Orchestrated Death (22 page)

‘I hate to interrupt your Ignorant Man from the Bogs routine, but did you want anything in particular? It’s cold away from
the fire.’

‘I think I got something for you,’ O’Flaherty said, dropping abruptly out of role. ‘Listen, there’s this young feller asking
for you. He says he’s got something important to tell you, and it’s got to be you because he’s shit-scared of Atherton. Says
Atherton’s got it in for him. Wants to see you alone.’

‘How d’you rate him?’

‘I think he’s the goods. Name of Thompson.’

‘Christ.’

‘Are you deaf, I said Thompson,’ O’Flaherty said witheringly.

‘Is he there now?’

‘No, he wouldn’t come to the station in case we locked him up. All this was on the dog an’ bone. I got him holdin’ fire in
The Crown and Sceptic, but only God knows how long he’ll stay put. Apart from bein’ in mortal terror, he’ll be as pissed as
a bloody fart unless you get out there soon. Where are you now?’

‘Turnham Green. I can be there in ten minutes. Listen, Pat, will you do me a favour? Will you ring a certain person and say
what’s happened and that I don’t know how long I’ll be.’

‘Ah, Jaysus, Billy –’

‘Come on, Pat. Don’t start that again.’

‘Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Now you’d better get for Chrissakes over to dat pub before yer man changes his mind.’

‘All right, I’ll speak to you later.’

He put the phone down and turned to find Joanna not looking at him. ‘A certain person, forsooth,’ she said, but quite mildly.

‘Simon Thompson wants to see me, alone. Says he’s got information for me. I’ve got to go and see him before he changes his
mind.’ She nodded acquiescence, turning her face away, sipping her drink and looking into the fire. All sorts of bits of him
wanted badly to cleave unto her just then, but he reached for his clothes automatically, however unwillingly. ‘I’m sorry.’

She shrugged.

‘I’ll ring you later, if it’s not too late,’ he said humbly.

She turned, contrite. ‘Ring anyway, even if it is too late. I’ll be awake.’

He dressed and kissed her goodbye before he left, but his mind had already left ahead of him.

The pub seemed full for a weekday. Slider stood just inside the door looking around so as to give Thompson a chance to accost
him first. Neither, of course, knew what the other looked like, but he pretty soon picked out Thompson from Atherton’s description
– ‘Miss World in trousers’ – and from the way he was crouched over an untouched half pint with
the preoccupied, inward-looking posture of an animal in pain. The eyes came round to the door, hesitated, went away, and returned
to meet Slider’s hopefully. Slider nodded slightly and went across and Thompson made room for him on the banquette. As soon
as he was near enough, Slider could smell the other man’s fear. This was no hoax.

‘Mr Thomspon?’

Thompson nodded, still hunched wretchedly. ‘You’re Inspector Slider?’

‘How did you know about me?’

‘Sue Bernstein said you were in charge of the investigation. She said you seemed like a decent bloke. And she said you’re
going with Joanna Marshall, is that right?’

Slider coughed slightly, taken aback by the directness of the question.

‘Well, I thought you were probably all right. Better than that Sergeant Atherton, anyway. He’s got it in for me.’ His voice
rose a little in panic. ‘He thinks I killed Anne-Marie. He’s out to prove it, whatever it takes.’ He seemed to flinch at the
sound of his own words, and crouched lower, looking around him as if he expected Atherton to leap up triumphantly from under
the table brandishing a tape recorder.

‘I’m sure he doesn’t think anything of the kind,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘We have to ask questions in order to get at the
facts, that’s all.’

Thompson looked at him hopefully, a film of sweat on his upper lip, his eyes fawning. ‘You seem like a reasonable bloke. You
don’t think I killed her, do you?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact I don’t,’ Slider said, ‘but that’s neither here nor there, is it?’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Well, if you really didn’t do it, you’ve got nothing to worry about, have you?’

‘It’s all very well for you,’ Thompson said bitterly, ‘but if you were in my position you wouldn’t be so cheerful. I had nothing
to do with it. You must believe me. I was as horrified as anyone when I heard.’

‘Perhaps a bit more horrified?’ Slider suggested. ‘Well, after all, you had had a relationship with her. You must have been
closer to her than anyone else –’

‘No-one was close to that girl,’ he interrupted with force. ‘She was weird and – look, I’m sorry she’s dead, but I can’t help
it. She was mixed up in something and it caught up with her in the end. It was her own fault, that’s how I see it.’

