Funeral Music (28 page)

Olivia was sobbing openly. Andrew stepped forward and with utter simplicity removed the knife from her hand. Sara withdrew her hand from Olivia’s limp fingers and sank into a chair, shaking. She covered her face with her hands and rocked to and fro, moaning, as blood from the puncture wounds on her thumb smeared her cheeks. She was aware of Andrew’s voice, intoning the words of the statutory caution and arrest, followed by brief words on his mobile phone.

Olivia was saying, ‘I’ll tell you everything. I want to tell you everything. Paul did kill Matthew Sawyer. I wasn’t there. I drove him back to Fortune Park with his bike in the car and went back to the Pump Room. I had to get something. I locked up. I’ll make a statement. He didn’t kill the Frenchman. It was the immigrant, the Senegalese man. I’ll tell you everything, only please find her. Sue’s done nothing wrong. She’s the only one I’ve got left. I’ll tell you everything, but you must find her.’

Bridger and a WDC arrived within fifteen minutes. The WDC took Olivia, handcuffed, out to the car. Sara refused to have a doctor called but allowed her cuts, numerous but trivial, to be dressed. Then, she stood under a scalding shower and afterwards got dressed in clean clothes. When she came downstairs Andrew poured her a large brandy which she downed almost in one. Even with Olivia out of the house, she was still a bad colour and inclined to tremble.

‘Miss Selkirk won’t be fit to make a statement before tomorrow. And I’m still on special leave, Bridger,’ Andrew said, ‘so you can deal with this tonight. I’ll be in in the morning. Find out everything she knows about an illegal immigrant, Senegalese, who was hiding at Rose’s place. He’s our chief suspect for the Rameau killing. And get everything you can from her about the Sawyer murder. We should get a guilty plea on an accessory charge. And I want due consideration to be shown. As soon as you’ve got a full statement, let her off the hook about the niece.’

In the hall, following the lull after the door closed, Andrew wrapped his arms round Sara. She allowed herself to sink against the warmth of his body, smelling his skin, anticipating the feel of it.

‘Oh, God,’ he said into her hair. ‘I’ve got you. Got you at last. I only went halfway to Olivia’s house, you know. I turned round and came here. I had to see you. I love you, Sara. I want you.’

Sara’s legs became unreliable once again. She giggled, partly from the brandy and partly because she was enjoying the idea that Andrew was easily strong enough to lift her and actually carry her upstairs, should her legs give way completely. To hell with the sexual politics. She was giving herself up to the sensation of his hands and of his warm skin and his mouth, and feeling with complete happiness the growing hardness of his body against her. The nerve of the man. He seemed to think he could just undress her right here in the hall, and he was right. She tugged at the zip of his jeans and as he twisted to help her get him out of them, she had the mundane thought that perhaps this time she should just lock the door, in case Bridger came back. Before Andrew had her shirt off. Where the hell was the key? Ah, yes, the hook in the cupboard. On the hook.

‘What did you mean, “let her off the hook about the niece”?’ she asked suddenly, drawing away.

Andrew moved a strand of hair away from her face and kissed her eyelids. His hands delved back into her shirt and slipped round her breasts.

‘Doesn’t matter now.’

‘Andrew?’

He took a deep breath and pulled her close to him again. ‘Okay. I knew,’ he said softly, looking at her, with one finger tracing a line down her nose and across her lips. ‘We sent out the registration of the landlady’s car yesterday afternoon. I was interested in the connection with Sue, so I put out a call. We got a check in Perthshire this morning. Vehicle owner and one female passenger, Sue Harman. Cecily Smith has walked out of her job, and decided to go away for a few days, and Sue went with her. So I knew they were quite safe. Wherever Paul is, he’s alone.’

He kissed her again, lightly, thoughtfully. ‘I’m sorry. But we need to find him. And the Senegalese man. And don’t you think she rather wanted to unload the whole story? Thank you for what you did.’

He kissed her properly.

‘You mean you made all that up? All that time you were standing there, with my wrist under that knife, you knew where Sue was?’

‘But I won’t get a conviction in this case without Olivia Passmore’s confession. And I won’t get to Paul without her cooperation. I had to put her under a bit of pressure.’

