A Judgement in Stone (24 page)

But the television set was in the morning room, and they couldn’t have been in the morning room from seven onwards, for they had taken coffee in the drawing room, and no amount of juggling with time could make that coffee drinking take place before seven. On the other hand, guilty or not, Lovat had said he had heard music. On Sunday afternoon Vetch broke the seals on the drawing-room door and revisited the scene of the crime. He was looking for signs that the television set had been in this room but, finding none, it occurred to him to check on the time the opera had begun. Vetch could easily have secured himself a copy of the
Radio Times
for that week from any newsagent. He still does not know to this day what made him pick up the
Observer
from the coffee table on the chance a
Radio Times
might have been underneath it. But it was. He opened it at the relevant page and noticed that page was splashed with blood. If anyone had previously observed this, he had not been told of it. In the margin, between and beneath the blood splashes, were three scribbled notes:

Overture cut. Surely no ascending seventh in last bar of
Là ci darem.
Check with M’s recording
.

Vetch had seen enough examples of Jacqueline’s handwriting to recognise that these notes had been made by her. And clearly they had been made by her while watching this particular broadcast. Therefore she had watched it or part of it. And, beyond a doubt, it had begun at seven. The only expert he had immediately to hand—and how much of an expert she was he couldn’t tell, he knew nothing of music—was Audrey Coverdale. He had
the door resealed, and lingered for ten minutes to drink the tea Eunice Parchman had made for him. While he chatted with her and Eunice told him she had heard no music when she came in at five to (or five past) eight, that the television set was always in the morning room and had been in the morning room at the time of her discovery of the bodies, the
Radio Times
was a few feet from her, shut up in his briefcase.

Audrey Coverdale was preparing to leave, for she had to be back at work in the morning. She confirmed that the notes were in Jacqueline’s hand and quailed at the bloodstains, glad that her husband was not present to see them.

“What does it mean?” said Vetch.

“
Là ci darem
is a duet in the third scene of the first act.” Audrey could have sung every aria from
Don Giovanni
and told Vetch, within minutes, the precise time at which each would occur. “If you want to know when it comes, it’d be—let me see—about forty minutes after the beginning.”

Twenty to eight. Vetch simply didn’t believe her. It was useless consulting amateurs. On Monday morning he sent his sergeant into Stantwich to buy a complete recording of the opera. It was played on a borrowed player in the Murder Room in the Village Hall, and to Vetch’s astonishment and dismay
Là ci darem
occurred almost exactly where Audrey had said it would, forty-two minutes after the commencement of the overture.
Overture cut
, Jacqueline had written. Perhaps the whole opera had been cut. Vetch got on to the BBC, who let him have their own recording. The opera had been slightly cut, but only by three minutes in the first three scenes of the first act, and
Là ci darem
occurred in the recording at seven thirty-nine. Therefore Jacqueline Coverdale had been alive at seven thirty-nine, had been tranquil, at ease, concentrating on a television programme. It was impossibly farfetched to suppose that her killers had even entered the house by that time. Yet Lovat and Scales had been seen in the Blue Boar at ten to eight by nine independent witnesses. Someone else had entered Lowfield Hall after Lovat’s departure and before five past—it now had to be five
past
eight.

Vetch studied Jacqueline’s notes, almost the only piece of concrete evidence he had.

Looking through the Wanted column in the
East Anglian Daily Times
, Norman Smith found an insertion from a man who was seeking a secondhand tape recorder. He didn’t hesitate for long before picking up the phone. Mrs. Barnstaple’s enquiries had not found the tape recorder’s owner, Joan still lay speechless, unable in any way to communicate, but it didn’t cross Norman’s mind to take the thing to police. Or, rather, it crossed his mind only to be dismissed as too trivial when the police were obviously occupied with matters of more moment. Besides, he might get fifty pounds for it, and this would be most welcome in his present penurious, carless state. Fifty pounds, added to the miserable sum for which the van had been insured, would just about buy him a replacement of much the same vintage as the wrecked one. He dialled the number. The advertiser was a free-lance journalist called John Plover who told Norman he would drive over to Greeving on the following day.

Which he did. Not only did he buy the tape recorder on the spot, but he also gave Norman a lift into Stantwich in time for the hospital visiting hour.

