“Have you told the police?” she’d asked after I had told her everything.
“Not yet,” I’d said. “I’m worried they won’t take me seriously.”
“But someone has tried to kill you twice. Surely they will take that seriously.”
“Both attempts were designed to look like accidents. Maybe the police will think I’m irrational or something.” I was beginning to suspect as much myself.
“How could someone have got into your house to tamper with the smoke alarm?” she’d asked.
“I’m not sure,” I’d said. “But I’m absolutely certain that someone did. My front door key was on the fob with my car keys that went missing after the crash. Whoever removed the battery and set light to my cottage must have it.”
As I had told her the full story, it had all seemed less and less plausible. I had no firm idea who the “someone” could be who was trying to kill me, or even why. Would the police believe me or dismiss it all as some crazed, circumstantial conspiracy theory? I would have had to tell them I believed that the someone may be a Russian polo pony importer that I suspected only because he hadn’t turned up at a lunch to which he had been invited. If that was a crime, then half the population would be in court.
“You can go and stay at my flat, if you like,” Caroline had said. “My upstairs neighbor has a key, and I can call her to let you in.”
“I’m not sure that’s safe either. Suppose someone has been following me. They would have seen me go there last weekend. I’m not taking that chance.”
“You really are frightened, aren’t you?” she’d said.
“Very,” I’d said.
“Then come here. Come to Chicago. We can discuss everything through. Then we’ll decide what to do and who to tell.”
I had driven to one of the hotels on the northern edge of Heathrow and had booked myself in for the night under a false name, using cash to pay in advance for my room. The staff raised a questioning eyebrow, but they accepted my fictional explanation that I had stupidly left my passport and credit cards at home and that my wife was bringing them to me at the airport in the morning. Maybe I was being rather overdramatic, but I was taking no chances that I could be traced through my credit card. If someone really had been in my house at three in the morning to start a fire at the bottom of my stairs, then it didn’t stretch the imagination much further to realize they might have taken my old phone and credit cards, with all the access that the numbers could bring to my accounts, and maybe my whereabouts if I used them. I had turned off my new phone just in case.
On Wednesday morning, I had left the rented Mondeo in the hotel parking lot, where, according to the hotel reception staff, it would be quite safe but would incur charges. Fine, I’d said, and I had paid them up front for one week’s parking with the remains of my cash. I then had taken the hotel shuttle bus to the airport and had reluctantly used my new credit card to purchase the airline ticket. If someone could then find out I was at Heathrow buying a ticket, that was too bad. I just hoped that they wouldn’t be able to get to the airport before my flight departed. If they could further discover that the ticket was to Chicago, well…it’s a big city. I planned to stay hidden.
I had decided not to sit in some dark corner of the departure lounge while I waited for the flight. Instead, I’d sat in the open next to an American family with three small children who played around my feet with brmmm-brmmm noises and miniature London black taxis, souvenir toys of their trip. It had felt safer.
Departure had been uneventful, and I now dozed at forty thousand feet above the Atlantic. I had not slept particularly well in the hotel, and three times during the night had checked that the chair I had propped under the door handle was still there. So as the airplane rushed westwards, I lay back and caught up on my lack of sleep from the previous two nights, and had to be woken by one of the cabin staff as we made our final approach to O’Hare airport in Chicago.
I KNEW that Caroline would not be waiting for me at the airport. She had told me that she had a rehearsal all afternoon, ready for that evening’s first night, and I had told her not to try to come anyway. I had somehow thought it might be safer. However, I still looked for her when I emerged from immigration and customs.
She wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t there. I hadn’t really expected her to be there, but I felt a little disappointed nevertheless. There were several couples greeting each other with hugs and kisses, with I LOVE YOU or WELCOME HOME printed helium-filled balloons attached to their wrists or to the handles of strollers full of smiling babies. Airport arrival concourses are joyful places, good for the soul.
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 behavior?
I took a yellow cab from the airport to downtown, specifically to the Hyatt Hotel, where I knew the orchestra was 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 lookout for potential murderers,” 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 are 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 having seriously advised 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 center of the eighth row. It was an excellent position, ruined only 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 program telling me that it was all Elgar before the intermission 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, had been 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 Chicago’s 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?