Holly Lester Read online

  HOLLY LESTER

  ANDREW ROSENHEIM

  for Clare

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Three

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  A Note on the Author

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  The third time she came into the gallery, even Billings realized she was interested in more than the pictures. He was drinking his second cappuccino of the morning, sitting behind the Cedar of Lebanon table that functioned as a desk, when his assistant Tara nudged him in the ribs. Usually this was her indication – composed of a mix of excitement and contempt – that an especially wealthy-looking punter had come in; on this occasion he did what he usually did and ignored her. But when a second firmer nudge threatened to put cappuccino froth in his nose, he looked up sharply.

  And there she was, moving in a bee-line towards him. He noticed again the extravagant black hair, wavy and framed around her face like an ebony hair band. Her eyes were equally distinctive – a deep startling blue, with lashes that either needed no mascara, or benefited from it without acknowledging the source.

  She was smiling as she walked towards him, showing the wide grin he was to get to know as the infallible accompaniment to her happy moods. On her cheek he noticed again a long faint scar which caught the overhead light and flickered white against the pink of her skin. Before he could even say hello, she started speaking in a rush. ‘It’s me again. I want to have another look at the Burgess. Could you show it to me please?’ The smile broadened, showing good but not obscenely good teeth.

  Billings stood up, ignoring Tara’s cynical appreciation and led the way downstairs. In the lower gallery, they both stopped to admire the only Burgess he had on display. It was a large canvas with a lighthouse painted in thick white oil against a background of powder blue. Not in any sense abstract, it nonetheless looked slightly unreal – the lighthouse seemed to loom out of the blue sea behind – and was all the better for it.

  ‘It is lovely,’ she said, but although it was a favourite of his he didn’t reply. He had always found it more productive not to join in with a client’s oohs and ahs; a nod or smile was enough to show tactful concurrence without acting smarmy. She turned to him and flashed the smile again. ‘I’ll buy it,’ she said.

  At six thousand pounds, he was not about to object.

  ‘Very good,’ he started to say, like a creepy clerk in one of the Bond Street establishments around the corner, then stopped as he realized how ridiculous this would sound – she didn’t look any older than he did in his late thirties, and she certainly didn’t stand on her dignity.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could move on the price?’ she asked wistfully.

  He hesitated. Truth was, he usually could move on the price and often did. But Burgess was undoubtedly the single poorest artist he showed, and Billings carried his work more out of a sentimental belief in its sheer loveliness than from any commercial benefit. Six grand, minus his own commission of forty-five per cent, would keep Burgess’s Somerset cottage warm for many winters to come.

  She noticed his hesitation and spoke decisively. ‘Never mind. I’ll have it. But on one condition,’ she added, turning to look at him, her eyes flashing. ‘I have to have you, too.’

  He felt a blush spread across his face with the warmth he associated with brandy, nipped neat from a flask on a winter day. Why could he never disguise his emotions? She looked at him and her eyes widened, then she laughed again. ‘Your services, I mean. I’ll need your help hanging it – I’ve got no eye for this sort of thing at all. If you left it to me, Mr Burgess might appear upside down.’

  He felt disappointment rather than relief at this explanation for I have to have you, too, but he was glad at least to feel his blush receding. ‘I’d be happy to help,’ he said simply.

  ‘Good,’ she said, and they moved upstairs. Uncertain how to read his exchange with her, he was happy to leave her with Tara to write the receipt and he went to help a Japanese couple who were looking at a Freud lithograph. He was explaining that Sigmund was an altogether different man when he felt a tap on his shoulder. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ the woman said as he turned around, ‘but just to say I hope you don’t mind bringing the painting with you when you come. Is tomorrow afternoon all right?’

  He nodded and she went on. ‘Your assistant has the address. Let’s say three o’clock.’ She smiled at him warmly. ‘See you then. And thank you for your help.’

