Gold Digger (18 page)

‘“I have to report that the Coroner, on receipt of the post mortem report, sees no reason to delay the funeral/ cremation of Thomas Porteous. The PM report concludes that albeit the deceased was unnaturally thin, he was not ill nourished and a degree of muscular fitness prevailed. He had survived far longer than anticipated, apparently due to excellent nursing care and imaginative nutrition. The ultimate cause of death was an embolism, coinciding, only possibly, with over exertion. Nothing untoward was discovered.”’

‘Over-exertion,’ Gayle said. Edward continued to read. Gayle smelt her own acetone breath, disliking the word ‘nourished’. She struggled to maintain her own slenderness; she was always hungry.

‘“Your demand for a second post mortem is under consideration. The Coroner is sympathetic to it, especially in the light of your information received as to the background of the deceased’s wife and her inappropriate behaviour at the scene of his death. Mrs Porteous remains the subject of enquiries.”’

‘So,’ Beatrice said. ‘She didn’t have to poison him. She gets away with it. Oh, my poor father, poor man.’

Such an expression of sympathy for the dear deceased was so breathtaking in its hypocrisy that even Edward paused.

‘He must be avenged,’ Beatrice said, sonorously. ‘It is our duty.’

Edward stifled his loathing for his sister-in-law because they needed her. Beatrice was stupidity incarnate what with
her poetry, her long gone spouse, her macrobiotic diet and her refusal to contemplate anything as menial as paid work. There was nothing left but the moral high ground, which she occupied tenaciously. Whatever rocked her boat; anything to keep her on board, even though she was the one who had blown it, even more than Gayle, after that damn party.

‘Look, another post mortem might exonerate her completely,’ Edward said. ‘Contesting the will remains an option, but even with all the dirt we’ve got on her, it takes time and it might fail. We can’t rely on her being put in prison. We can’t rely on driving her mad. We’ve got to outwit her, like Saul says. Get what we can, and get it soon. Get something, at least, and get it before Thomas is buried. Your mother died ten years ago next week. A good deadline, hey? What we can’t do is just play a waiting game. And her father couldn’t even get inside the house. We’ve got to go with Saul’s plan.’

The urgency and the authority were infectious. Gayle looked at her husband. If they did not get a large injection of money soon, she was going to lose him. He would leave her and she would be everything she feared most. She would be like Beatrice in a house like this: she would be as mad and bitter as her own mother and nobody would rescue her. She sat with her arms folded, her nails biting into her own skin, thinking of the house by the sea.

‘Wouldn’t it be easiest just to get rid of Her?’ Beatrice said. ‘Burn the house down with her in it, ha ha. And get the insurance,’ she added.

Beatrice, mistress of malice and the blunt instrument. Contemplating arson, but never subtlety, so destructive she was perfectly capable of turning herself into a bomb, which was a useful tendency, but not yet, because she would bring them all down with her clumsiness.

‘Hardly practical,’ Edward said, patiently. ‘With uncertain outcome. And we’d only get a fraction of the value.’

‘Her dad would do it for us,’ Beatrice said.

‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Gayle said. ‘He’s all talk. Go on, Edward, please do.’

He cleared his throat.

‘Saul’s plan is sure fire, short term. Thomas has a few priceless paintings. We take the best.’

‘But there aren’t any priceless paintings,’ Gayle said. ‘Raymond Forrest says not. There are a lot of paintings, but none of them particularly valuable, individually. There’s an inventory, nothing of outstanding value.’

‘An inventory that Di compiled. So it’s false. There
are
paintings worth upwards of a hundred thousand, and either Di has lied about their existence or
she really doesn’t know
. Saul does, though. He’s earmarked two in particular. If we were to get them, we’d be bagging a quarter million, which is better than nothing from where I’m standing. And Di wouldn’t be able to complain, because either she doesn’t know what they are, which shows how ignorant she is, or she’s lied about what they are and that makes her a cheat. She’ll be hoist on her own petard. She’ll have to be quiet about it, if she ever finds out.’

Gayle listened intently. Fifty thousand pounds, let alone a quarter of a million, would get their lives back on track. And there would be an element of revenge in the outwitting of that little bitch, whom she hated with a passion she never expressed, for reasons she never dared explore. A quite different level of loathing to the chanting malice of Beatrice.

