by Neil Hegarty
Well, and this explains my attitude to Dublin, Ward thought. He looked around, at the wooden curlicues of the Pied Piper’s interior. Rob knew about this story: Ward had told him, in dribs and drabs, over the months: and this, needless to say, gave Rob another reason to dislike Martin. Ward sensed too, though, that Rob assumed everyone in Ireland had a similar story to tell: that Irishness was a sort of useful shorthand for unhappiness in and frustration with early life, with workhouses, and bones lying in shallow graves in the fields. Probably Rob imagined a sexually perverted priest buggering his way through the annual cohort of altar boys, including Ward; perhaps he thought that Daddy’s fists and Daddy’s cane marks were better than the other available option.
Well, and he would just have to think whatever he wanted to think.
And who cared, really. He took in Rob, sitting there on a high stool in the Pied Piper, and clearly feeling better. An Americano and a good chicken sandwich followed by a caramel square had worked their magic, and that murderous, faint-with-hunger look had gone, at least for the moment.
‘Tell me,’ Ward said, ‘about your hunch.’
34
The Jewel was discovered in, Rob said later, a place that was not very jewel-like. Not very englamoured, as Rob said: and Ward looked at him with a degree of surprise: englamoured was not a word that Rob would ordinarily use.
A long evening of checking databases, following Rob’s hunch that led from one forged painting to another to a small theft in Spain, in France, in England; looking again at the gallery camera records, gleaning information, and clicking its sections together like individual pieces of Lego. A profile emerging, as Rob searched precise avenues, sniffing after a scent: that older man, slicing and stealing on the gallery recordings, had been in the building several days previously, casing the joint, taking it all in. He had even joined a tour that Gerard Boyle had headed. He had, Rob noted, really looked engaged.
The Jewel was destined for a private collection. A safe, there to moulder for, perhaps, decades.
It deserved better.
And this older man: Rob had been seeking him now for some months. Following his shadow through the darkness. An occasional player, Rob said, not habitual, but skilled; called upon for the occasional special job – not a high-profile theft, but niche. The Jewel was the exception to the rule. He studied the data, he added a little of his own: a pattern was forming, he would be tracked down, some day soon, now; even these shadowy guys couldn’t expect to get away with it for ever.
This was not, Ward thought, what Emily Sandborne had wanted.
She’d wanted none of this. Surely to God. Not the unearthing, the sordid digging around in her grave for her treasure to be taken away from her. Not the rehanging on a gallery wall, not the biography, not the slashed throat, and not – this being a woman who seemed to know her fabrics – the spoiled green-white silk on the walls of the Sculpture Court.
All this had happened in spite of her.
He kept these irrelevant thoughts to himself.
‘We can go back – tomorrow, even,’ Rob said. ‘The painting is gone – but only for now. We can leave your friend Patrick to deal with his crime; and we can go home and put out the call. I have a million connections in my head, look,’ he said, and he swung the laptop around. ‘Look at the pattern: Leeds, Rouen, Salamanca: regional galleries, lucrative but low-key thefts. I bet he’s behind them all. He should never have gone near The Jewel. He must have been mad.’ Rob pursed his lips. ‘And he’s no habitual murderer either, in spite of what this looks like. We can complete a profile in ten minutes and send it out, and bingo.’
‘Not ten minutes.’
‘No, not ten minutes. A day and a half, and Charlotte will be happy too. We should see Roisin O’Hara,’ Rob said and paused. ‘Just because.’
Ward nodded. ‘Yes, I’d like to, if we can.’
*
‘They tell me I can go home tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I told them I’m fine to go home tonight, right now, but.’ Roisin smoothed her hands over the thin hospital coverlet. ‘A night in hospital will set their minds at rest, they tell me.’
‘Well, you’ve had a shock,’ Rob said, ‘so I’m not surprised they want to keep you in. Always do what the medics say, is my motto.’
