Gold Digger

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Raymond’s everything a lawyer’s supposed to be,’ she said. ‘Solid, dependable and unimaginative. He’s a properly responsible man. Doesn’t dabble. Hears what he wants to hear, does what he’s asked to do.’

  ‘Unlike me?’

  ‘Definitely unlike you. You are profoundly irresponsible.’

  He paced between the windows, restless, speaking as he moved. He was dressed in olive cords, belted at the waist, bulking out the extreme narrowness of his frame. Saul was never just dressed; he was costumed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think everything’s going OK, all things considered. Just had a long chat with that dangerous, half-educated buffoon, Edward. Patrick is safely home.’

  She turned quickly, anxiety written large.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Saul said, carelessly. ‘Safely delivered to the flat and into the arms of doting mother, for whose sanity her husband secretly fears. He will no doubt pump the boy for information and I’ve hinted that nothing would ever result unless the interrogation was gentle. And I have also, not so gently, hinted that should your dreadful daddy be in touch, they’d better choke him off. Said they’d be blackmailed forever if they didn’t. Have I done well?’

  ‘There’s nothing Patrick can tell them,’ Di said. ‘He’s not a pawn to be used.’

  ‘No, I know he isn’t, but Edward thinks he is. I’ve never met such an immoral man. He was all for leaving Patrick here longer, using him as a spy. He didn’t think twenty-four hours, or however long it was, was enough for the boy to confirm the whereabouts of certain things. Like the paintings in the basement they are going to steal. The odd thing is that there’s them sounding off about Patrick being in danger from you, and Edward never thought so at all. Nor I suspect, does ghastly Gayle. She never really believed the myth. This paedophilic myth.’

  ‘It can’t be great, being Gayle,’ Di said, after a pause. ‘Can’t be easy.’

  ‘You’re doing it again, Di.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Always taking the other side. Can’t you sustain a good bit of hatred? Listen, love, they really despise you. Patrick coming here will have made that worse. They’re going to come back and raid you, just as planned. That’s what Edward wanted to finalise. Shall we give them the faux Fragonard or the faux Gainsborough?’

  She was struggling with the thought that Patrick, whom she loved, had come with a mission, rather than arrived spontaneously. She decided it did not matter either way.

  ‘Both, of course, we decided both. The collection can live without them, especially the Fragonard. They were part of Thomas’s inheritance, rather than his choice, even though they’re exactly the kind of artists he liked. Shadowy people, the cousin, the pupil, artists who never had the limelight. My kind, too, but they’re slightly tainted, somehow.’

  She was talking like a Collector again and he was nodding agreement.

  ‘Slightly dubious portraits of innocence on the cusp. Edward has the images, he’s seen the famous versions, and I’m taking him the transparencies this evening. He’s such a philistine, attention span of a gnat, always looking for the bottom line in euros. Encouraged to think he’s an expert.’

  ‘By you, I suppose.’

  Saul shrugged, elegantly.

  She joined him by the window. Clouds were better than anything. Clouds and flint. She felt nothing. She wanted above all to bury her husband having done what he wanted, with the freedom to do more of what he wanted. She could not enjoy conspiracies as Saul did.

  ‘You’re enjoying all this,’ she said. ‘Why does Edward trust you so much? I trust you because Thomas did and I believe in Thomas’s judgement. If I were Edward, I’d never be sure.’

  He laughed out loud.

  ‘I do notice your sideways glances, don’t worry, and I’m not at all offended. Your plump little lawyer man, Raymond, what a common name, he’s puzzled, too. Edward trusts me because he’s greedy and he doesn’t like me, in fact I’m anathema to him, but he trusts me, within limits of course, because I correspond exactly to his idea of what a shady Art Dealer should be. Effete, lounge lizard, morally bankrupt, ready to do anything for a commission. He thinks he found me, whereas I lured him in, like Thomas asked me to do, to find out what Goneril and Regan would do if they inherited, would they honour the collection? Would they share with you? The hell they would. They’d sell the lot, soonest, and the house for development. And spend it on anything other than the education of their children.’

  ‘I think Beatrice is the worst,’ she said. Pervert, paedophile; the words ringing back like screaming seagulls.

