by Peter Helton
Then I saw a limb where there wasn’t supposed to be one. A pale arm protruded from behind the sofa at an unnatural, twisted angle. I took a deep breath and rushed to it.
She was completely naked. Someone had indeed got to Sophie and by the looks of it with a meat cleaver. It took me a moment to get my bearings before I realized that while Sophie looked exceedingly dead, she had never been alive in the first place. I touched a lifeless arm. It looked real and it felt real. What I had seen when I first came to the studio had not been a real woman. No wonder Kurt had been reluctant to make tea for her.
Her arms and chest had been hacked and slashed but her face was unharmed and showed the same neutral expression I remembered from when she had ‘posed’ for Kurt. She looked more real than any waxwork I had ever seen and the revulsion I felt at looking at her smashed body felt ridiculously real too. I moved the arm; it bent at the elbow and remained in the position I put her in. I played with her fingers. She was completely articulated. The perfect model. Now sadly broken and bent.
I straightened up. Hufnagel was standing in the door. ‘I’ve had her for five years,’ he said flatly. ‘A friend left her to me when he went back to America.’
‘What is it? It looks very real.’
‘It’s sculpture, I forget the name of the guy who makes them. You can put them in any position you want.’
‘The perfect model.’
‘The perfect model. And you don’t have to pay them.’
‘Or make them cups of tea.’
‘Or keep the blowheaters going to keep them warm.’
‘Or make appointments.’
‘Don’t have to keep them entertained.’
‘With a choice of hair, I presume.’ On the wall next to the door was a rectangular patch of glistening black oil paint that had been painted, not splashed on. ‘Did they paint that black rectangle, too?’
Hufnagel wrinkled his nose in distaste. ‘No, I painted over something they did. It was obscene.’
‘Who did this?’
‘I haven’t the foggiest. Or why. That’s the second break-in. Presumably that’s what they wanted to do in the first place.’
‘Kurt, do you owe money?’
‘Yes, but HSBC aren’t the type.’
‘You’re not in a dispute with anyone? About the house or anything?’
‘You’re talking like a detective now. No, I’m just quietly painting, going a bit mad from time to time, but minding my own business. Me, Sophie and Tweetie.’
‘Tweetie?’
‘The budgie.’
‘Where were you when it happened?’
‘Visiting my mother. She’s in a home. Dementia. Doesn’t know who I am half of the time. And I might be deluding myself about the other half.’
‘Called the police?’
‘Before I called you.’
‘Have they been?’
‘Are you kidding? They wanted to know if the intruder was still on the premises. When I said they weren’t, they lost interest. They gave me a ‘crime number’ and that was that. Someone will come round eventually. I told them what they could do with their crime number.’ Hufnagel sighed, his hands buried deep in his trouser pockets, looking about. ‘It’s all completely smashed. I mean everything. I’m finished.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘Look at it; it’s all been hacked to pieces. Someone wanted to destroy me and they’ve done a pretty good job.’
I had to admit, it looked bad. It looked like a typhoon had been through it. It looked daunting. I gave the mess on the floor an experimental stir, uncovered a tube of paint – Indian yellow. I picked it up; it was unharmed. I lobbed it towards Hufnagel. ‘For your yellow period. Catch.’ He did. I found some more tubes. They were all intact. A bottle of turps, half full. A scattered bouquet of brushes, all unharmed. His painting table on which he mixed his colours, once turned the right way up, was intact. ‘They didn’t bother to destroy everything. They left you the means of production. Well, some of them,’ I said, stepping over the splintered easels and taking another look at the mangled Sophie. ‘You’ll need a new model.’
Hufnagel shivered. That’s when I noticed for the first time that the skylight had a big hole in it. ‘I can’t work in here. And I can’t afford a new model. Real or otherwise.’
‘Then you have no choice, you’ll have to work up at the college. If you need props, they have thirty years’ worth of stuff cluttering up the place.’
‘What will I do for a model?’
‘There’s a model I’m sure you can borrow. She’s very nice too, you’ll like her.’
