Dead Heat

  However, the source of my particular joy was not there. I knew that she would be deep into Elgar and Sibelius, and I was jealous of them, jealous of long-dead composers. Was that another example of irrational behaviour?

  I took a yellow cab from the airport to downtown, specifically to the Hyatt Hotel, where I knew the orchestra were staying, and sank into a deep leather armchair in the lobby that faced the entrance. I sat and waited for Caroline to return, and promptly went straight back to sleep.

  She woke me by stroking my head and running her hands through my hair.

  ‘Hello, my sleeping beauty,’ she said.

  ‘You’re the beautiful one,’ I said, slowly opening my eyes.

  ‘I see you’re keeping a good look-out for potential mur-cerers,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t even joke about it,’ I said. But she was right. Going to sleep in plain view of the hotel entrance and the street beyond was not the most clever thing I had done in the last twenty-four hours if I wanted to stay alive.

  ‘Where’s the rest of the orchestra?’ I asked.

  ‘Some are upstairs. Others – boring boring- are still hanging around at the concert hall. And a few have gone shopping.’

  I looked at my new watch. It read eleven thirty. Six-hour time difference, so it was five thirty in the afternoon. ‘What time is the performance?’ I asked.

  ‘Seven thirty,’ she said. ‘But I have to be back, changed and ready by six forty-five and the hall is a five-minute taxi ride away.’

  We had an hour and ten minutes. Was she thinking what I was thinking?

  ‘Let’s go to bed for an hour,’ she said.

  Obviously, she was.

  *

  I managed to stay awake for the whole concert. I remembered my father seriously advising me when I was aged about eight or nine, that you never ever clap at a concert unless others did so first. He didn’t tell me, but there must have been an embarrassing moment in his life when he had burst into applause, isolated and alone, during the silent pause between orchestral movements. I sat on my hands to prevent a repeat.

  Caroline had worked a miracle to find me a seat. A single ‘house’ seat in the centre of the eighth row. It was an excellent position, only ruined by the fact that the conductor, a big man with annoyingly broad shoulders, stood between me and Caroline, and I couldn’t see her.

  Even though I wouldn’t have admitted so to Caroline, I wouldn’t have known which piece was by whom without the programme telling me that it was all Elgar before the interval and Sibelius after. But I did recognize some of it, especially Nimrod from the Enigma Variations. Listening to it reminded me so much of my father’s funeral. My mother had chosen Nimrod to be played at the conclusion of the service, as my father, in his simple oak coffin, was solemnly carried out of East Hendred Church to the graveyard for burial, an image that was so sharp and vivid in my memory that it could have happened yesterday. Caroline had told me how powerful music could be and, now, I felt its force.

  For the first time, I cried for my dead father. I sat in the Chicago Orchestra Hall surrounded by more than two thousand others and wept in my personal private grief for a man who had been dead for thirteen years, a condition unexpectedly brought on in me by the music of a man who had been dead for more than seventy. I cried for my own loss, and my mother’s loss too, and I cried because I so longed to tell him about my Caroline and my happiness. What would we give to spend just one hour more with our much loved and departed parents?

  By the time the interval came I felt completely drained. I was sure that those alongside me had no idea of what had taken place right next to them. And that was as it should be, I thought. Grief is a solitary experience and the presence of others can lead to discomfiture and embarrassment for all parties.

  Caroline had told me that she wouldn’t be able to get out to see me during the interval as the directors frowned upon such behaviour and she wasn’t in the mood for crossing them at the moment, not after missing the original flight. It was probably a good thing, I thought. Even though we had met only last week, Caroline knew me all too well already, and I didn’t yet feel comfortable with every one of my innermost thoughts and emotions being open to her scrutiny. So I remained in my seat and decided against buying a cardboard pot of ice cream to eat with a miniature plastic shovel, as everyone around me seemed to be doing.

  The second half of the concert was the Sibelius symphony and I didn’t find it so dark and gloomy as Caroline had warned me to expect. In fact, I loved it. Somehow, as I sat there absorbing the music, I felt released from the past and fully alive for the future. I had no house, no car and precious few belongings to worry about. I was about to embark on two new and exciting journeys, one with a new London restaurant and the other with a new companion whom I adored. And someone was trying to kill me, either for what I knew or for what I had said, neither of which seemed that important to me. I had run away to America and was now enjoying the heady excitement of having left my troubles behind. The troubles in question might not have been resolved, but they were out of sight and, for an hour or so, out of mind too.

  The audience stood and cheered. They even whooped with delight and put fingers in their mouths and whistled. Anything, it seemed, to make a noise. There was no decorum or restraint here. Unlike we British who sit and politely applaud, the Americans’ way of expressing their approval is to holler and shout, and to dance on their feet.

  The orchestra smiled and the conductor bowed, repeatedly. The ovation lasted for at least five minutes with the conductor leaving the stage and reappearing six or seven times. Some in the audience even bellowed for more, for an encore, as if this was a pop concert. Eventually the conductor shook the hand of the orchestra leader and they left the stage together, putting an end to the acclaim and allowing the players to retire gracefully for the night.

  I met Caroline outside the stage door and she was as high as a kite.

