Indelible

by Peter Helton

  ‘Preferably on these premises where we can speak to students and staff without having to invite them all to the station. I think that would be preferable, don’t you agree?’

  ‘I see. Well, you can use this room, can’t you? I’ll be upstairs in my quarters, if you need me. But I feel I want to lie down for a while; this has given me a headache.’ Reid held the door open for her as she swept out of the room.

  Needham turned to Claire. ‘I believe you do the admin around here.’ Claire nodded. ‘I will need a list of all persons likely to have access to the college, students, staff, regular visitors and so on.’

  Reid was speaking into his mobile, no doubt ordering up an armful of recording equipment and a bevy of supporting officers. Murder, even suspected murder, provides a lot of work to a lot of people. While he talked he held the door open for us so we could vacate what had now become police premises. I was the last to leave, carrying the kettle, coffee and milk.

  ‘Leave the kettle,’ he said as I walked past him.

  ‘Dream on, Reid.’

  ‘Oh, and bring up a kettle if you can,’ he said into his phone.

  ‘Tell them to bring their own electricity, too,’ I advised him. ‘Strict rules about that here.’

  Hufnagel greeted the arrival of the kettle in Studio One with delight. ‘Shame you couldn’t have savaged the sofa as well,’ he added.

  ‘Savaged?’

  ‘Did I say that? I meant “salvaged”. I never understood why art school studios have to be so bloody uncomfortable.’

  Someone who knew all about the uncomfortable life in painting studios was Petronela. Hufnagel had posed her among a pile of clutter he had found in the store room. He had dragged a broken barrel, several tea chests, wooden exhibition plinths and armfuls of dustsheets into the studio and created a bit of rocky landscape for Petronela to stand in. A couple of blow heaters were humming. She was naked to the waist, the rest of her wrapped in a paint-stained sheet. Her hair was down and she was posed with a bow and arrow which she was pointing at the window. ‘Cupid?’ I asked.

  ‘Anteros,’ Hufnagel enlightened me. ‘Goddess of requited love.’

  ‘I’m sure he was a chap,’ Dawn objected.

  ‘Antera, then. Artistic licence.’

  ‘I hope yours is current,’ I warned. ‘Anne will be making the rounds, checking all artistic licences.’

  With my drawing gear still impounded by the SOCO team I stapled several loose sheets of paper to a piece of thick card, borrowed a pencil and sharpener from Dawn and stepped outside to resume my sketching in Summerlee Wood. And I stopped right there on the threshold. The place was teeming with police, both uniformed and plain-clothed, forensic technicians and assorted others. It was a textbook demonstration of how murder is in a class of its own when it comes to police effort. If you come home and find your house has been emptied by burglars, there’s a twelve per cent chance the police will catch them. If, however, you find one day that you have been murdered, you can rest in peace in the knowledge that there’s a ninety per cent chance your murderer will be caught.

  At Batcombe House it looked as though no stone was being left unturned by forensics people, no bush unbeaten by constables bearing sticks, no shed unrummaged by gloved officers and no nook or cranny left unphotographed. There was now a cameraman taking long, sweeping shots with a shoulder-held video camera and officers were herding gaggles of students from here to there in order to quiz them about their whereabouts at the time of the murder. I crossed the lawn at an oblique angle, trying to avoid getting entangled with the police effort, but I failed. As I passed the rusting hulk of a sheet steel sculpture I could hear banging and cursing – someone had squeezed inside to inspect it – and when the author of the blasphemy emerged streaked with rust he was in a foul mood. ‘Hey, you!’ He waved me over. ‘Sir!’ he added belatedly. ‘Who are you and where do you think you are going?’ I stopped and since I made no move towards him he walked up to me, still brushing dirt from his uniform. ‘Well?’

  I opened my jacket to reveal the ID tag on my jumper and pointed at it.

  ‘That’s upside down, sir,’ he objected.

  ‘Yes, I do a lot of yoga. It says “Chris Honeysett”. I’m a tutor here. I have had a long chat with your DSI and am now going into the woods to do some drawing. If you have no objections, that is.’

