by Gary Newman
‘Well, it’s Monday now. In a few hours, if everything had gone to plan with the plot against Mrs Hague, some copper in Folkestone would’ve been getting a horrified phone call from the new owners of the Capel bungalow – something dreadful found rolled up in a carpet in the summerhouse or the attic – then they’d be ringing us in Essex to nick you, Mr Rolvenden. We’d have thought you’d finally snapped: if you couldn’t have Mrs Hague, no one else would.’
‘A narrow squeak,’ I said, ‘but all the same, I’m glad I went down to Capel.’
We arrived in the main police station in Colchester just as it was turning full daylight, and Reet made a statement, then was driven off home by Paul to be in time for milking at the Holt. I was invited to make a few additions to the statement I’d already made so laboriously, after which I was allowed to collect my car from the precincts and drive the short distance home. Once there, and utterly done in by the physical effort and mental turmoil of the last few days, I simply locked the door behind me, staggered upstairs to bed, and crashed out till nearly noon.
On awakening, I blinked round the sunlit spartanness of the tall-ceilinged room, and my first thought was to ring up Leah and tell her all about what had happened, then it all rushed back to me, and I turned my face to the wall again and lamented. What had Reet said about ‘rude awakenings’? I finally managed to drag myself up, and so into the bathroom for a cold shower, then I went down to the kitchen to brew up coffee and put some mushrooms on to fry.
I took the coffee into the sitting room and slumped into the armchair in front of the dead ashes of the last fire. I felt stunned, fibrous with dismay. I remembered Reet’s little hand-squeeze in the car up from Capel, and compared her part in all this with Leah’s – Leah . . . Then my eyes wandered over to the mantelpiece and the photograph of Sebastian Rolvenden the First. I got up and walked over to it, examining the anxious stare in the large, long-dead eyes, as I’d done so often in the past.
I suppose we read our own feelings into the expressions on faces in photographs and portraits, for with a little frisson I fancied I saw a new sternness on the austere, trimly bearded face. The Bible in the Jiffy bag from Jersey came into my mind, the Bible with the string marker in it, with the words at the top of the first marked page about the ‘woman thou gavest me’ tempting Adam. Well, Grandfather, she’d tempted me . . .
Just then I smelt the greasy, meaty reek of burning mushrooms, and dashed back to the kitchen to eat brunch and ponder the immediate future. I wasn’t looking forward to the trial of Frank and Leah for kidnapping, criminal conspiracy and, no doubt, in Frank’s case for the fiddles Pat had been blackmailing him over. I would be a key witness, and dreaded the figure I’d cut in court: that of a shifty, menopausal Lothario. And how was I to face Leah across the court room? I’d a time, indeed, of rude awakenings ahead of me . . .
And Pat: when she was well enough to appear in court, would she have recovered her customary cockiness? And would she still be directing her scorn against me from the witness box? But however shabby my philanderings with her had been, however egotistical the way I’d dropped her, at least I’d played some part in saving her life. That went some way, surely, towards redeeming my conduct. Or so I rationalized . . .
I dropped the wholemeal crust on the plate, got up and took it to the range, then went upstairs to try to do some work. At around five that afternoon, I heard the tooting of a car horn on the headland. I went over to the window of my workroom, and, peering out, saw Reet’s Land Rover, with my ex-wife, alone, locking the door. Propped against the car was a large plastic bag, such as you retrieve garments from dry-cleaners in, with something flat and square in it. Reet looked up and waved, and, after I’d waved back, I closed and saved what I’d been working on, and hurried downstairs to let her in with her angular package, and usher both on to the sitting-room sofa.
‘I’ll bet you’ve had no rest since you left Colchester,’ I began, after she’d refused coffee, ‘what with the farm . . .’
‘I’ll get over it – anyway, I’ve left it to Paul and the students for the rest of the day. You’re, er . . . OK?’
‘Yes, slept like a top – I’m not looking forward to the trial, though.’
‘Your agent’ll be over the moon – think of the free publicity!’
There was expectancy in the air, and I found myself trying to appear unconcerned in the face of the challenging presence of the large, square package in the plastic bag. I felt I’d had enough revelations to be going on with for the time being.
‘Reet, there was something I wanted to ask you. I didn’t mention it in the car up last night, because I wasn’t sure you wanted it aired in front of Sergeant Morris.’
‘Go on.’
‘Why did you bid so much for that print of the Rawbeck sketch at the auction in Walberswick – the Morte Moriantur thing, with Grandfather and the Vickybird looking guilty on it? I mean, nearly two thousand quid . . .’
