Snatched

by Bill James

  The newspaper photographer arrived accompanied by a reporter, and Vaux posed with the Monet. The others watched. Vaux gave some quotes about the general worthwhileness of art.

  Lepage heard a woman’s footsteps approaching behind him and, feeling alarmed, quickly turned: sometimes Kate would surprise him from the back and, putting her hand up between his legs, give his balls a breathtaking cosset, not greatly worried about people nearby. But it was not Kate. For a few moments, Lepage failed to recognize this young woman properly, though he knew he had seen her around the Hulliborn.

  ‘Ah,’ Penny said, ‘yes, dear, I’m ready to go now.’ She stood.

  The woman carried a canvas holdall, something like the one lying with the suitcase against the gallery wall, and had a large shoulder bag, its wide strap across her chest.

  ‘We’re arranging a trip, and agreed to meet here first,’ Lady Butler-Minton explained. ‘It seemed especially appropriate somehow. We’re going to spend time together in Ethiopia, starting at Jimma. In fact, we might not return.’ At the word ‘together’ she leaned across and gripped the arm of the younger woman, who put her hand over Penny’s for a moment.

  ‘Jimma is one of Flounce’s old stamping grounds, surely,’ Vaux said. The photographer and reporter left.

  ‘In the south-west. But we’ll do a trek north as well and get up into the Ethiopian Highlands. Often, I need mountains,’ Penny said.

  ‘Oh, how one knows that yearning,’ Vaux cried. ‘At times, I long for a topography that can make me seem small, dwarf me, remind me of my mean stature in the wide scheme of Nature.’

  Clode said: ‘Minister, I have heard you more than once utter a kind of plea – “Ben Nevis, Cader Idris, heights of Lammermuir, let me but appreciate your scale, cower under your grandeur!”’

  ‘I do see myself as rather Wordsworthian,’ Vaux replied, ‘an insignificant, reverential figure against the majesty of landscape. I hope that to regard one’s self as akin to the poet is not arrogant.’

  ‘Arrogant?’ Clode disbelievingly repeated. ‘It is the very reverse. It is a resemblance based only on humility and self-effacement.’

  ‘But have we met?’ Vaux asked the young woman.

  ‘This is Trudy Dingham,’ Penny Butler-Minton said.

  Now Lepage remembered. Of course, she was Butler-Minton’s former research assistant, the girl whose family members had come to the Hulliborn incompetently seeking sex vengeance on Flounce, and whose bush had turned tern in the Birds cupboard.

  Penny Butler-Minton said: ‘Trudy and I are cooperating on a biog of Eric. I’ve been shooting her all the dirt. But totally bloody all! We’ll publish in due course. That’s what I mean about the bust – why I’m opposed. It will be mad to set up a monument after what we’re going to say, like reverencing a carbuncle.’

  ‘But this must not be,’ Vaux cried.

  ‘No way,’ Clode shouted.

  In the tortured circumstances, Lepage felt glad the journalists had gone, and that there was only one other person about the Raybould now – a woman, probably out of earshot at the far end of the gallery, apparently fascinated by one of the big old Italian things that hung there.

  ‘We intend to be very frank, but also just,’ Lady Butler-Minton said. ‘I’ve told Trudy everything I know, good and bad. And there are some tapes that Eric kept under lock and key at home. I’ve looked those out. Haven’t listened to them yet, but they’re certain to provide disclosures. These might be favourable, might not.’

  ‘The Japanese will not like uncertainty – the prospect of a possibly scurrilous book coming out, endorsed by Flounce’s widow,’ Vaux said.

  ‘There could be ramifications,’ Clode said.

  ‘From things Eric let slip I have the idea that the tapes cover his time in East Germany – the Wall, Mrs Cray, the haversack straps and so on. This material might be very positive – might show Eric in an excellent light,’ Penny said.

  ‘And if not?’ Vaux asked.

  ‘Would you still publish?’ Close said.

  ‘We aim for a complete portrait of Eric, don’t we, Trudy?’ Penelope said.

  ‘Research does not merit the name “research” if it suppresses or falsifies,’ Trudy said.

