A couple of months after I’d first got to know him, he asked me to pick him up and take him to an address in Harley Street. When I had delivered him I was to drive around or park up till he phoned me on my mobile and then I could collect him. When I did he was very quiet. He told me to drive up to Regent’s Park and go round and round it until he wanted me to stop. I knew better than to start chatting, so we did about two circuits of the park in total silence. I didn’t play anything on the stereo either, because he didn’t like music of any kind. As we were passing the zoo for the second time he tapped me on the shoulder, so I came to a halt. I heard him give a long sigh, and then he spoke:
‘My dear, I want you to do something for me. Don’t worry! I’m not going to ask you to put your fair white hand down my trousers. It’s nothing like that. The truth is, the very expensive Harley Street gentleman I saw just now has given me the facts. I have at most about nine months to live and the pain is going to get a lot worse. There comes a point, you know, when pain killers don’t work. Either that or you’re so drugged up to the eyeballs you might as well be dead. Life has ceased to be amusing anyway. Oh, don’t look so crestfallen, Edward dear. I was about to say that life has ceased to be amusing but that the only ray of light in the darkness is you, dear boy. Yet even you have not the power to palliate the agony to come. Yes, I know there are hospices and such like for people in my condition, but I somehow don’t feel that hospices are my thing. Too placid and pious for me: I’ve lived life in the world of colour and taste. “Nature I loved and next to Nature Art.” Do you know those lines of Landor’s? Well, with me it has been the other way around. Art was my first love; Nature has always seemed like a pale imitation. Well, the long and the short of it is I am becoming fed up with life. Suffer, suffer, suffer is just meaningless to me. It’s going to be all cross and no crown, from now on, so what’s the fucking point? Pardon my vernacular. So what is the favour I am working up to ask you? To put it bluntly I need someone to kill me in as efficient and painless a way as possible, and the only capable person I could think of was you, dear boy.’
I had no words to say to this, so there was a long silence. I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye a giraffe in the zoo across the road, peering innocently, aimlessly about.
‘You will be handsomely rewarded, of course,’ Ron continued. ‘On completing the task, you will receive the key to a safety deposit box. In that box are a couple of early Rembrandt etchings in fine condition, two Cosway miniatures, a Guercino in pen and wash of St Francis receiving the stigmata, and a little drawing in sanguine of a head by Raphael.’
‘What about provenance?’ I asked.
‘So! You have picked up a little from me. Well done. Yes. Naturally. Provenance has been provided, bur not traceable back to me so you won’t be suspected of theft or anything when you sell. Just talk vaguely of an inheritance. One can’t calculate these things exactly, but I shouldn’t be surprised if you get about two hundred thousand for the lot. Provided you work through discreet dealers and don’t sell them all in a lump, no one is going to ask awkward questions. I have made my plans very thoroughly, you see.’
Over the next few days he told me about them. I won’t go into every detail but the idea was this. One day in a fortnight’s time I would drive him to St Pancras where he would board the Eurostar. He would go down to his house in Provence. On a specified day he would pay off the people who look after him down there, saying that he was leaving and would shut the place up himself. Then I was to arrive and the death would happen. I would dispose of the body—he would give me the details of this when I got there—then shut up the house and leave. It might be some months, perhaps even a year, before his disappearance was noted, because everyone in England would assume he was still in France and those in France that he was in England. Moreover, there would be no body. Suspicion was unlikely to fall on me, and if it did, where would be the proof? Medical records would show that suicide of some kind was the most likely option, as indeed was the case. The fact that it was assisted could only be a supposition.
Did I hesitate? Of course I did. But the way he put it, I was doing him a favour. I asked for some cash up front to pay for my trip into France and he gave it to me. I used it to buy a couple of Paul Nash prints which I later sold at a profit.
***
Ron’s house was high in the hills above Collobrières. People from the village of Le Charnier about a mile away came in to cook and clean for him; and in France, but only in France, he occasionally drove a car, an old Deux Chevaux which was kept in one of the outbuildings. His house, Les Buissonets, had once been a farm.
