Hymn (6 page)

Lloyd recradled the receiver. As he did so, the seven o'clock news came on to the television. Immediately, he saw the unsteady hand-held image of a blackened, burned-out bus, out in the desert. The same bus that Sergeant Houk had been sent to investigate. Lloyd pressed the remote-control, and caught the reporter in mid-sentence.

‘. . . this afternoon by two Highway Patrol officers on a routine journey through the Anza Borrego State Park . . .'

Lloyd watched as the TV news cameras circled around the skeletal wreck of the bus.

‘. . . only known witness was a blind Indian boy who claims to have heard voices in the vicinity of the bus immediately prior to its burning, but . . .'

The camera pulled back to show three ambulances parked on the edge of the highway, and a row of body bags lying on the ground. The reporter said, ‘Only two of the victims have so far been positively identified. One was Mr Ronald Korshaw, a carpet salesman from Escondido. The other was Ms Marianna Gomes, a scenic designer for the San Diego Opera Company . . .'

Lloyd stared at the television with a tight feeling of fright and elation. So there's no connection between the deaths of all of these people in a burned-out bus in the Anza Borrego State Park and Celia's suicide on Rosecrans Avenue, is there, Sergeant Houk? But what do you think are the odds that two girls from the San Diego Opera Company should burn themselves to death on successive days? A zillion to one?

Lloyd had once met Marianna Gomes. He remembered a vivacious, dark-skinned girl in a flouncy red blouse. Red lips, black eyes, hips that swayed to a silent salsa. Hardly the suicidal type—any more than Celia had been.

He recalled Celia talking to him about Marianna, too. ‘She's so bright and so talented, and she has the craziest sense of humour.' Several times, when Celia had returned home late, she had told him that she and Marianna had been ‘working on something' together, and that they had ‘lost track of time'.

Was this what they had both been working on? Their mutual suicide by fire?

Lloyd swallowed the rest of his drink. His mind was clamorous with images, possibilities, snatches of remembered conversation.

‘Marianna and I have been working on this idea together . . . I guess we just got carried away . . .'

He could picture her now, in her sheepskin jacket, turning around as she closed the front door.

‘We were talking about what you could do if you had all the time in the world.'

When had she said that? He could distinctly remember her saying it: ‘. . . all the time in the world'.

Maybe both Celia and Marianna had been attending religious discussions with this mysterious Otto character? Maybe they had been working out their self-immolation with him? Because—think about it—how had Celia managed to get to Rosecrans Avenue with that yellow petrol can, if she hadn't had somebody to take her there? She hadn't been seen on the bus, no taxi-driver had reported taking her, and there were no vehicles in the area that were unaccounted for.

Lloyd picked up the phone again, and redialled Sylvia's number, but Sylvia must have left for her dinner at Mario's. He went back into the living-room, collecting the Wild Turkey bottle from the table. He hadn't bothered to refill the decanter. Wayne was still dozing, his head thrown back and his mouth open, purring deep like a cat.

Lloyd opened his desk-drawer, and lifted out a thick yellow legal pad. Writing in firm italics, in dark purple ink, he set down the title CELIA JANE WILLIAMS and then underneath he wrote June 15, the day of her death.

He had no real evidence; nothing to go on but speculation and fear. But he was sure now that Celia's decision to set herself alight hadn't been done spontaneously or rashly, nor had she done it in a moment of irrationality. She had planned it, maybe for weeks, maybe for months.

Whether Otto and his religious study group had anything to do with it, he didn't yet know. But he was determined to find out.

OTTO, he wrote on his pad, and then filled in the two Os with two eyes and a smile. Have a nice day.

He hadn't been brought up as a fighter, not in the physical sense, anyway. His father had always said that it was crazy people who demanded an eye for an eye. Survival was more dignified than trying to do to others what they had done unto you. But now Lloyd found himself consumed with a feeling of revenge that was like nothing he had ever experienced in his life. It was almost like being on fire himself. He couldn't sit still, he could scarcely breathe. He was going to find out who had taken Celia away from him, no matter how long it took, no matter how much it cost, and he would get even.

