The Kings of London Read online

  We eat vulgar foods. The coarse, unleavened bread, seaweed, unhusked rice. But if you prefer fish and chips we understand. There will be more for the rest of us.

  The sneer of the new generation. Everything you know is wrong.

  ‘I’ll order when my guest is here,’ Breen said.

  A young couple appeared and were about to sit themselves on the cushions opposite him.

  ‘I’m expecting someone to join me,’ said Breen.

  ‘Fine,’ said the young man, sitting down on crossed legs opposite him. The girl wore a crocheted waistcoat and sat clutching his arm. She picked up the menu, chewed her lip and said, ‘What’s buckwheat?’

  There was Indian music playing softly in the background, all twangs and swoops.

  The girl opposite whispered, loud enough for Breen to hear, ‘Look. It’s John.’

  Her companion turned round.

  ‘Don’t stare,’ she hissed.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just coming in.’

  ‘That’s not him.’

  ‘It is. John Lennon comes in here all the time.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not him. It looks nothing like him.’

  Breen looked. He had seen John Lennon once, close to after he’d been arrested for drugs. The man was right. It looked nothing like him.

  Breen was hungry and wanted to eat. Sitting on the cushions, his foot had gone to sleep. He had to shift to ease the pins and needles. He looked at his watch. The couple opposite him were being served something brown and nondescript in earthenware bowls.

  ‘Delicious,’ the boy said to the girl, ‘isn’t it?’

  Something about the food’s lifelessness reminded him of the meals of boiled cabbage and potato his father used to make before his son took over the cooking. Widowed when Breen was only five, his father had never felt at home in the kitchen.

  ‘Do they have salt here?’ the girl said, looking around.

  ‘You shouldn’t have salt with it,’ the boy answered.

  ‘But it’s kind of boring, to be honest.’

  ‘You need to rebalance your taste,’ said the boy. ‘You’re just too used to the taste of salt. You need to taste the food instead.’

  ‘I just prefer it saltier,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t add salt after it’s cooked,’ he said. ‘It’s not digestible until it’s cooked.’

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘What about pepper?’ She looked at Breen and winked.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  Breen smiled back at her, sucked down his tea and looked at his watch again, then looked around to see if he’d somehow missed Fraser coming in. Despite the hair-shirtness of the food, the restaurant was popular with the young and the beautiful.

  He noticed a tall, dark-haired man in a pale-pink suit arrive. He came straight over to Breen.

  ‘You must be the policeman,’ he said.

  ‘That obvious?’ said Breen, struggling to his feet to shake his hand.

  ‘I k-kept you waiting deliberately,’ he said, stuttering slightly. ‘To make you feel uncomfortable.’ He wore the suit without a tie; when he undid the buttons of his jacket, Breen caught a flash of a sky-blue lining. ‘You understand, I only agreed to come because of what happened to Frankie,’ he added unsmilingly. ‘Normally, I don’t much like the company of policemen. My experience of them has not been good.’

  ‘So I hear.’

  He sat down on a cushion. From a distance Breen had taken him for another one of the young and beautiful. He was surprised to discover, close to, that he wasn’t so young at all. He was in his mid-thirties, Breen guessed, older than he was himself. And yet he seemed not only at ease in this place, but somehow above it. People stared.

  ‘Was it you who put a p-policeman outside my flat?’ he said. Breen noticed how Fraser’s eyebrows went up with each stutter.

  ‘That was not me. Plain clothes or uniform?’

  ‘Plain clothes,’ he said, labouring over the words. ‘But as easy to spot as a nun in a whorehouse. They should give policemen lessons in how to dress. Who is it, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Bloody Drug Squad, I expect.’

  ‘Hi, Robert,’ the waiter who had served Breen called out with a smile.

  Fraser turned to the waiter and said, ‘A Heavy Special, please.’

  ‘Make that two,’ said Breen.

  ‘Are you sure, Sergeant Breen?’ asked Fraser.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Breen.

  ‘Good for you. Do you know about macrobiotic food?’

