Orchestrated Death (35 page)

He received the glass from the vet in a bemused way, his sense of unreality reaching a peak. He had no idea what he was doing
here, what he could possibly achieve, even what he expected to happen. He felt that if he waited long enough he would hear
his own voice, but that until he heard it he would not know what he was going to say. Hildyard sat down opposite him with
his drink, watching him impassively, and probably assessing pretty accurately the state of his visitor’s mind, Slider thought.

This isn’t an official visit,’ was what Slider did eventually say.

‘So I imagined. You’ve been taken off the case -grounded, as we used to say.’

‘What?’ Slider said stupidly.

‘During the war. Air force,’ Hildyard told him kindly. ‘What a picnic that was! Never a dull moment. A lot of us never got
over the peace, you know.’ He glanced at Slider’s hand. ‘Drink your drink,’ he urged pleasantly. Slider looked at the glass,
suddenly wondering, and reading his thoughts, Hildyard said, ‘It’s just whisky. I’ve nothing to fear from you. I knew you’d
been grounded before you did. Your Commissioner plays golf, you see.’

So he did. Slider remembered. ‘And bridge,’ he said vaguely. He sipped cautiously. The hot, wheaten taste flooded his mouth,
burned pleasantly all the way down and settled in a warm glow in his stomach. The vapours rose instantly inside him, reminding
him that he hadn’t eaten all day.

‘All the same,’ Hildyard went on conversationally, ‘I was half expecting you. Your presence at the funeral, for one thing.
You’ve been behaving very oddly, you know. There’s been talk – there may even be an investigation into your behaviour before
very long. “Cracking up”, isn’t that what you chaps say? Too much pressure, too much work, not enough time off. Trouble at
home, too. What are you doing here, at this very moment, for instance? I doubt whether you even really know yourself.’

Slider took a grip on his mind and dragged it away from the fire and the music and the irrelevancies of warmth and comfort.

‘I wanted to talk to you. There are some questions I want to ask you, just for my own satisfaction.’

‘And what makes you think I will answer any of your questions?’ Hildyard leaned back comfortably in his chair and moved one
long, bony finger gently to the music. It was the slow movement. ‘Lovely piece this, don’t you think? Did you know it was
through my representatives that Anne-Marie was able to develop her musical talents? Her aunt wanted her to devote herself
to something more reliable, especially given the trouble her parents’ marriage had
caused. But I persuaded her to let Anne-Marie study, and when she came out of the college, I dropped the right words in the
right ears to get her into the Orchestra. She never knew that part, of course – but even talent needs a helping hand. Don’t
you think that was kind of me? But we all wanted Anne-Marie to stay close to home. It was a great blow when she moved to London.
That, I think, showed ingratitude.’ His smile was unpleasant.

‘I should think her aunt would have been pleased,’ Slider said with an effort.

‘Well, perhaps. She didn’t like Anne-Marie. Also she is a musical cretin. I hate to have to say such a harsh thing of my fiancée,
but it’s the truth. Oh, you didn’t know I was going to marry Mrs Ringwood? A lady of mature charms, but none the worse for
that; and if she is no friend to the muse, she will at least be very, very rich, especially as you people have had the kindness
to wind up the investigation of her late niece. And I can always listen to my music in the privacy of my surgery. One can’t
have everything.’

‘I suppose Mrs Ringwood will live only just long enough to make a new will,’ Slider heard himself say. He was appalled, but
Hildyard didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, he chuckled.

‘Come, come, am I so unsubtle? Rest assured, Inspector, that when Mrs Ringwood dies, be it soon or late, there will be nothing
suspicious about her death. The doctor will have no hesitation in giving the certificate.’

‘Then why did you kill Anne-Marie in that particular way? You could have made it look like a natural death, or even a convincing
suicide.’

The vet’s face darkened briefly, but he said in a normal-sounding voice, ‘One has to award you points for frankness, at all
events. Why on earth should you think I killed Anne-Marie?’

It was persuasively natural, and Slider made himself remember Anne-Marie’s nakedness, Ronnie Brenner’s blue tongue, the fact
that Thompson had blood under his eyelids. He felt very tired. He wondered for a moment whether the whisky had been laced
with something after all, and then dismissed the idea. Perhaps he really was just cracking up. If so, he had nothing to lose.

