Gold Digger by Frances Fyfield Page A

also be reached from the inside. Raymond knocked and went in without waiting for an invitation.
    This was the room where Thomas had died. The room he had occupied most during the last six months of his so-called recovery from a cruel operation. The equipment for tubular feeding was packed away into a corner awaiting collection. Di had overseen all that, anything rather than have him stay in hospital – and that decision, too, would be open to scrutiny. Widow Diana was certainly under suspicion, and yet it seemed from their telephone conversations that she was blissfully unaware of it.
    Don’t ever let her go to prison, again, Raymond; that’s the one thing that’ll kill her.
    There was a different picture on the wall above the fireplace. It was of a plump nude, lying comfortably on a mattress.
    ‘He called that his last Duchess,’ Di said, coming through from the kitchen. ‘Lovely, isn’t she?’
    ‘Yes. She looks content.’
    The scale of the thing was large for the room, dominating it. A calm face gazed at him over a generous bosom.
    ‘She’s nothing like me,’ Di said, looking at the painting. ‘But she’s more like I’d like to look. Less skin and bone, always wanted to be fatter.’
    Raymond patted his own, ample stomach. ‘Believe me, it doesn’t have much to recommend it. Slows you down.’
    ‘Perhaps that’s why I need the weight, then. Cup of tea? I’m glad to see you.’
    He found that touching, bowed his head in acknowledgement. He had been anxious about this meeting, but yes, he had looked forward to it. Di was an enigma, a keeper of secrets: she looked at everyone with a frank and unnerving suspicion until she made her own judgements, and only then did she smile at you, and when she did, he felt peculiarly blessed as if he had earned praise. A strange way to feel about a convict he had once monitored on Thomas’s behalf, and all the same, she outmanoeuvred him. Intimidated him, was the way he might have described it and that worried him too, because it was odd to feel that way towards a person with whom he also felt entirely safe.
She’s the cat who walks alone,
Thomas said. Raymond had not expected to find her devastated four days after the death of her husband, and she was not. She was woven from tough material, but how tough, he really did not want to investigate. She was certainly a fiercely protective little protége of her man and his memory, but she was not sentimental. Perhaps caring for the sick knocked that out of her.
    ‘Why did you move that particular painting down here?’ he asked.
    ‘She belongs here, and we loved her. She cheered him up, me too. He always liked a painting he could talk to.’
    Many paintings had been purchased in the last years. There had been a veritable orgy of discreet buying. The children had hated that.
    ‘Saul found it, you know Saul? I wish he were here. He’s somewhere. He’s doing one of his disappearing acts.’
    There was a note of panic in her voice, quickly suppressed.
    A fair weather friend, that Saul
, Raymond thought. Hesipped the tea and decided to be brisk. One of the eccentrici -ties of collectors was the way they could talk about paintings and ephemera for hours, before getting down to business, even in an emergency. They were like that, to death and beyond.
    ‘Look, Di,’ he said. ‘You’re in trouble. I know Thomas is dead, and that’s the worst thing,’ and as he said it, he did not really know if it was the worst thing for her and wondered wistfully if he would ever know. All he knew is that he had never known Thomas Porteous to be as contented or as deviously determined as he had been in Di’s company. They chattered like starlings, behaved like puppies, patently obviously slept in the same bed. He did not wish to think of that aspect, which he found distasteful. But they talked, by God they talked, and walked. And went swimming. They did simple things that pleased them as much as spending money. On household management,