‘Only Braithwaite has signed them and sold them as his own for thousands of pounds each, and pockets the difference. Very neat.’ Alan finished his whisky.
‘And so it goes,’ I went on. ‘Only one day – what? What happens to make the whole thing blow up?’
‘The student shows up unexpectedly,’ said Kate, fully into the spirit of the thing, ‘just when Braithwaite is about to ship off another batch of the kid’s paintings. Which would have been fine, except that Braithwaite has already signed one of them, and the kid sees it and gets suspicious. And they have a shindy, and the kid picks up a painting knife—’
‘In self-defence,’ said Gilly with a frown.
‘In self-defence, if you want it that way, and stabs Braithwaite, who falls. The kid is appalled, runs off, Gilly shows up. Tableau.’
The timer went. I dished up, and while we ate, we thought over Kate’s scenario. ‘The only snag I can see,’ I said when we had finished and I was serving a defrosted tiramisu, ‘is, why didn’t the student come back and take away the painting Braithwaite had signed? That one little detail is what gave the show away.’
‘But only to someone like me. Almost anyone could look at those paintings, signed or not, and say without question that they were Braithwaite’s. Plainly the gallery that’s dealing in them has accepted them as genuine. And oh, what a brouhaha there’s going to be when they find out the truth! It’s going to shake the art world!’
‘And destroy Braithwaite’s reputation.’ Gilly spoke with pardonable satisfaction.
‘All right,’ said Alan, pushing his plate away. ‘That was superb, dear, by the way.’
‘You can thank Mr Sainsbury for the dessert. But thank you. I flatter myself I do defrost well. You were about to say?’
‘That we seem to have a tenable theory about the attack on Braithwaite, barring the small detail of finding the student, or whoever’s responsible.’
‘I hope you don’t,’ said Gilly.
Alan ignored her. ‘But. Unless you ladies can come up with probable cause for the student to have done the other things, that leaves us no closer to solving the main body of our problem. Namely, first, the death of Mr Chandler.’
‘I still think it was Braithwaite,’ said Gilly, ‘but I don’t know why, except that he’s such a rat.’
We sat in silence for a moment, and then I got up. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but my brain has done all the work it intends to today. I’m going to clean up the kitchen with anyone who wants to help, and then Alan, in the morning I think we need to talk to Derek and see what progress the police have made with any of this. There are so many threads hanging, we could weave a net out of them.’
‘A net to catch a killer,’ said Alan, and after that the rest of us didn’t say much.
Sunday, September 21
I woke in the morning with that feeling of general malaise that means a cold coming on, or worse. My head was stuffed with cotton, my throat felt as if someone had sandpapered it in the night, I was sniffly, and everything ached just a little. I wanted nothing more than to stay in bed, but I wasn’t anything like sick enough to justify that, and there were things to be done. Feeling like a martyr, I plodded in my bathrobe down to the kitchen.
Alan had made a pot of coffee, but he looked me up and down and turned on the kettle. ‘Toast?’
I shook my head. ‘Just tea.’ It came out in a rasp, and told Alan all he needed to know about my condition.
He brought my tea when it was ready, along with a carton of yogurt. It slipped easily down my sore throat and, with the tea, made me feel almost human. Watson had come to lie on my feet.
Alan poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down. ‘Not feeling quite the thing?’
‘Crummy. Nothing definite yet, just that sense that I’m going to feel perfectly awful in a few hours.’
‘Need anything from Boots?’
‘No, I think I’ve got all the cold remedies they sell. Nothing helps much anyway. It just has to run its course.’ I sniffled and reached for a tissue in my pocket.
‘Will you think me a neglectful husband if I leave you for a while? There’s church, and then I thought I’d drop in on Derek and see if he knows anything new and exciting, but if you want to be cosseted …’
‘For heaven’s sake, I’m not at death’s door! It’s just that my head has no brain cells today, only something grey and woolly that’s beginning to ache. I’m going back to bed.’
He kissed the top of my head. ‘Sleep well, then, and I hope I’ll have some news for you when I come home.’
