by Alice Castle
Beth scrambled to her knees, planning to help Katie up, but Katie effortlessly unwound herself to her full height while Beth was still trying to get upright, and graciously held out a hand to her friend.
‘How come you’ve spent the last I-don’t-know-how-long stuck in that thing, and yet I’m the one who looks like they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards?’ Beth muttered. She smoothed down her jeans, which had picked up a fair sprinkling of Teddy’s hairs, a bit of cushion stuffing, and a generous tuft or two of pale blue fluff from Katie’s tumble drier.
‘Ah, the many advantages of doing your Sun Salutations regularly,’ said Katie. For a moment, Beth braced herself for more of a spiel on the merits of yoga, but her friend had other things on her mind. ‘Let’s face the music, shall we?’ said Katie, giving Beth a somewhat grim smile.
They trooped out of the utility room together, with Teddy leaping up and down at them as they walked, as though it was normal practice to skulk in there during a lunch party. They paused for a moment in the kitchen doorway, then Katie bravely breezed straight over to Michael, who was looking slightly hunted as he uncorked yet another bottle of wine.
Beth realised that the fact there wasn’t a screw top in sight was now the giveaway sign of a very highfalutin’ party indeed, with a true connoisseur in charge. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d had to tangle with a cork. The Chardonnay that she usually lugged home in bulk under cover of darkness from the small Sainsbury’s in Herne Hill certainly didn’t require such niceties.
After pecking Michael on the cheek, Katie turned to the bank of ovens discreetly set into the long sweep of pristine marble. If Beth’d been forced to fry a bit of bacon at gunpoint in Katie’s kitchen, she would have been flummoxed. There was no outward sign of any knobs or dials, but in seconds Katie had everything going and various pans were bubbling away like there was no tomorrow. Hey presto, lunch was back on track, and with no sign of the giveaway Frost aluminium tins to reveal that the meal wasn’t all Katie’s own work. The hungry men relaxed visibly.
Then Katie turned back to the little group. ‘I think you were going to tell Andy something, weren’t you, Michael?’ she prompted.
Michael went puce and gave her a look which didn’t require over ten years of marriage to interpret. But he accepted the conversational baton Katie had hurled his way, and cleared his throat. ‘The thing is, Andy… Well, it’s like this…’
It was excruciating. Beth was no stranger to prevarication herself. In fact, she liked to dally for a good long while before she put things off. But watching someone else do the same was hard work. She flicked her fringe out of her eyes anxiously and saw Harry glance at her. Fringe-fiddling was one of her ‘tells’, a sure-fire sign she was ill at ease.
Harry now looked with renewed interest at the interplay between Michael and Katie. Kuragin, meanwhile, was glugging back his wine, apparently impervious to undercurrents which were currently making the room about as relaxing as total immersion in a Jacuzzi with all your clothes on. Beth was rather glad to see how much of the delicious Chablis he was putting away – with any luck it would act as an anaesthetic against the news he was just about to get.
‘Look, Andy, there’s no easy way to tell you this, but the puppy – Teddy here – has a bit of a bad habit… He’s at that stage, you know? Everything goes in his mouth.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Kuragin, though he looked a little mystified. ‘Like a baby. I remember my own Natasha when she was two… This is a while ago now, you understand,’ he added, as though the assembled audience couldn’t have worked that out.
As Beth was revising Kuragin’s age upwards every time she saw his face catch the light, she wouldn’t have been at all surprised to hear that Natasha now had children – possibly even grandchildren – of her own.
‘Well, yes, indeed. Notwithstanding that, and be that as it may…’ said Michael, reverting to a slightly pompous work persona that Beth had never really seen before. It was a measure of how flustered he was, and how much he was dreading breaking the bad news to Kuragin. It seemed as though Katie was finding it equally unbearable, as she was twisting a tea towel between her hands, but as usual she did the right thing when it became clear Michael was just going to take refuge in executive-speak.
‘Look, Andy, what Michael’s trying to say is that the dog has basically eaten your memory stick. He just chews up everything at the moment, and the stick was lying around on the table in Michael’s study…’
‘Where the door should have been shut,’ Michael added pointedly.
