The Rembrandt Secret (8 page)

‘You ruined him, you made him desperate. God knows what chances he was taking—’

‘And that’s
my
fault?’

‘You cheated him when he needed money. You know damn well you were his last resort.’

‘He could have gone to someone else! I didn’t force him to come to me.’

‘You were his
friend
!’ She sighed, her expression repelled. ‘I’ve watched you for years,’ she said. ‘I’ve watched you sell fakes for the real article. I’ve heard enough to piece together what you do, Tobar. What underhand dealings you enjoy so much. While pretending to have no interest, I
did
still listen.’ She could see her husband’s face tighten. ‘But business was business, and I liked the money you made. And frankly, judging by most of them, I thought the dealers were fair game. If you won a few more times than some, it was because you were a bit more ruthless.’

‘So what’s the problem now?’

‘Owen Zeigler thought you were his friend. That’s the problem. You acted like his friend, you behaved like his friend. You went to his house and invited him to ours,
like a friend
. We talked like friends, laughed like friends. And now, finally, I see that nothing you say or do is genuine. If you could cheat your oldest friend, what couldn’t you do to me?’

Unnerved, Tobar pushed the newspaper away from him. ‘Owen Zeigler’s death has nothing to do with me.’

‘Are you sure?’

His eyes cold, he studied his wife. ‘Were you and Owen Zeigler lovers?’

She smiled, her hands going to her face momentarily before she replied.

‘No … But out of all the dealers you know, all the people you mix with, Owen was the most honourable. He
cared for you, and yet you could still ruin him.’ She stood up, smoothing down her skirt. ‘I’m leaving you—’

‘Don’t be bloody silly! Because of Owen Zeigler?’

‘No,’ she replied, walking to the door. ‘Because if his death didn’t matter, I’d be as bad as you.’

‘He never liked these places,’ Marshall said, without turning round. He had heard the door open and had recognised the footsteps and the slight pressure of her hand on his shoulder. ‘He’d have said that I should just have put him in a box – one of those earth-friendly things that break down naturally – and buried him in a field somewhere.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

He turned and looked at his ex-wife. ‘Aren’t you going to say something funny?’

‘It wouldn’t be the right place.’

‘That’s why it would be funny. You always said the wrong thing in the wrong place,’ Marshall replied affectionately, his voice low, as he reached for her hand.

Georgia pulled up a chair next to him, both of them sitting beside Owen’s coffin in the Chapel of Rest. She didn’t look at her ex-father-in-law’s face. Couldn’t bring herself to – not yet. As soon as she had heard about Owen Zeigler’s death she phoned Marshall, and been there for
him – on and off – over the next forty-eight hours. Talking, but mostly listening.

Taking the scarf from around her neck, Georgia flicked her long curly hair from her face. Lying hair, Marshall used to call it. Always changing. Chestnut in the morning, fire-red in fluorescent light and amber coated in sunshine. But her eyes were constant, dark and steady, always alert.

‘They patched him up,’ Marshall went on. ‘He doesn’t look too bad now.’

Slowly Georgia turned from Marshall and looked into the dead face of Owen Zeigler. The scalp wound had been closed, leaving only a faint scar line running vertically down his forehead. Puzzled, she then realised that the ochre tinge to Owen’s skin came from make-up, applied thickly to cover the wound and the bruising. Steadily she studied his closed eyelids, the long line of his nose, his mouth. Unrecognisable, fixed into an undertaker’s idea of a beatific smile.

‘It’s not like him.’

‘No,’ Marshall agreed. ‘Someone said that they always make the dead smile so that they’re less frightening, but that grimace looks odd, sinister. My father would’ve hated it.’

He reached out, then realising that he couldn’t change his father’s expression, he withdrew his hand. Marshall stared at the red carnation in Owen’s buttonhole, taking in the light grey suit and the white shirt which he had brought into the undertakers the previous night after his father’s body had been released to the Chapel of
Rest; after the pathologist and the police had done with it; after Owen Zeigler’s scalp had been stitched together again …

‘How long have you been here?’ Georgia asked.

‘All morning.’

‘Have you eaten?’

Marshall shrugged. ‘I’m not interested in food.’

‘You have to eat. I’ll take you for some lunch.’

