In the Frame (25 page)

‘They took a pot shot at me. Would bullet cases be of any use? Fortunately I didn’t collect a bullet, but I’ve got six shells.’

‘They may be…’ He sounded faint. ‘What about the stock list?’

‘In the shorter list… Got it?’

‘Yes, in front of me.’

‘Right. The first letter is for the city the painting was sold in; M for Melbourne, S for Sydney, W for Wellington. The second letter identifies the painter; M for Munnings, H for Herring, and I think R for Raoul Millais. The letter G stands for copy. All the paintings on that list are copies. All the ones on the longer list are originals. Got that?’

‘Yes. Go on.’

‘The numbers are just numbers. They’d sold 54 copies when I… er… when the list reached me. The last letter R stands for Renbo. That’s Harley Renbo, who was working at Alice Springs. If you remember, I told you about him last time.’

‘I remember,’ he said.

‘Wexford and Greene have spent the last couple of days chasing around in New Zealand, so with a bit of luck they will not have destroyed anything dodgy in the Melbourne gallery. If the Melbourne police can arrange a search, there might be a harvest.’

‘It’s their belief that the disappearance of the list from the gallery will have already led to the immediate destruction of anything else incriminating.’

‘They may be wrong. Wexford and Greene don’t know I photo-copied the list and sent it to you. They think the list is floating safely out to sea, and me with it.’

‘I’ll pass your message to Melbourne.’

‘There’s also another gallery here in Wellington, and an imitation Herring they sold to a man in Auckland…’

‘For heaven’s sake…’

I gave him the Ruapehu address, and mentioned Norman Updike.

‘There’s also a recurring B on the long stock list, so there’s probably another gallery. In Brisbane, maybe.
There may also be another one in Sydney. I shouldn’t think the suburban place I told you about had proved central enough, so they shut it.’

‘Stop,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But the organisation is like a mushroom… it burrows along underground and pops up everywhere.’

‘I only said stop so I could change the tape on the recorder. You can carry right on now.’

‘Oh.’ I half laughed. ‘Well… did you get any answers from Donald to my questions?’

‘Yes, we did.’

‘Carefully?’

‘Rest assured,’ he said dryly. ‘We carried out your wishes to the letter. Mr Stuart’s answers were “Yes of course” to the first question, and “No, whyever should I” to the second, and “Yes” to the third.’

‘Was he absolutely certain?’

‘Absolutely.’ He cleared his throat. ‘He seems distant and withdrawn. Uninterested. But quite definite.’

‘How is he?’ I asked.

‘He spends all his time looking at a picture of his wife. Every time we call at his house, we can see him through the front window, just sitting there.’

‘He is still… sane?’

‘I’m no judge.’

‘You can at least let him know that he’s no longer suspected of engineering the robbery and killing Regina.’

‘That’s a decision for my superiors,’ he said.

‘Well, kick them into it,’ I said. ‘Do the police positively yearn for bad publicity?’

‘You were quick enough to ask our help,’ he said tartly.

To do your job, I thought. I didn’t say it aloud. The silence spoke for itself.

‘Well…’ his voice carried a mild apology. ‘Our
co-operation, then.’ He paused. ‘Where are you now? When I’ve telexed Melbourne, I may need to talk to you again.’

‘I’m in a ’phone booth in a country store in a village on the hills above Wellington.’

‘Where are you going next?’

‘I’m staying right here. Wexford and Greene are still around in the city and I don’t want to risk the outside chance of their seeing me.’

‘Give me the number, then.’

I read it off the telephone.

‘I want to come home as soon as possible,’ I said. ‘Can you do anything about my passport?’

‘You’ll have to find a consul.’

Oh ta, I thought tiredly. I hung up the receiver and wobbled back to the car.

‘Tell you what,’ I said, dragging into the back seat, ‘I could do with a double hamburger and a bottle of brandy.’

We sat in the car for two hours.

The store didn’t sell liquor or hot food. Sarah bought a packet of biscuits. We ate them.

‘We can’t stay here all day,’ she said explosively, after a lengthy glum silence.

I couldn’t be sure that Wexford wasn’t out searching for her and Jik with murderous intent, and I didn’t think she’d be happy to know it.

‘We’re perfectly safe here,’ I said.

‘Just quietly dying of blood-poisoning,’ Jik agreed.

‘I left my pills in the Hilton,’ Sarah said.