  As the Japanese began to confer amongst themselves, Billings turned to see what Tara was up to, and noticed a handbag on the Cedar of Lebanon table which didn’t belong to her. Of course, the mysterious lady had left it behind. He excused himself from the Japanese, who barely noticed, retrieved the bag, then walked rapidly to the front door.

  Up Cork Street he saw the woman bending down to unlock her car. He shouted, but could not be heard above the racket of taxis and the construction work on the scaffolded building next door. So he ran, awkwardly at first, with the handbag held in the air in case the woman looked up and saw him approaching. Then, as he saw that she was in her car and closing the door, he tucked the bag under his arm and ran like a fullback, weaving his way through the pavement traffic of pedestrians.

  First, an old lady in a fur coat – easy to cut around her. Then a pink pie-faced man in pinstripes, followed by a frail old fellow with a stick (swerve left, mind the stick). Two men after that, one tall, one very short with mean eyes – like the runt of a substandard litter. Move right to pass them by, increase the pace – and what the hell?

  Billings found himself shoved at great velocity face first into the brick wall of a shop front. The handbag fell from his grip, and when he tried to turn around for it he was ground against the wall by two sets of hands. He felt like pepper being pushed through a rough mill. Twisting his head, he saw the face of the little man just below his armpit. The Runt, as Billings was beginning to think of him, spoke in a tense whisper. ‘If you move, my colleague here will break your arm.’

  By Cork Street standards, this seemed a little extreme. There had been an armed robbery round the corner the month before, and in his basement vault Billings was storing a particularly valuable early Paul Nash landscape for a customer. But what an improbable way to steal it; he assumed instead that he was being mugged, although here too this seemed an odd way to go about it – why hadn’t these men simply grabbed the dropped handbag and run off? And since when did muggers wear dark suits? ‘What do you want?’ Billings found himself asking, trying to keep his voice calm.

  ‘Hold still,’ said the Runt, settling his hand even more firmly on the back of Billings’s neck, ‘and keep your mouth shut.’ The other set of hands now began frisking Billings, with the callous intimacy shown by airport guards when the metal detector goes off. So they wanted his wallet now, Billings concluded. But the hands merely patted his inside jacket pockets, then moved on to his shoulders. Working their way down his body, the hands finished at his ankles. Another voice spoke up. ‘He’s clean, boss.’

  The Runt removed his hand from Billings’s neck. ‘You’re all right,’ he said stepping back a pace, and Billings turned around slowly. He looked down into deep-set pair of mean piggy eyes. ‘I’
m what?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the Runt. ‘Really. Our mistake.’

  Billings turned to the other man, who looked sheepish and averted his gaze. No longer helpless, Billings felt his shock subside, replaced by anger. ‘What the hell do you two think you’re doing?’ Before the Runt could reply, the mystery lady appeared on the pavement beside them.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, her handbag now safely back over her shoulder. She nodded at the Runt. ‘Terry must have thought you were going to assault me.’

  ‘What, with your handbag?’

  The Runt called Terry looked embarrassed. The woman smiled, and Billings found his indignation gradually replaced by understanding. Clearly he had run afoul of overzealous security men; he was not unfamiliar with these ludicrous companions of the very rich. Arab customers in particular seemed addicted to having ex-SAS retainers in poor-fitting suits who pretended they were business ‘assistants’. When one such thug insisted on inspecting Billings’s gallery before his employer came to browse, Billings had retaliated by making sure the gallery was closed when the sultan eventually showed up.

  But he was slightly saddened nonetheless to discover that the attractive buyer of the Burgess was just another member of the paranoid plutocracy. Probably the wife of an arms dealer, unable to distinguish between the moral insecurity of her life and the putative physical perils around her. Calmer now, he nodded as the woman again apologized and her bodyguards moved even further away in an effort to reassume their usual anonymity.

