Still Life - Karen Pirie Series 06 (2020)

by McDermid, Val

  And she had to learn to stop comparing. Because she knew the dead always came out ahead.

  Hamish stopped a few feet short of her. ‘I was afraid I wouldn’t see you again,’ he said.

  ‘Hamish, there’s no way I’d ever stop buying coffee in Perk.’ She gave a mischievous smile. He met it with a tentative one of his own. ‘Come on in.’

  He thrust the flowers at her and followed her into the flat. Karen put them down next to the sink and turned to face him. Now there was no barrier between them. She gave him a level stare, then stepped forward and put her hands on the lapels of his overcoat. She turned her face up to his and he bent his head. Their lips grazed gently and she drank in the familiar smell of him. Beard oil with its notes of sandalwood and eucalyptus, the faint burned smell of roasting coffee beans and an undertone of undefinable masculinity. It was hard to resist.

  Actually, she didn’t want to resist. They kissed again, less provisionally this time, then they wrapped their arms round each other in a tight hug. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Hamish whispered. ‘I can’t help wanting to make everything right for you.’

  ‘That’s not your job,’ Karen said. ‘You think it’s how you show you care for someone. In my world, it feels like a marker for wanting to control me.’

  He sighed and screwed up his eyes in frustration. ‘I get what you’re saying. It’s hard for me to put that into practice.’

  ‘How about you wait till I ask for help, rather than breenge in when you decide I need it?’

  ‘The other side of that is you being able to ask.’

  A long moment. ‘So we both have lessons to learn.’ She gave him another quick kiss. ‘Now how about you take your coat off and make it look like you’re going to stick around for a while?’

  Hamish shrugged out of his coat and took it through to the hall to hang it up. By the time he returned, Karen was transferring the meze from the fridge to the table. ‘Need a hand?’

  ‘It’s fine. It’s from Aleppo.’

  ‘Excellent, that’s a treat,’ he said absently, moving papers aside to lean on the breakfast bar. Glancing down, he said, ‘Why have you got a picture of David Greig? And who’s the boyfriend?’

  ‘What?’ Karen turned swiftly, her tone sharp.

  Hamish waved the photograph of Iain Auld and the mystery man. ‘David Greig.’

  ‘Saying it again doesn’t help,’ Karen said. ‘Who’s David Greig?’

  He stabbed the mystery man with his finger. ‘David Greig. Don’t you know who he is? Or rather, who he was?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Now her interest was fully engaged. Was Hamish going to be the source of the answer she’d been seeking?

  ‘So why have you got a picture of a man you don’t know? Is this work?’

  ‘Yes, it’s work. You know I can’t tell you any more about it.’ She took the picture from Hamish, who let it go without a fuss. ‘Tell me about David Greig.’ Urgent now.

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t know who he is,’ Hamish said, sounding properly relaxed for the first time since he’d walked in.

  Exasperated, Karen said, ‘If I bribe you with a drink, will you stop treating me like an idiot?’

  Hamish grinned. ‘Deal. A glass of that red will do the trick.’

  Karen poured two glasses and returned with them to his side. ‘Tell me about David Greig.’

  ‘He was a YBA. One of the second wave, RCA rather than Goldsmiths.’

  ‘Hamish, I didn’t understand any of that. I’m a career cop from the back streets of Kirkcaldy. Can we just assume I know fuck all about fuck all?’ The relaxed mood of a few minutes before had gone as flat as day-old Irn-Bru.

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help being a pretentious wanker.’ He tried an apologetic grin. Karen replied with a twist of the lips that might have been an attempt at a smile. ‘YBA, Young British Artists. Conceptual artists who used shock tactics and understood very well the economic possibilities of making art make money. Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, Tracy Emin, that lot.’

  Light dawned. ‘That lot. Sharks in formaldehyde and unmade beds and elephant dung.’ Karen rolled her eyes. ‘Seems to me that they didn’t create art, they created a whole generation of people like me shaking our heads and going, “what the actual fuck?” They were a machine for making philistines out of the rest of us.’