‘What’s in this for Saul?’ Gayle said.

‘He’s a dealer, he gets commission. He was Thomas’s dealer, and now he wants to be ours. We’re a safer bet, that’s all.’

‘So why doesn’t he just bring us the paintings she’s lied about?’ Beatrice said. ‘Just take them off the wall and bring them to us?’

Again, Edward marvelled at her stupidity.

‘They aren’t on the walls,’ he said. ‘They’re hidden. And Saul couldn’t do that. He’s on site and he’s got to go on being trusted, because it doesn’t stop there, it’s just the beginning. No, we have to go and take them, at night. He tells us how to do it, and we do it. Gayle and I will do it.’

‘Why not me?’ Beatrice pouted.

‘Because Gayle will keep her head, Gayle can drive and she knows the house better than you,’ he said.

‘Do you, dear?’ Beatrice asked sweetly. ‘You went there more often than me when we were tiny, but do you really remember any more than I do? Bearing in mind we were both traumatised by events.’

‘I don’t know,’ Gayle said, slowly. ‘I don’t know that I was.’

‘Yes, you were. Mother said we hated it. We were frightened of Grandpa first, and then of Dad. Traumatised.’

‘I do remember the house as it was. We’ve scarcely seen it as it is now. We rushed away and didn’t come back.’

She turned to Edward.

‘So, dearest, why should this plan work better than the last? We tried to get her arrested, and that didn’t last for a minute. And that wretched father of hers couldn’t even mess the place up. Our little informant. So anxious to help. So ignorant. Pretending to know what he doesn’t. All he ever did was pass on gossip. He doesn’t know anything.’

‘I entirely agree,’ Edward said.

Let them fight their own battles and reap their own rewards, without sharing.

‘This plan will work,’ he said, ‘because it’s foolproof and it relies on no one but us.’

‘So I’m not fit to go on this expedition?’ Beatrice said. ‘What do I do? Keep the home fires burning when I’d rather put a bomb under hers? Our poor father. I don’t care what they say. She starved him. The witch killed him. Ten years since our mother died, and then the witch killed him.’

Beatrice’s singsong voice went down to a whisper.

‘The witch didn’t starve Grandpa,’ Patrick said, his voice cutting across Beatrice’s ranting. He was shouting and he never shouted: he was as quiet in his speech as his mother: he spoke so rarely and so monosyllabically, the voice unnerved them. ‘Grandpa said she made him eat too much.’

Edward turned on him, incredulously. ‘What?’

Patrick couldn’t stop shouting. He hated it when his father shouted, but he couldn’t stop doing it now.

‘He said so. He said she made him eat, even when he didn’t want to. They make jokes about it. Him and his nice brown witch. Di. That’s what he calls her.’

The shout fell into a silence, and then Beatrice cooed at him.

‘So when did Grandpa say that, darling? You haven’t seen him in a while. You’re inventing things.’

‘No I’m not. I talk to him all the time, I … ’

The shrill voice faded away. Gayle was by his side, standing over him, shaking him.

‘When? How? What did he say? Who does he talk to?’

‘To me,’ Patrick said, his voice shrill. ‘When I phone him.’

‘When you
what
?’

‘I phone him a lot, I talk to him.’ His voice rose to a shriek. ‘He tells me stories on the phone. I tell him about drawings,
I send them to him. And now I can’t.’ His face crumpled. ‘Now I can’t,’ he wailed. ‘I want Grandpa, I want Di.’

Gayle slapped him across the face so hard that his mouth wobbled open. He shook his head, as if dislodging a fly, and put his hands round his chin, holding his lips shut. That was all he was going to say. He tensed himself for the second blow; tried to remember she didn’t mean it, she never did.

‘Do you talk to Di, too, you deceitful little beast?’ Edward shouted.

He shook his head again, more emphatically, mouth still closed but saying,
No
. It was a lie and they believed it. He made up a picture in his head, an outline of a face, thought of something he could draw, the shape of a fish, a table, and a chair. A picture of a witch and her cheery, brown face, who left him with Grandpa and then took him back to the train with something to eat. And talked to him, as if he was real.

‘But you did talk to
him
,’ Gayle said softly. ‘All this time. You treacherous little monster. Go upstairs with the others.’

He went, taking his sketchbook.

