by Peter Helton
Apart from meal times, when students and tutors emerged from wherever they had been lurking to make their way down to the basement refectory, the Bath Arts Academy, despite being a hive of creative activity, could be very quiet and at times feel almost deserted. Batcombe House and the grounds were large enough to swallow all of the students and tutors. On cool, cloudy days like today when rain was threatening, there was not a soul to be seen outside and only the odd student could be heard walking from A to B.
I could hear a voice from the office door, which was ajar as usual. I knocked and went in. Claire was behind her desk on the phone, nodding at me and feeding ahas and yesses into the receiver. She pointed at a chair, presumably as an invitation to sit, but it was piled high with files and I declined.
‘The funeral has been postponed,’ she said after she had hung up. ‘That was Anne. She didn’t say why but she sounded furious.’
‘Has the body not been released?’ Out of habit my criminal mind immediately imagined dark findings at the post-mortem.
‘No, it has, it has. His daughter made it sound as though the postponement was somehow poor John’s fault, but she didn’t elaborate.’
‘Stressful time for her,’ I murmured inanely and changed the subject. ‘I contacted two of the would-be exhibitors and they both agreed.’
‘That’s marvellous. Who agreed?’
‘Fowling and Hufnagel.’
‘Excellent. But do have a go at Landacker.’
‘I will.’
‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you doing this. Anne has just about tripled my workload. She wants a complete overhaul of everything, a complete inventory, all the files up to date, everything ready for her inspection at a moment’s notice. She thinks of herself as a new broom, I believe.’ Claire pushed her glasses disapprovingly up her nose.
‘I don’t know her at all. I didn’t even know John had a daughter. She’s not an artist herself?’
‘Ha!’ I had scored a direct hit on a sore spot. ‘Anne Birtwhistle wouldn’t recognize a work of art if it fell on her. Which is entirely possible in a place like this. No, she’s an estate agent. Or works for an estate agent,’ she said pointedly.
‘I’m glad you two hit it off so well. It appears that quite apart from helping with this exhibition I’m now also the relief painting tutor.’
‘Told you,’ she said.
‘Can I see the timetable?’
‘It’s behind you,’ Claire said, panto style. Beside the door was a wall chart of the term, divided into weeks and days and mornings and afternoons, which listed in inch-square boxes the times of ‘student – tutor contact’ (what used to be called teaching) for all subjects. ‘Just look for Paul and substitute Chris and you have it,’ Claire said. I studied it with foreboding but found that it was unlikely that Paul had deserted his post because of the excessive workload. Formal teaching, in the form of lectures, happened once a week. All students had a tutorial once a month, and I had two tutorial afternoons a week. Otherwise my twenty-five painting students would be working on the projects I was planning to set them as well as doing their own work and it was up to me to chase after them and find them wherever they were painting or drawing. Nothing had changed there, neither had the system that set it very much apart from other art schools. At the BAA there were no divisions between the ‘years’. It was a three-year course but all were taught together and picked what lectures and projects they wanted since there were no exams and no grades awarded. Under John Birtwhistle the system had become so lax that one student had stayed for six years before anyone noticed. She was later successfully released back into the wild.
I was still trying to find a scrap of paper to copy down my ‘contact’ times when Lizzie Kroog pushed through the door. She wore her trademark brown leather waistcoat, the only kind of garment that didn’t regularly catch fire from welding sparks and from pocketing her smouldering pipe. ‘Saw your car, Honeysett. Leave that for the moment; no one takes much notice of the timetable anyway. Come on, I’ll introduce you to your students and to the rest of the staff if we can find anyone.’ She grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me away. Stealing a look over my shoulder, I could see that Claire was smiling happily as she went back to her paperwork.
