Play With Fire

by William Shaw

  ‘Sometimes it’s like that.’

  ‘I mean, we can’t just let whoever it was get away with it, can we?’

  Breen turned to look at him. ‘Sometimes they do get away with it.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ said Mint.

  They stood there, side by side, looking at the map.

  ‘She’s using a pseudonym,’ said Breen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The madam. That’s why you couldn’t find her. She won’t be using the name Florence. In prostitution, nobody uses their real name.’

  ‘I’m so thick,’ said Mint.

  The Slade was in Fitzrovia, closest to Lena’s flat, but Heatherley’s was in George Street, closer to the police station. Breen had always wanted to go to art school but his father had discouraged him. ‘Go back to the flower shop you found yesterday,’ he said. ‘See if the man who runs it is back.’

  ‘Right,’ said Mint, eager again. He was scrambling in his desk for a notebook as Breen left the room.

  A BOAC 707, on its way to London Airport, roared overhead.

  Breen was sitting in the back garden of a semi-detached house in Whitton. Pink roses fringed the suburban lawn, and the air was full of the scent of freshly mown grass.

  Zygmunt Wojcik was in his mid-fifties. He was lean, wore a neat American-style tennis shirt and pressed trousers, but had a drinker’s eyes. ‘Jan Bobienski,’ he said, ‘was an idiot.’

  ‘Be nice, Ziggy,’ said the plump woman who was putting tea on the table. Wojcik’s wife was English. She spooned sugar into her husband’s cup.

  ‘He was stupid,’ he said, squinting into the sunlight.

  ‘What do you mean, stupid?’

  ‘A pretty good pilot though. He got eight German planes. Mostly Dorniers. I got ten.’

  ‘The Battle of Britain?’

  ‘Of course. We Poles won it for you, you know? Our pilots had experience fighting Germans. Yours had none. Never was so much owed by so many to so few. But you never paid us back. You wouldn’t even let us march in the Victory parades because you didn’t want to offend your new friend, comrade Stalin.’

  He looked up into the sky. Already another airliner was following the last.

  ‘That really wasn’t fair, was it, dear?’ said Mrs Wojcik.

  ‘Where is he now, then?’ asked Breen.

  ‘Dead, of course. Bobienski went back to Poland after the war with the rest of the idiots from our government-in-exile. Come home, they said. Come home. Everything will be fine. Some of us did. I told them not to.’ The Pole gulped his tea down in one. A bumblebee hummed at the grass around their feet. ‘I was right. Stalin shot them or sent them to rot in the gulags.’

  ‘Terrible really,’ said Mrs Wojcik. ‘After all they’d been through already.’

  ‘Idiots,’ said Wojcik. ‘Stalin didn’t want anyone who knew how to fight for the freedom of Poland. The sort who fought for the Polish people. Why would he? We were dangerous men.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Wojcik, with a smile at her husband. ‘They were.’

  Wojcik looked away towards the end of the garden and scowled. ‘I told Jan Bobienski, he was a fool to even think about it.’

  ‘So he would have been sent to a prison camp?’

  ‘Who knows? I never heard from him again. He disappeared. All of them disappeared. Everyone who went back.’ Without explanation he got up and walked stiffly to the bottom of the garden, waving his arms. Breen watched him, thinking at first this was some strange expression of grief.

  ‘It’s the butterflies,’ explained Mrs Wojcik. ‘This year they’re bad. They’re ruining the cabbages.’

  Breen reached inside his briefcase and pulled out the small photograph he had found by Lena Bobienski’s bed, the couple with the boy and the young baby, and handed it to Mrs Wojcik. She raised her hand to her mouth and gasped. ‘Ziggy. Come and look at this. He has a photo of Jan.’

  ‘I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘Jan and his family. Before they went back to Poland.’

  Wojcik stopped shooing the butterflies off his plants but stayed at the bottom of the garden, away from the table.

  ‘Come, Ziggy dear. The policeman brought it for us to look at.’

