The Jewel

by Neil Hegarty

  ‘Right,’ Patrick Walsh said. They were now convened – Rob and Patrick Walsh and Ward – in a grimy little office in what Emma Read had introduced as the administration wing. She’d brought them all the way there herself: away from the Sculpture Court, and through one top-lit gallery and then another, the walls changing from oxblood to crimson to what was, all things considered, a very nice green, and then up a flight of modern stairs. The art changed too as they walked, in a way that discombobulated Ward: he held, he’d realised, in some filing cabinet in his brain, grainy memories of certain paintings hung in certain rooms, long ago, but all of this was now swept away. The place had a new smell, too. Brand new. He sniffed the air as he passed through the galleries in Emma Read’s perfumed wake. Surely art galleries ought not to smell so new.

  Perhaps Emma Read could read minds – or perhaps she had noticed Ward’s head turn and turn and turn again as they walked. Whichever it was, she soon spoke up. ‘The entire collection has been rehung,’ she said, as she glided along. ‘In chronological order, now: it’s best international practice; they did it at Tate Britain a few years ago, and it seemed to work quite well, so we thought we would give it a go here too. Perhaps you’ve seen the results at the Tate?’

  He had, of course. She ushered them through a door, a stitch in the building – was the best way, Ward thought, of putting it, thinking suddenly of his mother long ago, stitching silently and silently pressing. The building suddenly slid from new and restored glory into an environment less salubrious – a low-ceilinged corridor lit by yellow fluorescent tubed lighting. Emma Read smiled briefly. ‘This wasn’t part of the restoration: this is where, where the staff, has its offices. The public don’t come here. It isn’t very nice, I’m afraid.’ She stopped, opened a door. ‘I’ve set this office aside for you. It seemed the most appropriate space.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I hope I haven’t been indelicate; it was difficult to know what to do for the best.’ Ward must have looked puzzled, or Rob must have, because she added, with gentle apology, ‘I mean, this is where Gerard works, and Dr O’Hara.’ With that, she was gone.

  Patrick Walsh didn’t seem puzzled: he was rather more on top of the context than either of his companions, and now he pulled a chair across, and sat and rustled some papers. Importantly – but this was to be expected, because nobody had exactly been taking time so far to listen to what he had to say. Ward and Rob sat too, took in the grubby, down-at-heel little room, with its strip lighting and dispiriting view of a gloomy, damp courtyard.

  ‘So,’ Rob said.

  ‘So,’ said Patrick Walsh, and Ward caught Rob’s eye. There was a patter in which they had been trained: at a morning workshop run by – inevitably – Charlotte, plus a communications person brought in from outside. (‘From outside, Ward,’ Charlotte had said, glaring at him, ‘so you’d better turn up.’) Now Ward watched as Rob switched himself on and ran through the drill in his New Zealand tones.

  ‘Just before you begin, Patrick, could we just make a few clarifying points?’

  ‘Go for it.’

  ‘You know that our focus – our prime objective – is to assist in the recovery of the Sandborne,’ he said. Patrick nodded, and Rob went on. ‘This is why we’re here. We pool our resources with you, needless to say, and help in whatever way we can; our systems, our databases, will be using whatever information we can pick up here. I feel I ought to underscore this, because needless to say this crime, this near-death, is your turf and not ours; but our experience is that our parallel presence can sometimes feel unusual to the home police force.’ Rob paused to fetch breath, and added – rather limply, Ward thought – ‘Does that sound OK to you?’

  ‘No worries,’ Patrick said, that Australian usage rising unthinkingly to his lips. ‘We know all this: we know the systems, we know how it works. We’ve never worked with you guys before, obviously, but I’m sure we’ll make out fine.’

  Make out.

  ‘So,’ Patrick said again. ‘I thought it would help to run through the facts we have so far. I know you have some of the details – they were sent across early this morning – but we’ve brought together some additional material in the period since.’ Again he ran a finger through the papers on the desk in front of him – Dr O’Hara’s desk, perhaps, though there were three other desks crammed into this ugly, tiny office – and, perhaps with a touch of relief, set to work.

