Gold Digger (9 page)

Striding on his short legs, Raymond Forrest looked forward to the meeting. He paused, because he was early, a bad habit, although a valuable one for an eavesdropper. There was a moment of regret that he had not been here more often in the last month, listening to the words between the lines, when Thomas, however ill and speech-afflicted, had still seemed immortal and even relatively healthy. Cancer of the oesophagus had decimated his life, but he could still walk and communicate although with increasing frustration. Perhaps Raymond himself might have influenced the current plans Thomas was rehearsing with that deeply suspicious agent of his, Saul, if he had been here more often, and he might have warned his client that it did not do to be too complicated or rely on anyone who was not a lawyer. Thomas had been formulating plans for all sorts of contingencies in the event of his own demise and it was better for Raymond not to know every detail.
Just prove the will, Ray, do your bit.
Ever the messenger boy.

Pausing for breath, he reflected that nothing he might have said would have made the slightest difference. At least he had been there often enough to bear witness to the man’ s mental health. Extremely robust, he would say in any court of law. Agile, even. The man wanted everything left to his absurdly young wife and he was absolutely determined about that. Keep things away from the rapacious and the destructive: those were his instructions. He meant, of course, his children, Thomas’s children by his first wife, Christina. Di did not come into the category of the treacherous, yet. Perhaps her treachery would be in indirect proportion to the colossal trust Thomas had placed in her.

Raymond puffed a cigarette, as he often did before a meeting, in anticipation of it not being allowed indoors. Then he remembered that it was Di he was appointed to see, and there were no such rules in a house too large, convoluted and downright draughty to allow the lingering of toxins. Smoking was mandatory in Thomas’s palace, anyway: it was the first thing he had done when released from hospital, encouraged

by his wife. Too late for self-denial, he said.

Raymond walked on, remembering also in his approach that the grand front entrance to this grand old house was not the point of entry. Access was via the door in the side street at the back, the one the children would use when the building had been a primary school, full of stately rooms as well as some mean ones. Most rooms were full of pictures, paintings, drawings, sketches, but that was the man’s hobby, and what he and Di held in common was an obsessive love of art and the acquisition thereof. They responded with the same intensity to visual things, and that transcended all the differences there might have been. Raymond frowned. This child, Di, was about to be thrown if not to the wolves,
certainly among them and she was far younger than his own daughter.

He reached the house, via the narrow street at the back. A fence faced him with a small door in it, leading on to a back yard full of pots and iron steps up to the raised back door. There was a steel grilled entrance to the basement that could also be reached from the inside. Raymond knocked and went in without waiting for an invitation.

This was the room where Thomas had died. The room he had occupied most during the last six months of his so-called recovery from a cruel operation. The equipment for tubular feeding was packed away into a corner awaiting collection. Di had overseen all that, anything rather than have him stay in hospital – and that decision, too, would be open to scrutiny. Widow Diana was certainly under suspicion, and yet it seemed from their telephone conversations that she was blissfully unaware of it.

Don’t ever let her go to prison, again, Raymond; that’s the one thing that’ll kill her.

There was a different picture on the wall above the fireplace. It was of a plump nude, lying comfortably on a mattress.

‘He called that his last Duchess,’ Di said, coming through from the kitchen. ‘Lovely, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. She looks content.’

The scale of the thing was large for the room, dominating it. A calm face gazed at him over a generous bosom.

‘She’s nothing like me,’ Di said, looking at the painting. ‘But she’s more like I’d like to look. Less skin and bone, always wanted to be fatter.’

Raymond patted his own, ample stomach. ‘Believe me, it doesn’t have much to recommend it. Slows you down.’

‘Perhaps that’s why I need the weight, then. Cup of tea? I’m glad to see you.’