‘Yes, where Michael should have kept the door shut,’ Katie added with all the appearance of wifely compliance, yet without admitting any culpability.
During this tense interplay between husband and wife, Kuragin had been switching his attention from one to another with the well-bred but disengaged interest of the Duchess of Cambridge watching the Men’s Final on the Centre Court at Wimbledon. Yes, there might have been tennis fans there who’d been queuing since dawn, or who had applied for tickets at birth, but for her it was just another public engagement at which to display a jaunty hat and a polite smile.
Kuragin still looked a little baffled, but not seriously perturbed. Beth wondered whether it was a language thing, or whether the dreadful penny was yet to drop.
Three seconds later, gravity got the better of it. The man suddenly paled, and as the colour leached out of his cheeks, he looked every one of his many years. Beth felt for him, though she took a step backwards as a rush of blood and anger rushed in to fill the void of his obvious shock and disappointment, and his face became as red as an NHS poster warning of the dangers of hypertension.
‘Are you telling me my book has been eaten by that creature?’ he thundered, gesturing at Teddy, who squirmed with pleasure at being addressed and was now so used to shouty voices raised in his direction that he seemed to positively relish the attention.
Katie nimbly stood in front of Teddy to protect him from Kuragin’s wrath, and Beth realised for the umpteenth time what a gem her friend was. Despite her own ambivalence towards the pooch, to the extent that she had just shut herself in a cage to distance herself from all the problems he’d caused, she had fearlessly put herself between him and the wrath of a really rather frightening man, who was now towering over her and spitting with rage.
Michael, despite his clear annoyance at the whole memory stick debacle, which he seemed to lay squarely (and unfairly, in Beth’s view) at Katie’s door, also had no hesitation about throwing himself into the fray. He was immediately in front of Katie, so there was now a little queue of people being threatened by one angry Russian. Beth was agog, but before the situation could escalate, Harry was calming things down.
‘Kuragin, can I top up your glass?’ he said smoothly, taking the man’s arm and leading him a little way from the cooker, where the bubbling of the pans and Teddy’s sudden yapping were only serving to overheat the situation further.
As they walked the short distance over to the dining table, Beth was relieved to see Katie’s arms sneak round Michael’s back for a quick hug, and his hands go up to pat his wife’s reassuringly. He might not be thrilled that Teddy had ingested Kuragin’s golden prose – and what publisher would be? – but protecting his wife was a higher priority. Beth raised her glass to both of them and took a tiny sip.
At the dining table, Harry was handing a shell-shocked Kuragin yet another brimming glass of Chablis.
‘But what am I to do now? All those months, years… all wasted,’ he said, darting a glance of pure venom at Teddy, who was peeping out from behind the marble island where Katie was now putting something into bowls.
The sooner we start to eat, the better, thought Beth. She realised her stomach was rumbling again. A lot of hungry, stressed adults, and a dog with a bottomless ability to get into trouble, did not make for an easy situation when tempers were running high.
Harry was continuing to be a large, reassuring presence – the only
one amongst them who wasn’t visibly on edge. ‘You’ll presumably have backed it up somewhere?’ he said casually.
Kuragin thought for a moment. ‘You know, I need to ask my secretary. She takes care of all that sort of thing,’ he said, with a glimmer of a return to the expansive, aristocratic demeanour that he usually affected. This potentially miraculous solution to his travails had clearly not occurred to him at all. ‘I will pop to the garden and call her,’ he said, gliding out through the unlocked doors.
As soon as he’d left the room, Beth turned to Katie and Michael, who were grinning with relief. ‘Phew! Let’s hope his secretary’s a bit more on the case with technology than he is,’ Beth said brightly.
Michael made a pantomime of wiping sweat from his brow and turned to Harry. ‘Thanks for calming that down, mate. It was getting a bit nasty.’
Harry smiled modestly. ‘As luck would have it, I had a terrorism refresher course last week. He’s a lot easier to deal with than a suicide bomber, I’ll tell you that.’
