by Smilodon
Ted Allen was all cheery bonhomie. “Christ, Martin,” he said, “Never saw you as the devotional type. George Allardyce is your man. You might not remember George, bit before your time. George took the hump when the Department moved out of Somerset House. He started up a little gallery in Chester. I think he still does valuations for some of the esoteric stuff. He’s quite brilliant but a prickly old sod. If George doesn’t it then it doesn’t exist.”
We chatted for a couple of minutes more about mutual acquaintances and I thanked Ted and hung up. I got the number for the Allardyce Gallery in Chester from Directory Enquiries and placed the call.
A voice as dry as old parchment with more than a hint of irritation answered. I explained who I was and what I was seeking. The timbre of the voice changed utterly and enthusiasm poured down the wires.
“13th Century Triptych on Boxwood, eh? The most famous one, and there are only four we know of, was given by Rapsutin to the Czarina. That one is in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, another is owned by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Moscow. That leaves two in private hands. One of these I’m certain isn’t available. That Greek Oil Chap, Nikolaides, owns it. He doesn’t part with anything. That leaves the fourth and that has a very interesting little history.
“Now this one was brought out of Russia by a Wermacht Officer during the latter stages of World War Two. Unusually, for those times, it wasn’t looting. Seems that this German chappie had saved a monastery from the attentions of the SS. Apparently he was the religious type and he lined up his tanks and threatened to blow all the Blackshirts to Kingdom Come. They wanted to fire the place as nest of partisans. Our hero wasn’t having any. The Abbot or whatever presented him with this ikon as a sign of gratitude. The Nazis shot him eventually, of course, but the ikon was passed on to his sister.”
“What happened then?”
“Old Fat Herman grabbed it for his collection at Karenhall. There was the dickens of a fight after the war with the Reds wanting it back. However, Fraulein Sussmann or somesuch had the provenance. She got it back, has it still, to my knowledge. Hmmm. Advertised as the ‘property of a lady’, you say? My money’s on this one.”
“Any ideas how we might contact this Fraulein Sussmann?”
“Frau Meyer, she is now.”
“What did you say?”
“She got married, boy. Her name is now Meyer. Mrs Helga Meyer. Rich as Croesus and a patron of the Arts. Mad as a bat, of course, but then women of that age often are. Hope that answers you’re questions, I’ve got things to do. Goodbye.”
And with that, he hung up. I sat there in stunned silence for a full minute. Angela was gazing at me, her eyes brim full of concern.
“What did he say?”
Her voice had a nervous edge. I repeated what Allardyce had told me. It was Angela’s turn to be stunned. “Frau Meyer?” She kept repeating the question softly to herself. Liam and Niall came in and we told them the full story.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Niall.
I shook my head. Something was stirring uneasily at the back of my mind. I wasn’t there yet but I had the first glimmerings. We kicked it back and forth, worrying at it like Magic gnaws a stick. That elusive little tickle at the back of mind came and went. After a while, Angela said, “Let us summarise.” Niall pulled out a note pad and wrote as Angela spoke.
“Frau Meyer is my patron. She has bought some of my work. I think she has supported others but she doesn’t speak of it. Her brother gave her the ikon before he died. The Soviet Government contested her ownership after the War but she won. We think she is now selling the ikon through Hervey’s in London.”
We all affirmed that this was accurate thus far.
“This is where I don’t understand,” she went on. “Some people, who we think are Chechens, break into my house looking for something. Then Martin has a visit from this Mr Cornell. He tells Martin lies about my father. Later, he changes his story and says they are looking for a stolen ikon. Martin says Hervey’s won’t sell an ikon if the seller can’t prove where it came from. This, I believe. But if it is Frau Meyer’s ikon, then what has my father got to do with any of this? He doesn’t know Frau Meyer. She became my patron after I left Estonia. It makes no sense at all.”
From the glum looks all around, I could tell we were all equally flummoxed. Niall threw his notepad onto the low table between us.
“These are the notes I made,” he said.