I grunted something, sniffed again, disentangled my feet from Watson, and went upstairs. I rummaged in the medicine cabinet, found a packet of cold tablets, and took two before crawling into bed.
The next thing I knew, Alan was sitting on the edge of the bed, and the room had a late-afternoon feel to it.
I sat up, and then fell back against the pillows as a wave of dizziness swept over me. Alan’s look of indulgence changed to one of active concern. ‘Are you all right, love?’
‘I’m fine,’ I croaked. ‘Just a little light-headed there for a minute. I think it’s those stupid pills.’
‘You don’t sound “fine”. Shall I bring you some tea?’
‘No, I’ll come down. What time is it, anyway?’
‘Half-five, nearly.’
‘Good grief! I’ve slept the day away. Now I’ll never get to sleep tonight.’
‘More of those pills, and you will. Are you truly feeling better?’
I swallowed experimentally. ‘Truly. Throat a little raw, that’s all. And I think I’m hungry. And I want to know what you found out while I was doing my Rip Van Winkle act.’
‘You shall know all. Soup, or scrambled eggs?’
‘I think there’s some chicken soup in the freezer. The traditional cure-all.’
‘Right. It’ll be ready any time you are.’
I tried to convince myself I felt somewhat better once I’d showered and dressed. It was nearly dark by that time; I felt the guilt of someone brought up in the Protestant work ethic. Sleeping all day! But I was in fact still a little rocky, so I supposed I needed it.
The soup was steaming away on the stove when I came down. I couldn’t smell it, but when Alan set a generous bowlful in front of me, I found it tasted almost like chicken soup. He’d poured me a glass of white wine, as well.
‘Tea might keep you awake,’ he explained. ‘I suspect what you need more than anything is sleep.’
‘It’ll need more than wine to send me back to sleep after my disgraceful sloth today. But you were going to tell me what Derek has learned.’
‘A few interesting things. For a start, the lab people were able to work out the probable cause of the man’s death. It was the trashing of the darkroom that put them on the trail.’
‘All those deadly chemicals!’
‘Yes, well some of them are certainly deadly. So they decided to try tests for them, one by one. The most likely would have been the potassium cyanide, which is very quick acting, as you would know, given your choice of reading material. But it’s also quick to dissipate, in or out of the body. So they tried other things. I hate to think what the bill will be for all that. Fortunately it’s not my headache anymore. At any rate, they finally came up with traces of formaldehyde, which led them to …’ He paused suggestively.
‘Antifreeze? That metabolizes to formaldehyde.’ I had good cause to remember that, because my cat had almost died once from ingesting antifreeze.
‘Close. Methanol. It’s used in some developing agents.’
‘But I had an idea it killed very slowly, if very surely once the process has begun.’
‘Usually, yes. But it kills by damaging the kidneys, and it seems that our Mr Chandler had quite a lot of kidney damage already.’
‘But – I don’t understand. How could anyone have forced Chandler to drink some of the developer? And even with kidney damage, it wouldn’t have killed him on the spo
t. He would have felt ill, called the doctor or taken himself to the emergency room. He still would have died, but not at the bottom of the shaft!’
‘Indeed. And they thought about that, and then did a little more searching. And what they found is going to make you gnash your teeth, I’m afraid.’
I waited. I could feel my temperature rising, and not just from whatever bug had invaded me.
‘All the signs point to Chandler having died of a cerebral haemorrhage. A stroke, in other words. Natural causes.’
I refused more wine and went back up to bed.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I slept fitfully that night, having slept too much during the day, but I must have dreamed, because I woke once or twice with the tail of an idea disappearing around a corner.
I had had great hopes that my usual cold treatment of lots of rest and lots of fluids would do the trick. Not this time. I woke Monday morning unable to speak at all and feeling like death warmed over.
Gilly brought me my morning tea. I couldn’t taste it, but it was hot, and soothing to my throat, though swallowing was painful.
‘I think you need to see a doctor,’ she said, hovering over me.
