Guns in the Gallery Read online

  The Fethering Mysteries from Simon Brett

  THE BODY ON THE BEACH

  DEATH ON THE DOWNS

  THE TORSO IN THE TOWN

  MURDER IN THE MUSEUM

  THE HANGING IN THE HOTEL

  THE WITNESS AT THE WEDDING

  THE STABBING IN THE STABLES

  DEATH UNDER THE DRYER

  BLOOD AT THE BOOKIES

  THE POISONING IN THE PUB

  THE SHOOTING IN THE SHOP

  BONES UNDER THE BEACH HUT

  GUNS IN THE GALLERY

  GUNS IN THE

  GALLERY

  A Fethering Mystery

  Simon Brett

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2011

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2011 by Simon Brett.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Brett, Simon.

  Guns in the gallery. – (A Fethering mystery)

  1. Seddon, Carole (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Jude

  (Fictitious character : Brett)–Fiction. 3. Fethering

  (England : Imaginary place)–Fiction. 4. Women private

  investigators–England–Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery

  stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'2-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-165-1 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-015-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-517-6 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being

  described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this

  publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons

  is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To

  Roger and Louise,

  with thanks

  ONE

  The human mind is very selective in its retention of information. Carole Seddon had walked along the parade at Fethering more times than she cared to remember, but she’d never before been really aware of the Cornelian Gallery. Of course, she knew it was there, but she had never thought it might have any relevance to her own life. As she passed the frontage on a daily basis, usually with her Labrador, Gulliver, on the way to his walk on Fethering Beach, she had paid scant attention to the gallery’s window displays.

  This, like many things in Carole’s life, was a product of her austere middle-class upbringing. Her parents’ lives had been dedicated to keeping below the level of any parapets that they might encounter. By their scale of values, one of the worst social offences was ‘drawing attention to oneself’ – or, even worse, ‘showing off’. Though they’d never articulated the view, there was a tacit assumption in their household that most artistic expression was a form of showing off. And to their cash-strapped, penny-pinching, post-war minds, the idea of spending money on art belonged in the disapproving category of ‘frittering’. During her upbringing, Carole had lost count of the sentences she had heard from her mother which began: ‘Fancy frittering your money away on . . .’

  It was, of course, impossible to go through life in complete ignorance of art. Carole had been given a very basic grounding at school, and on foreign trips had paid visits to famous galleries where she had dutifully gazed at famous paintings, waiting in vain to feel the responses such images were meant to prompt. In common with other areas of her life, aesthetic appreciation was one in which her emotions were not easily unlocked.

  And, though with the passage of the years she had in some ways mellowed, Carole Seddon would still never have entered the Cornelian Gallery with a view to buying a work of art. The only adornments on the antiseptically clean walls of her house, High Tor, were a few landscape prints her parents had inherited from an elderly aunt. They had been part of her life for so long that she no longer noticed them – and would indeed have been hard put to say from which countries the scenes they represented came.

  But the reason why Carole Seddon went into the Cornelian Gallery that Monday morning in late April was printed on the glass door she pushed open. ‘FRAMING SERVICE’. She had something she needed to get framed.

  It was a photograph of her granddaughter. The birth of Lily to her son Stephen and his wife Gaby had been an important contributory factor in the thawing of Carole Seddon. And after her joyless upbringing, her rigid career in the Home Office, her tense marriage to, and ultimate divorce from, her husband David, there had been quite a lot in her to thaw. The process had been begun by her friendship with a new neighbour Jude, who had moved into Woodside Cottage, the house adjacent to High Tor, and the thawing could still at best be described as a ‘work in progress’. Though Carole’s personality had relaxed considerably, she was still capable of regression, clamming up her emotions at some social challenge or imagined slight.

  The photograph of Lily had been emailed by Gaby. Though initially slow to embrace computers, once she had bought a laptop Carole Seddon had quickly become hooked on the technology. There was something in its unemotional efficiency that struck a chord in her probing, analytical mind. She had catalogued all of her pictures into directories and subdirectories with the same scrupulous attention to detail that had characterized her work in the Home Office.

  Carole had also devoted some time to mastering the skills of Photoshop and ensured that no images were finally saved until they had been cropped and enhanced to look their absolute best.

  There was no one in the Cornelian Gallery when Carole entered, so she had a chance to take in its contents. The interior was not large, and much of the floor space was occupied by small tables, displaying what she could only think of as ‘knick-knacks’. There were notebooks, bookmarks, notelets, Ex Libris stickers, pens, pencils, erasers, sharpeners, all decorated with familiar images from the world of art. Carole wondered how the tortured mind of Van Gogh would have responded to the knowledge that his iconic sunflowers might one day provide the cover for a slab of Post-it notes. He’d probably have cut off the other ear.

