A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  ‘I’m Sam,’ I said. ‘Sam Clair. We didn’t have time for introductions last time.’

  ‘You’re lucky you kept your teeth,’ she said tartly, then wiped her hand on her skirt before passing it over to me, as you’d pass a parcel over a shop counter. ‘Viv Thrale.’

  I sat in the seat she nodded me to, and took the bloody tea. The biscuits were home-baked, and made having to drink it worthwhile.

  She sat too, and stared at me, expectant. I wasn’t sure what it was she was waiting for, so I started to thank her again. She waved it away. If someone was bleeding on the pavement, the wave said, you picked them up. End.

  I liked the attitude and moved on. I asked her if she knew who’d chained up my bike, and who had chased down my groceries, and if she did, would she thank them for me too. She nodded with the same bored briskness. Of course she knew them, the nod said, she knew everyone.

  I finally stuttered to a halt. She waited a moment, to see if I had anything to add, and then she said, ‘The police didn’t come up with anything.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘No one managed to get the car’s registration, or even know what make of car it was. I didn’t either. Or, rather, I saw the car, but it was too confused. I’m not even sure of the colour.’

  She pursed her lips. Then, as though she wasn’t entirely sure she was going to say it, she said, ‘Blue. Dark blue. A Volvo.’

  I blinked.

  She had decided now. ‘One of the boys thought it was new, maybe two years old. And definitely a woman driver, although he couldn’t say more than that. He’s a silly boy. He only got the last two letters of the registration: “MR”.’ Her expression told me what she thought of the poor boy’s inadequacies. And that she’d probably listed them out for him.

  ‘But the police …’ I let the sentence trail away.

  Her expression was unyielding. ‘The boy …’ I noticed she was careful not to give me his name. ‘The boy has been in trouble, and he wouldn’t volunteer anything. The way the police use stop-and-search around here, I wonder they expect anyone to tell them anything. The only people who will are the oldies.’ Her sniff said she was not in that category. ‘And they don’t see anything.’

  ‘But you do,’ I prodded.

  She took it as a compliment, and also as her due. ‘But I’m not home much. You were lucky to catch me in on a Saturday.’ I loved that, as if a cycle accident was the equivalent of dropping by to swap scone recipes.

  ‘And lucky now, too,’ I ventured. ‘May I pass the information on? Even if no one is willing to make a statement?’

  That’s why she’d mentioned it to me, her silence said. Then she snapped the lid back on the biscuit tin. My audience was over. She had places to go and people to see.

  Jake had texted to say he’d be late, certainly after dinner, and maybe not even then. While I wanted him at home, so he could tell me that of course Werner Schmidt’s death was an accident, and that everything was fine, I doubted that that was the way the conversation would go, so I was sorry he wasn’t there, and at the same time I was also glad. And, I told myself, it would give me the evening to work on my sodding Arts Council presentation. Neil had emailed me his (now my) ideas, but I needed to merge them with the information I’d collected from the other people I’d spoken to, and make them into a coherent whole. Maybe not coherent. That was too much to ask. But at least somehow give the illusion that I knew what I was talking about, even if no one else did.

  I sat down at my desk as soon as I got back from Viv’s. If I started to faff around in the kitchen, or picked up a book or a manuscript, I’d persuade myself that I could write the presentation at some mythical ‘later’ time, putting it off either until Jake appeared, which meant I wouldn’t do it, or until I was too tired and went to bed, which meant I wouldn’t do it. Before I began, though, I emailed Jake with Viv’s update on the car. I googled car registrations first, and found that the two letters the boy had seen were the least useful part of the number plate. The first letters or numbers would have told the police where the car was registered, and the year. I didn’t trouble to include Viv’s views on why the police hadn’t found the information for themselves. It wasn’t news to me, and I presumed it wouldn’t be to Jake either.

