by Danny Miller
‘Why not?’ asked Frost.
Sally shrugged. ‘I never fully knew. A mixture of things. Dad’s drinking had started to affect his business; there wasn’t the money like there used to be. He had an antiques shop in Chelsea. It was very successful – until it wasn’t. There may have been other reasons to leave, but I was too young to know. It all happened so fast. One minute we were happy in London, and then we were here.’
‘Your father must have dealt in very high-class goods, to have a shop in Chelsea?’
‘He did. He had great taste, and a wonderful knowledge of paintings. He started trading at a really young age, he had a stamp collection that he’d worked on since he was a child, and sold it at auction for a lot of money. Invested it all in a couple of paintings, sold those on for a huge profit and never looked back. My grandmother, who was a dreadful snob, thought he was turning into a spiv. So she sent him to a crammer boarding school in Brighton. His mother wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer, like his father, but he refused. The only thing he’d wanted to do at university was art. Well, he wasn’t any good at painting, so art school was out, so he went to the Courtauld to study art history. But once he was in London, he carried on his trading, gave up college after the first year and had a stall on the Portobello Road, and then in Antiquarius, an indoor market, and then opened a shop off the King’s Road.’
Sally moved over to a nest of burr-walnut tables that held a cluster of photos in art deco silver frames. They looked like 1960s David Bailey portraits, and featured a young and blonde Vanessa Fielding with a Vidal Sassoon five-point haircut, in a miniskirt and knee-length white patent-leather boots. Against a white backdrop she looked like she was dancing on air. It was obviously a professional studio session.
Frost compared the pictures of the beautiful long-limbed Vanessa with pictures of the younger Ivan. He was portly, bespectacled, and what mousy hair he had he was losing fast. Frost reflexively ran a hand through his own hair. He breathed easy. It was still there. It was clear that Ivan was punching well above his weight with Vanessa. As Clarke and Frost looked at the photos, perhaps Sally could tell what they were thinking, because what she said next, she said with such a practised ease that she was obviously used to the comparisons.
‘Back then Dad was witty, charming, confident, and had a deep knowledge of seemingly everything. My mum was from a working-class background, and Dad sort of did a Pygmalion on her. They made it work, they were happy, for a while.’
‘What do you do, Sally, for a living?’
She pulled away from the photos to address Clarke. ‘I went to art college, Dad’s influence, but studied graphic design. I’m starting to get some work, now my daughter’s a little older. She’ll be nine next month.’
Frost had heard enough and wanted to get on. ‘Well, this is as good a place to start as any.’
‘I can tell you now, nothing has been taken from this room,’ said Sally confidently.
Frost again looked at the photos, but at the silver frames this time. Even at this distance of a couple of feet he could see they were rather ostentatiously stamped Tiffany & Co. If this was a robbery, the value of what hadn’t been stolen was adding up to a good few quid.
They went through all the rooms, and each time Sally came up with a blank – nothing had been taken. She said she knew every item in the house intimately; it was the type of home where very little new was added, apart from the occasional broken cup.
And as they searched the house for that elusive missing item, Frost made a mental note in each room of the things that could have been taken, and how much they might have fetched. Whilst not cluttered, every room held something of interest and beauty and, more pertinent to the case, value. Maybe the burglar broke in and tidied up, and changed Ivan’s shirt whilst he was at it, thought Frost with mounting frustration. The last room they inventoried was Sally’s old bedroom.
‘Embarrassing, pretty much as I left it ten years ago.’
‘You left home early,’ said Clarke.
‘Yes. Met a guy at college early. Had a child early. He left us early.’
Clarke gave an understanding smile. ‘You’ve got a head start on me – my son, Philip, just turned two.’
‘They get a bad reputation at that age. They keep you busy, but there’s nothing terrible about them.’
‘My mum lives with me full-time now, makes things a lot easier. She’s a rock, actually.’
Without saying any more, Sue and Sally seemed to be on the same page, as shared experience and understanding passed between them.
