by Bill James
‘You put him into that box, Judith,’ the older woman declared, ‘and what has to be said should be said while he and the box are present. This is the culmination of a narrative. It demands a fullness, agonizing and tragic though this fullness might be.’
‘Oh, hell, it’s you,’ Judith said.
‘Your disgraceful appetite,’ the other said, and Harpur began to realize who she must be. Iles had probably got to it minutes ago.
He had emerged totally from his spasm, still bent forward over the edge of the pulpit and smiling cheerily said, ‘This is liveliness. This is ding and dong. And a name. We have a name? Here is Judith, as we know. He nodded in her direction. And?’ he said, turning towards the older woman.
So, no, Iles’s near-magical insights hadn’t unlocked these mysteries yet. Or, he wouldn’t admit they had. He knew only the same as Harpur. Or did he?
‘She’s Daphne, and a malevolent, obsessive, big-words cow,’ Judith said. ‘Narrative!’
Iles said, ‘Taught with you? Disapproved of you?’
‘I sought decency,’ Daphne said. ‘I sought rectitude, nothing more than normal, basic rectitude. And she, Judith Vasonne, as she was then, and Thomas Wells Hart, perverted this wish by contemptuously resisting my mission. Thomas Wells Hart turned it into profit for himself.’
‘She put a snoop on Tom and Tom made a monkey of him. Pinched his job,’ Judith said.
‘And so look at how he is now,’ Daphne replied. ‘Pinched the job and so landed the chance to die young. I have kept track of you, Judith. You went away, yes, married, I understand, but then someone tells me you’ve been seen here at The Knoll – seen with him. Such effrontery still! I could not let you carry on in life as if you had done no blundering wrong. This occasion would have been incomplete if I had not determined to speak all I knew. What you have heard from me this morning will give you an extra topic to discuss at your disgusting, unfeeling “piss up”,won’t it?’ She stood, glanced towards the coffin, bowed slightly, then walked slowly down the aisle and out into the street. It was a steady, meaningful walk with a bit of a thump to it, and Harpur thought she wanted to proclaim finality: all that needed to be spoken had been spoken and in suitable circumstances. End. She was wrong, of course, but for the moment Harpur didn’t know how to put her right.
‘There we are then,’ Judith said, ‘she’s given us her bilious piece. I think you should perhaps get on with your commentary, Mr Iles. Sorry about the bitch interloper. She hasn’t changed, except to get uglier and louder and primmer. Please resume. You had mentioned your sidekick, Harpur.’
‘Yes, Harpur,’ Iles replied. ‘It is Harpur who will be hunting down whoever killed Tom Wells Hart, on my … on our ground. Col probably possesses already many secret factors about the case that he hasn’t disclosed to me. He tends not to disclose matters to me, especially if they’re important. A kind of immaculate sliding-scale prevails: the more crucial the information he has, the more one would expect Harpur to consult me about it, and the less likely he is to do so. Think about this, would you, please? I am the assistant chief constable, brackets, Operations. That is my official, recognized designation. The brackets might seem to make this word unimportant, a bit added on – the way they put some lords’ first names. No. It defines an area of responsibility, a vital area of responsibility.
‘Now, what Harpur is engaged on is unquestionably an operation. What else could it be? Therefore, or ergo as Latinists might say, you’d assume he would report his major operational findings to me, his line manager. I fear you don’t know Harpur. I get a load of premier cru silence. It’s his housewifely practice, adding in private to his cosy little store-cupboard. I had the impression when meeting him today, for instance, that he’d just come upon something very useful. Yes, this very a.m. Possibly a caller turned up at that property of his with unexpected goodies. He lives in an extremely ripe-for-renewal district of the city. With no regard for social quality and rating, he stubbornly persists in bringing up his daughters there, including the lovely one I’ve categorically never laid a hand on, other than palm to knuckles, or knuckles to palm.’ Using his own two hands he gave a demonstration of how these meaningless, unerotic, even anti-erotic, mini-collisions might have occurred during a tea and seedy cake occasion. He said, ‘Harpur was slightly breathless and jumpy, as if he had just received a considerable surprise, probably a good, considerable surprise.
