Killing the Emperors

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

  ‘Certainly not. Unlike Hirst, I’m not made of money. But I’ll have his orifices stuffed with cigarette butts.’

  ‘Why cigarette butts?’ asked Pooley.

  ‘He’s flogged cabinets full of them.’

  ‘I thought he flogged cabinets full of pills,’ said Amiss.

  The baroness clicked her tongue. ‘He did indeed. As—again—had been done before him. Hirst and many of his contemporaries claim to be original in their use of commonplace objects, when they’re just providing variations on what Marcel Duchamp thought of nearly a century ago. They burble these days about being in the vanguard of transgressive art…’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Pooley.

  ‘Art that pushes the boundaries and has the knickers of the bourgeoisie in a right old twist. I’ve nothing against that myself. I sometimes fancy a bit of transgression. However, the point is that all this was done by the Dadaists after the first war and Marcel Duchamp, whom one might term the Dada of them all, had most of the ideas that the YBAs pass off as their own. Take the Hirst Stalin. One of Duchamp’s japes was to paint a moustache and goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and exhibit it. It was Duchamp who announced that objects he called “readymades” were art.’ She paused. ‘Well, him being a frog, he called them “ob-jets trou-vés.” He kicked off with a bicycle wheel and a bottle rack. Then came the urinal.

  ‘Stop looking so depressed, Ellis. It gets worse. Duchamp bought a urinal from an ironworks called Mott, called it Fountain, signed it R. Mutt and tried to exhibit it. It was rejected, but later became the icon of conceptual art, since Duchamp’s message was that anything he said was art, was art. “I declare myself an artist, and so anything I say is art is art” became an immutable law. Actually, Duchamp was making a case for artistic freedom and he was also making a joke, but the law of unintended consequences gives us Hirst and his chums and an art establishment bowing down before them.’

  ‘Like the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf,’ suggested Pooley.

  ‘Funny you should mention that. Hirst gold-plated a calf’s hooves and horns, called it the Golden Calf, and flogged it for nine mill.’

  Pooley groaned.

  ‘Fill us in on the cigarette butts,’ requested Amiss.

  ‘Hirst branched out into butts. Standing butts and lying-down butts carefully arranged by his loyal workforce. Some of the cabinets were edged in gold to appeal to Arabs. They went for hundreds of thousands of smackers.’

  Amiss sighed. ‘The older I get, the more it’s borne upon me that there’s one born every minute.’

  ‘In the case of Mr. Hirst,’ guffawed the baroness, ‘he also believes that you should never give a sucker an even break. Especially if the sucker is rich. In that regard he does have a touch of genius. He’s an alchemist: he takes base metal and turns it into gold.’

  ‘Well at least what you’ve been planning is pretty original, Jack. I don’t think even Hirst has come up with snuff installations before now,’ said Amiss.

  Mary Lou laughed. ‘Jack, didn’t you once suggest suffocating Jeff Koons in a giant plastic inflatable penis and sticking him outside some museum?’

  ‘I most certainly did. I settled on Washington’s Museum of Crime and Punishment as the location.’ The baroness looked pensive. ‘But I could never decide on quite the right title for the work. Obviously, I thought of Dick, but I’d reserved Dickhead for my creation combining real bits of that Quinn bloke who won fame with the sculpture of his head made from his frozen blood.’ She glanced at Pooley. ‘Come on, Ellis. You’re off-duty. Stop looking down your nose like a Reverend Mother who’s discovered the novices having an orgy in the cloister, and choose a so-called artist to rub out.’

  ‘It would have to be the ghastly Emin.’

  ‘Predictable, but nonetheless a good choice. We would be well rid of her maudlin narcissistic ramblings about her gynaecological workings. How would you dispose of her?’

  ‘Wrap her up in her unmade bed and roll it down a cliff?’

  ‘That’s a bit unimaginative by your standards, Ellis,’ said Amiss. ‘What’s the point of reading all those crime novels if you end up with such a pedestrian method of murder. Think Edgar Wallace.’

  Pooley took a small sip of his martini and concentrated hard. ‘OK. Poison her pudding with the cholera bacterium and claim she caught it because of her insanitary habits.’