  ‘Did you hear them?’ she said breathlessly. ‘Did you hear the noise?’

  ‘Hear it?’ I said, laughing. ‘I was making it.’

  She threw her arms round my neck. ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘You’re just saying that,’ I said, mocking her slightly.

  ‘I’ve never said that to anyone in my life before,’ she said rather seriously. ‘And yet it seems so simple and obvious to say it to you.’

  I kissed her. I loved her too.

  ‘It made such a difference,’ she said, ‘to have you in the audience. But I spent the whole concert trying to find you in the sea of faces.’

  ‘I was behind the conductor,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t see you either.’

  ‘I thought you must have gone back to the hotel.’

  ‘Never,’ I said. ‘I really enjoyed it.’

  ‘Now, you’re just saying that,’ she said, mocking me a little too.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I loved it, and… I love you.’

  ‘Oh goodie,’ she squealed and hugged me. I hugged her back.

  I stayed the night in Caroline’s room without telling the hotel or giving them my name. Even though it was very unlikely that anyone would have traced me, I took no chances and propped the chair from the desk under the door handle when we went to bed.

  No one tried to get in, at least I didn’t hear anyone trying. But, then again, by the time we finally went to sleep at midnight, I was so tired that I don’t think I would have heard if someone had tried blasting their way through the wall with a hand grenade.

  In the morning, we lay in bed and watched breakfast television, which wasn’t very good and full of far too many advertising breaks for my liking.

  ‘What do you have to do today?’ I asked Caroline while running my finger down her spine.

  ‘Nothing until four o’clock,’ she said. ‘We will have a run through of a couple of movements. Then tonight’s performance is at seven thirty, like last night.’

  ‘Can I come again?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I hope so.’ She giggled. br />
  ‘I meant to the concert,’ I said.

  ‘You can if you want to,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? It’ll be just the same as last night.’

  ‘You could surely eat the same dinner two nights running?’ I said.

  ‘Only if you cooked it.’

  ‘Well then,’ I said. ‘I want to come and hear you play again tonight.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find you a ticket.’

  ‘So what do you want to do until four o’clock?’ I asked.

  She grinned. ‘We could stay in bed.’

  But we didn’t. We decided to get up and go and have some breakfast at the restaurant on the ninety-fifth floor of the John Hancock Building, which, according to the tourist guide in the room, was the second-highest building in the Midwest, after the Sears Tower.

  I took the lift down to the lobby while Caroline went to put a note under the door of a fellow violist with whom she had agreed to go shopping, explaining that her plans had changed. As I waited for her, I asked the concierge for a map of the area and found the John Hancock Building clearly marked. I also found O’Hare airport to the north-west of the city centre. And something else on the map caught my eye.

  Caroline arrived, having delivered her note.

  ‘Are you aware,’ I asked, ‘that the state of Wisconsin starts only a few miles north of Chicago?’

  ‘So?’ she said.

  ‘Wisconsin is where Delafield is, and that’s where Delafield Industries Inc. are based.’

  ‘But how far away?’ she said. ‘Some of the states are huge.’

  I found out. The hotel concierge was most helpful. Delafield, Wisconsin, he said, was under two hours’ drive away. Yes, of course, he could organize a rental car, all he needed was a credit card. Caroline lent me hers. Better safe than dead.

  Interstate highway 94 conveniently ran directly from Chicago to Delafield and, as the hotel concierge had said, it took us less than two hours in our rented Buick.

  We turned off the interstate at the Delafield exit and found ourselves in an urban environment repeated thousands of times across the United States. The junction was surrounded on all sides by flat-roofed commercial and retail development, including gas stations, drugstores, supermarkets and the ubiquitous fast-food outlets each with an over-tall sign designed to be visible for miles along the highway in each direction. I thought back to when I had opened the Hay Net and the flurry of objections that had been raised by the local planners over the modest sign I had wanted to erect next to the road. In the end I had been given my permission, on the condition that the top of the sign was not more than two metres from the ground. I smiled to myself. The Cambridge-shire County Council planning officer would have had palpitations in this neck of the woods.

  Beyond the retail areas with their acres of tarmac car park, and sitting on a small hill, I could see some substantial industrial buildings with the words DELAFIELD INDUSTRIES INC. in big bold black letters on a yellow sign sticking up from the roof. Below the sign, painted large on the side wall of the factory in fading paint, was the legend THE FINEST AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY IN AMERICA.

  I wasn’t really sure what I hoped to achieve by coming all the way up to Delafield from Chicago. It just seemed to me to be an obvious thing to do, having discovered that it was so close. I had no idea what I would find. Indeed, I had no idea what I was even looking for. But if I was right and Delafield Industries was indeed the intended target, then if anyone knew the motive for the bombing, it would surely be Rolf Schumann. Whether he would tell me or not was another matter.

  We drove up to the main gate where a sturdy-looking barrier blocked our path.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’ asked a security guard, who appeared from the glass-fronted grey booth on my left. He wore a dark blue uniform complete with flat-topped cap and a belt around his waist with more gadgets hung from it than I believed was prudent. Surely, I thought, a belt with all that weight would pull his trousers down, rather than hold them up.

