by Neil Hegarty
He’d mentioned bone structure to Martin once, and Martin had never let him forget it. Had begun to make cracks about the shape of people’s heads, and to ascribe such an interest to Ward himself, as though Ward were an olden-days white South African racial supremacist making a note as he prepared a lecture in his Pretoria office; or one of those eighteenth-century observers of the physiognomic scene, piecing together theories about the races based on the shape of a skull, the cast of a brow.
‘Yes, Dr Mengele, ma’am,’ was one of Martin’s expressions, nowadays. Designed to stop a conversation, to bring it juddering to a halt. Created especially for those occasions when Ward was tilting back on a chair in the kitchen at Despard Road, having a drink at the end of a long day, needing to talk. Martin would listen for a little while, attentively, with the courtesy he had learned at his school. And then, ‘Yes, Dr Mengele, ma’am, it’s all in the forehead, ma’am,’ he would say, and proffer another Pringle. ‘Stop,’ Ward would say, and Martin would select a Pringle himself, judiciously, and crunch, and then say, ‘I think you’ll do the right thing by the lower orders, we all know we can trust you,’ or something of that sort.
Ward would manage the situation: a laugh, and move on.
And cry, later, when he was alone. This was more frequent, nowadays.
‘Mr Ward, Mr Atkinson?’
Ward nodded, and there was Rob nodding too, the two in unison, once more like schoolboys caught in the act. Charlotte, all over again. She set the tone, this new person, in a mere syllable.
No.
Look at me, Ward thought, as he shook her hand: here I am taking against her. Just like Charlotte.
Maybe I do have a thing against women. You want to be careful.
‘I’m Emma Read, director of the gallery.’ The woman dropped his hand, she took Rob’s hand. ‘And this,’ and she nodded vestigially to the policeman, ‘is Patrick Walsh, who is leading the investigation.’
Patrick Walsh was black of hair and blue of eye. He looked tired.
‘Good to meet you both,’ Rob said.
‘Yes indeed, thanks for meeting with us,’ Ward added.
Emma Read, who seemed to be the sort of person who would take charge of any situation, now spoke again. ‘We thought,’ she said, ‘that you should come immediately and see the Sculpture Court, see where all of – of this,’ she paused, ‘took place last night.’ Emma Read clearly believed in direct action; no blather here about whether anyone had had a good flight. She turned and led the way through the white, dramatic atrium, and up the stairs.
Rob and Emma Read were talking quietly now as they walked, and Ward said, ‘Can you tell me, I mean generally, what you think of this whole situation?’
Patrick Walsh slid a glance. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s bloody mad, isn’t it?’
An accent from somewhere down the country, as they liked to say in Dublin, somewhere culchie, as they liked to say; slightly modified, maybe by a couple of years in the city, though not too much.
Ward only said, ‘Mad: that’s about it,’ and they kept walking.
The white staircase gave way to an upper hall, then to a broad sequence of rooms, overwhelming, with oxblood-painted walls and oxblood-tiled floors, and hung with seventeenth-century oils – a few landscapes but mainly portraits, the sad, sleepy eyes of their subjects tracking the quartet. Too much colour, Ward thought: this is what it must feel like inside a stomach.
‘We think,’ Patrick Walsh added suddenly, ‘and I may say that we hope, that this crime, this near-murder, is a case of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We hope that’s what it turns out to be.’
The two men looked at each other for a moment.
‘OK,’ Ward said. ‘Can I ask how he is? – the victim?’
Not nearly as bad as was first thought, thankfully.
Up ahead, Emma Read was holding open a vast copper door. Rob had already passed through into the room beyond, and now Patrick Walsh followed him.
They were in the Sculpture Court.
The walls of the Sculpture Court were hung with silk: white, at first glance, Ward thought, though when you looked at them again, they seemed to hum with a sheen of green, an unpleasantness that reminded him of scum on a pond. The silk was clearly devastatingly expensive. What a mistake.
