Guns in the Gallery

by Simon Brett

  ‘Well, the police know what they’re doing,’ said Kier, perfectly reasonably. ‘And they’ve released Fennel’s body, so they must have finished any forensic examination they might be doing. The funeral’s going to be on Wednesday week.’ This was new information to Jude. ‘Just family and very close friends.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s a chapel in the grounds of Butterwyke. It’s being held there.’

  Typical, thought Jude. Whoever had built the house back in the eighteenth century must have had the same desire for privacy as the Whittakers. Everything sewn up and sanitized within the boundaries of the estate.

  ‘Kier, indulge me for a minute. Just imagine that Fennel’s death wasn’t suicide . . .’

  ‘That she was murdered?’

  ‘Yes. If that were the case, would you have anyone in the frame as a suspect?’

  ‘There’s an obvious one.’ The driver answered that question readily enough. ‘I heard their conversations in the back of this car when I was driving them about. He treated her like shit.’ The resentment was back in his voice.

  ‘Sorry? Who are we talking about?’

  ‘That sleazebag Denzil Willoughby.’

  ‘I suppose we could try and get a contact for him through Bonita Green,’ said Jude somewhat lethargically. She still felt drained by her healing session with Sam Torino. ‘Though I don’t know whether the number of her flat is in the book. The Cornelian Gallery will be, but it’ll be closed now, and actually, I seem to recall she doesn’t open on Sundays, so we won’t be able to get her tomorrow either.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ said Carole, uncharacteristically perky. ‘Come into the twenty-first century, Jude. There’s no problem these days with finding a contact for anyone.’

  ‘If you’re talking about Facebook and Twitter, I’m—’

  ‘I’m not talking about them. You don’t have to go to those kinds of lengths. Google will be quite sufficient. You can find virtually everyone, and certainly anyone who’s trying to present some kind of public profile like Denzil Willoughby. Come on, bring your wine glass with you and we’ll check it out on my laptop upstairs.’

  ‘Carole, I thought the point of having a laptop was that it’s mobile.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You can use it anywhere. On the train, in a coffee shop, upstairs, downstairs.’

  Carole Seddon’s face took on a bleak, old-fashioned look. ‘I prefer to use mine in the computer room,’ she said.

  Jude sighed wearily, picked up her glass of Chilean Chardonnay and followed her neighbour out of the kitchen.

  The ‘computer room’ was in fact Carole’s spare bedroom, very rarely used for its primary function. She almost never had people to stay, except of course for Stephen’s family, and even them she found something of a strain. A guilty feeling of relief came into her mind at the thought that Gaby and Lily would be staying elsewhere on their visit at the end of the month. Which reminded her, she must ring Fulham and report back on Walden. She didn’t really think it would be suitable for them. Fine for the Sam Torinos of this world, but maybe a bit too posh for Gaby . . . though of course she’s be far too discreet to say that to her daughter-in-law’s face.

  She brought the laptop out of hibernation and googled Denzil Willoughby. There were, to her, a surprising number of references. Maybe his self-estimation was not so disproportionate to his fame as she had thought.

  Carole homed in on the artist’s own website, whose home page contained, in her view, far too many four-letter words. As he had amply demonstrated at the Private View, his target audience was not genteel retired ladies in Fethering.

  Links directed browsers to other parts of the website. There was a rather aggressive biography which certainly didn’t mention the shaming fact that he had been a public schoolboy at Lancing College. There were lists of galleries where he had exhibited, though interestingly the Cornelian Gallery was not among them. Whether this was because he thought Fethering too insignificant to mention, or whether he had removed the reference in a fit of pique after the early closing of his exhibition, it was impossible to know.

  The website contained pages of photographs of Denzil Willoughby’s work. Guns were evidently a fairly recent preoccupation. Previous collections of work he’d done around the themes of famine, AIDS, tsunamis and the Rwandan genocide. Yet again, Carole Seddon didn’t see anything that she would have given houseroom to.

