A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  I returned to Reichel, this time putting him in a search with Celia Stein. A few random photos came up of the two of them at the same art world parties. That wasn’t incriminating, I already knew that Reichel moved in art world circles, and as he funded the trust Celia worked for, it wasn’t a hot newsflash that they knew each other, either. I noodled around the auction websites, which told me exactly nothing. Then I tried to narrow my search on Reichel to his connection to collecting. Most of the articles just said he ‘collected’, without saying what it was he collected, as though the act of purchase was the only part that was interesting. I checked the sources. Financial newspapers. For them it was only the act of purchase that was interesting.

  I started again, going back and searching each of the articles for references to artists. This was so boring that the ironing actually began to look enticing. And then, suddenly, there it was. A feature on Reichel in the Financial Times had a photograph of him in his office. And behind him was a Stevenson collage. And next to it was another. And another above. Three.

  I sat staring at the picture. Reichel collected twentieth-century art. I knew that before – hell, he’d told me so himself, before I assaulted him. Stevenson was an important twentieth-century artist. So was it surprising that Reichel owned a Stevenson? Not really. Was it surprising he owned more than one? Define ‘surprising’, I mocked myself. Major Collector Owns Several Pictures by Major Artist = Not Surprising. And if it was surprising, which it obviously was, because I was surprised, where did that get me?

  I was cranky. I’d drunk far too much coffee, and had found far too much information that meant nothing. But whatever it meant, it had to do with Merriam–Compton. The thought made me feel sick. I thought about how Aidan had looked before the funeral, and how, finally, afterwards he began to look like the person I’d known for so long. Was I going to direct my current lover towards my ex-lover’s business?

  I tried to find reasons to do no such thing. I couldn’t see any role for Werner Schmidt. He’d been killed by an old tin of glue, not an old Russian handgun. I might not know about guns, but I could tell those two apart.

  I brooded on the difference between what I did, and what Jake did. Superficially, looking at documents was more my field than his. He liked action, not reactions. I liked dealing with paper, but only, I now realised, because books are magic. A book works if it means something to the reader. It doesn’t matter if what it means to the reader isn’t what the author intended, or even if it directly contradicts what the author intended. If it speaks to the reader, then it works; if it doesn’t, it’s dead.

  These documents might speak to a financial expert, but they were saying nothing to me. And therefore, in literary terms, they were dead.

  I ever so gently put my head on the desk and moaned. Frank’s death couldn’t be resolved because the material had no narrative arc. That would work for Scotland Yard.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHEN I WOKE up I found that Jake had come in some time during the night. I had sworn to myself the night before that I would get up first thing and go for a run. Instead I found myself spooning around Jake’s sleeping back. If he woke up, it might be too late to go.

  I smothered a shocked laugh into his back. Really? I was thinking of initiating early-morning sex so that I’d have a reason not to go running?

  The laugh woke him. ‘What’s funny?’

  Being caught out was even funnier. ‘Nothing.’

  He rolled over. ‘Nothing?’ He smiled sleepily. ‘Nothing is awfully funny at—’ he squinted at the clock. ‘Jesus, Sam, at six o’clock? This better be really funny.’

  I told him. I wasn’t sure now if I was appalled or amused. He wasn’t sleepy anymore. And he wasn’t laughing. ‘You are going to be very sorry for that.’

  An hour later, I was feeling smug rather than sorry, but I was also extremely late. Jake had gone back to sleep, but I needed to be at the office by eight, because that was the only time I was going to have before the CultCo panel.

  I put on my posh suit in honour of the event and whizzed around getting my things together – laptop, manuscript, e-reader. Christ, there was more to carry now that everything was electronic than there had been in the old manuscript days. I dumped a cup of coffee beside Jake and kissed the back of his head, which was all that was showing.

  ‘Go away,’ he whined into the pillow, which I took to mean, Have a good day, dear, and I hope the panel goes well. It was now either safe for me to go into work on my own, or he was too tired to care.

