Gold Digger (2 page)

Raymond Forrest, lawyer.

No word, or the fact, of the knife, was ever mentioned, nor of the gloves on the desk or the footsteps inside the house, or
the slamming door. Or the other person running away, or the freakish foul weather that blew up such a storm that night that most of the houses on the front were flooded while the angry sea almost submerged the pier. Nor how, after Di was arrested, everyone rushed away towards the emergency, leaving Thomas alone.

A dark and stormy night: the worst in a decade, and nearly ten years ago.

D
iana Quigly, now twenty-seven years old, with a dead husband sitting downstairs, suddenly remembered him and worried about him getting cold. She also remembered there was something she wanted to tell him.

‘You know what, love, you really mustn’t get cold. I’ll warm you.’

She stayed in his arms for another hour. He was as thin as a rail, but his hair was so soft and he smelled so sweet, salty and clean.

Finally, she picked up the phone.

W
hen the ambulance arrived, following remarkably coherent instructions, she opened the door to them. She seemed perfectly calm, greeting the policeman, who had arrived at the same time, by name. The girl they saw was dishevelled with bad blonde hair and a body as brittle as ice. The initial impression she gave was not good. Too tiny; too fierce, too nonchalant and way too tough for eating.

‘He’s here,’ she said, unnecessarily. The room was small and ignoring the old man in the armchair by a still-live, though waning fire was like failing to see the elephant. There was a side table by the chair, with a half-drunk drink and a cigar smouldering in a saucer next to it. The girl had brandy on her breath.

‘Is he your dad?’

The first ambulance man went about his business. The room smelled benignly, of booze and cigar, like an
old-fashioned pub before the smoking ban. It was otherwise clean, comfortable, ordered and contained sundry medical equipment. A kitchen led off: it was impossible from here to imagine the dimensions of the house. The room off the street was the size of a maids’ parlour, a place where the cook would sit off duty in a period drama, ignoring the grandeur upstairs and the front entrance somewhere else. It appeared as if the Master of the house had died ignominiously in the Servants Quarters. The old man sat in his leather armchair, his hands on the worn arms and his head turned into the leather, as if burying his face in it. He had thick, white hair; his thin legs were crossed and his upper body relaxed.

‘What happened?’

‘He died, what do you think?’

She was diffident, speaking off stage to someone whose question it was. Jones, the interloper, was there, standing next to a man in the police uniform he had once worn himself.

‘Went for his walk, came back, sat in the chair. Stopped breathing,’ she said, almost carelessly. ‘He’s been very ill. I thought he was coming round. Is he really dead?’

They had been shuffling round, testing, moving quietly. An oxygen mask administered to the twisted head, and attempts made to make it breathe.

‘Yes. He’s dead.’

‘Oh, thank God,’ she said. ‘Thank God.’

There was a moment of shocked silence.

‘That his daughter, or what?’ someone whispered.

‘No, his
wife.’

‘But he must be … ’

The gurney arrived. The girl turned her back and finished
her brandy. The fire in the hearth turned grey and the room turned cold.

T
here were two of them left when the body had gone. Ex-Sergeant Jones and Mad Di.

‘That went well, didn’t it?’ he said angrily. ‘You don’t say
thank bloody God.
And what the hell took you so long? Don’t you know how it looks? The fire’s gone out, you smoked two cigars, you waited two hours before you dialled 999. What kept you? Listen, love, I saw him on the pier and I watched him go. I was there, later, fishing, I thought he was alright.’

She turned a haughty profile.

‘I was talking to him,’ she said. She smiled a brittle and glassy smile that did not enhance her. He thought she was a woman who would only be beautiful when she was older. At the moment, she looked ugly.

‘There’ll be a post mortem, Di.’

‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded, moved towards the kitchen and came back with a bottle of champagne. Not right.

‘A beer’d do nicely,’ he said.

‘Of course. What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘I followed the ambulance. I was watching, Monica was too. I met Thomas earlier. I saw him go home.’

