The Horse's Arse Read online

  The sun had set on Pat’s allotment. He went through the motions, but the magic hour had passed. The colours turned to sludge on his brush. Even Irene had caught the mood and stiffened. The life went out of her luxuriant flesh; it sagged.

  So that was Marty’s game. How hadn’t he seen it? It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough experience. But this was on a different scale even for Marty. Well they were in it together now, up to their necks, unless Pat shopped him. And how could you shop your own flesh and blood?

  It was all his fault, he’d been a rotten father. He should have put a stop to it years ago, but he let the boy run wild and now it was 30 years too late. He’d got him out of scrapes in the past, done a brilliant line in letters to the Head and charmed the pants (literally in one instance) off his form teachers. But letters and pant-charming wouldn’t get them out of this one.

  This was a crime of a more serious order.

  At lunchtime he sent Irene home saying he wasn’t feeling well; he must have overindulged the night before. And it was true that he felt sick to the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t so much the realization that he’d been used by his own son as the confirmation that someone would pay $40m for a Phelan Degas, when they wouldn’t pay $400 for a Phelan Phelan.

  Chapter XXXX

  The pale October sun filtered through the broken Venetian blind into the bedroom, warming the rumpled duvet and striking the empty interior of the open wardrobe. On its path across the carpet the shaft of light illuminated a trail of socks and boxers spilling out of an open chest of drawers, on top of which, in shadow, stood a half-drunk mug of coffee and a plate of toast. A late bumblebee vibrated the slats of the blind as it made futile assaults on the closed window.

  A smell of sleep hung over the room, which was itself slumbering as rooms will do when vacated by their occupants. Try walking back into one quietly and you’ll catch it at it. Vacated rooms resent unanticipated intrusions. And at 9.17 on this Saturday morning, the slumbers of this particular room were rudely interrupted by an angry voice shouting from the telephone on the bedside table.

  “I’ve just got back from a visit to my aged mother in Wales and found Wednesday’s paper. I don’t believe it. What the hell did you think you were doing? It’s under two weeks to the Derain auction. Couldn’t you have waited? Now you’ve probably blown the whole shebang. The mercy is that the picture’s gone to Khaleej where, thank God, no one will know the difference. In case you’re thinking of cutting me in, which I doubt, I’d like to make clear that I want no part of this. What I do want from you, now, is an assurance that you won’t be springing any more surprises. The merest whiff of that and the whole deal’s off. Where are you? I’ve been trying your mobile all morning. Call me.”

  But Martin Phelan didn’t call because, when James Duval’s nerve-jangling voicemail shook his bedroom awake, he was in an Emirates Airbus over Turkey en route to Zubarrah, capital of the Emirate of Khaleej, with a dozen dot paintings crated in the hold. He was over Iraq at 11.20 when a husky voice disturbed the peace for a second time pleading: “Where are you, Marty? I’ve been trying your mobile since yesterday. Are you OK darling? Call me.” And by the time the silence was again interrupted once again by the sound of a throat being cleared and a voice saying wearily: “Dad here, call me,” he was on a lounger by the palm-fringed pool of the Falconry Hotel, Zubarrah gazing out over a distant view of the floating cranes that were lazily dumping the breakwater for the Emirate’s new Pearl Island development: a 4km pearl drop in the ocean designed to accommodate a dozen hotels, a concert hall, cinema complex, shopping mall, championship golf course and Khaleej’s new Museum of Modern Art.

  Martin drained his beer and dipped a hairy toe in the water. Time for a swim and a snooze before his evening meeting with the Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage. What a perfect spot: sea, sand and endless sunshine. No leaking roofs, and no extradition treaty.

  Chapter XXXXI

  Rushes of adrenaline were rare in the offices of Scotland Yard’s Art & Antiques Unit. This was the civilised end of the theft and fraud business, where dirty money was handled in white cotton gloves. Investigations proceeded slowly, conserving energies that, as often as not, investigators knew would be wasted.