He had drawn a diagram with the word ‘ikon’ in the centre. A line ran to Frau Meyer and, through her, to Angela. Another line ran from the ikon to the name ‘Cornell’ then onwards to ‘British Government’ and then, in dotted form, to ‘Russian Government.’ Another dotted line linked the legend ‘Chechens?’ with both ‘Cornell’ and ‘Russian Government’.
We studied Niall’s chart like soothsayers reading the entrails of a sheep.
“The truth is, me darlin’,” said Liam, “your father doesn’t fit into the pattern at all. Either the ikon is the bloody red herring or your father is. I just don’t get it.”
Again, I felt that faint nudge from my subconscious. We talked on in circles for a while. Angela was becoming heated. She marched to the sideboard and pulled a batch of letters out of the drawer. She shuffled through them, extracting one. She pulled the phone towards her and dialled a long number. A conversation in German ensued. The only words I understood were ‘Frau Meyer’ and ‘ikon’. After a while she hung up and turned towards us, a gleam of triumph in her eyes.
“It is Frau Meyer’s ikon,” she said. “It seems she has recently decided to get rid of all her religious pieces. She has a quarrel with God, it seems.”
A smile played briefly around her face.
“She has found me a quantity of bronze and she is shipping it over. It should have been here last month but there was a problem with the shipping firm. Finally, she wishes to commission three new pieces from me; they are to be of my own choosing.”
We all congratulated Angela on her new commission. I knew, even if the twins didn’t, how hugely important such things were to relatively unknown artists.
“Well,” I said, ”we now know the ikon is for real. I don’t see how that helps us, though. One thing we can do, however, is tell Cornell. It might get them off our backs once and for all.”
The others agreed and I rose and crossed to the phone to call Cornell. My call was answered on the second ring. “Chief Inspector Howard,” a disembodied voice announced, “Who’s speaking?”
“My name is Martin Booth,” I replied, ”I’d like to speak to Mr Michael Cornell.” There was a snort from the other end of the line.
“Then you’re going to need a bloody ouija board, Mr Booth. I hope he wasn’t a close friend of yours because Mr Michael Cornell is dead.”
I was shocked to silence. The policeman carried on speaking as if he’d said ‘it’s raining in London today.’ I stammered through an explanation, winging it but basing it loosely on the truth. Cornell had come to see me asking about ikons. I’d promised to enquire among my contacts. I assumed it was a Government matter. He sounded narrowly suspicious as he questioned me further. I didn’t mention Angela, Chechens or anything else. He thawed a little when I said I’d been in Norfolk with friends since the previous evening. I agreed to call him when I returned to London. He barked his number at me and rang off. The others sat in silence as I relayed the conversation. I think we were all thinking furiously but no one had a single thing to say.
At length we drifted away from the parlour. Angela gave me a tight squeeze but shook her head when I started to say something. She gazed into my eyes with a look that was almost fierce with the love that was in her. “Not now, my Martin,” was all she said. I knew she was right. We needed time to think. We both noticed the grim look that passed between the twins. Something unspoken was agreed upon and I thought I knew what it was.
We spent the afternoon separately. I returned to the beach with Magic and Trotsky, to walk and think and try t
o clear my head. Angela went to her studio and, assisted by Niall, began to repair the damage in preparation for the new commission. Liam patrolled the dunes, keeping an eye on me and the approaches to the cottage. I noticed, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, that his jacket bulged beneath his shoulder once again. I had been right with my interpretation of that grim look.
Chapter Nine
I walked back to the cottage through the fading light. A man and a boy were making their way down to the beach. They were festooned with the arcane gear of beach fishermen. Long Rods, tackle boxes, paraffin lamps and the like seemed to hang everywhere and they were making heavy weather of it, trudging through the soft sand. The boy was animated, obviously excited. His father, for such I supposed the man to be, was patiently plodding in the child’s wake. I looked up and tried to spot my guardian but Liam couldn’t be seen. All the same, I knew he was there. It was both reassuring and terrifying at the same time.
