Indelible

by Peter Helton

  ‘Whatever is the cheapest one the Dementor can find. But I really think it ought to be the painting students who paint it.’

  ‘Sorry, my lot are too busy,’ I said. ‘Besides, it definitely wasn’t a painter who welded the hinges solid.’

  She acknowledged this with a wry smile and went back to work. I saw that while there was still a police car parked by the entrance, Rachel’s sheep pen and the incident tape had disappeared from the lawns. Hufnagel and Dawn were both still working in the studio, despite the lateness of the afternoon. It was getting dark noticeably earlier now and there was hardly any point in me starting work this late. There was strip lighting, of course, but fluorescent light distorts your sense of colour and is pretty useless for painting by.

  ‘I only really came to tell you why I wasn’t here all day.’ I quickly sketched the recent events for them.

  ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, I’m sure,’ said Kurt. I wasn’t sure if he meant me or Landacker and didn’t ask. He had made a lot of progress on his canvas and the arrow was now back in place. He was just letting Petronela go. Looking at his superb brushwork, I could not help noticing that, like Modigliani, he had lavished most of his artistic attention on his model’s perfect breasts.

  Dawn was more thoughtful. ‘OK, my studio is gone. Kurt here first had his place broken into, then his studio trashed soon after. Landacker had his studio broken into and now someone tried to set fire to it. How safe is your studio?’

  ‘It’s a hundred-year-old barn on top of the meadow behind my house.’

  ‘Wow, listed?’

  ‘No, listing. Of no architectural value whatsoever. Of course, I’m not working there at the moment. But I did find the tag on the studio door, and that worries me.’

  ‘I got one on my car,’ said Hufnagel.

  ‘Yeah, I saw.’

  ‘Did Rachel have a studio somewhere?’ he asked.

  ‘No. But she had a garage door,’ I said. After that we all sat gloomily in the darkening studio for a while, with our private gloomy thoughts.

  It was beginning to fall into place but in no shape I could recognize. ‘I’m going home,’ I said eventually. ‘It’s too late for me to do any work.’

  ‘No need to anyway,’ said Hufnagel, who had a bottle of wine open and was drinking from the neck. ‘Your phantom painter has done a bit more.’

  I swung around. So far I had paid little attention to my own painting, not having worked on it today. I skidded to a halt in front of it. He was right. It wasn’t much, but a beautiful slant of sunlight was now falling across the top of the old kiln where before it had only been sketched in. ‘How about yours?’ I asked Hufnagel. He pointed meaningfully with the top of his wine bottle across the studio at Dawn.

  ‘Yup,’ she admitted.

  ‘Added or subtracted?’

  ‘Neither. Just changed it. See that bit here, the edge of the cloud? It’s a deeper shade of pink than I had left it and here on the underside too. It’s rose madder. I don’t even own a rose madder; they must have used yours.’

  ‘How do you feel about it?’ I wanted to know, since I still hadn’t completely made up my mind about my own painting.

  ‘I think it’s presumptuous,’ Dawn said through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Whoever is doing it is basically saying, “I’m a better painter” or “I know better”. And, I mean, how could they be? I saw it. They weren’t there.’ She took a breath to continue but slowly deflated as doubt crossed her face.

  And I knew what she was thinking. ‘They could have been, you know?’

  ‘That’s even more creepy!’ she said with an unhappy frown. ‘That they could have been following me around while I was sketching.’

  ‘Someone was certainly creeping around me a couple of times while I was drawing in the woods.’

  ‘Ugh.’ Dawn got up and rubbed her arms as though she suddenly felt chilly. She looked out at the gathering darkness. ‘I’m packing it in for today.’

  ‘I was just leaving too.’

  ‘You’re not leaving me here by myself,’ Hufnagel said, grabbing his wine bottle and sweeping out of the French windows ahead of us.

  ‘Do you think he actually still has a driving licence?’ Dawn asked.

  Before I closed the door behind us I took one last look at our three paintings, trying to fix them in my mind so I might recognize any mysterious overnight changes, however small. As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered.

