A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  I didn’t see why that was strange. I’d avoid meeting me to discuss arts subsidy too, if I could.

  I wasn’t given much time to brood, however. Miranda had suddenly speeded up, clearly thinking that if she spoke very quickly, the content wouldn’t register. ‘The woman there is Celia Stein, and she’s apparently very busy at the moment, so I booked you in to see her this afternoon at four.’ And then she had gathered her papers and her mug and slid out the door before I could share my views on scheduling.

  I’d been thinking recently that I should put her forward for the next junior editor vacancy that came up. She was new, but she had hoovered up everything I’d thrown at her, and she deserved a better job than the entry-level one she did for me. And the job’s laughable salary meant that I couldn’t keep her and just give her better work. But if she kept this up, I was going to get her promoted simply to get her out of my hair.

  I called through the wall to the pod where she and her colleagues sat: ‘Where am I meeting her?’

  ‘Her office,’ she called back. ‘The address is in your diary.’ I looked. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been – just on the edge of Regent’s Park, which meant I could walk home afterwards. I tried to continue feeling martyred, but it wasn’t working.

  ‘Thanks,’ I called instead, my tone an apology for my thoughts.

  She giggled again. I really would have to find her a better job.

  At three-thirty I gave up. I’d spent most of my afternoon worrying about Aidan, then pushing those thoughts aside and going back to the contract I was negotiating with a new author, before the picture of Frank in his office took over again. The image was so vivid I was barely aware any longer that I hadn’t seen him myself.

  Instead I checked out Celia Stein online. The Daylesworth Trust’s website was remarkably uninformative. It said she had worked in ‘the arts’, as though that were a job description, before she had moved to the charitable sector. And that was all. I googled her, too, but with no other information I couldn’t disentangle her from the other Celia Steins the world was filled with, although for amusement I let myself imagine that she was the Celia Stein who was a competitive dirt-bike racer. Sadly, I decided the odds were against it, and so I set off knowing nothing, not a position I liked to be in.

  I walked. The bus would have taken as long, and I hoped that the mindlessness of walking would stave off the pictures of Frank, that dark body in the dark room. It didn’t, but it did make me realise that however much Jake wanted to keep me away from his job, we needed to talk. So when I reached the park, I stopped and texted quickly: Are you working or am I seeing you tonight? Then I looked around for the Daylesworth’s offices. The address Miranda had given turned out to be a street of white-stuccoed, rather grand houses, on one side of the road only, as they faced a private square at the south end of Regent’s Park. I’d always assumed the trust was a fairly small operation, but if it could afford more than a couple of rooms here, that was not the case. Or maybe the founder ran his business, whatever that was, from there, and they benefitted by the connection.

  The office, when I found it, had no sign at all out front, neither for the Daylesworth Trust nor any other business. I went up the stairs past a group of three women smoking in the sun. Inside was even less informative. Where I expected a reception area, or a hall, there was nothing but a surprisingly small stone-flagged foyer, dominated by a vast double staircase, its large stone steps and elaborate gilt and wrought-iron railing making it look like it belonged in a seaside resort hotel in the 1890s. There was no sign, but also nowhere to go but up, so up I went. At the top of the first flight, tucked into the side of the landing, was an ugly 1960s veneered plywood desk. A plainly dressed, middle-aged woman looked up. ‘Yes?’ she said, and it was only manners that stopped me from doing a carton-style double-take. She had the most beautiful voice, deep and gravelly, like Lauren Bacall, oozing sex and sin, but coming out of a completely ordinary face.

  I contemplated asking her to marry me, just so I could wake up to that voice for the rest of my life, but I decided she might think it was too sudden. ‘Would you tell Celia Stein that Samantha Clair is here?’ I said instead.

  She picked up the phone and dialled. Then, ‘I’m afraid there’s nowhere to sit, but she won’t be long.’

  I smiled. An opportunity to listen some more. ‘Not to worry. This is a very strange building. What was it before?’