  ‘We’re going to work on the first draft in Jimma, drinking that extraordinary tea they have there. Volume length. It will be a kind of exorcism,’ Penny said. ‘Friends in the town will lend us something to play the tapes on. We’ll get the draft finished, take a break in the Highlands, and then come back to Jimma and polish up our work, ready for submission to a publisher.’

  ‘But why are you doing this to Flounce?’ Vaux asked.

  ‘How, how, can you behave like this, Lady Butler-Minton?’ Clode said.

  ‘My mind is settled,’ she answered. ‘I’ve given up those talks with the spirit of Eric. A foolishness. A weakness. Obviously, I’ll listen to Lip on the tapes once or twice, and then this will be at an end, too. Our book will close that book.’

  The Minister said: ‘I’m afraid there is only one word for what you propose, Lady Butler-Minton. It is “betrayal”.’

  ‘No other term will suffice,’ Clode confirmed, with a hint in his voice that he had mentally tried a cohort of others.

  ‘We all need to be free of Eric now,’ Penny replied.

  ‘But how can you be joint with Trudy?’ Vaux said. ‘Didn’t I hear Flounce was banging her at one stage, or more than one?’

  ‘A posse of your relatives hunting him, Trudy?’ Clode said. ‘That’s the report as I remember it.’

  ‘There was an episode,’ Trudy said, ‘it being the kind of episode that, in changed circumstances – changed ideas about love – can bring two women together, having at a previous time being, as it were, linked via one man.’ She put her hand on Penny’s again.

  ‘Yes, changes have come,’ Penny said. ‘I, too, have had recent interludes.’

  ‘Youde? Pirie?’ Vaux said.

  ‘Spreading it rather,’ Clode said.

  ‘Closed now,’ she replied. ‘Especially Pirie. He was so much in favour of a memorial to Flounce – reproaching the Hulliborn for tardiness. Yet he knew I was against. It seemed a sort of perversity considering how things were.’

  ‘Ah,’ Vaux said.

  ‘Oh,’ Clode said.

  Vaux stared at the luggage beneath L’Isolement. ‘The tapes are in one of these bags, are they?’ he asked.

  ‘And are staying there,’ Penny said.

  ‘Get up, Lionel,’ Vaux snarled abruptly at Clode. ‘Don’t just sit there like part of the fucking Royal Academy judging panel. Find those tapes. We don’t know what damage they might do. The risk of the dubious is too great. Turn out her gear. Secure them. It’s our only way to hit back.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Clode said. He got up from the sofa and moved resolutely towards the luggage.

  Lepage said: ‘Minister, I don’t think I can allow this kind of behaviour on Hulliborn premises. Lady Butler-Minton is entitled to—’

  ‘“Entitled”, pox,’ Vaux said.

  ‘Absolute pox as for “entitled”,’ Clode remarked. But he had paused when Lepage spoke.

  ‘This is the health and future of your bloody museum we’re talking about, Lepage,’ Vaux said, ‘plus the whole panoply of British culture, plus, more to the point, the integrity of Anglo-Japanese relations in a commercial jungle. Don’t you grasp this, dickhead?’

  Clode moved forward again. Over his shoulder he shouted: ‘It’s your well-being and the all-round well-being of Britain in a ruthless world that concerns us, Lepage, you jerk.’

  ‘Wait!’ Lepage yelled after him. ‘I forbid this.’

  ‘It’s OK, George,’ Penny said. ‘I’ll deal with that string of wind.’ She took a few short, swift steps and, just as Clode bent over to unzip the holdall, got a grip on him by the seat of his fine trousers and the back of his superior dark suit jacket and, swinging him off the ground, rammed his head hard against the wall just to the right and below L’
Isolement, then repeated this twice. It seemed to Lepage like an extended version of how she had handled Neville Falldew on the balcony. Clode’s thin arms and legs trailed the ground like loose guy-ropes on a breeze-blown tent. The Raybould wall shook and, although the Monet held firm on its hook, above it, to the left, an N. Sotheby Pitcher wartime seascape, Convoy Assembling Under Barrage Balloons, 1941, shifted slightly, hung askew for a moment, then dropped.

