Joan checked her rota. Smiled. And went to say hello.
CATCH-13
Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor is the author of a series of books about William Dougal, as well as the Lydmouth mysteries, the Roth Trilogy – which was adapted for television as Fallen Angel, with Charles Dance – and a number of historical crime novels, including The American Boy, Bleeding Heart Square and, most recently, A Scent of Death. His other books include The Barred Window, novelisations and books for young people. Among other awards, he has received the CWA Diamond Dagger.
‘It don’t smell right,’ Winston said, scratching his nose.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I told him, as kindly as I could. ‘It’s just like the guy said. No windows. No cameras. And look – see the pipe? On the left there.’
Winston stared through the van’s windscreen. The drainpipe was just beyond the back door, held to the wall by a series of clamps. The man had told us that we’d find the spare key wedged in the brickwork at the back of the pipe just above the third clamp.
Winston sniffed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I do,’ I snapped. ‘I know he gave us a hundred quid, and after we’ve walked in and out that door there’s another four hundred to come. I also know I’ll lose my flat as well as the car and the van if I can’t pay the rent again.’
Before he could answer, I opened the door and got out. As I knew from bitter experience, Winston is someone who needs telling what to do. Before the recession, before everything went wrong and when I still had the business, he used to work for me. He did deliveries in this same van that used to belong to me and now belonged to him. He was always getting lost, or delivering the wrong box of organic veg, or no box at all.
I walked quickly towards the back of the workshop. It was on the edge of a small industrial estate on the wrong side of Slough, not that I necessarily mean to imply Slough has a right side. The estate had plenty of security at night, the man had said, but nothing in the day.
The workshop was a small, single-storey building with double doors at the front. The key was behind the pipe, just where the man said. Winston scrambled out of the van and joined me by the back door. He’d turned up the collar of his coat and pulled his woolly hat over his forehead. He looked like a burglar.
I pushed the key into the lock and turned it. The door swung open. I stepped inside, pulling Winston after me, and closed the door. Now we were actually doing it, my hands were shaking and I was finding it hard to think straight.
We were in a little room at the back with a paint-spattered sink. Beyond it was the half-open door of a little toilet and another doorway with a curtain half-drawn across it.
‘He said it was a joke,’ Winston said behind me. ‘No one pays five hundred quid for a fucking joke.’
I told him to shut up and pushed past the curtain. But Winston was right, of course. There was something a little fishy about this. Maybe the guy was using us for a theft. Or maybe it was revenge or something. Not our problem, as long as we kept our eyes open. What counted was the five hundred quid.
Winston whistled. ‘Jesus. What a tip.’
‘It’s normal,’ I said. ‘It’s the creative ambience.’
The studio was maybe twenty feet square with windows covered with steel shutters. Grey November light filtered down from two long skylights. The room was littered with junk – tables, easels, stuff dangling from the ceiling, brushes, jars, tins, fag ends – and everywhere the spatters of paint.
‘Is that it?’ Winston’s voice sounded uncertain. ‘That thing there?’
He pointed at what looked like an old plant-stand, Edwardian maybe, in front of the double doors. Where you’d expect to see an aspidistra there was a transparent box about the size of one of those biscuit tins that my auntie still gives me at Christmas.
I went over to it, tripping over a dismembered bicycle on the way. The box was made of perspex. It rested on a thin stone base. I stared at what was inside.
Winston peered over my shoulder. ‘Oh my God,’ he whispered. ‘I mean, that’s sick.’
‘It’s art,’ I said. ‘So it’s the concept that matters. That’s all. Think Damien Hirst. Or Tracey Emin.’
‘Who?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Explaining modern art to Winston would be like outlining the principles of evolutionary science to a chicken: it was simply better not to start. I lifted the box, which was surprisingly heavy. ‘We need a bag or something.’
‘This do?’ He grabbed a canvas-and-leather backpack hanging on a hook by the door. He lifted the top flap. ‘It’s empty.’
At that precise moment everything went wrong. Someone tried the handle on the door. They rattled it. There was the sound of a key sliding into the lock.
I’ll say this for Winston: he kept his head. Still holding the backpack, he pushed me towards the doorway at the back. I had the box in the crook of my arm. We belted through the little room and out of the back door. I pulled it shut behind us. We sprinted across the concrete apron to the van.
We lost five seconds while Winston fumbled for the key. Would you believe it, he’d locked the door? Then at last we were inside. The engine fired. The workshop’s back door was still shut. Winston accelerated away from the kerb. Rubber squealed as he pulled out in front of a lorry.
‘Don’t drive like a maniac,’ I hissed. ‘For God’s sake, try and act normally.’
He had the sense to take the side entrance out of the estate, so we wouldn’t pass the front of the workshop. I stuffed the box into the backpack that Winston had nicked, and pushed it down on the floor by my feet.
Neither of us spoke until we reached the motorway, with me checking the rear-view mirror every thirty seconds for flashing blue lights. Traffic was heavy and we made slow progress. The rendezvous was at a service station – not the one where we had met the man but the next one to the west. We were going to be late.
