“Something wrong?” asked Bea, who’d parked her bag on the floor and was fanning open her napkin. “You look awful.”
“Wrong? No, no. Just thinking about that woman dying in the Tate. About death. You know . . . ”
Bea was not interested in death, only the menu. She read it avidly, tongue caught between her red lips.
Well, it was a sort of death, wasn’t it? Through dinner by six or seven? Whole horrible vistas opened before his eyes, such as Agatha turning up at his door yet again in the evening, her meal taken in Plague Alley finished, so plenty of time to bike up to Ardry End for her port and biscuits.
No! He would simply return to the Jack and Hammer and stay until closing if it came to that. But the Jack and Hammer was the aperitif, not the pears and port. He didn’t want his daily routine disturbed.
Looking round the room, softly lit, rather art deco-ish and with a lot of Lichtenstein and Duchamp prints on the walls, he wondered if a pub had once stood on this site. The old pubs were going; think of the ones in Docklands: the Town of Ramsgate, the old Grapes no longer catered for the fisherman, the wharfinger, the workingman. Now they were all done up and over for the upwardly mobile professional who lived in one of those renovated warehouses. It was no longer the fish cart clanking and rattling along the cobbles, but the tires of Jaguar XJ-6s and BMWs hissing through the rain.
The waiter handed Melrose a wine list. That at least was something he could deal with while Bea clucked over the menu (the prices! Cor!). Melrose insisted she not bother about prices, that she have whatever she wanted, and when she said she fancied the steak and potatoes frites he was not surprised.
The waiter was, though, when she asked if the frites meant, was they fried? His nose seemed visibly to lengthen as he informed Madame that, yes, they were. Melrose ordered a bottle of Château Latour, and for himself only an appetizer of foie gras with lime.
As the waiter swanned off with the order, Bea wrenched round to watch his departing black-clad back. “Cheeky bastard. Like to chuck me straight out the door, he would. That’s all you’re having, just that appetizer?” she protested.
He said he’d had a very late lunch and couldn’t tuck into some elaborate main course. Actually, he was looking forward to his cook Martha’s boudin blanc with mustard sauce. It was a dish he especially loved because it kept Agatha absolutely away. “Disgusting white sausage” was her assessment. Spiced apples, sauteed to go with it, he imagined. Surreptitiously, he checked his watch. He could be back in Long Pidd by ten o’clock, perhaps even nine-thirty if there wasn’t too much lingering about in Dotrice.
Still, he liked Bea. He liked her open enjoyment of the costly interior, the obviously moneyed diners, the French menu. He tasted the wine, pronounced it exceedingly good, and the waiter poured. He watched Bea take in this heady environment, quite different from her cheese salad or egg mayonnaise sandwich, and smiled. There was something about Bea (and about Gabe, too, from what he’d heard of the man) that really didn’t fit the funky picture of two kids smooching in such an upmarket venue as the Tate Gallery. He said so.
Bea was picking the radicchio out of her Salade Dotrice, and answered, “Ah, that’s just Gabe’s way. Likes to see if people react.” Around the rim of her large salad plate she deployed bits of the radicchio. “You know, he wants to see if people get shocked. It’s to study behavior, he says. Says it helps his painting. Can’t imagine how.” She sipped her wine, chewed her Bibb lettuce. “Anyway, we weren’t really concentrating, know what I mean? I was looking over his shoulder at that painting on the other wall, A Grey Dawn, something like that, real sad it is—”
“But then Gabe might have had his eyes open, too.”
She shrugged. “Coulda done, yeah.” Lining up some more radicchio bits, she shrugged again. “So?”
“He might have noticed something.”
“If he’d seen something, he’d’ve said. Didn’t say anything to me.”
“Tell me again exactly what you were doing. I mean for the hour or two before Mrs. Hamilton died.”
She made a noise of impatience. “How many times do I have to tell it?”
“Perhaps many times more. In a story’s retelling, it often changes.”
“Not this story, it don’t.” With the handle of her fork, she pointed at her chest. “Not my story.”
