Rogue's Gallery (12 page)

I waited. I am not a Mr Thingummy.

‘Mozart.'

It was the taller of the two. He pronounced it Mo-zart instead of Moat-zart, a deplorable English habit. However I bowed – a reward for a good try. They began over towards me.

‘You're the johnny who's teaching my father composition.'

‘Well, not—'

‘You've got a hard job on your hands. You're starting from scratch.'

‘Typical of my father,' came from the shorter boy. ‘Wasting our inheritance on futile projects. Who will believe that he wrote it?'

‘And who would believe,' chimed in the older boy, ‘that he'd lavish all that money and time on a damned librarian?'

‘A damned what?' I couldn't stop myself saying.

‘Faithful servant and all that. But a piece of
music
? Choirs and solo singers, orchestral johnnies, the whole caboodle. For a book-duster? It should be a case of, when he dies, slipping a ten pound note to his widow.'

‘He's not married, Jimmy,' said the other. ‘Not at all, if you get me.'

‘Well, in that case you're ten pounds to the good.' The pair turned and resumed their marathon.

It was around this point in the execution of the contract that Mr Pickles began to take a more active interest in the progress of my composition. I found one afternoon when I went to play over the day's inspirations that cups and jugs of chocolate had been set out on a small table, and I had no sooner began playing than a footman came in with napkins and biscuits (biscuits are my weakness but the servants so far had not remembered to offer me any), followed a second or two later by Mr Pickles, who sat himself down and – to be fair to him – listened. At the first pause in the playing he called me over.

‘Mr Mozart, you must be in need of refreshment.'

I bowed my head briefly, and made my way over. He had poured into my cup some of the fragrant refresher, while pouring himself a cup from the other jug. Made with the finest Brazilian coffee beans, he explained. It was a country with which his mills had strong financial links. The drink was slightly bitter-tasting but acceptable.

‘So how is it going, then? Are you well on the way?'

I had the reputation for extreme facility in the writing of my scores. It was a reputation fully justified when it concerned my pieces written to order for members of the aristocracy or the theatre. Still, four weeks for a full-scale requiem was ridiculous.

‘I have five movements well advanced, either on paper or in my head,' I said. ‘I have fragments of ideas for the other nine sections. Time will tell which are usable.'

‘Ah yes. This question of time—'

I was so daring as to interrupt him.

‘Great work is not done in days. Remember, sir, I have strong connections with Kensington Palace. If the princess on whom all our hopes turn hears this is a workaday piece that anyone could have written, she will not attend. But if it is a work worthy of Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, then she will come if I persuade her, and I will not need to say anything about my participation in the piece.'

‘Oh my!' said my patron, as if he could barely comprehend the joyful possibility. ‘A magnificent prospect! A wonderful culmination to our mutual collaboration.'

What a mutual collaboration was I could not guess. All we had was a willingness to pay money on one side and an eagerness to accept it on the other, a purely commercial transaction.

So things went on. Now and then Mrs Pickles came in, usually listened for a time, then went out, possibly with a banal compliment, sometimes with a barbed remark about her husband or his family, depending on her mood. The boys (James and Seymour were their names, the second
being his mother's family name) came either singly or together, greeted me with ‘Hi' or ‘Good morning', and sometimes added a sarcastic comment, such as ‘Earning your daily crust, eh, Mr Mozart?' I didn't like them. Their father was at least fond of music, even if he knew nothing about it. The boys were simply vessels, without learning or achievement. I heard from the servants that they were both very deep in gambling debts.

The course of my time with the Pickleses changed one afternoon at the beginning of May. I had been forced, on my way out of Pickles Palace, to make a quick visit to the privy, the nature of which I won't go into. I was just washing my hands in the bowl of lukewarm water renewed every hour by a lower footman, when I heard two voices passing along the corridor outside. One was Mr Cazalet, whose work in the library prevented my having much to do with him while I was in the house, and the other was his, and temporarily my, employer, Isaac Pickles.

‘The uncertainty is playing on your mind I fear, sir.'

