Soft Summer Blood

by Peter Helton

  In an effort to save some calories, McLusky had filled his freezer compartment with low-calorie ready meals, most of them curries. He ripped the packaging off a chicken jalfrezi and shoved it in the microwave, then went to check on the rest of his mail. Among the dross was a hand-delivered letter. He did not recognize the handwriting and ripped it open without any feeling of foreboding. It was written in an elegant script, and from the Rossis. They had decided to put his flat on the market and hoped it would not take him long to find somewhere else to live. He let the letter drop on to the table, picked up his keys and left. He started on his first pint of Guinness at the Barge Inn at the precise moment his microwave across the street gave three forlorn bleeps to warn him that his curry was done.

  DI Fairfield had been lucky. Her airwave radio had mysteriously gone off air just seconds before control tried to call her to say that a representative of the Italian embassy had flown up from London to see what was being done to find Fulvia Lamberti. Fairfield’s phone also lost signal a moment after DS Sorbie had warned her of the unexpected visit. ‘Thanks, Jack, I owe you one.’ She had been on her way to Albany Road; now she turned her car around and drove off towards Bedminster. Fulvia’s stolen scooter had just been discovered there and carted off to Bishopsworth police station. There was no good reason for her to go there except to keep out of the way of the Italian diplomat. She wanted to see the scooter only because it was a piece in the jigsaw, however insignificant. So far it had been like trying to assemble the jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture was meant to show. There was Marcus Catlin, the ex-boyfriend, his attack on her painting and, according to him, Fulvia’s remark that everything, including the course and her own work, was nonsense. To Fairfield, Fulvia Lamberti sounded like a classic dropout.

  The scooter was standing in the back of a van parked outside the Bishopsworth police station. The station had been modelled on the shoebox design popular in the 1970s and the sight of it depressed her even more than that of Albany Road each morning. The PC who opened the van doors for her and was based at the station looked suitably dispirited. ‘Do you want us to do anything with it?’ he asked without enthusiasm.

  ‘Did you take fingerprints?’

  ‘Yeah, we did. We’ll let you know. I’m sure it was joyriders. They ditched it when the tank was empty.’

  The scooter had a desirable black-and-chrome retro look, with wide handlebars and a shiny headlamp, and it was undamaged. Fairfield imagined Fulvia riding it, looking heroic, as Catlin had described it, then imagined herself riding it: Kat, the art student. She puffed up her cheeks and let out a long breath and turned away. ‘Do us a favour and send it to our gaff in Albany Road? It belongs to a misper and we’re under pressure over it.’

  ‘Sure.’ The PC locked the van’s doors.

  ‘How difficult would a scooter like that be to ride?’ she asked.

  ‘That one? It’s automatic, so if you can ride a bicycle then you can ride one of those.’

  ‘Really? You know Compass Road?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s in Bedminster.’

  ‘How far would you say it was from where the scooter was found?’ Fairfield made a walking gesture with two fingers.

  ‘What, on foot? Eight, ten minutes tops.’

  ‘Interesting. Her ex-boyfriend lives in Compass Road.’

  A few minutes later she parked her car outside the house where Marcus Catlin lived with three other students. It was a terraced house in the middle of the row in a street marginally more salubrious than Albert Park on the opposite side of the river, where Fulvia had chosen to rent a room. Just as she got ready to exit the car, the front door of the house opened and Catlin stepped outside, wheeling a mountain bike. Fairfield was there before he could swing himself in the saddle.

  ‘What do you want here?’ he asked in a whine. Then his tone changed and his hand gripping the handle bar whitened at the knuckles. ‘It’s not bad news, is it? You’ve found her?’

  Fairfield made an unconcerned face. ‘Do you have a driving licence, Mr Catlin?’

  ‘Mr Catlin, is it now? I haven’t. In a city, cars make no sense at all.’ He patted the handlebar. ‘I’m quicker on this.’

  ‘You could get a motorbike. Or a scooter, like Fulvia. We found her scooter just a few minutes’ walk from here, abandoned. Out of petrol.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You’re thinking I pinched it and rode it down here until the petrol ran out.’

  ‘The thought had occurred to me.’

