Headcase

by Peter Helton

“Oh, lights, lights. Nothing’s more suspicious than torchlight. Here.” He had found the switch and a strip light flickered on.

  Austin’s garage was an Aladdin’s cave, only I suspect the fairy-tale robbers were probably less neat. Unlike Austin’s shop, which cultivated clutter to encourage punters to explore the place, everything here was tidily stacked for maximum use of space. The right-hand wall held a grey metal shelf unit. It was packed with plastic storage crates in bright primary colours. Against the left wall leant a number of wooden packing cases, three deep. The rest of the space was stacked from floor to ceiling with small pieces of furniture, oriental cabinets, bubble-wrapped bronzes, large silver pieces, and a carelessly deposited Chinese dinner gong which looked suspiciously familiar.

  Tim pulled forward a few of the plastic containers. “Fine china, silver cutlery, more plates and stuff. Can’t tell if it’s honest or swag, of course. Do we really have to photograph everything? We’d have to move fast.”

  “We might not have to. Give me a hand with these crates.” Each one of the nine crates against the wall had a felt-tipped destination scrawled on the narrow side on top: several said Oman, two Dubai and one said Moscow. I knew crated-up paintings when I saw them, having helped the gallery assistant at Simon Paris to pack my own for sending in the past. These crates were high class, screws, no nails at all. Tim produced a stubby little screwdriver, I made do with my pocket knife. We had the first one open in a minute. “Welcome back,” I said. It was one of the paintings I had sold to Al-Omari and friends. So they hadn’t left the country yet. Perhaps Al-Omari and Nadeem never bothered with that side of the operation, just flew in and out of the country and waited for their deliveries. It made sense. Why get your hands dirtier than you have to? I flipped the painting over. The canvas on the back was different from the one I normally used. I made short work of a row of staples and once I’d peeled back a corner of my painting one of Alison’s forgeries peeked out, a Sickert. Damn, she was good. “Wait,” I said to Tim who’d already pounced on the next crate. “I remember the sizes of Alison’s forgeries.” I counted off the seven crates. “But these two don’t fit, they’re too large. Open those.” We took the canvases out completely this time. My own work stared back at me in the acid light from the neon tube overhead. This time we ripped off all the staples to completely reveal paintings underneath. Both were nudes, both done in black, fluid, unmistakable brush strokes. And both were signed by a bloke called Picasso. Never my favourite painter but still worth a bob or two.

  “Did Ali do these?” Tim asked.

  “Nope, they’re the real thing. Look at the back. They’ve pasted modern canvas over the back of the original to match it up with what should be the back of my painting. Like a Picasso sandwich.”

  “They worth much?”

  “House in the country and a couple of cars.”

  “I always fancied that, are we taking them?” Even knowing my feelings on the subject, Tim was only half joking, running his fingers lovingly over the famous signature.

  “Not a chance, mate. We’re taking the forgeries, my canvases and the Chinese dinner gong. Let’s move.”

  A deeply entwined couple walking by never gave us a single glance and we pretended not to notice that they had their tongues down each other’s throats. We loaded up, locked up and drove off in less than three minutes. I parked up beside Tim’s TT. “Can you get on-line from here?”

  “Sure.” Tim slid into the passenger side and started up his laptop and car phone.

  “Art Loss Register, late Picasso, nudes,” I told him. They came up instantly, stolen four weeks ago from a private collection in Cheltenham.

  I rang Manvers Street nick even before we set off for the valley. I refused to give my name but tried to inject some urgency into the sergeant. “You have to get there tonight, soon, before the paintings are moved.”

  “Okay, we’ll send someone round.” He hesitated. “This is Sergeant Hayes, by the way,” said the vaguely familiar voice. “Is that you, Honeysett?”

  “Certainly not,” I said, peeved, and cut the connection.

