Up To No Good

by Victoria Corby

  The door to the sitting room was slightly ajar, the back of Charlie’s foot just visible through the gap. I stopped on the way back to the bathroom, wondering what he was doing on the floor. Had he dropped some­thing - a contact lens, maybe? Ought I offer to help him find it? I’d take a peek to check if he was in the blindly-patting-the-carpet position that I knew well from Oscar. No need to burst in wearing this attire if all he’d done was drop his keys.

  What I saw through the crack in the door nearly made me drop my glass.

  Coronation Street was blaring away, the Rover’s Return didn’t appear to have changed much in the five years since I’d last caught a glimpse of it, but far from being glued to the screen Charlie was kneeling with his back to the television, opening one of my picture cases. He laid the wrapped picture carefully on the floor and taking a Stanley knife out of his pocket began to rapidly, but carefully, slit through the parcel tape that held the protective layers of newspaper together. I watched, too surprised at this extraordinary behaviour to even think of moving, as he peeled away the layers like the skins of an onion. Something had been put face down over the glass of my picture so that it fitted snugly into the ornate frame. He scrabbled at it, murmuring with satisfaction as his fingers finally got a grip and lifted another, smaller picture out, placing it face down on the carpet. Quickly, as if he had practised this, he wrapped my picture up again, fastening the layers from a fresh roll of parcel tape he had in his pocket until it resembled the original wrappings closely enough for me never to have noticed there was anything different, and shoved it back in the case, leaning it up against the wall as if it had never been moved.

  Then he picked up the second picture and turned it over to look at it. I was sure I already knew what it was. But it didn’t make it any less of a shock to see him holding up something I knew; a framed oil painting of a sunlit beach under a jewel bright sky, a little boy playing in the sand, and Venetia’s double, hair streaming in the wind, triumphantly holding a whorled shell up in the air.

  CHAPTER 25

  I don’t think I made a sound but something, some instinct, caused Charlie to spin around. I suppose if I’d had any brains at all I could have easily scarpered back down the corridor into the safety of my bedroom long before Charlie, hampered in speed terms by keeping a tight grip on the Willard Sydney, had flung the door open, but I was so confounded by seeing him with something I knew was safely stowed away behind the sofa that it didn’t even occur to me to make a dash for concealment. He stared at me in silence, apparently almost as shocked as I was. ‘Oh bugger!’ he said eventually. ‘Bugger, bugger!’

  ‘So it was you who stole the picture,’ I said stupidly, still rooted to the spot, my brain clamouring, It wasn’t Robert! It wasn’t Robert!

  He raised his eyebrows, looking for a moment like the person I thought I knew. ‘I don’t expect you’d believe me if I said I was a private detective charged with getting it back? No? So I’d better admit it. Yes, it was me.’ He sighed deeply. ‘It was going so well, too. Why the bloody hell couldn’t you have stayed in the bath like you were supposed to?’

  ‘I wanted my glass of wine,’ I said, and then added dumbly, ‘was it all a put-on then, about wanting to watch Coronation Street?’ Discovering that someone who only a few days ago was appearing in some of your naughtier fantasies has apparently used you to transport stolen property tends to scramble your brains a little. Otherwise I’m sure I would have got on the case earlier.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked contemptuously. ‘You’re very nice, Nella, but you’re incredibly gullible. How many men do you know who would turn up here for a drink and suggest that you go off and have a bath without having some sort of ulterior motive?’

  ‘None,’ I said honestly and added, hoping to tweak his conscience, ‘but I thought you were different - a really, decent, considerate person.’

