by Ian Rankin
‘Not even Ms Fowler?’ Rebus asked. ‘I believe she was late to arrive?’
‘Yes, but that was a minute or two after I came back in.’
Rebus nodded thoughtfully. There was a teasing piece of ham wedged between two of his back teeth and he pushed it with his tongue. A woman put her head around the partition.
‘Look, Inspector, some of us have got appointments this afternoon. Isn’t there at least a telephone we can use?’
It was a good point. Who was in charge of the gallery itself? The gallery director, it turned out, was a timid little woman who had burrowed into the quietest of the groups. She was only running the place for the real owner, who was on a well-deserved holiday in Paris. (Cluzeau rolled his eyes at this. ‘No one,’ he said with a shudder, ‘deserves such torture.’) There was a cramped office, and in it an old bakelite telephone. If the women could leave twenty pence for each call. A line started to form outside the office. (‘Ah, how you love queuing!’) Mrs Beck, meantime, had returned to her group. Rebus followed her, and was introduced to Ginny Elyot, who had raised the alarm, and to Moira Fowler the latecomer.
Ginny Elyot kept patting her short auburn hair as though searching it for misplaced artworks. A nervous habit, Rebus reasoned. Cluzeau quickly became the centre of attention, with even the distant and unpunctual Moira becoming involved in the interrogation. Rebus sidled away and touched Brian Holmes’ arm.
‘That’s all the addresses noted, sir.’
‘Well done, Brian. Look, slip upstairs, will you? Give the loo a recce.’
‘What am I looking for exactly - suspiciously shaped bundles of four-ply?’
Rebus actually laughed. ‘We should be so lucky. But yes, you never know what you might find. And check any windows, too. There might be a drainpipe.’
‘Okay.’
As Holmes left, a small hand touched Rebus’s arm. A girl in her late-teens, eyes gleaming behind studious spectacles, jerked her head towards the gallery’s first partitioned room. Rebus followed her. She was so small, and spoke so quietly, he actually had to grasp hands to knees and bend forward to listen.
‘I want the story.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I want the story for my dad’s paper.’
Rebus looked at her. His voice too was a dramatic whisper. ‘You’re Lesley Jameson?’
She nodded.
‘I see. Well, as far as I’m concerned the story’s yours. But we haven’t got a story yet.’
She looked around her, then dropped her voice even lower. ‘You’ve seen her.’
‘Who?’
‘Serena, of course. She’s ravishing, isn’t she?’ Rebus tried to look non-committal. ‘She’s terribly attractive to men.’ This time he attempted a Gallic shrug. He wondered if it looked as stupid as it felt. Her voice died away almost completely, reducing Rebus to lip-reading. ‘She has loads of men after her. Including Margaret’s.’
‘Ah,’ said Rebus, ‘right.’ He nodded, too. So Margaret Grieve’s boyfriend was ...
The lips made more movements: ‘He’s Serena’s lover.’
Yes, well, now things began to make more sense. Maybe the Frenchman was right: a crime of passion. The one thing missing thus far had been the passion itself; but no longer. And it was curious, when he came to think of it, how Margaret Grieve had said she couldn’t recall whether the statue had been in the room or not. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could miss, was it? Not for a bunch of samey paintings of pink bulges and grey curving masses. The newspapers in her bag would have concealed the statue quite nicely, too. There was just one problem.
Cluzeau’s head appeared around the partition. ‘Ah! Here you are. I’m sorry if I interrupt -’
But Lesley Jameson was already making for the main room. Cluzeau watched her go, then turned to Rebus.
‘Charming women.’ He sighed. ‘But all of them either married or else with lovers. And one of them, of course, is the thief.’
‘Oh?’ Rebus sounded surprised. ‘You mean one of the women you’ve just been talking with?’
‘Of course.’ Now he, too, lowered his voice. ‘The statue left the gallery in a bag. You could not simply hide it under your dress, could you? But I don’t think a plastic bag would have been strong enough for this task. So, we have a choice between Madame Beck and Mademoiselle Grieve.’