‘Let’s pretend,’ he said thickly. ‘Just a sort of parlour game. Just for my own satisfaction. I think I’ve worked it all out,
almost everything, but there are one or two points –’

‘Do I owe you satisfaction?’

‘Not particularly. But all the same, just for argument’s sake, I suppose the Pentathol came from your surgery? Your records
are all carefully kept, and all drugs fully accounted for, I imagine?’

‘Naturally.’

‘You arranged to meet her at the pub after her session at the Television Centre. You’d stolen her diary, so you knew she wouldn’t
be missed for several days. You went in her car. I suppose you’d left yours somewhere so it wouldn’t be recognised?’

Hildyard gave a curious little seated bow. ‘The trains from Oxford are very good, and frequent,’ he said casually, not as
if it were an answer to any question.

Slider nodded, accepting the point. ‘Yes, Oxford. You had her drive you to the flat Ronnie Brenner had prepared for you. You
took her in. You -’ He stopped and swallowed. He couldn’t say the next bit. ‘Afterwards you took her clothes away and drove
in her car to Oxford, transferred to your own car and drove home, and disposed of the clothes. I wonder how?’ He though for
a moment. ‘I wonder, do you have a furnace of some kind? What about the bodies of animals you have to put down? I don’t suppose
everyone wants to bury their own pet.’

‘There is a furnace at the back of the surgery,’ Hildyard assented. There was an odd gleam in his eye. ‘Very similar to the
sort used in crematoria. Vaporises everything most efficiently.’

Slider nodded. ‘Then you had to go back and clear out her flat, remove all her personal papers so that there could be no possibility
she had left anything incriminating. But you forgot the violin – the Stradivarius. So you had to go back a second time. You
must have thought, the way things were, that you had plenty of time. It must have been a shock to see in the paper that she’d
been identified so soon. You panicked and killed the old lady –’

Suddenly Hildyard looked annoyed. ‘My dear sir, do I
look like the sort of man who panics? It was not I who killed the old lady, as you put it. That was a piece of bungled work.
There was no necessity for it at all.’

‘It may even have been an accident,’ Slider said in fairness. ‘Even we weren’t sure about that. But it was you who dealt with
Thompson, wasn’t it? He was becoming a threat, getting too close to the truth; and in any case, it was a way to tie up all
the loose ends. So you dumped Anne-Marie’s car near his house, hijacked him somehow, forced him to write the suicide note,
and cut his throat with one of your scalpels. It was clever of you to notice that he wrote left-handed and make the cut left-handed
too. A friend of mine says that surgeons have to be able to cut with either hand. Is that true?’

‘Oh yes. There are times when the angle of an operation is not accessible to a right-handed cut. Some of the best men operate
with both hands simultaneously, holding several instruments in their fingers for quickness’ sake.’

Slider was silent, thinking, and after a while Hildyard interrupted with a question of his own.

‘I’ve been wondering how you did manage to identify Anne-Marie’s body so quickly. I read in the newspaper report that she
was stripped entirely naked and that there were no belongings with her to identify her; nor had she been missed by anyone.’

‘The mark on her neck,’ Slider said. He was very tired indeed, and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘One of my men recognised
it as a violinist’s mark, so we went round all the orchestras with a photograph.’

‘Ah, I see.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘But there would have been no way to disguise that in any case.’

Slider opened his eyes. ‘No. But why the cuts on the foot? Why didn’t you make the death look natural, like suicide?’

Something of Hildyard’s self-possession left him. His expression wavered, his eyes narrowed with some emotion -anger perhaps?
He pressed his lips together as though to prevent himself from speaking unwisely, but after a moment the words escaped him.
‘I loved Anne-Marie. You can have no idea! She was my creation. She was my neophyte. I nursed and nurtured what there was
in her -’ He broke off
just as abruptly, and the light in his eyes went cold. He turned his head away and said indifferently, Orders from the top
must always be obeyed, whatever the individual thinks of them. Unquestioningly. Chaos otherwise. In business as in the services.’

‘Business,’
Slider said, struggling with the warm grip of the armchair, trying to get more upright to express his outrage. ‘How can you
call it business? If you really did know her all her life, how could you just murder her in cold blood, and feel nothing,
and call it business?’

