Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  Kim and I started up Broadway, neither of us speaking much. The streets were crowded and noisy and lurid and what we had to say to each other was too private to be shouted. It was hard enough just to walk side-by-side without people elbowing one of us out of the way. As Broadway widened still further into Columbus Circle my sense of smell alone would have told me we had reached Central Park by the rich ripe scent of horse sweat and droppings. There were three carriages pulled up on the further side of the roundabout, each with a docile horse nibbling at straw, their heads ducked almost sheepishly, as if they were only snacking out of boredom because business was slow. One carriage was straight out of a fairy tale, painted white and lined in sky blue, all its trimmings picked out in the same colour. Cinderella meets My Little Pony. Even the two plastic buckets of horse feed slung beneath it were the same sky blue. A couple of pigeons fluttered down and perched on the rims of the buckets, pecking at the feed.

  “I thought we could walk up to the Met,” Kim suggested as we crossed into the park. She set our path up the wide avenue. “Have you been there yet?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  Conversation tailed off. Neither of us wanted to be the first one to mention what had happened the night before last.

  Jon Tallboy was in custody, having confessed to the murders of Kate and Don. I had spent most of the intervening time being drugged with super-strong painkillers and having ice packs pressed to my throat to bring down the bruising, which was spectacular. I was wearing a polo neck and would be for some while to come. At least it gave me an excuse to go shopping. I had in mind some New York-style, black high-neck little sweaters which would go in a very Emma Peel way with my leather trousers. I’d just have to make sure no one in the changing rooms saw my neck, or they’d start screaming.

  I fingered it absently and winced. It felt raw. Kim noticed my gesture.

  “How’s the neck?” she said.

  “Oh, OK. I’ll just have some spectacular bruising for a while. I thought I might say I’ve had a sex transplant and this is from reconstructive surgery on my Adam’s apple.”

  She smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “I still can’t believe it,” she said. “I keep playing over the moment when I realised what was happening, just to convince myself it’s true.” She looked at me. “He’s going to say Barbara knew nothing about the murders. Take all the blame on himself.”

  My jaw dropped, which hurt my throat considerably.

  “You’re joking. The only reason I got myself in that mess was that we laid a trap for Barbara! How does he explain that?”

  “Yeah, do you want to tell me about that, by the way?”

  Kim and I hadn’t had a chance to talk about this till now.

  “Oh.” I shrugged. “I was pretty sure it was Barbara. The more I thought about it, the more the financial advantage to her of the whole scandal seemed the strongest motive going. I did wonder about Carol, because of Kate’s plans to leave the gallery and take so many clients with her. But the way Kate’s death was tied in to the graffiti kept blocking me. I couldn’t see Carol ever doing that to her own gallery. And all these little things kept confirming the Barbara theory. She was the one who rang the cops about the graffiti so it would be public and linked to Kate’s death. Her sales hadn’t been so good before and now they were flourishing. I wasn’t sure whether she could actually have expected that result, though, till I spoke to Suzanne. She’d found out that twenty years ago, when Barbara had just started the affair with that gallery owner, the one who made her career, there was a break-in at her studio and her paintings were slashed. It looked as if it was the guy’s wife who’d done it. So it was completely hushed up, but he restored and sold all the slashed paintings for her—even put the prices up and let the buyers guess as to whether the damage had been done deliberately. It was a sales ploy.”

  “God, that’s clever. Especially the keeping it quiet.”

  “He had to. He thought it was his wife.”

  “So that made you guys sure it had been Barbara.”

  “Pretty much. But there wasn’t any proof. So we got the idea of setting her up. Suzanne told Barbara that she’d heard from me about Kate’s plan to start a new gallery with Stanley. The story was that before Kate was killed, she told me who the third investor was—trying to persuade me to come with her—and I was wondering whether to tell the police about it. I was only guessing that Barbara was the mystery investor, but it was worth a try. There was nothing to lose. Suzanne said that she could tell it hit home with Barbara, though she hid it well. So she went on to the next bit: she said I might have been exaggerating, because I’d had a lot to drink, and she’d suggested I go to have a lie-down in Don’s old room.”

