Indelible

by Peter Helton

‘No, smaller car,’ said Annis from the window. ‘It’s a Skoda and it’s Needham’s Airdale terrier and some other guy.’

  I stood by the window with my cup of coffee and watched. I recognized bad news when I saw it; now it rolled into the yard with that slightly exaggerated, arrogant speed of a DI on a mission. DI Reid got out and strode towards the front door, followed closely by a DS whose polyester suit I recognized from a previous encounter.

  ‘They look very sure of themselves,’ Annis observed.

  ‘Never more so than when they’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘There’s always the Norton in the sitting room. You could be out the verandah doors and away over the fields before they’ve found their running shoes.’

  ‘Nah, Steve McQueen never made it either.’

  The door knocker was being worked enthusiastically. I went back to the breakfast table and attacked my boiled egg. It was perfect; soft but not too runny. I could hear Annis stalling with ‘I’ll see if he’s in, shall I?’, but Reid was having none of it and barged right through. He and his sergeant crowded into the kitchen. When the DS had put on his styling mousse that morning he had obviously overestimated the amount of hair he possessed; it looked thin, greasy and rigid and showed his grey scalp through the gunked-up strands. DI Reid was his usual beige-and-brown self; I was always tempted to call him ‘Sandy’ but this morning I didn’t get a chance.

  ‘Christopher Honeysett, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder. You don’t have to say anything but …’ He rattled down the whole caution.

  Christopher! No one had called me polysyllabically since school. ‘The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast,’ I quoted and plunged the spoon into my egg.

  ‘Cuff him,’ Reid told his sergeant.

  There was silence in the car on the way to Manvers Street nick; there’s no point in arguing with them once they’ve arrested you. I sat quietly in the back while Reid drove and the sergeant used a crumbling tissue to wipe at the egg-yolk stains on his suit.

  As soon as you get to a police station, time slows down. Everyone in there is horribly overworked, but since there are interminable regulations governing even the slightest activity, everyone acts as though they have all the time in the world. There are laws about wasting police time but none at all about wasting civilians’ time. Being processed at Manvers Street police station makes the check-in for your El Al flight to Tel Aviv look casual. They also manage to be irritatingly evasive when answering simple questions like ‘Where the hell is Needham?’ or ‘Are you out of your tiny mind?’ By the time they parked me in Interview Room Two – that’s the one with the unnerving stain on the wall – my breakfast had worn off and my patience thin.

  ‘Calm down; it’s all procedure,’ Needham said when he eventually got round to showing up with a file, my drawing kit inside a huge evidence bag and the polyester sergeant by his side. I looked hungrily at the faded egg stains on his suit. ‘Let’s have three coffees here,’ Needham said to the constable guarding the door.

  ‘Aha, the torture begins,’ I said.

  ‘I think we can better your last effort; we have a snazzy new coffee machine. Right, enough beverage chat.’ He went serious and scrabbled the plastic off a couple of new cassette tapes to load into the recorder.

  ‘You’re still using cassette tapes but you have a snazzy coffee maker. Wise use of resources.’

  ‘Both for your benefit. No one can interfere with a tape recording; it would instantly show up. Nobody trusts digital stuff, it’s too easily altered.’ He pressed the record button, rattled down the date and time, his own name and that of the DS, I forget what it was. When the PC entered the room with our coffees he told the tape that as well; nothing if not thorough. He informed the tape that I had refused the aid of a duty solicitor – I was reserving judgement on whether to call on my ‘own’ solicitor since she charged by the second and I earned by the hour. Needham dumped UHT milk into his beaker, reached in his pocket for his sweetener and dropped a hailstorm into it, after which he tried to mix it all up with a little plastic stirrer that was two millimetres higher than the level of coffee in his beaker. ‘You haven’t asked me why you are here, so presumably you know.’

  ‘Well, let me guess. I found the unconscious Rachel Eade and you somehow think I had something to do with her demise, though why I wouldn’t have made sure of her before calling the ambulance must have given you pause for thought. Come on, Mike, you know I didn’t do it. You know me.’