  To my amazement, Miranda was already at her desk when I got in. Most publishing people aren’t early, and she had fit neatly into that category from her first day in the job, usually appearing around ten. That was fine with me: she worked long past her contractual hours – I’m not sure if anyone in publishing even knows we have contractual hours – and she was happy to stay as late as necessary to finish whatever it was that needed to be done. And I always like the quiet first thing, time I usually spend doing the tedious jobs I put off if I leave them until later in the day, and can plead that more urgent things prevent me from getting to them.

  I stopped in front of her desk. ‘I’m going to speak to Olive, I promise. You don’t have to earn that gold star.’

  She laughed. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I just came in so I could get through last night’s emails before we need to leave for your Arts Council thing.’

  We? I was touched. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d want to come, just as, apparently, it hadn’t occurred to her she wouldn’t automatically go. Had I not had the session with Mr Rudiger, I would have hated for her to have been there. I don’t mind doing a half-assed job if no one I know is watching, but I would have died of shame if she’d been in the audience for my original presentation. Now, though, I was quite pleased with my contribution.

  The earlier meetings had been in the Arts Council offices, around the back of Parliament, which was a nuisance to get to. It wasn’t far, half an hour whether I walked or took the bus. But whatever time I saved by the meetings not being far from work, I lost as I hit Parliament Square, being stopped on average ninety-seven times in five minutes by tourists all desperately searching for Westminster Abbey, and having to give directions in International Mime, signalling ‘right’ and ‘left’ with the bored panache of an airport worker flagging in a jet.

  Today’s seminar was in the same building, but, as Miranda and I discovered, in a conference room reached via an entrance around the corner. Only in England does 14 Great Peter Street mean, Don’t go to Great Peter Street at all, but the next street along, the name of which we won’t tell you, and look for a door with a completely different number on it, which we’re also keeping secret, for reasons best known to ourselves. Neither of us was surprised. If this kind of thing bothers you, you’d best move to New York.

  We registered, and got our little folders of agendas, and I got a badge, while the woman behind the desk hastily made up a temporary one for Miranda, which was just a sticky label with her name on it. Those are fine for men’s suits, but when women have to put them on their blouses, the sticky backing destroys anything that isn’t cotton. Still, the real badges were even worse, with those little clips designed to snap on to men’s ties. They physically reinforce that neither badge-makers nor conference organisers have looked around in the previous half-century and thought, Yes, my goodness, some of those strange creatures called ‘women’ do actually attend conferences. Or maybe the badge-makers and conference organisers had wives who wore ties. The idea of a row of middle-management, tie-wearing men going out to dinner with their tie-wearing wives, trailed by a line of small, tie-wearing children, with a tie-wearing dog guarding the tie-wearing baby at home, allowed me to repress my outraged feminist sensibilities.

  Meanwhile, Miranda was flicking through her folder, checking out the schedule, and I swallowed my momentary snit. I didn’t want to be a downer, just because I’d done this kind of thing too often. ‘If there’s anything
you want to go to, do. The office is quiet, and I’ll hold the fort if you want to spend the day here.’

  She looked up, doubtful. ‘Would that be OK?’

  ‘Why not? I’m going to leave after I’ve done my stuff, but you don’t have to. I promise not to sign anything off at work without leaving you a note. I won’t mess up your nice systems.’

  She looked severe. ‘See that you don’t,’ she said with dignity, before giggling.

  CultCo was up first, the five of us, plus a Q&A session. The event was scheduled to last two hours. ‘I’m going to check the AV is set up, and give them my memory stick.’

  I set off in search of Jim. I’d meant to email him, to sort out the order we would speak in, but with the other things going on, I’d kept forgetting. Serve me right if I ended up speaking last, and therefore having to incorporate or delete material on the fly, depending on what the others were saying. Which would also mean I’d have to listen to their talks. Sensible man, Jim was standing by the biscuit plate in the coffee room. And, I was pleased to see, the biscuit plate didn’t hold biscuits, but miniature croissants. I’d laid down enough caffeine by now, I was ready for some saturated fats. Janey, the video producer, was there too, and Amelia Wilson, the curator from Glasgow who so far hadn’t been at any of the meetings. She and Jim were old friends, and so after I brushed off their horrified questions about the state of my face, we easily agreed the running order, presenting it to Willa when she finally stopped smarming the senior Arts Council people and joined us. She was miffed, but that was her problem. If she’d headed for the people she was supposed to be collaborating with instead of doing career promotion, she’d have had some say in the matter.

