In the Frame

14

Jik drove us from Auckland to Wellington; eight hours in the car.

We stopped overnight in a motel in the town of Hamilton, south of Auckland, and went on in the morning. No one followed us, molested us or spied on us. As far as I could be, I was sure no one had picked us up in the northern city, and no one knew we had called at the Updikes.

Wexford must know, all the same, that I had the Overseas Customers list, and he knew there were several New Zealand addresses on it. He couldn’t guess which one I’d pick to visit, but he could and would guess that any I picked with the prefix W would steer me straight to the gallery in Wellington.

So in the gallery in Wellington, he’d be ready...

‘You’re looking awfully grim, Todd,’ Sarah said.

‘Sorry.’

‘What were you thinking?’

‘How soon we could stop for lunch.’

She laughed. ‘We’ve only just had breakfast.’

We passed the turning to Rotorua and the land of hot springs. Anyone for a boiling mud pack, Jik asked. There was a power station further on run by steam jets from underground, Sarah said, and horrid black craters stinking of sulphur, and the earth’s crust was so thin in places that it vibrated and sounded hollow. She had been taken round a place called Waiotapu when she was a child, she said, and had had terrible nightmares afterwards, and she didn’t want to go back.

‘Pooh,’ Jik said dismissively. ‘They only have earthquakes every other Friday.’

‘Somebody told me they have so many earthquakes in Wellington that all the new office blocks are built in cradles,’ Sarah said.

‘Rock-a-bye skyscraper...’ sang Jik, in fine voice.

The sun shone bravely, and the countryside was green with leaves I didn’t know. There were fierce bright patches and deep mysterious shadows; gorges and rocks and heaven-stretching tree trunks; feathery waving grasses, shoulder high. An alien land, wild and beautiful.

‘Get that chiaroscuro,’ Jik said, as we sped into one particularly spectacular curving valley.

‘What’s chiaroscuro?’ Sarah said.

‘Light and shade,’ Jik said. ‘Contrast and balance. Technical term. All the world’s a chiaroscuro, and all the men and women merely blobs of light and shade.’

‘Every life’s a chiaroscuro,’ I said.

‘And every soul.’

‘The enemy,’ I said, ‘is grey.’

‘And you get grey,’ Jik nodded, ‘by muddling together red, white and blue.’

‘Grey lives, grey deaths, all levelled out into equal grey nothing.’

‘No one,’ Sarah sighed, ‘would ever call you two grey.’

‘Grey!’ I said suddenly. ‘Of bloody course.’

‘What are you on about?’ Jik said.

‘Grey was the name of the man who hired the suburban art gallery in Sydney, and Grey is the name of the man who sold Updike his quote Herring unquote.’

‘Oh dear.’ Sarah’s sigh took the lift out of the spirits and the dazzle from the day.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

There were so many of them, I thought. Wexford and Greene. The boy. The woman. Harley Renbo. Two toughs at Alice Springs, one of whom I knew by sight, and one, (the one who’d been behind me) whom I didn’t. The one I didn’t know might, or might not, be Beetle-brows. If he wasn’t, Beetle-brows was extra.

And now Grey. And another one, somewhere.

Nine at least. Maybe ten. How could I possibly tangle all that lot up without getting crunched. Or worse, getting Sarah crunched, or Jik. Every time I moved, the serpent grew another head.

I wondered who did the actual robberies. Did they send their own two (or three) toughs overseas, or did they contract out to local labour, so to speak?

If they sent their own toughs, was it one of them who had killed Regina?

Had I already met Regina’s killer? Had he thrown me over the balcony at Alice?

I pondered uselessly, and added one more twist...

Was he waiting ahead in Wellington?

We reached the capital in the afternoon and booked into the Townhouse Hotel because of its splendid view over the harbour. With such marvellous coastal scenery, I thought, it would have been a disgrace if the cities of New Zealand had been ugly. I still thought there were no big towns more captivating than flat old marshy London, but that was another story. Wellington, new and cared for, had life and character to spare.