  ‘While you are under caution it is Superintendent Needham. And yes, I have known you for a number of years, Mr Honeysett, but that has nothing at all to do with this line of questioning. If I thought it did, I would let someone else lead this investigation since you are the main suspect.’

  ‘Rubbish. You don’t believe for one minute I could have killed her.’ His stony visage made me reach for the coffee. It wasn’t real but drinkable.

  ‘I am showing Mr Honeysett exhibit two, a black, cloth-bound book, size eight by eleven inches. Do you recognize this as yours?’

  ‘Looks like mine.’

  ‘It came from this bag, exhibit three.’ He held up my sketch bag, still wrapped in plastic and labelled. ‘Which, at the time when officers arrived at the scene of Rachel Eade’s electrocution, you claimed to be yours.’

  ‘What happened to exhibit one?’ I asked, getting worried.

  ‘I am now opening the sketchbook and showing Mr Honeysett some of the drawings inside. Drawings of trees and some kind of stone structure. Did you make these drawings?’

  ‘I did. Can you get arrested for it? Your drawings are rubbish, ergo you must have killed Rachel Eade? You should have seen her drawings; they really were crap.’ The DS scribbled something on his notepad as though I had just said something deeply significant.

  ‘Yes, witnesses have mentioned your hostility towards Rachel Eade,’ Needham continued.

  ‘Hostility? Me? I hardly knew the woman. And what witnesses?’

  ‘A Mr Howard and his son. They delivered the sheep and pen that Eade rented from them to Batcombe House. According to their statement, you and Dawn Fowling got into an argument with Mrs Eade.’

  ‘I don’t remember arguing with her. Dawn had a bit of a ding-dong with her. Rachel was quite scathing about Dawn’s work.’

  ‘Was she scathing about yours?’

  ‘I don’t think she knows my work.’

  ‘You are being evasive. Was she scathing about your work? Did she say anything provocative about your painting? I hear you have recently changed styles.’

  My, he was thorough. ‘Yes, I have recently changed styles …’

  ‘And are therefore a bit touchy about criticism of it.’

  ‘She didn’t criticise it. And even so. Running down another artist’s work is hardly enough to make you feel murderous towards them. No one is that touchy. There wouldn’t be an artist left alive.’

  ‘I am now showing Mr Honeysett the chronologically most recent drawing in his sketchbook.’ He turned the page and pushed the book towards me. ‘Then how do you explain this?’

  I had reached for my coffee but set it down again very slowly. The drawing on this page I had never seen before. It was very competent and showed part of the sheep pen. The sheep were standing huddled in one corner and in the foreground lay a figure that was clearly Rachel, competently drawn, easily recognizable. She was wearing a dress I recognized and she looked dead, her eyes wide open. Just visible at the edge of the drawing were the clips that had been attached to the wires, delivering the lethal current.

  ‘How did that get into my sketchbook?’

  ‘Like all the others did. You drew it.’

  ‘I’ve never seen this drawing before. And look, Rachel wasn’t wearing a dress. She was wearing that a couple of days earlier, though.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me you did not draw this?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t draw this. Do you think I found her body and stopped to do a drawing?’

  ‘No,
’ said the polyester sergeant, ‘we think you drew this the day before you say you found her unconscious. At least that’s what the date suggests. It’s there on the side of the wooden post. That’s the day before Rachel’s death.’

  I turned the drawing sideways; he was right. ‘Well that proves it’s not my drawing. I never bother with the date.’

  Needham took the book off me again. ‘Nonsense, all your drawings are dated.’ He turned back the pages and pointed out the dates, hidden on branches of trees or among the foliage of ferns, a date had been inserted, and the dates were correct.

