by Peter Helton
I tore myself away and looked around. The windows in this gallery were blocked off with advertising for this and forthcoming exhibitions. I took pictures of the windows and the position of the cameras. Not that I really thought we could smash our way in and out of the windows. As Tim said, this wasn’t Norway and the people living on the other side of Bridge Street might show some curiosity if we tried it. I took a turn round the entire exhibition again and when I’d completed it there was no sign of Tim. It was hard not to look straight into the CCTV cameras once I had spotted them. I walked out into the foyer with its chequerboard marble floor and busts of local worthies and climbed the stairs, past some well-painted trifles. On the first floor another chequerboard foyer gave room to two tables, six black armchairs, a pour-it-yourself coffee bar and three white marble sculptures of women in robes holding aloft meaningful stuff. I turned my back on the marble horrors and walked into the permanent exhibition. Another information desk with another blue-suited attendant, a middle-aged man this time. He looked up but his gaze didn’t linger. Tim was there, slumped on the green upholstery of a bench, looking half asleep. I ignored him and wandered about. There was only one other person in the upstairs gallery, a bloke in a Barbour and wide-brimmed hat who was studying a large Gainsborough. I took out my mobile. It was deadly quiet in here. I’d have to mask the sound of the camera. I sneezed unconvincingly while surreptitiously snapping the layout of the gallery. I sneezed up at the enormous skylights. I sneezed at the overhead gantry. I sneezed at the security cameras. The attendant looked up briefly, then returned to whatever he was reading with just the tiniest twitch of the eyebrows. As I walked out Tim came alive and followed me down the echoing stairs and out into the rain.
‘Couldn’t you have tried coughing? That was the most unconvincing sneezing fit I ever heard.’ He stuffed his baseball cap in his pocket and led me to the right, past a takeaway pizza joint and into the shelter of the covered market that adjoined the museum. ‘This whole thing is a nightmare and I need a mug of tea. It’s your round,’ he added as he dropped on to a free chair in the little market café. I queued up and eventually got us two mugs of beige liquid from a tiny serving hatch. I’d forgotten all about this place. Time had forgotten all about this place. Since about 1959. We sat opposite each other at a narrow table and blew on our steaming mugs.
‘Told you taking pictures was a bad idea,’ I moaned.
‘Taking pic . . .?’ He waved his hands helplessly in the airspace between us. ‘The whole thing is a bad idea, Chris. A stupendously bad idea. A fantastically idiotic plan. A desperate, hare-brained venture. And can I just remind you here . . .’ He looked around at the shoppers eating and drinking at other tables and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial hiss which I was sure carried further than his normal volume. ‘May I remind you that I’ve been going straight for several years now, except for the stuff I do for you, of course. And I’ve never been charged, never even been nicked, I have no criminal record whatsoever. But there just happens to be a string of unsolved safe breakings out there and if I get caught in this madness and they fingerprint me . . .’
‘You left fingerprints?’ I asked indignantly.
He squirmed in his seat and shrugged. ‘Might have done . . . And anyway they’ve got DNA sampling and all sorts of new technologies. You so much as sneeze at a crime scene and they can identify you,’ he said meaningfully. ‘I had a good look at the place just now and I tell you, robbing the museum is complete lunacy, nobody in their right mind would do it.’ He took a gulp of tea. ‘I suppose that’s why their security is twenty years out of date.’
I returned from the lands of doom and gloom. ‘You mean . . .’
‘I mean nothing, you can stow that silly grin. Yes, we might be able to get in and, yes, we might even get our hands on The Dancer. But even twenty years ago alarms meant big and nasty noises and look at where we are: six hundred yards from the police station, smack in the centre of town . . . I bet you my collapsible crowbar they’ve got silent alarms in there but the moment you trigger it uniforms will gleefully pile into cars in Manvers Street and hare across here to relieve us of the Rodin and our liberty.’
‘So don’t trigger it. You’re the expert.’
‘I am. And I say it again: I don’t like it. Is there no other way? I mean, are you absolutely sure we can’t go to the police behind Jill’s back?’ He kept his eyes on his mug of tea while he waited for my answer. It was my decision, he had nothing to do with it. You’re the boss. And he was right.
