In the Frame (26 page)

‘Yes. Yes. Thank you.’ There was haste in his voice, now that he’d got his hands on the goods. ‘Thank you. Goodbye.’

Sarah had begun to say ‘Is that all?’ in disappointment when Porter’s loud voice chopped into the Hilton velvet like a hatchet.

‘I guess we’ll take care of those paintings, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Porter, Melbourne city police.’

I opened the door a little, and looked out. Porter stood four square in the lobby, large and rough, holding out a demanding hand.

At his elbows, two plain-clothes policemen. At the front door, two more, in uniform. There would be others, I supposed, at the other exits. They weren’t taking any chances.

‘Why… er… Inspector… I’m only on an errand… er… for my young friend, Charles Todd.’

‘And these paintings?’

‘I’ve no idea what they are. He asked me to fetch them for him.’

I walked quietly out of the office, through the gate and round to the front. I leaned a little wearily against the reception desk. He was only six feet away, in front of me to my right. I could have stretched forward and touched him. I hoped Porter would think it near enough, as requested.

A certain amount of unease had pervaded the Hilton guests. They stood around in an uneven semi-circle, eyeing the proceedings sideways.

‘Mr Charles Todd asked you to fetch them?’ Porter said loudly.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

Porter’s gaze switched abruptly to my face.

‘Did you ask him?’

‘No,’ I said.

The explosive effect was all that the Melbourne police could have asked, and a good deal more than I expected. There was no polite quiet identification followed by a polite quiet arrest. I should have remembered all my own theories about the basic brutality of the directing mind.

I found myself staring straight into the eyes of the bull.
He realised that he’d been tricked. Had convicted himself out of his own mouth and by his own presence on such an errand. The fury rose in him like a geyser and his hands reached out to grab my neck.

‘
You
’
re dead
,’ he yelled. ‘
You
’
re fucking dead
.’

His plunging weight took me off balance and down on to one knee, smothering under his choking grip and two hundred pounds of city suiting; trying to beat him off with my fists and not succeeding. His anger poured over me like lava. Heaven knows what he intended, but Porter’s men pulled him off before he did bloody murder on the plushy carpet. As I got creakily to my feet, I heard the handcuffs click.

He was standing there, close to me, quivering in the restraining hands, breathing heavily, dishevelled and bitter-eyed. Civilised exterior all stripped away by one instant of ungovernable rage. The violent core plain to see.

‘Hello, Hudson,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ Porter said perfunctorily. ‘Didn’t reckon he’d turn wild.’

‘Revert,’ I said.

‘Uh?’

‘He always was wild,’ I said, ‘Underneath.’

‘You’d know,’ he said. ‘I never saw the guy before.’ He nodded to Jik and Sarah and finally to me, and hurried away after his departing prisoner.

We looked at each other a little blankly. The hotel guests stared at us curiously and began to drift away. We sat down weakly on the nearest blue velvet seat, Sarah in the middle.

Jik took her hand and squeezed it. She put her fingers over mine.

It had taken nine days.

It had been a long haul.

‘Don’t know about you,’ Jik said. ‘But I could do with a beer.’

Todd,’ said Sarah, ‘Start talking.’

We were upstairs in a bedroom (mine) with both of them in a relaxed mood, and me in Jik’s dressing gown, and he and I in a cloud of Dettol.

I yawned. ‘About Hudson?’

‘Who else? And don’t go to sleep before you’ve told us.’

‘Well… I was looking for him, or someone like him, before I ever met him.’

‘But why?’

‘Because of the wine,’ I said. ‘Because of the wine which was stolen from Donald’s cellar. Whoever stole it not only knew it was there, down some stairs behind an inconspicuous cupboard-like door… and I’d stayed several times in the house and never knew the cellar existed… but according to Donald they would have had to come prepared with proper cases to pack it in. Wine is usually packed twelve bottles in a case… and Donald had two thousand or more bottles stolen. In bulk alone it would have taken a lot of shifting. A lot of time, too, and time for house-breakers is risky. But also it was special wine. A small fortune, Donald said. The sort of wine that’s bought and sold as an asset and ends up at a week’s wage a bottle, if it’s ever drunk at all. Anyway, it was the sort of wine that needed expert handling and marketing if it was to be worth the difficulty of stealing it in the first place… and as Donald’s business is wine, and the reason for his journey to Australia was wine, I started looking right away for someone who knew Donald, knew he’d bought a Munnings, and knew about good wine and how to sell it. And there, straightaway, was Hudson Taylor, who matched like a glove. But it seemed too easy… because he didn’t
look
right.’