  He smiled briefly. ‘And now you know better. Sorry to disillusion you.’ So conscience-tweaking didn’t work; it had been worth trying though. ‘God, you’re a pain,’ he said crossly. ‘Another two minutes and I’d have had this locked in the boot of my car and you’d never have known a thing about it. You’ve got a real talent for being where you’re not wanted, you know. The only lucky thing is that you aren’t very observant. I watched you chase into that hut after that bloody dog of Janey’s and I was sure you were going to find the picture then. If you’d only looked up you’d have seen it resting across a couple of beams a few feet above your head. I couldn’t believe my luck when you walked out without it and carried on yakking, nor when you said you hadn’t had time to look at your pictures yet. It was all going my way.’ He looked at me with acute dislike. ‘Now you’ve gone and wrecked everything.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ I said inanely, as it occurred to me it might be a good idea to humour him. After all, as he’d said, I’d just gone and wrecked a near-perfect crime. He was both taller and a lot fitter than me. I could still visualise him in his swimming trunks about to dive into the pool, and I remembered his muscles clearly. He had, I couldn’t repress a shiver, a Stanley knife in his pocket and last, but definitely not least, he was in a suit and I was in a bath towel. I wondered if I’d able to run back down the passageway and into the garden before he caught up with me. There wasn’t any way of getting out of it but I was pretty sure that if I screamed loudly enough, Mr Peters from next door would ring the police. Not to come and rescue me, but to complain about the amount of noise I was making. Still, the result would be the same.

  Charlie must have caught the flicker of my eyes for he frowned. ‘You’d better come in here and sit down where I can see you, while I decide what I’m going to do with you.’

  You might say that my blood ran cold at his tone. In the circs I was hardly going to argue, was I? Especially as I remembered that the key to the kitchen door had been put in a drawer safely hidden away from burglars and damsels in need of a quick exit. And after what I’d said to Robert this morning, he was hardly likely to be coming around hammering on my door, was he? So I could forget any ideas of a white knight coming to my rescue. I was on my own here. I obediently edged past him, keeping as wide a berth as possible, and sat down on the edge of the sofa, anchoring the towel with my knees, noticing with a sort of hysterical incredulity that I’d kept a tight grip on my wine glass. No point in letting it go to waste. I took a large swig, I needed something to keep my spirits up. He moved over to the fireplace and, keeping a possessive grip on the painting, leaned over to flick off the television. The silence was almost deafening. I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. I looked up at him and he looked at me. I don’t think either of us was absolutely certain of what to do next. I licked my lips nervously. Didn’t popular wisdom say that in these situations the best thing is to keep them talking?

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.

  ‘I need the money of course,’ he said, as if this should have been self-evident to anybody. ‘Have you got any idea how expensive it is trying to lead any sort of decent lifestyle in London these days?’

  Well, yes, I had. I was trying to do exactly that myself.

  ‘The salary I earn is absolutely pathetic, doesn’t even begin to meet my most basic outgoings - you know, things such as rent, taking girls like Sal out, decent suits and proper bottles of wine. And now I’ve got a couple of people who I owe money to on my back. They’re getting really insistent that I pay them - soon.’

  ‘These people - are they dealers?’ I asked, too appalled to think of holding my tongue.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said indignantly. ‘What do you think I am? I might indulge sometimes but I don’t have a habit - I’m not completely insane. I do quite enough damage to my body with the amount I drink without regularly adding the contents of a pharmaceutical laboratory to it as well. I couldn’t afford it either,’ he added in an aggrieved voice. ‘I like an occasional flutter, it’s the only chance I’ve got of making any real money, apart from things like this,’ he gestured to the Sydne
y with his free hand. Did he mean he’d done something like this before? ‘Only I haven’t had much of a run of luck recently. I thought Mack understood it was a temporary difficulty but he says he’s got money problems himself. I got a message before we left for France that if I don’t settle my account by the end of the month I’ll soon be walking on crutches.’

  Charlie looked at me without seeming to see me, then went on: ‘I was thinking of selling my car and telling everyone I’d converted to being an out-and-out green - that might have kept Mack satisfied for a while - but I’d still have had to find another twenty grand somehow.’

  ‘So you decided to supplement your bank balance with a nice painting.’

  ‘Except it isn’t nice, I don’t even like it.’ Did this make the theft more acceptable? ‘Though I know you do,’ he added witheringly, as if this implied I favoured highly coloured pictures of dinky windmills with fat white horses drinking out of the mill-stream and chocolate-box kittens playing with neon balls of wool. ‘I heard you telling Janey how nice it would look up there,’ he said, gesturing with his chin at the empty space above the fireplace, which now that he reminded me, was the perfect space for a Willard Sydney.