Frost wanted to add to the rock analogy about Susan’s mother: cold, hard and craggy. But he refrained. In the brief exchanges they’d had recently, relations with the venerable Mrs Clarke hadn’t improved. She’d even bought her daughter a new couch, feeling the old one that Frost had kipped on for a couple of months, when he was homeless, was somehow irretrievably ruined, maybe even possessed. He refocused on the bedroom. There was little of value in here outside of childhood memories. Some posters on the wall of David Essex, David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, and David Bowie in prime Ziggy Stardust mode, along with a stack of Jackie annuals, and another of LPs and 45s against the wall.
‘Oh, that’s weird.’
Frost and Clarke quickly turned to Sally, who was looking at an empty easel in the corner of the room. It was an antique-looking easel in a rich red wood, built for displaying paintings rather than the heavy work of producing them.
‘There was a painting here, now it’s gone. And it was still here three days ago, I know that.’
‘Was it yours?’ said Clarke.
‘No, Dad was just storing it in here.’
‘Was it particularly valuable?’ asked Frost.
Sally pulled a face that looked like this was the most stupid question she’d ever heard. ‘No, sorry – I would have actually paid someone to steal it. It was worthless and ugly. I’m pretty sure that’s why Dad insisted on it being in my room, as no one really comes in here now – and he didn’t have to look at it.’
‘It wasn’t of a clown with eyes that follow you around the room, was it?’ Clarke explained: ‘My nan had one of those in her hallway. It used to scare the life out of me.’
‘We had the flamenco dancer and the green lady in our house,’ Frost added to the bad-art debate. ‘You normally had one or the other, but we managed to have both. Still, hid the rising damp. What was it a painting of?’
‘From what I could make out, there was a hill, some trees, and a duck, or a chicken or something, didn’t make much sense. Horrible garish things, they looked like they’d been done by a child, but without the charm.’
‘They? There was more than one?’
‘There were three of them, paintings, oil on canvas. Dad gave one to me and one to my mother, and there was also this one,’ Sally said, gesturing to the now empty easel. ‘I don’t know where he got them, my mother thought he must have found them somewhere, literally on the street, or picked them out of a skip. He had a habit of doing that, bringing home stuff he found, like he was still collecting …’ She stifled a sob. ‘But it was always rubbish he brought home, stuff that people had thrown out. We just used to throw it out too. He’d never miss it, he was usually drunk when he brought it home.’
‘Your father collected some modern art, could it have fallen into that category? You know, “matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs”.’
‘No, Inspector, it wasn’t anything like Lowry, or remotely conceptual. It honestly looked like it was scrawled by a five-year-old. It’s completely worthless. To be honest, it just depressed me. It was just sad and pathetic. As you can see, my father was a collector and dealer in beautiful things, he loved and understood art. He was an aesthete. I thought the paintings were a sign of him losing his mind even more, trawling through skips. He’d let himself go so much, in all sorts of ways.’
‘How so?’ asked Clarke.
‘Well, you know, not washing, shaving or getting dressed, constantly looking
a mess, like a derelict … and just drinking himself to death.’
Sally sat down on the springy little single bed, cried, apologized, and took a moment to compose herself. Sue Clarke sat with her.
Frost looked out of the window, at a view of Denton Woods, the north end, away from the impending destruction. He thought about the wreck of the alcoholic – he’d seen them before. As a PC he’d once kicked down the door of a neighbour when the bottles of milk lined up outside began to resemble the pins in a bowling lane. He’d found a man who had obviously given up. The bottles of booze scattered around the room, unlike the milk bottles, had been well attended to. He was wearing soiled pyjamas, a raincoat and shoes. Just enough to get him to the off-licence and back. There is a tipping point, a point when they give up, thought Frost. Had Ivan Fielding reached that point? And yet, at the time of his death, he’d been clean-shaven and smartly dressed. A blue silk cravat with white spots tied around his neck, hiding the marks that would soon show up as a bruise.
