked out a slipper from under the bed. Ryan. Ryan had been there. Ryan might have done … something. The small, terrified idea that was hiding inside her mind reared its ugly head and looked out, didn’t like what it saw, and squirrelled back into its hidey-hole.

I won’t think about it. I won’t.

Unbidden, the thought of her mother sprang to mind. Bossy old bag with a sharp, sometimes vicious tongue on her, much too interfering, but Mum nonetheless. And it had to be admitted that it was Mum who had seen through Ryan’s glossy surface enamel and hadn’t liked what she saw.

A whimper escaped Gemma. I want Mum.

‘Gemma?’

The girl was so shocked at the sound that she really did jump, Harriet observed; if not out of her skin, then with a quite visible shudder. ‘What is it, Gemma?’ Harriet was concerned, the girl’s face looked greasy, greenish, the features slack with shock. ‘Did you think it was Mrs Marchant come back?’ She crossed the room rapidly and put an arm round the stricken girl. Gemma shuddered again but Harriet felt her relax, the fleeting prettiness visible again in the otherwise slightly vacant face.

‘Here, sit down a minute and get your breath back.’ She pushed the girl gently down on the high-seated chair by the window, waiting while Gemma calmed down and some colour came back into her cheeks. When Harriet spoke, she chose her words carefully, anxious not to scare away her quarry.

‘Tell me, Gemma,’ she said briskly, modifying her
headmistress
manner. ‘Tell me why Mrs Marchant frightened you so. No—’ she raised her hand as the girl gave a frightened exclamation. ‘I know she did, I saw that, and I also saw that she frightened a number of other people too.’

Gemma relaxed again as Harriet smiled at her. Miss Quigley was nice, she thought – very schoolmarmish, of course, but you could trust her. She made you feel safe.

‘It was Ryan,’ she whispered, blushing and lowering her eyes.

‘Ryan? Your boyfriend?’

Harriet tensed, remembering the dark shadow in the minstrel’s gallery, minutes before the crash of the euphonium. Was this it? Was this to be the solution to the mystery?

Gemma nodded miserably. ‘Mum never liked him,’ she admitted and Harriet chalked up a point to the percipient Mum. ‘It was the cleaner, she talked to my aunty and then she
told Mrs Marchant about me. About me getting rid of the baby, I mean.’

Harriet frowned slightly but gave Gemma a reassuring nod. ‘Well, that’s a great pity of course and the cleaner should mind her own business, but I don’t understand? What did Mrs Marchant say to upset you so much? After all, an abortion isn’t exactly uncommon, is it?’

‘It … she said, what would Matron think,’ came the stumbling reply.

Light dawned at once. Matron, with her strong, clear beliefs, her single-minded faith, her own rigid adherence to right and wrong, what would Matron have made of a girl who had chosen to have an abortion? Harriet felt a frisson of sympathy with Gemma. Matron Winslow would be a difficult woman to face if you had something on your conscience, however sadly commonplace it would seem to the rest of the world. Harriet was sure, somehow, that Pauline Winslow would have strong and definite views on the subject.

‘I see,’ was all she said, but she said it kindly and Gemma looked up eagerly.

‘It wasn’t
just
that,’ she urged, obviously desperate to confess now.

Harriet said nothing, just waited in attentive silence.

‘It was one night last week. Ryan and Kieran, that’s his friend, they came round late one night and I let them in the back scullery. Kieran stayed in the kitchen and Ryan and me – we went into the wash-house and we … we.…’

As her voice tailed away in an agony of embarrassment Harriet took pity on her. ‘All right, Gemma, I get the picture. And Mrs Marchant found out somehow and threatened to tell Matron?’

The girl nodded, still twisting her hands. ‘It was because … there’s a skylight in the wash-house roof and you can see down
from the landing window into it. We did it with the light on, you see.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Harriet was slightly nonplussed. Although she had made up for it later her own teenage excursions into sex had been at a time when girls were still overshadowed by the threat of an unwanted, shameful pregnancy. The idea of asking the family doctor to put her on the pill would have been quite unthinkable; after all, he was a close friend of her father’s. At seventeen, Gemma’s age, Harriet’s experience had consisted of a few desperately amateur fumbles and one dark uncomfortable episode on a chilly spring evening out on the hills. What had happened to that boy, she wondered now with a wistful smile? We’d certainly never have dared to ‘do’ it with the light on.

With an effort she wrenched herself back from more than forty years ago to the present and considered the girl beside her. The ingredients were all there, she sighed; sex and fear and blackmail. But murder? ‘And why was Ryan upstairs last night, just before the accident?’ she asked, her tone severe.

‘Oh!’ The startled gasp confirmed her suspicions, the boy
had
been there after all, it wasn’t just a figment of her imagination.

