Kiss Me When I'm Dead

by Dominic Piper

  ‘Well this is no bloody good. This is tiny. Can I take?’

  She holds up my mobile and walks over to her computer. She draws a wire out of the CPU and attaches it to my mobile. She sits down and taps a few times on the keyboard and Rosabel’s image pops up on her computer, filling the nineteen-inch screen. She stares at the image for a while without saying anything.

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Anjukka didn’t really see the point of the fur coat or having just a skirt on or whatever…’

  ‘It isn’t a skirt, it’s a dress. The dress has been pulled down to show the breasts. Do you know who the artist is?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘She’s very beautiful, isn’t she? The style is vaguely impressionistic and this type of pose is quite old fashioned now. Just my opinion, of course, you can take it or leave it. It’s a bit of conceit, is what I mean. She wants to show off her body, but at the same time she wants you to know she’s got a fur coat.’ She leans forwards with both hands resting on the desk and looks more closely at the image on the screen. ‘There’s something a little odd about it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Odd? In what way?’

  ‘Hard to put your finger on. How old is she? Do you know?’

  ‘No. I would say she was mid-thirties.’

  ‘You’re probably right. When was this painted? Any idea?’

  ‘At least ten years ago, I would guess.’

  ‘Obviously the artist has taken certain liberties in the way he or she has painted this woman; it isn’t entirely realistic, but then who wants a bloody photograph?’

  ‘So what’s so odd about it?’

  ‘The way the eyes and the mouth have been painted. If this was done from life, it’s a little sloppy in some ways. Was the person who commissioned this rich, by any chance?’

  ‘I would say so, yes.’

  ‘So this would have to be someone pretty good, or at least pretty expensive. Even so, the pose is a little strange. I think if you were having your wife painted, the idea of having her dress pulled down to reveal her breasts and then to have a fur coat on her lap – well, it’s not what people would normally have done. On top of that, her posture is slightly odd, the way the arm rests on the coat and the aspect of her shoulders compared to the position of her head.

  ‘And her facial expression is slightly unusual. That look in the eyes and the pouting lips, I think they were not taken from life. Just intuition, really. Intriguing. The more you look at it, the odder it becomes. Of course, many portrait painters strive to make the painting more attractive than the reality; it’s often what the subject or the commissioner asks for. Sometimes portrait painters do it even if it isn’t asked for.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.’

  ‘Could you text me that painting? I’d like to text it to someone else. It won’t take long. If it’s alright with you, that is.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I have no idea what this is all about. I forward Anjukka’s text message to the mobile number on Louisa’s business card. A couple of seconds later I hear her mobile bleep. She takes a look at the image, fiddles with her mobile and then starts to call someone.

  ‘My sister,’ she says to me. ‘I’m just going to forward this to her and then have a quick chat. She’s a doctor. It may be a waste of time, of course. She might even be busy, shovelling some patient’s intestines back in.’

  ‘Fine by me. I’m in no hurry.’

  She waits for a while as her sister’s number rings. She looks mildly irritated as no one answers straight away, then her face brightens.

  ‘Leonie? Me. Did you get that text? Have you got any means of blowing it up to a decent size wherever you are at the moment?’

  She covers the wrong part of the mobile with her hand and looks at me. ‘She’s in her office at the hospital.’

  ‘Good.’

  I still don’t know what’s going on. She’s back on her mobile again.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know these things are too bloody slow. Well, maybe it’s your computer. I suppose they’re still steam-powered in the NHS are they? I’m fine. Corin got rid of his car afterwards. Yes. They were asking too much to have it repaired so he gave it up as a bad job. Ha ha. You saw them? Bloody awful, aren’t they? OK. Have you got it on a decent screen now? I’d like your immediate impression. Don’t bother thinking about it. Just say the first thing that comes into your head. Yes. Yes. Ah. Well that’s interesting. I had a feeling about that but common sense overrode. No, I don’t know her. Some person I’ve got here. Are you still OK for Saturday? OK. OK. OK, darling. Later. Ciao.’

