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by Bill James

‘Whose, Jack – your mother’s?’

  ‘To some degree my mother’s, yes. Not many people’s mothers kill a stranger in an art gallery. But I don’t have to worry much about her reputation. She lives mostly in the States. They might hear about it over there, and they’ll probably think she did well, guarding the pics and the property and me. A lot of them still have that holy affection for firearms, and not just to go rabbiting with. Think of the star, Charlton Heston, fronting for the gun lobby. “Every citizen has a constitutional right to shoot another citizen’s head off if that other citizen looks dangerous, or might get to look dangerous any time shortly, unless his head is blasted off now.”’

  ‘So, when you say reputation you mean your own, do you, Jack?’

  ‘I mean the Darien gallery’s, and my own, yes. We co-exist. We cohere. Great art is sniffy about the company it keeps, and the settings it’s in.’

  ‘How can all that harm you and the gallery?’ Harpur said. ‘You didn’t do the shooting. As I remember it, you cooperated with the police.’

  ‘I did, I did – talking to your colleague Garland and others. But there are people in London and Manchester and Paris and Cairo and Antwerp and Ghent who’ll get reports of the disaster, and how will they respond, Colin?’

  ‘That’s a tricky one, Jack.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Not if you know this trade. They’ll say: “That sounds like a dodgy type of gallery and business. It has a shoot-to-kill old lady on the premises. Had.” They’ll start to think greedily about Darien – how they can make something of it for themselves now its position is sure to be shaky. They’ll wonder whether the Darien owner – “moniker Jack Lamb, is it?” – they’ll ask themselves whether this Jack Lamb can survive the appalling, farcical havoc, police and press acting very intrusive. There’ll be the smell of cordite over Darien. There’ll be a drop in trustworthiness. There’ll be the lawyer’s bill for getting his mother’s murder charge reduced. There’ll be a long, possibly bankrupting break from normal dealing. This is a situation that some of them will decide is worth looking into, don’t you think, Colin? Jack Lamb will appear weak, forced to flog off works cheap, a fire sale, if he’s to keep the business running. Bargains! Snips!’

  ‘You speculate this, do you, Jack? It hasn’t actually happened?’

  Lamb had been pacing about among the imagined artillery, now and then staring up into the black sky, as though to home in on a Dornier that could be blasted. Probably from watching a state funeral on TV he’d learned how to do the army slow march – one respectful half step forward, pause, then the other half – and he’d been practising that. He stopped. Harpur had sat down on the low surrounding wall of the guns position and Lamb stood unmoving now in front of him. Jack was 6’ 5” and about 260 lbs, He blocked Harpur’s view of the city. Harpur had sensed that what might be coming next from Lamb could be crucial. And it would be delivered downwards at him from this looming, mighty physique. It was like being addressed by a wall.

  Tonight’s get-together didn’t match the usual tout, nark, stool pigeon, snitch session, with Jack passing on selected information about crimes or intended crimes that he felt to be particularly odious and anti-social. Jack wasn’t simply an observer of the villainy or potential villainy now. He’d become part of it. He was encompassed. He wanted help.

  ‘I’ve had approaches. Why I asked for the meeting,’ he said.

  ‘Approaches?’

  ‘All right, an approach. There’ll be others, though. I know it.’

  ‘An approach how, Jack?’

  ‘Direct.’

  ‘Direct in which way?’

  ‘Direct in a direct way.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Lamb paused, as though what he would reveal now might seem incredible and therefore should get a measured, unmelodramatic mention. He said, ‘One of them arrived in a van with a wheeled suitcase, a capacious wheeled suitcase, full of cash, and spoke of an interest in two particular modern works. He’d been very accurately briefed, Colin, on what pictures I had here, on the walls or in the cellar lock-away. Some good, professional research had been done. It’s disturbing.’

  ‘You saw the money?’

  ‘Higgledy-piggledy, amassed in an excited rush, not neat, rubber-banded packs, but very genuine looking, tens, twenties, fifties. Somebody was in a hurry, wanted to get in first with the offer, no time for tidiness.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘He wasn’t a main man,’ Lamb said.

  ‘Someone handling a deal for someone else?’