  ‘But what would you call this work of art?’ asked Amiss.

  The brooding silence that followed was broken by the baroness. ‘I have it. Crown her with a neon light flashing Just Deserts. And not with a double “s”’.

  ‘I’m getting into the spirit of this,’ said Amiss. ‘Can we create a giant Campbell’s can full of soup and drown Andy Warhol in it? And yes, yes, I know he’s dead but we could exhume him.’

  ‘And call it You say tomato and I say die?’ suggested Mary-Lou.

  ‘Tempting though it would be to settle scores with any number of dead frauds,’ said the baroness, ‘I’m a busy woman and there simply isn’t enough time. We have to stick to the living.’

  ‘Can we get back to why you’ve concluded that artists are the wrong targets?’ asked Mary Lou. ‘You’ve strayed a long way from where you started.’

  ‘I know you interrogate people for a living these days, Mary Lou, but it would be a shame were this to prevent us from dallying a while in conversational byways.’

  ‘At the rate we’re going,’ said Mary Lou, ‘we’ll never even get a glimpse of the highway.’

  The baroness looked at her watch. ‘Wait till we’ve eaten. Now where the hell is Rachel? Ring her, Robert, and tell her to hurry up. If she’s not here in five minutes we’ll go in to dinner without her. I’m damned if I’m going to put the artichoke and goat’s cheese soufflé in jeopardy. It’s taken three arguments with the chef to get it quite right. The fellow’s congenitally unsound on the chili issue.’

  As Amiss headed for the door with his phone at the ready, she shouted after him: ‘Tell her it’s an emergency: the martini jug is empty.’

  Disaster was averted when Amiss’ wife arrived in the bar just in time, accepted with equanimity that the baroness considered her tube train breaking down an inadequate excuse for missing martinis, and the soufflé and all that followed were such a success that even the baroness could find no fault. The marrowbone stew with herb dumplings had caused her so much ecstasy she had been moved to charge into the kitchen to congratulate everyone. In the interstices of criticising her guests for insufficiently attending to their food and wine, she listened with surprising attentiveness to Rachel’s account of what life was like as a probationary teacher in a London comprehensive.

  By ten p.m. the five friends had settled in the gallery and had resolved the inevitable arguments with the baroness about whether, what, and how much they wanted to drink (‘You’re a crowd of blasted puritans’). Pooley and Rachel were drinking decaffeinated coffee (‘Wimps! The whole point of coffee is caffeine. I’ll have a double espresso.’) and nothing else (‘Typical!’). Mary Lou and Amiss had mollified their hostess by each ordering an Americano, agreeing to help her do justice to the decanter of port, and showing some interest in her impassioned explanation as to why the traditional Portuguese manner of treading grapes was immeasurably superior to anything a machine could do. After a few minutes, Pooley leaned forward and said, ‘Jack, I hate to interrupt, but I can’t stay long. If there’s anything else you want to tell us about, you should get on with it. I’ve an early start tomorrow and murderers to locate.’

  Reluctantly, the baroness turned her attention away from the delights of the Douro River Valley. ‘I was seeking to alert you to the destruction of art, of course. Pay attention.’

  Amiss yawned. ‘You’re always banging on about the destruction of something.’

  ‘What do you expect, when the Western wo
rld is going to hell?’ She reached again for her glass. ‘Do I not spend my life selflessly battling with the forces of anarchy?’

  ‘You’re usually leading the forces of anarchy.’

  ‘Only on battlegrounds of my choosing,’ she said stiffly. ‘When it’s a necessary means of getting my way. And anyway, I never defend intellectual or moral anarchy.’

  ‘I’ve heard you defend blackmail and intimidation,’ remarked Rachel.

  ‘If they’re my ends, they justify my means.’

  Pooley was getting irritated. ‘Can we cut the philosophical niceties, Jack. I’m a simple policeman. Get to it. What’s up?’

  ‘We have fought the culture wars together, my friends,’ she said, waving her glass of port for emphasis. ‘But we cannot rest. The forces of darkness still reign. They must be overthrown. This time it’s the Satanic army of the art world that must be destroyed.’