  She places her mobile next to the computer and folds her arms. I notice that she has a long, faded scar down the whole length of her left forearm. Painting accident?

  ‘My sister doesn’t know much about art, I’m afraid. But as soon as she saw that painting she said that someone had done a very, very good job of disguising a Hippocratic countenance. Not so good, though, that she couldn’t spot it. She was always the brainbox of the family, though I was actually better at science in school that she was. People never believe that, but it’s true.’

  I have to laugh now. I’m totally lost. ‘Sorry – what’s a Hippocratic countenance?’

  ‘It’s a painting of a corpse, dear. Very well executed, that goes without saying. It could even be said to be a true work of art in the technical sense. It’s almost like something one of these Britart types might have thought up in the Nineties. You look at her and you think what a beautiful sexy woman she is; the come-hither eyes, the succulent mouth, the pert breasts, the hard nipples.

  ‘You’d need the combination of an artist and a medical person to spot something like that and even then it might pass you by. It’s possible that the subject was preserved in some way or other. Embalmed or something. That’s just a guess. Personally, as a professional portrait painter, I can’t imagine a more disturbing commission, or, while we’re at it, a more disturbing scenario. In fact, I get a little shiver down my spine just thinking about such a thing. Imagine trying to sleep at night while something like that was sitting in your studio. Yuk. On the other hand, it would certainly deter burglars!’

  I get a little surge of adrenaline and my mouth is dry. ‘Could I have another coffee, please?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  I sit down and look hard at the image of Rosabel Raleigh on the computer screen. Despite what I’ve just been told, I still can’t see it and I don’t really believe it. It’s too early in the morning for this sort of thing. My brain isn’t capable of assimilating this type of information and all its repercussions.

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling. You look a bit rattled. I hit you with that pretty hard, didn’t I!’

  She laughs. It’s a sexy, throaty laugh.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I was rattled. More like baffled. It’s just, it’s what – what, why the fuck would you get someone to paint your wife’s embalmed corpse? It’s crazy. Having them embalmed – if that’s what’s happened – having them embalmed in the first place would be bad enough, but then to have them…’

  ‘Well, what interests me,’ says Louisa, lighting an unusually long cigarette, ‘is how you would find an artist who would do such a thing? I can’t imagine how you’d word it when you rang them up!’ She laughs again.

  ‘Have you ever heard of anything like this before?’

  ‘No. But, we could be wrong, sweetie. You have to take that into account as well. It was a snap judgment made by two people in a matter of minutes. It’s bizarre, certainly, but perhaps it’s so bizarre that it couldn’t possibly be true. Although, it could be said that the fact we’re even talking about it makes it true. Does that make sense? I don’t think it does.’

  ‘Let’s say it’s true. Why would you do it? Let’s start with the embalming.’

  She takes a deep breath. ‘Madly in love with the wife? Couldn’t bear to lose her? I must say that I’m no
expert on this sphere of life. I assume it’s legal in this country?’

  ‘I’ve no idea whether it’s legal or not. I presume it is. Even if it wasn’t, this is a guy who could probably pull some strings to make it happen. If you’re mega-rich, things like the law don’t matter that much.’

  ‘Alright, my love. It’s legal. So you’ve had your darling wife stuffed or whatever…’

  It’s no good; both of us crack up laughing at her use of the word ‘stuffed’. It takes us a couple of minutes to recover.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘She’s been stuffed, embalmed, whatever, but that still isn’t enough for you. You want a sexy portrait of her.’

  ‘Once again, I’m no expert,’ says Louisa, smiling broadly, ‘but I don’t think that an embalmed corpse would last forever. Maybe you’d want to get her immortalised in oils before she started falling apart.’

