In the Frame (4 page)

‘How long, in fact, do you think it would have taken?’

‘Depends how many people were doing it,’ he said, rubbing his hand over his face and squeezing his tired eyes. ‘They would have to have had proper wine boxes in any case. That means they had to know in advance that the wine was there, and didn’t just chance on it. And that means… Frost says… that I sold it myself some time ago and am now saying it is stolen so I can claim fraudulent insurance, or, if it was stolen last Friday, that I told the thieves they’d need proper boxes, which means that I set up the whole frightful mess myself.’

We thought it over in depressed silence. Eventually, I said, ‘Who
did
know you had the wine there? And who knew the house was always empty on Fridays? And was the prime target the wine, the antiques, or the paintings?’

‘God, Charles, you sound like Frost.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Every business nowadays,’ he said defensively, ‘is going through a cash crisis. Look at the nationalised industries, losing money by the million. Look at the wage rises and the taxes and the inflation… How can any small business make the profit it used to? Of
course
we have a cash flow problem. Whoever hasn’t?’

‘How bad is yours?’ I said.

‘Not critical. Bad enough. But not within sight of liquidation. It’s illegal for a limited company to carry on trading if it can’t cover its costs.’

‘But it could… if you could raise more capital to prop it up?’

He surveyed me with the ghost of a smile. ‘It surprises me still that you chose to paint for a living.’

‘It gives me a good excuse to go racing whenever I like.’

‘Lazy sod.’ He sounded for a second like the old Donald,
but the lightness passed. ‘The absolutely last thing I would do would be to use my own personal assets to prop up a dying business. If my firm was that rocky, I’d wind it up. It would be mad not to.’

I sucked my teeth. ‘I suppose Frost asked if the stolen things were insured for more than their worth?’

‘Yes, he did. Several times.’

‘Not likely you’d tell him, even if they were.’

‘They weren’t, though.’

‘No.’

‘Under-insured, if anything.’ He sighed. ‘God knows if they’ll pay up for the Munnings. I’d only arranged the insurance by telephone. I hadn’t actually sent the premium.’

‘It should be all right, if you can give them proof of purchase, and so on.’

He shook his head listlessly. ‘All the papers to do with it were in the desk in the hall. The receipt from the gallery where I bought it, the letter of provenance, and the customs and excise receipt. All gone.’

‘Frost won’t like that.’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘Well… I hope you pointed out that you would hardly be buying expensive pictures and going on world trips if you were down to your last farthing.’

‘He said it might be
because
of buying expensive pictures and going on world trips that I might be down to my last farthing.’

Frost had built a brick wall of suspicion for Donald to batter his head against. My cousin needed hauling away before he was punch drunk.

‘Have some spaghetti,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘It’s about all I can cook.’

‘Oh…’ He focused unclearly on the kitchen clock.
It was half past four and long past feeding time according to my stomach.

‘If you like,’ he said.

The police sent a car the following morning to fetch him to his ordeal in the office. He went lifelessly, having more or less made it clear over coffee that he wouldn’t defend himself.

‘Don, you must,’ I said. ‘The only way to deal with the situation is to be firm and reasonable, and decisive, and accurate. In fact, just your own self.’

He smiled faintly. ‘You’d better go instead of me. I haven’t the energy. And what does it matter?’ His smile broke suddenly and the ravaging misery showed deeply like black water under cracked ice. ‘Without Regina… there’s no point making money.’

‘We’re not talking about making money, we’re talking about suspicion. If you don’t defend yourself, they’ll assume you can’t.’

‘I’m too tired. I can’t be bothered. They can think what they like.’

‘Don,’ I said seriously, ‘They’ll think what you let them.’

‘I don’t really care,’ he said dully: and that was the trouble. He really didn’t.

He was gone all day. I spent it painting.

Not the sad landscape. The sunroom seemed even greyer and colder that morning, and I had no mind any more to sink into melancholy. I left the half-finished canvas on the table there and removed myself and trappings to the source of warmth. Maybe the light wasn’t so good in the kitchen, but it was the only room in the house with the pulse of life.

