by Alice Castle
‘All right then, coffee. Get me a coffee. Surely you can manage that?’ he snarled. ‘And be quick about it!’
Magenta looked him up and down, then reached behind the desk and grabbed her coat and bag. Sauntering as best she could on her perilous heels, she closed the door as he shrieked, ‘Wait! I haven’t told you what kind of coffee yet. Get back here now.’
Once she was safely outside and in full view of the bustling street, Magenta paused in the middle of the huge window onto the gallery, made sure she had Benson’s full attention, then extended her elegantly long middle finger up at him, before swaying away in her shoes.
Benson, ducking from the curious glances of passers-by, kicked the wastepaper basket as he strode away from the preposterous desk. The day was not going well. Why the hell was Slope playing hard to get? And now he’d have to find a new gallery girl as well. A stream of obscenities turned the expensive white space of his gallery to blue.
Chapter Seven
The next day Beth spent tied to her desk at Wyatt’s, renewing her acquaintance with her in-tray. She was still in the thick of planning the next exhibition on the life and times of naughty old Thomas Wyatt, the swashbuckling founder of the Dulwich schools who, as she’d discovered, had been up to his impressive ruff in the slave trade. With its customary aplomb, Wyatt’s School had turned this horrifying discovery into a talking point and a reason to endow an institute looking into the issue, which Beth was now heading up.
After the exhibition, her next project was to try and get a book on Wyatt’s shenanigans up and running. It would be part biography, part study on the iniquitous trade he’d made his money in, and would encompass a historical examination of the man’s life and times, as well as an understanding of the economic world he lived in. To say that Beth was daunted by the idea was an understatement. It was her brainchild, and played to her great love of history and her dogged research skills. But she was already beginning to think she’d bitten off far more than was reasonably chewable, even by Colin himself, who suddenly seemed to want to nibble on anything that didn’t move away fast enough.
She looked over at him from her desk. He had his chops around the table leg over in the corner of the room. She could have sworn it looked a little thinner than it had the day before. She’d have to invest in some of those rubber chicken toys or something, otherwise he’d wear out all the furniture with his slobbering. She’d thought only human babies had teething issues, but elderly Labs seemed just as prone to put absolutely everything in their mouths. She wondered, with a sudden pang, whether it was an anxiety thing. Was he wondering where on earth his master had gone, and compensating by gnawing everything? It was a bit odd, but then she didn’t pretend to understand dog psychology. She had enough trouble trying to work out small boys, big tall men, and naughty cats.
One good thing was that, so far, she seemed to have got away with bringing Colin to work. She certainly couldn’t leave him at home all day with only Magpie for company. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d come home to if she did, but she knew it wouldn’t be pretty. In theory, Colin had quite a size advantage over the black and white moggy, but Magpie had all the smarts.
It was nearly three by the time Beth had finished. She was glowing with virtue after spending almost a full day on the work she was supposed to be doing, allowing only for a quick lunch with her friend, Nina, and a brief trip out to the playing fields with Colin when he’d felt a pressing need. Ten minutes delving into Mark Smeaton after all that good behaviour really wouldn’t be too terrible, would it?
But she’d exhausted Wikipedia and was at a bit of a loss as to where artists hung out on the Internet. Maybe a general Googling would bring up a chunk of gossip or a thread that she could follow? Or, wait a minute, had Smeaton ever been married or involved with anyone else? Was there a love interest in his background, someone that either had a reason to do him harm, or would want to help Beth find those who had? After all, as she now knew only too well, the secret to a murder often lay very close to home.
She quickly clicked her way to the biography section of Smeaton’s Wikipedia page. But there was nothing there, bar a passing mention of his parents. She looked at the names, but they meant nothing to her. Suddenly she had a thought. There was one person she knew who was of the right generation, more or less, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Dulwich connections and might well have encountered Smeaton’s parents – particularly if either one of them played bridge.
