by Carl Goodman
‘What criteria would you use to evaluate if such an action was right or wrong?’
‘Intuition. The power of rational, intuitive thought. If you opened your mind you would know. You do know that,’ he added, a trace of a smile playing on his lips. ‘I can tell.’
‘Tell me,’ Eva answered, ‘would you kill to save a life?’
It was a quote from a song lyric but Huss clearly took her meaning. ‘Precisely,’ he agreed.
It didn’t make any difference one way or another. Eva shook her head. It wasn’t helping and in fact it felt too close to home to be comfortable. ‘Four years ago three women were murdered in the area. Kelly Gibson, Olivia Russell and Grace Lloyd. There was a connection, albeit a tentative one, with somebody who is listed as working at this church, one Mathew Harred. Do you know of his whereabouts?’
‘This is to do with the most recent killings?’
Eva could hardly deny it. ‘We need to be certain all lines of inquiry are followed and closed. As a matter of routine we’re re-examining all of the suspects from previous cases.’
‘Mathew should never have been a suspect,’ Huss said.
‘Nevertheless,’ Eva told him.
Huss sat in silence for a moment. ‘What happened to those young women was awful,’ he said eventually, ‘a crime against natural law. Are you aware of their connection with Mathew and New Thought?’
‘I was hoping you would enlighten me.’
He smiled again, this time at her intentional irony. ‘They all modelled for Mathew, along with quite a few other women and men as well. Mathew is a painter, rather a good one. He has been commissioned to produce a piece for us. He was working on it then. He’s still working on it now.’
Eva frowned. ‘He’s been working on a painting for four years?’
Huss practically beamed then. ‘It’s quite a large piece. It’s quite impressively detailed. I think the previous officer understood as soon as they saw it. It’s why the investigation into Mathew and his various connections went no further.’
He was teasing her. She could see that. She should have been annoyed at the fact Huss was playing a game even in the knowledge that she was investigating multiple murders, and yet there seemed to be no malice in his amusement. ‘Where is this painting?’
‘Right here,’ Huss said. ‘And in answer to your next question, yes of course we can see it now.’
* * *
‘Are you familiar with the work of John William Waterhouse or the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?’ Huss asked as they walked.
She knew the names, vaguely. There had been references to certain painters on the media studies course and she felt sure Waterhouse had come up. Eva took her phone from her pocket and did a voice search. Huss glanced at her as she did so and smiled his beneficent smile.
‘Yes,’ she told him when she saw the images that appeared on her screen. ‘He was popular in the Victorian era, I remember that much. I seem to remember that he wasn’t actually a member of the Brotherhood. He was too late for that. He just painted in their style.’ She flicked through the images. ‘Dramatic, stylised and sexualised is the way my lecturer described him.’ She stared at the paintings. ‘That doesn’t stop them being impressive though,’ she conceded.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ Huss said, ‘because Mathew’s work has been compared to his. As a church we decided a number of years ago that it would be interesting to explore the theme of infinity and our place in it as transcendental humans. We chose an artist to express our thoughts and ideas, but we decided to do so on a large scale. Mathew has been working on this single piece for five years. It may be several more years before he is finished.’
Huss pushed on a pair of double doors. They stepped into a hall, part of the old Norman church that had been extended to create a cavernous, cathedral-like space almost two hundred feet long and nearly seventy high. One entire wall was covered with scaffolding and sheets of translucent polythene. Spotlights lit certain sections of it. When she saw the parts of the painting that were not concealed by polythene sheets Eva understood.
‘Jesus Christ.’
Huss chuckled. ‘About two-thirds of the way up towards the right I think, along with The Buddha and various other deities.’ The painting covered the wall. Large swathes of it were hidden from view as though unfinished, but other sections were clearly visible. The sections she could see had been completed with extraordinary, exquisite detail, almost as though a set of photographs had been composited together to make a whole. ‘Mathew is creating a window on a transcendentalist view of the universe,’ Huss said. ‘And I think you’ll agree he’s making a very fine job of it.’
