Killing the Emperors

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

  ‘What is this?’ cried Fortune. ‘I can’t dance to this.’

  ‘It’s House Music, Henry,’ said Briggs. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘Dance now or die,’ interjected Big Brother.

  The baroness joined the dancers, slowly followed by all the others. Still being uncharacteristically more circumspect than anyone else about her intake of alcohol, she was the only person keenly observing the incongruity of the scene, particularly the odd movements of Fortune’s stomach. But within a few minutes, like everyone else, she had forgotten about anything except the pulsating beat.

  ***

  ‘OK,’ said Mike. He and Amiss were sitting in an anonymous room in a hotel on the Strand. Mike was middle-aged, leathery, and his eyes were fixed on Amiss’. ‘Now I’ve got the story. I’ve got the background. Now what else can you tell me that would help us find the bastard? I don’t take kindly to anyone trying to kill Jack Troutbeck. Not just because of Myles. She’s our friend too. I won’t forget the speech she gave us at that dinner in the Special Forces Club before we went into Iraq.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ said Amiss, ‘but I wasn’t always paying attention to everything Jack said about Sarkovsky.’

  ‘If there’s one thing I’m good at, Robert, it’s interrogation. Now I want you to go back to the beginning and tell me everything.’

  Amiss looked at his watch. ‘My wife will be home soon.’

  ‘Tell her to get here as fast as possible. And tell Mary Lou Dinsmore the same. Yes, I know her husband mustn’t know about this, so she’ll have to lie. Tough. Jack’s life is at stake. You may trigger each others’ memories.’ Amiss reached for his phone. ‘And, Robert, tell them they’ll be staying late. Possibly very very late.’

  ***

  ‘Everything we’re finding out about Sarkovsky is appalling,’ said Pooley. ‘His business seems to be in free-fall, not least because he had invested so much in a joint venture with Colonel Gadaffi. Work has stopped on the museum he was building in Russia, his London office has been closed down, and his accountant hasn’t heard from him in weeks.’

  ‘What have you got out of the accountant? Does he know anything about properties we don’t know about?’

  ‘He won’t talk. He just won’t talk. He’s too scared.’

  ‘Get a warrant for his arrest,’ said Milton. ‘I want him here first thing tomorrow.’

  ***

  After about half-an-hour, Fortune stopped dancing and fell on a sofa. ‘Geddyouup,’ said Big Brother.

  ‘Can’t,’ croaked Fortune.

  ‘He really can’t,’ said the baroness. ‘He’s got to have a break or he’ll have a heart attack. And the same applies to all of us. Whatever you have in mind, that would be a bit of an anti-climax, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You, Diary Room. OK, Fortune stop. All others continue dance.’

  As the baroness pulled on her shell-suit, for she felt strangely embarrassed at being naked talking to Sarkovsky on her own, she wasn’t the only one in the room thinking about They shoot horses, don’t they?

  Aware that she was still under the influence of ecstasy, the baroness played for time. ‘I’ve got a really good argument planned, Big Brother, but it won’t work if everyone’s exhausted. What do you think? Will you let us get some sleep?’

  Haggling produced the agreement that as people passed out with exhaustion, they could go back to the Emin room and rest. But a few hours later the reveille sounded and within a few minutes they were all back assembled on the sofas. The baroness looked around the crumpled group of depressed people and turned to Truss with a feigned enthusiasm. ‘Now, Gavin, I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had about Kounellis. He had a room at the Tate courtesy of what is laughingly known as the Anthony d’Offay bequest. Now will you or someone else please tell me why the taxpayer got lumbered with paying for this? It wasn’t a bequest. It was a sale.’

  Outbreaks of incredulity and anger from Pringle and Truss were interrupted by Fortune, who imposed silence with a wave. ‘I’ll handle this.’ He brought as much gravitas to bear as could a plump knight in a dirty lime green shell-suit, who had recently been seen naked dancing to acid house. ‘Let us be calm. What do you know of Anthony d’Offay?’