‘Grieve’s boyfriend has been carrying on with our artist.’
Cluzeau digested this. But he too knew there was a problem. ‘She did not leave the gallery. She was shut in with the others.’
Rebus nodded. ‘So there has to have been an accomplice. I think I’d better have another word with Lesley Jameson.’
But Brian Holmes had appeared. He exhaled noisily. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ he said. ‘For a minute there I thought you’d buggered off and left me.’
Rebus grinned. ‘That might not have been such bad idea. How was the loo ?’
‘Well, I didn’t find any solid evidence,’ Holmes replied with a straight face. ‘No skeins of wool tied to the plumbing and hanging out of the windows for a burglar to shimmy down.’
‘But there is a window?’
‘A small one in the cubicle itself. I stood on the seat and had a squint out. A two-storey drop to a sort of back yard, nothing in it but a rusting Renault Five and a skip full of cardboard boxes.’
‘Go down and take a look at that skip.’
‘I thought you might say that.’
‘And take a look at the Renault,’ ordered Cluzeau, his face set. ‘I cannot believe a French car would rust. Perhaps you are mistaken and it is a Mini Cooper, no?’
Holmes, who prided himself on knowing a bit about cars, was ready to argue, then saw the smile spread across the Frenchman’s face. He smiled, too.
‘Just as well you’ve got a sense of humour,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it after the match on Saturday.’
‘And you will need your Scottish stoicism.’
‘Save it for the half-time entertainment, eh?’ said Rebus, but with good enough humour. ‘The sooner we get this wrapped up, the more time we’ll have left for sightseeing.’
Cluzeau seemed about to argue, but Rebus held up a hand. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘you’ll want to see these sights. Only the locals know the very best pubs in Edinburgh.’
Holmes went to investigate the skip and Rebus spoke in whispers with Lesley Jameson - when he wasn’t fending off demands from the detainees. What had seemed to most of them something unusual and thrilling at first, a story to be repeated across the dining-table, had now become merely tiresome. Though they had asked to make phone calls, Rebus couldn’t help overhearing some of those conversations. They weren’t warning of a late arrival or cancelling an appointment : they were spreading the news.
‘Look, Inspector, I’m really tired of being kept here.’
Rebus turned from Lesley Jameson to the talker. His voice lacked emotion. ‘You’re not being kept here.’
‘What?’
‘Who said you were? Only Ms Davies as I understand. You’re free to leave whenever you want.’
There was hesitation at this. To leave and taste freedom again? Or to stay, so as not to miss anything? Muttered dialogues took place and eventually one or two of the guests did leave. They simply walked out, closing the door behind them.
‘Does that mean we can go?’
Rebus nodded. Another woman left, then another, then a couple.
‘I hope you’re not thinking of kicking me out,’ Lesley Jameson warned. She wanted desperately to be a journalist, and to do it the hard way, sans nepotism. Rebus shook his head.
‘Just keep talking,’ he said.
Cluzeau was in conversation with Serena Davies. When Rebus approached them, she was studying the Frenchman’s strong-looking hands. Rebus waved his own nail-bitten paw around the gallery.
‘Do you,’ he asked, ‘have any trouble getting people to pose for all these paintings?’
She shook her head. ‘No, not really. It’s funny
you should ask, Monsieur Cluzeau was just saying — ’
‘Yes, I’ll bet he was. But Monsieur Cluzeau -’ testing the words, not finding them risible any more, ‘has a wife and family.’
Serena Davies laughed; a deep growl which seemed to run all the way up and down the Frenchman’s spine. At last, she let go his hand. ‘I thought we were talking about modelling, Inspector.’
‘We were,’ said Rebus drily, ‘but I’m not sure Mrs Cluzeau would see it like that ...’
‘Inspector ...?’ It was Maureen Beck. ‘Everyone seems to be leaving. Do I take it we’re free to go?’
