A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  ‘I don’t remember what they were, but do the last two digits of the registration match what the witness gave us?’

  His voice was tight. ‘You know they do. Now tell me why. And who.’

  ‘Lucy. It’s the only answer that makes sense. She’s the only person with a motive to kill two people.’

  ‘Motive is for crime writers,’ he said, trying not to sound impatient. Then he backtracked. ‘Two people?’

  ‘This all got turned around. Start at the other end. Start with a fraud that’s been going on for years, that’s being run by Frank, just as Myra said. He locates a forger, who is his ex-boyfriend, and Myra is co-opted – for money, I presume?’

  ‘We think so,’ he said. ‘We’re looking now.’

  ‘It’s been going on for years, and everything is fine, because Frank had access to the material from the archive – cuttings, photos, even the glue. Then something happens. Schmidt starts to drink, or maybe the archive material begins to run out. Schmidt uses a book jacket that didn’t come from the archive, not knowing there would be small differences.’ I was clarifying this for myself too as I went along, and now I stopped to think.

  Jake’s teeth were no longer gritted. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Lucy has been working at the gallery on and off in her holidays for years. She may very well have noticed something, picked up bits and pieces here and there. If the forgeries are discovered, the gallery will go under. But if Frank dies, even if the forgeries surface – even if Schmidt stands in the middle of Piccadilly Circus shrieking “I’m a forger” – the person he forged for has killed himself in remorse. The gallery can continue, and that’s what she wants. It was her future.’

  Jake’s voice was kind. ‘Sounds good.’ The ‘little girl’ was almost audible.

  ‘No. Listen. It’s not just motive. She probably thought I knew more than I did.’ I repeated the conversations I’d had with her. ‘She knew I was coming from the farmer’s market to Toby’s on Saturday, because we’d liaised over the kind of food I was bringing for visitors.’ I thought about that for a moment. ‘She’s the only person who knew where I was going to be that Saturday.’ That had more effect. I could almost hear him sit up. ‘And she was at the Tate. I saw her. I waved to her.’ For some reason that infuriated more than the fact that she’d tried to kill me. I’d gone out of my way to be friendly to this woman because I felt sorry for her. Damned if I was going to be friendly to anyone ever again.

  Then I remembered. ‘There’s more. On the day I was hit by the car, she wasn’t at Toby’s all day. Jim said he’d gone up to meet her for coffee nearby. She could easily have borrowed Frank’s car for that. It’s hard to imagine anyone except family could have. And none of the rest of the family knows who I am.’

  ‘And Celia Stein?’

  ‘What do you want from me, miracles?’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I WENT BACK TO my soup-making. I may not have a fireplace, but at least I didn’t have to do my own dirty work, either. I felt much better. Or, I did until I heard the knock at my door. I’d been stirring the pot, and I was jumpy enough that the knock made me splash soup all over the floor. I stood there with the spoon in my hand, panicked, before I realised it was a knock, not the bell. Someone was at my flat door, not at the door to the house. Which meant it was either Mr Rudiger, or Kay or Anthony. I’d heard Kay’s voice a few minutes before, so maybe she wanted to go through to my garden – I was always happy for them to use it, and this evening it would be especially good to have company.

  I called ‘Coming!’ as I wiped my hands, and looked at the mess on the floor. It could wait.

  It was going to have to. Because when I opened the door, it was neither Mr Rudiger nor the Lewises. It was Jim Reynolds, looking tense. Which was reasonable, because slightly behind him was Lucy. Her expression was sober, judging, as though I’d come up wanting in some challenge. And apparently she was ready to back up that judgement, because in her hand she had a gun.

  I stopped in the doorway, one foot still outstretched to take the next step. I grabbed at the frame for support, but she jerked the gun, a move-away gesture, as she pushed Jim forward impatiently. He was an obstacle to be moved, it appeared, not her partner.

  Bollocks. I read too many trashy novels with happy-ever-after endings. A woman was standing in my doorway with a gun, and my first thought was, ‘Poor Jim, he really liked her.’

