by Peter Helton
Eventually I did stumble across the clearing by sheer luck and set up shop, unpacked my drawing materials and made myself comfortable on the packsack that turned into a stool. Once I started work I found concentrating on my drawing, something that usually came so naturally to me, hard to do. It would have been easy to dismiss the changing of the arrows as a student prank. Which it probably was. Yet in order for someone to change them they would have to have known about them in the first place, and that meant someone had been watching me. Even now, as I tried to render the contrast between the dry appearance of oak bark and a fleshy hart’s tongue fern in the shadow of the kiln, I kept feeling that I was being stared at and kept looking around at every little woodland noise. And who was the naked, wild-haired figure running about? A student? A local? And should I be worrying about any of this?
Having finished my drawing, I packed up and walked back slowly. Every so often I looked back over my shoulder to commit the view to memory so that I would find it again without the aid of artificial landmarks. Hansel and Gretel, of course, had dropped pebbles to find their way back, which had long convinced me that the brothers Grimm had never actually seen a forest, let alone been inside one.
Back in Studio One I found that Dawn’s observation of the heavens had not only yielded fruit but she also had an audience in the form of Phoebe, who watched her every move as she produced delicate skeins of greys, blues and whites in a large, wetly bulging sketchbook. The cigarette in the corner of her mouth had gone out; the no-smoking signs had mysteriously disappeared. Both Dawn and Phoebe were displaying their laminated picture IDs on their chests. ‘There’s yours on the stool. Wear it visibly at all times,’ Dawn said, mimicking Anne’s voice, ‘or Anne will come and rugby tackle you.’
I stuck mine to my jumper upside down, feeling more like a rebellious schoolboy than a tutor. I worked on my painting for a couple of hours, distracted by thinking about getting lost in the wood, irritated by Dawn and Phoebe’s chat and aware that I ought to go and find out who it was that could look forward to breakfast in bed for a month. And just like a schoolboy I was almost glad when it was time to leave.
Martin Byers looked awful in the passport photo his wife had furnished me with, but marginally better in real life. I was ready to hate him anyway if he was cheating on his pink family in Southampton. There was nothing pink about Martin, however. His hair was a glossy black; he had a five o’clock shadow that was perfectly on time and he wore what his employer probably called ‘smart casual’: black trousers and shoes, a dark blue shirt, no tie and a black jacket he was now zipping up, for it was getting noticeably cooler in the evenings now. He left the Mantis building in tandem with another man, similarly dressed but taller and fairer. I was stuck in my car a hundred yards down the road, with two wheels on a double yellow and the other on the pavement, watching them through binoculars as they walked side by side into the car park. I had hoped to find out what kind of car Martin Byers drove but was disappointed; he dropped into the passenger seat of his companion’s Audi. They sat for an annoying five minutes while the driver talked on his mobile and a traffic warden made his eager way towards me from the other side of the road. The Audi moved just in time to disappoint the traffic warden. I started the engine and followed. The blue Audi joined the processional traffic up towards Bear Flat, with me a few car lengths behind. There is always a danger of losing your prey in slow-moving traffic if the car in front decides to turn off and it takes you several minutes to reach the same side street, but things eased up once we had passed The Bear pub. Here the Audi turned immediately off into Bloomfield, slowed and then turned left into St Luke’s Road. I crept up to the turn-off and could see they were getting ready to park. I got out to walk to the opposite corner, where I hid in the entrance to the grounds of St Luke’s church. St Luke’s Road was quiet and leafy, residents’ parking only. Byers and his driver walked to a Victorian semi with sugar-icing gables and a yellow tricycle on the front lawn. The door was opened by a dark-haired woman in a green apron before they even reached it and they disappeared inside. Byers, presumably, was staying for supper at a colleague’s. I had got no further and would have to do it all again tomorrow. Or perhaps some other time.
TWELVE
‘Pilfering?’ Kroog dismissed it with a wave of her unlit pipe. ‘We get that from time to time.’