  ‘Not to worry,’ said Billings, now just wanting the three of them to go away

  ‘I hope you’re still coming tomorrow. I really do need your help.’ She looked beseechingly at him, and he found himself nodding.

  ‘’Til then,’ she said, and turned to walk back to her car. Terry and the other man followed her without looking at Billings, who pulled himself together (or so he told himself) and walked slowly back up the street to the gallery. As he reached its doors a car horn honked, and he turned around to see the woman waving at him from her Audi as it sped by. Seconds later, the two men in suits followed in a Vauxhall saloon. They did not turn their heads.

  He found Tara seated at the Cedar of Lebanon table looking at him curiously. ‘That took a while. Did you find her?’

  ‘Yes. And two security goons. They seemed to think I was intent on assassination.’

  ‘I thought you looked a little shaken.’ As was so often the case with Tara’s declarations, Billings wasn’t quite sure how to take this. He had inherited Tara from Miles when he had bought the gallery and found her mix of impertinence and know-how at once entertaining and infuriating. Her hard Left politics were interestingly contradicted, in his view at least, by a beady commercial sense and by a penchant for couturier analysis – she could spot Donna Karan from Armani across half the West End. This, in its intensity, always suggested to him that she did protest too much. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘so much for socialist principles.’

  ‘I don’t have any socialist principles.’

  ‘I know about your politics, thank you very much,’ said Tara with distaste, as if alluding to some paedophile past. In fact, if Billings had been forced to describe his political views, he would have called himself a wet Tory – surely since Thatcher the most harmless of breeds. Tara looked at him accusingly. ‘You’re not spending six grand on a bourgeois landscape by a very minor painter.’

  If he listened to Tara, Billings would only have Socialist Realism on the gallery’s walls. Odd this, given her voluminous knowledge of Abstract Expressionism – a learning which, frankly, matched his own, and made her presence in the gallery very valuable indeed, since he could not really prosper in the West End selling only the figurative art he loved. ‘I like Burgess’s work,’ he said. ‘And – when you put the Red Flag down – so do you. Unless you were lying to that French woman who bought that watercolour last month.’

  Tara seemed undeterred. ‘It’s not Burgess, it’s the principle. How are you supposed to help lead a socialist party when you’re wearing Nicole Farhi and spending six thousand pounds on art?’

  ‘I’m confused. Who’s helping to lead a socialist party?’

  Tara sighed. ‘That woman. The one who’s been making gooey eyes at you three times in the last three days. Mrs Lester.’

  ‘Is that her name?’

  ‘Jesus, James. Don’t you know who she is?’

  ‘Should I? All I know is she’s rich enough to have two bodyguards threaten to break me in half.’

  ‘Rich enough? I’d have thought it went with the position. And as a Tory you should know who your enemy is. So tell me, who’s the leader of the Labour party?’

  Oh God, he thought, struggling to remember. Why couldn’t he be a better citizen? Hers was the kind of question everyone should know the answer to. It didn’t take an Aristotle to suggest the polity required a certain low-level commitment, of which knowing the identity of the most significant political leaders was one.

  Tara saw his mind racing and began shaking her head. Desperate, he said, ‘Sam Browne.’ Tara sighed, and he added rapidly, ‘No, wait a minute, he’s the one who died.’

  ‘Well done,’ she said drily.

  ‘And who succeeded him? The young chap, the one with the phoney smile.’

  ‘I’ll say. And what might his name be?’ she asked in the syrupy voice of a primary school teacher.

  ‘Lester!’ he said triumphantly, sticking his index finger up in the air. ‘Larry Lester.’ Tara started shaking her head again. ‘I mean Harry Lester,’ he added.

  ‘Well done again,’ she said sarcastically. ‘And therefore, who might the lady in question be?’

  ‘Ah. Mrs Harry Lester.’

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘I have to say she didn’t seem very married to me.’

  ‘I agree with you there. And not very PC either for a future Prime Minister’s wife.’

