Indelible

by Peter Helton

  ‘I prefer right-to-left. If you don’t mind. How come she’s so important all of a sudden?’

  ‘I think she’s behind the tag we see everywhere. It’s an hourglass knocked over. Time is up, is the message.’

  ‘Jeez, you think Sara fried Rachel? What’s she got to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s, what, twelve years ago now? This is nonsense, Chris, it’s utter – oh there she is.’ He tapped a square photograph. It had three girls in it, standing in front of a large partially visible canvas. ‘That’s her on the right. She was quite pretty. Bit weird, of course.’

  I was too busy staring at it to pass sarcastic comment. The picture came off the board easily, being held on by double-sided tape. Sara Horn was a thin, blue-eyed girl with long blonde hair and an intense look about her. Her clothes were black. Now she preferred greys, had a pudding basin haircut and pink spectacles.

  ‘I’m going to get a drink,’ Hufnagel said and tilted away.

  On tiptoe I scanned over the heads of the visitors and saw Kroog’s smoke cloud disappear through the front door. When I caught up she was just turning the corner towards her cottage with Alex. They appeared to be arguing about something but I was too obsessed with my discovery to notice what it was about.

  ‘Lizzie!’ I caught up with them and held out the photograph. It was dark now but I was still holding the torch and illuminated the snapshot for her. ‘Sara Horn.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘That’s her, isn’t it? On the right.’

  She took the photograph from me, raised her eyebrows high and produced a pair of spectacles from her waistcoat. ‘Ah yes, poor girl.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She had a breakdown while she was here. She was very highly strung; I think she may have been taking drugs. There were all sorts of things going on at the time. She was sectioned, I believe. Never came back.’

  ‘She did, you know? Sara Horn turned into Claire Kilburn.’

  Kroog opened her mouth as though to say something to the contrary but instead she went back to the picture. She steadied my torch hand; I hadn’t even noticed I was shaking.

  ‘Think twelve years on,’ I prompted. ‘She’s over thirty now, put on about six stone in weight – medication does that to you – has very short hair and big pink glasses. Which she probably doesn’t even need.’

  ‘It’s her,’ Kroog agreed.

  Alex took the photo, looked at it and said, ‘Blimey.’

  ‘I think Sara Horn came back because she had a less than happy time here and she came back angry.’

  ‘Do you think she shot you?’

  ‘Yes, but I think she was aiming at someone else. An ex-tutor of hers. I had long left when she studied here. Where did you last see Claire?’

  ‘She ran out the door,’ said Alex, ‘a short while ago. In a real hurry.’

  ‘What car does she drive?’

  ‘Not sure. Small blue thing,’ Kroog said. ‘They all look the same to me.’

  ‘Right. I have an idea where she might have shot off to.’ I was already jogging towards my car. ‘Oh, by the way, I found Anne,’ I called back.

  ‘Did you have to?’ called Alex.

  I was glad of my torch as I hurried along the lane to where I had left the car; in my hurry it felt miles away. Claire or Sara, I didn’t know how to think of her, had been very agitated when she realized Landacker wouldn’t be coming. Why? It now seemed that everything had pointed to this day, the exhibition. When she managed to get a job here she may have hoped that all her old tutors were still working here and disappointed that three of them had left. She might even have put the exhibition idea into John’s head in the first place as a way of bringing them all back. I fumbled with the keys to my ancient car, then with the ignition, but once on the road I flicked my headlights to full beam and set the controls for The Old Forge, Motterton. Sara-Claire would be at Landacker’s place, and not for the first time. As far as I could tell she had started with Landacker, on the very day of my first visit. Who had the arrow been for? Hufnagel? If she had been behind the break-in and trashing of his studio then she could have killed him in private there and then. I could only presume that it was meant for Stottie, the graphics tutor.

