by Gary Newman
‘And that’s all he’s told you: he thinks he may be related to us, and he’s looking for his roots?’
‘Straight up and down, my son. I’m on his trail, though.’
‘D’you think the little Irish guy and Ramier are working together?’
‘A good question – I shall have to look into that.’
‘Have you seen the Irish guy since I caught him sniffing around at the Holt?’
‘Mmm . . . he reckons he’s picked up some of Grandfather’s stuff in Jersey, and he’s trying to suss out how much I know about it.’
‘Including this lost painting you mentioned?’
‘That’s my suspicion – something’s opened up in Jersey, something big, that’s starting to pull in the dealers. There may be other bods turning up here and in Suffolk, so we’ll just have to roll with it.’
‘I could go and meet this guy, Brogan, and see what –’ ‘No, Paul – you’ve got your plate full enough at the moment, with the development of the smallholding project, and, besides, you’re not exactly one of Nature’s ambassadors, you know.’
My son smiled – the first time I’d seen him smile since the Troubles – and it was like a blessed truce, but he then snorted with his usual impatience.
‘As for Brogan,’ I went on, ‘rest assured that if I can winkle anything out of him that has any possible bearing on your and Mum’s life at the Holt, you’ll be the first to know, and the same goes for Ramier.’
Paul was already on his feet, and didn’t shake off my hand when I put it lightly on his shoulder. I disengaged the hand as he turned towards the door, then, on the threshold, he turned and faced me, a sort of speculative puzzlement in his eyes.
‘D’you really believe this French guy’s related to us?’
‘I thought you weren’t interested in the Saga of St Sebastian . . .’ I couldn’t resist saying.
My son stepped through the open door on to the pathway.
‘Just find out what’s going on, Dad – that’s all. I don’t want Mum upset any more.’
Soon all I could see of my son was the rear of the Land Rover disappearing up the headland. I went indoors to ring Leah up, and bring her up to date about Paul’s visit.
‘Jealousy!’ was her immediate response to my description of my son’s call at the lighthouse. ‘Plain as eggs.’
‘Eh? Really, I don’t see what –’
‘Oh, come on, Seb! More than a year after your separation from your wife, you and your quest for your grandfather are still a hot topic of conversation at the Holt, and now that this mysterious foreign visitor comes dogging your son’s footsteps, it turns out he’s only interested in you!’
‘I’ve tried to make amends to Paul – really I have.’
‘Tell me, then, Seb: on this visit – the first he’s made to your new place, right? – did you ask him how things were going at the Holt? How the new students’ annexe was shaping up? If he was short of money? How his love life was going?’
‘I just wish I was on those sort of terms with him again – he’d only have told me to get stuffed.’
‘But did you think of asking?’
I paused awhile – food for thought – before answering.
‘Leah, you said you were getting fed up with teaching, didn’t you? How about working for me as secretary, analyst and sex plaything? Say, ten quid a week?’
‘In your dreams! But seriously, I should ring Brogan up and find out if he knows anything about this Frenchman, Ramier.’
‘Just about to.’
We exchanged goodbyes, and I rang off. I then rustled up Liam Brogan’s business card and rang the number of the Victoria hotel he’d scribbled on it. It seemed he was just on the point of going out, but he’d be happy to give me any information he could. I explained about Ramier, the man in dark glasses, and heard the puckish chuckle from the other end.
‘Yes, I spotted him at the auction in Walberswick, too. Bit of a wild card, that ’un, but very plausible with it. He’s been round to my place in St Helier, but just to browse. I don’t think he’s a professional dealer, though: he doesn’t really talk the talk.’
‘Well, you should know . . . He told me he was a hotelkeeper in Normandy.’
‘Is that so? Well, for a hotelier, he seems to have a lot of spare time. By the way, I was on the point of ringing you: I’ve got something to show you.’
‘Yes?’
‘Ah, taxi’s here. I really have to go now – date with an important client. How about lunch here tomorrow? Hotel restaurant’s pretty good – say, twelve-thirty?’
