A Bed of Scorpions (2 page)

This was much worse than I’d expected. Even though he’d said Frank had killed himself, it hadn’t crossed my mind that Aidan had found him. I’d assumed that it would be somehow tucked neatly out of sight. Apparently not. I waited. As much or as little as he needed to tell me was fine.

Aidan took a deep breath. ‘I went into his office, and …’ He paused, then continued in a rush. ‘He was there. At his desk. He’d shot himself.’

I flinched. I’d only ever been in the office part of the gallery once, or maybe twice. Downstairs the exhibition rooms were the kind of modernist dream that a movie director would have rejected as being too clichéd: white floors, white walls, and nothing else except big, light-filled windows. Upstairs was different, a rabbit warren of small offices and cubicles, booby-trapped with random outcroppings of old desks that appeared to have been abandoned, and filing cabinets stuffed in anywhere. I imagined Frank, his reddish-blond hair shining out in that dark labyrinth.

Aidan’s voice was hoarse. ‘There was blood. Across the wall, a huge spray of it.’ He was still staring at where I’d been sitting, as if he hadn’t noticed I’d moved.

A black gun appeared in my picture, on the scuffed floorboards, the body in one of Frank’s smooth, dark Italian suits thrown back by the violence Aidan was describing, the blood-red spray like an abstract painting on the wall behind him.

I tried to wipe it away by concentrating on practicalities.
‘Was he ill?’ I asked. ‘Or depressed? Did you know?’

Something shifted in Aidan. ‘I hope the bastard was depressed.’ He wasn’t looking at me, but he must have felt me flinch, because his tone became argumentative, as if I’d protested out loud. ‘He knew I would find him, me or Myra. Why would he do that to us? I’ve worked with him, we’ve been friends, for twenty years. Myra’s sixty and got a weak heart.’ He became pugnacious. ‘What kind of bastard leaves someone to find that?’

I had no answer. Instead, ‘Did he leave a note? Do you know why?’ Why – why kill yourself, and why kill yourself that way, and why there – seemed suddenly very important.

Aidan clenched his hands into fists. He clearly wanted to hit out. At Frank, though, not at me for asking. He barely knew I was there. ‘He left a note, if you can call it that. His computer was open and he’d typed “I’m sorry”. That’s it. “I’m sorry”.’

I answered the pain, not the anger. ‘Oh Aidan, that’s terrible.’ I put my arm around him and we sat there without speaking.

The lovely eastern European waitress who had worked at the café for as long as we’d been customers hovered by the table. She looked questioningly at the closed menus and then at the two of us, Aidan with his hands over his eyes again, me just staring blankly ahead. I leapt at the return of normality, grasping onto ordering lunch as something useful I could do.

I named a bunch of things at random. It didn’t matter what, we weren’t going to be able to eat anyway. I turned to Aidan. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘God, yes,’ he said, looking at me properly for the first
time. I smiled back at him and ordered a bottle of wine, then moved back to my original seat.

Maybe focusing on detail, on the practicalities, would help. ‘What happened? Did you call the police? And how’s Toby?’ Toby was Frank’s partner. They’d been a couple as long as I’d known Frank. Toby was a civil servant, but I knew nothing else about him. I didn’t know them nearly as well as I knew Aidan and Anna. It was more the kind of friendship where we kissed warmly when we bumped into each other somewhere, saying how good it was to meet, and we must get together, and then none of us ever followed up. Not from anything except busy lives and, really, ultimately, lack of interest. Not dislike, but not like, or at least not affection either.

Aidan brought me back to the present. ‘Of course I called the police. What do you think, we worked around him for the rest of the day?’

I shrugged an acknowledgement. My question hadn’t made much sense, and the anger in Aidan’s reply was still for Frank, not me.

‘We didn’t open yesterday, and so far not today either. They’ve been there, taking pictures, going through the files. They’re talking to his doctor, but if he was ill, he hadn’t told Toby. Who says the two of them were very happy – as happy as any couple who have been together for nearly twenty years can be, at least, is the way he put it, whatever that means. So …’ He shifted his weight, and I realised that only now had he got to whatever it was he wanted to talk to me about ‘So, they think it must be business problems.’

‘And were there any?’ He wanted me to ask, or he wouldn’t have told me that much.