The hall was thronged with figures in white marble, which were not Ward’s thing any more than seventeenth-century portraiture or oxblood paint were his things. And it was filled with actual living people: police in uniform dusting for fingerprints, down on hands and knees on the floor, on the glossy white paint of the far doors. ‘This is one of the new spaces in the gallery,’ Emma Read went on coolly, as if she were leading a guided tour, ‘in fact, it was opened to the public just a few days ago. The scene,’ she added, again unnecessarily, ‘is over there.’
It was obvious enough now – to Ward, and he assumed to everyone else listening – that Emma Read had an issue with taste, or with tastelessness: that she regarded this whole affair as a lapse in taste. That there was a colleague involved was a little way down her list of priorities; this was obvious too. That the colleague chose to have his throat slit here in the brand-new Sculpture Court was more than regrettable – it was a disgrace.
And now, look: the silk-hung walls were ruined.
Not that Emma Read said a word of all this: but, Ward thought, she might as well have been parading a sandwich board with her grievances listed in bold, black print.
Over there: Ward glanced at Rob, and the two men threaded their way through the marble figures towards the living figures, towards the area on the floor.
No silhouette outlined in white, for this was no television murder scene: but the detectives had marked the edges, the corners of the area. He had been tall, the victim, if the marked area was anything to go by. Nothing much here: and yet Ward felt his eyes glisten a little. Twenty-two: he was barely more than a child. Ward had all too frequently felt moved at the sight of an empty space on a wall where a precious, well-loved painting had once hung. He was used to the blaze of anger he felt at the sight of an empty frame, its contents ripped away contemptuously. But the sight of an empty space on the floor, where someone had lain in pain and fear a few hours before – this area of emptiness brought with it a wave of grief. This was a surprise.
Now Emma Read glided up behind him, spoke at his shoulder, caused him to start.
‘The alarm was activated at 2.15 a.m.’
Not that he was about to lose it. It wasn’t his style – especially not in front of strangers, and this stranger in particular. Rob had already moved from the space on the floor to examine the green-white silken walls, which carried now a wide arc of black blood droplets.
‘And the painting was here,’ Emma Read went on, and Ward glanced at her as she pointed to the wall. ‘The only painting in the room: it was, if you like, one of the gallery’s glories, and was hung here for maximum impact.’ Perhaps she saw something in Ward’s eyes, in his expression, because for a moment her hauteur seemed to sag, and she said, ‘Mr Ward, I’m not without feelings. But you are here to survey the scene, and I’m trying to give you the bare facts, all the facts I can.’
A bluff Kiwi accent can come in handy at such tight moments: now Rob stepped across the tiles and said, ‘And we appreciate it, Dr Read,’ and Ward began to exhale.
‘And the glass that held the piece – is here.’
This was more their thing. Ward and Rob had seen plenty of such discarded frames and the like. They were usually lying – all too obviously flung – on the ground: but this one, these two pieces of clear glass, had been set carefully against the silk-hung walls. As though in atonement, Ward thought at that moment, looking at it: but carefully set or not, the glass signified – no, it bawled, it roared and shrieked – desecration.
When people asked Ward why he did what he did – and they occasionally did ask; for example, men used to ask him in bars, if they were especially keen to get him into bed, it was worth the t
rouble of a supplementary question – he had a stock answer ready. ‘Because at heart I’m a zealot,’ he would say, and this tended to sort the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats. The chaff, the goats, they didn’t like words like ‘zealot’; the others didn’t mind it.
He was with Martin by this time though – so into bed, never.
Hardly ever.
A zealot.
Yes: the chaff, the goat, the man at the time would usually back right away. Sometimes, the fundamentalism positively attracted them: but Ward, more often than not, found at such times that his own ardour diminished; and he would make his excuses and his stumbling way out onto Old Compton Street or Shoreditch High Street, and go home to Martin, with relief.
