The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  Her apartment had been unoccupied for several months, waiting for Emily to organise the packing up of its contents, which she had unaccountably failed to do. So when my family life was thrown into upheaval, the decision that I should leave rather than she was made easier by the fact that I had somewhere to go. One weekend in May I packed up my clothes, some books and CDs, put them in the back of my car and drove them to Knightsbridge. And that was that. I moved into my mother’s old-ladyish apartment, with its eau-de-nil carpets and pink and green chintz, changing nothing. It was comfortable enough, but it was not the kind of place you hurried back to.

  As I approached home, my pace slowed and I finally halted in the square itself. I was standing by the railings of the central garden, looking up at the fanciful facade of the building, making up my mind to go in. I hated entering a dark house, something I had never had to do when I was married.

  The square was quiet. A black BMW slid past at about five miles an hour. The heads of both occupants were turned away from me towards the houses, searching for a number. It disappeared on the opposite side of the square. From the street came the purposeful click of a woman’s stride. I was aware that I made a suspicious figure by lurking there; that a woman alone, after eleven at night, might well feel afraid to see me, immobile, under the shadow of the trees. Yet I still could not persuade myself to behave normally, to propel myself across the road to my front door.

  The woman turned into the square. I saw her glance at me and continue resolutely onward. She was wearing a fur coat, though the night was not cold and she folded her arms in front of her, defensively. I could hear another car drifting round the one-way system, coming slowly from my left. I decided to go home at last. I stepped forward to the edge of the pavement and waited for the car to pass. As it glided in front of me, I saw it was the same BMW, still circling, still searching.

  A dark-clothed jogger appeared in the left of my vision, running on the opposite side of the road, towards the woman. He covered the ground fast, noiselessly. I was too far away to hear his breathing; his trainers struck no sound from the paving stones. He was close to her now, but instead of passing one another, two unconnected atoms, they clashed, as if a meteor had been pulled into a planet’s orbit. I watched the unexpected meeting, as they revolved in a balletic embrace, a joyful reunion of friends long-separated. I felt, simultaneously, identification and exclusion at the sight.

  The woman gave a little cry and slid out of the jogger’s arms. He bent over her abruptly. I was reinterpreting what I had seen. They had not recognised one another: these were two strangers who had become accidentally entangled in the darkness. The sound of my shoes on the tarmac made the jogger aware of my presence. It was only when he pulled away from the fallen woman and raced off, that I realised that he had not accidentally run into her, nor was he attempting to help her. What I had assumed to be a happy meeting was, in fact, a mugging; the embrace had been an attack.

  I ran across the empty road. The black BMW, on its third circuit, accelerated furiously. I heard the sudden gunning of its engine and caught the flicker of movement in the corner of my eye. It was coming straight for me. I made a spurt to reach the protection of the pavement, crashing to the ground in the gutter between two parked cars, banging my shoulder on the rear bumper of a Ford estate. I heard the dull slam of a door and the car made a half revolution of the square at speed.

  The woman in the fur coat still lay on the ground, like an animal hit by a passing lorry and left on the side of the road, a vigorous machine of muscle, bone and hair reduced to a slack bag of burst intestines.

  But it was not that bad. As I bent over her, I could see she was making an effort to rise. She was face down, her hair, almost the same colour as the fur, spread out around her. Her head swayed as she pushed herself up on her wrists. She was making brief animal grunting noises.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said. I put my arm round her back and my fingers slipped through the thick fur to grasp her armpits. The attempt to resurrect her was against all reason. As a doctor, I knew I should leave the injured undisturbed, but she was struggling upward and I wanted to restore the striding creature to herself. She had lost the shoes that had clicked with such determination, but regained her balance on her bare feet and at last turned round to face me.

  I shall never forget that first sight of Julian. A fur coat and Knightsbridge meant old ladies to me. Perhaps I had seen my poor mother being attacked. I was not prepared to see a young woman, still less one who had a physical presence that struck like a knife. I saw a strong face, bleached by the street-lights, large dark blue eyes, a shocked, half-open mouth.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked again.