I looked up the Ruapehu Fine Arts in the telephone directory and asked the hotel’s reception desk how to get there. They had never heard of the gallery, but the road it was in, that must be up past the old town, they thought: past Thorndon.

They sold me a local area road map, which they said would help, and told me that Mount Ruapehu was a (with luck) extinct volcano, with a warm lake in its crater. If we’d come from Auckland, we must have passed nearby.

I thanked them and carried the map to Jik and Sarah upstairs in their room.

‘We could find the gallery,’ Jik said. ‘But what would we do when we got there?’

‘Make faces at them through the window?’

‘You’d be crazy enough for that, too,’ Sarah said.

‘Let’s just go and look,’ I said. ‘They won’t see us in the car, if we simply drive past.’

‘And after all,’ Jik said incautiously, ‘we do want them to know we’re here.’

‘Why?’ asked Sarah in amazement.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Jik said.

‘Why?’ she demanded, the anxiety crowding back.

‘Ask Todd, it’s his idea.’

‘You’re a sod,’ I said.

‘Why, Todd?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘I want them to spend all their energies looking for us over here and not clearing away every vestige of evidence in Melbourne. We do want the police to deal with them finally, don’t we, because we can’t exactly arrest them ourselves? Well... when the police start moving, it would be hopeless if there was no one left for them to find.’

She nodded. ‘That’s what you meant by leaving it all in working order. But... you didn’t say anything about deliberately enticing them to follow us.’

‘Todd’s got that list, and the pictures we took,’ Jik said, ‘and they’ll want them back. Todd wants them to concentrate exclusively on getting them back, because if they think they can get them back and shut us up...’

‘Jik,’ I interrupted. ‘You do go on a bit.’

Sarah looked from me to him and back again. A sort of hopeless calm took over from the anxiety.

‘If they think they can get everything back and shut us up,’ she said, ‘they will be actively searching for us in order to kill us. And you intend to give them every encouragement. Is that right?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Or rather, yes.’

‘They’d be looking for us anyway,’ Jik pointed out.

‘And we are going to say “Coo-ee, we’re over here”?’

‘Um,’ I said. ‘I think they may know already.’

‘God give me strength,’ she said. ‘All right. I see what you’re doing, and I see why you didn’t tell me. And I think you’re a louse. But I’ll grant you you’ve been a damn sight more successful than I thought you’d be, and here we all still are, safe and moderately sound, so all right, we’ll let them know we’re definitely here. On the strict understanding that we then keep our heads down until you’ve fixed the police in Melbourne.’

I kissed her cheek. ‘Done,’ I said.

‘So how do we do it?’

I grinned at her. ‘We address ourselves to the telephone.’

In the end Sarah herself made the call, on the basis that her Australian voice would be less remarkable than Jik’s Englishness, or mine.

‘Is that the Ruapehu Fine Arts gallery? It is? I wonder if you can help me...’ she said. ‘I would like to speak to whoever is in charge. Yes, I know, but it is important. Yes, I’ll wait.’ She rolled her eyes and put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘She sounded like a secretary. New Zealand, anyway.’

‘You’re doing great,’ I said.

‘Oh... Hello? Yes. Could you tell me your name, please?’ Her eyes suddenly opened wide. ‘Wexford. Oh, er... Mr Wexford, I’ve just had a visit from three extraordinary people who wanted to see a painting I bought from you some time ago. Quite extraordinary people. They said you’d sent them. I didn’t believe them. I wouldn’t let them in. But I thought perhaps I’d better check with you. Did you send them to see my painting?’

There was some agitated squawking from the receiver.

‘Describe them? A young man with fair hair and a beard, and another young man with an injured arm, and a bedraggled looking girl. I sent them away. I didn’t like the look of them.’

She grimaced over the ‘phone and listened to some more squawks.

‘No of course I didn’t give them any information. I told you I didn’t like the look of them. Where do I live? Why, right here in Wellington. Well, thank you so much Mr Wexford, I am so pleased I called you.’