‘Oh, I'm perfectly all right. Masterpieces are not made in days, or even months, as Mr Mozart says. But I worry a little about him. He is not a young man. He looks increasingly ill every time I see him.'

‘I see him very little,' said Mr Cazalet neutrally.

‘Just so long as he lasts long enough to complete the great work,' came Mr Pickles's voice fading down the long corridor. Then I heard him laugh – a silly, childish laugh. I stayed in the privy, frozen to the spot, looking at my reflection in the glass.

I was not looking ill, not ‘increasingly ill' every time I
came to the Pickleses. If I was, the princess would have noticed and been concerned. She is very conscious of the great gap between my great age and her little one. She has so few congenial souls around her that she is desperate not to lose one of them. No, I was not looking more and more sickly.

On the other hand, there was the bowel trouble that had taken me to the privy in the first place.

There was another thing that troubled me: the foolish laugh as the pair disappeared from earshot. It sounded not just silly, but less than sane. Senile. And I thought of the fearsome mother now apparently sunk into imbecility for many years. Was senility heritable? Did that explain the multitude of reasons given for the requiem's composition: to me it was for his wife; to his wife it was for his mother; to his thoughtless and senseless sons he gave the least likely explanation of all – that it was for his librarian. It all sounded like a foolish jape. It suggested softening of the brain.

I told all this to the Princess Victoria at the beginning of her next lesson. Her performances that day were more than usually inaccurate and insensitive, and I drew her attention to this several times. Finally, as the lesson ended, she pulled down the piano lid and said: ‘I'm sorry to play so badly, Mr Mozart. The truth is, I am worried.'

‘Oh dear. Your mother and Sir John again?'

‘Not at all. Well yes, they are at it, but it's you I am worried about, and what you told me about Mr Pickles. Has it occurred to you that, if he is so concerned to hide the authorship of this requiem, the most convenient death for him would be your own?'

I fear I was so surprised that I could make no adequate response. I took my leave, made for the door, and turned to bow my farewells. The princess had not finished with me.

‘What was the nature of this little room from which you overheard this interesting conversation, Mr Mozart?'

My mouth opened and shut and I scurried out to make my escape.

Arsenic. That's what it was. I wondered at the princess's knowledge of the ways of the criminal world, but then I remembered she had grown up surrounded by plots and conspiracies. Threats on her life (usually involving the Duke of Cumberland, the next in line to the throne) had been the staple of society and newspaper gossip. Arsenic, the poison that is best administered first in small doses, leading up to a fatal dose. Illness of an internal kind is first established, than accepted as the cause of death. Simple.

And who, after all, questions the cause of death of a seventy-nine-year-old man? I was a sitting duck. And my murderer, insultingly enough, was a brain-softened vulgarian from the north of England!

On the next occasion, later that same week, that Mr Pickles came to hear my latest inspirations, I put into action a cunning but simple plan. Standing by the small table with the chocolate already poured out, I remarked to Mr Pickles that the magnificent proportions of the room were remarkably similar to those of St Margaret on the square, one of the churches we had considered for the first performance of the requiem. I suggested he go to the
far end of the room to hear how my latest extracts, from the Benedictus, would sound. He was childishly delighted with my proposal. As he walked the length of the room I changed our cups around. The biter bit! I played some of the Benedictus and Mr Pickles expressed his delight: the music penetrated to the far end of the room and was wonderful. We resumed our discussion over chocolate and I looked closely to see if a grimace came over the Pickles face when he tasted it, but I could see nothing.

My next conversation with a member of the Pickles family came two days later. I was sketching a crucial moment in the
Rex Tremendae
when the door to my little anteroom opened and the younger son, Seymour, put his head in.

‘I say, Mr Mo-zart.'

‘Yes?'

‘This requiem you're writing and pretending my Dad did it all – who is it supposed to be
for
? I mean who is it commemorating if that's the right word. Eh? Who is dead?'

‘I believe it is to commemorate your mother.'