I fell in with this, and went up to London next morning to keep my lunch date with Brogan. The hotel turned out to be a new place, in one of those garden squares behind the Green Line bus concourse at the back of Victoria station. The restaurant was Indonesian, and a beaming Brogan was standing behind one of the tables, his rough, pink hand pointed in my direction like the hand of an old-fashioned country road sign. I went up and squeezed it briefly, then sat in the chair opposite my host’s. There was an intriguing-looking buff envelope lying near Brogan’s place at the table. He rubbed his hands like an over-eager chef.
‘I recomment the rijstafel, with some nice, cold lager.’
And very good it was, too. My companion paid the sizzling curry the respect one would have expected from a connoisseur, and the round, pink face under the little mat of silver bristles positively glowed with well-being as he did justice to the meal.
‘This Ramier feller you mentioned on the phone yesterday evening,’ he said between appreciative little chomps at his food. ‘Interesting: sense of things hotting up . . .’
‘Talking of hotting up, this is excellent curry.’
Brogan’s baby-blue eyes twinkled, and he grinned good-humouredly.
‘Not at all bad . . . But Ramier’s on the same lines as us.’
So now we were in it together, I thought?
‘D’you mean he’s after the lost Rawbeck painting, The Ruffian on the Stair?’
My vis-à-vis nodded.
‘The Ruffian . . .’ he repeated in confirmation.
The hot towels arrived, and we ordered another round of lagers. Sleepy gamelan music was wafting from the Muzak as Brogan wiped his scarlet face with his towel, then gazed at me in a rather dreamy fashion for a moment.
‘Death,’ he said abruptly, ‘is of course the Ruffian on the Stair. You know the Victorian verse Rawbeck got his title from for the painting?’
I recalled again the opening lines:
Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair.
Brogan picked up the envelope at his side – one of those jobs with a stiff back to it – and carefully drew out something encased in what looked like tissue paper. He carefully unwrapped the object and held it up to me.
‘May I introduce Madam Life,’ Brogan announced importantly, ‘the tenant of the room.’
It was a sketch – just a few essential charcoal strokes – of a staircase, with, halfway up it, the squat figure of an old woman in Victorian dress, a little bonnet on her drawn-up hair. She was looking out from the sketch, and on her crudely but powerfully drawn features could be read alarm and incipient panic. This was horribly but very well evoked. On the landing of the stairs, waiting in the shadows for Madam Life as she made her way upstairs, was a shaded outline of a male form, malignant intent in his wary crouch. But what caught my attention above all were the rough lines which suggested a landing window, the window being edged by alternate lightly and heavily shaded oblong side panes. Like the window outside the room where my grandfather found Julian Rawbeck’s body . . .
‘It’s not signed,’ was my first response.
‘It’s the lad, though – it’s a Rawbeck!’ Brogan spluttered, carefully wrapping the acid-free tissue round the square of cartridge paper again, and replacing it in the stiff-backed envelope. ‘The pow
er and terseness of the drawing, and the sheer, lively malice of it . . .’
‘When was it done?’
‘The experts put it before 1895, when he started branching out from macabre subjects.’
I kept quiet at this point, but I dated the sketch more precisely to 1893, when Mrs Bella Nye had been murdered in her pub. I suspected she’d been Madam Life as represented in Rawbeck’s sketch, with Death, the Ruffian on the landing, played in real life by Laurence Victor Pidgeon, the Vickybird, then Mrs Nye’s cellar boy and general kick-about. So this had been one of the blackmail-levers Rawbeck had had against the Vickybird . . .
‘Rawbeck doesn’t seem to have worked up an actual painting from the sketch,’ Brogan was going on. ‘More’s the pity.’
And if he had made one, I reflected, the Vickybird would have burnt it on finding it in his master’s possessions after he’d murdered him.
‘The sketch you’ve just shown me’s about the same size as the print you offered at the Walberswick auction,’ I remarked, changing tack slightly. ‘Did it come from the same batch in Jersey?’
Brogan’s eyes twinkled more frostily than ever. He tapped the side of his nose with a blunt, pink finger.
