A picture of Taff shot into Alice’s mind. Somehow they must have found out about him, become aware of the part he played in McPhee’s death. Feeling suddenly tired, aware of every bruise on her body, she replied, ‘Tell you what, Ma’am?’
She looked DCI Bell straight in the eye, trying to appear confident and assured, to disguise the panic eating away at her. Everything would be all right, she told herself. She had done the right thing. If she was to fall, lose her job, if the whole edifice was to come crashing down all around her, then so be it. She could do no more. Taff would not be on her conscience.
If others took a different, more legalistic view, then that was up to them. And if they got rid of her for it, then the Force was not the place for her anyway. The man’s life was nearly over, measured in weeks rather than months, and he should not spend a minute of the time that remained incarcerated. She had no doubt about that. McPhee and his sister were beyond help and reparation.
‘What the hell’s being going on! You’re not on your own, you know.’
‘If it’s about Taff . . .’ Alice began, instinctively starting to marshall the arguments in her own defence as she was speaking.
‘It’s not about bloody Taff! Forget bloody Taff! No, it’s about you, Alice. You. About the campaign waged against you!’
‘You mean the mugger or whatever he was last night?’
‘No. Not that.’
‘What do you mean, Ma’am?’ Alice said, temporarily thrown off balance by thoughts of Taff and his predicament.
Without answering, DCI Bell got up from her desk, turned her back on her sergeant and strode towards the window. After a long, heavy pause she turned round, her hands clasped together.
‘The man who attacked you,’ she said, ‘told us everything. He described the late night phone calls, the funeral music, the gouge on the car’s bodywork, the punctures and the brick through the window.’
‘Him? But I thought he was just a mugger! He was responsible for all of it? Why? I didn’t recognise him. Who the hell is he?’
‘He’s called Thomas Paige, an ex-con with multiple convictions, largely for assault but with one or two for extortion. But it wasn’t him who organised the harassment, Alice, he’s just the cat’s paw, I’m sure. He’s nothing. He was only too eager to talk to us, tell us who was behind it all. First thing this morning we brought in your old colleague, William Stevenson.’
‘Stevenson. Why on earth? Did he find out who the man is?’
‘He is the man. He was behind it all, including the attack yesterday. He was the one directing operations . . .’
‘But why would he do that?’
‘As you can imagine, he’s admitted to nothing. He knows the ropes. But Paige, and another lowlife whose services he used, name of Hunter, have been positively chatty. So we’ll get him all right. Apparently, he blames you for the loss of his career, quite overlooking his own misdemeanours, his own little failings. According to him, your evidence at his hearing sunk him, deprived him of the little hope he had. He seems to have considered that the score would be evened up if your career were to come to an end too, so he’s been busy softening you up. Trying to make you crack, so that you couldn’t carry on with your work.’
‘He was behind it all?’
‘That’s what Paige told us, and his accomplice said the same. Why didn’t you tell me, Alice?’
The DCI resumed her seat behind her desk and looked, for the first time, directly into Alice’s eyes.
‘In all honesty, Ma’am, it took me a while to put everything together. At first I didn’t connect things – it didn’t even occur to me that the gouge mark and the puncture were part of it. By the time I did make the connection I didn’t want to . . . it was too frightening. I didn’t want to believe that someone was after me. Why would they be? Also, it sounded, even to me, a little too like paranoia. I thought you might think I was going off my head, imagining things, fabricating things . . . because of Ian’s death. I began to wonder myself.’
‘If only you had told . . .’
‘Jesus!’ Alice interrupted the DCI, struck by a sudden dreadful thought. ‘Ian. Was the hit-and-run driver Stevenson? Did Stevenson kill him?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure? How can you be sure it wasn’t him?’
‘No. It wasn’t him. That possibility had crossed my mind too, but both Paige and Hunter looked blank when I put it to them, didn’t know what I was talking about. But they confessed happily enough to all the rest.’
‘Murder’s different though.’
‘Murder is different, of course. But I’m sure Stevenson was not involved. Eric’s away as we speak checking out a lockup in Grove Street. Somebody brought a car there to have the bumper changed, and it seems the old one’s still there. It looks as if Ian was run down by an under-age joyrider. I wasn’t going to tell you until we were certain, but I’m pretty sure that it was a young lad from Fountainbridge.’
‘Thank God,’ Alice said, covering her face with her hands.
The DCI’s phone rang. Apart from the odd grunted assent, she said almost nothing until the conversation came to an end and she put down the receiver.
‘That’s good news, too, in its way, Alice. It was the lab. I got them to double-check the toxicology results after what you said to me. It seems they had two “Melville” samples on the system and they mixed the results up. Ian had been drinking on the night he died, but his blood alcohol count was under the legal limit, not over double as they originally suggested. I don’t know what that idiotic witness, Celia, was talking about. He will have been sober enough, compos mentis enough. The other witnesses didn’t say he launched himself out, by the way. We spoke to them yesterday.’
‘What did they say happened, exactly?’