She swayed back towards the kitchen and he saw the belt, with the pocketknife in a leather sheath, worn at the back, like a hunter.

‘Still got the knife, Di? The one your dad taught you to use?’

‘What knife?’

He drank and paused and shook his head and looked
around a small room that he knew led on to many larger ones, the huge cellar he remembered from his own schooldays, beneath.

‘What you gonna do with all this, Di?’

‘All what?’

‘Christ, Di, you never did help yourself much, did you? Or maybe,’ he added, because he was angry, ‘maybe you did.’

He was looking at the big nude, noticing it for the first time and thinking that was perhaps the last thing handsome old Thomas saw before dying in his seventieth year. There were hundred of pictures on the walls in every room of this house. A little smudge of a painting above the nude was hanging crooked on a nail nearly out of sight and he could not understand why it was there.

Di stared at the dead fire and lit another cigar. ‘Thank bloody God he’s out of it. Do you believe in heaven, Uncle Jones?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Only in hell.’

If only she would cry. He looked at her, half pitying, half disgusted. No one would ever call Di a Lady.

If only she would cry. No one would pity her otherwise.

No one would pity her at all.

She had dug deep for her pot of gold.

T
he Beginning. This was how Thomas remembered it. The last decade of his life had begun with the night of the storm when he had encountered Di Quigly, the thief. The happiest phase of his seventy years was the last seven, after she came back.

I
f she comes back after her release, Thomas, you must on no account let her in
, Raymond Forrest the lawyer said to his client on the phone.
You are highly vulnerable, and yes, I have monitored her progress and investigated her past, but I don’t know what she is like
.

Diana Quigly did come back to the house she had attempted to burgle two and a half years before. Inside prison, after two spells on suicide watch, she had stopped beating her head against doors, stabilised and counted not only the hours, but also the days. She did not go to the hostel towards which she was directed: lied that her uncle was expecting her and the lie was accepted. She was assessed as a wild animal tamed, personality disorders undiagnosed, no longer dangerous, perhaps savage when cornered, but safe to bet that her morbid, claustrophobic fear of incarceration would surely keep her on the right side of the law. She was highly literate for a thief as well as numerate and she had domestic skills that should qualify her for some sort of basic employment, such as stacking shelves.

Going back to the house of Thomas Porteous was as great a risk as getting in there in the first place and she was going to do it anyway. Di Quigly had nothing left but instinct and instinct drew her there. This town was her home; the beach was her domain.

To have called on Thomas Porteous after dark would have been rude and entirely against her strange code of manners, but as it was, it was a bright summer’s day, the sea as smooth as ruffled velvet and the pier baked in heat. She had once been brown as a nut and now she was as pale as snow and when the sun touched her arms, it burned. She wanted the sea, but whatever else she wanted she did not know. Instinct ruled, and all the same, she felt as awkward as a snail crawling out from under a rock even as she swung her arms, twisted and turned, jumped and ran, making herself breathless with space.

She was twenty years old, small, strong and virtually starving. She ate next to nothing, could vomit at the sight of a
biscuit or a burger, the staples of prison diet. Everything was behind the eyes: she relied on memories of places she loved. She had no parameters, no code by which to live, only pictures in her mind and the vision of a house full of paintings.

D
i knocked on the back door, accessed by wooden steps over the same steel shutters into the garage and cellar that no longer incorporated a garage. It was an unpropitious entrance for a house which had such a fine, rarely used entrance on the sea side. Thomas answered the summons with alacrity, then stood there, holding the door, not certain, blinking in the sun that hit the back of the house in the afternoon. His eyes cleared and he stood up straight, recognising her, and then his blue eyes twinkled in genuine if suspicious pleasure, turning to real, unfeigned, incautious pleasure. She noticed how straight-backed he was, standing with his hands on his hips, examining her while at the same time his white hair was standing on end and he was acting older than he was, pretending a sort of dishevelment. Looking as if he did not know the time of year it was, let alone the day; looking as if he didn’t expect her, while all the time, he had been waiting to see if she would come. It was as if they were both children and she had called round and asked him out to play, rather than he, the householder, greeting the thief who had tried to burgle him over two years before.

