Indelible

by Peter Helton

  ‘Is this person known to you then?’ one of the officers asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s Honeysett. I constantly find him here, but …’ He looked astonished at the damage to the barn.

  ‘Right, in the car,’ said the officer, pulling me away.

  ‘I was trying to put it out,’ I called to Landacker, but he gave no indication that he had heard me and stood with both hands on the top of his head in an attitude of despair. I let myself be dragged off. The sooner I got to a police officer with more than two brain cells, I told myself, the sooner I’d get out of this mess.

  Surely.

  By now I was handcuffed, had one hand stuck in a potsherd, my hair was wild and in my face, my trousers and shoes were sodden and I had an itch on my nose I couldn’t reach due to my handcuffs. I sat muttering darkly to myself in a self-righteous cloud of antipathy and misery.

  ‘We’ll get the police doctor to take a look at your finger once you’ve been processed,’ the officer called Terry promised. In the state I was in, he’d probably have me sectioned as soon as look at me. I pulled myself together, stopped muttering, rubbed my nose against the window frame, shook the hair out of my face and sat up and took notice.

  I was getting far too familiar with the booking procedure at Manvers Street station. I only very briefly lost my temper again when I was told that the jagged edges of the broken pot were considered dangerous and I would have to remain handcuffed until a doctor had been found. ‘For your own safety, sir,’ said the other officer, who I most wanted to slice into small pieces with it.

  A doctor was eventually found, who ummed and ahhed and suggested we try lubrication first. ‘This might hurt a bit,’ he said with remarkable presentiment and pulled. It did. I really had little to add to my previous expletives so I just gritted my teeth. Eventually he freed me by breaking the shard with a pair of pliers.

  The relief! ‘Thanks, Doc. How are you with handcuffs?’

  They came off next, since I was no longer in possession of anything sharp. Or shoelaces, phone or much else apart from my clothes. Arson was a serious crime, I was told, and there was no question of me going anywhere until I had been interviewed and a decision had been made whether to charge me or not.

  If you have never spent a night in a police cell, imagine a lot of nothing at an unnoticeable temperature with an indestructible red mattress, and a surveillance camera plus monitor high up in the wall. The TV is not tuned to your favourite show but if you make enough of a nuisance of yourself the ugly mug of Sergeant Hayes will appear on it and you’ll hear him say sympathetically: ‘I’d just try and get some sleep if I were you, Mr Honeysett.’

  Other guests of the custody suite appeared to include a drunk who made an awful racket, banging and shouting for half an hour, then appeared to fall asleep in the middle of a word, and a rattling drug addict who kept screaming about his rights and that he needed a fag and a doctor, both of which he eventually got. It’s hard to believe but despite the whining, injured voice in my head that went on and on about how mean and stupid everyone was and how dare they do this to me – me, Christopher Honeysett, painter, PI and all-round good egg – I fell asleep.

  They told me it was breakfast: a slice of white toast plus cornflakes and tea in red plastic containers on a red plastic tray. ‘The punishment has started already?’ Then I became amazingly polite and asked if it would be at all possible, at their earliest convenience, to speak to Superintendent Michael Needham when he had an incy-wincy minute to spare?

  No, that wasn’t possible. I lost some of my politesse when I enquired why the hell it wasn’t. Because he was in Bristol all day, being chummy with the ACC. The Assistant Chief Constable, the officer translated for me.

  Being stuck at an airport waiting for an indefinitely delayed plane home with no money and no conversation left is paradise compared with kicking your heels in a police cell. It was mid-morning when I was allowed to leave the custody suite and was marched all the way to Interview Room Two – the one with the unnerving stain, as you may remember – and handed over to the now equally familiar DI Reid and his bland sidekick with his suit full of static.

  For some strange reason, DI Reid seemed to dislike me. He was one of those overeager types whose confidence was as thin as the ham in his sandwich. He was desperate to prove himself and do something praiseworthy while his boss was away but I’d have thought even he would have realized that I couldn’t possibly be the one who had set fire to Landacker’s studio.