In the meantime, Vetch was extracting more information from the notes in the margin of the
Radio Times. Check with M’s recording
didn’t seem of much significance. He had already checked with two recordings—though not in pursuit of a spurious ascending seventh, whatever that might be—and nothing
could shift that aria or put it ten minutes before the time it had actually occurred. Unless Jacqueline had made the note
before
she heard the aria on television, had been listening during the afternoon to a record of Melinda’s, and wanted to check with the televised opera. But what she had written was the very reverse of that. Moreover, he was unable to find any record of
Don Giovanni
or any part of it in Lowfield Hall.

“I don’t think my sister had any records of classical music,” said Peter Coverdale, and then, “but my father gave her a tape recorder for Christmas.”

Vetch stared at him. For the first time he realised that a recording need not necessarily mean a black disc. “There’s no tape recorder in the house.”

“I expect she took it back to university with her.”

The possibility which this opened to Vetch was beyond any realistic policeman’s dreams—that Melinda Coverdale had actually been recording when the killers came into the house, that the time might thus be precisely fixed, and the intruders’ voices preserved. He refused to allow himself to speculate about that aspect of it. The first thing the killers would have done was remove the tapes and destroy them, then rid themselves of the recorder itself. The invaluable Eunice, the star witness, was called in.

She said, “I remember her dad giving it to her at Christmas. It was in her room in a leather case, and I used to dust it. She took it to college when she went back in January and she never brought it home after that.” Eunice was speaking the truth. She hadn’t seen the tape recorder since the morning she had listened in to Melinda’s phone conversation. Joan had carried it out from the Hall, Joan who in her madness was a thousand times more sophisticated than Eunice would ever be, and Eunice had not even noticed she had anything in her hand.

While Vetch’s men were scouring Galwich for that tape recorder, interrogating everyone Melinda had known, Eunice marched the two miles to Gallows Corner and caught the bus for Stantwich. In a side room off the Blanche Tomlin ward she found Norman Smith sitting by his wife’s bedside. She hadn’t bothered
to tell him she was coming. She had come for the same reason that he came, because it was the thing to do. Just as you went to the weddings and the funerals of people you knew, so you went to the hospital to see them when they were ill. Joan was very ill. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, and but for the rise and fall of the bedclothes, you would have thought she was dead. Eunice looked at her face. She was interested to see what that stretched canvas looked like without paint on it. Stretched canvas was what it looked like, yellow-brown, striated. She didn’t speak to it.

“Keep it nice, don’t they?” she said to Norman after she had made sure there was no dust under the bed. Perhaps he thought she was speaking of his wife, who was also “kept nice,” anchored to her drip feed, tucked up under a clean sheet, for he made no reply. They were both hoping, for different reasons, that Joan would go on like that forever and, going home together on the bus, each expressed the pious wish that such a vegetable existence would not be prolonged.

In forlorn hope, Vetch ordered a search of Lowfield Hall, including the long-disused cellar, and when that brought nothing to light, they began digging up the frostbound flower beds.

Eunice didn’t know what they were looking for, and she was very little concerned. She made cups of tea and carried it out to them, the policemen’s friend. Of much more moment to her were her wages or, rather, the lack of them. George Coverdale had always paid her her month’s money on the last Friday in the month. That last Friday, February 26, would be tomorrow, but so far Peter Coverdale had given no sign that he intended to honour this obligation inherited from his father, which seemed to Eunice very remiss of him. She wasn’t going to use the phone. She walked over to Cattingham and enquired for him at the Angel. But Peter was out. Peter, though Eunice didn’t know this, was driving his sister back to London, to her husband and her children.

Vetch appeared at the Hall on the following morning, and Eunice resolved that he should be her go-between. And this
Scotland Yard chief superintendent, Vetch of the Murder Squad, was only too happy to oblige. Of course he would get in touch with Peter Coverdale during the day, with pleasure he would apprise him of Miss Parchman’s dilemma.

“I’ve baked a chocolate cake,” said Eunice. “I’ll bring you a bit with your tea, shall I?”

“Most kind of you, Miss Parchman.”