‘Well?’ Her voice remained a little stern, enough to jolt Gemma into obeying her but not intimidating enough to put her to flight.

‘He said he … he had this idea, it was awful, I wouldn’t have let him do it,’ Gemma pleaded, with a sob in her voice. ‘He said it was a good time to sneak upstairs and pinch some bits and pieces of jewellery from the old ladies when they were all downstairs. He said he’d do it really careful, not enough to notice, and he’d move their things around a bit so they’d think they were just getting muddled.’

Harriet had to suppress a smile at the reference to ‘old ladies’, obviously she didn’t fall into that category, but the cool
nastiness of the boy’s plan shocked her. It was clever, very clever, she conceded. If I found my things shifted a little and something missing, would I be able to convince myself I hadn’t just misplaced it? Several of the residents were indeed a little forgetful and they strove manfully to conceal the fact. Pride would have forbidden a hue and cry for a ring, a brooch, while the short-stay nature of their visit would ensure a rapid turnover of victims. Nobody would stay very long so they could never be sure that their losses were the result of theft rather than absence of mind.

‘That’s a wicked thing to do.’ She spoke sharply and Gemma looked up at her, eager to placate her favourite guest.

‘I wouldn’t have let him do it, Miss Quigley, honest. It was just that last night he said he wanted to hear the band and I was going to make sure he just stayed in the kitchen, but I got called away. When I got back he’d disappeared, I thought he’d got bored and gone home.’ Her anxious face was a mirror for her emotions as she stared at Harriet. ‘And he’s not into drugs,’ she offered in mitigation. ‘He’s dead against them, ever since his brother died three years ago, an overdose it was. Ryan, he – he never did anything, not anything bad,’ she insisted.

As Harriet rose stiffly to her feet, aware of just how tired she was feeling, she patted the girl’s shoulder with unfailing kindness.

‘I hope he didn’t, Gemma,’ she said quietly. ‘I certainly hope he didn’t.’

A short nap in her room refreshed Harriet and after she splashed her face with cold water to wake herself up properly, she went downstairs with her book to sit in the sun parlour. The book failed to keep her interest, wrapped up as she was in this complex and unlikely puzzle at Firstone Grange.

Why can’t I leave it alone, she wondered. After all, the coroner’s officer was satisfied that Christiane Marchant’s sudden death was nothing more than everyone else had all assumed, a gruesome accident. Why get involved? Why should she interfere? Was it to serve the ends of a noble cause like Miss Silver, Patricia Wentworth’s governess sleuth, or perhaps Miss Marple with her passion for justice? A grin flitted across her face. It was, she admitted, much more the case that she, like Hercule Poirot, was full of overweening conceit. In the long ago world of her childhood, she had overheard a much-tried babysitter complain, ‘Young Harriet’s a real little madam sometimes, she simply won’t be told!’

She was right, Harriet sighed now with an air of nostalgic complacency, I simply
won’t
be told.

Those other occupants of Firstone Grange whose slumbers had been troubled on earlier nights by the malevolent presence of Christiane Marchant and her nasty little ways, now found themselves equally troubled by her malevolent absence. No
peace for the wicked, the saying goes. Or for the very slightly wicked, for that matter; or even the not-so-much-wicked-
as-just
-plain-stupid. Whatever the heinousness of their misdeeds, those who had found themselves involved, to their cost, with the woman when she was alive, now found themselves unable to be rid of her lingering animus.

Pauline Winslow, secure in the certainty of her faith and the support of her church, sat in her office looking at her Bible. There was no further cause for concern, she told herself firmly. That woman was gone, tidied away with as little fuss as possible given the circumstances, and the police were only too willing to be accommodating. That was the advantage of working with the ‘old folks’, especially at this time of year; nobody wanted to spoil Christmas for them. Even the press were no longer breathing down her neck, eager for gory details. They had been distracted by a heady cocktail of motorway madness, a parliamentary scandal that threatened to be deliciously deplorable, and an alleged monster spotted in the Peak District which might, just possibly, be an escaped puma, or, more likely, might turn out to be just a wild boar. The papers were too engrossed in pursuing these snippets of news to spare time for a nasty but admittedly comic-sounding accident.

Matron turned a page and tried to read, to gain peace and refreshment from the beauty of the King James bible (no modern rubbish for Pauline Winslow) but the small print jiggled hectically in front of her eyes and the well of quietness she sought failed to materialize.

‘Damn that woman,’ she swore aloud. ‘God damn her,’ and she was horrified as much by the vehemence that rang in her voice, as by the unaccustomed blasphemy.

Ellen Ransom huddled in her room, escaping from the slightly over-excited festive cheer that some of the residents were trying to whip up. She had ignored a cry of, ‘Life goes on, dear,’ from one woman and retreated to the safety of an armchair by her window to brood. What should she do? What
could
she do? The memories crowded in on her, making their presence felt more strongly even though they had been buried for more than sixty years. Buried until Christiane Marchant had greeted her with that knowing smile and she, Ellen, had felt the years melt away till she was young, and ill, and frightened, and it was 1945 once more.