‘With my wrist under a knife? She could have destroyed my hand. She could have—’

‘I don’t think she would have. Look, I am sorry. I had to do it though, don’t you see?’

He looked at her, worried, trying to make her see. ‘You
must
see.’

‘You
knew
. All the time she had my hand, you could have stopped her. You were
bargaining
with my hand.’ She looked at her hand, where a little blood was seeping from under the bandage. ‘Look, I’m bleeding again,’ she added prosaically.

‘Sara, I wouldn’t have let her hurt you. I love you.’

‘But if she had, suppose she had? And you kept on at her, knowing.’ She was going to choke on the truth of it.

‘Come on,’ he said gently. ‘Let’s sort you out. We need to get that under running water.’

She pushed him away, almost sadly, and started doing up the buttons on her shirt. ‘Go back to your wife, Andrew.’

‘I’ve left my wife. I don’t want my wife, I want you. Look, let me help you, you’ll drip on the carpet—’

‘I can do it myself.’

‘Sara—’

‘You should go back to your wife, you know. But go, anyway.’

She locked the door behind him, even though, this time, he had not paused long enough to remind her to do so.

CHAPTER 34

DEREK HAD TAKEN to bouncing on the balls of his feet. He had always worn good English shoes, polished to resemble varnished wood, but now, instead of planting his feet with the permanence and immovability of two small matching items of mahogany furniture, he had lately begun, when talking on the telephone or taking assembly, to swing a little, and then to bounce. He enjoyed the private flexing of his buttocks that this involved, now that there were five pounds or so less of them. Only another four and a half stone to go.

He was bouncing now, killing a bit of time in the station before he walked with a confident swing down to the Guildhall for his interview. He’d thought it better to come by train and avoid any panic over parking although it had meant leaving enough time for the train to be delayed or cancelled, and now of course he was early. How did he look? He had left home certain that he was immaculately dressed, so it was a little disconcerting the way that woman seemed to be staring at him. He stared back and shamed her into looking away. Probably waiting herself, although not for an interview. Been shopping, judging by the three carrier bags with Jigsaw and Square written on them. Nice dress, black linen it looked like, nice body. Nice hair. She was strolling about now, pretending to read the wall posters, and turning back in his direction. It was the face that was really amazing, because of her eyes, which were so large, blue-green and magnetically strong that he had to give a little cough and look at his watch. Watch it, Derek, he warned himself, you’re only five days into your promise to Pauline; at least try to make it to the end of the week before entertaining adulterous thoughts.

People were trickling through now from the London train and the woman was almost running.

‘Robin!’

The grey, curly-haired man with red-rimmed glasses to whom she was calling stopped dead, to the annoyance of the people behind him, and held out his arms.

‘You’re a darling to come just like this,’ she said a few seconds later, coming out from the grip of his bear hug. She was obviously too pleased to see him to lower her voice. ‘When I rang this morning I didn’t expect you to get on the next train.’

He was beaming back at her.

‘Actually, I had to cancel lunch with the artist formerly known as Nigel,’ he said in a loud, gleeful whisper. ‘But I had to come, there’s so much to talk over, lots to plan. Simon still wants you for the Dvořák before he leaves Birmingham, Nagano keeps asking. Can you still play something for me later, even with the bandage? And listen now, I know you said it’s not serious, but I know a very good man and I think you should just go and see him, just for me.’

‘Robin, it’s nothing, only scratches, honestly. Haven’t time to bother with it. I’m beginning to think about doing the Brahms sonatas again. What do you think?’

Robin sighed happily and shook his head. ‘Darling Sara, I think you’re as stubborn and wonderful as ever, and it’s plain tragic that I’m fifty-eight and happily married. Let’s have tea. Why don’t I take you to the Pump Room?’

‘No, not the Pump Room’ – she was laughing as she led him out of the station – ‘absolutely not the Pump Room. Let’s go somewhere else.’

The man was obviously puzzled. But the woman he called Sara was obviously not going to be drawn into the private reasons behind her distaste for the Pump Room, and Derek, watching her go, silently concurred with her opinion and felt the passing of a kindred spirit.