  Monday’s edition of the Bath Chronicle lay becrumbed and sauce-spattered amongst the leftovers from our lunch on the veranda table. ART THIEVES LAST SUPPER, the headline proclaimed ungrammatically. Avon and Somerset Constabulary, following an underworld tip-off (underworld? how dare they) arrested, in the early hours of Sunday morning etc. We had all read it several times already, not for the sketchy information the overblown article contained but for the satisfied glow it produced around the table. Austin and Gillian Pine had been picked up on their return from their literary feast after the police raided the garage. It appeared most of the items inside had been nicked from somewhere or another. Most of them, I knew, would never find their way home, being uncatalogued, uninsured, unregistered or unmarked. The Picassos at least would be reunited with their owner and that alone made it all worthwhile for me.

  “Personally I wouldn’t piss on a Picasso if it was on fire,” was Alison’s pronouncement on the value of the man’s oeuvre. “I’d certainly hate to have to fake one,” she added.

  “Your forging days are over, right?” I said sharply.

  She looked me straight in the eye. “Right.”

  “Talking of forgeries,” Annis said quickly, “what’s gonna happen to the ones you liberated from Austin’s garage? Do we give them back to the Dufossees?”

  “I doubt they’d like a reminder of what they’ve lost on their walls,” I suggested.

  “I don’t see why it matters,” Tim said cheerfully. “If Alison’s fakes are as good as you say they should look identical. If you like the picture you like the picture. Who cares who painted it?”

  Being shouted down by three overexcited painters all at once was a new experience for Tim. Of course it mattered! Originality! Provenance! Authenticity! We nearly drowned the poor soul in indignant jargon but he remained unimpressed. “Get a grip, guys. They’re nice, but they’re only pictures, you know?” he said sensibly. By the end of the discussion Tim had talked himself into a small collection of faked twentieth-century masterpieces, and very nice they look on his walls too.

  I had mooched around town for most of Sunday afternoon in the hope of catching up with Matt but didn’t get a whiff of him. Now, after having helped Tim hang his new collection, I was on the same disheartening mission, trudging through the airless and oppressive fug of a town praying for a thunderstorm. I acquired another armful of this week’s Big Issue and met with the same undisguised suspicion and hostility when showing the pictures around, no matter how many cans of Special Brew I doled out. No one admitted to having seen either Gavin or Matt and I was beginning to believe it. Gavin had most likely left town after I traced him at his friend’s place in Milsom Street. I know I would have. Matt was different, though. He thought he’d found a perfect hide-out in the city and so far it seemed to work for him. In fact it was working rather too well for him. As far as Jenny’s murder was concerned he was in the clear and there was no reason not to go back to Narcotics Anonymous now and invest in his drug-free life. I had checked. He hadn’t been back. The longer he stayed out there the more vulnerable he would become. But my search had a more selfish reason too; I needed to quiz him about Gordon and I very much wanted to talk to the other ex-resident who was still around, Lisa Chapwin. I’d tried her flat several times without success. Matt had told me no one would recognize her from the photo Needham had furnished me with, so I needed Matt for that, too.

  I let myself drift around town, sniffed around the backs of restaurants and cafes and peered into basements and courtyards. It was a pathetic way of searching for someone who was actively hiding. Most houses in Bath have basements and even sub-basements, and I was conscious of the fact that most of the pavements I trudged across were really the roofs of vaults, thousands of them, capable of hiding a million secrets.

  I sauntered up the Royal Avenue which bisects the east side of Victoria Park. I had found a free parking spac
e alongside the tennis courts there. Even though I longed to exchange this stuffiness for the coolness and comforts of the valley I made myself walk on past the DS. The lawns were crowded with groups of tourists, their coaches parked along the Avenue. Several football games were in progress below the ha-ha and children buzzed around the ice-cream van like wasps around a pot of jam.

  For lack of a better idea I headed towards the west side of the park and the botanical gardens, more for the idea of the cooling stream than any hope of finding Matt hiding there. I was passing the bandstand where a group of Japanese tourists were taking turns having their picture taken when I saw him. For all of two seconds. He was crossing the Royal Avenue, right to left, just beyond the obelisk, then I lost sight of him behind some trees. I ran, shedding my collection of Big Issues as I went, just managing not to get run over by a bloke on an out-of-control motorized skateboard and an open-top double-decker as I crossed Marlborough Lane. By the time I reached the obelisk a lot of big lunches and too many Camels were catching up with me. I’d only sprinted a couple of hundred yards but my lungs were screaming and my head was pounding as though I’d just climbed Mont Blanc. I had to stop. And rest my hands on my knees. And wheeze a lot. Heroically I resisted the temptation to make rash resolutions concerning big lunches and as soon as I got my breath back I lit a defiant Camel and enjoyed a little coughing fit.

