Beside a Narrow Stream

by Faith Martin

  Colin Blake looked surprised to hear the caution, and his assistant, watching open-mouthed, felt as if he was watching an episode of The Bill. When Hillary had finished, Blake merely said flatly, ‘Take over Baz. And call William for me. Tell him what’s happened.’

  ‘OK, Col, I will. You want me to call your wife?’

  ‘No!’ Blake said sharply. ‘I don’t want to worry her.’ He walked around the counter, taking off his apron as he went, and looked more surprised than ever when Gemma Fordham expertly cuffed him.

  They walked through the crowded streets, attracting a little attention as they did so, but nothing major. At the car, Hillary removed the parking ticket from Gemma’s windshield and slipped into the back seat with her prisoner.

  The drive back to HQ was completed in absolute silence.

  An hour later, the atmosphere in Interview Room Four was tense, but calm.

  Sitting on one side of the table was Colin Blake and his solicitor, Mrs Judith Coulson, who’d arrived at the station shortly after they did. Opposite them sat Hillary Greene and Gemma Fordham. A po-faced constable stood beside the door. In the observation room, Barrington, Danvers, Mel and Frank stood watching and listening carefully.

  Inside, the tape ran smoothly and quietly as Hillary began the interview.

  ‘Mr Blake, you’ve been charged with the murder of Wayne Sutton on the last day of April this year. Do you understand the rights that were read out to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We can waive the usual preliminaries, Inspector Greene,’ Judith Coulson said blandly.

  She was a large, grey-haired woman somewhere in her middle fifties, and wore a dark-blue suit that screamed bespoke tailoring. Hillary instantly put her down as an ex-Oxford Reader of Jurisprudence.

  So she’d have to be careful.

  ‘Mr Blake, I’d like to take a sample of your DNA. Do you have any ob—’

  ‘Have you got a warrant for that, Inspector?’ Coulson interrupted.

  ‘It’s being drawn up as we speak.’

  ‘Well, when you can actually produce it, we’ll deal with it then. Not before, if you please.’

  Hillary shrugged. It was no skin off her nose. ‘We also have a warrant to search Mr Blake’s premises. That is being carried out, also as we speak.’

  Colin Blake shifted on his seat. ‘I don’t want my wife upset.’

  ‘I’m sure the officers will be as discreet as possible, Mr Blake,’ she said, looking at him curiously.

  He didn’t look particularly nervous, or angry, or even worried. She wondered if his blankness was down to shock, and hoped so. Shock wore off, leaving you vulnerable. But if he was just plain stubborn, or hunkering down for the duration, she knew she’d never get a confession out of him.

  ‘On the evening of the thirtieth of April, you arranged to meet Mr Wayne Sutton in the meadow outside of the village where he lived, didn’t you Mr Blake?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You went there with the express purpose of killing him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You took with you a note you’d already written, supposedly from a woman called Annie, which you placed on his person after you’d killed him, and also a heart, cut out of red paper, which you also placed on his body.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have anything to substantiate these allegations, Inspector?’ Judith Coulson asked quietly.

  ‘We will have, once we have Mr Blake’s DNA for comparison Miss Coulson,’ Hillary said, equally quietly.

  ‘You see, Colin,’ she turned back to Blake, who stared back at her blankly, ‘you left one of your hairs on the body. It’s amazing how much hair is shed during a single day. The human body is constantly growing and replacing shed material. Take the skin cells off your hand for example.’

  Colin Blake glanced compulsively at his hands, then quickly away again. ‘When you hit Wayne on the head with the stone, you realized, quite rightly, that stone wouldn’t take fingerprints. But dried skin cells, like hairs, are constantly being shed. Millions of them apparently. And the forensic labs were able to take traces of the killer’s skin cells from the stone. And with that, and the hair sample you left behind, we’ll be able to prove you were there when Wayne Sutton was drowned.’

  ‘So far this all sounds like speculation, Inspector,’ Judith Coulson said, but her voice was a bit tighter now, a bit less sanguine.

  Colin Blake glanced at her quickly, then away again. His lips tightened.

