Twist Page 14

  Twist tried not to meet Sikes’s eyes as he walked across the room chewing a chicken leg and sat down in the empty beanbag facing Twist.

  ‘Bill’s right,’ Fagin joined, siding with Sikes but reasserting his authority, ‘you did well today, Twist, but today was just the hors d’oeuvre. Batesy, you are a talented boy but you must be focused from here on in. Any peep out of Losberne – I need to hear it. Dodge, you are washing up.’

  Dodge’s protest was ignored by Fagin who turned towards Red.

  ‘And Nancy, my girl, I want you to get Twist ready. He’s fast but he knows nothing about B&E.’

  ‘Tonight?’ she replied, filling a teacup with champagne.

  ‘It’s about time you and me had a night out, Nance …’ Sikes began, but stopped mid-sentence as Fagin pointed the champagne bottle at Twist.

  ‘Tonight,’ Fagin continued, pointing the bottle at Red, ‘you will take Twist out and show him the ropes. You’re always whining about how Dodge gets the plum jobs but this time you’re going in and Twist is going to back you up.’

  Twist risked a glance at Red but she didn’t return it. She was walking towards Sikes, smiling, passing him the champagne bottle then leaning down to whisper something in his ear. Twist watched Sikes. His face was blank, staring at the floor in front of him, but then his eyes snapped up and met Twist’s own as Red leaned in and pecked him on the cheek.

  ‘I won’t be late,’ she said and Twist squirmed as Sikes reached up, grabbed her wrist and pulled her in for a kiss.

  Twist pushed himself up out of his beanbag and smiled at Dodge who as usual had missed nothing on his way to the kitchen to wash the dishes. He followed Dodge, stopping at the door to look back as Sikes broke off the kiss and stared straight back at him.

  ‘I’ll wait up,’ Bill said.

  27

  It didn’t make sense being back at the Tate. It was illogical to return to the scene of one crime just to escape another more recently committed, but his behaviour around Red was beginning to appear increasingly irrational.

  ‘B&E’ was pretty much like the stuff they’d been doing on the high wall of the roof, only this time the drainpipes and window ledges had been a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

  It hadn’t bothered Twist as much as he’d thought it would. Perhaps it was the way that Fagin had framed their mission. Telling Red and him that they were on a training exercise and the palm-sized scanner – used to pick up signals emitted by keyless entry fobs – was just the evidence Twist needed to show that he’d made the grade, a small but vital part in Fagin’s bigger plan.

  The idea to steal the device had been Cribb’s. He’d used them before, during his days as a car thief, and knew that you needed a licence to buy one. If they could get Red inside Losberne’s gallery with it they might also be able to get her into the safe room at the rear of the gallery.

  Red had jumped first from a twenty-foot-high brick wall over razor wire to land on the near edge of the warehouse’s tin roof. Twist had followed her lead, falling flat on his face to avoid the risk of tumbling and becoming ensnared in the razors below.

  Once inside, Red had put on night vision goggles while Twist watched for movement from the security guard’s shed through a toilet window. There had been none. Asleep or otherwise engaged it had hardly mattered. They’d given themselves a time limit of ten minutes to find the device but Red’s smile had lit up the gloom within five, Twist squinting in the darkness to see the tiny black box attached by a wire to an equally compact keypad. He’d reached out to give her a celebratory hug, feeling her hands and fingers grip his back and then let go, her body twisting to the side to break his embrace.

  * * *

  ‘You’re not in yet,’ he’d heard her whisper as she turned, placing her fingertips to her lips to listen for any sound in the warehouse that might indicate they were not alone. And then it had hit Twist like a tiny taser shock.

  He had a spiralling sense of panic and then he was stepping past Red at the doorway and beckoning her down the steps to the ground floor of the warehouse from where she’d come, breaking into a run when he’d reached it because they had grossly underestimated Fagin and the test that he had set them.