  Clode lay face down, very long and still, nestling into the right-angle between wall and floor, possibly conscious but making no sound. Once it had come loose, the picture of battered looking but beautiful merchant ships, with their individual single balloons, fell very straight down the wall so that the bottom horizontal of the frame struck Clode across the back of the neck, like a guillotine, or the humanitarian chop for dispatching rabbits.

  Lying there, Lionel Clode took on a kind of dignity – that touching dignity of the mutely suffering, or of one who has fought the good fight, although gravely out of his class, and is unlikely to demand a return. The seascape finished face up on his back, and it occurred to Lepage that members of the public coming into the Raybould might assume the picture and Clode littering the ground like that comprised one of those significant modernistic collages, saying something new and didactic about the war at sea, or the relationship of Art to Humanity. It would be pushing it a fair deal to have Lionel represent Humanity, but his clothes were magnificent. Fortunately, though, there were not many people in the museum today, and at present the Minister’s group had the Raybould to themselves but for the woman at the far end, still apparently preoccupied by one of the larger Italian daubs. She seemed so set on loitering that Lepage peered hard, wondering if it were Kate, untypically showing some tact. But this woman was too old and too garishly dressed.

  Penny Butler-Minton picked up her luggage from close to Clode. He stirred now, then reached forward with one hand, vainly trying to stop her taking the holdall. He shouted from the floor in a remarkably strong voice for someone felled: ‘Nothing, I say nothing, can stop the Tokyo Flounce bust!’

  ‘Rest,’ the Minister told him. ‘Lie there, Li. Your duty is not well done, but it’s fucking done. Your mother would be proud.’ Vaux turned to Penelope and explained: ‘She is extremely unassuming, though tall. It was such a thrill for her when Li somehow passed high into the civil service Admin class. She would think it wonderful that his work brought him close to prized art.’

  Lepage was hardly listening. For several minutes he’d been watching Trudy Dingham, who seemed suddenly overcome by a strange, fiercely powerful, perhaps painful, excitement. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Trudy, what is it?’

  ‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘Oh, please, wait.’ She had a large, encompassing, privately educated voice which quivered impressively now with undefined passion.

  ‘Wait?’ he asked. ‘Who, Trudy?’ At first he’d thought she feared Penny might leave without her, as if the destruction of Clode had brought some kind of seminal crisis, cancelling all previous understandings and arrangements, like the 1914 assassination of Crown Prince Ferdinand at Sarajevo, igniting the Great War. How intense Trudy’s feelings towards her must be, he reflected, and how odd and consoling that two women who’d been having it off with Flounce turn-and-turnabout not long ago should subsequently establish this powerful, cockless, substitute bonding, and decide they must together dossier him intimately for the attention of the world. Was this another case of the survivors controlling what history could say? Lepage would treat himself to a slice of cynicism occasionally.

  But now he realized Trudy was in fact looking past Penelope, and realized, too, that the volume of her voice was meant to reach the far end of the Raybould. He turned. The woman who had been so obsessively studying one of the paintings there had now taken a few steps towards the gallery exit, but for the moment gazed fixedly towards the Vaux group with, as far as Lepage could make out from that distance, a small, hostile smile on her face: something she might have borrowed from Laughton as Captain Bligh in a movie channel showing of Mutiny On The Bounty.

  ‘Trudy, who is it?’ he asked.

  Vaux had noticed, too. ‘Yes, who?’ he said.

  Trudy moved towards the woman, but then halted, as though scared.

  Vaux did not approach the woman either, but called out, ‘Madam, have we met? Arts Council? I see you’re a Carpaccio Vittore fan. Into the saintly, are you? He certainly had a way with that kind of stuff. I don’t mind it too much.’

  From the floor, Lionel Clode called out gamely: ‘Minister, I’ve often heard you remark of Vittore Carpaccio that, although he might not be all plus, he certainly was not all minus. “Paints saints” you epigrammed, I recall.’ He tried an appreciative laugh, but it was swallowed up by the formidable Hulliborn wainscoting.

  ‘Leave it, Trudy,’ Lady Butler-Minton whispered. Lepage had never seen her other than full of confidence and strength, but even she sounded apprehensive now.

