Dying Fall (7 page)

He had. But plainly he didn't remember me.

At last he produced the key, and paused to watch me. He gathered up a pile of Sunday papers from his porch, quite forgetting that in all modesty he ought to bend at the knees, and eventually grunted that I should push the key through the letter box when I'd finished.

George's house was appallingly empty. I knew as soon as I stepped into the hall. His kitchen: there was no washing-up left in the sink, nothing on the draining board – but then, there wouldn't be. His living room was equally immaculate. He'd left a couple of scores open on the piano in his music room, and a pencil had dropped on the floor. I tutted and picked it up.

There was no point in going upstairs.

I went.

The bathroom. The toothpaste squeezed from the end of the tube, not the middle. Towels hung neatly to dry.

Two spare bedrooms, one with the ironing board folded against the wall. In a wicker basket a pile of neatly folded washing waited to be pressed.

His own bedroom. The smell of George which was not quite the right smell because it was stale, not newly showered. If he'd been here, he'd have thrown open the window to air the duvet he'd pulled back.

It seemed easier to cycle round to the police station and tell them what I feared than to try and explain over the phone. I was just locking my cycle to the railing when a Cavalier pulled up beside me. The driver wound down his window, smiling pleasantly. DCI Groom – Chris.

‘You've come about your body, have you?'

‘No,' I said. ‘Another one.'

All the time he was escorting me through the corridors to his room I was wondering why I'd made such an inane quip. From time to time, I could catch him glancing sideways at me.

We sat down on opposite sides of his tidy desk. He wrote down the facts as I gave them. He was taking me seriously.

I wonder how much he'd have told me about Aftab's return if he hadn't been filling in time while his colleagues busied themselves with the inquiries he'd set in train. He plied me with coffee while he talked – he'd just acquired a percolator, which bubbled irritatingly on the windowsill. Biscuits or cake? All this talk. Then at least the hard facts about Aftab. A PC in Bradford had found him sicking his guts up outside the Photography Museum.

I shook my head; I wanted to laugh in disbelief, and I fancy that Groom might, in other circumstances.

‘Why Bradford?'

‘He's got family up there. And the museum because he'd always wanted to go. That giant cinema screen, with all those special effects. He'd stayed in so long he'd got something like travel sickness.'

‘Not kidnapped?'

‘Doesn't seem like it.'

‘So why did his cousin –'

‘We'll find out. But Iqbal's in Amsterdam at the moment.'

‘Amsterdam!'

‘Amsterdam. Flew out yesterday, as soon as they'd had the funeral. Oh, he cleared it with us first. Said it was essential, even with the family in mourning. And since he had an unbeatable alibi for the time, we couldn't argue.'

‘Alibi?'

‘In Erdington nick. He'd cheeked a constable who booked him for playing silly buggers in that XR3 of his. So we pulled him in for a couple of hours.'

‘When you talk to him,' I said, ‘I suppose you couldn't ask him why he told you people Aftab had been kidnapped before he even told the family.'

I went through the motions of living for the rest of the day – I ate because I knew I ought, pushed on through my pile of marking because it had to be done. When I saw Chris Groom's Cavalier pull up outside my house at about five, I knew why he had come, even before I saw his face.

I made coffee automatically. Made my mouth open to ask the right questions.

‘Where?'

‘At the back of the Music Centre, Sophie. Where they're still working.'

‘How?'

‘A blow to the head. A scaffolding pole, probably.'

‘Do I – will I have –' I made an effort: I'd known since Friday evening, after all. ‘Do you need me to identify him?'

Groom shook his head.

‘Then who?'

‘Mr Rossiter, is it? The manager?'

Poor Tony.

‘Death was instantaneous. He wouldn't have felt anything. Though why he should want to wander round a building site, in the dark, in a force-ten gale, entirely defeats me. Asking for trouble, I'm afraid.'

‘But George wouldn't do anything like that. He was an orderly man. He always used to tidy my kitchen when he came here. Books, records. Couldn't stop himself putting them in order.'