  On one side wall hung a collection of West Sussex landscapes – the South Downs, local beaches – whose style looked vaguely familiar. Closer inspection revealed them to be the work of Gray Czesky, a self-appointed enfant terrible of an artist, whom Carole had met in the nearby village of Smalting. She winced as she remembered the prices he charged for his chocolate-box watercolours.

  One painting on that wall was clearly by another hand. Central to it was the instantly recognizable outline of Eros, but the statue was set in an unfamiliar Piccadilly Circus. Everything was covered with snow, not the pristine white of the newly fallen, but that tarnished grey of the thaw’s first day. The bleakness of the scene, of red London buses sloshing their way up towards Regent Street, was evocative of the comfortlessness of shoe-soaking slush.

  The opposite wall hosted a display of framed relief works in copper, bronze and bright enamel colours. Twisted torsos apparently grappling each other or wrestling with winged dragons. Undoubtedly
‘modern’ art, thought Carole with a knee-jerk sneer. And real dust-traps, added the compulsively house-proud element of her personality.

  On the remaining wall of the gallery were what looked at first sight like a sequence of Christmas tree designs, a series of upturned, arrowhead shapes in a variety of textures and colours. They puzzled Carole at first. She suspected further excesses of modernity and had only just identified them as samples of frame corners when the door at the back opened to admit the gallery’s owner.

  As she did with many other people in Fethering, Carole knew the woman’s name and a certain amount about her life, but the two of them had never actually had a conversation. Bonita Green was a small woman one side or the other of sixty, whose style of dress hadn’t changed a lot since she had been an art student (at ‘the Slade’, according to local gossip; though local gossip wasn’t quite sure what ‘the Slade’ was).

  And even back then her fashion sense had had something retro about it. Her lifelong sartorial icon appeared to have been the French chanteuse Juliette Greco. Summer and winter Bonita always dressed in black, V-necked black jumper, tight black slacks (there was no other word for them) and black trainers. Her brown eyes were outlined in black and her hair, improbably black and with the fluffiness brought by much dyeing, framed her face in a long page-boy cut. Perhaps as a student, she had had a sexily gamine quality, but age and two children had spread her contours considerably. Still, Bonita Green was so much a part of the Fethering landscape that people stopped noticing her. And no one ever voiced the thought that she might look faintly ridiculous.

  ‘Good morning. Can I help you?’ Her voice was affectedly sultry, matching the incongruity of her appearance.

  She knew who Carole was just as well as Carole knew who she was, but they both maintained the Fethering convention of being complete strangers to each other.

  ‘I was looking for a frame for a photograph.’

  ‘Is it a standard size? We have a big range of ready-made. Or will you want a frame specially made for it?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure.’ Carole Seddon reached into her handbag and produced a large envelope containing the precious picture of Lily. She withdrew the photograph slowly, trying to stop herself from hoping for a reaction of amazement at the beauty of its subject.

  She got none. Bonita Green was interested only in dimensions. ‘Doesn’t look standard,’ she said, before checking the edges with a transparent plastic ruler. ‘No, if you want to keep it this shape, you’ll have to have a frame made.’

  ‘What do you mean, “if I want to keep it this shape”?’

  ‘Well, it’s clearly been worked on in Photoshop. You could crop it again to get it to a standard size.’

  ‘That is the size I want it,’ said Carole with an edge of asperity. The gallery owner hadn’t exactly gone as far as to criticize her Photoshop skills, but had been too close for comfort to such a social lapse. ‘It is a rather special photograph for me.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ said Bonita Green, still insufficiently in awe of Lily’s beauty. ‘Had you any thought of what kind of frame you’d want?’ She gestured to the Christmas trees of samples behind her. ‘As you see, we have quite a wide range to choose from. I would have thought, for an image that size, you would need the frame to be at least this thick. But as to colour or finish, of course that’s up to you. What did you have in mind?’

  Carole was somewhat distressed to realize that she didn’t have anything in mind. Her intention had been to get Lily’s photograph framed. She hadn’t given any thought as to how it should be framed. Characteristically, she felt annoyed by her lack of preparation.

  ‘Presumably you’ve decided where you’re going to put it? So you’ll probably want to consider the decor of the room, so that it tones in with the colours there . . .?’

  ‘I think I’m probably after something neutral,’ Carole replied safely, at the same time hating herself for taking the safe option. She had a vision of her neighbour, Jude, selecting something exotic and multi-hued.

  Bonita Green’s hand moved to the relevant display. ‘These are the blacks, whites and metallic finishes. And if you want decorative motifs on the frame, there’s a wide selection of additional—’

  ‘No, I think just plain, thank you,’ said Carole.

