was a much-amended hand-written list of tenants. Salina Fleet was on the sixth floor. I took the lift, a modern job not more than forty years old with cylindrical bakelite buttons that stuck out like the dugs on a black sow. It opened straight onto the corridor. Salina’s was the first door along.
She didn’t answer at first. I knocked, waited, knocked again. A reggae beat was coming from somewhere, emanating from the very bones of the building, dreams of Jamaica. I knocked again and was about to turn away when the door opened a chink and Sal peered tentatively through the gap.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ Her mouth gave me a jumpy, automatic smile and her eyes tried to find their way around me into the hall. They were cold and glistening like she’d just been polishing them and had to put them back in to answer the door and they weren’t warmed up yet. Her once-fruited lips were thin and pasty. Unconsciously raising a little finger to them, she tore off a half moon of nail.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, harmlessly. ‘I haven’t come to take you up on your offer.’
The skin was drawn tight across the bridge of her nose, accentuating the bird-like cast of her face. It was a face about five years older than when I’d first seen it. She didn’t open the door any further and she didn’t invite me in.
‘Sorry to drop by out of the blue,’ I said. ‘But I’ve heard that they’re pretty well decided that Marcus’s death wasn’t suicide. Thought I should let you know.’
She accepted the news as though already reconciled to the possibility. Her neck flexed in a tiny bob, pecking an invisible grain of wheat. ‘Part of me hoped so, in a way. I can’t blame myself for an accident, can I?’
‘I was a bit abrupt yesterday,’ I said. ‘If you’d like to talk about it.’ I looked at the floor. ‘As a friend.’
She reached out through the gap in the door and put her hand softly on my chest. ‘You’re a sweet guy, Murray. Really, you are. But I’d rather be alone.’ She gave me the most bathos-drenched look ever practised in front of a mirror, sighed heavily and stepped back.
She’d tried that one before. Last time, it had nearly worked. Before the door could shut, I had my foot in it. Through the crack, I could see a bed. On the bed was a suitcase. ‘Going somewhere, Sal?’
‘How dare you!’ she spat through the gap, putting her shoulder to the door. ‘You can’t just force your way in.’
My thirty-kilo advantage sat inert against the door. ‘Talk to me,’ I said. ‘Please.’
The pressure on the door diminished somewhat. ‘This official, or what?’
‘Or what,’ I said.
She backed away silently, letting the door fall open. Her lack of pretence at hospitality was refreshingly unrehearsed.
What Salina called her loft was a large high-ceilinged room that might have once been a typing college classroom or the workshop of a manufacturing milliner. Chipboard partitions had been installed to create separate kitchen and bathroom areas, the floor had been sanded back and the place stocked with oddments of retro furniture of the Zsa Zsa Gabor On Safari variety. The wardrobe was a metal shop-display rack on castors, half empty. The bed took up the rest of the space, unmade beneath a scattering of clothes and a small, half-packed suitcase. The ashtray contained about five thousand half-smoked green-tinged butts.
‘Nice,’ I said.
My opinion was a matter of supreme indifference to Salina Fleet. ‘What’s this all about?’ she demanded.
A little of the old Sal had returned. She was wearing Capri pants with a pink gingham shirt knotted at the midriff and hoop earrings. She was still in mourning, though. The Capri pants were black. A bit of bluff might have got me through the door, but it wouldn’t get me any further. She’d backed herself against a window sill and folded her arms tight. She wasn’t going to take any bullying.
I wasn’t going to give her any. By way of emphasising that my intentions were honourable, I turned my back to the bed and perched on the arm of a zebra-patterned sofa. ‘Suicide or accident, Marcus Taylor’s death is a hot story. You’re not the only one the press have been talking to. All sorts of stories are flying around. My job involves keeping one step ahead of the pack.’
That was only part of it, of course. In the final analysis, it wasn’t the Protestant work ethic that was gunning my engine. It was my frail ego. I had the distinct impression that my string was being jerked. By whom and to what end was not yet apparent. But I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. ‘You being on the Visual Arts Advisory Panel, I thought you might be able to advise me.’
‘Stories?’ Feigning nonchalance, she put a cigarette in her mouth and flicked a disposable lighter. ‘What stories?’
‘Let’s start with yesterday first. You went to the YMCA to get a picture, right? But someone had beaten you to it.’ Her lighter wouldn’t fire. She kept flicking the wheel with her thumb. I got out mine, walked over to the window and lit both of us up. ‘Right?’
‘I told you.’ She exhaled Kooly. ‘I went to get some personal things.’
‘Toothbrush? IUD? Little things that slip easily into a folio case.’
‘And to make my private goodbyes to Marcus.’
‘By coming on to me?’
‘I was upset. Vulnerable.’
We wouldn’t get far heading down this track. I took myself back to the zebra. ‘Tell me about Marcus. How did you get involved with him?’
She shrugged. ‘How does anybody? We met last winter. At an exhibition. He tried to lobby me for a grant. He was hopeless-insecure and arrogant at the same time.’ All the things that women can’t resist. ‘I was on the rebound. We ended up in bed. You know how it is.’
I nearly did. ‘And so he got his grant.’
That was below the belt. ‘It was a committee decision, based on artistic merit.’
Now we were getting somewhere. ‘Good artist, was he? As good as his father, Victor Szabo?’
‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ Apparently the suggestion was ludicrous.
‘Like I said. Stories are flying around.’ I took the photos out of my pocket and showed her the snap of Szabo with the kid that might have been Taylor. ‘Like father, like son. And from what I’ve heard, there wasn’t just a taste for the booze in old man Szabo’s genes. Marcus inherited a dab hand for the brush. He could knock out a passable version of almost anything, I understand. Not that I’m any judge, but what I’ve seen of his work certainly confirms that view.’
Her eyes widened. ‘You’ve seen it?’
‘It?’
She didn’t say anything for a while. She was too busy giving me the slow burn. It could have popped corn at five paces. Lucky I was wearing my asbestos skin.
When that didn’t work, she tossed her head back and studied the way her cigarette smoke rose in a lazy coil towards the ceiling. I studied it, too. Ascending effortlessly in a solid unbroken column, it reached higher and higher, an ever lengthening filament of spun wire, stretching up towards the embossed tin panels far above. Then, just as its destination seemed within reach, it wavered, broke into an ephemeral mass of swirling spirals, and dissipated.
‘There was never any misrepresentation on my part,’ she said abruptly. ‘I want that clearly understood.’
‘Absolutely.’
She started pacing then, stalking the right approach. ‘If this thing gets taken any further, I want protection.’
Protection? From whom? What the hell was she talking about? ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to be the one that takes the fall?’
Her point taken, Salina moved into negotiating mode. ‘Damn right,’ she said. ‘Marcus’s image production was a perfectly valid form of post-modern discourse, right out there on the cutting edge. His pastiche-parodies of actual artworks effectively deconstructed the commonly held notions of value, authenticity and signature. They were a critical response to the pre-eminence of the so-called famous artist.’ She paced, delivering a dissertation. ‘His pictures were never mere copies. If his images were subsequently misread as such by others, that’s not my problem. It was not my role to impose a monopoly on meaning. Legitimate appropriations, that’s what they were. There was never any attempt on my part to pass them off as originals.’
Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, it’s as simple as that. Eek and ye shall find. Unless my grasp of art- speak was even more tenuous than I feared, Salina Fleet had just told me that Marcus Taylor had been knocking up