  Eventually, Wojcik walked back towards them, snatched the photograph, looked at it for a long time, stony-faced. ‘Idiots,’ he said eventually.

  ‘What was her name? Cathy, I think. They married a little before us, didn’t they, Ziggy?’

  Her husband grunted, put the picture down on the garden table, then returned to the vegetable patch.

  ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it all,’ she said, picking up the photo again. ‘It was a wild time. Most of them didn’t have girlfriends. Not steady ones, anyway. Nobody knew how long they were going to live, you see? I got along OK with Cathy, but she was a bit younger than me. The little boy’s name was Stefan, I think. I don’t recall a baby.’

  ‘Her name may have been Lena, I think,’ said Breen.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘What happened to his wife?’

  ‘He took her to Poland with him, I think. They all ended up in those ruddy gulags, like Ziggy said.’

  ‘The children as well?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Mrs Wojcik. ‘It was awful. But there was so much horror going on after the war, all the refugees everywhere, nobody really said anything about it.’

  ‘No,’ shouted her husband from the end of the garden. ‘Not the girl.’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘Not the girl. She was sick with tuberculosis. She stayed in England, with the Krysia family.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘I remember it. I told them not to go. Bobienski was supposed to send for her when she was cured, but he never did. How could he? By then he had disappeared.’

  ‘The baby’s name was Lena?’

  ‘Lena and Stefan, yes,’ he said.

  ‘So her family left but she stayed in England?’

  ‘After the war, all sorts of people disappeared,’ the man said. ‘Fuck off. Fuck off,’ he shouted, apparently at the butterflies, though Breen was not sure. ‘I think they took her in. We look after each other.’

  ‘More tea?’ said Mrs Wojcik, though he hadn’t touched his first cup at all.

  Afterwards, Mrs Wojcik saw Breen to the door. ‘Sorry about Ziggy. He doesn’t like to talk about everything that happened after the war. He was very disappointed in Mr Attlee, after all they had done. Well, we all were. The war was his time. It’s all been a little hard for him, afterwards.’

  Breen shook her hand, politely, and she closed the door behind him. He sat in the car for a while, looking at the photograph of the mother and father and their two children. Old history. He had still been a boy when the war had ended.

  That afternoon, he walked from the police station to the Slade. London in the summer was beautiful. Everyone seemed to move a little more slowly, to lift their eyes off the grey pavements and look at the world around them.

  The Slade was on one side of a leafy quadrangle, a large, pale university building decorated with absurd Corinthian columns. At this time of year, with the students away, Breen’s footsteps echoed in empty corridors.

  ‘Know what? I bet you she’s the old bird who’s been modelling for one of our Summer School courses,’ suggested an eager man with big round glasses and a brightly checked suit. ‘Come,’ he said.

  He led Breen into a studio, a large, white-painted hangar of a room, where stood dozens of half-finished sculptures, some made of clay, others plaster of Paris. Wire frames poked through the incomplete pieces. The man in the checked suit looked around until he found one in clay; a standing nude whose face was half finished.

  ‘Ta-da! Is it her?’ The man’s voice boomed in the empty room. ‘I bet it is. One of the old school. All the young ones disrobe for tuppence these days, but they’re useless. Can’t sit still.’

  Breen peered at the clay. The face in Mr Payne’s pai
nting had been fleshy and round; this face appeared to show the bones beneath the skin. He was comparing a likeness with a likeness, not the real thing; he could not be sure.

  ‘Or this one? Same model. Different student.’

  It was the breasts that were not right. ‘It’s not her,’ he said. This woman was flat-chested; Florence’s bosoms had been large, drooping down her chest. He shook his head.

  ‘Frankly, I’m disappointed. I was so looking forward to this old girl being a murderer.’

  ‘I didn’t say she was,’ said Breen.

  ‘I shall pretend she is, all the same,’ said the man, showing him to the door.

