Funeral Music Read online

  ‘Well, who was locking up last night?’ James asked. ‘Because if they locked up in the usual way and set the alarm, whoever it was either left Matthew Sawyer, or Matthew Sawyer’s body, inside.’

  ‘But it was Matthew Sawyer who was meant to do the locking up,’ Sara said. ‘Olivia mentioned it when she was saying good night. So what then? Who actually did lock up? The murderer must have done it.’

  ‘That’s if the alarm was set. Suppose George was behaving as usual because he wasn’t surprised to find the alarm switched off? Because he’d done the murder? Oh, but wait, no, because if he’d done the murder and left the alarm off, so that the police would think the murder was done by someone who didn’t know how to set the alarm, then part of that trick would be acting all surprised when he “discovered” the alarm off in the morning. So he couldn’t have done it. Could he?’

  ‘Don’t. You’re getting me all confused,’ Sara said, sniggering. ‘Anyway, I think it’s all horrible. When I think of the last people going off home, never thinking of what they were leaving him to. You stayed till the end, didn’t you? Looked like you were enjoying yourself, anyway.’

  ‘You know me. Hate to leave before the party’s over.’ James raised his glass to her archly before drinking from it. ‘I’m still wondering why he was killed. Not burglary, by the look of it, or vandalism. Must have had enemies.’

  ‘One enemy at least,’ Sara said firmly, ‘although I can never understand how people’s feelings run so high. I mean, in the real world—’

  ‘Ha! You mean in your sheltered little world, don’t you?’ James said, more abruptly than he intended. ‘You don’t know what goes on, you don’t really. People aren’t always what they seem, you know.’

  Sara gave him a look of pitying sarcasm. ‘Oh, right. I get it, we’re back in gay paranoia land, are we? No, wait, perhaps Matthew Sawyer was an underground drugs baron. Or a pimp. Both. Christ, James—’

  ‘Cow. You don’t know what goes on. It’s not paranoia, there’s a lot of real homophobia out there and it’s not all yobs gay-bashing on a Saturday night in the provinces. There’s a lot of it under the surface.’

  ‘So you think Matthew Sawyer was gay, do you?’

  ‘I’m not saying he was gay, am I? Not that being gay and homophobic don’t often go together.’

  ‘Oh, don’t get started on that. Anyway, I think we should leave it to the police.’

  James said mischievously, ‘You mean you’re going to ask the splendid Andrew what he thinks. He might even be conducting the case.’

  Sara shot James a look. ‘There’s no need to be nasty about him, just because he’s a policeman.’

  ‘The world’s first cello-playing policeman,’ James said slyly. ‘And I’m not being nasty about him. I just question his motives for pestering you, and getting you to teach him the cello, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s nothing to question. How would you feel if you’d been stopped from learning the piano just when it was getting interesting? Because your parents thought it was time to get proper qualifications and a proper job? Andrew was just made to give it all up and he’s regretted it all his life. He could have played professionally, only he wasn’t encouraged. It’s a criminal waste of talent.’

  ‘He fancies you.’

  Sara scowled.

  ‘And what about your motives for taking him on? Is it really his talent that’s so interesting? He’s very good-looking, of course, but don’t tell him I said so – he’d be horrified.’

  ‘Anyway, Andrew’s not a policeman, he’s a detective,’ Sara said, ‘as you perfectly well know. Detective Chief Inspector.’ She added, as an afterthought, ‘You’re just jealous, because you fancy him yourself.’

  ‘I do not intend to dignify such a scurrilous suggestion with a reply,’ James sniffed. ‘And as usual you’re missing the important bit, which is that you, the world-class concert artist, are actually giving lessons to PC Gorgeous. And don’t get me wrong; he may well be worth teaching, but whether or not you should be spending your time doing it, instead of thinking about getting back to playing a concert or two, is open to question. In my view.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘And there’s his little wifey to consider, isn’t there?’

