The Rembrandt Secret (14 page)

20

Having checked with the police that he could return – and stay – at the gallery, Marshall took his case up into the flat where he had lived as a boy. Oddly, he was not afraid, because he felt both obliged and compelled to be there. He was fully aware that some people, not least Georgia, would be surprised, but as he moved into his old room he felt a strangely comforted. He was back home. That his father had been murdered in the basement below did not prevent him from staying; neither did fear for his own safety. The premises were alarmed, and Marshall had realised that if he was going to be watched, he would be watched anywhere. What point would there be in moving to Amsterdam? Or New Zealand. Or France. He had the Rembrandt letters, and if they knew that, and if they still wanted them, nowhere would be safe. If he was under threat, he would be under threat everywhere, so why not stay in the place he called home?

Or was it that he hoped to draw someone out? Marshall would never have taken himself for a brave man, but he was a good son. He had admired his father, and now felt the kind of guilt only offspring can feel on the unexpected death of a parent. Sighing, he unpacked his case, pulling open the drawers in the cabinet he had used as a child. Inside one was a newspaper, dated 1978, on top of which he now laid some clothes.

He was relieved that the original Rembrandt letters were in the Dutch bank, out of anyone’s reach but his. Then he thought of the copies, secreted in his half completed translation of Dante, and decided that he would hide the copies after he had read them again. Marshall had always had a redoubtable memory, and he was relying on that ability to memorise the letters, detail for detail. When they were safely lodged inside his head, he would destroy the copies, leaving only the originals in Amsterdam.

He plugged in his mobile phone to charge it and noticed that he had missed two calls. He listened to the messages. One was from Teddy Jack:

I wanted to say thanks again. I don’t know how much your father told you about me, but I was in jail, long time back, and I did some jobs for him … Watching people and the like. I just thought you might like to know, because I think you might need me.

Listening to the message again, Marshall found himself baffled.
I did some jobs for him. Watching people and the like …
Why would his father have hired an ex-convict to spy on people? For what reason? And
which
people? Not for the first time Marshall realised how little he knew of Owen Zeigler. He had seen his father as a charming, urbane man in an elegant business. Cultivated, respected, respectable. But the other part of Owen Zeigler – the man he
didn’t
know – had a former criminal as a confidant. That Owen Zeigler had debts, secrets, enemies, and a lover. And if Marshall was going to find out who had killed him he had, first and foremost, to find out who his father had really been.

Moving to the second message on his mobile, Marshall was surprised to hear the well modulated tones of Charlotte Gorday:

I rushed off without explaining what I needed to see you about. I thought I could return to New York and just go on as normal. But I now know I was wrong. Please return my call.

Glancing at his watch, Marshall decided that it was too late to phone and he would call Charlotte the following day. Then he thought better of it and entered her New York number, waiting for her to pick up. It rang out several times before it was answered, but not by Charlotte.

It was a man’s voice, American, that said a curt ‘Yes?’

Thrown by this, Marshall took a moment to answer. ‘Is Charlotte there? Charlotte Gorday?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘My name’s Marshall, Marshall Zeigler.’ He paused. ‘Is she there?’

‘Are you any relation to Owen Zeigler?’

‘His son,’ Marshall replied, feeling uneasy. ‘Could I speak to Mrs Gorday now?’

‘She’s dead.’

‘
What?
’

‘My wife is dead,’ Philip Gorday said, his voice flat. ‘She committed suicide.’

No, Marshall thought, not suicide. No one left a phone message saying that they needed to talk urgently if they were about to end their life.

Cautious, he said, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘She was depressed about your father’s death. She couldn’t handle it. I didn’t realise how hard it had hit her …’ Philip Gorday paused, surprised to be talking to the son of his wife’s lover. Surprised to be talking at all. ‘She stabbed herself.’ He repeated the words, as though by repetition they would make more sense. ‘Stabbed herself. Right in the heart … I would never have suspected that. An overdose, yes, but a knife? She was elegant, always perfectly turned out, stabbing seems too ugly for her.’