  Breen walked west, towards the second of the art schools. It was the third day of the case. Mint’s anxiety was justified. If there wasn’t some kind of breakthrough now this could easily become one of those investigations that rolled quietly along for months. She had been a prostitute. There were no colleagues or relations to urge the police onwards, and nobody to shame them when they didn’t produce results.

  When he arrived at Heatherley’s he checked his map to be sure he was in the right place. This was not such a grand affair as the Slade. From the outside it looked more like a workshop.

  He knocked. No one answered the door, so he opened it. Sitting at a small desk in a small room to the right of the entrance hall was a young man in a hand-knitted sleeveless jumper and a T-shirt doing a crossword puzzle in a newspaper.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me knock?’ said Breen.

  ‘Yes, but most people just come in anyway,’ said the man.

  ‘I’m looking for a woman who models here,’ said Breen pushing his warrant card under his nose. The young man, skinny, with wire-framed glasses, looked up.

  ‘We have all sorts of models,’ said the man.

  ‘Do you have a list?’

  ‘Somewhere, I suppose.’

  ‘A middle-aged woman. It’s important.’

  The man shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m just on the front desk. They let us off some of our fees if we help out. Hey. You can’t just walk in there.’

  Breen had left the small room, returned to the hallway and pulled open two dark swing doors. As they opened, the aroma of linseed and turpentine made him pause.

  ‘It’s private. If you wait in the front office I’ll see if I can find someone to help show you round.’

  Breen ignored him, pushing open the door of the first room he came to. It was empty. Easels circled around a chaise longue. The walls were covered with paintings of still lifes and nudes, some framed and hung, others propped against the edges, half finished. The floor was rich with colour from spilled paint.

  He looked at the pictures. This was not a fashionable art school full of daring new painters like Peter Blake and David Hockney. Or Andy Warhol, even. This was clearly not the Slade, either. These were old-fashioned, painterly works, the sort that still made it into the older, dimly lit Bond Street galleries, not the new trendy new ones like Robert Fraser’s or Kasmin’s.

  Back in the corridor, he heard voices. There must be students upstairs.

  He made his way up and found a room full of artists. The reinforced glass, though covered in pigeon shit and dirt, still bathed the rooms with even north light. Under it, a young man stood, one leg in front of the other, arms crossed, completely naked. He was an athlete of some kind; his stomach was even, muscled, and shone, as if oiled. There was something deliberately cocky about the way he turned his head a few degrees to look at Breen, eyebrows raised slightly, as if daring Breen to stare. Surrounding him, the students paused, brushes in mid-air and they, too, looked at Breen.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said and was about to close the door when he saw her.

  It was a painting, propped on the opposite wall. Florence was reclining in the same pose as in the picture he had seen in Mr Payne’s bedroom, but in this version the light was vaguer, kinder to her older flesh. He walked across the room to look at it. It was good. The pale pinks and blues of her skin were delicate without being hesitant. He wished he could have learned to paint like that.

  He pointed at the picture and said, ‘What’s this woman’s name?’

  The tutor, an elderly man in half-moon glasses said, ‘No talking.’

  ‘What is her name?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The model?’

  ‘Next door,’ the tutor said, irritated at the interruption.

  Breen closed the door behind him and moved down the corridor.

  THIRTEEN

  After a couple of days when nothing happens, sometimes, you have a stroke of luck.

  It was her; the woman called Florence. And if she was the murderer, she would not find running away easy. Like the man in the last room, she was naked but for a wisp of silk that covered one breast, leaving the other bare. Unlike the man in the previous room, she didn’t look up as he entered.

  ‘You’re late,’ said a squat, round woman in a blue boiler suit smudged with colour. ‘Hurry up.’ She pointed to an easel at the far side of the room.

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘No talking,’ she snapped. ‘We work in silence.’

  He paused for a moment, considered pulling out his warrant card to explain himself. But there was no need to embarrass the woman, and besides, he found it useful to observe a suspect. So he walked across the room and stood in front of the easel. There was an empty canvas already on it, and, placed on a low table, a small wooden box, a dirty cloth, a bottle of turps, another of linseed oil, some charcoal and a tin filled with brushes of all sizes.

