by Danny Miller
‘Where we going?’ She slipped on her jacket.
Frost took out the packet of ibuprofen that Rita had got for him and downed a couple with a mouthful of Susan’s coffee, which turned out to be cold.
‘How’s your back?’
‘Still making its presence felt.’
Clarke called out to PC Simms, who was just about to go out of the door. ‘Do you want to come with, Simmo?’
Simms turned to Clarke, his face lit up with excitement. ‘The super wants me at Denton Woods, collecting info on the protestors.’
Before Clarke could say anything, Simms shot out of the door. ‘Good for him. I thought he was supposed to be shadowing me this week.’
Frost smiled. ‘We’ll be working for him one day. Young Simms is ambitious, knows the high-profile cases to jump on and the back-burner ones to avoid. He knows which side his sliced white has marge on.’
Tuesday (5)
Banes didn’t have to wait long for Kevin Wheaton to show up. It was only a couple of hours before the Ford Cortina drove slowly down the now boggy track, out of the woods and towards what passed for civilization in this part of the world, Denton town centre. It was dark now. All he saw were the headlights emerging from the thick blackness. But as the Cortina passed him, he recognized the burly ex-con immediately. Kevin had his inside light on, probably had a map on his lap, so there was no mistaking him. Just as he had recognized him at Longthorn, when he came to the infirmary. Always with a smile on his face, trying to look as jolly as possible, to lift the mood of the dying man he was visiting.
Banes started the van up, turned it around and followed Kevin down the track. He knew all about Kevin Wheaton, he was like him in some ways, an impostor of sorts. And they both had the same information, and they were both after the same prize. Wheaton had no interest in saving the woods, he was there to hide. The protest made for good cover, provided him with an excuse to be camping out in January. But Banes knew that Kevin wouldn’t be gathering around the campfire with the protestors and singing songs, because they would soon suss him out as the impostor he was. Kevin wasn’t quick on his feet, couldn’t adapt to his environment, improvise and blend in.
Kevin Wheaton was a thief. He may not have been much good at anything else but, to his credit, he was a good thief. He’d learned from the best, he’d learned from Conrad Wilde.
Banes followed the Cortina at a safe distance into the town, into Market Square, where the shoppers were finishing up for the day, and the market traders were taking down their stalls, bantering loudly about how slow business was after Christmas, even with the sales, and hoping for better luck tomorrow.
The Cortina parked up just off the square in East Street. Kevin got out of the car, locking up and looking around him with all the natural suspicion of an ex-con. They treated the whole world as though it was just like them. Satisfied that no one was on his tail, Wheaton slipped into the Lamb and Flag pub.
‘Mind if I join you?’
He did mind, of course he did. But he wasn’t going to say anything, wasn’t going to cause a fuss and draw attention to himself. The pub was reasonably full, and as Kevin Wheaton looked around the saloon bar, he could see it wasn’t an unreasonable request to ask to share the table.
The burly ex-con was reading the local paper, the evening edition of the Denton Echo. The front page was all about the protests, which were hotting up and becoming newsworthy. There’d been some real violence, the front-page photo showed some big bloke in a red tracksuit stepping in and helping a copper … and then Kevin lowered the paper and the story was lost to him.
Kevin nodded bleakly to the man before him. It was permission for him to sit, but was also a warning to him not to try to engage him in conversation, no matter how vacuous.
‘How are you, Kevin?’ asked Banes as he put his pint on the table, and before Kevin could respond, quickly added, ‘We’ve met. In Longthorn.’ He sat down opposite the ex-con. ‘Bet you don’t remember me, do you?’
Kevin’s aggressive expression turned to one of blankness.
‘My name’s Clive. Clive Banes.’
The blankness continued. Which was exactly what Clive Banes had expected. Even after shaving off his beard and getting rid of the fake glasses, he was seldom remembered, rarely recalled, and always quickly forgotten.
‘I worked in the Longthorn infirmary. I was an orderly. I used to see you visiting your friend Conrad, Conrad Wilde. I used to talk to Conrad. He was a lovely man. An interesting man.’