  But the artworks were very definitely for sale. Though the website didn’t quote prices, there were links to Denzil Willoughby’s agent and a couple of galleries with whom he had deals to sell his work. And if he ever sold anything at the prices that had been quoted at the Cornelian Gallery Private View, then he could make quite a good living.

  Another link on the website was entitled ‘Artist at Work’. When the two women got into it, all they could see was what appeared to be a dark interior of a huge room.

  ‘What’s he selling there?’ asked Carole cynically. ‘Space? Darkness? Air? No doubt, because the Great Denzil Willoughby had the concept of marketing such stuff, he can charge what he likes for it.’

  ‘I don’t think that is one of his artworks,’ said Jude. ‘I think it’s his workshop.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And I think there’s a webcam on it permanently, so that members of the public can go online and watch the “Artist at Work”.’

  ‘What, watch him sticking photographs of black teenagers on to fibreglass guns?’

  ‘If that happens to be the creation of the moment, yes.’

  ‘What incredible arrogance! To assume that anyone would be interested in his work in progress. Artists used to work on their own and not show their work until they’d finished it.’

  ‘That’s not true of all artists, Carole. A lot of them used to treat their studios as a kind of salon, through which all and sundry could pass at will.’

  ‘Yes, but they were at least real artists.’

  ‘They “painted things that looked like things”?’

  ‘Exactly,’ replied Carole, unaware that she was being sent up.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jude went on, ‘I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happening. When Denzil Willoughby’s there in the workshop, the lights are on and we can watch the genius at work. But presumably neither the genius nor his assistants are working on a Saturday evening.’

  ‘Assistants?’ Carole repeated incredulously. ‘Why does he have assistants?’

  ‘Oh, to do the work for him. You don’t think he actually stuck those photographs on the gun himself, do you?’

  ‘Well, he must have done. If he’s claiming that it’s his work of art, the least he must’ve done is to make the thing.’

  ‘No, Carole,’ said Jude, an amused grin on her tired face. ‘He just had the concept of doing it.’

  As she knew she would, her neighbour just said, ‘Huh.’

  Carole went back to the home page of the website, where Jude saw something else of interest. There were two tabs labelled ‘Virtual Visitors’ and ‘Real Visitors’. The first one took them back to the webcam shot of the darkened studio. But the second tab took them to a page on which there was an image of the back of a postcard, artfully scrawled with the words:

  ‘Want to see the artist at work in the flesh? Every Monday between eleven o’clock and four Denzil Willoughby’s studio is open to any motherfucker who wants to have a look.’ This was followed by instructions as to how to get to the studio.

  ‘Well,’ said Jude, ‘if we want to talk to Denzil Willoughby, we know what we have to do, don’t we?’

  ‘Oh, but we couldn’t,’ said Carole.

  ‘Couldn’t we?’ said Jude.

  In the gossip column of Carole’s Sunday Times the following morning there was a photograph of Sam Torino at Walden. It was a measure of her celebrity that space had been made for her in a paper most of whose feature content had been put to bed by the Friday evening.

  It was a great advertisement for Chervil Whittaker’s glamping
site.

  And, needless to say, there was no mention of her sister’s recent death.

  TWENTY

  Denzil Willoughby’s workshop, they discovered, was in Brixton. This immediately set alarm bells ringing for Carole. Though she didn’t read the Daily Mail, faithful to her Times and its crossword, her mind could sometimes run on distressingly Daily Mail lines. So for her the word ‘Brixton’ was shorthand for race riots . . . and all that that entailed. The fact that the riots had happened over thirty years ago did not have any effect on her knee-jerk reaction.

  Looking at the A–Z when working out their optimum route to the workshop, Carole was struck by how near Brixton was to what she regarded as ‘nice’ suburbs. Wandsworth was very near, Battersea not far away, and even the adjacent Clapham was apparently now a suitable location for the aspiring middle classes. Carole Seddon’s deep-frozen attitudes demonstrated how rarely she actually went to London. How rarely, in fact, she left Fethering.

