Chapter 29
I swear, the reason these people are all so thin is that they have so many parties to attend that they just don’t physically have time to eat.
We’re at the Pentagon Gallery. It’s in that bit of London between Piccadilly and St James’s Park.
The principal businesses here are art dealerships and antiquarian booksellers; on our way here I think we passed an actual yacht showroom.
The street above us is Jermyn Street, where a certain kind of posho – or a man passing as one – will happily hand over three hundred quid for a velvet smoking jacket, mostly because it has a label on saying it used to cost six hundred.
The Pentagon is a six-sided building, sitting in the centre of a small eight-sided square.
(I don’t know either.) Today’s exhibition is in the ultramodern style, which is so far over my head I can’t even see the contrails.
I really try to like art. I enjoy new stuff, and obviously there is nothing less sexy than someone who only enjoys Dutch Old Masters, but there is literally a box here that claims to contain the vapour of a grape, to challenge our preconceptions about nineteenth-century Sicily.
I didn’t know people had preconceptions about nineteenth-century Sicily.
Perhaps I’m feeling irritable about the grape box because Em and I had a tiff on the way here, on the quite important matter of whether we’re seriously going to try and fly to Nevis. Nevis! It sounds mad. It is mad. Here’s how it went:
I told Em I wouldn’t go, and she said I had to because she couldn’t do it all herself, and I pointed out that I had no passport, and she asked me if there wasn’t any way I could get my hands on one, and I paused long enough for her to realise there was a way I could get hold of one, and she dragged the truth out of me, which was my own stupid fault, and now we have agreed that once this meeting with Charli is over, I’m going to leave London and head to a small town in the south of England I thought I would never see again, and I feel frankly sick at the thought, and I can’t believe it, but I’ve told her something absolutely true about myself, and it feels like I’ve lost an entire layer of skin.
So that’s where I’m at.
Anyway. The gallery is home to a lot of art-world types – a few veterans of the Red Trouser Brigade, but mostly it’s kaftans and eyeshadow.
Charli Harcourt is here, chatting with a friend and holding a blini.
She’s in a deep purple shirt, and leather trousers even tighter on her than they would have been on the original cow.
She’s also wearing a pair of shoes Em assures me would have cost as much as a new Mini.
When she sees us, she waves a languorous hand, excuses herself from her friend, and comes over.
‘Tiff.’
‘Hello, Charli. You remember Dom.’
‘Let’s talk somewhere.’ Charli gestures, still holding her canapé. We go and stand by one of the unoccupied paintings, which is titled 1200 black squares on a black background, or: mother.
With her free hand, she hooks a loose strand of hair back where it belongs, and looks at us. She smiles, brief and coy, and for a moment I think she’s about to confide in us. Then just as suddenly as it appeared, the smile drops off her face, replaced by iron, and she opens the batting.
‘All right. Who are you really?’
Em crinkles her brow. ‘I’m Tiff, remember?’
‘No you’re not. Come on, I don’t have time for this bollocks.’
‘No, I am. We met at Guggy’s, and … before that, it was the hotel opening in Mustique, remember? We were on the roof for the fireworks and then the lifts broke.’ Well done for remembering that, Em.
‘I checked my records once I got home. That hotel’s opening party was entirely sub-aquatic. There were no fireworks.’ She holds Em’s gaze. ‘So we’ve never met.’
More crinkles. ‘Oh. Really? I must have got confused …’
‘Knock it off. You two went to see my daughter. Why?’ Shit. ‘You told her you’re private investigators.’
‘We are,’ Em concedes. ‘But—’
‘Who hired you?’
‘We can’t say.’
‘Are you police?’
‘No.’
‘Then I should have you arrested now.’ She looks to one side of the room, as if ascertaining that someone’s there. Oh God. In response to Charli’s glance, a man is walking towards us. He’s not Mr Bowling Ball, but he’s in a similar suit and shares the same ‘prison gym’ build.
‘For what, Charli?’
‘For approaching my daughter. She’s been through a very traumatic relationship recently and she’s lost her father within the last week. Are you out of your minds? Do you know the laws on harassment? Who even are you?’
‘We – I – apologise, Mrs Harcourt. I know this must have been an unbelievably difficult time for you. I don’t know how you’re still standing.’
At that, a bit of Charli’s reserve breaks down. For a second her polished exterior cracks, and I think I get a glimpse past the carefully constructed life – the parties, the glamour – to the woman within. Her voice catches faintly.
‘You don’t know. You have no idea what it’s been like.
’ And there’s venom there, but there’s vulnerability too.
She had a husband, a child, everything she had learned to want, then the marriage fell apart, and the child is grown, and she’s facing a world where people are murdered, and where all the questions she carefully never asked about her husband’s prosperity are drifting to the surface like alligators through a swamp.
She didn’t want anything especially wrong from this life, I think.
Only what most of us are looking for. Just a bit of stability.
Her thug is lingering by her shoulder, and she notices his presence. ‘Never mind, Grigor. False alarm.’ After a little bonus scowl at us, he recedes.
I pipe up for the first time. ‘Mrs Harcourt, we do understand. We know you just want the best for your daughter. But we think there was something going on between your ex-husband and Rob Wallace – they fell out badly and we don’t know why – and we’re just trying to work out whether it has any bearing on his death. ’
‘But who hired you?’ For a moment she looks desperate enough to eat her blini.
‘We can’t tell you any more than we told your daughter. But we can tell you we’re going to find the truth. We will work out who killed David.’
‘Do you have any ideas yet?’
‘Not really. We know he urgently wanted to see his friends.’
‘Ugh. The Balham lot. They were awful.’ Charli turns to Em, but nods at me. ‘And that stupid pointless game of theirs. Honestly, love, if this one ever gets into Fantasy Football, dump his arse.’
‘We’re not actually—’
‘And they were a bunch of wasters. You might want to check out Ben Westcott. I’m sure he’s got a conviction for something or other. Bought his way out of it, but it was something to do with a dodgy shotgun licence.’
‘Shotgun?’ Charli nods, and Em and I file that away.
‘We do know Mr Harcourt wanted to tell the police something important.’
Her eyes widen. ‘Oh, Dave, you silly sod. What did you get yourself into?’
‘And he wanted protection for you, the police think. You and Lulu.’ She stays quiet at that. It seems to hurt her more than anything.
‘Charli,’ says Em, ‘did Mr Harcourt ever mention Nevis to you?’
‘Mention? We went a lot.’
‘Did he ever suggest he might have financial interests there?’
‘Apart from the house? I don’t think so.’
Em and I look at each other.
‘The house?’