  There had been neither sight nor sound of the security guard because there had been none. And rather than this realization triggering alarm bells, like it should, it had lulled them into a false sense of security. The pair of them standing, celebrating their success in the middle of a high-tech firm specialising in next generation surveillance and security, somehow secure in their belief that they were safe just because they had seen no signs of human life or heard the blare of an alarm.

  * * *

  It had taken them ten minutes to attempt to correct their mistake. Ten minutes to run, walk and backtrack just over a mile in total, as the sound of sirens had grown loud and shrill from the direction of Millbank. Once they’d reached the river they’d taken off their tops and their beanies and dropped them over the edge and Twist had looked back once to see the curling turbulence suck them under before pacing out to catch Red, just another pair of night runners eating up the miles in training for the marathon in April.

  And it had been during that run that Twist had realised where they were heading, that without even knowing it, they’d taken an almost direct course to the Tate Britain, to the scene from his past life, before he’d met her, where his Simoniac Pope was still displayed. And it had occurred to him then that she had to see it and that if she didn’t she might never be able to get him like he so badly wanted to be got.

  And so he’d suggested they take the detour. Get off the main drag away from the obvious approach route of the police on their way to the warehouse. And as he’d explored the set of her lips and the slight flare of her nostrils for a micro signal that might reveal that she was thinking what he was thinking, a cop car sped past then slowed momentarily, perhaps for a double take, the blue lights illuminating the buildings along Millbank and the riverside in turn.

  And that had been enough to convince her to let him lead her here. To his picture, on the rear wall of the gallery, of a tormented pope, sitting in the shadows, sandwiched between the ivy, away from the sterile glare of the gallery lights inside.

  Now, standing beneath his most daring piece of work, Twist explained how he’d at last been recognised and forced to escape the gallery and a team of security guards. He watched the expression on her face as the sweat chilled on his skin. She stood there looking up at it. Not saying anything for a moment but then turning to look at him, in disbelief.

  * * *

  The gallery was open late for a special exhibition. At the entrance Twist recognised the same security guard as before. He was slumped on a plastic chair just inside the front door next to a security gate, thumbing through the sports pages of yesterday’s Mail.

  Twist watched as Red stepped forwards and smiled sweetly at him, watching as he struggled to sit up out of his slouch, pushing down on the plastic arm rests then placing his hands in front of his chest like a dog begging for a bone.

  Twist followed Red up into the galleries. She turned and smiled at him from the first landing of the stairs, daring him to climb higher, sensing his reluctance to get drawn further into the maze of art where the guides might recognise him and be less slow this time in sealing him inside the great partition doors that closed the end of each gallery.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I want you to show me how you escaped.’

  Beginning beneath the bench, he started to re-enact each scene of the chase, forgetting the danger in her smile and her laughter as the drama unfolded. At the top of the stairs he launched himself, Errol Flynn style, onto the banister, sliding down sideways on his belly before springing off and half running half walking, turning to beckon her with quick, half-concealed movements of his hand towards the Ladies. He went back into the same cubicle, getting stuck, once again, head dangling as she pushed him, laughing hysterically until he was clear and dangling from the ivy
looking up as she emerged, effortlessly, from the window to join him.

  It was insanity. To return here and take this risk but even the ogre who had tried to kick the door down in the cubicle and tear his head off his shoulders was nothing to him now as they climbed down the ivy and stopped at the bottom to look once again at the demonic figure he’d put up on the wall it grew upon.

  It had been ring-fenced almost like a crime scene but incredibly it had been left intact.

  ‘Who is the man?’ asked Red, staring up at the wall.

  ‘The Simoniac Pope,’ Twist began. ‘Simony was the sin of exploiting one’s position in the church to make money and the eighth circle of hell is a chasm containing the popes guilty of this sin. According to the audio guide inside, their punishment is to be thrust upside down into a stone hole with the soles of their feet on fire.’

  ‘That’ll teach him, won’t it?’ Red said.

  ‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’ Twist replied, clutching himself against the wind which had whipped up while they’d been inside.