  I walked on a few more yards past the arch, beyond which the Royal Avenue joined its own loop, and scanned the pavement ahead. There was no sign of Matt. Just then an old boy with a baseball cap and a brightly polished spade across his shoulder appeared to materialize from the bushes on the left, a few yards ahead. I found a narrow alley leading straight down towards the Upper Bristol Road. After a few yards I just knew I had found Matt’s secret abode: on either side of a low chain-link fence stretched what looked like hundreds of allotments, and every one of them appeared to have that favourite of kids’ hiding places, a shed.

  There were few people about, and those oblivious to or unafraid of the threatening storm clouds rolling in from the south didn’t seem concerned about me wandering among the plots. Pretending to show an interest in the profusion of beans, peas, carrots and spuds, I passed close enough to each shed to check for signs that someone had made a permanent home of one. I exchanged the odd nod with people looking up from digging or weeding. If Matt was hiding out here he’d hardly advertise the fact so I didn’t stop to ask questions.

  The place was a warren. If originally it had had a discernible layout it was now difficult to see where one plot ended and the next one started, and even though I began my search at the top of the gentle slope it was impossible to get an overview of the place. The huts, fruit cages and dwarf trees, the rows of bamboo canes, clumps of sunflowers, compost heaps and trained bean plants had me walking around in circles, unsure if I’d seen this or that particular plot before.

  I’d come to another dead end against a dry stone wall and the thick undergrowth beneath the trees at the northern boundary. Too lazy to retrace my steps I squeezed sideways past a sprawling compost heap and a thicket of rampant Jerusalem artichokes and stepped right into Matt’s home from home.

  “Thought you’d never make it.” Supremely relaxed, he sat with his arms folded and his legs stretched out in front of him on a low, roughly made bench in front of a broad shed. I looked around me. The space was completely enclosed with massive red-currant bushes, rows of Jerusalem artichokes and beans. The shed itself was half built into the hedge at the top and so overgrown with bindweed it had become part of the rampant growth all around us.

  “You seem unsurprised,” I said, surprised.

  “I saw you traipsing round and round for the last twenty minutes,” he said with a satisfied smile. “I thought you’d miss it altogether, but just in case I put the kettle on. Cuppa?”

  Incredulous, I followed Matt to the door of the large hut. It wasn’t the set-up which surprised me, however. It was Matt. The inside of the six-by-eight hut was scrupulously clean and obsessively tidy. In one corner a narrow mattress on some pallets served as a bed, with an upturned orange crate as a bedside table. A dented kettle burbled on a camping stove, which sat on a home-made table. Matt released a couple of mugs from hooks screwed into the front of a shelf running above it. A plexiglass window filtered foliage-green light into the place. No, Matt himself was by far the greater surprise. He was no longer the jumpy, weedy and pasty ex-user I had been looking for. His movements had lost their impatient jerkiness, his skin was tanned, his eyes clear. He fixed me with them now. “Milk?” He produced a plastic bottle from where it had been floating in a cooling bucket of water under the table. He was enjoying himself immensely, I could tell.

  There wasn’t a breath of wind. The first rumble of thunder rolled over as we settled on the bench outside, with our mugs sitting on yet another upturned box.

  “Nice place,” I said appreciatively. “How’d you find it?”

  “Didn’t have to, mate. It’s my Uncle Stew’s but he’s waiting for a hip replacement and can’t make it out here now. He used to bring me here when I was a kid.”

  “And you’ve been working his allotment?” I could see the calluses on his hands and the black soil that stained his nails.