Rebus was suddenly businesslike. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to stay behind a little longer.’ He glanced towards the group - Ginny Elyot, Moira Fowler, Margaret Grieve — ‘all of you, please. This won’t take long.’
‘That’s what my husband says,’ commented Moira Fowler, raising a glass of water to her lips. She placed a tablet on her tongue and washed it down.
Rebus looked to Lesley Jameson, then winked. ‘Fasten your seatbelt,’ he told her. ‘It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’
The gallery was now fast emptying and Holmes, having battled against the tide on the stairwell, entered the room on unsteady legs, his eyes seeking out Rebus.
‘Jeez!’ he cried. ‘I thought you’d decided to bugger off after all. What’s up? Where’s everyone going?’
‘Anything in the skip?’ But Holmes shrugged: nothing. ‘I’ve sent everyone home,’ Rebus explained.
‘Everyone except us,’ Maureen Beck said sniffily.
‘Well,’ said Rebus, facing the four women, ‘that’s because nobody but you knows anything about the statue.’
The women themselves said nothing at this, but Cluzeau gave a small gasp - perhaps to save them the trouble. Serena Davies, however, had replaced her growl with a lump of ice.
‘You mean one of them stole my work?’
Rebus shook his head. ‘No, that’s not what I mean. One person couldn’t have done it. There had to be an accomplice.’ He nodded towards Moira Fowler. ‘Ms Fowler, why don’t you take DC Holmes down to your car? He can carry the statue back upstairs.’
‘Moira!’ Another change of tone, this time from ice to fire. For a second, Rebus thought Serena Davies might be about to make a lunge at the thief. Perhaps Moira Fowler thought so too, for she moved without further prompting towards the door.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if you like.’
Holmes watched her pass him on her way to the stairwell.
‘Go on then, Brian,’ ordered Rebus. Holmes seemed undecided. He knew he was going to miss the story. What’s more, he didn’t fancy lugging the bloody thing up a flight of stairs.
‘Vite!’ cried Rebus, another word of French suddenly coming back to him. Holmes moved on tired legs towards the door. Up the stairs, down the stairs, up the stairs. It would, he couldn’t help thinking, make good training for the Scottish pack.
Serena Davies had put her hand to her brow. Clank-a-clank-clank went the bracelets. ‘I can’t believe it of Moira. Such treachery.’
‘Hah!’ This from Ginny Elyot, her eyes burning. ‘Treachery? You’re a good one to speak. Getting Jim to “model” for you. Neither of you telling her about it. What the hell do you think she thought when she found out?’
Jim being, as Rebus knew from Lesley, Moira Fowler’s husband. He kept his eyes on Ginny.
‘And you, too, Ms Elyot. How did you feel when you found out about ... David, is it?’
She nodded. Her hand went towards her hair again, but she caught herself, and gripped one hand in the other. ‘Yes, David,’ she said quietly. ‘That statue’s got David’s eyes, his hair.’ She wasn’t looking at Rebus. He didn’t feel she was even replying to his question.
She was remembering.
‘And Gerry’s nose and jawline. I’d recognise them anywhere.’ This from Margaret Grieve, she of the significant other. ‘But Gerry can’t keep secrets, not from me.’
Maureen Beck, who had been nodding throughout, never taking her moist eyes off the artist, was next. Her husband too, Robert, the architect, had modelled for Serena Davies. On the quiet, of course. It had to be on the quiet: no knowing what passions might be aroused otherwise. Even in a city like Edinburgh, even in women as seemingly self-possessed and cool-headed as these. Perhaps it had all been very innocent. Perhaps.
‘He’s got Robert’s figure,’ Maureen Beck was saying. ‘Down to the scar on his chest from that riding accident.’
A crime of passion, just as Cluzeau had predicted. And after Rebus telling him that there was no such thing as passion in the city. But there was; and there were secrets too. Locked within these paintings, fine so long as they were abstract, so long as they weren’t modelled from life. But for all that ‘Monstrous Trumpet’ was, in Serena Davies’ words, a ‘composite’, its creation still cut deep. For each of the four women, there was something recognisable there, something modelled from life, from husband or lover. Something which burned and humiliated.
