Painting in the Shadows

by Katherine Kovacic

  John is completely engrossed in what he’s doing, so I keep out of his way as I prowl round the room. There’s a bin lying on its side near Meredith’s easel, but it’s empty. I’d noticed that earlier, and now I wonder if it means the police have taken the contents away so they can examine things at their leisure. Then again, if you’d just swallowed a virtual pharmacy of pills or chugged some sort of chemical, you wouldn’t bury the bottle in the bin, you’d either chuck it on top – where any cop could find it – or you’d drop it on the floor or nearest surface. I eye the mess on the floor speculatively. Conservators use assorted toxic paints and potions, any of which could be part of that spill and undergoing a process of chemical reaction; sorting through that lot is going to take a while, and there’s no way I’m plunging my bare hands into the middle of it. There are several other bins scattered throughout the room, so I decide to tackle those first. If I was going to commit a crime, I’d get rid of the evidence somewhere else. Of course, if I was trying to make it look like suicide, I guess I’d leave it in plain sight. I shift back and forth on my feet as my thoughts take me one way and then the other. Finally, I stop dithering and head for the bin furthest away, snagging a pair of disposable gloves as I go.

  ‘Is there a radio or CD player around here?’

  ‘Dunno. Too quiet for you, after all?’

  ‘It’s a little sombre. If you find a radio, see if you can get 3MBS. Something classical would be the perfect soundtrack for this work.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ I scan the area, ducking and swaying like a boxer in slow motion as I look under and around things. I spot a boombox on the other side of the room, splattered with paint and, when I get there, its buttons tacky with an assortment of unidentified substances. A bit of fiddling brings me to 103.5 and I give the volume knob a twist. Saint-Saëns ‘Danse Macabre’ fills the room.

  ‘Well that’s not at all ironic,’ I say.

  John looks up.

  ‘Shall I find something else?’

  ‘No, there’s something about dancing skeletons and the devil’s violin that seems to resonate with me right now. Tasteless and inappropriate, yes, but at the same time …’ He returns his focus to the warp and weft of the canvas.

  Gloves on, I dig my way through four rubbish bins. It’s mostly what you’d expect in an art conservation lab: cotton swabs, rags, empty paint tubes and glue pots, scraps of paper and canvas. Occasionally the tedium is relieved by chewing gum or an apple core, but given that eating in here is probably frowned upon, even those things are few and far between. The gloves I’ve been wearing are looking a bit the worse for it, so I strip them off and grab a fresh pair on the way across to what I’m now thinking of as Meredith’s corner. I’ve decided to just have a gentle poke and prod along the surface and see if anything stands out. The radio is now playing the duet from The Pearlfishers, and I pause for a moment to listen, trying to figure out who is singing. The recording sounds fairly recent and I pick Luciano Pavarotti as the tenor, but can’t put a name to the baritone. I hover for a moment, thinking I’ll wait till the end and hear what the announcer says, but realise I’m procrastinating. Easing the drop sheet away from the floor so I don’t disturb anything, I fold myself down, ending up cross-legged at the edge of the police tape.

  I can’t see any broken glass, so I cautiously reach toward the top layer of debris. John coughs loudly. Then he does it again. I turn around and see Fiona has come in, and a few steps behind her is the male police officer we encountered earlier and some guy in jeans and a leather jacket who scans the room with sharp eyes. I quickly pull my hands back from the debris, rip off the gloves and shove them in my pocket. By the time they reach me, my hands are folded in my lap.

  ‘Poor Meredith,’ I say.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  I look around and am confronted by close-range denim-clad legs. Slowly I tip my head back and let my gaze travel up: slim hips (is that a holster?), taut pecs in a black T-shirt under a leather jacket, a strong jaw and a full head of black hair. Nice, except for the suspicious frown creasing his lovely broad forehead.

  ‘What are you doing?’ He’s even got the gravelly voice to go with the whole bad-ass look.

  ‘Just thinking about Meredith. What a waste.’

  He offers me a hand and I reach up, expecting to shake but finding myself hauled to my feet. Thank God I’m fit enough that I manage it gracefully. Relatively speaking, anyway. Now that I’m vertical, and so close, I find the top of my head even with his nose, which must make him about six foot two. This would be great if I wasn’t feeling like I’d been sprung drinking someone else’s booze at a party. Which I would never do, of course.

  ‘This is Alex Clayton, sir,’ the uniform guy says before I can find my voice.

  ‘Detective Hunter.’ My God that gravelly voice.

  Pity about the name. I’ve never met a virtual tautology before. Detective Hunter now shakes my hand, which makes me realise I hadn’t let his go. I try to step back from him, but the police tape is there and he has to grab me before I go over arse-first into his crime scene. Smooth, Clayton. Now he gently eases me away, placing himself between me and the police tape. Fiona has joined John and they’re bent over the painting, leaving me at the mercy of the law.

  ‘Why don’t you sit over there?’ He uses that chin to indicate the general area near John and Fiona. Fiona has donned her own magnifier and the two of them have their heads together, looking like a still from some weird performance art piece.