  It was also my second thought, because I was frozen. I had no sensible responses at all. I stood still, just staring, waiting. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  It’s amazing what power a gun gives you. The handful of times I’d met Lucy, I’d thought of her as a nice girl, with equal stress on both words – that she was pleasant, and also very young for her age. The gun made her older. And much less pleasant, of course.

  She repeated the move-away gesture more sharply, and pushed Jim a little more aggressively. I took a step back as she bit her lip, pulling her teeth along it, considering the problem – me being the problem.

  ‘How did you get in?’ I was disturbed to realise I really wanted to know, so that if a gun-toting nice girl showed up again, I’d be prepared.

  ‘I had a chance to look around outside before your upstairs neighbour appeared. You really shouldn’t leave notes on top of the recycling that say ‘I’m upstairs’. It’s all too easy for other people to stick them back on the front door.’

  So it would appear.

  ‘We walked up with her, and then back down after she went into her flat.’ She shrugged. ‘No one suspects people who look like me.’

  No shit. ‘But …’ I had no idea where that sentence was going, so I started again. ‘Jim?’

  Jim hadn’t said a word so far. He was sweating, and looked like he was in shock. When I said his name he shook his head, as though he wasn’t sure who I was talking about.

  Lucy was. ‘That’s your fault too.’

  ‘Me?’ I realised my voice was rising to a whine. Any second now I was going to say ‘It’s not fair,’ like an eight-year-old. I might stamp my foot too.

  ‘You brought him into this.’ She pushed her voice up to a falsetto, presumably in imitation of me: ‘Oooh, did you know that I’m a tragic geek who can identify something that no one else in the world has ever thought worth looking at? And then, I can call attention to it by asking a designer about them? And publicly display the problem at a conference where even more arts people will see it?’ She dropped her voice back to its normal register. ‘Because of you, Jim knew the pictures were forgeries. Because of you, Aidan knew – he told me to send them over to you. Everyone knew. Because of you. And the gallery would have been bankrupted. What would have happened to me?’

  Mr Rudiger was right. It was all about her. ‘So Frank had to die?’

  ‘Of course.’ She didn’t even understand why I was asking.

  I’d been standing talking to a woman with a gun, whom I was sure had killed two people, and I was frightened, but not terrified. Now, her sheer blankness brought back the same feeling I’d had in the archive. Fear has a physical location. It lives in your stomach, and rises up through your throat, looking for an exit. I had pushed it down in the archive. I needed to do the same now.

  I swayed in the doorway. ‘Can I sit down?’ I looked at the sitting room.

  She considered it, rolling her lip through her teeth some more. ‘Not here. Is there a room where you can’t see in from the street?’

  ‘The kitchen. At the back. There’s a garden, but there’s no access to it from outside.’ I didn’t know why I was being helpful, but in the short-term I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  She gestured with the gun. She looked so comfortable doing it, I wondered if she’d been practising, the way teenagers practise looking cool in the bedroom mirror. ‘Walk ahead of me, both of you.’

  I took Jim’s arm. I told myself I was trying to keep him calm, but it was really for comfort.

  The kitchen is small. Counters, sin
k, fridge, and cooker along two walls. When people come for supper, the kitchen table gets pulled into the middle of the room and we squeeze around it. The rest of the time it’s pushed into the corner across from the counters, and there is just space for two to sit at it. She did the gun-gesture thing again: Jim was to go in one chair, me in the other.

  ‘Sit. But keep your hands where I can see them.’

  I nodded and moved slowly to a chair, putting my hands carefully on the table. Jim wasn’t as careful, but that’s because he was barely thinking. She knew that, and was watching me, not him.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re here, though. If you kill me, where does it get you?’

  She rubbed her forehead. It didn’t seem any clearer to her. I wasn’t sure whether pushing at this was a good idea or whether it would just make her angry. Which would in turn make her decide to get on with what she’d come for.

  I kept my voice even. ‘Where did you get the gun?’ I tried to sound as though I had merely an academic interest in what was happening. As far as I was aware, guns weren’t handed out in freshers’ week. Or they hadn’t been when I went to university. Realising I was capable of mental sarcasm helped me stay calm.