  I checked my watch. The only thing I wanted to do now was to go home, crack open some beers, stick a Béla Bartók CD on the hi-fi and wash the last two days out of my system, but it would be chucking-out time at Mantis IT Solutions soon and, however much I wanted to, I couldn’t let Susan Byers down. Whether I would dare send her a bill for my lacklustre performance was another matter. At least I had given Martin Byers plenty of time to forget about the black Citroën that had now returned to the double yellow lines down the road from the Mantis car park. I hadn’t been there five minutes when he emerged from the building, together with his friend. But lo! He didn’t get into the chap’s Audi with him. They parted and Martin got into a big, wine-red Alpha Romeo. He might be working in IT but in his spare time he was a man of taste. Was he going to do anything else today that was noteworthy or was he just going to follow his Audi friend up the hill?

  I followed at a safe distance. It soon became clear that he was neither following his friend nor taking the quickest route to his city-centre flat. Instead we joined the clutch-grinding late-afternoon procession along the Pultney Road, moving ten car lengths at a time, then coming to a stop again. The Citroën DS being ancient, the only in-car entertainment to be had was to twiddle the radio tuning knob and confirm to myself my violent dislike of pop, hip-hop and opera and my complete indifference to all types of sport. The traffic crawled past Sydney Place, where Jane Austen used to live and complain about the ‘noise and bustle’ of the city. I managed to squeeze across the junction without getting separated from my prey, then the traffic began to flow again as the A36 took us past Claverton and out of town.

  Now, the A36 goes to many places but eventually it’ll take you to Southampton, where Martin Byers’ pink family would horribly clash with the colour of his car. I pulled into a layby near the aqueduct and called Susan Byers.

  ‘Is your husband coming to visit you in Southampton?’ I asked her.

  ‘He is. He’s coming to stay for three days, lucky us. He’s got his car back from the menders at last.’

  ‘Oh good. That means I don’t have to follow him all the way down the A36. Could you tell me next time he’s leaving Bath? I just spent half an hour sitting in traffic behind him.’

  ‘At least I know you’re doing your job now,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve found out anything I should know?’

  ‘Not so far. I followed him to his colleague’s house a couple of times, that’s all. Are you sure you want me to continue with this?’

  ‘Yes. I need to know.’

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘She needs to know, she says,’ I complained. ‘But at least he’s away for a couple of days and I don’t have to worry about it. Pass the jam when you’ve achieved the impossible.’

  ‘In a sec.’ Annis was busy challenging conventional physics by piling a Matterhorn of rose-petal conserve on her last little piece of croissant. Why that woman wasn’t twenty stone by now remains a literary mystery. ‘Don’t let it slide,’ I think she said after she had closed her mouth over it. ‘She’s getting more pregnant by the day and you can’t tell her anything.’

  ‘More pregnant? Rubbish. You’re either pregnant or you’re not.’

  ‘I think Susan Byers is all too aware of that.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a go if you’re so concerned?’

  ‘Nope, too busy. Too busy painting and I have a lecture to write.’

  ‘You do?’

  She got up from the breakfast table and picked up her steaming mug of coffee. ‘Kroog talked me into it. She
wants me to give your lot a spiel about my work.’

  ‘You don’t have to write a lecture for that – you can wing it, surely.’

  ‘No thanks. I have sat through too many of those when I was a student. I’m going to do it properly.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Not like me, then, I thought as I drove up to Batcombe House, although I had in fact given the assignment for my students quite a bit of consideration. I was gratified to see, when I walked into Studio Two, that the place was littered with the results. The walls were lined with small paintings, lively ones, colourful ones, dark ones, even monochrome ones. Some students had painted great detail, others had reverted to impressionist idioms, two had rendered their chosen view in abstract colour blocks. I recognized Hiroshi’s canvas without having to ask – it was a painting of a mossy stone, rendered in startling detail. Phoebe’s style had taken on a definite turn towards the pastel clouds of Dawn’s paintings; she had begun to let her hitherto neat hair go wild too.

  One or two students had produced terrible daubs but on the whole the crop looked good and I told them so. This appeared to please most of them but I noticed that Hiroshi seemed beyond such feeble praise and Ben’s face clearly said that any painting that didn’t have Petronela in it was a complete waste of his time.