  The long arm of the law was never so stretched as when a rolled up scrap of canvas costing tens of millions was half-inched by a bunch of Eastern European gangsters. By the time the work was recovered, if ever, it had been tossed like a hot potato along a chain of intermediaries so extended that the individuals involved could convincingly claim never to have touched it.

  The Yard’s involvement was often merely a matter of form, sometimes quite literally a matter of form-filling. It was the nexus of go-betweens, professional and non-professional, legitimate and criminal, that got the job done. The missing painting was spirited back to the rectangle of wall it had vacated and that was the last one heard of it. A few more facts on the Interpol database, a few more entries on the Police National Computer, but few arrests and no convictions. Chasing global art thieves was a non-contact sport.

  And now this. An attempted kidnap right on the Met’s doorstep, targeting a valued member of the unit’s staff, had jolted the squad into a sudden sense of its own importance. Detective Sergeant Jeff Burningham had a soft spot for DC Desai; he even knew the boy, a bright kid. He had given him the autographed football he’d won in June at the Arsenal Foundation charity raffle.

  Burningham took it personally, and he did his utmost to ensure that all available forces were thrown behind the investigation. Desai and the young reporter who broke the story about Bernard Orlovsky’s anonymous donation – and got his leg broken for his trouble – had both been given 24-hr police protection. The reporter had been warned off the story; they didn’t want to risk any further upsets. And the boy was safe for now with his grandmother in Leicester.

  The number plates, if the boy had remembered right, were fake but the make of keypad and the lead that the lock-up was in the Islington area had led police to a storage facility beside the canal in Wharf Road, N1. The electronic entry code had been changed, but when officers forcibly entered the premises they found the bodies of two men hanging from a crossbeam. The men, both white males in their 30s, were stripped to their underpants, with no other means of identification than an Umbro beanie hat found on the floor beneath one of the bodies.

  Fingerprint tests revealed the Beanie-wearer to be a petty crook going by the name of Andrew Davies, who had been in the Scrubs two years earlier for GBH. He had worked as a club bouncer and a glam wrestler under the stage name Rock Steelman, and had recently been temping as a doorman for upmarket security agency ArtSafe, used by leading London galleries including Orlovsky’s.

  Since developing into a murder inquiry, the investigation had widened. Interpol had been alerted. Orlovsky was widely believed to have underworld connections, although nothing had ever been pinned on him. For the time being, discretion was the better part of valour. Reports of the two deaths had been kept to a minimum, with coverage so far confined to The Islington Gazette. If the nationals got whiff of an Orlovsky connection, the investigation could be blown wide open.

  There was little to connect the kidnap to Orlovsky, no obvious motive, but then nothing in the art world these days was obvious. The art market’s ethics might be those of a car boot sale, but its workings were considerably more complex. At the top end of the market there was no longer such a thing as a simple, transparent, above-board transaction. The repercussions of a single deal could spread out in any number of directions.

  In the case of a global operator with multiple irons in the fire, the possible lines of enquiry – and avenues of escape – were endless. Orlovsky wasn’t someone you could just slip cuffs on. He wouldn’t come quietly; he had powerful friends.

  At this point in his career the Detective Sergeant would have liked nothing better than a high-profile arrest at the Orlovsky Gallery with a BBC camera crew in attendance, but if the charge didn’t stick the F
orce would be left with egg on its face. Nothing had ever stuck to Orlovsky. He was as slippery as a jellied conger eel.

  Burningham settled in for the long haul.

  He made a mental note to get young Desai a new football. A mate of his was on the Arsenal Board.

  Chapter XXXXII

  On a slow news day, Orlovsky’s disappearance made the front pages. ‘NO SHOW AT OWN EXHIBITION LAUNCH: art magnate fails to join the dots at Byrne private view’ ran the headline in the Times. ‘SPOT THE MISSING GALLERIST’, splashed the Evening Standard over a photo of a star-studded gathering floating in a galaxy of coloured dots. ‘SPOT OF BOTHER?’ queried The Express.

