In the Frame (20 page)

Sarah was astonished. ‘How did you know about Greene? How did you know there was anyone in our room besides Jik and me? How did you know we were in such awful trouble?’

‘Jik told me.’

‘But he couldn’t! He couldn’t risk warning you. He just had to tell you to come. He really did…’ Her voice quivered. The tears weren’t far from the surface. ‘They made him…’

‘Jik told me,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘First, he called me Charles, which he never does, so I knew something was wrong. Second, he was rude to me, and I know you think he is most of the time, but he isn’t, not like that. And third, he told me the name of the man who I was to guess was in your room putting pressure on you both to get me to come down and walk into a nasty little hole. He told me it was chromic oxide, which is the pigment in green paint.’

‘Green paint!’ The tearful moment passed. ‘You really are both extraordinary,’ she said.

‘Long practice,’ Jik said cheerfully.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

‘We left before the last race, to avoid the traffic, and we just came back normally to the Hilton. I parked the car,
and we went up to our room. We’d only been there about a minute when there was this knock on the door, and when I opened it they just pushed in…’

‘They?’

‘Three of them. One was Greene. We both knew him straight away, from your drawing. Another was the boy from the Arts Centre. The third was all biceps and beetle brows, with his brains in his fists.’

He absentmindedly rubbed an area south of his heart.

‘He punched you?’ I said.

‘It was all so quick…’ he said apologetically. ‘They just crammed in… and biff bang… The next thing I knew they’d got hold of Sarah and were twisting her arm and saying that she wouldn’t just get turps in her eyes if I didn’t get you to come at once.’

‘Did they have a gun?’ I asked.

‘No… a cigarette lighter. Look, I’m sorry, mate. I guess it sounds pretty feeble, but Beetle-brows had her in a pretty rough grasp and the boy had this ruddy great cigarette lighter with a flame like a blow torch just a couple of inches from her cheek… and I was a bit groggy… and Greene said they’d burn her if I didn’t get you… and I couldn’t fight them all at once.’

‘Stop apologising,’ I said.

‘Yeah… well, so I rang you. I told Greene you’d be ten minutes because you were in your underpants, but I think he heard you anyway because he was standing right beside me, very wary and sharp. I didn’t know really whether you’d cottoned on, but I hoped to God… and you should have seen their faces when the waiter pushed the trolley in. Beetle-brows let go of Sarah and the boy just stood there with his mouth open and the cigarette lighter flaring up like an oil refinery…’

‘Greene said we didn’t want the champagne and to take it away,’ Sarah said. ‘But Jik and I said yes we did, and
Jik asked the waiter to open it at once.’

‘Before he got the first cork out the others all began coming… and then they were all picking up glasses… and the room was filling up… and Greene and the boy and Beetle-brows were all on the window side of the room, sort of pinned in by the trolley and all those people… and I just grabbed Sarah and we ducked round the edge. The last I saw, Greene and the others were trying to push through, but our guests were pretty thick on the ground by then and keen to get their champagne… and I should think the cleaning trolley was just about enough to give us that start to the lift.’

‘I wonder how long the party lasted,’ I said.

‘Until the bubbles ran out.’

‘They must all have thought you mad,’ Sarah said.

‘Anything goes on Cup day,’ I said, ‘and the staff of the Hilton would be used to eccentric guests.’

‘What if Greene had had a gun?’ Sarah said.

I smiled at her twistedly. ‘He would have had to wave it around in front of a hell of a lot of witnesses.’

‘But he might have done.’

‘He might… but he was a long way from the front door.’ I bit my thumbnail. ‘Er… how did he know I was in the Hilton?’

There was a tangible silence.

‘I told him,’ Sarah said finally, in a small mixed outburst of shame and defiance. ‘Jik didn’t tell you it all, just now. At first they said… Greene said… they’d burn my face if Jik didn’t tell them where you were. He didn’t want to… but he had to… so I told them, so that it wouldn’t be him… I suppose that sounds stupid.’

I thought it sounded extraordinarily moving. Love of an exceptional order, and a depth of understanding.

I smiled at her. ‘So they didn’t know I was there, to
begin with?’

Jik shook his head. ‘I don’t think they knew you were even in Melbourne. They seemed surprised when Sarah said you were upstairs. I think all they knew was that you weren’t still in hospital in Alice Springs.’