‘Yes, my information is cruelly Col-redacted, but I understand that, because Tom was going on a dangerous assignment, he had cleared his pockets of all items that might offer insights to an enemy. In other words he was willing for the sake of his work to become a non-person, a sans papiers – a no-i.d. – as some are labelled in France. But his actual character and spirit were so vigorous that they would survive this temporary partial blot-out of himself. He could be identified easily from his car registration, it’s true, but what I mean is his determination not to provide any search of his clothes with indications of his present investigations. He made himself a nobody, yet he was always a much admired, much loved, somebody, as this turnout here today proves so well.
‘Harpur, despite certain unamusing, chronic character weaknesses, will bring his killer, his killers, to trial and demonstrate worldwide that Thomas Wells Hart’s death deserves and will receive investigation by the best officer available: Col.’
People at a funeral do not applaud but there was a grateful, widespread, warm murmur of thanks, even though some would have noticed the ACC’s shudder episode and feel cheated that it hadn’t progressed into something authentically rough-house and crazed. When Iles came back to his seat. Harpur, alongside him, said, ‘…’
But why Harpur again?
Why? Prats! Can’t you see? It’s because Iles still needed something to kick against after so much conversation and not much else.
Harpur said, ‘You graced this congregation with a resounding, much appreciated tribute to someone whose garments you so deftly yet sensitively rifled right there at the death scene, sir, no shilly-shallying, no fear of blood, no abject serfdom to protocol and dogmatic police procedural rules. Pro-active would be my term for this – pro-active in its most pro-active form. Your steady handling of the interruptions was notable and positive. You drew these revelations from them as no one else could have. Your remarks about Hart’s empty pockets brilliantly left out the fact that you yourself had done the search.’
‘Thanks, Col,’ Iles replied. ‘I treasure your approval, of course, in my fashion.’
‘Which fashion is that, sir?’
‘Mine.’
‘Anyway, my deepest and most sincere congratulations, sir.’
Heart-to-heart, Iles replied, ‘Just don’t fuck up, you jerk, now there’s some extra material, that’s all.’
TWENTY-FOUR
So, I’d watched the recent mysterious playlet at Jack Lamb’s place, Darien, and then taken an ad-lib speaking-part in the layby presentation a little later. Upshot? Obvious: I had to backtrack hard and recognize that I’d probably been stupidly wrong at The Knoll to dismiss Judith’s worry about her brother as alarmist flim-flam. I’d just landed the partnership at that time and felt cocky enough to believe absolutely in my instinctive and instant ability to read a situation accurately. I’d lacked caution. I’d learned some since. I was learning more now.
OK, I admit I didn’t have an identification for blue-van-man, and couldn’t be sure he must be Keith Vasonne. Nor did I know for certain – really know, not just guess at – what the wheely contained, and how it figured in the encounter with Lamb, if it did.
But Judy had said she suspected her brother might be into dodgy art dealing at Darien, after Lamb’s mother’s shoot-out. I’d viewed what might be something like that, hadn’t I? Coincidence? Could be.
I was bound to wonder, though, whether what I’d witnessed today made Judy’s anxiety seem justified and sensible; not only witnessed: I’d joined in. Shouldn’t I have realized that Judy wasn’t the kind to panic
and fantasize possible big danger for her brother? We’d been close enough a few years ago for me to understand how her mind worked. Most likely this wouldn’t have changed. She’d have her reasons for what she’d said, and strong reasons. Because she’d been a Religious Education teacher years ago, it didn’t follow that she had a taste for hocus-pocus.
I did realize, of course, that it was no crime to look for bargains at a gallery hit by rough and very grave trouble: say, the owner’s holidaying elderly mother jailed for gunfire manslaughter on the premises, almost murder. To keep the business alive and the cash flow flowing it might have to drop prices for quick sales. Any commercial outfit in trouble did this. Likewise the stock exchange. Buyers would naturally, and legally, swoop to take advantage. After all, why else were the reductions offered?
But … oh, yes, there’s a but: but, for art trading, a core question might have to be faced, and faced first: is the customer’s, or customers’, intended purchase money clean? How come you got so rich in the readies, mate? You want to take us into something unwholesome?
