A Bed of Scorpions (7 page)

Not that I’m boasting. I’m not a heaven-sent Lady Bountiful, scattering sweetness and light. If I were, it wouldn’t have taken me nearly twenty years to meet him, or to discover he had been a hugely influential architect in the 1960s and early 1970s, but had retired, no one knew why, when he was still young. I still don’t know why, and I wouldn’t dream of asking. I think of us as friends, but he is thirty years older than I am, and his manner is very formal – as I said, I never even use his first name. As far as I’m concerned, ‘Mr’
is
his first name.

I tapped on his door, and when he answered, asked if he’d like to come down for a drink. That’s the polite code we’ve devised for ‘I thought I’d see if you’d like some company, and if you have the inclination – I assume he has the time – I’d be happy to come in and visit for a while’. That evening, as he mostly does when I go up, he stepped back and gestured me in, saying he was about to open a bottle.

His flat couldn’t be more different from mine if we’d set out to do it intentionally. Despite his career as a modernist architect (raw concrete was his thing), the place looks like something from Hansel and Gretel – all Central European dark wood, that is, not that it’s the home of a starving
woodcutter and his family. The floors are polished dark wood, the furniture is dark wood and dark upholstery, and then red rugs and curtains warm everything up. It’s like a very comfortable womb, if the womb had been decorated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s heyday.

Mr Rudiger poured us some wine, and we discussed household matters – did the hall need repainting, and would Anthony have time to hack back the ivy soon, and wasn’t Bim getting big, basically just catching up on the week or so since we’d last seen each other. Then I filled him in on Aidan and Frank, which, I realised once I began to talk, was why I’d come up. Mr Rudiger was a terrific listener, always interested, always ready to offer an opinion, but always, somehow, keeping himself apart. The world operated like television for him: it was a one-way street, and he didn’t participate. Since he was not invested in the outcome, everything he said sounded sensibly impartial. Helena told me what to do. Mr Rudiger somehow told me what I already knew I ought to be doing.

‘I’m waiting for Jake to get home, and then I’ll tell him,’ I finished.

Mr Rudiger cocked his head. ‘He’s home.’

‘He is?’ I hadn’t heard the door.

‘About ten minutes ago, but I wanted the end of the story first.’

That was slightly uncanny, and made me wonder how much noise I made when I got home. ‘I’d better go and get it over with then.’ I put my glass down.

‘Do you want to ask him up here?’ He smiled at me gently in the way he had, as if someone was telling him a good joke just out of my hearing. I knew, and he knew
that I knew, that if I told Jake in front of Mr Rudiger, Jake couldn’t get cross with me for being involved. And, really, I didn’t see how I could help being involved, I whined to myself. I hadn’t become friends with Aidan twenty years ago in the expectation that his business partner would die in an unexplained fashion two decades later. And I hadn’t chosen to sit on this sodding arts panel in the expectation that a fellow panellist would be jumping said business partner’s niece. In fact, none of this was my fault, and I was becoming quite self-righteously outraged by Jake’s potential crossness.

Mr Rudiger’s smile broadened. They weren’t telling jokes out of earshot now, but right here in the room. I grinned back at him, since we both knew what I’d been thinking.

‘Good idea,’ I said, and I texted down,
Dinner won’t be ready till 8.30 earliest. Mr R says would you like to come up for a drink?

Mr Rudiger looked amused again. ‘Do you text from room to room?’

I was appalled. ‘No!’ I hesitated. ‘Hardly ever.’ My tone was grudging.

He laughed again, and moved to the door, hearing Jake on the stairs before I did. I waited in the sitting room while the two men greeted each other. I needed to work out exactly what I was going to say, and until that moment I’d successfully managed to avoid thinking about it at all.

When they sat down, I let Jake take his first mouthful of wine before starting. I told him about Lucy, and the gallery representing Stevenson, who had recently reappeared as another potential suicide. As Helena had guessed, if Jake
had seen the news of the finding of Stevenson’s body, he hadn’t remembered it. And as I had guessed, he was not happy to hear about it from me.

He rubbed his head and stared at me angrily, as though I’d done it to spite him. ‘You couldn’t have told me this morning, or last night, when I would have had time to get moving on this, send some emails to the States?’ Then he looked away. Not cross now, just thinking out what to do. He stood. ‘I’ll make some calls, send some emails. I’ll need an hour before dinner.’ Even I could interpret the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you click to Mr Rudiger’s front door.

