by Frank Tayell
“We’ll go and see,” Kettering said. “Constable?”
Ruth fell into step behind the sergeant, and they went into the house. The slumlord might have left the light on in the victim’s room, but there was no light in the hallway. Kettering tried the switch by the door, but nothing happened.
“No bulb,” Kettering said. “That tells you a lot.”
So did the smell of damp pervading the property. It was worse than outside. Another sailor stood by the open door at the end of the hall. She wasn’t quite ramrod-straight, but stiffened as Kettering and Ruth approached.
“Did you touch anything?” the sergeant asked.
“No, ma’am,” the sailor said.
Kettering took one look through the door then turned to her. “You know where the coroner is? Good. Off you go, sailor.”
The sailor left.
“All right, Deering,” Kettering said. “Take a look, and apply some of that famous detectoring that Mister Mitchell taught you.”
Ruth pulled on her gloves as she stepped into the doorway. The room’s light might have been on, but the bulb was dim. She took out her torch. It was an old-world LED, a gift from Riley, and offered a far stronger beam than Kettering’s standard-issue, two-foot-long club of a lamp. Ruth could almost hear the sergeant’s nostrils flaring at this flagrant use of taboo technology, and then dismissed it as she examined the scene.
“The victim is male,” Ruth said. “Around fifty years old, maybe fifty-five. He’s bearded, but that’s been trimmed not styled. It’s the same with the hair on his head. He probably cut it himself. He’s dressed in a dark suit, slightly threadbare but clean. There’s a knitted jumper under the jacket, but no tie. He’s not wearing shoes. He’s lying on the bed, his right hand is on his chest. His left is hanging over the side of the bed, nearest to the door. There’s blood on the wall behind the bed, and on the sheets and his clothes. Death was from a bullet to the brain.”
“Oh, so you’re the coroner now, are you?” Kettering asked.
“Fine. The victim was shot—”
“Victim?” Kettering prompted.
“Deceased,” Ruth said. “The man was shot in the head. There’s a gun lying on the ground near his outstretched left hand. It’s a revolver.” She took a step across the otherwise empty and clean floor. “A government-issue revolver. Looks clean. There’s no blood splatter on it.” She peered at the man’s wound.
“How many cartridges in the gun?” Kettering asked.
Ruth cracked the weapon open. “Six. It was fully loaded.” She emptied the rounds into her hand. “Only one has been fired.” She put the casings into a brown paper evidence bag, and then put the gun back where it had lain.
“Interesting,” Kettering said. “Each bullet would cost a day’s pay. If he was keeping one for himself, for whom did he buy the other five? His ration card’s on the table. His first name is Noah.”
“Did you know him, Sarge?” Ruth asked. “The landlady said he’d been in Dover for nineteen years.”
“I’ve seen him around,” Kettering said. “But I didn’t know him. He never crossed my path, which means he never broke a law. Not until now.”
“Suicide isn’t a crime,” Ruth said.
“Unauthorised possession of a firearm is,” Kettering said. “And as you pointed out, that’s a government-issue revolver. What else can you tell me about the scene?”
“It’s a large room,” Ruth said. “But I think it was the only one he had. The bed takes up about half the space. Next to the bed is a chair. On the other side is a cabinet, and next to that, against the exterior wall, is a stove with a ramshackle chimney. Next to it are floor-to-ceiling curtains. I assume they’re covering a window, and that means the stove’s chimney leads directly outside. Against the other wall is a table on which are some paints, mostly blues and greens. Next to that is an empty easel. There are six finished paintings. Three are on the floor, propped against the wall. The other three are hanging on the wall opposite the bed. Everything is tidy, more or less. There’s no carpet, but there are rugs, and they look relatively clean. I guess the stove was for heating and cooking.”
“Not many possessions for nineteen years in Dover,” Kettering said. She crossed to the curtains and pulled them back an inch. “These are sliding doors. There’s an outhouse in the garden. Not that you can really call it a garden. It’s a dumping ground for rubbish. I can see some of the ruins they use for live-fire exercises. If the man was shot during the daytime, then it’s possible no one heard it over the gunfire from the firing range. One saucepan, one mug, I don’t think he entertained.”
