by John Harvey
‘How much d’you get per session, at the college?’
‘Ten pounds an hour.’
‘I’ll pay you twelve. Fifteen. Lunch thrown in.’
Katherine shook her head. A couple came out of the club, drunk, laughing, and pushed their way between them, almost knocking Katherine’s glass from her hand.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why’s it so important?’
‘Is it?’
‘You seem to think so.’
Winter flicked his cigarette away into the road. ‘Here,’ he said, taking a card from his pocket. ‘The address of my studio. Come round, any time, get a sense of things. If you still feel uncomfortable with the idea, then as the French say, tant pis.’
He left her with the card in her hand.
11
Trevor Cordon lived in a converted sail loft in Newlyn, together with a springer spaniel, a small library of mainly nineteenth-century novels – he was on his way through the Barsetshire Chronicles for the third time – and several teetering piles of cassettes and CDs, picked up at charity shops across the county, Penzance to Redruth and beyond. Cordon and the springer were both getting on a little, starting to creak at the knees.
A detective inspector in the Devon and Cornwall police, further promotion stalled by a mixture of his own intransigence and a lack of ambition, Cordon was content enough to ply the local brand of neighbourhood policing, spiced up as it was, from time to time, by excursions in the company of the Major Incident Team – in which context he’d met Frank Elder, Elder having been drafted in to help with training, and assist, in a civilian capacity, in the pursuance of the occasional serious investigation. Most recently, a double murder, mother and daughter, initially thought to be victims of a fire; the house in which they’d lived, on a secluded spot deep into the peninsula, had gone up in flames, a dozen fire appliances to deal with the blaze; only later, when the charred bodies were autopsied, was the true cause of death revealed, asphyxia caused by a combination of smothering and severe chest compressions, rather than, as had been assumed, by smoke inhalation.
Elder had helped to plot a path through a circuitous trail of potential witnesses, unravel a complex family tree. Who had the most to gain, the least to lose? What slights, what jealousies had grown, festering through the years? More and more, Cordon had said, like a Daphne du Maurier novel.
The daughter had been in her late fifties, twice divorced, twice remarried, five children, three living within a hundred-mile radius; her mother, in her eighties, had been a minor celebrity in her day, a poet and painter in her own right and the muse and lover of one of the latter-day Lamorna colony of artists.
Art, Elder said as if it were an infection, it gets bloody everywhere.
In the end, the perpetrators proved to be a pair of drugged-up sixteen-year-olds, lured to the house by rumours of hoarded cash, the prospect of easy money, and acting out their angry disappointment before setting fire to the place in an attempt to cover up their crime. They were caught when one of them attempted to sell a silver watch at a pawnbroker’s in Camborne and the owner, checking his list of stolen goods, phoned the local police.
Little or nothing either Elder or Cordon had done amounted to much more than the expense of police time and money. That was how it was sometimes. An apparent waste of diminishing resources. Still, it was the job; you did what you could.
‘Miss it, don’t you?’ Cordon said. They were in the Star Inn, not far shy of closing. ‘Wish you’d never chucked it in, I’ll be bound.’
‘Do I, buggery! What little I’m doing now, that’s quite enough, thank you very much. And I’d not be doing that if it weren’t for the money.’
Cordon chuckled. ‘I’ll believe you, millions wouldn’t.’
Outside, a narrow strip of pavement facing towards the harbour, the air struck cold. Stars plentiful overhead.
‘Nightcap?’
‘Best not.’
‘Taxi, is it?’
Elder laughed. ‘It’s a long bloody walk else. And I’ll not be driving. Last thing I want, one of your lads breathalysing me, making me walk a straight line.’
‘Come back and help me crack this new bottle of Bushmills, then. Call a cab from there.’
The interior of the old sail loft was warm and smelt faintly of dog. Cordon poured two good shots of Irish whiskey into appropriate glasses; sliced bread and cut generous chunks from a hunk of cheese.