She put the receiver down while it was still squawking.

‘He was asking me for my name,’ she said.

‘What a girl,’ Jik said. ‘What an actress, my wife.’

Wexford. Wexford himself.

It had worked.

I raised a small internal cheer.

‘So now that they know we’re here,’ I said, ‘would you like to go off somewhere else?’

‘Oh no,’ Sarah said instinctively. She looked out of the window across the busy harbour. ‘It’s lovely here, and we’ve been travelling all day already.’

I didn’t argue. I thought it might take more than a single telephone call to keep the enemy interested in Wellington, and it had only been for Sarah’s sake that I would have been prepared to move on.

‘They won’t find us just by checking the hotels by telephone,’ Jik pointed out. ‘Even if it occurred to them to try the Townhouse, they’d be asking for Cassavetes and Todd, not Andrews and Peel.’

‘Are we Andrews and Peel?’ Sarah asked.

‘We’re Andrews. Todd’s Peel.’

‘So nice to know,’ she said.

Mr and Mrs Andrews and Mr Peel took dinner in the hotel restaurant without mishap, Mr Peel having discarded his sling for the evening on the grounds that it was in general a bit too easy to notice. Mr Andrews had declined, on the same consideration, to remove his beard.

We went in time to our separate rooms, and so to bed. I spent a jolly hour unsticking the Alice bandages from my leg and admiring the hemstitching. The tree had made tears that were far from the orderly cuts of operations, and as I inspected the long curving railway lines on a ridged backing of crimson, black and yellow skin, I reckoned that those doctors had done an expert job. It was four days since the fall, during which time I hadn’t exactly led an inactive life, but none of their handiwork had come adrift. I realised I had progressed almost without noticing it from feeling terrible all the time to scarcely feeling anything worth mentioning. It was astonishing, I thought, how quickly the human body repaired itself, given the chance.

I covered the mementoes with fresh adhesive plaster bought that morning in Hamilton for the purpose, and even found a way of lying in bed that drew no strike action from mending bones. Things, I thought complacently as I drifted to sleep, were altogether looking up.

I suppose one could say that I underestimated on too many counts. I underestimated the desperation with which Wexford had come to New Zealand. Underestimated the rage and the thoroughness with which he searched for us.

Underestimated the effect of our amateur robbery on professional thieves. Underestimated our success. Underestimated the fear and the fury we had unleashed.

My picture of Wexford tearing his remaining hair in almost comic frustration was all wrong. He was pursuing us with a determination bordering on obsession, grimly, ruthlessly, and fast.

In the morning I woke late to a day of warm windy spring sunshine and made coffee from the fixings provided by the hotel in each room; and Jik rang through on the telephone.

‘Sarah says she must wash her hair today. Apparently it’s sticking together.’

‘It looks all right to me.’

His grin came down the wire. ‘Marriage opens vast new feminine horizons. Anyway, she’s waiting down in the hall for me to drive her to the shops to buy some shampoo, but I thought I’d better let you know we were going.’

I said uneasily, ‘You will be careful...’

‘Oh sure,’ he said. ‘We won’t go anywhere near the gallery. We won’t go far. Only as far as the nearest shampoo shop. I’ll call you as soon as we get back.’

He disconnected cheerfully, and five minutes later the bell rang again. I lifted the receiver.

It was the girl from the reception desk. ‘Your friends say would you join them downstairs in the car.’

‘O.K.’ I said.

I went jacketless down in the lift, left my room key at the desk, and walked out through the front door to the sun-baked and windy car park. I looked around for Jik and Sarah; but they were not, as it happened, the friends who were waiting.

It might have been fractionally better if I hadn’t had my left arm slung up inside my shirt. As it was they simply clutched my clothes, lifted me off balance and off my feet, and ignominiously bundled me into the back of their car.

