The Art of Deception Read online

  The Art of Deception

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part 2

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Part 3

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Part 4

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Part 5

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  Copyright

  The Art of Deception

  Elizabeth Ironside

  For Prue and Andrew

  Prologue

  ‘The mind of a killer is a fascinating study,’ Prisca remarked.

  She was eating a trout, concentrating on piercing its crisply fried skin, slicing along its back and separating it into fillets, having already removed its head. She was the sort of vegetarian who, somehow, categorises fish among plant life.

  ‘Can one tell, do you think?’ she went on. ‘Not after the event, but before. Not who did it, that’s an obvious question, but who will do it? Could you? Did you see?’ She did not look at me.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘There was a lot I didn’t see.’

  ‘Before now I’ve only ever known murderers retrospectively.’ She was lifting out the backbone and removing it fastidiously to the side of her plate. ‘That is, they’d already killed when I met them, when I was a prison visitor. I never knew them before the act. And that’s the interesting bit.’

  ‘Beforehand I had everything wrong. All the information was there, but I simply didn’t read it properly.’

  I had chosen a steak, because I couldn’t be bothered to consider anything else on the menu. I cut through the encrusted surface and the reddish edge was gently weeping onto my plate.

  ‘To do you justice, some of the information was faked.’

  ‘You know I don’t accept that.’

  ‘Nicholas, you were duped, tricked all along the line. Either that or you’re fooling us.’

  She selected a forkful of pink flesh, dabbed it with sauce and put it in her mouth.

  ‘Why aren’t you eating? Isn’t rare enough for you? You ought to write it up. It would be therapy, get you started again. You needn’t bother with who did it, we know all that. Die view you want is not who, but why. Could you see beforehand? Should you have guessed what was going on? You were the only person who had the information, who knew everybody, or at least knew about everybody.’

  ‘It’s not just a question of who is going to be the killer. It’s also who is going to be killed.’

  ‘The victim was always pretty obvious. Asking for it, in my opinion. Not that I dreamt… But I didn’t know the half of it.’ Prisca helped herself to a piece of French bread. She stabbed a curl of butter and pasted it into place.

  ‘I can’t write any more. I’ve been trying to work on my book on art and perception, but I can’t concentrate. I think I need a holiday.’

  The steak was tough. It required some energy to saw through it. Human flesh was equally fibrous, dense, knit together in a durable web of tissue. To puncture the skin and pierce the muscle was the work of force. I put my knife and fork down, wishing I’d chosen something else.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Prisca never took holidays and did not see why anyone else should. ‘You’ve just got to get the whole thing out of your system. Write it up. Then you can come back to your academic stuff later. Refreshed.’

  She ate the last mouthful of her fish and took a sip of wine. All that remained on her plate was a framework of fine bones.

  ‘I suppose I could try. I’d want to explain how it seemed at the time, the signs that were there, but which I didn’t understand, to do it without hindsight, innocently.’

  ‘However you want to tackle it,’ Prisca said, 'the important thing is to cauterise the past.’ She took the menu from the waiter. ‘Now, what shall we have for pudding?’

  After some thought, she chose an arrangement of exotic fruit. I had roasted figs.

  ‘I think it’s quite important for you,’ she said, ‘to come to some kind of understanding of what happened, why it happened, why it happened to you of all people.’

  The figs, three fat black bulbs, sat in a raspberry sauce, which made a pink pool in the centre of the white plate. I broke into the first fruit until the side of my fork. It opened up like a wound to reveal its centre, a milder red, fibrillous, speckled with golden seeds. Food had recently taken on an extraordinary power to return itself to raw materials in front of my eyes. And not just the form of its origin, but transubstantiated into flesh, open, throbbing, bloody, female. If writing about what had happened would put an end to this, it would be worth doing.

  ‘It all began like this,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It began that night two years ago, when you and I had dinner together to talk about Emily. Do you remember? That’s when I met her.’

  Part 1

  Girl in a Fur

  1

  ‘I don’t see. I simply don’t see what she wants. What do women want?’

  ‘“What do women want?”’ My cousin repeated the question in her faintly American accent. When I spoke, in exasperation, it had been a simple query; in her mouth it became something different. The tone of her voice, reflective rather than interrogative, suggested that she was more concerned with assessing why I asked than with giving an answer. Her dark, Nefertiti-like face wore an expression of compassion.

  ‘The usual things, I would have thought. Home, job, children; love, power, comfort; respect, justice.’ She stopped to think of a third, matching quality. ‘Revenge,’ she finished.

  ‘In fact, everything, at once, all the time, right now.’

  ‘Like men.’

  ‘No, men are more reasonable. We know that certain things are impossible, so you have to make choices.’

  I don’t like conversations like this, pretentious, generalised. I like particularity; whoever said God is in the detail was right. Prisca has always been one for the abstract approach. On this occasion it was my own fault for asking the question in the first place. It must have been the benign effect that Prisca has always had on me that had allowed me to voice such a Freudian query.