Kroog marched me straight over to Studio Two. The large and airy studio – in long-forgotten times a well-proportioned withdrawing room – was large enough for more than a dozen painters to work in, either on radial easels or with their canvases fixed to the wall. The rest of the students were either working outside or had found space somewhere else in the building. Only about ten students were there. They had all turned towards us. Kroog always somehow managed to get attention long before she opened her mouth. ‘Let me introduce you to your new painting tutor, Chris Honeysett. I know he sounds sweet but don’t expect him to be as wet as your last tutor. Chris has taught here before so I know he is a bit of a slave driver and a workaholic and expects you all to pull your finger out.’ They all stared at me as though I had three sixes tattooed on my forehead. I widened my eyes at Kroog but she managed to step firmly on my toes under the pretence of looking around all their faces. ‘Projects will be handed in complete, essays on time and attendance will be one hundred per cent or Honeysett here will come down on you like the proverbial. You might want to pass the message on: your holidays are truly over.’ Kroog turned and swept out again.
‘As you were,’ I said and followed in her wake down the corridor. I caught up with her at the next door. ‘Was that kind of intro really necessary?’
‘Of course it was. They’ve been half asleep since Paul left. They were nodding off even while he was still here. I expect you to introduce some drama into their lives. Right, drawing,’ she said with her hand on the battered doorknob. ‘You realize you’re teaching that too, of course. General drawing and life drawing.’ She ushered me into the Small Studio, which was mainly used for drawing of all kinds. Small was a relative term, however. Fifteen artists could easily draw in here at the same time. Among the groves of easels and nests of drawing boards were just three students grouped around a female life model. She had her ash-blonde hair held in a short ponytail and sat posed on a spartan chair.
‘Your new drawing tutor,’ Kroog introduced me. ‘The life model is Petronela, who is from Poland and who I hope is getting enough breaks,’ she said, looking reprovingly at the students. She then told me their names, which I immediately forgot again, but I recognized the types: fanatics. Fanatical about drawing, especially from nature. All three of them had faces streaked with charcoal and wore black clothes from head to toe, but judging from the thickness of charcoal dust around their feet those could have been any colour before they started. We’d get on just fine.
‘Actually would be nice to make break now,’ said Petronela and stretched. ‘I am thinking my leg is making thrombosis and I need cigarette urgent now.’
‘Half an hour maximum without a break,’ I told them. ‘You,’ I pointed randomly at one of the students, a thin chap with glasses, ‘are in charge of time keeping.’ It appeared I had finally started work.
We exited through the French doors and I followed my guide through a fine rain into the ceramics department via the conservatory. Several students were about, including the pottering girl I had met when I first arrived. Kroog turned to her. ‘Abbi, is Dan about?’ The girl just pointed at the ground. ‘Downstairs,’ Kroog said to me. ‘Follow me into the bowels of the bat cave.’ Down a steep flight of stone steps we descended into the basement. It smelled damp, wet even, and clay seemed to have seeped into the fabric of everything down here, floor to ceiling. Only the odd bare low-wattage bulb was dangling from the ceiling here and there, providing minimal lighting. Kroog found what she was looking for in a shady room lined with slatted wooden shelves crammed with every type of unfired clay object. The quite unnecessary sign on the door said Damp Room.
‘Chris, meet Dan Small, the ceramics tutor.’ Dan Small was anything but what his name suggested. He h
ad a physique that lent itself well to humping huge bags of clay about. His large hands were caked with the stuff, his hair and facial stubble sand-coloured and his eyes a watery blue. ‘This is Chris, who’s taking over from the treacherous Paul.’
‘Welcome aboard.’ He wiped a hand on his blue overall before he allowed me to shake it. ‘Yes, fancy wanting to give up all this to teach under a cloudless sky. And for a mere three hundred per cent pay rise.’
‘It does rain in Queensland too, you know,’ said Kroog. ‘But it comes all in one lump. Do you mind giving a talk to my sculptors again sometime this term, Dan? Remind them that there is such a thing as ceramic sculpture.’
‘Sure, I’ll dust off last year’s lecture notes.’
‘Don’t you dare. Find something new to say. Whatever you told them last year didn’t work.’ Kroog led me out along a corridor where a student was lifting slabs of grey clay into a dumb waiter. ‘Handy, those things. They had the kitchens down here originally. Dan’s a good man, likes to get his hands dirty and get right in there. In stark contrast to the next and last inmate I’ll introduce you to.’ When we regained ground level we found ourselves in the east wing and our feet echoed past the stairs to the refectory until we came to a half-glazed modern door. ‘Graphics,’ was Kroog’s terse explanation. She walked right in. In one long room sat a few students, mostly staring at computer screens. ‘Stott about?’ she asked the room.