I called Annis, told her Hufnagel was OK but we could do with her Landy for moving another painter up to Batcombe.
‘What’s wrong with your car?’ she demanded. ‘Or his?’
‘His rear suspension is gone and my car is pristine. I don’t want to get paint on it and I don’t want it to smell of turps.’
‘And my Landy doesn’t matter, I suppose.’
‘You’re happy to put Rick’s sheep in the back.’
‘Not sure about “happy”.’
‘Anyway, I thought you wanted to see Batcombe House.’
Kurt was just like me when it came to studio equipment, he couldn’t do without this and couldn’t work without that. We had just finished shovelling everything salvageable into boxes and piles when Annis arrived. ‘Taxi for Hufnagel?’ She was not in a shovelling mood and picked her way cautiously through the hall.
‘Hi, I’m Kurt,’ said Kurt.
‘Are you hiring yourself out as landfill?’ she asked tactfully. ‘There’s garbage outside and garbage inside.’
‘Do you mind? This was my studio.’
‘Then what was that outside?’
‘That was always garbage,’ Kurt said.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘I just knew you two would get on,’ I said happily.
Annis looked around wide-eyed. ‘This looks like you upset someone. Your cleaner, perhaps?’
‘Look, I’m grateful for the lift but I could do without the witticisms right now.’
‘They killed Sophie,’ I explained. I showed her the butchered model behind the couch. We had covered her with a sheet and I lifted it like an attendant at the morgue.
‘Yup, it’s her, inspector.’ She turned to Hufnagel. ‘Looks like you either upset a male psychopath or you upset a normal woman. Either way, I’d be very careful. I’ll be outside.’
We stuffed the Land Rover to the gunnels with what remained of Kurt’s studio, then Kurt took a few minutes to find his jacket, a few minutes to find his car keys, and quite a while to find first gear, after which our three cars trundled in convoy back towards Bath and then out to Batcombe House to add another artist to the collection of nutters.
‘The more the merrier,’ said Dawn without moving a facial muscle. Or any other. Annis was also not inclined to get paint on her dress by carrying the remnants of Kurt’s painting life into Studio One. Her dress?
‘Why are you wearing a dress?’
‘I’m meeting Tim. We’re going to see the new whatsisname film and grab a bite afterwards.’
‘Right. Enjoy.’
‘I will.’
I didn’t even know she liked whatsisname. A strange pang of jealousy tried to nest under my naval. I dismissed it. Annis spent most of her time at Mill House not six feet away from me. Why should I feel jealous about her having a night out with Tim? Especially since I hated cinemas. Surely it was the nights in that counted? Don’t ask. Just don’t ask; she hates it when you ask. ‘Coming back tonight?’ Couldn’t stop myself.
‘Maybe, maybe not. Hard to tell from here. Get on with clearing the stuff out, I want to do some shopping before the cinema.’
When Kurt and I came back to the car to get the last few boxes, Annis was in deep conversation with Kroog. Lizzie turned to me. ‘You didn’t tell me you knew Annis Jordan. I saw her last show, it’s fabulous work. That’s the kind of painting I approve o
f.’ She turned back to Annis. ‘You must come and give a talk to our students about your work.’
Annis knitted her forehead. ‘Tell you the truth, I hate talking about my work.’
Lizzie linked arms with her and gently dragged her away. ‘Let’s give the boys some room. Of course you hate talking about your work, love, only complete idiots enjoy it, but you owe the next generation …’
‘Kroog,’ said Hufnagel as the two strolled off across the lawn. ‘As scary as ever. Luckily she completely ignores me.’
So did Dawn. Her mood was still as dark as it had been ever since her last encounter with Rachel and the mood of her painting had changed accordingly. Gone were the delicate pinks and yellows of her colour studies; dark clouds advanced across her canvas now, harbingers of a storm that would surely be breaking soon. I heard Annis’s Land Rover grind away outside, pretty sure that Kroog had successfully twisted her arm about giving a talk to the students.
