Death and the Chaste Apprentice (18 page)

Sitting for a moment in the little manager's office, Nettles having scurried off, Charlie standing waiting for some action, Dundy meditated on the unattractive figure of the world's next “great conductor.” He realized that all such figures had two sides, the artist and the private man, and that with Gottlieb the private man trailed badly last. He wondered briefly at such an unadulterated swine being the mediator between great composers and the ordinary man. He seemed to remember that a lot of musicians had behaved very badly in Nazi Germany. Then he shook himself and put aside the thoughts as unprofitable.

“I'll ring the festival office,” he said. “See if something can be arranged.”

“Well, of course,” said the voice on the other end of the line, “the director of the festival is very busy, because it is the first night of the opera. That's what he's doing at the moment. He's down at the Alhambra seeing that the critics get their creature comforts and welcoming distinguished guests: Lord Harewood is coming, and Lord Goodman, and all sorts of people like that. On the other hand, I do know that he's very concerned about this murder, concerned that it shouldn't cast a cloud over the festival. . . .”

“Ha!” said Dundy to Charlie as they collected together their notebooks and got ready to leave the Saracen for the first time that day. “Cast a cloud over the festival! Murder never casts a cloud over anything! As far as the mob coming here is concerned, it'll be a great bonus. Murder is
the great British spectator sport, the ultimate in good clean fun.”

Walking past the copper on the door and out into the pale evening sunlight, they found they had to cope with cameras and media persons stationed outside. One reporter looked pointedly and hopefully at their wrists (“Black held in Aussie slaying”), while another pursued them along High Street with questions. “Wrong man, sorry,” lied Dundy, and they managed the rest of the five-minute walk in peace.

By now it was nearly seven o'clock, and the audience was flocking around and into the blue-and-maroon little theater, splendid, yet slightly dotty. Charlie looked at the audience curiously. It was certainly not like the Covent Garden audience—not dressy and ignorant. Charlie had got the measure of a Covent Garden audience in his younger days, when he had done duty for a ticket tout in Floral Street on a Pavarotti night. This audience was very different. There was the odd sprinkling of black-tie-and-long-skirt couples, but in general this was a young people's festival and a mecca for enthusiasts and cranks. Dress was casual, even colorful. Dundy, too, watched them for a moment; then they both slipped through into the foyer. Here Dundy gave a discreet message to one of the attendants, to be passed on to the director. Then they made for a deserted corner to wait for the rush to subside.

“My mother used to play Bingo in a place like this,” said Charlie cheerfully. “This one's gone uphill.”

The director Dundy could point out to Charlie, having seen his picture in the
Ketterick Evening Post.
He was a comfortable, candid-looking man, with just a hint of being worried out of his life, which Iain Dundy could quite understand, granted what much of his life must be like. He was standing by the stairs welcoming faces in the
audience that he recognized. There were many of these, for the festival thrived on its regulars, and they seemed as pleased to see him as he apparently was to see them. The audience was as comfortable looking as the director. They were mostly discussing the singers and waxing lyrical about the particular canary they fancied.

“It's a bit like a sports meeting,” said Charlie. “People comparing Cram with Coe.”

“And going all the way back to Bannister,” agreed Dundy. “Some of these people sound like canary fanciers from way back, or gramophone freaks who collect seventy-eights. It wasn't like this in the old days. They've built up these audiences, just as the Saracen has.”

For Dundy had been to the festival opera years before, when he had had a wife to buy tickets and the tickets had miraculously coincided with an evening off. The opera had been Donizetti then, too—
Don Sébastien, Roi de Portugal
(“like listening to a mouse trying to roar”—
The Observer).
Dundy had rather enjoyed it, but he remembered the audience's commentary as being more bemused than informed.