I had been trying to work out who had killed Mickey the Mouth. I didn’t like the man much but wouldn’t have wished him dead. The obvious suspects were the Chechens, if that was what they were. Cornell’s ikon story seemed to have been fabricated for our consumption. He knew of the link between Frau Meyer and Angela and learned of the sale. He probably guessed that I would keep digging, discover the link and then back off to protect Angela. It was subtle and would have been effective apart from that false start involving Angela’s father. I couldn’t believe the currency story. It just didn’t fit. There was only one conclusion I kept returning to. Angela’s father was alive and someone wanted to find him rather badly.
I decided to keep my speculations to myself. It was just a gut feeling. I hadn’t a scrap of evidence but whenever my thoughts turned down that track, the little warm prickling sensation at the back of my mind grew stronger. The evening was as calm and still as the day had been. The clear skies promised another hard frost and the temperature was dropping by the minute as the sun dipped to sleep behind the land. I stopped for a moment just to take it in. I breathed in the promise of the night. My mind quietened. The spinning thoughts slowed and died, one by one. I looked for a moment of tranquillity. Resentment crept over me instead, catching me unawares. I suddenly found myself thinking, ‘why me?’ This was soon followed by the old childhood saw ‘it’s not fair!’ No sooner had the phrase formed in mind the spell was broken. I could laugh at myself again, mocking the self-pity. After all, I now had Angela.
She was coming out of the studio as the dogs and I came in. Magic launched his soggy length towards and she knelt to fuss him. Trotsky looked in an interested fashion, too aloof to prostitute himself for an ear-scratching. She smiled up at me. “ Hello, my Martin,” she said and my heart gave a funny lurch. She was dressed in some sort of loose-fitting overalls and her hair was scraped back and held her at her nape with a band. Some loose tendrils of hair had escaped and she blew them from her face with puffed cheeks. Magic’s tail was thumping manically against the wall. The tail of a flat-coated retriever is lethal to anything at retriever-rump level other than reinforced concrete. Angela sighed and rose. She sniffed at her armpit unselfconsciously. “Phew, I smell like an old bear,” she said and grinned. “Time for a shower.”
We took that shower together. I washed her hair and then minutely washed every inch of her, first with the soap and then with kisses. I wanted to make her come then and there but she eased away from me gently. “Later,” she said. She giggled at my erection and then proceeded to ‘wash’ it enthusiastically. I groaned as my semen spilled out over her hand and spattered her thigh. Her eyes were soft with emotion, as if I’d given her an expensive gift. She languidly washed the pearly drops away then leaned her head on my chest. I held her close for a brief space as the water ran down over us. It was a perfect moment of peace in a strange and disturbing day.
Over a plain dinner we discussed Angela’s forthcoming commission for Frau Meyer. By tacit agreement, we did not discuss the death of Mickey the Mouth or any other of the day’s events. It was still all there, though, a spectre at the feast. I think we were all too worn down by the experience of living inside an enigma to face it yet again. Angela decided that she would honour her intention stated when we first met. She would ‘do’ Trotsky. A completely naturalistic piece, she promised. No tortured soul clawing its way through the twisted bronze. She threatened to do the twins but they refused with a laugh. “Sorry, darlin’, we don’t get our kit off for anyone but our wives,“ Niall had replied. Angela had been surprised; she didn’t know they were both married.
“That leaves Martin,” said Liam. “You could just twist some of those bronze rods into a big knot of spaghetti and say it was a portrait of a lawyer’s mind.”
This sparked off a series of ‘Lawyer Jokes’ at my expense. I responded with Irish Jokes, which Angela insisted had originally been Russian Jokes. We then got to plumb the depths with old Essex Girl Jokes. Angela needed some translations as the significance of Ford XR3i’s was lost on her. No joke is funny when you have to dissect it so the evening petered out with Angela still plaintively pleading with me to explain why the answer to “How does an Essex girl turn off the light before sex?” was “She shuts the car door.”
Niall and Liam had rigged up camp beds for themselves in the Studio. They complained that sleeping in the parlour was ‘too noisy’ and winked suggestively. Angela coloured up a nice bright shade of red as she caught their meaning. The head of the brass bedstead must have been hammering on the parlour wall, the two rooms being adjoining.