  As my headlights illuminated the bottom of the hill in Motterton I could see a small blue car parked awkwardly opposite The Old Forge’s front gate. The driver door was half open. Someone had been in an even greater hurry than me. I locked my car, climbed up Landacker’s front gate and let myself drop down on to his drive on the other side.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The house lay in complete darkness, the security light on the drive did not react as I cautiously approached the only dim source of illumination there was. It came from the open door of the studio. Somewhere inside a lonely lamp was burning. I had left the torch behind; quite apart from the light it might provide, its rubberized weight in my hand would have given me a little more confidence than I was feeling at the moment. Getting shot doesn’t do much for your poise. As noiselessly as possible I sidled into the dark vestibule and from there slid into the studio proper.

  A lonely anglepoise lamp was the only illumination in the place, lighting the sad remains of a shattered computer and splintered projector. The printer, too, would print no more. The large studio easel had been knocked over, the painting table overturned. The resulting cascade of expensive tubes of French oil paints had been partially trampled. A bright trail led away from the devastation, across an expensive rug and to the foot of the spiral staircase, as though a wounded animal with multicoloured blood had dragged itself across the room. That is how wounded painters should bleed, I thought as I put my foot on the bottom rung of the iron stairs: in many colours. Would I find a bleeding painter at the top of the staircase?

  Or would he have already stopped bleeding? I took one step then froze: I could hear a voice. A voice was good news, a voice meant life. What I really wanted to hear was two voices. I took step after step as quietly as I could.

  It was very dark up here on the gallery but it was immediately obvious that the voice did not come from here. I remembered a door at the furthest end, dark, yale-locked, devoid of a door handle. I felt my way towards it; I heard murmuring voices, then, just as I laid the palm of my hand against the cool, smooth surface, a shrill, ironic laugh – Claire’s. I pushed gently but the door was locked.

  In films private eyes usually say at this point: ‘Stand back!’ and then charge at the door, barging it open with their shoulder, but having tried it once with a spectacularly painful lack of success, I wasn’t about to try it again. I knocked with my open palm, like police officers like to do. ‘Open the door!’ I added unnecessarily.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Claire, close to the door.

  ‘It’s Chris.’

  ‘Go away.’

  I heard Landacker’s voice from further away but I couldn’t catch what he was saying. ‘I can’t do that. Open this door, Sara. You shot me, you owe me an explanation.’ After a pause the door was unlocked and opened.

  Painters bleed mundanely monochrome in a bright, lively red. Claire – she always remained Claire in my mind – was pressing a small blue hand towel against her stomach to stem the blood that was still spreading from there, soaking into her mouse-grey top. On the floor, leaning against the leg of a writing desk in the small square room, sat Landacker. Beside him stood an old green safe, the door wide open. On the desk stood a large canvas bag bulging with a dozen or so sketchbooks, large and thick and spattered with paint.

  Landacker looked very pale. In his left thigh stuck an old-fashioned bayonet. He was bleeding even more heavily than Claire, though not, I thought, from an artery. ‘Call an ambulance, Honeysett. And the police. The bitch tried to kill me,’ he said without taking his eyes off the bayonet.

  ‘You lying, thieving, disgusting toad! He tried to kill me!’ she shouted. ‘With that. He had it hidden in his safe. Along with my sketch
books. My sketchbooks! Mine! Every single bloody Landacker canvas comes straight out of my sketchbooks.’

  ‘How?’ I said, groping blindly for my mobile. I couldn’t take my eyes off the two bleeding painters. There was a baseball bat leaning by the door, and that bat had seen some action too recently, though mainly downstairs. I had no luck with finding my mobile.

  ‘I thought you knew? You know my real name, anyway. I had a breakdown. I went completely mental, completely hyper. I didn’t sleep, I had visions of paintings day and night, I was convinced they came straight from God. I filled sketchbook after sketchbook with oil sketches of abstract paintings. Brilliant paintings, mysterious paintings, gorgeous, surprising, extraordinary paintings! Help yourself, Honeysett, have a look.’

  I reached across and picked up the top sketchbook. As soon as it fell open it was obvious – here were Landacker’s paintings, one solo exhibition after the other, in A3 format; every surprising compositional detail, every colour study. All he had done was project them on to his canvases and copy them. There was a lot of manic writing, scrawled notes and squiggles on the back of each study. He could never have pretended the sketchbooks were his.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Looks very familiar. You’re one hell of a painter. I can’t find my mobile, is there a phone downstairs?’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ said Claire. ‘That’s the only good thing about being fat, if a scrawny bastard like him sticks a knife in you, the first few inches are just blubber. I don’t think he got anything vital though it hurts like hell as soon as I move.’