“I’m talking about details, tiny things. Things that might have gone missing—such as you just told me. You had your eyes open. Perhaps Gabe did, too.”
She slumped back, prepared to give him a bit of a hard time. But then her steak arrived, and she brightened. The waiter cast a doubtful eye on the circle of radicchio leaves that ringed the salad plate he was removing.
While she cut up the filet into small bits (as if she were feeding the cat) she told him how she herself had gone along to “have a deco at the Turners,” while Gabe had gone to the Swagger Portraits.
“And he saw Frances Hamilton there, too.”
“So it’s him you should be talking to, not me, right?”
“I want to talk to him, yes.” Melrose looked into the dregs of his wine. “But you might be more observant than he is.”
Surprised, she stared at him. “ ’Course I’m not.”
“Those miniatures and that jeweler’s loupe you were using to look at them.” He smiled over at her. “That was interesting. You place them in the dollhouse, right?”
Bea popped an evenly cut square of meat into her mouth, looked at him, shook her head. “You got a point you’re making, or what?”
“Probably not. I don’t know.”
“I don’t either.” Bea forked up a dainty bit of filet, chewed thoughtfully. “Here’s this lady drops dead because of her heart, or something like that, and the cops, even Scotland Yard, they’re all over it.” More chewing as she shook her head. “How come? And how come that CID detective is so interested in Gabe and me? Huh?” The tone was one of mock challenge as she leaned toward him.
Melrose smiled and refilled their glasses, the waiter’s job, but the waiter was busy tossing some greens around in a bowl. Caesar salad, no doubt. They always made such a fuss of a Caesar salad. “Superintendent Jury rather liked the significance of you and Gabe sitting directly in view of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beatrice.”
“He did, did he?” She chewed with some deliberation, ran the forefinger holding her fork beneath her nose, and said, “Fuck him.” Then she speared another morsel of steak. “Ditto you. Nice, this,” she added, waving the meat on the fork.
Melrose laughed and sipped his wine as he regarded the Lichtenstein on the wall beside them. “You like these prints, Bea?”
Without looking up from her tiny mountain of potatoes frites, she answered, “If I want to look at cartoons, I’d sooner watch Ren and Stimpy.” She flicked a disdainful glance toward the print. “Nah.”
He watched the waiter brandish the clay bottle of olive oil over the huge bowl. “Do you like Art? Capital-A Art, I mean?”
“Some.” She shrugged off Art, drank half her glass of wine, ate her potatoes.
“No, not ‘some.’ A lot. A whole lot. People who are merely waiting for other people to finish viewing something, an exhibit or a room full of paintings, might just wander through the rooms. Or go down to the restaurant and have a coffee. Said people do not go off to have ‘a deco at the Constables.’ ”
“The Turners. J.M.W. I don’t much like Constable.”
“Yes. My point exactly.”
“You ain’t got a point. But you can fill me up again, ta very much.” She tapped a stubby finger against her glass.
“Since the two of you didn’t have ten quid between you, you generously let Gabe go along to the Swagger exhibit.”
“What’s generous? Who wants to see a bunch of overdone portraits of a lot of toffs, anyway?”
He smiled. “How did you know that’s what that particular exhibit was about?”
“Pretty obvious, ain’t it?”
“No, it ain’t. At l
east it ain’t to me. And I’m not stupid—”
Her expression suggested he might do well to reassess that opinion.
“—and the catalog says the term ‘swagger’ was coined by the Tate’s curator.”
Bea frowned. “What’s all this in aid of?”
Melrose swirled the wine in his glass, wondered if they were in a nonsmoking section, decided not to ask and lit up a cigarette. He knew Bea smoked from the nicotine stains between her fingers, so the smoke wouldn’t bother her. “You paint, don’t you?” It was a shot in the dark.
“What?” She made a face and stabbed at her steak. “Oh, don’t be daft!”
Melrose exhaled a gentle stream of smoke and watched it curl and disperse. “Probably better than Gabe.”