I painted Regina standing beside her cooker, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. I painted the way she held her head back to smile,
and I painted the smile, shiny-eyed and guileless and unmistakably happy. I painted the kitchen behind her as I literally saw it in front of my eyes, and I painted Regina herself from the clearest of inner visions. So easily did I see her that I looked up once or twice from her face on the canvas to say something to her, and was disconcerted to find only empty space. An extraordinary feeling of the real and unreal disturbingly tangled.

I seldom ever worked for more than four hours at a stretch because for one thing the actual muscular control required was tiring, and for another the concentration always made me cold and hungry; so I knocked off at around lunch-time and dug out a tin of corned beef to eat with pickles on toast, and after that went for a walk, dodging the front-gate watchers by taking to the apple trees and wriggling through the hedge.

I tramped aimlessly for a while round the scattered shapeless village, thinking about the picture and working off the burst of physical energy I often felt after the constraint of painting. More burnt umber in the folds of the kitchen curtains, I thought; and a purplish shadow on the saucepan. Regina’s cream shirt needed yellow ochre under the collar, and probably a touch of green. The cooking stove needed a lot more attention, and I had broken my general rule of working the picture as a whole, background and subject pace by pace.

This time, Regina’s face stood out clearly, finished except for a gloss on the lips and a line of light along inside the lower eyelids, which one couldn’t do until the under paint was dry. I had been afraid of seeing her less clearly if I took too long, but because of it the picture was now out of balance and I’d have to be very careful to get the kitchen into the same key, so that the whole thing looked harmonious and natural and as if it couldn’t have been any other way.

The wind was rawly cold, the sky a hurrying jumbled mass of darkening clouds. I huddled my hands inside my anorak pockets and slid back through the hedge with the first drops of rain.

The afternoon session was much shorter because of the light, and I frustratingly could not catch the right mix of colours for the tops of the kitchen fitments. Even after years of experience, what looked right on the palette looked wrong on the painting. I got it wrong three times and decided to stop.

I was cleaning the brushes when Donald came back. I heard the scrunch of the car, the slam of the doors, and, to my surprise, the ring of the front door bell. Donald had taken his keys.

I went through and opened the door. A uniformed policeman stood there, holding Don’s arm. Behind, a row of watching faces gazed on hungrily. My cousin, who had looked pale before, now seemed bloodlessly white. The eyes were as lifeless as death.

‘Don!’ I said, and no doubt looked as appalled as I felt.

He didn’t speak. The policeman leant forward, said, ‘There we are, sir,’ and transferred the support of my cousin from himself to me: and it seemed to me that the action was symbolic as much as practical, because he turned immediately on his heel and methodically drove off in his waiting car.

I helped Donald inside and shut the door. I had never seen anyone in such a frightening state of disintegration.

‘I asked,’ he said, ‘about the funeral.’

His face was stony, and his voice came out in gasps.

‘They said…’ He stopped, dragged in air, tried again.

‘They said… no funeral.’

‘Donald…’

‘They said… she couldn’t be buried until they had finished their enquiries. They said… it might be months.
They said… they will keep her… refrigerated…’

The distress was fearful.

‘They said…’ He swayed slightly. ‘They said… the body of a murdered person belongs to the State.’

I couldn’t hold him. He collapsed at my feet in a deep and total faint.

For two days Donald lay in bed, and I grew to understand what was meant by prostration.

Whether he liked it or not, this time he was heavily sedated, his doctor calling morning and evening with pills and injections. No matter that I was a hopeless nurse and a worse cook, I was appointed, for lack of anyone else, to look after him.

‘I want Charles,’ Donald in fact told the doctor. ‘He doesn’t
fuss
.’

I sat with him a good deal when he was awake, seeing him struggle dazedly to face and come to terms with the horrors in his mind. He lost weight visibly, the rounded muscles of his face slackening and the contours changing to the drawn shape of illness. The grey shadows round his eyes darkened to a permanent charcoal, and all normal strength seemed to have vanished from arms and legs.