  The other three wanted to talk one after the other, because their work overlapped. Fine with me. That put me up first, and then I could more or less zone out until the questions. Which is what I did. I did listen to bits of the others. Jim’s presentation was about museum shops, which was interesting. Willa’s was about Willa, and how, if I understood her correctly, the arts world would be a blighted, withered shoot instead of the fine, flowering plant it was, had it not been for her stalwart work. I may have paraphrased that slightly.

  The Q&A was smooth sailing too. One of the great benefits of going first is that the next hour tends to blur everything in people’s minds, and they focus more on the last things they’ve heard. So I emerged relatively unscathed. There’s always a moment in conferences when you can feel people thinking, That’s enough now, and beginning to pick up their bags. We had, with unspoken unanimity, reached that stage.

  I began to collect my things too. My plan was to head for yet more coffee, have a quick cup and briefly be sociable, and then head out. But as I stood up, a slip of paper was shuffled down the line of panellists and stopped in front of me. ‘Can I have a quick word while we’ve still got the AV going?’ And Jim, at the far end of the table, nodded first at the paper, and then at the now-blank screen.

  So I waved at Miranda, a see-you-in-a-bit wave, and waited for Jim.

  ‘Great talk,’ he said, walking down to my end of the table.

  ‘Thanks. Yours too. Very interesting.’ What on earth?

  ‘I didn’t want to say …’ he looked embarrassed. ‘That is, I wanted to say …’

  ‘Maybe you should just “say”?’

  ‘Your talk was great.’

  So he’d said. And there was a ‘but’ coming. So I prompted. ‘But?’

  ‘But.’ He nodded. ‘But.’ Then it came out in a rush. ‘But did you know your dates were wrong?’

  I was taken aback. ‘They were? Show me.’

  He thought I was arguing. ‘I don’t want to be rude. But I just thought, when you give this talk again …’

  ‘If I do this again, you have my full permission to shoot me, on the grounds that I will have lost my mind.’

  He laughed, relieved I wasn’t angry, or even insulted.

  I wasn’t, but, ‘Tell me anyway. I’m interested.’ I joggled the mouse of the laptop to activate the screen, and then clicked back till I found my images. ‘Which ones?’

  ‘The Tetrarch jackets.’ I went to them and brought them all up on the screen together.

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘The ones you say are from the 1990s are from the 1960s.’

  ‘No.’ I didn’t mind being wrong, but in this case I wasn’t. Jim was a designer, and had a better eye than I did, but I’d worked for that company for nearly a decade. I knew the material inside out.

  ‘They are.’ He was just as certain. It was like children in a sandbox: no they’re not, yes they are. Any minute he’d call my mother to tell her that I’d hit him with my spade. I liked him, but hitting him with a spade didn’t seem like a terrible idea.

  I decided to hold it in reserve, and in the meantime present myself as a rational human being. ‘Why do you think so?’ Subtext: I don’t think so.

  He reached out for the mouse. ‘Do you mind?’ I moved over and he clicked forward. He brought up two Stevensons, one that I had got from Denise, and the one he’d sent me, the one he’d wanted to use for notepads. I’d included it as a little joke for him.

  He clicked again, and zoomed in on both. ‘Look,’ he said. I looked. He’d zoomed in on the jackets of the books in both collages.

  ‘OK,’ I said, in a tone that meant, I’m not seeing whatever it is you’re seeing.

  He clicked over to my 1990s examples of Tetrarch jackets.

