The Fountain in the Forest

by Tony White

  Street-sweepers were wheeling their barrows out of the depot next to the school. A group of smokers huddled, chatting outside Philomena’s, and a woman in the black polo shirt and polyester-slacked uniform of the bar worker was using an extendable hose to water the countless plants that bedecked the Sarastro Restaurant. A board outside listed the specials: ‘Slow-cooked calamari. Green salad with chervil and yoghurt dressing.’ A man in a suit was reading a newspaper in the morning sun, another in shirtsleeves talking on his mobile, a briefcase propped against one leg between his black, polished shoes. Someone had left a can of 7-Up on the windowsill of number 44, and a woman studied the tourist information map near the cycle-hire docks. High above his head, another familiar and evocative sound: a teacher ringing a handbell to signal the end of morning playtime.

  Rex crossed over Russell Street and pressed the button to ring another bell.

  ‘Hello, it’s Detective Sergeant King,’ he said. ‘Is that Jane? Oh, hi. Yup, me again.’

  The door buzzed open. Rex pushed it and stepped inside. He was going back to Terry’s paint frame to take another look. To see – in the words of the clapping song – ‘what he could see, chop, knee’.

  8: CORDEAU (TWINE)

  At least mooching around the paint frame took Rex King’s mind off Tennyson for a bit. The consensus seemed to be that the latest scare might have been baseless, the apparent leak being ‘content-free’, or a shot across the bows, as Francis Bland QC had put it, but as Rex had told Lollo, he felt little or no sense of relief. He knew that there was more to emerge, and so did the four officers who had been acquitted. It was probably only a matter of time before the shit hit the fan.

  The smell in the paint frame and the wider backstage area was almost gone. It would have been a lot harder to get rid of if the still unidentified body had hung undiscovered for even just a day or two longer. Estimates were putting time of death around forty-eight hours before discovery, so sometime on the Sunday, with decomposition having been sped up by early-summer warmth, but now the crime-scene clean-up team had been in, both to the paint frame and the basement drop beneath. Ozone machines, now gone off to some other job, had been left switched on in the space for a couple of days, and while the whole place now smelled of disinfectant, it was at least comfortable enough that Rex was able to have a closer look around.

  He didn’t know what he was expecting to find. Socks and Co. would have hoovered up all or most artefacts and oddments that weren’t merely paint-related, to be logged and sorted, pored over for occulted patterns. Besides that there were plenty of receipts, phone numbers scribbled on Post-its, photos, and various kinds of bumf. Plus the more general tat that anyone accumulates in a workplace; the stuff that gets stuck in a drawer for later, and is never returned to. In this case, some old birthday cards, corn plasters, a copy of The New Avengers Annual 1977, and an envelope marked ‘Slow-worm moult? Alfriston, Sussex’, which contained just a section of translucent reptilian skin.

  All – or any – of this could tell a story, if you could only look at it in a particular order, or a certain way. Whether it was the right story was another matter altogether. But right now, what Rex needed to do, and he and Webster were in agreement on this, was find a thread to follow. And frankly, any thread would do.

  At the far right-hand corner of the paint frame and mounted against the wall was a large sink made of thick white ceramic. Rex remembered from days poring over the Aston Matthews catalogue with Helen that this was called a Belfast or butler sink, and this one was big enough to use for washing out paint buckets and brushes of all kinds. A single copper pipe with an odd tap on the end of it projected a few inches out of the wall above the sink. Next to this, with the lower end of its slightly sloping top overlapping the sink above a weir-type overflow, stood a floor-mounted stainless steel draining unit on which were ranged a white plastic kettle, a box of Sainsbury’s Red Label teabags, a jar of Nescafé and a semi-solidified bag of Tate & Lyle granulated sugar, accompanied by the requisite collection of paint-spattered mugs of varying design and similarly diverse and stained teaspoons. It was all very familiar. ‘Oi, Rex,’ Terry used to say. ‘Put the fucking kettle on, mate. That tea isn’t gonna make itself.’

  Rex ached for a bit of that kind of normality and bonhomie now.

