The Horse's Arse

by Laura Gascoigne

  There was something written inside the frame.

  What was it?

  A nurse popped her head around the curtain.

  “There’s a police inspector to see you.”

  It was Yasmin, in that snappy blue suit.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  It seemed incredible when he’d only just found out himself.

  “I’ve been ringing your mobile since yesterday afternoon and getting a ‘number unavailable’ message. I wanted to ask you how the meeting went with Orlovsky and when I couldn’t get through I started worrying. I had an awful feeling something had happened, and when I called your office and they told me you hadn’t come in, I did a missing person check around the A&Es.

  “I’ve notified your boss. Tell me what happened.”

  Chapter XXXIV

  Artists were like dogs, thought Pat, they needed taking out for a sniff around or they pined. Yesterday’s outing to Shropshire Fields had done him the world of good. He’d bounced out of bed this morning with his tail wagging and his ears pricked.

  The effect on the Seals had been spectacular. Last night’s session on the Fifth had been a real humdinger; he had finally wrestled The Souls of the Slain to the ground. For years they had been haunted by the ghost of El Greco, but last night’s final push had sent the spook of Toledo packing. So confident was Pat of victory, in fact, that he hadn’t tucked the picture in for the night. He wanted it up and ready to greet him in the morning.

  A few more nights like that and The Seals could be winging their way to the purpose-built chapel of Pat’s imagination, three down each aisle and the seventh over the altar.

  Holding back on the cobalt violet had been the answer. Pat recognised his weakness for the colour. In his chromology violet was the colour of love, hence the temptation to go overboard with it. But last night he had resisted its blandishments. He had even left a mound of it on his palette under cling film, in case it came in handy for this morning’s Jawlensky.

  It was a measure of how chipper Pat was feeling that the thought of this morning’s copying couldn’t dampen his spirits. It was the very last that he’d agreed to do, and he was ending on a high note. Alexej von Jawlensky was an artist he could get along with, a man after his own heart. A Russian aristocrat, a man of the spirit, a painter who could make his colours sing – not just expressionist con brio, but expressionist con amore.

  The still life subject made it easier. It meant he’d have something to paint from, something that wouldn’t storm out in a pet while he was making tea complaining that he hadn’t done it justice. Jawlensky had always insisted on something to paint from, he didn’t make things up. He wasn’t a synthetist, he was a synaesthetist. What looked like a bowl of apples to Gauguin sounded to Alexej like the music of the spheres.

  The composition was a twofer: portrait format with a compotier of fruit in the foreground and a vase of flowers behind. The flowers hung over the fruit in the compotier like a mother bending over her brood to check they were leaving for school correctly dressed. Scrubbed, combed and pomaded. The apples of her eye.

  Pat had already plotted the colours. Cobalt blue for the compotier and vase, the family connection. Greens, pinks and yellows for the fruit, with one violet plum almost – but not quite – plumb in the middle. Alexej specialized in off-centre compositions. If you drew a vertical line through the middle of this picture, the vase and compotier would be performing a pole dance around it.

  The fruits in the photograph were different shapes and sizes, while Pat’s were all apples scrumped from the same tree. No matter, it was similar enough to see how the light fell. And the fact that the flowers were fabric didn’t matter either. Nothing you couldn’t fix with a brush and paint.

  He whistled as he crossed the lawn with a big black boom box, another recent acquisition from Maisie’s shop. Jawlensky called for music and he had just the thing, a red CD embossed with a gold hammer and sickle: The Best of the Red Army Choir. True, Alexej left Russia before the Revolution and his army service was with the Imperial Guard, but why quibble over details? The red of the Red Army Choir ran in his veins.

  The Fifth Seal greeted Pat warmly on entry, and he reciprocated with a friendly salute. Nothing to fear in that department; he could rest easy. The Jawlensky still life was ready and waiting with the composition sketched out on the prepared board in indigo paint and the black and white photo tucked into the easel rest.