  Mary Lou looked apprehensive. ‘Haven’t you won enough cultural battles to justify hanging up your sword, Jack?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Amiss heartily. ‘When you come to think of it, you’ve been pretty comprehensive and successful.’

  The baroness threw him a contemptuous look. ‘You’re mistaken if you think such blatant flattery will get you off the hook, Robert. I don’t indulge in false modesty…’

  ‘You can say that again,’ said Mary Lou.

  ‘Darling, please don’t interrupt her,’ said Pooley. ‘It only slows everything up.’

  ‘…so I recognise that I have had some small success in routing the evil forces of political correctness at St. Martha’s2 and Paddington University.3 And, of course, there was the Knapper-Warburton.4 But I cannot rest upon my laurels. There’s much more to be done.’

  She leaned forward confidingly. ‘Now, I recognise that I cannot fight and win global cultural wars. Mine have to be small canvases. Like Jane Austen’s. I am not Tolstoy.’

  ‘You’re a bit more like him than Jane Austen, if I may say so,’ said Amiss. ‘At least in your appetites.’

  She ignored him. ‘So the small canvas this time is related to art. And once more I need help.’

  ‘What kind of help?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Stop looking so apprehensive. I’m not going to kidnap Robert. Now pay attention and I’ll tell you what we have to do.’

  1 For the story set in the ffeatherstonehaugh’s gentlemen’s club, see Clubbed to Death

  2 Matricide at St. Martha’s

  3 Murdering Americans

  4 Carnage on the Committee

  Chapter Two

  February 2012

  His phone rang mid-morning. Since the caller sounded like a frantic skylark, Robert Amiss realised it had to be Petunia Stamp, the college secretary of St. Martha’s. Trying without much success to make sense of the cacophony of twitters, he gathered that she was upset. He pictured the fluttering little creature—pink alice band slightly askew and chest heaving underneath some frightful knitwear appliquéd with kittens or butterflies—and wondered yet again how Baroness Troutbeck—who suffered fools appallingly—could stand her. And vice-versa.

  ‘Take it slowly, Miss Stamp. Is something the matter?’

  ‘It’s the mistress, Mr. Amiss. The mistress. Where, oh where, is the mistress?’

  Patient questioning elicited the information that the baroness had been expected back in Cambridge the previous night but had not turned up. Since she often arrived early in the morning, no one had worried until she failed to surface at the monthly council meeting. ‘A council meeting, Mr. Amiss! She missed a council meeting! You know she would never miss a council meeting. And no message. No message. And she’s not answering her phone. Something terrible must have happened to her. What will we do? Should I send for the police?’

  ‘Leave it with me for the moment, Miss Stamp. If anything’s happened to her, it would probably be here rather than in Cambridge. I’ll investigate and get back to you. And don’t worry. You know she’s the toughest of tough old birds.’

  Interpreting Miss Stamp’s silence as an indication that she didn’t know whether to be comforted by this undoubted truth or horrified by his lèse-majesté, he said goodbye in what he hoped was a manly reassuring voice and rang off.

  ***

  ‘Sorry to have got your PA to rout you out of a meeting, Mary Lou, but it’s urgent.’

  ‘I was interviewing a grumpy poet for tonight’s programme and was glad to have an excuse to get rid of the asshole. What’s up? You sound agitated.’

  ‘It’s contagious. Miss Stamp’s been on the phone in a right old state because she can’t find Jack. And I admit to being worried. She didn’t turn up for this morning’s council meeting. And they can’t get hold of her.’

  ‘Hell, I’m worried! That never happened during my time at St. Martha’s. Never ever.’

  Amiss got up and began to pace. ‘That’s what’s troubling me. Jack’s reliability and punctuality are positively aggressive.’

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘Car crash?’

  ‘Precisely. The way she drives it’s a miracle she’s never had one.’

  ‘But if she was in hospital she’d have had ID and St. Martha’s would know by now.’

  ‘Unless Myles was down as next-of-kin. And they wouldn’t have been able to find him. Isn’t he still in Iraq?’

  ‘Last time I heard. But she wouldn’t have named Myles. He’s away too much.’

