Star Fall

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I’m ready. It’s time,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Don’t feel you have to go back,’ he said awkwardly. ‘We can manage without the money.’

  ‘It’s not about the money,’ she said. ‘At least,’ she added honestly, ‘not mainly. It’s about what I do with my life. I can’t sit at home and do nothing.’

  ‘What about George?’ he asked.

  ‘Your father and Lydia will babysit when necessary. You know that. They can’t get enough of him. And on the occasions when they can’t, well, we’ll fix something else up. People all over the country manage to find babysitters.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant – don’t you want to stay home with George?’

  ‘I don’t see you fighting to stay home with him.’

  ‘I have a career.’ The instant he said it, he knew what she would say.

  ‘So do I.’ She locked eyes with him for a moment. ‘You’re gone all day, and in a year or so George will go to nursery school and he’ll be gone most of the day. And then what?’

  ‘You can have another baby,’ Slider said. ‘You know the doctor said there was nothing wrong with you, it was just bad luck, no reason to think it would ever happen again—’

  ‘I don’t want another baby,’ she said flatly.

  There was a silence, filled with a complexity of pain; his and hers, and theirs.

  ‘It’s natural that you should be a little bit afraid …’ he began.

  She sighed. ‘Bill. Please. Understand. I don’t want another baby. I love George. He’s my son, and I love him more than life. I love you. But I’m not a hausfrau. That’s just not me, and you’ve always known that. I need to work. My work is who I am. You accepted that before George came along. You have to get back to accepting it again. We never planned this baby. If I’d had it, I’d have loved it too, but things didn’t turn out that way. Now we have to move on.’

  ‘I want you to do what makes you happy,’ he said. He hadn’t meant it to sound the way it came out: it sounded resentful and sulky. She raised an eyebrow, and he tried again. ‘I’m not some kind of sultan. I never expected to lock you up in my harem and breed from you. I married Joanna the musician.’

  ‘Well, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Compromise has always been difficult, given our two careers,’ he said. ‘I thought you were going to settle for rather more domesticity and rather less career, that’s all.’

  ‘I’d have had to, with two babies,’ she said. ‘But now I don’t.’

  ‘I understand. I’m not disapproving of your going back to work. Truly, I’m not.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I’m anxious about you, that’s all. Your well-being. I want to be sure that you’re ready for this. I know how tiring it can be. The strain. The long hours. The late nights.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said. Her voice and face softened. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I won’t crock myself. And,’ she continued, going to the heart of his unspoken fear, ‘I’m not running away from the miscarriage, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not hiding all sorts of mental anguish from myself by burying myself in work. I’ve been through the anguish. It’s done with. I’m out the other side.’

  ‘But,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I’ve never seen you cry.’

  She gave him a slow, amused, loving smile. ‘Is that what’s bothering you? When did you ever see me cry?’

  ‘I’ve never seen you lose a baby before.’

  She put down her glass and hitched along the sofa to him, drew his arm round her, nestled her head into his neck. He kissed the crown of her head, held her against him, loving her so much it gave him an ache in his stomach.

  ‘I cried inside,’ she said.

  The papers went mad over the Melling assault. The front pages were ablaze. The Telegraph and the Mail had those tedious headlines lazy journalists love, based on the movie title The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover – a movie no-one now living had ever actually seen. The Telegraph headline was ‘THE BALLET DANCER, HIS LOVER AND THE CAMERAMAN’, while the Mail went with ‘THE TV STAR, HIS LOVER AND THE CAMERAMAN’. The Sun had ‘TV STAR BALLET BOY BUST-UP’ and the Star had ‘TV GURU LOVE-RAT PUNCH-UP SHOCK’. The Express’s headline was ‘DANCER IN TV STAR ASSAULT SPARKS IMMIGRATION ROW’, and the Financial Times went with ‘G8 TENSIONS THREATEN DOHA ROUND’.

  It would have been a welcome distraction, except that Melling was eagerly giving interviews in which he blamed the police for his current condition, which meant the papers had to explore the fact that he had been questioned and released over the Egerton case, leading to sub-headings along the lines of ‘Police Baffled’ and ‘Police Have No Leads’.