And this was the thing: Martin was the only one who’d engaged with the question correctly, in Ward’s view. What do you do? He did this by leaning forward on the heavy, black, cast-iron, Victorian chairs on which they were seated – on that first night, their friends now far away in the Spanish restaurant in Farringdon – seats so heavy they could hardly be moved. Possibly to stop them being thrown about late at night, by drunken punters? Terrible chairs: very rapidly, Ward’s bum felt cold and sore; and Martin’s bum obviously was too, judging from the way he began, after a few minutes, to wriggle on his chair, and shift from buttock to buttock. But then he paid Ward the ultimate compliment, the gargantuan compliment of seeming to forget about the discomfort, of seeming to actually listen.
And then, of course, he went home with Ward, or rather, he permitted Ward to go home with him, and of all compliments this was the best.
‘Oh yes,’ Martin said, sitting forward in the iron chair, ‘I’ve read about this.’ About the trade in stolen art, he meant – it really was a huge trade, wasn’t it? A huge international trade, an extraordinary and extraordinarily profitable trade. ‘I read a piece about it in the Guardian: didn’t they steal something from, where was it, was it Boston? – just lately?’
Not too lately – but yes, that was one of the most recent biggies.
‘The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, that’s right. In Boston.’
‘What was it they stole again?’
‘You name it,’ Ward said, and rubbed his nose in embarrassment, as though the responsibility for the theft was his. The gallery staff had actually let the thieves into the building in the middle of the night, he said. They had knocked on the door, posing as policemen, or looking to borrow a little milk, who knows, and been let in, just like that, and then they tied the staff up and stole more than a dozen paintings.
Worth half a billion dollars.
‘Half a billion,’ Martin said.
‘They sliced them out of their frames. Vermeer, Rembrandts, the lot. The gallery left the empty frames hanging on the walls. I saw them,’ he added.
Martin was watching him. ‘You saw them?’
‘When I was nineteen,’ Ward said. ‘A student summer, a work visa, I went to Cape Cod, me and half of Ireland.’
Ward remembered the warm sand between his toes, on the beach at Provincetown. But it didn’t stay between his toes, it got everywhere: sand in his bed and in his hair, on his bread, between his buttocks. ‘I couldn’t stand the place,’ he said. ‘I went into Boston whenever I could. And one day I went to the Gardner.’
How to explain the shock, the moment of revelation? He saw again the planted quadrangle with its tiled floors and Italianate facades. The sage-green, richly embossed wallpaper in the Dutch Room, the polished furniture. The hush and the opulence.
The frames, hanging naked on the wall.
Martin leaned forward a little on his heavy iron chair. ‘And what?’
His head swimming.
Martin said, still leaning, still intent, ‘What is it? What are you remembering?’
An image of the Rembrandt, that Rembrandt, in a glossy art book, he’d studied it, marvelled at the speed and pitch of the boat, the foaming of the waves, the panic and the human frailty. He said, slowly, ‘One of the stolen Rembrandts. Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee. They say Rembrandt painted himself into the picture, looking out at us. Very calm. It felt as though he was looking right at me.’
He paused. Their first date. Martin might laugh.
But no. Martin was still sitting forward on his heavy chair, still intent. ‘Go on.’
Ward said, still slowly, ‘I just mean – then to see the empty frames. The desecration of it, the empty frames. I couldn’t take it in.’ He sat back now, in his own uncomfortable chair; the chill of the iron pressed through the fabric of his clothes.
‘So, that was that, was it? That was the moment?’
Ward nodded. It was. His own course set, in that shocking moment. ‘I suppose it was,’ he said and he tried to smile a little; Martin ought to stop gazing; better to shake up the conversation, he didn’t want Martin thinking he was a freak. Mention the Nazis. ‘And then, the Nazis too.’ They would be on happier, less personal ground with the Nazis. They were great ones for stealing artworks too, the Nazis, and bunging them into the Austrian salt mines for safekeeping.
Everyone enjoyed a conversation about the Nazis.
Martin smiled too, and studied his drink. He said something quietly.
Ward said, ‘Hm?’