There was a photograph, faded a little now, fixed to the fridge door, Cordon and a youth of fourteen or fifteen side by side on a small boat out to sea, wind catching the boy’s hair, sunlight glinting off the surface of the water. No disguising the look of pleasure on Cordon’s face, the smile.
‘Your lad?’ Elder said. ‘See him at all?’
‘Not since he was over a few years back. I say a few, must be five now, maybe six. Talk once in a while. Christmas and New Year. Birthdays.’ Cordon shrugged. ‘You know how it is.’
‘You’ve not been out to see him?’
‘Australia? Too bloody far by half. Scillies, that’s far enough for me.’ His face creased in a smile. ‘He used to say, when he’d got settled, it’s great here, you’d love it, you should come, and I’d be yes, yes, of course, but not just now. Both of us knowing it’d never happen.’ He reached for his glass. ‘His mother went the one time, I believe.’
‘Miss him, though?’
‘Once in a while. You? Your lass? Katherine, is it?’
Elder shrugged. ‘London, not Australia.’
‘See quite a bit of her then?’
‘Not really.’
‘Comes a time. Live their own lives.’
‘She was down not so long back.’
‘Like to have met her.’
‘Only here a couple of days.’
‘Maybe next time then.’
He refilled Elder’s glass and then his own. Time to talk about something that didn’t matter. What was going on in the Premiership. The current state of Cornish rugby. Twenty minutes or so later, Elder’s phone beeped with a text from the driver; he was waiting at the end of the street.
As soon as Elder was back from his morning run and showered, coffee on the stove, he switched on the computer. Three email messages, one from Vicki.
If you haven’t already seen it, there’s something about that Anthony Winter in the news.
A link to the BBC News website. British artist Anthony Winter threatened with legal action over alleged breach of contract.
The gist of what followed being that Winter had apparently walked out on a long-standing agreement with one gallery in favour of exhibiting with another. Rebecca Johnson, described as an art consultant, was quoted as saying, ‘Anthony is only interested in having his work displayed in the most sympathetic settings and the most appropriate circumstances. As regards the galleries concerned, I’m sure that any disagreements can be resolved to everyone’s mutual advantage.’ There followed extracts from conflicting interviews with Rupert Morland-Davis, owner of Mayfair-based Abernathy Fine Art, and Tom Hecklington of the Hecklington and Wearing gallery in Shoreditch. From Anthony Winter himself there was no word.
Elder typed Hecklington and Wearing into the search bar.
The gallery was pleased to announce a major exhibition of New and Recent Work by the renowned British Artist, Anthony Winter, opening in three weeks’ time.
Legal action, Elder assumed, notwithstanding.
12
Winter’s studio was in a former piano factory in Kentish Town. An elongated two-storey building between a builder’s yard and a new development of mixed-use office and living space, there was nothing to mark it out as what it now was. No sign, no name plate above the door. Only a circular bell push that didn’t seem to work.
Katherine stepped back. The windows on the upper floor were bare. The way round to the back was blocked on one side by a brick wall topped with nasty-looking barbed wire, on the other by a tall mesh fence. Nothing to do but bang on the door and shout.
&nb
sp; After several minutes that yielded nothing aside from making herself hoarse, Katherine kicked at the ground in annoyance and turned away. Almost as if he’d been waiting, Winter unlocked and opened the door.
‘What’s all the hullabaloo? Noise enough to wake the dead.’
‘The bell’s not working.’
‘Of course it’s not working.’
‘Then how d’you expect people to let you know they’re here?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Fine. In that case don’t ask them to come round.’
She was approaching the side entrance to the new building, the narrow strip leading out onto the street, before he called her back.
‘Katherine, wait.’
If she’d carried on walking, perhaps it would have been different. But instead she stopped, hesitated, slowly turned and walked back.
‘I was busy, working. Any distraction …’ Winter made a vague gesture with his hand. ‘You’re here now. Better come in.’
He went back inside, expecting her to follow.