Pics, and to a lesser extent sculpts, had become a very preferred method of investing, and nicely laundering, crooked cash: drugs sales cash; blackmail pay-offs; extortion income; kidnap ransoms; protection fees; and more protection fees; fraud profits; robbery hauls. This is money that cannot be held in a bank or building society or in stocks and shares because it would be conspicuous and liable to bring dangerous attention from the Treasury and the police. Major villains, loaded with splendid but awkward, deeply incriminating, bales of raw, unlawfully piled up currency, might not know much about art but they did know what they liked: safe and extremely respectable ‘placement’, to use a trade term; placement for hot, hazardous sterling or dollars or euros; these placements – actually replacements – likely to appreciate at a jolly speed, especially as they were bought knockdown cheap: low start, fast rise; ‘Lazarus leaps’, as the process was known, after the New Testament celebrity who came back from the dead.
The works acquired in this type of slippery, confidential deal would probably never get displayed in some gangster’s drawing room for his/her spouse or aunty or neighbours or accomplices to enthuse over; to envy and guess at a six- or seven-digit value already, and growing; the entire process more or less pure: well, in fact, more less than more. The trouble with admirers was that they might rapturously and carelessly talk elsewhere about these beautiful items, their fortunate new proprietor and the address they gloriously bedecked. Eventually well-documented whispers would possibly reach the Metropolitan Police’s anti-Proceeds Of Corruption Unit (POCU), and/or one of the law’s fine-arts detective squads here, or in the United States or Japan or Dubai or China, or almost anywhere in Europe. ‘Global’: this was the reputation of great pictures, their charm, their impact, international. Obviously, such reputations wouldn’t have flowered unless the works had been on public view at some happy time in the past. However, very unwise now.
Art critics sometimes praised a picture for being subtly understated, though not anything by Jason Pollock or Frank Auerbach. But works that became elegant parts of the laundering process didn’t state anything at all, subtle or otherwise; not to outsiders, anyway. They were craftily kept concealed, until re-sale. In fact, they might be not simply understated but sequestered underground, in a temperature-controlled, dust-free, utterly private strongroom – concrete walls and roof, reinforced steel door, multi-locked – built for this purpose in the owner’s cellars, and looked in on now and then or oftener exclusively by him/her.
These visits would not be simply or even mainly for quiet, contemplative aesthetic pleasure – say, delight in perspective, light and shadow, eloquent portraiture, colour range and accuracy – but to check that no sly and greedy bastard had got into the property somehow, forced the locks and nicked the whole fucking classy lot, total displacement, like that famous swiping raid on a gallery in Boston USA. Once works from a private strongroom had been stolen they would most likely stay stolen. Their owner could not report this loss to the police because there’d be intrusive and very focussed inquires about how the owner came in fact to be the owner. The answer was clear: plunder. That’s what they’d been bought with. The owner wouldn’t want to give this answer, though, nor even to be asked the question.
To keep a deterrent Rottweiler in the strongroom would be risky. The beast might get heavyweight playful and take bites out of the pictures and/or pulverize exquisite figurines. Pity the collector. Enjoying triumphant thoughts of future auctions he/she might open the metal door one morning and find the guardian dog with fragments of a blue, glowing, waterlilies job by Monet in the dangling, rhythmically swaying strands of its muzzle drool.
OK, the owner might have a gun in the house somewhere and, in an absolutely understandable, culture-based fury, get it and shoot the sodding vandal: a due, wholehearted rejoinder on behalf of art, loveliness and the soaring Beijing market. This could make further mess, though, plus the difficulty of removing the corpse. A shot Rottweiler could produce quite a lot of blood and bone fragments.
I thought Judy’s worries about Keith came in two kinds. First, she might be scared on her own and their parents’ account that he’d get drawn into crime and possible arrest and humiliating conviction for handling loot. Incidentally, perhaps Jack Lamb felt similarly nervous about possible disastrous tangles with the law. I wondered if at Darien I’d watched Keith Vasonne arrive with a case full of funds, wanting to make an offer for some of Lamb’s treasures. I didn’t think the money would be Vasonne’s own. Judy hadn’t hinted at that. He might be acting as a go-between courier for someone else: someone of grander crookedness and vaster opulence who didn’t want to risk a personal appearance, and/or who regarded haggling as beneath him/her now. This would suggest that Keith, if it was Keith, must be well trusted and, therefore, not a novice in the laundering vocation.
