by Neil Hegarty
Good old Ireland, he thought. Nice job. ‘Let’s have a look at it.’
Rob unrolled a reproduction. Even here, the colours sang.
‘And let’s have a look at her.’
Because it was the artist herself who caught and held his eye. Sad, the books said; a solemn witness, said the catalogues. He waved an index finger. ‘What did the biographer say about her expression there?’
Rob said, ‘Oh wait, I have this, too: “Sandborne’s grief and anger are caught in her eyes; and the watchfulness, the alertness of her form indicates the transgressive nature of this piece – of a female figure controlling this tableau, upright and vigilant and wary of danger, here in a public place where no woman should be.”’
Well, perhaps: but to Ward’s eye there was a pull upward in the set of her lips. The slightest indication of a wry smile.
Who can tell what I’m thinking, who can tell how I made this piece, who knows how I mixed my colours and set them to last? Nobody. Nobody knows me at all. So, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Good on you, Mrs Sandborne.
And now her time had come: now, the scholars had become interested, and the word had got about, and this piece of linen valued and found to be essentially priceless – distemper pieces never lasted, always faded, The Jewel was one of a kind. Now, Sandborne was – iconic, the art websites said, and emblematic.
Found, famous, appreciated, at long, long last. The biography revised, and the Dublin gallery, which had kept faith with its curiosity decade after decade, unable to believe its luck.
Bravo, Mrs Sandborne. Too late for you.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Rob said. ‘The bloody waste, mate.’
And now, here I am, Ward thought, despatched to Ireland. Thanks a bunch, Mrs Sandborne.
*
Rob had fallen into this job more or less by accident: so he explained once, long ago, over yet another pint of bright-red beer. He had worked at Te Papa back in New Zealand, had taken a year’s leave to do the whole OE thing, met his Englishwoman in London and married her in short order, and had to magic up a job in England. This was Rob’s story, packaged by him into the plainest possible Kiwi box.
As Ward now knew, there was a bit more to it than that: he had taken a degree in art history in Wellington before joining the museum: and all in all, he and the agency made a good fit. And now Ward knew that he was a bit of a bloodhound – good at sniffing out the story, the clues, the lies. He loved the forgeries, Rob said – and it was true: a mere month after he joined, he had spotted that the green pigment in a German Expressionist piece had not in fact existed when Erich Heckel was alive and painting: the painting a forgery, the dealer and the august gallery saved. Rob’s discovery made discreet waves; additional funding was secured – and he became a minor hero. More results followed: he was bloody-minded about getting a result; and he loved his pigments. He was possessed of a sort of professional morality that burned. Fuck’s sake. The waste of it. But he kept this side of himself carefully hidden from the likes of Charlotte.
And he was your typical laconic New Zealander: he didn’t like talking about himself too much, and Ward knew this also; the two of them had a good deal in common.
And divorced, now, from Jane, though you’d hardly know it.
So: pigments, and Victoriana: so Charlotte had a point, putting them together.
‘Shall we go through the paperwork, then, mate?’ he said now. ‘Or, do you want another coffee first?’
‘I’ve had my two. Let’s go for it.’
‘So, The Jewel,’ Rob said, leafing through the file. ‘I had a good look through this morning. There’s a good chance it’s left the country already, the Irish police say: bunged onto a waiting craft and’ – he shuffled a page – ‘it’s probably over here somewhere already, they think, ready to be processed.’ He said processed with a raised eyebrow: this was Charlotte’s catch-all phrase for a catch-all phenomenon; a painting could be kept hidden quietly for a while, before being moved on; or it could be sent straight to its client by various means; or it could be held for ransom, for as short a time as possible. It all depended – and processed it was.
He paused. ‘So that’s the thing,’ he repeated, ‘but now, here we have a not-quite-dead person too. So, male, twenty-two years old, Irish, unlucky to have been there. A professional job, our turf, so can we offer any insights, is there a match with any knife-wielding maniacs in our systems, which there isn’t.’