  The London art world was abuzz with rumours about the mystery absence of the ever-present Orlovsky from the opening of his much-hyped exhibition. Frustratingly for Fay Lacey-Pigott, the only publication not leading on the story was Marquette. With unusual courtesy Orlo had staged his vanishing act in good time for the magazine’s November deadline. But could she find anyone to cover it? Could she hell.

  Daniel, who was still hobbling round the office on crutches, had made an uncharacteristically lame excuse about it being a matter for the police – which, as far as his editor could see, was the whole point. He insisted on finishing the piece he was working on about the meteoric rise of the Khaleeji Royal Family up the ranks of the International Art Movers & Shakers list. As the IAM&S list wasn’t published until January, it could have waited.

  Daniel’s broken leg seemed to have broken his nerve. And Crispin, to Fay’s fury, had refused point blank, saying he wouldn’t stoop to ‘gutter journalism’ and persisting with a run-of-the-mill report on the recent sale of the rediscovered Derain for a record £16m marking an upturn in the fortunes of RazzleDeVere.

  Gutter journalism! This was what was called news, my dears! The stuff news gatherers were employed to gather. How could a publication boasting the strapline ‘First with the Art News’ ignore the sudden unexplained disappearance of the leading gallerist who had topped last year’s IAM&S list? It would have been pointless to give Bernice the gig, it was beyond her pay grade. So here was the editor at zero hour cobbling together a pitifully under-researched 400 words on what should, by any normal journalistic measure, have been a lead story.

  Fay felt like crying. The photograph would have to be blown up. There was an eye-catching shot of 6ft1in model Mawgan Jones attending the launch in a limited edition dot-painted dress specially designed for the occasion by Georgia McClintock. It was better than Orlovsky’s ugly mug, and it might pull in a half-page of fashion advertising.

  The Derain would have to go on the front page.

  Fay called up the image on screen and felt a bit better. It was a beautiful picture.

  Chapter XXXXIII

  The bookies’ odds on Tammy Tinker-Stone to win the Ars Nova had shortened to 11/10. Daniel wondered how the odds were calculated. Bookmakers were not known students of artists’ form, although the art and racing worlds had certain things in common. Ruthlessness, corruption, wastage, drugs, losers prematurely put out to grass.

  The one artist whose form the bookies were in any position to judge this year was Tinker-Stone, as the other three nominees were all unknown quantities: ‘British-based’ – the qualification for entry – but variously born in Tunisia, Lithuania and Taiwan.

  Tinker-Stone was only the favourite because they’d heard of her, because she was English and had long sleek hair and the sort of good strong teeth that invited a sugar lump. Next most fancied at 13/8 was the Tunisian woman artist A’ishah Madani, nominated for a film about a love affair between a niqab-wearing Muslim and a blinkered horse – an Arab Equus set in the Société des Courses Hippiques in Tunis.

  The Taiwanese and Lithuanian were rank outsiders at 100-1. But you never knew with the Ars Nova. There had long been mutterings that the race was rigged, the selectors being doped rather than the runners. Not that the selectors needed doping, since they were themselves carefully pre-selected and could be relied upon to be onside.

  In the heyday of Cool British Art most of the guests at an event like this would have failed a dope test but, post-recession, austerity was the drug of choice, its endorphin-releasing effects heightened by heart-stopping workout routines in the gym. Austerity didn’t stop art fashionistas spending on clothes and jewellery, but nothing flashy. They wore the sorts of things that only looked expensive to those who could read labels without seeing them. It was a code.

  Daniel felt completely out of his league. He was far too low down the art press rankings to qualify for an invitation to this event but had been whistled up to stand in for Fay, who was under emergency orders from her personal trainer to spend a week at a health spa. Crispin Finch had been out of editorial favour since refusing to cover the Orlovsky story.

  Things had to be pretty serious for FLP to miss the premier event in the British art calendar, but her trainer had apparently informed her that she was no longer as young as she had been – which, bitched Crispin, was what triggered the collapse.