He didn’t move. ‘People have been coming and going all morning.’

‘Your father was popular—’

‘Not with his killer.’

Her hand tightened over his. In the corner of the small, clean room candles burned, a stained glass window depicting a Biblical scene. The glass was thick, and coloured darkly enough to prevent anyone from seeing in – or out. Georgia looked at the dead man, noticing minute, pointless details. Like the pristine way the pale blue silk lining of the coffin was pleated; was this a grim echo of birth, she wondered? Blue for a boy, pink for a girl?

‘The funeral’s tomorrow. I’m burying him in the church near Thurstons,’ said Marshall, quietly. ‘Only a few people will travel that far, but the reception in London will be for everyone else. My father would have preferred that, I think … I don’t know, he never said. I don’t know what he would have wanted. He didn’t leave a will either.’

‘He didn’t expect to die.’

‘Nicolai Kapinski said my father had never even thought
about death. Well, in a way, why should he? He wasn’t
that
old a man, but still, you’d have thought it would have come into his mind now and then.’

‘I think people fall into two categories – half think about death too little, the other half too much.’

He turned to look at her. ‘Which are you?’

‘I’m superficial, I only want to think about life.’

‘You were never superficial,’ he replied.

Leaning forward, Marshall’s eyes fixed on the coffin. Varnished wood, with brass handles that looked pseudo-French. The undertaker had shown him numerous brochures of coffins and brass plaques and handles – so many bloody handles – as if the handles mattered. And Marshall, still deeply in shock, had studied the brochures and chosen everything carefully, with thought, as though he was planning a menu. And all the time he was remembering how he had found his father; reliving the same hot fear as details of the murder scene intermingled with the coffin handles. He saw again the rope which had bound Owen’s hands; recalled the hot, iron smell of blood, as the overhead light had dimmed and flickered, and the swollen insides sliding to the floor. He had wanted to pick them up, to push them back into the cavity of his father’s stomach, to hold them in, and somehow make him whole again …

‘Marshall?’

Distracted from the memory, he became aware that he had been grasping Georgia’s hand so tightly her fingers were white. ‘Sorry,’ he said, letting go. ‘I was just thinking.’

Nodding, she glanced through the small round glass window in the door. Someone was passing and paused, looking in and smiling a kind, professional smile. She responded, wondering how anyone could work in an undertakers’ office, where there was only one ending – death. As a teacher, Georgia was involved with children; little humans for whom life was beginning, not ending. With luck, none of them would die too young, and she hoped that, in twenty years time, they would seek her out and tell her what a difference she had made to their lives.

It was a familiar daydream, which Georgia already had when she was married to Marshall. They had met at a private view at the Zeigler Gallery, Georgia invited there by friends and finding herself quickly bored. Rescued by Marshall, she had been amused at how little he was interested in his father’s illustrious business. He could so easily have slid into ready-made affluence but, as he told her later, his heart wasn’t in the art world. Georgia had liked that about Marshall Zeigler. Liked a man who didn’t take the easy way out.

Their marriage had fallen apart after six years because they were both too young and too independent to settle into domesticity. Friends yes, lovers certainly. But a married couple? No. That hadn’t been written into either of their charts, so their decision to separate had been amicable, their divorce good natured. Georgia had quipped to her friends, ‘I was very good to my husband. I left him.’

In time they both found other people. When Georgia had had her heart broken, she had turned to Marshall,
and when the heady intoxication of his affairs fizzled into flat champagne, they had always commiserated. In fact, they had remained fixtures in each other’s lives, and their bond was such that they could talk every day for a week, and then have no contact for two months without it being a problem. When they spoke again, they picked up where they’d left off, and if one of them needed the other, they were always there.

‘You never think your parents will be frightened, do you?’

Surprised, Georgia glanced at her ex-husband. ‘Was Owen afraid?’

‘Terrified, the last time I talked to him … He was supposed to be spending the weekend with
me
, not lying in a bloody coffin.’ He stared angrily at the corpse. ‘They made him look like a ghoul.’ He fiddled angrily with his father’s tie. ‘And he never tied it like that! They’ve done a crap job. I told them. I told them
exactly
how it had to be, how everything had to be. You’d think they’d have listened. You’d think that, wouldn’t you?’