The room ran the length of the building, save for one end which had been partitioned off. A curved staircase led up to a second floor which was open and stretched less than a third of the way across. At the rear, broad arched windows reached down towards the ground. The bare boards were shiny with use and thickly speckled with paint. Canvases, turned inwards, rested in twos and threes against the walls. Tins of paint in various sizes were piled on top of one another on a metal plan chest and others sat abandoned here and there across the floor.
By the central window a large easel was angled towards an empty bed, in front of which a glass vase of failing poppies, purple, white and red, stems arching outwards, stood on a tall three-legged stool draped with a velvet cloth.
‘Just give me a minute. A minute. Look around. Make yourself useful. There’s coffee. Down at the end there. Black for me.’
The partitioned area divided into two: toilet and shower to one side; small, overcrowded kitchen to the other. A toaster sat uneasily on a pile of books; the lead from the electric kettle trailed down towards the floor. The remains of what looked like lasagne was encrusted round the inside of an oval dish on the stove. Katherine found a jar of ground coffee in the cupboard above the sink; a coffee pot – the kind that Chrissy swore by – in the sink itself, waiting to be washed. Milk was in the small fridge on the counter, a Roberts radio resting on top.
Newspaper clippings and postcard reproductions of paintings overlapped on the wall.
Katherine thought she recognised a Picasso – a woman’s body splintered into ugly segments and then put back clumsily together again. The other artists she couldn’t identify. A blotchy portrait of a man reflected in a bathroom mirror, head shaven, dark holes where the eyes were meant to be. A naked man on a brown settee, legs spread wide, genitals showing, holding a small black rat in his right hand. The clippings seemed to be a mixture of reviews of other artists’ work, recipes, and odd news items – three people fall to their deaths from same clifftop in a single day; epidemic of flying ants drives family from their home.
When it was ready, Katherine poured the coffee into mugs and added milk to her own.
Hesitated, uncertain.
‘Shit!’ came the sudden shout from behind. ‘Shit and fuck again!’ And the sound of something being hurled to the ground.
When she stepped out from behind the partition, Winter was standing away from the easel, wiping the end of a paintbrush on a torn piece of rag. ‘Just when you think you’ve got it cracked, another fucking petal falls.’
They sat up on the mezzanine floor. A day bed and two canvas chairs either side of a small folding table. Winter pressed buttons on a remote control and music started up from speakers above their heads, something classical, some kind of string quartet Katherine thought, the sort of thing Abike went sneaking off to see, Sunday mornings at Wigmore Hall.
‘So, tell me about yourself,’ Winter said.
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
Katherine shrugged and turned her head away, avoiding his gaze.
‘Where are you from? Originally, I mean.’
‘London, I suppose. We moved up to Nottingham when I was just starting secondary.’
‘We?’
‘My mum and dad. My mum’s still there. My dad’s in Cornwall. Well, mostly.’
‘And you, you’re …’
‘Stuck in a holding pattern, Stelina says …’
‘Who’s Stelina?’
‘One of my flatmates.’
‘Works for an airline, does she? Air-traffic control?’
‘The NHS.’
‘Currently going down without a parachute.’
Katherine wasn’t sure if she was meant to laugh. It felt awkward, strange, sitting there talking to someone she hardly knew. Someone close to her father’s age; partway, she supposed, to being some kind of celebrity. Made her feel as if she were sixteen again. Not a good feeling at all.
‘So, modelling, for you it’s a sideline, not a career?’
‘I suppose.’
‘V says you’re very good. And she’s an excellent judge.’
‘I don’t even know enough to know what being good is.’
‘Maybe that’s better. More instinctive.’
‘I doubt that.’ She drank some of her coffee, hooked one ankle over the other. Whatever movement she made, no matter how small, his eyes followed. ‘What’s it mean anyway, being a good model? Aside from how you look?’
Winter leaned forward, fingers loosely interlaced, elbows resting on the edges of the chair. ‘What distinguishes a good model, a really good model – above all else they want to give the artist what he or she needs. And the closer they come to one other, the more they work together – the good model knows what that is without a word having to be passed between them.’
