The Bath Conspiracy

by Jeanne M. Dams

  I didn’t actually want anything cooked. I was impatient to be on our way. But I appreciated Alan’s ploy to divert any further questions Amy might have had. She wasn’t snoopy by nature, but she did enjoy talking to her guests. Perfectly natural, but today we didn’t want to talk about our plans, and as we were the only guests in the room, her sociable habit would have to go unsatisfied. I asked for sausage and one fried egg, just to keep her busy.

  ‘She’s such a dear,’ I said when she had left. ‘I wish we didn’t have to …’

  ‘Yes. Pity.’

  One of the nicest things about a good marriage is the ability to communicate without words.

  When she came back into the room with our food, her dog Jupiter sneaked in with her. He was a sweet little white dog of no particular ancestry, who loved people. He wasn’t supposed to be in the breakfast room, and knew it, so he looked up at us with melting eyes that clearly said, ‘I know I’m being bad, but won’t you forgive me?’ There may be people who can resist that look, but Alan and I are not among them. We were grateful for his intrusion this time, anyway, because it gave us a subject for conversation that took us away from the plans we didn’t want to discuss.

  So by the time we’d finished our meal and talked about our animals, past and present, another couple had come in seeking breakfast and it was time to leave for the hospital.

  ‘We’ll have to tell her about it when we can,’ I said as I got into a warm jacket.

  ‘A suitably edited version.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The hospital’s car park on this raw, gloomy day wasn’t more than half full, but we still had to park quite a ways from the entrance. I was grateful for Alan’s arm as we walked to the door; unpredictable wind gusts were enough to put me off my balance and knock me down without his help. ‘My tower of strength,’ I murmured as we went inside.

  Judith was waiting for us, along with Andrew. ‘I brought him a present,’ she said, holding up a carrier bag. ‘New art materials. If anything will get him busy drawing, these will.’

  I laughed. ‘When I was a kid, my favourite present was a new box of Crayolas. If it was the box of sixty-four colours, with the silver and gold ones and the crayon sharpener, I felt like a princess! But don’t most kids nowadays prefer markers?’

  Then I realized what I’d said. Sammy was, after all, not a kid, not in terms of age, anyway.

  But Judith didn’t seem to notice. ‘Not Sammy. I gave him some once and he didn’t like them at all. He couldn’t tell me why, but I think he prefers the shading, the nuances you can get with crayons. I brought both kinds of paper, too, smooth and textured. He’s as particular about his materials as any other artist. And I’ve had an idea about the gift. Why don’t you give it to him? It will help to make sure he believes you are a friend.’

  ‘That’s generous of you, Judith, and a good idea. We’ll do it.’ I took the bag.

  ‘Well, shall we go up? Andrew, are you coming? He’d love to see you.’

  ‘No, I’ll stay and keep Mr Nesbitt company.’

  Alan lowered his head and looked over his glasses at the young man, who laughed and said, ‘Sorry, keep Alan company,’ and Judith and I headed for the lift.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sammy was sitting up in bed, watching something on television and looking very bored. He broke into a big smile when he saw Judith. Then he saw me, and the smile disappeared.

  ‘Sammy, I think you know my friend Mrs Martin, don’t you? She met you a few days ago, and when I told her you like to draw, she got you a present.’

  ‘What is it?’ His tone was neutral.

  I handed him the bag, saying not a word.

  He was suspicious, but took the bag and, after a moment of uncertainty, dumped it upside down on his bed.

  That did the trick. He looked at the box of crayons with sheer joy on his face. ‘Crayons! My favourites! New ones, nice and pointy.’ One of the pads of paper threatened to slide off the bed; Judith rescued it.

  ‘Those crayons are my favourites, too.’ It was true. I don’t often use crayons anymore, except to touch up worn spots on oddly coloured shoes when no shoe polish will work, but I still love them. I love the smell. Blindfold me and put a box of Crayolas in front of my nose, and I’m instantly eight years old again, lying blissfully on my stomach with a colouring book in front of me, carefully outlining the cat’s body before filling it in with a soft grey. ‘I hoped you would like them.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes! You are a nice lady! I’m going to draw now. I’m going to draw you.’

