The Rembrandt Secret (7 page)

When he came back in the holidays, Timothy had developed a stoop to disguise his height and a shock of fair hair which fell over his eyes, blocking the world out. By the time he was eighteen, he’d just managed to scrape through his exams and was used to keeping quiet and out of trouble. But once back in London there was only one place he could go – the gallery. And under the kindly but forceful tutelage of his father, Timothy Parker-Ross tried very hard, but learned very little.

However, Timothy Parker-Ross had one talent – for friendship. He was constant and caring, and for a lonely child like Marshall, he was the ideal ally. Often the boys
spent long afternoons at the British Museum, staring at the Egyptian mummies and telling each other stories about how No. 657 had been put away, out of reach. Because it was cursed. Everyone who had ever looked at the female corpse had died … And Marshall had let Timothy tell the story in his own time, responding with a tale of his own, about the soldier ghost in the Zeigler Gallery.

‘D’you die if you see it?’ Timothy had asked.

Bemused, Marshall had thought for a moment. ‘I dunno. I suppose not, otherwise how could you tell anyone you’d seen it? You’d be dead.’

At other times the boys went to the cinema in Leicester Square, where Marshall developed an addiction to sci-fi and Timothy watched the screen with an expression of bland confusion. And afterwards they would catch the nearest bus, seeing how many stops they could go before the conductor asked them to pay. When they were caught out, they jumped off …

Marshall’s thoughts slid on. When his father bought the country house and moved his family there, Marshall had missed London. Missed the smell of packing and sawdust. Missed the muttered curses as the delivery men tried to get larger paintings through the gallery doors, or round the back entrance. Missed the plane trees coming into leaf as the Ritz grinned its pillared smile at Piccadilly. Missed the newspaper seller at the end of the street who told him stories about the celebrities who had come to stay in the capital’s finest hotels; told him about how he
had been a chauffeur:
Oh yeah, I drove them all, when I was a chauffeur
… Marshall had even missed the ghost. The lost faint shadow of the unknown soldier who had punctuated his dreams. But most of all he had missed his friend.

They had kept in touch, but it was never the same. Timothy had started to be trained up in the gallery business and when Marshall’s mother died, life changed irrevocably. It seemed that within one summer Marshall lost most of the little family he had. Weeks after his mother died, his grandfather – the shadowy, slightly frightening Neville – had succumbed to a blood clot on the lung. Suddenly life shifted gear. There had been no more time for looking at mummies, for sci-fi, or dodging buses. He had grown up. Childhood had come to its end.

Marshall looked at the Zeigler Gallery, his gaze travelling down from the flat to the ground floor. The light was on in the porch doorway, but the blind was down on the door and he couldn’t see in. If he was honest, he was dreading walking in and talking to his father. The thought shamed him, but it was there nevertheless. Owen had been so distracted, so desperate, and Marshall had never seen his father like that. Never seen the urbane Owen Zeigler out of control … He sighed, opened the car door and got out. His father was getting older and he was in shock. He needed his son. The roles had suddenly shifted. As they did with all children and parents, and in all generations. Now Owen needed help. In the past, it had been Owen offering help to his son. This time, it was his son’s turn to give support.

As he walked to the gallery door, Marshall considered what Samuel Hemmings had told him. He would ask his father about Rembrandt’s monkey. Samuel was right, it would give them something to talk about, something to take Owen’s mind off his problems. Marshall knocked on the door, listened, but there was no answer and so he unlocked it with his own key and walked in.

‘Dad?’ he called out.

No reply.

Looking round, he turned on a desk lamp and then flinched. Papers had been pulled out of shelves and files, drawers turned over, the main gallery ledger thrown onto the floor, its white throat of pages gaping open. Surprised, he stepped over the mess, imagining how his father had been panicking, going through the books.

‘Dad?’ he called out again.

Again, there was no response. But the mess was so unlike his father, it unsettled Marshall. Owen enjoyed order; reckless untidiness was uncharacteristic. He prided himself on keeping his papers meticulously. Surely, even in the state he was in, Owen wouldn’t behave so out of character? Moving to the stairs which led up to the flat, he walked upstairs to his parents’ old bedroom. There again, the place was in chaos, drawers pulled out and overturned, the contents scattered. By now seriously worried, Marshall moved out onto the landing and into his old room. That was untouched, as was the sitting room. Puzzled, he walked downstairs again, picking his way through the
mess of papers as he headed for the back stairs which led down to the basement.

