A Bed of Scorpions (14 page)

‘Glue inhalation? Sniffing glue, you mean?’

‘Sam! Spray glue is used for mounting works on paper.’

Of course it was. Designers at T&R always had tins of glue lying around too. But I hadn’t known it could kill you. I said so, and Aidan agreed. He hadn’t either.

‘That’s all I know at the moment. No doubt the police will be back in the gallery soon, buzzing around the place.’ He saw me wince. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean your policeman in particular. Although …’ he raised an eyebrow. ‘Will it be him and his colleagues again?’

‘I think so. I’m sorry.’

We were both apologising back and forth, like some sort of parody of English people stepping on each other’s toes.
Aidan recovered first. ‘So, how is it out there in the real world?’

He didn’t want to know about my world just then, and anyway I still had Helena’s dirty work to do.

‘Same old same old. Timmins & Ross might be taken over. And I disgraced myself at a party last night. I kicked my dinner partner.’

He was amused. ‘On purpose? What did he do?’

‘Grabbed my face, the dick. A man named Spencer Reichel. Do you know him?’ I kept everything except annoyance with Reichel off my face.

Aidan’s face didn’t alter either. ‘Sure. He collects twentieth-century art. He buys from us a bit, although he’s not a regular client. And he funds that art charity, the one for reproductions. We dealt with them in the past for a couple of
catalogues raisonnés
of our artists.’

Dear God, this hadn’t been where I was going, but I grabbed his arm. ‘Wait. What?’

He looked at me curiously, and repeated, ‘He’s an art collector, and he funds an art charity. What’s wrong with that?’

‘The Daylesworth Trust?’ I accused him, as though this were information he’d been hiding from me. ‘Celia Stein works for him?’

‘Yes,’ he said patiently. ‘And?’

And what indeed? I didn’t know why it should matter, but somehow it did. I tucked it away and returned to the fray. ‘And the man’s a dick.’

Aidan didn’t bother to hide his contempt. ‘He is, but that’s not why you mentioned him. What are you ferreting around for?’ It wasn’t as if he didn’t know me well.

‘Matt Holder was at the dinner too.’

Aidan was cross now. ‘And?’

I might as well be blunt. ‘I also sat next to Alan Derbyshire – I didn’t kick him,’ I added virtuously.

He smiled briefly. ‘Well done.’ The smile vanished almost before it had appeared. ‘Holder’s solicitor. What the hell is this about? If it’s just Helena wanting to make sure that there’s nothing that’s going to come back and bite me, tell her to ask. And then I’ll tell her that there isn’t.’ He stomped off.

My, hadn’t that gone well.

I
STOPPED TO FILL
the sit-by-Toby position for ten minutes, and then made my escape. It was a gorgeous evening. It would be light for another couple of hours, and the air had that sense of elasticity that summer in London does, as though there were magically more hours in the day.

It made me feel as though I ought to use that extra time, so I walked instead of taking the bus. It would only take another ten minutes, and if I went the way I would have come from the market on Saturday, I could collect my bike, which should still be chained up to the lamp post where I’d fallen.

Should. It wasn’t the greatest neighbourhood, but then, I didn’t have the greatest bike. In the privacy of my own web browser I look at what I call bike porn – high-end Dutch and Danish commuter bikes, with amazing add-ons and accessories. But back in the real world, a combination of pragmatism and cheapness means that, whenever I need
a new bike, which has only been twice in twenty years, I end up with a bog-standard city bike. Nothing anyone would want to steal.

I know this for a fact. One day I had a brainstorm when I was in town, and forgot to chain my cycle up when I went to see a film. Three hours later, right on a main road, it was still there when I came out. I stood there boiling with fury at the insult to my poor cycle –
my bike isn’t good enough to steal?
– even as I realised this was not an entirely rational response.

Nonetheless, the odds, I thought, were anything from fair to good that that same cycle would now be where I’d left it on Saturday, and so it proved. Somebody had even reattached the front basket, which had flown off when I’d gone arse over tit. As I bent down to unlock the chain, I saw there was a note taped to the basket’s base: ‘Thank you for the flowers. I hope you’re alright. Viv at number 73.’

It was written on a piece of paper that had been torn from an exercise book, and the writing looked like the kind that was taught in schools in the thirties and forties. I presumed number 73 meant 73 of the street we were on, or a street name would have been included. I looked around. There was a 73 only metres away. I didn’t give myself time to think, or even wonder why I was doing it. I replaced the chain, walked over and rang the bell.

There was a long pause, and I was about to give up, when I heard a step in the hall. ‘If you’re selling something, you can bog right off,’ called a voice.

I was immediately glad I’d rung. ‘I’m not selling anything,’ I called back. ‘I’m the person who had the cycle accident on Saturday.’

The door opened immediately. It was the grey-haired woman who had suggested I ring a friend, and she must have been standing on the mat. I’d been flat on the pavement when I’d last seen her, and not in any condition to notice anything much, but even so, I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed how short she was – she was more than a head shorter than I am, and I’m shorter than almost everyone over the age of eight.