  ‘I was passing and wondered if Mr Rolf Schumann was in,’ I said.

  ‘And your name, sir?’ the guard asked. He, himself, wore a plastic name badge with BAKER embossed on it.

  ‘Butcher,’ I said, deciding against ‘candlestick maker’. ‘Max and Caroline Butcher.’ I had no idea why I didn’t tell him my real name. If Mr Schumann was, in fact, in, then he might just remember me from Newmarket racecourse and wonder why I had given a false name to his security guard. But it didn’t matter.

  ‘Do you have an appointment, Mr Butcher?’ asked the guard politely.

  ‘No, I’m afraid we don’t,’ I replied, equally politely.

  ‘Then I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We don’t accept visitors without an appointment.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But is Mr Schumann actually here?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ he said.

  ‘Couldn’t or won’t?’ I asked.

  ‘Couldn’t.’ He had lost the politeness from his voice.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked him.

  ‘Please, sir,’ he said, not amused and not wanting to play the game any longer, ‘turn your vehicle around and depart these premises.’ He pronounced ‘vehicle’ as if it were two words – ‘veer-hickle’, with the emphasis on the ‘hickle’. ‘Otherwise I shall have you forcibly removed.’

  He didn’t appear to be joking. I resisted the temptation to say that I was still owed some money by his company for having cooked a lunch at which his boss had been blown up. Instead, I did as he asked, turned my ‘veer-hickle’ around and pulled away. I could see him large in the rear-view mirror. He was standing in the road with his hands on his hips, and he watched us all the way down the hill until we disappeared round the bend at the bottom.

  ‘That didn’t seem to go too well,’ said Caroline somewhat sarcastically. ‘What do you suggest we do now? Climb their fence?’

  ‘Let’s go and get that breakfast we’ve been promising ourselves.’

  We parked the Buick on Main Street, and sat in the window of Mary’s Café drinking coffee and eating blueberry muffins.

  Delafield was somewhat topsy-turvy. What was known as Delafield Town was all the new development near the interstate highway, including the retail parks and the agricultural machinery factory, while the city of Delafield was a delightful old-world village set alongside Lake Nagawicka. Nagawicka, we were reliably informed by the café owner, meant ‘there is sand’ in the language of the local Native Americans, the Ojibwe Indians, although we couldn’t actually see any sand on the lake shore.

  ‘More coffee?’ asked Mary, coming out from behind her counter and holding up a black Thermos pot.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Caroline, pushing our mugs towards her.

  ‘Have you heard of someone called Rolf Schumann?’ I asked Mary as she poured the steaming liquid.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Everyone round here knows the Schumanns.’

  ‘I understand he’s president of Delafield Industries,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘At least he was. It’s such a shame.’

  ‘What’s a shame?’ asked Caroline.

  ‘About his condition,’ Mary said.

  ‘What about his condition?’ I asked.

  Mary looked round as if checking no one else was listening. There was only the three of us in the café. ‘You know,’ she said, shaking her head from side to side. ‘He’s not all there.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said. Mary was embarrassed. I was surprised, and I helped her out. ‘Is the problem to do with his injuries?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quickly. ‘That’s right. Due to his injuries.’

  ‘Do you know if he’s still in hospital?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I believe so.’ She looked around again and then continued in a hushed tone. ‘He’s in Shingo.’

  ‘Shingo?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Shingo. You know, the mental hospital.’ She said the last two words in little more than a whisper.
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  ‘Where exactly is Shingo?’ I asked her, in the same manner.

  ‘In Milwaukee, on Masterton Avenue.’

  ‘Do the Schumanns live in Milwaukee?’ I asked, more normally.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘They live here. Up on Lake Drive.’

  We took our leave of Mary and her muffins, not because I had gained enough information, I hadn’t, but because I felt that she was just as likely to tell the Schumanns about us, and our questions, as she was willing to tell us about them. Discretion, I thought, was not one of her strong points.

  The city of Delafield, the village, had numerous shops full of stuff that one has no good use for but one just has to have anyway. We visited each in turn and marvelled at the decorative glass and china, the novelty sculptures, the storage boxes of every size, shape and decoration, the home-made greeting cards and the rest. There was a lovely shop with racks of old-fashioned-looking signs, one with fancy notebooks and another with legend-embroidered cushions for every conceivable occasion, and more. There were toys for boys, and toys for girls, and lots of toys for their parents too. Delafield was a stocking-filler’s paradise. Not that it was cheap. Caroline’s credit card took quite a battering as she bought far too much to get easily into her suitcase for the flight home. Presents, she explained, for her family, although we both knew that she wanted it all for herself.

  Everywhere we went, I managed to bring the Schumanns into the conversation. In the embroidered cushion store the lady appeared to be almost in tears over them.

  ‘Such nice people,’ she said. ‘Very generous. They have done so much for the local community. Mrs Schumann is always coming in here. She’s bought no end of my cushions. It’s so sad.’

  ‘About Mr Schumann’s injuries?’ I prompted.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And all those other people killed in England. They all lived round here, you know. We used to see them all the time.’