It was with some trepidation that Beth picked up the phone to her mother, Wendy. Now in her fifties, Wendy’s lifestyle was that of a much older woman, involving bridge, little teas, tremendous enthusiasm for fiddly types of crochet and embroidery, and the occasional sedate walk in Dulwich Park with one of her long-time confidantes. Beth sometimes wondered how she’d grown to adulthood with such a light hand on the parental tiller. Her father had always been at work. She remembered trying to get into the garage, as a small child, as that was the place her father disappeared to every morning and the spot he emerged from every night. With her child’s logic, she assumed he spent his days shut away in there, and already she could see why he might want to. She’d even tried turning the hands of the kitchen clock forward, one day, to hasten him home. But despite her best efforts, the hours had dragged, and she and her older brother, Josh, had amused themselves in their own ways.
Josh had loved drawing and taking photos, while she had always had her nose in a book. Then Josh had discovered the opposite sex and had taken to roaming the nearby park with a succession of girls from the College School, as today’s Dulwich teenagers still did, but he’d always kept a protective eye out for his sister. Their somewhat isolated childhood had made them quite a team; the two of them against the world.
Times had been different then. There had been much less watchfulness over the business of being a child. She and her friends had later roamed freely after school in Dulwich Park, too, trailing home only as dusk fell and the park wardens rattled the gates. She’d always been the one urging her friends to leave, terrified of being locked in all night. Others had dragged their feet. There had been so much less to do at home – no computer games, no computers at all; children’s telly limited to a couple of hours an evening; nothing for older kids and teenagers, and all usually finished by the time she got in anyway. It was no wonder that she’d taken refuge in books from such an early age.
Sometimes Beth looked at Ben hunched over his console, and wondered if he’d ever take the pleasure in a written world the way she had always done. Reading had been such a solace to her. Though she’d had friends aplenty at the junior school, secondary had been much trickier. But she was never lonely when she had companions like Nancy Mitford waiting for her in the Hons’ cupboard, or Dr Watson, eagerly waiting to explain how his eccentric friend had arrived at another astonishing conclusion.
Josh, in his lazy, affectionate way, had always looked out for her when they were at junior school together. But when he was eleven, off he went to Wyatt’s. She, two years younger, waited for the moment when she’d go to the girls’ equivalent in Dulwich, the College School. But it was not to be. It was then that one of the major crises of Beth’s life had struck, with the death of her father.
There were repercussions for all of them. Josh, perhaps, lost a steadying influence that could have shown him there were worse things than commitment. Wendy was locked into (or embraced) a solo path, which became narrower and narrower with every passing year. And Beth’s confidence that life would carry her through blithely, took a knock she had never really recovered from. She’d been about to sit her exam for the College School when her father died and, to no-one’s surprise, in the circumstances it didn’t go well. Instead, she found herself packed off to the second-best school in the area, which had been fine, but perhaps hadn’t stretched her as much as she’d needed. She sometimes wondered whether it was this that kept her focussing so relentlessly on Wyatt’s for her Ben.
With all she now knew about th
e stresses and strains on girls at academic hot-houses like the College School, Beth sometimes wondered whether she’d actually had a lucky escape years ago. And she’d done very well for herself, there was no doubt of that. Her financial worries were caused by her lack of a partner and the relentless downturn in the fields of research and journalism that had always appealed to her so strongly, nothing else. And at her school, she’d managed to be a surprisingly big fish for such a little person, because the pond was comparatively titchy, while even years ago, the College School had been bursting with piranhas.
Josh, meanwhile, who must have passed his own Wyatt’s interview when no-one had really been looking, had never done anything much with his top-notch education. You didn’t need a fistful of A levels or a university degree to hold a camera. True, he was a clever chap who’d carved out a niche for himself without appearing to try one iota, which was a hard trick to pull off.
