Fearful Symmetry (2 page)

CHAPTER
2

D
ETECTIVE
C
HIEF
I
NSPECTOR
Andrew Poole took the call from DC Heaton and afterwards sat on at his desk, leaning across it with his chin cupped in one hand. He hoped he’d rung off with the kind of weary but purposeful authority that junior officers needed.

‘Right, thank you, Constable. No point you hanging on there any longer. Still no relatives shown up? Better get on down to the woman’s flat, then. DS Bridger’s freezing the scene but we’ll need to establish who’s to be informed. Bound to be some family or friends of the deceased somewhere or other. And Heaton, when they’ve been tracked down: “cause of explosion not yet known”. Same thing if there’s any press there. All right?’

DCI Poole was sorry Imogen Bevan had died, for her own sake. But he was almost sorry on his own behalf because, having posted DC Heaton at the hospital to await the remote possibility that Miss Bevan might be interviewed, while he organised the setting-up of an enquiry here at the Manvers Street station, there was now no excuse for him not to go back home, even though he was now in all probability investigating a murder. And he did not want to go home. The call informing him of the suspected letter-bomb explosion had interrupted the first turning of the meat on the barbecue and given him the satisfaction of handing over to Valerie the long tongs and the butcher’s apron, with an insincere frown at having to leave. Now that Miss Bevan had died and he had officers at the scene of the explosion, there was nothing more, for the present, that he could do.

Lifting his head from his hand, he leaned back in his chair and looked round the empty Major Incident Room. Imogen Bevan would never know that hers would be the first murder dealt with here and she could hardly appreciate the honour, but it was progress. The last murder case he’d worked on, the death of the director of Bath Museums, had begun with the usual scramble to commandeer an empty room and purloin telephones, equipment and furniture from all over the building, wasting the better part of the first day. After that, he had made a case to the District Commander for a permanent room. Now he had his Major Incident Room, with telephones, computer screens and consoles on a continuous line of desks which stretched round two sides, pinboards and large-scale maps on the walls, and even a microwave and kettle. Tomorrow morning they could get straight down to it, as soon as they had the PM report.

For now, he was free to return home to Oldfield Park where all three kids would probably be lying inside with the curtains drawn, glued to the bank holiday feature film. His three carelessly beautiful, maddening children, Benji, Dan and Natalie, whom he had discovered he could not leave. Outside, Valerie would be banging around in a penumbra of charcoal smoke, picking up from the scuffed grass the dirty skewers, knives, trodden bones, half-raw discarded ropes of meat and ketchup-soaked napkins that reduced their semi-detached garden, post-barbecue, to something more like an abandoned field hospital. She would look up at him, her furious face smeared with sooty exertion, before barging past him with another bin-liner, pointedly saying nothing about the seventy concrete paving slabs and half-ton pile of sand that had been lying at one side of the garden for over a year, and that Andrew had still not built into Valerie’s dream patio on which they could have proper civilised barbecues that would be rather less Crimean in their aftermath.

He should go back home. But instead, he allowed his chin to sink into the cup of his other hand and he leaned forward again, staring at his desk and trying, although not very hard, not to think about Sara, because that only made him feel worse.

CHAPTER
3

T
HERE WAS A
certain tidiness, Sara decided, in being a woman alone in a room at night with a drink, a bath, a bed and a book. She had forgotten, or had not noticed in the first place, which floor of the hotel she was on. There might even be a view, but it could wait until morning. She did not have to look out at the New York nightscape to feel like an insignificant scrap of humanity, and she doubted if the city’s energising buzz would penetrate the triple-glazed, unopenable window tonight, even if she were in a mood to receive it. She swallowed some of her whisky. She would be fine as long as she did not switch on the television. It was only when she switched on the television and talked back to it that she knew she was really lonely.

She was so tired of hotels. She was tired of stepping over thresholds into too-spacious rooms, tired of being called ma’am, tired of giving bright thanks and tips to someone with her luggage. Most of all, she was tired of the turning back, after the door closed, to the veneered surfaces wiped bare with chambermaidenly competence and the scent of acrylic carpet through which she fancied she could always smell a silence as heavy and over-generous as the swagged curtains and coordinating bedspread. It was nearly ten o’clock on Monday night. Waiting for her bath to fill, she thought of the now empty concert hall in Seattle where she had played on Saturday. The people in the audience, three hours behind New York time, would now be sitting down to dinner. They might now be reading the fulsome reviews of her performance in the Seattle press and disagreeing, the way some people liked to, with all the critics, indulging in a little recreational shredding of her reputation (‘Didn’t you find her Beethoven rather
jejune
?’). But there had been nothing mean-spirited about the Beethoven, despite how lousy she had felt during most of it, rather sick and light-headed. It was only afterwards, after the exhausting chats that well-meaning people got her into at the dressing room door, when she was trying to make her way out to her taxi with cello case, concert dress and hold-all, that she had given in to the fatigue and faint annoyance that she was now feeling. They had been so kind, these people, and she had signed a few programmes and answered the predictable questions.