He shook his head. ‘The evidence we have so far points to his having tried to take a short cut. “No Access” signs everywhere. Just ignored them. Going to meet someone, perhaps.'

‘I told you. He was going to meet me.'

I thought he'd never leave. He found cake for me to eat, then the whiskey bottle. He offered to phone friends or relatives. What about a neighbour? Finally, in desperation, almost, he mentioned a counselling scheme staffed by trained police officers. But I shook my head to that, too. I didn't want anyone, not yet. I had lost someone I loved more than I'd ever loved anyone. I thought of him on that slab, peered at by Tony and gently covered. I felt guilty. It was I who should have done him that last service.

When you've been at it for ten years, you can teach on a sort of automatic pilot, so my classes went as normal. One or two of my colleagues remarked how pale I looked, but attributed it to incipient flu. It wasn't until I started getting a little stream of sympathetic phone calls from people in the orchestra that someone realised there might be something wrong, and Shahida cornered me in the staff loo.

‘Why on earth did you come in?' she asked.

‘The students –'

‘– could have taken care of themselves, for once. You're allowed time off for a bereavement, for goodness' sake.'

I shook my head.

She looked at me shrewdly. ‘You'd rather be here? Company? But you'll have to mourn some time, Sophie. Have you had a good cry yet?'

I shook my head. I'd sat at the piano playing Schubert till about three when the whiskey and I had fallen asleep on the sofa. I'd woken at six, and made sense of my aching head and body with a long shower.

‘Is Aftab back?' I asked, retiring to the cubicle.

‘Talking to the police, I gather. They mentioned charging him with wasting police time. But I had a long talk with the nice sergeant – Mr Dale, is it?'

‘And?'

‘He said they were still thinking about it. The point is, they think he's hiding something, Sophie, and no one knows how to persuade him to say anything. I've tried. Nothing.' She paused.

I flushed the loo and emerged to wash my hands. The water was cold and brown. So was the water from the cold tap. Preferring not to use the towel, I shook my hands dry and waited. I sensed there was something else she wanted to say.

‘He – Mr Dale – says he wants to talk to you. He said he'd be here about six if you could wait that long.'

Six! But I had nothing to go home for, nothing but an empty house and the knowledge that George would not be phoning.

Dale met me in the foyer, full of students coming in for evening classes. Two lifts were now out of order. He passed me an expensive-looking white envelope addressed in an elegant italic script.

He turned aside to scan the noticeboard while I read the letter. If I glanced up, I could see him making the occasional note.

Groom wondered if I might want to lay a few flowers where they had found George's body. Would I care to meet him at the Music Centre? He'd already spoken to the Music Centre's security service.

I was touched. The human face of the police once again. I found myself grinning: all those preconceptions I was having to revise. And perhaps Groom was right. Seeing the place the accident happened might help.

‘I'll drop you off, shall I, Sophie?' asked Dale, appearing at my elbow. ‘You know,' he continued as we left the building, ‘I'd have expected the college to be making more fuss about this poor kid. A collection or something.'

I nodded. “Panic but emptiness”,' I misquoted.

He laughed. ‘Better try that on Chris. Great reader is Chris. But as it happens I know that one. Forster. One of my girls did him for A level.'

We talked about his family as he drove the two or three hundred yards to Tesco's so I could buy some flowers. White roses. Sentimental white bloody roses.

‘Did you know,' I said, as I slipped back into the car, purring away on double yellow lines, ‘that one of your rear lights has failed? The nearside one.'

‘Blast! We're supposed to check them, you know, every time we take one from the pool. Have to get it fixed. No bike today?'

I shook my head. ‘In this weather?'

‘Probably best not to anyway, in the circumstances,' he said.

‘Why on earth –'

‘I was just thinking, Wajid's death, George's death –'

‘Things happen in threes? I'm not superstitious, Ian.'

‘Neither am I. I was just wondering if you might not be a bit – vulnerable, shall we say? – on a bike.'