  ‘Do you?’ he said, surprised. ‘Oh, good. Because on current arrangements, it’s Edward and Gayle who are coming to take the designated pictures in the basement, a couple of nights hence. Lovely Patrick hasn’t got in the way of that at all. My word, that boy can draw.’

  He held aloft two sheets from the sketchbook Patrick had left behind, one showing the ticket collector and one showing Quig.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, pointing to the latter. ‘Now there’s a man who could skin a kitten but not a lion. Couldn’t do a thing unless someone shot the beast first. Is this a subject for discussion?’

  ‘No.’

  She peered at the screen and wrote another line as if her fingers were connected to the keyboard. He waited.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said. ‘What did you really think when I came on the scene? The thief who came back?’

  ‘I was absolutely appalled,’ he said. ‘Until I knew the truth of it. That you’re a born connoisseur. And Thomas needed another pair of eyes.’

  She bowed her head. ‘Is that all?’

  He sat down, hitching up the immaculate cords to save them bagging at the knee.

  ‘No, of course not. We both met Thomas on our own road to Damascus. We are both his missionaries and apostles, and over the course of time, you’ve learned what the words mean. You’ll do.’

  He rose.

  ‘And on that note, my dear, I’ll be about my Machiavellian tasks, shall I? Including prepping the sulking staff. Expect me back tomorrow. I think we can expect a visitation, possibly the day after. A crucial date, isn’t it? Peg and Jones will be there to protect you. Obviously, I can’t be here; I have to be elsewhere, ready to receive the stolen goods. I have to be out of the way so that you do not know that I had anything to do with it. A crucial date, n’est-ce pas? Beatrice thinks it’s perfectly poetic. Ten years since her mother drowned.’

  The truth was on the tip of her tongue, and then the coughing began again. He had never been quite free of it. In public, he could make it discreet, but not here. She got up and stood behind his chair with her hands free, until she stroked his hair, as if he were Patrick, or Thomas, or any ill, restless child. There was no point offering patent remedies; Saul had his own dispensary of those.

  He let her do it, relaxed for a minute, safe in her hands.

  She might not know the cause: she might not know the extent of the illness, but she knew when a person was ill. He pulled himself away, hugged her fiercely and impersonally, and went downstairs.

  ‘Got to prep the staff,’ he said.

  I must not be afraid of my father, she wrote, her hands steady on the keys. But I am. Tell me Thomas, out of Beatrice and Gayle, who was the favoured child? Who was the one you loved best?

  The old steel shutter had never been properly secured. It looked fearsome, but to the initiated, it was easy to penetrate by a simple twisting technique. Patrick, that weird boy, had known how it was done. It followed, to Jones’s mind, that either someone had taught him or he had learned it himself. It was perfectly possible, Jones thought, that this was not Patrick’s first clandestine visit to the house since he was banned; not the first from that enterprising little man who could easily have slipped away for a day. Jones was only annoyed because although he had seen so much, he had missed out on the boy, while he knew about the others who came here, too. Jones had watched from th
e pier, knew who was drawn to this house, just as he was, like people always had been, three generations of them. Lost souls, kids, waifs and strays, rather than thieves. There was the old down and out fisherman, who came here about once a month when he could not find his way home: so did Monica’s cousin at the end of one of his benders, so did a very few, disparate people, who had known the house in some other context of their lives, and they were all tacitly permitted to take shelter in the basement, as did an intermittent parade of children. They came and went silently, and when they were gone, Di cleaned up and left it ready for the next. Jones both approved and disapproved. It might be an act of mercy, but it was a silly thing to do, leave your house open like that, although he had to concede she wasn’t taking much of a risk. Any intruders via this route had nowhere else to go and they could not access the house itself unless the door into the kitchen was unlocked. That was a heavy sprung door, which swung on itself so that getting in from below was not an option unless it was propped open. Di could confine her secret overnight guests to the makeshift comforts down there, which were enough for the temporary respite of sleeping it off. A washbasin with a single tap, water, blankets, enough.