  “Every day. It’s not just this bit.” He indicated the enclosed space. “It runs all the way down to that water trough. My neighbour says it could feed a family of four. Well, it certainly feeds me.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Good. It helped me stay clean, too.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Shame you found me. I knew it couldn’t last. Do the Pigs know where I am yet?”

  “The Pigs, as you so charmingly put it, aren’t interested. Case closed,” I tried to reassure him.

  “Who did it then?” he said without a hint of interest.

  “They pinned it on Dave.”

  “You’re not convinced, I can tell.”

  I grunted my assent. “While you were at Somerset, did Gordon Hines ever…do anything weird to any of you? Did he ever make advances towards you or anyone else?”

  “You mean sex?”

  “I mean sex. Did you ever get the impression that he was getting overly close to anyone?”

  Matt shrugged. “Old Gordon and his prayer book. I don’t know, mate. He never tried anything on with me, that’s for sure. But I think Lisa found him quite creepy.”

  “Did she mention anything?”

  “Just an impression I got. Lisa didn’t really speak then. Hardly came out of her room, hardly ate. She’d come downstairs at mealtimes, because it was the rules, swallowed a couple of mouthfuls and went back to hide in her room.”

  Matt was right, of course. She was the invisible resident. She was there for less than six months, during which time I saw her perhaps two or three times, which is why I hardly remembered her. “So you never got any inkling Gordon might have interfered with her?”

  Matt raised an ironic eyebrow. “I was stoned 24/7 those days. I didn’t have any inklings full stop. Mind you, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone try and interfere with her now.”

  “Explain?” I invited.

  “For a start she’s ten stone heavier. Okay, I’m probably exaggerating, but she’s massive now. The kind of medication she’s on can do that to you. She packs quite a wallop, too, I can tell you.” He swung a fist out in illustration.

  “So you did find her.”

  “Lisa found me. She’s not well. Babbles religious stuff, from the Bible or somewhere, I’m no expert; the days of the locust? Valley of the shadows? Stuff like that. She hit me last time I ran into her, didn’t see her coming. She’s got a moped now to get around on. She just suddenly appeared in front of me, helmet on and all that. Started haranguing me about nothing. By the time I’d figured out who she was she’d already thumped me. Angry girl,” he concluded.

  “Where was that?”

  “Outside Green Park station. After she thumped me for no reason she got on her
moped, one of those 50cc ones, and rode off into town.”

  The clouds had turned from leaden grey to verdigris and the heavens opened with a lightning flash and an instantaneous peal of thunder overhead. We took our mugs inside and watched the deluge through the open door.

  “What about Gavin? Any sign?”

  “Nothing, mate. I reckon he’s done a proper runner. That’s what I call decent rain,” he added. “Saves me a lot of watering. We’ve needed this.” He nodded sagely at the heavy raindrops bouncing on the hard-baked earth.

  “You’ve turned into a proper gardener, then.”

  “You’re not wrong.” He turned away from the door to face me. “I’m thinking of doing just that. Horticultural college and all that. Perhaps you’ll see me on telly one day, the new Alan Titchmarsh. He only had one O-level, did you know that? I’ve got five GCSEs.”

  “I think that’s an excellent idea, Matt. But this…” I encompassed the interior of the hut with a sweep of my arm, fit’s cosy but it’s not a solution.”

  “D’you think I don’t know that? It’s not meant to be permanent. I just need to get my head together, and it’s easier here than in my flat. Okay, so the police don’t want me, but there’s others who do,” he reminded me.

  “Perhaps we can do something about that,” I suggested.

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Just let me know when you’re ready; we’ll deal with your creditors. And I’ve a friend called Tim who’d sort you out a front door the Bank of England would be proud of.”

  “You sure, Chris?”

  “Dead cert. Still got my card?”

  He pointed to the wall over his bed. It was pinned up there along with pictures and gardening articles cut from Sunday supplements and a picture of Charlie Dimmock leaning on a spade. Outside, the downpour had lessened. I made to go.

  “Wait.” Matt pulled a black-handled knife from his pocket and unfolded its three-inch blade. “I’m not letting you out of here without some vegetables. I hope you like broad beans, I’ve a right glut of those…”