‘Client confidentiality, Mr Rolvenden – client confidentiality . . . I recall at the auction your wife gave that other lady a fair run for her money for the other little Rawbeck work of mine, but then the lady who made the successful bid is married to a dealer. You must know her quite well, Mr Rolvenden: I couldn’t help noticing you were in pretty lively conversation with her at the auction.’
So Brogan had witnessed my spat with Pat Hague in the auction room, too.
‘I was at school with the lady’s husband,’ I said. ‘We’re old friends.’
‘And you didn’t actually bid for Morte Moriantur . . .’
‘I’d already had a good look at it at the viewing the day before.’
‘You know, Mr Rolvenden, I like Suffolk – the most private of your English counties – and there’s an odd melancholy about the coast, a sort of look-thy-last quality as it slides into the sea. I feel I must get to know the region better . . .’
Brogan was drawing me into greater and greater detail, and I knew it would just be a matter of time before he’d put his oar in irretrievably, and compromise my search for the truth about my grandfather. Better wind this up before I’d blurted out too much . . .
‘Well, that’s certainly a fascinating sketch,’ I said, dabbing my lip with the napkin. ‘Thank you for showing it to me, and for an excellent lunch!’
We both got up, and exchanged final handshakes across the table.
‘You know where to find me, Mr Rolvenden.’
I walked out into the bustle of Belgrave Road again, my mind full of thoughts. I decided to go up across Warwick Way and take a turn round the railed garden of Eccleston Square. It was a spring ritual of mine while in London to do the circuit of the splendid camellias in the square. I crossed to the corner of the leafy pleasance, and the traffic roar seemed to be soothed away by the startling, glossy-dark greenness of the evergreen foliage. The beauty parade began with the lush pink gorgeousness of the riotous blooms of a latish display of Donation, and I made my way deliberately down along the high iron railings, like a meditating monk in a cloister. As I paced, I considered what had passed during my lunch with Liam Brogan.
The Rawbeck artworks, then, and how to fit them into my grandfather’s story. The one Reet and Pat had been interested in at the Walberswick auction – Morte Moriantur – had been the print of the sketch of my grandfather and another young man in what would have been a highly suggestive and in fact compromising pose in the 1890s of the Oscar Wilde case. This – or rather, the original – I was sure, would have been the Rawbeck work Grandfather mentioned in his notebook as having been stolen by the Vickybird and sold to the Paris art dealer, Carbonero. The one the first Sebastian Rolvenden had been eager to get back at all costs. Why on earth had Reet wanted it, though?
The unattributed charcoal sketch Brogan had just shown me – let’s call it The Tenant of the Room – I strongly suspected to have been meant by Julian Rawbeck to represent Mrs Nye, the pub landlady who’d been murdered while the Vickybird had been in her employ. Most interestingly, the landing window of the stairs on which Mrs Nye was standing in the sketch confirmed my suspicion that her and Rawbeck’s murders, though six years apart, had been committed in the same pub, the Ring of Bells in Lefevre Road, which wasn’t far from the Home in the East and Soundings Alley mentioned in my grandfather’s notebook.
This charcoal sketch, no doubt, would have been used by the artist as a sort of Sword of Damocles to be held over the head of the Vickybird – a reminder of his crime – to keep him in line. Rawbeck would’ve had other, more material proofs in his blackmail arsenal against him, I was sure. Whether there’d been a completed version of the sketch in oils, disposed of by the Vickybird after he’d silenced Rawbeck for good, was merely academic now.
As to where Brogan stood in all this, my original theory concerning all the things he’d shown me up to now – the Rolvenden heirloom razor, Julian Rawbeck’s platinum tiepin, the Morte Moriantur print and now the macabre charcoal sketch – had been strengthened. I was more convinced than ever that the Irish dealer had acquired them from the same person in Jersey that had originally looted my grandfather’s effects there in 1940. The original thief had recently died on the island, and his shamefaced heirs had handed what had been left of my grandfather’s hoard in their possession – the notebook and the rest of the contents of the Jiffy bag – to Lawyer Le Touzel to send on to me. The one thing Brogan clearly hadn’t yet got his eager red hands on, though, was the lost Rawbeck masterpiece, The Ruffian on the Stair. The race was still on for that.