1945. Douglas was still in the Far East after three years, a reluctant hero, caught up in something he’d wanted no part of, shipped over to the East and wounded during the Burma campaign. He had been sent back to his unit afterwards, where he kept his head down, made no complaint, and got on with the grim business of survival.

Survival. That had also been uppermost in Ellen’s mind at that time. She had survived the war, certainly, but that had been the least of her worries that spring and early summer of 1945. In those days she had been working in the munitions factory at Holton Heath on the south coast of Dorset, between the busy working port of Poole and the walled Saxon market town of Wareham. She had lodged with her elder sister who, with three small children and a husband in the navy, had been glad both of Ellen’s company and her contribution to household finances. Production was winding down a bit at work with the imminent cessation of hostilities in Europe, and Ellen had been out and about enjoying herself. Well, I was entitled to, wasn’t I? Even now she felt aggrieved, as though someone had just scolded her.

There was even a bomb; dropped right into the munitions factory, it had been. She clapped her hand to her mouth as she recalled the terror that had transfixed them all when they
realized they were sitting ducks. And the silence. She had never forgotten that moment of silence as they realized the bomb had not exploded. Then one or two women fell down in faints, several screamed or sobbed, a couple had soiled themselves, but she, Ellen, had pulled herself together and poked her nose in. ‘Rags, it was,’ she had told her daughter years later. ‘Them slave labourers in the camps had packed it with rags so it wouldn’t detonate. It was the bravest thing I ever heard.’

It had been at a friend’s house, or rather a friend of a friend, that she met the vivacious young French woman who dazzled them all with the exotic story of her escape, in a fishing boat, from occupied western Brittany, and of her tribulations as a refugee before she had ended up working in a small private hotel in Bournemouth. She and Ellen had struck up an unlikely friendship, the one so small and typically French; not at all pretty but unforgettably vivid. And the other, a big, fair, chocolate-box pretty English girl, a trifle slow and missing her husband. Even at the time of that fateful meeting there had been a worm of panic gnawing at Ellen’s heart as she resolutely ignored a problem that was shortly set to become both
self-evident
and a complete disaster.

Ellen ground her teeth in an agony of pity for the foolish girl she had been, and of rage at her so-called friend. What had happened that long ago summer had soured her for the rest of her life and now, when old anxieties should have been long at rest, back she had come into Ellen’s life, that small, vivacious Breton woman with her only too excellent memory.

I’ll have to confess, she thought suddenly. The idea manifested itself entirely unexpectedly, but the more she tried to dismiss it as both foolish and dangerous, the more attractive it became as an option. The only option, for her peace of mind.

Yes. She felt a sudden surge of hope, uplifting her. I’ll have to confess it, what I did. But how? Who would listen?

Downstairs in the drawing room Tim Armstrong’s son was trying to broach the subject that occupied his mind to the exclusion of any other. He fidgeted uneasily as he watched his father fiddle with the button on the cuff of his tweed sports jacket. How would Tim take the news? Would he understand what was going on anyway?

‘You might as well get it off your chest, son.’ Tim was sitting up, looking suddenly alert. ‘What’s bothering you?’

Tony stared at him, aware of a sudden sharp pang of memory as his father fixed him with a keen, intelligent eye, just as he had always done. ‘Is it Pam? Doesn’t she want me back after this visit? I can understand that, you know. It’s hard for her with her job and the children to manage, and now me to cope with too. If I could stay on top of things I could … I could give her a hand now and then but I can’t guarantee that things won’t get scrambled any time.’

His son’s eyes filled with hot, unbidden tears as his father put out an awkward but kindly hand and patted his shoulder. ‘It’s not that, Dad,’ he mumbled, pulling out his handkerchief and loudly blowing his nose. ‘It isn’t that, Pam loves you, she knows you can’t help it. No—’ He stared round the room seeking inspiration, relieved and appalled at the same time that the moment had come. No help for it, better just to spit it out.

‘It’s something different, Dad. I’ve been offered promotion and a hefty pay rise but it means moving. The company’s relocating to Cheshire, been in the pipeline for quite a while, but we only got the official say-so yesterday.’

He cast an anxious glance at his father but Tim’s face was hard to read. ‘I spoke to your doctor about it, Dad,’ he ventured diffidently. ‘He wasn’t very keen on the idea, said it could do more harm than good if you had to uproot. He said … he said
you’d be better off staying down here, where everything’s familiar.’

To his surprise his father greeted this stammered verdict with a genuine smile. ‘Of course I would, son,’ he agreed heartily. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right, something will turn up.’