“Apart from that,” said Niall, “your dogs fart abominably. At least, Liam claims it was them…”
We could hear their good-natured banter receding as we readied ourselves for bed once more. I knew they would take it turns to keep watch through the night, after the events of the day.
Angela once more tumbled me into our private world of soft embraces and thrilling touches. We made love twice before sleeping. The first time a gentle, loving, lingering journey to ecstasy, the second a raunchy, passionate gallop doggy-style, with Angela gasping harshly in Estonian as orgasm wracked her for the third or fourth time that evening. I haven’t been with that many women, but Angela’s capacity for orgasms was a brand new experience for me. She seemed to hit a plateau and then, out of the blue, she was scaling the peaks, hardly dropping down between one pinnacle and another. Sometimes, she seemed to be coming almost continuously with no break discernible between one climax and the next. I loved it. There can’t be any better tonic for a man’s ego than to have his woman trembling in a constant state of orgasm.
Afterwards, we lay chatting about it. Angela laughed at my wonderment.
“Sometimes,” she said, “It never happens at all. If I’m tired or if I feel low, there is nothing. But when I feel safe and loved, my Martin, then, poof! I am like a string of firecrackers, one explosion following another. But you must not mind if it doesn’t go that way every time. Sometimes, I might want just to make you happy and that will be enough for me.”
I didn’t really understand but claimed I did. It seemed the wisest thing to do.
Angela drifted off to sleep. She seemed now to have adopted a particular position, head on my chest, one leg flung over me. I have to say I loved it. My mind wouldn’t let me go, however. It was a roiling mass of thoughts and theories that echoed round and round in my over-tired brain. It was maddening, whenever I felt I just might be dropping off, this thought would re-emerge to the forefront of my consciousness like a line from a song that you can’t get rid of. ‘He’s alive! He’s got to be alive!’ To this day, I have no idea from whence this conviction had come. It was a certainty, as irrefutable as the dawn. Angela’s father was at the bottom of this. I didn’t know who had died in Gothenburg wearing his identity but I knew we would find no answers there. He’d covered his tracks well enough to fool British Intelligence and we weren’t in their league.
I tried to think of something else, something dull and neutral, like tax, but it
didn’t work. When I eventually fell asleep it was through sheer exhaustion. I woke several times during that night. Once I heard a muttered exchange as Liam relieved Niall on watch and felt guilty. I ought to be taking my turn. Then I felt guilty that, if I did so, Angela would be left alone. I salved my conscience with the thought that I was protecting her. It was still dark when I woke for the last time. I heard one of the twins in the kitchen, filling the kettle. There was also the thump-thump sound of Magic’s tail wagging against the floorboards. A voice was speaking; I couldn’t hear the words but could tell, by the inflection, that someone was talking to Magic. The wagging thump intensified. It sounded like the dog had just conned someone into providing an unscheduled early breakfast. The pure familiarity of the sound relaxed me and I slept properly at last.
When I eventually woke up, it was full daylight and Angela was sitting naked on my chest. Her full breasts fell towards me and I lifted my head to gently kiss a nipple. She leaned forward more to offer herself to me and I suckled like a newborn babe. It wasn’t particularly arousing but it was enormously comforting. I suppose that says something about my affection-deprived childhood. If it does I don’t give a toss. I enjoyed it and so did she. We must have carried on like that for several minutes. I was just getting interested in taking matters further when there came a knock at the door. We were summoned to breakfast.
I shaved while Angela showered and then showered while she dressed. We arrived in the kitchen almost together, I can move fast when I’ve a mind to. As we all ate, Niall indicated the morning copy of the Daily Telegraph. Michael Cornell had made the inside page. Saddam Hussein still had all the headlines to himself. I scanned the article quickly. It didn’t tell us much new except that he had been killed on Monday morning at around Six O’clock. Police were appealing for anyone who might have seen something suspicious in the area. Cornell was described as a senior civil servant. He had been killed on his doorstep, the cause of death: a single stab wound to the throat. The milkman had found the body and called the police. The only other detail of interest was that a Foreign Office spokesman stated Michael Cornell had been on leave of absence from his position at the time of the murder. There was some veiled speculation that sex had been the motive; it was hinted that Cornell might have been gay.