Despite her lack of height, she looked me up and down and made me feel that I was the small one. She didn’t say anything, either, just waited.

‘I came to collect my cycle, and was so pleased to see you’d left your name in the basket, so I could say thank you for your help.’

Her eyes, which had been so vague on Saturday, snapped now. She nodded decisively. I had passed some unknown test. She stood back. ‘Would you like some tea?’

I loathe tea, and think of it as something that I’m forced to drink when I’m ill, but I realise that only emphasises my foreignness, which I didn’t want to do now. ‘Very much, thank you.’ I wiped my feet carefully, even though it was sunny and there was no particular reason for them to be dirty.

She nodded again. Another step up in her estimation.

‘Come in,’ she said over her shoulder, already moving down the passageway.

Most of my part of London is a patchwork. Because of the nearby railway lines, the area had been heavily bombed in the war, and so afterwards streets got chopped up, rows of Victorian houses like mine suddenly stopping dead to give way to blocks of flats like Viv’s, built in the 1950s 
to replace flattened neighbourhoods. The 1950s was an unbeautiful time for building generally, and these buildings were particularly unbeautiful. It seemed likely, looking at the kitchen, that Viv’s parents had been the flat’s first residents. The linoleum on the floor was a 1950s-style black-and-white check, the few cupboards were chipped melamine, both the cooker and the fridge were tiny and incredibly ancient. Nothing could have been altered or renewed for at least four decades, and it might well have been longer. But everything was cared for, looked after and valued. There were crisply ironed blue-and-white striped curtains at the windows, and a blue-and-white rag rug was on the floor in front of the sink. A tray of seedlings sat in a patch of later-evening sun on an almost doll’s-house-sized white-painted table, with two doll’s-house-sized white chairs pushed underneath. Above the seedlings were pots of herbs, and a hanging basket, and – I looked again – pots were on every single flat surface, lining the back of the counter, on top of the fridge, everywhere.

‘It’s a garden,’ I said, amazed.

She smiled, the first genuine smile she’d given me. ‘I’m lucky. This side is south-facing, and so even though I don’t have a garden, I’ve got the next best thing.’

‘Then the flowers went to a good home, although you might say it was coals to Newcastle.’

She speared me with a don’t-give-me-any-nonsense look. ‘I haven’t managed to grow peonies in here.’ Then she gave the sink a considering stare, as though now she’d mentioned it, she might give it a try.

The kettle must have just boiled, because she moved a teapot that had been sitting beside the cooker onto the
table. She gave me another look, up and down again, and then turned and took a biscuit tin off a shelf. I don’t know what it was that made her decide, but it was plain that I’d passed whatever test it was. Not everyone got biscuits. I was both pleased, and felt silly for being so pleased.

‘I’m Sam,’ I said. ‘Sam Clair. We didn’t have time for introductions last time.’

‘You’re lucky you kept your teeth,’ she said tartly, then wiped her hand on her skirt before passing it over to me, as you’d pass a parcel over a shop counter. ‘Viv Thrale.’

I sat in the seat she nodded me to, and took the bloody tea. The biscuits were home-baked, and made having to drink it worthwhile.

She sat too, and stared at me, expectant. I wasn’t sure what it was she was waiting for, so I started to thank her again. She waved it away. If someone was bleeding on the pavement, the wave said, you picked them up. End.

I liked the attitude and moved on. I asked her if she knew who’d chained up my bike, and who had chased down my groceries, and if she did, would she thank them for me too. She nodded with the same bored briskness. Of course she knew them, the nod said, she knew everyone.

I finally stuttered to a halt. She waited a moment, to see if I had anything to add, and then she said, ‘The police didn’t come up with anything.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘No one managed to get the car’s registration, or even know what make of car it was. I didn’t either. Or, rather, I saw the car, but it was too confused. I’m not even sure of the colour.’

She pursed her lips. Then, as though she wasn’t entirely
sure she was going to say it, she said, ‘Blue. Dark blue. A Volvo.’

I blinked.

She had decided now. ‘One of the boys thought it was new, maybe two years old. And definitely a woman driver, although he couldn’t say more than that. He’s a silly boy. He only got the last two letters of the registration: “MR”.’ Her expression told me what she thought of the poor boy’s inadequacies. And that she’d probably listed them out for him.

‘But the police …’ I let the sentence trail away.

Her expression was unyielding. ‘The boy …’ I noticed she was careful not to give me his name. ‘The boy has been in trouble, and he wouldn’t volunteer anything. The way the police use stop-and-search around here, I wonder they expect anyone to tell them anything. The only people who will are the oldies.’ Her sniff said she was not in that category. ‘And they don’t see anything.’

‘But you do,’ I prodded.

She took it as a compliment, and also as her due. ‘But I’m not home much. You were lucky to catch me in on a Saturday.’ I loved that, as if a cycle accident was the equivalent of dropping by to swap scone recipes.

‘And lucky now, too,’ I ventured. ‘May I pass the information on? Even if no one is willing to make a statement?’

