Strange Music (11 page)

‘Instead of commissioning a new ballet and producing it themselves.'

‘Our
selves!'

‘Right! We're already the new broom, OK?' He rubbed his hands. ‘This is going to be
fun
!'

Within an hour they had compiled two lists.

(Enough to be going on with . . .)

(Enough to be going on with – we only want to scare them witless, not to death.)

Tuesday, 14 February 1950

Chris Riley-Potter waited through minutes that weighed like hours while Felix examined ‘The New Guernica.' Actually, it could no longer be called by that name because, although Picasso's masterpiece was the inspiration for starting a mural on the same grand scale, the painting had evolved in quite a different direction – inspired by Nina's original bright orange footprints. Now the entire wall was one heaving, seething mass of footprints – herds and shoals and skeins and flocks of footprints . . . footprints of every colour available in Rowney's, Winsor and Newton's, the Universal Drawing Office, and Cornellisen's (and Jewson's, the builders' merchants in Hertford) . . . cheeky urchins' feet . . . tired waiters' feet . . . streetwalkers' . . . policemen's . . . newborn babies' . . . Winston Churchill's . . . Mahatma Ghandi's . . . and the foot of the one-legged flute player in Oxford Street (‘Forty Years' Service and not a Penny Pension') . . . think of them and they were there. Somewhere.

At last Felix spoke: ‘It is everything I hate about modern art,' he said. ‘And yet I have to admit it is one of the most powerful and dramatic paintings that I, personally, have seen since
Les demoiselles d'Avignon
.' He looked directly at Chris for the first time. ‘And I hated that, too. God, how I resisted that one! But it got me in the end. And now, I suppose, I'm going to have to do the same all over again with this!'

Chris let out a quantity of breath that even he had not been aware of holding back. ‘Yippee-kyoh!' he whooped. And with a hop and a skip to the window he flung up the bottom sash and laid a hand to a bottle of champagne kept cold on the outside sill. But then he withdrew and closed the window again. ‘Better wait for Anna,' he said. ‘She won't be long now.'

‘Anna?'

‘Yeah.' He grinned. ‘Nina and I . . . we sort of . . . she's gone, anyway. You must be the last to know.'

‘I've been in town the last two days. Who's Anna?'

‘She's still at the Slade. She'll be here soon.' He walked up to his mural, near the doorway into the kitchen. ‘I wasn't too sure about this bit. You see how the feet sort of organize themselves into groups, except—'

Felix interrupted. ‘When you say she'll be here soon—'

‘Quite soon. This is the group you see first. Or are supposed to see first—'

‘Does she have a car?'

‘Who?'

‘This Anna.'

‘Oh. No. She walks from the station. But no sooner does your eye—'

‘Three miles? In this snow? It's not safe.'

‘She's Danish. She's a lot more used to snow than you or me. Well, than me, anyway. What I'm trying to explain is—'

‘But the roads . . . cars . . . skidding . . . they're treacherous. And it'll be dark soon.'

‘She walks over the fields. It's only two and a half miles. She's done it every day so far. She says she loves it – tramping through the snow, even in the dark. It reminds her of home. Wait till you clap eyes her, man. She – is –
the
– most beautiful girl you've ever seen. Heads turn in the street, I tell you. Anyway,' he turned back to the painting, ‘can you see any sort of a group in this shower of feet near the door?'

They were still discussing the painting an hour later when Willard entered the flat without knocking and said, ‘You'd better come up to our place, Chris. There's been a spot of trouble.'

‘What d'you think?' Chris asked, waving at his painting.

‘Later, man. I love it. I wanna talk to you about a commission, but right now this is more important.'

‘Me, too?' Felix asked.

‘Sure. Everyone should hear this.' Leading the way back upstairs, he added, ‘And
do
something about it.'

They heard Anna before they saw her – talking voluble, excited Danish to Marianne, who was trying to calm her in quiet, soothing Swedish. Though the two languages sounded quite different, the women seemed to understand each other.

And Chris had not exaggerated, Felix realized, the moment he set eyes on her. Small, petite, honey-blonde with the most intensely radiant blue eyes imaginable, she glowed with the innocent sexiness of all pretty blonde children, but heightened, because of her near-maturity, to a degree that caught his breath.

The moment she saw Chris she flung herself into his arms. ‘Did I kill him? I don't think so.' She spoke to him as if he must have understood what she had been saying earlier.