‘Fahkin’ dimbo!’
The curse came from a stretched-out form I’d almost stumbled headlong over, and I found myself muttering an apology to what looked like the leather face, under a stocking-cap, of a Danish bog-burial at my feet. Well and truly wrenched out of my reverie of 1890s East Hackney, I left the vagrant to his sprawlings, and strode back to the main thoroughfare of this corner of modern London in search of my car.
When, a few hours later, I’d got back to my Essex lighthouse, there was something waiting for me in my Inbox: a skittish message from Pat Hague which suggested that she’d managed to squeeze some destabilizing mischief out of the Rawbeck print she’d forked out a couple of grand for at the Walberswick auction.
The message read: Care to step over to the boathouse for Pidgeon pie?
Chapter Seventeen
Pat had meant the message as a wind-up, of course, but where had she got the ‘Pidgeon’? Some detail of the Morte Moriantur sketch I’d missed at the auction viewing, perhaps? Then I groaned inwardly: I was the father of all chumps . . . There could’ve been something written on the back of the print. I hadn’t bothered to ask to be shown it at the time. Brogan would know, of course, but I’d trust him as far as I could throw him. Reet, then – she must’ve made a thorough examination of the print, to have made a bid of nearly two thousand pounds for it next day. I’d trust her: she’d conceal, but when fairly challenged, would tell the truth. I flopped down in my swivel chair, and, reaching for my mobile, pegged in the number of the Holt. My ex-wife’s voice answered.
‘Seb here, Reet: that sketch you bid for at the auction the other week . . .’
A pregnant moment followed before Reet answered, with tension in her voice.
‘Yes . . . What about it?’
‘I’m not going to pry into why you wanted it – that’s your business – but could you possibly tell me if there was anything written on the back? I daresay you’d have looked at it closely at the viewing on the Thursday?’
‘Why d’you want to know – what’s this all about?’
‘That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, dear heart! It’s just occurred to me that there might have been something on the back of the print that could provide a clu
e as to my grandfather’s early life. I never thought to look at the back of it at the viewing.’
‘Oh, I see . . .’
There was now unmistakable relief in Reet’s voice.
‘No, Seb, there was nothing written on the back of the print. I looked, and there was nothing at all.’
I thanked her and rang off. So that was that. So where had Pat got this ‘Pidgeon’ angle from? She was playing games, of course, and the very thing she wanted was for me to go down to the boathouse and be baited, and here I was getting ready to do just that . . . But if it was something genuinely new about Laurence Victor Pidgeon, I simply couldn’t afford to pass it up. With a sigh of pure defeat, I took up my mobile again and tried the number of the Hagues’ boathouse. Flinching in anticipation of Pat’s triumphant crowings, I waited for the answering voice, but none came, and eventually the recorded message litany came through.
It was on the tip of my tongue to record the message: ‘What about that pie you promised me?’ but of course, this must be part of the new game – I had to sit up and beg for my titbit. Angrily, I switched off the mobile – that was it! Sod her – it’d only have been a blag, anyway, and life was too short. I got up off the chair and walked over to the window, staring out across the flats. ‘Pidgeon’ with a ‘d’: it was irresistible . . .
I went downstairs to the front door, which I slammed locked behind me, jumped into my car, and drove straight over to the Wivenhoe marina and the Hagues’ boathouse, only to find the place locked up and silent. My persistent ringings at the doorbell, then knockings, and finally tap-pings at the window shutters got no response, and, incandescent, I jumped back in the car and drove home again. Led by the nose again. Leah had been right: I shouldn’t be let out on my own . . .
Back at the lighthouse, I flung myself into an article I’d been commissioned to do, and worked single-mindedly on it till nine. The concentration and steady industry needed to complete the task calmed me down, and a hefty omelette afterwards with a couple of glasses of Merlot finished the process. By ten I was in my cane armchair in the sitting room, a mug of coffee at my side. Pat or no Pat, I thought, my researches would go on. Reet was now holding out on me over my quest for my grandfather, and this made me even more determined to get to the bottom of the business. I don’t like loose ends – they make me feel tense – and I had to clear the air.