  ‘OK, this looks really good. Now for the last two parts of your assignment. So far you have drawn your subject from life, then painted your subject from life. I now want you to go and photograph your subject, from the same place where you were when you painted it, and at the same time.’

  ‘What do you mean, the same time?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Well, I can see that some of these paintings have a very bright afternoon feeling to them; there’s a sunset scene over there, and I presume it wasn’t done at the crack of dawn?’ The author of the paintings shook her head in horror. ‘Thought not. And Phoebe will have to wait until dusk.’ Phoebe had painted an uncharacte‌ristically crepuscular painting of Batcombe House, seen through the foliage of a low tree branch. She had exaggerated the menace of the ancient facade to the point of parody. ‘Please do not use your mobiles to take the pictures. They need to be decent quality, as we’ll print them out. Mobile phones have lenses made from broken pop bottles and make up for it with cheap electronic trickery. And they don’t have an optical zoom so as you zoom in you lose quality. If you don’t have a camera, borrow one. There are about half a dozen simple ones in the graphics department for students to use. If you ask Stottie – I mean Catherine – if you ask Catherine nicely she’ll lend you one. And take some care over the photograph, don’t just take one, take many, make sure you have a good photo to work with.’

  After an exhausting twenty-five minute stint of teaching I was ready for a quiet day of drawing and painting, especially since last night I had possibly overdone the beer-and-Bartók therapy.

  The weather had turned autumnal; cooler and cloudier, with sudden showers that washed the last taste of summer out of the shortening days. I stood on the lawn outside Studio Two and lit a cigarette. It was my new smoking rule, with which I was hoping to curb my recently re-acquired twenty-a-day habit – I would only allow myself to smoke outside, whatever the weather. I had invented it that very moment and naturally it wasn’t raining just then. What was happening just then was that inside Batcombe House something heavy crashed to the ground and the door of Studio One flew open, spitting Hufnagel out on to the lawn. Without looking left or right he marched across the grass to the big hollow steel sculpture rusting there and began kicking it all over in a fit of rage. The rusting hulk boomed like a cracked bell and drowned out whatever Hufnagel was shouting. Then he abruptly stopped kicking the thing, turned around and limped back, hands balled into fists by his side, stringing together random swear words until he seemed to run out somewhere near me. But he wasn’t looking at me; he was staring murderously at the house. ‘What’s happened, Kurt?’

  He looked down at his feet. ‘I think I just broke my sodding toe.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. I’d have kicked something softer.’

  ‘If I catch who did it I’ll kick them until they’re mush,’ he said fiercely. ‘With the other foot,’ he added.

  I thought I knew what this was about. ‘Is the arrow gone again?’

  The question turned Hufnagel rigid with anger. ‘The arrow gone? Yeah, it is, actually. But that isn’t the half of it! Go! Go inside and take a look!’

  Reluctantly I stepped into Studio One. I could now see that the noise I had heard a minute ago had been Hufnagel overturning his painting table in a fit of rage. Brushes, paints, bottles of painting mediums everywhere. The smell of spilled turpentine was thick in the air. My eyes met those of Dawn, who was sitting in front of her own painting, smoking a roll-up, her face screwed up with suppressed laughter.

  I approached Hufnagel’s big canvas with caution. Yes, the arrow was gone again. And so was the bow. Petronela’s fists were now both empty, giving her the look of an awkward pugilist whose threat could not be taken entirely seriously since an enigmatic smile played on her face. Yet I was sure this was not what had provoked the explosive reaction. What had brought Hufnagel to the brink of apoplexy was that the phantom painter had given Petronela a bra.

  I thought it was a very nice bra too, in a shimmering bronze and green, lacy, with delicate straps and a tiny green bow in the centre. It suited her complexion and was painted with great realism and in Hufnagel’s style, fitting seamlessly into the composition.

  Hufnagel appeared at my elbow, letting out a fresh groan. ‘Why me?’ he asked. ‘You? You get helpful elves. Me? I get bastard goblins.’

  ‘What’s Dawn got?’

  ‘Pastel pixies. It’s not fair. They were such beautiful tits, too,’ he moaned.