  He considered this for a moment. ‘No, that will be fine, as long as you stay away from the taped-off areas.’ Half a mile of blue-and-white caution tape was fluttering from tree to tree and sculpture to sculpture in the autumnal breeze. ‘I’ll just make a note of it.’ He tilted his head in an effort to copy my upside-down name into his notebook.

  I walked away. ‘Honey followed by a sett. Two Ts.

  ‘Got it.’

  I couldn’t help it, all this was bringing out the schoolboy in me – Anne’s primary-school style of trying to take charge, police trying to control our movements and questioning our motives.

  An unfriendly wind was sweeping the hillside now and Summerlee Wood had become an unquiet place. The breeze was noisy in the trees and looking up I could see the first leaves had begun to turn. It suddenly felt much cooler, too. I zipped up my leather jacket and crunched over freshly snapped twigs to the scene of my painting. I sat down on a mossy log and began covering the first sheet of cartridge paper with pencil marks, greedy for information for my painting. The gusty wind snatched at my paper and I fought the flapping corners. I was determined to get down enough in this session to keep my painting going for a few days. Next sheet. My eyes jumped to the tree trunk that would form the right edge of my painting and my pencil probed the folds and furrows of the bark. Then I stopped. The light was getting worse, now there were dark clouds riding on the wind. I squinted at the tree trunk. There it was. I got up and looked closely at it. Someone had carved something into the bark, a simple design I had seen once before elsewhere: I>
  I ran my finger over it. It had scabbed over and did not look fresh to me, yet I imagined I would have noticed it had it been there before. It was the same stylized butterfly design I had seen carved violently into Landacker’s gate, though it could of course be something else or it could mean nothing at all, just one of those mindless tags vandals left everywhere. Whatever it meant, it looked like there was a connection between Landacker, the school, and whoever carved these tags. I copied the tag’s design on to a sheet of paper – just a flattened X, really – and put my pencil away. There was too much to think about to allow me to concentrate on drawing.

  There had been three incidents now: attacks on Landacker’s studio and then Hufnagel’s, and on Rachel herself. Rachel of course did not have a studio. Could the killing have been unintentional? Had the intention been to give her ‘a nasty shock’ and her death been an accident? Apparently no one had known about her weak heart.

  I walked back a different way, skirted the swampy back end of Fiddler’s Pond and passed the back of the sculpture sheds. Not that you could have got close to them from here – they had spawned a lagoon of metal and wood junk heaped there by generations of students. And if even sculpture students thought it was useless junk then it definitely was. A forest of nettles grew through it all. I hoped for their sakes that the police weren’t intending to search this lot.

  My stalking through the undergrowth meant I was keeping out of sight and therefore out of Needham’s clutches while managing to approach Kroog’s cottage from behind. The rotten remnants of a wooden fence barely required me to lift my feet to step over it and into what had once been a sizable garden. It had been allowed to revert almost completely to nature and had it not been for the remnants of the rotted fence it would have been impossible to say where garden and wilderness met. There were however a few tomato plants in pots close to the back door. The windows had almost disappeared under tall weeds that would have been easy to chop down, which meant that Kroog probably liked it that way. Looking back I could see a corner of the pond and remembered that the windows of the k
itchen faced this way. The snooping part of my PI brain has never found it too hard to subdue my polite upbringing, and I made a careful foray into the weeds until I could peer in through the window. Not that I harboured any particular suspicions about the elderly tutor; I’m just made that way.

  I was looking into what was indeed the kitchen where I had drunk coffee a few days ago. Kroog was there, sitting still at the table with her pipe in her hand and her skull cap lying beside a cup of tea or coffee. She was looking straight ahead through a cloud of tobacco smoke. Behind her stood Alex, also looking silently at nothing, smoking a cigarette while stroking Kroog’s sparse hair, almost absentmindedly, like one would pet a cat while thinking of something else. Carefully I extricated myself from the weeds and retreated. Then I walked to the back door and knocked.