  A snort escaped her. ‘It’s nineteenth century, and it’s listed, a building of historical importance. But for anyone who works here, it’s a white elephant, is what it is. We’re not allowed to touch any of the architectural features, so we’re just shoved in wherever we fit, all over the place.’

  ‘Why are you here, then, if it’s so impractical?’

  She looked sour. ‘Good question. We were in a purpose-built office block not far away. When the building was scheduled for demolition, when Crossrail was given the go-ahead, we needed to move quickly. The upstairs here is lovely – the bosses have beautiful offices. That may have something to do with their choice.’ She stopped abruptly and picked up the phone. I couldn’t tell if she had just realised she was spilling internal politics to a total stranger, or if she’d heard a step before I did. At any rate, when a woman appeared on the stairs above us, the receptionist was booking a cab and I was admiring the ceiling mouldings.

  She came towards me holding out her hand. ‘Celia Stein,’ she confirmed. ‘How nice of you to offer to come to me. I appreciate it.’ She was the kind of woman I’ve always longed to be, looking at them wistfully in restaurants and theatres. She was neither terribly tall, nor terribly thin, but she looked both. Her hair, a reddish brown, fell in waves past her shoulders, and was held back from her face on one side with a comb. Her clothes were not dissimilar to mine – trousers and a blouse – but there the resemblance ended. Hers were two shades of elegant taupe, chosen to set off her russet colouring, while mine were black and white, chosen to reduce to the bare minimum the time spent thinking about them. And, I acknowledged to myself, that was why I would never look like women like Celia Stein: she took time and trouble and I didn’t. Her hairstyle, so simple-looking, probably took half an hour of careful blow-drying every morning, and needed highlights once a month; my hair was cut when I remembered, and otherwise had to look out for itself. She also spent money, a neon sign flashing over her head: Expensive to Maintain. Her trousers were linen, her shirt silk, her watch thin and discreet, her shoes sleek Italian (maybe) leather. I bet the highlights cost a bomb too, and her dry-cleaning bill.

  I gave myself a mental shake. I had no idea why my hackles had gone up. She was watching me, and I think she knew it. ‘Please come up,’ was all she said, and, ‘Thank you, Denise,’ to the receptionist as she turned to lead the way.

  Celia Stein’s office was small and not particularly glamorous, whatever Denise thought. Or maybe she wasn’t high enough up the pecking order. Her room was not dissimilar to mine, which was also in an old house converted to office use, and equally harshly carved out of a space that had once been beautiful. Hers was at the back of the building, and looked out onto a light-well and the rear of the house behind. Otherwise, it was run-of-the-mill: standard-issue office desk, filing cabinets, shelves. The only spot of colour came from a print on the wall, an orange and gold mishmash of 1950s cartoon characters. Its colours suited her look, even if the style didn’t go with her personality. Or what I had decided in the first twenty seconds was her personality. Sam Clair, the Sigmund Freud of snap judgements.

  She sat at her desk and gestured to the single remaining chair. There was coffee in a cafetière on her desk, and two cups, which softened my mood considerably. We made small talk for the few minutes it took to pour us both a drink, and then she said, ‘Tell me how I can help.’

  I tried to look like those dewy-eyed ingénues everyone wants to help when they have a flat tyre. Or, at least, that’s the way it works in black-and-white movies. It’s not my best look. ‘I’m not re
ally sure,’ I admitted. ‘I was shanghaied into sitting on an Arts Council panel on subsidies, and since you’re the only people I ever deal with on the subsidies front, I thought I’d come and pick your brains.’

  She gave a small, controlled smile. I suspected everything she did was controlled. ‘I can tell you about our own funding,’ she said, ‘and I can give you our guidelines for selecting projects to support. I’ve also put together the figures we release annually on our charitable allocations. Does that help? What more can I tell you?’

  It was a good question, because I hadn’t a clue. And what she had done could have been emailed over to me. She hadn’t needed to allow me to break into her day for that, and she didn’t strike me as the sort who went out of her way to have any of her days disrupted against her will.