Uncertain of what to say, Marshall hesitated. ‘I’m sorry, really sorry.’

‘Did you know Charlotte?’

‘I only met her once. She was—’

‘Extraordinary.’

‘Yes,’ Marshall agreed, trying to keep the call going. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘You’re like your father. He was always kind,’ Philip replied, his voice trailing. ‘It’s all right, you know.’

‘What is?’

‘Charlotte killing herself. I wish she hadn’t, but she loved him very much, you see.’ Philip faded on the other end. ‘He won in the end.’

‘How’s that?’

‘He got her. Your father – he took her with him. Even when he was dead, she loved him more than she loved me.’ Philip took a slow breath. ‘It was not his fault. I have only myself to blame, Mr Zeigler. I have only myself to blame.’

The call ended and Marshall listened to Charlotte’s message again. And then again, memorised it before he wiped it. His father’s lover had killed herself out of grief over Owen’s death. It was feasible, believable, even likely, in a woman who had lost the man she most loved. People did react badly in grief. They behaved out of character, because they weren’t really themselves at that time. Everyone knew that shock could change a person, made a good person vicious; a clever person dull; a well- groomed, elegant woman violent. No, Marshall thought, it wasn’t right. He agreed with her husband; it was too much out of character.

The woman Marshall had met in Amsterdam had been poised. Deeply upset and troubled, but still with enough pride in herself to apply her make-up and perfume. Not out of vanity, but habit. A way of carrying on with normality, in order to
preserve
normality. Charlotte Gorday could have taken an overdose. Might, in a moment of blurred sanity, have thrown herself off the top of a building, making a graceful angel out of her dying fall. But drive a knife into herself? Risk mutilation? Butchery? Risk pain and failure? Not even on the strength of one short meeting did that seem like something Charlotte Gorday would have done.

Stabbed. Eviscerated. And then there were the stones in Stefan van der Helde’s stomach. The stones no one had ever understood … Marshall stared ahead, his mind running over the facts. The first victim had been Stefan van der Helde, with the stones. The second, Owen Zeigler, disembowelled. The third, Charlotte Gorday, stabbed through the heart …
Was
it a suicide? Or had she been killed too?
Had Charlotte Gorday been murdered?
Marshall paused, asked himself why. Because of her closeness to his father, or because she might have known about the Rembrandt letters …?

‘Jesus,’ Marshall exclaimed aloud, and ran downstairs into the gallery, turning on the lights.

He could half remember something from his childhood, but the memory was faint and needed jolting back into focus. What
was
it, he thought, making for his father’s office at the back. What was it he was trying to remember? Stones. Evisceration. Stabbing.

Looking round Owen’s study, Marshall wrestled with his memory. He was suddenly a child again, bored with sitting still. Owen had been busy that weekend. They had been going to Thurstons, but his father had been detained by a customer who had come in to see him unexpectedly. As an hour had dragged on, Marshall had slid off his chair and gone to the window to look out, down into Albemarle Street.

It was winter then, dark coming early, the flat shaded behind him. Wait for me, Owen had told him, this is an important customer, just wait. Preoccupied, he hadn’t noticed Marshall slipping out of the office and making for the flat upstairs, where he had opened the window and felt the chill of that December afternoon, snow promised before nightfall. Looking across the street to the offices opposite, he had stared at a group of typists working at their machines, noticing how one of them kept fiddling with her glasses. His attention had then moved to the street below, where the spindly shape of Timothy Parker-Ross was coming into view.

Leaning out, Marshall had called down to him.

‘’Lo there!’

Startled, the lanky Parker-Ross had looked up, waving a gangly arm.

Hearing footsteps coming upstairs, Marshall had then closed the window and hurried out, meeting his father on the landing.

‘Are we going now?’