  She eventually opted for a colour which Bonita Green descried as ‘gunmetal’, but which she herself would have called ‘grey’. It was appropriate. The colour matched Carole Seddon’s helmet of hair, and there was sometimes a grey bleakness in her pale blue eyes. Slender, with a good figure – though she would never have thought of it in that way – she was in fact a good-looking woman in her fifties. But she didn’t like drawing attention to herself. She maintained her parents’ tradition of keeping below parapets.

  But in fact, by choosing the unobtrusive from the framing options, Carole had selected something rather stylish. Bonita approved her choice, and the approval sounded more than the automatic blandishment of a shop-owner. ‘You don’t want a frame that’s going to distract from the colours of the photograph itself,’ she said. That was probably the nearest Carole was going to get to a compliment on her granddaughter’s beauty.

  Colour was not the only decision that needed to be made. There were also choices available in material, finish, mount and glass. Carole opted for a wooden frame with an ‘antique’ gunmetal surface, an Ice White mount and White Water glass. This last was the most expensive, but she let herself be persuaded of its superiority over other glasses. Again, Bonita Green seemed to approve of her selections and that gave a small boost to Carole’s fragile confidence.

  The cost of the work was considerably more than she had anticipated, but she managed not to blench, reassuring herself that only the best was suitable for Lily. Then came the question of how long the work would take. Would the photograph have to be sent away?

  ‘No, all our framing is done on the premises,’ replied Bonita Green. ‘Just a moment.’ She moved towards the door from which she had emerged and called out, ‘Spider, could you just come here a minute?’

  After a moment, a large man lumbered into the gallery. He wore blue overalls, spattered with a Jackson Pollock of paint and glue drips. The remarkable thing about him, though, was his hair. Dyed black, swept back in a quiff with long straight-cut sideburns, it had the complete Elvis Presley look. And in fact Spider’s bulk helped to make him look quite like the deceased superstar, in his late Las Vegas diamanté Babygro incarnation. He loomed over his employer, a presence that was at the same time protective and slightly threatening. Carole tried very hard – and not entirely successfully – to avoid looking at the hair.

  ‘Spider . . . this lady . . .’ The gallery-owner maintained the local convention of ignorance. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Carole Seddon.’

  ‘May I call you Carole?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Thank you. And I’m Bonita.’

  This was a very important moment in Fethering protocol. Though the two women had both known each other’s names for years, from this moment on they would be able actually to use them.

  ‘And this is Spider, who does all my framing.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  The big man nodded acknowledgement. Bonita Green lifted up the photograph of Lily. ‘Carole wants this framed. We should have everything we need in stock. I know you’ve got a bit of a backlog at the moment . . .’ The big man nodded again. ‘So when do you reckon we can promise this for?’

  There was a silence. He seemed to have an aversion to speech and Carole wondered if he was actually dumb. But at length, slowly he articulated the word, ‘Thursday.’

  ‘What sort of time would that be, Bonita?’

  ‘First thing. If Spider says Thursday, he means he’ll have finished it on Wednesday.’

  ‘So I might be able to pick it up on Wednesday?’

  ‘No. I usually close the gallery round four thirty. Spider often works on after that, sometimes Frid
ays and weekends as well. Isn’t that right?’

  With a nod of confirmation and farewell, the taciturn framer went back into his workroom.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ said Carole. ‘First thing Thursday I’ll pop in. What time do you open?’

  ‘Ten thirty. Ten thirty every day, except Sunday and Friday, when we’re closed.’

  The Calvinist work ethic within Carole could not repress the thought that ten thirty to four thirty was a fairly undemanding opening schedule. And taking Fridays off. But then again she knew very little about Bonita Green. Perhaps the woman was lucky enough to have a private income, and maybe the Cornelian Gallery was nothing more than a wealthy woman’s hobby.

  ‘Anyway, I’d better be off. Would you like me to pay now or pay a deposit or something?’

  ‘No, that’ll be fine. Settle up when you pick the thing up on Thursday.’

  ‘Well, that’s very good of you.’

  ‘Oh, if you were a complete stranger, I’d ask for payment upfront. But because you’re local . . .’ said Bonita Green, thus deflating the Fethering convention that they didn’t know anything about each other.

  ‘Thank you so much, anyway, and I’ll—’

  But Carole’s parting words were interrupted by the appearance from the back of the gallery of a man in his early thirties. He had floppy brown hair, and was dressed in an expensive pinstriped suit. The tie over his white shirt was of that lilac colour favoured by politicians.

  ‘Good morning, Mother,’ he said breezily.

  ‘Morning. Giles, this is Carole Seddon. My son, Giles.’

  They exchanged good mornings.

  ‘I was actually just leaving.’

  ‘And has my mother given you an invitation to our Private View?’

  ‘No, I haven’t, Giles.’

  He shook his head in mock reproof. ‘Dear, oh dear. Where’s your entrepreneurial spirit? I thought we agreed that you were going to hand out invitations to everyone who came into the gallery.’

  ‘Well, yes, but I—’