‘No.’ It was hardly likely, Ward thought: murders cropped up from time to time in this line, and they knew their stuff about them; but presumably so did the police in Ireland. Probably, he added to himself, they knew more. ‘Is there anything?’
‘Definitely not on the systems, no way,’ Rob said judiciously. ‘But.’
‘But,’ Ward said.
There was a pause.
‘Let me take a bit of time,’ Rob said, ‘and we’ll see what we see.’
‘OK,’ said Ward, ‘right,’ he said, and the two men began to look through the notes spread out across the table. Charlotte was waiting.
*
They munched through their files in forty of their allocated sixty minutes. Not, thought Ward, that there was much to be absorbed in the way of facts: Sandborne, the gallery, a man and a woman and a slit throat; that was it, really, and the Irish police had, not unreasonably, gathered little more information in the few hours since the crime had been committed.
‘Colours,’ Rob mused at one point, ‘and fabric.’
‘Anything?’
Rob moved his head – though difficult to tell whether it was a nod or a shake. Ward knew to leave him alone.
With twenty minutes left, Rob called Jane again, to finish setting up the new childcare rota; Jane was still cross, Ward surmised, if Rob’s defensive tones, his flushed neck were anything to go by. Ward left a message on Martin’s voicemail, to be collected when Martin emerged from his budget meeting with Julia. Ireland was definitely happening: talk later; and all delivered in the businesslike tones that Martin liked at such times. This took a couple of minutes, ten minutes to check email and look at headlines – the news of the stolen Sandborne had now been released, Ward noticed dispassionately, the journos were hauling stuff out of storage about Poor Emily – and then, with five minutes to go, he gathered himself, prepared to meet Charlotte once more.
‘Come on then,’ Rob grunted, and snapped shut his laptop. Less than half of Ward’s mind was on the Sandborne, files and notes and slashed throat notwithstanding; more than half was on Martin. I’ll text him from Heathrow, he thought; it’ll be fine. I have to think about the work.
I have to think about Ireland.
I have to deal with Charlotte, now, in a couple of minutes; I have to avoid being dealt with by her.
I have to go to Dublin, and stay there for a while.
I have to work to find The Jewel. And, he thought, I need to put this top of my list of priorities.
He blinked, and saw Rob’s eye on him.
‘I was thinking about Martin. He said he was thinking about going down to Kent for the night.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘His friend Nigel lives there.’
‘Nigel. Nigel who lives in a converted oast house, that Nigel?’
Ward nodded.
‘His ex Nigel, that Nigel?’
Ward nodded.
It was evidently all Rob could do not to roll an eye. But instead he said, ‘Well, it’s out of your hands.’ A pause, and then, ‘What about Felicity?’
But Felicity had her dining plan all set up. She’d be fine, he told Rob, fed and watered as usual.
‘That’s good,’ Rob said. ‘I like Felicity. She’s numero uno.’ He got up. ‘Come on, then. Ake ake.’
16
The truth was that Ward did not much like crimes that melded, mingled one into another. Robbery and murder: they should occupy different worlds. Robbery was one thing: they were trained in such a matter. Murder was another, and they were
untrained. Murder was bad. He and Rob had seldom had to deal with murder and the like: just the once, in fact.
And the once, for a variety of reasons, had been enough.
It had been a prominent affair. Munich and a soap-opera crime: a high-profile theft, an accompanying murder. The museum – its quality, its starry status – and the painting – the Blaue Reiter school, Gabriele Münter – heaped glamour on the case. The Germans had heard about Rob: this was more German Expressionism, they wanted him on the spot. He had gone to Munich, Ward had tagged along, and they dealt with lots of German people, also glamorous, very professional. Ward had eaten a good deal of heavy Bavarian food, potatoes and dumplings and fragrant salami, and masses of cakes, and returned to London several pounds heavier than he had left it. (Rob, who was a disciplined eater, had stuck to veggie fare, and had stayed just the same weight.)
Later, Martin had complained about this extra weight, during sex. ‘Get off me, I can’t breathe, you’re squashing me flat.’
Martin had not had to complain about any other aspect of this trip to Munich. He had never guessed about any other aspects, or so Ward assumed.