  ‘Someone hoping to handle a deal for someone else,’ Lamb replied. ‘Someone hoping to handle a deal for someone else who’s large scale and flush with crook cash he or she wants turned into something respectable and reeking of culture?’

  ‘Laundering,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Why I said classic,’ Lamb replied. ‘Commonplace. Isn’t it? Investment in art. It’s a standard ploy for dumping ill-gotten loot – drugs cash especially, but also, protection cash, robbery cash, fraud cash, kidnap cash, terrorist cash, menaces cash. These days, pictures are international currency, but safer, and not subject to exchange rates. Dirty money gets cleaned up, made impeccable. And more than that, it can be transformed into something gloriously distinguished. Then, after a decent, tactical gap, the purchases will be sold on, alchemized into cash again, but now cash from an apparently above-board, honest bit of trading. It’s called “the Balkan strategy”. Don’t know why.

  ‘The new rich tend to go for contemporary pieces, not the ancients, so launderers buy modern, knowing they can get a fine price for it at an eventual re-sell. Take a look at auction prices reached in GB, China, Japan, the US for, say, works by Jeff Koons, or Warhol, or Hoyland or Twombly or Emin or Hirst, or Ligon or Ofili. They will give you an idea of the going rates. Of course, most sales are totally fine and legal. A few, no.’

  ‘The assistant launderer gave a name – his own or his employer’s?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘He said to call him Monsieur Rendrecompte. Mr Invoice. This is above all a merchantile situation, not to do with aesthetics. Colin.’

  ‘He was French? Belgian?’

  ‘The word was French. But I’d say his accent seemed Brit, even local.’

  ‘You didn’t know him, recognize him, though?’

  ‘I can give you a description, Colin.’

  ‘You refused the suitcase offer, did you?’

  ‘Of course, I fucking did. OK, I don’t want to get prim. As we know, there are disreputable areas to some art trading, and it’s true that I might, accidentally, have been involved in such business now and then. Inadvertently.’

  ‘Accidentally?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Accidentally. Utterly accidentally.’

  ‘Right, utterly accidentally,’ Harpur replied. ‘Utterly, utterly accidentally. Inadvertently.’

  Lamb said, ‘We don’t always know the full provenance of a picture or sculpture, and this can draw a dealer into dubious territory. As I believe some US statesman said, we know there are things we don’t know but there are also things we don’t know we don’t know.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘But M. Rendrecompte’s laundering mission was so crude, so screamingly blatant, so much a cliché, that hardly any dealer would look at it.’

  ‘Did you part friends?’ Harpur had asked.

  ‘Do I want friends like that?’

  Do you want enemies like that, or like whoever it was that sent him with the money on luggage castors? He/she might feel disrespected, and vengeful. But Harpur hadn’t said this, only added it to those other unsaids in his mind, that mute pandemonium.

  ‘I just thought you ought to know the situation, Colin.’ Lamb had been preparing to leave.

  ‘Well, yes, thanks, Jack.’

  ‘On the face of it, I suppose no offence has been committed. We don’t know the money was bad money. It was, of course, but I can see it might be hard to prove.’

  ‘More of that slipperi
ness in the word “know”. I’ll keep an eye,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘That’s all I’d hope for, Colin.’

  Most likely it wasn’t, but Jack would find it humiliating to ask for better defined help. He’d probably expect Harpur to pick up the unspoken signals and do something about them. Harpur did pick up the unspoken signals. He didn’t see what he could do about them though.

  As he and Iles drove back to headquarters from the body in the Ford Focus at Cairn Close, all these factors jostled spikily and separately in his head, but he found that his brain, more or less of itself, with no conscious prompting from the brain’s proprietor, was trying to synthesize this awkward lot, bring it into some kind of unity and sense and recognizable shape. His reason wanted to shepherd in together Lamb’s boodle bearing visitor, and the blasted Focus in Cairn with Hart sprawled, resprawled, over the wheel. Where the fuck was the connection, though? The only connection was Harpur: he’d heard of or seen both. But surely it amounted to a kind of daft egomania to imagine this proved a link between the art courier and Thomas Wells Hart in the Focus, didn’t it? His brain could produce the questions OK, not the answers. He had no QED. Darien was Darien with all its woes, and Cairn was the close with its purged-pockets deado.