Kevin was of medium height, but bulky in build. Maybe made to look bulkier than he was by his blue quilted ski jacket. His hair was short on top with a neat side parting, but the impression of neatness was undone by a flange of rat’s tails hanging down his back. He wore a gold ring in each ear. His knuckles were inked with prison tattoos that were little more than blue blobs. Banes assumed they were supposed to read as LOVE and HATE. But his stubby fat fingers had worked like blotting paper and soaked the ink up to render their message indecipherable.
Kevin took a sip of his pint. ‘I’ve never done a day’s prison in me life. And my name’s not Kevin.’
‘We both know that’s not true. And strictly speaking, Longthorn isn’t a prison. It’s a secure hospital for the criminally insane.’
‘I’m not a nutter!’
‘No, technically. But you were visiting someone who was certified as being one.’
‘You’re getting on me fuckin’ nerves, mate. Maybe you should take your pint and piss off.’
‘Listen, Kevin, there’s no need for the aggression. We’re on the same side. We want the same thing.’
‘Do we?’ Kevin Wheaton lifted his pint off the soggy beer mat.
‘That’s why we’re here. That’s why you’re camped up in the woods.’
‘You following me?’
Banes lowered his voice and leaned in. Kevin Wheaton lowered his pint and listened.
‘When I used to speak to Conrad, towards the end, I sometimes think he looked on me as a priest. Someone to unburden himself to of all his sins. I know he looked on you as a son, he told me as much. I was surprised not to see you at his funeral.’
Kevin looked sheepish and guilty as his eyes flicked down towards the thick head of froth on his lager; it seemed to hold his attention like a child staring up at clouds in the sky, trying to discern shapes of animals. Banes suspected the guilt came not from failing to attend his mentor and father-figure’s funeral, but from his reason for being in Denton. Once Banes had arrived in town, he’d scoured the local paper, and had found out about the death of Ivan Fielding, the former Chelsea art dealer, and the suspected break-in at his property that might have precipitated his untimely demise. Just a few paragraphs in the Denton Echo, but the article had immediately caught Banes’ eye. It was the only crime in the local paper that looked in any way relatable to his and Kevin’s common cause.
‘Where did you first meet Conrad?’
‘The Scrubs,’ muttered Kevin, looking almost tearful at the memory. ‘My first real stretch. I was just a kid. Conrad had been there for a few years. People were wary of him, he’d got into some fights. But he was good to me.’
‘He looked after you. Taught you the ropes, how to rob a place, what to steal …’
Kevin Wheaton nodded slowly, his mind obviously scrolling back to the past. Happy days. ‘He did. He taught me everything I know. I’ve only done five years in prison since I met Conrad – and that was only because of grasses. Conrad showed me how to case a place, how to bypass alarms. He always told me to stay focused once you’re in, and to just go after the prize you were after. Get what you come for, then get out.’
‘Good advice. And you got it, right, Kevin? You got what you were after?’
Kevin Wheaton broke out of his nostalgic reverie and pondered his more recent crimes. Banes knew that Conrad might have taught Kevin a thing or two, but not enough. Conrad was cunning, smart, sharp. Kevin was the opposite of all that, as his next utterance proved.
‘
I didn’t kill him.’
Banes gave an internal smile of satisfaction but remained outwardly unmoved, businesslike. ‘I didn’t say you did.’
‘I swear on my mother’s life, he was alive when I left him … I swear on my—’
Banes quickly raised a halting hand for Wheaton to stop. ‘Kevin, please … please, I don’t want you to swear on your mother’s life, it’s meaningless. I read the papers. They said he was dead. What I want to know is, do you have it?’
‘Have what?’
‘You know.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do.’
‘I swear on my—’
‘Kevin, please, no more swearing on that poor woman’s life. You know what I’m talking about. Conrad told me all about it. Now, again: do you have it?’
‘The painting?’
Banes smiled. ‘Yes. That’s it. The painting.’
Stephen Parker answered the door. He stood there, seemingly reluctant to let Frost and DC Clarke cross the threshold.