  Once I had my email open, I realised I’d just assumed I would also tell Jake about Celia Stein. But now I paused. If I did that, then it brought Reichel into the picture. Which brought Matt Holder into the picture. Which shone a spotlight back onto the gallery, back to where we didn’t want it to be now that Frank’s death was being looked at again. Instead, I jotted everything down in an email to Helena. I didn’t even know why the Celia Stein/Spencer Reichel connection seemed important to me. Let her decide who should know and what they should know. I had no idea what I was doing, and she always knew what she was doing.

  Done. I opened another document and started on the presentation. I’m normally in favour of procrastination, but it was Tuesday, and the panel was on Friday. At some point, procrastination begins to look like a death wish. Tonight, I’d decided, was the tipping point. So I wrote the damn thing. Not happily, but I did it. I included lots of buzzwords – discoverability, inclusivity, cross-platform availability – and while I was on a roll lots more buzzwords that I think I made up but which sounded great – integrated virtual sectionality. I had no idea what they meant, but I didn’t think it mattered. The points Neil, Celia, and Emma wanted to make were made. After that, I might as well entertain myself.

  It was eleven before I emailed the final text to everyone who had given me input, with a covering note asking them to let me know by Thursday lunchtime if I’d misrepresented their ideas. And then I was done. I decided to celebrate with a glass of wine and a rest on the sofa before thinking about dinner. I knew perfectly well that that meant that thinking was as far as dinner was going to get, but it’s like throwing leftovers away. If you put the leftovers in the fridge for three days after a meal, throwing them out on the fourth day isn’t as wasteful as throwing them away right after supper would have been. So if I thought about making dinner for a while, then drinking the meal wouldn’t be as bad as if I’d just admitted from the outset that it was going to consist of three glasses of wine. Besides, I’d had some crisps at Toby’s, and a biscuit with Viv: alcohol, fat, salt, and sugar, the four major food groups, were accounted for. Then I remembered the tea. It had had milk in it, and so dairy was covered too. Damn, but I was healthy.

  I propped myself up against the arm of the sofa in my usual reading position, but I knew it was a lie even as I grabbed a manuscript off the pile. I stared out of the window, thinking about the past few days and drinking my wine. I must have sat like that for, well, at least five minutes.

  When I woke up Jake was moving the bottle and glass off the floor and onto the table. He saw me lift my head and bent over me. ‘Come on, sweetheart. Bed.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Two.’

  In the morning I’d want to know what was happening that meant he was working until two, but not now. Now I very much wanted to pretend we were back in the days when I didn’t know about Jake’s work. Instead of getting up, which felt like too much effort, I pulled him down to me. ‘How tired are you?’

  ‘Not that tired.’

  By the time the alarm went off, Jake was gone again. It was like going out with – or staying home with, rather – the invisible man. I lay in bed for a while, thinking evil thoughts about vampires who materialised after dark and vanished – poof! – before light. Then I thought evil thoughts about people who had four glasses of wine and only a sandwich to eat all day. Yesterday I’d sworn to myself that even if I couldn’t run yet, I’d get up early and go for a walk. I thought more evil thoughts about people who make resolutions. And still more about wimpy types who don’t keep them. Then I got up.

  I was in no rush. Because of Frank’s funeral, I’d told Miranda I wouldn’t be in until the afternoon, if then. I was, like my colleagues, working from home. I took m
y coffee into the spare bedroom, which I call my office, and sent a few gossip-collecting emails to friends in other publishing houses, to see if any of them had picked up on our rumours. Were their bosses having early breakfasts with unnamed others, for example? Then I settled down to try and find the information I wasn’t brave enough to ask Jake for.

  My library has online access to most UK newspapers, and several of the big US ones, so I started there. Werner Schmidt. There were a few reports on his death, most only a few lines long. Art restorers are not big news, and the preliminary conclusion, that he had accidentally inhaled glue, was not of itself newsworthy. A couple of tabloids had used the glue angle to write about the hazards of glue-sniffing, creeping out their readers with addiction horror stories. But even they were forced to acknowledge that, when spray glues had been reformulated nearly two decades ago, it all became increasingly rare. The spray had to be extremely close and extremely dense to cause the convulsions and asphyxiation that they so gloatingly described.

