Guns in the Gallery

by Simon Brett

  ‘You’d do it fine, love,’ said her husband. But his reassurance sounded automatic, not convinced that she would.

  Carole, whose antennae were very sensitive to deficiencies in the self-esteem department, was once again struck by the Whittakers’ insecurity. All that money and they never seemed quite at ease, always pretending to be people they weren’t.

  ‘Anyway,’ Ned went on, ‘Walden’s Chervil’s baby, so you don’t have to worry.’

  ‘Yes, but suppose she was away one night and you weren’t there either and someone from the site came up to the big house wanting me to sort something out for them . . .?’

  ‘It won’t happen, love,’ he said, with a new harshness in his voice, and Carole realized that this was the type of argument they had had time and time again in the course of their marriage. She wondered what level of resentment Ned felt for his wife’s pussy-footedness.

  ‘Anyway, Carole,’ Ned went on, ‘it wasn’t Chervil I wanted to talk about. I wanted to apologize for her sister’s behaviour.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t really notice it,’ Carole responded fatuously.

  ‘The fact is . . .’ A look was exchanged between husband and wife. Sheena was clearly urging Ned to stop, but he still proceeded. ‘The fact is that Fennel does have some mental health issues . . .’

  ‘I had heard that, yes.’

  ‘. . . and when she has too much to drink, she does things . . . well, you’ve seen what she does.’

  ‘Yes. Sounded like it was something she wanted to get off her chest.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Had she been with Denzil Willoughby for a long time?’ Normally, Carole wouldn’t have asked such a question while its subject was still in the room, but the hubbub of conversation was so loud that she didn’t worry about being overheard.

  ‘We didn’t know she had been,’ replied Sheena, rather bleakly.

  ‘Fennel tends to play things rather close to her chest,’ Ned added. ‘Particularly when it comes to her love life.’

  ‘We kind of knew there was someone in her life, and from things she said, we thought it might be someone in the art world. But no names.’

  ‘Does she live with you down here?’

  The Whittakers exchanged another look before Ned replied, ‘Not all the time. Mostly she lives in a flat we’ve got in Pimlico, but . . .’

  He ran out of words and his wife filled the gap for him. ‘There are times when she needs to be with us. Not that we are particularly happy about that.’

  ‘Nor’s she, to be fair, Sheena.’

  ‘No, I suppose she isn’t,’ his wife conceded.

  ‘It’s just –’ Ned shrugged – ‘a difficult situation.’

  ‘Is she under proper medical supervision?’ asked Carole. The question, with its implication that there also existed improper medical supervision from people like healers, was not one she would have asked had Jude been present.

  Above his glasses Ned Whittaker’s brows were raised heavenwards. ‘We’ve tried everything with Fennel. Paid for the best treatment there is available, right from the moment when she first . . . became ill. Everything seems to work for a while, but then . . .’

  This time a look from his wife seemed to stop him from saying more. Carole wished she could read the couple’s private semaphore. She got the feeling the Whittakers didn’t see eye to eye over the treatment for their daughter’s condition. Maybe one of them sincerely believed that Fennel could get better and the other was less optimistic. But Carole couldn’t work out which of them took which position.

  Further conversation was prevented by a sudden burst of shouting from the other side of the gallery.

  ‘How dare you say that! My artistic vision is at least as valid as yours is!’

  The shouter was, perhaps inevitably, Gray Czesky. Carole should have remembered from their previous encounters how susceptible the painter was to the booze. From the security of his expensive seafront house in Smalting and the enduring safety-net of his wife’s private income, Gray Czesky loved presenting the image of the volatile, unconventional artist. Some local people might accept his work at his own evaluation of it, but clearly Denzil Willoughby had different views.

  ‘How can you call that art?’ he cried, pointing with derision at the framed watercolour of Fethering Beach that Czesky was holding. ‘A photograph’d be better than that. It’s just a representation of something you see in front of you. You haven’t added anything to what a photographer would produce, just made a considerably less accurate picture of some bloody beach!’