The smiling hazel eyes that were so unusually alert suddenly underwent one of those disconcerting shifts of focus, and Tim Armstrong was gone. With a very different smile on his face, he looked inward. ‘In any case, I couldn’t go away from your mother,’ he said reproachfully. ‘She’s here, waiting for me. I couldn’t leave her alone.’

For a moment Tony Armstrong fought a bitter urge to wail aloud, to burst into sour and bitter tears. Oh God, he thought, surreptitiously wiping his eyes. That Dad of all people should have come to this. Dead for twenty years or so, Tony’s mother was no longer a factor in his own life. Oh, he had loved her, he had loved her dearly, and it had been dreadful when she died so suddenly like that, but his dad had been the one who had held him together. Well, we held each other together; his mouth twisted in a smile as he remembered their awkward, English attempts to make a semblance of a life, to make things bearable somehow.

He was pierced by a sudden memory. Three weeks ago Pam had rung him at the office in a panic. ‘It’s your Dad,’ she had cried. ‘I can’t find him anywhere. I thought he was asleep but he’s disappeared, he’s not in the house.’

Loath to call the police yet, Tony had driven around while Pam waited anxiously at home. He tried to picture his father’s movements; his old home perhaps? Then inspiration struck and he took an illegal right turn at the T-junction so that he could head back towards their local cemetery. Mum, he thought; he’ll have gone to find Mum.

As he drove slowly, looking from side to side of the road in case his father was walking there, Tony screwed up his face in an effort to keep the emotions at bay. I love Pam, he thought; well, of course I do. But if it happened to us, if she died, would the grief still be so raw? After all these years? Sometimes it’s as though Dad has only just lost her, he’s so engulfed in sorrow. He swung into the gravelled parking circle and leaped out of the car, scanning the avenues. Yes, Tim was there, just standing by Jane’s grave a couple of hundred yards away. It was pouring with rain and he was bare headed and not wearing a coat.

Now, staring at his father, Tony Armstrong could scarcely believe they were one and the same, the quiet old man in this peaceful room, smiling his inward smile, and the distraught figure he had caught up with a few weeks previously. In his head he could still hear the sound that had rung round the gravestones; the difficult, anguished sobs of a man who had never been known to shed a tear.

I never once saw my father cry, Tony bit his lip. Not until that day.

Driving out of the White Lodge gates Vic and Doreen Buchan slowed down when Harriet’s neighbour hurried up to them, dragging her old retriever.

‘Sorry to stop you,’ she panted. ‘I was just wondering if you’d be popping over to Firstone Grange tonight?’

‘Yes, we will be.’ Doreen looked doubtfully at the dog. ‘Did you want a lift?’

‘Oh no thank you, it’s not that. I just wondered if you’d let Harriet know that I’ll make sure her cottage is aired for Monday, with the heating turned on, Sam told me that’s when she’ll be home. And I’ll make sure there’s bread and milk in, and put a casserole in the oven so she doesn’t have to bother about cooking.’

With a wave she was off, towed homewards by the dog,
leaving Doreen to lean back in her seat as Vic headed the Mercedes towards Chambers Forge. I could tell Miss Quigley all about it, she thought suddenly.

The idea was so shocking that a gasp of surprise escaped her, causing Vic to grunt and half turn his head. ‘Nothing,’ she murmured dismissively but the thought persisted, comforting her. Yes, I could tell Miss Quigley.

Gemma Sankey was feeling comforted too, relaxed and safe at home, letting Mum’s scolding flow over her, aware that her mother was actually pleased to see her. With one last caution against Ryan, Mrs Sankey disappeared upstairs for the Saturday night bath that was part of her ritual as she looked forward to watching
Casualty
in her dressing gown.

The front door bell rang. Gemma sighed, put down the magazine she’d been reading, and pottered out to the hall. The chill blast of air made her recoil so that for a moment she failed to recognize the two figures on the threshold, huddling under the small tiled porch.

‘Hullo, Gem.’ Ryan was slightly at a loss, an unusual situation for him when it came to girls. He’d tried ringing and texting Gemma’s mobile but she had turned it off, and a couple of tentative calls to Firstone Grange had only produced a snotty voice that told him Gemma was not allowed to take personal calls while she was at work. ‘You coming out, then?’

Her resolution wavered for a moment as she registered his ingratiating smile. She had loved him for so long, been his adoring slave, proud to be seen with him, then she caught sight of Kieran in the background. There was a small frown creasing Kieran’s kind moon-face as he regarded Ryan’s back and as she looked at him she saw him give a tiny shake of his head. Kieran, who was kind to his granny, was warning her about Ryan – who was not kind to anyone.

‘No,’ she said calmly, preparing to close the front door. ‘I’m staying in tonight, Ryan, and I won’t be going out with you again. You’d better go now, before my mum catches you.’