Funeral Music (25 page)

She made him nervous. It would be easy to rush up behind her, he’d be on top of her as soon as she heard him. She was not very big or even properly dressed so that even if she struggled, which he did not anticipate, it would be over very quickly. It was a nice-looking house, there would be proper food around, and there was the car. She would not be able to report the car stolen until someone let her out, probably in the morning. He could safely drive all night and dump it somewhere very early. It would get him all the way to the Channel.

The notes were coming back to her easily enough; of course she had never quite forgotten. Memory never had been the problem. It was all coming back as the sound rose up from the urgent, moving conjunction of string and bow. It was taking her now, the indestructible and monumental rhythm. It hovered across the lavender and fruit bushes, the roses, the medlars and the apple trees and floated higher, up above the garden and out over the roof of her house below. Where to now, the straining, restless sound? She would go with it to its end, giving it all her courage and all her power. She could feel it, hear it, almost see the music rising as she swayed in obedience to her bow. She could send it higher still. Edwin, can you hear? I am playing for you. And although I am playing quite softly you will hear it because it is rising up into the wide sky and coming to you across the rooftops and fields and rivers and bridges and right in at your high window at the top of Bathwick Hill, and Edwin, I know you will hear it. Can you hear it, Edwin, can you hear it and can you feel the fire in this music, as I think I now can?

But somehow, as she played on, he could not find the moment to rush out at her, catch her unawares and silence her. He had to find the right moment, but the music seemed to be filling each moment in a way he could not explain, but knew he had to be governed by. And as he waited he found that he wanted the music to go on. He was still going to do it but he would not be any rougher than was necessary, and he would have to wait until she stopped playing.

It was as if the knowledge required to play the music was passing from her head and ears and fingers and arms, which knew every note, every deft turn of the bow, every shift of fingering and every last accidental, into some other part of her, the part holding the cipher that could turn the notes into music. She could hardly hold it. It had been so long, but it was coming back. She was getting it now, that feeling that she was only fully remembering the music after she heard it, as if it was not quite she who was playing. It was someone just infinitesimally ahead of her, a someone else who was yet a part of her, to whom she was listening and saying yes, that is right, that is
it
. She laughed and turned her head up to the sky. Edwin, this is what I meant. We have to let the notes go, and then we play music. This is how it is meant to be. It is music, it is not just notes, any more than the sky is just space. It is music, I am playing music again. She played on, until the piece came to the end in its full-hearted, sweeping finality and with it a triumphant shout which was her own voice. She dropped her bow gently on the grass and, still straddling the instrument, stretched her legs like an exhausted lover. Silence filled the garden. She bowed her head and the tears which ran from her eyes splashed onto the wood and trickled down the polished front of the instrument. Matteo, I also played for you, she said quietly. It was also for you. She wept for a long time.

With the sound of her crying, his strength simply leaked out of him and he had known that he could not harm her. Already too much harm had been done. Tears rose in his eyes for her, for himself and the mess he had made of his life, and for the life he had taken, and as his tears fell, he remembered again all the childhood tales of the unquiet dead and he wept for all the poor, lost souls wandering the night skies between this world and the next.

Now she could feel the cold creeping in through the soles of her wet shoes and a rustle of wind made her shiver. The grief which had taken hold of her was subsiding and leaving in its place a soft, clear calm and a kind of bemused gratitude. Why now? Why now, after more than a year, should she be able to weep for him, and for the first time be able to play, really play again? Perhaps it was not the timing that really mattered so much as time itself. She was peaceful. She put away the chair, bolted the hut and carried the cello down the path. Above her the trees swayed in the warm wind. Soon, the weather would break.

The man was glad to see her go. He watched until she disappeared and saw the light go on in an upstairs room. He waited longer just to be on the safe side. He had no idea what he was dealing with. He was puzzled and annoyed with himself. It had been stupid to think he could make it here. He had to get back to France, take a hold of himself, think. The police would be looking for him, but he had money, he would manage it. He waited until the upstairs light went out and then stole silently down the path. The keys were not in the car and anyway, she would probably hear it being driven away. But he caught sight of the unlocked bike and lost no time in pedalling off into the darkness further up the valley.