  Hamish chuckled. ‘I can’t disagree with you. I had a few mates who went to art school in the nineties and, honestly, I thought their stuff was the emperor’s new clothes, to the max. But I did go and see the Sensation exhibition in New York in 2000.’ He shook his head, a bemused look in his eyes. ‘I thought a few of the pieces were amazing but it didn’t change my mind.’

  ‘So where does David Greig fit in among the condoms and the giant vulvas?’

  ‘So you did take some notice?’

  ‘Red-top headlines notice. What did this guy actually make?’

  ‘Like most of them, he had a gimmick. He did portraits, but in a very weird way. What he did, he started with a landscape or a building that was integral to the subject of the portrait. So, if he was painting me, he’d maybe have gone up to Clashstronach and painted the glen with the croft house and the sea loch in the background. Or he might have chosen the interior of one of the Perk outlets. Then he’d take that landscape and cut it up into little pieces. Slices and triangles and squares and shards. And he’d build my portrait out of those fragments.’ Hamish drank some wine and made appreciative noises.

  Karen frowned. ‘You mean, a collage? Made out of the landscape painting?’

  ‘Exactly. I know it sounds completely mad, but somehow he made it work.’ He took out his phone and googled, ‘David Greig Tony Blair’. The screen revealed an image of the former prime minister that was almost photographic except that the colours were an odd palette of greys and blues, with the occasional shading of green. ‘You can’t see it on this scale, but he started with a painting of Fettes, where Blair went to school. Greig would photograph the original landscape painting and exhibit it alongside the portrait.’

  Karen shook her head. ‘It’s very tricksy. But how is it art?’

  ‘I think it’s meant to make us challenge our perception. That the context a person occupies shapes our view of them.’

  She groaned. ‘Talk about simplistic. It’s just showing off.’

  ‘Maybe, but showing off a high degree of skill.’

  ‘Seems like a waste to me. You said, “Who he is. Or rather, who he was.” What did you mean by that? Has he fallen out of favour?’

  ‘He killed himself,’ Hamish said. ‘I don’t remember all the details, but he threw himself off a cliff. His body never turned up, but it wasn’t like the guy out of the Manic Street Preachers who simply disappeared. Greig left his clothes and his wallet on the clifftop. I’ve got a vague recollection of a suicide note.’

  ‘When was this?’ She forced herself to sound nonchalant. Two men in a photograph. The look of love. One disappears, one apparently kills himself but his body never turns up. She didn’t believe in coincidences like that. But belief was nothing without evidence.

  Hamish puffed out a breath. ‘I don’t remember. Must be ten, twelve years ago. Is any of this helpful?’

  ‘Identifying Greig is a big step forward. I don’t know where it’ll take me, but it’s a lead.’ On an impulse, she picked up the newspaper cutting and flipped it over. ‘I don’t suppose you know who Hilary is, in the context of the art world?’ Her voice was a tease but it disguised a genuine inquiry.

  Hamish studied the scribbled lines on the page. ‘Did your guy go to Oxford, by any chance?’

  Karen stared open-mouthed. ‘How the hell did you work that out?’

  Hamish pointed to each line in turn. ‘Well, OUDS is the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and Hilary’s what they call the spring term there. In that context, I’d take a wild guess that “12 NT” stands for a production of Twelfth Night.’

  He spoke so casually, as if his interpretation was obvious. F
or Karen, it held the bitter sting of her limited experience. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘Why do they call a university term Hilary? That’s mad. I thought Hilary must be a person.’

  ‘It’s probably named after some saint. The patron saint of mortar boards or some such nonsense. I’d have thought the same as you except that I used to go out with a girl who fancied her chances at a career on the stage. She’d done a lot of acting when she was at Oxford. She was always talking about OUDS as if it was the Royal Shakespeare Company.’ Hamish pushed his hair back from his face with an awkward smile. She realised he was trying to not make her feel inadequate.

  ‘And did she make it?’ Karen didn’t really care but it seemed the easiest response.

  He grinned. ‘She’s working in HR in some City law firm.’

