Pix (Volume Book 24) (Harpur & Iles Mysteries)

Pix

Also by Bill James in the Harpur and
Iles series:
You'd Better Believe It
The Lolita Man
Halo Parade
Protection
(TV tie-in version,
Harpur
and Iles
)
Come Clean
Take
Club
Astride a Grave
Gospel
Roses, Roses
In Good Hands
The Detective is Dead
Top Banana
Panicking Ralph
Eton Crop
Lovely Mover
Kill Me
Pay Days
Naked at the Window
The Girl with the Long Back
Easy Streets
Wolves of Memory
Girls

Other novels by Bill James:
The Last Enemy
Split
Middleman
A Man's Enemies
Between Lives
Making Stuff Up
Letters from Carthage

Short stories:
The Sixth Man and other stories
By the same author writing as
David Craig:
The Brade and Jenkins series:
Forget It
The Tattooed Detective
Torch
Bay City

Other novels by David Craig:
The Alias Man
Message Ends
Contact Lost
Young Men May Die
A Walk at Night
Up from the Grave
Double Take
Bolthole
Whose Little Girl Are You?
(filmed as
The Squeeze
)
A Dead Liberty
The Albion Case
Faith, Hope and Death
Hear Me Talking to You
Tip Top

Writing as James Tucker:
Equal Partners
The Right Hand Man
Burster
Blaze of Riot
The King's Friends
(reissued as by
Bill James)

Non-fiction:
Honourable Estates
The Novels of Anthony Powell

Bill James

Copyright © 2008 by Bill James

First American edition, 2009

First published in Great Britain by Constable and Robinson Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information
storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages.

ISBN 978-0-88150-882-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
has been applied for.

Published by The Countryman Press, P.O. Box 748,
Woodstock, VT 05091

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

When Mansel Shale looked into his personal soul – and he did that now and then, though not making a big thing of it, for God's sake – yes, when he looked into his personal soul he saw that the main reason he ran a business was so he could use the good profits to buy good art. Manse liked the neatness and the wholesomeness of this thought – good profits, good art. It made the profits seem more worthwhile, not just a crude, grab-all chase for money. In discussions with certain friends Manse often mentioned he could not be more in favour of art. He considered that those words – ‘could not be more in favour of art' – got his feelings exactly, and he stuck with them. So, when he returned one afternoon after golf to the ex-rectory where he lived and found nearly all his paintings fucking gone from the walls, it truly knocked him.

Above all, Manse loved pictures known as Pre-Raphaelite, being a tremendous team well over a hundred years ago. One of these pictures, in a very suitable frame, was by a great artist called Arthur Hughes, and until now it had covered the wall safe where Manse kept all his Heckler and Koch 9 mm pistols and ammunition. Obviously, the frame of a picture did not amount to anywhere near as much as the picture itself, but he thought frames should be suitable. Sometimes, when he bought a picture, he would have the frame changed, finding the original one what Manse referred to as ‘off-key' or ‘at variance'. Mock wood for frames Manse detested. If you had a genuine picture, surely the frame should be just as genuine. He disliked seeing the safe exposed – unkempt for it to be
glinting at about his eye level, so plain and metallic, very much in that way of safes. When the picture hung there, it had been full of grand, bright, but also soft, colours.

Manse operated the combination and opened up. Everything looked all right inside – the three automatics and bullet boxes. He relocked and decided he had to check all through the house for any more troubles. And this turned out wise, plus significant, really. Near the top of the rectory's main stairs, with his throat cut and four bruises to the face, lay a white, dark-haired man of about thirty-five, wearing a very decent Paul Mixtor-Hythe, three-piece navy suit, the lowest button on the waistcoat undone, as always recommended by style people for waistcoats so as not to seem stuffy. In fact, he was very obvious from below in the rectory entrance hall, his limbs haywire, but Manse had been focused on the ground floor empty wall spaces, first in the hall itself, then the drawing room and the study-den, and didn't at first look at the stairs. Naturally, nothing in any of the suit pockets gave an identification, though a quiet label sewn
on to
the inside breast pocket did identify Paul Mixtor-Hythe as the tailor. Manse knew that label, of course. The suit was messed up now, but you could still see it had been custom-made in terrific material, a sort of total rightness.

In their time, the Pre-Raphaelites had what grew famed as a Brotherhood. This idea always thrilled Shale. He wished he could belong to a Brotherhood himself, not necessarily to do with art, because he realized he had almost no talent at that, but a
commercial
Brotherhood, instead of this damn barbaric competition lately and out-and-out turf warring in the substances industry. The traders' understanding Manse had with Ralph Ember could not really be called a Brotherhood. It was an arrangement – a fine arrangement, but still, just an arrangement. And, of course, all the time people wanted to get in on it, newsters to the game in this area. The media sounded off non-stop about Nottingham and Manchester getting rough through commercial rivalry in the drugs business, but they ought to take a look here.

Although his safe had been put on show now, all the other bared bits of wall stood blank except for hooks and dust lines, and Manse felt like this blankness took over his own personal soul, especially as the paintings had no insurance, because information on value might leak, followed by possible questions on how he could afford them. This would be about £3.5 million, Pre-Raphaelites plus others. People
knew
how he could afford them, but that was different from being asked straight out how he could afford them. Shale always tried to dodge that kind of head-on quizzing. Too much definition helped nobody.