CHAPTER 31

SARA WOKE AT dawn with the conviction that last night she had been absurd. Lying in bed, she felt an acute anxiety that what had happened might, in daylight, turn out to be rather less or perhaps not at all momentous, and that what she had believed out in the garden to be the triumphant scaling of a barrier might yet turn out to have been a trick of the moon. If she were to pick up a cello now, she might find that the deadening mastery of technique was once again in control, once again camouflaging the fact that since Matteo she had been able to play not like an artist but as an operator, turning out, at best, a few expressive clichés and stage emotions. She showered and dressed slowly. This was the day she was seeing Edwin for lunch, and she wanted nothing more than to be able to sit with him again and tell him that she was indeed, really and truly all right, that she had shifted the boulder out of her stream as he had said she would. Perhaps she would play for him again. But she could not trust any impression formed under a full moon.

In the music room she sat down and began. She warmed up and began to play the second cello suite nervously. But her heart was beating hard because through the imperfections she was hearing the music in the old way again. She thought she knew what the music was saying and also knew with a wild burst of happiness that she wanted to play it and play it and play it, working until she had exhausted all the ways she could find of saying it. She thought of how, in this room, Matteo would work obsessively at the piano, going over scores, listening to recordings, often working into the night because the music and the possibilities of what he might do with it had so excited him. At those times he had been so absorbed and happy, and looking round the room that was still his, Sara surprised herself by finding that she was happy too, remembering. She found herself crying, recalling Edwin’s phrase about the gift, and remembering Matteo’s.

Much later she took her coffee up to the table by the pond. The dragonflies had gone. The sun’s glare was muffled behind clouds and the air was heavy with damp heat. There was something else that Edwin had said about a gift. A gift of love. And slowly, sipping her coffee and hoping for the return of the dragonflies, Sara began to understand.

When she thought she had made sense of everything, she tried unsuccessfully to ring Andrew.
Ring me if you need me
. That’s what he’d said, she thought furiously, and now she did, and he had gone and switched off his mobile.

BY LUNCHTIME the clouds lay like a warm lid over the city. Edwin was not in the garden, probably because the weather was uncertain, but the French window into Olivia’s study was open. Serena must be in the kitchen. Feeling that, but for Edwin, she would much rather be somewhere else, Sara made her way across the grass and stepped inside. Because she was expecting the study to be empty, she started at the slight movement from the chair in the corner.

‘Oh, I didn’t see you,’ she gasped. ‘I didn’t think you’d be here on a weekday.’

Olivia looked up from her glass. ‘Sorry if I gave you a fright. I’m sorry, I forgot you were coming today. Come into the kitchen. I’m having a drink. Join me.’

Sara followed her into the kitchen and stood while Olivia took an opened bottle of white wine from the fridge and fetched another glass. Her eyes took in another bottle over by the sink. And here’s one she emptied earlier, she thought. She certainly had started early.

‘Of course you won’t have heard. I’m afraid that yesterday—’ Olivia began, when they had sat down at the table in the window.

But Sara could not bear to hear Olivia’s appalled account of the body in Paul’s room. ‘I have,’ she interrupted. ‘I have heard, so I do know. Andrew was having a lesson when he got the call, so I took him to Fortune Park.’

‘Oh,’ said Olivia, apparently uncurious. She sipped at her drink.

Sara had no choice but to go on. ‘I’ve been thinking, and I know as well that Paul didn’t do it. Kill that Frenchman, I mean.’

‘Oh.’

‘He couldn’t have. Or rather, he wouldn’t have. For one thing, he wouldn’t have used his hands. Not in that way, I mean,’ she said. She took a deep breath, feeling unprepared. Should she even try to express what she was sure of but could only dimly and imperfectly explain?

‘The hands,’ she blurted. ‘Paul’s hands. He has hands that are too . . . fine. I don’t mean not strong enough, but I don’t know what else to call it. He couldn’t strangle someone.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Olivia murmured, still seeming only half interested, ‘but it doesn’t amount to a defence. And in any case, I don’t think it helps Paul.’