  ‘I don’t know. What happened?’

  ‘You were mugged. Did he take your bag?’ I could see no sign of one.

  ‘No.’ A quilted pouch on a chain hung over her shoulder. I bent to pick up her shoes.

  ‘We must call the police. I live just here. If we go in, the porter can phone.’ I indicated the door of my building just in front of us.

  ‘Yes, I’ll go home.’ She had not understood me. She staggered and I put my arm around her again. I opened the front door and saw Victor, the night porter, sitting behind his desk in the warmly lit entrance hall. He stood up, his worn face like an old leather jacket, creased into an expression of concern.

  ‘Miss Bennet. Mr Ochterlonie.’

  ‘Could you call the police, Victor. There’s just been a mugging outside our door here. Will you sit down?’ I tried to lead her to the sofa beside the gas fire.

  ‘No, no, I’ll go up.’

  I had by now realised I was dealing not with a passer-by, but a neighbour in my own block, whom I had never seen in all the years my mother had lived here, nor in my own few months’ tenure. She made for the lifts.

  Will you phone, Victor?’ I said over my shoulder. The doors closed and she began to sag, leaning heavily against me, her head hanging down. I was afraid that she was more severely injured than I had first thought and I wished I had asked Victor to call an ambulance as well.

  ‘Fourth,’ she said.

  I pressed the button for my own floor. By the time we had arrived she was moaning softly on every out-breath.

  ‘Here.’ She produced a key from the pocket of her coat. I dropped the high-heeled shoes and unlocked the door opposite my own.

  ‘Is there an alarm?’

  ‘No.’ She was gasping now. ‘I don’t bother.’

  The door swung inwards and with my free hand I groped for the light switch. My companion, in one movement, shrugged off her fur coat and me. Stepping forward into her home, she fell headlong once again. She was wearing black trousers and some kind of dark top, so only when I knelt beside her and put my hand on her prostrate body, was I aware of the soaking blood, its colour concealed by the dark clothing.

  The next few hours were occupied by the ambulance, the casualty department, the police. I filled in forms on her behalf with an authority born of two minutes’ conversation with Victor, out of whom I managed to squeeze her name.

  ‘Miss Julian Bennet,’ he had said as we waited for the stretcher to come down the stairs. ‘She’s lived in that flat for about three or four years now. She used to go and see your mum, do a bit of shopping for her when she wasn’t feeling too good. I’d’ve thought you’d’ve met her.’

  Even at the time I wondered why I was getting myself involved. Once she had been loaded into the ambulance, I could have waited for the police at home, sunk in my own armchair with a glass of brandy to soothe the shock. Why I accompanied her to the hospital, I could not explain.

  I did not leave until she had come out of the operating theatre. I met the usual reluctance of professionals to commit themselves to an opinion. Eventually, I captured the nurse with stout calf muscles and ham-like hands who had first dealt with her, cutting off the remains of the blood-soaked top. There was a knife wound in her right side, she told me. She had lost a lot of blood. It was nothing to
fuss about. It was simply a question of sewing her up and pumping her full of new blood. She would be out of theatre soon and then they would be able to tell me more. And so I waited longer, until I heard she was in the recovery room and would be put on a ward in the morning.

  In the meantime a policeman came in the early hours of the morning to interview me. We sat in the entrance hall. Teams of lifts moved silently up and down, occasionally arriving at the ground floor, opening their doors for a second or two before closing themselves on emptiness and rising to an inaudible summons. I had never had anything to do with the police in my life, not even a motoring offence, and at this stage suspicion and guilt had not entered my consciousness. I was willing to be helpful, as long as I was put to no special trouble. I had nothing to conceal. So when things went less than well, it was not from any defensiveness on my part.