La Jolla was masked in a pearl-grey Pacific fog the following morning, as Lloyd drove down to Denman's Original Fish Depot. Waldo's light-blue Cutlass Supreme was already parked outside, and behind the Victorian-style frontage, with its parlour palms and its art nouveau window-frames, Lloyd could see the lights inside the main restaurant. He unlocked the door and went straight in.

‘Waldo?'

Waldo was sitting at one of the dining-tables, writing menus. Outside the window, La Jolla Cove was invisible, as if the world ended just beyond the balcony.

‘Mr Denman, how are you? You didn't have to come in to the restaurant yet. Everything is fine. Everything is running smooth.'

He stood up, and they embraced each other, a little awkwardly because of Waldo's intervening pot-belly and his insistence on proper protocol. Lloyd would never be ‘Lloyd' to Waldo, not even if they were still running the Fish Depot together when they were nonagenarians. Waldo's first law of industrial relations was that if a man gave you a job, then you respected that man. If you couldn't respect him, you should find another job.

‘You went to the mortuary?' asked Waldo, gently. ‘You saw her?'

Lloyd nodded. ‘Yes. I've met her parents, too.'

Waldo frowned at him. ‘Didn't you say she didn't have no parents?'

‘Well, yes, that's what she said, but it turns out she does. They came down from San Celemente last night and stayed over. I saw them off about a half an hour ago. They're very broken up about it.'

‘Everybody is broke up, Mr Denman. Everybody is broke up real bad.'

Lloyd went through to the kitchens. A huge copper saucepan of fish stock was simmering on the hob. He lifted the lid and sniffed it. ‘Smells good. Louis is going to be giving Marcel Perrin a run for his money one of these days. Did he manage to buy any bluefish?'

‘He's gone down to the dock to fetch some now. He wanted more abalone too.'

Lloyd looked around, and then he said, ‘I'm going to need some time off, Waldo. I want you to take charge of things for a while.'

‘Sure, Mr Denman. You can count on me. How long do you think you're going to need?'

‘I don't know, it could be a couple of days, it could be a week. There's a problem I have to take care of. I'll try to keep in touch, but if you get into any kind of trouble you can always call my lawyer, Dan Tabares. He's in the phonebook, Tabares Oldenkamp Tabares.'

Waldo watched Lloyd uneasily. ‘You want to tell me what's wrong, Mr Denman? Maybe there's something I can do.'

Lloyd squeezed Waldo's hard, podgy arm. ‘Not this time, amigo. This is one that I have to sort out on my own. I'll pay you two hundred dollars a week more, okay? And you'll have full authority to sign cheques.'

‘Mr Denman, it wasn't for the extra money that I offered to help.'

‘Of course you didn't. But you're going to have extra responsibilities now, and extra responsibilities means extra pay. Okay?'

‘Well, okay, Mr Denman, if that's what you want.'

Lloyd went through to his office. He collected his Filofax, his spare set of keys, and the cassette from his answering-machine. Then he went across to the small table where he kept his business cheque books. Somebody had crowded the top of it with about a dozen of the old salt-and-pepper pots they used to use, before Lloyd had bought a complete new service from Villeroy & Boche. He unlocked the desk, and eased the lid up only a quarter of an inch so that he could retrieve a cheque book without dislodging any of the salt-and-pepper pots.

He had managed to tweak one cheque book between two fingers when the salt-and-pepper pots suddenly slid, and scattered all over the floor.

‘God damn it,' he cursed.

‘Everything okay, Mr Denman?' asked Waldo, peering around the door.

‘Oh, sure, fine—I just . . .'

He looked down at the scattered salt-and-pepper pots and they suddenly reminded him of something. Celia's scrimshaw, scattered across the carpet. And why had the scrimshaw scattered like that? Not because somebody had swept it all off the top of the piano with their arm. If somebody had done that, the scrimshaw would have been sprayed over a much wider area. No—it had all slid off the piano-top together, in the same tumbled cluster as these salt-and-pepper pots. Because somebody had done what he had just done with this desk. Lifted the lid, to retrieve something that was inside.

He gave Waldo a last quick list of instructions, and then he left the Original Fish Depot and stepped quickly out into the cool, moist fog. He wanted to go home and see what it was that his late-night visitor had been looking for.