  They were drawing in to the yard at headquarters. Iles said, ‘Judith Vasonne comes to spend a little holiday break with her sister-in-law and brother on our patch while hubby is occupied elsewhere. That’s credible. Presumably she has no kids. While with her relatives she gets in touch with a one-time boy lover. No, I don’t believe that was a revival of old sexual interests. Youth is no longer her taste. But this particular one-time youth is now a private detective, and apparently very good at it. She might have still been at the school when he got the job with Bainbridge and knew about it; might even have heard he’d quickly earned a partnership, has exceptional talent, and not just shagwise. Is that why she contacts him again, Col?’

  ‘You think so, sir?’ Iles could often bring off almost mystical and telepathic glimpses like this.

  ‘What has she seen at the sister-in-law and brother’s house that causes her to ring Tom Hart?’ the ACC asked.

  ‘What has she seen, sir?’

  ‘This I don’t know. That might sound like a dim and negligent condition to be in. Wrong. Because I know I don’t know, and because this is not an unknown unknown, I can feel, do feel, I ought to and will correct the not knowing that I know about by finding out what it is I at present don’t know. The not knowing can be remedied because the not knowing is not unknown. Then I will know that I know. This is what it means to be Operations in brackets, Col.’

  ‘I know,’ Harpur replied.

  NINETEEN

  Of course, I didn’t find out about that meeting between Harpur and Jack Lamb until later on, and then only through hints. But never mind about the meeting; I’d actually witnessed what Lamb described to Harpur – the arrival of the blue van and its driver.

  We’ll get to that shortly. There is some other material to fit in first.

  I don’t think Judith could have read in my face that I thought her bugging notion a probable non-starter; a more than probable non-starter. I certainly didn’t say this to her. It would have made her feel snubbed, or worse: naïve, clumsy, stupid. I dreaded the idea of hurting her in any way. After all, hadn’t she been part of my education, and not just in Religious Studies? Especially not in Religious Studies. I owed Judith plenty. She’d saved me from feet. Much of what I knew about women came from Judith. It helped me now and then, for instance, with Irene Celadon, the ‘someone else’ Judy wanted to ask about at The Knoll, but didn’t; probably couldn’t, because she’d decided my sex life was the past and therefore of no concern to her any longer – except that it obviously and confidentially was.

  But I said she shouldn’t secretly unlock any doors at her brother and sister-in-law’s house, Failsafe, quite yet, and that, first, I’d do some general inquiries. I could tell this disappointed her; more than disappointed her: riled her. Maybe she feared it was my rotten way of side-stepping her scheme. OK, perhaps she’d be part right. God, the sliminess and falsity of ‘quite yet’, words pretending to be nicely judged and gradual, but really meaning, ‘for fuck’s sake stuff the bug guff, Judy’.

  ‘Exactly what general inquiries, Tom?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Preparatory.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘I’d need to look into the art situation mentioned by your sister-in-law.’

  ‘The bugging could do that for you. It would be background to the Failsafe meetings and discussions.’

  ‘Might be. We’ve no clear notion of what his business is, have we? I’d like to dig into that.’

  ‘This is what I mean,’ she’d answered. ‘The bugging would tell us.’

  ‘Possibly. I’d prefer the more roundabout way of coming at it. For now. “Softly, softly, catchee monkey.”’

  ‘Bollocks,’ she replied.

  Yes, it was: a hack proverb to help me skip commitment. For a few seconds I thought Judy would go on with the argument, but then she seemed to accept that, whatever she said, I’d use my own methods: the methods I’d been trained in. This wasn’t school days any longer. Perhaps I wished it was. She shelved the bugging idea, and our meal at The Knoll had finished amiably enough: a bit of cheek-kissing, checks we hadn’t changed mobile numbers, and promises to keep in touch.

  My intention was still to help her – in genuine honour of how we had been for each other way back. I’d do it, though, by proving Judith’s worry about her brother’s work was nuts. I had a positive aim: to negative suspicion. The proof would need to be clear and real. Judith had a brain. She’d spot any make-believe and lies. I’d have to be very skilful, and very invisible, especially at the start. I must stay unseen, or I’d be snookered, whether he had anything to hide or not. If Judith found I’d been exposed she’d naturally assume that Keith and his associates would change their behaviour for a while, go harmless and respectable, supposing the behaviour had previously been bad – crooked, criminal. There’d be no hope of finding the truth.

