Indelible

by Peter Helton

  ‘Enough for someone to want to kill her?’ Needham looked doubtful.

  ‘We’re mostly dealing with young people here, passionate young people and also perhaps some strange young people. Arty people can get quite obsessed, messianic, even, about their mission in life.’

  Annis confirmed it. ‘It’s a religion. And every religion has its extremists.’

  ‘You’re saying that to some, art is more important than people?’ Needham asked.

  ‘Oh, much more important,’ Annis said. ‘There’s loads of people in the world, billions. Always more where they came from. But there’s very little art. And even less good art.’

  ‘Anne has been going around threatening to close down whole departments or to confiscate materials and machinery,’ I said.

  ‘I think she’s going further than that now. From what I heard earlier, she’s closing the place down,’ Needham said.

  ‘Yes, I think I heard her say something like that but I was somewhat distracted at the time. If she had already decided to close the place and someone knew about it, that may have pushed someone to extreme measures. There’s only one problem with all that.’

  ‘Which is?’ Needham queried.

  ‘It doesn’t at all fit in with Rachel’s death. She has nothing to do with it.’

  Needham drained his beer. ‘Not necessarily. People who kill once, at least those who kill with premeditation, might find it easier to kill again. They are less likely to feel remorse than someone who, let’s say, killed a person in a brawl or in a red mist.’

  ‘Yes, but …’ Annis tried to interject.

  ‘Let me finish. The other possibility is that Rachel’s death was a prank gone wrong and has nothing whatever to do with tonight’s shooting. And that means Chris here could well have been the intended victim. It was dark. The arrow had found a home, Chris went down, our archer thinks he’s achieved what he came to do and flees the scene. And that means you need to look over your shoulder.’

  ‘That still leaves a lot of other possible targets,’ Annis argued. ‘We can probably rule out Tim.’

  ‘Yes, what was he doing there?’ Needham wanted to know.

  I couldn’t be bothered to explain it. I suddenly felt tired. Very tired. ‘Just stuff, nothing important.’

  ‘You look all in, Chris,’ Needham said. ‘You better take him home, Annis. And make sure you lock your doors tonight.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘Of course you couldn’t have cereal for once,’ Annis moaned.

  ‘Powdered grass seed rehydrated with cows’ milk, let me think … mm, no thanks, I’ll pass.’ It would, admittedly, have been a lot easier to eat one-handed than soft-boiled eggs and croissants with jam but I felt like being difficult. For some reason my shoulder hurt more today than it did yesterday. Getting dressed had been a challenge.

  ‘And I suppose apart from feeding you boiled eggs I’ll have to chauffeur you up there,’ Annis complained. ‘Wouldn’t it make sense to take a few days off? Stay away from the shooting gallery and wait for your shoulder to heal?’

  I was doing pretty well with the croissants so far. I had hacked them into pieces on my plate and decorated each piece with a dollop of quince jam. ‘I can’t. The exhibition is coming up. I have a painting to finish and the phantom to catch.’ I was doing pretty well with the egg, too. I had smashed the top and peeled it – normally I decapitate mine – and jabbed my spoon into it. Ah. A certain amount of spillage had to be expected, of course. I did manage to get some on my spoon and into my mouth.

  ‘Then promise me one thing.’

  ‘Mm … what?’ I said, distracted by my breakfast battle.

  ‘Don’t wander off into the woods up there on your own. That’s just asking for it.’

  ‘It’s all right, the police have the bow and arrows in custody. Bum!’ I had plunged my spoon into the egg and when I tried to pull it out the whole egg rose out of the egg-cup. I was stuck.

  ‘So what? So far it’s been high-voltage electricity and bows and arrows. Next it might be chainsaws or spears. You have no idea who’s behind this. If they walked up to you in the woods with a smile and a poisoned HB pencil, you’d be smiling back until it was too late. Promise you’ll stay inside.’

