Pix (Volume Book 24) (Harpur & Iles Mysteries)

by Bill James

  Pix

  Also by Bill James in the Harpur and

  Iles series:

  You’d Better Believe It

  The Lolita Man

  Halo Parade

  Protection (TV tie-in version, Harpur

  and Iles)

  Come Clean

  Take

  Club

  Astride a Grave

  Gospel

  Roses, Roses

  In Good Hands

  The Detective is Dead

  Top Banana

  Panicking Ralph

  Eton Crop

  Lovely Mover

  Kill Me

  Pay Days

  Naked at the Window

  The Girl with the Long Back

  Easy Streets

  Wolves of Memory

  Girls

  Other novels by Bill James:

  The Last Enemy

  Split

  Middleman

  A Man’s Enemies

  Between Lives

  Making Stuff Up

  Letters from Carthage

  Short stories:

  The Sixth Man and other stories

  By the same author writing as

  David Craig:

  The Brade and Jenkins series:

  Forget It

  The Tattooed Detective

  Torch

  Bay City

  Other novels by David Craig:

  The Alias Man

  Message Ends

  Contact Lost

  Young Men May Die

  A Walk at Night

  Up from the Grave

  Double Take

  Bolthole

  Whose Little Girl Are You?

  (filmed as The Squeeze)

  A Dead Liberty

  The Albion Case

  Faith, Hope and Death

  Hear Me Talking to You

  Tip Top

  Writing as James Tucker:

  Equal Partners

  The Right Hand Man

  Burster

  Blaze of Riot

  The King’s Friends (reissued as by

  Bill James)

  Non-fiction:

  Honourable Estates

  The Novels of Anthony Powell

  PIX

  Bill James

  Copyright © 2008 by Bill James

  First American edition, 2009

  First published in Great Britain by Constable and Robinson Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

  form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information

  storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the

  publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages.

  ISBN 978-0-88150-882-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  has been applied for.

  Published by The Countryman Press, P.O. Box 748,

  Woodstock, VT 05091

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Chapter One

  When Mansel Shale looked into his personal soul – and he did that now and then, though not making a big thing of it, for God’s sake – yes, when he looked into his personal soul he saw that the main reason he ran a business was so he could use the good profits to buy good art. Manse liked the neatness and the wholesomeness of this thought – good profits, good art. It made the profits seem more worthwhile, not just a crude, grab-all chase for money. In discussions with certain friends Manse often mentioned he could not be more in favour of art. He considered that those words – ‘could not be more in favour of art’ – got his feelings exactly, and he stuck with them. So, when he returned one afternoon after golf to the ex-rectory where he lived and found nearly all his paintings fucking gone from the walls, it truly knocked him.

  Above all, Manse loved pictures known as Pre-Raphaelite, being a tremendous team well over a hundred years ago. One of these pictures, in a very suitable frame, was by a great artist called Arthur Hughes, and until now it had covered the wall safe where Manse kept all his Heckler and Koch 9 mm pistols and ammunition. Obviously, the frame of a picture did not amount to anywhere near as much as the picture itself, but he thought frames should be suitable. Sometimes, when he bought a picture, he would have the frame changed, finding the original one what Manse referred to as ‘off-key’ or ‘at variance’. Mock wood for frames Manse detested. If you had a genuine picture, surely the frame should be just as genuine. He disliked seeing the safe exposed – unkempt for it to be glinting at about his eye level, so plain and metallic, very much in that way of safes. When the picture hung there, it had been full of grand, bright, but also soft, colours.

  Manse operated the combination and opened up. Everything looked all right inside – the three automatics and bullet boxes. He relocked and decided he had to check all through the house for any more troubles. And this turned out wise, plus significant, really. Near the top of the rectory’s main stairs, with his throat cut and four bruises to the face, lay a white, dark-haired man of about thirty-five, wearing a very decent Paul Mixtor-Hythe, three-piece navy suit, the lowest button on the waistcoat undone, as always recommended by style people for waistcoats so as not to seem stuffy. In fact, he was very obvious from below in the rectory entrance hall, his limbs haywire, but Manse had been focused on the ground floor empty wall spaces, first in the hall itself, then the drawing room and the study-den, and didn’t at first look at the stairs. Naturally, nothing in any of the suit pockets gave an identification, though a quiet label sewn on to the inside breast pocket did identify Paul Mixtor-Hythe as the tailor. Manse knew that label, of course. The suit was messed up now, but you could still see it had been custom-made in terrific material, a sort of total rightness.

  In their time, the Pre-Raphaelites had what grew famed as a Brotherhood. This idea always thrilled Shale. He wished he could belong to a Brotherhood himself, not necessarily to do with art, because he realized he had almost no talent at that, but a commercial Brotherhood, instead of this damn barbaric competition lately and out-and-out turf warring in the substances industry. The traders’ understanding Manse had with Ralph Ember could not really be called a Brotherhood. It was an arrangement – a fine arrangement, but still, just an arrangement. And, of course, all the time people wanted to get in on it, newsters to the game in this area. The media sounded off non-stop about Nottingham and Manchester getting rough through commercial rivalry in the drugs business, but they ought to take a look here.