‘If there are,’ he said, and I noticed the change in the verb tense, although I wasn’t sure if he did, ‘if there are, I’m not aware of them.’

All I knew about the art world was the bits Aidan had dropped over the years, and what I read in the papers. Both suggested that money was far more important in their business than in mine. Even as I thought that, I knew that it was stupid. Money ruled my working life: how much could I offer an author, how many copies of each book were sold, at what price, how much could we squeeze out of subsidiary rights? But I never saw the money, never invoiced for it, never received the payments. I never had any real sense of the cash flow of the business as a whole.

The art world was different. A gallery like Aidan and Frank’s – like Aidan’s, now, perhaps – dealt with vast sums. Whenever I heard the two men talking about work, the commodity element was always right there on the surface. Art was about buying and selling, it was about trading an object for cash in a way books never were for their creators, or their version of art dealers, the publishers. Someone would say, ‘Fabulous show, I love what the artist is doing,’ and the answer was ‘Yes, we’ve sold six pieces’, or ‘But no one’s buying’. I’m not saying that publishers don’t think about selling books. We do. It’s just that, at £7.99, one sale more or less doesn’t matter; when you’re selling a single object for six figures, it does.

None of that was relevant, though, so I returned to detail. ‘What happens now?’

Aidan looked blank at what I realised was a question vague to the point of inanity, and I clarified. ‘Can Toby make
plans for the funeral? Does – did – Frank have family?’

Aidan sighed and rubbed his face again. He looked bereft. He was temporarily done with being angry with Frank, temporarily done with worrying about the financial havoc that might be lurking. Frank was once again his working partner of two decades, the man he probably spoke to more often than he spoke to his wife.

‘His parents are dead. There’s a brother and sister-in-law, and two nieces. He was close to them.’ He paused as the waitress brought our food. We looked at it, slightly nauseated, but automatically spooned random dollops of salads onto our plates. Neither of us picked up our cutlery, though. We waited until the wine arrived. That we picked up. Just as quickly, Aidan put his down. ‘I need to keep a clear head. And I don’t think I’ve eaten since …’ His eyes widened. ‘Since the plane.’

That was more than a day and a half. I pushed his plate towards him. ‘Then eat something now. Even if you don’t want to.’ I sounded like his mother, but that was a good thing at the moment, I decided.

He picked up his fork, but he just held it, as though he were pacifying me by making the gesture. He returned to where he’d left off. ‘One of his nieces, Lucy, works for us in the holidays. She’s at university, but she fills in, and Frank was hoping she might join us full-time.’ He paused, his mouth thinning again. ‘How could he do that to her?’

I touched his hand, nudging it towards his plate. He smiled gently at me, and brushed his other hand across my cheek, a gesture of intimacy we hadn’t had for years. Then he ate a couple of mouthfuls, although it was to show me he was OK, not because he was OK.

‘The other thing is that I’ve had to cancel all my trips.’

‘You do? I know Frank does – did – the admin and gallery side, but is there so much that you have to be there?’

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘It’s not that. The police don’t want me to leave the country for the moment.’

I sat back, shocked. ‘They said that? That sounds like television.’

‘It was like television: finding him, being told not to leave London without checking in with them first. Oh, they were very polite. But I thought it was best to speak to a lawyer, and a forensic accountant.’

I tilted my head. ‘What’s that?’

‘Not the kind who does your books, or your tax returns. The kind you use if you’re being audited. Or, in this case, if the CID are telling you not to leave town.’

CID. I sat up. ‘I don’t understand. If the police think there are money issues …’ I was circling around the words I didn’t want to use, fraud, tax evasion, money-laundering, or – or what? ‘Are you saying the police are looking at this as … as not suicide?’ Now I was circling around the big word I didn’t want to use. But otherwise, why CID, why not Revenue and Customs? I was hazy on the division of labour at the police, but this didn’t sound right for embezzlement and suicide.

More importantly, it sounded worryingly close to home. ‘Um, I can’t remember if I told you, when I last saw you …’ I stalled, started again. ‘Do you know about my …’ This was absurd. ‘Do you know I’m seeing a policeman?’

Aidan stared me dead in the eye. ‘Why do you think I’m here?’