Eventually the forward-moving stream thinned, the director's genial greetings became fewer, and the noise of the orchestra's tuning up penetrated through the doors into the auditorium. Last-minute arrivals, scuttling through, managed no more than a smile and a nod at the director. He looked towards Dundy, raised his eyebrows, then nodded up the stairs. Dundy and Charlie went over, and all three went on thick red pile up to the circle, then through a door that led them into a maze of corridors out of bounds to the general public. Eventually they came to a door labeled “Festival Director,” and Charlie and Dundy were ushered into a tiny but cozy office with a desk piled with reference books and telephone directories and with room in front of the desk for only a couple of chairs. The
walls were decorated, like London Italian restaurants, with publicity photographs of opera singers.

“I have a little office at the Saracen as well,” explained the director, making them comfortable and pouring them both neat whiskeys from a bottle in the filing cabinet. “But somehow it's been less pleasant working there since poor old Arthur died.”

Dundy was willing to hear just one more verdict on the unlovable Des.

“The new manager?” he asked. “Our popular corpse?”

“Exactly. I'm sure you've got the general idea by now. An appalling know-all, a peddler of folk wisdom and quack remedies, a one-man popular informer.”

“And a great collector of inconvenient information about people,” added Dundy.

“Yes, I—” The director hesitated, looked at Dundy, and then plunged in. “I suppose you remember the case earlier this year when my daughter was accused of shoplifting?”

“Yes, I was sorry you got all that publicity. I wasn't involved.”

“Of course not. I don't blame the police. But she'd just lost a baby, had postnatal depression— Anyway, it made a good story for the local papers, and damn the consequences for her. It was all perfectly public, but what made it worse was Des coming up at the first committee meeting after the magistrates' hearing. ‘Terribly sorry to hear about your little family trouble. As a father myself I can sympathize.' All done in a nicely raised voice. I could have—Well, no, I couldn't. But I
felt
like it then.”

“I had no idea Capper had children.”

“Nor had anyone. Maybe it was just a fiction to justify the sympathy. If he has, he seems conveniently to have cast them off, or it off, somewhere along the line.”

Dundy looked at Charlie. He knew that both of them
were toying with the entrancing notion of Des having fathered Singh during his time in India. Dundy shook his head and put the notion from him. Singh was about twenty years too young.

“You have no idea how he came to be appointed?” he asked.

“None. It's something all of us on the committee have discussed, I can tell you. We could only assume some . . . hold on the chairman or managing director of the Beaumont chain.”

“Blackmail, you mean?”

The director looked mildly horrified, as if such a thought had at least not been put into words hitherto.

“Oh, come, come,” he said. “It didn't have to be anything so dramatic. He could have done somebody some . . . service.”

“Saved his son and heir from drowning?” said Dundy cynically.

“That sort of thing. Saved his life in the disturbances at the time of Indian independence. He waxed very eloquent about his experiences at Mountbatten's right hand.”

“Hmmm,” said Dundy. “Very
Jewel in the Crown.
As a matter of fact, I wouldn't mind betting Capper got his notions of what happened at independence time from that TV series. He wasn't in India at the time; he'd gone on to Hong Kong. You mentioned his characteristic as almighty know-all and crushing bore. But it wasn't those in particular that annoyed the festival committee, was it?”

“No, though it was embarrassing, because he was pig ignorant, and we had to find ways of listening to him pontificating about things he knew bugger-all about. No, it was his pushiness and his prying that touched us on the raw. He took it as his right to go everywhere, poke his nose in everything.”

“Did he have such a right?”

The director shrugged. “In theory, maybe. No other member of the committee would have
thought
of exercising it. But Des went everywhere, got to know everything, and
gave his advice
.”

Dundy waved his hand in the direction of the auditorium, whence pale echoes of vocal glory penetrated even to the director's office.

“I gather on occasion he poked his nose into rehearsals of the opera we can hear now.”

“Oh, yes. I don't know how often. I was down here one day watching rehearsals and waiting to see that swine Gottlieb afterwards. There was a nasty moment, with Gottlieb humiliating the tenor, who had to be brought to the front of the stage if he was to be heard, and Mallory having to placate the soprano. The producer was rearranging positions, and suddenly I saw Des was there in the wings. I remember my heart sinking and thinking: Des is all we need at this stage.”