  His tone was adversarial. I found my initial neutrality hardening into dislike which focused on his appearance and voice. He was short and stocky with thick curly brown hair. His voice, corrected Sarf London, had a tough, sceptical tone. He could see I was not telling the truth. But the truth I was not telling had nothing to do with Miss Bennet and the crime. The ‘truth’ about why I had been standing on the edge of the square that evening was impossible to tell: it was the whole history of dinner with Prisca, Sholto’s school, Emily’s defection. So I just said, unconvincingly, that I was enjoying the fresh air.

  He stared at me incredulously. ‘Fresh air? At eleven o’clock at night?’

  ‘More or less.’

  “The black car. Remember the number plate?’

  ‘No.’ That was not the kind of thing I ever noticed, let alone remembered.

  ‘It was a BMW?’

  ‘I thought so. But, you know, at night… I wasn’t concentrating on it. It didn’t seem important. Until afterwards.’

  “The jogger. Did he wear a hat? What sort of clothes? Jeans? Track suit? What sort of trainers?’

  “Yes, a ski hat, at least, he could have had a hat, or dark hair.’ I struggled to recall. ‘I can only tell you he wasn’t bald and he wasn’t blond. His head was dark.’ The jogger reran his track in my memory. I could only see speed and force. ‘He was fit,’ I said. ‘He ran well, fast.’

  As an observer, I was a failure, a wilful one. My record became more suspicious when I denied all knowledge of Miss Bennet.

  ‘She used to do errands for your mum, your porter says. And you’d never even heard of her.’

  ‘No.’ There was no point in explaining.

  ‘And you’ve lived there how long?’

  I counted. ‘Four months.’ Since Emily threw me out and took over the Holland Park house.

  ‘And in that time you never once saw her, never shared a lift with her?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked at me belligerently. I stared back.

  When I got back I found Victor had turned off the ceiling lights in the entrance hall, which was now only lit by his desk lamp and a light by the fire, where he was reading a paperback. He took off his reading glasses as soon as I came in.

  “You stayed a long time, sir. I rang to find out how she was.’

  ‘What did they say? They may have told you more than me.’

  ‘Oh, she’d had an emergency operation and was comfortable now.’ I sat down wearily in the sofa on the other side of the fire. The building had been refurbished some five years ago and at that time the hall had been fitted out like a miniature country house hotel, with a gas fire and masses of chintz.

  ‘What exactly happened out there, sir?’ Victor asked.

  ‘She was mugged by a jogger.’

  ‘But the blood. Where did that blood come from?’

  ‘She was stabbed.’

  ‘They’re trying to kill her.’ He was more upset than I had at first realised.

  ‘There was only one man, Victor.’ Then I remembered the BMW. ‘No, you’re right, there were three of them. Who would want to kill her?’ I asked rhetorically. ‘Who is she? How is it that I’ve never heard of her, never seen her in all these years?’

  ‘I can’t account for that. Once seen never forgotten, it’s true. But you’re always very absorbed. And they were always very keen on their privacy. But she’s going to be all right?’ He was genuinely anxious.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ It was the first time it had occurred to me to think of his feelings. With his mask-like politeness and inscrutable black face beneath his grey crinkled head, his personality was impossible to assess. I looked down at his shoes. He had a dandyish streak, for they were expensive loafers, with tassels.

  ‘And it was just a mugging?’

  “Yes, what else could it be?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  The whites of his eyes were beige, as if the deep brown of the irises had somehow leaked out. He gazed defiantly back at me. I was not going to learn from him who Miss Bennet was, nor who might want to kill her. I dragged myself out of the sofa.

  ‘Goodnight, Victor.’

  3

  The evening following the mugging I was due to deliver the first of the Coulounieix lectures at London University. I had been preparing them, off and on, for the last year, and my preoccupation with them had, I suppose, obscured the signs of Emily’s disenchantment with me.