  In a crowd like this Daniel would normally have been invisible, but he found it parting deferentially before his crutches. It occurred to him that he should have asked for a wheelchair, as he quickly discovered that crutches and notepads don’t mix. Just as well, perhaps. In this exalted company a pad would have marked him out as an outsider; better to put it away and trust to memory. More annoying was having to refuse the champagne for fear of ending up doing an Enzo.

  The announcement of the winner would be made at 9pm, which gave Daniel an hour to check out the competition. He found the Tunisian artist’s film surprisingly touching, especially the climactic moment of the stolen nuzzle between the veiled woman and the blinkered horse. But the other nominees’ work was unremarkable. The Lithuanian made what he called reductionist abstracts, lifting the paint off in parallel lines with a squeegee, and the Taiwanese had filled a gallery with discarded circuit boards and called the installation Copper Mountain.

  Tinker-Stone was showing two new videos. A wall panel mentioned her previous nomination for Gutted, “a meditation on the tragicomic mask in the context of today’s popular culture, where the sports stadium has replaced the theatre as the principal locus of communal catharsis”. In the first of her new videos, Smile Please, she “had turned her lens inward to examine her own milieu via the self-referential device of a series of ‘self-portraits’ reflected in the smiles of art world insiders”. The second video, Performance Art, took a new direction. There was no accompanying explanation because, said the wall text, the artist felt that it spoke for itself.

  Performance Art was a film of a painter in his studio, showing him working on a long vertical canvas. Although the film was shot from behind, the painter was instantly identifiable as an archetypal bohemian of the old school, with a pink flowered shirt and mint-green trousers – not to mention tortoiseshell-tinted hair – competing for attention with a vibrantly coloured canvas.

  The film’s running time was 42 minutes – the sort of length that, under normal circumstances, only a diehard video cultist would be able to sit through – but its effect on Daniel was hypnotic. There was a lilting rhythm to the artist’s repeated actions, standing back, looking, applying a dab of colour, standing back again, mixing another colour, scratching the back of his neck, looking out the window, taking an occasional swig from a mug on the table. Daniel watched, oddly mesmerised, as he took a rag and removed a patch of viridian from the centre left of the canvas, reached for a tube of violet, squeezed it on the palette, reconsidered, placed a dab of dark red on the top right, thought again, took a smaller brush, loaded it with blue and drew the outline of a form – a horse? – on the bottom left.

  He was not an elegant figure – in three-quarter profile you could see a beer gut – but his movements back and forth across the canvas had the grace and poise of a kind of painterly Tai Chi. And it wasn’t only his movements that held the eye; the painting itself was in motion. Forms came into focus, coalesced and re
ceded as parts of the picture were built up and scraped off. The image was in flux. With time-lapse photography, thought Daniel, it would have been like staring into a fire: a glint here, a flicker there, a deep glow, a sudden pool of darkness. The soundtrack, too, with its scuffs and scrapes and soft footfalls, lulled you into a meditative state. You could almost hear the background hum of thought, interrupted by an occasional sound of throat-clearing.

  Something about that sound struck Daniel as familiar, though he couldn’t put his finger on what. He was puzzling over it when an attendant came in to say that the prize announcement was about to be made in the next room. The crowd swarmed to the door and Daniel let them. He wasn’t going to fight his way through on crutches when he could hear perfectly well from the comfortable seating in front of the video.

  The prize envelope this year was to be opened by celebrity photographer Dario Testaccio. Daniel heard a heavily accented voice announcing: “And the winner of this year’s Ars Nova Prize for ars innovation is… Tammi Tinkerston!”

  As Tinker-Stone began her acceptance speech, Daniel watched the painter in her video turn away from the canvas to wipe his brush on some sheets of newspaper on the table beside him, and he suddenly realised what was familiar about him. Of course! He was the painter from the allotments. And in a gap exposed by his turning movement, Daniel noticed something else that looked familiar.

  Propped on a shelf just to the right of the easel was a small canvas of a seaside scene with boats and figures in a radically different style to the one he was painting. The picture looked unfinished, but it was without a doubt the Derain of The Harbour at Collioure featuring on the cover of next month’s Marquette.