“And what, you’re gonna go around feeling people up to see if any of them’s a murderer? Not at my mum’s effing wedding reception, you’re not!”
“Everyone shakes hands at a wedding. Nobody will even notice.”
The organist broke into “Here Comes the Bride,” and all heads turned.
Cheryl’s mum looked very much like Cheryl, only taller and more statuesque. Her dark face under the white veil was austerely beautiful, and she walked like an empress. It was something of a revelation—if heredity counted for anything, Cheryl was going to grow old very gracefully indeed.
The bride proceeded up the aisle in stately fashion, and various elderly women on both sides of the aisle made good use of their handkerchiefs. Alice Gascoigne kept hers firmly in its holster; she’d seen me by now, and she was staring at me with an expression like the one Banquo’s ghost must have used on Macbeth.
“You said she was sad,” I reminded Cheryl. “Now you know why. Do you want the bastard who did that to her to get away with it?”
She didn’t answer.
Cheryl’s mum was making her vows now. They sounded as though she’d run them up herself, because they went from “With my body I thee worship” into some pretty explicit subclauses.
Cheryl looked away. “Okay,” she said, sounding miserable and flat. She opened her purse, which was made of cream-colored leather and just about big enough to hold a handkerchief and a tampon. By some alchemy she took out of it a large rectangle of card with a gold border. She handed it to me without a word. It began You are cordially invited to the wedding of Eileen Telemaque to Russell Clarke, on Sunday, November 27, 2005. With a whispered thanks to Cheryl, I shoved it into my pocket.
More vows from the groom, who sounded as though he was reading from a crib sheet and seeing some of them for the first time. Well, if you don’t read the small print, you haven’t got a leg to stand on.
“When does the reception start?” I whispered to Cheryl.
“At three. It’s on the invite. Felix, don’t fuck this up, okay? Don’t do something awful.”
I went through some hurried mental calculations. There was some stuff I needed to do first. I squeezed Cheryl’s hand and slid back along the pew. “Catch you later,” I promised.
“You’re gonna catch something,” Cheryl prophesied bitterly.
It’s hard to leave a wedding discreetly while it’s still in progress. The ushers glared at me as I strolled past them and out the door, trying to look as though I’d only popped in to read the gas meter. Behind me, the swelling organ chords worked their way through to a very impressive diapason that hung in the air like floating furniture.
I got to the Bonnington first, broke into the secret rooms all over again, and did what I had to do. The atmosphere down in the basement room was so oppressive, I felt as though I was sipping the dank air rather than breathing it. I took care not to touch McClennan’s ward of silence with my bare skin again. To be honest, I could barely bring myself to look at it. It struck me right then as the most purely evil thing I’d come across in a long and eventful life.
When I was finished, there was nothing left for me to do but loiter. I let myself back out onto the street, locked up carefully behind myself, and retired to the Rocket on Euston Road. One side of the pub looks out toward Ossulston Street, which is where those sleek white limousines would turn to go into the one-way system before parking out in front of the Bonnington. I’d have plenty of warning and plenty of time in the meantime to sink a pint and steady my nerves.
I hadn’t lied to Cheryl. Not exactly. But I hadn’t told her the whole truth, either. There was no point at all in me shaking hands with the archive staff if all they were thinking about was the cost of the canapés and how big the bride’s arse looked. I had to get their emotions stirred up and their thoughts turning toward the dead woman. Well, I’d come up with a way of doing that. And it was going to make Mrs. Telemaque’s fourth wedding one that everyone would remember.
The cars rolled up about half an hour later. I gave them a quarter of an hour after that and then went sauntering along after them.
The doors of the Bonnington were open. No sign of the ushers from the Oratory, but an MC in a red tux gave me a welcoming smile that congealed into something a lot less cordial when he saw how I was dressed. I flashed the invite at him and walked on by.
There was no receiving line, so when I got up to the reading room, my entrance went unnoticed. I looked around at a scene of untrammeled joy and innocent celebration; it made me feel just a little bit awkward about what I was going to do next.
Some trestle tables had been set up at one end of the room and draped with long white tablecloths that trailed to the floor. Champagne cocktails were being served, and waitresses dressed in vaguely period black and white were tacking around the room with silver trays full of elegant finger foods. All very refined. More annoyingly, the shelving units and the librarians’ station had all been pushed back against the wall and camouflaged with white sheeting; there was no natural cover that I could use for the next stage of the proceedings, which was the truly fiddly one.
It didn’t help that I stuck out like a rabbi at a hoedown. The only reason nobody had noticed me so far was because there was a speech going on, and all eyes were turned on the man—a complete stranger to me—who was giving it. I scanned the crowd, saw Rich dressed in an immaculate gray morning suit with a sky blue waistcoat, talking with Jon Tiler off at the edge of the crowd on the far side of the room from me. Cheryl was up at the front, her arm linked in her mother’s. After a little casting around, I located Alice and Jeffrey by the drinks table, Alice holding out her champagne flute to be refreshed while Jeffrey talked to a fat woman in a voluminous red dress. His face set in a tight, pained smile, he looked like a man trying hard to have a good time at his own lynching party.
I looked around for somewhere I could play undisturbed, but nothing much suggested itself. Just as the speech wrapped up to loud applause, I ducked behind a pillar that at least would shield me from a casual glance. I slipped my whistle out of my pocket and put it to my lips.
Right here in the heart of her territory, my sense of the ghost was as sharp and as clear as it was ever going to be, but this still wasn’t going to be easy. Too much going on, too many competing sounds and stimuli. I closed my eyes to block out at least one source of distraction and tried to focus only on the feel of her in my mind—the sense that for me was more like hearing than anything else, but still impossible to dissect or describe.
The groom was speaking now, and all other conversation in the room had stilled. I waited, seething with impatience, for the background hum to start up again. He talked for what seemed like an hour—about what a difference Eileen had made to his life, about how lucky he was, about how much he was looking forward to being a father to Cheryl. I wondered if he’d seen the job description.
When the applause came again, I squeezed out the first notes. I tried to keep it low, and I managed at first, but the tune goes where it wants to go. If you push it into a different pattern, you get a different result.
My mind narrowed to the succession of notes, the inscape of the ghost’s music. Part of it was “The Bonny Swans,” but most of it was new, hers and nobody else’s, the sound that was the space she occupied in the world, the song that sang her.
Suggestive gaps in the skein of voices from around me told me that the guests closest to me had heard the music now. They were probably looking around for its source. I carried on playing, not hurrying, not slowing—I was tied to the wheel now, and I had to go where it took me.
The silence spread, and footsteps were coming toward me, but it was almost done. A few more bars would take me there. A hand clamped on my shoulder. Eyes tight shut, I ignored it, wound down through a plaintive diminuendo to a single note, which bounced up again into an unexpectedly defiant closing trill.