  There was an indrawing of breath from the locals. Though they had carte blanche to moan about the oily fragments of plastic that piled up there, the dog messes and illegal barbecues, they didn’t like outsiders criticizing Fethering Beach.

  ‘There is no bloody artistic vision there,’ Denzil Willoughby continued.

  ‘Of course there is!’ Both men were now very drunk and squaring up to each other, as if about to start throwing punches. ‘What you see when you look at a Gray Czesky watercolour may look like an innocuous, innocent image, but there’s a lot of subtext there. There’s violence, there’s political dissent in there, if you only have the perception to see it.’

  ‘Crap!’ Denzil Willoughby countered. ‘I’ve got more political dissent in the fingernail of my little finger than you have in your entire bloody oeuvre!’

  The denizens of Fethering watched these exchanges with the concentration they would apply to a Wimbledon final. Maybe this really was what happened at every Private View. They felt excited to be part of the action.

  ‘So that’s what you think, is it?’ Gray Czesky spat out the words.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I bloody think. And if you want to make something of it—’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, will you all shut up!’

  The words were spoken in a shriek, and it took a moment before the spectators could believe that they had issued from the lips of Bonita Green. They turned in amazement towards the diminutive figure of the gallery-owner as she went on, ‘This entire evening has been ruined! Probably the Cornelian Gallery has been ruined by all this shouting and insults and accusations.’

  She moved towards the back of the shop with considerable dignity. ‘I am going upstairs to my flat. And when I come down here tomorrow morning, Giles, I am relying on you to have all the rubbish in here cleared out.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Denzil, cheated for the moment of one fight but eager to find another. ‘When you use the word “rubbish”, do you—’

  ‘Yes, Mr Willoughby,’ said Bonita Green rather magnificently as she left the room, ‘I do include your work.’

  NINE

  ‘I think we should go glamping,’ Fennel Whittaker announced, as Jude brought the Mini to a neat halt on the gravel in front of Butterwyke House.

  ‘I think we should get you to bed,’ said Jude, trying not to sound too much like a nanny.

  ‘Fine, but why not to bed in a yurt?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Go on. I want to.’ It was the urgent pleading of a small child.

  ‘But Walden opens tomorrow.’ Jude looked at the girl shrewdly. ‘This isn’t a plan to mess up Chervil’s big day, is it?’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t. I wouldn’t do anything like that. I’ve got nothing against Chervil.’

  ‘You seemed to have back at the Private View.’

  ‘What? When I . . .’ Her hand shot up to her mouth in consternation. ‘Oh my God! Did I actually slap her?’

  ‘Yes, you did. Surely you remember?’

  ‘It’s all a bit of a haze. I was so determined to be articulate in what I wanted to say to Denzil that I didn’t notice much else that was going on.’

  ‘You had also had far too much to drink,’ said Jude severely.

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I had,’ agreed Fennel, for a moment a contrite schoolgirl. But the mood didn’t last for long. Waving the nearly empty bottle she had brought from the Cornelian Gallery, she cried
, ‘And now I need some more!’ She opened the passenger door and tottered out on to the gravel. ‘I’ll just go and raid Daddy’s wine cellar . . . and then . . . I’ll go and sleep in a yurt!’

  Jude was for a moment uncertain what to do. She knew that, in her current mood, Fennel would not take kindly to being coerced into bed. But she also knew the fragility of the girl’s temperament. The high Fennel was on was a big one and when she came down from it she was going to have a nasty hangover, both alcoholic and emotional.

  Jude decided the best thing she could do was to stay with the girl, try to be there to help when the mood changed, as it inevitably would. And if that meant spending a night in a yurt . . . well, she’d never spent a night in a yurt before and Jude was always up for new experiences. She hadn’t got transport back to Fethering, anyway.