  We had been talking about Emily, my wife, my soon-to-be-ex-wife, whose behaviour in the past few months I had found incomprehensible. Prisca had acted as mediator on several occasions. I trusted her honesty and good will and she had proved herself exemplary in this difficult role.

  It was Emily’s behaviour that had produced my irritable question. Only by assuming that there was some fundamental need that had been left unmet could you account for what she had done. I should say at once there was no other man. At the time of her atom-splitting statement, that she and the children were going to leave, I was convinced there must be a lover. Only sexual infatuation could explain why a woman would abandon her home and husband with such ruthless abruptness. She denied it and no one else had appeared to claim her when we finally separa
ted. So one obvious explanation failed. Outsiders may have drawn other conclusions. They may have thought that I was pathologically jealous, a woman-chaser, but I, at least, knew that this was not the case and that Emily had no reason to leave.

  She had made known her wish to go without preliminaries. There had been no period of tears and scenes to warn me of what was coming. I had known Em for twelve years; we had been married for eleven. She had been an uncertain teenager when I first met her, a nineteen-year-old drop-out from university. Within a year we were married and she was expecting our first child. She settled into marriage and motherhood at once. It was obviously what she was created for. Her vagueness and uncertainty of purpose disappeared and we had our three children within five years.

  There was nothing wrong with Emily’s life or our marriage, as far as I could see. We were well off. I earn a decent amount from my writing and academic work, but the truth is that my earnings are irrelevant. My great grandfather, a buccaneering capitalist of the nineteenth century, who founded our family fortune with a great drugs and cosmetics empire, made flexible and prudent dispositions for the transfer of money between generations. Neither taxation nor inflation nor my father’s alimony payments had seriously harmed his arrangements. We lived in a large house in Holland Park and Emily had all the nannies and helpers she required. She had a generous allowance for herself which she spent without any accounting to me. When she decided the children needed more space, we bought a house in Dorset where we went for weekends and holidays. She ran our lives. Love, power, comfort. She had them all.

  Then one day last spring she announced that she was leaving me. It was Sunday and we had been in the country for the weekend. We arrived home at last after a hot, fractious journey, during which sibling rivalry could not be contained. Cordelia had been annoying her brothers and they, to have their own back, stole her favourite toy, a very old doll which had belonged originally to Emily as a child. She had soft limbs, a rigid, hydrocephalic head, large eyes and masses of dark hair. She was known, in spite of plentiful signals of her femininity, as George.

  We began to unpack the car. Among the bags and baskets in the hall Sholto noticed George. Emily and I, laden with suitcases and boxes, saw him seize the doll and run upstairs with her, shouting to Cordelia, ‘George is coming with me. She doesn’t want to live with you any more.’

  Cordelia shrieked like a siren and pursued him.

  Emily shouted, ‘Sholto, Delia,’ and tripped over the edge of the Persian rug, spilling the vegetables we had picked in the garden that morning over the hall floor. ‘For goodness sake, Nicholas, do something.’

  I looked at the asparagus and beans and new potatoes rolling over the marble and walked upstairs after the children. At the top of the stairs Sholto was hanging over the bannisters, holding George out over the void.

  ‘She’s going, she’s going.’ He was keeping his sister off with his other arm. She was grappling with him, pushing him outwards against the balustrade.

  ‘Cordelia, Sholto,’ I said sharply.

  Sholto, his attention diverted for a second, drew in his arm. Cordelia, undeflected, seized the doll.

  ‘Well, I don’t want her any more,’ she said and threw the beloved toy who had betrayed her, with all her force. By the time I reached them and had grasped an arm of each, they were both leaning out to look down at where George lay on the marble tiles of the hall. She had landed face down, her hair thrown up above her head and her soft limbs twisted into impossible contortions.

  Sholto said with satisfaction, ‘Look what you’ve done. You’ve killed her. She’s broken her neck.’

  Delia let out a wail of grief. Emily was coming up the stairs with Angus behind her. This was her opportunity.

  ‘Nicholas,’ she said, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  It is no wonder that, months later, I was still trying to understand what women wanted. Emily had decided she needed to ‘fulfil’ herself, to ‘be’ herself, and to do so she would be leaving me and enrolling on some university course. Paradoxically, she did not reject the children. They were to be hers exclusively.

  I felt I was entitled to feel a little aggrieved at Prisca’s reaction to my question.

  ‘In so far as your abstractions have any bearing on real life,’ I said, ‘I would have thought that Emily had everything you mention. Love, power, comfort, whatever.’

  The waiter set down the plate containing my main course in front of me. I looked down at the comforting heap of steak and kidney and the piled mashed potato.

  ‘I would have found it easier to cope with if she had taken a lover,’ I said. ‘At least I could have understood that.’ I chewed the combination of textures, firm and soft, with relish.