  ‘Supposing…?’

  ‘Really bad crash and a fire?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Oh, God, Mary Lou. Of course it’s possible. What’ll we do?’

  ‘I’ll get Ellis to put someone on to it. It shouldn’t take long. It would have to have been an accident on the North Circular or the M11.’

  ‘Unless she went by a scenic route?’

  ‘With a motorway available on which to do a ton?’

  ‘Sorry. Dumb idea.’

  ‘But then of course there’s the other horrible possibilities.’

  ‘Heart attack? Stroke? Burglars?’

  ‘That sort of thing. I’ll ask Ellis to send someone round to her flat and will be back to you as soon as I hear anything that counts as news.’

  ***

  ‘You’re supposed to be a crime writer,’ Amiss said to himself crossly. ‘Think of a benign reason why she’s disappeared.’ He thought of the baroness’ propensity for pursuing even unlikely potential conquests—male and female—as well as of her greed for all the good things of life, but then he thought of her sense of duty and her fierce loyalty to St. Martha’s. He made a vain attempt to get back to work, but finding himself looking as blankly at the screen as it looked at him, he decided to engage in displacement activity. With Radio 4 talking at him of all manner of political and cultural controversies that he could hardly take in, he attacked the kitchen belligerently and tidied up everything in the flat he could find to tidy. Resisting the temptation to bother Ellis Pooley, he forced himself to sit down at the computer, pay bills, and answer emails. He rang Miss Stamp again, found her frantic, failed to steady her, went out for a walk, phone in hand, made an unnecessary visit to the supermarket to buy unnecessary food and went home and tried to interest himself in Sky News. But Middle Eastern tensions, domestic rows about public expenditure cuts, and a hurricane threatening American cities failed to do the trick. ‘I’ve been so worried,’ he told his wife when she got home, ‘that I thought of taking my mind off Jack by giving Plutarch a bath.’

  Rachel looked at the fat feline sprawled across the rug. ‘That would have been a suicide mission.’

  ‘I know. I know. That’s why I never bathe her. But it would certainly have distracted me.’

  ‘Phone Ellis.’

  ‘I don’t want
to seem to be fussing. He’ll be doing what he can. Mary Lou would have called if there was news.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Robert. Impossible person though Jack is, we’re all very fond of her and you and Ellis have been through so many wars together that you’re blood brothers. Phone him. Now!’

  ***

  ‘He’s virtually certain that she can’t have had a crash on the way to Cambridge,’ Amiss reported. ‘There were only half-a-dozen during the relevant period and everyone involved has been identified.’

  ‘Has he had her flat checked?’

  ‘Yes. A neighbour had a key. Nothing suspicious. And her car’s gone. He was flummoxed and wondering whether to get her reported as a missing person.’

  ‘She wouldn’t like that if she’d simply gone AWOL.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t have gone AWOL when she was due at that meeting. It wasn’t as if it was even just routine. She’d mentioned to me there was a row brewing about something or other which she had to resolve. She was trying to decide whether the appropriate tactic was conciliation or repression. You know Jack. She was looking forward to it.’

  ‘So he’d better have her reported as a missing person, then.’

  ‘That’s what I told him. No choice.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Miserable. Scared. Edgy.’ He gave a bleak laugh. ‘Like Tracey Emin. Come on, wife. Take me out for a walk and a drink and try to get my mind onto something other than that the most likely explanation is that Jack Troutbeck’s dead.’

  ***

  It was after eight o’clock the next morning. Amiss had given Rachel breakfast and had walked her to the tube, assuring her unconvincingly that he would call on his innate male ability to compartmentalise, avoid tormenting himself about Jack, and get some work done. Having instructed himself to hold off until nine from ringing Pooley, he looked at newspapers on-line and found himself reading the same paragraphs over and over again and checking his watch every few minutes. At half past eight, when the phone rang, he jumped up so energetically that he knocked over his coffee and the dregs spread over his keyboard. He paid no attention but grabbed the receiver. Plutarch, ever alert to the main chance, seized the opportunity to leap on his chair and curl herself into a contented marmalade circle.