‘I’ll give you their statements later. Basically, they both describe a row between him and Celia. She was putting you down somehow or other, “slagging you off”, is how the woman put it. He got cross, said he wasn’t going to listen to her any more, left and the rest of them left too. As he was crossing, a car, which was going well over thirty, hit him. It jumped the lights, tore out of a side street.’
‘They had a row about me?’
‘You can read it yourself. Looks to me as if Celia’s got it in for you, for some reason. Ian argued with her, told her he wanted to be at home with you. Just read it.’
‘I will.’
‘Now, returning to this Taff person, for a second, what were you going to tell me about him?’
‘Nothing, Ma’am, nothing. I misunderstood you.’
20
Wearing a thick coat, scarf and woollen gloves to protect herself against the cold, Alice looked around the studio. Leaning against one wall was a mass of canvasses, some used, some unused, some facing it and others facing into the room.
With cold hands, she began to organise them, putting aside the unused ones, grading the others by size and ensuring that they faced the correct way. A wonderful sketch of an ancient goat, almost geometric in style with the animal’s spine and hip joint standing out against its spare flesh, jostled for space with an oil painting of a ship on the high seas. The sail of the ship ballooned out as it fought its way through gigantic waves.
She picked up the goat picture and admired it, remembering the day it was drawn. The goat was a milk-white Alpine nanny named Fizz who lived on a farm near her sister’s house. The sketch had taken Ian all of fifteen minutes and the end result, although quirky, almost smelt of goat, so successful had he been in capturing the essence of the creature, its quiddity.
The ship, too, had a story attached to it. Explaining the simplicity of the composition to her he had said, almost shyly, that it was a self-portrait. It was an image of himself butting through life, enjoying it and everything it had to throw at him. Skimming along, with the wind in his sails. Looking at it then, she had been touched by the optimism in the work, the joie de vivre it portrayed. No jagged rocks were to be seen in the clear water.
Picking up a papier-mâché model of a hare from the windowsill she placed it with all the other treasures on the floor, and was just about to lift up another painting when she heard the sound of wood tapping on concrete. Looking up, she saw old Mrs Melville, similarly clad against the cold, approaching with her rosewood stick in one hand and Hamish holding the other.
‘I thought I might find you here,’ the old lady said, smiling and coming forward to kiss her. The little boy, newly released, rushed over to a picture and lifted it up.
‘I’m meeting Celia here. She wanted something of Ian’s,’ Alice said.
‘I know, she told me. She said she was concerned you weren’t “authorised to dispose of his effects”. I told her we’d spoken about it ages ago, and that as far as I was concerned everything of Ian’s was yours. But she seemed to have difficulty in accepting that, and asked if I’d pop by to “keep her right”. I had to bring Hamish back anyway so there was no difficulty in coming. I tried to contact you earlier but you must have been out. What are you going to give her?’
‘She wants to choose herself.’
‘Typical. So typical of her. I don’t know what Ian saw in that ghastly, patronising woman!’
Seeing all the pictures spread before her as if at an exhibition the old lady asked, ‘Which ones are your favourites, dear? I’d hide them away quickly, if I were you. You don’t want her to get them!’
‘The goat and the boat. The boat’s him, you see. He told me that ages ago. He said it was a sort of self-portrait. What about you? Which ones do you particularly like? We’d better tuck them away too.’
‘I’ve got so many of his at home. I suppose I have a slight weakness for The Murderous Crow and I like that one,’ she said, pointing at a half-finished canvas. It showed a winter scene, a cottage with a red pantile roof and a tall chimney stack against a snowy background.
A high voice piped up. ‘You’ve not put my picture there!’ So saying, the child picked up another watercolour and placed it in the very centre of the line of works propped against the wall for Celia’s inspection.
‘Hamish, they’re laid out like that for a friend of Daddy’s to take away. You wouldn’t want to lose it, would you?’ Mrs Melville said, going towards it, ready to remove it and Alice’s favourites from the line-up.
‘I don’t care,’ Hamish said. ‘Daddy liked it, but I’ve got others. Much, much better ones at home.’ He looked at it hard for a moment, shook his head doubtfully and then dashed through the sheet which divided the building into separate studios, intent on exploring someone else’s territory.
As the material still rippled with movement, Celia Naismith appeared, dressed immaculately as ever with a fur hat and black leather gloves. She looked like a Russian countess.
‘Are you both all right?’ she said, an expression of pity on her face.
‘Fine, thank you,’ they replied simultaneously, as if part of a chorus.
‘Oh, I do like that,’ she gushed, taking off her gloves and making a beeline towards the goat. Moving other pictures aside to examine it on its own, she murmured in a shocked tone, ‘What a loss. What a loss . . .’
Keeping it in one hand, she picked up the ship picture and looked at the two of them together, her eyes flitting between them as if weighing them up against each other.
As she peered closely at the goat again, Alice said, more in hope than expectation, ‘Isn’t it a bit . . . figurative for your taste, Celia?’
‘Maybe,’ Celia replied, putting the goat picture down and staring at an abstract which appeared to be composed of nothing more than red and blue circles on a yellow background.
