Nicola Barker - Darkmans

Kane blinked.

‘Pardon?’

‘Tar,’ she repeated, ‘they dipped their feet in it.’

As she spoke she led Kane into a beautiful, high-ceilinged studio, awash with natural light.

He winced — struggling, at first, to adjust to the sudden brightness — then gazed around him, awed. It was a massive room; like a glass-ceilinged chapel, a smart Docklands penthouse, and an Old Curiosity Shop, all rolled into one.

‘What’s that smell?’ he asked.

‘Wax and honey. I’m re-canvassing a painting.’

She pointed to a large, aluminium table in the corner of the room. ‘It’s a hot bench,’ she explained.

Kane walked over and gazed down at it. There was a lead running from the table to a plug in the wall.

‘And this table heats up?’

He tentatively touched it. It felt cool.

‘The bench? Yes.’

His phone began shuddering. Peta tucked the feather into a large vase full of feathers which was standing on an old dresser nearby, then joined him at the aluminium bench, grabbed hold of a small pair of tweezers and carefully eased off a tiny fragment of the ancient canvas.

‘There,’ she said, holding it aloft.

He squinted through his fringe at it. ‘Is that the actual painting, then?’

‘The canvas behind the painting. Yes.’

‘Come again?’

‘These tiny pieces of fabric are the dead canvas. The canvas was disintegrating behind the paint — rotting away — and when that happens the paint begins to peel and fall. The work is lost. So we preserve the paint by suspending it in a mixture of warm honey and beeswax, then gradually pick off all the dead threads. It’s an incredibly laborious, time-consuming process.’

Kane gazed down at the painting, quite fascinated.

‘Is this what you do for a living?’

‘As a living? God no. It’s just a tiny part of what I do.’

He glanced around him, frowning. ‘And does Peter work here too?’ ‘Peter?’

She seemed momentarily thrown off-kilter by this question. ‘But of course. That goes without saying. Everything here belongs to Peter. It’s Peter’s bench, Peter’s barn…’

‘Peter must be loaded.’

‘ Stinking .’ She shrugged. ‘Although it’s never been about the money with him. It’s always been about the work. He insists that his prices are astronomical only because we live in a culture where an object’s price and its inherent value are considered virtually one and the same thing.’

As she was speaking Kane’s roving eye alighted on a large, wooden structure over to his left.

‘Stocks,’ he exclaimed, walking across to them. He reached out a hand to caress the ancient wood. It felt wonderful to the touch: rough, thicky-grained, almost primitive.

‘It’s a pillory,’ she corrected him. ‘Stocks are the ground-level version which they fastened around the ankles. The pillory constrains the arms and the head.’

‘Is it still functional?’

‘Absolutely.’

She strolled over to the pillory, reached up and opened one side of it. ‘Try it,’ she said, ‘these holes are for your wrists, and this…’ ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s for the neck.’

He carefully slotted himself in. She gently closed the top half around him.

‘It’s a tight fit,’ he said, feeling a strain in his shoulders and a slight constriction in his throat. He started as he heard some kind of bolt being shot.

‘People were considerably smaller then, remember,’ she said, stepping back to appraise him. He tried to peer up at her through his fringe, but the wood fell too closely around his flesh for any kind of ease of movement.

She returned to the hot bench, bent over it again, and was soon deeply engrossed.

‘Is it very old?’ he asked, rocking his body back and forth. The structure was heavy. It barely shifted. His phone, meanwhile, shuddered silently in his pocket.

‘Each individual element of the whole is totally legitimate,’ she answered.

’How d’you mean?’ he frowned. ‘Is it a replica?’

‘No. It’s an original. Peter made it. He made two. This was the first, but he wasn’t entirely happy with it.’

‘Why’d he make it?’ he asked.

‘He made it for a museum of medieval life in Durham.’

‘And what’s wrong with it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Pardon?’

He was concentrating on his phone. The vibration (she was right, he thought. I am addicted to it).

‘You tell me,’ she repeated.

‘What’s wrong? Uh …I wouldn’t have a clue.’

He tried to inspect the structure, but it hurt to twist his head around.

‘Your father couldn’t guess either,’ she observed, ‘when I locked him in there.’

‘Beede?’

Kane’s competitive instincts were immediately activated. He struggled to examine the pillory again.

‘Is it the metalwork?’

He didn’t know why he thought so. He just did.

‘Good theory.’

‘The joinery. There’s something…’

But what?

‘…slightly wrong .’

‘You’re close…’ She sounded impressed. ‘They didn’t do much mining in the late medieval period. Most of their metalwork was recycled — they’d simply smelt it down and re-use it. So there was a very specific kind of finish …’

‘Hang on a second,’ he interrupted her (having finally digested the full implications of what she’d just said). ‘You don’t mean to tell me you put Beede in the pillory?’

‘But of course I did,’ she smiled.

Kane blew a strand of hair from his eye. ‘Seriously?’

‘Ask him yourself if you don’t believe me.’

She was still bending over the hot bench, working, methodically.

Kane pondered the idea of Beede in the pillory a while. He was both amused and perplexed by this unlikely concept: I mean Beede —the indomitable Beede — disempowered; held at bay; constrained ?

‘Fuck…’ he swore (he couldn’t help himself — the thought of it was simply so…so tantalising. So naughty. So delicious ). ‘Didn’t he go nuts?’

‘Beede?’ She glanced up. ‘Go nuts? Don’t be ridiculous. He trained in the military. He was fine about it.’

‘How’d you get him in here?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Did you use force?’

‘ Force? ’ she seemed astonished by this question. ‘Against your father?’

‘How else?’

‘He climbed in himself. Voluntarily. The same way you just did.’

Pause

Kane cleared his throat. ‘Was he in here long?’

‘No. At least not by ancient standards…’ she shrugged, ‘four hours…Maybe five.’

‘Five hours ?’

Kane was horrified.

‘I didn’t trust him,’ she explained, her voice tinged with regret, ‘not at first. I’m naturally suspicious — in my line of work I have to be. And he never actually asked to be released. He was too proud. And I never actually said —I mean not in so many words — that I wouldn’t release him. I just left him in there, as a kind of experiment, really, to see how things might pan out…‘

‘Your line of work…?’ Kane scowled, confused.

‘And much to his credit,’ she continued, ‘he bore it all very bravely, without complaint, which I thought at the time was wholly admirable.’

‘Your line of work…?’ Kane repeated. Then suddenly everything just fell into place. ‘Good God ,’ he grinned, ‘you’re a forger …’ ‘In all honesty,’ she confided, straightening her spine (with a slight wince), ‘that’s not a word I’ve ever particularly warmed to.’

‘Really?’