‘Smooth and friendly,’ said Sarah, nodding.

‘And rich,’ Jik added.

‘Probably a moneyholic,’ I said, pulling open the bed and looking longingly at the cool white sheets.

‘A what?’

‘Moneyholic. A word I’ve just made up to describe someone with an uncontrollable addiction to money.’

‘The world’s full of them,’ Jik said, laughing.

I shook my head. ‘The world is full of drinkers, but alcoholics are obsessive. Moneyholics are obsessive. They never have enough. They
cannot
have enough. However much they have, they want more. And I’m not talking about the average hard-up man, but about real screwballs. Money, money, money. Like a drug. Moneyholics will do anything to get it… Kidnap, murder, cook the computer, rob banks, sell their grandmothers… You name it.’

I sat on the bed with my feet up, feeling less than fit. Sore from too many bruises, on fire from too many cuts. Jik too, I guessed. They had been wicked rocks.

‘Moneyholism,’ Jik said, like a lecturer to a dimmish class, ‘is a widespread disease easily understood by everyone who has ever felt a twinge of greed, which is everyone.’

‘Go on about Hudson,’ Sarah said.

‘Hudson had the organising ability… I didn’t know when I came that the organisation was so huge, but I did know it was
organised
, if you see what I mean. It was an overseas operation. It took some doing. Knowhow.’

Jik tugged the ring off a can of beer and passed it to me, wincing as he stretched.

‘But he convinced me I was wrong about him,’ I said, drinking through the triangular hole. ‘Because he was so careful. He pretended he had to look up the name of the gallery where Donald bought his picture. He didn’t think
of me as a threat, of course, but just as Donald’s cousin. Not until he talked to Wexford down on the lawn.’

‘I remember,’ Sarah said. ‘When you said it had ripped the whole works apart.’

‘Mm… I thought it was only that he had told Wexford I was Donald’s cousin, but of course Wexford also told
him
that I’d met Greene in Maisie’s ruins in Sussex and then turned up in the gallery looking at the original of Maisie’s burnt painting.’

‘Jesus Almighty,’ Jik said. ‘No wonder we beat it to Alice Springs.’

‘Yes, but by then I didn’t think it could be Hudson I was looking for. I was looking for someone brutal, who passed on his violence through his employees. Hudson didn’t look or act brutal.’ I paused. ‘The only slightest crack was when his gamble went down the drain at the races. He gripped his binoculars so hard that his knuckles showed white. But you can’t think a man is a big-time thug just because he gets upset over losing a bet.’

Jik grinned. ‘I’d qualify.’

‘In spades, redoubled,’ Sarah said.

‘I was thinking about it in the Alice Springs hospital… There hadn’t been time for the musclemen to get to Alice from Melbourne between us buying Renbo’s picture and me diving off the balcony, but there had been time for them to come from
Adelaide
, and Hudson’s base was at Adelaide… but it was much too flimsy.’

‘They might have been in Alice to start with,’ Jik said reasonably.

‘They might, but what for?’ I yawned. ‘Then on the night of the Cup you said Hudson had made a point of asking you about me… and I wondered how he knew you.’

‘Do you know,’ Sarah said, ‘I did wonder too at the time, but it didn’t seem important. I mean,
we’d
seen
him
from the top of the stands, so it didn’t seem impossible that somewhere he’d seen you with us.’

‘The boy knew you,’ I said. ‘And he was at the races, because he followed you, with Greene, to the Hilton. The boy must have pointed you out to Greene.’

‘And Greene to Wexford, and Wexford to Hudson?’ Jik asked.

‘Quite likely.’

‘And by then,’ he said, ‘They all knew they wanted to silence you pretty badly, and they’d had a chance and muffed it… I’d love to have heard what happened when they found we’d robbed the gallery.’ He chuckled, tipping up his beer can to catch the last few drops.

‘On the morning after,’ I said, ‘a letter from Hudson was delivered by hand to the Hilton. How did he know we were there?’

They stared. ‘Greene must have told him,’ Jik said. ‘We certainly didn’t. We didn’t tell anybody. We were careful about it.’