  Above all this, hanging by its handle from a large iron hook that had been driven into the bare brick wall, and with a flex that trailed to the two-gang socket it shared with the kettle, was a big old-fashioned Roberts radio, in wood and chrome with leatherette panelling, but so paint-spattered that its dial was all but illegible. Rex reached over the kettle and flicked one of the socket’s power switches. A loud burst of static quickly subsided and Rex was pleased to hear the Roberts’ wooden construction contributing to a rich and bass-heavy sound that perfectly suited the classical music station to which it was permanently tuned: BBC Radio 3. Whatever it was that was being played, Rex immediately sensed that he was coming to it late, since both orchestra and choir seemed to be building and ascending through wave after ever-louder wave of orgasmic blare. It was hard to differentiate individual instruments, but it sounded like a choir singing at the tops of their voices in an escalating game of call and response with fanfares of woodwind, brass and percussion, and everyone playing just as loudly as they could.

  Next to the Roberts, and fixed to the wall with two torn-off strips of masking tape, was a page torn from a book or a catalogue. It was a reproduction of a print depicting a staged tableau that looked vaguely familiar to Rex. Night-time in the Holy Land, and eleven disciples are ranged across the stage in positions of repose, they are sleeping, while on the left, higher than the rest, Christ kneels at the feet of an angel. Picked out in hand-drawn white letters above the cypress trees in a dark greenish sky were the words ‘Christus am Ölberge’ – Christ on the Mount of Olives, perhaps? – while beneath the image, but still part of the print per se, were the words ‘Passionsspiele Oberammergau. – Christus am Oelberg.’ The whole thing looked slightly off-register, as if it had been cheaply printed at the time. Perhaps it had been an illustration in a ha’penny programme, or was a souvenir postcard, rather than an artwork produced for exhibition. Across the image someone – Terry, presumably – had ruled a pencil grid, dividing the picture into equal squares, and up the right-hand side of the page they had scribbled ‘Beethoven Op: 85’, also in pencil.

  Classical music wasn’t really Rex’s cup of tea. If it could be thought of as a club, then it was one of which he had no particular desire to be a member. Occasionally these days he might listen to Radio 3, or someone in the office might put on Classic FM of an afternoon, but there’d been sod-all in the way of music at school and the only record they’d had at home when Rex was a child was the ‘original motion picture soundtrack recording’ of Fiddler on the Roof that a family friend had given his parents one Christmas. They hadn’t even had a record player at the time.

  Hearing some classical music now cheered Rex up no end. This was what the paint frame had sounded like whenever he had visited, at least when the stage was dark. The radio would always be blaring out something or other, when there was no performance going on next door. If there were two jobs on and a couple of people painting on each gauze, it could be a mad-house. It was sad that those days seemed to have suddenly gone, in more ways than one. When was it that the business had started to spiral? And when it did, as Eddie Webster had rather tactlessly put it, had Terry Hobbs simply spiralled with it?

  At last, after several great staccato stabs of noise, the music reached its stuttering climax, and then silence.

  ‘That was Scène héroïque: La Révolution grecque by Hector Berlioz,’ said the female continuity announcer after a second or so, and Rex almost expected to hear Terry burst out laughing at the contrast between the extravagant romance of the crescendo and the announcer’s hushed and reverential tones.

  ‘Taken,’ the broadcaster continued, ‘from the 2004 EMI recording of the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra
and Les Éléments Chamber Choir featuring the soloists Laurent Naouri (bass) and Nicolas Rivenq (baritone), conducted by Michel Plasson. And isn’t it wonderful to hear these lesser-known and early works by Berlioz. I’ll be playing some more of those recordings on tomorrow’s programme, including his Mélodies irlandaises, Opus Two: number three, “Chant guerrier”, and number six, “Chant sacré”, both of which also feature as soloist a certain young French pianist named David Bismuth’ – she pronounced it ‘Da-veed Biss-moot’ – ‘who is now, of course, something of a star in his own right. And I’ll also be playing a more recent release, some “remixed” Berlioz from 2012’s Opera Riparata by the prolific Italian avant-garde turntablist Okapi and the Aldo Kapi Orchestra—’

  That’s enough of that, thought Rex, as he turned the power switch back to ‘Off’.

  As if in response, but obviously coincidentally, he heard loud applause in some far part of the building. Perhaps there was a rehearsal going on, or a leaving party. Closer to the Piazza and it could have been tourists applauding some mime, or one of the many other genres of busker that played there.