Martin looked up, and smiled more broadly. ‘“The empty frames,” I said. The empty frames.’
Shortly after that night, thieves executed a heist in Paris, another hair-raisingly expensive painting, and it was all over the papers; and now Martin seemed positively impressed that his new boyfriend was working in that line.
He hadn’t heard of the agency, of course, before that night. Nobody had ever heard of it. Which was fine by Ward, though he knew that it annoyed certain of his colleagues.
‘Art Investigations, no, definitely not, I mean, until now,’ Martin said politely.
‘The Art Investigations Agency, is the full title,’ Ward said. ‘Or, if you prefer, L’Agence d’enquête sur l’art.’
‘I think I prefer the English version, if that’s OK,’ Martin said, very politely.
‘So do I, really.’
‘And so—’ Martin prompted.
‘Well, the French bit is important, because we receive funding from the Council of Europe. We’re pan-national; but lots of countries fund their own similar agencies, we’re not unique by any means.’ Martin was looking at him so very earnestly that Ward felt a dark flush – not attractive – creep up from his neck.
‘Golly,’ Martin said. ‘You’d think I’d know something about it. And it’s based here, is it, in London?’ He did seem surprised, and fair enough too: any agency with European funding, whether based in London or not, tended – as Ward knew well – to get pilloried on a weekly basis, these days, by the tabloids. But his agency prided itself on keeping its collective head down and its profile low, partly for this very reason: Ward was fairly sure that the papers hadn’t yet sniffed them out, and relieved too.
‘London is a sort of centre of the art theft trade: so when it came to establishing the agency, it made sense to base it here. And they did.’
‘I see,’ Martin said.
The next morning – one of those first Sunday mornings, in Tufnell Park, they were still in bed – Martin asked some more questions about the agency: and Ward was pleased to see that he really was intrigued, that his questions hadn’t been – as they so often were – mere steeplechase hurdles to be surmounted with a leap and a splash, on the track to sex. Martin didn’t possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of art: but he did go to galleries sometimes, he did like to ‘sniff around’, as he put it, and he could understand where Ward’s interest came from. More than that: he respected it.
He was a member of a strange, careful tribe: he was an English Catholic. Quite an old family, in fact: from Northumberland; they’d held on to their lands when all about them were losing theirs; and had kept a fair bit of money intact too. Educated poshly, a Catholic boarding school.
‘So, all those cassocked pri
ests queuing up to pounce on you, right there on the altar: what an exciting schoolboyhood for you,’ Ward said, quite early in the relationship, before catching on to the fact that Martin didn’t much care for this sort of humour.
‘There was some of that, yes,’ Martin said, ‘but I managed to sidestep them.’
Ward wasn’t even surprised to hear this, Catholic priests being Catholic priests, and all too good at pouncing, but Martin went on:
‘I think my school was a bit more careful though, probably; the priests were more likely to pounce on each other. Anyway, nobody pounced on me – not priests, anyway.’ He went on to say that he did a bit of pouncing himself – ‘in my final year, only with other age of consents, of course, we were all at it, I think the school offers it as an A Level.’ But he didn’t seem too keen to continue this topic. Later, Ward realised that this was down to those deeply ingrained English Catholic instincts of self-preservation. Don’t talk too much, and don’t give anything away.
Martin did open up, like a blossom in warm sunshine, once he found himself in a solid, secure relationship – or so Ward used to tell himself. He reassured himself that Martin was comfortable in his skin, the evidence being that he was happy to slip into falsetto in front of his friends, to make jokes about Dr Mengele, to essay from time to time a mocking lisp, to have fun.
Yes, Martin’s was a bright, sunny face, one that he was happy to present to the world. As for the shadows: these he showed only to Ward, who was glad to see them. These shadows, these pools of darkness behind the closed door of the house on Despard Road: their existence, Ward told himself, indicated trust, meant that Martin trusted him.
He trusted Ward, and Ward trusted him.
So Ward once thought.
32
‘Gerard Boyle was the name. Right?’