Guns in the Gallery

Carole went back to the home page of the website, where Jude saw something else of interest. There were two tabs labelled ‘Virtual Visitors’ and ‘Real Visitors’. The first one took them back to the webcam shot of the darkened studio. But the second tab took them to a page on which there was an image of the back of a postcard, artfully scrawled with the words:

‘Want to see the artist at work in the flesh? Every Monday between eleven o’clock and four Denzil Willoughby’s studio is open to any motherfucker who wants to have a look.’ This was followed by instructions as to how to get to the studio.

‘Well,’ said Jude, ‘if we want to talk to Denzil Willoughby, we know what we have to do, don’t we?’

‘Oh, but we couldn’t,’ said Carole.

‘Couldn’t we?’ said Jude.

In the gossip column of Carole’s Sunday Times the following morning there was a photograph of Sam Torino at Walden. It was a measure of her celebrity that space had been made for her in a paper most of whose feature content had been put to bed by the Friday evening.

It was a great advertisement for Chervil Whittaker’s glamping site.

And, needless to say, there was no mention of her sister’s recent death.

TWENTY

Denzil Willoughby’s workshop, they discovered, was in Brixton. This immediately set alarm bells ringing for Carole. Though she didn’t read the Daily Mail, faithful to her Times and its crossword, her mind could sometimes run on distressingly Daily Mail lines. So for her the word ‘Brixton’ was shorthand for race riots . . . and all that that entailed. The fact that the riots had happened over thirty years ago did not have any effect on her knee-jerk reaction.

Looking at the A–Z when working out their optimum route to the workshop, Carole was struck by how near Brixton was to what she regarded as ‘nice’ suburbs. Wandsworth was very near, Battersea not far away, and even the adjacent Clapham was apparently now a suitable location for the aspiring middle classes. Carole Seddon’s deep-frozen attitudes demonstrated how rarely she actually went to London. How rarely, in fact, she left Fethering.

Needless to say, the remainder of her weekend had been spent in paroxysms of indecision as to whether she and Jude should actually go to Denzil Willoughby’s studio. Carole ran through a more or less exact repeat of the feeling she had had running up to the Private View. And an invitation on a website was even less specific than one handed over in a gallery. At least in the first instance she had known Bonita Green and the venue was local. Turning up at an artist’s workshop unannounced represented a very different level of intrusion.

And Jude’s reassuring words hadn’t totally convinced her. ‘Come on, we want to talk to the guy. We don’t have any other obvious way of contacting him. And the invitation for anyone to drop into his workshop couldn’t be clearer. After all, Carole, what’s the worst that can happen?’

That question, so casually thrown around by people less paranoid than herself, always caused Carole Seddon great anguish. Though meant to be rhetorical, it was an enquiry which never failed to set her imagination racing. She could always supply a long list of worst things that could happen.

Of course, as with the Private View, something deep inside her psyche knew that ultimately she would end up going to Denzil Willoughby’s workshop. So on the Monday morning, having taken Gulliver for his customary romp on Fethering Beach, Carole checked on the website to see whether anything had changed on the ‘Artist at Work’ link. The only difference was the amount of daylight, which now left no doubt that what the webcam showed was the workshop interior. It lit up what, to Carole’s mind, was an amazing amount of junk, none of which could ever be included in her definition of ‘art’. But the warehouse space was still uninhabited.

Carole closed down her laptop and joined Jude on the first cheap train from Fethering Station to Victoria. From there they would get the Victoria Line to its southernmost outpost of Brixton.

On the journey they didn’t talk much. Carole hid behind the screen of her Times, while Jude just looked out of the window. She did sometimes read – usually books from the Mind, Body and Spirit section at which her neighbour would be guaranteed to harrumph noisily – but that particular morning she was content just to let her thoughts flow. Carole wished she ever felt sufficiently relaxed just to let her thoughts flow.