Wexford was sitting inside it; a one-man reception committee. The eyes behind the heavy spectacles were as hostile as forty below, and there was no indecision this time in his manner. This time he as good as had me again behind his steel mesh door, and this time he was intent on not making mistakes.

He still wore a bow tie. The jaunty polka-dots went oddly with the unfunny matter in hand.

The muscles propelling me towards him turned out to belong to Greene with an ‘e’, and to a thug I’d never met but who answered the general description of Beetle-brows.

My spirits descended faster than the Hilton lifts. I ended up sitting between Beetle-brows and Wexford, with Greene climbing in front into the driving seat.

‘How did you find me?’ I said.

Greene, with a wolfish smile, took a polaroid photograph from his pocket and held it for me to see. It was a picture of the three of us, Jik, Sarah and me, standing by the shops in Melbourne airport. The woman from the gallery, I guessed, had not been wasting the time she spent watching us depart.

‘We went round asking the hotels,’ Greene said. ‘It was easy.’

There didn’t seem to be much else to say, so I didn’t say anything. A slight shortage of breath might have had something to do with it.

None of the others, either, seemed over-talkative. Greene started the car and drove out into the city. Wexford stared at me with a mixture of anger and satisfaction: and Beetle-brows began twisting my free right arm behind my back in a grip which left no room for debate. He wouldn’t let me remain upright. My head went practically down to my knees. It was all most undignified and excruciating.

Wexford said finally, ‘We want our list back.’

There was nothing gentlemanly in his voice. He wasn’t making light conversation. His heavy vindictive rage had no trouble at all in communicating itself to me without possibility of misunderstanding.

Oh Christ, I thought miserably; I’d been such a bloody fool, just walking into it like that.

‘Do you hear? We want our list back, and everything else you took.’

I didn’t answer. Too busy suffering.

From external sounds I guessed we were travelling through busy workaday Friday morning city streets, but as my head was below window-level, I couldn’t actually see.

After some time the car turned sharply left and ground uphill for what seemed like miles. The engine sighed from overwork at the top, and the road began to descend.

Almost nothing was said on the journey. My thoughts about what very likely lay at the end of it were so unwelcome that I did my best not to allow them houseroom. I could give Wexford his list back, but what then? What then, indeed.

After a long descent the car halted briefly and then turned to the right. We had exchanged city sounds for those of the sea. There were also no more Doppler-effects from cars passing us from the opposite direction. I came to the sad conclusion that we had turned off the highway and were on our way along an infrequently used side road.

The car stopped eventually with a jerk.

Beetle-brows removed his hands. I sat up stiffly, wrenched and unenthusiastic.

They could hardly have picked a lonelier place. The road ran along beside the sea so closely that it was more or less part of the shore, and the shore was a jungle of sharply pointed rough black rocks, with frothy white waves slapping among them, a far cry from the gentle beaches of home.

On the right rose jagged cliffs, steeply towering. Ahead, the road ended blindly in some workings which looked like a sort of quarry. Slabs had been cut from the cliffs, and there were dusty clearings, and huge heaps of small jagged rocks, and graded stones, and sifted chips. All raw and harsh and blackly volcanic.

No people. No machinery. No sign of occupation.

‘Where’s the list?’ Wexford said.

Greene twisted round in the driving seat and looked seriously at my face.

‘You’ll tell us,’ he said. ‘With or without a beating. And we won’t hit you with our fists, but with pieces of rock.’

Beetle-brows said aggrievedly, ‘What’s wrong with fists?’ But what was wrong with Greene’s fists was the same as with mine: I would never have been able to hit anyone hard enough to get the desired results. The local rocks, by the look of them, were something else.

‘What if I tell you?’ I said.

They hadn’t expected anything so easy. I could see the surprise on their faces, and it was flattering, in a way. There was also a furtiveness in their expressions which boded no good at all. Regina, I thought. Regina, with her head bashed in.

I looked at the cliffs, the quarry, the sea. No easy exit. And behind us, the road. If I ran that way, they would drive after me, and mow me down. If I could run. And even that was problematical.