  ‘Now you are joking.’ Billings spoke with confidence. ‘Labour will never get in again.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ Tara said. ‘Your lot have been in far too long. People want a change. But honestly, James, I can’t believe you didn’t know who that woman was. Her picture’s in the paper almost every day. Where have you been?’

  Chapter 2

  New York, that’s where he had been, for almost fifteen years. He had left London just after the Falklands War, feeling stymied by the unavailability of capital to start his own business. It had not been a grand establishment he had aspired to, but he had wanted independence.

  Not that he found it in New York, where his knowledge of modern English painting and eighteenth-century caricatures (Gillray, Hogarth) proved most valuable under someone else’s employ. He learned perforce as well the basic business of post-War modernism, at first to be able to talk to the natives at openings, then as a lucrative part of his curriculum vitae. Rothko, Kline, Motherwell – soon they were as much strings to his professional bow as anything done transatlantically by the Camden Town Group.

  He hadn’t meant to stay away so long and travelling now westwards on the Central Line towards his flat in Shepherd’s Bush, he felt again how strange London seemed to him. In fifteen years he had watched New York grow ever more ghastly, ever more obviously the visible symbol of a decline which, as a foreigner, he felt no qualms about identifying in American life. And the art world had become not only ghastly but preposterous: four pounds of dog turds encased in lucite a cause célèbre of a SoHo showroom, a video of a performance artist auto-fellating – these had been the landmarks of the latest Manhattan season.

  So he had been immensely relieved to come back with enough savings and a backer to buy his own place of business in the West End. He had not returned with great expectations; he had simply expected London to be much the same, a sort of Dorian Gray among cities. Instead he had found her profile even younger than when he had been young; approaching forty, he actually felt old in a city that now seemed to worship youth where in his
time youth had been tolerated but no more. Returning, he had looked forward to the very sense of limits he had found so professionally frustrating fifteen years before; instead he found American-style ambition surging like an electrical storm around him. Expecting sanity, he found, in the words of a writer about New York, a neurosis in the London air which the inhabitants mistook for energy.

  Leaving the Underground, he walked along Goldhawk Road until he turned down the small street of Victorian houses, now broken into flats, including his own. From the corner he saw Marla sitting and drinking a Coke on the front steps with Sam, their Labrador. For a moment he thought how beautiful she looked – like a lanky Ali McGraw, with shoulder-length dark hair. Always dressed in a loose American way, she wore jeans and trainers, a blue cardigan that covered what had once been his own Brooks Brothers shirt. As he drew near he steeled himself. Sam’s left paw was bandaged; at Marla’s last appearance the week before it had been the right paw. ‘Hello Marla,’ he said languidly, determined to get into the house as quickly as possible.

  ‘Sam’s hurt himself,’ she said. ‘He put a thorn in his paw.’

  ‘You must have got the thorn out, or he wouldn’t be wearing the bandage. Is he thirsty?’

  ‘Very,’ she said and looked at him hopefully.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, stepping past her and turning his key in the latch. ‘I’ll bring some water out.’ He closed the front door firmly behind him.

  He ignored his feelings of guilt, filled a small bowl of water from the kitchen tap and took it outside. Marla had decided to sulk and hung her head. He ignored her and put the bowl down in front of Sam, who showed absolutely no interest. ‘He doesn’t seem too thirsty to me,’ Billings said sharply. Then he took a gentler tone. ‘You can leave the bowl there when he’s finished. I’ll get it later.’

  Back inside he poured himself a large whisky and drew the curtains. He sat down and told himself he was doing the right thing. Give her an inch and she’ll take it all, he told himself; God knows in the course of their marriage he had shown tolerance. Even coming to England had been, at least partly, a final attempt to patch things up. Her terrible behaviour in New York was caused by her environs, she had argued, not by anything to do with the essential Marla. England, she had told him, would calm her down; London, last bastion of urban civility, a mild city where even Marla could not fail to be polite to people.