‘Pretty sure. I think they’re local, that’s why they picked on us and the police always leak like a sieve, someone’ll get a whiff of something. For instance, if suddenly all leave is cancelled, which is what would probably happen, that affects a lot of people and their friends and relatives and even if they didn’t know what it was all about, anyone with their ear to the ground will know something’s afoot. And I think the guy has demonstrated that he knows what we’re up to. Not to mention you being followed.’ Something I didn’t tell Tim was the spooky feeling I had that we were being watched even now. I’ll be watching. I looked around. Sometimes the safest place was in a crowd. Nothing but shoppers everywhere, and no one I’d seen more than once today. I shrugged deeper into my jacket.
‘Okay,’ agreed Tim. ‘You might be right but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Even in my maddest days I wouldn’t have considered a scheme like this. Clearing out someone’s safe at a private house or an office is one thing. But robbing a museum makes front page headlines. Do you realize that it’ll get flashed round the world? That the French are going to send Froggy Fuzz across the Channel to catch the guys who stole their beloved Rodin dancer? And you definitely do not want to fall into their hands, they have nasty habits by all accounts. Unlike us Brits the French take their art seriously. We could all end up in a chain gang breaking rocks in the Auvergne for thirty years. And I still need a reality check: am I really discussing this with Chris Honeysett, the painter, who hates art theft more than anything?’
‘Yeah, well,’ I said lightly, ‘sculpture is just what you bump into when you step back to admire a painting. And it was a French geezer who said that.’
‘That’s all right then,’ Tim said and rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘And here’s another thing: what’s it for? You can’t sell these kind of things, can you? I mean everyone will know it’s nicked. So what’s the point?’
‘No, you can’t sell it on the open market because it’s too high profile and you’ll never be able to stick it in your front room. Unless it’s already paid for, of course,’ I mused.
‘Stolen to order, you mean.’
‘Stolen to order and destined for some mafioso dacha in Russia or Turkey. To go with the 7-series Beemer in the garage that was probably nicked from a supermarket car park in Hull and driven on to the ferry to Holland before the owner even got his shopping through the check-out. And how damn clever to get idiots like us to do the dirty work. I bet you my spectacles they got the idea from the Japanese. Last year someone wanted to extract a ransom from a Japanese businessman but they didn’t abduct one of his family, they took the son of his chauffeur. Now there’s obligation for you.’
‘Did he pay up?’
‘No, he got a new chauffeur. What do you think? How could he not pay up? Who would have done business with him if he hadn’t? How could he have lived with himself, for that matter?’
And ‘living with it’ would come into it for us too. My Accumulated Guilt Quotient was already going through the roof. Louis had been snatched to get to me, to buy the services of Aqua Investigations. Whoever he was, he knew me, at least by reputation. I myself knew plenty of unsavoury individuals and had paraded their mental mug shots through my private gallery but no one stood out as an obvious choice for the face behind the voice. His voice reminded me of nobody and of nothing, it was too distorted over the phone, and if I really had met the bastard before, then that was deliberate.
The elderly couple at the table
next to ours left and their place was taken by a man wearing a waxed jacket and a matching wide-brimmed hat. I looked across at his face. Around fifty and quite a bit paler than a man ought to be. I’d never seen him before, yet I began to feel uneasy and I motioned Tim with my head: let’s get out of here. As we rounded the corner towards the exit I looked back. The man was staring straight at me and from a distance of twenty-five feet our eyes met briefly, then his gaze slid over and off me, not interested, turning instead to the young boy carrying two steaming mugs towards his table.
‘What’s the matter?’ Tim wanted to know.
‘Nothing, paranoia’s setting in, that’s all.’
We had deliberately exited at the back of the market into the courtyard. The old Empire Hotel and the old police station – now thankfully Browns restaurant – the Guildhall and the covered market all backed on to what was now used as a private car park for council workers, restaurateurs and market traders. A man in dirty chef’s whites puffed at a small cigar by a door at the back of the Empire, a seagull flew over and scored a direct hit on a shiny blue Jaguar.
