Pictures of Perfection (10 page)

‘Mary and I … went to the Liverpool Museum & the British Gallery, & I had some amusement at each, tho’ my preference for Men & Women always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight.’

Caddy Scudamore was all eye. What she looked at she saw totally, and much of what reached her through the other senses was translated visually also. For her the baking smells of Dora Creed’s oven filled the street between with golden threads, and birdsong was a drift of blossom on the bright spring air.

Naturally, because God is fair, and fairy godmothers always reserve some gifts from the cradle, there were compensating deficiencies.

In conversation she only heard what she wanted to hear; in kindness, she only gave what she knew she could spare; and in morality, she was pleasantly surprised at the regularity with which the justifiable and the convenient coincided.

‘All that is needed to raise her to the top rank of artists,’ opined Justin Halavant in his
Evening Post
preview of her last one-woman show, ‘is a deep distress to humanize her soul.’

It was presumably in a spirit of pure artistic
altruism that after the show’s opening, he had ambushed her on the studio stairs and wrestled her to the ground with breathless assurances of eternal love and a rave review.

Caddy, however, was not yet ready for quite so deep a distress, so she had responded by kneeing him in the balls.

Whether this distress humanized his soul is difficult to say, but it certainly hospitalized his body, and no review of any kind appeared in the
Post
, just a note to say that the Arts Page editor was convalescing after, appropriately enough, ‘a bad fall’.

Up to this point, there had been a close and generally mutual beneficent connection between Scarletts and the Eendale Gallery. The Scudamores were regular ornaments of the artistic soirées Halavant held for his metropolitan friends, and he always brought his house guests to the Gallery, urging them to buy cheap what the soaring wheel of the art market would soon render dear. His patronizing possessiveness sometimes got up Kee’s nose, but money in the till is a potent decongestant, and had he been able to accept his testicular rebuff in the spirit in which it was given, that is, necessary but no big deal, then as things had been they might have remained.

Unhappily Halavant’s hurt went straight through his prostate to his pride. It was inconceivable to him that the Scudamores would not dine out on the story, so he set about getting his retaliation in first.

One evening Kee walked into the Morris bar just as Thomas Wapshare said, ‘I never read any review in the
Post
of young Caddy’s latest show. Did I miss it?’

Halavant, who was sitting with his back to the door, shook his head sadly and, raising his voice so the whole room could hear, replied, ‘No, Thomas. There was no review. As you know, I’ve long been a patron of Caddy’s work. More, I may say I’ve been a guide and counsellor to the girl. But in this latest show I felt she had gone down a blind alley. As a friend, I offered this criticism constructively and privately. And I promised her there would be no adverse review. Alas, her response was distressingly immature, causing a rift which I hope time will mend. The child has indisputable talent. Let’s hope she grows up before she fritters it all away on such meretricious daubs.’

He paused, modestly awaiting the applause due to such a display of selfless forbearance, but his audience’s gaze was focused over his shoulder. He turned his head slowly and Kee advanced, smiling.

‘Justin, I’m so glad I’ve caught you. I want to apologize for my sister’s behaviour. After all you’ve done for her, I really don’t know how she had the gall to resent your attempts to grope her. But as you say, she’s very young. Probably it was just a knee-jerk reaction. Talking of knee jerks, how are your privates? Has the bruising gone? I believe they were dreadfully swollen, though in your case, that’s not a totally unusual condition, is it?’

Thus the rift betwixt salon and gallery became a schism, though the usual good sense of interested Enscombians prevented it from hardening into trench warfare. Why take sides when, with a bit of nimble foot-work, you can move quite happily between the lines?

Sergeant Wield as yet knew none of this as he entered the Eendale Gallery and saw the now familiar expression of half-recognition touch the face of the slim, elegant blonde woman working with a calculator at an open ledger.

‘Miss Scudamore?’ he said. ‘Miss Kee Scudamore?’

‘That’s right. Can I help you?’

He showed her his ID and said, ‘I were looking for Constable Bendish. You haven’t seen him around, have you?’

‘No. Sorry. He used to come in regularly on Sundays to check I wasn’t selling anything which would contravene the terms of the Sunday Trading Act, but thankfully he gave that up for Lent.’

Wield smiled and said, ‘What about his hat?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I understand you observed a policeman’s hat on a statue.’