  ‘Do I look like a man who knows about macrobiotic food?’

  ‘Not in the slightest,’ said Fraser, grinning for the first time. ‘As I said, you look like a policeman. It’s a diet based on ancient sacred principles. The most ancient food is whole grains, you know. Avoid processed grains and sugars.’

  ‘About Francis Pugh…’ said Breen.

  ‘You’re not interested in food, then? Or the spiritual life?’

  ‘I’m working, right now,’ said Breen.

  ‘I understand you are an art collector,’ said Fraser.

  Breen frowned. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘A little birdie told me you’d been showing around a Bridget Riley of Frankie’s. How did you come by it?’

  The woman from the gallery must have told him. ‘I found the picture in the remains of his house.’

  ‘Was it wrecked? He had a lot of good stuff, Frankie.’

  ‘Actually right now it’s hanging on the wall in my flat.’

  Fraser laughed. ‘You’re an art thief? How superb. There’s hope after all.’

  ‘Did you sell it to him?’

  ‘I probably did, as a matter of fact,’ said Fraser. ‘I used to do a lot of Bridget’s work. Do you like it?’

  A waiter appeared with steaming earthenware bowls. They seemed to be full of a thin brown soup of some kind. ‘I don’t think I do, I’m afraid,’ said Breen.

  Fraser sighed. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re from the I-know-what-I-like school of British taste.’

  Breen looked him in the eye, then shook his head. ‘The opposite. These days I don’t know what I like, at all. I used to think I did. But, no, I don’t much like it.’

  Fraser nodded, smiled, lifted the soup bowl to his lips, took a gulp and then put it down again. He wiped his chin with a paper napkin. ‘Shame you saved the wrong picture, then. Frankie had one of the best Hockneys I’ve ever sold. And a Jim Dine that was amazing. I’m pretty sure he took a Patrick Caulfield off me, though I don’t think he ever paid. But you leave all the paintings and save a lousy print. And I heard they just bulldozed the rest. Sad, really. Are you keeping it?’

  ‘Keeping it?’

  ‘I mean, I would if I were you. I doubt the family would ask for it back,’ said Fraser. ‘His dad couldn’t care less, I don’t expect. You wouldn’t be the first copper on the take and at least you’d be taking something half decent, even if you didn’t know what it was.’

  ‘Is that why you like art? So you can feel superior?’

  ‘You miss the point. I don’t have to like art to do that.’

  Breen said, ‘It’s what the English middle classes do, isn’t it? Use culture to look down their noses at other people.’

  ‘How d-dare you. I’m not remotely middle class,’ said Fraser. ‘I went to Eton. Your trouble is the same as all of the English. Seriously. You think people like me are snobs and that art is a trick that’s being played on you. And so you can never enjoy it for what it is, which is a shame. The British are afraid to feel anything at all. We are living in a golden age of art and music but most people in this country are too small-minded to notice.’ Fraser looked around him, then lit a cigarette. ‘The only trouble with vegetarian restaurants is they don’t serve wine. Why is that? I mean, wine is vegetarian, isn’t it?’

  The rest of the food arrived. More earthenware bowls full of brownish rice and another of dark mush.

  Breen eye
d it. He stuck a fork in and tasted a little. The woman opposite had been right. It needed salt. ‘So was Francis Pugh’s collection worth a great deal?’ said Breen.

  ‘In money terms? Or art terms?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘Frankie had a good eye,’ he said.

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘He got it.’

  ‘Got what?’ said Breen.

  ‘It, of course. It.’ Fraser took a mouthful of brown rice and held it on the fork in front of him. ‘Money-wise, I think if he’d lived he’d have quadrupled what he’d paid for those paintings in ten years.’ He popped the rice into his mouth and chewed slowly. ‘More, probably. But right now, none of them are worth that much.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘But who cares? I don’t think Frankie cared that much about the value of things. Do you like the food, Sergeant?’