  “Not a totally improbable story,” Kim commented.

  “Always invent a lie that’s as close to the truth as possible. And Suzanne did a great job. Barbara fell for it. We were hoping she would follow me down to the basement and try to strangle me. Suzanne was keeping an eye on her, without seeming to, and she would have come after Barbara if she started downstairs, as a witness. Of course Barbara talked to Jon, but Suzanne didn’t make the connection. We were so sure it was Barbara … I was delayed because of that photograph, and by the time I got downstairs he was waiting for me.”

  I looked at his daughter. “Even when I saw him I couldn’t believe it. We all underestimated Jon.”

  “She planned it all,” Kim said. “I got that much out of him last night. We went out in the yard and talked. Carol sent Kevin down as well, to keep an eye on him till the cops arrived, but I made him and Lex wait inside so they couldn’t hear.” She shot a glance at me. “I thought it might be my last chance to talk to him alone for God knows how long.… Anyway, he said Barbara’s sales were falling badly. Then she came up with the idea of trashing her show to get publicity—only they realised they’d need the keys and the alarm code to the gallery. And Barbara knew that Kate wasn’t happy at Bergmann LaTouche, so she sounded her out. Kate told her about her plans to set up a new gallery and asked Barbara to come with her.”

  “She was asking everyone,” I commented drily. “If Barbara wasn’t selling she wouldn’t have been much of an asset.”

  “Barbara knows lots of people,” Kim pointed out. “She could have been very useful.”

  I nodded. We were passing the lake now, its surface like an old mirror which, silvered with the years, blurs and softens everything it reflects. Only the water was the misty green of oxidised copper, the trees hanging on its surface a brighter green, their edges clouding into each other like melting wax.

  “So they strung Kate along,” I said.

  “Barbara told her she’d come in with her as a partner.”

  “But she didn’t have that kind of money, did she?”

  “Barbara said she’d made some good investments and Kate believed her because she wanted to. Dad said it all spun out of control really fast. One minute he and Barbara were talking about vandalising the show and the next Kate was on board and Barbara was spinning her all these lies about investing in her gallery to get her to agree to hand over the keys and tell them the alarm code.”

  I nodded. “‘And then it got even more complicated, because Don was working late and saw her trash her own paintings.”

  “Dad said he couldn’t have brought himself to do it, poor sap. I bet she got a twisted kick out of it, too.”

  “Did you read Don’s note?”

  Kim nodded. The red arrow I had peeled off Don’s painting had turned out to be his insurance note. He had written it while waiting for Jon Tallboy to arrive with the blackmail money, then painted the back red and stuck it to his latest work-in-progress. That was typical Don: such an oblique way to do it, as if he were mocking himself for even taking that kind of precaution. The police hadn’t found it, though they’d searched the whole place thoroughly: but they would never have started picking bits off the paintings. It might have stayed there for ever if I hadn’t r
emembered last night that it was the same painting that I had seen just before I had found his body, the only one that had been turned around to face the room….

  The note wasn’t enough to convict Barbara on its own. It said that Don had seen her trash her own paintings, then heard her ring Jon on her mobile to tell him she was coming home. “I haven’t just done the paintings,” she had said gleefully. “I’ve made sure that little bloodsucker won’t be able to tell anyone about our deal.” Hearing that, Don had insisted that it was Jon who came with the money.

  “It was stupid of me,” I admitted. “I knew Don could only have been killed by someone he didn’t take seriously. Carol or Laurence, or Suzanne, or even Java—he knew most of them didn’t like him, or he respected their intelligence, so he’d have been on his guard. And that ruled out Barbara, too. You just have to look at her to know she’s capable of murder. But if Jon went in there, with a bottle of bourbon shaking in his hand because he was so scared—that part he wouldn’t even need to act—and offered Don some … well, Don would have thought that Jon was just Barbara’s errand boy, and despised him. I heard him call Jon a dumb candyass. He probably knocked back half the bourbon in one shot just to show Jon how real men drink. That was Don all over.”