  Another laughing jag ensues. We shouldn’t be laughing at this. This is really weird, sad, sinister and disturbing, not funny at all. We continue laughing for a few more minutes.

  ‘So then you’d be looking for a really good artist who had the stomach for this and who would keep his or her mouth shut,’ I say. ‘You’d probably have to sling them a pretty large amount of money. Much more than three thousand pounds.’

  The image of Raleigh’s currency-stuffed safe pops into my mind and so does the twenty thousand bonus he promised me if I found Viola.

  ‘That, my dear, would be the difficult part. If someone approached me with a job like that, I don’t know that I’d do it for any amount. I mean, no one wants money that much, do they? It would be gruesome!’

  ‘Yes they do. A lot of people do. I think if you were wealthy enough and knew where to look you could find someone in a couple of days.’

  ‘Perhaps we’re making it out to be too sinister. Perhaps that portrait is the conclusion to one of the great love stories of our time. Perhaps we’re looking at a twenty-first century Dante and Beatrice!’

  ‘I don’t think so. She committed suicide.’

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot about your sort of girlfriend’s employer.’

  ‘Yeah. You pick things up, you know?’

  We sit and stare at Rosabel’s portrait. Taylor Conway thought that the suicide happened when Viola was about fourteen. Assuming his guess was accurate, that’s about ten years ago. So Raleigh’s wife commits suicide, he has her embalmed and then he has someone paint her. He keeps the painting in his office and talks about Rosabel in the present tense.

  Viola grew up knowing, presumably, that her mother had shot herself. If Louisa and her sister are right about this portrait, and I somehow think they are, Viola may also have grown up with that ghoulish souvenir of her mother always around the house somewhere.

  There’s no way of knowing whether she realised her mother was painted post mortem, but if she did, the mental and emotional damage would have been considerable, one would guess.

  By the time Viola was about twenty, she had a dangerous drug habit, a bunch of weird but essentially harmless friends and was beginning to drift into prostitution. A couple of years later, she was being ruthlessly and sadistically exploited by that fucker Novak and his chief monkey.

  Eventually, she pissed Novak off so he sold her to the mysterious Mrs Bianchi. Now Viola’s disappeared while on a job and her dad hires me to find her, while possibly having me followed by another private investigator, albeit an inept one. Her dad’s lieutenant, Fisher, cruises swanky call girl sites on the Internet, presumably looking for suitable girls for his boss’s important scumbag clients.

  I think I need to get an A3 pad like Taylor and make a big flowchart with all this stuff on. It’s giving me a headache having to think about it. I’ve got a vague feeling that all these things are connected in some way, but I really can’t imagine how at the moment. I suspect, though, that there is information that I don’t yet have that would make sense of at least some of this.

  I think it’s time to break the silence and get out of here.

  ‘OK! Well, thank you very much for your time. I’ll get Anjukka to get in touch when she’s ready. I’ll let her know that I think you’re the one. If she should ask, don’t tell her how much you charge. Perhaps you could cut the amount in half or something.’

  ‘Will do. Sorry you had such a creepy time here! If you like, I can text you some photographs of the portraits I showed you in there. I’m sure she’d be interested.’

  ‘Thanks. That would be really useful.’ I hand her my business card, which she pings with a forefinger to see if it makes a noise. It doesn’t. ‘My number’s on there.’

  ‘Oh, one more thing, Mr Beckett.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If what we’ve just been speculating about is all true, then it puts a whole different complexion on certain aspects of that portrait. I mean the breasts being bared in that way and the unmistakable erotic charge that the painting gives off. It did occur to me, well…’

  ‘What? Say it.’

  ‘The top of the dress around her waist could have been like that for two possible reasons. That’s if we’re right about her being dead while it was being painted. Either the dress was pulled down to expose her breasts for erogenous effect, or they were unable to pull the dress up over her arms because she was inflexible, if you get my meaning.’

  ‘That’s certainly something to think about. Thanks again.’