  ‘He’s a dealer who made a fortune out of all manner of dreadful contemporary artists, collected stuff as he went—especially from his clients—had it valued at a hundred and twenty-five million quid and then out of the goodness of his heart said he’d sell the seven hundred or so items as a job-lot to the nation just for what he’d paid for them. A snip at twenty-eight million, we were told by a rejoicing art establishment. But he insists on the exhibits being displayed just as he directs. And that means what are called Artist rooms just show the d’Offay exhibits of selected artists. And they’re mostly full of rubbish.’

  ‘It was incredibly generous,’ shouted Pringle. ‘Nick said so.’

  ‘Sure was. I’d have paid much more for it than that,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘Before you changed course, sweetie,’ said Herblock.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Before I changed course.’

  ‘We are familiar,’ began Fortune, ‘with your closed, ignorant mind…’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Briggs. ‘It seems to me that Jack knows quite a bit. She doesn’t agree with you, but you can’t say she’s ignorant. I’d like her to tell me about this transaction.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Anastasia.

  Fortune glowered, but eventually made to his friends a ‘what-can-one-do?’ gesture. ‘Go ahead. Trash a great man and an incomparable collection.’

  The baroness thought of having another drink, exercised iron control, reached instead for water, settled herself more comfortably and began. ‘We should have told d’Offay to shove off, but instead, the Tate—or Tate, as we are now required to call it to show we’re cool—and the National Gallery of Scotland, who now jointly own the stuff, were abject in their gratitude and sent exhibitions round the country so the population could be elevated by—if you’ll excuse the expression that seems to be a constant theme in the genre which you so revere—shit.’

  ‘I can’t stand any more of this,’ shouted Truss.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ said Fortune. ‘Allow her to condemn herself out of her own ignorant mouth.’

  The baroness made an elaborate gesture. ‘Thank you, Henry.’

  ‘I will admit that I have not yet made it to Edinburgh to see Mr. d’Offay’s worthless rubbish in the modern art gallery, but I know it includes an entire room devoted to Damien Hirst’s Away from the Flock, which some of you mightn’t know is a pickled lamb. Yep. Damien bought a lamb, he got someone to suspend it in formaldehyde, and, hey presto, the taxpayer is paying for what d’Offay thinks is destined to become a milestone of post-war art. Oh, and it’s in Edinburgh rather than London because, apparently, of the ubiquitousness of sheep in Scotland.’

  Truss was now so much beside himself that he was rocking to and fro with his head in hands. ‘Hey, Gavin,’ said Anastasia. ‘Cool it. Sometimes we have to hear what we don’t like.’

  ‘Would it help if I said something nice about Hirst?’ said the baroness. ‘In Tat’s Artist room, I saw a photograph of the artist as a young man posing laughing beside a severed head. He was sixteen and doing something original, even if it was disgusting. I am grateful that he doesn’t do scatology and indeed has forborne from forcing any of his excretions on us. Or even, come to think of it, his erections—unlike Terence Koh, who under the mentorship of Charles Saatchi, stuck huge erect phalluses on Jesus and the Virgin Mary, who at the time, if I remember correctly, were in a urinal.

  ‘To give Hirst his due, if he has a penchant for polymorphous perversity, he’s keeping it to himself. Unlike other d’Offay artists, like Gilbert and George.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them,’ said Briggs. ‘Jason was recommen
ding me to buy some of their stuff.’

  ‘What’s in their room?’ asked Anastasia.

  ‘Rubbish by two narcissistic weirdos who do photos and montages about themselves. As the great art critic Brian Sewell—who has resisted the barbarians—put it about Gilbert and George, “these names alone are enough to make the heart of the sane man sink.” However, Tat disagrees. In its view, they have sacrificed their individual identities to art and thus turned the traditional notion of creativity on its head. So at the expense of the taxpayer we look at their images of fellatio, using improbably large organs of even more improbable colours. Such works, according to Tat, demonstrate their transgression and vulnerability.’

  Pringle was becoming hysterical. ‘But they do. They do.’

  ‘In my view,’ said the baroness ‘the pair should be taken at their own early estimation. As far as I could see, their only worthwhile work in Tat was a photograph of them with cut-out letters pinned to their chests which read “George the Cunt” and “Gilbert the Shit.”’

  Pringle moaned.

