Страница 34 из 101
When she found the Stanhopes, she was at first disappointed. Two of them were rather dull landscapes, not of Hobb’s End, but other Dales scenes. The third, a little more interesting, showed a distant view of Hobb’s End in its hollow, smoke drifting from chimneys, the bright vermilions and purples of sunset splashed across the sky. A fine effect, but it told A
The fourth painting, though, was a revelation.
Titled Reclining Nude, according to the catalog, the painting reminded A
The woman reclined on a bed in much the same pose as Goya’s original, propped on a pillow, hands behind her head, looking directly at the painter with some sort of highly charged erotic challenge in her expression, bedsheets ruffled beneath her. Also, like the Maja’s, her round breasts were widely spaced and her legs bent a little, awkwardly placed as her lower half twisted slightly toward the viewer. Her waist was thin, her hips in perfect proportion, and a little triangle of hair showed between her clasped legs, co
There were differences, though. Stanhope’s model had golden-blonde hair rather than black, her nose was shorter, her large eyes a striking blue, her lips fuller and redder. Even so, the resemblance was too close to be accident, especially the frank eroticism of her expression and the hint of pleasures recently enjoyed, conveyed by the rumpled sheets. Stanhope had obviously been strongly affected by Goya’s original, and when he had encountered the same sort of sensual power in a model, he had remembered this and painted it.
But there was more to Stanhope’s vision. As A
Stanhope hadn’t given his model a realistic background either, but if you looked very closely, you could see images of tanks, airplanes, armies on the march, explosions and swastikas. In other words, he had painted the war into the background. It was subtle; the images didn’t jump right out at you and dominate the work, but they were there, and when you looked closely, you couldn’t ignore them: eroticism and weapons of mass destruction. Make of it what you would.
A
“Everything all right, miss?” he called out.
A
He eyed her suspiciously and went back to his paper.
A
SEVEN
On Monday morning, Banks looked again at the postcard reproduction of Reclining Nude: Gloria, Autumn 1944 that lay on his desk. It was an unca
A
At home, Banks had tried to reach Brian all weekend, without any luck. He knew he should call Sandra and find out what she had to say about it all, but he didn’t want to. Maybe it was something to do with sleeping with A
He walked over to stand by the open window. The gold hands against the blue face of the church clock stood at a quarter to eleven. Horns blared out in the street and the smell of fresh bread from the bakery mingled with the exhaust fumes. An irate van driver swore at a tourist. The tourist swore back and scurried off into the crowd. Another coach pulled up in the cobbled market square and disgorged its load of old ladies. From Worthing, Banks noticed, by the sign painted on the side. Worthing. Why couldn’t the old biddies stay down there, maybe roll up their skirts and go for a paddle, stop and smell the seaweed? Why did everyone have to come to the bloody Dales? When it came right down to it, he blamed James Herriot. If they hadn’t done that damn series on television, the place would be empty.
Banks lit a proscribed cigarette and wondered, not for the first time this past year, why he bothered with the job. There had been plenty of occasions when he felt like packing it all in. At first he hadn’t done so because he simply couldn’t be bothered. As long as people left him alone, it didn’t really matter. He knew he wasn’t working up to par, even on desk duties, but he didn’t give a damn. It was easy enough to show up and push paper around without enthusiasm, or to play computer games. The truth was that he hurt so much after Sandra left that everything else seemed meaningless.
Then, when he bought the cottage and started pulling himself together, or at least managing to distance himself a bit from the pain, he seriously considered a career change, but he couldn’t think of anything else he was qualified for, or even wanted to do. He was too young to retire, and he had no desire whatsoever to go into security work or a private detective agency. Lack of formal education had closed most other paths to him.
So he stuck with it. Now, though, partly because of this dirty, pointless, dead-end case – or so Jimmy Riddle must have seen it – Banks was finally getting back to some sense of why he had joined in the first place. When something becomes routine, mechanical, when you’re just going through the motions, you have to dig down and find out what it was that you loved about it in the first place. What drew you to it? Or what obsessed you about it? Then you have to act on that, and to hell with all the rest.
Banks had cast his memory back and thought about those questions a lot over the past few months. It wasn’t simply a matter of why he walked in the recruiting center that day, asked for information and then followed up on it a week later. He had done that partly because of his disenchantment with the bohemian scene after Jem’s death, partly because he hated business studies, and partly to piss off his parents. He and Sandra knew they were serious about one another by then, too; they wanted to get married, start a family, and he would need a steady job.
With Banks, it wasn’t some abstract notion of justice, or being on the side of “good” and putting the “bad” guys away. He wasn’t naive enough to see the police as good, for a start, or even all criminals as bad. Some people were driven to crime through desperation of one kind or another; some were so damaged inside that they were unable to make a choice. When it came right down to it, Banks believed that most violent criminals were bullies, and ever since he was a kid he had detested bullies. At school, he had always stuck up for the weaker kids against the bullies, even though he wasn’t especially big or tough. He got frequent black eyes and bloody noses for his trouble.