I arrived there in my own motor at the appointed time one August evening and, as I drove up to Les Buissonets, I thought I had never seen a more beautiful spot. For miles around there were nothing but vineyards, fields and forest, punctuated by the ochre-tiled rooftops of a few homesteads. How could anyone want to die in such a place, I thought, at such a time? Then I stopped myself. I had been stopping myself from thinking about it all the way down through France. That was how I got through the journey. I was beginning to get the trick of detachment.
Ron was standing on the terrace of his house to greet me. ‘Edward, my boy, how delightful to see you!’ I might have been an old friend coming for a long stay. On the terrace was a table and two chairs so placed that we could watch the sun set behind the hills. On the table was a bowl of fat green olives, a bottle in an ice bucket and some glasses. We sat down.
‘You must sample this,’ said Ron, filling my glass. ‘I’ve been trying to finish off my last bottles of Pouilly Fumé and haven’t quite managed it. I suppose you’d have preferred Champagne, my dear, but I’m afraid I never could abide the stuff.’
I made some boring comment about the beauty of the view. It was glorious. Ron sighed heavily. He was visibly older, slower, more in pain than when I had seen him off on the Eurostar a month before.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It used to be so lovely and unspoilt until all those ghastly people started writing books about how lovely and unspoilt it was.’ I could see no evidence of spoiling, but I was not going to argue with him on his last night.
When we had finished the bottle Ron showed me to my room. We had still said nothing about what was going to happen that night, and I suspected it was going to wait till after supper.
Ron said: ‘Madame Bobelet who “does for me” as they say has left behind one of her excellent cassoulets to which I am sure you, if not I, will do justice.’
The inside of the house was comfortable but quite plain; whitewashed walls, tiled floors covered by rugs, plain modern furniture. One whole wall was a bookshelf and there were a few nice pictures, post-Impressionist mostly. Above the fireplace in the main room which contained a large wood-burning stove there was an exquisite little Vuillard. A woman was seated in a garden of chequered shade; the head of a man could just be seen peering at her over the top of a hedge.
We finished the cassoulet and went on to cheese and a tarte aux pommes, and still Ron had not got round to the subject. He kept up a steady flow of talk about all sorts of rubbish, mostly gossip and scandal in the art world. I sensed he was doing this with an effort, and I wanted to tell him to relax. It was only when he produced a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem as we were finishing the tarte that he came round to it. He poured two small glasses of the rich golden liquid and held one up to the light.
‘I call this the Nectar of the Gods. I wonder if they still drink Nectar in the afterlife; I do hope so. Talking of which . . .’ And he began to give me instructions.
After we had washed up and removed all evidence that two of us had dined that night he would go upstairs to his bedroom. There he would take a large overdose of painkilling drugs which he had stockpiled for the purpose. I asked him why in that case he needed me.
‘For two reasons, my dear Edward,’ he said with a touch of irritation. ‘In the first place, as I know only too well from the experience of my friends, these things have a habit of
going wrong. I do not want to wake up and find that my stomach is being pumped by eager French nurses in a Collobrières hospital. In the second place, I have no desire to offend my very dear friends and neighbours, Madame Bobelet and the rest. They are all good Catholics and they would be most upset if they thought I had committed suicide. At least if I simply disappear they can entertain some other possibility. May I continue?’
When he was unconscious I was to strangle or suffocate him until I was sure he was dead. Then—‘and this, my dear, will be the most arduous and unsavoury part of the process’—I was to convey his body to the bathroom next door and dismember the corpse. (‘A hacksaw has been provided.’) The extremities, hands and feet, I was to incinerate in the living room wood-burner; the disembowelled entrails were to be boiled in the stock pot, the liquid of which could be poured down the sink. The remaining mess could be minced up and thrown off the terrace to be consumed by carrion creatures. I was to take the amputated limbs and torso in the Deux Chevaux to a nearby wood and there bury them in separate places. ‘It is a wood not much frequented by huntsmen, but morels and other nutritious fungi are sometimes gathered there at certain times of the year.’ There remained only Ron’s head.