  ‘To move on to the Hirst room. Apart from his rare moment of originality in having that snap taken in a morgue, everything else d’Offay had bought from him was all the old dreary derivative stuff: dead sheep, spots, skulls, pharmaceutical aids. Oh, and butterflies. Another idea pinched from someone else.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ said Marilyn. ‘I bought plenty of them and I was told they were original.’ She shot at Herblock what the baroness thought might be a glare. He patted her hand. ‘Original in the sense that he brought his own genius to bear on the insect, hon.’

  ‘That mountebank—though, I admit, talented mountebank—Salvator Dali was painting butterflies many years ago,’ said the baroness. ‘Hirst merely produced labour-saving versions by buying job-lots of real butterflies and letting them loose in a gallery or sticking them onto painted surfaces. Someone should have set the anticruelty people on him. Then an American artist called Precious started using the wings of real butterflies to create the effect of stained glass windows. Ten years later, Hirst—or rather his assistants—started doing exactly the same. However, death is a big feature of the Hirst brand, and d’Offay wanted a work made specially for him, hence these unfortunate insects randomly stuck on a painting are called Monument to the Living and the Dead.’

  ‘You don’t get it,’ shouted Pringle. ‘You just don’t get it. These butterflies are a metaphor for mortality. Hirst’s work is about life and death: it is relevant to us all.’ Then, remembering where he was, he shivered.

  ‘Artists have always been preoccupied with life and death,’ the baroness said evenly. ‘It is not an original notion. We can meditate on it without having to have this sort of crap all round us to remind us. A few words would do it. May I refer you to the Book of Common Prayer: “In the midst of life we are in death.”’ She looked about her and saw that she had made a tactical error: everyone was now silent and reflective. ‘Oh, lord,’ she said to herself. ‘We’re all depressed now. It’s the drug wearing off.’ Like an old warhorse, she stirred herself. ‘But here again,’ she cried, ‘useless though he is, Hirst is to be preferred to Andy Warhol. Now if there was ever a charlatan who robbed the rich just for the hell of it, it was that preening, narcissistic, self-absorbed, old queen who had one good idea and flogged it to death cynically.’ She saw Fortune stirring into angry life and settled back to up the ante.

  ***

  It was after two a.m. when the three friends got back to the flat. ‘I know we’re exhausted,’ said Mary Lou, ‘but we’ve got to get our story straight for Ellis. I’ve already lied that I had to stay over because Rachel and I had so much work to do on my school presentation. Now let’s perfect the next lie.’

  Rachel gave her a sympathetic squeeze. ‘It’s simple enough, isn’t it? We’ve been up late talking about Jack and wondering if there was anything useful we might have forgotten. And Robert just remembered the Albanians.’

  ‘You call him, Mary Lou, and then you can put me on.’

  She pulled her phone out of her bag. ‘I hate doing this. I absolutely hate it. Ellis and I have never had to lie to each other.’

  Amiss gave her a hug. ‘I know, but we have to protect him and this is the only way. I’ll go on lying about not having heard from Myles. You have to lie about tonight. And at least we’re telling him something useful.’ He laughed bleakly. ‘Late in the day.’

  Rachel glared at him. ‘Robert, you are not to beat yourself up because you didn’t think of the bloody Albanians earlier. It took three hours intense questioning for it to surface.’

  ‘And Ellis couldn’t have done what Mike did,’ said Mary Lou. ‘He’s obviously been at this for years. I feel sucked dry.’

  Rachel gave Mary Lou another squeeze. ‘Robert and I will go to bed now and leave you to ring Ellis. Try not to feel bad. You’re doing this for Jack.’

  ***

  Milton had taken pity on Morrison and Byrne and given them a night off. They wouldn’t have found the next hommage anyway, since it was much further down the Thames than their beat. Placed outside the O2 arena in Canary Wharf, at a cursory glance, it looked like a statue, so no one noticed it until about four a.m., when a security man having a quick cigarette spotted the notice. ‘It’s another of those hommages,’ he told the police. It says “Hommage to Koons. Jason and Bubbles.” I don’t know if it’s a novelty statue or they’re dead people. The small fat one’s sitting on the tall thin one’s lap and they’re wearing golden suits, golden wigs, and their faces are pasty but their lips are red. The small one’s even got a little golden beard. I tell you, I’ve seen some strange things in my time, but this isn’t something you’d want to see before breakfast.’