  ‘Come on,’ Red said, ‘it’s cold. Let’s go back inside.’

  * * *

  The guard couldn’t understand how they’d left without him seeing them but he didn’t stop them. The temporary exhibition was a retrospective on a miserable painter called Lowry who Twist had never heard of. He painted miserable people in grim industrial towns moping along in front of steel mills and factories.

  ‘At least working for FBoss is fun,’ Red said, staring at the last picture in the exhibition.

  It was true, Twist thought. More fun than working in a factory or working sixteen-hour shifts for a necrophiliac undertaker called Sowerberry.

  ‘Fagin will help you get what you want,’ Red said, turning to look at him. ‘If you tell me I can tell him.’

  Twist wondered if Fagin had put her up to this. It seemed strange why he’d set it up for the two of them to hang out together.

  ‘If you need to get overseas he can fix it. Maybe not America but Eastern Europe. Berlin or maybe Prague. He’s got connections out that way. A fake ID, passport, anything …’ Red’s voice trailed off as she walked out through the exit and into the twentieth-century gallery.

  ‘ “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”,’ Red said, reading from the description by the side of a disturbing painting by Francis Bacon.

  ‘Come on,’ Twist replied, taking her hand and pulling her gently but finding her anchored to the spot, fixated on the painting.

  ‘What do you know about that picture?’ Red asked him as he craned round to see the dwarfish guide who had first found him sleeping beneath the bench, whispering to a man-sized colleague who was sat bolt upright on a stool in the far corner of the gallery.

  ‘Bacon said they were the furies. The vengeful spirits of the Greek myths … but he threw in all kinds of other stuff. Like ectoplasm which shows the materialisation of ghosts, and they say he stole something from Picasso.’

  Twist ignored Bacon’s grotesque white half-goose half-dog monsters and looked back into the far corner but the small guard had vanished. Jogging back up the gallery he checked left and right but there was no sign of him and when he turned there was no sign of Red either.

  He turned three sixty and saw that there were two exits facing one another on opposite sides of the gallery. He chose the right one that led into the Romantics and found he had guessed correctly. She was standing in front of the original; William Blake’s Simoniac Pope.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ Twist said, turning to see the little guide reappear, reflected in the painting of a giant black dog to the right of the flaming Pope. He had an impish grin on his face and Twist knew the game was up.

  Red turned and Twist nodded his head to the right and finally she understood.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, turning to his left and beginning to walk casually up the gallery, sensing the guide’s eyes tracking him until they passed Millais’s Ophelia.

  ‘That’s Ophelia,’ Twist said, breaking into a slow jog. ‘She went out with Hamlet, went mental and then drowned herself.’

  ‘Reminds me of this girl I knew in the care home,’ Red said, catching Twist up as he opened the fire exit door on the first floor. ‘Used to lie in the bath tripping.’

  28

  Fagin stared at the racks of clothes that stretched round what had once been the hotel’s cloakroom and asked himself what a billionaire Russian art aficionado would wear to an informal business meeting.

  He ran his hand along the shoulders of the clothes, feeling the cotton, silk and fur brush against the tips of his fingers, releasing the odour trapped inside them and, with the heady mix of dry cleaning detergent, dust and stale body odour came a memory of Ivanka, the trapeze artist turned wardrobe manager who had beckoned him up into the costume trailer during a power cut in Brazov and made a man of him.

  A fugitive at fifteen, all skin and bones, struggling on the mound of dirty laundry as she bit him repeatedly on his nose all through the long intermission as the clowns pedalled furiously, juggling burning torches on unicycles to quell the tide of terror that had risen up in the crowd in the big top as the geriatric lion had begun to roar inside his cage.

  His hand reached a gap in the rail and touched a suit bag which he pulled out and held up, using it to shield himself from whichever of the boys had sneaked in and was working his way along the far side of the rack hoping to take the fifty pound note he kept in his pocket to keep their skills sharp.

