Come to Grief (25 page)

I often used John Sidney in my job: whenever, in fact, I didn’t want to be known to be Sid Halley. After the past months of all-too-public drubbing I wasn’t sure that Sid Halley would get me anything anywhere but a swift heave-ho.

Trish Huxford, somewhere, I would have guessed, in the middle to late forties, was pretty, blonde (natural?), small-framed and cheerful. Bright, observant eyes looked over my gray business suit, white shirt, unobtrusive tie, brown shoes, dark hair, dark eyes, unthreatening manner: my usual working confidence-inspiring exterior.

She was still on a high from the photo session. She needed someone to help her unwind, and I looked—and was—safe. Thankfully I saw her relax.

The amazing dress she had worn for the photographs was utterly simple in cut, hanging heavy and straight from her shoulders, floor length and sleeveless with a soft ruffled frill around her neck. It was the cloth of the dress that staggered: it was blue and red and silver and gold, and it
shimmered.

“Did you weave your dress?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“No, you wouldn‘t, not nowadays. Can I do anything for you? Where did you come from?”

“London. Saul Marcus suggested you might know who wove my strip of silk.”

“Saul! How is he?”

“He has a white beard,” I said. “He seemed fine.”

“I haven’t seen him for years. Will you make me some tea? I don’t want marks on this dress.”

I smiled. “I’m quite good at tea.”

She led the way past the throne and around the white-painted screen. There were choir stalls beyond, old and untouched, and an altar table covered by a cloth that brought me to a halt. It was of a brilliant royal blue with shining gold Greek motifs woven into its deep hem. On the table, in the place of a religious altar, stood an antique spinning wheel, good enough for Sleeping Beauty. Above the table, arched clear glass windows rose to the roof.

“This way,” Patricia Huxford commanded, and, leading me past the choir stalls, turned abruptly through a narrow doorway which opened onto what had once probably been a vestry and was now a small modem kitchen with a bathroom beside it.

“My bed is in the south transept,” she told me, “and my looms are in the north. You might expect us to be going to drink China tea with lemon out of a silver tea-pot, but in fact I don’t have enough time for that sort of thing, so the tea bags and mugs are on that shelf.”

I half filled her electric kettle and plugged it in, and she spent the time walking around watching the miraculous colors move and mingle in her dress.

Intrigued, waiting for the water to boil, I asked, “What is it made of?”

“What do you think?”

“Er, it looks like ... well ... gold.”

She laughed. “Quite right. Gold, silver thread and silk.”

I rather clumsily filled the mugs.

“Milk?” she suggested.

“No, thank you.”

“That’s lucky. The crowd that’s just left finished it off.” She gave me a brilliant smile, picked up a mug by its handle and returned to the throne, where she sat neatly on the vast red velvet chair and rested a thin arm delicately along gilt carving. The dress fell into sculptured folds over her slender thighs.

“The photographs,” she said, “are for a magazine about a festival of the arts that Chichester is staging all next summer.”

I stood before her like some medieval page: stood chiefly because there was no chair nearby to sit on.

“I suppose,” she said, “that you think me madly eccentric?”

“Not madly.”

She grinned happily. “Normally I wear jeans and an old smock.” She drank some tea. “Usually I work. To day is play-acting.”

“And magnificent.”

She nodded. “No one, these days, makes cloth of gold.”

“The Field of the Cloth of Gold,” I exclaimed.

“That’s right. What do you know of it?”

“Only that phrase.”

“The field was the meeting place at Guines, France, in June 1520, of Henry the Eighth of England and Francis the First of France. They were supposed to be making peace between England and France but they hated each other and tried to outdo each other in splendor. So all their courtiers wore cloth woven out of gold and they gave each other gifts you’d never see today. And I thought it would be historic to weave some cloth of gold for the festival ... so I did. And this dress weighs a ton, I may tell you. Today is the only time I’ve worn it and I can’t bear to take it off.”

“It’s breathtaking,” I said.

She poured out her knowledge. “In 1476 the Duke of Burgundy left behind a hundred and sixty gold cloths when he fled from battle against the Swiss. You make gold cloth—like I made this—by supporting the soft gold on threads of silk, and you can recover the gold by burning the cloth. So when I was making this dress, that’s what I did with the pieces I cut out to make the neck and armholes. I burnt them and collected the melted gold.”

“Beautiful.”

“You know something?” she said. “You’re the only person who’s seen this dress who hasn’t asked how much it cost.”

“I did wonder.”

“And I’m not telling. Give me your strip of silk.”

I took her empty mug and tucked it under my left arm, and in my right hand held out the rag, which she took; and I found her looking with concentration at my left hand. She raised her eyes to meet my gaze.

“Is it . . . ?” she said.

“Worth its weight in gold,” I said flippantly. “Yes.”

I carried the mugs back to the kitchen and returned to find her standing and smoothing her fingers over the piece of rag.

“An interior decorator,” I said, “told me it was probably a modem copy of a hanging made in 1760 by ... um ... I think Philippe de Lasalle.”

“How clever. Yes, it is. I made quite a lot of it at one time.” She paused, then said abruptly, “Come along,” and dived off again, leaving me to follow.

We went this time through a door in another white-painted partition and found ourselves in the north transept, her workroom.

There were three looms of varying construction, all bearing work in progress. There was also a business section with filing cabinets and a good deal of office paraphernalia, and another area devoted to measuring, cutting and packing.

“I make fabrics you can’t buy anywhere else,” she said. “Most of it goes to the Middle East.” She walked towards the largest of the three looms, a monster that rose in steps to double our height.