‘Is it today?’ he said. ‘What time do you call this? I was wondering if it really was today.’

She looked at her watch, the only thing of her personal possessions she had managed to preserve.

‘I think it’s today,’ she said, pretending to consider it. ‘It might not be, though. It might be tomorrow. It
could
be the middle of next week.’

He laughed.

‘This is Alice in Wonderland, where Alice meets the Mad Hatter, and he says, come in. So come in, please.’

‘Alice wasn’t so clever about time, either,’ she said.

His eyes twinkled, the joy of a teacher seeing an old pupil he had liked.

Come in, come in. I’ll make tea
.

T
hey were in the gallery room before she had time to think, as if he had been prepared for her and the kettle already boiled. There was a tray of china cups, a tarnished silver pot, sugar in a delicate bowl.

‘I expect you’ve come to see Madame de Belleroche. Have you come to see Madame de Belleroche? She’s been waiting for you, since ever she decided she belongs to you. It was you who saved her after all.’

He was gabbling a little, suspicion returning, the warning of his lawyer echoing in his ears.
If she comes back, don’t let her in. She’s not a child.

But I am
, Thomas had said.

She noticed the hesitation.

‘I haven’t come to take anything away,’ Di said, handling the cup with care. It felt so different to a plastic beaker. ‘I came to say I’m sorry I did it, and I came to say, thank you.’

He was prowling round the room with a teacup in his hand, stopped in surprise.

‘Now that really is rich,’ he said, ‘You thanking me. You shame me.’

‘I meant thank you for the books you sent me,’ she said, quietly.

‘I’m so pleased they arrived,’ he said, formally, before beginning to prowl again.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t keep them,’ she said. ‘No one keeps anything in prison. But I did read them. And I cut things out and put them on the wall.’

‘So at least you got to look at pictures.’

He looked at her closely, searching for signs of self-pity and resentment, finding none. She was too busy looking round, smiling at Madame de Belleroche, looking, looking, looking, with wide-eyed, hungry wonder.

‘Got a question for you,’ Thomas said, suddenly. ‘There’s this new painting my friend Saul found for me,’ he began, stopping short of it. ‘Well, old but new to me, and I’ve been longing to know your opinion. I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong.’

It was an oil painting in thick paint, showing a small child with tiny fists, sitting in an old, wooden highchair and banging the tray. The face was as angry as the fists and it was a powerful image from a distance, drawing her towards it with a shared joy in the wilfulness of the subject and the noise it made. Di put down the cup and moved towards it, noticing with something like disappointment that the closer she grew, the more lifeless it became. She touched the surface, puzzled by her own reaction, because against all expectation of this hectic, flushed, bumpy-looking baby face, the surface was smooth. She touched it again.

‘It’s flat,’ she said. ‘It shouldn’t be flat, should it? He used so much paint. I should be able to feel it. Touch it.’

He nodded agreement, suppressing his own excitement.

‘Yes, you should. And why do you say “he” for the artist? Why does it have to be a He?’

‘Because it usually was,’ she said, thinking aloud as she spoke. ‘When this was painted. Look at the chair. Look at the baby’s clothes. It’s a hundred years old, or thereabouts.
Those days, lady artists didn’t paint babies in chairs, they were too busy feeding them.’

She stared, closely, almost myopically, touching the surface with the tips of her fingers. He looked down on the back of her head, noticing her thin hair, and then he grinned. My word, she’d got it, she’d got it in one. That painting was over-restored, relined, flattening the paint to bland smoothness. He half knew it and she had seen what was wrong. He stepped back, close enough to tap her shoulder, keeping his distance, terribly shy and enormously pleased.