‘Christ,’ Gayle said with an apologetic laugh, feeling her hand sting, redesigning her voice to descend to normal. ‘Sorry about that. The viper in the bosom. How could he do this to me? He fell in love with a witch at a party. You’re right, Bea, probably an invention.’

‘Poor little soul,’ Beatrice said in that same, singsong voice. ‘Don’t blame yourself, Gayle dear. Perhaps you leave him alone too much.’

‘I don’t,’ Gayle said, ‘We take him everywhere.’

She thought of the long evenings after school when she and Edward drank and rowed indoors, and banished him. She stopped. Thought of cash missing from her purse and the way her mobile phone ate money and went missing.
Thought of her own son phoning her own father and suppressed a silent scream. How free he was, how self-sufficient, her boy who bunked off school and whose cloying, clinging affection she had never wanted until she noticed its ceasing. Gayle felt on the brink of losing everything.

‘Back to the matter in hand,’ Edward said, recovering himself, while thinking at the same time of how much his runt of a son was left alone to listen.

‘We have to plan against the eventuality of the police doing nothing. We have to get what we can before she spends it, or sells it. We rely on Saul, because we have common interests. Saul will help us obtain the two most valuable pictures in the collection. Soon. Before the anniversary of your mother’s death. Doesn’t that appeal to you, Beatrice? If we follow this plan, we’ve got working capital for the rest. We’ve got
something
.’

An eagle in the hand worth a flock in the bush.

‘I’ll settle for that,’ Beatrice said. ‘And it would be lovely revenge, wouldn’t it. We steal from the thief who stole our father. Let us join hands.’

It was like they were plighting some troth. Gayle smiled conspiratorially at Edward and rolled her eyes, but still held her sister’s hand over the table.

‘I would rather there wasn’t a fight,’ Gayle said, finally, as hands were awkwardly un-joined. She meant that she knew she would never be able to trust herself in a fight. She was the calm one, privately afraid of her own, vicious temper. She had just struck her own son, for God’s sake, this time in public: she knew her restraint was precarious, because
she wanted that house
. That house haunted her and she knew that it haunted Patrick, too. Where had he gone when he bunked off school? Beatrice went to make herbal tea in her sticky
teapot with water boiled in a diseased kettle. The touch of the place disgusted Gayle – sticky soap, sticky everything, a vision of life as she might lead it without her inheritance; a vision of insanity. She adjusted the shoulders of her jacket, twitched the knees of her skirt and admired her shoes, rearranged her voice yet again. The vision of that house came back again: she was supposed to remember misery in it and yet that was a memory she could not find. She looked at the walls of this house, which were as bare and unadorned as her own. She had never been a homemaker; never had the knack. Gayle craved to own something in her own right.

Silence from next door. Fruit and nuts had been passed upstairs to those gangly, tall children of Bea’s who looked as if they had been raised in the dark, younger than Patrick and yet twice his height. They would flee their mother soon, whereas miniature Patrick would always be hers; she would make it up to him, and he would always be hers. What was it he said? I WANT DI. That was the last straw. She turned to her husband – my, my, he was masterful.

‘Are you sure about masterpieces worth hundreds of thousands, darling? You know nothing about art,’ she said, ‘any more than I do. Even though you’ve been hanging around dealers, trying to find out. Going to galleries with Saul. You’ve worked ever so hard.’

‘Yes,’ he said modestly. ‘I’ve learned a lot.’

He was staring at the screen. Beatrice leaned over his shoulder. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘We’ve missed another page.’

Mrs Porteous is amenable to the idea of a settlement, subject to advice, but is currently confused as to how to achieve it. Mr Thomas Porteous possessed many paintings and sundry works of art, but none of any great value, entirely in accordance with his
practice. The collection has great, potential value only as a whole. The house is part of the collection: there are no disposable items.

‘She denies it,’ Gayle said, flatly. ‘She denies the masterpieces because she wants it all. That proves they do exist.’

And she has been speaking to my son
, she thought.
I hate her
.

‘So we take what’s ours,’ Gayle said, beginning to feel the thrill of it, her long fingers twitching. ‘We identify the pictures and we take them away. She won’t be able claim them back if she’s lied about them. Nor can she take back what doesn’t exist. We steal what’s ours. We enter the place and take them, and he’ll fix it, right? Saul?’

She sat back, exhilarated.