“Where did he wash?” Ruth asked.
“The bathroom will be upstairs,” Kettering said. “Though, considering there’s an outhouse, I’d say that it probably doesn’t work. He would have done his best with hot water from a saucepan and the public washhouses.”
“It’s a grim way to live,” Ruth said.
“It is,” Kettering said. She crossed to the fabric wardrobe, and rifled through the clothes. “Ah, I’ve found the bullet. It’s in the wall, about level with the man’s head. We’ll need pliers to extract it.” She turned to the paintings. “Those are good. Very good.”
“They are,” Ruth said.
All were seascapes. The three hanging on the wall formed a triptych portraying a day in the life of a sailor. The first showed a fishing boat hauling in a net during a storm. The middle painting had the ship arriving in port. The third portrayed a shadowy figure standing next to a picturesque cottage while the boat was now safely anchored in the harbour.
“Do you think that man is looking towards his boat?” Ruth asked.
“I think he’s looking towards the gathering storm clouds,” Kettering asked. “But a better question is whether the man in the paintings is Mr Wilson. You notice that he hasn’t painted the man’s face. He left that part of the canvas blank.”
“Perhaps he hadn’t finished it,” Ruth said.
“Then why hang the picture on the wall?” Kettering replied.
Ruth bent, and examined the three pictures on the floor. There were no faces in those pictures, either. One showed a dozen Royal Navy ships sailing into the distance. Another showed Dover’s cliffs, the sea below empty of ships, but festooned with gulls the same shade as the white chalk cliffs. The third was another fishing boat at sea. It looked similar to the ship in the three paintings hanging on the wall, and she wondered if that painting had originally been part of the sequence.
“He was good,” Ruth said. “Really good. I’d have paid for one of these.”
“I’d say he was good enough that you shouldn’t have been able to afford one of them,” Kettering said.
“So why was he living here?” Ruth asked.
“That’s the wrong question,” Kettering said.
“What’s the right one?”
“Well, there’s two, actually,” Kettering said. “And the second is linked to the first, and that first is why was this man murdered.”
“He was murdered, then?” Ruth asked.
“You tell me.”
Ruth looked again at the victim. That had been her first instinct in seeing the corpse, that this was a victim of someone else rather than just his own despair. The advice of Henry Mitchell came to her.
“He’s not wearing any shoes,” she said. “He’s got rugs on the floor. Nice ones, too. Nicer than the furnishings in the rest of the room, and they’re clean, but I wouldn’t want to walk barefoot out into the hallway. His shoes are by the back door. They’re worn, but like the suit, they’re clean. He paid attention to his appearance, though not to style.”
“And how does that prove he was murdered?” Kettering prompted.
“Okay.” Ruth tried to visualise the scene before the man died. “The shoes are by the back door because that’s the door by which he entered and left. He didn’t use the front door. Well, why would he? There’s no bulb in the hallway, so it would be easier coming and going via the back, making u
se of natural light.”
“Good point, but that’s not it,” Kettering said. “Try again.”
“If he was a victim, then someone came in. They got him to lie down. They… they sat in the chair while he lay on the bed. They fired from the chair, and left the gun. They ran, probably back the way they’d come.”
“You’re deducing the events based on the supposition he was murdered,” Kettering said. “Now I know he was murdered, but how do I know that?”
“You saw a footprint outside?” Ruth guessed.
Kettering sighed theatrically. “Mister Mitchell will be very upset.”
“The angle of the gun?” Ruth said. “The way it’s fallen? The— The gun’s clean! Someone cleaned the gun. There’s no blood or brain splatter on the gun, but there is on the wall.”