  ‘The note from Annie and the red paper heart were carefully thought out red herrings, weren’t they Colin?’ Hillary carried on smoothly. ‘You knew Wayne was a gigolo, and you knew it would be one of the first things we found out about him. So we’d already be predisposed to look to that area of his life to try and find his killer. After all, when a good-looking young man, who makes his living off gullible middle-aged ladies is found dead, it’s the first thing you think of, isn’t it? Either that one of his women became jealous and murderously angry, or that one of his women’s husbands, fathers or lovers, took exception to him sponging off their loved one and took the opportunity to get rid of him. The red paper heart was just to make sure that we concentrated our efforts on that aspect of his life, wasn’t it?’

  Judith Coulson sighed heavily but said nothing.

  ‘But Annie was a bit of a mistake, Colin,’ Hillary said softly, leaning forward a little in her chair. ‘You see, there was no Annie in his life. And we looked for her, as you intended we should, wasting our time and efforts on a hiding to nothing. But you see, the more we couldn’t find her, the more we smelt a rat,’ she continued, not quite truthfully. ‘You’d have done better just to leave it at the paper heart.’

  Colin Blake blinked, but said nothing. If she was making any dents in his self-confidence, she couldn’t see it. She felt her anger grow, and quickly held it back. Now was not the time to lose it.

  ‘Wayne Sutton didn’t like you did he, Colin?’ she said flatly, deciding to change tack. ‘He didn’t like the way you painted, or managed to sell your canvases regularly.’

  Colin shrugged. ‘That’s no secret,’ he admitted.

  ‘What did you think of his style?’ Hillary asked, partly to get him talking, partly because she was genuinely interested.

  ‘He tried too hard,’ Colin Blake said, after a moment’s thought. ‘He wanted to be original, but in trying to do something different, he squashed his talent, rather than fostered it. But try telling him that!’

  Hillary nodded. ‘He must have hated listening to advice from you,’ she mused. ‘Wayne didn’t just resent you, or dislike you, he positively loathed and hated you, didn’t he?’

  Blake swallowed hard, but otherwise looked unimpressed.

  ‘Everything about you offended him,’ Hillary pressed on relentlessly. ‘That you could paint better than he could, that you sold your canvases strictly on their own merits, even that you earned an honest living, whereas he, as he must have known deep down, was something of a local joke. And then, there was your greatest sin of all.’

  Blake shifted on his seat again and Coulson looked at Hillary, fascinated in spite of her professionalism.

  ‘You were actually achieving the lifestyle that he wanted for himself,’ Hillary murmured knowingly. ‘You were getting in with the “right” set. I’m talking, of course, about your friend, Jasper Fielding.’

  Colin Blake licked his lips and glanced across at Coulson. ‘Do I have to listen to this?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Judith Coulson said wryly.

  ‘Let’s consider Mr Fielding for a moment, shall we?’ Hillary went on brightly. ‘How did you meet him?’

  Blake stared at her.

  Hillary glanced at the solicitor, then back to Blake. ‘Is there some reason you don’t want to answer that, Mr Blake? It seems a simple and straightforward question to me.’

  Colin Blake sighed elaborately. ‘OK. Fine. I met him about five years ago. I had an exhibition at a local gallery, and Jasper bought one
of my canvases. After that, he recommended me to some more of his friends, and I regularly sold to them.’

  ‘A fact that your fellow Ale and Arty members knew about. So when Wayne joined, he learned about it too. It must have driven him mad,’ Hillary mused. ‘There he was, a working-class lad, just like you, who wanted to make a name for himself as a serious, professional artist; what he needed were rich friends in high places, too, who could hook him up to the posh galleries and introduce him to the movers and the shakers. He probably saw himself as the next Andy Warhol right?’

  Colin smiled. ‘I imagine so. But in reality he was only a second-rate artist, and probably a second-rate gigolo, come to that.’

  ‘Right. You mutually loathed each other. So when Wayne tumbled to your little scam with your friend Jasper Fielding, you had no other option but to kill him, did you?’ Hillary pounced.

  Judith Coulson coughed loudly. Hillary ignored her.

