CONDITION BLACK by Gerald Seymour Page B

the garden. It was a big house, at least four good bedrooms, and the garden must have been the best part of two acres.
    "Is there a problem? I mean, tell me. Is it just because we're amateurs?"
    The classes were at Debbie's house. When she had rung in response to the advertisement card on the board in the Tadley Post Office, she hadn't thought of where the classes might be.
    She had wanted to draw again, and to paint, and she had not wondered before the first class as to the group she would be joining. She was the outsider. She came from a housing estate in Tadley, and her husband worked at the Establishment behind the Falcon Gate. She had not stopped to think that she might be inserting herself into a social scene that she had walked away from when she had left home. Rich wives, with rich husbands, simply amusing themselves twice a week. She liked them, that was the trouble.
    After the class they treated themselves to lunch, cold poached salmon the first day and the best cut of cold beef the next, and wine to go with it, and a raffle amongst the six of them for a bottle. Five pounds for each class . . . And there had been her materials. She could say, in all honesty, that she had looked out her college paints and brushes but they had been dried up and beyond recall. It must have been a dozen years since they were last used. For the first class she had just taken two soft pencils, and she had sketched while the others had mixed watercolours for the still life ol a bowl of apples, oranges and pears. For that day's class she had taken her own watercolours, bought with the Visacard in Reading . . . They were going by minibus to London for the visit to the Tate Gallery, with a driver, and the transport alone was £ 1 5 3 head.
    Just a miserable mistake.
    She had waited behind after lunch. She had helped Debbie clear away. She had wanted to speak to Debbie after the others had left, and all the talk over lunch had been of the trip to the Tate.
    She could have bought each of the boys a pair of trainers for what she had spent on the watercolours.
    "It's nothing to do with whether I'm good, whether I'm lucky enough to have been given more talent than you, the rest of you . . ."
    It was to do with money, bloody, bloody, money.
    She turned back to Debbie. She felt dirtied in her old jeans, and her old student painting smock. The other women hadn't pulled something out of a bottom drawer to come to the classes.
    The other women, Debbie and her friends, would have been shopping in Newbury or Hungerford, run round the boutiques, for something careless and suitable. Debbie's husband owned a software business outside Newbury.
    "Bloody hell, am I stupid." Debbie's voice had softened.
    Sara turned to her. There was a turquoise stone set in a pendant and hanging from a fine gold chain at Debbie's throat. The chain was long, too long, and Debbie had unbuttoned the two top buttons of her blouse so that the stone wouldn't be hidden, Sara thought the stone would have cost all of their own take home money for a month after the mortgage was paid.
    "It's boring old money, isn't it?"
    Sara nodded She should have been at home. She should have been thinking about the boys' tea, and about Frederick's dinner

    "Well, I have the solution," Debbie said. "You're going on the payroll, Sara. You're going on a freebie to the Tate because you're going to be our guide. And here, too, because when we need a model, you will be our model."
    She wanted so much to belong, could not help herself.
    Debbie said, "You're prettier than any of us, anyway. You'll be brilliant."
    Sara said, "I really don't . . . "
    "You're not modest, are you?"
    The Chief Inspector was not a snappy dresser. If he had been working for three days and three nights then it was in the suit he was wearing now, and his shoes had mud on them, and Erlich didn't think Ruane would be impressed.
    A yawn, then a big sigh. They were in a small office on the fourth floor, and one wall of the office was