The Kill Artist

work for me. I'll pay you a generous salary, plus commission. You can do quite nicely, Julie."
    "Work for you? Are you completely insane? Oliver, how dare you?"
    "Don't get your back up. Don't get your pride up. It's business, not personal. You're drowning, Julian. I'm throwing you a lifeline. Don't be a fool. Take the bloody thing."
    But Isherwood was getting to his feet and digging through his pockets for money.
    "Julian, please. Keep your money. It's my party. Don't behave like this."
    "Piss off!" Isherwood hurled a pair of twenty-pound notes toward Dimbleby's pink face. "How dare you, Oliver! Really!"
    He stormed out of the restaurant and walked back to the gallery. So, the jackals of St. James's were circling, and fat Oliver Dimbleby wanted the biggest piece of the carcass for himself. Buy me out, Oliver! Imagine the nerve! Imagine me working for that tubby little misogynist! He had half a mind to call Giles Pittaway and tell him the story about the broken window.
    As Isherwood marched across Mason's Yard, he vowed not to surrender without a fight. But in order to fight he needed a clean Vecellio, and for that he needed Gabriel. He had to find him before he fell under Shamron's spell and was gone forever. He walked up the stairs and let himself into the gallery. It was terribly depressing to be alone. He was used to seeing a pretty girl behind the desk when he came back to work after lunch. He sat down at his desk, found Gabriel's number in his telephone book, dialed the number, let it ring a dozen times, slammed down the receiver. Maybe he's just gone to the village. Or maybe he's out on that bloody boat of his.
    Or maybe Shamron has already got to him.
    "Shit!" he said softly.
    He left the gallery, flagged down a taxi on Piccadilly, rode up to Great Russell Street. He paid off the cab a few blocks from the British Museum and stepped through the doorway of the L. Cornellissen & Son art supplies shop. He felt strangely calm as he stood on the scuffed wooden floor, surrounded by the varnished shelves filled with paints, palettes, paper, canvases, brushes, and charcoal pencils.
    A flaxen angel called Penelope smiled at him over the counter.
    "Hullo, Pen."
    "Julian, super," she breathed. "How are you? God, but you look all in."
    "Lunch with Oliver Dimbleby." No other explanation was necessary. "Listen, I was wondering if you've seen our friend. He's not answering his phone, and I'm starting to think he's wandered off the edge of a cliff down there in Cornwall."
    "Unfortunately, I haven't been fortunate enough to lay eyes on that lovely man in quite some time."
    "Anyone else in the shop heard from him?"
    "Hold on. I'll check."
    Penelope asked Margaret, and Margaret asked Sherman, and Sherman asked Tricia, and on it went until a disembodied male voice from deep in the shop-the acrylic paint and pencil section judging by the sound of it-announced solemnly, "I spoke to him just this morning."
    "Mind telling me what he wanted?" said Isherwood to the ceiling.
    "To cancel his monthly shipment of supplies."
    "How many monthly shipments exactly?"
    "Every monthly until further notice."
    "Did he say why?"
    "Does he ever, darling?"
    Next morning Isherwood canceled his appointments for the rest of the week and hired a car. For five hours he sped along the motorways. Westward to Bristol. Southward along the Channel. Then the long haul down through Devon and Cornwall. Weather as volatile as Isherwood's mood, marbles of rain one moment, weak white winter sun the next. The wind was constant, though. So much wind Isherwood had trouble keeping the little Ford Escort attached to the road. He ate lunch while he drove and stopped only three times-once for petrol, once for a piss, and a third time on the Dartmoor when his car struck a seabird. He picked up the corpse, using an empty plastic sandwich bag to protect his fingers, and said a brief Jewish prayer for the dead before ceremoniously tossing the bird into the heather.
    He arrived at Gabriel's cottage shortly before three o'clock. Gabriel's boat was covered in a tarpaulin. He crossed the lane and rang the bell. He rang it a second time, then hammered on the door, then tried the latch. Locked.
    He peered through the paned glass into a spotless kitchen. Gabriel was never one for food-throw him a scrap of bread and a few grains of rice and he could walk another fifty miles-but even by Gabriel's standards the kitchen was exceptionally clean and free of supplies. He was gone, Isherwood