He found that touching, bowed his head in acknowledgement. He had been anxious about this meeting, but yes, he had looked forward to it. Di was an enigma, a keeper of secrets: she looked at everyone with a frank and unnerving suspicion until she made her own judgements, and only then did she smile at you, and when she did, he felt peculiarly blessed as if he had earned praise. A strange way to feel about a convict he had once monitored on Thomas’s behalf, and all the same, she outmanoeuvred him. Intimidated him, was the way he might have described it and that worried him too, because it was odd to feel that way towards a person with whom he also felt entirely safe.
She’s the cat who walks alone,
Thomas said. Raymond had not expected to find her devastated four days after the death of her husband, and she was not. She was woven from tough material, but how tough, he really did not want to investigate. She was certainly a fiercely protective little protége of her man and his memory, but she was not sentimental. Perhaps caring for the sick knocked that out of her.

‘Why did you move that particular painting down here?’ he asked.

‘She belongs here, and we loved her. She cheered him up, me too. He always liked a painting he could talk to.’

Many paintings had been purchased in the last years. There had been a veritable orgy of discreet buying. The children had hated that.

‘Saul found it, you know Saul? I wish he were here. He’s somewhere. He’s doing one of his disappearing acts.’

There was a note of panic in her voice, quickly suppressed.

A fair weather friend, that Saul
, Raymond thought. He
sipped the tea and decided to be brisk. One of the eccentrici -ties of collectors was the way they could talk about paintings and ephemera for hours, before getting down to business, even in an emergency. They were like that, to death and beyond.

‘Look, Di,’ he said. ‘You’re in trouble. I know Thomas is dead, and that’s the worst thing,’ and as he said it, he did not really know if it was the worst thing for her and wondered wistfully if he would ever know. All he knew is that he had never known Thomas Porteous to be as contented or as deviously determined as he had been in Di’s company. They chattered like starlings, behaved like puppies, patently obviously slept in the same bed. He did not wish to think of that aspect, which he found distasteful. But they talked, by God they talked, and walked. And went swimming. They did simple things that pleased them as much as spending money. On household management, Di was thrifty, he remembered. Thomas practically had to force her to buy clothes.

‘The children are certainly going to contest the new will. After all, it appears to have been executed so soon before he died.
I
know it was drafted long ago, and they were kept in the dark, but they’ll fight to the end and beyond and fight dirty, no doubt. The balance of his mind was disturbed, etc, etc. He was suborned by an opportunist, criminal girl, who seduced him into marriage, etcetera, etcetera … ’

His voice trailed away, then hurried along with the bad news. The trouble with this death was that although Thomas had lived beyond medical prognosis due to the care he received, it was still unexpected.

‘… who then took him out of hospital, prematurely, took over his care, fought with everyone for the right to look after
him, and thus ensured his premature death. At a point when he had difficulty communicating and was entirely dependent, he was starved to death, denied official entry when he did die, and in the meantime, his hand was forced to a
new
will, which should therefore, be overruled. That’s the sort of thing, anyway. There has to be a post mortem, of course. So everything waits for that. You know I spoke to them, and Gayle sent condolences, but oh dear, I can’t believe anything, because Edward phoned me afterwards, you see; he was rather drunk and it was extremely revealing. They do wish you ill, my dear. And they do know the circumstances of his death.’

He did not want to tell her how bad his interview with what he called ‘the girls’ and Edward had been. He sat back, exhausted by his own recitation. She bowed her head, allowing him to look down on her wasted hair. It had grown thin during the last months, balding at the back. She looked up and smiled sadly.

‘As bad as that? Well, it isn’t true, you know. It’ll be ironic if they construct a case against me on the basis of what I’ve told them.’

‘
I
know it isn’t true,’ Raymond said, ‘because I had many conversations with Thomas. And I know he didn’t want anyone else around him but you. It might have been easier now if you had insisted otherwise.’

She nodded.

‘Yes, I can see that, if only to have a witness. But to suggest I kept people away is not right. Thomas went out every day: he could walk and he looked well; no one knew how ill he was and he didn’t want them to know. There might have been more offers of help otherwise. What people saw was a man who could walk to the pier and back and smile at people. He
had his pride, Thomas. You knew that he spent hours a day attached to a feeding tube because he told you. His daughters knew because I told them; I made sure they knew what was happening, and so did you. I reported to them regularly, and I pleaded with them to come and see him. They wouldn’t or couldn’t.’