  Gravity refused to help free my spoon so I had to massacre the thing. ‘Poisoned pencils, eh? They could just as easily stick one in my ear inside as outside.’ I hacked what was left of my egg into pieces and shovelled it into my mouth.

  ‘I’ve seen two-year-olds make less mess when they’re eating. Get cleaned up and I’ll drive you to Batcombe.’

  It was a misty day and a fine spray of rain drifted across the hill above Batcombe and hung like a veil between the trees of Summerlee Wood. It didn’t look that inviting anyway, I thought, as I promised Annis again not to enter the wood alone. ‘I’ll drive you back after I’ve given my presentation,’ she said. ‘About sixish.’

  I had forgotten it was today. ‘That’s late for a lecture. Students usually go home around four.’

  ‘I know. This way I’ll only have students there who are really committed.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

  Had the phantom been in? That was the question on my mind as I walked into the studio. The answer was immediately clear. The phantom had been. And the phantom had been busy. Hufnagel’s painting was untouched; I wasn’t sure about Dawn’s, but my painting had been moved on considerably. Most of the trees had been worked on, detail added to passages I had started and the background sharpened up. Had I painted it myself, I’d have been proud of it.

  ‘Okay, let’s have you,’ I said out loud and opened the cupboard just as Dawn came into the studio, closely followed by Hufnagel.

  ‘You’re here!’ said Dawn. ‘They didn’t keep you in, then.’

  ‘Walking wounded.’

  ‘Has the phantom been?’ Dawn wanted to know straight away.

  ‘Mine hasn’t been touched,’ Hufnagel said. ‘It’s so completely ruined I suppose he thought his job was done.’

  ‘Or hers.’ Dawn reminded him.

  ‘Ah, but Chris’s canvas got the treatment,’ Hufnagel said. ‘Let’s see the recording. I can’t wait to wring his or her neck.’

  ‘Steady on,’ I warned as I disconnected the laptop and put it on a table. I clicked on ‘view last recording’. ‘Here goes.’ The screen showed the studio from a high angle, a little fish-eyed at the edges. Mounting it that high had been necessary to get in the French windows and all three canvases, with mine roughly in the centre. There being practically no ambient light, only the French windows showed clearly, the rest were darker shapes in the darkness. Numbers ran in the bottom-right corner of the screen, displaying the time to within a hundredth of a second, the manic digits being all that moved on the screen. ‘Okay, I’ll fast-forward.’ The numbers went into overdrive but all the rest stayed the same.

  ‘This feels really creepy,’ Dawn whispered. ‘What if it’s a real ghost? Invisible?’

  ‘There!’ Hufnagel and I called out at the same time.

  I returned the viewer to normal speed. A light had appeared in the corner of the screen, the corner the camera didn’t cover. Our phantom had entered not via the French windows as I had expected, but from inside, through the door from the corridor.

  ‘How did they get into the building then?’ wondered Dawn.

  ‘Any old sash window,’ Hufnagel said. ‘I did tell Anne to nail them shut but she called me an idiot.’

  ‘Well …’ Dawn conceded.

  ‘The conservatory door to the ceramics department doesn’t lock either,’ I said, ‘and you can get down into the basement and up again into the house from there.’ The figure was wearing a hooded top that was surrounded by a blazing halo.

  ‘That’s one of those hands-free head lamps,’ Dawn said. ‘I can’t see who it is, can you?’

  I couldn’t. None of us could make it out. The light illuminated everything and anything but not once did it allow us to see the face.
Whenever the phantom painter turned towards the camera, which was rare, the light created such a glare that the face remained hidden. Most of the time however the figure had its back turned to the camera while it sat and worked on my painting. It was infuriating in more ways than one.

  To actually see it happen made me deeply resent the presumptuousness of the phantom. ‘Cool as a cucumber. It’s unbelievable. I can tell you who it isn’t, of course, and that’s Phoebe.’

  ‘Why not?’ Hufnagel asked.

  ‘She’s in hospital.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘And it doesn’t look like Hiroshi.’

  ‘No, Roshi is taller,’ Anne agreed. ‘And has broader shoulders. I think it’s a bloke, though.’

