‘But... for how long?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know Mr. Updike. Maybe for ever.’
His round jolly face looked troubled.
‘Why did you bother to come and tell me all this?’ he said.
‘I’d do a great deal more to break up this bunch.’
He asked ‘Why?’ again, so I told him. ‘My cousin bought a painting. My cousin’s house was burgled. My cousin’s wife disturbed the burglars, and they killed her.’
Norman Updike took a long slow look at my face. I couldn’t have stopped him seeing the abiding anger, even if I’d tried. He shivered convulsively.
‘I’m glad you’re not after me,’ he said.
I managed a smile. ‘Mr. Updike... please take care. And one day, perhaps, the police may come to see your picture, and ask where you bought it... anyway, they will if I have anything to do with it.’
The round smile returned with understanding and conviction. ‘I’ll expect them,’ he said.
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.