  Things were so bad that Hammersmith Headquarters set up a press conference, at which the assembled journos were addressed by no less a figure than Detective Chief Superintendent Morgan, Commander Wetherspoon’s right-hand man and Brown-Noser in Chief. His principle skill was in talking at length, fluently and plausibly without actually saying anything – invaluable in this case, since there was nothing to say except ‘Police Baffled’. Porson came back from it almost tearful, begging Slider to get him something – anything – to show Mr Wetherspoon before the end of the day.

  ‘He says we’re showing him up. They’re laughing at him down the golf club. Tell me you’ve got some leads you’re following up. Somebody you’ve got suspicions of.’

  Slider had to tell him they had nothing; upon which Porson’s capacity for supplication split under the pressure, and he bellowed that Slider had better bloody well go and get something then, and double-quick, or they’d all be watching daytime TV tomorrow.

  When Slider got back to his office, Connolly was there, not bearing tea this time, but a piece of paper. ‘It’s about Patrick Duggan, boss,’ she said. ‘The forger.’

  ‘Copyist is what we call him now, I think,’ Slider corrected.

  ‘Whatevs.’ Connolly shrugged. ‘I was getting all the papers together, like you said, going through the computer records and printing stuff out. And I found something a bit odd. It’s a letter, but it wasn’t in the correspondence file. It’s not really correspondence at all. Look.’ She handed him the sheet of paper. It was a printout of what was obviously a photocopy of a letter, which was neither from Egerton, nor addressed to him.

  ‘Where did you find this?’ Slider asked.

  ‘It was in the folder that lists all the art and antiques in the house. They’ve each got a separate file with a photograph, description and valuation. This file just had this photocopied letter in it.’

  Slider examined it. The letter heading, in large letters, said ‘Patrick Duggan. Fine Art Restoration and Copying’. The address, below that, was in Little Missenden, and the letter was addressed to Philip Masterson at his home.

  ‘Interesting,’ Slider said. He read on.

  Dear Philip,

  I enclose my invoice for the copy of the painting in your office, ‘Girl with Embroidered Reticule’ by Joest van Wessen (1480–1539).

  As you know, it is my custom, when copying an Old Master painting, to introduce a deliberate small variation from the original, in order to guard against any accusation of fraud. You will see that in my copy of your painting, there are six gilt tassels on the reticule, as opposed to five on the original.

  I would appreciate settlement of my invoice within thirty days as discussed. Thanking you for your esteemed patronage and hoping to be of service to you again in the future,

  Yours truly,

  Pat Duggan

  ‘Well,’ said Slider, ‘that is interesting. Why would Egerton have kept a copy of this letter?’

  ‘Why would he even have it in the first place?’ Connolly went him one better.

  ‘I think a visit to Mr Duggan would be in order,’ Slider said.

  ‘Yes, boss. I’ll see and get out to him this morning.’

  ‘I meant me,’ Slider said.

  Her face fell like rain on a Bank Holiday.

  ‘But you can c
ome with me,’ he added. ‘Only fair, since you found it.’

  The address – Mistletoe Cottage, Christmas Lane, Little Missenden – was almost unbearably picturesque. ‘It makes you sound as if you’ve got badly fitting false teeth,’ Slider observed as he drove out into the countryside. The snow had mostly gone in town, but in the fields there were still wide patches, and white lines of it lingered along the cold side of walls and hedges.

  The cottage itself turned out to be much less romantic than its name, sitting all alone and rather tumbledown in a wide vista of dull fields, and blighted by the widened and straightened A413 that allowed traffic to Brands Hatch past about fifty feet away. It was a plain grey-stone cottage with several less-than-lovely brick extensions and a couple of ugly sheds in a long back garden dedicated otherwise to Brussels sprouts and the skeletons of sunflowers and teasels.

  ‘Strange,’ Slider said as they pulled up in the muddy lane outside, ‘how someone who makes his living as an artist can put up with such unaesthetic surroundings.’