‘The last time you saw your father, how did he look?’
‘The same.’
‘The same as you found him?’
‘No, not at all. He was in his dressing gown.’
‘Unshaven?’
‘Yes, yes, he was always unshaven towards the end.’
‘But not the day you found him. Do you know if he was expecting anyone the previous evening or that day?’
Frost stared intently at Sally as she thought about this. It obviously struck her as anomalous too. With her brow creased and lips pursed, she managed to look both confused and thoughtful as she ran through possible scenarios.
‘No … no, there wasn’t anyone to expect. Not any more.’
Monday (3)
There was no sign of his neighbour, Shirley, as he twirled the key in his front door that night. But it was late, he’d made sure of that. He’d gone to the Spread Eagle pub on Eagle Lane to avoid her.
As he’d sat in the booth necking his second pint, refusing to look at yesterday’s discarded News of the World that was rolled up on the seat next to him, he looked down at his developing paunch, and thought maybe he should make use of Paradise Lodge’s basement gym, with its weights and resistance machines and its steam room and jacuzzi. The very second he thought that, he envisioned himself bubbling in the hot tub with a glass of bubbly, and the bubbly blonde Shirley dropping her towel and joining him. He squeezed his eyes shut to rinse the vision from his mind, and reprimanded himself for letting such a notion slip through. He’d decided to heed the much-touted advice about one’s own doorstep, and what not to do on it.
Now safely in his flat, he poured himself three fingers of Teacher’s whisky and slumped down on the sofa. He looked about the ‘apartment’ (as the brochure for Paradise Lodge had insisted on calling it) and was amazed at just how light his fingerprints on the fully furnished flat (as he insisted on calling it) were. Of course he’d jumped at the chance of the discounted weekly cleaning service on offer, so it seemed to always look the same; even his mess didn’t last long. Apart from some books on the shelf (mainly military history, biographies of world leaders and war heroes, some Le Carré, and he was developing a liking for Trollope), some clothes in the walk-in wardobe and a small pile of video cassettes by the TV, there were few clues that the place was inhabited at all. There were some stop-gap framed artworks on the walls, nothing like Ivan Fielding’s, but also nothing like his mum and dad’s green Chinese lady and flamenco dancer, either. There were some stacked boxes in the hallway closet that did contain important parts of his life: pictures of his wife, memorabilia from his marriage and his old home. The past, memories good and bad. But somehow Frost felt that he wouldn’t ever be unpacking them here.
He reached for the remote and pressed the Trinitron into action. Denton Woods had made the tail of the local evening news, with a report on the growing opposition to the promised new housing development. It was certainly bleeding the force’s resources, with Mullett having to ask the new Rimmington superintendent for some uniform back-up.
He flicked around the four channels. Four bloody channels, spoilt for choice, and yet never anything on. He took a swig of his drink. Then another, which finished it off. He got up and went into the kitchen and pulled a can of Skol out of the fridge. He paused for thought, then pulled three more out, knowing that, realistically, he’d neck them all. It made economic sense: saved him getting up again, and saved the little light in the fridge going on and off again. He glimpsed Shirley’s fish pie in the fridge and knew he’d be laying waste to that around midnight.
The booze worked like a remote to change the channel in his mind back to earlier at Grey Gables, and Ivan’s fate. He shuddered at the thought. Maybe a uniform would kick his front door down one day, and find him shipwrecked on his couch, surrounded by tins of Skol and bottles of Teacher’s. And Shirley’s Pyrex dish on the coffee table where he hadn’t even been bothered to put her fish pie on a plate.
Maybe the fresh shirt Ivan was wearing at the time of his demise was his last attempt to claw back some dignity? The painting, the missing painting from Sally’s old bedroom – maybe in a moment of sobriety Ivan had destroyed the childish daub he’d found in a skip somewhere to again try to get back some vestiges of his former self?