“This is a Jacquard loom,” she said. “I made your sample on this.”

“I was told this piece was... a lampas? What’s a lampas?”

She nodded. “A lampas is a compound weave with extra warps and wefts which put patterns and colors on the face of the fabric only, and are tucked into the back.” She showed me how the design of ropes and branches of leaves gleamed on one side of the turquoise silk but hardly showed on the reverse. “It takes ages to set up,” she said. “Nowadays almost no one outside the Middle East thinks the beauty is worth the expense, but once I used to sell quite a lot of it to castles and great houses in England, and all sorts of private people. I only make it to order.”

I said neutrally, “Would you know who you made this piece for?”

“My dear man. No, I can’t remember. But I probably still have the records. Why do you want to know? Is it important?”

“I don’t know if it is important. I was given the strip and asked to find its origin.”

She shrugged. “Let’s find it then. You never know, I might get an order for some more.”

She opened cupboard doors to reveal many ranks of box files, and ran her fingers along the labels on the spines until she came to one that her expression announced as possible. She lifted the box file from the shelf and opened it on a table.

Inside were stiff pages with samples of fabric stapled to them, with full details of fibers, dates, amount made, names of purchasers and receipts.

She turned the stiff pages slowly, holding my strip in one hand for comparison. She came to several versions of the same design, but all in the wrong color.

“That’s it!” she exclaimed suddenly. “That’s the one. I see I wove it almost thirty years ago. How time flies. I was so young then. It was a hanging for a four-poster bed. I see I supplied it with gold tassels made of gimp.”

I asked without much expectation, “Who to?”

“It says here a Mrs. Gordon Quint.”

I said, “... Er ...” meaninglessly, my breath literally taken away.

Ginnie?
Ginnie
had owned the material? “I don’t remember her or anything about it,” Trish Huxford said. “But all the colors match. It must have been this one commission. I don’t think I made these colors for anyone else.” She looked at the black stains disfiguring the strip I’d brought. “What a pity! I think of my fabrics as going on forever. They could easily last two hundred years. I love the idea of leaving something beautiful in the world. I expect you think I’m a sentimental old bag.”

“I think you’re splendid,” I said truthfully, and asked, “Why are you ex-directory, with a business to run?”

She laughed. “I hate being interrupted when I’m setting up a design. It takes vast concentration. I have a mobile phone for friends—I can switch it off—and I have an agent in the Middle East, who gets orders for me. Why am I telling you all this?”

“I’m interested.”

She closed the file and put it back on the shelf, asking, “Does Mrs. Quint want some more fabric to replace this damaged bit, do you think?”

Mrs. Quint was sixteen floors dead.

“I don’t know,” I said.

On the drive back to London I pulled off the road to phone Davis Tatum at the number he’d given me, his home.

He was in and, it seemed, glad to hear from me, wanting to know what I’d done for him so far.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll give Topline Foods a visit. Who did you get Owen Yorkshire’s name from?”

He said, stalling, “I beg your pardon?”

“Davis,” I said mildly, “you want me to take a look at Owen Yorkshire and his company, so why? Why
him?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Do you mean you promised not to, or you don’t know?”

“I mean . . . just go and take a look.”

I said, “Sir Thomas Ullaston, Senior Steward last year of the Jockey Club, told Archie Kirk about that little matter of the chains, and Archie Kirk told you. So did the name Owen Yorkshire come to you from Archie Kirk?”

“Hell,” he said.

“I like to know what I’m getting into.”

After a pause he said, “Owen Yorkshire has been seen twice in the boardroom of
The Pump.
We don’t know why.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Is that enough?”

“To be going on with. Oh, and my mobile phone is now safe. No more leaks. See you later.”

I drove on to London, parked in the underground garage and walked along the alleyway between tall houses that led into the opposite side of the square from my flat.

I was going quietly and cautiously in any case, and came to a dead stop when I saw that the streetlight almost directly outside my window was not lit.

Boys sometimes threw stones at it to break the glass. Normally its darkness wouldn’t have sent shudders up my spine and made my right arm remember Gordon Quint from fingers to neck. Normally I might have crossed the square figuratively whistling while intending to phone in the morning to get the light fixed.

Things were not normal.

There were two locked gates into the central garden, one opposite the path I was on, and one on the far side, opposite my house. Standing in shadow, I sorted out the resident-allocated garden key, went quietly across the circling roadway and unlocked the near gate.

Nothing moved. I eased the gate open, slid through and closed it behind me. No squeaks. I moved slowly from patch to patch of shaded cover, the half-lit tree branches moving in a light breeze, yellow leaves drifting down like ghosts.

Near the far side I stopped and waited.

There could be no one there. I was foolishly afraid over nothing.

The streetlight was out.

It had been out at other times....

I stood with my back to a tree, waiting for alarm to subside to the point where I would unlock the second gate and cross the road to my front steps. The sounds of the city were distant. No cars drove into the cul-de- sac square.

I couldn’t stand there all night, I thought ...
and then I saw him.

He was in a car parked by one of the few meters. His head—unmistakably Gordon Quint’s head—moved behind the window. He was looking straight ahead, waiting for me to arrive by road or pavement.

I stood immobile as if stuck to the tree. It had to be obsession with him, I thought. The burning fury of Monday had settled down not into grief but revenge. I hadn’t been in my flat for about thirty hours. How long had he been sitting there waiting? I’d had a villain wait almost a week for me once, before I’d walked unsuspectingly into his trap.