That’s why she’d mentioned it to me, her silence said. Then she snapped the lid back on the biscuit tin. My audience was over. She had places to go and people to see.

Jake had texted to say he’d be late, certainly after dinner, and maybe not even then. While I wanted him at home, so
he could tell me that of course Werner Schmidt’s death was an accident, and that everything was fine, I doubted that that was the way the conversation would go, so I was sorry he wasn’t there, and at the same time I was also glad. And, I told myself, it would give me the evening to work on my sodding Arts Council presentation. Neil had emailed me his (now my) ideas, but I needed to merge them with the information I’d collected from the other people I’d spoken to, and make them into a coherent whole. Maybe not coherent. That was too much to ask. But at least somehow give the illusion that I knew what I was talking about, even if no one else did.

I sat down at my desk as soon as I got back from Viv’s. If I started to faff around in the kitchen, or picked up a book or a manuscript, I’d persuade myself that I could write the presentation at some mythical ‘later’ time, putting it off either until Jake appeared, which meant I wouldn’t do it, or until I was too tired and went to bed, which meant I wouldn’t do it. Before I began, though, I emailed Jake with Viv’s update on the car. I googled car registrations first, and found that the two letters the boy had seen were the least useful part of the number plate. The first letters or numbers would have told the police where the car was registered, and the year. I didn’t trouble to include Viv’s views on why the police hadn’t found the information for themselves. It wasn’t news to me, and I presumed it wouldn’t be to Jake either.

Once I had my email open, I realised I’d just assumed I would also tell Jake about Celia Stein. But now I paused. If I did that, then it brought Reichel into the picture. Which brought Matt Holder into the picture. Which shone a spotlight back onto the gallery, back to where we didn’t
want it to be now that Frank’s death was being looked at again. Instead, I jotted everything down in an email to Helena. I didn’t even know why the Celia Stein/Spencer Reichel connection seemed important to me. Let her decide who should know and what they should know. I had no idea what I was doing, and she always knew what she was doing.

Done. I opened another document and started on the presentation. I’m normally in favour of procrastination, but it was Tuesday, and the panel was on Friday. At some point, procrastination begins to look like a death wish. Tonight, I’d decided, was the tipping point. So I wrote the damn thing. Not happily, but I did it. I included lots of buzzwords – discoverability, inclusivity, cross-platform availability – and while I was on a roll lots more buzzwords that I think I made up but which sounded great – integrated virtual sectionality. I had no idea what they meant, but I didn’t think it mattered. The points Neil, Celia, and Emma wanted to make were made. After that, I might as well entertain myself.

It was eleven before I emailed the final text to everyone who had given me input, with a covering note asking them to let me know by Thursday lunchtime if I’d misrepresented their ideas. And then I was done. I decided to celebrate with a glass of wine and a rest on the sofa before thinking about dinner. I knew perfectly well that that meant that thinking was as far as dinner was going to get, but it’s like throwing leftovers away. If you put the leftovers in the fridge for three days after a meal, throwing them out on the fourth day isn’t as wasteful as throwing them away right after supper would have been. So if I thought about making
dinner for a while, then drinking the meal wouldn’t be as bad as if I’d just admitted from the outset that it was going to consist of three glasses of wine. Besides, I’d had some crisps at Toby’s, and a biscuit with Viv: alcohol, fat, salt, and sugar, the four major food groups, were accounted for. Then I remembered the tea. It had had milk in it, and so dairy was covered too. Damn, but I was healthy.

I propped myself up against the arm of the sofa in my usual reading position, but I knew it was a lie even as I grabbed a manuscript off the pile. I stared out of the window, thinking about the past few days and drinking my wine. I must have sat like that for, well, at least five minutes.

When I woke up Jake was moving the bottle and glass off the floor and onto the table. He saw me lift my head and bent over me. ‘Come on, sweetheart. Bed.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Two.’

In the morning I’d want to know what was happening that meant he was working until two, but not now. Now I very much wanted to pretend we were back in the days when I didn’t know about Jake’s work. Instead of getting up, which felt like too much effort, I pulled him down to me. ‘How tired are you?’

‘Not that tired.’

By the time the alarm went off, Jake was gone again. It was like going out with – or staying home with, rather – the invisible man. I lay in bed for a while, thinking evil thoughts about vampires who materialised after dark and vanished – poof! – before light. Then I thought evil thoughts about people who had four glasses of wine and
only a sandwich to eat all day. Yesterday I’d sworn to myself that even if I couldn’t run yet, I’d get up early and go for a walk. I thought more evil thoughts about people who make resolutions. And still more about wimpy types who don’t keep them. Then I got up.

I was in no rush. Because of Frank’s funeral, I’d told Miranda I wouldn’t be in until the afternoon, if then. I was, like my colleagues, working from home. I took my coffee into the spare bedroom, which I call my office, and sent a few gossip-collecting emails to friends in other publishing houses, to see if any of them had picked up on our rumours. Were their bosses having early breakfasts with unnamed others, for example? Then I settled down to try and find the information I wasn’t brave enough to ask Jake for.