  After a long while it was Alex who opened the door, a couple of inches first to check who I was, then she opened it wide and stood wordlessly back to let me in, her eyes unblinkingly looking into mine as though trying to convey a message. If so, I could not decipher it.

  Kroog was sitting at the table with her skullcap back in place. ‘Hello, Honeypot. Coming round the back like a true local. Are you hiding from the hairy arm of the law? So are we. You are welcome to join us. Alexandra will make fresh coffee.’

  And Alexandra did make coffee, fresh, strong and brewed in the kind of chipped enamelled coffee pot that you can safely leave on the back of the stove to keep hot. There was already enough smoke in the room to fulfil all my nicotine requirements just by breathing but eventually we all three lit up again, purely from habit. ‘Don’t let DSI Needham find out Alex makes good coffee or he’ll find excuses to come and sit in your kitchen,’ I warned them.

  Kroog smiled at Alex, endorsing the compliment, but it looked like the smile took some effort. Then she narrowed her eyes at me. ‘It was murder, of course.’ She paused and shook her head. ‘I’m sounding like Miss Marple, have to watch that. And the police think it’s one of us who did the silly woman in.’

  ‘I’m sure they do. And I’m sure they’re right. Someone set a trap for her. They probably saw her climbing across before, touching the wire. That gave them the idea to connect the fence to the mains. All they had to do was watch and wait. Needham and his lot will question everyone who was here as to where they were and who else they saw or were with. Then they’ll draw up the diagram from hell to see who gives whom an alibi and if there are gaps or contradictions. Then they’ll pounce.’ If, on the other hand, they come away empty-handed, they will of course pounce on me as statistically the most likely suspect. But I kept that thought to myself.

  ‘And they’ll be completely wasting their time,’ Alex said while exhaling smoke towards the ceiling.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Whoever did it could have connected the current any time and then gone to the lecture or whatever. They didn’t have to be there. She could have climbed in without touching the wire, but did touch it on the way out. That’s probably why she was found inside. No need for someone to turn it on in between the two actions.’

  ‘Then why didn’t we have two dead sheep in the pen as well?’

  ‘You don’t know much about sheep, Chris,’ said Kroog. ‘Put them in an electrified enclosure and they’ll get themselves zapped at the fence once, but after that they’ll never go near it again. That wire could have been connected to the grid all morning without anyone noticing.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said while the implication sunk in. Not only did this mean the alibi question was useless, it also meant that the fence could have still been connected when I climbed across it. Twice. ‘But it was turned off when the police found the connection.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘So someone did turn it off after they had achieved their aim.’

  Kroog wagged her pipe stem at me. ‘Yes. But until then anyone could have touched the wire, which means they didn’t give a lot of thought to who else they might have killed.’

  ‘So whoever killed Rachel hated her enough to allow for some collateral damage.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ said Alex. ‘Let’s hope Rachel is the only one the killer took exception to. Or we can expect more booby traps around the place.’

  FIFTEEN

  There are traps enough for the unwary in even the most ordinary lives, but some of the more painful ones are surely those we set for ourselves. At times my own life appears to be strewn with booby traps that, on closer inspection, were built by myself, often long ago. As I was driving towards the offices of Mantis IT Solutions – by special dispensation from the superintendent himself – I was not yet thinking of booby traps but did think I had made a mistake in agreeing to Mrs Pink’s request to check over her husband. I felt too restless, too busy to sit in the car and wait for hours for Martin Byers to do something even remotely suspicious. Or even remarkable. But then again, what better opportunity to think things over than when you have to sit still and stare at nothing much anyway? There was my new painting, something that is often enough to preoccupy me; the way it looked so far was hardly a showcase for artistic brilliance that students could aspire to. There was the teaching, which was an odd thing to be doing if you hated teaching. Was I doing it justice or was I even worse than the last tutor they’d had? To top it all there were the strange goings on in Hufnagel and Landacker’s studios and now Rachel’s death. I was still not calling it murder in my mind: there was still the possibility that it was a prank gone wrong. I was reserving judgement. Unexplained death. Or let’s split the difference: manslaughter. I was surprised it had not been renamed ‘personslaughter’ yet, surely an oversight soon to be remedied.