  ‘Use your head. I go everywhere on my bike. I would have had to cycle there, then leave my bike to ride the scooter away. You’re really wasting your time. And mine. I’ve a lecture to go to. ’Scuse me.’ He wheeled the bike past her on to the road just as the door opened again and a girl emerged, also pushing a bicycle. She was clad in so many different colours that the pink bicycle appeared positively restrained. The girl frowned at her but in a friendly, inquiring way.

  In the street Catlin hesitated, looking over his shoulder, suddenly reluctant to leave. ‘Go on,’ Fairfield called to him, ‘you’ll miss your lecture.’ Catlin cycled off.

  ‘He doesn’t have a lecture,’ the girl scoffed. ‘He’s just going to the shops; there’s no milk as usual and it’s his turn.’ The girl, who had short multicoloured hair, wore a pink tie-dyed top, an orange-and-yellow skirt and Pippi Longstocking socks in white and blue stripes. Her scuffed Doc Marten boots were dark purple with a pattern of daisies.

  Fairfield showed her ID and asked her name. ‘I’m Bethany. It’s about Fulvia? No news, then?’

  ‘We found her scooter but that had been stolen before she disappeared. You have met her?’

  ‘Yeah, she came out here a couple of times when they were still together.’ She nodded her head in the direction Catlin had taken.

  ‘Why do you think she finished with him?’

  ‘She was out of his league, I think. I got the impression she wasn’t sure why she was hanging out with him. And he was like a puppy dog, adoring everything she did and said and never taking his eyes off her. It would have driven me mad. Not something likely to happen to me, of course.’

  Fairfield admired this honest assessment. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I don’t get many adoring looks.’ Bethany’s face was plain and pink from too much sun. ‘Is it OK if I go? I really do have a lecture.’

  ‘Are you on the same course as Marcus?’

  A shake of the head. ‘Sculpture, second year.’

  Fairfield watched her cycle down the sunny road on her hand-painted boneshaker. When she turned on her mobile there was a text from Sorbie telling her that it was safe to return to the station. When she got behind the wheel of her Renault, she felt a new reluctance to return to the station as she visualized its echoing drabness. She slammed the car door shut and sat for a whole five minutes before starting the engine.

  ‘Didn’t you know you’re not supposed to do that?’ asked Austin.

  ‘I thought that was takeaways.’

  ‘It sat in your microwave for hours before you warmed it up. How are you feeling now?’

  ‘Empty.’ McLusky, sitting at the kitchen table, held the phone with one hand while miserably prodding a teaspoon at the peppermint teabag that was stubbornly floating on top of the hot water in his mug. He had been the last to leave the Barge Inn the previous night and on his return remembered the food in the microwave. After warming it up, he had wolfed it down and gone to sleep, only to be awoken two hours later by definite warning signs that his body was preparing to reject his latest food offering from all available orifices. He had spent half the night in the bathroom.

  ‘At least you’ve lost weight.’

  ‘Shut up, Jane.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Hope you feel better tomorrow.’

  ‘Ta. Don’t mention warmed-up food to anyone.’ McLusky let the mobile clatter on to the table.

  By the afternoon, having eaten several slices of dry bread, McLusky felt less fragile, but his mood had not improved.
So much for asking Laura to move in with him. At least he would make sure that the next flat he rented would have the central heating she required. He would be the first to admit that his living arrangements were on the primitive side – he still slept on a mattress on the floor, for instance – but memories of their life together in Southampton kept intruding into the blissful fantasies of their future life together. He had never been home long enough to really appreciate the domestic perfection of the home Laura had created for them, and he suspected that, deep down, domestic perfection bored him.

  He was mulling it over while driving south to Bath, the picturesque city south-east of Bristol, with its eighteenth-century architecture and ostentatious gentility, and crime statistics Bristol could only dream of. Elaine Poulimenos, having walked out on Leonidas with two valuable paintings and her Porsche 911, had moved there. McLusky was surprised to find that it was less than ten minutes’ drive from the Longmaid residence, and even less in a Porsche. Perhaps Elaine had wanted to keep close to her friend Jenny.