Tim sniffed the air and pulled a face. ‘This really stinks. There might be a way into the museum from back here but it would mean one hell of a climb.’ He turned his back on me and began walking away through the narrow passage between the hotel and the market building.
I went after him and tried to find something optimistic to say. ‘If a couple of guys with a ladder can nick a Munch from a museum in Norway then surely we must be able to pinch an itsy-bitsy Rodin in Bath.’
He wasn’t having any of it. ‘They do things differently in Norway. Must be the long winters. Or perhaps it’s the terrible folk music, but this is different. We can’t even reconnoitre the place properly. We won’t know if there’s a way in until we get there and getting there is probably just as risky as breaking in is going to be. I really don’t like this, Chris. I think it’s one break-in too far. The chances of getting away with it are minimal – and I just mean away from the museum, there’s no way we won’t get nicked for it later. And don’t look at me like that.’ Apparently I was looking at him like that. ‘It’s a lot to ask for a kid you never even met.’
I had never seen Tim less enthusiastic about any scheme I had proposed but I knew that without him my chances were nil. ‘If I didn’t know you any better I’d say you didn’t want to do it.’
‘Ha-bloody-ha. I’ll have a think but that doesn’t mean I’ll do it. Now I’m going to work.’
‘To work on what?’ I asked, too wrapped up in my own problems to function entirely in the real world.
‘Work. To work, Chris. I do have a job at the uni, you know, the kind that pays my bills. But I might be able to get away early today. I’ll come round and we’ll have another talk then.’
I opened my mouth for an answer but he was already dashing across the street through the traffic, waving without looking back.
Chapter Sixteen
October rain, what can you do with it? Shopping. I’d picked up a couple of ambitiously priced bottles of French red with deliberate absentmindedness then found myself contemplating the pretend summer of the supermarket. Time-warped summer vegetables from Spanish poly-tunnels and optimistic little salmon kebabs that really belonged on a sizzling barbecue couldn’t disguise the fact that people were leaving puddles of cold rainwater on the floor. I heroically turned my back on such anodyne fare, though happily bought the wine, left the supermarket and crossed to Green Street where I picked up a dozen venison sausages at the butcher’s. Having strapped my purchases to the back of the bike I puttered through the drizzle to Larkhall where at Tony’s greengrocer’s things were more in sync with the season. I stocked up with a string of shiny red onions, plenty of dirty carrots, knobbly potatoes, knobblier horseradish and an armful of ruby chard. By the time I pootled out of Larkhall the Norton had taken on the air of a French bicycle wobbling home from the market, with half a kitchen garden tied to the tank. I parked the bike in the muddy yard close to the house, untied my purchases and splashed dirt all the way from the front door through to the kitchen, plonking my purchases on the table where they joyfully tumbled from their bags. Yet the unhappy atmosphere seemed evident in the very pine-fragranced and lemon-freshened air. Deep in my irrational self I resented Jill and her son and their predicament, I resented all of it as an imposition and intrusion into my happy-go-lucky lifestyle. Never mind Tim’s reluctance, I couldn’t wait to break into the museum and swipe the silly little Rodin and give it to the bastard who’d snatched Louis.
Out of nowhere the nameless cat jumped on to the table and meowed in a low, self-possessed fashion at my purchases. Zabaglione, I thought, then dismissed it instantly. They’d end up calling him Zab.
I even resented Louis for getting himself kidnapped, the silly brat, although I’d never met the poor kid. I wanted my life back. I wanted to be back at the moment before Annis had handed me the phone, I wanted to be back before the storm when I was happily painting in a studio with a roof on it. The cat pawed at the bags. A horseradish root rolled off the table. I kicked it hard across the kitchen floor like a moody teenager who had been grounded: it’s not fair. The cat jumped off the table and galloped out of the kitchen. Yeah, that’s right, make me feel guilty. Very unlike a moody teenager I crawled around on all fours until I’d found where the damn root had ricocheted and washed it carefully. Then I went and dropped my filthy boots on to a newspaper in the hall where I should have left them in the first place and decided to shower my irritations away. When I got to my bedroom I could hear someone else had got to the en suite before me and my mood lifted instantly. I pulled off my clothes where I stood and dropped them on to the floor, then walked into the steamed-up bathroom. Annis’s silhouette moved sinuously behind the glass of the shower cubicle. This was one bathroom scene I was determined would have a good ending. I rapped against the glass with my rings. She slid open the door and pointed her breasts at me, in happy salutation, I hoped.