  ‘And why not?’ he asked, smiling as though he had said something clever. ‘Unlike you, it seems, Greg Landacker is doing pretty well with his aunt.’

  ‘Is he?’

  The DS nudged him. ‘Art, sir.’

  Reid frowned at the interruption. ‘What?’

  ‘Art, sir. You said “his aunt”.’

  ‘Right … art. From his art …’ He seemed to have lost his thread for a moment. ‘Yes, we spoke to Mr Landacker. He had a break-in not so long ago and found you on the premises then, too. It seems to me then that you are jealous of Mr Landacker. He seemed to think that it was possible too. He said you had been, and I quote, “reduced to teaching”.’

  ‘Did you find the petrol can?’ I asked.

  ‘Let me ask the questions, Mr Honeysett,’ he said with a practised sigh.

  ‘I didn’t see one either. Yet it was definitely petrol.’

  ‘You should know, since it was you who set the fire.’

  ‘And presumably I carried the petrol there in my pockets.’

  ‘You could have thrown the plastic can in the fire and it would have burnt.’

  ‘Is that what the fire officer told you?’

  There was just a hint of a pause. ‘No. They said there was no sign of it. But you could have … had an accomplice, of course. Who left.’

  ‘And I stayed behind to get myself arrested? I went there to speak to Greg, found the place had been set alight and was throwing water on the fire when you lot turned up!’

  ‘Perhaps you changed your mind. You set fire to it …’

  ‘With an accomplice.’

  ‘… and realized it was a stupid thing to do and tried to put it out again.’

  ‘Having told my accomplice, “You go, I’ll stay and put it out with this here flowerpot.” Having called the fire brigade.’

  This ding-dong nonsense went on for long enough to get boring even for Reid. He terminated the interview, then let me wait for another age before I was released.

  ‘On bail!’ I complained to Annis, who was waiting outside. ‘I had expected an apology, at the very least for the food they made me eat, if not for arresting me. The bed in the cells was appalling, the noise in the place …’

  Annis knew how to handle a fulminating Honeysett. She steered me round the corner into Demuth’s restaurant where they had just begun serving lunch and by the time I had got stuck into roast aubergines with miso and sunflower seeds (and crispy new potatoes with pickled mustard greens, very nice), I was beginning to shake the episode off.

  ‘Break-in is one thing,’ I suggested. ‘Burning the place down is in a different league.’

  ‘It’s in the same league as murder,’ said Annis while jabbing a fork into her salad. ‘But from what you told me, the first one wasn’t much cop as a burglar. They may have come back and tried to burn the door down.’

  ‘And it got out of hand with petrol going everywhere.’

  ‘And with you turning up.’

  ‘And with me turning up in my car which is still parked in the weeds opposite Landacker’s gate.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  It was still there. I walked around it once to make sure it hadn’t acquired any tags or scratches and then, for the first time ever, rang Landacker’s bell next to his gate like a normal person. We could have just wandered in since the gate was open. Greg already had the menders in; there was a van in the lane and one on his drive. The intercom squawked: ‘Yes?’

  ‘Aqua Investigations,’ I informed
him.

  ‘You have a nerve, Honeysett.’

  I let Annis, the acceptable face of Aqua Investigations, go in first. Landacker came sailing out of his front door to start the inevitable tirade, saw Annis and at once changed his mind. I could see immediately that he had become more interested in smarming her than bellowing at me.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m not throwing you back out in the lane,’ he said indulgently.

  ‘Because you didn’t have time to thank me last night. For calling the fire brigade and chucking water on your fire until they got here.’ I would have mentioned my swollen finger but annoyingly it had already gone completely back to normal.