  When he parked outside her new address in Newbridge, a northern suburb of Bath, he found that Elaine Poulimenos had exchanged life at Bybrook View for one in a small post-war end-of-terrace house with a view of hedges, brown DIY fencing, cars and a lot of other post-war terraces. There was no garage and no sign of the Porsche, but Elaine Poulimenos was in.

  ‘Putting that up for sale was the first thing I did, Inspector,’ she said with a certain pride. Elaine Poulimenos, McLusky knew, was fifty but looked a few years younger, dark and petite in bleached jeans, an amber-coloured top and leather sandals. McLusky thought that a Porsche 911 convertible would have suited Elaine perfectly; he was less sure about the IKEA furniture and the vinyl floor tiles in the square kitchen where she led him. McLusky saw with dismay that she was in the middle of preparing a meal and stifled a groan when she told him she was making a curry. ‘My husband hated curry; now I make them all the time.’

  ‘Do you?’ McLusky seated himself at the bright pine kitchen table.

  ‘And please don’t call me Mrs Poulimenos; I’ve left that behind at last. I’ve gone back to my maiden name, Simmons. But you can call me Elaine,’ she said, taking up her knife and dicing a shiny aubergine.

  Where was she at the time of the murders? ‘I was with Paul. Both times.’

  ‘Your new partner?’

  ‘Yes. But he won’t be back for hours yet; he has some extra-curricular thing he’s doing. He’s a teacher.’

  ‘I must warn you that alibis provided by husbands or partners don’t count for much.’

  The knife arrested an inch above a sacrificial carrot. ‘I’m not a suspect, am I? Seriously? Why would I kill them both? If I had reason to kill anyone, it would have been my own husband. But I walked out instead. Ten years too late, I admit, but it’s never too late to start again. Paul and I are happy. We may not want to stay here forever, of course.’ She waved her knife at the window beyond which lay the drab corridor of a treeless garden. ‘But I’m happier now than I can remember. And I can’t say I will miss Nicholas Longmaid. I’ve been telling Jenny to leave him for ages. And Charles? I liked him, in a distant sort of way. I’m not a painter and that’s all he ever wanted to talk about, which meant it was us girls mostly and the three boys off painting or looking at paintings or discussing paintings. Or, God forbid, discovering a new paint shop.’

  ‘You yourself own a couple of … rather fine paintings, I hear.’ He had already forgotten the name of the painter.

  ‘At Christie’s. The auction is next month. I’ll be just as happy with a couple of reproductions.’

  ‘There were four of the boys, as you call them. To begin with. Did you know Ben Kahn?’

  ‘Oh, Benjamin …’ She wistfully drew out the name and put down her knife as though she could not talk about him while slicing onions. ‘Ben was … different. He was multi-dimensional and not boring at all. He could really paint. What was more, he could paint without boring the pants off everyone. It’s a shame he died so young while …’ She resumed her chopping, a little more vigorously than before.

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  ‘No, more’s the pity. He died only a few years after they all met on that painting holiday. Drowned in Cornwall.’

  ‘Yes, I heard. You weren’t there?’

  ‘No, just the four of them. Men doing their manly painting. It was terrible. They went out there to have a good time together in the cottage and only three of them came back. It was never the same after that. I think none of us were. It affected everything. The three who came back were not the same people that went out there.’

  ‘Did it affect your marriage, too?’

  Elaine put down the knife, faced McLusky and absent-mindedly wiped her hands on a tea towel. ‘I think it did. There was a lasting sadness. Or perhaps it was guilt.’

  ‘Why guilt?’

  ‘For having been unable to save him. For having organized the trip in the first place. For coming back without him. Of course, it fell to us women to tell Ben’s son. He had already lost his mother by then. Cancer,’ she added when McLusky opened his mouth to ask.

  ‘What happened to Ben’s son?’

  She reached over and flicked on the electric kettle. ‘Elliot? He was brought up by Ben’s sister, Hannah, in some place near Cardiff; I forget the name. I only saw him once after Ben’s death, at the memorial service. But I think he moved back to Bristol and apparently he’s a painter like his dad. Whether he makes a living of it I’ve no idea. I’m certain his dad could have, he was that good. I’m making coffee – would you like some? No? Are you sure?’