‘No,’ said Sara, ‘it doesn’t help him. But the main reason it doesn’t help is the same reason that we both know Paul didn’t do it. We know Paul didn’t kill Bernard, because Paul didn’t kill Matthew Sawyer that way.’

Olivia looked wearily out of the window. ‘What makes you think Paul killed Matthew Sawyer?’ she asked, without surprise.

Sara hesitated. There was simply not enough time to give proper consideration to the question of whether or not it was wise to say any more. She had to go on.

‘Edwin’s offering of love, I suppose,’ she said. Olivia looked back at her, apparently bemused. ‘Edwin’s stairlift. He called it “an offering of love”. At first I thought he just meant from you to him. But then there was the other thing he said. “Remember Churchill.” I didn’t know what he was on about at first.’

She stopped. What
did
she actually know? She had pieced together a hypothesis based on the utterances of an oxygen-deprived octogenarian. It would be possible, and much more comfortable, to backtrack now, this minute, out of the whole conversation and leave things well alone. But that would mean dismissing Edwin’s words as senile babble and she could not do that. It was Edwin who had coerced her gently into playing the Bach suite, the piece she had been playing when she had first encountered the terrifying block, and he had known precisely what he was doing. She would not deny his wisdom. And she was probably in too deep already.

‘ “Remember Churchill.” When I asked you, you said he meant the people who made the lift.’ Olivia nodded. ‘But the words kept coming back to me. Remember Churchill. It didn’t make any sense. So I went over the other things he’d said that afternoon and then I knew. He didn’t mean Churchills who made the lift. He meant Frank Churchill in
Emma
, didn’t he? Jane Austen’s Churchill. The piano in
Emma
, the “offering of love” to Jane Fairfax, who was so cool and impenetrable, remember? It’s a while since I read it. But Frank Churchill suddenly went off to London pretending it was to get his hair cut, when he was really arranging to have the piano sent anonymously to Jane Fairfax. She loved music, and played so well and they were secretly in love. That was what was in Edwin’s mind when he said to remember Churchill.’

‘Sara—’ Olivia interrupted.

‘So that was what made me see. I remembered Paul going off mysteriously to London,’ Sara went on, and she could not resist saying, ‘For piano, read stairlift. Frank Churchill: Paul. You: Jane. I’m right, aren’t I?’ Not that it was funny in the least.

‘Sara—’

‘Paul’s in love with you, isn’t he? I should have seen it when I came to supper that night, but of course I didn’t. And when I saw his room. That ticking material instead of curtains – blue and white stripes, like here. Everything so tidy, simple. A few flowers. People can’t usually help liking the same things as the person they’re in love with. And if they can’t be with them, they try to have the person’s atmosphere around them by having the same things.’ She thought of the music room in Medlar Cottage. ‘I do know.’

She looked enquiringly at Olivia, who did not respond.

‘And it was Paul who paid for the stairlift, wasn’t it, because he adored you. You had to make it appear that you could afford the stairlift anyway, with or without the grant that Matthew Sawyer stopped you from getting. And Paul couldn’t let it be known that he was paying for it. He must have spent everything he’d saved, mustn’t he? That’s what he was doing in London that day. I suppose he had to go in person and pay in cash, make it look like an anonymous gift, so there was no invoice with his name and address, just the address here. Did you ask him to do it, or was it his idea?’

She paused and took a large sip from her glass. Olivia had given up trying to say anything and was staring at the table.

Sara continued quietly, ‘Of course you don’t have to tell me, and perhaps you’re not going to speak to me at all, but I don’t think Matthew Sawyer was killed just because of the grant.’

There was no response, so Sara went on, ‘You see, I think somehow it had turned up. How did that happen? It did turn up, didn’t it – the Hackett Collection?’

Olivia looked at her, astonished. ‘What makes you think that?’

Sara motioned towards the study. ‘The boxes. I saw the shoes that day I came to supper, remember? In one of those grey conservation boxes. I saw the same sort of boxes in Paul’s room yesterday, scattered all over the floor. Only for a second. And I saw a little pair of scissors and other things too; a satin pincushion, I think. A silver needlecase.’