  Needless to say, the remainder of her weekend had been spent in paroxysms of indecision as to whether she and Jude should actually go to Denzil Willoughby’s studio. Carole ran through a more or less exact repeat of the feeling she had had running up to the Private View. And an invitation on a website was even less specific than one handed over in a gallery. At least in the first instance she had known Bonita Green and the venue was local. Turning up at an artist’s workshop unannounced represented a very different level of intrusion.

  And Jude’s reassuring words hadn’t totally convinced her. ‘Come on, we want to talk to the guy. We don’t have any other obvious way of contacting him. And the invitation for anyone to drop into his workshop couldn’t be clearer. After all, Carole, what’s the worst that can happen?’

  That question, so casually thrown around by people less paranoid than herself, always caused Carole Seddon great anguish. Though meant to be rhetorical, it was an enquiry which never failed to set her imagination racing. She could always supply a long list of worst things that could happen.

  Of course, as with the Private View, something deep inside her psyche knew that ultimately she would end up going to Denzil Willoughby’s workshop. So on the Monday morning, having taken Gulliver for his customary romp on Fethering Beach, Carole checked on the website to see whether anything had changed on the ‘Artist at Work’ link. The only difference was the amount of daylight, which now left no doubt that what the webcam showed was the workshop interior. It lit up what, to Carole’s mind, was an amazing amount of junk, none of which could ever be included in her definition of ‘art’. But the warehouse space was still uninhabited.

  Carole closed down her laptop and joined Jude on the first cheap train from Fethering Station to Victoria. From there they would get the Victoria Line to its southernmost outpost of Brixton.

  On the journey they didn’t talk much. Carole hid behind the screen of her Times, while Jude just looked out of the window. She did sometimes read – usually books from the Mind, Body and Spirit section at which her neighbour would be guaranteed to harrumph noisily – but that particular morning she was content just to let her thoughts flow. Carole wished she ever felt sufficiently relaxed just to let her thoughts flow.

  Once she’d read all The Times’s news and features, she addressed her mind to the crossword, but felt awkward doing it with someone she knew beside her. Carole Seddon was very anal about her crossword solving, and the knowledge that even as close a friend as Jude was present put her off. The fact that her neighbour was totally uninterested in the clues or her answers did not fully remove the feeling that she was under surveillance. As a result, her concentration suffered and she was slow to make the necessary verbal connections.

  When they emerged from Brixton Station, Carole was surprised to find herself in what felt like just another upmarket London suburb. True, there were more dark faces on the street than she was used to, but then she did come from the backwater of Fethering, where even the convenience stores had yet to be taken over by Asians. And some of the vegetables on display outside the Brixton shops were a little more exotic than what she’d find in the local Allinstore. But otherwise, not for the first time, Carole Seddon felt slightly embarrassed by her unthinking readiness to accept stereotypical attitudes.

  The address they’d found on Denzil Willoughby’s website was at the end of a street of small houses built for railway workers but now gentrified to a very desirable standard. Their destination was an old warehouse, which had also been expensively converted. Curtained windows on the upper storey suggested that a loft apartment had been carved out of the space, though whether or not Denzil Willoughby lived up there Carole and Jude didn’t know.

  The warehouse had high double doors, presumably to let in wagons or heavy machinery for its original owners and life-size guns plastered with photographs for its current incumbent. Into one of these doors was set a smaller door which opened at Jude’s touch. There was no sign of a knocker or bell, so she just led the way in. Carole was happy to follow, aware that she might not have been so bold had she been on her own.

  They found themselves in a space high enough to garage three or four double-decker buses. A spiral staircase led to the floor above, and two doors at the back led off perhaps to offices or other utilities. In reality the level of clutter inside the workshop was even more chaotic than it had appeared on the webcam. Carole was vaguely aware of the concept of objets trouvés, art made from everyday articles dignified with unlikely titles, but she could not for the life of her imagine how some of the detritus collected in Denzil Willoughby’s workshop would ever make it into a gallery.