Her mouth, open to receive a forkful of potatoes frites, remained open as she lowered her fork. “Oh, don’t be daft!” she repeated. Furiously, she chased bits of meat around her plate like a billiards player potting balls. Plate clean, she then laid down her fork. “Even if I did—”
(Meaning, she did.)
“—what’s it to do with this lady pegging out there on the bench?”
“I don’t know. Except I imagine you’re far more observant than you let on. I would imagine that what a painter sees is almost indelibly impressed upon his mind or his inner eye. Perhaps even if he doesn’t consciously recall it.”
“Bloody hell.” She said this without emphasis. “So out of the corner of me eye I see some guy in a black mac and Ray-Bans brush up against this Mrs. Hamilton and stick her with a needle. Something like that?”
“Not exactly. I’m actually more interested in reactions to art from someone who’s extremely sensitive to it.”
Her mouth pulled back over pearly teeth in an expression of utter disbelief. “You are a lousy detective.”
“I’m not a detective.” Melrose studied the Duchamp a bit farther along the wall from the Lichtenstein.
“You are a lousy detective.” She held out her glass for more wine.
“You said that.”
He poured; she drank.
Then she asked, “What in bloody hell does art have to do with this?”
Melrose was silent for some time, raising his eyes from the dark red depths of his wineglass to look at the prints. “You like Turner. Do you like the French impressionists?”
“What I like is the looks of that sweet trolly. Just look at that chocolate-chocolate thing. What is it?”
Melrose didn’t look and didn’t answer, beyond raising a finger to signal the waiter. While she eyed the trolly, he studied her. She was obviously intelligent—extremely so—and perceptive. He was surprised Jury, or Wiggins even, hadn’t seen through the punk empty-headed act. That act (Melrose imagined) was assumed to fool “society,” but probably also to fool her boyfriend, Gabe. Possibly even to fool herself. Right now she was regarding him, winding a lock of that ridiculous eggplant-tinted hair round her finger. Her eyes were expressionless, as if nothing about him were registering. They were also a cool, clear pale green. The color reminded him of ocean water at the shore’s edge, running in, moving out.
The waiter appeared at the table and explained that the chocolate “thing” was a combination of mousse, cake, crumbled praline enveloped in a bittersweet chocolate glaze. Bea said she would have a piece “with a dollop of that whipped cream on it.” The waiter smiled bleakly at this lily-gilding, but obliged. No, nothing thanks for Melrose himself except for coffee.
“Her nephew was killed not very long ago,” he said, when the waiter had moved off to serve other diners.
Bea’s head came up from her dessert plate and her careful apportioning of chocolate bites. She looked puzzled.
“Mrs. Hamilton’s nephew. He was murdered. In the States.”
“That’s terrible. You think it’s got something to do with how she died?”
Melrose shook his head. “Not directly, no. That matter was cleared up, pretty much. But there are other things related to it.”
“What things?”
“A couple of other deaths, possibly. The police aren’t sure.” He wondered if she’d read about the body found at Old Sarum. “Do you read the papers?”
She just looked at him. “Nah. Never learned, me. Sign my name with an X, too.” She slid the fork from her mouth, licking off the bits of chocolate.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so patronizing. What I meant was, have you read the papers recently? About the young woman found dead at Old Sarum?”
That made her stop her chocolate-laden fork in midair. “God, you don’t think it’s to do with that?”
Melrose shrugged. “Don’t know.” Perhaps he shouldn’t have said anything. He was not sure what he might, and might not, tell these people he was questioning. It was all so nebulous, the relationship so . . . well, impossible, really, that he couldn’t imagine he was giving away secrets.
“They didn’t say how she died. How did she?”
“I don’t know.”
She returned her attention to her final tidbit of mousse. “Don’t know much, do you?”
“No. What sorts of things do you paint?”
“Never you mind.” Done, she sighed as she carefully lay her fork across her plate. “That was a treat. I could fancy some brandy.” She looked behind her for the waiter.
“Still life? Landscapes? Big squares of color à la Rothko?”
“Why’d you want to know? You’d only tell Gabe.”
Melrose rolled his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. Do I act like someone who’d grass on you?” He raised two fingers to bring the waiter.