Unable to stand the thought of public display, of visitors walking into the gallery and saying ‘Good God, doesn’t that statue look like ...?’ Unable to face the thought of this, and of the ridicule (the detailed penis, the tongue, and that sticking-plaster) they had come together with a plan. A clumsy, almost unworkable plan, but the only plan they had.
The statue had gone into Margaret Grieve’s roomy bag, at which point Ginny Elyot had raised the alarm - hysterically so, attracting all the guests towards that one room, unaware as they pressed forwards that they were passing Margaret Grieve discreetly moving the other way. The bag had been passed to Maureen Beck, who had then slipped upstairs to the toilet. She had opened the window and dropped the statue down into the skip, from where Moira Fowler had retrieved it, carrying it out to her own car. Beck had returned, to find Serena Davies stopping people from leaving; a minute or two later, Moira Fowler had arrived.
She now walked in, followed by a red-faced Holmes, the statue cradled in his arms. Serena Davies, however, appeared not to notice. She had her eyes trained on the parquet floor and, again, she was being studied by Cluzeau. ‘What a creature,’ he had said of her. What a creature indeed. The four thieves would certainly be in accord in calling her ‘creature’.
Who knows, thought Rebus, they might even be in bon accord.
The artist was neither temperamental nor stupid enough to insist on pressing charges and she bent to Rebus’s suggestion that the piece be withdrawn from the show. The pressure thereafter was on Lesley Jameson not to release the story to her father’s paper. Female solidarity won in the end, but it was a narrow victory.
Not much female solidarity elsewhere, thought Rebus. He made up a few mock headlines, the sort that would have pleased Doctor Curt. Feminist Artist’s Roll Models; Serena’s Harem of Husbands; The Anti-Knox Knocking Shop. All as he sat squeezed into a corner of the Sutherland Bar. Somewhere along the route, Cluzeau - now insisting that Rebus call him Jean-Pierre - had found half a dozen French fans, in town for the rugby and already in their cups. Then a couple of the Scottish fans had tagged along too and now there were about a dozen of them, standing at the bar and singing French rugby songs. Any minute now someone would tip an ice-bucket onto their head. He prayed it wouldn’t be Brian Holmes, who, shirt-tail out and tie hanging loose, was singing as lustily as anyone, despite the language barrier - or even, perhaps, because of it.
Childish, of course. But then that was men for you. Simple pleasures and simple crimes. Male revenge was simple almost to the point of being infantile: you went up to the bastard and you stuck your fist into his face or kneed him in the nuts. But the revenge of the female. Ah, that was recondite stuff. He wondered if it was finished now, or would Serena Davies face more plots, plots more subtle, or better executed, or more savage? He didn’t really want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about the hate in the four women’s voices, or the gleam in their eyes. He drank to forget. That was why men joined the Foreign Legi
on too, wasn’t it? To forget. Or was it?
He was buggered if he could remember. But something else niggled too. The women had laid claim to a lover’s jawline, a husband’s figure. But whose, he couldn’t help wondering, was the penis?
Someone was tugging at his arm, pulling him up. The glasses flew from the table and suddenly he was being hugged by Jean-Pierre.
‘John, my friend, John, tell me who this man Peter Zealous is that everyone is talking to me about?’
‘It’s Sellars,’ Rebus corrected. To tell or not to tell? He opened his mouth. There was the machine-gun sound of things spilling onto the bar behind him. Small, solid things. Next thing he knew, it was dark and his head was very cold and very wet.
‘I’ll get you for this, Brian,’ he said, removing the ice-bucket from his head. ‘So help me I will.’
Author's Note
There are Cluzeaus in and around Périgueux. Lots of them, and all spelt like that. You can find them in the Dordogne phone book. I did.
I.R.