  Breen prodded his fork into the bowl and pulled out something pale and rubbery.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tofu,’ he said. ‘Fermented bean curd. A lot of this stuff comes from Japan. We have a lot to learn from them.’

  Breen nibbled on the pale white rectangle that seemed to taste of nothing. ‘Did Pugh buy anything off you in the last couple of months?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Frankie hadn’t bought anything off me for months. Broke, I expect.’

  ‘Or anyone else, that you know of?’

  Fraser lifted another a forkful of rice into his mouth and shook his head.

  ‘When did you last see Francis?’ asked Breen.

  Fraser said, ‘I expect you know the answer to this already, don’t you? The policeman outside has probably told you.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I last saw Frankie about three weeks ago. He came to my flat. Longer probably. Four weeks.’

  That was something, at least. No one else Breen had spoken to had met him so recently. He laid down his fork. His jaw ached from chewing. ‘What was he doing at your house?’

  ‘He just dropped in. We had a drink.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘God. What does anyone talk about?’

  Breen said, ‘The man is dead. I need to know who he is and what he does.’

  ‘Art, if you want to know. I’m pretty sure I told him about two artists from St Martin’s that I met. I am planning to show their work at the gallery later this month and I was probably trying to persuade him to buy something from them. He argued the work was sensationalist. I agreed, basically. Tell me something, Mr Policeman. These artists want to put the words “Shit” and “Cunt” in my gallery window. Just for a day. It’s a kind of happening. Do you think I’ll get away with it?’

  ‘If you don’t tell the police first,’ said Breen.

  ‘Exactly.’ Fraser laughed. ‘But is it art?’

  Breen thought for a second. ‘If it’s on a toilet wall it’s an obscenity. If it’s in an art gallery window, then it’s art.’

  ‘Bingo,’ said Fraser with a smile. ‘You’re not quite as bad as you look.’

  ‘And did you speak to him on the phone or anything after that?’

  Fraser thought for a second, then shook his head.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes. I liked him. But he’d fallen off the radar a bit, if I’m honest.’

  So far, Fraser was the only person who had seen Pugh, or talked to him, in the last weeks of his life, but that was still weeks away from his murder.

  ‘Why?’ said Breen.

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And you can confirm where you were on the evening of the twenty-eighth of November?’

  Fraser put down his fork too, now. ‘I was wondering when you’d get to that. I have house guests. Too many, as it happens. They can confirm I didn’t go out and kill Frankie, if that’s what you mean.’

  What little Breen had eaten sat heavily on his stomach. ‘How well would you say you knew him?’

  Fraser sucked his lower lip for a second, then said, ‘I suppose I knew him as well as anybody. Not that Frankie was the kind of person who let anyone get close to him.’

  ‘Shy?’

  ‘Not really. Just p-private. The p-people who have to invent themselves often are, I find.’

  His stutter had returned, Breen noticed. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘We got on because we were the same thing. P-people who are escaping what England demands they should be. From other ends of the class spectrum, p-perhaps. But though class is clearly important to you, it’s not important to me.’

  The restaurant was thinning out a little. The couple opposite them stood and left.

  ‘So why do you think somebody killed him?’

  Fraser looked Breen in the eye and said, ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t. The thing about Frankie is that nobody disliked him. Apart from his daddy, of course. Why don’t you look there? Nothing would surprise me.’

  ‘Did you know any of his girlfriends?’

  Fraser shook his head. ‘I didn’t really think much of his camp followers, to be honest. He liked married women. That way he knew they wouldn’t try and run away with him.’

  ‘Jealous husbands?’

  ‘Possibly. He was young. And very, very good-looking. And there was no chance of him wanting to become involved. Women liked that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You sound surprised. You think it’s just men who want to fuck a lot?’

  Growing up in a woman-less house, his understanding of women was limited to what his father had told him about them. It turned out to have been not always accurate.

  ‘I could swear you’re blushing, Sergeant.’

  Breen said, ‘Were there any women in particular?’