Now there were three of us in here. Kurt wrenched the screw top off a bottle of supermarket red, took a long draught from the neck and began noisily to arrange his new studio. I tried to concentrate but as soon as Kurt had set everything up he started stapling a canvas to his stretcher. Our student days lay a long way in the past and we were no longer used to sharing studios and cramming ourselves into small places, which meant that between the three of us we had managed to take over the entire available space.
‘If Landacker turns up as well he’ll have a bit of a struggle fitting himself in,’ Kurt said.
‘I wonder if he’ll bring his Persian rugs,’ I added.
‘Persian rugs?’ the other two said in near unison.
Soon I wished I hadn’t mentioned it. The light had gone and I was not in the mood for drinking plonk and playing ‘ain’t-it-awful’, so I called it a day and drove back home.
THIRTEEN
Annis did not come home and hadn’t returned when I grumbled into the kitchen in the morning. An excellent opportunity to cook a full English breakfast, I told myself; something Annis didn’t go near and loathed the smell of. I checked the egg basket, I opened cupboards, I studied the fridge. Normally there is at least one constituent missing but this was a morning of miracles: every single ingredient was there. The two secrets of a good full English are, firstly, use three frying pans and your grill. The only excuse for cooking it all in one pan is being stuck up a mountain in a tent, otherwise it’s three frying pans, no arguments. Sausages go in one pan, bacon under the grill, mushrooms get to roll around by themselves in a fiercely hot skillet, which they can’t do if you have eggs stuck in there too, which is why they go in pan number three, and baked beans heat gently in a pot on the back of the stove. Secret number two is timing. It all has to come together beautifully at the end, even though they all take different lengths of time to cook, so it’s absolutely essential that the phone doesn’t ring persistently in your office and you feel so guilty about never answering it that you run all the way upstairs and snatch up the receiver.
‘Aqua Investigations.’
It was Susan Byers. Had I made any progress? Was there any news at all?
‘So far I have found no evidence to support your theory, you’ll be glad to learn. He visited a male colleague’s place after work, presumably for supper, and an early-morning call at his Circus Mews flat seemed to suggest there was no one but him staying there overnight. It’s too early to say for sure but so far it looks good.’
‘Keep watching,’ she said. It sounded to me as though she wanted the guy to be guilty. The whole conversation couldn’t have taken more than three minutes – well five at the most, surely – but the sausages were black on one side, raw on the other, the baked beans had boiled dry, the mushrooms shrunk to tiny marbles and the bacon was on fire.
I went off the full English idea, chucked the lot in the bin and drove towards Batcombe. I was a bit late for breakfast but I would throw myself on Mrs Washbrook’s mercy.
‘What have you done about the pilfering?’ she demanded to know.
‘Investigations are ongoing,’ I said, something I had never said before in my life but if it bought me some non-incinerated food, why not?
‘They’d better be,’ she said, not believing it, but she allowed me a late breakfast in the empty refectory nonetheless.
This emptiness continued upstairs. There was no sign of my fellow exhibitors. Had I seen their cars when I arrived or only imagined it? The studio’s French windows were open. I nipped around the corner to check if my memory was playing tricks on me. No, both Hufnagel’s scrapheap and Dawn’s multicoloured van were in the car park. So was Anne Birtwhistle, a clipboard under one arm, hauling awkwardly at one leaf of the wrought-iron gates, trying to pull it shut. I turned away but she had spotted me. ‘Mr Honeysett. I really would appreciate some help.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘They have stood idly open for so long they’re refusing to shut.’
‘And why are you shutting them?’
Anne looked at me as though I had asked a question about bears and woods. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious. Gates are supposed to be closed, that is what they are for.’
‘I thought that was walls,’ I said as I pulled half-heartedly at the gate. ‘I thought gates were for admitting people.’
‘Of course. If they have the right ID. Put your back into it, won’t you?’
Together we managed to pull both leaves of the protesting gate shut. They probably hadn’t been closed for thirty years. ‘It doesn’t have a lock,’ I felt moved to point out. ‘I’m not sure this adds significantly to our security.’