  ‘How did it start, hmm? Did he ask you for money? Or did he threaten to go direct to Jasper and blackmail him for a share in the cut? Either way, you knew it would come down to killing him, didn’t you, Colin? Because it wasn’t really about the money, was it? Not for Wayne. If it had been, you’d have probably cut him in on the deal, and that would have been the end of it. Am I right?’

  Blake folded his arms across his chest and stared over her head.

  ‘Oh, it would have rankled, but you could have lived with it,’ Hillary soldiered on. ‘But you knew Wayne better than to trust him. You knew, ultimately, that he wouldn’t be able to resist bringing you down. In the end he could always have a cosy life living off his women. But the chance to see you disgraced, to see you behind bars, to see you taken down a peg or two … that would just have been too good for the likes of Wayne to resist, wouldn’t it?’

  Colin blinked, and she could see in his eyes she’d hit the nail right on the head. But just then the door opened, and Barrington came in with a message. She took the slip of paper from him and read it, careful to keep her face blank. Barrington silently left, not expecting a reply.

  The note was from the head of the search team:

  ‘Blake’s house clean, but neighbour told us suspect rents an old barn from a nearby farmer as studio-cum-storage shed. Have applied for extension of warrant, and will search there ASAP.’

  Hillary folded the note, hoping they’d strike lucky at the barn, because she was becoming more and more certain that Blake simply wasn’t going to crack.

  ‘You know Jasper will spill his guts, don’t you, Colin?’ Hillary asked casually, changing tack yet again. ‘His sort always do, believe me.’ She smiled at him and nodded. ‘Oh yes, we know all about Jasper. His family had money, didn’t it, back in the old days, living in Bath, entertaining the beau monde. And later, with their biscuit factories. A rather vulgar way to earn money for the likes of the Fieldings, of course – trade. But very profitable.’ Hillary shrugged, leaning back in her chair. ‘And then came the slow decline. The gradual selling-off of the property. The sale of the fancy Bath residence, and the move to the country, where the lack of ostentatious wealth wouldn’t be so obvious. The discreet sale of the odd suite of jewellery, the parcels of land, probably, ironically, the odd portrait or two.’

  Colin Blake, apparently, didn’t see the funny side of that, because it was only Hillary who smiled.

  ‘Who was it who first came up with the idea of the scam?’ she asked softly. ‘I can’t, somehow, see Fielding having the nous for it. It had to be you. And picking Jane Austen for your subject was a stroke of absolute genius.’

  She saw Judith Coulson look at her client curiously, before bending her head back over her notes.

  ‘All the ingredients were right, weren’t they?’ Hillary said, letting her voice become almost dreamy now. ‘It really was very clever,’ she flattered softly. ‘Fielding’s family lived in Bath, and were known to entertain the leading lights of the day. And Jane Austen could easily have attended a soirée there. So the provenance is, if not rock-solid, at least reasonable. And the choice of a little-known artist was inspired. I imagine, when the art fraud squad begin to check it all out, that they’ll find that Fletcher Crispin-Jones really did spend some of his time in Bath, painting the celebrities of the day?’ She nodded, for all the world as if he’d confirmed her hypothesis. ‘So who’s to say that he didn’t attend one of the Fielding family’s famous dos? That he didn’t sketch the shy and retiring Miss Jane Austen? And, if he did paint her portrait, why shouldn’t it end up in the Fielding family attic? Stranger things have happened.’

  Hillary leaned forward on the table and smiled at Colin slowly. ‘Jasper must have jumped at the chance when you put it to him. He was badly in need of a boost of money, wasn’t he? And you had all the materials there right to hand. I daresay there were several canvases of the right age and period just hanging on the walls of Heyford Court going spare – the worthless daubs of long-forgotten, second-rate artists. I’m no expert, but I know that a lot of artists reused old canvases. So when the art experts came to check the phoney Austen portrait, they wouldn’t be surprised, or even suspicious, to find signs of another painting underneath. In fact, it would only help to confirm that it was the genuine thing. And you, of course, are an expert copyist, aren’t you, Colin?’ Hillary smiled. ‘A man who can combine Augustus John and Burne-Jones, a man who can paint like Constable – well, a man like that wouldn’t have any trouble copying the style of a little nobody like Crispin-Jones, would he?’