‘Well, I’m actually going on to New York tomorrow and meeting Herve Petrescu on Monday. Yes, a new work for solo cello, keyboard, percussion and pre-recorded tape. Oh, yes, a huge challenge. Yes, it’s being written for me. No, I met him in Prague, a few weeks ago. Just a brief meeting, this time we’ll be looking at his first ideas for the new piece. No, I haven’t done much contemporary music. Yes, he
is
extraordinary. No, I’m not abandoning the classics. Yes, terribly challenging. Then I’m going back home to England. Petrescu will be coming over a bit later.’

She had first met Herve in Prague in early August, during the third week of her present round of engagements. She and Robin, her agent and manager, had waited for an hour at their outside table in the Old Town Square before he’d shown up for their lunch appointment. With him had been a much younger woman, leggy and mute. Whether she spoke no English or simply had had nothing to say never became clear because Herve, having tossed off her name by way of introduction, thereafter ignored her, except when he took a cigarette. He would take one from the packet, raise it to his lips and half turn towards her, his eyes still on the other side of the table. She, without fail, would have the lit match ready with a servile smile that Herve ignored and made Sara long to kill her.

‘I herp you lakk my werk?’ was the first thing he said to Sara and she, catching in Robin’s eye a look that said
behave yourself,
had resisted the temptation to reply that she hoped he liked hers too and force him to apologise for not turning up the night before to hear her play the Dvo
ák Cello Concerto with the Prague Symphony. Probably too busy with Leggy Mute, she had reflected silently, feeling unattractively prim. And she did not mention that it was Robin who had insisted she accept the invitation to première the new work that Petrescu would be commissioned to write for her. (
It’ll ginger you up, you might think about doing more contemporary repertoire. And he’s very hot
.) Indeed there had been little need to mention anything very much, since the purpose of the meeting, as far as Herve was concerned, was to deliver an enlightening tutorial about himself.

‘Nineteen sixty-nine, my MA from Bucharest. Composition, analysis and formalised music. Then two years at Cologne and Darmstadt with Cage, Xenakis, Stockhausen and Ligeti.’ He blew a long, tired plume of smoke across the table as if to emphasise how exhausting it had all been. ‘You should know my Opus 11: Ultimate Space into Emergent Plasma for nine cellos from this period?’

Sara tried to express ‘oh, yes, absolutely’ with a lift of the eyebrows.

Herve leaned forward. ‘You know? Where 4,170 timbre-processes integrate the first forty-five spectral components of a C-fundamental—emanation of the emanation?’

‘Oh, that one.
Love
it,’ she had said, staring. Robin’s lips twitched. ‘No doubt, Herve,’ she went on earnestly, ‘as one of the, so to speak, mainsprings of the renewal of musical language this century, you are excited by the . . . the new, should one say,
well
spring of young composing talent in Europe?’ From across the table Robin’s eyes were frantically asking what the hell she was up to. She kicked him under the table. ‘We all know that genius will out, of
course
’—she gestured sycophantically in Herve’s direction—‘but it behoves one of your stature to encourage new talent.’

Herve smiled and turned to Leggy Mute again with a cigarette between his lips. Inhaling once, he removed the cigarette and waved it around. ‘People come all, all the time. Like disciples, pilgrims, to my studio. Advice, lessons, I give all. Give, give, give.’

Sara rummaged in her bag and handed over a card. ‘Just what I was hoping you’d say. Perhaps you can give someone this. These people here—this is the name and address—they need someone to write them a community opera. Perhaps you know someone who’d like the commission, one of your disciples. Someone able to write for voices, and able to live in Bath for a few months. Not much money though, I don’t think, but then, it’s not
about
money, is it?’

Herve was blinking at the card which she had thrust into his hands.

‘Marvellous!’ Sara said quickly. ‘I’ll leave it in your safe hands. Thank you, Herve, they’ll be
so
grateful.’ She picked up the menu and beamed round the table. ‘Is everyone starving? I am.’

Afterwards, Robin had had to admit to some admiration of her nerve. But he was worried. Herve Petrescu was a man who had to be taken seriously. Shouldn’t she be making a little more effort with his music? She had reassured him that she would genuinely, wholeheartedly try to like Herve’s music, without adding that it should be easy because she had found it all too easy if not to like him, then to find herself unable to ignore his huge, irresistible ego. To take seriously, at any rate, the fact that he was tall and interestingly fifty-something, and had the kind of agonisingly intelligent grey eyes, containing the right proportions of tragedy, brains and sexual promise, that she thought of as particularly and irresistibly Eastern European. He would make a perfect dispossessed chess champion with four mistresses in a black-and-white film, she considered, but had merely agreed obediently with Robin that Herve was an extraordinary man, and it was only the effect of his complex, intense intellect that some people might mistake for vanity.