  Something you could never judge from a photograph was scale, but as the Russian tended to work relatively small Pat had cut the board to 20x30cm. It was an old piece of mount board from a charity shop painting he had picked up chez Maisie, dated 1963. Out by few decades, but who was counting? A blink in the eye of eternity.

  Pat shifted the easel over to the left to get the Fifth Seal out of his line of sight. He was happy for the picture to hum to itself in private, but he didn’t want it interrupting. If there was going to be background noise it would be coming from the Red Army.

  He picked up the photo and squinted at it. There was a darkness in the tone of the tabletop that seemed to come up from below, like rising damp. He’d start with indigo and go over later in a lighter colour. Magenta, maybe. That should strike a warm bass note for the tenor voices of the blue crocks to rise above. Further warmth, he thought, might be extracted from a backing chorus of raw sienna on the wall behind, dusted with orange like a smoggy sunrise. Jawlensky’s signature strategy of weaving horizontal and vertical brushstrokes would allow the fabric of the picture to breathe.

  Propped on the shelf behind the easel Pat could see the Vlaminck and the Marquet, signed and sealed and awaiting delivery. He moved them out of his line of sight to a position above the Fifth Seal, along with the book of signatures Martin had lent him, which he’d sworn on his honour not to cover in paint.

  The International Directory of Artists’ Monograms and Indiscernible Signatures, 1800-1991 by John Castagno, published by Scarecrow: the name of the publisher tickled him, as did the ‘indiscernible’. He couldn’t see what difference a signature would make, but the collector was apparently a stickler for detail. Funny what collectors minded about: everything but the painting, really. Marquet’s signature was firm and neat, Vlaminck’s was a scrawl. He’d had a reasonable stab at them. They were discernible. Who was going to notice anyway?

  The Red Army Choir was belting out Kalinka as he blocked in the fruit; when their voices modulated into the tender strains of The Nightingales he feathered in the roses. When they broke into The Troika’s Gallop he turned up the volume while he mixed a deep, deep green from terre verte and ultramarine for the densely shadowed foliage at the heart of the picture – which was why he didn’t hear the cowbell.

  * * *

  From the complainant’s description, it was not quite what Planning Enforcement Officer Hank Dooberry had been led to expect. Still, in his experience you should never judge a house from its front. What went on round the back of people’s houses was nobody’s business – except of course the local planning department’s.

  There was nothing remotely business-like about the frontage of 15 The Mall, though if you were running an illegal business you’d be stupid to advertise it. You’d be astonished what people in the London Borough of Haringey got up to in innocent-looking sheds in their back gardens. Breeding pit bull terriers and growing cannabis were the least of it. They’d found a shed last year round the back of a terrace in Green Lanes that was being run as a massage parlour by illegal Bulgarian immigrants. That was a major violation, it made the BBC News. A painting factory, whatever that was, sounded relatively minor, but every complaint had to be followed up.

  Well this lot weren’t exactly hiding anything. There it was, a big carved wooden sign on the alley door with the words ‘THE SHED’ daubed in large white letters over the name ‘SEA VIEW’. He searched for a bell, tried the door handle, which came off in his hand, and spotted a toilet chain hanging from an ironwork bracket with a ceramic toggle reading �
�PULL’.

  He pulled, and heard the distant clang of bells.

  Nothing happened.

  He pulled again, twice, and went round to try the front entrance. There were three bell pushes, none apparently connected, and a big brass knocker – a pair of knockers, you might say – in the shape of a mermaid.

  He lifted the siren politely by her tail and was just about to bring her down with wallop on the scallop-shaped plate when he heard a loud “Halloo” from the alley.

  “Come out, Invisible Man, wherever you are!”

  The voice was so resonant it made him jump. He tripped backwards down the step and dusted off his dignity by producing his ID card.