Beth wasn’t unhappy with her lot, though. And having landed the job at Wyatt’s, and then having managed to bump it up into something much more substantial, she was doing surprisingly well. Wendy, too, thoroughly enjoyed her life once she didn’t have to keep breaking off her activities to iron a husband’s shirt or nod along to his anecdotes, though for some while the little trio kept up the fiction that she was heartbroken. She certainly never looked at another man, but Beth, from her current vantage point, saw that more as her mother washing her hands of the entire sex as a bad job that might interrupt her bridge schedule, rather than pining forever over her hardworking, kindly father.
When Beth had found to her horror that history had repeated itself and snatched her own husband away, she was determined not to copy her mother’s pattern. She sometimes worried she had leaned over too far the other way and made Ben the focus of her life too much. That could be just as unhealthy as the benign neglect of her own childhood years. Katie had once said as much to her and, while she’d been furious at the time, she now saw the justice of the statement.
She’d redressed the balance a little with her relationship, such as it was, with Harry York. But even here she was beginning to suspect that Ben got more out of it than she did. It was great for Ben to have a man about the place, not laying down the law exactly, but showing a different side of life. And, of course, he showed much greater aptitude with the PlayStation controller than Beth ever could. Isn’t that what the psychologists said boys needed growing up?
But what was she getting out of it? York was perpetually cross with her, and she was always infuriated with him. Was this what love was supposed to be about? And, not to take too big a leaf out of Prince Charles’s book, what was love anyway? She wasn’t sure it was the feeling she’d had lately about the big policeman. That might be better described as red-blooded anger.
One thing was for sure, though. Wendy adored him. She’d fussed over him as though he was a visiting dignitary on the few occasions Beth had towed him along for a Sunday lunch or an awkward tea. And true, his presence did somewhat lighten the atmosphere which, once again, was good for Ben.
Beth sighed and picked up the phone. Her mother meant well. And she might actually come in handy over this Rye business.
The phone rang five or six times before it was answered. Wendy’s nervous voice quavered, ‘Hello?’ as though certain she was about to be bombarded with exhortations to double-glaze her windows or swap to an incomprehensible electricity tariff. Beth sighed again. She’d offered to get her mother caller ID on her phone to save her this anxiety, but Wendy had resisted, insisting it was all far too much trouble.
‘It’s me, Mum. Just wanted to ask you something. You know everyone on the bridge circuit, right?’
As ever, when put on the spot, her mother started to prevaricate. Beth could just imagine her, standing in her over-furnished hall, surrounded by the fancy plates hanging on the wall and the porcelain statuettes standing on the console table. According to her mother, they were all worth a fortune and every single one requiring loads of painstaking dusting, done by a long-suffering cleaner and most emphatically not by the lady of the house.
Her mother was like a beautiful piece of Dresden herself. Not quite as short as her daughter – and who was? Beth thought sourly – Wendy was still a tiny woman, delicately built, and with a shepherdess prettiness that had scarcely faded with the passing years. She favoured pastel shades, flouncy florals, trailing scarves, and dainty little heels, despite her tottering steps. Beth sometimes thought a little crossly that she was a broken hip waiting to happen. Her hair was already snowy white. She maintained this had happened the moment her husband had had his heart attack, though the family album told a different story. Not entirely by coincidence, the colour was a perfect foil for her blue eyes and clear complexion. Indeed, her hair just looked like the eighteenth century wigs sported by so many of her favourite ornaments.
As usual, she was acting as though Beth had trained an interrogator’s spotlight on her and was trying to get her to admit to something incriminating. Her ingrained response was to equivocate for all she was worth. ‘I wouldn’t say that, dear, oh no.’
‘Well, you’ve been playing for thirty-odd years, haven’t you? And living in Dulwich for even longer?’
‘Don’t remind me, dear. Are you trying to make me feel my age?’
Beth noted the tiniest hint of asperity in her mother’s tone and tried a new tack. ‘You’ve got such a fantastic memory, I just wondered if I could run some names by you…’
This was much more successful. ‘Of course, dear, any time. You know I always like to help where I can. Though I don’t quite understand what you want, and anyway, I’m running a bit late. I should have left already; I only stopped because of the dratted phone. Oh, that was you.’