That was interesting. He was upset that I was involved, which I had expected, but he didn’t think what I had told him was worth going back to the office for, which I hadn’t. Or perhaps he just had a mad passion for my lamb stew.

I shared this possibility with Mr Rudiger, who laughed out loud. I guess my stew isn’t as good as I think it is.

I
N THE MORNING
, Jake had left for work before I got back from my run. That almost never happened, and he usually told me beforehand if he had to go in early. I didn’t take it as a particularly good sign. He’d been quiet when I came down from Mr Rudiger’s, not irritated anymore, but absent-minded.

Most people now, when you say ‘absent-minded’, are absent, but not terribly minded. Usually they (OK, me too) are mentally absent because they’re checking emails and texts, playing on Twitter or Facebook, giving the real people around them half their attention, or less, and scattering the remainder among a range of electronic distractions. I know that, truthfully, the only time I am entirely focused is when I’m editing. Then I shut down my email and Twitter altogether, and concentrate absolutely on one thing. It’s an inanimate thing when it’s a manuscript. When I’m working on a new book face-to-face with an author, it’s the
same focus, but on a person, and my mind is split in two, with a constant assessment, like a voice-over, running in my head alongside, but separate from, whatever I am saying out loud: is s/he receptive now, if so, it’s a good time to hit him/her with that major reservation I have about the first chapter; s/he is on the defensive now, so I’ll fall back and go through the things I like and think really work. I am aware that I’m doing this – and I’m really good at it, if I do say so myself – but the focus is entirely on that other person, and I never think about me, much less about email, or anything else at all. If you listen to the way fishing enthusiasts talk about fly-fishing, it sounds the same: you end up concentrating so hard, you’re part of the river, and of the fish, and you somehow feel what they feel.

It sounds really wanky, I know. I assume most editors do, and think, the same, although I’ve never asked. But now I realised that this aspect of my job matched Jake’s. Agreed, I don’t generally mix with people who think violent death adds that vital soupçon of flavour to the day’s routine, but when Jake interviews witnesses – and I know this from first-hand experience – he has the same honed-down concentration, and I’m sure if I asked him he’d say there was the same split-voice commentary. The only difference is that Jake also has levels of antagonism to overcome. Most witnesses don’t want him to know what they are thinking. Even if they are not guilty of anything worse than not waiting for the little green man before crossing the road, there are always things that are no business of the police. Authors might be antagonistic too – might? Hell, they definitely are – but they mostly
recognise that we want the same things: for their book to be as good as it can be. The only divergence is on how to get it there.

So, when I said Jake was absent-minded, what I really meant was that he was concentrating, just not on me. That was fine, and for the most part I spent the evening as I would have done if he hadn’t been there. Mostly. I didn’t read while we ate, which I would have done if I’d been alone – that seemed a little too blatantly fuck-you. But I flicked the radio on, and listened to that, and then after we’d washed up I put the TV on so Jake could pretend to be watching, while I pretended to read. On the surface, there wasn’t much difference between this evening and many others. Except that he wasn’t really there, and that when I went to bed, he just sat on, staring past the television.

And in the morning he left early. Without telling me.

It was the case, not me, I repeated. And for most of the day I believed it.

Helena rang at lunchtime to say Aidan and Anna were coming for dinner, and did I have anything scheduled that meant I couldn’t come too.

‘I’ve got a book launch at six, but that’s all.’ That was easy, but I paused. ‘Is Jake invited too? I don’t know if he’s working tonight, but are you going to ask him?’

‘How early can you leave your launch?’

I was surprised. Helena never got home before seven, and so she rarely ate before 8.30. This was breaking all her rules.

‘If you can get here by seven, we can have an hour to talk, and I’ll ask Jake for 8.30.’

I still hesitated. ‘I think I’m uncomfortable with that. Would it be better if we didn’t come?’

‘I’m uncomfortable too. But no one asked us about our comfort levels. We get on with the situation we’ve been handed as best we can.’ The lawyer’s credo. Maybe I’d embroider it on a cushion for her birthday. If I learnt to embroider first.

I thought for a moment. I was in the middle, and I couldn’t change that. Helena was in the middle because she was Aidan’s lawyer and my mother. She couldn’t change that. Maybe I’d just embroider the damn cushion for myself.