  ‘Very true,’ I commiserated. I didn’t tell him what I really thought: that the painting had been improved immeasurably by the addition of the bra and by losing the bow and arrow nonsense. It was now a contemporary, rather enigmatic image of a young woman in a belligerent pose rather than a nineteenth-century allegory chosen as an excuse to paint a half-naked girl. I helped him right the table and pick up his paints. ‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘if it wasn’t for the free canteen food, I’d be out of here. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to hide myself here tonight with a cricket bat and wait for the bastard.’

  ‘No, please don’t. I have a much better idea.’ I wasn’t sure it was a much better idea, but the last thing we needed was one of the students being worked over with a cricket bat by an irate and possibly drunk Hufnagel, no matter how justified his rage. ‘We’re going to install a spy camera. Once we have them on tape we can confront them with the evidence. But even then cricket bats will definitely not be a feature.’

  ‘And where are you going to get a spy camera? Oh, I forget, you’re also a private eye.’

  ‘Sometimes I do, too. Fortunately I have a couple of associates who remind me from time to time. And one of them is rather good with all this electronic surveillance stuff.’ I walked outside and called Tim. He was less than enthusiastic.

  ‘Do you remember what happened last time we did that?’ he asked.

  ‘I poured a mug of coffee into the rugged laptop.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that too. I spill stuff over keyboards all the time, that’s why I chose a rugged laptop, otherwise we’d be on the fifth replacement by now. Actually, leaky jam donuts are the worst, there’s no way back from those unless you’re very quick. No, the last time you set up the cameras to catch a night prowler, someone ended up left for dead on the ground.’

  ‘It’s fresh in my mind. But if I don’t do something it’ll be cricket bats in the dark. Anyway, why should it happen again?’

  ‘Because this stuff always happens around you. When do you want it?’

  ‘As soon as.’

  ‘You surprise me. I’m busy this afternoon but I’ll come up as soon as I can get away. What’s your postcode there?’

  ‘No idea but Batcombe House is
marked on the A to Z.’

  ‘What’s an A to Z, you luddite?’

  The more I looked at Hufnagel’s painting, the more I liked the changes the phantom had made. But how to tell him? And even if I could convince him, could he possibly pass it off as his own painting if the phantom had completely altered its meaning? I made a token effort to help him mop up the spilled painting mediums but his anger still throbbed in the air and any suggestion that the phantom was a better painter than him would not have gone down too well. ‘Are you going to repaint your bow and arrow?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Well, I would, but guess what?’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘They have disappeared as well.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to mention the bra.

  The phantom seemed to have had no time to do any work on my own canvas in the night; changing Hufnagel’s image so radically must have taken some time. When I searched my painting and found no additions or changes I had to admit to myself that I felt a tiny bit disappointed. The phantom was improving it, tweaking it, like a Photoshopped photograph has its colours adjusted, its shadows deepened, blemishes removed. No matter how much I puzzled about it, I could not decide which student was my favourite suspect. Hiroshi was an obvious candidate for improving on my canvas, Ben Creeling the obvious choice for the Hufnagel canvas. I doubted Phoebe would dare tweak Dawn’s painting, since Dawn seemed to be her new painting hero, but I had to admit to the possibility that the phantom was a team effort.

  I had hours before Tim’s promised arrival, which I decided to spend drawing in the woods since the atmosphere in the studio was too heavy with Hufnagel’s frustration and thick with fumes from spilled painting mediums, and if I had to listen to one more tirade by Hufnagel I might just blurt out that the phantom had at least managed to drag his painting into the twenty-first century. Or thereabouts.

  I had almost forgotten about Dan’s unquenchable enthusiasm for the rediscovered kiln in the woods but it was all too obvious when I got to my little clearing. He had managed to infect some of his students too and a couple of them had joined him out here in his restoration efforts. One of them was a tall bloke with a stoop, which a lifetime at the potter’s wheel was unlikely to improve, the other was Abbi, the blonde potter who had greeted me so sagely on my first day at the school. She remembered it well. ‘What did I say about the future? From Dumpy to Dementor in a hop, skip and a jump. Shame Boris the spider didn’t manage to drown her at her dad’s funeral.’