Free Orchestrated Death by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Page A

awful for you,’ she said suddenly, and he was surprised.
    ‘Worse for you, surely?’
    ‘I don’t think so. I have no responsibility about it, as you have. And then, because I only knew her alive, I’ll remember
     her that way. You only ever saw her dead – no comfort there.’
    Why in the world did she think he needed comforting? he thought; and then, more honestly, amended it to how did she know he
     needed comforting?
    ‘Who were her friends?’ he asked.
    ‘Well, I suppose I was her closest friend, though really, I can’t say I knew her very intimately. We shared a desk, so we
     used to hang about together while we were working. I went to her flat once or twice, and we went to the pictures a couple
     of times. She hadn’t been with the Orchestra long, and she was a private sort of person. She didn’t make friends easily.’
    ‘What about friends outside the Orchestra?’
    ‘I don’t know. She never mentioned any.’
    ‘Boyfriends?’
    She smiled. ‘I can tell you don’t know about orchestra life. Female players can’t have boyfriends. The hours of work prevent
     us from mixing with ordinary mortals, and gettingtogether with someone in the Orchestra is fatal.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because of the talk. You can’t get away from each other, and everyone bitches and gossips, and it’s horribly incestuous.
     Men are much more spiteful than women, you know – and censorious. If a woman goes out with someone in the Orchestra, everyone
     knows all about it at once, and then she gets called filthy names, and all the other men think she’s easy meat – just as if
     women never discriminate at all.’
    ‘But Anne-Marie was very attractive. Surely some of the men must have made passes at her?’
    ‘Yes, of course. They do that with any new woman joining.’
    ‘And she rejected them?’
    ‘She had a thing going with Simon Thompson on tour last year, but tours are a different matter: the normal rules are suspended,
     and what happens there doesn’t count as real life. And I think she may have gone out with Martin Cutts once or twice, but
     that doesn’t count either. He’s just something everyone has to go through at some point, like chickenpox.’
    Slider suppressed a smile and wrote the names down. ‘I see.’
    ‘Do you?’
    He looked into her face, wondering how she had coped with the situation. She had said those things about being a female player
     without bitterness, merely matter-of-fact, as though it were something like the weather than could not be altered. But did
     she know those things from first-hand experience?
    She smiled as though she had read his thoughts and said, ‘I have my own way of dealing with things. I’ll tell you one day.’
    The waiter came with their first course, and they waited in silence until he had gone away. Then Slider said, ‘So you were
     Anne-Marie’s only friend?’
    ‘Mmm.’ She made an equivocal sound through her mouthful, chewed, swallowed, and said, ‘She didn’t confide in me particularly,
     but I suppose I was the person in the Orchestra who was closest to her.’
    ‘Did you like her?’
    She hesitated. ‘I didn’t dislike her. She was a hard personto get to know. She was quite good company, but of course we talked a lot about work, and that was mostly what we had in common.
     I felt rather sorry for her, really. She didn’t strike me as a happy person.’
    ‘What were her interests?’
    ‘I don’t know that she had any really, outside of music. Except that she liked to cook. She was a good cook –’
    ‘Italian food?’
    ‘How did you know?’
    ‘I was at her flat today. There were packets of pasta, and two enormous tins of olive oil.’
    ‘Oh yes, the dear old green virgins. That was one of her fads – she said you had to have exactly the right kind of olive oil
     for things to taste right, and she wouldn’t use any other sort. The stuff was lethally expensive, too. I don’t suppose anyone
     else could’ve told the difference, but she