In the Frame (22 page)

‘Mr. Updike,’ I said. ‘At the gallery… which man was it who sold you the Herring?’

‘Mr. Grey,’ he said promptly.

Mr. Grey… Mr. Grey…

I frowned.

‘Such a pleasant man,’ nodded Updike, beaming. ‘I told him I knew very little about pictures, but he assured me I would get as much pleasure from my little Herring as from all my jade.’

‘You did tell him about your jade, then?’

‘Naturally I did. I mean… if you don’t know anything about one thing, well… you try and show you do know about something else. Don’t you? Only human, isn’t it?’

‘Only human,’ I agreed, smiling. ‘What was the name of Mr. Grey’s gallery?’

‘Eh?’ He looked puzzled. ‘I thought you said he sent you, to see my picture.’

‘I go to so many galleries, I’ve foolishly forgotten which one it was.’

‘Ruapehu Fine Arts,’ he said. ‘I was down there last week.’

‘Down…?’

‘In Wellington.’ His smile was slipping. ‘Look here, what is all this?’ Suspicion flitted across his rounded face. ‘Why did you come here? I don’t think Mr. Grey sent you at all.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But Mr. Updike, we mean you no harm. We really are painters, my friend and I. But… now we’ve seen your jade collection… we do think we must warn you. We’ve heard of several people who’ve bought paintings and had their houses burgled soon after. You say you’ve got burglar alarms fitted, so if I were you I’d make sure they are working properly.’

‘But… good gracious…’

‘There’s a bunch of thieves about,’ I said. ‘Who follow up the sales of paintings and burgle the houses of those who buy. I suppose they reckon that if anyone can afford,
say, a Herring, they have other things worth stealing.’

He looked at me with awakening shrewdness. ‘You mean, young man, that I told Mr. Grey about my jade…’

‘Let’s just say,’ I said, ‘That it would be sensible to take more precautions than usual.’

‘But… for how long?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know Mr. Updike. Maybe for ever.’

His round jolly face looked troubled.

‘Why did you bother to come and tell me all this?’ he said.

‘I’d do a great deal more to break up this bunch.’

He asked ‘Why?’ again, so I told him. ‘My cousin bought a painting. My cousin’s house was burgled. My cousin’s wife disturbed the burglars, and they killed her.’

Norman Updike took a long slow look at my face. I couldn’t have stopped him seeing the abiding anger, even if I’d tried. He shivered convulsively.

‘I’m glad you’re not after
me
,’ he said.

I managed a smile. ‘Mr. Updike… please take care. And one day, perhaps, the police may come to see your picture, and ask where you bought it… anyway, they will if I have anything to do with it.’

The round smile returned with understanding and conviction. ‘I’ll expect them,’ he said.

Jik drove us from Auckland to Wellington; eight hours in the car.

We stopped overnight in a motel in the town of Hamilton, south of Auckland, and went on in the morning. No one followed us, molested us or spied on us. As far as I could be, I was sure no one had picked us up in the northern city, and no one knew we had called at the Updikes.

Wexford must know, all the same, that I had the Overseas Customers list, and he knew there were several New Zealand addresses on it. He couldn’t guess which one I’d pick to visit, but he could and would guess that any I picked with the prefix W would steer me straight to the gallery in Wellington.

So in the gallery in Wellington, he’d be ready…

‘You’re looking awfully grim, Todd,’ Sarah said.

‘Sorry.’

‘What were you thinking?’

‘How soon we could stop for lunch.’

She laughed. ‘We’ve only just had breakfast.’

We passed the turning to Rotorua and the land of hot springs. Anyone for a boiling mud pack, Jik asked. There was a power station further on run by steam jets from underground, Sarah said, and horrid black craters stinking of sulphur, and the earth’s crust was so thin in places that it vibrated and sounded hollow. She had been
taken round a place called Waiotapu when she was a child, she said, and had had terrible nightmares afterwards, and she didn’t want to go back.

‘Pooh,’ Jik said dismissively. ‘They only have earthquakes every other Friday.’

‘Somebody told me they have so many earthquakes in Wellington that all the new office blocks are built in cradles,’ Sarah said.

‘Rock-a-bye skyscraper…’ sang Jik, in fine voice.

The sun shone bravely, and the countryside was green with leaves I didn’t know. There were fierce bright patches and deep mysterious shadows; gorges and rocks and heaven-stretching tree trunks; feathery waving grasses, shoulder high. An alien land, wild and beautiful.