  I closed the tabs, feeling sick. What a terrible way to die. I thought of Schmidt sitting alone in his studio, gasping for breath. As a displacement activity, and because it was too horrible to think about, I began to search for information on Celia Stein and Reichel. Reichel didn’t lead anywhere much. He was exactly what I’d been told, a hedge funder who collected modern art, which, I noted in passing, many hedge funders did, the way nineteenth-century robber barons had bought truckloads of Gainsboroughs. I didn’t read any of the financial-press reports on Reichel’s hedge-funding activities because, truth be told, I wasn’t entirely sure what a hedge fund did, and the articles never troubled to explain. Were funds hedged, or hedges funded? Either made as much sense to me. On the art front, the reports were no more enlightening, although there I could at least understand the words. Reichel was Great and Good as far as the art world was concerned, a trustee for heritage bodies like the National Trust and English Heritage. He gave liberally to the right charities, went to the right arts venues, had his picture snapped with the right people. Dee-dah-dee-dah. Admirable, but I couldn’t see how it was relevant.

  Apart from being a prominent man, Reichel also had a usefully unusual name. Searching for Celia Stein together with Stevenson at least got rid of those other Celia Steins I’d been confronted with when I first searched for her, but there still wasn’t much that was helpful. Most of the references were to exhibitions where she was quoted as the family representative, and that was bland: she was thrilled to be bringing her father’s work to insert-name-of-city-here. If she had interesting or original views on art, or on anything else, she had kept them to herself. I checked Delia Stevenson too, just to see what there was, and the answer to that was, basically, nothing. She left being the face of the Stevenson estate to Celia.

  I stared at the screen. Now what? I checked my email. Nothing from Helena or Jake. Three emails about a submission I hadn’t begun to read from an agent I particularly disliked. Two from marketing asking for catalogue copy I hadn’t written. Miranda, listing out meeting requests from our finance people, to go over my next year’s budget. All of them needing to be dealt with swiftly. So I decided to google Stevenson himself. I read the newspaper features on him, and on the upcoming show. One of them said that this was Stevenson’s first major European retrospective. He was one of the ‘fathers’ of pop art, but had never had the same kind of success, or profile, as many who came after him.

  That gave me a new idea – anything, frankly, not to have to write catalogue copy. I found a website where, for a tenner, I’d get three days’ access to world auction prices, which sounded like a reasonable deal. So I fed my credit card number in and watched the numbers come back. It was like I imagine playing the slot machines at Vegas would be: put some money in and, most of the time, nothing comes back, but the spur of a possible return keeps you upping the ante each time. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to put more than a tenner on it, but I was willing to make that my entry stake.

  Stevensons didn’t fetch nearly as much as Warhol or some of the other big names, although that wasn’t a secret. But seeing what was spent on art was weirdly compelling, like looking into the shopping carts of the people behind you in the line at the supermarket – three tins of cat food and a single tomato? Diet soda and two dozen muffins? The auction houses didn’t tell you who bought what, so you couldn’t try and construct a lifestyle, the way you could with supermarket baskets, but even just the prices were fascinating. Almost involuntarily I signed up to more websites. More credit-card numbers, this time for more than a tenner, and for less than three days. But it was Vegas, and the next pull at the one-armed bandit was going to be the one that produced a jackpot, and answers would tumble out. More auctions, more anonymous sales.

  I stared out the window, trying to remember why I was doing this, and what I thought it would achieve. I had no answer, to either question, but the stubborn part pushed in: if I stopped now, then not only would I not have learnt anything, but I’d have to admit I’d wasted all that money, as well as – I looked at the clock – three hours. I’d pulled on jeans first thing, and I needed to dig out my dark suit for the funeral. Helena was collecting me so we could go together. Officially she was due in half an hour, but in Helena time that was more likely to be twenty minutes. Maybe fifteen.

