“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions if I can.”

“Is that entirely necessary, Constable?” she asked.

“We often investigate cases where the circumstances surrounding the death are unclear,” I said. Actually we, that is the police, don’t investigate unless foul play is bleeding obvious or if the Home Office has recently issued a directive insisting that we prioritize whatever the crime du jour was for the duration of the current news cycle.

“Are they unclear?” asked Simone. “I understood poor Cyrus had a heart attack.” She sat down on a pastel blue sofa and gestured for me to take my place on the matching armchair. “Isn’t that what they call natural causes?” Her eyes glistened and she rubbed at them with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, Constable,” she said.

I told her to call me Peter, which you are just not supposed to do at this stage of an inquiry—I could practically hear Leslie yelling at me all the way from the Essex coast. She still didn’t offer me a cup of tea, though—I guess it just wasn’t my day.

Simone smiled. “Thank you, Peter. You can ask your questions.”

“Cyrus was a musician?” I asked.

“He played the alto sax.”

“And he played jazz?”

Another brief smile. “Is there any other kind of music?”

“Modal, bebop, or mainstream?” I asked, showing off.

“West Coast cool,” she said. “Although he wasn’t averse to a bit of hard bop when the occasion called for it.”

“Do you play?”

“Lord no,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly inflict my ghastly lack of talent upon an audience. One needs to know one’s limitations. I am a keen listener, though—Cyrus appreciated that.”

“Were you listening that night?”

“Of course,” she said. “Front-row seat, although that isn’t hard in a tiny little place like the Spice of Life. They were playing ‘Midnight Sun,’ Cyrus finished his solo and just sat down on the monitor, I did think he was a bit flushed, and then he fell over on his side and that’s when we all realized that something was wrong.”

She stopped and looked away from me, her hands balling into fists. I waited a bit and asked some dull routine questions to center her again—did she know what time he’d collapsed, who’d called the ambulance, and did she stay with him the whole time? I jotted down the answers in my notebook.

“I wanted to go in the ambulance, I really did, but before I knew it they’d whisked him away. Jimmy gave me a lift to the hospital but by the time I got there it was too late.”

“Jimmy?” I asked.

“Jimmy’s the drummer, very nice man, Scottish I think.”

“Can you give me his full name?” I asked.