  He continued to mooch. Looking under paint pots, a glass jar in which the white spirits had not quite completely evaporated, a ball of twine, just on the off-chance that something had been missed. There were fan heaters and multi-gang extension leads, scraps of canvas and bundles of lath, a sledge-hammer, and enough bulk packs of masking tape to open a shop. After this, he was still planning to go up to The Rock & Sole Plaice for lunch; eat in. It wouldn’t be the same without his mate, of course, but he could just fancy a portion of their cod and chips with mushy peas, plus the chance to have a quick chat with Ali or Ahmet, whoever was on, to see if they’d seen Terry any more recently than Rex had, or if they had noticed anything odd last time he’d been in.

  The Ziyaeddin family had been running that place since 1980. Salt of the earth, they were, Ali and Ahmet. Well, salt and vinegar.

  Rex had almost come around to Terry’s position on mushy peas, which was that you could tell the quality of the establishment by the attention they paid to their humblest dish, in this case the pease-pudding. Rex had eaten in some supposedly higher-class establishments where an order of mushy peas had been answered with what appeared to be about a dessertspoonful, no more, of tinned garden peas hastily mashed with a fork and garnished with butter and a piece of mint leaf. Disgraceful. The Rock & Sole Plaice made the real thing in the traditional way, with dried marrowfat peas that were soaked overnight then simmered to a pulp. And they served them red-hot too.

  Terry Hobbs was fond of limericks, and Rex had been pleased but not surprised to see a book of Edward Lear’s on the table in the studio. It was not a collection of Lear’s nonsense verse, however, but a glossy coffee-table book of the vivid and rather accomplished Levantine watercolours Lear had made during his mid-nineteenth-century tour of Albania, Greece and Turkey. Whether this had been left here as research for a commission or simply as reading for pleasure, Rex couldn’t say without checking Terry’s bible, his Job Book, an enormous binder, which – since it functioned as contacts book, billing system and diary of sorts – had been logged and was now at the station.

  Terry knew a lot of Lear’s limericks off by heart. He was also especially fond of the rather odder and more diffuse poetic form known as the clerihew: four-line biographical poems of irregular metre and length, and playfully derogatory in content. He’d nailed King in a clerihew years earlier, one evening after a particularly fine ‘rock and chips times two’. They’d both been trying to decide between the jam sponge and the spotted dick on The Rock & Sole Plaice’s dessert menu. This was sheer greed, and would have been before King’s self-imposed elevator ban had begun to pay off. When he could ill afford to indulge.

  ‘A clerihew!’ Terry had announced, after a bit of furtive scribbling.

  When old Rexy King

  Ate too much pudding,

  His belly would tend

  To swell or distend.

  True enough, and Rex still had the napkin that it had been written on, somewhere. His friend had illustrated the verse with a passable caricature.

  In the paint frame there was no space that was not used to stow something. The volume beneath the sink and drainer was stuffed with countless jars and pots, stacks of cut-off milk cartons, one-and two-gallon cans, and buckets: vessels all for the mixing of paint. The size and shape of container being determined, of course, by the brush to be used. There were paint-smudged bottles of bleach and cleaning fluids; a plunger and scrubbing brushes. Set into the floor in front and to one side of this sink unit was a stone well the size of a large paving slab, which was so shallowly inclined on its four sides that the inverted-pyramid-like void it created was almost imperceptible. Into the centre of this recess was set a slatted iron drain cover. Every surface of this assembly was covered with what looked like a couple of centuries of paint slops, some of which had merely coloured the iron or stone, while in other places it had thickened into enamel-hard ridges and nodules that looked like puckered skin, drips upon drips. The drain looked as if it had been here for longer than the building in which it now found itself, and Rex imagined this pipe would probably once – in the days before Bazalgette’s Embankment – have discharged directly or indirectly into the river. God knows where it led now.

  Near the sink at the back of the room was an exceedingly shabby leather sofa, which had clearly once been white or off-white. Its soft cushions were covered in paint too, of course, with torn and open seams, and the whole was propped up under one corner with a thickish paperback book where a castor was missing, something that Rex had never noticed on his many previous visits. He knew that Socks had looked under the cushions. He’d seen them do so, and find all sorts of crap in the process. Pieces of change had been retrieved, a travel card or two, and a cigarette lighter that had presumably been there since before the workplace smoking ban, but he wasn’t sure if they had taken any notice of the book.