‘Room for a small one?’ I asked. The old ones are still the best, apparently.
‘Not all that small either.’ She grabbed me and gently pulled me into the cubicle. ‘I was just going to come out,’ she said.
‘I was just going to come in,’ I pointed out.
‘Oh all right then.’
I slid the door shut. The cubicle was ridiculously small and steamy. Annis started soaping me all over but dropped the bar just as she got to the interesting bits, which was a right shame. It slithered into the drain hole and half blocked it. There was simply not enough room to bend down and retrieve it. While the water slowly rose we arranged ourselves first this way, then that. There were bits I was desperate to kiss but couldn’t hope to reach without dislocating a limb. I accidentally nudged the mixer with my elbow and the water turned to skin-blistering hot. Annis screamed and I fiddled it back to normal. A few minutes later her knee nudged it into the arctic zone. This time we both screamed.
Eventually we tumbled out of the cubicle with the firm intention of getting into bed but didn’t quite make it and somehow ended up on the carpet. Annis managed to scrabble the duvet down on us from the bed while I was otherwise engaged.
‘I do love you, Annis,’ I panted. And meant it.
‘Doesn’t count.’
‘Eh?’
‘Things men say when they’re shagging. Blokes say all sorts of stuff. Means nothing.’
‘Doesn’t, huh?’ I didn’t really have the breath to argue with the woman. The house phone rang for a while, the old 1940s dialler by the bed making a right racket. We ignored it.
‘I love you too, Honeypot. Turn sideways, hon, something’s digging into my back.’
‘Meaningless drivel. You were lying on my mobile.’ I picked it up and threw it on to the bed. It started to ring. Tough.
I pulled the duvet off us again and imagined I could see steam rising from her shimmering, shuddering flanks. Annis’s eyes flickered and tilted, always a happy sign, then she buried her face
in my shoulder and held tight.
The phone stopped chiming at last. The cat came padding up the duvet and sniffed, then put a possessive paw on Annis’s trembling thigh.
‘I’m hungry. We could call him Bhaji,’ she said, propping herself on one elbow and scratching him under his chin.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said and slipped away.
When I emerged from my third shower of the day Annis had moved to the bed. So had the cat. Both of them were asleep. I turfed out the cat. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ I informed him. He gave a complaining meow, padded to a pile of Annis’s discarded clothes and started nesting procedures there. I turned off my mobile, pulled the plug on the dialler phone and slid under the cover.
When I woke again to the distant ringing of the house phone downstairs I noticed the light had changed. I turned on my mobile and checked the time. Ten to six. Annis turned out to be awake too. ‘I’m not moving until I can smell supper, I am famished. Go cook,’ she said and pushed me out of bed. I reconnected the dialler phone but the caller had hung up. Tough.
In the kitchen I started with the horseradish. I peeled and grated the knobbly root until I went blind with tears. The entire kitchen had filled with the sharp, energizing smell. Even mixed with thick cream and seasoned it was still strong enough to make your scalp tingle.
To make the red onion gravy I sliced them finely and then chucked them in a pan with oil and butter and sautéed them on the lowest possible heat for what seemed like forever. Long enough, anyway, to stir them absentmindedly, stare through the window into the rain and wonder how we might get into the museum, how we might get away with the Rodin and how I could make sure that I got Louis in exchange for it. So far I had only vague notions of ‘breaking in’, ‘getting away’ and then ‘not giving it to them until I had the boy’. It hardly amounted to anything resembling a plan.
I added a spoonful of redcurrant jelly to the pan and once it had dissolved deglazed with a generous slug of port and kept stirring.