‘She’s still very upset, and tired, very tired.’
Sue Clarke issued her standard understanding smile. Which always impressed Frost; he could never quite muster it.
‘Yes, Mr Parker, we can appreciate that, of course—’
‘But we still need to talk to her,’ said Frost bluntly.
‘Who is it?’ came a voice from inside, presumably Vanessa Fielding’s. It was loud and strong.
‘She sounds good to me,’ said Frost.
Parker turned his attention from the two detectives and called out into the hall behind him, ‘It’s the police, about …’
There was a pause. Then came the voice again, weaker this time, emotional, like she’d just been reminded of her loss. ‘It’s OK, Stephen, let them in.’
Frost and Clarke made it clear to Stephen Parker that they would like to talk to Vanessa on her own. She didn’t protest. And Parker slipped away, said he had some papers to mark.
They were soon sitting in the living room, drinking coffee from an exotic-looking service, which was out of keeping with the rest of the house, all neat and tidy and modern and very beige. The only other real splash of colour came from the spines of the books on the pine shelves that took up two walls of the room.
As Vanessa poured, she explained, ‘It’s Clarice Cliff. Very of the period. Her designs were all the rage in the early ’30s. It was something that Ivan instilled in me – not the coffee set, I bought this myself, but a love of extraordinary things. A gift or a curse, because once you understood Ivan’s philosophy and aesthetic, you just simply couldn’t bear to have the ordinary around you. It makes you very judgemental. Ivan loved being surrounded by beautiful things.’
Her eyes swept around the room, almost apologizing for the blandness of it. Her assertions would sound immodest, bordering on the boastful, if it wasn’t so damn true, thought Frost. Vanessa, in her late fifties, appeared to have changed little from her 1960s photo shoot. She was in black slacks and a black roll-neck sweater that just seemed to accentuate her swanlike poise, and her blonde hair now had shimmers of silver running through it. She wore no make-up, but you would have needed PC Simms’s now legendary magnifying glass to see the fine lines on her taut alabaster skin.
‘It’s those beautiful things that we need to talk about,’ said Frost. ‘After a search of the property, we found some items that were hidden. And according to our database, they were stolen.’
He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the photos he’d shown DI Anthony Dorking and handed them to Vanessa. She carefully worked her way through them, satisfying Frost that she was getting a good look at each one. When she’d finished, she placed the photos in a neat stack on the coffee table.
‘Do you recognize any of the items?’
‘Never seen them before in my life. There’s quite a lot – where on earth did you find them?’
‘I found them under the floorboards of Grey Gables. There was a trapdoor under the grandfather clock in the living room.’
‘I swear to you, Inspector, I had no idea they were there. I haven’t lived at Grey Gables for well over four years.’
‘The items were stolen over twenty years ago,’ said Frost, ‘in various robberies. How long they’ve been under the floorboards, I couldn’t say.’
‘And neither can I, Detective.’
‘Would you like to take another look at the pictures?’ offered Clarke.
She shook her head. ‘I will swear on a stack of Bibles now that I have never ever seen any of those things in my life.’
Frost wanted to move things on, so he changed tack. He laid out all that Anthony Dorking had told him, from Ivan’s criminal partnership with Conrad Wilde, to Fielding being a secret police informer, to Conrad’s eventual arrest and the dissolution of their felonious enterprise. When he’d finished, she seemed to be digesting the information with a slight pursing of her lips and an agreeable murmur of accord. She seemed neither shocked by what she had just heard nor indeed familiar with it. She just sat there, perfectly poised and amiably unfazed.
It was only after a prompt as to whether she knew Wilde that she said, ‘Conrad Wilde? I don’t suppose that’s the kind of name you easily forget.’
‘So you never met anyone by that name, were never introduced to him, however fleetingly?’
She laughed, and shook her head like it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. ‘Ivan was very successful and knew lots of people. And when we lived in Chelsea there were lots of parties, and naturally I was introduced to lots of people. So I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. What do they say about the ’60s? If you remember them, you weren’t there.’