  ‘Can I watch what you’re doing?’ I ask Hunter.

  ‘If you like watching people pick through rubbish, knock yourself out.’ He pulls a pair of disposable gloves from his pocket and dons them with an unnecessary snap.

  ‘What are you looking for? I mean, we were told the police believed Meredith … took her own life, has that changed?’

  Hunter narrows his eyes and stares at me for a couple of beats. ‘At this stage we’re pursuing several avenues of inquiry; however, this search is just routine.’

  My eyes are rolling before I can stop myself. Hunter is still staring and there’s a flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth. Not that I’m looking at his lips.

  ‘The coroner will give us some answers, but we need to see if there’s anything here that will point us in the right direction in terms of things she may have ingested.’

  ‘So she swallowed something? Not inhaled, injected, infused via the skin … Sorry, the alliteration makes me sound facetious. I don’t mean to be.’

  ‘At this stage, I can tell you that, yes, we think Ms Buchanan swallowed something, but presently we have no idea what. I gather that even if she wasn’t in possession of some sort of drug or pharmaceutical, there are quite a few things here?’

  I spread my arms wide. ‘Take your pick. It’s a smorgasbord. Sorry.’ I focus on Hunter’s chin instead of his eyes so I can think better. ‘Let’s see, a bunch of solvents: acetone, toluene, xylene, methanol to get you started. John, Fiona, do either of you still use white or red leads?’ I call, turning to where they are seated.

  ‘Not for years,’ John says, tilting his head back crazily to try to look at us from beneath the magnifier. ‘A lot of the adhesives would be toxic to some degree though.’

  Fiona just shakes her head.

  I snap my fingers, ending the gesture with a raised index finger. ‘Formaldehyde!’

  Hunter screws up his nose. ‘The stuff they use to preserve body parts?’

  ‘Who does?’ I ask.

  ‘Anatomy museums, chamber of horrors, stuff like that. What do you people do with it?’

  ‘Oh of course, like Damien Hirst’s pickled shark.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a work of art.’ I make my fingers into air quotes. ‘And, to answer your question, conservators,’ I hook my thumb over my shoulder toward Fiona and John, ‘use a formaldehyde solution to
spray on the back of a canvas that’s had mould.’

  ‘And I always wear a mask.’ John pipes up without turning around. ‘That’s nasty stuff.’

  Detective Hunter doesn’t reply, but ducks under the police tape and surveys the mess, hands on hips, before reaching out and righting the upturned rubbish bin.

  ‘Bin’s empty,’ he says to the constable, who scrawls importantly in his notebook. ‘Someone must have tipped it on the floor.’

  ‘Would the victim have knocked it over when she … you know?’ The constable asks.

  ‘The stuff looks like the contents of every other bin in this place.’ I jump in.

  Hunter gives me a look and I realise belatedly I should probably keep quiet about my search of the rest of the room. I shut my mouth and drop my gaze back to the assorted crap on the floor.

  ‘I don’t think she knocked it over, Constable, because the bin was over here and the top was facing toward the back wall.’ He indicates the bin. ‘While the mess is mostly there and spread out.’ He points the other way.

  ‘Right.’ The constable bends his head back over the notebook.

  Hunter crouches down and starts to sift through the debris. He picks out an empty turpentine bottle and sets it to one side. Surely Meredith wouldn’t have drunk that. Was the turpentine close to where Meredith was lying or further away? And would it matter? Turpentine poisoning would be agonising, so you’d hardly be likely to still have hold of the bottle when you hit the floor. There was no sign of any vomit either, but would you expect that if turps was the culprit? I have no idea and I grimace at my own thoughts before focusing back on the action.

  Hunter has whittled the mess down considerably, collecting a group of full and half-full paint tubes into a pile. I note with satisfaction there are a couple of tubes of white (a zinc white and a titanium white) as well as black, charcoal, pewter and several shades of grey. These are the types of colours Meredith would actually have needed to retouch the painted surface once the canvas was repaired. There are only a few scraps of rag, paper, and the odd cotton swab on the floor now, and the detective starts to pick them up one by one, examine them and dump them in the bin. He reaches for the last item, a tightly wadded rag, but as he lifts it, it unfurls and a confetti shower of small paper scraps falls to the linoleum. He looks at the rag before dropping it in the bin, then picks up two of the fragments.

  ‘Torn-up photo,’ he says, picking up and discarding a number of pieces in turn. ‘Doesn’t look like anything. Certainly not a picture of someone.’

  He grabs a handful and leans toward the bin.

  ‘Wait!’

  He turns to me, eyebrows raised in query.

  ‘Don’t you think … I mean … Could that be important?’

  The constable shoots me a startled look and Detective Hunter sighs heavily before opening his hand over the bin. He stands up, stripping off the gloves and rips one end of the police tape. The rest of the tape flutters to the floor as he steps across to me.

  ‘Look, Ms Clayton, I’ve been patient but I’d appreciate it if you don’t try to tell me how to do my job.’