‘So was I,’ I said. ‘That letter offered to show me round a vineyard. Well… if I hadn’t been so doubtful of him, I might have gone. He was a friend of Donald’s… and a vineyard would be interesting. From his point of view, anyway, it was worth a try.’

‘Jesus!’

‘On the night of the Cup, when we were in that motel near Box Hill, I telephoned the police in England and spoke to the man in charge of Donald’s case, Inspector Frost. I asked him to ask Donald some questions… and this morning outside Wellington I got the answers.’

‘This morning seems several light years away,’ Sarah said.

‘Mm…’

‘What questions and what answers?’ Jik said.

‘The questions were, did Donald tell Hudson all about
the wine in his cellar, and did Donald tell
Wexford
about the wine in the cellar, and was it Hudson who had suggested to Donald that he and Regina should go and look at the Munnings in the Arts Centre. And the answers were “Yes, of course”, and “No, whyever should I?”, and “Yes”.’

They thought about it in silence. Jik fiddled with the dispenser in the room’s in-built refrigerator and liberated another can of Fosters.

‘So what then?’ Sarah said.

‘So the Melbourne police said it was too insubstantial, but if they could tie Hudson in definitely with the gallery they might believe it. So they dangled in front of Hudson the pictures and stuff we stole from the gallery, and along he came to collect them.’

‘How? How did they dangle them?’

‘They let Wexford accidentally overhear snippets from a fake report from several hotels about odd deposits in their baggage rooms, including the paintings at the Hilton. Then after we got here they gave him an opportunity to use the telephone when he thought no one was listening, and he rang Hudson at the house he’s been staying in here for the races, and told him. So Hudson wrote himself a letter to the Hilton from me, and zoomed along to remove the incriminating evidence.’

‘He must have been crazy.’

‘Stupid. But he thought I was dead… and he’d no idea anyone suspected him. He should have had the sense to know that Wexford’s call to him would be bugged by the police… but Frost told me that Wexford would think he was using a public ‘phone booth.’

‘Sneaky,’ Sarah said.

I yawned. ‘It takes a sneak to catch a sneak.’

‘You’d never have thought Hudson would blaze up like that,’ she said. ‘He looked so… so dangerous.’ She
shivered. ‘You wouldn’t think people could hide such really frightening violence under a friendly public face.’

‘The nice Irish bloke next door,’ Jik said, standing up, ‘can leave a bomb to blow the legs off children.’

He pulled Sarah to her feet. ‘What do you think I paint?’ he said. ‘Vases of flowers?’ He looked down at me. ‘Horses?’

We parted the next morning at Melbourne airport, where we seemed to have spent a good deal of our lives.

‘It seems strange, saying goodbye,’ Sarah said.

‘I’ll be coming back,’ I said.

They nodded.

‘Well…’ We looked at watches.

It was like all partings. There wasn’t much to say. I saw in their eyes, as they must have seen in mine, that the past ten days would quickly become a nostalgic memory. Something we did in our crazy youth. Distant.

‘Would you do it all again?’ Jik said.

I thought inconsequentially of surviving wartime pilots looking back from forty years on. Had their achievements been worth the blood and sweat and risk of death: did they regret?.

I smiled. Forty years on didn’t matter. What the future made of the past was its own tragedy. What we ourselves did on the day was all that counted.

‘I guess I would.’

I leaned forward and kissed Sarah, my oldest friend’s wife.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Find one of your own.’

Maisie saw me before I saw her, and came sweeping down like a great scarlet bird, wings outstretched.

Monday lunchtime at Wolverhampton races, misty and cold.

‘Hello, dear, I’m so glad you’ve come. Did you have a good trip back, because of course it’s such a long way, isn’t it, with all that wretched jet lag?’ She patted my arm and peered acutely at my face. ‘You don’t really look awfully well, dear, if you don’t mind me saying so, and you don’t seem to have collected any sun-tan, though I suppose as you haven’t been away two weeks it isn’t surprising, but those are nasty gashes on your hand, dear, aren’t they, and you were walking very
carefully
just now.’

She stopped to watch a row of jockeys canter past on their way to the start. Bright shirts against the thin grey mist. A subject for Munnings.

‘Have you backed anything, dear? And are you sure you’re warm enough in that anorak? I never think jeans are good for people in the winter, they’re only cotton, dear, don’t forget, and how did you get on in Australia? I mean, dear, did you find out anything useful?’