I always found that a couple of croissants in the morning wear off quickly, which is why I found myself in the refectory this morning, loading my tray with jam, a boiled egg and coffee and popping some bread into the big toaster.
Mrs Washbrook was insistent. ‘I know, but recently it’s been worse. It happens nearly every day. Or night, I should say.’
‘Are they walking off with legs of lamb?’ Kroog asked.
‘Not yet. It’s bread, cheese, slices of ham. And leftovers,’ she admitted.
‘Leftovers?’
‘Leftovers.’
‘That suggests it’s an admirer of your cooking. You should feel flattered.’
‘Well, I don’t. I never really minded before: kids get hungry late at night and they have no morals, so they climb through a window into the house and pilfer. But I have a budget and Anne Birtwhistle is demanding I balance it. That I keep accounts. And pilfering doesn’t help.’
‘Ah, that’s where the trouble lies.’
‘Oh, yes, and more is to come, I am sure. Until now I was given money and spent it as I saw fit. I’m here to feed the college, you know? Not to run a business or make a profit, after all. But Miss Birtwhistle has other ideas, I’m afraid.’ She turned to me. ‘You’re a private detective, I’m told. Why don’t you do something and try and find out who sneaks in here each night to make sandwiches?’
Here we go again. This never happens to anyone else. If you’re a structural engineer, no one will ask you to design a bridge while you wait for your toast to pop, but if you’re a private detective, nowhere is safe. ‘Can’t you make the place more secure?’ I asked. ‘How do they get in?’
‘Same way you did. They walked in. There’s no door, you just come down the stairs and there you are, help yourself. I can’t throw chains around everything, it’s ridiculous.’ Fortunately this is when my toast popped up and Mrs Washbrook was wanted elsewhere.
When I got into the studio the no-smoking signs had reappeared. ‘Super-glued straight to the wall,’ Dawn said. ‘Unmovable.’ She was busy painting over the one on the wall beside her easel. It was a study of dark clouds.
‘I’m reliably informed that only idiots smoke,’ I said with a sigh, realizing that I’d have to go through all the irritating business of giving up again. ‘Oh, look, Rachel is back. And you were right, she did bring a little man with her to carry her things. No, I lie, two little men.’ Dawn stopped what she was doing and together we stood by the window and watched Rachel leading the way as two rural types, flat-capped father and bare-headed son by the looks of it, carried what appeared to be giant jigsaw pieces cut from plywood. They dumped their load on the lawn, walked off and soon returned with more things to drop on the grass. Rachel set them to work, directing them here and there, flapping her arms, an iPad in one hand, her mobile in the other.
‘She brought her masterplan,’ commented Dawn. ‘Cobbled together on her iPad over breakfast with a “conceptual sculpture app” no doubt. I bet she didn’t spend more time on it than it took to eat her organic muesli. Let’s see what the airhead is up to. Should be good for a laugh.’ She opened the French windows and strolled out. ‘Lovely to see a sculptor with a hands-on approach!’ she called as she strutted over. ‘Are your servants part of the exhibit?’ Rachel chose to ignore her but the older one of her helpers stopped to look at us, pushed his flat cap back on his head and scratched his scalp with a thumbnail. ‘Have you decided not to use sheep but serfs instead?’
‘Don’t mind her,’ Rachel said airily to her helpers. ‘It’s only one of the resident nutters and her retinue.’ I looked over my shoulder and saw that Phoebe had followed us out.
‘Have another look at the image,’ Rachel said to the man in the flat cap in a voice that implied she thought he was dim-witted. She held her iPad up for him to see. It had a shakily drawn diagram on it.
‘Still can’t draw a straight line, I see,’ Dawn said. She turned to me. ‘I’m sure there’s an app to improve useless drawings.’
‘There is,’ I chipped in. ‘It’s a free app, too. It’s called “practice”.’ I hadn’t really planned to get drawn in to this spat but it simply slipped out.
What the two men were in fact installing, once the large plywood shapes had gone on to the grass, was an electrified sheep pen in the shape of a five-pointed star, consisting of nothing more than a few stakes in the ground supporting three strands of wire that were connected to an energizer and a twelve-volt battery. There was a small solar panel to keep the battery topped up.