‘It’s incredible,’ Eva agreed. ‘What exactly am I looking at?’
‘If this were a church belonging to a traditional religion then I suppose you would say this was a painting of the afterlife. It isn’t though, and we are less inclined to try to pin labels on such things. You might term it infinity, the realm of souls, the multiverse, perhaps the extra dimensions of string theory or perhaps Feynman’s sum over histories. However you choose to describe it, it is an artistic interpretation of the existential domain that we as transcendentalists know we truly inhabit, even though in our current, limited form we can only perceive the thinnest veneer of it. Mathew is creating this intuitively, one careful brushstroke at a time.’
‘I’d like to meet him,’ Eva said as she stared at the wall.
‘You shall,’ Huss told her.
‘Alone,’ Eva said.
Chapter Fifteen
Her footsteps echoed in the empty church. Halfway along the otherwise silent hall Eva stopped and gazed up at the painting. Behind a foreground of scaffolding, ladders, platforms and polythene lay what seemed to be a gateway to another universe.
She understood what Huss had meant when he had compared Harred to John William Waterhouse and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. There were figures in the painting, many figures, and they all had the delicacy of detail that she associated with Waterhouse or Rossetti. There was a depth to the shadows though, a blackness that seemed more akin to Caravaggio to her. Eva only knew a little about art, but she knew what she liked, and as she gazed along the length and depth of the painting she decided she liked the work of Mathew Harred.
What was it though? What was she looking at? It seemed almost like some work of romantic science fiction. An image of a corridor universe, vast and cylindrical, that stretched towards infinity. An asymptotic curve, Eva remembered from somewhere. Huss had mentioned string theory and she had read about that in what felt like the distant past. Calabi-Yau manifolds, the rolled-up dimensions that were thought to exist somewhere below the Planck length in the places where modern physics tended towards insanity. Harred had captured that somehow, the lens of terrifying infinities that haunted the nightmares of science, yet at the same time he had also caught the simple humanity of his subjects. In a clearing in a forest that somehow drifted in orbit above the chromosphere of a supergiant star, Eva found the faces of Kelly Gibson, Olivia Russell and Grace Lloyd.
They stood in a small knot of people who seemed to be discussing a scroll. When she moved closer she could see the scroll contained a poem. The detail was precise. Everything in the foreground was life-size – the women, the scroll, even the trees that edged the clearing and occluded prominences bursting from the surface of the dull red star. When she walked up to the scroll she found she could read the words on it. O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, she read. Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
‘Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead.’
A voice above her spoke. Eva looked up but her view was compromised by the glare of a spotlight shining down on her. Something above her moved. She stepped backwards, out of the spotlight’s beam.
‘I’ve always loved Eliot. Words so dense you could almost chew on them.’ Something was coming towards her, she realised. Something was descending from the ceiling. ‘I had an acupuncturist once. Sh
e was Chinese. She liked to argue the superiority of Chinese culture. I didn’t entirely agree with her, but nevertheless I took pleasure in her pride. She liked to point out that when an English sentence was translated, for every three lines on the page it took up in English it only occupied one line in Mandarin. I wondered how this could be. I thought about it for some while but eventually realised the obvious. Take the word “hello”. In English we represent it with five linear strokes, one arc, one almost complete ovoid and one complete ovoid. In Chinese, the phrase ‘nǐ hǎo’ is made up of seventeen linear strokes. There is no difference. The information density is the same. It is simply focused in different places.’ Like an avatar, Mathew Harred descended from above.
He wore a climbing harness and was suspended from the ceiling. Harred was dressed in jeans and an olive-green T-shirt that hung loose at the waist. In that instant Eva knew with absolute certainty that Harred was not the man who had tried to kill Moresby in St Jude’s Hill. Harred could not be the man who had killed Irina Stepanov.