  She took out her mobile to tell Carole what she was doing, but was prevented by the return from the house of a meandering Fennel, clutching a wine bottle in either hand. It was the same Argentinian Malbec that they’d been drinking at the Private View. Jude got out of the Mini to greet her.

  ‘Forward!’ cried Fennel in the manner of a valiant crusader. ‘To the yurts!’

  Carole got back to High Tor, her mind buzzing with everything that had happened at the Cornelian Gallery. She was very glad she had finally agreed to go to the Private View. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

  But while Gulliver welcomed her return with his usual display of undiscriminating affection, there was still something that nagged at Carole. Where was Jude? Landline and mobile were checked, but there was no message or text.

  Carole felt sure it was a man. Quite when her neighbour had had the opportunity to meet a man at the Private View and to go through the minimum conversation required before an agreement to sleep together, Carole didn’t know. But that remained her strongest suspicion.

  She remembered how bad she had felt the other time when Jude had gone off on a one-night stand, that awful teenage sensation of having been abandoned by a best friend. Carole went to bed that night with a mix of emotions, half disapproval, half envy.

  Jude woke with a head as fuzzy as the sheets of felt that covered the lattice framework of the yurt. She was still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, but she’d slept deeply and her surroundings were surprisingly comfortable. The thread count of the bedding was luxuriously high and all the other fittings were straight from the top drawer. Since glamping seemed to bear no relationship to the sodden indignities of real camping, Jude thought she could quite get used to the idea.

  As consciousness returned, she began to piece together the events of the previous night. She remembered arriving in the yurt with Fennel. She remembered checking whether they should be using the place, with Walden about to open the following day, and the reassurance that only two of the bigger yurts had been booked for the first weekend. ‘And staff’ll come in and clean the place out,’ Fennel had said. ‘Always plenty of staff to do everything at Butterwyke House.’

  ‘But don’t you think you should tell Chervil you’re here?’

  ‘Oh, if you insist,’ Fennel had said grudgingly, and dashed off a text to her sister.

  Jude also recollected that they had drunk a lot. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see one empty bottle and she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover they’d drunk the other one too. Or maybe there had been more. She did have a vague recollection of Fennel having left the yurt at some point in the night. Had that been to get more booze from the house? No, it had been to fetch her latest artwork, the watercolours she’d done in the previous few days. And Jude remembered looking at the pictures, thinking how good they were and how much more serene than the agonized images of earlier in the week.

  She also had a recollection of the girl getting a text on her mobile, though quite when that had been she couldn’t be sure.

  But through the woolliness of her head, what Jude did remember from her night was how well they had got on together, more like two contemporaries than a pair of women with nearly thirty years between them. And she also recalled how positive Fennel Whittaker had sounded. Yes, she was very drunk, but in a strange way she’d been in control, rational, optimistic about her future. Bawling out Denzil Willoughby in public may not have pleased the guests at the Private View, but it seemed at least to have given Fennel some kind of expiation.

  Jude looked across to the other bed, hoping that the girl was safely sleeping off the effects of her prodigious alcohol consumption.

  With a shadow of foreboding, she saw that Fennel wasn’t there. Not in the bed, not in the yurt.

  Increasingly anxious, Jude slipped on her shoes and hurried outside. She noticed dew on the grass, it was still quite early. Not of course that the glampers of Walden would actually have to step on grass and risk getting their feet wet. Paved pathways linked the yurts.

  The door to the one designated as gym and spa was half open. Jude hurried across.

  The sight that met her was appalling. Fennel Whittaker was slumped in a chair beside a small table on which stood a half-empty bottle of wine and a Sabatier kitchen knife. On the floor lay her most recent watercolours.

  The blood had almost stopped dripping from the girl’s slashed wrists. But it seemed to be everywhere else, splashed and spreading across the white tiles.

  TEN

  Strange how quickly a hangover can vanish. There seemed to be so much happening that Jude didn’t have time to notice her headache. First she’d had the awful task of rousing the owners of Butterwyke House and telling them that their daughter was dead.