  As he drove back towards Bristol, he was certain that coffee was not what he needed, but he felt dehydrated and only a couple of miles from Elaine’s house he pulled into a lay-by behind a burger van and bought himself a large mug of black tea. For the first time ever, the smell of grilling bacon and stewing onions that pervaded the grassy verge failed to kindle his appetite. He stood by his car, sipped his tea and called Austin.

  ‘Ben Kahn had a son, Elliot. After Ben’s death he went to live with Ben’s sister in Wales, near Cardiff, but apparently he’s moved back to Bristol. Find me an address?’

  McLusky almost enjoyed standing in the sun, sending tiny sips of tea down to his stomach. By the time Austin called him back, he felt a surprising eighty per cent human.

  ‘Yes, Jane.’

  ‘You sound a lot better.’

  ‘I’m recovering.’

  ‘I meant you sound a lot better than you did five minutes ago.’

  ‘The restorative powers of a roadside mug of tea. Get on with it, Jane.’

  ‘Found him. He’s not in the city; he’s in a village called Stanton Drew.’

  ‘I know it. There’s a stone circle nearby. Nice pub, too.’

  ‘He lives at Primrose Cottage.’ Austin gave the postcode. ‘I found his website as well – artofbenkahn dot com, he’s a painter.’

  ‘There’s a surprise.’

  He pocketed his mobile and for a moment sat very still behind the wheel, then turned and felt around in the mess on the back seats until he laid his hands on his scuffed road atlas. He opened it at the appropriate page and with a biro marked off the places: Mendenhall’s Woodlea House near Dundry, Poulimenos’s Bybrook View near Chew Lake, Stanmore House where Longmaid had been shot. He connected them all with a heavy line. The places formed a near-perfect triangle around Elliot Kahn’s Primrose Cottage. He entered his postcode into the satnav and drove to Stanton Drew.

  He would easily have found the village without navigational aid. McLusky had been to the picturesque village before, on one of his rambling drives during his months-long suspension from duty. He fondly remembered the Druid’s Arms, probably the only pub to have Neolithic standing stones in its beer garden. The satnav, however, urged him past the pub and the row of tiny cottages it abutted into narrow lanes on the outskirts of the village. Here, at the end of an unmade farm track between fenced-off pasture, he found Pri
mrose Cottage, a utilitarian whitewashed house with a dark pantiled roof. The bright orange 1970s VW camper van parked in front would have barely enough room to turn around in the narrow concreted area in which the track dead-ended. As he got out of his car, McLusky could hear classical music, an orchestral piece he had heard before but could not place. Predictably, considering the volume of the music, there was no answer to his repeated knocking. The door was unlocked. With his warrant card ready to legitimize his intrusion, he entered into the tiny hall, which was made even smaller by having canvases stacked three-deep against the walls. Immediately to his left was the kitchen which smelled faintly of laundry though he saw no washing machine. He followed the music to a closed door at the back of the house and there knocked again forcefully. The door was wrenched open by a man of about thirty; a blonde stubble of beard provided contrast to his deeply tanned narrow face. ‘What the … oh.’ His eyes fell on the proffered warrant card. The man nearly filled the narrow door but behind him McLusky could make out an easel and a nude female model sitting on a chair. The music was now loud enough to make communication challenging. Elliot Kahn wore jeans and T-shirt lightly spattered with paint and pushed a hand into his sun-bleached mop of hair, as an aid to thinking. ‘Oh, yeah, of course, perhaps we should …’ The young woman broke her pose to wrap herself into a dustsheet and turn the music down. ‘Thanks, Berti,’ said Kahn, and to McLusky he suggested, ‘Talk in the kitchen?’ McLusky walked to the kitchen, blinking away the after-image of the naked woman.

  Kahn set a whistling kettle on the stove which was fed gas from a large butane bottle beside it. He turned the valve and lit the gas with a cook’s match. ‘You’re here because of Charles Mendenhall, aren’t you?’

  ‘How did you hear about his death?’

  ‘My auntie Hannah. She read it in the paper. A paper is another thing we don’t get out here,’ he said, nodding at the gas bottle.