  Landacker buried his hands deep in the pockets of his sand-coloured corduroys and looked a bit more at Annis, then at the two workmen carrying charred timber away. ‘Oddly enough, I believe you, Honeysett. It’s just that you always appear just when rubbish happens around here.’

  ‘How about the last time you burnt supper? I was nowhere near the place,’ I said reasonably.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right. But what on earth were you doing here last night?’

  This time we didn’t have to talk on the doorstep, though I had no doubt that this was purely due to Annis’s presence. ‘Nice place,’ she said when we walked through his preposterous house. ‘Imaginatively done.’

  ‘Thank you. It was a wreck when I bought it.’

  ‘Love the staircase. Is it real glass?’

  ‘It is actually. The architect has a brother who runs a specialist …’ Etcetera, etcetera.

  He had a huge espresso machine with enough pipe-work to heat a house and made cappuccinos for us and found me an ice-blue Murano glass ashtray when I asked if I could smoke. ‘Just this once,’ he said. I was really warming to please-call-me-Greg Landacker.

  I finally got to explain to him that the tag I had first seen scratched into his gate now made the rounds up at the college and that I was afraid it might have to do with Rachel’s death. Did he have any idea what it meant?

  ‘None at all, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I would have said.’

  ‘Who’s got it in for you?’ Annis asked him.

  He smiled serenely and opened his hands as though in supplication. ‘I’m an extremely successful artist. I’m beginning to think it might simply be professional jealousy. After all, it was the studio that was targeted both times. It’s simply the price of fame, I expect. I’m having my security beefed up as soon as the workmen are finished.’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ said Annis. ‘Which is worrying, because the tag appeared on our studio as well.’

  ‘Our?’ Landacker asked. ‘Are you an artist as well?’

  ‘Annis Jordan,’ she offered.

  ‘Of course,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘Where was it that I saw your work last?’ Two minutes later he was refreshing his memory by studying her work on his iPad, making all the right noises.

  ‘I do love your work,’ Annis reciprocated. ‘Now that I am actually here, you can’t possibly send me away without showing me your studio.’

  Landacker stopped ogling Annis and her paintings. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. I never allow anyone into my studio while I am working on a painting. I cannot bear anyone seeing my work until it is absolutely perfect. I’m quite superstitious about it too. I’m sure you’ll understand.’ He got up, signalling that it was time to go.

  He walked us halfway to the gate, then stopped and looked worried. I could see that an effort had been made to sand away the I>
  I kept walking. ‘I don’t know, Greg. I’m going there next.’

  ‘Well … let me know, OK?’

  ‘Well, I’m not going,’ said Annis back at the cars. ‘Shame he wouldn’t let us have a look at his studio. He’s a worried man underneath all that price-of-fame rubbish. He terminated our audience rather quickly when I asked to see his studio.’

  ‘Yes, I didn’t know the form, was I supposed to kiss his signet ring?’

  ‘He’s definitely a worried man,’ she said, climbing into the cab of her Landy. ‘I wonder if he knows why someone is doing this to him?’

  ‘If he knew, wouldn’t he say? Tell the police? Tell us?’

  ‘Perhaps. But maybe not if the person who’s doing it has a really good reason,’ she said and drove off.

  Good reason! You’d need a pretty good reason to set fire to a painter’s studio, I thought as I drove towards Limpley Stoke where the late Rachel Eade had lived with her solicitor husband. Then I thought of the X-symbol sanded into the door of our studio at home and wondered if I should not worry about my own. Only I could not think of a single thing that would make our rattling clapped-out barn with its bodged-in windows more secure. Our three acres were bordered by fields and woodland. It would take a twelve-foot security fence and patrolling Alsatians to keep out a stranger carrying matches. And what had we done to deserve to have our studio torched?

  And what had Rachel done to deserve being electrocuted, I asked myself for the umpteenth time as I let the DS roll to a stop in front of the house. Rachel’s car was standing in the open double garage and a sober, grey Lexus was parked in front of it. The reason I had not come here before was of course cowardice. I had hoped not to find anyone here so I would not have to deal with the grieving husband but it was too late now; a curtain was moving and even before I had managed to lock the car the front door opened.