He was perched on the edge of the bed; around them, white hospital light, and the life of the building proceeding smoothly. Visiting time had just begun and the ward was filling up decorously. She nodded.
‘Of course you’re right.’
Ward was sitting in the one chair. She looked smaller, he thought, than the woman he had watched clipping along, brisk and silent, through the camera footage, and she looked younger too. Slight – too thin. Dark, with just a few silver hairs. She looked tired, which was to be expected, and she spoke more softly than he for some reason had imagined. A light, musical accent, western.
She had added a few details. She was a good witness, a noticer: the height, the size, the clothing, she had retained a good deal in spite of the trauma of the moment; and Rob had listened intently and nodded, his eyes gleaming. She had explained, quite calmly, that the responsibility for the whole episode lay on her shoulders; and she had refused to be comforted. The only good thing was, she said, that her friend had escaped with his life. But everything else was bad.
Rob took her hand at this point. Hardly the professional thing, but she grasped his hand in return and held it.
‘You have to go easy on yourself,’ he said gently, as Ward watched him.
She grimaced. ‘That’s a thing I’ve never been able to do. And I don’t think I deserve it in this case.’
Rob said nothing. Ward looked on: a tableau, seen at a slight distance. She still had a tight hold on Rob’s hand, but now there was a detectable shift, a movement in the air, as if she was speaking in dialogue with herself.
‘Not for years and years now. Easy: ease is not a thing I feel I’ve earned in my life.’ And again a shift of focus, as she looked at Rob and he gently removed his hand, and she ran her hand now through her dark hair.
‘That seems very cut and dried,’ Rob said gently.
She shook her head. ‘I just mean,’ and now another shake of the head, as though she herself hardly understood what she was saying, ‘have you ever felt as though your life was bound up in something else, in something that was completely beyond your control?’
Rob nodded. ‘I suppose so. Sometimes,’ he said, ‘in fact, yes, frequently, now.’ He looked at her. ‘Is that how you feel?’
She nodded.
‘My sister died, you see,’ she said, ‘and I wasn’t around for her very much just before she died, and ever since then,’ and again she ran a hand through her hair, ‘I feel as though I don’t deserve to have a life of my own. As though I’ve been touched by frost. And now, Gerard. It all feels part of some destiny. So that’s what I mean about ease: it’s not something I connect with my own life.’
A pause.
‘I think I know what you mean.’ Rob cleared his throat. ‘Though, remember that your friend is going to live, he isn’t going to die, and that none of this is your fault.’ She opened her mouth to speak, and Ward continued to watch from his slight distance as Rob went on, ‘But that isn’t what I wanted to say.’
She looked at him. ‘What did you want to say?’
‘The things that you can’t help, you leave in the past, like a load of suitcases that you don’t want. The things you can help – the future, the present day – you take with you. You lighten the load, you stride out, you reach out with both hands.’ Rob laughed a little. ‘And I’m mixing my metaphors a bit now. I’m not so arrogant that I’m going to lecture you about your sister, but I do know that you have a responsibility to yourself and your life. To, how do I put it,’ and Ward watched as Rob moistened his mouth with his tongue, and paused for a moment, ‘to renew your faith in yourself, in the future. If you can.’
She gazed at him. ‘A friend said something similar to me, not so long ag
o.’ She paused. ‘I assume you’re speaking from experience.’
Rob said, ‘Well, not exactly. Though I have been thinking along those lines.’
She looked at him. ‘Well, I will too, I’ll do some thinking too.’ And then seemed to shake herself a little. ‘But you’re not here to counsel me, gentlemen. I’m sorry. Is there anything else you need from me?’
Ward shook his head and smiled, and Rob rose. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘And you’ve heard enough advice from me.’ He smiled now, too. ‘We’re fairly confident your police will find this man, perhaps with the help of a little information from us. And the painting – confident there too.’
‘I’m glad,’ she said. She looked exhausted, suddenly, and they took their leave with hands shaken and smiles. When Ward glanced back, her eyes were already closed.