  Not that she needed to have worried about the contents of the spacious cellar, either. No tired drunk or runaway child wanted old things hidden in boxes or wrapped in canvas, even if they could be bothered to investigate. In fact, as Jones thought aloud to Peg, the lack of temptation applied to the whole fucking house. A big old house was not always a beacon for thieves because there was nothing new in it; even the white goods were old, there was nothing anyone could sell immediately down the pub or the car boot fair. No money, no jewellery, no state of the art technology. Your ordinary thief would not know what to do with a thousand paintings, collections of suitcases and dressing-up clothes.

  ‘It goes like this, Peg,’ he told her, sermonising. ‘You’re pretty safe in a house full of valuable stuff, provided it’s specialised. Art’s a pretty safe thing to own. What you’ve got to guard against is the casual thief who gets in and craps on it out of sheer frustration because none of it’s any good to him, does damage ’cos he’s pissed off. As for your professional, specialised thief – well, if he’s any good, he’ll know what’s there before he sets out. He’ll have a list of what he wants, he’ll have reconnoitred, he’ll know what to do with the stuff and he’ll be in and out in a jiffy. There’s nothing you can do about him. He’s not some silly little trasher, he’s got a brain.’

  He lit a cigarette, surveying the back yard and the leverage of the shutter with the eye of the expert.‘I reckon our Saul was a thief like that,’ Jones said. ‘A proper thief, stealing to order.’

  Saul emerged behind them, quiet as a cat, touching Jones on the shoulder, making him jump. Peggy sat on a pot of withered pansies by the front fence. The rain had flattened everything.

  ‘Jolly good analysis, old chap,’ Saul said with irritating joviality. ‘And how many thieves like that have you ever caught?’

  ‘Not a one, I don’t think. Not without inside information,’ Jones said, cheerfully enough, totally unembarrassed about being overheard on his pontificating. ‘Like I was saying, I’d never have caught the likes of you. Only the stupid ones get caught. The idiots. With you, it’d be like catching an eel with bare hands and no net. Besides, I wouldn’t have wanted to, really – you’ve got to respect a proper thief.’

  ‘Only the stupid ones get caught,’ Peg echoed, so quietly no one heard. ‘People like me.’

  Saul looked up at the sky. Jones looked at the ground.

  ‘There’s another kind of thief who doesn’t get caught,’ he said. ‘And that’s the one who’s allowed in. The ones who are encouraged to get away with it. Even if they don’t know it. And that’s what’s going to happen here, isn’t it? Like an insurance scam. Those bastards deserve everything they get.’

  ‘Not quite like that,’ Saul said.

  ‘You going to bless me with the final details, or what?’ Jones asked, sarcastically, but with a level of humility. There was some instinct in him that looked upon Saul as the leader and Jones was always looking for one of those.

  ‘Yes, when I’ve seen Edward. When I come back. By phone, OK? I’ll phone first and explain.’

  Jones nodded.

  ‘Just tell me what to do. And just so’s you know, Di’s not off the hook with the police. I’m getting static on the news, but she’s still in the frame, always gonna be. So the sooner we do this, the better.’

  Saul’s coughing began again. It swayed him on his feet, and he made a parody of it with exaggerated gestures of patting his chest and adding extra noises.

  ‘Filthy cold here,’ he said finally when it subsided and he made them laugh with his pantomime. ‘So what on earth are you darlings doing out here, anyway? Not sulking, I hope.’

  Oh Lord, he thought to himself, how much they need a master and how much he would rather not be one.

  ‘A bit,’ Jones said. ‘See, Peggy here thinks Di shouldn’t have sent Patrick home.’

  ‘In case she should do the same to you?’ Saul said, practically kneeling at her feet. ‘Why on earth would she ever do that?’

  Because I’m one of those stupid thieves, with a proper warrant out for my arrest. The one who left fingerprints and did damage. Not just a pickpocket. A drunk who trashed things for fun.

  She could not say it aloud. None of them would listen anyway.

  Saul patted her hand and she looked towards her cold feet on the ground. He smelled cologne-sweet. He said, ‘She wouldn’t ever send you away until you are ready to go. And she’d never give anyone up to the police, even if they pulled her teeth out.’