  His place was towards the back of the room. From where he stood he could see a few other half-completed pictures. A young woman with straight fair hair in front of him, slightly to his right, turned and gave him a small, welcoming smile. She was working with a palette knife on a thick layer of paint.

  He picked up charcoal and started to sketch a rough outline of Florence. The easel was not in the best position. He had a view that was side on, slightly towards her back. Her hands were in her lap, so her arms obscured the folds of her belly and breasts.

  He tried to remember what little he knew. It was about how the light fell on skin, and how that skin absorbed or reflected it. To paint was to learn how to see it, then how to re-create a drama of seeing. He opened up the box, and looked at the names on the tubes: Payne’s Grey, Sap Green, French Ultramarine. He grinned, like a child opening chocolates.

  The woman in the boiler suit was watching him disapprovingly.

  She clapped her hands once. ‘Work,’ she said.

  When he had roughed out a shape, he picked up the Orange Ochre and began mixing it with a little white and started laying a foundation, but on the canvas it looked too dark. He mixed more white.

  He had learned, as a boy, playing with paints and pencils, the importance of working decisively. With oils you could revise and overpaint, but the strokes needed to convey a real sense of intention.

  That said, he had always been better at drawing than painting. Breen had bought all his equipment with money from paper rounds and Saturday jobs, though he’d never been able to afford materials this good. His father, who had struggled to establish himself in the building business when he had arrived in London from Ireland, had never encouraged him to paint; he had wanted to protect him from disappointment.

  Growing in confidence now, Breen added more colour, pleased with what he was achieving. The weight of the woman sitting in the chair had begun to transfer itself onto his canvas.

  He paused as the tutor moved to stand behind the pretty, fair-haired woman who was obviously struggling; her version of the nude model was disproportionate and flat. The tutor harrumphed, took the woman’s brush from her hands, dipped it onto her palette and added a simple highlight to her canvas in one stroke. ‘There,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the woman, peering at the transformation. ‘Why didn’t I see that?’

  ‘Because you don’t feel anything,’ said the woman.

&nbs
p; Breen turned to his own painting again and worked on it harder. He squinted at the model, noticing for the first time a kind of rich purple in her skin, beneath the pallid surface. He searched his colours to find a way to represent it, working animatedly.

  A dollop of paint fell on his brogues. Taking the rag, he bent to wipe it off and when he straightened he realised that the stocky tutor was now standing at his picture, leaning forward and scrutinising it.

  He stood, watching her examine his work, saying nothing. The painting was still in its early stages, but he was pleased at how much had come back to him.

  ‘Where did you say you trained?’ she said finally.

  ‘Just at school.’

  ‘God save us,’ she said, quietly. ‘And have you painted much since?’

  ‘No,’ said Breen.

  She turned and walked away.

  ‘Well?’ he called after her.

  She stopped and said, ‘You have no technique at all. You’re wasting your money here. Come back when you’re ready. Class is over now.’ She clapped loudly.

  The model picked up a cotton dressing gown and wrapped herself in it, taking a packet of cigarettes from the pocket.

  The painter with the long blonde hair was looking at Breen sympathetically. ‘Mind if I look?’ she said.

  ‘Go ahead. It’s appalling, apparently.’

  She stood next to him and looked at the vivid shapes he’d made on the canvas. ‘Don’t worry. She’s like that with everyone. Even the ones with some talent. I have none, obviously, but I just love doing it.’ She was smiling at him. ‘I don’t think yours is that bad at all, actually. Jolly sight better than mine, that’s for sure.’

  The students had started cleaning their brushes. He did the same.

  ‘A few of us go for a drink afterwards. Would you like to join us?’ she said, but he didn’t have time to answer, because the model had put on her dress and was heading for the exit.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he called. Florence was already at the door. He dropped his brush, ran after her and caught up with her in the corridor, laying his hand on her shoulder.

  She turned, cigarette still in hand. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said. ‘About Miss Bobienski.’