The light was off, so his father couldn’t be down there, Marshall thought. But a moment later, he decided to go downstairs after all. He flicked on the light and went down the steep steps into the warren below. As he descended, he could feel the shift in temperature. The cellar wasn’t damp, but it was always a few degrees colder than the gallery above. Dipping his head to avoid a low beam at the bottom of the stairs, Marshall passed into the cellars. He hadn’t been there for a while, in fact not for some years. But when he was a child he had visited Gordon and Lester in the basement, watching as they mended the frames or packed up paintings to be shipped abroad. Sometimes he would sit on the steps and listen to their conversation about the old days, when they were Guardsmen, and hear them laugh and talk about some of the customers – many of whom they seemed to despise. They would talk about the dealers too, and Marshall would hear random titbits of gossip, which he knew they had gleaned from other porters and gallery assistants.

Curious, Marshall moved further into the cellar, past the wooden shelves where the Dutch interiors were stored, and past the segregated selection of church interiors. His gaze trailed over the edges of gilded frames and corners of paintings only half seen. He could remember the winter when a pipe had burst in the cellar and they had all – himself included – joined together in a line, passing painting by painting along the row until Marshall’s
mother lifted them to safety on the cellar steps. Afterwards she had made tea with whisky in it for the Guardsmen, and Owen had spent the rest of the night checking each painting for water damage.

Slowly Marshall moved on, past the old bins and the worktables, towards the partitioned-off portion where Lester and Gordon had their meals and the odd smoke out in the yard. He was just about to reach the partition when he heard a sound overhead.

He stopped and called out, ‘Dad?’

Again there was no answer, and all Marshall could hear was the wind rap its knuckles on the back door. About to retreat, he decided he would check the lock before he left the basement. He moved forward to the partition and turned the corner, but in the place where Gordon or Lester would usually be sitting, was his father.

Owen Zeigler was tied to a cold water pipe, his arms suspended above his head, his body naked apart from his boxer shorts. His back was facing Marshall, the skin ripped from a beating, a piece of bloodied electric flex lying on the floor next to his feet. The wounds were varied; some little more than a scratch, but others were lashes which had torn into the flesh repeatedly, some slicing through the muscle beneath. There was barely an inch of Owen Zeigler’s back that had not been lacerated. The blood had stopped flowing a while since.

Marshall took a moment to react, immobilised by the horror of what he was looking at. At last he moved towards his father, walking through a pool of blood and
urine. His hand shaking, he felt for a pulse at his father’s neck.

‘
Dad? Dad?
’ he said softly, stupidly.

It was obvious from the angle of Owen’s head that he was dead, but Marshall kept talking to him, mumbling comfort as he reached up to try and release his father’s hands. When he couldn’t unfasten the bonds, Marshall stepped back, shaking uncontrollably, looking round for something to cut the rope. He could feel the blood sticky under his shoes, and feel the cold air coming through an open window, but he couldn’t take his eyes off his dead father. His murdered father. Tenderly he touched Owen’s face, then took off his jacket and placed it over his father’s head. But as he did so, the body slumped, swinging from its tied wrists as it turned round to face him.

All the elegant charm of Owen Zeigler’s face had disappeared under a coating of blood. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in pain, his scalp was split, his eyes stared out blindly, his rib cage caved in under the mottled flesh. And from the gaping cavern of his belly his intestines began, slowly, to slither to the floor beneath him.

Owen Zeigler had been gutted.

Rosella Manners stood by the door of the breakfast room of the Barnes house, watching her husband. She was standing barefoot, having kicked off her shoes moments earlier when she entered the house. It was a habit of long standing, a way to make her husband – shorter by three inches – feel less intimidated by her height. Her expression was unreadable, her coat unfastened, her bag on the hall table. Letting herself in, she had avoided any exchange with the housekeeper; keen that no one should overhear what she was about to say.