  ‘One area I’d like to explore is the future of reproductions in books. Given the spread of images online, and the costs of printing, the question, why illustrate books at all, is an obvious one. If the author can say, “Vermeer’s Music Lesson”, and the reader can look at it online, spending money printing it, or spending money paying a permission fee to the owner of the picture, is surely becoming pointless. Just what is the future of this kind of publishing?’

  ‘It’s a good question, but my job here deals almost entirely with works of art that are still in copyright, and protecting those rights,’ she said.

  That didn’t sound like a charitable activity.

  She must have read my face, because she went on, as if I’d argued, ‘We give funds to publishers who want to use these works, who might otherwise not use them, or use them without clearing the legal hurdles. This promotes the spread of modern art, as well as protecting the rights for the artists and their descendants.’

  It still didn’t sound like charity to me, but it was none of my business. I nodded as though she’d made valid points, and went through the questions I’d thought up on the way over, about funding and resource allocation. I was going to have to talk for twenty minutes, so the more concrete examples I could gather, the better. Celia, whatever her job was, had plenty of experience.

  After half an hour, she made it plain without actually saying anything that we were finished, and I had to agree. I took her cool hand, held out as if she were dropping a charitable donation of her own into my indigent palm, and left. On the way down, I paused to say goodbye to Denise, just so I could hear her velvet purr again. It was just ‘Goodbye’, but it made me smile as I left, and I was halfway across the park and only twenty minutes from home before I thought to check and see if Jake had replied to my text.

  He had. You know you’re seeing me tonight. You had lunch with Merriam.

  Eek.

  Jake arrived a couple of hours later. I heard the front door close, and the thunk as he dropped his bag. A few weeks before I’d been having a drink with my upstairs neighbour, Kay, when we heard him come in.

  ‘He’s got keys already?’ she said, aiming for a neutral expression.

  ‘Does it bother you?’ We did share a front door, so it wasn’t an unreasonable worry. I hadn’t known him long.

  ‘It’s just, well …’ she looked embarrassed. I waited. ‘It’s fast. You’ve only been seeing him a couple of months.’

  I was amused. ‘I didn’t realise we were discussing my relationship. I thought you were worrying about safety, and I was going to tell you that if things went horribly wrong and I ended up raped and murdered in my bed, at least the police had the keys.’

  She snickered, and then hastily covered, ‘I didn’t mean to imply—’

  I waved it away. ‘I know. It’s fine. He has my keys because he works strange hours, and I don’t want to have to get up at midnight to let him in.’

  I didn’t call out when I heard the door. My bag was at the front and Jake would know I was in and come down the hall to find me. As I went up on tiptoe to kiss him hello, one corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile. A finger gently flicked my collar. ‘Battledress?’ he said mildly, but his smile widened.

  He was right, damn it. Unless I’ve had to wear what I think of as my posh suit to work, for a lunch, or an author event, my office clothes are casual enough that I don’t bother to change when I get home. Since I hadn’t known about my meeting with Celia, and lunch with Aidan never rates the posh suit, I hadn’t been dressed up. But I’d had a bath and changed that evening when I got home, as some sort of unconscious preparation.

  I bit back a sigh, which he also noticed. Dating a detective, I had discovered, could be a royal pain. All the stuff that most people remain serenely unaware of, he picked up on right away. Once or twice he’d tried to persuade me this was a good thing – ‘energy efficient’ was the phrase he’d used.

  I decided not to engage, or at least, not right away. ‘Drink?’ I said, and turned automatically to get the glasses.

  ‘Not for me. I’m probably going to have to go back to work later.’

  That made me pause, but I didn’t turn around. After a second I moved over to the sink, where I’d been washing spinach for dinner, and continued where I’d left off. ‘Oh?’

  Jake put his arms around me from behind. ‘“Oh?” yourself. We’re going to have to talk about this, you know.’

  ‘Fun!’ I said in an idiot-child voice. ‘Our best thing, talking.’ I hadn’t planned on quarrelling, but I found myself well on the way.