  “Hank Dooberry, Haringey Planning Department. We’ve received a complaint about a temporary structure at the back of this residential premises being used for a commercial purpose. Are you the householder?”

  “The Shedholder,” said the man, “Pat Phelan,” and held out his hand.

  Dooberry looked him over. His clothes were as peculiar as his tradesmen’s entrance – red flowered shirt worn over a yellow t-shirt with grey camo pants and sandals over emerald green socks. His hair could have been described as camo-coloured too. Dooberry would have been pushed to identify its shade, which ranged from silvery red at the roots to black at the tips. When the man bent down to reattach the door handle, the back of his head made Dooberry think of Davy Crockett’s hat.

  “I expect you’d like a look,” the man cleared his throat with a theatrical flourish. “You’d better come through.”

  As he led the way down the side alley, the sound of a male voice choir floated over the garden. “I’ve got the Red Army Choir performing in there,” he explained in a tone of apology, waving towards the open door of a large wooden cabin. “I’ll ask them to pipe down, politely.” And he hurried into the shed and turned the music off.

  Dooberry got out a camera and a notebook, took a couple of photos and scribbled some notes. It was an ambitious structure, not your usual self-build job: double-fronted, two large windows, pitched roof with gable end overhanging a verandah. But although it filled the bottom end of the garden, he could tell at once without needing to measure that it was within the permitted dimensions for temporary structures.

  The question was what was going on inside.

  “It’s a shed and a half, isn’t it?” said Phelan appearing in the door. “Come on in and have a look around.”

  This was not the sort of reception Dooberry was used to and it made him uncomfortable. He could feel his mask of professional composure slipping.

  The complainant had mentioned large canvases, and there was a stack of them leaning up against the wall opposite the entrance with the top one facing outwards.

  Dooberry squinted at it. The picture was a swirling mass of light and colour, but he had absolutely no idea what it was of. Were those sheets hanging on a line or ghostly apparitions? Whatever they were, they were not a business proposition. Who in their right mind would pay money for that?

  There was a smaller canvas on the easel that looked equally messy, but what caught Dooberry’s attention were two little pictures propped on a shelf above the big canvas to the right of the door. One was of a street of coloured houses leading uphill, the other of a river with bridges that looked like Paris.

  With both of them, you could tell what they were – and even to Dooberry’s untutored eye, their styles were different. The two paintings were obviously by different people and, when he went over to look, the signatures said so.

  The Paris one was legible: it said ‘Marquet’. The other one with the hill he couldn’t decipher. It looked a bit like ‘Flamingo’ without the ‘o’.

  “These yours?” he asked.

  The man looked sheepish.

  “They’re copies. Copies of paintings by famous artists I’ve been asked to make for a collector who can’t afford the real thing. When he painted this picture,” he pointed at the houses, “Maurice de Vlaminck couldn’t give ’em away, now they go for tens of millions.”

  So that was his name. Dooberry had never heard of him. But then he’d never heard of half the artists whose pictures were said to be worth millions in the papers when they were stolen from galleries.

  A suspicion was forming in his mind.

  “We’ve had reports of people coming and going.”

  Phelan raised both arms and gestured around the shed like a conjuror, as if to prove it was empty.

  “Quiet as the grave. I’m a solitary soul.”

  He was lying.

  The neighbour had reported seeing gangs of people carrying pictures out of the place and receiving payment. Dooberry had stumbled on something bigger than a planning issue. This was a matter for the police.

  Chapter XXXV

  Daniel knew there was something wrong from the light, or the absence of it.

  Light usually came into the hallway through the living room windows, but although the door to the living room stood open the hallway was dark. There were no blinds on the windows, since Daniel had never got round to buying any. What was blocking the light was a piece of hardboard with a note from his landlord reading: ‘BREAK IN Wednesday evening. Police informed.’

  Glass littered the desk where his laptop had been. He usually hid it when he went out, but he’d only popped to the shops.