As it happened, it wasn’t a bit but the whole cake which Eunice was forced to sacrifice, for Vetch had chosen eleven o’clock to hold a conference in the morning room with three high-ranking officers of the Suffolk Constabulary. She left him with a quiet “Thank you, sir,” and returned to the kitchen to think about getting her own lunch. And she was eating it at noon sharp, eating it off the counter in the absence of the table, when Vetch’s sergeant walked in through the gun room with a young man Eunice had never seen before in tow.

The sergeant was carrying a large brown envelope with something bulky inside it. He gave Eunice a pleasant smile and asked her if Mr. Vetch was about.

“In the morning room,” said Eunice, knowing full well whom you ‘sir’-ed and whom you didn’t. “He’s got a lot of folks with him.”

“Thanks. We’ll find our own way.” The sergeant made for the door to the hall, but the young man stopped and stared at Eunice. All the colour had gone out of his face. His eyes went wide and he flinched as if she’d sworn at him instead of speaking perfectly normally. He reminded her of Melinda in this same kitchen three weeks back, and she was quite relieved when the sergeant said, “This way, Mr. Plover,” and hustled him out.

Eunice washed the dishes by hand and ate up her last bar of chocolate. Her last bar, indeed. She wondered if Vetch had yet done anything about Peter Coverdale and her wages. Outside they were still digging up the garden, in the east wind, under occasional flurries of snow. Her favourite serial tonight, Lieutenant Steve in Hollywood or maybe Malibu Beach, but she would enjoy it far more if she could be sure her money was forthcoming. She went out into the hall and heard music.

Music was coming from behind the morning-room door. That meant they couldn’t be doing anything very important in there, nothing that wouldn’t bear a polite interruption. The music was familiar, she had heard it before. Sung by her father? On the television? Someone was singing. Foreign words, so it couldn’t have been one of Dad’s.

Eunice raised her fist to knock on the door, let it fall again as a voice from within the room shouted above the music:

“Oh, Christ!”

She couldn’t identify that voice, but she knew the one that came next, a voice silenced now by massive brain injury.

“Get back in there. We’ve got guns.”

And the others. And her own. All blending with the music, vying with it, drowning it in frenzy and fear.

“Where’s my husband?”

“He’s in the kitchen. He’s dead.”

“You’re mad, you’re crazy! I want my husband, let me go to my husband. Giles, the phone …! No, no … Giles!”

Eunice spoke to Eunice, across the days. “You’d better sit down. You’ve got it coming to you.”

A cackle from Joan. “I am the instrument of One Above,” and a shot. Another. Through the music and the screams, the sound of something heavy falling. “Please, please!” from the girl, and the reloaded guns fired for the last time. Music, music. Silence.

Eunice thought she would go upstairs and repack her things before retribution came from whatever it was in there that acted out, in some way beyond her understanding, the deaths of the Coverdales. But a numbness stunned her mind, and she was less than ever capable of reasoning. She began to walk towards the stairs, relying on that strong body that had always done so well by her. And then that body, which was all she had, failed her. At the foot of the stairs, on the very spot where she had first stood on entering the Hall ten months before, where wonderingly she had seen herself reflected in a long mirror, her legs gave way and Eunice Parchman fainted.

The sound of her falling reached Vetch, who was nerving himself
to play the tape once more to an audience of policemen, white-faced now and rigid in their chairs. He came out and found her where she lay, but he could not bring himself to lift her up or even touch her with his hands.

Joan Smith still lies speechless and immobile in Stantwich General Hospital. She is in a machine which keeps her heart and lungs functioning, and the medical powers that be are at present deciding whether it might not be a mercy to switch that machine off. Her husband is a clerk in a post office in Wales, and he still keeps the name of Smith. There are, after all, a lot of them about.

Peter Coverdale still lectures on political economy in the Potteries. His sister Paula has never recovered from the deaths of her father and Melinda, and she has had three sessions of electroconvulsive therapy in the past two years. Jeffrey Mont is drinking heavily and almost qualifies for the destination in which Joan Smith placed him at her second meeting with Eunice Parchman. These three are engaged in continuous litigation, for it has never been established whether Jacqueline predeceased her son or he her. If she died first, Giles briefly inherited Lowfield Hall, and thus it must now be his father’s, the property of his next of kin. But if he died before his mother, the Hall should pass to George’s natural heirs. Bleak House.