Beth frowned savagely, safe in the knowledge that her mother couldn’t see any of the range of grimaces she kept specially for their phone conversations.
‘Right. Well, I’d hate to hold you up. But could we maybe meet up? I could show you the names, see if you know them?’
‘Well, if you really think it would be useful, dear, though I don’t quite see how I could possibly… Of course, I’m quite booked up… But who are these people, and why do you want to know about them?’
Wendy wasn’t the only one who could descend into impenetrable vagueness when it suited her. ‘Oh, I just wondered, that’s all, we can chat about it when I see you,’ said Beth airily. ‘Shall we say tomorrow, then, at Aurora in the Village?’
‘Aurora? That place with the dreadful coffee? I don’t know why you’d want to go there, dear. And I definitely can’t do tomorrow.’
Beth kicked herself. Of course, Wendy wouldn’t be able to meet so spontaneously. Anyone else might squeeze their daughter in with twenty-four hours’ notice, but Wendy was so rigid in her habits she made the average straitjacket look like a Lycra catsuit.
‘I’m just getting my diary,’ said Wendy, and Beth waited in fuming silence as her mother pottered around audibly. Beth could see her all too clearly in her mind’s eye, fluttering between this drawer and that, ineffectually faffing over notebooks and poncey pens adorned with silk tassels, before finally tracking down her appointments book. When she eventually got back to the phone, she was out of breath and flustered. ‘This is making me terribly late, Beth. But, oh well, if you insist, let’s pencil in something for next week. Perhaps we could meet on—'
‘How about Monday?’ Beth asked. As she had a job and a child to manage single-handedly, she was willing to bet she was a tiny bit busier than a woman who’d never worked in her life. But no, as usual, the last word went to Wendy.
‘I was going to say Wednesday. At 2.30. That’s the earliest I can do it, and even then, well, it’s not going to be easy. But I suppose I’ll just have time before bridge at St Barnabas,’ Wendy twittered. ‘I must go now, dear, I’m terribly late,’ she added, putting the phone down without further ado, and certainly without checking to see whether Beth was also free.
Beth smiled serenely as she repl
aced the receiver. Although her mother had managed to push the appointment as far away as she could, she had still agreed to a meeting, and Beth was a little surprised. She’d thought a lot more excuses would be deployed before a suggestion was trotted out that they got together next April. A delay of only a few days felt like a bit of a victory. Ok, it might not seem like a major step forward to anyone else, but making Wendy drink a dishwater cuppa while doing something helpful was quite enough progress for Beth this afternoon.
She’d just have to contain herself until Wednesday, and who knew, by then she might have an even longer list of suspects to question her mother about. She quickly cleared her desk and collected Colin. He got up like a stiff old gentleman and shook himself thoroughly, before being hauled down the road as fast as both their stumpy legs would go, to pick up Ben.
It was a crisp, clear afternoon, the sky not yet tinging into the indigo of darkness. Colin panted heavily as they chugged along the chilly street. The days were drawing out and, though there was nothing yet on the twiggy trees to suggest spring was waiting in the wings, there was just the suspicion of a relaxation in winter’s grip. Beth was glad to feel it, though it reminded her that the Wyatt’s interviews were looming ever closer.
She suddenly realised that she’d probably have to get Ben an outfit. This was going to be tricky. There was no real problem in persuading him to be chatty and confident with adults. As an only child, he’d been used to bearing the full brunt of parental attention and was good with grown-ups. He wasn’t at all keen on getting dressed up, though. There could be a major battle looming.
Luckily, at the school gates she bumped into Katie, who was listening with a slight smile to Belinda MacKenzie regale the playground with the latest crimes committed by her au pair, who, like a very difficult trigonometry problem, just wasn’t working out.
‘I simply asked her to get a little light lunch together for seven friends and their kids, and she actually rolled her eyes at me. Can you believe it?’ shrilled Belinda, clocking Beth with a cold stare and ignoring her completely.