Hildyard rose abruptly and towered over him, but Slider was too far gone to feel any menace. His glass was taken from him
by strong fingers and he heard the vet say, ‘Damn it, I shouldn’t have given you such a big one. I suppose you’d already been
drinking before you came here. Come on, pull yourself together, you drunken fool! Can’t have you passing out here. You shouldn’t
have come here anyway. Damn it, I shouldn’t have let you in.’

And he still hadn’t admitted anything, Slider thought. Not denied, but not admitted. He had no doubt that Hildyard was guilty;
but even if the case hadn’t been closed, none of this was admissible anyway. No witnesses. No witnesses? The strong hands
were on his shoulders now, gripping like steel, and Slider tried to flinch away from them, belatedly alarmed. He loathed the
touch which had so recently tightened the wire round Ronnie Brenner’s neck.

‘You aren’t even worried, are you?’ he said in bleared outrage. ‘You’re not human at all, you’re a monster. You say you loved
Anne-Marie, but you murdered her just because they told you to. And you killed Ronnie Brenner and then just came back here
and lit the fire, as if it was all in a day’s work.’

The hands were suddenly gone. Hildyard straightened upright and looked at Slider with sudden alertness. ‘Killed Ronnie Brenner?
What are you talking about?’

‘You followed me to his house this afternoon, and when I came out you went in and killed him.’

The vet looked strange. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve been here all day.’

Slider struggled. ‘Then what –’

‘Listen!’ Hildyard was suddenly tense, his whole body rigid, his head cocked in a listening attitude. ‘Did you hear that?’
he whispered. Slider shook his head, meeting the vet’s eyes at last, and witnessed a curious phenomenon: the vet’s yellowish
face seemed to drain completely of blood, turning first white, and then almost greenish, waxy. His eyes seemed to bulge slightly
in their sockets, his lips drew back involuntarily off his long teeth. Slider had never seen such terror in a man’s face.
It was not a pleasant sight.

‘They followed you here,’ Hildyard whispered. ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’

‘Who? How?’ Slider said, but the vet waved him to silence.

‘Wait here. Keep quiet,’ he whispered. He put down the glass he was holding and went to the door, opened it a crack and listened
a moment, and then slipped out, moving on the balls of his feet, as soundlessly as a cat.

Slider waited. The fire crackled unimportantly. After a while he heaved himself out of the chair and went to the door which
Hildyard had left open a crack. The air in the hallway was colder than in the room, and whistled unpleasantly into his ear
as he applied it to the gap. He heard the slow, heavy tick of the longcase clock in the hall, and behind that the soft black
silence of an empty house.

And then, distantly, a muted thud. It was a tumbling sort of thud, such as might be made by a stack of heavy, soft objects
falling over. Slider opened the door wider, and then heard quite clearly from the other end of the house, the surgery end,
the loud crash of breaking glass.

His mind was instantly stripped clean of lethargy and fumes. Adrenaline pumped through him as he shot across the hall, flinging
open doors, understanding without words what that thud and crash meant. Dickson’s voice, ‘They don’t tolerate failures’, was
with him as he raced across a dining-room, crashing his shins against a chair that got in his way, through the further door,
and into the new part of the house, the extension, which still smelled of plaster. He crossed another small hallway, through
a door into the waiting room, which smelled of that disinfectant that vets use, and through the final door into the surgery
itself.

Stink of petrol, broken glass, a fierce blaze, dense smoke already building up. On the floor the fallen stack of Hildyard,
sprawled face down, the back of his skull smashed by an expert blow to a pink pulp, shards of bone and strands of hair all
mashed together. All this Slider gathered in a split second, and already the heat and smoke were too much. His eyes were streaming,
he could hear himself coughing and feel the pain in his chest as he dropped to his knees. Must get out.

He took hold of the collar and shoulder of the vet’s jacket and tried to drag him backwards towards the door; but the man
was an immense weight, and the door seemed an impossible distance away. Slider’s mind stepped away from it all, away from
the fire and the fear and all the multitude of agonies it had been suffering, and looked down on the scene from a great height,
from a cool, dark, impenetrable distance. He was vaguely aware that this was a bad thing to do, but he couldn’t now remember
why, and he was so tired, and the darkness was too inviting for him to want to try.