  ‘That’s your average genius,’ Connolly observed. ‘So deep in their own world, they never notice what class of a ganky kip they’re living in.’

  The door (paint peeling off, brass Lincoln Imp door-knocker in desperate need of a polish) was opened by a short, stout woman in trousers and a bulky home-knit Arran cardigan, with faded blue eyes behind rather startlingly green framed glasses, and a perm so tight it looked as though she’d had a tin of beans poured over her head. She gave them the sort of happy, trusting smile that tells the door-to-door scammer they’ve rung the right bell. Slider hastened to show his brief and introduce himself.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, the smile not changing a whit. ‘Come in. Pat’s expecting you. He’s in his studio. Mind your head – that beam’s a bit low.’

  The narrow passage had bulging walls, an uneven brick floor that bucked like a frisky pony, and a low beam right across it in just the spot best calculated to catch you as you turned from shutting the door. The air was cold and damp and the cottage smelled of mould and dogs, two of whom – a collie and a Lab – came advancing to meet them with tails swinging.

  Mrs Duggan squeezed past Connolly and Slider, saying, ‘It’s this way. Better let me go first or you won’t find it.’

  She was right. The original small, rectangular cottage had been built on to in such a haphazard way that they were led through rooms, across passages and round corners on a route they would not have been able to guess without help. The three of them, plus the two dogs, made an unwieldy mass for some of the sharp turns, and the light was so dim that it was hard not to stumble on the uneven floors and raised thresholds. Finally, they stepped out of doors and across a three-foot gap to the door of one of the large sheds, into which Mrs Duggan ushered them while repelling the dogs with waved hands and a certain amount of hooshing.

  ‘Pat, it’s your visitors,’ she announced.

  The shed was brick built with large windows and was refreshingly light after the house, and much less cold and damp, and there was no mould smell, but instead the penetrating odour of paint and turpentine. It was spectacularly untidy. In the near left corner there was a cheap office desk with a computer on it and a filing cabinet behind it, but the desk’s entire surface was covered in letters, bills and other paperwork, and there were two overstuffed wire trays on top of the filing cabinet carrying on the theme. The rest of the room was given over to art. There were battered wooden tables covered with tins of paint, bottles of turps, brushes soaking in jam jars, scrapers, rags, boxes of charcoal and chalk, Oxo tins full of odds and ends, heaps of cartridge paper, drawings, and reference books; and on easels and propped around the rooms were canvases in various states of completion or in process of being scraped off. There were various chairs and stools scattered about, their surfaces equally inhabited, and the theme was carried on over the wooden floor, where things seemed to have been put for want of anywhere else to leave them.

  In all this visual cacophony it was hard immediately to identify the owner, but Slider’s challenged eye finally picked him out in a corner between an easel, an old-fashioned tailor’s dummy and a large artificial ficus plant in a pot. He was holding a palette and working on the painting on the easel, and did not seem to notice that he had been invaded. He was short like his wife and stocky where she was round, wearing thick cord trousers and another bulky home-knit sweater with the sleeves rolled up, over which he had tied a pinafore in dull-blue cotton, liberally specked and smudged and dribbled with paint. He had an upstanding mass of grey hair, a bushy beard, grey except for two dark dabs at the mouth corners, and thick-framed glasses, which left little of his face visible between them. He looked a lot older than Slider had expected, though that might be the effect of all the hair; but studying the face as he continued to be ignored, he saw the deep folds and lines and guessed Duggan must be in his seventies at least.

  Mrs Duggan, standing beside them, must have detected some difference in her husband’s movements because after a silence she suddenly said, ‘Pat! Visitors!’ and this time Duggan turned at once, put aside his brush and palette and came towards them. Behind the glasses his eyes were deep blue and aware, and his smile was lively. He picked up a cloth from one of the tables he passed and wiped his hands as he advanced.

  ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘You must be the detectives. I won’t shake hands because I’m rather painty. Are you the young lady I spoke to on the telephone?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Detective Constable Connolly.’

  ‘Ah, lovely accent! Dublin, isn’t it? I’ve a bit of Irish in me myself, as you can probably tell. What part are you from?’