  I snatched the book from his hands and squinted at the numbers. ‘It’s not my handwriting. It’s very close, it looks like mine, but it isn’t. The drawing too is similar to my style. Someone’s made an effort to make it look like it’s mine. And put all the dates there in my handwriting.’ Then I saw it. The butterfly symbol that had been carved into the tree I was drawing had also been drawn on to the tree I had drawn. If you follow me. ‘Here, do you see that?’ I turned the book round and tapped it. ‘It’s some kind of symbol I keep seeing and I did not draw that bit either. Someone added it to the tree recently and also added it to this drawing, which I made before the symbol appeared on the tree.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It looks like a stylized butterfly to me. And I saw the same thing scratched into Landacker’s gate at his house.’ I now had to launch into a lengthy explanation on who Landacker was and what connected him to the college.

  Needham took his time thinking it all over. ‘How would this hypothetical person who did all that have gained access to your sketchbook?’

  ‘Easily, it’s in my bag, the bag is in the studio, the studio is always unlocked. Anyone could have taken it and drawn in it. Come to think of it, I did notice yesterday that it had been taken out and put back in upside down.’

  The detective sergeant came to life again. ‘“Come to think of it”? Very convincing. And you didn’t think anything of it at the time, naturally.’

  ‘Who asked your opinion?’ I was beginning to get angry because I was beginning to get scared. Someone had done a convincing job on this sketchbook. ‘Did you check this for fingerprints?’ I asked Needham.

  ‘We have. There were none on the cover, which is why I’m allowing you to handle it. There were only yours on any of the pages inside the book.’

  ‘None on the cover? How do you explain that? Why wouldn’t there be any on the cover?’

  The sergeant looked dismissive. ‘Because you spilled something on it and cleaned it? Who knows?’

  Needham took the book from me and slid it back into the evidence bag. ‘It had no fingerprints on it because it was cleaned and it was cleaned because whoever took your sketchbook was not wearing gloves when they took it and then realized they had left prints on it. It has been wiped with some sort of kitchen cleaner. Someone is trying to set you up, Chris, and making a pretty good job of it.’

  ‘Then you do believe that I had nothing to do with it?’

  ‘My sergeant here doesn’t believe a word you say. Believe is neither here nor there. What I believe doesn’t outweigh what we found in this sketchbook. I certainly can’t tell the difference between the drawing of the murder victim and the rest of the drawings. They look like they are of one hand, Chris. Yes, I believe you, but that’s not enough to get you off the suspect list.’

  ‘The drawing at least proves one thing,’ I said, breathing a little easier. ‘The drawing was done before the event. Whoever drew it did it from memory and showed her in the dress she wore the last time she was up at Batcombe. In the drawing she is dead. So it was definitely planned. It was murder. And since I didn’t do it, that means the murderer is still up there.’

  And as Alex had pointed out in Kroog’s kitchen: we didn’t know if the killer’s hatred confined itself to Rachel Eade.

  The sun came out just in time to greet my exit from Manvers Street police station where I lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and broke into a lung-emptying cough. I staggered out of the car park, dropped my cigarette and trod on it. Then I chucked the remaining pack into a nearby bin. There – I had stopped smoking.

  All you need to stop smoking is to stop doing it.

  I had been offered a lift home but I declined; one ride in a police car is much like any other and the air fresheners they use instead of opening the windows give me a headache. Quite apart from that I needed to replace all my drawing gear; it appeared it was safe to release me back into the community but my entire sketching equipment – sketchbook, pens, paints, the lot – remained in custody. Ah well, buying more art materials could hardly be described as hardship, the more the better. Since the stuff doesn’t go off it makes sense to stock up – it’s not going to get any cheaper. At Harris & Son in Green Street I explained my predicament to Ronny, a painter who sometimes moonlights as a shop assistant there. She found me a complete kit from all four corners of the shop. Half an hour later and I had remortgaged my house for a bijou watercolour kit with twelve colours, two retractable travel brushes to go with it, watercolour sketchbook, another sketchbook (can’t have too many), dip pen, Indian ink, Chinese ink, a fistful of watercolour pencils, a selection of waterproof fine liners, assorted pencils of various grades, a craft knife and a collapsible water pot that looked like a Chinese lantern. Always wanted one of those.