  Sara sighed. She knew that after Andrew Poole had lost the battle over his music studies and joined the police, he had been easy game for Valerie. They had married when they were both twenty-three and henceforth Andrew’s life had shrunk to a preoccupation with the mortgage, parent-craft classes, police exams, his in-laws at every other Sunday lunch, forays to Mothercare, instalments on the furniture, the microwave and camcorder, and regular spats with Valerie on all of these topics. Most of this he explained the first time he had come to see Sara. He had not told her until he knew her better that it had been after one especially bad row that he had gone out and spent their holiday fund on a cello, having the previous Christmas sold his old one, under pressure, so that they could buy the kids a computer. Valerie was still giving him grief about it but he had reached a point when he just had to play again, and Valerie was going to have to lump it.

  ‘His little wifey is his business,’ she now told James.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ James said. ‘Maybe your motives are entirely pure. But Poole did kind of manipulate you into teaching him, didn’t he?’

  James could be so irritating. She wasn’t going to explain it all again, how Andrew had simply needed lessons, and when he had read in the Bath Chronicle, which had run a feature on her, that she had come to live near Bath, he had written her a sort of fan letter. He had introduced himself, told her that he had all her recordings and said that he did not suppose for a moment she would consider teaching him. She had written back acknowledging the first part of the letter, failing to state categorically that she did not take pupils. Then he had simply rung up and asked when he could come and meet her and get her advice. She had not been surprised to find that the attractively gentle voice was attached to a strongly built, fair-haired, brown-eyed man a year or two older than she was. But she had been surprised at how musically he had played despite many years’ rust on his technique, and how very strongly he had resisted the idea of approaching any of the other people she suggested about lessons. ‘But I don’t take pupils,’ she had protested.

  ‘I don’t charge him,’ Sara said, staring defensively at James, who was sipping smugly from his glass. It was hardly the point. Andrew had written again. And then telephoned. By this time he was being so reliably surprising that she, ridiculously flattered, had relented. The thought had entered her mind that she would much rather that this amusing, insistent man with his gentle way of getting exactly what he wanted were in her life, rather than out of it.

  ‘Look, it’s only once a fortnight or so. And I like him and I like teaching him, so you can stop looking at me like that. If he is on the case, he’ll probably have made an arrest by now. How complicated can it be? Give me another drink. Didn’t you get any cheese?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ said James, still looking smug.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE NEXT MORNING, despite a slight hangover, Sara drove out along the London Road between the high walls of the Batheaston town houses. She stopped for a paper at Dennis and Maureen’s shop where, to her surprise, news of the corpse in the water and her involvement in its discovery had not yet arrived. Then she turned left up towards Bannerdown, where the Roman road ran straight along the top of the hill towards Colerne and the sanctuary of the health club at Fortune Park.

  As Sara came through the double doors into the club she saw that Sue was on the desk and that her happy mood of two days ago had flown. It was almost an achievement, the way she managed to look so depressed in her sharp little up-and-at-’em fitness-instructor outfits, although this job was often combined with being the club receptionist and waitress. Her perfect athletic body was dressed and immaculately accessorised today in expensive aerobics kit, yet her face betrayed a life again quite devoid of fun.


  ‘Hello there,’ Sara said, annoyingly bright.

  Sue tried to raise a smile.

  ‘Oh, dear. Paul?’ Sara asked.

  Sue nodded. ‘Not what you think – not a row or anything.’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘He’s being questioned about...oh, God, it’s awful...about...oh, God, a murder! At the Pump Room. The police rang up here. He’s gone into Bath police station, and the whole game’s up! He’s been found out and it’s over. He won’t be able to work here any more!’

  Sara wanted to say several things at once, one of which was that if Paul had committed the murder then there were surely going to be more pressing and serious consequences than the loss of his job. Instead, she deferred her exercise without complaint, took a stool at the bar among the potted palms and old copies of Country Life and sipped coffee while she listened. She managed with a little difficulty to tell Sue that she had been there, that she had actually been the one to find the body. Sue was suitably aghast but the news deflected her only momentarily from her own woes.

  ‘No! God! Ugh! Ghastly! Really, poor you. Ghastly! So anyway...’