Jik stared. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Nothing. I just thought you might like to know.’

‘
The
pill?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus,’ Jik said.

A delivery van struggled up the hill and stopped outside the shop. A man in an overall opened the back, took out a large bakery tray, and carried it in.

‘Food,’ I said hopefully.

Sarah went in to investigate. Jik took the opportunity to unstick his tee-shirt from his healing grazes, but I didn’t bother.

‘You’ll be glued to those clothes, if you don’t,’ Jik said, grimacing over his task.

‘I’ll soak them off.’

‘All those cuts and things didn’t feel so bad when we were in the sea.’

‘No.’

‘Catches up with you a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘Mm.’

He glanced at me. ‘Why don’t you just scream or something?’

‘Can’t be bothered. Why don’t you?’

He grinned. ‘I’ll scream in paint.’

Sarah came back with fresh doughnuts and cans of Coke. We made inroads, and I at least felt healthier.

After another half hour, the store keeper appeared in the doorway, shouting and beckoning.

‘A call for you…’

I went stiffly to the telephone. It was Frost, clear as a bell.

‘Wexford, Greene and Snell have booked a flight to Melbourne. They will be met at Melbourne airport…’

‘Who’s Snell?’ I said.

‘How do I know? He was travelling with the other two.’

Beetle-brows, I thought.

‘Now listen,’ Frost said. ‘The telex has been red-hot between here and Melbourne, and the police there want your co-operation, just to clinch things…’ He went on
talking for a long time. At the end he said, ‘Will you do that?’

I’m tired, I thought. I’m battered, and I hurt. I’ve done just about enough.

‘All right.’

Might as well finish it, I supposed.

‘The Melbourne police want to know for sure that the three Munnings copies you… er… acquired from the gallery are still where you told me.’

‘Yes, they are.’

‘Right. Well… good luck.’

We flew Air New Zealand back to Melbourne, tended by angels in sea-green. Sarah looked fresh, Jik definitely shop-worn, and I apparently like a mixture (Jik said) of yellow ochre, Payne’s grey, and white, which I didn’t think was possible.

Our passage had been oiled by telexes from above. When we arrived at the airport after collecting Sarah’s belongings in their carrier bags from the Townhouse, we found ourselves whisked into a private room, plied with strong drink, and subsequently taken by car straight out across the tarmac to the aeroplane.

A thousand miles across the Tasman Sea and an afternoon tea later we were driven straight from the aircraft’s steps to another small airport room, which contained no strong drink but only a large hard Australian plain-clothes policeman.

‘Porter,’ he said, introducing himself and squeezing our bones in a blacksmith’s grip. ‘Which of you is Charles Todd?’

‘I am.’

‘Right on, Mr Todd.’ He looked at me without favour. ‘Are you ill, or something?’ He had a strong rough voice and a strong rough manner, natural aids to putting the fear of God into chummy and bringing on breakdowns in the nervous. To me, I gradually gathered, he was grudgingly offering the status of temporary inferior colleague.

‘No,’ I said, sighing slightly. Time and airline schedules waited for no man. If I’d spent time on first aid we’d have missed the only possible flight.

‘His clothes are sticking to him,’ Jik observed, giving the familiar phrase the usual meaning of being hot. It was cool in Melbourne. Porter looked at him uncertainly.

I grinned. ‘Did you manage what you planned?’ I asked him. He decided Jik was nuts and switched his gaze back to me.

‘We decided not to go ahead until you had arrived,’ he said, shrugging. ‘There’s a car waiting outside.’ He wheeled out of the door without holding it for Sarah and marched briskly off.

The car had a chauffeur. Porter sat in front, talking on a radio, saying in stiltedly guarded sentences that the party had arrived and the proposals should be implemented.

‘Where are we going?’ Sarah said.

‘To reunite you with your clothes,’ I said.

Her face lit up. ‘Are we really?’

‘And what for?’ Jik asked.

‘To bring the mouse to the cheese.’ And the bull to the sword, I thought: and the moment of truth to the conjuror.

‘We got your things back, Todd,’ Porter said with satisfaction. ‘Wexford, Greene and Snell were turned over on entry, and they copped them with the lot. The locks on your suitcase were scratched and dented but they hadn’t burst open. Everything inside should be O.K. You can collect everything in the morning.’

‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Did they still have any of the lists of customers?’