  He picked up the two pads and instantly dismissed the smooth-surfaced paper in favour of the textured. I let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.

  Sammy scooched himself up in the bed. Judith raised the bed so he was sitting nearly upright, stuffed a pillow in the right place for back support, and moved the tray table closer. It was the hinged kind, with storage space under the tray, so she raised it and looked around for something to keep it open. I offered my purse.

  Judith hefted it. ‘Goodness, what do you keep in there?’

  ‘Anything I think might come in handy someday. I could probably survive on a desert island for quite a while.’

  Sammy found that excruciatingly funny and roared with laughter. I smiled in sympathy. Whatever Sammy did, he did with all his might. Right now he was enjoying his visit with his gran and me.

  As soon as his workstation was set up to his satisfaction, though, he dismissed us from his mind as completely as if we had left the room. His concentration was fixed entirely on the picture he was creating. He glanced at me from time to time, but it was apparent that he regarded me simply as a model, not as a fellow human being. He worked quickly and intently, his tongue sticking out of one corner of his mouth, his hand pausing only to select another crayon.

  It was only about twenty minutes before he put the crayons neatly away in their box and handed me my portrait. My eyes were lavender, my hair a pale pink, my (deep red) shirt the palest of greens with thin white stripes here and there. It was all very abstract, but it was in his most loving style. And it was, somehow, the face I saw in the mirror every morning.

  ‘Sammy, it’s beautiful,’ I said, my voice breaking. ‘I’m nothing like that beautiful.’

  ‘You are, too! Are you crying? Don’t cry!’

  ‘I’m crying because I’m happy, Sammy. Women do that. I’m happy because you made such a beautiful drawing of me. You’re really, really good at drawing people.’

  Judith recognized her cue. ‘Oh, he can draw anybody. Sammy, can you draw us some of the people you see in the shops where you work?’

  His face instantly lost its smile. ‘I can’t go back to work. They won’t let me. I feel good, but they won’t let me get out of here.’

  ‘Soon they will. I promise, Sammy. They told me today that in two more days, maybe three, they’ll let you go home. And as soon as we’re sure you’re really well, you can go back to work. Why don’t you show Mrs Martin some of the people you like where you work? You can draw them from memory, I know.’

  We were getting away from our mission, but we might be able to get Sammy around to it. Meanwhile he was happy, and that was part of the goal.

  Rapidly he drew a few faces, all of them in the bright, happy style. Some men, some women. I recognized some of them and was able to identify them for Sammy. ‘That’s the man at the Jane Austen Centre, isn’t it? And this must be the manager at the Baths shop.’ And so on. He beamed every time I could tell him who the original was.

  ‘And wasn’t there another man you met at one of the shops?’ Judith ventured into dangerous territory. ‘I think you thought he was your friend, but he wasn’t, really, was he?’

  Sammy swept his drawings onto the floor. ‘Bad man! Don’t like him.’

  ‘No, we don’t either.’ I took up the thread. ‘Nobody likes him, Sammy. Even the police don’t like him. They’ve arrested him, Sammy, and he’s in jail.’

  ‘Good! He�
��s a bad man.’

  ‘He’s so bad, Sammy, that he’s telling lies to the police. They think he stole a lot of things, but he’s lying and telling them you did it. We know that’s not true, but it would help them if you could tell us what really did happen.’

  ‘You like stories, Sammy,’ said Judith in a nursery sort of voice. ‘Why don’t you tell us this story? Once upon a time there was a very bad man …’

  ‘He made me do bad things! He told me to take things and then he would pay the shops for the ones he wanted to keep and give the others back, but he never did. He made me put things away in a car, and then he got mad at me because it wasn’t his car. He made me cry!’

  ‘You took a trip with him once, didn’t you, love? I remember you told me he was taking you out for a treat, but I don’t remember where.’

  This was the first I’d heard of any such outing. I listened carefully to Sammy’s answer.