I shook my head. ‘Just a bad cold,’ I mouthed. ‘Don’t get too close.’
‘I think you should have some antibiotics, or a jab, or something.’
I shook my head again, lacking the energy to argue that antibiotics were of no avail against virus infections, and that I’d already had a flu shot.
‘Well, if you’re sure. But I’m going to ring Alan at lunchtime to check on you. And he and I agreed, since you’re out of the hunt for now, I’m going to nose around a bit at the college, see what I can find out about those missing personnel records.’ She saw my look of alarm. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. But with Horrible Will out of the picture – oops, sorry, didn’t hear that coming – with him in hospital, I should be safe enough.’
‘We don’t know for sure,’ I tried to say.
‘That he’s the one,’ she finished for me. ‘I know. I’ll be careful. I must go; Alan’s waiting. I told him I could bike it, but he insisted. Take care of yourself!’
I burrowed back under the covers and into restless sleep again.
This time my dreams were near the surface. They formed the familiar frustration pattern: something, never clearly defined, that I needed to do but couldn’t because of hindrances at every turn. In intervals of near-consciousness I had to search my pockets. Or someone else’s pockets. Pockets. Pita pockets, dry as dust. Pocket billiards. Air pockets, and I was falling …
I clutched the bed frantically to save myself and woke up fully, my mind still whirring with thoughts of pockets. My mouth was dry; I’d probably been sleeping with it open, since I was so stuffed up. I reached for the bottle of water on the bedside table, but it was empty.
I had to go to the bathroom anyway, so I struggled to get out of bed. Both cats had somehow managed to get into the room, and were weighing down the blankets. They made quite a racket when I tried to dislodge them, especially Sam, whose Siamese yowls can raise the dead when she really gets going. Watson came loping up the stairs to see what was going on, followed closely by Alan.
The cats shut up as soon as I stopped moving, and lay purring, soft, warm, and innocent. Watson tried to jump on the bed to join everybody, but Alan caught him in mid-leap and held him fast.
‘What can I get you, love?’
I gestured toward the bathroom. He swept the cats off the bed with one whip of the blankets and helped me up. I pointed to the water bottle; he nodded and took it downstairs, herding animals ahead of him. (Or trying to. Not for nothing is ‘herding cats’ a metaphor for frustrating activity.)
I had a drink of tepid water from the bathroom, but when Alan brought up the chilled bottle, I drank a long draught with great relief and sank back on the pillows.
‘Better?’
‘Not much.’ It was a croak, but at least it was audible. I cleared my throat. It still hurt like fury, but there was something I had to tell Alan, if I could only get the words out.
‘Pockets,’ I whispered.
‘Pockets,’ he echoed, whispering himself. ‘What about pockets?’
‘I don’t know. Important. I dreamed …’ I stopped. Impossible to go into the whole story of my dream, and my feeling that pockets were somehow vital. ‘Search.’
‘You want us to search someone’s pockets?’
People do reply to whispers with whispers. It’s a natural reflex. Somehow I was finding it irritating. ‘Don’t know.’ Easy, feverish tears were starting. ‘Never mind.’
‘I’ll work it out,’ said Alan. ‘Rest.’
I took two more cold tablets, along with another large swig of water, and drifted away in a fog of fever and, later, chills.
I don’t remember much of the next few days. I slept, drank tea, took pills, had nightmares I couldn’t remember afterward. My throat stopped feeling as if someone had used industrial-grade sandpaper on it and moved on to the chopped-with-a-meat-cleaver stage. They had the doctor in, they told me later. He diagnosed a strep infection and wanted to take me to the hospital, but Alan refused. Gilly moved to the couch in the parlour so Alan could have the spare room bed, but I believe he slept very little in the intervals of nursing me.
All of this went on while I was semi-conscious. I roused only to take pills and drink something. They fed me some horrible liquid that tasted like wallpaper paste, but I was too sick to resist.
One morning I woke to a quiet house. It felt early; what sky I could see from my bed was a pearly pink. I turned to look at the clock. Seven-thirty. Surely someone ought to be stirring by now. What day was it?