‘Yeah. Damp but readable. Names of guys in Canada.’

‘Good.’

‘We’re turning over that Yarra gallery right this minute, and Wexford is there helping. We’ve let him
overhear what we wanted him to, and as soon as I give the go-ahead we’ll let him take action.’

‘Do you think he will?’ I said.

‘Look, mister, wouldn’t you?’

I thought I might be wary of gifts from the Greeks, but then I wasn’t Wexford, and I didn’t have a jail sentence breathing down my neck.

We pulled up at the side door of the Hilton. Porter raised himself agilely to the pavement and stood like a solid pillar, watching with half-concealed impatience while Jik, Sarah, and I eased ourselves slowly out. We all went across the familiar red-and-blue opulence of the great entrance hall, and from there through a gate in the reception desk, and into the hotel manager’s office at the rear.

A tall dark-suited member of the hotel staff there offered us chairs, coffee, and sandwiches. Porter looked at his watch and offered us an indeterminate wait.

It was six o’clock. After ten minutes a man in shirt and necktie brought a two-way personal radio for Porter, who slipped the ear-plug into place and began listening to disembodied voices.

The office was a working room, lit by neon strips and furnished functionally, with a wall-papering of charts and duty rosters. There were no outside windows: nothing to show the fade of day to night.

We sat, and drank coffee, and waited. Porter ate three of the sandwiches simultaneously. Time passed.

Seven o’clock.

Sarah was looking pale in the artificial light, and tired also. So was Jik, his beard on his chest. I sat and thought about life and death and polka dots.

At seven eleven Porter clutched his ear and concentrated intently on the ceiling. When he relaxed, he passed to us the galvanic message.

‘Wexford did just what we reckoned he would, and the engine’s turning over.’

‘What engine?’ Sarah said.

Porter stared at her blankly. ‘What we planned,’ he said painstakingly, ‘is happening.’

‘Oh.’

Porter listened again to his private ear and spoke directly to me. ‘He’s taken the bait.’

‘He’s a fool,’ I said.

Porter came as near to a smile as he could. ‘All crooks are fools, one way or another.’

Seven-thirty came and went. I raised my eyebrows at Porter. He shook his head.

‘We can’t say too much on the radio,’ he said. ‘Because you get all sorts of ears listening in.’

Just like England, I thought. The Press could turn up at a crime before the police; and the mouse might hear of the trap.

We waited. The time dragged. Jik yawned and Sarah’s eyes were dark with fatigue. Outside, in the lobby, the busy rich life of the hotel chattered on unruffled, with guests’ spirits rising towards the next day’s race meeting, the last of the carnival.

The Derby on Saturday, the Cup on Tuesday, the Oaks (which we’d missed) on Thursday, and the International on Saturday. No serious racegoers went home before the end of things, if they could help it.

Porter clutched his ear again, and stiffened.

‘He’s here,’ he said.

My heart, for some unaccountable reason, began beating overtime. We were in no danger that I could see, yet there it was, thumping away like a steam organ.

Porter disconnected himself from the radio, put it on the manager’s desk, and went out into the foyer.

‘What do we do?’ Sarah said.

‘Nothing much except listen.’

We all three went over to the door and held it six inches open. We listened to people asking for their room keys, asking for letters and messages, asking for Mr and Mrs So-and-So, and which way to Toorak, and how did you get to Fanny’s.

Then suddenly, the familiar voice, sending electric fizzes to my finger tips. Confident: not expecting trouble. ‘I’ve come to collect a package left here last Tuesday by a Mr Charles Todd. He says he checked it into the baggage room. I have a letter here from him, authorising you to release it to me.’

There was a crackle of paper as the letter was handed over. Sarah’s eyes were round and startled.

‘Did you write it?’ she whispered.

I shook my head. ‘No.’

The desk clerk outside said, ‘Thank you, sir. If you’ll just wait a moment I’ll fetch the package.’

There was a long pause. My heart made a lot of noise, but nothing much else happened.

The desk clerk came back. ‘Here you are, sir. Paintings, sir.’

‘That’s right.’

There were vague sounds of the bundle of paintings and the print-folder being carried along outside the door.

‘I’ll bring them round for you,’ said the clerk, suddenly closer to us. ‘Here we are, sir.’ He went past the office, through the door in the desk, and round to the front. ‘Can you manage them, sir?’