‘Not yet,’ Owen had replied, ‘it’s important, Marshall, you have to be more patient.’

He had been sulky, out of temper. If his mother had still been alive, she would have kept him company, but his mother was dead and the days seemed full of his father’s business, and waiting. Always waiting. No cooking in the kitchen, no music playing from his mother’s radio. No television even, because somehow when she died the sound and colour of everything had died too. Bereft, he had longed to leave London that day and go to the country where the house was still welcoming, still carrying something of his mother in its walls. But instead he had been told to wait, and keep waiting …

As he recalled the day, Marshall could feel the rage as clearly as he had then; feel the hot swell of temper that flushed his face as he had stood up to his father.

‘Why do I have to stay here? Why? I hate the gallery—’

‘The gallery pays for your schooling—’

‘That’s all you ever talk about! The gallery, the gallery! You and your customers and the bloody paintings!’ He had struck out, childishly petulant. ‘I hate pictures! I’ll never work here, never! If I never saw another painting as long as I lived, I wouldn’t care!’

Without warning, Owen had slapped him and Marshall, his eyes stinging, had fought not to cry. It had been the first and last time Owen ever hit his son, and when he spoke, his voice had been uncharacteristically hard.

‘You’ve never been interested, have you? Never looked at a picture, not once.’ He had paused, all anger gone, something much worse in its place – disappointment. Disappointment and resignation. ‘I’m sorry, Marshall, I shouldn’t have hit you, or expected you to be like me.’ He had turned away, walking to the door. ‘I won’t be long, I promise. And then we’ll go to Thurstons, all right? Maybe go fishing tomorrow, would you like that?’

Marshall had nodded, dumbly miserable. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

‘Yes, we’ll go fishing,’ Owen had concluded, walking out.

And Marshall had known in that fraction of a second that his future would never be in the art world. He had no passion for it. The thrill his father felt at proving a picture’s provenance, of making a sale, had never interested him, no matter how exciting. Taken to auctions, Marshall had been a bored observer, unimpressed by the glamour and money, just smiling to please.

His thoughts went back to that winter day, reliving his father’s disappointment. The matter was never referred to again, but it was accepted that Marshall would never follow his father’s profession. The Zeigler Gallery might survive, but it would not be run by Owen’s son, and all the triumphs of scholarship and dealing would peter out. In this manner, father and son had split. Until now. Now that Owen Zeigler was dead, Marshall was suddenly, indelibly, drawn back into the world he had so long avoided.
But he still couldn’t recall what he was trying to remember
…

Exasperated, he looked around his father’s office again. Examined the desk, the books, the photographs, the paintings on the wall. Nothing. Was it something to do with the photographs? No. The paintings? No. Marshall turned back to the shelves, to his father’s books. It was something in the books, perhaps. Something Marshall had read, or been told, many years earlier when he would have been only half listening, that bored, truculent kid. He reached for the first volume on Vermeer and flicked through it, then put it down on the desk, none the wiser.

All right, Marshall said to himself practically, think about everything that’s been going on. Consider what the facts were. Stefan van der Helde and his father had both read the Rembrandt letters. Charlotte Gorday had been his father’s lover. She had told him that she knew everything about Owen, so
had
she known about the letters? Perhaps she had, but had not thought them important, not realised they were the reason for two men’s deaths. And now her own.

Think, Marshall told himself, think … Once again he was back to being a child in this same room. But this time it was hot, stifling summer in the middle of London, and he was standing on a chair, reaching for a book on the top shelf. The memory came back with burning clarity. Marshall could see himself on the chair, reaching for the book, that beautiful, glossy volume with its gilt lettering on the spine. So big, so heavy. He had overheard his father say that it was magic, that the book held magic, and Marshall had to look, hadn’t he? Had to see the magic for himself. So he had reached for the book but, when he pulled it off the shelf, it had been too heavy for him, and he had dropped it.