  Remembering his training, and the mantra ‘Don’t discount anything!’, Rex decided to take a look for himself.

  ‘Don’t discount anything!’ was not an emphatic admonition to shopkeepers keen to maximise their margins, but the title of an exercise in the Grade 4 ‘Supervise investigations and investigators’ module that had been part of Rex King and Eddie Webster’s PIPs training a few years back. It was good advice too. In that particular role-playing exercise, during training, the phrase had reinforced a particular learning outcome, which in this case had been ‘Ensure all the material gathered as part of an investigation is recorded, retained and revealed in line with current legislation and policy’, which seemed fair enough. But in the real world it was also a useful reminder to always be ready to turn over one more stone; to not take things for granted; to keep going and not give up.

  Kneeling with as straight a back as he could manage, and bracing himself as he reached down to lift the sofa slightly so that he could slip the book out from underneath it, Rex’s attention was instead diverted by something else. His gloved fingertips had brushed an object of some kind. Forgetting the book, he stood up and went back over to the narrow workbenches that ran down the centre of the space to retrieve a large paint tin that he thought he might be able to use as a kind of jack.

  Kneeling again, he lifted the sofa and slid the paint can beneath its front edge, then took his phone out of his pocket, set the flash and took a photograph of whatever it was, in situ. Then, reaching in, he first tried to estimate the extent and weight of the object before taking hold of it firmly with both hands to slide it out from under the couch, where he photographed it again. Later he told Webster that at first he’d thought it was a folded blanket or duvet cover that had been left here for the occasional sleepover. When demand was high, perhaps, or delivery deadlines were pressing, and work would continue around the clock. But this felt heavier than bedding, and the weave far coarser to the touch. It was a gauze, a large piece of scrim that even without unfolding he could see from t
he staple holes along one edge had been stretched for painting.

  Looking at the folded gauze, then the frame, Rex figured that it must have been rolled up as it was taken off the frame, from the bottom, a little at a time, like a long flat sausage. You’d have to lower the frame a little, free a few more staples on each side, then gently roll the gauze – effectively, flop it over – from both ends at once, the pull created by this flopping or rolling motion across the width of the fabric possibly drawing the frame down a little more each time too. Difficult but not impossible for one person to do; easier for two.

  The resulting flattish roll of fabric, some two feet wide by thirty feet or whatever it was, had then been folded over a couple of times from each end to create the bundle that had been placed beneath the sofa. Curious about both any image that it might bear and what possible reason there might have been to hide it, if hidden it had been, Rex decided that he would first need to unfold the gauze. In the restricted space of the paint frame, there was only one way to do this: vertically. He dragged it across to the main part of the room, positioning it on the floor in front of one of the frames – the one that remained unsullied – between the lip of the drop and the line of narrow workbenches, then unfolded first this side and then the other until the whole roll was laid out a couple of feet in front of the drop.

  Grasping the wood, he pulled the huge frame down so that its upper horizontal was positioned at roughly shoulder height. Again, this would have been easier with two people, and it took a while, going back and forth, but Rex un-flopped first one end of the roll then the other, then one end, then the middle, and so on, until he had given himself a few feet of free scrim to play with. He took one corner of this with one hand, the staple gun in the other, and fastened it to the horizontal wooden beam. He repeated this along the length of the gauze, stapling it to the wood every foot or so, being extremely careful not to fall down the drop himself, then continued in this vein – unrolling, stapling, raising the frame a foot or two at a time – until enough of the image was exposed that he could see it had been copied from the print that was taped up over the sink. The sleeping disciples – minus Judas, of course – were hidden as yet, but Christ and the angel were clearly visible. The cypress trees and the night-time sky. Even though it was obviously unfinished, Rex could see that Terry, presumably, had been trying to reproduce the slightly off-register colouration of the original by masking areas out and overlaying what looked like flat washes – however these might have been applied – of transparent colour. The lighter, angel-lit areas of the image were raw scrim; it was the darkness that was being painted on, layer by layer.