Aidan had been looking at me as if I were an idiot for
the simple reason that I was an idiot. I hadn’t wondered why he was there at all. We were having lunch because we’d planned to have lunch. But that made no sense. If I’d found a colleague dead in my office – I flinched even at the thought – if I had, wouldn’t I have cancelled everything that could be cancelled? And lunch with a friend I saw every couple of years plainly fell into the ‘could be cancelled’ category.

‘What are you thinking? I’m not sure I’d know where to begin. I don’t know who does what at Scotland Yard.’ I was burbling, I knew, but I couldn’t stop. ‘Jake doesn’t talk about his work. Sure, he moans about the office, or his colleagues, but nothing else. Not ever. I don’t think he can – how can the details of violent death be conversation? And you know that’s what he does, don’t you? Murder, not fraud, or tax, or …’ I steadied myself ‘Or embezzlement.’

Aidan was grim. ‘Of course I know that’s what he does. He’s doing it. In my gallery. Now.’

The breath left my body. I opened my mouth. And closed it again. Then I did it again. Until, ‘Jake is in the gallery,’ I repeated. Of course that was why Aidan was here. And of course that was why Aidan was here. ‘You cancelled our lunch when you found Frank. And then, when the police arrived, and you realised Jake was …’ I waved a hand. ‘That Jake was Jake, you reinstated.’

He nodded.

I closed my eyes briefly, trying to gather my thoughts. Then, ‘I have no idea what to do or say. All I can think is that I need to stay as far out of this as possible. Far.’ If I’d been standing up, I think I would physically have been backing away. As it was, I felt myself pushing against
the banquette, my hands rigid on the edge of the table. I tried to loosen my grip. Nothing. Because even as I said the words, I knew they weren’t realistic. How could I possibly stay out of this? And whose side was I on? Jake’s? Aidan’s? He and Frank had been my friends my whole adult life.

I stopped short. Why was I thinking there were sides? Why did I assume Aidan’s side was different from Jake’s? If someone had killed Frank, then we were on the same side. Obviously. I said this to myself twice, to make sure I recognised how obvious it was. The bile sitting at the bottom of my throat replied that perhaps it wasn’t so obvious at all.

And Jake. Jesus. That he wasn’t going to be happy was an understatement of epic proportions. Even calling it an understatement of epic proportions was an understatement of epic proportions. We had met when he was investigating the death of a courier. First I was simply someone he interviewed for background, and then, involuntarily, I had become more deeply involved. And he had hated that. That I’d been in danger had made him furious, not with me, but with himself for letting it happen. That I knew Aidan and Frank, that Aidan was having lunch with me even as Jake was opening an investigation, wasn’t going to get a five-star write-up in the
Crimebusters’ Review.

That was on the professional side. On the personal … On the personal, my stomach churned. We had been feeling our way gently. I had what Jake called a reflexive liberal-leftie attitude to the police, distrusting much of what I saw in the news. He, in turn, was, I think, slightly bemused by what I did for a living, or at least the passion I felt for it. He liked books, he read, but he didn’t really think they
were essential. They were a fun pastime, like football, not a reason for existence. I also had a sneaking suspicion that it was probably wildly against police regulations for him to have begun a relationship with me when I was a witness in a case he was investigating. But he had never said so, and I had never asked. There was rather a lot neither of us had talked about, in fact. I’d always known that while I talked a lot, it was only ever about things that didn’t matter. Now I realised he was the same.

‘Was Jake there yesterday?’ I asked abruptly.

Aidan nodded, keeping his eyes on my face.

I’d seen him yesterday evening. We spent most of our free time together, but there wasn’t that much of it. As a detective, Jake worked unsociable hours. Publishing also spills out long past the eight-hour office day. I do a fair amount of evening work-socialising – launch parties, readings, and events – as well as the more usual social-socialising. In between that, and work, whatever time was left, we were usually together.

I thought back to the previous night. Jake had arrived at my flat early and we’d cooked dinner together. Jake was a surprisingly good cook, and made things I was scared of, like pastry, so we worked in tandem, without getting in each other’s way, with a couple of glasses of wine and idle chat. I closed my eyes, trying to remember what he’d said. He’d mentioned the politics that was holding back a promotion for one of his colleagues, and that he needed to prep for an upcoming court appearance, neither of which was about the day’s work as such. After dinner he’d watched television, I’d read, and then we’d gone to bed, which was where we did some of our best communicating.