  She remembered particularly Sheena Whittaker’s response, simultaneously bursting into tears and saying, with something that sounded almost like relief, ‘At least we don’t have to worry about it happening any more. The worst has happened.’

  It was a strange reaction, one that Jude would try to analyse when she had more leisure. But the immediate demands on her time included taking Ned to the scene of his daughter’s death, knowing that he’d witnessed something similar before in the Pimlico flat. He seemed physically to shrink with the impact of what he saw. Jude knew quite a lot about the bond between fathers and their first-born daughters, and she knew that the wound that had just been inflicted on Ned Whittaker would never fully heal.

  Then there was the calling of the police, the half-hearted drinking of coffee until they arrived, followed by the complete official takeover of the situation. As the one who had found the body, Jude was given some fairly basic interrogation about the details of her discovery. She was asked for her contact details and told that there was likely to be further questioning. But, for the time being, she was free to go home. To her surprise she saw that it was still not yet nine o’clock.

  Jude had rung for a cab and, while she waited in the stricken hallway of Butterwyke House, she heard the sound of a car drawing up on the gravel outside. Chervil, presumably snatched from the arms of Giles Green by a telephone summons from her parents, burst in through the doors, seeing Jude and saying, ‘Isn’t this bloody typical? Are there any lengths Fennel wouldn’t go to, to spoil one of my projects?’

  Another question to be pondered on when Jude had more leisure. Which she didn’t have in the half-hour cab ride back to Fethering. She was still in shock and the only question in her mind was whether she could have done anything to save the life of Fennel Whittaker.

  To Jude’s mind, guilt, like regret, was a completely wasted emotion. Looking backwards and wishing the past undone made for a pointless expenditure of emotional energy. But on this occasion, surprised to find herself sobbing in the back of the cab, Jude did feel some level of responsibility for what had happened.

  ‘Presumably you inspected the crime scene before you went back to Butterwyke House?’ Carole’s tone turned her words into one of those expressions remembered from school Latin: a question expecting the answer yes.

  And she got what she expected. ‘I had a quick look round, yes. But I was in shock and pretty bleary.’
>
  ‘I’m not surprised, given the amount of alcohol you say you’d consumed.’ This tart reproof showed that, in spite of Jude’s explanation, Carole hadn’t quite forgiven her lack of communication.

  Jude was about to launch into a defence of empathetic drinking. She knew that the previous evening trying to stop Fennel having more wine would not have worked. Matching the girl glass for glass had increased the closeness between them.

  But a look at Carole’s face told her that articulating such thoughts would be a waste of breath, so instead she said, ‘It looked like a classic suicide set-up. Alcohol, there were pills on the table too, and the kitchen knife, which had clearly been used to cut the wrists.’

  ‘Suicide note?’ Jude nodded wearily. ‘I don’t suppose you read it?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What, you opened the envelope? The police aren’t going to be very pleased when they—’

  ‘It wasn’t in an envelope. Just lying there on the table. I didn’t have to touch it to read it.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘I can’t remember the exact wording, but the usual stuff . . . “can’t go on . . . no talent as an artist . . . everything too painful . . . hate myself . . . simpler for everyone if I . . . ” You know.’ Once again Jude was surprised by tears in her eyes.

  ‘Did it read convincingly to you?’ asked Carole gently.

  ‘Oh yes. That’s the kind of thing people write in suicide notes. It always sounds terribly banal in retrospect, but . . .’ Jude reached under layers of garments to produce a handkerchief on which she blew her nose loudly.

  ‘So it sounds like it really was a suicide.’

  Reluctantly, Jude nodded her head. ‘Except . . . when we talked that evening . . . yesterday evening – God, it was only yesterday evening – Fennel sounded so positive about everything.’

  ‘So positive about everything you can remember,’ said Carole sniffily. The lack of a phone message still rankled. ‘Come on, concentrate, Jude. Was there anything else you saw at the scene of the crime that you think might be relevant?’