‘Printmaking, I think,’ said the closest student, the only one who wasn’t wearing earphones and had therefore heard the question. He was very smartly dressed and had a fashionable haircut. His desk was strewn with gleaming gadgetry. I took one look at him and knew I could chase him screaming around the house with a single stick of charcoal.
‘Upstairs then,’ Kroog said and swept out of the room again. Up a set of back stairs the tour continued. ‘Stottie has been volunteered to take on the print department as well, now that John has gone to the big print room in the sky.’ She pushed through a set of double doors into a room with two enormous printing presses, several very long tables and endless wooden cupboards and plan chests. A woman wearing spotless vinyl gloves and a brand new blue cotton apron stood in front of an open cupboard, staring inside. ‘Catherine, I want you to meet Chris Honeysett, the new painting tutor. Chris, Catherine Stott, graphic design and now printmaking.’
The woman looked at me without much interest. Catherine was in her early forties, had fine dark hair, cut at a slant and ending in two points on either side of her face. Her ears supported large, modern silver and rose quartz earrings and a matching inch-wide band of silver encircled her neck. ‘I won’t shake hands,’ she said, holding up her vinyl-gloved hands. ‘It took me ages to wriggle into these.’
‘Where are all your students?’ Kroog asked her.
‘I set them an essay so they’re out of my hair until I find my way around this chaos. Nothing is where you’d expect it to be in this place; it’ll take me ages to put it in some kind of order. I don’t know how John managed to find anything.’
‘Just ask your students, I’m sure they can tell you where everything is.’
Stott gave her a distasteful look. Kroog left her standing there miserably and walked slowly across the room, running a finger over a polished wooden handle on an old-fashioned printing press that looked like it might literally weigh a ton. ‘It’s a miracle they haven’t fallen through the floor yet,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘When they do they’ll wipe out the entire graphics department.’ Then she let her eyes travel across the room as though she might never see it again.
‘Don’t mind Stottie,’ she said when we were on our way back down. ‘Bit of a dry stick. She never expected she’d be having to get her hands dirty again at her age. I remember her portfolio, she was very good at printmaking but got seduced by the dark arts and disappeared into her computer. Must be a shock to the system, having to use real colour again.’ Kroog cackled happily and pulled out her pipe. ‘That concludes the tour. The staff room is where it always was and not even the sofas have changed.’ We were heading towards it when we could hear a voice echoing down the corridor that I recognized as Anne Birtwhistle’s. ‘Through here,’ Kroog said and abruptly pulled me into an empty study room. She closed the door behind us, opened the sash window, climbed through it into the garden and marched away. ‘Come on, coffee at my place.’
We made our way through the fine drizzle across the gardens, passing some truly outlandish student sculptures on the way. A few of them were worked in stone but the majority of it was welded rusting metal or enormous wood sculptures that stood like patient giants in the rain. One appeared to be a machine that looked like a ten-foot tall, eight-legged metal spider full of electric motors and trailing wires.
Now my place is messy. Did I mention that? I admit Mill House is a bit of a tip. Much that should be in the studio migrates down to the house: small paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, rolls of paper, that sort of thing. But this was something else. Kroog walked straight in, the door apparently unlocked. I had never been inside ‘The Bothy’, as this six-bedroomed nineteenth-century house was so wittily called. It really consisted of two substantial cottages knocked together and it would more truthfully have been named ‘The Warren’. I presumed Kroog had lived here for the last thirty years since it would have taken at least that long to create this richness of clutter and chaos. The front door led straight into a large sitting room. The two cottages had not been completely knocked through but were connected by doors upstairs and down. Standing as they were on the wooded slope that ran all the way down to Fiddler’s Pond meant that three steps led down from one front room to the next, with a similar arrangement on the floor above. Dark and narrow wooden stairs led to the first floor from each end of the double sitting room. The windows were small and almost completely blocked by overgrown shrubs on the outside, magazines, books and typescripts on the inside, casting the interior into perpetual gloom. What at first I had taken for a person standing in the shadows turned out to be a dressmaker’s dummy wearing an embroidered kimono and a straw hat. Between towering piles of books, magazines and newspapers stood five-foot-tall rolls of drawing paper, bundles of files and countless balls of scrunched-up paper. Artworks stood, hung and leant everywhere, some finished, some perhaps abandoned or in progress, though most of them were in the form of maquettes, small-scale essays, some of which I recognized to be the forerunners of their life-size cousins on the lawns. Ashtrays were conveniently placed at three-foot intervals; the ceiling between the beams had gone beyond nicotine yellow towards burnt umber. Apart from one moth-eaten chair in front of a cluttered desk, all furniture designed for sitting on – sofa, chaise longue, armchairs – were piled high with stuff.