  ‘You know when I was your age …’ he said, snatching through the gap in the railing and catching Dodge by the hair, ‘I used to enjoy dressing up.’

  Dodge smiled in defeat.

  ‘What are you up to, FBoss?’ he asked, as Fagin released him.

  ‘There’s one role in this charade that only I can play,’ Fagin said, unzipping the bag and pulling out the navy blue woollen suit.

  ‘I mean with Red,’ Dodge said. ‘Buddying her up with Twist the whole time. You must have seen the look on the boy’s face?’

  Fagin let the suit bag drop to the floor as he slipped his fingers inside the front of the jacket, tracing the stitching that held the silk lining to the wool of the jacket’s exterior and listening to Dodge whose instincts he had learned to trust.

  ‘Oliver’s not quite part of the family yet, Dodge. We still need a hold on him. Some boys want respect. Some boys just want a place in the pecking order. What does Oliver want?’ he asked, pulling the jacket over his shoulders and checking his look in the full-length gilt mirror opposite him.

  ‘Spray cans?’

  ‘He wants what no one ever gave him, Dodge …’

  Dodge watched Fagin unfasten his belt, kick off his slippers and drop his threadbare corduroys to the floor. He was wearing a pair of off-white long johns and he looked up, aware that Dodge was still standing in front of him, unsatisfied by his answer.

  ‘Is something else troubling you, Dodger?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dodge replied, ‘as a matter of fact there is.’

  * * *

  On their way back from the gallery they reached a bridge. A plaque showed a picture of a Victorian man with a moustache who Twist recognised as the royal consort, Prince Albert, who’d had sixteen children with Queen Victoria. There was a shiny gold monument in Hyde Park that he knew about and he wondered how many other things, like this bridge, she’d had built to remember him by. It was hard to believe, looking at the picture of the stern-faced grandmother on the plaque next to the husband she’d outlived by over thirty years, that they’d ever had sex at all.

  He turned to look at Red and wondered what she would do if he reached out and took hold of her hand. Probably nothing, he thought, turning instead to stare at the life-size replica of a triceratops on the far bank, wondering what it would look like painted neon pink, until Red broke the silence with a question.

  ‘So, er, how did you get into art?’ she said, catching his eye as he turned back to face her.

 
‘They never liked the tagging at the homes or the schools I went to, but the way I got shifted around, by the time the teachers figured out who I was, they didn’t know who to come after …’

  ‘I used to like PE,’ she replied.

  ‘Were you always so fit … I mean, in such good shape, er, physically,’ Twist blurted, shrinking as Red shot him a look and he found himself staring down at the path, coughing nervously. ‘I mean … good at athletics … Rio Twenty Sixteen.’

  He liked the sound of her laughter even when the joke was on him.

  ‘You don’t know much, do you?’ she said. ‘Everyone knows I’m gonna be a dancer.’

  He watched as she turned slowly, lifting her arms above her head, folding her hands in neatly at the wrists and rising onto her tiptoes, taking tiny steps that grew bigger until she was reversing her entire body, facing him then facing away with each new step in a wide circle, tracing the air with her hands.

  He watched her hair spread out behind, then she drew her hands to her chest before releasing them to spin her faster and faster around him, each step becoming a leap, turning like a twister tearing around the cobblestones, spinning towards the river, out of control and out of reach.

  29

  ‘You number one driver. Fast like James Hunt,’ the oligarch said, leaning forwards, his ash-white face visible in the rear-view mirror of the S-Class Mercedes limo as it edged forwards in traffic that had backed up all the way from Piccadilly Circus to Green Park and the Ritz Hotel.

  Cribb, the chauffeur, nodded, accepting the compliment with all the deference he could manage beneath his black peaked cap. His suit was straight out of central casting but at least it was sticking to him, which was more than could be said for his boss’s moustache. It was glued so badly to the oligarch’s top lip that he had to fix his mouth in a grimace just to keep it in place.