‘You did good,’ Ward said; and Rob nodded very slightly.
*
Very late in the evening, Patrick Walsh rang with the news. It had been located, The Jewel: it had been swaddled carefully in heavy-duty brown paper, and handed into a city-centre charity shop, which had taken all day to get around to unwrapping and discovering it. ‘It seems undamaged,’ said Patrick Walsh. ‘They seem clear that it’s undamaged: we have it in front of us now, in Dr Read’s office.’
‘We’ll come up, if we may.’
‘Dr Read will meet you at the main stairs, she says.’
They walked through the peacock-coloured galleries – Roisin O’Hara’s colours, Ward thought now – to where Emma Read stood at the head of the flight of white stairs. No reserve now: she was smiling, and flushed.
‘If you’ll follow me, gentlemen.’
She led the way through the sequence of oxblood halls, and into a lift to the top floor. One wall of her office was a sheet of glass, a single pane through which the lights of the city glittered. Patrick Walsh sat, very upright, in a chair in the corner. He too smiled.
‘And there it is.’
A piece of fine linen, a tinge of porridge-grey – and a tableau of figures surmounted by brilliantly illuminated stained glass. Black-gleaming armour, shadowed faces, downcast eyes.
‘We’ve had it checked over. Of course it’ll be done again, properly, slowly, in the days to come. But it seems fine.’
Emily Sandborne, glancing at them from the furthest shadow, the furthest darkness. The beginnings of a smile, perhaps: yes, he still saw this in her visage – but now Ward saw something else, too. A steeliness, a challenge in her eye.
‘Before it’s displayed again.’
A challenge?
‘Thank God,’ added Emma Read.
A challenge. Definitely, yes.
‘May I?’ said Rob, and Emma Read nodded.
The green of the malachite, set into the armour there at the fabric’s very centre: as Rob bent over the fabric, Ward saw that the malachite seemed to catch the light, casting a profound glow upward to chime sweetly with the green of Rob’s eyes. A perfect match.
Coda
John stood on the pier at Holyhead. In the distance, the cliffs of Holy Island gleamed black.
He might have ended it that morning without even getting on the boat, without going through the trouble of the crossing – the ‘voyage’, as he had heard one passenger say to another, as though they were setting sail for the South Seas. There being no point prolonging this life, if you wanted to call it that.
But several things had held him back.
Ireland was foreign soil, an alien land. So, for that matter, was Wales, where he had disembarked, and wandered the streets of Holyhead before making his way out to the pier. But Wales would do. A different island, though: that would have been another matter altogether.
The harbour walls at Holyhead were impressively long. Plenty of scope there. Nobody would be watching. It had been best, yes, to make tracks for home, and to pause well before he reached where home had once been, to remember that there was no home available any longer.
So, where he was would have to do.
There would be kelp swaying and moving in these deep, cold waters. Like the tidewrack by the Thames, long ago. Waving strands of kelp, to welcome him in, and entangle him, and draw him willingly down.
He had cut himself as loose as possible: passport tightly wrapped in plastic in his zipped jacket pocket, to make it easy on them. But nothing else. Everything else left behind.
Stella would be pleased with this gesture, if she knew. Well done, darling, she would say, if she were here on the pier with him, the salt wind lifting her hair. Let it all go. Bravo, say I.
And, Do the right thing, John, Gran would say, remembering Northumberland. Listen to yourself, and do the right thing. She’d provided the perfect example.
And then, old Etienne. Fool. Letting me down at the end, old man. They told me you were too old.
Etienne would be in hot water with them now.
Cold water was better.
Behind him, the afternoon ferry to Ireland was leaving a trail as it moved slowly through the harbour waves. The sun was shining oblique on the waves: a pale grass-green where the light fell on the water; heavier tones, not green so much as black where the rays did not reach, a white wake.
