Free A Bed of Scorpions by Judith Flanders

and also designing and producing the tie-in goods they sell in the shop.’
    There was no particular reason I shouldn’t hear Stevenson’s name twice in two days. Lucy had told me there was a big exhibition coming up, Jim was an exhibition designer. If Frank hadn’t died, this would just have been the sort of coincidence where everybody said,
Gosh, what a small world
. But Frank had died.
    ‘I heard about the exhibition just last night,’ I said. ‘From the niece of Stevenson’s dealer.’
    ‘From Lucy?’ he said quickly. He saw my surprise, and added, ‘She’s been working on the show with the gallery, and we’ve become quite friendly.’ He flushed slightly, and I assumed that ‘friendly’ encompassed more than having coffee together. Or even a gentle game of dominoes. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye as he slowly turned even redder, and decided that dominoes was definitely not on the list of what he and Lucy were doing together.
    ‘She seems very nice,’ appeared to be a suitably bland response, so I made it.
    ‘She is,’ he said, as though I’d argued. When I looked startled he backed off and shrugged. ‘Her uncle doesn’t like me.’
    ‘Why not? You seem likeable to me.’ He was a bit older than Lucy, but not enough to be unusual, he had his own company, the Tate thought enough of his abilities to employ him. ‘Do you have a history of being unkind to small, furry animals, or is it that weekly strip poker game with the Bishop of Durham’s gang that bothered him?’
    Jim grinned. ‘The Bishop of Durham’s strip poker night remains an unfulfilled ambition.’ He sighed theatrically. ‘One day …’ Then he was serious. ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t—’ He winced. ‘Why he
didn’t
like me, and I feel terrible now. Everything was fine at first, so I must have said something, or done something, but I have no idea what. And then he decided he didn’t like our work, either.’
    ‘Your installation?’
    He frowned. ‘No, that was approved a long time ago, and anyway, even if he didn’t like it, that’s the Tate’s side ofthings. This was only a few weeks ago. We’d come up with ideas for souvenirs for the shop which the Tate loved. And God knows, getting the Tate to love anything is a struggle in itself.’ He shook his head at the follies of art institutions. ‘We’d designed the usual things, mugs, posters, you know?’ I did. ‘Then, because Stevenson used so many typographic elements, we thought it would be fun to do something with those. We chose a bunch of collages which had book jackets in them, and we reproduced the jackets to wrap around pads, so you had notebooks with the collage on them, on which you could see the book jacket, in which, you know, a Russian-doll thing of a reproduction in a reproduction.’
    ‘Sounds fun.’ Fun might be pushing it, but it sounded harmless enough.
    ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? But Merriam–Compton kicked up this huge fuss, said we were sullying Stevenson’s reputation, making him look like he was just a graphic designer. Which is absurd, but they have a lot of influence with the estate, and so we had to agree not to do them.’
    ‘So mugs equal artistic integrity, notepads equal commercial exploitation?’
    He laughed, but he was angry too. ‘Apparently so. Anyway, I ended up only communicating with the gallery through Lucy. And now Lucy’s spending most of her time at Compton’s house, but it feels wrong to go there now he’s dead when I know he wouldn’t have wanted me there when he was alive. So I’d feel bad visiting. And I feel bad not visiting.’
    ‘Why don’t you meet her nearby? It’ll get her out of the house for a few hours, and you can think of it as your Boy Scout daily act of kindness.’
    ‘That’s a really good idea. Thank you.’ He looked around vaguely, like I was leading him astray. Which I was, because he stopped suddenly. ‘Damn. I’ve walked past my office. I’ll be in touch about