  Or, suppose they were innocent – which I thought likely – they’d carry on being innocent, regardless of a spy, me. There’d be nothing worthwhile for a spy – me – to spy on. But if they were into villainy they’d do that super cover-up and switch, temporarily at least, to a strong, thorough show of innocence for the spy – me – and any other spy colleagues.

  I drove out towards Rastelle Major to take a look at the Vasonne property, Failsafe. I already had an idea of the layout from Judith’s drawing, and a Google visit, but I wanted to see the actual building and grounds in their setting. This – the setting, the geography – was crucial. It would dictate the kind of secret observation possible, or not. Yes, or not. That private eye course listed the indispensable conditions for concealed surveillance. We were told not to try it unless all of these were in place, repeat, all.

  It was a fairly modern, large, detached double-fronted property, five bedrooms, several bathrooms, straggling ivy up the facade over the front porch, a separate brick double garage, I thought I could make out the side door into the so-said so buggable conference room that Judith had spoken about. There was nobody coming to or going from that garden door while I watched. A concrete path leading to a gate on to the road split the front lawn into two. The rear garden had a pool, a children’s chute and climbing frame and a gazebo.

  Failsafe was one of three similar detached houses built on the edge of a small copse. The Internet gave the most recent purchase price, presumably by the Vasonnes, as £950,000. Three sources formed my summing-up of the spread: Judith’s sketch; the Internet; and now, personal viewing. The last was easily the weakest. A secret snoop would be impossible, either on foot or in the car. The three houses stood in a little line off the road. It wouldn’t get much traffic and what there was could be easily seen from one of the bay windows; similarly, any pedestrian hanging about. It would be stupid for me to dawdle here. I st
opped for a couple of minutes in the car, did my quick bit of useless gazing at the gazebo etcetera, then pushed on towards Rastelle Major.

  Well, for a mile or two towards Rastelle Major. I decided, though, on a second residence inspection, but now a different one mentioned by Judith: Jack Lamb’s Darien. This should be easier. I’d passed Darien several times when driving to see clients of the firm who lived out that way. The house lay in a hollow. On one side of it was a hillock where ash, beech and willows grew: Chase Woods. I could watch from there without being obvious. I wouldn’t be very close but I always carried field glasses in the car.

  I’d Googled Darien, too. A caption to the photographs said parts of it dated back nearly five hundred years, though there’d been subsequent changes and additions. The note also suggested that the name, Darien, a region of Panama, had probably been taken from a Keats sonnet, and if so couldn’t be as old as the house. In the seventeenth-century Civil War it was a Royalist stronghold and there’d been local skirmishes. There’d been a local skirmish more recently, too: Jack Lamb’s mother with a handgun saw to that.

  I took a narrow B road route up towards Chase Woods, left the car in a layby and walked to a spot from where I could see everything except the far side of the house, while pretty well concealed by the trees and bushes. There were flagstone terraces at the front and back, a circular swimming pool, and several outbuildings, including what could be staff bungalows, a summer house, stables and a couple of barns, perhaps used as garages now. Art could supply a nice living for some.

  Not much moved. A middle-aged woman came out briefly from a side door, lit a cigarette and had half a dozen quick, deep drags. When she’d finished she bent and thoroughly ground out the stub. She seemed to push the remnant through a drain cover under one of the down pipes, then went back in to what was probably the kitchen.

  The furtive, fervent beat-the-ban smoking session had distracted me. When I put the glasses back on to the front, tree-lined, gravelled drive, I saw a small blue van approaching the house. It stopped near the porch. The driver climbed swiftly out and went to the rear of the vehicle. He opened the doors and produced a large, grey and black-wheeled suitcase. He carried this on to the terrace and could then use the wheels. When he had the case in his arms he held it with what seemed a loving reverence, as though the most precious item in some outlawed religious ritual. He made for Darien’s main entrance, and went out of sight in the brick-walled porch. I guessed he’d been admitted to the house. A salesman of some sort, with his samples in the case? Wasn’t there a collection of poems called A Case of Samples. Clairvoyant?