‘How convenient. But pithy little aphorisms don’t pass for facts in police work. And even through the haze of all the funny cigarettes, you just said you wouldn’t forget a name like that.’
‘Then that answers your question: I never met him or heard of him. Ivan always kept his business dealings away from me, and from Sally.’ She gave an apologetic shrug. ‘Would anyone like any more coffee?’
As Frost and Clarke finished their drinks, he considered Vanessa’s story. Plausible? Up to a point. Whilst it may have been the swinging ’60s, and bras were being burnt, Ivan could have been old-fashioned enough not to divulge his business affairs to her. Especially the more dangerous elements. And she was incurious enough not to ask, to just enjoy the glamorous life that he was providing for her. As Frost had first noted, and Anthony Dorking had pointed out, the art and antiques trade was always murky, and if Ivan had erred into out-and-out criminality, then Vanessa wasn’t too shocked. But she remained innocent to it. That was her story, and she was sticking to it. And for now, Frost couldn’t see a way of disproving it.
Frost and Clarke thanked her for her time and got up to leave, intoning the customary formula that they would be in touch. But before they’d made it to the living-room door, Frost spun around.
‘One last thing: your daughter noted that the only item missing from the house was a painting.’
‘Oh God, which one? I know we can’t touch anything in the house until you’ve concluded your investigation, but really, Inspector, I do worry that with the house being empty someone might—’
Clarke calmed her. ‘It’s OK, Mrs Fielding, nothing of any value was taken. Just the opposite, in fact. It was in Sally’s old room, and it was rather on the ugly side, she said. Not any of the ones on the sitting-room wall.’
Just then, Stephen Parker gave a little knock on the glass panel of the door and entered the room. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were finished.’
Frost reckoned he’d probably been stood by the stairs earwigging, as he’d left the door ajar earlier. Which was perfectly natural and hardly against the law, but Frost still fixed the lecturer with a hard stare.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know of any such painting,’ Vanessa said.
Clarke expanded, ‘Sally said there were three of them. Ivan gave one to Sally and one to you? Your dau
ghter thought he found them on the street, or in a skip? The one in her old room was of some hills, or something similar.’
‘Here.’
They all turned around to see Stephen Parker holding up a painting. It was about eighteen inches by twenty. He’d managed to slip out of and back into the room without being noticed, which struck Frost as very achievable in someone so bland.
Parker said, ‘It’s kept under the stairs. Pretty horrible … I’m sure you’ll all agree.’
Vanessa’s expression changed from innocent bemusement to sour contempt. ‘Oh, yes. Those pictures. I’d completely forgotten about them.’ She turned to her boyfriend. ‘I thought you were going to throw it out,’ she said, looking annoyed at Parker for not doing so. ‘If you’d like it, Mr Frost, or you, Miss Clarke, you’re more than welcome to it.’
Frost and Clarke had their faces scrunched up in embarrassment, caught in the unforgiving glare of the picture’s artistic ineptitude. It was eye-achingly awful. It featured what could have been a hill, rendered in thick globs of glossy green oil paint; some long brown vertical strokes suggested trees; there was a streaky blue sky and some white splodges for clouds. If the missing painting was similar, Sally Fielding was right in her description: it looked like the daub of a child. The two detectives didn’t take up Vanessa’s offer.
Parker rested the painting against the wall. ‘Part of a triptych, I believe.’
‘Well, there were three of them,’ said Vanessa dismissively. ‘I think that’s a slightly grandiose term. I believe a triptych is three paintings that can be hung separately and still look good. This looks like one painting has been cut into three parts. It’s just … ugly and meaningless.’
‘Why would anyone steal the one from Sally’s old room?’ asked Parker.
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘You said, Sally reported it stolen.’
Frost smiled – nicked – Parker had obviously been eavesdropping. ‘No. Not quite. She just noticed that it was missing from the house. Sally assumed that Ivan must have thrown it out. We just thought we’d let you know.’
‘And following Ivan’s lead, that’s exactly what I shall do to this one, throw it out,’ announced Vanessa.