‘Get that chiaroscuro,’ Jik said, as we sped into one particularly spectacular curving valley.

‘What’s chiaroscuro?’ Sarah said.

‘Light and shade,’ Jik said. ‘Contrast and balance. Technical term. All the world’s a chiaroscuro, and all the men and women merely blobs of light and shade.’

‘Every life’s a chiaroscuro,’ I said.

‘And every soul.’

‘The enemy,’ I said, ‘is grey.’

‘And you get grey,’ Jik nodded, ‘by muddling together red, white and blue.’

‘Grey lives, grey deaths, all levelled out into equal grey nothing.’

‘No one,’ Sarah sighed, ‘would ever call you two grey.’

‘Grey!’ I said suddenly. ‘Of bloody course.’

‘What are you on about?’ Jik said.

‘Grey was the name of the man who hired the suburban art gallery in Sydney, and Grey is the name of the man who sold Updike his quote Herring unquote.’

‘Oh dear.’ Sarah’s sigh took the lift out of the spirits and the dazzle from the day.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

There were so many of them, I thought. Wexford and Greene. The boy. The woman. Harley Renbo. Two toughs at Alice Springs, one of whom I knew by sight, and one, (the one who’d been behind me) whom I didn’t. The one I didn’t know might, or might not, be Beetle-brows. If he wasn’t, Beetle-brows was extra.

And now Grey. And another one, somewhere.

Nine at least. Maybe ten. How could I possibly tangle all that lot up without getting crunched. Or worse, getting Sarah crunched, or Jik. Every time I moved, the serpent grew another head.

I wondered who did the actual robberies. Did they send their own two (or three) toughs overseas, or did they contract out to local labour, so to speak?

If they sent their own toughs, was it one of them who had killed Regina?

Had I already met Regina’s killer? Had he thrown me over the balcony at Alice?

I pondered uselessly, and added one more twist…

Was he waiting ahead in Wellington?

We reached the capital in the afternoon and booked into the Townhouse Hotel because of its splendid view over the harbour. With such marvellous coastal scenery, I thought, it would have been a disgrace if the cities of New Zealand had been ugly. I still thought there were no big towns more captivating than flat old marshy London, but that was another story. Wellington, new and cared for, had life and character to spare.

I looked up the Ruapehu Fine Arts in the telephone directory and asked the hotel’s reception desk how to get
there. They had never heard of the gallery, but the road it was in, that must be up past the old town, they thought: past Thorndon.

They sold me a local area road map, which they said would help, and told me that Mount Ruapehu was a (with luck) extinct volcano, with a warm lake in its crater. If we’d come from Auckland, we must have passed nearby.

I thanked them and carried the map to Jik and Sarah upstairs in their room.

‘We could find the gallery,’ Jik said. ‘But what would we do when we got there?’

‘Make faces at them through the window?’

‘You’d be crazy enough for that, too,’ Sarah said.

‘Let’s just go and look,’ I said. ‘They won’t see us in the car, if we simply drive past.’

‘And after all,’ Jik said incautiously, ‘we do want them to know we’re here.’

‘Why?’ asked Sarah in amazement.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Jik said.

‘Why?’ she demanded, the anxiety crowding back.

‘Ask Todd, it’s his idea.’

‘You’re a sod,’ I said.

‘Why, Todd?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘I want them to spend all their energies looking for us over here and not clearing away every vestige of evidence in Melbourne. We do want the police to deal with them finally, don’t we, because we can’t exactly arrest them ourselves? Well… when the police start moving, it would be hopeless if there was no one left for them to find.’

She nodded. ‘That’s what you meant by leaving it all in working order. But… you didn’t say anything about deliberately enticing them to follow us.’

‘Todd’s got that list, and the pictures we took,’ Jik
said, ‘and they’ll want them back. Todd wants them to concentrate exclusively on getting them back, because if they think they can get them back and shut us up…’

‘Jik,’ I interrupted. ‘You do go on a bit.’

Sarah looked from me to him and back again. A sort of hopeless calm took over from the anxiety.

‘If they think they can get everything back and shut us up,’ she said, ‘they will be actively searching for us in order to kill us. And you intend to give them every encouragement. Is that right?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Or rather, yes.’

‘They’d be looking for us anyway,’ Jik pointed out.

