Dick Francis - In the Frame

Jik and Sarah, as I had done, looked round the room and saw nothing much worth stealing. Nothing, certainly, worth alarms all over the house. Updike watched them looking and his beam grew wider.

‘Shall I show these young people our little treasures, Chuckles?’ he said.

Chuckles didn’t even reply. The television cackled with tinned laughter.

‘We’d be most interested,’ I said.

He smiled with the fat anticipatory smirk of one about to show what will certainly be admired. Two or three steps took him to one of the big dark cupboards which seemed built into the walls, and he pulled open the double doors with a flourish.

Inside, there were about six deep shelves, each bearing several complicated pieces of carved jade. Pale pink, creamy white and pale green, smooth, polished, intricate, expensive; each piece standing upon its own heavy-looking black base-support. Jik, Sarah and I made appreciative noises and Norman Updike smiled ever wider.

‘Hong Kong, of course,’ he said. ‘I worked there for years, you know. Quite a nice little collection, eh?’ He walked along to the next dark cupboard and pulled open a duplicate set of doors. Inside, more shelves, more carvings, as before.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about jade,’ I said, apologetically. ‘Can’t appreciate your collection to the full.’

He told us a good deal more about the ornate goodies than we actually wanted to know. There were four cupboards full in the lounge and overflows in bedroom and hall.

‘You used to be able to pick them up very cheap in Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘I worked there more than twenty years, you know.’

Jik and I exchanged glances. I nodded slightly.

Jik immediately shook Norman Updike by the hand, put his arm round Sarah, and said we must be leaving. Updike looked enquiringly at Chuckles, who was still glued to the telly and still abdicating from the role of hostess. When she refused to look our way he shrugged good-humouredly and came with us to his front door. Jik and Sarah walked out as soon as he opened it, and left me alone with him in the hall.

‘Mr. Updike,’ I said. ‘At the gallery... which man was it who sold you the Herring?’

‘Mr. Grey,’ he said promptly.

Mr. Grey... Mr. Grey...

I frowned.

‘Such a pleasant man,’ nodded Updike, beaming. ‘I told him I knew very little about pictures, but he assured me I would get as much pleasure from my little Herring as from all my jade.’

‘You did tell him about your jade, then?’

‘Naturally I did. I mean... if you don’t know anything about one thing, well... you try and show you do know about something else. Don’t you? Only human, isn’t it?’

‘Only human,’ I agreed, smiling. ‘What was the name of Mr. Grey’s gallery?’

‘Eh?’ He looked puzzled. ‘I thought you said he sent you, to see my picture.’

‘I go to so many galleries, I’ve foolishly forgotten which one it was.’

‘Ruapehu Fine Arts,’ he said. ‘I was down there last week.’

‘Down...?’

‘In Wellington.’ His smile was slipping. ‘Look here, what is all this?’ Suspicion flitted across his rounded face. ‘Why did you come here? I don’t think Mr. Grey sent you at all.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But Mr. Updike, we mean you no harm. We really are painters, my friend and I. But... now we’ve seen your jade collection... we do think we must warn you. We’ve heard of several people who’ve bought paintings and had their houses burgled soon after. You say you’ve got burglar alarms fitted, so if I were you I’d make sure they are working properly.’

‘But... good gracious...’

‘There’s a bunch of thieves about,’ I said. ‘Who follow up the sales of paintings and burgle the houses of those who buy. I suppose they reckon that if anyone can afford, say, a Herring, they have other things worth stealing.’

He looked at me with awakening shrewdness. ‘You mean, young man, that I told Mr. Grey about my jade...’

‘Let’s just say,’ I said, ‘That it would be sensible to take more precautions than usual.’

‘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.

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.’