Guns in the Gallery

Immediately Spider clammed up. Again Carole did not think his silence arose from any animus against his employer. He was just embarrassed to be seen in communicative mode, and moved silently back to his work.

The gallery-owner quickly sorted out the credit card transaction to pay for Spider’s work. She was delighted, she said, that Carole was so pleased with the job done and if any more framing was needed . . . well, she knew where to come.

But her customer couldn’t help noticing that Bonita seemed distracted. The Juliette Greco black was a little smudged and the eyes it circled were red. The woman appeared to have been crying.

FOUR

‘There’s a long tradition of mankind seeking out the simple life,’ said Ned Whittaker. ‘One only has to think of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. Then of course there are English pastoral poets like James Thomson with The Seasons, and later the back-to-nature writings of Henry David Thoreau. I feel that what we’re doing here at Butterwyke House is a part of that continuing process.’

Carole tried to avoid Jude’s eye. The twitch of a grin from her neighbour might have a destructive effect on her own straight face. Neither of them had expected to hear ‘glamping’ described in such ambitiously literary terms.

As Ned Whittaker pontificated, he stood in the Georgian bay window of his home’s magnificent sitting room. Manicured lawns stretched away to an invisible ha-ha, beyond which sheep safely grazed. From the window, nothing could be seen that did not belong to the Whittakers. And here was the owner extolling the simple life.

Only in his late forties, Ned had a slim, well-toned body. His short grey hair, rimless spectacles, checked shirt and lazy cords gave him the look of a minor academic. His voice retained the South London twang of his modest upbringing. There was about Ned Whittaker a boyishness, which he cultivated.

His wife Sheena was a plump, comfortable blonde who had spread sideways a bit. The couple had met at school, then she’d become a hairdresser and they’d married when they were both nineteen. The wedding had been quickly followed by the birth of two daughters and at that stage the family had lived in a modest rented flat. Ned had worked as a sales assistant in a gentleman’s outfitters.

His success, he always maintained when asked about it, arose completely from ‘being in the right place at the right time’. And that was true. A colleague at the shop where he worked had proposed to him the then novel idea of selling online, getting members of the public to order clothes through their computers. At the time Ned knew virtually nothing about IT, but his friend did, and that was what mattered. What Ned brought to the party was a very good buyer’s eye for sourcing cheap garments from the Indian subcontinent.

The business had been a success right from the start. Within three years profits had increased a hundredfold. Ned and his partner didn’t have a conscious strategy for the development of their company; it was just that whatever decisions they made seemed to generate more income. It was as if they could not help themselves from making money.

And in that heady time bigger rivals looked with a degree of envy at the newcomers’ success. Some of the major High Street names had been slow off the mark developing their online businesses and saw the advantages of buying off the shelf a company that was already up and running. A bidding war developed. As the figures offered became more and more astronomical, Ned Whittaker had been against selling out. He didn’t think they had yet reached their own full potential. But his partner, who had always been the commercial brains behind the company, said it was time to move on, and Ned graciously gave his consent.

Early in 2000 the takeover deal was made, leaving Ned Whittaker and his partner with more millions than they would ever have time to spend. Within weeks the dot-com bubble burst and one large High Street chain was left with a very expensive white elephant and thousands of angry shareholders.

The Whittakers than started spending their legitimately gotten gains. Butterwyke House was one of their first purchases. Once they were established there, they were recognized by local charities as potential sponsors and quickly joined the ranks of the Great and Good of West Sussex. They became generous benefactors to the arts and medicine. As a result, they were invited to all kinds of local events, where they met a lot of other people whose main – and in some case only – point of interest was their wealth.