  ‘So does this,’ Landacker complained. ‘There’s a phone downstairs, but I don’t want you to leave me alone with her, she’s mental.’

  ‘Nearly ten years I spent in one psychiatric institution after another. But now I’m utterly sane, my friend. And I’ve come for you. All of you.’

  ‘What have the others done to you?’ I asked.

  ‘They were all at it, they were all responsible. My boyfriend couldn’t cope with my mental state, and he dumped me when it kicked off. Dumped me to shag Stottie instead, the antiseptic posh cow. I’m sorry you got in the way; I was aiming at her current boyfriend. I thought it would do her good to find out what it’s like to lose one. Then Kurt hit on me when I was already quite bad. For a while I thought I had found a soulmate but he was just pretending so he could get his leg over. I was going to mess him up a little too but then the phantom painter did that for me.’

  ‘You’re not the pantom painter? I could have sworn …’

  ‘Work all day and paint all night? No thanks, that’s how I had my first breakdown. I have no idea who it was but he did me a favour. Hufnagel was livid.’

  ‘Why did Rachel have to die?’

  ‘She didn’t have to die, the stupid woman. I don’t think I wanted her to die. Not sure. Not that I cared much either way, really. She was my “personal tutor” at the time. The person you come to if you are troubled; everyone has one assigned to them. She told me to pull myself together or leave the college. “Not everyone is cut out to be an artist; not everyone can live with the tension” was what I got from her. So I thought I’d bring some tension to her life. I’m not sure I wanted her to drop dead but it’s no great loss to the art world, is it? Oh, this really hurts now.’ She lifted the blood-soaked hand towel.

  How sane or disturbed Claire was I couldn’t tell, but I agreed with Landacker: I would feel uneasy leaving the two in that blood-stained room together. It was beginning to affect my own equilibrium. I picked up the bag from the desk, shoving the sketchbook in with the others. ‘Let’s you and I get downstairs. I’ll carry these for you. Then I’ll call an ambulance.’

  ‘All right,’ she said and picked up the baseball bat.

  ‘What do you want with that?’

  ‘Brain you with it if you try and make off with the bag, Honeysett. That is my life you are carrying. I had it stolen once but not again.’

  I looked her in the eyes. She looked completely sane. ‘Leave it here. You won’t need the bat.’

  ‘You’re not that cute, Honeysett. Go on,’ she said, giving me a gentle poke with the thing.

  ‘Watch out for her, she’s vicious, that woman, and completely mad. The sooner they lock her up again the better!’

  Claire took one step at a time. I made sure to stay close so as not to alarm her. ‘What did you have in mind for Landacker originally? Were you going to kill him?’

  ‘No, I was going to expose him. You were all supposed to bring your sketchbooks and I had the press invited and they came, too. I was going to expose him in front of the journalists and destroy him. And then the bastard didn’t show at all.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know who chained up Anne in the kiln in the woods, would you?’

  ‘Is that where she was? What a good idea. No, not the foggiest. But she was asking for it. God, I thought those stairs went on forever. There’s an old dialler phone over there, I didn’t smash it,’ she said. ‘I like those old phones.’

  I dropped the bag at the foot of the stairs and went to the back of the studio. Next to the wreck of the laptop stood a shiny black 1960s dialler phone. The line crackled a little but it worked; I enjoyed the sound of the dial running through the three nines of the emergency number. I asked for ambulance and police. Two stab wounds, I explained. ‘No, I have no idea of the bloody postcode but it’s the same place that caught fire the other day.’ Was it me that was hurt, the operator wanted to know next. Was the attacker still on the premises? Hard to answer that, really. I turned around. Claire was nowhere to be seen. The bag with the sketchbooks had gone. So, on further inspection, had Claire’s car. The baseball bat was leaning against the bonnet of mine.