The Arthur Hughes used to talk to Manse – that's how he often described it, like a spoken, one-to-one message – and he felt wonderfully in touch with the work and with the painter. In fact, he felt in touch with not only the painter hisself but with the period he lived in and the Brotherhood. This connection delighted Manse, going back to the middle of not just the last century but the one before. He was in favour of history. Also, art had a spiritual factor and he approved totally of that. Manse considered spiritual things in general should get a better chance. A safe and the guns and rounds it contained could be very important, definitely, but not in a spiritual manner at all. As Shale regarded this present situation in his home, there'd been a troupe stealing the pix and a fight started over something. Or possibly an execution had been schemed as extra to the robbery somewhere private and quiet, such as on his property. He felt so damn relieved nobody dear to him was around the house at the time these savages intruded. That might of been grave.

For instance, he enjoyed letting a girl move in and cohabit here now and then, although this house had been a rectory before Manse bought it. A girl might remain for weeks at a spell, or even a couple of months if he didn't have much else going on, and Lowri or Patricia or Carmel could easily of been here when this break-in happened. Fortunately, though, Manse had arranged a couple of weeks for hisself without one of the girls while he did some wide thinking. He believed in a pause now and then.
But these girls meant something deep to Manse. Never would he let more than one stay at a time because he would of regarded that as poor, unkind behaviour to the girls theirselves, and confusing for his children. He did not choose these girls just anyhow, and not only to do with features and body. He knew Carmel kept quite a deal of contact with her parents, which Manse considered a credit. All these girls gave him pleasant companionship and so on for spells since Sybil, his wife, left Manse to live in Wales with that chef or anaesthetist.

And this produced the grandest and happiest piece of fluke today – Manse's children, Laurent and Matilda, were away on a routine half-term with their mother. Otherwise, one of them, perhaps even both, might of got pulled into this foul violence. Luckily, Sybil did not want the children with her non-stop, or, if she heard of the rotten mischief that hit the rectory today, she might argue the children was in danger with Shale, due to his ongoing career. Occasionally, they'd be in the house alone. Sybil and Manse had never divorced, and he considered it would be wrong for another woman to live with him on a permanent arrangement, particularly as this house used to belong to the Church and was, clearly, the home of rectors, very much one up on ordinary vicars. It had a good driveway behind trees and hedges and seven bedrooms. He liked to think of rectors trotting to the front door in a pony and trap after visits or a service and pouring a pick-me-up from a silver-embossed decanter. As soon as Manse bought it, the house had become a
former
rectory, yes, but he did refer to it now and then as ‘the rectory' and he felt he must respect its past up to quite a point. Some of his writing paper had ‘St James' Rectory' printed on it as Manse's address. People joked sometimes about Manse in a rectory, manse being the word for a Nonconformist minister's house, but rectories was Church of England. Also, of course, some thought it amusing that a rectory had been bought with drugs money, though Manse did not go along much with that kind of humour.

When he saw what had happened, then looked right
through his place and around it outside, he naturally got on the phone at once. ‘Chandor, you fucking evil lout – have you been here? Of course you been here.'

‘Manse, that you?'

‘This got your mark on it,' Shale said. ‘No sign of a break-in anywhere. This got your mark on it. And in daylight.'

‘What's happened?'

‘Don't –'

‘Honest to God, Manse.'

‘Or if not you as you, your people, running a-fuckingmok.'

‘What – some trouble at your home?'

‘This got to be put right, or as near as can be,' Shale replied. ‘Soonest. I need to wash – well, you can believe it following that kind of contact! – then I'm going to pick up my kids, after access days with their mother. I don't want them coming back to a house in this state. That cannot be helpful.'

‘Which?'

‘Which what?' Shale said.

‘Which state?'

‘Don't piss me about.'

‘The house – in a poor state? Some intrusion? Is that what you're saying, Manse?'

‘You know the state it's in, you sodding smarm prince,' Shale replied. ‘You know about intrusions.'

‘Hang on a minute, Manse, will you?'

Shale heard Hilaire Wilfrid Chandor call to someone, maybe in a different room, possibly his name. It sounded like Rufus. That would be the kind of name someone who worked for Chandor might have. Then Chandor's hand went properly over the mouthpiece and Shale got nothing but a mumble, what could be an
angry
mumble, or put-on angry for Manse to pick up the tone of, a performance they'd most probably rehearsed, him and this sodding Rufus. After a minute, Chandor took his hand away and spoke to Shale again: ‘I'm not getting a clear answer from
these two fuckers here but I think they might have improperly targeted your –'

‘Which two fuckers? Was there three, then, at first?'

‘Absolutely improperly. Look, Manse, you go on and pick up your children. That's at Severalponds service station, yes? The usual swap over? It's going to take you, what – four hours there and back with an interlude for cold drinks and possible muffins? Ample. I'll see things are absolutely fine at the rectory in time for your return with Laurent and Matilda. Guaranteed. Don't worry. An error. I acknowledge it. Anything that's been taken will be replaced, I assure you, and undamaged.'