Winston turned on the radio and tapped his fingers on the wheel in time to some musical drivel. I opened my mouth to tell him to turn it off and then closed it as I remembered that he was no longer my employee and that it wasn’t my van or even my radio any more. Instead I opened the backpack and examined the box.
It contained only one thing: the mummified corpse of a small fish. It had decayed so far that it had reached the point where it was almost inoffensive, like a vaguely fish-shaped scrap of dirty leather. Probably it stank but the perspex had an airtight seal and I couldn’t actually see any maggots so perhaps they’d all died off as well.
In fact, I realized as I examined the thing more closely, there was more than one fish in there. The other one was on the upper surface of the stone base itself. The corpse was actually resting on part of it. At first I thought the second fish was painted or inked on the stone, a skeletal shadow in faded orange. Then I saw I was wrong. It was actually embedded into the stone.
It was a fossil.
Conceptual art isn’t so hard once you get the hang of it. This was obviously telling us that there was more than one way of being dead.
‘Yuk,’ said Winston, glancing at the box. ‘Lush bag, though.’ He stretched out a hand and touched it. ‘Can I have it?’
‘But we’ve got to put the box in something.’
‘No prob,’ he said. ‘There’s a black plastic sack in the glove compartment.’
The glove compartment had silted up since I’d owned the van. It was full of the debris of Winston’s life, empty cigarette packets, copper coins and broken pencils. I found the black sack under my old A-Z, which now had half its pages missing. A blob of chewing gum had attached itself to the plastic but I eventually got the bag open.
When I transferred the box I saw underneath the base for the first time. There was writing, perhaps a signature, incised into the grey stone. It looked like ‘G. Ring’.
It took us nearly an hour to reach the service station. I hated leaving the shelter of the van and I hated carrying that plastic sack across the car park. I knew there
’d be cameras and security men everywhere. I felt as though I had a neon sign on my back saying ‘THIEF’.
Winston nudged me. ‘He’s there.’
He sounded as relieved as I felt. The man was sitting in the café just to the left of the door. He was a big guy with grey hair and a close-cropped beard flecked with reddish hairs. He looked like a semi-retired Viking in a leather jacket. His English was excellent but it probably wasn’t his first language.
He had been chatty enough this morning, which was the only other time we’d met him. Winston had taken me out for a coffee to cheer me up after they repossessed my car. The man had been at the next table. He’d eavesdropped on us talking about money, or rather the lack of it. Then he’d sidled over and bought us another coffee. While we drank it, he oozed charm over us and made his proposition.
But on this occasion he didn’t waste time talking or oozing charm – he just nodded, waved us to chairs and almost snatched the black sack. He opened it and examined the box without taking it out.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good. And this is for you.’ He put a white envelope on the table and stood up, the box under his arm. ‘Goodbye.’
Winston stared after him. ‘He’s in a hurry.’
I opened the envelope and found a wad of twenty-pound notes. I gave one of them to Winston. ‘Let’s celebrate, shall we?’ I still found myself telling Winston what to do. Someone had to. ‘I’ll have a small latte and one of those chocolate muffins. Can I borrow your phone?’
While Winston was queuing at the counter, I went on-line and Googled ‘G. Ring artist’. And there he was, the top result: Gerhardt Ring, born Munich in 1959, a performance artist.
Performance? What performance?
I soon found out. The more I found the worse it got. Ring specialised in creating sequences of stills from videos he had shot. Just the one set of prints – and then he destroyed the original video. The guy had an international reputation. He was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art. Tate Modern had put on a retrospective of his work last year. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had paid $1.3 million for his most recent piece, ‘Catch-12’, one of a series. A Tokyo gallery had bought ‘Catch-11’. ‘Catch-10’ was in Sidney. The BBC had devoted a Culture Show special to him.
Oh Christ.
Winston came back with the coffees and I told him how we’d been set up. Soon the whole world would be able to see us making prats of ourselves for as long as art galleries existed.
‘Catch?’ he said, frowning. ‘What’s all that about then?’
‘Because it’s what you do with fish. You catch the bloody things.’ I took a deep breath and explained, ‘Ring made the box we nicked for him, right? But for him that’s just the start. Each of the “Catch” pieces is based on a video of someone like us stealing it, the same box. Someone who doesn’t know it’s not a real theft. See?’
While we were talking, the phone was downloading a photograph of Gerhardt Ring. I glanced down. It was our man, all right, though the photo had been taken a few years ago. The beard was longer and wilder, and above it was a mass of red hair.
‘He’s German,’ I said. ‘And he’s a red head. Herr Ring. Red Herr Ring. Red Herring. Get it? It’s a pun! And I bet the fossil’s a herring, too, and the rotting fish on top of it. Ha bloody ha.’
‘Is that a joke?’ Winston said. ‘Don’t seem very funny to me. But maybe that’s the Germans for you. My gran says—’
‘Shut up about your gran. Can’t you see? He’s actually telling us that the box is a diversion, a distraction. The real thing’s the video. Or rather the stills he gets from the video and sells for millions … In other words, he’s getting a shed-load of money out of making fools of us.’