Six foot four, she estimated. Early forties, with the kind of build that came from hours, days, weeks and years of working out. Harred exuded power. Every sinew in his body seemed taut, every muscle primed and ready. He slipped down the rope from the ceiling, comfortable in his harness. When he touched the ground he unclipped the buckle and stepped out of it, then Harred extended a hand towards her to shake. There was an earthy smell about him. Linseed oil, Eva realised. As she stood in front of him, looking up slightly to meet his grey eyes, she started to make a mental list of the physical differences she could count between Harred and the man she had encountered in St Jude’s Hill, but after only a moment or two gave up. There was no point. Taller, broader and more powerful than the man dressed in black who had tried to kill Moresby with a taser, both Harred’s physique and his casual, relaxed demeanour set him apart. They had not met before. Of that Eva could be certain.
‘DI Harris,’ she told him. ‘I’ve come to talk to you about these three women.’ She waved her hand at the painting, at the place where Gibson, Russell and Lloyd studied the poem.
‘There’s probably not much more that I can tell you that hasn’t been said already,’ Harred answered. ‘I’ve had several hundred people pose as models in various parts of the painting now. It’s a deeply troubling coincidence they were murdered, but I don’t think it was any more than that.’
Eva stared at their faces. ‘Wouldn’t you say it was more than a coincidence that three women who died are painted here in a group?’
Harred gave her a slight, sad smile. ‘No. They were originally in different locations on the canvas. After they were killed I repainted them. I suppose I intended it as a memorial.’
Harred could not have killed Stepanov, Swain or Markham. He was not the man she had seen at St Jude’s Hill. The certainty of that allowed her to relax, just a little. ‘It’s actually beautiful,’ Eva conceded. The women were wrapped in silks, much as in the Pre-Raphaelite style. She could not help but admire the detail in the brushwork. Their skin almost glowed. She turned her attention to the rest of the paining. ‘What does it…’ she cast around for a word, ‘mean?’
‘It’s an imaginary piece of course,’ Harred said, ‘a vision of our lives beyond this frame of reference, a universe of infinite possibilities in which we can realise our true potential.’
Eva let her eyes drift across the breadth of the worlds he had created. ‘It feels a little apocalyptic.’
Harred frowned. ‘Is that a prospect that worries you? I mean especially today, in these unsettled times? Doesn’t it feel as though a perfect storm is brewing, brought on by our own failings? Are we witnessing the era of systemic failure, the singularity at which everything finally breaks down? It’s not hard to imagine that. What’s harder to imagine is what a solution might be, especially when so few of us even know what “good” looks like.’
He had grey eyes, Eva noted. Broad shoulders, tanned skin, ash-blonde hair that he wore in a crew cut, and a day or so of stubble on his chin. There was an intensity to his stare that she found perturbing. ‘And you,’ Harred asked her, ‘what does it mean to you? Where do you see your place in this universe?’
The question unsettled her. ‘I’m not sure I have one,’ Eva said.
He mocked her with a smile. ‘What, the police officer that came back from the dead? No place in this universe? I’d have said that of all of us the opposite is true of you. It can’t bear to let you go.’ He stood close to her. Close enough that she could smell the oil paint on his skin. ‘What was it like?’
The same damned question, Eva thought, except Harred’s interest felt like more than idle curiosity. It pressed down on her, tugged at her memories. Standing beneath this extraordinarily complex work that he was creating, she felt the urge to say more than she had ever said before. The urge took her completely by surprise, like a curtain suddenly being lifted in a darkened room. ‘A sense of being airborne,’ Eva admitted before she had even thought about it. ‘Of flying high over a landscape. I don’t remember details, only sensations. A sense of speed, of air rushing by. Elation,’ she told him. She glanced at Harred, wondering whether to tell him what had come next. ‘And power.’
He looked both fascinated and delighted. ‘Power for what?’
A feeling of guilt then. An almost final admission. ‘Revenge.’
Harred raised his eyebrows. ‘Of course. Somebody had tried to kill you. Did you know that at the time?’
‘Oh yes,’ Eva said.
He kept staring. ‘Do you get revenge?’
The curtain came back down. ‘I never had the opportunity. He was killed in an ambush by a rival gang some time afterwards.’
Harred stroked his chin. ‘That must have resulted in conflicting emotions?’ Eva said nothing.