Beth couldn’t resist giving him a hug. It was at times like this that it really was handy to have a policeman around. Harry smiled back at her, and her heart took a sudden leap. Yes, he’d been grumpy earlier (again!) when she’d been trying to get somewhere with the Smeaton case, but he was basically on her side. On their side, she realised rather proudly, as both Katie and Michael beamed at him in delight.
The mood had cheered up so much that even Kuragin coming back in and announcing in a crestfallen way that he couldn’t get hold of his secretary didn’t put too big a dent in things. Beth had every sympathy with the woman. Why should she be available to take calls from her employer at 1pm on a Sunday, for goodness sake? She remembered dimly from a long-ago Russian history module at Uni that serfdom had been abolished in 1861. Maybe Kuragin, who definitely seemed to be behind the times, hadn’t got the memo yet.
Now that frayed tempers had been knitted up a little, Katie snapped back into hostess mode and bustled over to the ovens, sliding out several beautiful Italian earthenware dishes. Each one contained a Frost lasagne. Golden brown on top and bubbling seductively, they managed to look authentically home-made, but in the best possible way. Beth’s own lasagnes, as rare as hen’s teeth, had either too much or too little béchamel sauce, leaving the pasta alternately bone dry and crispy, or water-logged. Her last effort had seen the liquid cascading out during the cooking process, to sizzle away happily on the bottom of the oven until it vaporised into an indelible sooty stain.
These triumphant lasagnes suffered from only one problem – they were too irresistible. Everyone crowded round and made it difficult for Beth and Katie to plonk down bowls containing a delicious-looking salad, some new potatoes that had been flown halfway round the world to join them via the nearest Waitrose, and an intriguing-looking beetroot and quinoa dish that she was absolutely certain Ben would shun.
The boys thundered downstairs at the first time of asking and took their places without any prompting, and everyone else followed suit. Katie passed the beetroot first to Kuragin, saying, ‘I thought you’d recognise this dish, I looked it up, so I know it’s a special Russian staple.’
He gave every appearance of delight, but Beth sensed a reserve in the man. She supposed if she were to be served a full English breakfast at every meal, in honour of her country’s supposed traditions, she might get a bit fed up, too. She noticed Harry taking a microscopic portion.
Once everyone had full plates, Kuragin turned politely to Harry. ‘And what is it that you do? Are you involved in publishing, too?’
Harry laughed. ‘I’m a detective with the Metropolitan Police,’ he said, seeming to brace his broad shoulders for a response.
Beth was sympathetic. In such a huge and bustling city, everyone had a tale of woe about a missing bike or a picked pocket. It was a bit like being a doctor at a party, she decided. Everyone bombarded you with their symptoms and expected not a diagnosis, but in this case an instant arrest. To her surprise, though, Kuragin didn’t immediately expect Harry to sort his life out.
‘You must be investigating the Smeaton murder, then?’ he said, glancing shrewdly over at Beth.
She fumed inwardly. He must have known her game all along. All her delicate questioning had elicited nothing, and even more gallingly, the damned man had known about the killing right from the start. He must have been enjoying her efforts to find out what and how much he knew, laughing at her down his long, aristocratic nose. Inwardly, she harrumphed, but she schooled herself not to show her annoyance. She could still chisel some information out of him, she knew she could.
‘And how did you hear about it? There’s been nothing in the media about it yet,’ Beth said, not even trying to stop herself.
Harry, Katie, and Michael were now staring at her hard, while Ben and Charlie looked up from plates which were suspiciously untroubled by beetroot.
‘News travels so fast in the art world,’ said Kuragin expansively. ‘For example, did you know that his last works – or those of Slope, I should more properly say – are already doubling in value?’
‘I’ve never quite understood why that happens,’ said Katie, trying to plop some beetroot onto Charlie’s plate but missing when he yanked it out of the way at the last moment. She frowned at him until he placed his napkin over the rich red splatter and refused to meet her eyes. It wasn’t until he’d taken a compensatory mouthful of green salad instead that she refocused on Kuragin.