EPILOGUE

TWO LIVES WERE lost in the second Channel Tunnel fire. When the heat had abated sufficiently to allow the crews to reach the scene, they found the same powdered concrete and fused metal in steaming confused heaps and also, this time, two carbonised male skeletons. It had been, as a spokesman said, deeply traumatic for everyone concerned. The thirty-eight passengers had been in the restaurant car at the front of the train when the alarm was given and smoke had begun to appear. Everyone had been very frightened but remained calm, except for that one man. Only that one driver had panicked and lost control and it had been surprising because he was a regular, a French lorry driver who knew the tunnel well and had always seemed a calm, easygoing sort of character. The stewards had been quite unable either to understand or to calm his incoherent shouting, and it was when they had been busy trying to reassure the other passengers and issue the smoke hoods that he had broken through the emergency door and run off. To the horror of those watching he had bolted down the tunnel in the direction of the fire instead of towards the escape tunnel a few metres further up. Of course it later became clear why, when firemen recovered the other body, that of the driver’s illicit passenger, crouched in the cab of the lorry.

The French lorry was identified easily enough from the paperwork on the English side and so, consequently, was the driver, Thierry Langlais, who collapsed in the tunnel trying to reach his hitchhiker and never got home. But the passenger who had died in his hiding place became something of a difficulty. He had had no ticket to travel, and whether any spoonful of the ashes around him could once have been a passport was impossible to tell. A search of dental records was fruitless. No one came forward to report that their student son had failed to telephone, no wife or lover or acquaintance of any kind made any enquiry whatsoever. The police rather perfunctorily traced the lorry’s regular journey of the week before, starting from Agen on Saturday, arriving in Bristol on Sunday, leaving Bristol on Tuesday for its two destinations in London, then back via the tunnel on the night of Thursday 24 July, the night of the fire. The driver could have picked up a hitchhiker anywhere on the way.

If anyone had thought to prompt them, some of the regular drivers using the overnight lay-by and burger van on the A46 Bath road just off Junction 18 of the M4 might have been able to remember seeing a man, who had seemed to come out of nowhere, approach the cab of the French lorry that pulled in during the evening of Tuesday 22 July. There were one or two who might have identified the lorry as Thierry’s, because Thierry more often than not pulled in for a burger on his haul back from Bristol. They might, if they had noticed, have been able to recall that as Thierry had jumped down from the cab, he and the man had talked for a few moments. Then the man had waited by the cab while Thierry had gone to get burgers at the mobile van at the end of the lay-by, where he had remarked that he had a French-speaking hitchhiker to relieve the boredom of the journey home. And although it had been too dark, and the man too far away to say with certainty whether he had been white or black, one of them might have remembered that the man had climbed up into the passenger seat as Thierry had stepped up at the driver’s side and driven off. But no one did ask them. Police officers on both sides of the Channel checked their missing persons lists regularly at first, then less assiduously and finally not at all. They bemoaned with their colleagues the lack of resources for conducting such searches, thought privately that the dead man was probably a foreign national, and hoped, when they thought about it at all, that relatives would eventually come forward.

The passenger could not be allowed to remain a difficulty indefinitely. Because his clothes, his belongings and the seat he had been trapped in had smelted into his soft body, all that remained after his fierce and unofficed cremation were his bones, sunken under a soldified ooze of molten vinyl and tacky with human tar. With the tenderness of archaeologists the fire crew had chipped his skeleton out intact from the encrusted fusion of wet clinker, tied a number round the black twig of a toe bone and placed it in a box labelled ‘Male: 30–40 yrs: 1m 79cm: Not identified’.

All through the rest of the summer he lay in the mortuary. At the end of September he was removed to a room at the end of a corridor in the basement where it was quiet, where the human traffic of relatives, undertakers, mortuary attendants, pathologists and police had all but ceased. There, the only noise was the faint hum of the refrigeration system that kept the room in perpetual winter, and there, wrapped in frosty white paper, he was placed in a vacant drawer alongside other, seldom-opened drawers, in which lay the bodies of other unclaimed and unmourned people.