Kroog disappeared through a narrow doorway into an unevenly stone-flagged corridor, the flags worn concave by the centuries. ‘Come through to the kitchen; you may find it less challenging,’ she said before launching into a rumbling cough.
She was right. The kitchen was rustic, with a solid scrubbed oak table and an enormous stoneware sink full of piles of unwashed pots and dishes, but there were chairs to sit on and the table was empty apart from an ashtray and a lidded jar in the centre. Kroog set the kettle on to a Rayburn that made my own at home look positively space age.
I declined the offer but Kroog poured a measure of brandy into her own coffee, then filled her pipe from the jar on the table and lit up. I lit a cigarette for myself and for a short while we just sat there wreathed in unfashionable smoke.
‘John’s sudden death must have been quite a shock for you,’ I suggested. ‘You’ve known him, what, thirty years at least?’ She nodded. ‘You were close, I expect.’
Kroog leant back in her chair and narrowed her eyes. ‘Very close for a while, after his wife died. That seems a long time ago now. I think we both thought of each other as fixtures and fittings at Batcombe. John barely left the place in thirty years, certainly never took a holiday. Lived in it, worked in it, lived for it. At least I
usually have a hundred and fifty yards distance from the place.’ She nodded the back of her head in the direction of the ‘big house’; the kitchen windows looked grimily the other way, towards the wood and the pond. ‘And just recently I thought John was getting just a touch too …’ For a rare moment she seemed lost for words. ‘Perhaps he was getting a bit confused, but he kept saying the place had become strange.’
‘In what way?’
‘I hardly dare say it; you’d think he’d gone senile. I’m not so sure he hadn’t. He said he could feel something evil at the house. When I asked him what the hell he meant by that he said it was a feeling he had. As though the place was haunted. He said something was stalking the corridors at night. There are sixty-five prank-filled students and no locks on the windows and he thinks something is stalking the corridors? They’ve always managed to climb in somehow to start mischief. So I laughed at him. I said it was probably just Stottie’s desiccated spirit looking for nourishment, but he was serious. Something spooked him. In a house where he knew every ceiling crack and floorboard! And he insisted that someone had come into his rooms at night and gone through his things. I think that’s another reason why he wanted you here, because of the private-eye thing. He wanted you to keep an eye out for anything strange.’
‘So that’s how I ended up on the list of exhibitors,’ I said, a little miffed now.
‘No, that’s not why. But that’s how you ended up at the top of the list.’
I now realized what had been a little odd about the list: it was alphabetical, except for my name at the top of it. ‘But you have no reason to believe there really is anything strange going on?’
‘Strange? Here?’ We shared a smile, then Kroog turned serious again. ‘I don’t know. Strange things have always happened at Batcombe House. It’s an art college, not a school of accountancy. We’ve had a fox trying to get into the kitchens last week. We’ve had sheep wandering around on the first floor. Stottie had her tyres let down one day, then slashed the next. Not very nice, but hardly the work of an evil presence. She just annoys people, always has. I have felt pretty haunted myself since John died. I spent the first forty-eight hours drunk, I’m afraid.’ Her pipe had gone out and she re-lit it. I reached for another cigarette from my pack. Kroog looked at me, then leant in towards me as though she had suddenly thought of something. ‘Only complete idiots still smoke, you know that, don’t you?’