  The mention of a knife attack swiftly brought an armed response unit down the hill and the mention of my name brought Superintendent Needham with similar haste. The armed response guys patted me down for weapons, not knowing who was who and Needham, who did know who was who, grabbed me by the arm that hurt and dragged me into his car and asked me a million questions. ‘Why, when you knew it was Claire or Sara, didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I didn’t really know for certain, I just had a sudden brainwave. You probably wouldn’t have got here any quicker and what could you have done? Police hammering on the door would hardly have calmed things down in there. It was all over when I arrived.’

  Landacker, the bayonet still sticking in his thigh, was being carried out to the ambulance, a drip in his arm. Needham went over to arrest him for attempted murder. The look Landacker gave me told me he was considering his next one.

  ‘Shame you didn’t get the index number of her car,’ Needham said as the blue beacon of the ambulance disappeared up the lane. ‘Still, we have a description and she needs medical treatment, so I’m sure we’ll pick her up soon. Follow me to Manvers Street to make a full statement.’

  ‘Have a heart. I’ve had a long day. Can’t it wait until tomorrow? I found Anne Birtwhistle for you.’

  ‘So I heard just as I left the college.’

  ‘Kidnapped and chained up in an old kiln in Summerlee Wood.’

  ‘By whom?’ Needham asked sharply.

  ‘Don’t know yet. I might find that out for you too if you let me sleep on it.’

  ‘All right, bright and early tomorrow, though, my office.’

  Early it was, bright it wasn’t. Naturally I didn’t get an early night. Annis and I had endlessly talked it all out over a few glasses too many, then there were the phone calls that had to be made. It meant that when I eventually stepped out of Manvers Street police station, having made my statement and drunk too many coffees, the grey blanket of cloud overhead mirrored my state of mind perfectly. By the time I had rolled through the wide-open gates at Batcombe House, I had come to a definite conclusion about it all: I had been right from the start; teaching was not for me.

  All seemed eerily quiet compared to last night. There was no sign of any students – they’d all taken the day off to nurse their hangovers p
resumably, and of course there was no Claire in the office. I let myself into the studio through the French windows. There were empty bottles and glasses everywhere – well, mostly around Hufnagel’s painting. It had acquired a red dot, I saw now, which made me feel good because it meant I hadn’t made too many false promises when I dragged him up here.

  I went out through the other door, along the corridor, to check on the rest of the place. The photo wall had been removed and some of the student paintings were gone. The centrepiece, however, Hiroshi’s large forest landscape, was still in place. And the phantom had been very busy on it during the night.

  Hiroshi’s painting was as mysterious as ever, a dark and tangled forest scene through which a faint footpath wound into a vaguely guessed-at, misty distance. But now on the path, hand in hand, walked two naked people, seen from behind. One was my wild man of the woods, Hiroshi himself; his companion was Alex, looking back at me over her shoulder with a half-smile, perhaps of uncertainty, perhaps of regret. On the floor in front of the painting, carefully folded, lay their clothes; their shoes stood neatly beside them.

  I could smell Kroog’s pipe. Lizzie was standing in the door to the admin office behind me. ‘They’re gone,’ she said in a voice a little gruffer than usual. ‘There’s a Japanese legend, or is it Chinese? Who cares. Of some painter. He was imprisoned for something. Asked his guards if he could have his paints to decorate his cell. He painted a beautiful landscape on the wall and then walked into it, never to be seen again.’

  ‘It’s a very good painting,’ I admitted.

  ‘Alex is a very good painter.’

  ‘I thought she was a sculptor? Working with you?’

  ‘Yes, that too. But that was just a bit of infatuation with an old tutor; she was a painter to begin with. She’ll be very good at both.’

  ‘Where will they go?’

  ‘Who knows? Japan? They’ll make a success of it wherever they go.’

  ‘Won’t Anne send the police after them for chaining her up in the woods?’

  ‘Henry and I will talk her out of it. She’s already gone back to her old life and Henry is moving in upstairs. He’s thinking of adding theatre design to our course program. I don’t suppose I can persuade you to stay on with us?’