‘What was she mixed up in?’ Slider asked evenly, his heart jumping.

Thompson took the plunge. ‘I don’t know the details, but I’m pretty sure she was mixed up in some kind of smuggling racket.
I got the idea she was beginning to want out, but she’d got in too deep. On the plane coming back from Italy she seemed pretty
scared, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was about.’

‘Ah yes, Italy. Tell me about that. You and she were going around together, weren’t you?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘It was just for the tour – that was understood. We’d done it before. We swapped rooms with some
other people so that we could sleep together, and everything was all right until the last day, in Florence. We’d been out
in the morning, poking around the junk shops in one of those alleys behind the main square – you know.’ Slider, who had never
been to Florence, nodded. ‘Then I said how about getting some lunch and she suddenly said no, she had to go and see somebody.
Just sprang it on me like that – never mentioned anything about it before. Well, when you’re spending a tour together, you
sort of expect to know what the other person’s doing, don’t you?’

Again Slider nodded.

‘So naturally I asked her who she had to see all of a sudden, and she wouldn’t tell me. Got quite nasty about it. Eventually
she said if I really wanted to know she was going to see her cousin Mario, but it was none of my business, and I never gave
her a moment’s privacy and – things like that. Suddenly we were quarrelling and I didn’t know how I got into it.’

‘You think she deliberately engineered the quarrel – so as to get away from you?’

Thompson nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, that’s it. And she was different, too – jumpy and nervous, looking over her shoulder as if
she thought someone might be watching her. Anyway, we argued a bit, and she stormed off, and I – well, I
sort of followed her. I didn’t really mean to. I was just walking in the same direction at first, because that was the way
I wanted to go, and then because I was angry I sort of got the idea that I’d follow her and see where she went and then later
I’d face her with this cousin Mario nonsense …’ His voice trailed off.

‘You were jealous, perhaps?’ Slider suggested. Thompson shrugged. ‘Did she see you following her?’

‘I don’t think so. I had a job to keep up with her, mind you, because she went a hell of a long way, right off the tourist
track, and after a while I got scared of losing her, because I’d never have found my way back. I had no idea where I was.’

‘Did she seem to know where she was going?’

‘Oh yes. She never hesitated. And she took lots of little alleys and back streets and so on. I’d never have remembered the
way – it was too complicated.’

Cautious, thought Slider. How the hell did she miss an incompetent bloodhound like Thompson? ‘Where did you eventually end
up?’

‘In an ordinary street, with houses and a few shops on either side. Not a tourist street. Not smart. And then she turned into
a doorway.’

‘A shop?’

‘I didn’t see. I was a bit behind her, and when she went in I didn’t like to go too close in case she came out again suddenly,
and spotted me. So I stood in a doorway further down the street and waited. I kept thinking, suppose there’s a back way? Suppose
she goes out the back way, I’m really fin trouble.’

‘You didn’t notice the name of the street, I suppose,’ Slider said without hope.

Thompson looked eager and said, ‘Yes, I did. The doorway I was standing in was right opposite the street sign, so I was sort
of staring at it for ages. I remembered it because it was so inappropriate – Paradise Alley, only in Italian, you know.’

Blimey, Slider thought, a fact. Someone actually remembers something.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, she was in there I don’t know how long, but it seemed a long time to me, maybe ten minutes, and when she came out she
was carrying a bag.’

‘What sort of bag? How big?’

‘I think you call them carpet bags. You know, like a big sports bag, but soft – canvas I think – and with handles on the top.
About this big.’ He offered his hands about thirty inches apart.

‘Was it heavy?’ Thompson looked puzzled. ‘How did she walk with it? Did she walk as if it was heavy?’

‘Oh,’ he said, enlightened. ‘No, not really. She just walked normally. Well, I ducked back into the doorway until she’d gone
past and then followed her again until we got near the main square and I recognised where I was, and I turned off to the side.
But she must have turned off down the next street, because a minute later when I came into the square I bumped into her. She
didn’t look too pleased to see me, but I put it down to we’d just had a quarrel. So I asked her what was in the bag. Well,
it was a natural question, wasn’t it?’

‘Perfectly. What did she say?’