  ‘Oh. Damn. You’re right.’ The colophons on the Tetrarch book jackets from the 1990s were identical to the ones on the jackets Stevenson had included in his collages. In the 1960s. Thirty years before they had been created. I tried to think it through. ‘So. The colophons that were used in the 1990s must have been drawn earlier, in the 1960s. But I’m sure they weren’t in regular use.’ Quite sure. This had been part of my job. ‘I guess they were drawn, used a bit, a design director decided he didn’t like them and they were dropped until they were relocated thirty years later, and revived for a while as “heritage” branding.’ It was possible. Maybe plausible. ‘Stranger things have happened. But thank you very much for not pointing out that I’m an idiot in front of the entire conference. That was kind of you.’

  ‘It’s not often anyone else is interested in this kind of design. We logo-nerds have to stick together.’

  ‘Then thanks for not having me expelled from the logo-nerd club.’

  I left Miranda to the joys of discussions on subsidy in the arts, and bailed out of the rest of the day, planning to walk back to the office and enjoy the sunshine.

  But I didn’t even notice it. Now that the conference was over, everything I’d pushed to the back of my mind reasserted its prominence. I was withholding information from Jake. I hadn’t told him about Matt Holder, nor about the Reichel–Celia connection. I’d been telling myself I just didn’t like bringing attention back to the gallery. I stopped dead in the middle of crossing Parliament Square. That was foolish, but no more foolish than walking through Parliament Square in the first place. Between self-important police stopping pedestrians and cars so self-important MPs could flash by, or newbie cyclists wobbling off on their freshly rented hire bikes smack into flocks of tourists who had forgotten everything they’d been told about looking right, not left, when they crossed, it is likely that aliens have pinpointed this patch of London as the place to land and atomise a healthy chunk of the human race without being noticed. Or perhaps they already have. Hard to say.

  I continued across to the relative safety of Whitehall before I returned to the very unsafe thought I’d just had. Without giving myself time to consider it further, I pulled out my phone.

  ‘Merriam.’

  ‘Ade, it’s me.’

  We both paused. I hadn’t called him Ade in twenty years. And I’d stopped assuming he’d know who ‘me’ was almost as long ago. I sidestepped that. ‘Can we talk? Are you in town?’

  ‘I’m here.’ He didn’t sound worried, or angry. Just tired. ‘L
unch?’

  Things were bad if he was free for lunch not just on the same day, but an hour ahead. Trying to fit into Aidan’s schedule normally was like trying to see Obama. But with fewer assistants, so more rescheduling. ‘Sure. Usual place?’

  ‘See you in half an hour.’

  I dropped my phone into my bag and stood staring at the pavement. I knew I should call Jake. I looked for a cab instead.

  This time I was there before Aidan, and I spent ten minutes figuring out what I was going to say. But when he arrived I postponed. ‘How’s Anna? The kids? Toby?’

  Before he could answer, our usual waitress came over, and this time she was a little happier with us, as we both ordered, and interacted with her. Some change, then, in a fortnight. She left, and Aidan stared down at his mat. He didn’t bother with my questions, knowing I was stalling. ‘Officially, we’re in limbo. The inquest on Frank was adjourned, pending new enquiries after Schmidt’s death; the inquest on Schmidt is next week. I’ve been told that it’s likely that will be adjourned too. So, unofficially, we’re moving on. I’ve made Lucy an offer to come and work for us when she finishes university, which is what would have happened if Frank had been alive. Now, I’m thinking that in a few years, if it works out, she can replace him as a partner – she and Sarah inherited his share. We’re acting as if everything’s fine, as if things will just go back to normal, but they aren’t, and they won’t.’

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  He was startled. Apparently it had never occurred to him to ask himself what he’d thought. He considered it now. Finally, ‘I don’t know about Schmidt. I barely saw him except in a professional capacity. But I don’t think Frank killed himself for some private reason – that he was ill, or depressed, or that Toby was going to leave him.’ He was still staring at his mat, and now he drew lines on it with his fork. Then he blurted out, as if he hated himself for it, ‘I think it was something to do with the gallery.’