It looked as though Lamb had refused to deal. Although he might need trade and income he quite possibly didn’t fancy Vasonne’s kind of trading, suppose it was Vasonne. Lamb would already be finding life tense. There’d been the shooting, the sending down of his mother, plus the disturbing fact that, because of the killing in his home and gallery, police would have swarmed all over the property, undoubtedly giving attention to the art work he had there, and wondering about where it had come from – its provenance, to call on another piece of trade jargon – and its genuineness, or not. No matter how keenly Lamb needed to make some sales, he would know he had to keep clear of anything suspect, at least for a while. Perhaps he even feared blue-van-man could be an attempted stitch-up by the police.
The second, and much worse, cause of Judith’s dreads was that she might fear for Keith’s physical safety, perhaps for his life. Because art deals often involved very big money, they could also involve very hard and ruthless people. She possibly doubted his ability to cope in that dicey game. Profits from illegal art trading now ranked third in criminal earnings, only drugs and armament more. This meant competition, sometimes brutal competition, and sometimes lethal. I, Thomas Wells Hart, can vouch for this, of course, if I’m allowed to comment, admittedly out of time-order here.
I had Judith’s current mobile phone number and decided I might sometime fairly soon give her a ring. I’d intend it as an admission of regret for not immediately seeing at The Knoll that her concern might signal genuine crisis. She hadn’t actually grown visibly enraged by my attitude then, but I’d sensed her disappointment, even, possibly, a sliver of contempt – ‘Chicken!’ – though she wouldn’t say it. ‘Betrayal!’ – though she wouldn’t say it: betrayal of that risk-taking happiness we’d had when I was younger and less timid. I still didn’t fancy trying to bug the conference room at her brother’s house, but I’d be willing to talk about other ways to discover what was going on. Other positive ways. That in itself would demonstrate how ashamed and sorry I felt for my previous indifference. No need to make an apology: it would be built-in. The change of approach should tell her that
I wanted to make up for the time we might have lost through my blindness. I felt I’d come over as someone acquainted with humility now and no longer a brassy, knowall twerp. I’d give her a description of blue-van-man and she should be able to say whether he might in fact be her brother. I thought he almost certainly was. And I thought, too, that he was probably much deeper into crookedness than she feared.
TWENTY-FIVE
From BW to all staff,
Please note that the attached contract with Ms Daphne Davenpole is for a period in the first instance of one week only. Ms Davenpole requests covert surveillance of Miss Judith Vasonne, a teacher colleague, and Thomas Wells Hart, a pupil at the school where the two women work. Ms Davenpole did not say why she wanted surveillance carried out, but I have agreed that the firm will provide the specified service for seven days, at the end of which either side may close the arrangement without penalty or explanation. It should be regarded as a trial exercise and subject to revision and/or cancellation. It is obviously possible that Ms Davenpole’s motive in booking the surveillance contains emotional/sexual elements. Embarrassment might have prevented her from speaking of this to me. Naturally, she is entitled to her silence, but the agency needs to act with exceptional sensitivity and discretion in these circumstances, especially as to-date no apparent criminal offence is involved. All parties are adult.
Narrative reports of the surveillance results together with any relevant photographs will be submitted daily to the agency and sent on to Ms Daphne Davenpole immediately either by courier or e-mail. For convenience and confidentiality the two parties under surveillance should be referred to only by the initial letter of their respective surnames V and H. Ms Davenpole has supplied the agency with home addresses of V and H, and a school sixth form photograph in which H appears as well as V and some other teachers, though not Ms Davenpole herself. V lives alone in a one-bedroom flat. H lives with his parents and siblings in a semi-detached four-bedroom house. Her thoroughness in providing these items suggests considerable strength of purpose. We have no certainty of that purpose, though, and this is a further reason for carefulness.