  “Thank God for that note,” Kim said heavily. “Dad was trying to say he killed Kate, too. Hopefully he won’t get away with it. Barbara must always have planned to kill her, to keep her mouth shut. She’d have worried that Kate would talk when she realised the promise to invest in the new gallery was a crock of shit.”

  “Difficult, without implicating herself.”

  “Not if she managed to get the new gallery going anyway. And she could just spread the rumour quietly. Everyone would love the story of Barbara’s being that desperate.”

  She took a deep breath. “We’re talking about this so rationally … but even if my father didn’t kill Kate, there’s still Don. And he tried to kill you too. You. I mean, you’re practically my adopted sister. I still don’t believe it. You know what?” Her voice hardened. “All that fuss about Kate’s tattoo? Barbara knew about it. Dad let that slip. Kate showed Barbara when she’d had it done. That’s why Barbara picked Strawberry Fields. Maximise the news value.”

  Her face was white and tense. There was nothing I could do. I sensed that she didn’t want a hug or words of support. The last thing she needed was the kind of softness that would break her down into tears.

  “That bitch,” she said viciously. “Dad takes the rap and she could still get off scot-free, if she plea-bargains and testifies against him. Or just denies killing Kate and says Don made that part up. There’s no hard evidence. Plus,” she added furiously, “she’s raking in loads of publicity. She’s made for life.”

  Call me superficial, but this rankled with me, too. I didn’t notice the New York Times ringing me up and begging for an interview about my life and times. Who cared about some obscure British artist whose show had just opened? The entire media population of Manhattan was probably doorstepping Barbara right now. And she’d be pretending she loathed the attention while quietly planning how to maximise its effects.

  “Thurber and Frank aren’t stupid, you know,” I said in an effort to be consolatory.

  “Who?”

  “Those two detectives. They’re pretty sharp. No way they think Jon did it all on his own. They’ll nail her if they can.”

  “Really?” Kim brightened.

  “Jon still has to explain why Barbara went straight to him and told him what Suzanne had said, about me knowing who the third investor in Kate’s gallery was. If Barbara didn’t know anything about it, why would she bother to tell him?”

  Kim looked more cheerful. But it was a sop I was throwing her. If Jon were determined to confess to both killings, even the most conscientious cops would settle for that. Nobody would want to complicate things when they had nice neat guilty pleas to both murders.

  I thought of Jon Tallboy as I had seen him being taken away by the cops; a broken man in every sense.

  “Cracked two fingers and nearly put one of his eyes out,” Thurber had said to me with a hint of approval in her flat Dalek voice. “Nice going.”

  “Brits must be tougher than I thought,” Frank chimed in.

  “She’s trying to say something,” Thurber observed in exactly the same way that she might have used to comment on an animal in a zoo.

  I coughed and gestured for her to come closer.

  “She says will she have to testify,” Laurence said, tendering me another ice pack.

  Thurber flipped her hand.

  “The guy’s spilling his guts as we speak,” she said. “One of those confession nuts. He Catholic?”

  “Don’t make her talk!” Laurence said crossly. “Can’t you see it’s hurting her?”

  “Take a lot more than that to hurt her. Right?” Thurber gave me a one-tough-woman-to-another twist of her lips which on another person would have been a smile. “But yeah, unless he gets a fancy lawyer first who shuts him up, we’re looking at a guilty plea. Which lets you off the hook.”

  “We gotta go,” Frank said. “Paperwork calls. Enjoy the rest of your stay in New York, Ms. Jones.”

  Thurber huffed out her breath. “You crack me up,” she said to him as they moved away. “Are you serious? Enjoy the rest of your stay in New York?”

  “Courtesy is my watchword,” Frank said blandly.

  “Yeah, right. And I’m Doris Day.”