‘This,’ she said excitedly ‘is the one I told you about, the one he gave me before.’
As she put it on an empty easel to get a better view of it, Alice quickly concealed the goat behind the pictures Celia had already looked at.
‘Oh, and I must have the hare!’ Celia said, picking up the papier-mâché model and popping it into the wicker basket that she had over one arm. ‘He did so little modelling,’ she added, as if in explanation.
‘Now . . . one more,’ she said, surveying the remaining pictures in the line-up.
As Alice watched anxiously, she hovered beside the picture of the little boat, her fingers twitching above it as if about to pick it up and take it away forever.
‘You don’t think,’ Mrs Melville chipped in, ‘that that abstract is rather splendid, do you, Celia?’
‘Which one?’ the woman asked.
‘That one,’ the old lady replied, pointing to Hamish’s picture with the end of her stick.
‘Mmm, I see what you mean,’ Celia said, turning her attention to it and narrowing her eyes. ‘It is quite a statement.’
Catching Mrs Melville’s eye, Alice objected, ‘You don’t think it’s a little . . . childish, though?’
Before the old lady could reply, Celia cut in, assuming that the remark had been addressed to her. Art was her sphere, the sphere where she reigned supreme, and if Alice did not like the work then it was almost certainly good, probably unusually so.
‘Childish? Heavens, no. It has, of course, a charming simplicity about it. Its form is bold, daring almost, but “childish”, never! Try and look at it properly, Alice. The choice of colours he’s used is sophisticated, artful in the proper sense of the word. Those oranges! Those purples! They’re not just any old poster orange or any old poster purple, but two colours made by him, chosen by him to set each other off, to . . . electrify each other. Make each other zing! Think of that wonderful flower border at Great Dixter. The more I look at it the more I can see in it . . . ’
She stopped mid-sentence, thinking to herself that, perhaps, it was a tad crude. Surely Ian would not have left so many areas uncovered by paint? But how could he have missed them? Worse, maybe poster colours had been used after all? It looked suspiciously like it.
‘I believe, dear,’ Mrs Melville said mischievously, now enjoying herself immensely, ‘that Ian himself did think it was rather good. Of course, I have no idea why.’
‘I do,’ Celia said. She had committed herself completely and publicly, and she decided her only credible option was to bluster on. Bullshit on. They would be none the wiser. Cloth eyes, the pair of them. The picture was with the rest of his work, with his paintings, it must therefore be by him, mustn’t it? Whose else could it be? But could it really have been done by him? Something so . . . so incomplete, so immature?
‘Why?’ Alice asked, unable to resist.
‘Let’s say, for simplicity’s sake,’ Celia continued, taking a deep breath, ‘that bands of colour, whether in a straight line or, as here, in a rainbow formation, have a long and venerable history. In lesser hands, that’s all we would see, but here in Ian’s hand, a master’s hands, the combination of forms and colours lift this otherwise simple piece into an altogether different realm. As you may or may not know, Ian was very interested in the relationship between curves and straight lines, the feminine and the masculine . . . silence, white sound and noise . . . how one shape calls out, relates, to another. If any artist understood the importance of contrast, in shape, tone and colour, that artist was Ian. Those other pictures, the goat, the boat and so on, they all show, obviously, a degree of technical proficiency, a good “eye” as you might term it, but, in many ways, that’s a commonplace. A given. His talent, his real talent, to my way of thinking, lay in his use of colour and form. And, studying it as it deserves, this picture shows . . .’, she paused, trying to inject conviction into her voice, ‘perfection, well, skill, anyway, in both boldness of composition and stroke, and an almost breathtaking disregard for the staid, for the conventional. It, by its very existence, separates out the seeing from the blind, the ingenue from the sophisticate.’
That should end the discussion, she thought, nodding her head to add authority to her pronouncement.
‘So,’ Mrs Melville said, unable to prevent herself from smiling widely, ‘it’s the one you should have, Celia. God kno
ws, neither Alice nor I have your eye, your appreciation. We thought it was . . . well, just a childish daub – but to you, and no doubt to others like you, it’s . . . well, I can’t begin to describe it as well as you’ve done, but let’s just say, what? The acme of artistic accomplishment?’
‘Mmm . . . or fairly close to it, anyway,’ Celia answered, holding it up nearer to her face, closing one eye and, finally, committing herself beyond recall. ‘And you’re right, I think I will take it.’
Alice glanced across the room at the old lady and gave her a surreptitious wink, getting in return a fleeting thumbs-up. At that moment, Hamish entered the room. He had a splodge of brown paint on his forehead and his lips were covered in yellow, an oversized paintbrush sticking out of his mouth. In one hand he held a picture and, seeing Celia, he wandered up to her and dropped it at her feet. It was another rainbow, this time composed of thick brown, yellow, black, grey and red stripes.
‘For you,’ he said. ‘Watch out, it’s wet. But it’ll go with my other one, won’t it?’
The Road to Hell Page 25