She waited to see if Olivia was going to come forward with a denial before she went on.

‘Then I remembered Sue saying that Bernard was selling English antiques in Paris. Was he by any chance selling off the Hackett Collection as well?’

Olivia looked at Sara, who was staring back with a look not of condemnation but of impertinent curiosity. Sarcastically, Olivia said, ‘Well, you do get around, I’ll say that much. First at the scene of the crime again. Look, if you’re so certain that Paul’s a murderer, then what are you doing here? Why haven’t you gone to the police? Suppose Paul’s here? What’s to stop him doing the same to you, to keep you quiet?’

‘Because I don’t think you’d allow it,’ Sara said simply. She waited. They both drank some more.

‘So did Paul sell the stuff to Bernard for you?’ She felt like an irritating child who will not leave off asking awkward questions.

Olivia closed her eyes then nodded. ‘I’ll tell you, since you’re so nosy. It won’t make any difference. You’ve guessed a lot of it, anyhow.’

She refilled their glasses.

‘The collection turned up soon after I was made acting director, about three years ago. It was quite extraordinary. I got a call one day from the manager of a branch bank in Warminster. This chap was new, he sounded about eighteen. They were converting the basement and getting rid of the old vault. They’d found some boxes marked Bath Museums. He said they would fit in the boot of a car, so I went over, and do you know, when I got there, I still thought he was about eighteen.’

She sniggered drily. ‘It was awful, really. A nice little Victorian Gothic branch bank, and they were drilling away at the façade so they could fit in a line of cash machines. Inside they were doing out the whole place in pink and grey, artificial weeping figs in round white pots everywhere, you know? They must have ripped out lovely old panelling to do it. And he was so pleased with himself. He had some awful phrase for it: expanded customer facilities or something. Ghastly.

‘He had no paperwork to say what was in the boxes. There were three of them, flat packing cases, tied with string and sealed. Filthy, marked Property of Bath Museums. He just wanted rid of them. He thought I might know what they were, but he didn’t really care as long as I took them away. They didn’t need vaults in a branch bank now, he said, everything was on computer. I just signed a receipt for them and took them.’

She sighed again. ‘Then things just seemed to turn out in a funny way. I had these boxes in the car. I had no idea what was in them so I took them home; it was quite late by then. When I opened them I found the Hackett Collection. Obviously it had been taken out of Bath before the bomb in the Circus – lots of stuff was – and then it must have just got lost. The museum’s paperwork, anything that would have recorded where it had gone to, was destroyed by the bomb. And then I noticed that the bank manager had tucked the receipt under the string of one of the boxes. He’d actually given me back the receipt instead of keeping it, so there was no record that the bank had ever had it. Obviously too busy thinking about his expanded customers and their facilities.’

She cast her eyes heavenwards and she and Sara exchanged a headshake. Honestly, bank managers these days. It struck Sara as odd that everything had become so
conversational
. Didn’t Olivia realise that she was incriminating herself? Or should she seriously worry that the reason for Olivia’s calm was that she herself was going to be silenced before she had a chance to go to the police? Perhaps she should drop a hint – a lie, in fact – that Andrew knew where she was and what she was doing.

‘The museum had no extra secure storage available, so the boxes hung around here for a bit. It’s bending the rules, but they were safer here. And anyway, I was the boss.’

She smiled. ‘That might have been it, but then other things happened. Just after that Dad, Edwin, got worse. I’d been looking after him, going back at lunchtime and so on, but he needed someone here all the time. So we had to get a day nurse. That was when I promised him I would never let him go into a home. And money was incredibly tight because I was still being paid my old salary and I was expecting to be upgraded to director level.’

Her lips tightened. ‘When I agreed to be acting director, I was helping them out of a hole. I knew it would take them a while to sort out my new salary and I was very patient. There was no question that I should’ve been put on the director’s scale and I assumed it would be backdated. And in the end they took more than six months over it, and they decided not to upgrade me. They just “enhanced” my old salary by an
insulting
amount and refused to backdate it. They regarded the first six months as an “induction period” payable at the old salary.’

‘But that’s monstrous. Didn’t you have a union or anything?’