Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [25]
Mona’s neighbour, wearing curlers in her hair, bedroom slippers on her feet and a floral apron over her dress, stood shivering out in the November street, futile protest obvious in every muscle.
Oliver stopped the exodus and talked to the neighbour.
‘Mona had not been dead six hours,’ she said indignantly, ‘when Joanie herself came to pick through her mother’s things. It’s my belief she didn’t find what she came for. She was slamming things about and she drove off furious. That’s why they’re clearing out the house so fast now. Like hyenas, they are. Mona left her rent book with me, see, and the rent money for when she’s been away at your place. You don’t think that’s what they want, do you? It’s not very much. What shall I do about the rent?’
Oliver said he would see to the rent, and everything else. On his ultra light mobile phone, he reached Peregrine and explained to him the existence and provisions of Mona’s will. ‘So please instruct your men, my dear fellow,’ he said with courteous but inflexible authority, ‘to unload the van.’
Peregrine thought it over briefly and did as Oliver asked. He had sent the van at Joanie’s insistence, but she hadn’t explained the need for speed: it wasn’t as if Mona’s things were valuable, far from it. Joan (confided Peregrine to Oliver, man to man) sometimes got the bit between her teeth. She would be livid though, he privately realised, when she learned Mona had bequeathed her tatty old rubbish to someone else.
‘About Mona’s funeral,’ Oliver said, ‘Cassidy and I would like to attend. We were very fond of her, as you know.’
Peregrine asked which day would suit them.
‘Any day except this coming Wednesday,’ Oliver replied. ‘Cassidy is flying to Scotland for a concert on that day and I have a lunch-time speaking engagement which I cannot shift.’
‘It was Mona’s own fault she died,’ Peregrine said, suddenly defensive. ‘Joan offered to go and look after her, you know, but Mona didn’t want her. She phoned several times and told Joan to stay away. Very hurtful, Joan says.’
Oliver said thoughtfully, ‘There isn’t a telephone in that room where Mona was ill. It was very cold outside in the stable-yard, I believe, and it’s quite a step to any door into our house, which was unheated while we were away.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Where did Mona phone from?’
Peregrine’s silence lasted long enough for him to change the subject to photos of Joan in childhood. If Oliver found any…
‘I’m certain,’ Oliver assured him smoothly, ‘that Cassidy will give Joanie everything Mona would have liked her to have.’
‘Funeral any day but Wednesday,’ Peregrine confirmed, sounding almost friendly. ‘I’ll let you know.’
When Oliver reached home Cassidy was no longer hunched over the kitchen table but had moved to the drawing-room where she could let out her feelings on her piano.
Oliver sat quietly on the broad staircase from where he could listen to her without being seen. Cassidy sang a new song, a raw song, a song without many words, a song of sorrow in flats and minor intervals.
All good songs, she’d told Oliver once, were of love or longing or loss. Cassidy’s new song vibrated with all three.
She stopped playing abruptly and, finding Oliver on the stairs, sat down beside him.
‘What did you think?’ she asked.
‘Brilliant.’
‘It hasn’t a name yet…’
‘But you wrote it for Mona,’ Oliver completed.
‘Yes.’
With Oliver beside her, Cassidy took her half-defined melody next day to the musicians in her studio in London, where her often gloomy lyrics writer, captivated, gave it words of universal