I swallowed and looked dejected, which wasn’t awfully difficult.

‘I’ll tell you...’ I said. ‘Out of the car.’

There was a small silence while they considered it; but as they weren’t anyway going to have room for much crashing around with rocks in that crowded interior, they weren’t entirely against.

Greene leaned over towards the glove compartment on the passenger side, opened it, and drew out a pistol. I knew just about enough about firearms to distinguish a revolver from an automatic, and this was a revolver, a gun whose main advantage, I had read, was that it never jammed.

Greene handled it with a great deal more respect than familiarity. He showed it to me silently, and returned it to the glove compartment, leaving the hinged flap door open so that we all had a clear view of his ultimate threat.

‘Get out, then,’ Wexford said.

We all got out, and I made sure that I ended up on the side of the sea. The wind was much stronger on this exposed coast, and chilling in the bright sunshine. It lifted the thin carefully combed hair away from Wexford’s crown, and left him straggly bald, and intensified the stupid look of Beetle-brows. Greene’s eyes stayed as watchful and sharp as the harsh terrain around us.

‘All right then,’ Wexford said roughly, shouting a little to bring his voice above the din of sea and sky. ‘Where’s the list?’

I whirled away from them and did my best to sprint for the sea.

I thrust my right hand inside my shirt and tugged at the sling-forming bandages.

Wexford, Greene and Beetle-brows shouted furiously and almost trampled on my heels.

I pulled the lists of Overseas Customers out of the sling, whirled again with them in my hand, and flung them with a bowling action as far out to sea as I could manage.

The pages fluttered apart in mid air, but the off shore winds caught most of them beautifully and blew them like great leaves out to sea.

I didn’t stop at the water’s edge. I went straight on into the cold inhospitable battlefield of shark-teeth rocks and green water and white foaming waves. Slipping, falling, getting up, staggering on, fining that the current was much stronger than I’d expected, and the rocks more abrasive, and the footing more treacherous. Finding I’d fled from one deadly danger to embrace another.

For one second, I looked back.

Wexford had followed me a step or two into the sea, but only, it seemed, to reach one of the pages which had fallen shorter than the others. He was standing there with the frothy water swirling round his trouser legs, peering at the sodden paper.

Greene was beside the car, leaning in; by the front passenger seat.

Beetle-brows had his mouth open.

I reapplied myself to the problem of survival.

The shore shelved, as most shores do. Every forward step led into a stronger current, which sucked and pulled and shoved me around like a piece of flotsam. Hip-deep between waves, I found it difficult to stay on my feet, and every time I didn’t I was in dire trouble, because of the black needle-sharp rocks waiting in ranks above and below the surface to scratch and tear.

The rocks were not the kind I was used to: not the hard familiar lumpy rocks of Britain, polished by the sea. These were the raw stuff of volcanoes, as scratchy as pumice. One’s groping hand didn’t slide over them: one’s skin stuck to them, and tore off. Clothes fared no better. Before I’d gone thirty yards I was running with blood from a dozen superficial grazes: and no blood vessels bleed more convincingly than the small surface capillaries.

My left arm was still tangled inside the sling, which had housed the Overseas Customers since Cup day as an insurance against having my room robbed, as at Alice. Soaking wet, the bandages now clung like leeches, and my shirt also. Muscles weakened by a fracture. and inactivity couldn’t deal with them. I rolled around a lot from not having two hands free.

My foot stepped awkwardly on the side of a submerged rock and I felt it scrape my shin: lost my balance, fell forward, tried to save myself with my hand, failed, crashed chest first against a small jagged peak dead ahead, and jerked my head sharply sideways to avoid connecting with my nose.

The rock beside my cheek splintered suddenly as if exploding. Slivers of it prickled in my face. For a flicker of time I couldn’t understand it: and then I struggled round and looked back to the shore with a flood of foreboding.

Greene was standing there, aiming the pistol, shooting to kill.