‘I thought for a minute she wasn’t going to tell me. I thought she’d tell me to mind my own business. But then she sort of
laughed and said olive oil.’

‘Olive oil?’ Slider was perplexed. Little wheels were whirring and clicking, but the patterns were making no sense.

‘Olive oil, two tins, that’s what she said. Well, she was nuts on cooking, I knew that. She said it was a special sort you
couldn’t get in England, and her cousin Mario got it for her to take back.’ He shrugged, distancing himself from the whole
mess.

‘You say she laughed,’ Slider said. ‘Did she seem happy? Excited?’

‘It wasn’t that sort of laugh,’ Thompson said doubtfully. ‘More sort of – as if she was having a secret laugh at me. She wanted
to get shot of me, anyway, that was for sure because I said I was going to get some lunch and asked her to come with me, and
she said she was going back to the hotel and shot off like a scalded cat.’

‘When did you see her next?’

‘In the hotel room when I went back to get my fiddle for
the seating rehearsal that evening. She was already there in the room when I arrived.’

‘Did you see the bag again?’

‘Yes, it was there on the end of her bed. I asked her, actually, if her cousin had given it to her, because it seemed rather
a nice sort of thing just to be giving away. She didn’t answer right off – looked a bit shifty, you know, as if she was wondering
what to say – then she said he’d only lent it to her and that he’d be collecting it from the hall that evening. I’d have followed
it up, but she jumped up and said she wasn’t waiting for the Orchestra coach, that she wanted some fresh air so she was going
to walk to the hall. And she just went. I think she wanted to get away from me, in case I asked her any more questions.’

‘She took the bag with her?’

‘Yes, and her fiddle case.’

‘So you never got to see inside the bag?’

‘No. She had it with her in the rehearsal, under her chair, but she must have passed it to this Mario when rehearsal finished,
because she didn’t have it later. But I’ve a fair idea what was in it, all the same, and it wasn’t olive oil.’ He looked at
Slider expectantly.

‘Not olive oil?’ said Slider obediently.

‘No. I’m pretty sure it was another fiddle, and a valuable one at that.’

Slider jumped, though he showed nothing more than interest on the outside. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘Because I was sitting behind her in the seating rehearsal and at the conceit, and the fiddle she was playing at the concert
wasn’t the same one that she was playing during rehearsal’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. I knew her usual fiddle, because the varnish was very dark and there was a tiny bit of beading broken off just
by the chin-rest which showed up very pale against the dark varnish. But the one she had in the concert was much lighter and
when she rested it on her knee I saw it had an unusual sort of grain on the back. But most of all, it sounded different –
much, much better. I’d say it was a very valuable one. It might have been a Strad or an Amati or something, in which
case it would be worth a fortune.’

‘You weren’t able to get a closer look at it, I suppose?’

‘No, but I’ll tell you what – she was very close with it during the interval. She never put it down for a moment – she put
it back in the case, and then stood holding the case, even while she had a cup of coffee. Now I’ve never seen her do that
before. I’ve never seen anyone do that.’

‘So you think she collected a valuable violin from this cousin Mario in order to smuggle it to England, swapped it with her
own violin, and passed that to him in the carpet bag sometime between the rehearsal and the concert?’

‘That’s what I think. That night back at the hotel, when she was in the bathroom, I tried to get a look at it, but her fiddle
case was locked and obviously I couldn’t break it open. That was another thing that convinced me, because she didn’t usually
lock her case.’

‘But surely,’ Slider said slowly, ‘someone would have noticed that she wasn’t playing her usual instrument.’

Thompson looked puzzled. ‘Well they did – I did. I noticed.’

‘What about her desk partner? Surely she would have noticed straight away?’

Thompson looked disconcerted, and then frowned, evidently upset at having his theory overturned. Then his brow cleared and
he looked excited, for a moment almost boyish. ‘I remember now – Joanna wasn’t at the concert! That’s right! She and Anne-Marie
went for something to eat after the rehearsal, and Joanna came down with Montezuma’s Revenge, and couldn’t play the concert.
Screaming diarrhoea. Normally we would all just have moved up one, but there was already an odd desk at the back because Pete
Norris had broken his finger in Naples, so they just put Hilary Tonks up beside Anne-Marie, and of course she wouldn’t know
what Anne-Marie normally played.’