“We've heard about this little episode,” said Dundy. “And about what happened afterwards in the Green Room.”

“Do you remember exactly what Gottlieb said to Capper?” asked Charlie.

“Pretty well. ‘I do not take advice from taverners'—I remember that. ‘You come near one of my rehearsals ever again and I have you . . . thrown out on your fat bottom.' He has the men who could have done it, too.”

“Did Capper say anything?”

“Nothing to the purpose. ‘Sorry, I'm sure,' or ‘No offense'—something like that. He just slunk away.”

“But hoping to get his revenge,” said Dundy. “We've evidence of that. He didn't like public humiliation.”

“Who does? But with Capper it would have been a strong emotion, I'm sure. He nursed grudges.”

“Yes.” Dundy looked at him straight. “Tell me, if you were out to ‘get' Gunter Gottlieb—”

“As, God help me, I may be yet.”

“—how would you do it?”

The festival director considered. “I think my first reaction would be to say: hit him professionally.”

“Ah! That's what I wondered. Because he is, shall we say, vulnerable, on his personal side, too, isn't he?”

“Girlies,” said the director, shaking his head. “I know. It's something I've had to be very aware of. It's the popular press I fear: Royals and vicars and people in the arts world—those are the ones the tabloids have a particular down on. He seems impregnable, but that could be his Achilles heel. That's why I had a word about it with his minder—”

“Ah! You did that?”

“It seemed the sensible thing. I discovered that he was thick as two planks, but he had learned enough about the law to know how to keep on the right side of it when he had a mind. So I made it clear to him: nobody underage. And preferably nobody local. I think he's been recruiting from the groupies who followed him from Coventry and from people here for the festival. Gottlieb's needs are occasional and brief.”

“So that's made him pretty near impregnable on the personal side, you think? That's why you'd go for him on the professional side if you had to?”

“Yes, because odd though it may seem, the festival is important to him. It's part of his overall strategy, and he wants to be a success here, make it
his
festival.”

“How did you come to appoint him?”

“That's easily explained. It seemed such a coup! He came with the Midlands Orchestra last year and gave a quite wonderful concert. Mahler and Beethoven—the most thrilling Seventh you can imagine. Our regulars were over
the moon: It was the sort of glorious music making they heard in their dreams, one of them said. Our regular opera conductor was off to be resident chief of one of the state orchestras in Australia, so there was a vacancy to be filled. Not expecting him to accept, we approached Gunter Gottlieb.”

“And he accepted?”

“Not immediately. He thought for three days, then accepted provided he had charge of all the musical side of the festival. That seemed like a wonderful bonus to all the committee. We couldn't believe our luck.”

“I take it you've learned better since?”

The director thought a bit, trying to be fair. “It would be wrong to say that. I think this festival will probably be a great success from a musical point of view. The opera will, too: He makes Donizetti sound as good as mature Verdi. But it will all be a personal success for himself, and to some extent it will be manufactured.”

“You mean he brings his own fans, and so on?”

“Well, yes, he does, but I didn't mean that. There are four orchestral concerts, and the third will be given by the Welsh Symphony Orchestra. At the planning stage he insisted that they give
Death and Transfiguration
and insisted, too, that we engage Ernest Petheridge to conduct. Between ourselves, never the brightest conductor, and now, at seventy-five . . . Well, he can be relied on to endow the idea of eternity with new degrees of tedium. They'll be snoring in the aisles.
Then,
two nights later, the final concert, with Gunter Gottlieb conducting
Also Sprach Zarathustra
—surefire popular success, brilliant orchestral showpiece, and of course brilliantly conducted. And don't get me wrong—it will be. But it will
seem
that bit more brilliant by comparison. You get me?”

“Oh, I get you.”

“And then, of course, there's the business of next year.”