  Hufnagel didn’t go along with that. ‘I think it’s a girl.’

  ‘Chris, you have the casting vote,’ Dawn said.

  ‘I abstain. It’s definitely one or the other.’

  ‘Listen to the great detective.’

  It was true. One minute I thought the phantom looked female, then there was a movement or an angle that made me think it was a bloke. Knowing how excellent the result of the phantom’s work was made me wish the CCTV images were in colour; I might even have learnt something. I irritably fast-forwarded the tape. Two solid hours the phantom had spent painting last night, then spent another ten minutes cleaning the brushes and my palette.

  ‘A very tidy phantom, I must say,’ Dawn said.

  ‘I think the phantom cleans the palette each time because it might reveal its identity. Every painter has certain habits, ways of laying out the paints and so on. This ghost painter has thought about that, I’m sure.’

  As I rewound to look at the footage one more time there was a knock on the door and Claire came in. ‘Morning. You haven’t seen Anne anywhere, have you? Oh, hi Chris, didn’t expect you in, how’s the shoulder?’

  ‘Spiffing. No Anne so far, long may it last.’

  ‘Normally I’d agree but the police want to talk to her again.’

  ‘You heard of our phantom painter?’ I asked. ‘We have fuzzy footage. Want to have a look?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ I ran the recording for her. ‘Is that it?’ she asked. ‘Dark shape with a halo?’

  ‘That’s as clear as it gets. What do you say – boy or girl?’

  ‘I’d go for girl. Are you running a book?’

  ‘For that we’d have to catch the phantom first.’

  ‘Well, my money is on girl. And of course eighty per cent of our students are girls. And most of the staff are female. It’s a girl. If you see Anne, tell her she’s a wanted woman.’

  ‘That’ll be a new experience for her,’ Dawn bitched quietly.

  I shoved the laptop back in the cupboard and stood in front of my canvas for a while. ‘It’s coming along,’ I said, mostly to wind up Hufnagel. ‘How about you, Kurt? Are you going to reverse the phantom changes?’

  Hufnagel was just opening a bottle of supermarket plonk; he was reinvesting the money he was saving by eating in the canteen in liquid inspiration of the screw-top variety. ‘I’ve not decided. Until then I’ll concentrate on the background.’

  ‘Good thinking. I’ll go and round up my students.’

  Once I had herded them all into the studio I found that their main interest was no longer painting but death by electrocution, deadly arrows in the dark and Phoebe’s head injury. Parents were understandably upset. Two students had apparently already decided it was too much and were preparing to leave.

  ‘Did you see who shot you?’

  ‘Do you think there’ll be another murder?’

  ‘Is it true the college is closing down?’

  ‘Do we still have to do this project?’

  ‘No, I didn’t see the archer. The place is full of police again so I think another murder is unlikely. I have not heard anything about the college closing but if I see Anne Birtwhistle I will ask her about it. And yes, you definitely have to continue with the project. I want you to print out the photographs, on cheap paper in the graphics department, preferably when neither Catherine nor Anne are looking because printer ink is expensive. Then I want you to paint your subject again, working only from the photograph. And while you are doing it I want you to pay attention to your mental processes, and to notice to which extent you are drawing on memory and the detail you observed when you were drawing the same view and what kind of information you get from your photograph, how it differs from direct observation. Pay attention because there might be an essay in it later.’

  General groans. ‘Is there any chance the phantom will come and do the painting for us in the night?’ asked Hiroshi.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, looking around the room. ‘But there’s a very good chance that the phantom is in this studio right now.’ Excited murmurs all round. ‘And all I want to say to the phantom painter is this …’ I paused for effect and was rewarded with complete silence in the room. ‘Excellent work! Keep it up.’ Laughs and cheers.

  By the time I was queuing for lunch in the canteen I had been asked three times if I had seen Anne. Apparently everyone needed to talk to her about this or that. Only Mrs Washbrook couldn’t have cared less; all she wanted to know was what I had done about the pilfering.