  The lectures are given bi-annually, usually by philosophers, and it was unusual to invite someone like me who spanned the world of art history, psychology and medicine. Strictly speaking, I am not an academic, though during this time I held the post of visiting professor of History of Art at the University of London. When pushed to define my occupation, as, for example, on a passport application form, I call myself a writer, for writing is how I spend the bulk of my time, though it does not provide the bulk of my income. I trained as a doctor, a profession that seemed socially useful, which was my ambition when young. However, I was distracted from my aim by psychology, in which I specialised after completing my training. I studied questions of vision and perception, which directed my attention to art, where we have an external rendering of an internal vision, a point of access to what others see. I’m interested in the physical processes in the brain that allow artists to deceive the eye in order to produce threedimensional effects in a two-dimensional space; and in the symbolic and associative codes by which the mind endows chosen objects with significance.

  I was also drawn to art because my great-grandfather and my grandfather had been among the great British collectors of the nineteenth century. They had been newly-moneyed men and had concentrated on modern styles of painting.

  Their collection is a mixed one. My great-grandfather was very taken by Loiseau, a minor Impressionist whose work has never been as highly regarded as his fellows’. Nonetheless, they admired and bought Monet, Matisse, Cezanne. They began collecting in the 1880s and continued through to the ’thirties. The First World War gave a boost to the family fortune, which resumed its growth in the 1940s, allowing my father to indulge his expensive enthusiasm for American art. I grew up with paintings and the visual arts made a natural focus for my work.

  While shaving that morning, I found it difficult to concentrate on my lecture because clips of the previous evening replayed themselves in disconnected bursts.

  The fur-coated woman, her arms folded around herself, walked into the square. This time, in memory, I noticed that her stride was too long, even in high heels, for her to have been the elderly lady I had taken her for. Preconception had interpreted vision. The black BMW saloon passed me, once, twice. As the driver braked to turn right, only one rear light appeared. I hadn’t recalled that detail for the police last night. Had I made it up? Was the mind re-interpreting vision after the event, too? I leaned forward to the mirror and felt the stiffness in my shoulder where it had hit the rear bumper of the parked Ford. I saw not my own face but Julian Bennet’s, once seen never forgotten, as Victor had said. This clip was a still, in black and white, a Magnum photograph rather than a movie. Tricks of the light, deceiving the eye, leaching the
colour from the face, blackening the hair, eyes and mouth, making a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional person.

  What I was about to become involved in with Julian I had no possibility of guessing beforehand. The lectures were another matter. I knew that they would be controversial, indeed, I wanted them to be provocative. I anticipated it would be my theoretical exposition that would excite interest, but it produced nothing like the passion that was fired by an example I only interpolated at the very last minute, as the result of a chance sighting that day.

  The lecture was to be delivered at six in the evening in the Senate House. I had arranged to see Minna Horndeane, the director of the Litvak Foundation, in the middle of the afternoon. I arrived a quarter of an hour early and when I learned that Minna was out, I decided, rather than wait in the secretary’s cramped office, to look at the pictures in the gallery.

  The Foundation had been established in the 1940s; its core works had come from Germany in the ’thirties, retrieved, along with his family and his fortune, by a German Jew who had been lucky enough to get a visa to escape. After the war he had endowed the Foundation with the lease of his attractive Mayfair house, his collection of seventeenth-century paintings, silver and textiles. It had evolved into an important centre for research, in the forefront of technical developments for restoration. The collection was not large, but it was particularly fine, containing three Rembrandts, survivors of the scrutiny of the Rembrandt Research Project which has rejected so many of the master’s works in the last few years, a Rubens, a Vermeer, among other favourites.

  I went down with the intention of looking at a Pieter van den Bergh and found it had been moved from the position it had occupied when I last examined it several years ago. As I wandered idly through the neighbouring rooms, not bothering to ask where it had gone, I came across another painting which had moved, the Vermeer, Lady in a Pelisse.