‘Did they know about our robbery?’

‘I’m sure they didn’t.’

I grinned. ‘They’ll be schizophrenic when they find out.’

Jik and I both carefully shied away from what would have happened if I’d gone straight down to their room, though I saw from his eyes that he knew. With Sarah held as a hostage I would have had to leave the Hilton with Greene and taken my chance. The uncomfortably slim chance that they would have let me off again with my life.

‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

Sarah smiled. ‘Whenever are you not?’

We ate in a small Bring Your Own restaurant nearby, with people at tables all around us talking about what they’d backed in the Cup.

‘Good heavens,’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘About what?’

‘Your winnings,’ she said. ‘On Ringwood.’

‘But…’ I began.

‘It was number eleven!’

‘I don’t believe it.’

She opened her handbag and produced a fat wad of notes. Somehow, in all the mêlée in the Hilton, she had managed to emerge from fiery danger with the cream leather pouch swinging from her arm. The strength of the instinct which kept women attached to their handbags had often astounded me, but never more than that day.

‘It was forty to one,’ she said. ‘I put twenty dollars on for you, so you’ve got eight hundred dollars, and I think it’s disgusting.’

‘Share it,’ I said, laughing.

She shook her head. ‘Not a cent… To be honest, I thought it had no chance at all, and I thought I’d teach you not to bet that way by losing you twenty dollars, otherwise I’d only have staked you ten.’

‘I owe most of it to Jik, anyway,’ I said.

‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘We’ll add and subtract later. Do you want me to cut your steak?’

‘Please.’

He sliced away neatly at my plate, and pushed it back with the fork placed ready.

‘What else happened at the races?’ I said, spearing the first succulent piece. ‘Who did you see?’ The steak tasted as good as it looked, and I realised that in spite of all the sore patches I had at last lost the overall feeling of unsettled shaky sickness. Things were on the mend, it seemed.

‘We didn’t see Greene,’ Jik said. ‘Or the boy, or Beetle-brows.’

‘I’d guess they saw you.’

‘Do you think so?’ Sarah said worriedly.

‘I’d guess,’ I said, ‘That they saw you at the races and simply followed you back to the Hilton.’

‘Jesus,’ Jik groaned. ‘We never spotted them. There was a whole mass of traffic.’

I nodded. ‘And all moving very slowly. If Greene was perhaps three cars behind you, you’d never have seen him, but he could have kept you in sight easily.’

‘I’m bloody sorry, Todd.’

‘Don’t be silly. And no harm done.’

‘Except for the fact,’ Sarah said, ‘That I’ve still got no clothes.’

‘You look fine,’ I said absently.

‘We saw a girl I know in Sydney,’ Sarah said. ‘We watched the first two races together and talked to her aunt. And Jik and I were talking to a photographer we both knew just after he got back… so it would be pretty easy to prove Jik was at the races all afternoon, like you wanted.’

‘No sign of Wexford?’

‘Not if he looked like your drawing,’ Sarah said. ‘Though of course he might have been there. It’s awfully difficult to recognise a complete stranger just from a drawing, in a huge crowd like that.’

‘We talked to a lot of people,’ Jik said. ‘To everyone Sarah knew even slightly. She used the excuse of introducing me as her newly-bagged husband.’

‘We even talked to that man you met on Saturday,’ Sarah agreed, nodding. ‘Or rather, he came over and talked to us.’

‘Hudson Taylor?’ I asked.

‘The one you saw talking to Wexford,’ Jik said.

‘He asked if you were at the Cup,’ Sarah said. ‘He said he’d been going to ask you along for another drink. We said we’d tell you he’d asked.’

‘His horse ran quite well, didn’t it?’ I said.

‘We saw him earlier than that. We wished him luck and he said he’d need it.’

‘He bets a bit,’ I said, remembering.

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Another commission down the drain,’ I said. ‘He would have had Vinery painted if he’d won.’

‘You hire yourself out like a prostitute,’ Jik said. ‘It’s obscene.’

‘And anyway,’ added Sarah cheerfully, ‘You won more on Ringwood than you’d’ve got for the painting.’

I looked pained, and Jik laughed.