Somewhere nearby a door opened and closed again. Footsteps clicked in a corridor. Harred looked away. ‘I expect that will be my patron,’ he told Eva. From across the hall two women approached them. ‘Detective Inspector Harris,’ Harred said in a loud voice, ‘may I introduce Berta Nicholson and Lily Yu. Berta is single-handedly funding this project,’ he added.
Eva could take a hint. ‘Delighted to meet you,’ she said as the two women stopped in front of them. ‘Unfortunate circumstances, but I’ve been admiring Mr Harred’s work. It’s extraordinary.’
Nicholson beamed. A tall woman in her forties, Eva guessed, with auburn hair and pale skin, she wore a smart, casual suit with a handbag that must have cost a month of Eva’s salary. Lily Yu stood beside her. About the same height as Nicholson with a willowy frame and jet-black hair that was partly covered by a light, wide-brimmed hat, Yu gazed at Eva. She did not even attempt to conceal her interest.
‘We marvel at it almost every day, don’t we Lily?’ Nicholson said. ‘Every brushstroke is a work of genius. Mathew dedicates all his time to it. He even lives in the church. It’s really quite a monastic existence, isn’t it Mathew?’
Eva was not sure how the two of them could have been more obvious. Harred clearly knew the drill, though. ‘I’m concentrating on the work,’ he assured them. ‘It’s a major undertaking. I’m quite exhausted at the end of the day. I’m happy to rest here alone.’
‘Did you know the murdered girls?’ Eva asked Nicholson.
‘I think I met them briefly,’ Nicholson said. ‘We sometimes have parties at our house. I may have invited them, but I can’t recall if they actually came.’
‘I’m fairly sure they didn’t,’ Yu said. ‘I would have remembered.’
They stood in awkward silence for a moment. Eva was about to leave but Harred turned to her. ‘Detective Inspector, may I take your photo? With your permission I’d like to include you in the painting. After all, with your history it seems like a particularly apt inclusion.’
Eva was about to refuse when Nicholson clapped her hands. ‘What a brilliant idea! Please agree Detective Inspector. Mathew will do a wonderful job, I’m sure you know that by now.’ She went to s
hake her head, but Harred already had his phone out.
‘Where will you put her?’ Yu asked. Despite herself, Eva wanted to hear Harred’s response.
‘DI Harris is unique,’ he told Yu. ‘I think she could occupy a unique position.’
‘And her part?’ Yu demanded. ‘What will be her role?’
‘That’s obvious,’ Harred said. ‘She will take the part of the destroyer.’
* * *
‘It sounds weird,’ Flynn said. ‘Why the hell would Harred want you in his picture? No disrespect,’ she added quickly.
‘It was weird,’ Eva agreed. The four of them sat in the incident room with stacks of files that by now were piling up untidily. Information from the general public, potentially connected cases, general trawls of the Police National Database. The things she knew for certain were they were following two killers and that the latest set of victims had eye surgery in the last year. And that Semion Razin has a fixer embedded within the station, she reminded herself. The eGPU attached to the laptop in her apartment had crunched through tens of billions of permutations but, like the other cases, that password showed no signs of cracking yet.
‘Harred’s alibis for the previous murders still look solid enough,’ Newton said. ‘But how could he keep working on one painting for years on end?’
‘You’d have to see it. It’s more like hundreds of paintings, just on the same canvas. Not canvas,’ Eva frowned, ‘fresco. He was painting directly onto the wall.’
‘If Berta Nicholson is just paying Harred a salary then it’s not as expensive as it sounds,’ Raj mused. ‘If she’s rich enough to do that and not worry about it.’
Eva stood and went again to stare at the pictures of the victims taped onto the whiteboards. She glanced again at the line she had drawn, from psychopath to rational motive. ‘I keep seeing these crazy bubbles of wealth around here, places where normal rules don’t apply. If you’re rich enough you can get away with so much weird shit, like having your eyes replaced or spending your life in a tennis club, or having a painter spend years working on a massive view of some alternate reality. What else do they get up to?’