  Blake swallowed hard but again said nothing. Hillary noticed that, beside him, Judith Coulson had become very thoughtful. No doubt she was thinking of her fee, and all the kudos a long, complicated case would bring.

  ‘You know, I have to hand it to you,’ Hillary said admiringly. ‘Between the two of you, you had the perfect scam. Fielding, with his genuine family history and background to back-up an “accidental find” in his attic. And you, with all the skills to forge the portrait. And you were so clever. That’s what really impresses me. You see, most people when they forge a painting, do so because of the painter. People want to believe they’ve got a genuine Monet, or Rembrandt, or who-the-hell-ever, because of the fame of the artist. What they actually painted is almost beside the point. But you went one better. You deliberately picked an obscure painter, because it was the fame of the sitter, that was going to net you the money. Who’d bother to forge a Crispin-Jones? Apart from a handful of artistic academics, nobody would know or care about a painting of his. But a genuine portrait of Jane Austen! Well now, the Yanks alone would go mad for that. Especially since there’s supposedly only one painting of her in existence – that little daub by her sister that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.’

  She reached for the glass of water and took a long, deep swallow. She’d been talking for what felt like hours, and she wasn’t getting anywhere. But at least she could rattle him a bit with the scope of what they did know.

  ‘There have to be plenty of rich Jane Austen fans who’d pay a fortune to have a genuine painting of her, or even only what might be a genuine painting of her. That’s what made your scam so clever. Even the possibility of owning such a rare object would be enough to start a bidding war.’ She shook her head in admiration and took another sip of water. ‘So, there you were, with everything ready. You’d forged the painting, Jasper had “found it” in his attic, and the experts had been contacted and the ball was rolling. All you had to do was sit back and wait for it to sell to the highest bidder. Then disaster struck. Wayne figured out what you were up to.’

  Hillary leaned forward, frowning. ‘Just how did he figure it out, Colin?’

  Blake stared at her blankly.

  ‘Do you even know?’ she asked. ‘No? Well, no matter,’ she shrugged. ‘Juries don’t need to have all the ins and outs to bring back a guilty verdict. And we’ll soon have DNA evidence linking you to Wayne’s killing, and Jasper will sell you out in a nano-second once he realizes he could be charged as an accessory to murd
er.’

  She paused as Barrington came back in, smiling. Hillary read the message and glanced up at Blake.

  ‘This is from the team searching the barn-studio you’ve been renting. They’re confiscating everything. Presumably, forging a painting from the early eighteen hundreds isn’t all that easy. You’ll have had to mix the paints to the specifications of the day for a start, and stuff like that?’

  She saw him shift hard on the chair, and smiled. ‘I thought so. The art squad have experts in that sort of thing, you know. How hard will it be for them to prove that you had everything you needed to fake the portrait? Soon the whole world will be in no doubt that the Fielding/Austen portrait is worthless. So Wayne will have won after all.’

  Blake stared at the wall behind her head and said nothing.

  It was her final shot, Hillary shrugged, gathered up her papers, and left.

  You couldn’t win them all.

  Gemma Fordham signed off on the tape and also went, leaving Blake and Coulson to discuss his defence. No doubt, it would be a long talk.

  ‘Too bad you couldn’t crack him,’ Mel Mallow said, a few hours later, as they all gathered in his office for a celebratory drink. The warrant had come through for a DNA sample to be taken from Blake, and nobody doubted that it would prove a match with the samples taken from the crime scene. Even better, Barrington had been informed by Interpol just twenty minutes ago that Jasper Fielding had been arrested in Biarritz, and would be accompanied back on the next flight to Heathrow. Apparently, he was already singing about what he knew, and was claiming to have fled the country in panic and fear when he’d read about Wayne Sutton being murdered, fearing that he himself might be next.

  A very chuffed art fraud squad was all over the ‘Austen’ portrait and the Crown Prosecution Service were happy with the case against Blake and all ready to sign off on it.

  ‘A confession would have been nice,’ Hillary agreed drily, ‘but I could have gone at him all day and not got anywhere. When that sort close down, they’re like limpets. There’s just no moving them.’