  The dark-haired man who stood on the doorstep looked a young forties but his eyes were hard and ancient. He looked like he hadn’t slept for days, or if he had, he had done it in his suit and with the help of a bottle of Scotch. No, gin, I mentally corrected as I got close enough to smell him. He looked unmoved as I walked up to him, giving no sign whether he was going to be civil, fall over or head-butt me.

  ‘Mr Eade?’ I asked.

  He took a deep breath and looked towards the heavens to grant him patience. ‘My name is Dominic Swift. My late wife kept her maiden name for her artistic identity. Who are you and what do you want?’

  Who was I, private eye or painter? ‘I teach up at the Bath Arts Academy. I’m Chris Honeysett.’

  His voice was bitter. ‘Are you the chap who invited her up there to do her installation?’

  Cowardly, I said: ‘The invitation came from the late John Birtwhistle. But I delivered it, yes.’

  He looked away from me down the lane and sniffed, as though not sure what to do with this information.

  ‘I am extremely sorry about your wife’s death …’

  ‘Murder. Her murder, Mr …’

  ‘It’s Chris. Yes, her murder. I am worried that there might be another killing. Strange things are happening around other people who were invited to exhibit. I came to ask you whether you had seen any graffiti around your place. Specifically something like a flattened X, almost like a stylized butterfly.’

  He wordlessly stepped past me and walked over to the garage. He pulled down the metal door; it banged shut in front of Rachel’s car. In the centre of the door was the tag, scratched into the pastel-green paint with vicious strokes. The scratches had already begun to rust. ‘Is that what you are looking for?’

  I nodded. ‘When did that appear?’

  ‘Soon after she went up to the school for the first time. What does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could be just a tag. Like the idiots who spray-paint their tag all over town, marking their territory like dogs.’

  ‘Looks different to me.’

  ‘What does it look like to you?’

  ‘Just four slashes. It looks angry. In retrospect I’d say it looked like a warning.’

  I agreed. There was very little else to say and Swift did not ask me inside. I asked him one more question. ‘Your new garage in town …’

  He gave me a suspicious look. ‘How do you know I have a garage in town?’

  ‘Rachel mentioned it in passing
. Did you know it had been a painting studio for some years before you took it over?’

  ‘Was it? I knew it wasn’t used as a garage for a while. Is that relevant somehow?’

  ‘I’m grasping at straws.’

  ‘So are the police.’ He walked back to his front door, paused, looked at me over his shoulder. ‘They said it may have been a prank that went too far.’ He pressed his lips tightly together and nodded curtly with wide eyes that were losing their focus. Then he said stiffly: ‘That I may have lost my wife to a prank.’ He went inside. The slowness and gentleness with which he closed the door behind himself expressed his hopelessness more completely than anything else he could have said.

  A prank, I thought as I drove towards Batcombe House. It was still possible, of course, in which case this feeling of impending gloom that had been growing on me would all be wasted. What I couldn’t decide was what would be more tragic – Rachel’s life taken deliberately or wasted accidentally.

  When I reached the school I was greeted by the strange sight of students doing manual labour. There were about a dozen of them, some on ladders, climbing all over the rusty wrought-iron gates. I could only just squeeze my car through a gap in the cloud of rust and flaking paint. On closer inspection I found it was a selection of sculpture students who were sanding and filing the rust of ages from the ironwork. The gates also appeared to have been returned to a useful state by having their hinges unwelded, if there was such a word. ‘We’re going to paint it too,’ said Alex, who was wearing a folded newspaper hat to keep the rust out of her hair and had an unlit roll-up in the corner of her mouth.

  ‘And do you get to keep your welding gear?’

  ‘Only just,’ she admitted.

  ‘What colour are you going paint it?’