‘It would indeed be ironic, if they use what you have told them against you. But I do suspect they have other sources of information, and they have certainly investigated you. Are there records of what you told them?’

She shook her head, baffled. ‘No, mostly phone messages. Beatrice was unpleasant. She told me I’d made my filthy bed and I should lie on it. I only spoke to Gayle or Edward after that. I think Gayle thought she still had plenty of time to visit, only she didn’t have time. As for taking him out of hospital, they wanted it, I wanted it, he wanted it. He was desperate to come home. I didn’t refuse aftercare, but the nurses didn’t understand the feeding equipment. All they could suggest when there was a problem was going back into hospital, and Thomas said it was like going to prison and no one goes to prison on my watch. We were better working things out for ourselves. I thought Gayle understood.’

‘You don’t have to justify it to me,’ he said.

‘Yes, I do,’ she said, remarkably calm and non-indignant. ‘And as for me forcing Thomas to make a different will, that’s crazy. No one could force Thomas to do something he didn’t think right to do.’

‘Maybe it would have been better not to have misled them,’ he wondered aloud, guilty about his part in that. ‘Only they weren’t misled, exactly, they were allowed to
assume.
’

‘To assume whatever they assumed before. Thomas thought that was safer.’

‘And I agreed about that. Was there
any
happiness in the last few weeks, Di?’

He had a memory of arriving here the last time, in September, early again, and finding them both helpless with laughter, arguing the merits of a piece of flint and what it resembled. A woman or a bear, he couldn’t remember.

She nodded her head, vigorously. Hair drifted away.

‘Oh yes, there were plenty of good times, until he realised his sight was going. Thomas lived through his eyes, you see. Until he realised it wasn’t going to get better. Until he knew he shouldn’t swim any more. When he thought he was a burden to
me.
The hot summer tortured him: he was writing more than speaking, oh yes, he could still write … oh shit.’ She turned away.

‘Is that when he went into planning overdrive?’

‘Serious, long term planning – he started that long ago, you know that. Plans to preserve the collection and extend it. The will is all about that. As for contingency plans, well – he was hatching those with Saul in the last three months. Plans based on their knowledge of his children. You all know them better than I do. I was glad of the planning, it gave him a purpose.’

Raymond stared at the nude. ‘With great respect, and with all these contingency plans, I doubt if even Thomas could imagine how vicious it might get. He was a great judge of people, of course, but anybody can underestimate.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘I can only trust whom he trusted. What I have to carry is
his
trust, Raymond, his trust in me to do what he wanted. But all the same, it doesn’t seem right to leave his children with nothing, however cruel they’ve been. If there’s a way to rectify that, that’s what I’d want to do, for the sake of
their
children.’

Especially Patrick. Brave little Patrick, who bunked off school and caught the train, and came to see Grandpa in secret.
Don’t mention that
.

‘Why should you care about his children?’ Raymond asked, listening to her voice.

‘Because
he
did. Because I want to change their minds? Because maybe, being the way they are isn’t entirely their fault. And because, in a way, I feel sorry for them. Thomas was the most marvellous man in the world. To have a father like that, and not to know him, strikes me as not just sad, it’s bloody tragic. They must feel it.’

She got up and marched round the room with her arms crossed across her chest.

‘
But,
preserving this house and this collection comes first. Because it
is
for his children in a way, but not just for them. It’s for lots of people and their children, and their children. It’s for everybody in the end and that’s what the money’s for. There’s only so much of it, after all. Of course they can share it, but only like everyone else.’

Raymond was noticing how Di had a wonderful panoply of accents, ranging from something local to posh, slipping and sliding in between, a voice that went from the modulated to the strident. She was a natural mimic, which was, he thought uncomfortably, a great attribute for a confidence trickster.
You can trust her absolutely,
Thomas had said.