  Then, the woman abruptly turned away, and, without looking again at the Carpaccio, strode swiftly from the Raybould, her red and cream skirt and vermilion shoes flashing splendidly as she passed through a patch of sunlight from the window.

  ‘No, no, please don’t go!’ Trudy cried. The woman took no notice, did not glance back. After that first small movement towards her, Trudy seemed transfixed, but then suddenly called, ‘Mrs Cray!’ in that meaty, well-bred tone. ‘It is Mrs Cray, isn’t it? I must talk to you.’

  For several moments all the Vaux party were clearly dazed by her words. Then, astonished and even shaking a little, Lepage moved urgently to stand near Trudy. ‘Mrs Cray? How can you know this? You’ve met her previously? Who has ever seen her? Hell, does she even exist?’

  ‘I feel it. I know it,’ Trudy replied. ‘Somehow. Eric gave fragments of description – the clothes style, the untroubled brow.’

  ‘You can see the untroubled nature of her brow from here – from this distance?’ Lepage asked. ‘Aren’t we talking about a chimera? This is absurd.’

  The Minister had joined the two of them and heard this moment of talk. ‘Mere guess? Intuition?’ he asked. ‘It’s not a subject to trifle with, you know. How foolish!’

  ‘Totally inane,’ Li bellowed from the floor.

  ‘Please, Director, stop her leaving,’ Trudy said. ‘Don’t let her disappear. For once, she’s alone. Somehow, officials and protectors will close around her again and she’ll be gone.’

  Lepage said: ‘But—’

  ‘Please,’ she cut in, ‘somehow I know this is our chance.’

  ‘You could go yourself, come to that, damn it,’ Vaux told her.

  ‘What’s wrong with your own legs, Trudy?’ Clode said. ‘They look grand to me from here.’

  ‘Somehow I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘Too many sodding somehows,’ the Minister replied.

  ‘Somehows are somehow running riot,’ Clode remarked.

  ‘Very well, Trudy, I will,’ Lepage said. This was a girl who had lovely breasts which, although unfeelingly divided for the moment, by the harness of her shoulder bag, would obviously soon re-form as a very sound unit; and who possessed, in addition, a wonderful, chubby, compact arse surmounting slender thighs and bonny long legs, as admired also by Clode from a different angle. Plainly, there was a case for taking her seriously, even if she did seem to have gone gay.

  ‘Mrs Cray could give the answers to so much,’ Trudy said. ‘Take us beyond the speculative in some of our research.’

  ‘Cray sounds a British name,’ Lepage said. ‘Does she speak English?’ He did not wait for an answer, but ran down the Raybould and out on to the landing. From there he could see ‘Mrs Cray’ quickly descending the main staircase towards the revolving door exit, her skirt and shoes still giving occasional multi-coloured gleams. ‘Mrs Cray!’ he yelled. He waved. Some museum visitors turned at the noise, but she didn’t. He made for the spiral staircase. With any luck he’d come out ahead of her.

  He got none of that luck, thou
gh. As he descended, he met Angus Beresford coming up. There was no room to pass. ‘Go back, please, Angus. It’s an emergency,’ he said.

  ‘What emergency?’ Beresford asked. ‘Did I hear someone calling Mrs Cray? Wasn’t she to do with the Wall and Flounce?’

  ‘Go back and let me through,’ Lepage replied.

  ‘Is it concerning that flasher, Falldew, again? I thought I glimpsed him near Zoology (Mammals).’

  Lepage tried to push by, but Angus was too burly.

  ‘It is to do with him again, isn’t it, George? Where? Let me deal with this.’ Now, Beresford did turn and started to descend. ‘It happened where I said I saw him, did it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Send Beresford somewhere else – anywhere else.

  At ground level, Beresford ran off to the left, making for Ronnie Acton-Sher’s department. Lepage went directly ahead, towards the revolving door and, as he arrived, saw the woman approaching across the foyer. ‘Thank God,’ he said.

  ‘What, sir?’ Keith Jervis said, on duty at this main entrance. ‘Is it the matter of an incident?’

  ‘No, no, I must speak to this lady, that’s all,’ Lepage replied. He spun around to face her.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said. English, but possibly not her first language.