  Although his safe had been put on show now, all the other bared bits of wall stood blank except for hooks and dust lines, and Manse felt like this blankness took over his own personal soul, especially as the paintings had no insurance, because information on value might leak, followed by possible questions on how he could afford them. This would be about £3.5 million, Pre-Raphaelites plus others. People knew how he could afford them, but that was different from being asked straight out how he could afford them. Shale always tried to dodge that kind of head-on quizzing. Too much definition helped nobody.

  The Arthur Hughes used to talk to Manse – that’s how he often described it, like a spoken, one-to-one message – and he felt wonderfully in touch with the work and with the painter. In fact, he felt in touch with not only the painter hisself but with the period he lived in and the Brotherhood. This connection delighted Manse, going back to the middle of not just the last century but the one before. He was in favour of history. Also, art had a spiritual factor and he approved totally of that. Ma
nse considered spiritual things in general should get a better chance. A safe and the guns and rounds it contained could be very important, definitely, but not in a spiritual manner at all. As Shale regarded this present situation in his home, there’d been a troupe stealing the pix and a fight started over something. Or possibly an execution had been schemed as extra to the robbery somewhere private and quiet, such as on his property. He felt so damn relieved nobody dear to him was around the house at the time these savages intruded. That might of been grave.

  For instance, he enjoyed letting a girl move in and cohabit here now and then, although this house had been a rectory before Manse bought it. A girl might remain for weeks at a spell, or even a couple of months if he didn’t have much else going on, and Lowri or Patricia or Carmel could easily of been here when this break-in happened. Fortunately, though, Manse had arranged a couple of weeks for hisself without one of the girls while he did some wide thinking. He believed in a pause now and then. But these girls meant something deep to Manse. Never would he let more than one stay at a time because he would of regarded that as poor, unkind behaviour to the girls theirselves, and confusing for his children. He did not choose these girls just anyhow, and not only to do with features and body. He knew Carmel kept quite a deal of contact with her parents, which Manse considered a credit. All these girls gave him pleasant companionship and so on for spells since Sybil, his wife, left Manse to live in Wales with that chef or anaesthetist.

  And this produced the grandest and happiest piece of fluke today – Manse’s children, Laurent and Matilda, were away on a routine half-term with their mother. Otherwise, one of them, perhaps even both, might of got pulled into this foul violence. Luckily, Sybil did not want the children with her non-stop, or, if she heard of the rotten mischief that hit the rectory today, she might argue the children was in danger with Shale, due to his ongoing career. Occasionally, they’d be in the house alone. Sybil and Manse had never divorced, and he considered it would be wrong for another woman to live with him on a permanent arrangement, particularly as this house used to belong to the Church and was, clearly, the home of rectors, very much one up on ordinary vicars. It had a good driveway behind trees and hedges and seven bedrooms. He liked to think of rectors trotting to the front door in a pony and trap after visits or a service and pouring a pick-me-up from a silver-embossed decanter. As soon as Manse bought it, the house had become a former rectory, yes, but he did refer to it now and then as ‘the rectory’ and he felt he must respect its past up to quite a point. Some of his writing paper had ‘St James’ Rectory’ printed on it as Manse’s address. People joked sometimes about Manse in a rectory, manse being the word for a Nonconformist minister’s house, but rectories was Church of England. Also, of course, some thought it amusing that a rectory had been bought with drugs money, though Manse did not go along much with that kind of humour.

  When he saw what had happened, then looked right through his place and around it outside, he naturally got on the phone at once. ‘Chandor, you fucking evil lout – have you been here? Of course you been here.’

  ‘Manse, that you?’

  ‘This got your mark on it,’ Shale said. ‘No sign of a break-in anywhere. This got your mark on it. And in daylight.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Don’t –’

  ‘Honest to God, Manse.’

  ‘Or if not you as you, your people, running a-fuckingmok.’

  ‘What – some trouble at your home?’

  ‘This got to be put right, or as near as can be,’ Shale replied. ‘Soonest. I need to wash – well, you can believe it following that kind of contact! – then I’m going to pick up my kids, after access days with their mother. I don’t want them coming back to a house in this state. That cannot be helpful.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Which what?’ Shale said.

  ‘Which state?’

  ‘Don’t piss me about.’

  ‘The house – in a poor state? Some intrusion? Is that what you’re saying, Manse?’

  ‘You know the state it’s in, you sodding smarm prince,’ Shale replied. ‘You know about intrusions.’

  ‘Hang on a minute, Manse, will you?’

  Shale heard Hilaire Wilfrid Chandor call to someone, maybe in a different room, possibly his name. It sounded like Rufus. That would be the kind of name someone who worked for Chandor might have. Then Chandor’s hand went properly over the mouthpiece and Shale got nothing but a mumble, what could be an angry mumble, or put-on angry for Manse to pick up the tone of, a performance they’d most probably rehearsed, him and this sodding Rufus. After a minute, Chandor took his hand away and spoke to Shale again: ‘I’m not getting a clear answer from these two fuckers here but I think they might have improperly targeted your –’

  ‘Which two fuckers? Was there three, then, at first?’