The house seemed even quieter and emptier during the day than it did at night. He carried all his office papers inside, and left them on the kitchen counter. Then he went into the living-room and across to the piano.

He listened. Nothing but the sound of insects in the yard, and the whispering of lawn-sprinklers. Nothing but the measured dripping of a bathroom tap.

It was like a life, dripping away, drip, drip, drip, down the drain.

Carefully, he took all of the pieces of scrimshaw off the piano-lid, and laid them out on the cushions of one of the sofas. He was conscious as he did so that the photograph of Celia was watching him from the open bedroom door. Come, my Celia, let us prove . . . while we can, the sports of love.

The telephone rang and made his skin tingle with shock. He took off the last two pieces of scrimshaw, and went to answer it.

‘Lloyd? It's Sylvia.'

‘Oh hi, Sylvia. I guess you heard about Marianna.'

‘Wasn't that terrible? I was devastated. And the day after Celia, too.'

‘She was a really terrific girl.'

Sylvia said, ‘I came back from Mario's and saw it on the late-night news. I was just devastated. You don't think there's any connection, do you?'

‘That's what I asked the police, but they really didn't know. I think there's a pretty strong chance that there is a connection. It seems like far too much of a coincidence, two girls from the same opera company burning to death two days apart.'

‘I don't know, Lloyd. It's not as if Marianna killed herself on her own. You know, not as if she was following Celia's example. She had twelve other people with her, and none of them had anything to do with the San Diego Opera.'

‘Well, I guess the police will come up with something,' Lloyd told her, guardedly.

‘I guess so,' Sylvia agreed. ‘It's such a terrible waste of life.'

‘I really have to go now,' Lloyd told her, eyeing the bare white lid of the piano. ‘Did you say you were coming around today?'

‘For sure . . . that's if you still want me to.'

‘Why don't we go out for drinks? I could use somebody to talk to. I'll pick you up at six-thirty.'

‘I'd like that.'

Lloyd put down the phone and returned to the piano. Gently, he eased up the lid, and peered into the shadowy interior. Pianos always smelled the same inside, of wax and resin and felt dampers, almost like church. He lifted the lid right up, and propped it open.

At first glance, there didn't appear to be anything inside it. The trouble was, he didn't know what he was supposed to be looking for. A key, maybe? A wad of dollar-bills? A message? A chamois-leather bag, crammed with diamonds?

Nor did he know if his nocturnal visitor had managed to find what he was looking for. It was quite possible that he had already taken it—in which case, Lloyd would never find out what it was.

And there was still the question of who had hidden it, and why, and how come a burglar had known what to look for, and where it was?

As he peered around inside the piano, he came up with all kinds of random, half-developed, kaleidoscopic theories. Maybe some drugs dealer had been using the piano store as a front for selling crack, and had stashed some of it inside the piano he least expected to sell. Maybe the piano-frame had been cast out of solid gold by the Brinks Mat gang, as a way of smuggling it out of Europe. Maybe some spy had been using the piano as a drop for information stolen from the US Navy base.

Maybe . . .

He inclined his head sideways and caught sight of a pale brown envelope sellotaped to the inside of the piano. He carefully picked off the tape, and lifted the envelope out, making sure he held it right by the very corner. After all, it might have some Russian agent's fingerprints all over it, and what would the FBI say if he smudged them? He had seen enough episodes of Mission Impossible to know the correct procedure. This message will self-destruct in ten seconds.

He laid the envelope on his writing-desk, and opened it. Inside, there was a sheaf of yellowed papers. He slid them out on to his blotter, and carefully fanned them out. He wouldn't have known what they were before he had met Celia, but he recognized them immediately as an operatic libretto. It must have been a pretty major opera, too, since the pages were numbered from 125 to 137.

There were also some pages of music manuscript, written with a spidery, splotchy pen, and heavily crossed-out and corrected. On the very last page there was a pencil note: Wagner ‘Junius' January 1883.