  We were nearly there. The grey bulk of the Metropolitan Museum loomed up at us through the trees. As we turned onto Fifth Avenue a blader shot towards me along the pavement, an Alsatian racing along beside her, its lead in her hand. At the last minute, just as it looked as if the lead was going to catch my knees and send me sprawling, she let it go and she and the dog spun off on either side of me in a neatly executed splinter movement.

  “Bet she does that on purpose to freak people out,” I muttered.

  It didn’t break the ice. Kim hadn’t said a word for the last ten minutes. A pall of gloom wrapped around her, so thick I could almost see its dark shadow. The silence fell again and hung around us as we climbed the sweep of stairs leading up to the entrance of the Met. Kim led me through the great entrance hall and down a wide corridor. We skirted a huge cafeteria that looked as if it belonged at Bloomingdale’s, with its taupe walls and tasteful peach lighting to flatter ladies who lunched, and turned into a series of richly appointed galleries.

  But Kim shepherded me into a lift which shot us up to the fifth floor, and as the doors opened daylight flooded in, bright and unmistakable. We were on the roof. Through the glass lobby I saw a pergola, green leaves climbing up the stone wall, shining in the sunlight like a magic garden. Out on the roof a breeze blew gently, stirring the leaves. A huge bronze statue in front of us caught the sun and shimmered in its heat as if its surface were still molten. Behind it, running all around the edge of the balcony wall, was a thick box hedge, outlined by a silver rail.

  “It’s the Sculpture Garden,” Kim informed me curtly as we pushed open the glass door and stepped out onto the roof. “I come here when I’m feeling down.”

  In the centre of the space was a Rodin which I recognised at once: three superbly muscled naked men, bending over, their hands clasped at knee level. They were supposed to look mournful—these were the Three Shades from Dante’s Inferno—but no ghosts were ever that well built. Their genitals, thick and juicy, nestled in the crooks of their groins, as if they were so heavy they needed to rest, supported, for a brief moment. And their heads clustered together, touching affectionately, like their hands. It looked like they were making a pact: we three against the world.

  Kim had moved past me. I watched her walk out onto the extension, whose floor was made of boards, reaching out to the Upper East Side like the prow of a liner. At its tip was a statue of a standing woman, poised on tiptoe, one hand to her face, the gleaming bronze set into relief by the skyscrapers behind us. Kim passed it and disappeared round
the hedge. I went round the statue and leaned on the wall, looking at the New York skyline, as spectacular a view as the sculptures themselves. The stacked and stepped blocks and towers flowed into the distance, their pale greys and browns dazzled almost white by the sunlight, their windows flashing back the rays like signalling mirrors. And if I narrowed my eyes and stood back, the green flat-cut surface of the box hedge merged into the tree-tops of Central Park, which stretched away, thick and still and close-packed as a moss garden high above the city.

  Hugo would have loved it up here. Anything to be on top of the world. If the devil had tempted him in a high place he’d have sold his soul straight away for dominion over what he saw and counted it a fair bargain. And judging by his news, he’d already made a decent start.

  “It’s a new drama series, BBC1, prime time,” he’d said gleefully when he rang me yesterday. “And I, my dear, am the Leading Man. Stardom beckons. The cover of the Radio Times is calling me. And I probably have to go on a diet. I thought I looked rather fat on screen.”

  “Hugo, you don’t need to go on a bloody diet,” I said as testily as I could with the soreness of my throat.

  He sighed gustily. “Wait till you see the tape.”

  “I don’t care about the tape. I’m not having sex with a stick insect.”

  “It would be technically difficult,” Hugo agreed. “But you’re so resourceful I’m sure you could if you put your mind to it.”

  “Oh, I’ve got some more blonde jokes for you.”

  “Just one. Then I’m going. You sound like Marlene Dietrich with a bad cold and I’m feeling guilty at torturing you like this.”

  “OK. What do you do if a blonde throws a pin at you? Run like hell—she’s got a grenade in her mouth!”

  I couldn’t help laughing, but my throat was so painful that I had to stop halfway through, croaking. Hugo swore at me for hurting myself and hung up to stop me talking further. It was his way of showing that he cared. I couldn’t help missing him.