Groom, his shoulders hunched against the rain, appeared from the shelter of the building to open the car door. He made no attempt to help me out. He was about to shut the door again when I remembered my marking, in a plastic carrier in the front foot space. He looked at it with distaste: perhaps he'd expected an executive briefcase, but briefcases aren't cyclist friendly – they're hard to clip into place and don't have enough room for sandwiches, a spare pair of shoes (I cycle in trainers) and wads of marking.

The security officer, a kid in her teens, picked over the contents.

‘What about the band's instrument cases?' I asked. ‘It must take ages to check all of them.' I opened my handbag obediently.

‘They have passes issued by the security people,' she said. ‘And come in through the Artistes' Entrance.'

‘The side door, you mean?' I'd come in that way on Saturday. I didn't realise I was an Artiste.

Groom picked up the roses and tucked them stem first into the crook of his arm, letting them hang like a rifle. ‘This way.'

We passed through the central plaza. Two men were still working on its centrepiece, a futuristic fountain involving, according to the press, a system of balances and valves which would form the visible mechanism of a huge water clock. Obviously they wouldn't want a huge, ticking affair so close to the concert arena. But I suspected that somewhere hidden away was a neat little electronic chip that really ran it. A haze of dust covered everything: you couldn't imagine it being clean enough for the Visit. One of the men started a power drill; without speaking, we speeded up, heading for the far doors.

I could feel the silence as they closed behind us.

‘You've been here before?' asked Groom.

‘That's right. We did a joint rehearsal, the choir and the MSO. The band room is down there, and the changing rooms and loos. Typical, isn't it, that they didn't provide enough: goodness knows what'll happen when everyone has to get through in a concert interval.'

‘Enough what? Sorry.'

‘Enough women's lavatories.' I meant to embark on some heavy joke, but stopped short. Suddenly a door slammed.

It shouldn't have alarmed me. There were people working all over the site, after all. But Chris had tensed as well. Then came another noise, more homely, infinitely less menacing. A sneeze.

The tension dropped swiftly: we started to laugh.

‘That's probably Stobbard Mayou,' I said. ‘The conductor. He suffers from chronic hay fever, they say. And dust is likely to make it worse.'

As if on cue, Mayou appeared from the shadows of the far corridor, slinging an enormous sports bag, the sort favoured by our students, over his right shoulder. He was wearing a blouson jacket and snug-fitting jeans. Chris Groom's eye fixed on what he carried in his left hand. I suspected he would dislike on sight what was indisputably a handbag.

I was right.

‘Chief Inspector Groom, West Midlands CID,' he said formally, flicking out his ID.

Mayou shifted his sports bag to the other shoulder and put out an easy hand. ‘Good evening, Chief Inspector.'

Even during the stress of Saturday's rehearsal, I'd liked his smile, and now I realised how pleasant his voice was – a very warm baritone. Beneath his blond, curly hair his face glowed with clean-shaven health under an unobtrusive tan. His eyes, cold and dominating during the altercation on the platform, were now merely alert and interested and very blue. Obviously all that arm-waving did great things for the pectorals. And he had the most beautiful hands – long-fingered and elegantly boned.

I thought Groom's handshake looked a bit perfunctory.

‘Any problems, Chief Inspector?'

‘None. But I'm surprised to see you here, sir. I understood the building would be empty.'

‘Far from it, alas. It sounds like they're pile-driving out there. And I'm told some of the guys will be working all night, they're so behind schedule. Tell me,' said Mayou, turning his immaculate smile on me, ‘don't I … haven't I –?'

‘Yes. Sophie Rivers. The back row of the sopranos.'

‘Sophie,' he repeated slowly. ‘Sophie Rivers. Funny thing, names, they're a closed book to me. But faces – they're all here.' He touched his forehead. ‘Particularly pretty ones – Sophie.'

A short silence. I could hardly respond to that sort of line. And both men were waiting for the other to leave. A matter of not losing face.

I relieved Groom of the roses. ‘I've come to lay these on the spot where George died,' I said. ‘The bassoonist.'

‘Ah yes,' said Mayou. ‘A real tragic loss. I admired and respected that man.'

‘It was mutual,' I said, smiling, but suddenly shy.