The boy wasn’t dead, as he had feared. The radio, the newspapers had been clear: gashed and marked for life, most likely; the blade of his knife had been keen. He ought to feel – violent, searing sensations, rending and tearing and ripping: but in fact he felt nothing like that. If anything he felt calm, or quite calm. Not distressed or agitated, anyway. He had a solution: an atonement, it occurred to him to call it. He had dropped into the charity shop, for all the world a good citizen, and set his neat parcel on the counter with a smile, and headed off for the ferry terminal, a solution in mind. Atonement was a natural word, given what had just happened, in someone else’s life.
And he hadn’t even known the boy’s name.
But, solution was better.
He was weary of all this. He had existed, and soon he would no longer exist. His gran, and his parents, and even Stella in her way: each had existed, and then stopped existing. Soon it would be his turn. In his mind’s eye, the strong flow of the Thames as it rose and fell, the flow of brown river water on shingle. A home taken away. A lack, an absence – covered over, successfully enough for years, by activity and money and a sort of bitter satisfaction – but resurfacing, in the end. And a solution; and a sense of relief that he need pretend no longer.
A verse surfaced too, emerging from the sudden calm of his mind.
For he maketh the storm to cease, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad, because they are at rest: and so he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.
He stepped forward.
He would be able to wash himself clean.
*
Roisin sat and looked at her dustily distempered walls.
Her heart had fallen, sinking into her stomach. There was nothing much wrong with her, they said, other than shock. She had her pills, and she needed to keep taking them – but really, she might as well be resting quiet at home as remaining here.
They were satisfied that she’d be fine.
Gerard would be fine too, they said, and that had made her heart easier. He would have a scar, of course – there was no way that he couldn’t have a scar – but better a scar than the other thing.
He had said so himself. Quietly: the knife had missed his windpipe, but he’d been told to speak very quietly, to rest himself. She had taken the lift upstairs, and visited – during visiting hours, of course – and he had told her that, apparently, there were people out there who would quite go for scars.
‘Like war wounds, in the old days, you know. My friends say they’ll help me with the dating apps.’
Roisin said, ‘They have?’
Gerard smiled, swallowed gingerly. ‘I’m only joking.’
Roisin scratched her head. Maybe they’d invent an app for people like her, too. Though no, there wouldn’t be a m
arket for it. And the technology wouldn’t exist.
In the meantime, Gerard seemed, well, surprisingly chipper. Surprisingly so, yes. ‘And they found The Jewel,’ he added.
She nodded. Just left there, she said. On purpose, they supposed. But Gerard shrugged a little at that.
‘Who knows,’ he said. ‘We don’t know. He might have. Dr Read seemed mighty pleased, anyway.’
‘Yes, I bet she was.’
‘My job waiting for me, she said, just as soon as I want to come back.’
‘Well, I should bloody well think so.’ Roisin cleared her frown and added abruptly, ‘I want to apologise. If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have been there in the first place.’
But Gerard shook his head, and smiled a little, and said something about fate. About destiny. It was just meant to be, he said. She shouldn’t give it another thought.
Roisin would think of nothing else, for a while; afterwards, she would see. She remembered the friendly New Zealander and his words. And the bottom line was that there was no need to burden Gerard with any more of this. She moved to go, hesitated, spoke. ‘Maybe, when you’re better, you can come over and have tea,’ she said. ‘I make a mean Madeira cake.’
He nodded. He’d like that, and he smiled again, saving his voice.
Now she sat in her shadowy sitting room. Dim lamps played a little on the dusty surface of the distempered walls; through the open door, she could glimpse – were she to look that way – the thickly hung wall of the hall, the framed paintings marching up the stairs. Gilt gleamed a little in the lamplight: tiny, microscopic points of light. Were she to look that way.
She had taken down the relevant catalogue – earlier, by daylight – and studied The Jewel. Why, she hardly knew: to take it in in its entirety, to look at its colours and its gleaming lights and dark pools of shadow, to watch the almost-smiling of Mrs Sandborne, to watch her as she watched the future.
What would she make of all this? You survived, she might say, and I did not. Make the most of your survival.