‘What? Who?
Kill?
'

‘Someone followed her across the fields,' Marianne explained. ‘And when she reached the stile into the churchyard—'

‘Yes!' Anna, still hugged tight by Chris, took up her story. ‘He grabbed me and said the more you struggle, such more will it hurt. But with a torch I shone it in his eyes and ran and he fell over a . . . a stone . . .'

‘Gravestone,' Marianne said.

‘Yes. And I sprang on him—'

‘Jumped on him.'

‘Yes.' She slipped out of Chris's arms and made the old floorboards tremble with her demonstration.

‘Where?' Willard asked.

Tony and Nicole joined the crowd. ‘We heard,' Tony said. ‘Adam's coming up, too.'

‘Where?' Willard repeated.

‘Still in the churchyard,' Anna said, slightly bewildered.

‘No. On him. Where did you jump on him? Whereabouts on his body?'

She shrugged. ‘All over.'

‘Head? Neck? Spine? Stomach?'

Every man was thinking,
balls
? This time she just shrugged.

There was a moment of awed silence as they pictured this beautiful, doll-like young girl stomping ‘all over' a supine man and then leaving him in such a state that she could not be sure he was still alive.

‘Did he cry out? Try to get up?'

‘Steady on, old boy!' Chris complained.

‘'Fraid not,' Willard replied. ‘If she did kill him, or even leave him seriously injured – well, we've got to work things out here. The cops will turn up soon enough.'

‘Maybe no one saw her,' Chris objected. ‘Did anyone see you, darling?'

She shook her head.

‘There's snow all around. Footprints . . .'

‘She made them yesterday. Felix gave her a lift today, right, Felix?'

‘I would have if you hadn't—'

Willard cut in again. ‘There was fresh snow last night. There'll be only one set of prints between the churchyard and here.'

‘We'll say she made them this morning on her way
to
the station.'

‘Walking backward for three miles? Butt out, Chris – you're not helping.'

Adam joined them at that moment. ‘No one was killed,' he said. ‘I rang Bob Ambrose to see if he'd heard anything. The only excitement he knows of is that someone called an ambulance to the council houses and it took Con Christie to Hertford Hospital. He's the one who broke into The Bull last Saturday night. They think a car knocked him over and didn't stop.'

When Eric arrived Adam's retelling was even more terse: ‘Someone called Con Christie tried to attack Anna in the churchyard and the ambulance has just taken him to hospital.'

Eric reached out and shook her hand. ‘You're a real daughter of Waldemar!' he said. ‘Denmark would be proud of you, Princess!'

The smile almost split her face. ‘Yes!' And she laughed for the first time. ‘And my second name is Margaret, indeed!'

‘Queen of Denmark, Norway,
and
Sweden,' Marianne explained to the others. ‘Daughter of King Waldemar.'

‘Trust bloody Eric!' Tony murmured. ‘So, is the panic over?'

‘Not by a mile!' Willard insisted. ‘We've got to make sure this Christie guy doesn't try to take it out on Anna. Or anyone else here at the Dower House. We've gotta make it so he turns back and walks down some side street if he sees even the smallest, youngest kid from this place. And
we
don't want to come out one morning and find paint stripper over our cars . . . tires slashed . . . pigs let into the walled garden . . . stuff like that. I
know
guys like this. Scum. We should strike while the iron is hot. How can we find out when they turn him loose?'

‘Who's his doctor?' Marianne asked. ‘Probably Doc Wallace in Old Welwyn. Who knows him socially?'

Nobody volunteered. At length Adam said, ‘He's asked us to design a detached surgery in his garden. I could try.'

‘There's another phone in the bedroom,' Marianne told him.

‘Here's a silly question,' Eric said when Adam had gone. ‘Why the vigilante stuff, Willard? Why are we not simply driving Anna to the police station in Hertford – or asking them to send someone out here?'

‘Because this piece of excrement knows the police will need
evidence
to arrest him for revenge acts like that, and he'll be careful not to leave it. But we only need
suspicion
before we pay him back. And we'll make sure he knows it, too. Come on, people! We can't leave our kids vulnerable to a bit of pond-life like that. They walk across those fields twice a day.'

It was a telling point but Eric persisted: ‘It's illegal, Willard – and he will know that, too. He'll say it wasn't him in the churchyard. He was knocked down by a car that failed to stop. And then we all turned up out of the blue, headed him off at the pass, circled our horses around him, pulled out our six-shooters, burned a fiery cross on his lawn, and told him to head down the arroyo for Mexico if he knew what was good for him. Then
we're
in the hoosegow, man!'