She wandered into the oversized bathroom, turned off the taps and returned to the room, settling on the bed. Even the walk to the bathroom and back tired her. The useless doctor she had seen this morning had said she was suffering from stress. What a surprise, and how utterly New York of him that he should consider that ‘some lifestyle modification’ would lower her slightly raised blood pressure. She just needed to get home, she had said. Sure thing, and a little lifestyle modification, like getting tough with people who made too many demands, he’d agreed, and could he please have an autograph as a lasting memento? Sure thing, she said, how about this one here on the cheque? She had let him think she was joking.

In the afternoon she had met Herve in a high-up, wondrous New York apartment belonging to Herve’s US agent and publisher, and she had almost laughed with excitement at the sight of Manhattan literally at her feet. So it must have been jet lag or simple exhaustion that was at the root of her disappointment with what Herve had produced for her to play. She had gone through the ‘sketches’ diligently, but somehow she was not really seeing it yet; something was eluding her. When Herve joined her in England in ten days to start work in earnest she would have got to grips with what his stuff was all about. She had reassured him of that. She really ought to listen to the tape again and read the notes properly. She got up, pulled out her Walkman from her hold-all and fixed the headset over her ears. She found the cassette, loaded it in the machine and settled back again on the bed with the thick bundle of papers that Herve had given her that day along with the tape. There was nothing to be daunted about. Today it must have been something to do with the New York light that had made the whites of his eyes look a little creamy, but still there had been an intriguing glint in them when he had said to her, ‘I lakk to werk very clerse wiss my perfermer’.

The bath could wait. She would listen again to ‘Visions: Revisions: Archetypes (1995)’ for gamelan, percussion and synthesiser, and she would try again, by concentrating very hard, to understand the essay on Herve by some German musicologist, instead of being sidetracked into imagining Herve naked. Because that, she predicted, thinking ahead to the next few weeks of werking very clerse, might not much longer have to remain a job for the imagination, although any such development would be on
her
terms. She pressed the Play button and began to read.

Petrescu’s music, with its strong emphasis on timbre, is thus founded on the notion of ‘process’, a technique allowing the transition from a given state to another within a directional continuum of sound (BONG
ONG
whee whee whee). His music is characterised by the entirely (BONG
ONG
whee broop shshsh) original oppositions it sets up between sound object and (pup
pup
prrup) transitory process
(whonk)
, continuity and discontinuity, speed and stasis (
prrup
). The ‘processes’ are superimposed on one another, enabling the course of the music to include polyphonic or (
kssss!
) heterophonic constructions according to (WHONK
kssss
) articulatory
(aah ksss!)
principles (
wheee eee
eeep).

Jet lag. Or simple exhaustion. The New York light. Something. But please God, not her own limitations.

After her bath Sara dumped the contents of her bag onto the bed and checked that her passport, wallet and ticket for tomorrow were in order. She rang the reception desk to order a taxi to the airport. By some conspiracy among airline schedulers, she was stuck in this city for another seven hours. At last she was going home, but she felt afraid of what lay ahead. Reluctantly, she confronted a fresh lineup of anxieties, telling herself to be sensible. She was going home, in order to work quietly with Herve on the new piece, without distractions or interruptions. Circumstances like those were a privilege, and that was how she resolved to look at them from now on. And there was to be an open rehearsal of the ‘work in progress’ at Iford Manor in mid-September before its proper London première in December, and she’d always rather fancied playing Iford Manor. It was a tiny jewel of a place just outside Bath, an English manor house with an astonishing Italianate garden where arcane but delightful concerts were staged every year. As it was ordinarily impossible to step off the international circuit to play such a venue, she was looking forward to it.

No, the thing that was worrying her was the question of Herve himself, and not just his so far impenetrable music. She forced herself to remember the embarrassing part of this afternoon. As she was leaving she had turned and asked him nonchalantly if he had found anyone to take on the commission for the community opera. His equally nonchalant half-nod had conveyed that he had taken care of it. And then, almost as if he had just thought of it, he had asked, with a penetrating look into her eyes and his hands gently on her shoulders, if one favour did not deserve another? She had met his look with what she thought was a smouldering one of her own. Now, in her room, she groaned at the memory of how she had risen to this dangling worm of sexual interest like the desperate old fish that he might now think her. She had swallowed it whole and wriggling and, with barely a gulp, concurred that one favour most certainly did deserve another. In that case, he had one to ask. He smiled. She smiled back. He needed somewhere to stay while he was in Bath. He loathed hotels. Perhaps he could stay with her? As his hands massaged her shoulders, one fingertip reached over the collar of her cashmere jersey and just, only just, stroked the skin at the base of her neck. First, and simultaneously, Sara appreciated that it was a little late for dignified backtracking and that the pressure of his finger on her skin was delicious. Second, and more slowly, she began to think how nice it was to hear things like ‘so exciting to work as closely together as possible’ from lips so close to her own. The glacier of immense physical want that had formed deep in her body since Matteo’s death was creaking dangerously.