  Daniel felt faint. He hobbled over to the sofa, picking his way on crutches through the papers strewn across the floor. His desk drawers were gaping open and the carpet around them was awash with pictures of sheds.

  The thesis was backed up, thank God, but everything else – three years of his life – was gone, apart from what was in his phone.

  It buzzed.

  ‘Just checking you got home OK. x Yasmin’

  ‘Sort of OK, thanks. Flat broken into, computer gone.’

  It rang.

  “Don’t touch anything, I’m coming over to look before the local constabulary get their big fat fingers into everything. What’s the address?”

  Daniel told her.

  “Be with you in 20.”

  Before he could reply she’d rung off.

  Wha-a-a-at?

  Yasmin was coming to his flat.

  The feeling of faintness gave way to a wave of panic. On a normal day the place looked like it had been burgled. How much of this squalor could be attributed to thieves?

  There was nothing for it but to disobey police instructions. He scuttled about on his crutches sweeping up dirty socks and boxers, stuffing them into gaps behind the books in the bookcase, then shoving mouldy coffee mugs and half-empty beer cans under the sofa.

  This was no way to welcome the woman you loved.

  He got out the hoover and looked at it.

  Left hand, right crutch? Right hand, left crutch?

  Left hand, right crutch seemed the better option until he tried pushing the suction head over the carpet and it stuck in the pile. He experimented with using the vacuum wand as a replacement crutch and dragging his leg in plaster after him. Quasimodo on Quaaludes would have been nimbler.

  He threw the hoover back into the cupboard and limped to the bedroom.

  When did he last take the sheets to the launderette?

  He sniffed the duvet.

  One month? Two?

  He opened the window.

  Now for the kitchen, with a minute to go.

  Too late! The doorbell. He threw the dirty pans and dishes into the swing bin and went to get it.

  “Hiyah,” said Yasmin.

  She was dressed in jeans and a maroon leather jacket. She looked beautiful.

  “Sami’s sleeping over at a friend’s house, which is lucky otherwise I couldn’t have come. Crutches!” She looked him up and down. “They rather suit you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He moved them back a little reluctantly to let her past.

  She started with the area around his desk.

  “Your computer’s gone, you say. Anything else?”

  “Nothing I�
�ve noticed. There’s nothing else worth stealing.”

  “The thieves wouldn’t know that until they looked. Opportunist thieves do a place over, open all the drawers and cupboards…”

  “They might have been disturbed,” Daniel interposed, praying she wouldn’t start opening the drawers and cupboards.

  “Odd,” she inspected the broken glass around the window, “it doesn’t look like your average break-in. I had a look from the outside and it’s a clean break. Done with a glasscutter. A surprisingly professional job for such slim pickings – no disrespect intended,” she turned and grinned at Daniel. “My hunch is that they won’t have left prints.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Sounds as if we’re about to find out,” she called from the hallway as she went to get it.

  “Good evening – DC Desai, Art &Antiques Squad,” she introduced herself to two police officers standing outside. “The victim is a friend of mine.”

  “Been in the wars, I see,” said the older officer to Daniel.

  “Yes, that as well. Not my lucky week.”

  “Cup of tea?” asked Yasmin.

  She had taken over.

  While the senior officer interviewed him and the junior one dusted for prints, Daniel could hear her moving around the bedroom and kitchen. He didn’t know if this was how it felt to be violated, but it certainly felt worse than being burgled.

  When the dusting was over, she returned with four mugs of tea and a crumpled bag with a spoonful of sugar in the bottom.

  “No milk,” she apologized. “There was a carton but I decided against it, unless anyone fancies cottage cheese in their tea.”

  She wrinkled her nose at Daniel.

  “Found anything?”

  “Not a sausage skin,” said the senior officer, “they were wearing gloves. A cut above your average N4 thief – round here they’re mostly either kids or crackheads. How new was the computer?”

  “Three years old.”

  “Not worth anything then.”