Mozart was playing, very quietly, the scent of the white lilies in the hallway was almost cloying. Fresh flowers twice a week. Rosella had insisted on it. Even when she was away. It was good chi, she would say mockingly, it keep the energy alive in the house. But looking at Tobar – who still had not noticed her – she realised that it was pointless to keep up any of the little pretences she had accumulated over the years. He was not a man susceptible to atmosphere. He was, she knew, immune to anything
other than the materialistic. Rosella might try for an imitation of married life, but that was all it was – emotional costume jewellery.

She glanced over to the carpet under the coffee table. They had bought it in Tangiers, Tobar haggling with the dealer, flirting with him to get the price reduced. And she had stood in the background, silent behind her sunglasses, and suspected she had been taken for his secretary or a sister. Never a wife. Her gaze moved to the mantelpiece; to the cherubs nestling together amorously. Only both
putti
had male genitalia and their marble perfection was a frozen moment of homoeroticism. Everywhere was the language of the boy. Of her husband’s preference, of the late-night conversations in the study and the two separate mobile phone numbers.

It both distressed and amused Rosella that she might be pitied, that people would think her wasted. Why be a wife to a man who had no need of one? But then again, she thought, why be a wife at all? Motionless, Rosella kept staring at the back of her husband’s head. Gossip had tracked their marriage as day followed night, but she was a clever woman: she was well aware that to be perceived as a victim was her protection. Her own mock morality.

Throwing her copy of the
Evening Standard
over to Tobar, she watched as it struck him on the shoulder.

Irritated, Tobar turned round. ‘What the hell—’

‘Read the paper,’ she said, her mouth a thin line of disgust under the patrician nose. ‘See what your handiwork has done.’

Immediately he snatched it up, read the passage she had marked, and lost colour. ‘Owen Zeigler killed …? What the fuck happened?’

‘You cheated him with that Rembrandt—’

‘Now, look here—’

‘Don’t lie to me, you little bastard. I know you, remember? I know every rotten thing about you.’ She sat on the edge of a chair, facing him, swinging one of her stockinged feet. ‘You cheated him when he needed money. If you’d sold that painting as a Rembrandt, it would have saved Owen’s business—’

‘But not his bloody life.’

‘How d’you know? Maybe he took a risk, borrowed too much, got mixed up with the wrong people. God knows, there are enough sniffing around the galleries at the moment, scenting blood.’

Tobar was reading the paper hurriedly. ‘It was a robbery that went wrong—’

She snorted. ‘Odd that no paintings were taken. Mind you, the most valuable one had already gone, hadn’t it?’

‘I was told that it wasn’t a Rembrandt!’

‘You bloody liar!’ she spat. ‘I remember what you said when Owen Zeigler first bought that painting –
Lucky bastard, that will ensure a rich old age
.’ She leaned towards her husband, her expression taunting. ‘You wanted that painting for decades. And then you got it, but the novelty soon wore off, didn’t it? You had to make Owen look like a fool, like a third rate dealer, to compound your triumph. So you sold it on. And he trusted you. If he hadn’t
have been so desperate, do you think he would have believed you?’

Tobar shrugged. ‘I was told it wasn’t by Rembrandt. I lost money too—’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Rosella replied. ‘I’ve seen your work, and I’ve not liked what I’ve seen. Why do you think I spend so much time away from you?’

‘We both know you have another man.’

‘I have
one
man. You never counted as a man in my eyes,’ she replied, with withering scorn. ‘I was your
beard.
That’s what you call it, isn’t it, Tobar? When a homosexual needs to look married, the
faux
wife is his beard.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘Well, it’s time you were clean shaven.’

Stung, he turned his pale eyes on hers, his expression flat. ‘Stop being so fucking melodramatic. You need me.’

‘Not any more,’ she replied. ‘I used to, but not now.’

‘We have an arrangement.’

‘We
had
an arrangement,’ she corrected him. ‘But now I couldn’t live in the same house with you after what you’ve done.’

He was thin with spite. ‘I don’t know why you’re being like this. It’s business. I’m sorry Zeigler’s dead, but I didn’t kill him.’