‘And we are going to say “Coo-ee, we’re over here”?’

‘Um,’ I said. ‘I think they may know already.’

‘God give me strength,’ she said. ‘All right. I see what you’re doing, and I see why you didn’t tell me. And I think you’re a louse. But I’ll grant you you’ve been a damn sight more successful than I thought you’d be, and here we all still are, safe and moderately sound, so all right, we’ll let them know we’re definitely here. On the strict understanding that we then keep our heads down until you’ve fixed the police in Melbourne.’

I kissed her cheek. ‘Done,’ I said.

‘So how do we do it?’

I grinned at her. ‘We address ourselves to the telephone.’

In the end Sarah herself made the call, on the basis that her Australian voice would be less remarkable than Jik’s Englishness, or mine.

‘Is that the Ruapehu Fine Arts gallery? It is? I wonder if you can help me…’ she said. ‘I would like to speak to whoever is in charge. Yes, I know, but it is important. Yes, I’ll wait.’ She rolled her eyes and put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘She sounded like a secretary. New Zealand, anyway.’

‘You’re doing great,’ I said.

‘Oh… Hello? Yes. Could you tell me your name, please?’ Her eyes suddenly opened wide. ‘
Wexford
. Oh, er… Mr Wexford, I’ve just had a visit from three extraordinary people who wanted to see a painting I bought from you some time ago. Quite extraordinary people. They said you’d sent them. I didn’t believe them. I wouldn’t let them in. But I thought perhaps I’d better check with you. Did you send them to see my painting?’

There was some agitated squawking from the receiver.

‘Describe them? A young man with fair hair and a beard, and another young man with an injured arm, and a bedraggled looking girl. I sent them away. I didn’t like the look of them.’

She grimaced over the ‘phone and listened to some more squawks.

‘No of course I didn’t give them any information. I told you I didn’t like the look of them. Where do I live? Why, right here in Wellington. Well, thank you so much Mr Wexford, I am so pleased I called you.’

She put the receiver down while it was still squawking.

‘He was asking me for my name,’ she said.

‘What a girl,’ Jik said. ‘What an actress, my wife.’

Wexford. Wexford himself.

It had
worked
.

I raised a small internal cheer.

‘So now that they know we’re here,’ I said, ‘would you like to go off somewhere else?’

‘Oh no,’ Sarah said instinctively. She looked out of the window across the busy harbour. ‘It’s lovely here, and we’ve been travelling all day already.’

I didn’t argue. I thought it might take more than a single telephone call to keep the enemy interested in Wellington, and it had only been for Sarah’s sake that I would have been prepared to move on.

‘They won’t find us just by checking the hotels by
telephone,’ Jik pointed out. ‘Even if it occurred to them to try the Townhouse, they’d be asking for Cassavetes and Todd, not Andrews and Peel.’

‘Are we Andrews and Peel?’ Sarah asked.

‘We’re Andrews. Todd’s Peel.’

‘So nice to know,’ she said.

Mr and Mrs Andrews and Mr Peel took dinner in the hotel restaurant without mishap, Mr Peel having discarded his sling for the evening on the grounds that it was in general a bit too easy to notice. Mr Andrews had declined, on the same consideration, to remove his beard.

We went in time to our separate rooms, and so to bed. I spent a jolly hour unsticking the Alice bandages from my leg and admiring the hemstitching. The tree had made tears that were far from the orderly cuts of operations, and as I inspected the long curving railway lines on a ridged backing of crimson, black and yellow skin, I reckoned that those doctors had done an expert job. It was four days since the fall, during which time I hadn’t exactly led an inactive life, but none of their handiwork had come adrift. I realised I had progressed almost without noticing it from feeling terrible all the time to scarcely feeling anything worth mentioning. It was astonishing, I thought, how quickly the human body repaired itself, given the chance.

I covered the mementoes with fresh adhesive plaster bought that morning in Hamilton for the purpose, and even found a way of lying in bed that drew no strike action from mending bones. Things, I thought complacently as I drifted to sleep, were altogether looking up.

I suppose one could say that I underestimated on too many counts. I underestimated the desperation with which Wexford had come to New Zealand. Underestimated the rage and the thoroughness with which he searched for us.

Underestimated the effect of our amateur robbery on professional thieves. Underestimated our success. Underestimated the fear and the fury we had unleashed.