Of course, it was most likely a mistake to make such assumptions. Ward knew this: on the other hand, Rob was so very straight-as-a-die. Who would ever guess?
And it had only been the once, really, more or less the once, and long enough ago, now, that it had become just an element in their friendship. As a tree grows around and about a nail embedded in its trunk, and makes the nail a part of itself – so Ward liked to think: it was like this.
A woody scent, a touch acrid, under the Munich chestnut trees.
After a long day in the Lenbachhaus, he and Rob had walked slowly back to their hotel in Lehel. Dusk was settling over the city. The gallery, in this warm spell of May weather, had stifled them – the office areas increasingly stuffy as the day had worn on, as the meetings had worn on, as tempers had risen steadily under a carapace of German calm – and now, as they walked through the Hofgarten, they shed jackets and ties, opened shirt buttons, tried to slough off the tension and exhaustion.
‘Christ,’ Rob said. The case was sensational: the media was crawling all over it. It was tasteless, and violent. It was everything that it should not be. ‘Let’s sit for a moment. I need to fill my lungs with something more than dust.’
They sat, amid the radiating paths and pruned trees, facing the ugliness of the Chancellery building. Surely this painting would never be located or returned: it was evident that the Germans they had met thought so; and this explained the frantic atmosphere inside the gallery.
‘Christ,’ Rob said again.
Ward shrugged. ‘Let’s go down to the river, get some fresher air and a bite to eat.’
They walked on slowly. And by the Isar, the air was indeed fresher; and the tall candles of chestnut blossom, white and pink, shone above them. Rob breathed deeply, breathed in the woody, acrid chestnut aroma that now filled the air. ‘Fantastic.’
‘It reminds me of sweat,’ Ward said, ‘that smell. At the gym.’
Rob said nothing. His divorce had been settled, that very week, once and for all. He felt – it was difficult for Ward to judge how he felt. Delicate, he sensed, bruised; relieved, also. A page turned.
They ate outside, within earshot of the river, still running fast with spring rain and cold and green with melted snow. One, two, three good German beers, and now the tension of the day did slough away, and they laughed at rubbish, at ribald jokes, at gossip from the Warren Street office; and maybe it was not especially surprising (Ward thought later) that when they returned to their hotel, a few streets back from the river, and when the doors of the lift had closed, maybe it was not especially surprising that Rob should turn to him and, just like that, kiss him. Full on the lips. A proper kiss, and a response, and more kissing as they stumbled down the third-floor corridor, and more kissing when the door of Ward’s room closed behind them.
It wasn’t all that surprising. Not really.
Rob needed to unburden himself – and besides he knew about Martin, about that patch of unhappiness in Ward’s life that was now like a seam coming apart, the stitches unravelling one by one.
And so maybe they both needed this; certainly they both wanted it, each taking advantage of the other, and of the situation.
In the morning, when Ward woke, Rob had already gone, had slipped away in the night, had left the smell of himself on the white hotel sheet. When they met at breakfast – a gargantuan buffet, of which they both also took full advantage, eggs and salami and cheese and pickles and gallons of weak German coffee (‘well, we worked up an appetite last night,’ said Ward) – they were very grown-up about the whole thing, they discussed what had happened, they agreed that it had been fun, that it shouldn’t happen again. It would be unwise. Rob had appeared unfazed; and when Ward checked in with himself, he too realised that he felt a – a calmness, more than anything else. Quite unfazed: a good thing to have happened. But it probably shouldn’t happen again.
And it hadn’t, really. It had hardly ever happened again.
And Martin didn’t know about Ward’s lapse, and had almost certainly not guessed. It would have been punishing, had he guessed. Ward could imagine the forms of punishment that might be meted out.
Martin wasn’t taken with Rob: thought him hardly worth thinking about, or talking to. Rob barely registered. Which was as well.