  ‘It was just a place where there were lots of rocks. Not very nice. No ice cream or anything. There were lots of people there. I don’t know why. It wasn’t fun. Gran, can I have some ice cream?’

  ‘I don’t know if they have any here. This place isn’t very much fun either, is it? I have a Mars bar, if you would like that.’

  ‘Do you have one for my friend?’ He smiled at me, his good nature restored. For the moment.

  ‘Oh, Sammy, thank you, but it’s a funny thing, I’ve never cared for Mars bars. You have it.’ I love them, but there are times, I firmly believe, when white lies are not only forgiven, but approved.

  I waited for him to finish his candy bar, which he did surprisingly neatly. He wiped his hands carefully on the napkin Judith gave him. ‘Don’t want to get chocolate on my drawings,’ he explained. ‘Got to keep my hands clean.’

  ‘Right,’ I agreed. ‘Sammy, I’m interested in that trip to the place with rocks. I sort of like rocks. Were these the pretty kind you can take home and polish?’

  He shook his head emphatically. ‘Not pretty. All alike. Boring. The bad man made me take one, though. It was heavy. He said he was going to give it to a friend.’

  ‘Did you ever see him talking to a friend?’

  ‘No. I want to go to sleep now.’

  ‘Oh, but you haven’t drawn us any pictures of the people at the rock place,’ urged Judith.

  Sammy shrugged. ‘Nobody interesting. Well, just one. The bad man talked to her for a little while. He told me she was an old friend, but I think he was lying. They didn’t look like they were friends. She went away. And then he told me to get that rock and then we left. She was funny-looking. I didn’t like her.’

  He reached for his other pad, the smooth finish he preferred for his hostile portraits. Bearing down hard on the crayons, he produced a picture of a man and a woman in his same semi-abstract style. In essence it was a picture of hatred slashed onto the page. It was also a picture of the man I knew as Simon Caine, and a woman I couldn’t identify.

  ‘Sammy, may I keep this one, please? And the picture of me?’

  ‘All of them,’ he said, spreading his arms wide. ‘I can make lots more. Goodbye.’

  He crunched down in his bed and closed his eyes. Judith lowered the bed back to almost flat and took away the tray table. Sammy was asleep before she had finished putting away the drawing materials.

  We picked up all the pictures, including the ones that had been swept to the floor, and carried them down to the waiting room, where Alan and Andrew were intent on a game of chess, playing with a set of miniature men and a board about the size of a fancy Christmas card. From the look of the piles of captured men, they were just about evenly matched.

  ‘Come back, you two,’ I said in a voice a little too loud for a hospital. Alan looked up, plainly not quite sure for a moment who I was and why I was interrupting something important.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ I said to Judith, ‘short of tipping up the board and spilling everything to the floor. When he gets involved in chess, a whirlwind could take the house away and he wouldn’t notice, provided the game was still intact.’ I moved closer to Alan and looked him straight in the face. ‘I don’t suppose you’d have any interest in how our talk with Sammy turned out.’

  ‘Oh. Oh! Good heavens, I’d actually forgotten. Andrew’s very good, and I was working out what, if anything, I can do to evade his clutches.’

  ‘Yes, I could see that. It’s a miracle you are able even to see the pieces. I’d have to hold them up to my nose to tell which were bishops and which were knights, and the king and queen look exactly alike to me. That’s a reflection on my eyesight, Andrew, not on your men.’

  He grinned. ‘It is rather small, isn’t it? My father gave it to me just before we left Jamaica, so we could play on the ship. I almost always keep it in my pocket.’

  ‘And a good idea, too. But may I request that you memorize the positions, or take a picture or something, and put it away for now? There’s lots we want to tell you and show you, and I’m starving. Let’s all go find lunch some nice place where we can talk.’

  Judith and Andrew bickered amiably about pubs while we walked to the car park, and finally chose one which, they said, would be crowded enough to mask conversation but not uncomfortably full. ‘And they have excellent beer.’ That from Andrew. ‘And decent food,’ added Judith, smiling at me.

  What I really wanted at that point was some meatloaf from my own freezer, along with my own mashed potatoes and gravy. However, failing that, an excellent fish pie would be welcome.