“A dead man doesn’t clean up after himself,” Kettering said. “That was the clue. The paintings were the hint. Look at them. They’re all of the sea. There’s no suicide note, but that’s not uncommon. I’ve attended a fair number of suicides in my time. Not as many now as there were a few years ago, but people usually die in a spot that has some personal meaning to them. Sometimes opportunity will override that. If he’d slit his wrists in a bathtub, I’d understand, but he shot himself. He liked the sea. That’s the common feature in the paintings, so why didn’t he shoot himself on the cliffs?”
“Because he didn’t shoot himself.”
“Precisely,” Kettering said. “Confirmation is on the sleeve of his jacket. The gun is meant to have fallen from his left hand. On the painter’s smocks hanging in the cupboard, the paint is all on the right sleeve.” The sergeant held up a sleeve of white cotton. “The left sleeve is almost immaculate. The man was very definitely uni-dextrous.”
“That’s cheating,” Ruth said. “How was I meant to know that?”
“I never said you couldn’t look in the wardrobe,” Kettering said. “We know this man was murdered. We know the method. Any ideas about motive?”
Ruth hadn’t, but she took the hint, and examined the room again. “There’s a paint pallet on the table-top, but no canvas on the easel. Maybe Mr Wilson was killed for the picture. Maybe he painted something that the killer didn’t want him to. Like their face.”
“Or someone else’s face. Or maybe not,” Kettering said. “Maybe Mr Wilson simply didn’t like what he’d painted and threw it out. We have a starting point, the beginning of a list of questions, and I’ve a few for that landlady. Dust the gun for prints, do the same for the easel, and the glass doors. Then sketch the scene. You know the routine.”
Ruth took out her notepad, but as soon as Kettering was outside, she took out her tablet. The small square of plastic and glass had been a going-away gift from Isaac. She wasn’t sure if the gift was meant as an apology. Considering what she knew of Isaac, probably not. Not that she knew much about him. The man mostly lived out in the wasteland and outside of the law, but before the Blackout, he’d been her adoptive-mother’s assistant. The tablet had come loaded with music, books, and even a few old TV shows. Other than the encyclopaedia, Ruth was most taken with the light. The entire screen could be turned into a lamp bright enough to read her favourite paperbacks. The tablet also had a camera. As she had to keep the tablet concealed, the only opportunity to take a photograph had been inside her rooms above the police station. Since nothing in there changed except her meals, and she saw no point in taking pictures of those, she’d not made much use of it. Here, though, the camera could save her an hour of awkward and inaccurate sketching. With one ear listening in case the sergeant returned, she snapped photographs from every angle.
Fifteen years ago, the bodies of five women had been found in the cellar of a house in Parkstone. There had been few clues and less evidence. Ultimately, the killer had been caught because a barman had overheard him boasting about the crime. The barman had recorded the conversation, and that had been used as evidence to arrest, charge, and bring the killer to trial.
The defence had argued that, since no one knew which devices the AIs had infected, no one knew which devices might have been compromised and so whether any data stored on them could be trusted. The prosecution had brought forward a dozen experts who attested that they knew, but it wasn’t enough for the judge. The charges had been dismissed. The killer had been set free. As much as any crime can be said to have a happy ending, this one did. A police officer had followed the killer. He had stalked him, watching his every move, knowing that the man would kill again. Before the murderer could strike, he was arrested, knife in hand. However, the precedent had been set. Old-world technology could be contested in court. As no officer wanted another guilty suspect released on a technicality, technology wasn’t used. Ruth wouldn’t use it in this case. She’d have to submit sketches of the crime scene with her report, but she would rather draw them in the comfort of her apartment than in the grim surroundings of Mr Wilson’s room.
She bent down, aiming the tablet under the bed. By the light of the flash, she saw something near the wall. She fished it out. It was a sketchbook, open to a page on which sea and cliffs had been drawn in pencil and charcoal. In the bottom-right-hand corner was an odd smudge of blue-grey paint. It puzzled her until she thought about where the sketchbook was, and where it would have been. She checked the victim’s socks. On the left sock was a slight smudge of blue-grey paint.