  ‘One more thing. If I was your sort of girlfriend and I was working for the man who had that portrait commissioned, I would seriously think about getting myself another job. Just a thought.’

  We shake hands and I walk down the staircase and out into Bond Street, wondering if the man I’m working for is entirely sane.

  11

  AN UNEXPECTED BEATING

  It may be nothing of course. If I can keep the discovery about the Rosabel Raleigh portrait separate from the investigation into Viola’s disappearance, then I’ll be able to keep on working with a clear head.

  I can do this by viewing Nathan Raleigh as nothing more than an eccentric millionaire who had his heart broken. He married a beautiful woman who was perhaps mentally disturbed in some way. She committed suicide, leaving him to bring up a teenage daughter on his own.

  The pain was too much for him to bear. He could not endure having Rosabel buried or cremated, but there was another option; he could have her embalmed. The embalmed state would, I presume, not last forever, so as one final memorial to Rosabel’s beauty, he dressed her in some of her favourite clothes and had an oil painting done of her.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to pull her dress up over her breasts. Couldn’t he have put one of her favourite bras on her body before the artist started work, I wonder? Couldn’t the artist have painted a bra or some clothing on afterwards? There must be paintings where the subject was wearing something different during the sitting. I think of the things that Louisa Gavreau said, particularly the bit about having your darling wife stuffed, and start laughing to myself. The whole thing doesn’t really hold water and I put it out of my mind so I can focus on the job in hand.

  There’s a Costa directly opposite Mrs Bianchi’s place in Portman Street, so I go inside and order a coffee. It’s still fairly early, this will be my sixth coffee today and I can feel that I’m already grinding my teeth from the caffeine overload. Still, if any emergencies crop up I’ll be on high physical alert. It’s moderately warm, so I’m able to sit outside and have a good stare at the house.

  The address that Novak gave me just said the street number and ‘third floor’. I take a long, leisurely look. These are smart, well-kept brick houses from the mid-1800s with shiny black Edwardian front doors, complete with lion’s head brass knockers and ornate cast iron boot scrapers. Nasty looking spiked metal railings with gold tops to deter unwanted visitors and window boxes exploding with colour. If you lived here, you’d need money, no doubt about it. But it isn’t quiet. This is a busy road, and just looking to my right I can see and hear three separat
e sets of road works in progress and each one with a couple of pneumatic drills thundering away.

  The ground floor is a company of some sort. There’s a gold plaque on the wall, but I can’t read what it says. Just after the waitress puts my coffee in front of me, two guys in smart pale grey suits come out of the main entrance, laughing at something. One of them holds a slim attaché case, the other one has pink headphones in. Through the window I can see a young woman working on a computer. There’s a photographic print on the wall that looks like a car with its headlamps on in thick fog.

  There’s a secondary entrance to the right of the main one and I presume this is the access to the other floors. I can see a slim silver oblong with three doorbell buttons and small name plaques. This must mean that there is only one occupant on each floor.

  The first floor has shutters inside the windows and they’re all closed up. Maybe they’re on holiday. Above that, is what looks like another office. There are window boxes and ornate cast iron verandas. The window boxes don’t have flowers, but have small pine trees and hardy-looking shrubs. During the few seconds I’m looking, I count five different people wandering around, all in business suits, or, in the case of the solitary female, in a dark grey dress, set off by a string of white pearls.

  Third floor is Mrs Bianchi, I presume. Looks like all the others. The light reflecting off the windows indicates double or triple glazing. Well, you’d need it around here. Outside, there are well-maintained window boxes with bright red flowers. I try and run through what I’m going to say when I press her button. I just hope she doesn’t have some psycho heavy waiting for me like Novak did.

  I look at my watch; it’s almost ten-thirty. I finish my coffee and stroll across the road, taking a quick look in each direction for traffic and possible tails. There’s nothing, or if there is, they’re better than Tote Bag.