  ‘Guns. Two.’ She waved hers again, like a child proud of her new balloon. Look what I’ve got, Mummy. ‘When Frank bought the Stevenson estate, Delia just packed up the entire contents of his studio. Everything. All the finished work, the half-finished, his files. She didn’t sort anything, just had movers ship it out as it stood. When I went to intern for the gallery, they gave me the scut-work, the jobs no one wanted to do.’ This still rankled. ‘Frank had passed on the boxes with Stevenson’s source files to Werner, but there were dozens more boxes no one had ever looked at, because it was like looking at the back of your cupboards. The contents of Stevenson’s desk drawers, old phone bills, shopping lists, whatever.’ She waved her gun again, this time at the idea of heaps of unsorted items. ‘I was the drudge who was supposed to clean it out. The paperwork would be sold to a university archive, to earn yet more money for Delia’ – another historic grievance – ‘and then the rest was ditched. All except the guns.’

  I had a flashback to that dinner with Reichel. He was the kind of man who expected women to sit and listen to him talk about himself, saying ‘You did?’ admiringly at intervals. That was alpha-male vanity. This was just different vanity. ‘Guns?’ I said, therefore, in an admiring tone.

  Yes, that was what she’d wanted. She smiled. ‘There were two guns in one of the boxes.’

  I thought of what Jake had said. ‘But the one that killed Frank was Soviet.’

  She was the cat that had swallowed the cream, she was so pleased with herself. ‘And as untraceable as I’d thought it was going to be. Stevenson served in Vietnam. When I found it I did some research.’ Just what the world needed, a murderer with a library card. ‘Lots of US servicemen picked up Soviet weapons in Vietnam, and then brought them home with them. For a long time they were quite common in the States. But never here, because there was no connection to Vietnam.’

  This was fascinating, but since she was planning to kill me with the results of her research, I failed to muster quite the enthusiasm she was looking for. If I stopped talking, though, she might decide she had to do something. I looked sideways at Jim. No help there. And I’d run out of questions.

  I licked my lips. ‘Jake will be back soon.’ He probably wouldn’t be, after my call to him, but it was all that I had.

  She smirked at me. ‘And if he is, he’ll find your note on the door again. “I’m upstairs”.’ Her voice was a mocking sing-song.

  ‘But I won’t be there, and he’ll come back down.’ Why was I arguing with her?

  ‘We’ll have heard him go up.’ She waggled the gun once more. ‘And by the time he’s back down, it will be too late.’ She was so sure of herself, leaning against the counter like a girlfriend who had dropped by for coffee. I stopped being frightened. Her casual stance was making me angry.

  The soup, which had been simmering quietly, began to hiss. I was sure Sam Spade wouldn’t have reacted the same way, but he and I had been brought up differently. I lifted my chin towards it. ‘Can I turn it down?’

  ‘Don’t move.’ She was fierce. But she had been brought up like me, and she pushed off from the counter, looking even more like it was a coffee morning, to turn it down herself.

  Her boot skidded in the spilt puddle I’d left five minutes earlier – five minutes that felt like five years. That half-pause was enough. Without conscious thought, I was out of my chair and at the stove, pulling at the saucepan, heaving the contents towards her in a huge arc. She threw up her hands to protect her face from the boiling liquid. She hadn’t let go of the gun, but it was no longer pointing at anyone as she screamed.

  My God, the scream. I may never get that sound out of my head.

  And then everything happened at once. The room was filled with enormous men, all shouting. I don’t think Lucy, burnt as she was, even registered them. I stood there, saucepan in hand, prepared to launch myself at the first person to come near me. And then I realised one of them was Jake.

  It probably only took twenty minutes before an ambulance came to take Lucy away under police escort. Jim went, with another escort, to be treated for shock. A paramedic looked at where I’d burnt my hands on the pan, and then I was sent, with yet more escorts, up to Mr Rudiger. Helena arrived at some point. Two detectives asked me for a statement, which I gave. And then gave again when they came back for details around midnight. And then we sat and waited.