I got up to go to the bathroom and realized that, though I felt hollow and was more than a little tottery, I wasn’t light-headed with fever. Nor – I swallowed – did my throat feel like raw meat. In fact, I didn’t feel awful at all. I realized that my nightgown was damp with sweat, cast it off, and stepped into the shower.
I was dressed and downstairs with a pot of tea in front of me and animals all around me, when Alan came down. He was dressed, but he looked a trifle haggard, as well he might. ‘Are you back among the living then, darling?’
I hadn’t tried talking yet. I cleared my throat. ‘Risen from my bed of pain. And hallelujah, I can talk! What day is it?’
‘Sunday. You’ve been away for a week, love. And there was a day or two …’ His voice shook a little, and he became very busy making coffee.
‘You know, that’s exactly the way it feels – as if I’ve been away. I’m sorry I gave everyone so much trouble. Did the doctor come? I can’t quite remember.’
‘He did. Are you aware that you had a very bad case of strep?’
‘No. I just know I felt like nothing on earth. What have you all been doing, meanwhile?’
‘Looking after you, for the most part. Do you remember that Gilly was going to try to track down the missing personnel records at the college?’
‘Vaguely. And there was – was there something about pockets? Or did I dream that?’
‘You dreamed it, but you said something about searching pockets to me.’
‘I don’t think it was searching pockets.’ I frowned, trying to remember the dream-urgings. ‘There was something terribly important in someone’s pockets. It was – I think it was meant to point the way to a search. If that makes sense.’
‘Not a lot. The only thing I could imagine that you might mean was what we found in Chandler’s pockets. There wasn’t much.’ He pulled a list out of his own pocket and read it. ‘“Two ten-pound notes, one fiver, three pounds seventy-three in coins; a plain white handkerchief, clean; two flyers for an exhibition of architectural drawings at the Design Museum in London; one small picture of a grey tabby cat.” I wouldn’t have thought there was anything of great interest there, but that is truly all there was.’
‘A picture of a tabby cat. That seems a most unlikely thing for Chandler to be carrying a
round. A photo?’
‘No. A drawing. Or rather, a print of a coloured drawing.’
‘A print. Could it have been one of those computer-generated prints? What do they call them? Something French.’
‘Giclée. I suppose it could be. What are you thinking?’
‘I’m not quite sure. But suppose it was a print. That could lead in the direction of a printmaker. And the chisel in his back points to a sculptor. And he was poisoned with some darkroom chemical. Suppose all these things were planted as clues to his murderer?’
‘If so, they rather cancel each other out, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but they do lead one away from a painter, don’t they?’
‘Hmm. Not terribly sensible, really.’
‘Is good common sense a characteristic one would attribute to William Braithwaite?’
‘I take your point. If, of course, Braithwaite is our man. And not forgetting that nobody could have killed Chandler, because he was in Greece. And in fact no one did kill him; he died of a stroke.’
‘The fact remains that, unless we’re all victims of mass hypnosis, someone did put him in that elevator shaft.’
Alan sighed. ‘I’ll ask Derek about the cat picture. But right now, would you like something to eat?’
‘I would. Something smooth. My throat’s still a little scratchy.’
So he scrambled some eggs and poured orange juice, and then made himself a more substantial breakfast, and we ate in companionable silence. Presently he said, ‘Were you thinking of going to church? It’s nearly time.’
I almost never miss church, but I shook my head. ‘I’m still pretty shaky on my pins, and there’s a tickle at the back of my throat that tells me I’m about to enter the coughing stage. You go, if you want. I’ll be perfectly okay by myself.’
‘Not by yourself.’ Gilly entered the room, yawning and stretching. ‘I have some students coming this afternoon to help me pour a small bronze, but I can stick around for a while. And I have something interesting to tell you.’
‘I’m afraid there’s no more tea, but I can make some.’ I started to get up, but she put out a hand.
The Gentle Art of Murder Page 22