  ‘I didn’t –’

  He holds up a hand, palm centimetres from my face. I assume the technique is developed in traffic cop school.

  ‘I’ll be submitting my report today. Once the coroner has that and the results of the medical examination, a decision will be made regarding the need for further investigation with a view to criminal prosecution.’

  He’s not only a tautology, he’s a wanker.

  ‘Will that be your recommendation, Detective?’ It takes effort to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  He looks at the constable, jerks his head, and the two of them start for the door.

  ‘We’re finished here,’ he says, without looking back. ‘We’ll inform the museum’s director of our findings.’ He pulls the door closed as they go and it thumps home like a full stop.

  I turn around sharply and catch John grinning at me before he quickly bows his head back over the painting.

  ‘You can shut up too,’ I say.

  There’s a snort of laughter, but I don’t dignify it with a response.

  ‘Are you even doing any work?’ I walk across to peer over John’s shoulder. At the moment, he’s watching Fiona care­fully tease threads of canvas back into order.

  John turns toward me without lifting the magnifier from his face. ‘Still doing the fibres and it’s going to be a while yet.’

  ‘Time for a coffee?’

  ‘A real coffee would be good. I’m not drinking that instant muck.’

  ‘Well I don’t think they run an Atomic coffee maker around here.’

  He screws up his nose below the edge of the magnifier. ‘Maybe you could get something from the cafe?’

  ‘I doubt they do takeaway. It could be a problem if the punters spill their lattes on the Balthus. Fiona? Will they do a takeaway?’

  ‘If you show them your lanyard they will, but you’ll need mugs from the break room. I’ve finished this bit, so I can go. They know me.’ She wipes her hands down the front of her lab coat and stands. The harsh sound of her stool scraping across the floor seems to amplify as it bounces off the ceiling.

  I wince, but Fiona seems oblivious and hurries from the room.

  ‘Problem solved.’ John nods and swivels back to the bench.

  Just talking about a decent coffee has made me realise how much I’m craving a caffeine hit. For now, I head back to the erstwhile crime scene and crouch on the floor where some of the scraps of paper still remain. They are definitely bits of photographic paper: the remnants of an image someone has torn to shreds. The pieces are so small, it’s impossible to tell what the photograph had shown, but Hunter was right; the colours are wrong for it to be a picture of a person. Even so, I feel my heart start to speed up. I drag my hands across the floor, scooping all the tiny pieces toward me, flipping any that are face down. Then I kneel over the bin. Luckily, most if not all of the pieces dumped by Victoria’s Finest are lying on top of the rag and I carefully pick them out and add them to my collection. They are all gradations of the same colour and at this stage they all look very, very similar, like one of those insane two-thousand-piece jigsaws of a blue ocean under a blue sky. Only not blue.

  ‘Why would someone upend the bin?’ I say it to myself, but John hears.

  He flips up the magnifier and turns to look at me. ‘Maybe Meredith did knock it over, then kicked it out of the way. Maybe she snapped.’

  ‘But what if it wasn’t Meredith, what if someone else did it?’

  ‘Why would they do that? Setting the scene? Trying to make it look chaotic, as though Meredith was coming undone? Or are you thinking there’s a mystery killer and they were looking for something?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know.’ I keep moving the pieces of photograph around, and a moment later hear a soft creak as John settles on his stool and turns back to his work.

  ***

  ‘John I might have something.’ I don’t look up as I say it, I just keep shifting the pieces, trying to arrange them into some­thing coherent. There is the scrape of a stool across the floor and John is beside me. A corner piece catches my eye and I grab it, holding it up briefly for John to see.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something that copper thought was nothing. I’m still looking at the torn-up photo.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Not sure, but I think it might be a photo of a painting.’

  ‘Conservators take photos of paintings all the time. You know that, Alex. How does this help?’

  ‘Because,’ I gather up as many pieces as I can and clamber to my feet, ‘conservators don’t rip photos up if they’re keeping records, but more importantly because of the dominant colour of the painting.’ I carry my load across to the bench and empty my hands on a clear area next to J
ohn and Fiona’s work space.

  As I head back to pick up the few pieces still left on the floor, John picks up one of the scraps from the bench and holds it closer to the light.

  ‘Well bugger me, that is interesting,’ he says.

  I return and stand next to him, adding the last fragments to the pile. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘It looks like Alizarin Crimson. Whatever that picture is, the person who painted it had something of a penchant for Alizarin Crimson.’

  John stands for a moment, stretching his neck first to the left and then the right. He arches backwards, hands in the small of his back, then returns to his stool in front of the damaged canvas.

  ‘I’ll get on with this,’ he says. ‘Reassembling that lot looks like a one-woman job.’

  ‘Thank you ever so much.’ I drag another stool across to the bench.

  My craving for coffee has gone, replaced by real excitement at the scraps of photograph. I have no idea how this is going to help us figure out what happened to Meredith, but at least it’s something. Sitting down, I shuffle the pieces around, trying to find a starting point to fit them together. I find the same corner piece again and set it in what I imagine to be the top left corner. But maybe it’s the bottom right.