‘I’ll get there as close to seven as I can.’

My mother lives a twenty-minute walk from me. Near enough for a friendly back and forth, not so close I feel her terrifying efficiency bearing down on me all the time. I didn’t bother to change, since it was just Aidan and Anna, and in effect a working dinner. Or a war summit. I brushed my hair and put some eyeliner on. That way I’d look as if I’d made an effort. I wouldn’t really, but it would be enough to stop Helena from sighing when she saw me.

If I didn’t love Helena, I would have learnt to dislike her a long time ago. She seems to do everything perfectly, with no effort. I know that that’s not true – I know it can’t be true – but from my vantage point, that’s what it looks like. She’s been a senior partner at a big City law firm forever, she has an active social life, with dozens – hundreds? thousands? – of interesting friends, with whom she has dinner, goes to films, concerts and theatre. She is well dressed without being a style victim. She exercises,
she doesn’t drink too much, she probably even flosses regularly and gets her five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. So you can see why she drives me crazy. Her private life is firmly private. She and my father divorced when I was a young teenager. I don’t know why. I was too young to be told more than an edited version when it happened, and since then I’ve never asked and have no plans to. I’ve always figured if I stick my nose in her business, it gives her licence to stick hers in mine.

I only spent twenty minutes at the launch. It wasn’t one of my books, or I couldn’t have done that, but I wanted to go and be a warm body to be counted. It was a book I admired, and it looked like it wasn’t going to get much attention. Which is often what happens to books you admire but don’t love. By the time I got to Helena’s, Aidan was already there, and it looked like he had been for a while, papers in front of him, iPad open. Anna was coming from work, and would be there closer to eight. The plan was that the three of us would speak first, them as client–solicitor, me as unofficial conduit of police information. But it all felt slightly underhand, just as Jake being invited later felt underhand. And shabby.

Helena picked up her laptop, which she’d put down when I let myself in. ‘We’re going through the Stevenson inquest reports,’ said Helena, answering my unspoken query. ‘As Stevenson’s dealer, Aidan had a representative there.’

‘I read the
New York Times
reports, and I saw the English papers last month. What was there that wasn’t reported?’

Aidan rubbed his eyes. He looked exhausted. ‘That’s what makes no sense. There wasn’t anymore. The situation
was weird, but not disturbing, you know?’ He looked over at me, presumably as a connoisseur of the difference between weird and disturbing. Weirdly
and
disturbingly, I knew exactly the difference.

‘Delia and Celia both told exactly the same story, there was nothing off,’ he continued, looking aggravated rather than worried.

‘Delia and Celia?’

‘Stevenson’s widow and daughter.’

‘Seriously? A woman named Delia named her child Celia? And she wasn’t convicted of child cruelty?’ I shook my head, amazed by the sheer bizarreness of the world. I felt a laugh bubbling up, but then stopped, the smile left pasted on my lips, like a napkin I’d forgotten to untuck.

Aidan would have gone on, but Helena knew me better. ‘What is it? What have you just thought of?’

‘Celia. She lives here in London, right?’ I looked at Aidan. ‘A tall, cool redhead? Married to a man named Stein?’ They were questions, but I already knew the answers.

‘Divorced,’ said Aidan, missing the point, but Helena was on it like a terrier snapping at a cube of cheese. ‘How do you know about her?’ She stiffened. ‘Or do you
know
her?’

‘I know her. Sort of. I didn’t know I knew her.’ I held up a hand to stop Helena telling me I was being incoherent. I knew I was, and so I started again. ‘I didn’t know who she was when I met her, what her maiden name had been. And since I didn’t know the gallery represented Stevenson, even if I had known who she was, it would have just been a sort of interesting “Did you know?” thing.’ I replayed the conversation I’d had with
Miranda in my head. Miranda had said she’d tried to get hold of someone at the Daylesworth Trust for weeks, but no one had been interested. Then, out of the blue, Celia Stein had phoned and agreed to see me. Phoned the day after Frank’s death, and despite the fact that her role at the trust barely impinged on my subject. I thought about the meeting. She had a Stevenson hanging on the wall of her office, too. What else could those bright colours and cartoon figures have been? I just don’t expect people to have pictures by world famous artists on their office walls. Even if I had recognised it, I would have assumed it was a reproduction.