The coffee didn’t taste good and I couldn’t face the muffin.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I want to go home. While I still have one.’
‘Can I have the muffin if you’re not going to eat it?’
We walked in silence to the van. It started to rain, which suited my mood. We sat side by side, looking at the water streaming down the windscreen while Winston ate the rest of the muffin.
‘Look on the bright side,’ he said when he’d finished. ‘At least we got five hundred quid. Bird in the hand, eh?’ He leant over the back of the seat. ‘And this bag. Nice – it’s Italian, you know. Lovely bit of work. Milan, probably. You could say it’s a sort of bonus.’
His face changed.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘There’s something in the side pocket.’ He drew out a small, shiny object. ‘Will you look at that – a video cam. Nice bit of kit. Look – he cut a little hole in the bag and mounted it so the lens goes there.’ He fiddled with the buttons. ‘We can sell it on eBay. But it’s a shame about the hole in the bag. That’s vandalism, that is. Hang on, though – look at this.’
Winston angled the video cam so we could both see the back. Miniature people flickered on the tiny screen.
‘That’s me,’ I said bitterly. ‘And that’s you. And that’s the part when someone tried to get in at the front.’
But Winston was smiling. ‘So that’s all right then.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’ll be back, won’t he? That Herring bloke. All we have to do is come here tomorrow, have another cup of coffee and wait.’ Winston dropped the video cam in the Italian leather-and-canvas backpack. ‘This is what he really needs. It’s worth one point three million dollars to him. Maybe more.’ He was still smiling. ‘One red herring. Catch-13.’
THE WRONG MAN
Charles Todd
Charles Todd is the writing name of an American mother and son duo, Caroline and Charles Todd, who are best known for their historical mysteries. Their first Inspector Rutledge novel, A Test of Wills, appeared in 1996. In addition to the Rutledge books, they have written a series featuring Bess Crawford, and two stand-alone titles.
Summer, 1920
The church was full that Tuesday morning. Alexander Fletcher had been well liked. He’d sent three sons to war, lost all three, and was never bitter about it, saying he believed strongly in King and Country and had done his best to serve both. His money, what there was of it, he’d left to the fund for the church roof.
The hymns had been sung, the rector was just finishing his eulogy, and the organist was waiting for the signal for the Recessional.
A hollow rapping began, tentative at first, and then much louder, growing more frantic with each blow. The rector stopped in mid-praise, and all eyes swung toward the coffin, watching in horror as it began to wobble. The organist, taking the silence for his signal, began to play again. The undertakers, Messrs Lassiter and Sons, rushed forward to fumble with the locks as the pounding reached crescendo. The lid, released, seemed to spring open of its own accord, and as it did the dead man rose to a sitting position and looked wildly around.
Pandemonium broke out. The parishioners stood as one body and began to scream.
The man in the coffin, realizing where he was, tried to leap out of his prison and succeeded in sending it flying. Unhurt, he stumbled up the aisle, his bare feet slapping on the stone paving, and he disappeared through the church door before anyone else could move. He was never seen again.
Afterward, the only thing everyone could agree on was that the revived corpse was not Sandy Fletcher. Where Sandy had got to, no one knew, least of all Mr Lassiter or his sons.
Inspector Ian Rutledge was sent to the village of Merrow because he was already in Oxford. The undertakers had been adamant that the local constable was not up to the task of finding either Sandy or whoever had put a live man in his place. Their firm was being accused of a reckless disregard for the dead and they were having none of it.
It was late that Tuesday evening when Rutledge drove into Merrow. But there was a lamp burning in the rectory, and he decided to stop there before finding lodgings for the night.
The rector answered his knock almost at once, glasses in hand. ‘Am I needed so
mewhere?’
Rutledge gave his name, and the rector led him to the study where he’d been working.
‘We were beyond words, all of us. Unable to do anything but stare, it happened so quickly. And then we realized it wasn’t Mr Fletcher after all. I shudder to think what would have happened if the coffin had been buried. Half an hour was all that stood between that poor soul and eternity. The doctor suggested later that the man had been drugged, awaking before he should have. It’s the only explanation.’
‘And the undertakers had no idea when or how the switch was made.’
‘None at all. They’re reliable men, the Lassiters. They’ve been in business here for three generations. This will ruin them if the police can’t find out what happened.’
‘Describe the fleeing man.’
‘I don’t think any of us could, it all happened so quickly. Dark hair, medium height, slim build. Bringing back the image in my mind, I could remember that much. Young or old, I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Did Mr Fletcher have enemies? Or the Lassiters for that matter?’
‘Not that anyone knows. The constable has asked.’
‘Was there a funeral shortly before Fletcher’s?’
‘You’re thinking the bodies were switched? Or put one on top of another? Monday we held services for Maddie Hamilton, and the coffin was open. Her express wish. I was there when the lid was put in place. I ask you, who would wish to bury a man alive?’
‘Perhaps someone wanted him to wake up and find himself unable to do anything about it. A crueler death than most.’
Rutledge thanked the rector and left. Just off the market square he found an inn. The sleepy night clerk gave him a room on the front, and from his window he could see the church tower’s clock. It had gone one.
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