  As she carried on, things began to make sense. Paul had been working at the Assembly Rooms on Friday afternoon and evening, preparing and serving the vegetarian buffet. And that was the problem. Paul should not have been there, because moonlighting was strictly against his contract at Fortune Park. The management’s line was that they paid their staff to be alert and on the ball and they did not want anyone going off doing functions in their off-duty hours and then showing up the next day to serve breakfast, half dead with fatigue. So their contracts forbade it. Sue had once pleaded for special permission to run an aerobics class outside the health club and been turned down.

  ‘He was only doing it to get on a bit,’ Sue said. Sara murmured understandingly. ‘He’s wasted as a waiter, you see. He’s a chef really. He’s really good, he’s half French, his mother was French, he trained over there at his uncle’s restaurant. He wants to be a chef, only he hasn’t got any formal qualifications and he could only get taken on here as a waiter. It’s practically impossible to move up in the kitchens here, not from being a waiter. It’s like the army, everyone in the kitchen’s got a rank, and even the juniors have got to have degrees, just to slice the vegetables. He’ll never get a start here. So he’s been doing a bit for Coldstreams, you know, the people that do the food at the Pump Room and the Assembly Rooms and wherever. The Guildhall as well, I think. He’s been assistant chef sometimes, at some of the functions. It’s vegetables mainly. He did meringues the other week. But it’s proper cooking. And he’s careful, he only takes on the hours he can manage on top. Now he’ll get the sack. It’s so unfair! We need the money. He’s trying to save so we can get a flat together.’ Her face crumpled.

  ‘Look, don’t assume the worst. You never know, maybe the management will be sympathetic. They might even help when they know why he was doing it. Maybe they’ll even help him with training. Or maybe Oliver Coldstream will put in a good word for him with his boss here, explain it all.’

  ‘Paul’s hardly ever seen Mr Coldstream. And he’d never even seen Matthew Sawyer at all, and just because he was there he’s got the police asking him questions, and he’ll probably lose his job. It’s so unfair.’

  Sara did not know what comfort to offer. More people had come in and the pool was now busy, relatively speaking, with three or four children and their dad and a couple of ladies. Sue had to be on hand to do lunches. Sara changed a little reluctantly into her running kit and jogged off alone out of the back door of the club. Circling her arms as she went, she trotted sedately round the outside of the walled garden that separated the club from the hotel, and joined the narrow service road that led down the side and round to the front of the hotel, which had originally been an exquisitely pretty manor house. It was homely but imposing, with its gabled upper windows, pillared entrance and semicircular apron of lawn. But the guests’ BMWs parked directly in front of the long windows did nothing to enhance the façade, and presumably also impeded the view from the public rooms down the avenue, a straight road between high beeches, which ran for more than a quarter of a mile from the lawn in front of the house down to the main gate. Sara plodded along under the trees, her legs heavy. Yesterday’s events had taken more out of her than she had thought and she was not yet enjoying the run. There would be no stopwatch today, just the two-mile circuit down the drive, out and round by the edge of Colerne and back in to Fortune Park by the rear entrance.

  The even pace of running always helped her to think. So he was stabbed. How is it that such a tall man, probably quite strong, could end up in the water? She concentrated on getting her breathing to come evenly as she thought about this. He could not easily have been overpowered and pushed over the railing, unless his attacker were stronger than he was. But if he were hurt, or already dead, his body could have been tipped in easily. Was he stabbed in the back, then, and tipped over into the water? Those long legs would have acted like a lever. Perhaps ‘not thought to be selfinflicted’ is police code for stab wounds in the back. She had seen no knife, but perhaps it had been under the water, or lying around somewhere. The police would want to find that. Her legs were getting warmer now. Don’t murderers always get rid of the weapon? Sawyer’s body must have been there all night. Perhaps he wasn’t married, then, because his wife would have contacted the police when he didn’t come home after the dinner, surely? Probably divorced. She had reached the end of the avenue now and she turned left out onto the pavement towards the crossroads on the edge of the village. The way ahead rose slightly with an angle of incline that was practically imperceptible if you were walking, but running, even at this gentle pace, you felt every contour. She ran on the spot for a few paces and again circled her arms extravagantly in an effort to loosen up her breathing. She set off again, lifting her knees more deliberately. Now the pace was coming more easily. She quickened her stride and felt her body relax into an easy rhythm of breathing and moving that she knew she could keep up for an hour or more. Wonderful.