I told Helena and Aidan what had happened, how she’d been in touch, ending, ‘But why? Why would she want to see me?’ I tried to unpick it. ‘What is her function? Does the family run the Stevenson estate, or is it lawyers?’

Aidan was dour. ‘Good question. The legal situation is clear, the human one less so. Stevenson was officially “missing”, not dead, for years, and the estate was administered by court-appointed trustees. But in reality Delia made the decisions. She was Stevenson’s legatee, even if his will would only go into effect once he was declared dead, which since he’d written to say he was leaving, took the full seven years. We – that is, Frank – had represented Stevenson before his disappearance, and a few years after he vanished Frank bought everything he’d left behind. Stevensons weren’t getting a great price, and Delia needed the money: Celia was about to start university, and Delia has two children from an earlier marriage. But in the last few years, Celia has taken over. She’s on the spot, while Delia still lives in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. And
Celia’s field is art.’ His tone turned pugnacious. ‘Celia knows what she’s doing. It’s not like we’re defrauding some little old lady. Celia’s as sharp as they come.’

Having met her, I agreed. ‘I don’t understand. If Frank bought all the works, why does she have any say over what you own?’

‘Usually when we buy an entire estate, yes, we would own the pieces outright. But it can be less …’ He searched for the word. ‘Less absolute than that. With Stevenson, Frank had had a contract with him before his death. I don’t remember now the precise terms of the deal – I may never have heard them – but it was along standard lines: unless they agreed otherwise for some reason, everything Stevenson produced was sold through Frank, who took a commission on the sale before the rest went to Stevenson. After Stevenson died, the situation could have remained the same, with the trustees, or Delia, or whoever was in charge, continuing to sell the works through Frank on commission. But Delia didn’t want that. She needed the money, and so we cut a deal – Frank and I were in partnership by then – that we would pay the then-current price for everything, except a few things Delia decided to keep, and as the paintings were sold, any increase in the prices would go back to Delia, less our commission.’

I concentrated. ‘So the deal was, essentially, the same, it’s just that you paid some, or possibly most, of the money upfront.’

He nodded. ‘And it wasn’t a small sum, either. We had to stretch ourselves financially to do it. It was a good arrangement, it’s made us decent money over the years, if
not huge. Stevensons have never really found their market the way other pop artists have.’

I looked over at Helena. She knew what I was thinking, and she filled me in. ‘Aidan’s forensic accountant is still working through everything, but he says that he’d be very surprised to find anything untoward at this stage. Since yesterday, he’s paid particular attention to the Stevensons Frank has sold over the years, and although he’s just started, everything seems to be in order there too.’ She flicked a glance at Aidan, who was slumped, staring down at his hands. ‘We’ll tell Jake about Celia when he arrives.’ Aidan looked up again, but made no protest.

Jake and Anna arrived within minutes of each other, and we sat and had a drink, pretending to make bright chat, as though this were an ordinary evening where we’d gathered just because we liked each other. That didn’t last. We moved to the dining table and passed the dishes, and then Helena brought us to order.

I’d watched Helena and Jake work together before. But that time Helena hadn’t been representing one of the people Jake was investigating. Who was also sitting right there. The differences were stark. Jake didn’t take the lead now. He might as well have hung a sign around his neck: ‘Observer’. Helena laid out the information she had received from the gallery’s lawyer in the States, the one who had attended the Stevenson inquest. Aidan filled in the background as necessary. And then Helena told him about Celia.

Anna and I said nothing, just pretended to eat. Jake nodded occasionally, to indicate that he was listening. But he kept his eyes on me as Helena and Aidan spoke, seeming to be more interested in gauging my response than
in the facts Helena was relaying, or even deciding what they meant, or what she might not be telling him. He said almost nothing, and he didn’t eat anything either, just sat, one arm crossed over his chest, the other hand at his lips. I contemplated throwing something at him, but I was afraid he’d just shift slightly out of the way and keep staring.

I’d like to say the conversation faltered after that, but that would imply that at some point there had been conversation. There hadn’t. After giving his few bits of information, Aidan fell completely silent. Anna, who never talked much, at first joined Helena in pretending that things were normal, making a brief attempt to discuss a film they’d both seen. But then they gave up too. Helena ate as she always did everything, neatly and temperately; Aidan, Anna, and I pushed our food around briefly, and then stopped even that. And we watched Jake out of the corner of our eyes, watching him watching me.