  ‘So,’ I said when we were settled in a quiet corner, ‘we have some things to show you.’ Judith pulled out the stack of pictures, with my portrait on top.

  The men looked from me to the picture and back at me again.

  ‘It’s … astounding,’ said Alan. ‘How does he do it? The colouring is wrong, the drawing is crude – but it’s you. He’s got your soul down on paper.’

  ‘I know. And he did it in about twenty minutes. It’s a little scary, actually. Now look at this one.’ I pulled out the picture of Caine and the woman he talked to at the ‘rock place’ – presumably the quarry in Wales where the bluestone came from.

  ‘Caine, of course. Did Sammy name him?’

  ‘He calls him the “bad man”. He told us a little of what happened between them, all corroborating what we’d already guessed.’

  ‘Hmm. But who’s the woman?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have the feeling I’ve maybe seen her before, but I can’t place her. Sammy says she was at the quarry and talked to Caine for a while. Or no, he said he – Caine – talked to her. I’m not sure that makes a difference, but to me it implies that Caine initiated the conversation.’

  ‘Would he be that precise?’ Alan asked dubiously.

  ‘I think so,’ said Judith. ‘As you see, he’s good at drawing people, even their characters. He’s also good at understanding relationships. For instance, when he was small and at school, he would tell me about the other kids bullying him. Sometimes others would stand up for him and there would be a fight, or at least a hot argument, which he would describe to me in detail. If I checked with the teacher afterward, his account would always be accurate in every detail. So when he says this man talked to this woman, I think we can assume that’s the way it happened.’

  Alan let that drop for the moment. ‘And these other pictures?’ he asked, riffling through the stack.

  ‘We asked him to draw some of the people at the shops. You can see he drew only people he likes.’

  ‘Which includes almost everyone,’ said Judith. ‘This Caine person with the woman, and the Prince of Wales one, are the only drawings I’ve seen in that hard, angry style.’

  ‘Which is interesting, if you think about it,’ I said slowly. ‘It must mean he doesn’t like her, either. In fact, he said so, I remember now. And why would he dislike her, from only that one encounter? He didn’t even talk to her.’

  ‘I would imagine,’ said Judith, ‘that she looked at him in a way he’s come to
mistrust. A combination of scorn and pity, with scorn predominating. He still gets it a lot, from people who don’t know him.’

  Our food arrived, hot and fragrant, and we fell to with a will, and dropped the subject while we ate. When we got to dessert, we all chose a lovely apple crumble, and while we waited for it, Alan made a proposal. ‘Judith, I’m not a connoisseur, but I do love art, and I’ve been visiting museums and galleries for most of a long life, so I have something of an eye. I believe Sammy’s talent to be exceptional. Would you allow me to take these pictures to a friend of mine who has a gallery in London? I think he might be interested in doing an exhibition.’

  ‘I … goodness, I hardly know what to say. Of course we think he’s wonderful, my friends and I, but then we love him. And we know the people he draws, so we can see how marvellously he captures them. To someone who didn’t know them … I don’t know, maybe they would just look like crude children’s drawings.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You’ll recall that I’ve never actually met him, and I could see the genius in his drawings instantly. I can’t make any promises, of course, but if you’ll let me show these to my friends, we’ll see.’

  ‘I’m not sure, Alan. Suppose the man did like them, and wanted to do a show? Would it mean Sammy would have to do a lot of drawing quickly? He isn’t always in the mood, and he can be very stubborn if he doesn’t want to do something. And then, would he have to go to London? He’s lived here always, with me. I think London would terrify him.’

  ‘I don’t know the answers to those questions, but we could take it one step at a time. It’s just that I hate the idea of his hiding that great light under a bushel.’

  ‘And maybe,’ I offered, ‘knowing that people really liked his work and wanted to hang it up in a shop in London, maybe that would help make up for the betrayal by the man he thought was a friend.’

  ‘Yes, I see that it might. Very well, Alan. Take them and do whatever you like with them. I won’t mention any of this to Sammy. Not yet.’