  ‘So there was someone in the hall. What were you doing, going to the loo?’

  He nodded. ‘You two were nattering so hard you wouldn’t have noticed a herd of rhinoceroses charging down the passage. I didn’t think much about what Janey was saying until I’d put Sal in the car and came back for her handbag. And there was the picture, unalarmed, unguarded, unwanted. You lot were behind a shut door, no one was going to know I’d come back to the house and Sal was so sound asleep she wasn’t going to notice if we went back to the cottage with some extra luggage. And it’d solve so many problems. I’d get enough from flogging it to cover all that I owed, even have a bit over for a seed fund to make some serious money, Janey wouldn’t have to look at it any more and Tom’s obvi­ously in need of some dosh too. I wasn’t ever going to have an opportunity like this again.’ He looked at me seriously, as if I couldn’t possibly disagree with his point of view. ‘You could almost say it would have been a crime not to have stolen it.’

  ‘An almost philanthropic gesture, you might say,’ I agreed. The filthy look he gave me reminded me that I was supposed to be humouring him, not putting his back up.

  ‘I couldn’t believe how easy it was - as if someone wanted me to have it,’ he said. ‘I stopped on the way back and hid it in that old hut, reckoning if it was found by someone it was hardly going to be a disaster, but the only person who even went in there was you. Then the police settled on you as chief suspect.’

  ‘Was it you who set them on me?’ I asked, my fingers tightening around my glass. I emptied it before I broke it and set it down on the floor beside me.

  For the first time since he’d begun to start talking he looked slightly less certain of himself. ‘Not really.’ He didn’t meet my eyes. ‘They already knew about you sharing a flat with Venetia and saying you were going to steal the picture. They asked if I thought you were joking, and I, well,’ he cleared his throat, ‘I said you were a pretty serious sort of person, that’s all. It was just a red herring, Nella. I knew they wouldn’t be able to pin anything on you,’ he added, looking at me with wide eyes as if I couldn’t help but sympathise with what he’d done.

  I bloody well could, as it happens. ‘So that makes it all right, does it?’ I said furiously. ‘Do you have any idea of what you did to me, Charlie? I have never been so frightened in my life.’

  ‘You try having some East End gorilla threatening to break your leg and then you’ll know what fear is,’ he said dismissively, as if this settled the matter. ‘And they let you go soon enough. Your shining honesty,’ he put a distinctly nasty twist on the words, ‘won through, didn’t it?’

  I counted to ten lest I say something that was going to get him really angry. And then to twenty. ‘But weren’t you taking a terrible gamble by hiding the Sydney with my pictures? I nearly unwrapped them to show them to my brother, but... something came up and I didn’t have the chance.’

  ‘But I like gambling, Nella. That’s why I owe so much money,’ Charlie said, no doubt stating the obvious. ‘And Sal’s not stupid, you know.’ Unlike a certain Nella Bowden. ‘She was bound to wonder what was going on if I produced a picture-shaped parcel of my own for us to take back, wasn’t she? But she’d have seen nothing untoward in us taking something of yours back. And if we’d got stopped by Customs...’ he smiled slightly, ‘they were your pictures. I’d made certain I hadn’t left any fingerprints on the wrappings. Have you got any idea how difficult it is using parcel tape when you’re wearing washing-up gloves? And you’d already been under suspicion once, hadn’t you?’

  I stared at him dumbly, wondering how it was you couldn’t tell what a cold, manipulative bastard lay con­cealed under Charlie’s friendly unassuming surface. And a remarkably clever one who seemed to be able to rescue almost any situation too. Look at the way he’d immedi­ately come on to me the moment he realised that the pictures weren’t going back with him, or how he’d arrived early this evening so that I would be stressed, tired and even more susceptible to his ingenious suggestion to get me out of the way.