‘What?’ Her eyes turned from his face to the window as she looked across at the bookshop. ‘Ah, you’ve been talking to Edwin Digweed.’

‘Listening,’ said Wield, and was rewarded with an understanding smile. ‘He said you’d mentioned
it to him. Didn’t seem like a secret, so he passed it on to me for what it’s worth.’

‘Quite right too,’ she said. ‘I’d probably have mentioned it myself when Sergeant Filmer got round to me.’

Wield, not too impressed by this sudden display of civic dutifulness, said, ‘So you’d heard the Sergeant was asking questions?’

‘It’s a small place,’ she said.

‘Depends if you count the moors,’ said Wield. ‘Now about this hat …’

‘
Oh my God!
That’s incredible! Don’t let him go!’

The outburst came from a young woman in a paint-stained smock who’d appeared at an interior door. Wield just had time to register full parted lips and huge dark eyes under a torrent of richly black hair before she turned away and he heard footsteps racing up a flight of stairs.

‘My sister, Caddy,’ said Kee. ‘You must excuse her. She doesn’t waste much time on social niceties.’

The footsteps returned cut by half, as she took the stairs two or three at a time. Then she was back in the gallery clutching a sketching pad and a pencil.

‘I’ve got to have your face, do you mind? It’s amazing. Do you live round here? I’d love to do a portrait, would you be interested?’

All the time the pencil was speeding over the paper.

‘Caddy, for heaven’s sake!’ said Kee in that tone
of reproof underpinned with pride that parents use when their kids are being intrusively precocious. ‘This is Sergeant Wield. It seems PC Bendish has gone missing.’

‘Probably off chasing rustlers or something. Sergeant, OK, if you’re hot on a scent, I can see how sittings could be a problem, but if I could take a few pics? I can work off photos, not the same, of course, but at least they don’t want to talk or pick their noses. OK? Great, don’t go away.’

The flying footsteps routine was repeated.

‘Sorry again,’ said Kee. ‘Don’t let her bother you if you’d rather not. But she is good.’

‘These hers?’ said Wield, studying a selection of watercolours. ‘Very nice. She’s good on sheep, isn’t she?’

‘No, not those,’ said Kee. ‘They’re Beryl Pottinger’s, our school head teacher. They sell surprisingly well. Tourists like a nice view of somewhere they’ve been. Those are Caddy’s up there.’

Wield looked and said, ‘Oh aye’, which was the nearest his natural courtesy as well as his native reticence would let him come to ‘Bloody hell!’ From Mrs Pottinger’s placid pastorals to Caddy Scudamore’s lurid landscapes was perhaps a small step for an artist, but it was a mighty leap over a high cliff for a man whose walls were hung with Victorian prints of Gilbert and Sullivan characters.

Caddy was back with a camera which seemed to have a will of its own, clicking and winking and
winding itself on with minimal outside interference. Wield began to feel uneasy. Both privately and professionally his instinct had long been to keep himself in the background, and this degree of attention was without doubt threatening. When the camera was replaced with a camcorder, he felt it was time to retreat.

‘This statue. You couldn’t show me where it is, could you?’ he said pleadingly to Kee.

She looked at the ledger, looked at his face, took pity, switched off the calculator and said, ‘Why not?’

‘I’ll come too,’ said Caddy. ‘I need to get him in motion.’

‘Oh no you won’t,’ said her sister firmly. ‘This is a place of business, remember?’

‘You could have fooled me,’ said Caddy sulkily. She was, observed Wield with a critically neutral eye, one of those rare women on whom sulkiness is becoming. When she pouted, her full lips rounded into a moist pink funnel a hetero could pour his soul into.

‘Oh well, I’d better get these developed, then,’ she said, and vanished up the stairs once more.

‘Caddy, you will listen for the doorbell, won’t you?’ called Kee after her, but got no reply.

‘I might as well give up,’ she said to Wield with the resignation of use. ‘Once she gets in that darkroom, she doesn’t hear a thing.’

‘She develops her own, does she?’ said Wield.

‘Oh yes. Don’t be deceived by the impression
she gives of chaos on the hoof. Like a lot of kids nowadays, she manages to have one foot in Bohemia and the other in high tech without showing any sign of doing the splits.’

The pride was there again, strong and unmistakable. You needed to be a pretty well-balanced character and have a firm sense of your own worth to tolerate the demands of wayward talent in a younger sister, thought Wield.