‘That is not a very constructive remark, Mr Honeysett. At least we now appear to have security and are no longer inviting all and sundry to just wander in whenever they feel like it.’
Right on cue a car arrived; three students in a tiny Renault. They were so surprised by the closed gate that they nearly crashed into it. Anne was already walking away. ‘You let them in,’ she said. ‘But only if they have their passes. And they’re late for this morning’s lecture. I’m thinking of introducing fines for lateness. Make sure you close the gate after them, Mr Honeysett.’
One of the students got out of the car when he saw me struggle with the gate but left me to shut it by myself. My hands were covered in rust and I had broken into a sweat. It was already a very warm day again. For one of us it would soon get a lot warmer.
Back in the studio I was still alone. I scanned the lawns to see if Dawn was lying out there studying the sky, but I realized its fluffy white cloud would contribute little to the stormy painting she was working on and I didn’t see her. Kurt, I noticed, had managed to prime his canvas and finish his bottle of wine before disappearing. That left Mr Honeysett with a patchy canvas and a couple of drawings in Studio One. It was too fine a day to be stuck inside, though everyone else appeared to be. I could faintly hear the lecture being delivered upstairs and thought I could discern the familiar rhythms of Kroog-speech, interrupted by coughing. Just look at that sunshine, I told myself, how many more days like this are we likely to enjoy this year? Get out there and draw. Or even just get out there. At that moment Rachel appeared on the lawn, in designer jeans and a black-and-silver top, come to inspect her sheep pen as she did every day – for nibbling progress, I assumed. OK, I’d wait until she was gone and in the meantime check that my drawing gear was packed. I was going for all-out effort: watercolours, inks, graphite, coloured pencils, the lot. It was all in place. Only not as I had left it. Someone had definitely been through it; the sketchbook was in the wrong place and shoved back inside with the spine facing down, something I never did. Ah well, the joys of a shared studio, I supposed. And after all, my sketchbook should be open to inspection for educational reasons alone. When I looked up I could see no sign of Rachel, so I shouldered my heavy little packsack and set off, feeling deliciously like I was skiving. I was halfway across the lawn, giving the giant spider a respectful berth, when I saw Rachel. She was lying on the ground insid
e the sheep pen. She was lying face down and she was not examining the grass.
I didn’t run. Should I have run? I quickened my step, not taking my eyes off her, hoping she’d get up but the leaden feeling spreading from my stomach said she was not going to. I dropped my pack by the electric fence. ‘Rachel,’ I called. The sheep stood side by side in the furthest point of the star-shaped enclosure, staring. My stride just managed to clear the electric fence. On the other side I knelt down beside her; she looked unharmed but she also looked dead. I called 999 and asked for an ambulance. I felt for a pulse at her neck; there seemed to be the faintest flutter but I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t my own. ‘She’s dead or unconscious. And send the police as well. No, I have no idea what the sodding postcode is.’ Now what do you do? What had happened to her? There was no blood, no immediate sign of an injury, but I wasn’t about to roll her about. Should I try CPR? Could I do CPR? What did CPR stand for? I couldn’t think. Pull yourself together, Honeysett. I felt for a pulse again. There was definitely something. She looked very pale, despite the make-up.
I thought I’d best leave it to the professionals, vaguely wondering if I should get a jacket to keep her warm but deciding it was a warm enough day. So I stood around feeling helpless. Then I saw the piece of paper. It was lying on the ground, crumpled up, half-covered by Rachel’s left hand. What the hell, when the police got here I was going to be in trouble anyway so I took out my mobile, took a picture of where it lay in relation to Rachel’s body and then teased it out from under her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ It was Dawn, standing by one of the tall wood sculptures and screwing up her eyes, frowning at me.
‘It’s Rachel, something’s happened to her. She’s alive I think but unconscious.’
‘Now what’s the stupid cow done to herself?’ she said but she looked more concerned than she sounded. I saw she was carrying a sketchbook. I could hear faint sirens.