  ‘Clontarf.’

  ‘I know it. My mother was from Raheny. My father was from Donegal, though. And you are?’

  ‘Detective Inspector Slider. I’m the investigating officer in the enquiry concerning Rowland Egerton.’

  ‘Right. Right.’ Duggan looked sharply from one of them to the other. ‘Let me clear you a couple of chairs.’ He did so by unceremoniously scraping everything off on to the floor – now Slider knew how it got that way. He and Connolly sat, rather gingerly. Duggan perched on the end of the table nearest them, folding his arms across his chest, making himself look even more spherical, while Mrs Duggan remained where she was, standing by the door, vaguely smiling. ‘So,’ said Duggan, ‘what did you want to know?’

  The Irish in his voice was so diluted that it was hardly more than a slight softening of certain vowels and a rolling over of the ‘r’ in some words.

  ‘You had quite a long association with Mr Egerton, I understand,’ Slider began.

  ‘I’ve known him for years,’ said Duggan. ‘Twenty or thirty, it must be. He’s put a lot of work my way over the years – good, paying work. One thing about Rowland, he knew how to pick the right customers. People who wanted the best and never questioned the bill. We’ll certainly miss him, won’t we, Sheila?’

  Mrs Duggan nodded.

  ‘Will you be missing him any other way?’ Connolly asked. ‘As a friend, maybe?’

  ‘Well, we haven’t seen so much of him over the last couple of years. You know how it is – you get set in your ways as you get older, don’t get out so much, go round in the same small circles. But yes, I’d still call him a friend; I shall miss him. I read what happened in the papers – not that they said much. It was very shocking. How did it happen?’

  ‘That’s what we’re still trying to find out,’ Slider said.

  ‘Hence your visit. I get it. Going round all his old pals. Well, he and I had some pretty wild times together when we were both younger. Drinking, chasing girls – sorry, Sheila! Obviously, after I got married, I was doing the drinking and he was chasing the girls. He had an amazing strike rate. Women couldn’t get enough of him. And of course his telly career only helped. It’s like catnip to women, fame. Any sort of fame. You’d be amazed the letters I got from women after I was jugged for fraud. Offers of marriage and everything.’

  ‘Do you know who h
e’s been going out with recently?’ Connolly asked.

  ‘No, I can’t say as I do. As I said, I haven’t seen so much of him lately. It must be – oh, what? – a year since I saw him.’

  ‘You did a job for him last May,’ Slider said. ‘Four paintings.’

  ‘That’s right – for a house in Onslow Square. Russian businessman. Wanted four large oils in the style of Chagall. Was that only last May? It feels like longer.’

  ‘Did you see Mr Egerton at that time?’

  ‘Once at the client’s to size up the job. Once when I delivered the paintings. And we went out for a drink afterwards. He seemed in good form.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘God, I can’t remember! Nothing in particular.’

  ‘Anything about his television work? His current love-life?’

  Duggan shook his head. ‘Nothing that sticks in the mind. It was just old-pals talk, you know? This and that. I think we may have mentioned his Royal Palaces series, but more from the point of view of the paintings he featured in it. There’s such a lot of great art shut away in those places that never gets seen. I think I told him he was a lucky pup to get the chance. We, the British Public, are the biggest art-owners on the planet, but we only get to see a tenth of it, if that.’

  ‘There’s a lot of art in government offices, I believe,’ Slider said, glad he had come to the point on his own penny.

  ‘God! Yes. The Whitehall treasure trove. The state owns so many fabulous pieces; the government seeds them round the various department offices. It’s a cheap way to store them – security built in, a stable environment, and at least they’re look-at-able, even if the poor old wage slaves generally don’t bother.’

  ‘But I believe one particular wage slave, at least, did bother,’ Slider said. ‘Tell me about your dealings with Philip Masterson.’

  Duggan stared at Slider with an intensified interest, as though cogs were whirring and clicking behind those bright eyes. ‘Philip Masterson! There’s a name I haven’t heard for a long while. I’d forgotten about that job.’