‘Ah, yes, the head,’ said Ron. He went to a sideboard on which stood an old black japanned tin box with sloping sides, like a hatbox. ‘You must indulge my whim about the head. You are to cut it off and place it in this box. Now, see, I have punctured it with holes. You are to fill it up to the brim with stones—rather heavy but there’s no helping that, and when you are half way across the channel you are to cast it into the sea. What with the holes letting in the water and the stones it should sink immediately. I want my head to drop full fathom five to the bottom half way between England and France.’
‘But why?’
‘Because it is my wish. I have always had a fancy to be buried at sea. Obviously the whole body would be too much even for you, dear boy. So I thought just the head, like Orpheus, you know:
‘And let the wind and tide haul me along
To Scylla’s barking and untaméd gulf
Or to the loathsome pool of Acheron
‘I’m afraid you will have to indulge me. After all, I am paying, with my life so to speak.’
Once I had disposed of the corpse, with the exception of the head, I was to clean up the house, turn off the mains electricity, and shut it up just as if Ron had gone away. Then I was to return to England, taking with me the head as far as mid-channel.
‘And now,’ said Ron, rising ponderously, ‘you must excuse me. I have to go upstairs and er . . . make my preparations.’
I reminded him that there was still the little matter of my reward to settle: the keys to the safety deposit box containing the works of art.
‘Of course! My dear Edward, I do apologise, I almost forgot!’ He went over to a small bureau, unlocked a drawer, took out an envelope and handed it to me. ‘The keys and the authorisation codes. And now—’ He held out his hand which I shook, as I suppose I was meant to do.
There was a short silence. Through the open window we could hear frogs going ‘rivet-rivet-rivet’ in the valley below. I wondered what Ron’s last words to me were to be. When they came, they surprised me, but with Ron I should have expected the unexpected.
‘Now remember, Edward dear,’ he said ‘when you are washing away the blood to do it with cold water, not hot. If you do it with hot then tiny particles of blood become encrusted into the surfaces they come into contact with. A dear friend of mine who had the misfortune to murder his mother made this mistake and went to prison for a very long time. The detective told him that had he washed the axe in cold water he might have got away with it. Why they never teach one these things at school I shall never know.’
He went upstairs and I finished the Yquem. It was too good to waste. I thought it might make me drunk enough, but it didn’t.
None of it was easy. The disembowelling was foul, but the worst of it, oddly enough, was burying the legs and arms and torso in that wood. Helpfully Ron had marked the place on the map for me, but it was nearly dawn by the time I had finished there, and I was in a constant state of terror that some wandering French peasant would come across me and start asking questions. I spent the whole of the next day cleaning up after me and the following night I drove away from Les Buissonets, clean, empty and shuttered. I didn’t take anything from the house, though I was tempted. There was a little Boucher drawing in his bedroom—a girl’s head in red chalk with white highlights on very pale blue tinted paper, a real beauty—but I knew it could find me out, so I didn’t. The only thing I took from the house was his head.
The head had been difficult too. The neck was a bugger to saw through—he had a thick neck, all bone and gristle—and for some reason the eyes kept opening. It was a horrible thing to hold which was why I let it slip through nervous, reluctant fingers and it bounced on the bathroom floor with a slight crunching sound. You may never have heard a head bounce, and you don’t want to. That was when the teeth fell out. I didn’t know he had false teeth, you see, so that was another shock. I don’t know why, but I decided that the best thing to do was to put them back in. Now I wish to God I hadn’t.
As instructed, I put it in the tin box with the holes punched in it. You could see the top of the head, all dry and flaky now with a few strands of red grey hair straggling across it, so I filled the box up to the top with gravel. The box now weighed a ton, but I wrapped it in a black plastic bin liner, because it was going to start to smell pretty soon and there would be liquids coming out of the holes.