‘And does that happen often?’
‘Hardly at all.’
His mobile rang and he glanced at the screen. ‘I’ll have to take this.’
Downstairs, he paced the length of the room. ‘Rebecca, I understand … I’ve got it … Of course I’ve fucking got it. You think I’m some kind of naive …? Yes. Yes, I know.’
Katherine stood, went to the window. On the far side of the builder’s yard the railway line ran west towards Hampstead and the Finchley Road. Beyond that she could see the beginnings of the Heath, Parliament Hill Fields, grass and trees; people, little more than matchstick figures, out running, pushing buggies, walking their dogs.
Winter’s voice, louder, closer to exasperation. ‘Well, tell Rupert he can … Yes … I don’t know, anyway you can. Just make sure it gets done.’
By accident or design, he kicked over a pot of paint on his way back to the stairs.
‘Sorry about that. Business, I’m afraid. I’m supposed to have this show coming up, a year, eighteen months from now. Maybe sooner, I don’t know. And now it’s got mired in all these fucking negotiations …’
He lowered himself back down into his chair. ‘It used to be, once upon a time, when I started, all I had to do was paint. That was it, get up, go to the easel, dip a brush, paint. Hockney … You’ve heard of Hockney?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘When he was a young man, still a student, he made this sign, like a poster, and stuck it on the chest of drawers beside his bed so it would be the first thing he saw when he woke. Get Up and Work Immediately. Lucky bastard, to be able to do that. Could then, can now.’
‘And you can’t?’
Winter laughed. ‘Yes. Yes, I can. Except, you know, life … life fucking intervenes. Life and money. Reputation. Lack of it. Hockney now, what is he? Eighty? He’s got it made. Has for years. Decades. Do what he likes. Always has. Dye his hair, smoke like a fucking chimney in the face of all the available advice; flaunt the fact that he was gay before it was practically bloody essential. Except now it’s bisexual that’s the thing. Bisexual and then some. Fluidl
y fucking gendered, whatever the fuck that is. LGB fucking T. And no matter what, he’s still a national fucking treasure. Hockney. He could pose naked save for a piss pot on his head on top of the plinth in Trafalgar Square and everyone would cheer.’
‘You sound as if you’re jealous.’
‘Jealous? That’s not the word. A certain amount of envy perhaps. Not for the work, though I like the work, some of it, quite a lot in fact, the early stuff especially, not this iPad nonsense. No, it’s that somehow he’s earned the right to do what he likes, say what he likes, without having to manoeuvre, second-guess, smarm up to the right people, the right collectors.’
Katherine didn’t know what to say, how to respond to the flurry of angry words. She picked up the empty mugs and moved towards the stairs. ‘Why don’t I just take these down and …’
‘And come back.’
‘What?’
‘Come back tomorrow. Early. We’ll get an early start. Eight, can you make it by then? Eight-thirty?’
‘But I haven’t said …’
‘This show, the one I was on the phone about earlier, it’s going to be big. A big deal. And there’s at least another three canvases I’ve got to have finished by then, if not four. And I can’t do that on my own.’
She made the mistake of looking into his eyes.
‘What do you say then? Eight sharp?’
‘Okay.’
Back outside, she was slightly unsteady on her feet without knowing quite why.
13
She thought of a hundred and one reasons for not going. Convinced herself that she had no obligation, no need; woke at half past four rehearsing what she might say by way of an excuse. Somehow she’d been talked into agreeing to something she didn’t really want to do and if, in the cold light of day, she changed her mind, well, that was fine. Posing naked before one man, one pair of eyes. She flinched at the thought.
‘Kate, you don’t have to do this,’ she said aloud.
She was still saying it as she folded her robe into her shoulder bag, along with a pair of ballet shoes she’d borrowed from Chrissy, and a change of underwear. Make-up, mobile, headphones. The overground from Dalston Kingsland to Kentish Town West and then a fifteen-minute walk.