  The crime had been committed between 2.05 a.m. and 2.14 a.m. Unusually precise timing, but an unusual crime. It had been witnessed at close quarters, for one thing, and the witness had lived to tell the tale. It had been witnessed electronically: the alarms had been remotely deactivated – which was, as Rob knew and Ward knew and everyone in the unit knew, a piece of cake nowadays; a spotty teenager in his high-smelling bedroom could deactivate any alarm, anywhere. ‘It was a state-of-the-art system,’ Patrick added, and his tones indicated that he, too, understood how little this meant. But the video cameras were working just fine: and so they recorded all the necessary comings and goings – and now, to demonstrate their proficiency, Patrick pulled his laptop towards him, fiddled, and brought up a greyish video recording onto the screen.

  There was the young man, there was the older woman, making their way down the very corridor outside the door; there they were yanking open the fire doors and disappearing from view. There they were reappearing now into the sight of another camera, and disappearing again, and reappearing again: CCTV hardly ever works, as everyone knows and nobody ever says, Ward thought, the guilty little secret of our modern times – but the gallery’s cameras were in extra-good working order, with nothing left to chance. You had to hand it to them – though, granted, it was a pity about the crappy alarm system. Ward scratched his head.

  Patrick must have read his thought, because now he said, ‘The gallery concedes that it cut corners with the alarms.’

  Ward said, ‘No, really?’ – and Patrick grimaced a little.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  Now he pulled up the images of the Sculpture Court. There was the man – as bold as brass, as Ward’s mother would have said – manhandling the Sandborne. Now there was the knife, and now there were the empty panes of glass that had once held The Jewel. The man – small, slight. Ward hadn’t expected to see a balaclava or the like – they didn’t exactly wear balaclavas nowadays, there being other perfectly good and simple ways to occlude one’s identity, one’s features: and this small man had the glasses, the little hat, the scarf. ‘You can ignore the Bourne films,’ Ward had told Martin on that first night, long ago, their stomachs full of good Spanish food and their warm blood full of good Spanish wine, ‘if you can’t get an iris, if you can’t get a fingerprint, if you can’t get a good, square, full-on shot of someone’s complete face, then you’re back at zero.’ Even Agent Bourne would be back at zero looking through these greyish images: and Ward knew it, Rob knew it, Patrick Walsh knew it.

  But no: because now he watched Rob sit a little forward, his attention focusing further.

  ‘Now here they come.’

  The ugly bit, the seldom-seen bit: and now, Ward felt himself moving back – he actually moved the chair back from the desk until a look from Rob (‘perhaps he used to shear sheep back in New Zealand, do you think?’ Martin asked him once) brought him inching forward again.

  They entered the frame – burst into the frame, really – and while there was a great deal to look at, God knows, all Ward was able to see was the spray of blood from Gerard Boyle’s throat, bursting through the air in an arc, filling the air, staining the silk walls. The video was silent, of course, but he could imagine the noise, the screams, the bubbling of blood in an open wound. Gerard Boyle fell to his knees, and then to the floor: how amazing that he had lived, after that.

  ‘Then the companion runs away, then the – the wannabe murderer, the thief, whatever you want to call him, leaves too: and it’s all over in another minute.’

  Patrick Walsh spoke evenly, in the tones of a man who has seen it
all before: but Ward thought that there was none of that macho carry-on that you sometimes got from guys in his position. There was an awareness, a respect, whatever you wanted to call it. Someone might have died, that someone had a name, his name was Gerard Boyle, and Patrick Walsh gave the impression that he was aware of the gravity of these facts.

  Rob was still looking at the screen: but now he sat back slowly and said, ‘What else?’

  ‘Dr O’Hara, Roisin O’Hara: appointed four years ago,’ Patrick Walsh said, lifting a sheet of paper on the desk, setting it down again. ‘Highly thought of in the art world, but—’ He paused, and Ward added the subordinate clause.

  ‘Not great in the real world?’