As I drove up through France that head was on my mind the whole time. I dreaded the moment when I would have to drop it off the ferry into the sea. Ron didn’t understand. Lugging that great thing up on deck in a crowded cross-channel ferry, then heaving it over the side: it was bound to attract attention. It made me angry that Ron had been so inconsiderate. I was driving up through France on small roads, stopping for a meal here and there, snatching a few hours sleep in my car, and with every hour that thing in the tin box was getting older and more putrid. The head was doing my head in. (Ron hated that phrase ‘doing my head in’; that’s why I said it.)
In the end I realised that dropping it off the ferry was out of the question, and one night, as I was crossing the Loire at Châteauneuf, I saw my way out. It was nearly midnight; there was no-one about, so I stopped half way across the bridge. I got the box out of the boot and removed the bin bag covering. I was right. The outside of the box was already slimed and had begun to smell. I hesitated only a moment before I dropped the thing over the bridge and into the Loire. He wanted the sea, I gave him a river: where’s the difference? As Ron used to say: ‘Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.’
After that my journey got a lot easier. I almost laughed when I reached Cherbourg, and the Douane were sniffing through our luggage with dogs. There was something about the boot of my car that interested those dogs, but, of course, they found nothing.
The first thing I did when I got home was to ask after that safety deposit box at Ron’s bank, some posh private one in the City. I felt I had earned my reward, but this was the first of my nasty shocks. In the box there were no Rembrandt etchings, no Cosway miniatures, no Guercino pen and wash, only the ‘Raphael’ head in sanguine, but no provenance.
I took it to a dealer Ron had mentioned and gave him some rubbish about an inheritance, trying to make my voice sound as posh as possible. He sniffed and hemmed and hawed.
‘You have no provenance?’ He asked.
I shook my head.
‘Of course it could be a Raphael. The quality is fine; the paper’s right, but it might be a copy. Probably contemporary, though, 1520s or thereabouts. However without provenance I could only offer you—’ And he mentioned a contemptible amount of money. I left in a rage.
It was only a few days later that the aggravation really started, and it began with a phone call. Very few people know my number: the minic
ab firm, of course, a few close mates, and Ron had known. I don’t let it out to all and sundry. I answered and it was a woman’s voice.
‘Where is he?’ she said.
‘Who is that?’
‘What have you done with him?’
‘Who the hell are you? What are you talking about?’
‘You know perfectly well, Edward dear.’ Then I suddenly recognised that awful upper class quack.
‘It’s Mrs Argenti, isn’t it?’
‘Where is Ron?’
‘Last time I saw him, it was over a month ago. He was getting onto the Eurostar. I suppose he must be still in France.’
‘Don’t give me that, Edward. I know what’s been going on.’
‘Well, if you know, then why are you asking me?’ I said and rang off. I thought that was a smart answer, but of course it wasn’t because it must have made her think I had something to hide. After that she would often ring, sometimes very late at night when she was drunk. I always slammed down the phone. I considered reporting her to the police as a nuisance caller, but thought better of it. The people at the minicab firm denied giving her my number. I think I believe them; it must have been Ron.
I had to go back to minicabbing because Ron had cheated me out of my reward. There was no way I was going to sell the Raphael head for a few thousand, just so some poncey dealer could sell it on for ten times that amount. It’s a nice drawing anyway: probably the head of a young man with this mass of curly hair, but it could be a girl. He—it—is looking round at you with a half smile on his face, enigmatic, almost like the Mona Lisa. (Maybe it’s a Leonardo? Ron didn’t know everything.) All I can say is that the more you look at that face, the more it looks back at you and the stranger it becomes. The detail is extraordinary. I’ve looked at it with a magnifying glass and it’s as if he’s done every strand of red curly hair separately.
The Ballet of Dr Caligari Page 4