  ‘Absolutely improperly. Look, Manse, you go on and pick up your children. That’s at Severalponds service station, yes? The usual swap over? It’s going to take you, what – four hours there and back with an interlude for cold drinks and possible muffins? Ample. I’ll see things are absolutely fine at the rectory in time for your return with Laurent and Matilda. Guaranteed. Don’t worry. An error. I acknowledge it. Anything that’s been taken will be replaced, I assure you, and undamaged.’

  ‘It’s not just possessions missing. There’s this . . . well . . . another aspect altogether.’

  ‘What’s that, Manse?’

  ‘Another aspect altogether.’

  ‘Right. I think I’m getting the outline, Manse. I’m learning more from you than I’ve got so far from these two fuckers, but that’s going to change, believe me. They have their own damn rivalries and venom. Who can tell what they’ll get up to?’

  ‘Which two fuckers? Was there three of them? More?’

  ‘They assume they can read my wishes, Manse, and they go ahead crudely, grossly, and very, very wrongly. Yes, amok, you’ve got it. You –’

  ‘Why was they in my place at all? I mean, why?’

  ‘No sense of what’s appropriate.’

  ‘In a Paul Mixtor-Hythe suit, not reach-me-down.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Chandor said. ‘That would probably be right.’

  ‘Black slip-ons, Charles Laity by the look.’

  ‘You know how it can be with staff. They imagine they’re being helpful but fall into excess.’

  ‘This is the kind of thing that could upset children not just now but lifelong. They see something bad and also a sudden lack on walls where they’re used to beauty, vividness, warmth. And so they’ll come to regard disappointment as normal.’

  ‘You can relax, Manse. The rectory will be just as you like it and a credit to you. Kids of their age ask damned embarrassing questions, I know. Sharp-eyed. They notice things.’

  ‘Well, of course they fucking notice things. If there’s something like that dumped here they’re going to notice, aren’t they? It’s unusual.’

  ‘Point taken, Manse.’

  ‘I don’t understand how you got people like that working for you.’

  ‘I’m going to think about them after this, believe me, Manse. Staff reappraisal annually under seven main headings, including Balance and Tact. Well, have we been getting any of that? Hardly. They mean well, but –’

  ‘Mean well to who?’

  ‘Your place will be perfect,’ Chandor replied. ‘Or something in lieu.’

  ‘In fucking what?’

  ‘In lieu – instead, Manse.’

  ‘There’s no instead for them items off of the walls.’

  ‘I meant if they’ve already gone, or something like that.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘ “Something like that.” ’

  ‘Suppose they’ve been moved on.’

  ‘Moved on how?’ Shale replied.

  ‘Like sold. If they’ve been sold to some middleman already, perhaps for freighting abroad, collectables. In that case,
the absolutely total money will come to you, Manse. I’ll get it out of the two fuckers, I promise.’

  ‘I don’t want the money. I want the items.’ That business colleague, Panicking Ralphy Ember, had taught Manse never to be clear on the telephone because of intercepts, and to use general words like ‘items’ or ‘aspect’ when things was sensitive. And Manse did not have no doubt – these things now was sensitive. Chandor seemed careful, too. Even landlines could be tapped, especially if you thought of someone like that fucker, Assistant Chief, Iles. He did what he wanted.

  ‘Or, if they’ve taken a knock-down price for them on account of haste, I’ll make it up to you from my individual funds, Manse,’ Chandor said. ‘You quote me the average cost from any auction catalogue within the last six months and that’s the price you’ll get from myself, no haggling, plus five per cent for disturbance. I wish to avoid the least grievance on your part at this juncture.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘What which, Manse?’

  ‘Juncture.’

  ‘This moment in time.’

  ‘But why is this moment in time a juncture?’ Shale replied. ‘That’s what I’m getting at. What is it makes this moment in time a juncture? Why are you in my place at all? You’re someone who’s hardly been set up in this region for any duration, but you’re into my property. This is a fucking rectory for Christ’s sake. Do you know rectories? I say this operation got your mark on it, but I don’t really know your mark because you’re so new, but I’d just guess it’s your mark not to leave a mark because that’s the sort you are and coming here from London.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to upset you at this juncture or moment in time, or any other, Manse – I wish to avoid causing you grievance ever. That goes without saying.’

  The sod did say it, though. He wanted friendliness. His people had done everything wrong, or that was his tale. Chandor would try to put patches on. Shale said: ‘How can I get the price from catalogues? They never been sold. They been here all the time since I bought them. They’re not going to be in no catalogue.’

  ‘The equivalent, Manse. Things that match them more or less for age, type and distinction. The internet will tell us. It’s the same as if you wanted to price a certain 2004 Bentley, you would not need to have the actual car itself there, you could look up what models of that year and type were going at.’