As they left the Gallery the young cyclist Wield had noticed the day before came to a silent halt before them.

‘Hello, Jason,’ said Kee neutrally. ‘Do you want something?’

‘Caddy. Got something for her.’

‘I’m afraid she’s too busy now,’ said Kee.

The youth regarded her with strangely unfocused eyes. She returned his gaze as steadily and stood her ground in front of the door.

Wield, whose eyes had been taking in the young man’s sub-military garb and the shotgun clipped to his crossbar, said, ‘You got a licence for that gun, lad?’

‘Yes,’ said Toke without looking at him. ‘Later, then.’

He moved swiftly away.

Wield said, ‘Hold on … !’ but Kee interrupted, ‘It’s OK, Sergeant. He does have a licence. In fact he’s probably got a licence for all the weapons he’s got.’

‘All …? How many does he have, then?’

‘A whole armoury, according to local rumour. But I’ve never seen them, so don’t take what I say as gospel.’

‘You don’t like the lad, but?’

She shrugged and said, ‘He’s a bit weird. And he’s got a thing about Caddy. I don’t like weird men having a thing about my kid sister.’

They set off at a brisk pace up the High Street.

As the hill began to climb she pointed to a narrow driveway off to the right just below the church.

‘That takes you round to Corpse Cottage where Mr Bendish lives. Then it climbs up the hill to the vicarage.’

‘Is that right?’ said Wield, pausing. ‘It’s well hidden.’

‘Do you want to take a look? We can carry on up to the vicarage and get into the churchyard that way.’

‘The vicarage is round there too, is it?’

‘Higher up, on the same level as the church.’

Wield said, ‘No, we’ll just go the regular way. I’ll leave the cottage till later.’

When I’ve not got a sharp-eyed civilian in tow, he added mentally, and then caught those sharp eyes smiling at him as though he’d spoken aloud.

They climbed the hill till they drew level with the War Memorial.

Wield paused. It was in the form of a Celtic cross with the simple inscription
For the Fallen of the Parish of Enscombe
with two lists of names,
alphabetical and without rank, one for 1914–18, the other for 1939–45.

‘You had some bother last Armistice Day,’ he said.

‘Yes. When they gathered for the service, they found someone had spilt blood over the cross. Animal blood. You were asking about Jason Toke. It was Jason that did it. Everyone knew.’

‘Toke?’ said Wield. ‘He’s a funny-looking antiwar protester.’

‘How very observant of you,’ said Kee. ‘He is, as he looks, quite obsessed with things military. Just like his brother.’

‘There’s another?’

‘Was. Warren. A couple of years older than Jason. A year ago last Christmas he got blown up in Northern Ireland. That’s when Jason started turning weird. One symptom was he wanted the Parish Council to put Warren’s name on the War Memorial. He got extremely upset when they wouldn’t.’

Wield ran his eye down the list of names.

‘There’s a Toke there already. Two.’

‘Oh yes. They’re all here if you look. Tokes and Wapshares. Hogbins and Guillemards, Digweeds and Halavants, all the old local families. A roll of honour or a testament to futility, depending how you look at it.’

‘No question how Toke looked at it,’ said Wield. ‘How come he hasn’t joined up?’

‘Perhaps even the Army draws a line. No, that’s
unfair. It’s just as likely to be a reluctance to leave his mother alone. They’re very close.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Wield. ‘So your only real objection to Toke is he fancies your sister? Can’t blame him for that.’

He spoke sincerely. Even lacking the equipment tuned to that particular wavelength, he had no trouble picking up the signal.

‘Yes,’ she said not without pride. ‘Caddy’s very attractive.’

‘So you don’t really think Toke could be positively dangerous?’ he pressed.

She said, ‘Who knows what anyone is capable of if pushed in the wrong direction, Sergeant? Even a policeman.’

They had walked up the hill and now they entered the churchyard. It was extremely well kept, grass razed, weeds strimmed, moss and lichen carefully removed from the headstones to leave even the oldest inscriptions legible.

‘Someone works hard,’ Wield observed.

‘We know how to take care of our dead,’ said Kee.

The same names he’d seen on the War Memorial were repeated here, though the democracy of its alphabetic listing was absent, with Tokes and Hogbins packed close together under simple slabs radiating away from the marble mass of the Guillemard mausoleum, over which brooded an intricately carved version of the bird he’d noticed on their coat of arms.