  It was nearly morning before I saw Jake again. He came up with a colleague, introduced as Chris. I prepared for another statement, but he shook his head and said wearily, ‘He knows about …’ and waved his hand, to indicate the comprehensive nature of what Chris knew. Us, I assumed.

  I wet my lips. ‘How is Lucy?’

  ‘She’ll be all right. Scarred, but all right.’

  I nodded. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Jake sat down heavily beside me on the sofa, and took my hand, playing with the bandages.

  ‘How did you know she was here?’

  ‘We did a check on the car reg your friend Sam gave you. It belonged to a Marion Halcombe, address in Tooting. It took us longer than it should have, but we got there. She was married six months ago to a man named Jeremy Compton. She’s Lucy’s stepmother. So I came back to talk to you, get more detail on your conversations with Lucy. The post-it note on the front door—’

  ‘Lucy expected you to see that and go upstairs. Why didn’t you?’

  He tapped my nose. ‘Because you don’t leave notes for me on the front door, you leave them on the inside door.’ Thank God the man was a detective. His voice turned grim. ‘I organised backup, and—’

  I tried not to sound too much like Pauline, untied from the railway tracks by Dudley-Do-Right. ‘And you came and got me.’ I was going to cry again, and I’d already spent the past week weeping over everyone I’d come into contact with. So I changed the subject.

  ‘And Stevenson?’

  Jake looked blank, so I clarified. ‘Why did Lucy make Frank’s death look like Stevenson’s suicide?’

  ‘We don’t know that she did. She’s not in any condition to be questioned at the moment, and it may have been a coincidence. As far as we’re concerned, it doesn’t matter. She threatened to kill you, she threatened Jim Reynolds, she confessed to killing Compton in front of both of you.’ He shrugged. Not his problem.

  I wet my lips. ‘What about Schmidt?’

  Jake’s expression became guarded. ‘They’re going through the witnesses again, to see if anyone saw her. If she was there, she left no prints.’

  She’d hardly be the first criminal to wear gloves, but in the long run it didn’t matter. Aidan would salvage his gallery. He’d had no connection, and Frank was dead. The only person who would care was Delia, who had loved her husband. And maybe Celia.

  ‘What about Celia?’ I’d thought she was
guilty, even if I didn’t know what she was guilty of. Maybe just of being beautiful and disdainful. In a properly organised universe, that would be illegal.

  He rubbed his forehead. ‘We’ve been clearing that up. But what she’s been doing isn’t criminal.’

  ‘What has she been doing?’

  ‘She wanted money, and wasn’t getting what she considered her share from the estate. When Spencer Reichel was told that Merriam–Compton wouldn’t sell to him, he was cut off from the prime source of Stevensons. She contacted him, and sold him some of the pictures she’d inherited, which she had every right to do. Then he gave her a job at the Daylesworth Trust, and in exchange she brokered sales from the gallery to anonymous “collectors” – Reichel.’

  I sighed. ‘So much damage, for a few paintings.’

  Mr Rudiger spoke. Since he hadn’t said anything for hours, we all jumped. His deep voice made him sound like God, if God had grown up in Prague. ‘For a few paintings, and vanity.’

  He was right. Vanity, or entitlement, or just sheer greed. What a waste.

  I turned to Jake. ‘When will your colleagues be out of my flat?’

  His shrug said I shouldn’t hold my breath. I’d slept in Mr Rudiger’s spare room before, and his nod, without my having to ask, said I would be again. I stood up. ‘I’m going to bed.’ I announced my plans firmly, so no one could be under any misapprehension. ‘I’m going to sleep for a week, and by the time I wake up you’ – I pinned Jake with a particularly hard look ‘you will have spoken to your office about us. Because next time, I am really, really not doing this sneaking around crap.’

  Next time? Everyone in the room stared at me with varying degrees of disbelief. Well, almost everyone. Helena just smiled.

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  Do you want to know about our other great reads, download free extracts and enter competitions?

  If so, visit our website www.allisonandbusby.com.