“Dunno, do I?” She regarded the Duchamp with a frown. “I paint in blue.”
“Blue?”
She nodded. “Blue. That’s all. Every kind of blue ever invented and some of my own. I got blues you ain’t ever seen.”
Melrose opened his mouth to comment but could think of nothing to say.
“So when Gabe painted Ash blue, I thought it was some kind of message. Didn’t get half mad, did I? I thought maybe he snuck into my digs and nosed around. Nobody noses around my digs.”
Her small face took on a sharp, feral look as if warning Melrose, in case that was what he was thinking of doing.
“I beg your pardon? Painted Ashley Cripps blue? You did say that?”
“Yeah. Didn’t your CID mate tell you?”
“He forgot.”
“So it was a bet or something stupid. Ash ran around stark—except he was blue. Probably just to shock the Liar.” She smiled serenely when the waiter set down their double cognacs. Two gorgeous snifters, brandy glowing with reflected candlelight. “You are not cheap, I’ll say that for you. Cheers.”
What wouldn’t she say for him, he wondered as he smilingly raised his glass and touched hers. “Thank you. Tell me: why are you drawn to the Turners in the Tate?”
“I told you. The light. The way he does light. When I get depressed, I go look. Great stuff, it makes me feel better. But so does this.” She sipped her drink, licked her lips. “What’s all these questions about Art, anyway?”
“I just wondered how intense your reaction was to Turner. I wonder—” Melrose frowned slightly, raised his glass to see how her image would be distorted through the liquid—“if Art can kill.”
“You’re joking.” She gave a brief, cut-off laugh.
“You believe it can cure.”
“I do?”
“You just said so. Turner takes care of your depression.”
“Bloody hell, that’s not exactly kill or cure.”
They drank their brandy; he paid the bill.
• • •
A NIMBUS of yellowish light surrounded the iron sconces set high in the brick wall of the restaurant, turning the misty rain to gauze. It was a light rain, but it could seep into your bones, Melrose knew. As they waited by the curb for a cab, he removed his topcoat and held it over Bea’s head, tentlike.
Surprised, she looked up at him. “A real gent, you are!”
She laughed. “Now, Gabe, he hogs the umbrella.” She threw up her arm, waved her hand. “There’s a cab down there.”
But the driver didn’t see them. The cab looked to be making a U-turn to head back the way it had come. Suddenly, an ear-piercing whistle made Melrose jump. He looked around to see Bea with her little fingers positioned in the corners of her mouth. A second whistle rent the night. The taxi backed up, headed toward them.
She shrugged at his raised eyebrows. “Learnt that when I was a kid.”
As the cab crawled toward them, its headlamps glowing through the rain, Melrose said, “You’ll never need Mace.”
The cab pulled to the curb and he started to hand her into the backseat. She paused and asked, “What about you? Ain’t you coming, too?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to walk.”
“Walk? In this muck?”
“I don’t get to London much. And I like to walk.”
Uncertainly, she said, “Suit yourself.” Then she held out her hand; her grip was surprisingly firm and strong. “Listen, thanks. That was ever so lovely, and so are you. For a toff. I’ve been wanting to go there for the longest time. Nobody else at the museum has been.” She revelled in this knowledge.
“Then I’m glad we have.” He scribbled his telephone number in his small notebook and ripped out the page. “Here. If you think of anything, or if Gabe does, just ring me, will you?”
Bea crumpled the bit of paper into her pocket. “I will.”
“Once we sort all of this business out, if we ever do, I’ll come back and we’ll have dinner here again.”
She smiled broadly. “Right you are. Only next time, you eat a proper meal, hear?”
“Absolutely. Goodnight, Bea.”
In the cab she rolled down the window. “Next time you come, I’ll let you see some of my paintings, if you like.”
He leaned down to the window. “I’d like.” He thought, if her painting was like her, it would be interesting. Bea, with her purple hair, her odd language slippages (East End up to West), her clear intelligence, her Turner and Rothko. Her hundred shades of blue.
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