Even Dawn got bored watching it being set up and, having temporarily run out of bitchy comments, turned to go back to her painting.
That was the moment Rachel had been waiting for. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said distractedly. ‘By sheer coincidence it seems that we are now renting the garage you used to try and paint in. My husband’s offices are just around the corner, you see, and he really didn’t like leaving his Lexus parked in the street, so close to the council flats. Small world, isn’t it?’
‘Isn’t it just? And so crowded,’ Dawn managed, but I could tell it had hit home. Back in the studio she was subdued and for a while stood staring blankly at her canvas. Phoebe had followed us back inside but, perhaps intimidated by Dawn’s mood, hung around by the French windows.
‘Don’t you have a project you could be getting on with?’ I asked her. She squeezed out of the door without a word. Outside, the finishing touches were being put to Rachel’s pen by the younger man. A few minutes later the older man arrived with two fluffy sheep, led reluctantly on a rope. ‘The sheep are here,’ I said. ‘And they look freshly laundered.’
Dawn turned around and stood by her canvas, arms folded in front of her chest. She was staring down at the floorboards. ‘A Lexus. Only a complete non-entity would buy a Lexus anyway.’
‘Let it go, Dawn. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence.’
‘I don’t think so. I think it’s karma.’
After many years of living in the valley I knew what sheep normally looked like and the two Rachel had bought, borrowed or rented for her ‘piece’ had definitely been washed, bleached, clipped and fluffed. Sheep only ever looked like that five minutes before they were to be judged at an agricultural show. They were duly shut up in the electrified star so they could munch a deeply significant pattern into the grass. Rachel took several pictures on her mobile, then wafted off towards the car park.
‘How about I make us some coffees?’ I suggested. Dawn grunted. ‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’
Only Catherine ever called it the Senior Common Room; to the rest it was the staff room. I found her in a foul mood at the kettle. ‘First this fifty pence a mug business, now someone’s pinched the entire packet of biscuits I put out there not an hour ago. Gone, disappeared, not a crumb left behind.’
‘Nice biscuits?’
‘Chocolate chip.’
‘Tragic.’
Dawn’s mood remained dark. The next morning she looked gloomy and tired, as though after a heavy night’s drinking, and her chatter had been replaced by monosyllabic answers and grunts. If her easy chatter had been distracting me before, her brooding depression in the corner was even more off-putting. When just after lunch Rachel came to inspect the progress of her sheepish piece, Dawn stood like Nosferatu by the window, staring out at her, snorting and wreathing herself in smoke. There was no way I’d ever give up smoking while this went on, with Kroog and Alex in a permanent tobacco cloud and Dawn lighting up twice an hour, more often if she was agitated. With the typical self-delusion of the addict I was now smoking Extra Lights, so at least I could claim not to be enjoying it, once the inevitable confrontation with Anne arrived. That Anne had so far avoided having a major anti-smoking confrontation with Kroog, who I’m sure even puffed her pipe in the bath, made me think that Kroog continued to successfully give her the slip.
But I was wrong. I was taking a stroll in the warm sun after lunch when I bumped into Kroog as she exited the ceramics department via the conservatory, closely shadowed by her guardian angel. She was fuming, and this time she needed no tobacco. ‘As though it isn’t enough that this airhead Rachel gets invited to do her art charade here’ – at this she pointed the stem of her pipe at me as though it was all my doing – ‘now I have to listen to John’s demented daughter, telling me that,’ she stabbed her pipe in the direction of the sheep pen, ‘is the kind of sculpture we should be teaching at this college! And while I’m telling her in no uncertain terms that that has nothing to do with sculpture, or even art, but is merely an illustration of shoddy thinking and a pile of sheep dip …’ Kroog needed the rest of her breath for a grumbling cough that seemed to last for an awfully long time. Alex produced a wad of tissues from her jacket pocket, which Kroog accepted with a nod. When finally she had recovered she looked into the black bowl of her pipe, nodded and stuffed the thing into the pocket of her waistcoat. ‘That’s when I found out why she liked that sort of thing. Because it’s cheap. That’s what she said. She’s been looking at the bills and she thinks we’re using too much electricity in the sculpture department.’ Kroog gave me a heaven-help-us look. ‘Presumably we’re to make sculpture from egg cartons and loo roll cores now.’ She stormed off towards the sculpture sheds. ‘I’ll show her “too much electricity”!’ Alex hesitated for a moment, as if wanting to say something to me, but changed her mind and rushed after her mentor.
