MORNING SERIAL

BUT I found conflicted in my chest the need to follow the Russian and talk to him, and the want to stay rooted by the graveside.

I made eye contact with the priest, and now his demeanour did not seem quite so sympathetic, not quite so placid, and seemed something to do with taking me for a fool, and I wanted to say something unkind to him, or worse, put my forefinger to his shoulder.

He seemed to read something of this in my face and the priest turned his attention away from me.

“So that was Mr Benthem’s employer?” I said.

“I couldn’t be certain,” said the priest, as he walked back to the path. “He did not give his name. He just asked if everything was taken care of and I said that it was and he said that as long as we could leave it at that then he would be leaving.”

“And that was that?” “Well, yes. What more is there to say?”

It seemed there was no good place to begin on answering that question.

I was angry, not just because Francis had been the recipient of a funeral so awash with the stuff of loneliness, but because I had come to it off the back of a letter requesting I attend, requesting, it turns out, I be the sole witness to this drudgery in the desert.

And furthermore it had been a long time since I had housed the energy for a run-around the likes of which Francis Benthem enjoyed, and I knew the look of a man who could not be trusted as effortlessly as I knew how to spot a Russian.

Grifters, gangsters and wide-boys had been as common as furniture when I had started out in Soho, and that kind hung around the fringes of the big art scene the whole time I had had my foot in the door – from the late eighties – since I had met Francis.

There would always be some aspirational miscreant looking to turn an artist into a fraudster, offering to introduce you to a “friend of his” who needed a Titian for a “private buyer”.

> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks.com

CONTINUES MONDAY