  I was ready and waiting outside in ten minutes. I wish I could pretend that that was because I had one of those streamlined ‘capsule’ wardrobes I read about in the Sunday supplements. Really it’s because I don’t have any clothes. But I was in my dark suit, and heels, and I’d put on make-up. Good enough, surely. I stood talking to one of my neighbours, who was complaining about the kids who congregate at the bottom of our street, near the pub. They smoke outside, and make a fair amount of noise in the evenings, but what bothered her were the fast-food containers and the cigarette butts they dumped in her garden. I agreed that it wasn’t pleasant, but I had no suggestions apart from cleaning it up in the mornings, which we all did. None of us enjoyed it, but it was just part of city life. She didn’t see it that way, and complained regularly to the pub’s manager, who promised each time that something would be done, and then did nothing. I’d heard the story before, so I made soothing and sympathetic noises in the right places while not giving it my full attention. Or, to be truthful, any attention at all.

  When Helena drew up, therefore, I leapt into the car with an enthusiasm that was entirely misplaced. I didn’t want to go to the funeral. I didn’t want to see Aidan again after last night. And I really didn’t want to discuss my lack of interrogation skills with Helena. Now I was going to be doing all three. Fun.

  Helena didn’t waste time. I knew she wouldn’t. It’s only ten minutes to the church from my house. ‘Aidan rang me last night.’

  ‘I imagined he would.’ It was a block, rather than a parry. I hadn’t wanted to talk to Aidan, but Helena had forced it on me, and now she was going to give me grief for having done it badly.

  ‘That was clever, being so blunt,’ she said approvingly.

  I blinked. ‘Oh. Good.’

  She laughed. ‘I know you didn’t intend to be blunt,’ she said, ‘but Aidan didn’t. And it finally got him to tell me what happened with Holder. If he’d done that at the time, I could have saved him a lot of money.’

  ‘What happened?’ I was less interested in the money.

  ‘According to Aidan, Holder was sacked because he’d been told that Merriam–Compton were not willing to have Reichel as a client, and he sold him some paintings anyway.’

  That one sentence created so many questions I didn’t even know where to begin. So I asked them almost at random. ‘Reichel wanted to buy from them and they wouldn’t sell to him? Since when do people refuse to do business with rich clients? And how would Holder have the authority to make sales when his bosses said no?’

  Helena looked at me approvingly again. This was a good morning for me. Usually I asked questions that she thought ‘everybody’ knew the answers to. ‘Aidan say
s that Reichel first started to buy from them five years ago. Not a lot, but he was a regular purchaser. Two years ago, he went to a dinner the gallery gave for one of their artists. Anna was there and she told Aidan the next day that Reichel had …’ – Helena was choosing her words carefully – ‘that he had assaulted her. She said he’d groped her in the hallway when she’d gone to get her coat, and pinned her against the wall. That when she said no he hit her. Someone came past, and she managed to move back to where there were people, but she was sure she wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.’

  I remembered the way Reichel had behaved in public, at a dinner party, and could well believe that the private Reichel would be worse.

  Helena continued. ‘Anna refused to go to the police, and Aidan agreed with her. She’d had a couple of glasses of wine, and she also had adolescent children. The way the courts work, they and their classmates would have had the opportunity to read newspaper reports of prosecuting counsel’s picture of their mother as a drunken slut.’ Helena’s mouth was pinched tight. ‘Anna told Aidan she wanted to go on exactly as if it had never happened, and Aidan agreed.’

  ‘That’s a horrible story.’ Poor Anna. I’d have to make sure she didn’t guess that I knew. I switched back to the present. ‘Where did Holder come in?’

  ‘They told Frank, and that was it. The gallery just cut Reichel out. When he got in touch to say he wanted to buy something, he was told it was no longer available.’ Helena pulled into a parking space a few hundred metres from the church. She cut the engine, but neither of us moved, continuing to sit and stare out the window as though we were still driving. ‘Holder was simply told that Reichel was not welcome in the gallery, that he was not an approved purchaser. But instead, when Aidan and Frank were both away, he promised him two works.’