Wolf to the Slaughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘At odd times, you know. I thought Ann had come and gone. We go our own ways.’ His voice rose suddenly to a shrill pitch. Burden began to wonder if he might be slightly mad. ‘But I’m lost without her. She never leaves me like this without a word!’ He got up abruptly, knocking a milk bottle on to the floor. The neck broke off and a stream of sour whey flowed across coconut matting. ‘O God, let’s go into the studio if you don’t want any more coffee. I don’t have a photograph of her, but I could show you my portrait if you think it would help.’
    There were probably twenty pictures in the studio, one of them so large that it filled an entire wall. Burden had only once in his life seen a larger and that was Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ viewed reluctantly on a day trip to Amsterdam. To its surface, giving a three-dimensional look to the wild cavorting figures, other substances apart from paint adhered, cotton wool, slivers of metal and strips of tortured newspaper. Burden decided that he preferred the ‘Night Watch’. If the portrait was in the same style as this picture it would not be helpful for the purposes of identification. The girl would have one eye, a green mouth and a saucepan scourer sticking out of her ear.
    He sat down in a rocking chair, having first removed from its seat a tarnished silver toast rack, a squashed tube of paint and a wooden wind instrument of vaguely Mediterranean origin. Newspapers, clothes, dirty cups and saucers, beer bottles, covered every surface and in places were massed on the floor. By the telephone dead narcissi stood in a glass vase half-full of green water, and one of them, its stem broken, had laid its wrinkled cup and bell against a large wedge of cheese.
    Presently Margolis came back with the portrait. Burden was agree ably surprised. It was conventionally painted rather in the style of John, although he did not know this, and it showed the head and shoulders of a girl. Her eyes were like her brother’s, blue with a hint of jade, and her hair, as black as his, swept across her cheeks in two heavy crescents. The face was hawk-like, if a hawk’s face can also be soft and beautiful, the mouth fine yet full and the nose just verging on the aquiline. Margolis had caught, or had given her, a fierce intelligence. If she were not already dead in her youth, Burden thought, she would one day be a formidable old woman.
    He had an uneasy feeling that one ought always to praise a work when shown it by its creator, and he said awkwardly:
    ‘Very nice. Jolly good.’
    Instead of showing gratitude or gratification, Margolis said simply, ‘Yes, it’s marvellous. One of the best things I’ve ever done.’ He put the painting on an empty easel and regarded it happily, his good humour restored.
    ‘Now, Mr Margolis,’ Burden said severely, ‘in a case like this it’s normal practice for us to ask the relatives just where they think the missing person might be.’ The painter nodded without turning round. ‘Please concentrate, sir. Where do you personally think your sister is?’
    He realised that his tone had become more and more stern, more schoolmasterish, as the interview progressed, and suddenly he wondered if he was being presumptuous. Since his arrival at Quince Cottage he had kept the newspaper feature in mind, but only as a guide, as information on the brother and sister that could only have been elicited from Margolis after hours of probing. Now he remembered why that feature had been written and what Margolis was. He was in the presence of genius, or if that was journalist’s extravagance, of great talent. Margolis was not like other men. In his fingers and his brain was something that set him apart, something that might not be fully recognised and appreciated until long after the painter was dead. Burden experienced a sense of awe, a strange reverence he could not reconcile with the seamy disorder that surrounded him or with the pale-faced creature that looked