  In the event I didn’t have long to wait. There was Martin Byers, leaving the building with the same man, going into the car park and getting into the passenger side of the same car. I was beginning to have a bad feeling about this: I was letting Mrs Byers down by not taking this seriously enough. The woman was pregnant and needed an answer. But what if it wasn’t another woman? What if it was another man? Although there were no signs in the men’s body language to suggest even for a minute that they were anything other than work colleagues. My bad feelings were confirmed when I followed the Audi uphill again and the car turned into the same road, stopped in front of the same house and the same woman welcomed them in: Martin was being treated to supper again and I was ready for mine. I put a reminder into my phone to ask Mrs Byers what car, if any, her husband drove, then I set a course for home. Remember those booby traps I mentioned?

  All I could think of when I got to Mill House was a shower, a change of clothes and some supper, preferably something involving the smoked salmon I knew was sitting in the fridge. The Landy was in the yard and I could see the door to the studio was open, so I knew Annis was around somewhere. I would make us some supper and then we could mull over today’s strange happenings. Talking to Annis often made things much clearer, always depending on the amount of wine we consumed, of course. I skipped up the stairs, tapped on her door and walked in. I shouldn’t have. Annis and Tim were in the middle of something. Nothing extraordinary, I was relieved to note, but nevertheless something I didn’t expect them to be doing at Mill House. We had successfully shared Annis’s favours for years now and there were unspoken rules about things. I had thought.

  I turned round on my heels mumbling something like ‘sorry guys’ but the longer I thought about it the less apologetic I felt. I had a very hot shower, though a cold one would perhaps have served me better, then stomped downstairs and cluttered around in the kitchen, tearing salad leaves and slicing cucumbers with more gusto than was strictly necessary. It was Tim who came downstairs first.

  He stood in the door and watched my performance for a minute. ‘Sorry, mate, Annis thought you’d be ages yet.’

  I kept chopping. ‘Why is your bloody car not out there?’

  ‘At the menders.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the damn thing?’

  ‘Electrical fault.’

  ‘Right.�
� I know diddly-squat about cars and we both hate football so that was all safe topics exhausted. Except one.

  ‘Someone’s been killed up at the art school?’ Tim asked, coming closer but staying safely out of slicing radius.

  ‘Electrocuted. Could be a bad prank or could be murder. I need you to do me a favour.’

  ‘Sure, anything,’ Tim said with unusual eagerness.

  ‘I’ll give you a list of people in a minute, find out as much as you can about them. Also I’m supposed to be following this guy who’s meant to be a philanderer and all he ever does is go for dinner at a colleague’s house. See if you can find any dirt on the man. I’m grasping at straws here.’

  ‘Sure, mail me the stuff.’

  ‘I’ll write it down for you after supper. Nearly done.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  Annis came rattling down the stairs with her hair wet from the shower, ran her hand up my back and kissed my neck. ‘Hi, hon, thought you’d be ages yet. You said.’

  ‘Needham let me go early.’

  ‘Oh, right. Smoked salmon, yum. I’ll open some wine, shall I?’

  And that’s all there was to it.

  Next morning an unusually eager Annis made breakfast while I showered, and I sat down to hot poppy seed bagels, cream cheese with freshly chopped chives, a perfectly timed boiled egg and a cafetière of Blue Mountain. Ah, guilt. Long may it last.

  ‘I was quite serious last night,’ Annis said. ‘Be careful up there. Batcombe, the name says it all.’

  ‘Means valley of bats. Not that I’ve seen any yet.’

  ‘If that electro-shock thing was meant to be a prank then someone up there has bats in their belfry. Ditto if it was murder, of course. Hurry up with that bagel, hon.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s one of those nondescript grey cars coming down the track, can’t see who’s driving.’

  ‘Not Needham again?’ I asked through a hasty mouthful of bagel. ‘He must have smelled the coffee.’