  Among the objects on display were a rusty tractor and an assortment of car engines. A decommissioned red telephone box with its glass replaced by kitchen foil stood next to an antiquated milking machine. A broken neon sign reading ‘Kebab’ was propped against a collection of blue plastic barrels which had contained pesticide. Three collecting boxes moulded in the shape of small blind boys with white sticks loitered in the company of some mangy cuddly toys. Two Belisha beacons leant against a wall with an assortment of golf clubs, fishing rods and ice-hockey sticks. Superannuated cigarette machines were piled up next to a set of giant plaster frogs.

  Near the door were some artefacts Carole and Jude recognized – the photograph-covered gun and the framed pieces which had recently been returned from the Cornelian Gallery. They had been piled up higgledy-piggledy, almost as if the artist had lost interest in them.

  In the centre of the warehouse was what appeared to be a fully functional fork-lift truck, though whether that was there to move about the other junk or destined to form part of an artwork in its own right neither Carole nor Jude could guess.

  As they took in the warehouse’s bizarre contents, they realized that the space was no longer uninhabited. On the floor at one end lay a life-size painted wooden crucifix into which a shaven-headed young man was banging galvanized nails. Laid out on the floor the other end was a giant poster of President Obama over which a young woman was laying a painstaking trelliswork formed by strips of Christmas Sellotape. There was no sign of Denzil Willoughby.

  Neither of what were presumably his assistants took any notice of the new arrivals, but continued with the work of realizing their master’s ‘concepts’. Carole couldn’t somehow see a direct line in what she was witnessing back to the studios of the Old Masters, where eager helpers were allowed to do limbs and draperies while the boss took over to do the clever stuff like the faces.

  She cleared her throat to draw attention to their presence, but neither of the assistants looked up from their toil. Then Jude announced, ‘Good morning. We’ve taken up the invitation on the website to come and have a look at the “Artist at Work”.’

  ‘That’s cool,’ said the girl, her eyes still fixed one her parallel lines of Santa-decorated tape.

  Carole moved across to the young man with the crucifix. ‘And what are you doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m banging nails into the bloody thing,
’ he replied, as it talking to someone educationally subnormal.

  ‘Yes, but why?’

  ‘What do you mean, “why”?’

  ‘Why are you doing it?’

  ‘Well, because Denzil told me to.’ Again he sounded as though he couldn’t believe the stupidity of her question.

  ‘And because Denzil’s told you to do it, does that make it art?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ said the young man. ‘If you want to call it art, fine.’

  ‘I definitely don’t want to call it art.’

  ‘Still fine.’

  ‘Does Denzil think it’s art?’

  ‘Denzil doesn’t care. He does what he does. He’s not bothered by definitions. If people want to call it art, he’s not about to contradict them.’

  ‘And if people want to buy it?’

  ‘He won’t try and put them off,’ said the young man, banging a galvanized nail into the wound where the soldier had pierced Christ’s side.

  ‘Is Denzil around?’ Jude asked the girl.

  ‘He may be,’ she replied gnomically.

  ‘Are you expecting him?’

  ‘Usually. Sometimes.’ An answer which wasn’t a lot more helpful than the previous one. The girl, Jude noticed, was slight and dressed in black, perhaps rather like Bonita Green might have looked when she was twenty. And though she wore no make-up and seemed to have made no effort with her appearance, the assistant breathed an undeniable sexuality. Jude wondered whether Denzil Willoughby claimed the same droit de seigneur over his female assistants that artists are traditionally reputed to exercise over their models.

  Since the person they had come to visit wasn’t there, Jude could see no reason not to try and get some information out of his staff, so she asked, ‘Did you know that Denzil had recently had an exhibition in Fethering.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Fethering. The Cornelian Gallery.’

  ‘Oh, I heard the name of the gallery, yes. Didn’t know where it was.’