‘Well, she's alive and blooming and if she's ill she's quite unaware of it. And
we'd
– that's Jimmy and me – heard it was for Cazalet the book johnny. Damned unlikely, what? And now I've heard it is for Gran, who is alive but not so you'd notice and there won't be much difference when she finally goes over the finishing line.'

‘I couldn't comment. Maybe your father is confused. Many people who have lived exceptionally active lives do get … brain-tired earlier than most of us. Or perhaps he has just been joking.'

‘Pater doesn't joke. And a requiem's a pretty funny thing to joke about. But you think senility, maybe? I think I ought to talk to a lawyer. He could be declared
non compos.
Stop him throwing his money around.'

‘I doubt it. I have seen no signs of it except for the stories about the requiem. His condition would have to be much further advanced before you could start trying to jump into his shoes.'

‘I say, you make it sound unpleasant. I mean, I'm deuced concerned—'

I got up and shut the door on him.

A crisis in an affair such as this should not be too long delayed. In a comedy it would come in the third act, with the outcome in the last. Two days after my conversation with Seymour, Isaac Pickles and I had one of our afternoon meetings. We talked first, I explained my aims in the Tuba Mirum, he got up of his own accord and by the time he reached the end of the room the jugs had been shifted round and I was at the piano ready to play and add a sketchy vocal performance as well.

‘Enthralling, Mr Mozart,' he said, when he returned to the table. ‘You have excelled yourself – as I always say because you always do.' He took up his little jug of chocolate, poured it into his cup, added sugar, stirred, and then took a great, almost a theatrical gulp at it.

It was as if his eyes were trying to pop out of his face with astonishment – he let out a great, flabbergasted yell, then cried out in fear and outrage. As he weakened he bellowed something – a command, a query, a protestation of innocence. I could only assume he had
put a hefty dose of arsenic in my chocolate jug, and was now really getting the taste of it for the first time. I ran to the door, but before I got there Seymour had appeared through the door at the room's other end, and before I could shout servants were running into the room from all quarters. When I got back to the table the butler was trying to induce vomiting, others were banging him on the shoulders or trying to put their fingers down his throat. Soon two footmen came with a stretcher and said the doctor had been sent for. He was taken, crying out and retching, to his bedroom. The family physician arrived twenty minutes later. By six o'clock in the evening he was dead. The doctor, though he had not been consulted recently, heard from servants and family Isaac Pickles's complaints about an upset stomach. The lower footman who serviced the privies gave more specific evidence. The doctor signed the certificate. I was left to ponder what in fact had happened.

On the long walk back to my house in Covent Garden I subjected my assumption to detailed scrutiny. Would a man who had just popped a hefty dose of arsenic into my chocolate jug take a first taste of his own chocolate in the form of a massive gulp? I would have thought that, however confident he was of having got the right cup, some primitive form of self-protection would ensure he took a modest sip.

Then again, why would he try to poison me
now
? The requiem was barely half complete in rough form. If he had waited a few months it could have been in the sort of shape that would mean it could be completed by one
of my pupils – the dutiful but uninspired Frank Sussman sprang to mind. Certainly Isaac Pickles couldn't complete it himself. By poisoning me at this point he was spoiling all his own plans, mad as they were, by killing the goose that was laying the golden egg. If senility was setting in – and I rather thought it was – it was strongly affecting his judgment and his logic and causing him to act in his own worst interests.

Was there an alternative explanation? The chocolate, on days when Mr Pickles intended honouring me with his company, was put outside the drawing room on an occasional table, the jugs protected by their padded cosies. When Pickles arrived the chocolate was brought in by the footman if one was around, or by the Great Man himself if one was not. Either outside the drawing room or once he'd got in, Mr Pickles added a small amount of arsenic to my jug or my cup. His plan was a very small increase in amount so that my death could be timed to coincide with the completion (or the as-near-as-makes-no-difference completion) of the requiem. He was already anxiously scrutinising my appearance and convincing himself I was looking ill, as in the early stages of the operation I must have been.