‘I may have been wrong, but I thought your peace of mind – your mental balance, even – was worth that.’
‘But if it was that important, why didn’t you tell me about it?’
Reet’s eyes flashed for an instant.
‘For the same reason why I didn’t come tattling to you about what Pat told me about Frank and Leah – I’ve got my bloody pride! Nor by the same token do I intend to make this picture lark into a big scene of the Jealous Wife’s Revenge.’
‘All right, then: what was on the print that you thought might have had that effect on me? I had a good look at it at the viewing, but I didn’t spot anything that devastating in it.’
‘It was a prelude to something, Seb . . .’
‘A prelude to what, for heaven’s sake?’
My ex-wife tapped the package at her side.
‘To this.’
‘But, what . . .’
‘Cast your mind back to the last holiday we all had together – you and me, and Frank and Pat – in the Jersey farmhouse.’
‘Yes, go on.’
‘The solemn little boy who pointed you out to his father in the lane – Le Brocq the school caretaker’s son – remember?’
‘Yes, he asked his dad if I was the man in the shed, and we all laughed.’
‘Well,’ Reet went on, ‘it stuck in my mind, somehow – the little boy had been so serious about it – so sure . . . Later on, when I was on my own, I went over to Mr Le Brocq’s cottage, and mentioned the incident. He laughed, and said it was his grandfather’s shed his son had referred to – the kid was always hanging around it. The old boy had accumulated so much junk over the years, it was like an Aladdin’s cave in there.
‘Le Brocq said he was afraid the old man was getting past looking after himself unaided, but he knew it would kill him if he had to go into care, so he was delaying it for as long as he could: his wife cooked for the old chap, kept his house tidy, and so on. He told me where old Le Brocq lived, and I went along there. As a matter of fact, I found him in his shed, surrounded by junk. He was very old – gaga and cagey at the same time – but he seemed to come to his senses all of a sudden when I told him I was Mrs Rolvenden.
‘Then he asked me bluntly what I was doing on the island, and I told him I was on holiday there with a party, but when I mentioned the incident with his little grandson, his eyes narrowed, and he looked sort of angry. “It’s mine,” he said, and “It belongs to me.” I just smiled and tried to humour him – I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
‘Just then he shooed me out of the shed and shut the door behind us, then stood and stared into my eyes for a while. Then he grinned slyly, and said, “I want two hundred for it – not a penny less. It’s mine to do as I like with – two hundred.”
‘By then I was really curious, so I asked if I might see “it”, whatever it was, since I still hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.’
Reet then paused in her narrative to reach over to the plastic bag and take out the package, which was wrapped round wit
h stout, dirty brown paper and bound with yellowed twine.
‘I’ve kept it in the bank ever since,’ my ex-wife said, as she undid the twine. ‘Neither Brogan nor the Frenchman knows anything about it.’
With hesitation in her eyes, Reet handed me the painting, and I smiled, as I fancy someone might smile who’s just had a limb blown off, but doesn’t immediately take it in. I then gave a sort of croak before reading out the inscription on the little bone plaque at the bottom of the frame.
‘The Ruffian on the Stair,’ I read out, ‘and Julian Rawbeck’s monogram down in the right-hand corner. So he did finish it, after all . . .’
In the painting I saw the staircase, leading up to the door – ajar – of the tenant, Madam Life, who wasn’t in the picture. Above the landing was the stairhead window, edged with narrow, rectangular panes of alternate crimson and blue, the window modelled on that over the pub in Hackney, where in 1893 the Ruffian, Laurence Victor Pidgeon – the Vickybird – had in real life murdered his employer, Mrs Bella Nye. Rawbeck had held this knowledge, like a sword of Damocles, over the Vickybird’s head, until he’d freed himself by cutting the artist’s throat in the very same room suggested in the painting I was looking at.
But above all, I now knew what had lain behind my grandfather’s eagerness to recover the painting, after the Vickybird had stolen it from him and sold it to the Paris dealer, Carbonero, in 1899. As I beheld the hatchet face of the Ruffian – the Vickybird – as he stared out, grinning malevolently from the sombre canvas, halfway up the stairs, I understood that the picture cast doubt on my grandfather’s paternity of his son – my father – A.H. And I knew why the little boy in the Jersey lane had identified me immediately from the painting, which had lain so long in his grandad’s shed. In the painting, one of the Vickybird’s eyes was brown and the other green. My search for my grandfather was over.