  Fraser smiled. ‘Like I said. His women didn’t interest me. He knew better than to turn up at my flat with them.’ He looked around. ‘Are we finished here? I could do with a drink.’ He looked at his watch. ‘There’s an opening at Kasmin’s. Free wine. Want to come, Sergeant? As you’re an art collector now.’

  He stood, leaving Breen to pay the bill.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you like these?’ asked Fraser.

  The gallery was painted white – the walls, the ceiling and the floor – and full of people clutching glasses of free wine. Fraser clearly got a kick from introducing Breen as a policeman.

  ‘He’s been questioning me about a murder,’ he said.

  ‘How fascinating,’ they cooed.

  The artist was a young American with thick glasses and a bush of dark hair who talked intensely to a circle of people who surrounded him, nodding occasionally.

  The paintings consisted of strong geometric curves painted in bright colours. Interlocking rainbows of pink, purple, blue and yellow. Breen peered forward, trying to imagine how they were created, they looked so meticulous. They were standing next to a young woman called Suzi who wore denim and who Fraser said was a revolutionary.

  ‘Yes,’ Breen said. ‘I do like them.’

  Fraser wrinkled his nose. ‘Really?’

  The revolutionary said, ‘This is a time for revolution, not post-abstract expressionism.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Breen.

  ‘Neither does she,’ said Fraser. ‘Get us some more wine, dear,’ he said, and handed her his glass. Breen watched her go and wondered if she was a model, or some glamorous pop star’s girlfriend. She had straw-blonde hair and high European cheekbones, and her jeans fitted tightly around her behind.

  ‘What about this one?’ said Fraser.

  ‘It’s not like I prefer one over the other. I just like them. I find them joyful.’

  ‘I suppose they are,’ said Fraser.

  ‘You don’t like the exhibition?’ asked Breen.

  ‘I’ll be honest. I think most of this stuff is a dead duck. But you like it. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘Thing is,’ said Breen, ‘I’ve hardly seen any art li
ke this. I’m probably naive.’

  ‘B-bully for you,’ said Fraser, smiling. ‘It’s something no one here would admit to.’

  A youngish woman in a fox-fur stole holding an ashtray in one hand approached and grabbed Fraser’s hand. ‘Dear Robert. How lovely to see you. Do you know Harry Cox?’ she said. ‘He’s a collector. Very keen,’ she said, in a stage whisper. ‘I haven’t seen you in so long. Are you having another exhibition soon? Please say you are.’

  The man she was with was short, bald, and wore a gold chain around his neck. He held out his hand for Fraser to shake.

  ‘Robert does Peter Blake, Harry,’ said the fur-stole woman. ‘You adore his stuff, don’t you, Harry? Harry’s frightfully rich.’

  The man called Harry smiled. He liked being called rich.

  The woman steamrollered on. ‘Are you doing a new exhibition soon, Robert? We do so miss your shows. Robert is the most thrilling gallerist in London,’ she whispered to Harry.

  ‘I’ve heard all about you,’ said the short, bald man. ‘Do you rate this artist? I was thinking of buying something.’

  ‘Were you?’ said Fraser.

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  The woman was still grasping Fraser by the hand. He turned to her and said, ‘I was just telling my policeman friend here, I’m planning a show called “Shit and C-cunt”,’ stuttering on the ‘c’-word. ‘One day only.’

  ‘Really?’ said the woman, face abruptly fixed in a smile.

  ‘Do you know Cathal?’ said Fraser. ‘He’s an art thief. And an excellent critic too. Cathal finds this work joyful, Mr Cox. I’d take his advice on it, if I were you.’

  ‘How delightful,’ said the woman, looking less sure of herself. ‘And what about you, Robert? Are you well? Have you recovered from your brush with the law?’

  ‘You think this work is good, do you?’ the fat art collector asked, turning to Breen.

  ‘Well… I like it.’

  The man nodded. ‘You’d recommend me buying it?’

  The man was looking at him eagerly, as if his opinion counted for something.

  ‘Cathal has a talent for finding a real steal,’ said Fraser, ignoring the woman who was still trying to get him to talk about life in prison.