  ‘With talents like that I’m amazed that you aren’t making a fortune in organised crime,’ I said spitefully.

  He shuddered. ‘I’m not a criminal.’ Really? ‘And I can’t stand violence.’

  I was glad to hear that.

  ‘I don’t make a habit of doing this, you know,’ he said, with a touch of indignation. ‘But this was irresistible. I stood to lose nothing, only win,’ he went on reminis­cently. ‘And it was going so well, until you came along.’ He glanced at me with such savagery that I shrank back slightly, clinging onto my towel as if it was a suit of armour.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to have upset your plans,’ I said nervously and quite untruthfully.

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t.’ He eyed me thoughtfully, stroking his chin.

  I felt my heart speed up painfully. What was he intending now? To tie me up with the parcel tape? Take me hostage while he sold the picture? Would he allow me to get dressed first? It would take some time to fence a painting like that and I couldn’t spend weeks in a towel.

  ‘I’m sure you’re intending to call the police the moment I leave the flat,’ he said pleasantly, ‘but I really wouldn’t, if I were you. You see, if you do, I’ll be forced to tell them how I planned the theft with my accomplice, a supposedly respectable art dealer called Robert Winwood, and that it was he who took a stolen picture worth a quarter of a million quid into the country, in one of his carrying cases too. That part has the undeniable benefit of being true. Robert will be taken into custody for questioning, of course. They’ll have to let him go eventually, but there’s bound to be lots of publicity.’

  He cocked his head on one side, looking meaningfully at me. ‘Of course he knows all about how your whole career can be wrecked by a wrongful arrest, doesn’t he? Wouldn’t it be a pity if it happened for the second time? For the second time ... because of you.’ I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. Charlie’s eyes twinkled merrily. ‘If you’re going to have cosy private chats with Oscar you should make sure first that you’re out of earshot of someone reading his book.’

  He leaned down and picked up the picture and smiled at me in a terrible parody of the smile I used to find so attractive, or perhaps it wasn’t a parody. I could see beyond it now. ‘So shall we say, Nella, that you’re going to forget that I ever came to your flat this evening, that you ever saw this,’ he shifted his grip around it slightly, ‘or that you know anything about a missing Willard Sydney? It would be best for everyone.’ He waited, and I stared back stonily. ‘What point is there in you stirring up a whole lot of trouble?’ he asked in a reasonable voice. ‘It won’t do any good to anyone, but if you keep quiet, Janey and Tom get their money, Robert gets to keep his reputation and the job he loves so much - and I get to keep two whole
legs,’ he added with grim humour.

  I’m ashamed to say I was tempted to cave in and do as he wanted. I had a nasty feeling the threat to Robert was a very real one - maybe to me, too. Charlie hadn’t actually got around to saying he’d finger me too - he’d probably taken that as read. And I was still in a towel. Except...

  ‘There’s only one problem, Charlie.’

  ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘Do you want to be cut in on what I get for the picture?’

  I hadn’t thought of that. ‘Considering that you used me to smuggle it into the country, I would have thought it was reasonable, wouldn’t you?’ I took a deep breath, hoping that my voice wasn’t going to betray me. ‘Except there’s no point - it’s worthless.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘I’ll get at least fifty thou.’

  ‘Bit of a generous estimate, isn’t it? I thought you usually only got about ten per cent of the market value for a stolen picture.’ Charlie looked startled at this information (gleaned off an episode of The Bill, but I kept my source to myself). ‘Sorry, Charlie, but you won’t even get two hundred quid for this one. It’s one of Robert’s reproductions. As you said yourself, Tom needs the money. He’s already sold the original.’

  He started, then recovered himself. ‘Nice try, but not true,’ he drawled, nonetheless turning the picture over and examining the back with keen attention. ‘As I thought, you’re talking rubbish,’ he said with a certain degree of relief. ‘It doesn’t have a marker on it to show it’s a copy.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie, this is the era of the microchip. You can’t possibly see it,’ I said as scornfully as I could. ‘But I can assure you, it’ll take an expert only five minutes to tell you what’s in your hands was painted this year.’