  ‘The staff don’t like her. And she doesn’t like them either, and she doesn’t disguise it. I gather she thinks it beneath her to have to interact with them, so she sends memos instead. Dr Read reports that she is excellent at the technical aspects of her job, but yes – terrible on the human side.’ Patrick Walsh paused again, and then added, ‘Which is neither here nor there, but when people take the opportunity to bitch and bitch like – really, like crazy: well, as I say, it doesn’t make it any easier. For example,’ and Patrick shook his head, ‘they’re saying that it’s all Dr O’Hara’s fault for making the victim work late in the first place. Terrible stuff. Anyway, my hope is that we can wrap this up as quickly as possible, and that you can too, on your side, and that all these politics become, frankly, irrelevant. So, fingers crossed for that.’ Patrick smiled, a very little, but there was no disguising the sense of disgust that he felt.

  Ward said, ‘So the atmosphere is tense, really, and we’ll have to deal with that.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Patrick said.

  ‘And what about Gerard Boyle? What do we know about him?’

  Nothing much, seemed to be the answer. Gerard Boyle was twenty-two, he too was from ‘down the country’, which Patrick seemed to think was a satisfactory reply. (‘Where down the country?’ Ward asked, and Patrick lifted a paper again, but in surprise this time, and finally said, ‘Roscommon, apparently.’) Nothing much: or rather, there was nothing much to tell. A degree – and then straight into a minor job here in the gallery.

  ‘Twenty-two,’ Patrick said. ‘In the wrong place at the wrong time. He was working late: the fact is, I think, that there was still a degree of behind-the-scenes chaos here, in spite of the fact that the building was open, the rebuilding job over, all that sort of thing.’ They were all still running around like headless chickens, Patrick said, and Gerard Boyle had been one of the headless chickens. It was an unfortunate analogy, given the context, and Patrick seemed to realise this himself after a moment, because a reddish blush bloomed on his cheeks for a few seconds before he returned to himself.

  ‘We’ll be asking more questions about him, of course,’ Patrick went on, as though to disavow any notion of incuriosity, ‘and we haven’t had a chance to speak to his colleague, to Dr O’Hara. She’s in hospital, they tell me; just for observation. So that will have to wait – perhaps tonight, or failing that, tomorrow.’ He paused and said, ‘She seems to think it’s all her fault.’

  Rob nodded. His eyes, as they returned to the screen, glinted a little.

  33

  Ward looked at Rob, then, and he took the cue – besides, Patrick seemed to be running out of things he could tell them – and indicated that he, at any rate, needed something to eat. ‘Of course,’ Patrick said, and he tidied up his files and stood up politely. ‘I’ll be here,’ he added, and they made their way down the corridor and out into the main gallery once more.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just a little hunch. A little click. Let’s get outside.’

  They continued to clack from one expensive room to another.

  ‘It’s so much better looking than I remember, this place,’ Ward said. ‘They really must have spent a fortune.’ They found the white stairs again, strode through the white atrium again, tugged open the heavy doors, passed the police and the cordon and the onlookers, and headed off up Clare Street.

  Patrick Walsh hadn’t mentioned the Sandborne. Which was to be expected, perhaps: an attempted murder trumped a stolen painting, every time: but Ward noticed it just the same.

  He had seen the look in the eyes of some listeners: a suggestion he was a princess, wailing over his lost art. But it wasn’t like that at all: Ward understood the notion of moral gradations; human blood would always sit above stolen paintings in the moral order. Of course he understood that – he was no sociopath – but he also understood that art wasn’t something to be so quickly discounted, either. ‘It’s part of our lives,’ he’d told Martin, home in Despard Road after a night out, after he’d caught this judging look in the eyes of an acquaintance. ‘It’s all part of our history and—’

  ‘I know,’ Martin said. He was perched on the end of the bed, taking off his shirt. ‘Our common humanity, our patrimony: it’s a violation, a form of rape. You don’t need to convince me. But you don’t always have to convince the already convinced, you know,’ he added, ‘not every time,’ and stretched out his long arms and yawned.

