Just a Dead Man
Page 22
I continued to circulate, noticing people I had no idea I had invited. Mrs Golightly’s formidable bulk hove into view, looking rather pleased with me. One of her teachers seemed to be scoring a modest triumph, and she was prepared to be gracious. “This is excellent, Laura,” she said, waving a solid arm in the direction of one of Vanessa’s abstracts. “I do hope it goes well for you.” The subtext was that this was the kind of thing she liked to see her staff doing, not getting themselves mixed up with murders. But I was, to my own surprise, enjoying myself too much to do more than smile and thank her.
I noticed that my favourite painting, the still life looking inside through the window, had a red sticker on it. I had priced it high, rather hoping I could take it home with me when the exhibition was over. I fought my way over towards the desk to find out who had bought it. It was my father. Not only had he paid for the wine, which was dwindling at an alarming rate, but had also overpaid for a painting. But when I tried to tell him he could have had it for free if only he had asked, he stopped me.
“Don’t sell yourself short, Laura. I love it. We’ve wanted it ever since we saw it in your studio, but we wanted to pay for it. So no more nonsense. You’re doing well, by the way. Look over there.”
The two hand paintings, the apple and the mango, both had red stickers too. “Good Lord! I thought they were a bit esoteric, not likely to sell. Who bought them?”
“There. That chap standing next to them, looking proprietorial. He was ahead of me at the desk.”
I looked across the crowd, and there was Adam Pillay, neat in dark jeans and a light-green open-necked shirt. He was looking at the paintings with the fixed stare I remembered from the day he had first seen the apple one; the day I had first seen him; the day Phineas Ndzoyiya’s corpse had been dumped in the plantations.
I made my way slowly through the crowd to his side. “Hello, Adam. I believe you bought these two.” And then I stopped. I wasn’t quite sure what to say next. I could thank him. Or tell him he shouldn’t have. Or ask him why. But it all sounded silly. What I did say was that I remembered him looking at the first one, that day.
“I was fascinated by it,” he said, simply. “And then, when I saw the other one, I really felt I wanted to have them both. I love the idea, the contrast. They appeal to me, somehow.”
“The associations, the murder, don’t bother you?”
“No. Why should they? They have nothing to do with it. And if they do bring things back, well … not all the memories are things I would rather forget.” He turned and looked at me. “Could I ask you … Would you come round to my flat one evening and help me to find the right place for them, so that they can be seen at their best? The way you envisaged them when you were painting them? I could even cook you my special prawn curry.”
“I can think of nothing I would like more,” I said.