I fed us both from tins and frozen packets, reading the instructions and doing what they said. Donald thanked me punctiliously and ate what he could, but I doubt if he tasted a thing.

In between times, while he slept, I made progress with both the paintings. The sad landscape was no longer sad but merely Octoberish, with three horses standing around in a field, one of them eating grass. Pictures of this sort, easy to live with and passably expert, were my bread and butter. They sold quite well, and I normally churned one
off the production line every ten days or so, knowing that they were all technique and no soul.

The portrait of Regina, though, was the best work I’d done for months. She laughed out of the canvas, alive and glowing, and to me at least seemed vividly herself. Pictures often changed as one worked on them, and day by day the emphasis in my mind had shifted, so that the kitchen background was growing darker and less distinct and Regina herself more luminous. One could still see she was cooking, but it was the girl who was important, not the act. In the end I had painted the kitchen, which was still there, as an impression, and the girl, who was not, as the reality.

I hid that picture in my suitcase whenever I wasn’t working on it. I didn’t want Donald to come face to face with it unawares.

Early Wednesday evening he came shakily down to the kitchen in his dressing-gown, trying to smile and pick up the pieces. He sat at the table, drinking the Scotch I had that day imported, and watching while I cleaned my brushes and tidied the palette.

‘You’re always so neat,’ he said.

‘Paint’s expensive.’

He waved a limp hand at the horse picture which stood drying on the easel. ‘How much does it cost, to paint that?’

‘In raw materials, about ten quid. In heat, light, rates, rent, food, Scotch and general wear and tear on the nervous system, about the amount I’d earn in a week if I chucked it in and went back to selling houses.’

‘Quite a lot, then,’ he said seriously.

I grinned. ‘I don’t regret it.’

‘No. I see that.’

I finished the brushes by washing them in soap and water under the tap, pinching them into shape, and
standing them upright in ajar to dry. Good brushes were at least as costly as paint.

‘After the digging into the company accounts,’ Donald said abruptly, ‘they took me along to the police station and tried to prove that I had actually killed her myself.’

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘They’d worked out that I could have got home at lunch time and done it. They said there was time.’

I picked up the Scotch from the table and poured a decent sized shot into a tumbler. Added ice.

‘They must be crazy,’ I said.

‘There was another man, besides Frost. A Superintendent. I think his name was Wall. A thin man, with fierce eyes. He never seemed to blink. Just stared and said over and over that I’d killed her because she’d come back and found me supervising the burglary.’

‘For God’s sake!’ I said disgustedly. ‘And anyway, she didn’t leave the flower shop until half past two.’

‘The girl in the flower shop now says she doesn’t know to the minute when Regina left. Only that it was soon after lunch. And I didn’t get back from the pub until nearly three. I went to lunch late. I was hung up with a client all morning…’ He stopped, gripping his tumbler as if it were a support to hold on to. ‘I can’t tell you… how awful it was.’

The mild understatement seemed somehow to make things worse.

‘They said,’ he added, ‘that eighty per cent of murdered married women are killed by their husbands.’

That statement had Frost stamped all over it.

‘They let me come home, in the end, but I don’t think…’ His voice shook. He swallowed, visibly trying to keep tight control on his hard-won calm. ‘I don’t think they’ve finished.’

It was five days since he’d walked in and found Regina
dead. When I thought of the mental hammerings he’d taken on top, the punishing assault on his emotional reserves, where common humanity would have suggested kindness and consoling help, it seemed marvellous that he had remained as sane as he had.

‘Have they got anywhere with catching the thieves?’ I said.

He smiled wanly. ‘I don’t even know if they’re trying.’

‘They must be.’

‘I suppose so. They haven’t said.’ He drank some whisky slowly. ‘It’s ironic, you know. I’ve always had a regard for the police. I didn’t know they could be… the way they are.’

A quandary, I thought. Either they leaned on a suspect in the hope of breaking him down, or they asked a few polite questions and got nowhere: and under the only effective system the innocent suffered more than the guilty.

‘I see no end to it.’ Donald said. ‘No end at all.’