But the point was, not that there had been a lapse in Ward’s personal life, but that the case itself, this Munich case, had been disagreeable in the extreme. There had been a good deal of media attention: the murder had been part and parcel of the crime, and had been ritualised, involving a hanging carried out right there in the gallery – tastelessly elaborate, Rob complained, like something from a Dan Brown novel. This meant pressure, of course – how cross the authorities were about it all – but yes, it also meant a dash of glamour; certainly there had been envious looks thrown in Ward’s direction and Rob’s direction and even one or two catty comments from among the ranks of his colleagues.
The assumption that the ‘boys’ had enjoyed it. When the opposite, for the most part, was the case.
Ward had caught one of these catty comments. In the craft beer place around the corner: he was settled in one high-backed booth after work, waiting to go on a bender with Rob when he finally arrived (this was how quickly everything had settled down to a sort of normality) and quite invisible to the little gaggle of his colleagues gathered in a neighbouring booth for a bout of the usual post-work gossip, bitching and slander over a beer. He heard enough, quite enough: he heard that he was too smug, too cocky, too much of the Paddy about him; while Rob, well, what did a Kiwi know about crime, anyway? Apart from sheep-shagging, obvs.
‘What does a Kiwi know about art, like, full stop,’ said one of them, to titters. He sounded like Martin.
‘Nice, guys,’ Ward said, surfacing like an orca above the top of the booth wall. ‘Agency solidarity. We can never get enough of comments like these.’ And ignored the cries and bleats of regret, headed out into the night, rang Rob as he reached the corner: he fancied a change – what about walking towards Marylebone? – he’d see him on the corner.
And the agency was just this sort of place: a bit bitchy, incestuous, like a university department, like the Borgias in the matter of rivalry and career development. No wonder, Ward sometimes reflected, no wonder they were all pursuing a career in crime – or the solving of it, which was just the other side of the same coin: they all had the criminal’s eye for the main chance. He didn’t exclude himself from that description, either – though he did exclude Rob, who had something of a homespun, scrubbed-clean air that certainly wasn’t Borgian.
Rob was alright. And their friendship was weathering well, in spite of everything. And Rob had been instrumental in locating the Münter. The reams of information held on the agency database had come together under his eye and formed a pattern, in a way that seemed miraculous; and the thief �
�� the killer – apprehended two days later in the Munich suburbs. The agency congratulated, again, and more funds released.
*
‘All set?’ Charlotte asked: then, without waiting for a reply – her usual method – she began rustling through the heaps of papers on her desk. ‘Only, you know, time running along, and all that.’
‘Quite,’ Ward said.
Charlotte did a little more shuffling and ruffling. ‘You’re booked on a noon flight, Sandra has the details, and so you should be at the gallery around two o’clock, they tell me. Dublin: I haven’t ever been, but of course you have, Ward, so you’ll be on home ground. In a manner of speaking, I mean.’ She smiled briefly at Ward, switched the smile off. ‘At any rate, it’s good to know that you’ll understand local ways of doing things, local sensitivities, proclivities, the usual. It’ll all be very helpful, I’m sure.’
Rob said, ‘What proclivities would those be, exactly?’
Charlotte said, ‘Ward will fill you in on the local colour, Rob, I’m sure. Won’t you, Ward?’
Ward nodded. ‘Oh yes, sure I will,’ he said.
‘So,’ Rob said in more businesslike tones, ‘what sort of sense do you get from the Irish police?’
‘Sense.’
This was another thing about Charlotte. She had a way of making questions sound in some way foolish. Ward knew what Rob meant, Charlotte knew too, it was a reasonable question: were they panicked, did they have things under control, were there leads, were they all at sea? Would there be resentment at the mere sight of them?
Resentment was the worst scenario, as all three of them knew. Sometimes the local authorities were excessively protective of their patch, would sooner a crime wasn’t solved at all, than see it assisted by outsiders. They all knew this: would Charlotte then, Ward thought, not just cut the crap, and get on with it?
It seemed that she would, that she was now thinking better of annoying them. ‘I think you’ll find a certain relief. This theft, this Sandborne,’ and here she glanced at Ward, ‘isn’t exactly good news anyway – but in this local context it’s even bigger, Ward, am I right?’