  Jake pulled me away from the sink and gently pushed me into a chair before moving over to the glasses I’d abandoned. He opened a bottle of wine and poured me a glass without speaking. Then, ‘No, not our best thing, but we’re smart, and we can get better at it.’

  I snorted. ‘A learning experience. It’s the only thing my week has been lacking.’ Until the words came out of my mouth, I hadn’t realised how angry I was. Or maybe I was frightened? I regrouped. ‘I’m sorry. Yes, I had lunch with Aidan, who told me you were at the gallery. I’m worried.’ I looked away, and then back. ‘Are you … that is, why are … I don’t even know the words to use.’

  Jake took the glass from my hand and took a swig. In England it doesn’t count as drinking if you don’t have your own glass. Everyone knows that. He leant against the counter. His usual work dress was khakis and a white shirt, so, glass in hand, sleeves rolled up over his forearms, he looked like a colleague I’d met for a drink after work. Or he did until his next sentence, which shattered that illusion, had I held it.

  ‘Am I investigating a murder?’ he paraphrased for me.

  I nodded mutely.

  ‘We don’t think that way. At the moment, we have an unexplained death.’ He paused. ‘I thought about this on the way home. My job has issues of confidentiality, but all jobs have those. That’s not why I don’t talk to you about my work. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t want to. You’re a clean space in my life, a place where I don’t have to think about the things we wade through every day.’

  I nodded again, this time feeling some of my hostility, or fear, or whatever it was, dying away. Although not talking about what preoccupied him for two-thirds of his waking life was also a problem. For another time. I pushed it away.

  Jake drank some more of what had now become his wine, so I got up to get myself a glass.

  ‘There’s nothing I can’t disclose at the moment, but that’s mostly because we know almost nothing. Given the situation, if you want to hear what we know so far, I’m happy to lay it out.’

  Wanted? I was absolutely sure I didn’t want to know. But did I need to know? Yes. More than a little reluctantly, I nodded to him to go ahead.

  He had obviously prepared it in his head, and it came out in tidy little bullet points. ‘We were called in yesterday morning, after the divisional detectives had been alerted to an unexplained death.’

  I would like to believe that I didn’t smile at Jake dropping into policeman-ese – he really didn’t speak like that normally – but either I must have, or he just knew me well enough to recognise that it was the use of language I would concentrate
on. He tapped me gently on the nose, the way you do to tell a puppy to behave. So I behaved.

  ‘There are several possibilities.’ Jake began to tick them off on his fingers. ‘That Frank Compton had an accident, which can almost certainly be discounted. That Frank Compton killed himself for personal reasons; or because he was of unsound mind; or for work-related reasons. Or that Frank Compton did not kill himself, and it was staged to look as if he did, for unknown reasons.

  ‘At the moment, we are asking questions. His partner, Toby Stafford, knew of no health problems, but we are checking to see if Compton had physical or mental health issues he had kept to himself. Stafford also says that they had a good relationship, but others suggest it was volatile, and we are looking at that, as well as making preliminary enquiries to see if there was anyone else in the picture. The final area is business issues, and we are therefore looking at his finances, personal and business, to see if there are any irregularities that mean we should continue to investigate while we wait for the coroner’s report.’

  ‘Irregularities,’ I said carefully.

  He was looking at the floor, not me. ‘There was GSR on his right hand.’

  ‘GSR?’

  He looked up and smiled apologetically. ‘Gunshot residue – the traces left behind when a firearm discharges.’

  I read crime novels, I knew about this. ‘Surely that’s what you would expect? Why is that an irregularity? Was he left-handed?’

  ‘No, he was right-handed all right, but the scatter is not entirely consistent with how he must have held the pistol, based on the angle of the wound, which was, in addition, much further to the back of the skull than is common in self-inflicted wounds.’ He shrugged. ‘He could have held the pistol awkwardly, or it could have slipped, but it is an anomaly. More than that, though, is the weapon.’ He rubbed his hand through his hair, as though the problem itself could be rubbed out. ‘It’s a 9mm Makarov semi-automatic.’