“You kicked it under the bed,” she said. “So… yes, you would have been walking by it. You kicked the sketchpad under the bed in the hope that the killer wouldn’t see it. Why? What didn’t you want the killer to see?” She flicked through the pages. Some were filled with drawings of the same section of cliffs, other pages had a view of the sea from the cliff tops. A page near the front had a near-perfect sketch of a Roman galley. At the back was a drawing of a three-masted tall-ship that reminded Ruth of the oil paintings of Nelson’s fleet festooning the Naval headquarters in Dover Castle.
She turned back to the page with the smudged paint, looked at Mr Wilson’s sock, then at the floor, and finally at the curtained doors.
“If the killer had come to the front door, you would have put your shoes on to go out into the hall. You didn’t put your shoes on, so the killer came to the back door. Was it locked? Did they knock? You opened it, and then walked back into the room, presumably backward because you had a gun in your face. As you walked towards the bed, you kicked the sketchbook underneath. You were told to lie down. Hmm. You thought the sketchbook was important. Did the killer? Presumably not as important as the painting. There’s paint on your sock, and paint on this page, but since all the drawings were done in charcoal, the paint came from something you were working on at the time.” She checked the six pictures, but all were dry. “And the killer took that painting with them.”
She glanced up at the light, then at the curtains covering the double-wide glass doors.
“You had the curtains open, didn’t you? Of course you did. That’s the only possible reason you stayed in a place like this. You wanted the natural light. The killer shut the curtains so your body wouldn’t be seen by anyone going to use the latrines outside.”
She dusted the curtain rail, and then the wall. There were plenty of prints, but Ruth doubted they belonged to the killer. Someone who’d had the foresight to wipe down the gun would have remembered to clean their prints from anything they’d touched.
She continued her search, taking an occasional photograph, but the only other notable find was the painting at the back of the wardrobe. Ruth doubted it had anything to do with the crime.
It was a painting of a woman and two children in a park. From the plane flying overhead, it was of the world before the Blackout. A woman stood a few feet from a boy who was pushing a slightly younger girl on a swing. Though all three figures were facing the artist, and though the smallest details on the clothing had been picked out, right down to the tear in the girl’s jeans, they had no faces. Instead, there were three blank sections of canvas without even sketch marks under
neath.
“Was this your family?” she asked.
Mr Wilson didn’t answer.
The coroner, Dr Olivia Long, arrived ten minutes later dressed in full military uniform. Like the mayor and many other members of Dover’s civilian administration, Dr Long was in the naval reserve and took full advantage of that to attend the officer’s mess with its un-rationed menus.
“Just one?” Dr Long asked, gesturing at the corpse.
“Yes, Doctor,” Ruth said. “One poor man, murdered for no good reason.”
“Murder?” Long peered at the corpse, then the hand, then knelt and examined the wound. “Almost certainly. The angle looks wrong for it to have been self-inflicted. I’ll have confirmation for you by tomorrow morning. Your sergeant wants you.”
Kettering was outside, alone. “Did you find anything?” she asked.
“There’s a painting in the wardrobe,” Ruth said. “It was wrapped in a sheet, hidden at the back. It’s of a woman and two children playing in a park before the Blackout. I think it was his family. They didn’t have faces.”
“Maybe Mr Wilson didn’t like painting faces,” Kettering said. “Or perhaps he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He lived alone, so I think we can guess what happened to his loved ones.”
“You sent the landlady home?” Ruth asked.
“She didn’t have much to say. I got a little more out of Mr Wilson’s neighbours, but only after they were sure that Mrs Dempsey was no longer within earshot. When this case is closed, I’m going to open an investigation into her. She is not a good person. That being said, this is a good place for a murder. That house on the left is rented by a group of inshore fisher-folk. They wake at three, return fourteen hours later, eat, sleep, and wake to do it again. On the other side, there are two families with young children. The parents work on the docks. They’re too exhausted to notice anything. In Mr Wilson’s house, the top-floor rooms are currently vacant. Two cobblers paid a deposit and a month’s rent in advance, but never came to take up occupancy. Their tenancy started on the sixth.”