  Certainly Ward was aware of how the air was able to sour rapidly: how close he could come to having his head kicked in, by men and women alike. Rape? ‘Hardly,’ was a common response, the G&T turning to pure alcohol, the slice of cucumber to a gherkin. ‘It’s hardly the same.’ The most common, the mildest reply. Though sometimes not mild at all. ‘That’s offensive to me, as a person,’ or a variant thereof. ‘That’s a typical man thing to say.’ Or the much less varnished, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Not in the agency, obviously. Rob and all the others – even Charlotte – got exactly what he meant, no questions asked, no swear words blazing in the air. These paintings were part of us – that was it, essentially. Yes, our patrimony, to turn a sexist phrase. And when they were stolen to order, as nowadays they almost invariably were, they left a gap, a violation in their wake, that could never be filled until the painting was returned. If it ever was, and too often it never was. The painter’s sweat and tears and sleepless nights; the painter’s vision; and then the years and years heaped on top of that, of other people, other nameless people, gazing and staring at the painting, and allowing it to connect with their lives, memories, hopes, tragedies through which they’d lived, bruises they’d sustained, the happiness they’d witnessed and experienced. And the way in which a painting, like any piece of art, was able to connect with that, and provide clarity, and understanding, and buoyancy, maybe, where there was no buoyancy before, so: no, Ward thought, and sometimes said, ‘don’t tell me that the theft of a painting isn’t rape. When it’s stolen, and laid in a safe in America, or Russia, or India, never to be seen or displayed again; or burned when the ransom money isn’t handed over. Don’t fucking tell me,’ as he had all too often said, quite coolly, across a table in a pub, or a table in someone else’s house, across the lemon roulade, the cheese, the wine glasses: ‘don’t tell me, don’t fucking lecture me about what a painting can do, and what the loss of a painting can do.’

  Martin, he had once thought, enjoyed these very occasional tirades. Very occasional: they weren’t Ward’s style, frankly: but sometimes he saw red, such as when he was made out to be a shit, a sexist and chauvinist pig, a bastard (and he’d been baptised with all these names), when people clambered up onto the moral high ground and swung around and spat down on him. Martin saw that sometimes Ward saw red, and that fire would then spill forth.

  Did Martin understand, really? He liked to sit by the fire and watch it burn. He did, truly, enjoy the occasional conflagration – but no, perhaps not in the way that Ward had once imagined. He remembered the empathy of those early days, the cocked head and furrowed brow and the nods, the listening manner, the air of understanding. Not so very many years ago – but what a gap, a crater in time, as it now seemed! Martin seemed like a different person: though Ward was understanding now that his partner was, in fact,
the same now as then, the same as he had ever been.

  ‘Ward fights crime, is in fact what he does.’

  The mocking upward inflection, the shrillness of the crime.

  ‘Our common humanity, our patrimony. The empty frames: it’s a violation, a form of rape.’

  The stress on the words had come later. I wasn’t completely stupid, Ward thought.

  There actually had been a lemon roulade once: only half eaten, its meringue as chewy on the inside as all good meringues ought to be, and with almonds scattered, and the curd properly tangy: and he had his eye on a second slice, but got side-tracked. Martin helped himself to a second slice though, and enjoyed it – he told Ward, later – all the more for the accompanying sourness in the air as the argument blazed on. ‘Lemon on the inside, lemon on the outside,’ he’d said, ‘it was the full experience, really it was.’ Recollecting the evening now, Ward didn’t think their hosts saw it quite that way though: certainly they were never invited back, which was a pity because it really had been a terrific lemon roulade.

  How Martin had egged him on. And their hosts: that was two more friendships down the toilet.

  He paused, there on the street.

  ‘Where’ll we go? Where do you recommend?’ Rob asked. ‘And hurry up, I’m bloody starving.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better tell me about your hunch?’

  ‘Over coffee.’

  Ward sighed theatrically. ‘There used to be a cafe just a bit further along, the Pied Piper, let’s see if it’s still there.’

  Rob frowned; his parental sensibilities were offended. ‘What sort of name is that?’

  ‘A good sort of name,’ Ward told him; Rob knew his views on modern children. ‘The Pied Piper had the right idea. They should teach his story to policymakers.’ A Vision for Today: Ward could just see it on the PowerPoint, accompanied by a slide of a rat, and another of a pigtailed girl. And the Pied Piper was still there: they went in.