The art dealer sat back a little from the table and took a breath. He was clearly preparing to deliver a lecture. Beth resigned herself. Though she found listening to over-privileged, opinionated, middle-aged (or older) men delivering their opinions about as enjoyable as performing a pedicure with her teeth, she had to concede that at least this was an area Kuragin did actually know about. He wouldn’t just be chuntering on for the joy of listening to his own voice, as some of the old buffers’ brigade seemed to. She might even learn something, as long as she didn’t get too angry and bored to listen.
Idly, she watched Charlie flick the splotch of beetroot onto the floor by his feet. As if at a pre-arranged signal, Teddy bounded forward, tail wagging furiously, and sniffed at the little mound. Immediately, his ears went down, and he looked up at his beloved master with troubled, even hurt eyes. If he’d been able to speak, he’d have been saying, “Seriously? What the hell is this?” Beth suppressed a smile.
‘You find my explanation amusing?’ Kuragin broke into her thoughts.
She swivelled to look at him, feeling chastened but fighting it. She’d done nothing wrong. He’d been droning on; she’d been zoning out. This wasn’t school, and she didn’t owe him her attention.
‘Definitely not amusing, no,’ she said frankly, hoping she was staying on the right side of rudeness. However obnoxious she was beginning to find the man, he was still Katie and Michael’s guest.
‘You weren’t interested in my explanation?’
‘Scarcity value pushes up prices. The fact that Smeaton, or Slope, won’t be producing any more work means that there is a limited pool of his pieces available. Therefore, while there is a market, the price of each work will grow exponentially,’ said Beth, summing up Kuragin’s fifteen-minute exposition succinctly. ‘I’d love another helping of the delicious lasagne, if I may?’ she turned to Katie, who was trying to hide her own smile.
As they cleared the table later, Katie turned to Beth and whispered, ‘You know, I’ve just thought of someone else we should talk to, you know, about that business?’
‘We?’ Beth asked, a little taken aback.
‘Well, if you’ll have me. Yes, why not. After all, I saw the poor man, too. And I sort of have this feeling…’
‘Yes?’ Beth was agog.
‘Why should it all be down to the men? You know, Michael didn’t sort out the memory stick issue. Or get me out of the cage. And Harry hasn’t exactly been pushing forward with the Smeaton business, though I suppose he couldn’t over lunch. But what I mean is, why
are we waiting for them to sort anything out? Look at them,’ Katie said, pausing to gesture over to the lunch table, where the men sat, surrounded by remnants of the meal, stacks of dirty plates, empty dishes, and napkins tossed here and there, ignoring the mess with the ease of long practice. ‘They won’t clear that lot up on their own, unless we put a bomb under them. Why should we assume they’d be any better at finding out the really important stuff?’
Beth looked at Katie, astonished. She didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or hug her friend. She settled for just nodding her head. About a hundred times. ‘Katie, you’re on. Let’s do this. I thought you were just going to give me another lecture on how dangerous it all is.’
‘Well, it is,’ said Katie, immediately looking doubtful again. ‘But as long as you promise we won’t get hurt, then I think we should get on with it. It’s been days now, and nothing at all has happened…’
Beth paused for a moment and looked seriously at her friend, then quickly checked over her shoulder. The men were still intent on their own chatter and were paying no attention to them. She spoke in a low, careful voice, hoping against hope that her friend would understand what she was about to say.
‘I completely get how you feel. I feel the same way. But I can’t promise it won’t be dangerous, you know I can’t. People don’t like giving up their secrets. And someone violent is behind all this. Someone who was angry enough to stab Smeaton all those times. You saw him, you know it wasn’t one clean, quick twist of the knife. That would have been bad enough, for goodness sake. He would still have been dead. But this is what someone like Harry would call overkill. It was hatred, pure and simple. That’s a nasty person out there on the loose. And look at what’s happened to me over the past few months. I’ve been hit on the head, my house has been burgled, my office has been broken into – and a really, really weird woman did a wee in my loo that one time and didn’t even flush.’
Katie laughed, and Beth smiled, too, but her grey eyes were serious under her fringe. ‘I mean it, Katie. There’s a murderer out there. A bona fide bad person. And people get even more ruthless when they’re under threat.’