We drank coffee, went back to the motel, and divided to our separate rooms. Five minutes later Jik knocked on my door.

‘Come in,’ I said, opening it.

He grinned. ‘You were expecting me.’

‘Thought you might come.’

He sat in the armchair and swivelled. His gaze fell on my suitcase, which lay flat on one of the divans.

‘What did you do with all the stuff we took from the gallery?’

I told him.

He stopped swivelling and sat still.

‘You don’t mess about, do you?’ he said eventually.

‘A few days from now,’ I said, ‘I’m going home.’

‘And until then?’

‘Um… until then, I aim to stay one jump ahead of Wexford, Greene, Beetle-brows, the Arts Centre boy, and the tough who met me on the balcony at Alice.’

‘Not to mention our copy artist, Harley Renbo.’

I considered it. ‘Him too,’ I said.

‘Do you think we can?’

‘Not we. Not from here on. This is where you take Sarah home.’

He slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t reckon it would be any safer than staying with you. We’re too easy to find. For one thing, we’re in the Sydney ‘phone book. What’s to stop Wexford from marching on to the boat with a bigger threat than a cigarette lighter?’

‘You could tell him what I’ve just told you.’

‘And waste all your efforts.’

‘Retreat is sometimes necessary.’

He shook his head. ‘If we stay with you, retreat may never be necessary. It’s the better of two risks. And anyway…’ the old fire gleamed in his eye… ‘It will be a great game. Cat and mouse. With cats who don’t know
they are mice chasing a mouse who knows he’s a cat.’

More like a bull fight, I thought, with myself waving the cape to invite the charge. Or a conjuror, attracting attention to one hand while he did the trick with the other. On the whole I preferred the notion of the conjuror. There seemed less likelihood of being gored.

I spent a good deal of the night studying the list of Overseas Customers, mostly because I still found it difficult to lie comfortably to sleep, and partly because I had nothing else to read.

It became more and more obvious that I hadn’t really pinched
enough
. The list I’d taken was fine in its way, but would have been doubly useful with a stock list to match the letters and numbers in the right hand column.

On the other hand, all stock numbers were a form of code, and if I looked at them long enough, maybe some sort of recognisable pattern might emerge.

By far the majority began with the letter M, particularly in the first and much larger section. In the smaller section, which I had found at the back of the file, the M prefixes were few, and S, A, W and B were much commoner.

Donald’s number began with M. Maisie’s began with S.

Suppose, I thought, that the M simply stood for Melbourne, and the S for Sydney, the cities where each had bought their pictures.

Then A, W and B were where? Adelaide, Wagga Wagga and Brisbane?

Alice?

In the first section the letters and numbers following the initial M seemed to have no clear pattern. In the second
section, though, the third letter was always C, the last letter always R, and the numbers, divided though they were between several different countries, progressed more or less consecutively. The highest number of all was 54, which had been sold to a Mr. Norman Updike, living in Auckland, New Zealand. The stock number against his name was WHC54R. The date in the left hand column was only a week old, and Mr. Updike had not been crossed out.

All the pictures in the shorter section had been sold within the past three years. The first dates in the long first section were five and a half years old.

I wondered which had come first, five and a half years ago: the gallery or the idea. Had Wexford originally been a full-time crook deliberately setting up an imposing front, or a formerly honest art dealer struck by criminal possibilities? Judging from the respectable air of the gallery and what little I’d seen of Wexford himself, I would have guessed the latter. But the violence lying just below the surface didn’t match.

I sighed, put down the lists, and switched off the light. Lay in the dark, thinking of the telephone call I’d made after Jik had gone back to Sarah.

It had been harder to arrange from the motel than it would have been from the Hilton, but the line had been loud and clear.

‘You got my cable?’ I said.

‘I’ve been waiting for your call for half an hour.’

‘Sorry.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve sent you a letter,’ I said. ‘I want to tell you what’s in it.’

‘But…’

‘Just listen,’ I said. ‘And talk after.’ I spoke for quite a long time to a response of grunts from the far end.

‘Are you sure of all this?’

‘Positive about most,’ I said. ‘Some of it’s a guess.’

‘Repeat it.’

‘Very well.’ I did so, at much the same length.

‘I have recorded all that.’

‘Good.’

‘Hm… What do you intend doing now?’