  ***

  Having kissed Rachel goodbye and cleared the breakfast dishes, Amiss went out to the newsagents and bought all the papers. ‘You interested in these ‘omidge murders?’ said the newsagent.

  Amiss nodded. ‘It’s because I write crime novels,’ he said. ‘We have to keep an eye on real-life murders.’

  ‘That was weird, putting that woman in that glass box like that bloke Damien Hirst put that shark. Who do you think’s behind it, then?’

  ‘No idea. Some lunatic.’

  ‘If you ask me it’s an art-lover,’ said the newsagent, guffawing. ‘Someone making one of those artistic statements of the obvious. Like that modern art’s all baloney.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Mark my words, there’ll be more. You’ve got a serial killer here. He’s going to knock off all those people he kidnapped, one by one.’

  ‘I hope you’re wrong.’ Amiss smiled wanly and went home.

  ***

  The security man had always longed for his fifteen minutes of fame, preferably accompanied by riches, and to that end he had melted into the background once the police arrived and had called his favourite tabloid to offer an exclusive. So it was that Amiss knew there were two more Hommage murders before Pooley had even had time to ring him. Amiss had had promised to awaken Mary Lou at nine. It was only a quarter past eight, but he roused her anyway, told her there were things to discuss that wouldn’t wait, and had coffee and toast ready for when she joined him five minutes later.

  Her reaction to the news of the double murder verged briefly on the hysterical. ‘Oh, Robert,’ she sobbed. ‘We’re going to be too late. You know we are. There just isn’t time to find her. And if he’s now killing them in pairs, even if she lasts till the end, there are only two days to go. What are we going to do?’

  ‘There’s only one thing we can do, Mary Lou. Or, rather, one thing you can do.’

  ***

  When she realised that Fortune and Pringle were both missing, the baroness had also had difficulty in staying calm. First up, she retreated into the bathroom. She went over and over what she’d said when required the night before to s
ay who was worst. She’d definitely gone for Fortune, but she might have said something disparaging about Pringle too. ‘No, no,’ she told herself as she climbed out of the shower. ‘It was because they were a couple. And a couple of gays at that, which of course always offended that homophobic shit. So maybe it won’t apply to Chester and Marilyn.’ She allowed herself to wonder if they’d be better off going on strike and daring him to send in the Albanians. Wouldn’t a quick death be for the best? And then she thought of Anastasia gamely trying to be cheerful and suppressed the thought. Maybe even now Milton and Pooley had located the prison and were at the head of a task force of armed cops, all ready to take on Sarkovsky’s revolutionary guard.

  The image didn’t give her much comfort. Whatever way she imagined it, a lot of people were likely to end up dead. And she couldn’t see how the six remaining prisoners would be exceptions. Still, her job was to rally them. Before, no doubt, having to pick yet another fight.

  She dried herself, put on her soiled pink shell-suit, and went out to try to convince five terrified people that their fears were exaggerated.

  ***

  The commissioner was back and beside himself with frustration. ‘My God,’ he screamed at the assistant commissioner. ‘What took you so long? We should have been in there tearing Sarkovsky’s life apart two days ago. I want every member of Murder Squad on this job right now. And I want all our armed response units and firearms officers ready to go at a moment’s notice. Where’s Milton?’

  ‘Interviewing Sarkovsky’s accountant to see if he might know anything about any other properties the guy owns in London. But since he could have bought them through a foreign company, it won’t be straightforward. We’ll have to give it time.’

  The commissioner, who had always hated and despised the assistant commissioner as a lazy, incompetent, buck-passing dipstick who’d only got his promotion because he was a genius box-ticker, thought of beating him to a pulp but then remembered he was a policeman and head of the Met. He clasped his hands very tightly together. ‘Just get out and get on with following my instructions, Pilsworth. Now! And tell Milton to get back here as soon as possible and come to see me immediately.’