Guns in the Gallery
(Fethering Mystery #13)
by Simon Brett
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.