  Peg nodded. She was going to tell Di. Di would listen to someone wearing her clothes. No one else would.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  All right, Saul said to himself on the train. I am going to see Edward. I am going to see this through. I have organised a burglary. All that matters is the Collection, and although I am a coward, I do so love games. This is about me. And about what I know. Have to get it right.

  There was a sour-faced ticket inspector on the train, who eyed Saul with distaste as if he was inedible. Maybe not the same man as the one in Patrick’s sketchbook, left on the kitchen table overnight: perhaps they were all like that. Patrick; now there was a boy with a talent for depiction which might well develop into something else. Another reason for compromising his father who might otherwise ruin him.

  Saul arranged himself comfortably and got out his laptop. He might have dressed in some ways like an elegant old fogey but he preferred his equipment to be streamlined. The laptop was carried in an envelope of old, soft leather, found in Florence. He wanted to read, but he had read too much and his eyes were tired. He would have liked to read what Di wrote on her old computer in private: he would like to know what she hid from him. Something niggled; an area of ignorance, like an itchy patch of skin he could not reach to scratch. What troubled him on his way to organise Edward into the other end of the burglary that was going to liberate the Collection, was the personality and whereabouts of the late Mrs Christina Porteous, who was somehow fixed upon his inner eye, disturbing his vision, as if she had anything to do with anything.

  Most of the material he had gathered on the first Mrs Porteous was inside the laptop. He had been collating it for years, noted it now into bullet points, the way he did with a description of a painting he was trying to sell. He did it to put her into perspective. The first Mrs Porteous had been a vibrant art student in the conservative nineteen sixties, with the sort of face and figure which courted adoration and got it. She wanted the world, and got instead studious Thomas Porteous, teacher, son of a teacher, dallied with him, dropped him, took him up again, married him when life did not quite fulfil its promises. Had children, hated the process, disliked her life, loathed her dull man of duty, left him, came back, left again until she finally left for good; regretting it thereafter, since the new man was made of straw and the old o
ne got rich. Won her custody battle for the two little girls hands down after she had cited Thomas’s ‘unnatural tendencies’ towards them and the merest hint of that untested evidence was enough. After that, no contest, not in those days. Thomas paid generous support for his girls and wrote to them, often, in sweet, undemanding letters which were returned, without postage. They had gone to expensive schools at their mother’s behest, but not the sort of schools that taught a girl the value of work. Saul had a desire to press these handwritten pages back into the hands of their intended recipients. One day, perhaps he would.

  So; Thomas got rich and the now-ex Mrs Christina P got poor. She wanted to come back; she thought she could undo the past, but she had gone too far and the door was closed. She beat against it until her knuckles were raw and then she got angry, possessive of people and things long after she wanted them and could not bear to be caught out in a lie. The grandchildren were the next opportunity to blackmail Thomas but she had really boxed herself into a corner on that one. Too late to say he’s old and no longer dangerous, and then expect to be believed. She wanted what Thomas had and she could not bear for him to have it. She hated him enough to want him dead: she found his serene existence intolerable. All recorded in the scribblings of a deranged woman that Saul had recovered from the little flat where he was now bound to finalise a plan with her son-in-law.

  What else of Christina? She had liked the sea, if only to sail across it to France on day trips, and that was where she would have liked to live. She had announced her intention of going there on the day she was last seen and she never came back. Saul told himself that she was no longer relevant, and yet, there she was, glued to his inner eye and this was stupid. He moved his mind on.

  For the purposes of his investigations into the minds of the Porteous daughters and Edward, Saul had conducted research that was less than scholarly. Burglary was so much quicker. He had been inside their houses, finding photos, mementos, notes and diaries, first in Beatrice’s messy place, then in Gayle’s white-walled, sterile environment. He was, after all, a born thief: old habits really did die hard and he never intended to relinquish the talent he had honed in his youth, or the adrenaline rush that went with it. He had always been in love with attics, rooftops and cellars, the extremes of a dwelling: exploring other people’s houses in their absence revealed uncanny familiarity with the inhabitants, so that he felt he knew them better than they knew themselves. He no longer took anything away, except what he learned.