  Out of the shelter of the avenue the landscape opened up too. In the fields on either side of the high road along which she was running, the new wheat was sighing and soughing in the breeze which blew out of a huge, exhilarating sky. The sun came and went with the clouds but the wind itself seemed to carry light. As she ran on with her hair whipping her face, Sara recalled the ploughing and sowing of the black fields on a squally March day, when grit had been blown into her eyes and mouth by gusts which had lifted the seagulls away like paper bags. And months before that, when she had ventured out heavily track-suited one winter morning, out of a solid sky the wind had suddenly begun to throw out fistfuls of sleet which had rattled around her on the empty road, across the iron topsoil and swirled into the dark field corners. Today there was such brightness in the silky wheat, the banks of cow parsley and the far-off glinting, low roofs of Colerne. In another few weeks the air would be sharp with wheat dust and stray chaff and the fields brittle with stubble. She had lived for months like this now. Months of being patient, allowing her fatigue to lift, developing her stamina, reclaiming her energy, practising and practising, hoping for some change in her playing that still had not come and that she could not force. And as she was waiting, practising, running round and round, things were planted, they grew and they were reaped. If nothing changed she might be plodding between these fields in her tracksuit next time round, watching the snow and waiting for the spring.

  As she breathed and ran steadily, she thought back to the events of Friday and Saturday. At the Assembly Rooms I saw Matthew Sawyer, Olivia, Sue, of course, and Cecily and her odd man in the foyer. Derek something. I left there just before seven, got to the Pump Room maybe twenty minutes later. Saw James, then changed, warmed-up, had a drink. Played at eight for twenty-five minutes, well, thirty with the encores. Who was at the Pump Room? Olivia, she turned up about quarter to eight, left early, almost before dinner was over. I chatted to he
r before she left. I didn’t dare mention the scene at the Assembly Rooms. Don’t even know if she saw me there. She left a minute or two after ten; she said she had to get back to say good night to her dad before he was settled for the night. He’s housebound with a nurse now, and Matthew was in charge of locking up, she was just a guest. ‘I’m off duty,’ Olivia said. ‘Being deputy has its compensations.’ He was covering the Pump Room, George was due to lock up at the Assembly Rooms. I didn’t notice Matthew Sawyer until almost after dinner, about quarter to ten. I suppose he was behind the scenes somewhere, or still at the Assembly Rooms till then. He didn’t have a table, just went round and chatted to people, with puddings and coffee. I left at half past ten. Pissing with rain. Said good night to George, on the door. Plenty people still there, James included. He stayed till very near the end, he said. Forgot to ask him last night when he did leave, and who was still there. Who was last, before Matthew Sawyer? Maybe the murderer just waited till he was the only one left. Maybe he was hiding. And what was it George said: ‘Last out, first in’? Well, I wasn’t the last out. Whoever was last must have done the murder. No, could have done it. Where have I got to? Nowhere. Just been running round and round and round, story of my life.

  She absolutely would not speculate any more. She would put the whole thing right out of her mind. She jogged back to the health club entrance feeling invigorated if not enlightened. In the gym she stretched out her legs and back and spent ten minutes whirring back and forth on the rowing machine. Most of the rest of the club’s clientele had abandoned themselves to lunch by the time she was ready to swim, so she had the pool almost to herself and drifted up and down, hypnotically slow, stretching and floating between strokes. At last, physically tired, she gave herself up to a pleasant weariness and read her paper on a lounger by the side of the pool.

  CHAPTER 6

  ANDREW, A HORSE could play that better.’ Sara had not meant to sound quite so brutal, but since the only point of Andrew Poole’s lessons was to help him achieve a half-decent standard, she had resolved to keep him up to the mark. She could safely dismiss James’s suggestion of an ulterior motive for taking him on, because it was of no relevance at all that Andrew’s body had struck her again as exceptionally finely made. She could hardly be expected not to notice how long and muscular were his thighs, straddling the cello. Of course she was aware of how intelligent and strong was his face, but she was unmoved. It was central to her role as his teacher to notice these things; they were part of the visual information that she relied on to help him improve his technique or concentration. James should know that, but next time she saw him she would tell him anyway.