  ‘I’m making progress,’ I told her. Had she heard about the phantom painter? I explained what was happening night after night in our studio. ‘And I think your pilferer and our phantom painter could be one and the same. We have now caught him on CCTV but the images are inconclusive.’ Mrs Washbrook seemed to agree that this was progress and rewarded me with an extra sausage in gravy.

  By the afternoon it was becoming clear that Anne was not around. Nobody was heartbroken but DI Reid wanted to interview her about the ‘arrow incident’, as attempted murder was apparently now called. There was also a community police officer on the warpath about security at the college; I saw him pass the windows several times, stopping to stare in, taking photos around the grounds on a phone and then scratching his neck while staring at the thing.

  It was now just two days before the paintings were to go up, with the doors opening for the anniversary exhibition the following evening. For once even Dawn worked quietly at her atmospheric canvas and I saw that Hufnagel was adding a semi-abstract background of contemporary urban greys to his painting. Despite the phantom’s helping brush I had plenty of work to do. Eventually I was the only one still left in the studio, fussing over values, tightening things here, blurring things there. As often happened in my own studio too, I didn’t stop until the natural light became too dim for work. I did not bother putting on the lights, just sat by the window with my feet up on another chair, watching my forest scene dwindle into the darkness just as it would now be doing outside. A real autumn chill had replaced the unseasonal warmth of the last month. I laid a hand on the old-fashioned lump of a radiator under the window; it had no heat to spare for radiating if it wanted to keep itself from freezing, probably another result of Anne trying to make the school profitable. The image of the naked man in the woods came into my mind. He was shivering. I quickly kitted him out in knitted woollens and a beanie. While I was at it I combed out his beard and it was obvious that I was looking at Hiroshi. Perhaps he was taking his own research into his subject more seriously than I had given him credit for. Anyway, with the weather turning much cooler now I expected his man-of-the-woods phase would be drawing to a close soon.

  It was nearly completely dark now. From upstairs came the distant sound of scraping chairs, signalling that Annis had finished the presentation about her own work. Soon there was footfall and I heard voices in the corridor; it seemed Annis had attracted a fair number of students to her lecture, certainly a lot more than I could have mustered had I dared to schedule a lecture for this hour. Soon the voices dwindled away, some car engines started up, then just the sound of a single bicycle squeaking away down the lane.

  A moment later the door opened and a little light fell into the room from the dim corridor. Annis
found the light switch and flicked on the neon light. I squinted against the sudden glare.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said and flicked the lights off again and closed the door. ‘Are you in a dark mood?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ She came and found my mouth in the dim light and planted a kiss on it.

  ‘Good lecture?’

  ‘Full house. Kroog, too, smoking her pipe in the back row. I do like her. What happened with the phantom vid?’

  I told her. ‘The way it was done it was almost like the phantom knew about the camera. Not one glimpse of the face.’

  ‘No suspects at all?’

  ‘I ruled out Hiroshi but I have him down for the wild man in the forest now. Most people who saw the CCTV think it’s a woman.’

  ‘Are you sitting in the dark to catch the phantom then? One-handed with your other arm in a sling?’

  ‘It’s a thought. I’d only have to turn the lights on; I don’t want to wrestle with the phantom.’

  ‘I’ll keep you company. What time did the phantom turn up last night?’

  ‘Half past ten.’

  ‘Some time to go then. What’ll we do till then?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of something.’

  Dear reader, we did. In the absence of Anne it was Kroog who locked up the front doors. We heard her talk to someone as she walked away towards her cottage; I guessed it was probably her companion Alex. While the building fell completely silent we huddled together for warmth and discussed in murmurs the events of the last two weeks – break-ins, trashed studios, fires, wild men in the woods, Rachel’s electrocution, the attempt to frame me for it, the tags scratched everywhere, the phantom painter, the pilfering, and now Anne’s disappearance. ‘You don’t think she’s just had enough and stomped off in a huff?’ Annis asked.