  ‘You dodged a bullet there.’

  He laughed. ‘In more ways than one, Karen. I’m a lot happier here than I would have been in her Docklands flat.’

  Karen picked up the paper to avoid meeting his eyes. ‘So you reckon this is something to do with a production of Twelfth Night in, what? Hilary Term 1992 or 1993?’

  ‘Does that make sense in terms of your investigation?’

  It did, but she wasn’t going to share that. ‘Stop fishing.’ Karen leaned over and kissed Hamish. She was longing to dive into researching David Greig, but she knew that could wait. Nobody was going to die before morning. She told herself that the important agenda for the evening was to make things right between her and Hamish. So she pulled him to his feet. ‘Time for food. I’ve hardly eaten all day and, now you’re here, I need to keep my strength up.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, then took his hand and led him to the table.

  He hesitated at his chair. ‘Are we all right? Am I forgiven?’

  Karen met his eyes. ‘I don’t want this to be over, Hamish. But we need to be honest with each other when either of us is uncomfortable with what the other one says or does. That goes for you as much as me.’

  Hamish stared at the table. ‘I’ll try.’ Then he looked up and gave her the disarming grin that always stirred her. ‘The trouble is, I don’t mind when you get stroppy. I love the challenge.’

  ‘Then stop trying to placate me. Now sit down and eat your dinner.’

  ‘Don’t you want to get on the laptop and research David Greig?’ He sat, giving her a mischievous look.

  He knew her better than she generally liked to admit. Karen pulled a face. ‘Dead men can wait. Especially when I’ve got a living one to take advantage of.’

  31

  Saturday, 22 February 2020

  Karen’s eyes snapped open. The low light from her bedside clock read 4:27. Next to her, Hamish snored softly, but that wasn’t what had woken her. She’d been dreaming, something about the sea. Looking down at the sea? Whatever it had been, it had slipped out of her consciousness now, gone too fast to grasp. She eased herself out of bed, shivering at the night air on her naked skin. She grabbed her dressing gown on the way out of the bedroom, knowing there would be no more sleep for her that night. There was only so much oblivion she could earn from good sex.

  Closing the door softly, she made her way back to the living room and turned on the heating and the desk lamp by her laptop. She’d have liked a cup of coffee, but there was no possibility of grinding beans without waking Hamish, and there was no need for both of them to be sleep-deprived. She settled down with a can of sugar-free Irn-Bru; any hit of caffeine was better than none.

  Karen sat for a long moment contemplating the blank screen, indulging herself in the buzz of anticipation. It had only been a couple of days since she’d discovered the photograph of Iain Auld and David Greig, but it felt as if the puzzle had been nagging at her for much longer. Now she had an answer, she wanted to savour this moment before the hard work started.

  She booted up and typed ‘David Greig artist’ in the search box. It might have been around a decade since Greig had disappeared but the internet had not forgotten him. Approximate 1.25 million hits. Wikipedia was the first port of call. Pinch of salt needed, of course, but although the entry could be underpinned by malice or adoration, there would be something to get her teeth into.

  David Greig (1969–2010) was an English conceptual artist, considered a member of the Young British Artists movement. His portrait of Ali Smith was shortlisted for the 2002 Turner Prize.

  Early Life

  Greig was born in Manchester and raised in a single-parent household by his mother. He attended Burnage High School for Boys. He was awarded a BA in painting from Edinburgh College of art and an MA from the Royal College of Art.

  The Edinburgh connection piqued her interest. She made a note to check whether anyone who had taught Greig was still in post. That would definitely be worth an hour of her time.

  Art Practice

  His primary interest was portraiture and he very quickly developed a unique practice involving landscape painting, collage and multimedia to construct portraits of his chosen subjects. The environments of the landscapes always had an intimate connection with the portrait subjects. His intention was to demonstrate how our personalities are integrations of many fragments. His work was considered to be more accessible than many of his YBA contemporaries, not least because he generally chose subjects who were in the public eye – politicians, pop stars, actors, writers. From early in his career, his work achieved some of the higher prices paid for contemporary art. Balanced against that was the relative modesty of his output, given the time and intensity his method required. He seldom produced more than three or four paintings per year.