  Since Ronny had given me a ten per cent discount, I somehow imagined I had saved enough money to take a taxi home. ‘There’s me worrying about you languishing in a cell,’ Annis said, ‘and you take a taxi home via a paint warehouse. How much did that lot cost?’

  ‘Let’s just say my discount paid for the cab.’

  ‘So that’s what earning regular money does to you.’

  No one had called from the college, so presumably no one was missing me yet. Plenty of time to have lunch then. It was after two o’clock by the time I rolled through the Batcombe House gates, which were wide open again, though Anne was there doing her best to shut them even as I drove past her. There were still police cars in front of the house.

  ‘Mr Honeysett!’ Anne summoned me. I wandered over, carrying my new sketching gear in an old shoulder bag, itching to get away into the woods. ‘The police gave me a lecture on security yesterday and they are still here quizzing everybody, and these bloody gates are standing wide open and I can’t get them shut. Kindly deal with them, will you? I have too many other things to do.’ She stomped off, leaving me to ‘deal with them’. I had no more luck than her: first one leaf, then the other failed to budge.

  A student ambled past. ‘I wouldn’t bother if I were you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, thank you for the advice.’

  ‘Suit yourself. But rumour has it someone welded them solid.’

  ‘Oh good, at least that makes me feel less of a wimp.’

  At the studio a half-naked Petronela greeted me with a quick smile without disturbing her pose, Hufnagel greeted me with a grunt and Dawn greeted me with: ‘A few students came in, wondering where you were.’

  ‘Nice to be missed. I was going to talk to them about their assignments this morning but was held up. I’ll try and round them up now.’

  ‘They are all a bit jittery about Rachel’s death. They’re now saying it was murder. They had me in the staff room twice, going on about how I hated her. There’s a difference between hating an arrogant dilettante and killing someone, I kept telling them. But that detective inspector has cloth ears. Do you think it was murder?’

  Hufnagel spoke without taking his eye off his canvas. ‘Yes, Honeysett, you’re supposed to be a detective – give us your considered opinion. Was it murder and, if so, who dunnit?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But whoever did it is pretty damn good at drawing.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ asked Kurt, but I walked out, leaving the remark to hang there.

  With us old folks hogging one painting studio (and the only life model), Studio Two was crammed with painters and the drawing studio had been in
vaded too. Neither pleased Ben Creeling, who cornered me as soon as I walked in. ‘I have been working on a series of drawings of Petronela and had planned a painting of her, and now that Huffniggle is claiming her all for himself.’

  ‘I know, the cheeky sod,’ I said. This seemed to cheer Ben somewhat but I had not much else to offer him. ‘You’ll be kept quite busy with your next assignment and Mr Hufnagel will have finished with Petronela in a week or so.’

  ‘A week!’

  I left him steaming. I was pretty sure he had developed a more than purely artistic interest in the model and this was one lesson every painter has to learn early on: you can’t have everything you draw.

  ‘Right. You’ve all been drawing out there, on location, and some of your drawings were very good indeed. I now want you to go out there and paint the same locale. No paintings bigger than, say, twenty-two inches. Use your favourite medium and have a finished painting around this time the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘The day after tomorrow!’ came the chorus.

  ‘When Van Gogh got going he produced at least one painting a day. Plus sketches and drawings. He also illustrated his letters and he didn’t have a Mrs Washbrook to cook for him. So there’s no reason why you can’t paint a small canvas in two days. Of course those who didn’t walk more than twenty paces from the college will be at a slight advantage, but I expect might soon wish they had drawn somewhere more interesting.’

  ‘What if it rains?’ came the question.

  ‘Wear a hat.’

  Naturally I was just putting it on. I had never painted in the rain in my life but I was determined to go out into the woods, whatever the weather, and do my drawings so that at last I could get properly going on my ambitious canvas. I realized, of course, that I had competent competition in Hiroshi, who was also painting a woodland scene, though minus the kiln, but I could catch up while he was busy with his assignment, I thought. When I’d finished my pep talk, Hiroshi came over.

  ‘I have been busy drawing for my large canvas. I saw you too have been going into the woods. Is it permitted to see your sketchbook?’