Georgia put her arm around him.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘I never said goodbye.’

‘Say it now.’

‘What?’

‘Say goodbye now.’

‘He’s dead. I don’t believe in life after death.’

‘I’d still say it, Marshall. You never know.’

Georgia got to her feet and walked out of the chapel. She
leaned against the wall in the corridor, took a few deep breaths, and then looked in through the porthole in the door. Marshall was standing at the head of coffin, looking down. She could see his lips move, but could only decipher the last six words:
I’ll make someone pay for this.

Dressed in their heavy overcoats and black armbands, Gordon Hendrix and Lester Fox stood in the gallery doorway and watched the street. Next to them, Vicky Leighton, the gallery receptionist, was crying softly. They could see Marshall talking to a dealer, and Lester nodded respectfully to Samuel Hemmings, who had come up to town for the funeral of Owen Zeigler. Off to one side, on his own, stood a tiny, shaken Nicolai Kapinski, drained of all colour, his balding head a pale orb against the dark collar of his winter coat. Tufts of other people dressed in black clustered like barnacles on the bow of the London street. Faces, pallid from emotion or cold, exchanged murmured remembrances of a dead colleague. And at the corner of the street, the pinched figure of Tobar Manners watched. Surrounded by a bevy of his cohorts, his metallic eyes flicked from the mourners to Marshall, and back again.

Rosella had kept her word and left him, but no one knew. Everyone thought it was just another of her holidays.
And Tobar would leave it like that … His face turned slightly against the wind, he stared at the back of Marshall’s head, only half listening to what someone was saying. Of course there had been talk about the Rembrandt sale – a good deal of whispering behind Tobar’s back. Some people had even intimated that he had cheated Owen Zeigler, and implied that he was indirectly responsible for his friend’s murder.

And now, suddenly, the stakes had been raised even higher. Now there was a murderer in their midst.

He wouldn’t admit it, but Tobar Manners had been struggling too. Not as much as some of the less successful dealers, because his coup with the Rembrandt had protected him. Of course he had lied to Owen; of course he had arranged for a second party to sell on the painting, then share the proceeds with him. His wife might know, but no one could prove it.

Pulling up his coat collar, Tobar turned, watching as Samuel Hemmings approached in his wheelchair.

‘Manners,’ Samuel said, his tone unreadable as he sat, leaning his chin on his stick, his driver waiting in the car across the street. In the dropping temperature, Samuel looked frail; whippet thin, muffled in a coat and scarf with a fur hat pulled down low over his forehead.

‘You look like a fucking mushroom.’

‘Good to see you too, Tobar.’

‘I didn’t expect you to make it up from Sussex, I thought you’d died.’

‘Oh, no. After all, it wasn’t me you robbed,’ Samuel countered deftly. ‘How are you sleeping?’

Shuffling his feet, Tobar glanced at his companions, then looked back to the old man, his voice low. ‘Don’t go throwing around accusations, Mr Hemmings. Although you’re old and most people would put it down to senility, I’d still be careful.’

‘You look thin,’ Samuel went on, unperturbed. ‘Your food not going down well? Must be all that bile in your gut, Tobar. Or a bad conscience. It shows on your face—’

‘Shut up!’ Tobar hissed, leaning down towards him. ‘Owen’s death has nothing to do with me.’

‘He was in trouble.’

‘Well, that much is obvious now,’ Tobar replied, pulling his collar up further against the cold.

‘Owen needed money, and you could have helped him out.’

‘You were his bloody mentor, why didn’t you do something?’

‘He didn’t come to me.’

‘Well, that says it all, doesn’t it?’ Tobar replied peevishly. ‘Go home, old man. You can rattle all the sabres you like there, but stay away from me.’

‘Your wife told me she’d left you.’

Paling, Tobar flinched, guiding Samuel’s wheelchair a little further away from the group.

‘She’s on holiday—’

‘I know Rosella,’ Samuel replied, his voice quiet but steady. ‘And she told me she’d had enough. Apparently
what you did to Owen finished your marriage. Rosella has always talked to me, Tobar, about all kinds of things. She’s basically an honourable woman. Materialistic, certainly, likes her comfort. But she has a conscience, and living with you and seeing the things you did …? Well, it was too much for her, and she needed a confidant.’