Frost slammed the freshly opened can on the frosted-glass coffee table, where it frothed up to leave a nice ring for the cleaner, and he got to his feet. He collected his keys from the breakfast counter and left the flat, determined not to let the rot set in. Barely ten seconds later he walked back in and picked up the can of Skol and took it with him – seemed a shame to waste it.
As Frost let himself into Grey Gables, he was aware that it still wasn’t officially a crime scene. Even with today’s autopsy, what would it show? Probably that Ivan died an alcoholic’s death: heart and renal failure, and choking on his own vomit. The marks, perhaps signs of a struggle, were slight, and even Gerald Drysdale, who always veered towards the morbid and murder when he could, had said that the bruising could have happened by Fielding simply turning over in bed, such was the perilous state of his health.
But with seemingly nothing taken from the house, a house that was crying out to be robbed, Mullett would surely close the case down. No motive, no proof, no circumstantial. Death by alcoholic misadventure, another quick clear-up and better statistics for him. It was said that when it came to numbers of unsolved cases, Mullett always wanted his lower than the UK entrant’s score at the Eurovision Song Contest.
With his gloved hand, Frost switched on the living-room light. It flickered into life, soft and low. He began to pad about the large room, his carefully placed feet falling softly on the dark polished hardwood floor that was almost completely covered in Persian rugs, ranging from the plush to the threadbare, depending on the wear they got. Maybe they should have been rotated, maybe they had been at one time, but yet again, it was something that Ivan had let slip.
Frost eased himself down on the sofa and looked at the bottles on the table, the full ashtray. All the same brand of cigarettes, no lipstick traces on any of the butts to throw some interest into the mix; and all seemed to be uniformly smoked down to just above the print. All the work of one man. A creature of habit, and all of them bad by the looks of it.
There was a loud chime that made Frost jump and swear. In the corner lurked a grandfather clock standing on a rug. Frost checked the Casio on his wrist – either it was wrong or the clock was. He’d put money on it being the grandfather. The rug under it looked plush, no reason why it shouldn’t; it was in the corner after all, not much foot traffic. There was also a slight tilt to the clock, a perceptible lean. Not much, you wouldn’t really notice if you weren’t looking. But Frost was looking. Hard.
He got up to make a closer inspection and noticed the varying imprints on the nap of the rug where it appeared the clock had been moved and not put back on its mark. As far as Frost could see, the back of the case was sealed and any necessary winding or maintenance coul
d be done from the front. He eased the clock away from the wall, and manoeuvred it from side to side until he’d walked it off the rug. He then rolled up the rug and found what he’d been hoping for: a hidden trapdoor in the floorboards.
Frost quickly straightened up when he heard the noise. He wasn’t being jumpy this time, but it didn’t sound like the usual creaking, the moans and groans of old house beams and joists adjusting to the cold snap. No, this sounded louder, more pronounced. He quickly rolled the rug back over the trapdoor and made his way as softly as he could across to the hallway, picking up a heavy brass candlestick off a side table on the way. The light in the living room was weak, a low-wattage bulb that was about to blow, and it barely reached into the hallway. Still, he didn’t turn the hallway light on.
He winced as he made his way up the staircase. Each step had its own distinct creaking sound, which you would probably notice only if you were walking carefully and trying not to be noticed. To Frost it was like moving along a big keyboard – if anyone was on the first floor they’d hear him note for note. It was pitch-black up there, like staring up into a tunnel. Like most people, Frost had a list of things that spooked him, but spooky old houses at midnight wasn’t one of them. So he was surprised to feel his heart going about its work, and pumping away just a little faster than usual.
He was about to take the last step on to the landing when a door burst open and a figure rushed at him.
Frost grabbed at the banister, but his hand slipped and he was falling backwards, fast. He felt each edge of the steps on the base of his spine, then all the way down to his neck, one, two, three, four … Be stopped counting and concentrated on the pain. His back felt like cheese running down a blunt grater. His hand grabbed at a banister strut more successfully this time and that worked in slowing his descent, the top half of him anyway.