That explained the note by the kettle, then; Anne was on a drive to make savings around the place, and sculpture, at least the kind of which Lizzie Kroog approved, used cosmic amounts of energy, mostly through the use of power tools. So did kilns and kettles. Painting, for the moment, looked safe.
Appropriately, the sun had gone in and a cool wind had sprung up. I walked on, past the conservatory, where I could see Dan was giving a demonstration that looked more like chemistry than pottery. Among the rapt students was Abbi, the pottering girl I had met on my first day. She looked up as I passed and gave a small wave. My mobile chimed: it was Annis.
‘Where are you, hon?’
‘At work, why?’ It felt strange even to say it, let alone do it.
‘I just had a weird phone call. From Hufnagel. He was in a phone box somewhere and wanted to talk to you. Something’s happened but he ran out of money almost immediately and the pips went. He sounded pretty desperate and wants you to go out there. Round his place. Can you do it? He sounded like he was in a right state.’
‘Drunk?’
‘He didn’t sound drunk to me. Just upset.’
As I drove out towards Stanton Drew I contemplated what miserable specimens most oil painters really were. Perhaps it was breathing all those turpentine fumes; watercolourists seemed to be a much sunnier bunch on the whole. For a start they didn’t have to lug seven tons of equipment across their lives. And who had ever heard of a tortured watercolour artist?
While I certainly didn’t wish Hufnagel ill, I still sincerely hoped that this emergency was more than just having run out of coffee and bin liners. When I parked at Honeysuckle House I could see that his car was there but had a crack in the windscreen. He had better not have called me out here for that, either. When I squeaked open the little wooden gate I could see that the rubbish was still around but had been rationalized into black bin liners, which had already been savaged again by the wildlife. I stepped over the escaped bits of gunk and walked towards the back door. It was wide open. I could immediately see that some sort of emergency was indeed in progress The budgie cage was lying on its side in the corridor and looked as though it had been kicked. I briefly wondered whether whoever had kicked it had known the budgie inside was fake. There was other debris lying about a
nd it seemed to get worse further along. I was just about to step inside when I heard a subdued call from the back of the house.
I found Hufnagel in the garden. He was in his shirtsleeves, perched like a bird on one of the two broken fridge freezers, his arms wrapped around his knees, staring at the ground. His hair was even wilder than usual; his hands were covered in red paint. He looked very much like a man who was suffering a breakdown. I managed to resist the urge to put my arms around him, but I stood close, looked into his eyes. He had been crying.
‘It’s all smashed. The whole place. The studio. And Sophie.’ He nodded his head towards the studio annex. ‘They attacked Sophie,’ Kurt said with a voice that sounded like he had been hollowed out.
I suddenly felt more than just uneasy. ‘Where is she?’
‘She’s inside.’
I left him perched there and rushed to the house. The kitchen was a complete shambles, but that was normal. Past the kitchen door, however, the debris on the floor was of broken crockery mixed with torn books and papers. I kicked a dented lampshade out of the way. It got worse near the studio, and when I stepped through the wide-open studio door I saw that he had been only too right; it was indeed all smashed up. Someone had gone to town on it. Everything that could be broken lay broken on the floor: glass vases, ceramic jugs, decorative boxes, stools, plant stands and plant pots had been smashed on the floor or thrown against the walls. Even the plants had been mangled. The easels lay splintered. The sofa slashed, the hangings shredded. Every single painting in the room had been cut to ribbons with a knife.