Lloyd sat back in his chair and stared at all these discoloured sheets of paper in perplexity. They looked as if they could be Wagner's original score—although Lloyd had no idea what Wagner's writing had been like. If they were, they were probably quite valuable. But why had Celia hidden them inside her piano? Why hadn't she locked them up at the bank? And who had known, apart from Celia, that they were hidden there?

He leafed through the libretto again and again. He couldn't understand it, because it was all in German, and written in a handwriting that he could scarcely decipher anyway.

Maybe he should show it to the police. Celia had never mentioned it to him. Maybe her big secret was that she had stolen it. He knew what a nut she had always been for Wagner memorabilia. Maybe its rightful owner had killed her out of revenge. Despite what several eyewitnesses had said on the local televison news, Lloyd still found it difficult to believe that Celia had actually poured petrol all over herself and set herself alight. Maybe somebody had forced her to do it—at gunpoint, perhaps. Somebody who had been standing sufficiently far away not to be noticed when the petrol went up.

Wagner ‘Junius', January 1883. He left his desk, and went across to the bookshelf, taking out Richard Wagner by Hans von Kiel. Licking his finger, he leafed through it until he reached the index of Wagner's operas: Die Feen, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, The Twilight of the Gods, Lohengrin and, lastly, Parsifal, which had been written in 1882, the year before Wagner died of a heart attack. No mention of an opera called Junius.

Lloyd looked through the list of overtures and pieces for chorus and orchestra. The Siegfried Idyll, the Faust Overture, but no Junius. He closed the book and sat with his mouth covering his hand, deep in thought.

Was it possible that Celia had faked this opera—either as a wicked joke or as a way of making herself some extra money, and that somebody who resented that kind of fraud had found her out? She had been brilliant at improvising Wagneresque music. At parties, she had been able to sing great bursts of pretence verses from The Ring. She had even invented a Wagnerian operatic character of her own, Bulkhilde, and she had once discussed Bulkhilde with the San Diego Opera's artistic director, Tito Caporosso, for over twenty minutes before he realized he was being leg-pulled.

He had heard of homicides in the art world, after forgers had tried to con dealers and auctioneers out of millions of dollars. But was there a music mafia, too? People who would burn you alive because you sold them a fake opera? It didn't seem particularly likely. In fact it seemed almost laughable.

Lloyd found a spare plastic record sleeve, and slipped the pages of music manuscript into it. His first step would be to take them to Sylvia's tonight. Sylvia was an expert when it came to long-lost music manuscripts, and her knowledge of Wagner was almost as encyclopaedic as Celia's had been. In 1972, Sylvia had found nine previously undiscovered piano suites written by Debussy after his visit to the Bayreuth Festival in 1889—compositions that were strongly influenced by Wagner.

If anybody would know about Junius, it would be Sylvia.

Lloyd was beginning to feel hungry. He hadn't been able to eat properly since he had first heard about Celia, and despite the horror of having to identify her body, or even because of it, his stomach had started to growl. He decided to go down to Michelangelo's Italian restaurant on Rosecrans and treat himself to a plate of their spaghettini alla vongole.

There was another reason why he wanted to go to Rosecrans: he wanted to see for himself the place where Celia had died.

He called Waldo to check how the Original Fish Depot was faring. ‘You don't worry about nothing, Mr Denman. All booked up this lunchtime, all booked up tonight. No problems.'

Lloyd was still talking to Waldo when he thought he glimpsed a shadow moving silently across the kitchen floor. He paused in his conversation for a second, keeping his eyes on the open kitchen doorway. Then he said, ‘Okay, Waldo, thanks a lot. I'll check in later, okay?'

‘You got it, Mr Denman.'

Lloyd gently replaced the telephone receiver, and waited. He thought he heard the back doorhandle eased on its spring. Somebody trying to turn it. Somebody with infinite patience, trying to open the back door without him hearing. This time, however, they wouldn't have any luck. He had not only locked the door, he had shot the bolts, too, top and bottom. Nobody would be able to break into the kitchen without kicking the door out of its frame.

He softly crossed the living-room until he reached the kitchen door. He hesitated for a moment, his chest tight with anticipation.

Suppose somebody's standing outside the back door, trying to force their way in? Even worse, supposing it's . . .