  “You may be right. These problems often just come down to sexual compatibility. But if she had, you would have been devastated.’

  I decided not to argue with Prisca’s first point. It wasn’t true; there was nothing wrong with sex in our marriage.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’m not possessive. I’m not physically jealous at all. If she had had a lover and stayed with me, I would at least have had the children. I still think that Emily should let me have them, if she wants to launch herself on her new life of self-fulfilment.’

  ‘Nicholas, you say you are not possessive, yet you do everything to keep her. You and Em have been very civilised and I hope you’ll go on being so. I still hope for reconciliation, as I know you do. And it’s far more likely to happen if we avoid rows.’

  I said, self-pityingly, ‘I miss the children.’

  It was true. There were times in my solitary life now when I realised that if I had been at home I would have been looking at Sholto’s homework or listening to one of Cordelia’s interminable stories. For, although Emily had originally said that she wanted to leave with the children, it had been clearly much more sensible for me to move out. When all the factors of the children’s busy lives had been taken into account, it looked as though I would have to buy the house next door. So I left instead. I had behaved well in every respect. What I did not admit to Prisca was that I did not miss them much. I was surprised how quickly I had settled down to a bachelor life again.

  ‘Of course you do.’ Prisca looked at me over her spectacles, with an expression that made me uneasy, as if she was reading my real feelings.

  An obese peer approached us on his way to his table. Seeing Prisca he stopped and, bending over her as closely as he could, began to talk about the proceedings of a committee on which they both served, with the barest acknowledgement to me of his interruption of our conversation. I had chosen a restaurant within the Division Bell area, not far from her office in the Lords, for Prisca’s convenience.

  Prisca requires some explanation. She had, for a short period, been the wife of my cousin, Montfort. The unlikely marriage between a Scottish landowner and a half-American, Sorbonne-educated Barbadan with a PhD from Harvard can be accounted for primarily by the fact that Prisca was extraordinarily beautiful and, then, socially inexperienced. The mix of races in her ancestry, African, Indian, Caribbean, even Caucasian, had produced someone strikingly sexy. My cousin loved showing off and Prisca was the coup de theatre of his career of marriage and remarriage. As for me, I fell for her wholeheartedly, a situation she handled with great tact, even though she was barely nine years my senior. She is very clever, far too clever for Montfort, with whom she rapidly lost patience. She divorced him as soon as she could and went on to public life, teaching law at London University, doing voluntary work, sitting on committees, chairing a Royal Commission on education whose findings were ignored and finally being made a Labour peer in 1988. In discarding my cousin, she did not give up on his family and for years I had found in her a friend whose loyalty I never doubted and whose perspicacity I sometimes feared.

  When she had finished talking to her colleague, she turned back to me to explain what Emily wanted in particular rather than in metaphysical terms. This time it was a question of Sholto’s schoo
l.

  A couple of years ago I had suggested that the boys should go to boarding school. Emily had been vehemently against the idea. Now, Prisca explained, Sholto had raised the subject himself: he wanted to go away to school. I hope that I did not betray the rage that erupted in me. Emily had double-crossed me. She had got the house under false pretences by insisting that the children’s routine should not be disturbed, and now she was packing them off to school, to enjoy her new life of ‘fulfilment’ and irresponsibility. I hid my feelings and appeared all reasonableness, as we discussed what to do. But even as I agreed that Emily and Sholto should go to look at one or two schools, I knew, deeper than reason, that I had been fooled again.

  Prisca was pleased with me. She watched me indulgently while I ate sticky toffee pudding, which she refused. Finally, I saw her to her little car and closed her door for her. She wound down the window as she started the engine. I stood on the pavement waiting for her to drive away.

  ‘Nicholas,’ she said, hooking her fingers with their pale oval nails over the edge of the glass. ‘Perhaps it’s time to let go, to let her go.’

  ‘I have let her go,’ I said angrily. ‘I’ve let her do whatever she wanted, just as I always did. I would simply like to understand.’

  Prisca turned the wheel and began to manoeuvre out of her parking spot. Then she stopped, the nose of her car jutting into the road.

  ‘What women really want,’ she said, ‘is the last word.’ She closed her window and waved goodbye, her yellowish palm making a curious circular pass. Then she shot away down Marsham Street. I set off home, walking.

  2

  Home for me now was my mother’s flat in Knightsbridge. My poor mother was ill most of her life. Years ago, after my father left her, (he was, like my cousin Montfort, a much married man) she took up hypochondria as her main interest. When she began, a year or so ago, to whisper about a pain in her side, I took no more notice than of the other fake syndromes she had cultivated over the years, and nor did she. She did not realise that this was the real thing at last; she had cancer and it was going to kill her. The last stages were rapid and merciful. If they had been more protracted, she might in any case have died of astonishment at the experience of pain.