  Karen skimmed the details of exhibitions, galleries and critical responses to Greig’s work and scrolled down to the part that really interested her.

  Death

  Greig committed suicide on 10 June 2010.

  That sentence stopped her in her tracks. Three weeks after Iain Auld’s disappearance, the man pictured in an intimate moment with him had also vanished. Excited, she read on.

  He had complained to friends of feeling depressed at the ending of a relationship. His clothes, shoes and wallet were found neatly folded on the top of the Gogarth cliffs on Anglesey. In his jacket pocket was a suicide note which was read out at the inquest into his death. In it, he said he had lost his creative impulse when his lover had left him and that he did not want to live if he could not paint. His body was never recovered.

  Reputation

  His work is still held in critical esteem and remains popular with collectors, achieving good prices at auction, particularly since several of his portraits were destroyed in the catastrophic Goldman Gallery fire of 2017. Many of his portraits were sold privately and from time to time they emerge on to the market. In the past decade, eight previously unrecorded works have appeared. Their authenticity has not been doubted because of Greig’s unique method of validating his work. He would affix a selection of nail clippings to the back of his canvases. ‘My agent has legally verified examples of my DNA. If anyone doubts my work, they can have one of the nail clippings tested to clear the matter up,’ he told a journalist who was investigating the nature of authenticity in a contemporary art world that had come to rely heavily on the concept of the ‘factory’ production of artworks, which its proponents compared to the studio system of renaissance masters.

  How must it feel, Karen wondered, to work in a job where what you achieved was worth more when you were dead? Phil Parhatka had been one of the most committed cops she’d ever served with. The work he’d done, particularly in his last post with the Murder Prevention Unit, had transformed lives and prospects. But who even remembered his name, apart from her, his family and a few close friends? Ten years on from his death, would she still be grieving? Would she still be turning over the pages of memory, seeing even more value in the things he’d done? Would the women and kids whose lives he’d saved even remember his name? And yet David Greig, a man who’d never saved a life, was revered and referred to in dozens of reference books and articles. Whe
re was the justice in that?

  For a moment, she buried her head in her hands. Thinking this way was the quickest route to guilt over the man asleep in her bed and that wasn’t fair to Hamish. Or to her own future. Karen growled deep in her throat and sat up straight. She had the basic facts lined up. Now it was time for whatever spin the media had put on Greig’s death.

  She went for the trashiest tabloid first. BRIT ART BAD BOY IN CLIFF PLUNGE screamed the headline.

  Multi-millionaire artist David Greig has thrown himself off a cliff to his death, police believe.

  Notorious for his drug-fuelled partying, gay David, 41, left a heartbroken suicide note on top of the sheer cliffs in Anglesey, North Wales, it is claimed.

  A friend said, ‘He had a bad break-up and he’d lost his mojo. Without his art and his lover, he just couldn’t go on.’

  Karen would have bet her flat on the fictitious nature of the ‘friend’. She skimmed the rest of it and gleaned the information that Greig’s car had been found unlocked in the nearby South Stack lighthouse car park and that Anglesey had been the scene of childhood holidays.

  One of the red-tops had dredged up an ex. Among the scurrilous tales of drug-taking and sexual misbehaviour was an admission that Greig had calmed down in the past few years after a health scare. ‘“He more or less stopped partying hard,”’ she read. ‘“I know he was seeing someone, but he’d started to keep his personal life very private. Then a couple of months ago, the news all over town was that he’d been dumped and he was completely devastated.”’

  Karen frowned. The timing was interesting. If the ex-boyfriend’s timeline was right, Greig had been left broken-hearted at least a fortnight before Iain Auld had disappeared. If Auld had been his secret lover, a distraught Greig moved neatly into the prime suspect slot. A spurned lover driven wild by grief and rage was a much better fit. And it made sense of Greig’s suicide. Overcome by remorse, he’d gone back to a place where he’d been happy and taken his own life. Textbook, she thought.