Why, I have to ask myself — taking a pause — am I not more étonné by what I have discovered? Did I suspect all along? Did I know all along? Well, whether I knew at the beginning or not I’d have had to be some sort of nincompoop not to have had a pretty good idea more recently that something of this sort was in the wind. The strange behaviour of a certain detective inspector was clue enough, and then the strange behaviour around him — their getting me to call him off, for example — was surely a clincher. I just didn’t know what it clinched. And I still don’t know what’s to be done with what I now know, that’s if I now know anything. There’s a lot of knowing and not knowing here — knowing what you don’t know and not knowing what you do — but then that’s the secret service for you. Ha! Which is not to say I am amused. I am worried for him. My man Kevern, I mean, not the detective inspector about whom I have no worries whatsoever. And I must say I am the smallest bit worried for myself. Hurt might be a better word. Just because it’s been my job to suss him out doesn’t mean it’s been his job to string me along. For how many months have I been declaring him clean? And all that time he’s been posing as my friend, even bringing his poor girlfriend round to meet us. Does she know? That’s supposing, of course, that he himself has known any more than I have. Does he even know who or what he is? The innocent way he presented his mother’s wretched work — unaware that he was as good as handing himself in — doesn’t suggest duplicity. Had he known what he was about, or had any inkling what it was necessary to conceal, he’d have gone out into his garden in the dead of night, dug a hole as deep as hell, and dropped those sketches of hers down it. Alternatively, given where he lives, he should have thrown them into the sea the minute he found them.
And here’s another question I’m bound to ask myself: was there always a suspicion that these works existed, and that eventually it would be they — this little nothing of a notebook, this handful of neurotic prints and drawings done by a deranged, unhappy woman — that gave him away? Was that why I — a professor of the Benign Visual Arts — was given him to watch? Because the crime, if a crime is quite what it is fair to call it, was always going to show itself first and foremost aesthetically? I’m flattered, if that’s the case, though there might be those who wonder why it took me so long. To which my answer is — Art Appreciation is a slow business.
‘It’s the look of him we want you to engage with,’ was what I was told at the beginning. Words to that effect, anyway. ‘How he dresses, how he decorates his home, his taste in personal and domestic decoration.’ I had to report back pretty soon that he had forcefully resisted every hint I’d dropped about visiting him in his ‘home’ — ugh, that word! ‘I make a point of not entertaining,’ he told me. ‘I can’t cope with it. It makes me anxious. But let me take you and Demelza out for dinner.’ I could, I suppose, have dropped round on spec, but wouldn’t that have aroused suspicion? You don’t just find yourself on the cliffs of Port Reuben with time on your hands. A shame, as I said in my report at the time. I like to read a man’s soul in his kitchen. And I doubt anyone would have done it better. Though after what I have just seen I’m more than a little relieved that I never did get to see what hangs on his walls. What if his house is festooned with more examples of his mother’s sclerotic primitivism? I could not have let things lie at that. There are mistakes of taste you can let go — I’d have winked at the odd porcelain shepherdess or picturesque rendition of the Damascus Gate at sunset, believe me — but an unambiguous depravity of taste has to be reported. There’s a box for that very thing on my forms. Tick the following: ersatz Negroid art; obsession with the fractured body as reflection of tormented mind; excessive devotion to biblical themes not rendered pietistically; asymmetry, violent oppositions of colour or form, counterpart shapes, dread, menace, anxiety, expressive dualities, basket-case subject matter, and more in a similar vein. You see my problem — if his walls are decorated by his mother I’d have had to tick the lot.
And that’s before we get to the father whom he once described to me as a glassblower in wood, but that might just have been to put me off the scent. What if his candlesticks were ironically discoordinated — a veritable attack on Hellenistic proportion — to their very wicks and tails? Is there not even, now I put my mind to it, a grotesquerie of misshapen elaboration in the figures with which Kevern himself decorates his lovespoons?
Just thinking about all this sends me into a moral tailspin. I love the man. Like the man, at least. All right, all right — I don’t mind the man. It’s possible, then, that I’d have not minded one or two of his confrères. But I am reminded that on grounds of their aesthetic I’d have been tempted to pick up a stone myself had I been alive at the time. I don’t say to throw it, just pick it up. But who’s to say that the action would not have been enough to encourage me to do something worse. Having said that, I trust that my love of beauty would eventually have won out, stopped my hand and bade me turn my back.
PS And now here’s more news. Detective Inspector Gutkind has been found with his throat cut in his own ‘home’. His cat too. Both of them shrouded in white dust. Sounds like something Kevern Cohen’s mother might have drawn. Speaking of whom — the son not the mother — isn’t he now likely to be a prime suspect?
Not too good for me, all this. Not a good reflection on my acuity.
iii
She was impressed by how well Ailinn took what she had to tell her — or at least that much of it which, initially, was all she dared tell her. She read the letters that had come down to her, not with calm exactly, but with the fatalism of someone who expected nothing better and had half-dreaded something worse, and this omened well, Esme thought, for how she would deal with further revelations. But Ailinn was a slow burner. ‘And your role in this?’ she asked after a period of reflection.
‘That of a well-wisher.’
‘Please don’t treat me like a fool.’
‘You think I intend harm to you?’
‘I don’t know what you intend. But you have deceived me so far, so why shouldn’t I think you will deceive me more? Who are you and what do you want?’
‘You know who I am.’
‘No I don’t. I thought you were someone I just happened to meet at a book group and who needed a friend. But there was obviously no “just happened” about it. Don’t look at me in that bruised way, Ez. You have lied to me all along. Are you a policewoman?’
‘Do I look like a policewoman?’
‘What do looks have to do with it? You looked like my friend.’
‘I am your friend.’
‘But it’s clear from the way you say it that our friendship was a happy accident. What are you actually?’
‘I’m your guardian angel.’
‘There is no such thing. And even if there were, you aren’t it. Why do you know so much about me? Why have you made a project of my life? Nothing better to do with your own?’
‘That’s cruel, Ailinn.’
‘Yes it is. But what you’ve been doing is cruel. Did you think I’d be grateful when I discovered you’d been digging the dirt on me?’
‘It isn’t dirt.’
‘That’s a matter of opinion. But you can hardly deny you’ve been digging.’
‘I stumbled upon you, Ailinn, that’s all.’
‘Stumbled?’
For a horrible moment Esme wondered if Ailinn intended to jeer at the way she walked. But that wasn’t what had struck the girl. ‘Stumbled upon me in the course of what line of work, Ez?’