The Art of Murder jp-3

by Michael White

  ‘What was his book to be about?’

  Fanshaw uncrossed his legs and shifted in his chair. ‘It was provisionally entitled The Lost Girl. It was about Juliette Kinnear.’

  Pendragon gave him a blank look. ‘I’m sorry …’

  The publisher smiled and sat forward, elbows on the desk in front of him. ‘It’s okay, Chief Inspector. I’m not surprised you don’t recognise the name. I think this book would have brought the subject to a much wider audience. Juliette Kinnear was an artist. She was one of the Biscuit Kinnears, you know who I mean?’

  Pendragon nodded. ‘I’ve heard of them. A very wealthy family.’

  ‘She was enormously talented. Indeed, I would say she was the most talented female artist of her generation. If she had lived, she would have been world renowned by now, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Oh, she suffered from some mysterious mental disorder and committed suicide in the mid-nineties. A terrible waste.’

  ‘And Thursk’s book was a biography of her?’

  ‘No, it was actually a lot more than that. It was really an expose, with Juliette’s story as its cornerstone. Noel was digging deep, very deep, into the London art world. He was extremely well connected, you see. Basically, he knew everyone. And everyone’s guilty secrets.’

  ‘Ah,’ Pendragon intoned.

  ‘So there you have your motive, I imagine, Chief Inspector.’

  Pendragon nodded. ‘Although it doesn’t quite explain the connection with Kingsley Berrick.’

  ‘Maybe the connection is spurious.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Fanshaw. But I’m most grateful for the information. Now, would it be possible for me to have a copy of Thursk’s manuscript, as far as he wrote it?’

  Fanshaw drew a deep breath and screwed up his face. ‘I’m afraid, that’s just it, Chief Inspector. Noel hadn’t delivered a single word.’

  Chapter 17

  Brick Lane, Stepney, Friday, 1 p.m.

  Pendragon was in a foul mood as he came through the doors of the station, head down, barely looking where he was going. The duty officer turned to a young constable beside him and raised his eyebrows as the DCI stormed past them. Just beyond the main desk, Pendragon almost knocked Jimmy Thatcher off his feet. The young sergeant was holding armfuls of papers, half of which flew across the corridor.

  ‘Damn it!’ Pendragon exclaimed, and crouched down to help. Straightening, he passed a large sheaf of paper to Thatcher and apologised. ‘Sergeant?’ he added. ‘You tied up with paperwork?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thatcher said mournfully.

  ‘Well, take a break. Get over to Noel Thursk’s flat. Forensics have been through the place. I want you to bring in the man’s computer and any disks or … what are those things? … USB drives you can find. Pass them all on to Turner. Then you can get back to the paperwork.’ And he nodded at the untidy pile in the sergeant’s arms.

  ‘Anything from Grant and Vickers on the cameras?’ Pendragon asked as he strode into the Ops Room, pulling off his overcoat as he went.

  Turner was seated at one of four desks arranged in a vague semi-circle. ‘Nothing, sir. But I’ve stumbled on something you might find very interesting.’

  ‘Arcade’s alibi?’ Pendragon asked as he approached the desk. Turner was staring intently at a flat screen and tapping at a keyboard. ‘Nah. A podcast.’ Turner looked up at his superior’s blank expression. ‘You have no idea what I’m talking about, have you?’ the sergeant added.

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘A podcast is a broadcast over the internet. You can stream it on an MP3 player or any computer if it’s online. Audio, visual … It’s a bit like TV or radio, but you pick it up with a computer.’

  ‘So what sort of podcast have you found?’ Pendragon asked. The way he said it sounded as though he couldn’t quite grasp the concept or why the world needed such a thing.

  ‘I was doing a search on Francis Arcade. Got the standard Wikipedia stuff and a few art sites he’s mentioned on, then this popped up.’ Turner clicked the mouse and the screen changed. Photographs of two faces appeared, those of the murder victims, Kingsley Berrick and Noel Thursk. Written across the faces were the words TWO DEAD MEN: A Post-mortem Podcast. The sergeant clicked again and a two-and-a-half-minute video played. It was shot using a single camera. The jerkiness showed it was almost certainly hand-held. The setting was the Berrick amp; Price gallery the previous Tuesday. It featured the two dead men of the title in conversation with others at the event. The camera moved around the room. Snatches of conversation could be heard — Berrick deliberating on some aspect of commercial art, Thursk nodding as he listened to a woman telling him an anecdote. He smiled and replied with something inaudible.

  The podcast ended as abruptly as it had started and the screen turned black.

  ‘Before you ask, guv, this was only put online a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘Shame,’ Pendragon said.

  ‘So what do you make of it?’

  The DCI shook his head and lowered himself into a chair. ‘I’m at a loss. It’s almost as though the man wants us to pin the murders on him.’

  ‘You want to go back for a second visit?’

  ‘No, Sergeant. I think this time we get Mr Arcade in here.’

  As Pendragon spoke into the digital recorder, Arcade sat perfectly still on a metal chair pulled up close to the table in Interview Room 1. The Chief Inspector concluded by saying that the suspect, Mr Francis Arcade, had declined the services of a lawyer.

  Pendragon stared at the young man and remained equally still, equally silent, for more than two minutes. The only sound in the room came from the electronic ticking of the wall clock. Finally he pulled a plastic folder towards him across the shiny metal surface of the table. ‘I watched your wonderful piece of work,’ he began. Arcade did not stir. ‘Who filmed it?’

  Arcade returned Pendragon’s intense gaze. ‘Michael Spillman, a friend.’

  ‘We might need to talk to him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother. He flew to New York early Wednesday evening. Besides, he was just doing me a favour. Made a copy of the videotape and emailed it over. Berrick and Price had commissioned a recording of the evening. It was all above board. Ask your mate Jackson.’

  ‘It’s a rather obvious message, isn’t it?’

  ‘A few days ago these two men were alive and well. Now they cannot speak or move, and soon they’ll be ash. Haven’t you ever wondered at recordings of someone who has since died? Are they really still alive? Were they always dead? I sometimes wonder if isolated tribes who have no understanding of the camera are right to fear it. Perhaps it does leach away our souls. But then, perhaps it’s good that it does, for how else may we be kept alive when memory fails?’

  ‘Very profound. Very Damien Hirst,’ Pendragon replied tonelessly. ‘Where’s the artistic merit to it?’

  ‘I thought this was a murder investigation. Why are you so interested?’

  Pendragon shrugged. ‘Humour me.’

  Arcade gave a wan smile. ‘I don’t spare a moment’s thought for artistic merit and nor should you, Chief Inspector. But … if you want me to humour you.’ He tilted his head to one side for a second. ‘It’s about intent. My friend supplied the material just like an art shop provides paints and canvases. I edited the film. But much, much more important is the intent behind the work. The conceptualisation, if you like. In this case, the mystery of the after-image. The only possible form of Life After Death.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m an artist. That’s what I do.’

  ‘Oh, come on! That’s a glib remark and you know it, Francis.’ Pendragon allowed a look of disappointment to flicker across his face.

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘It’s boring.’

  Arcade could not hide his surprise.

  ‘You’re provoking us, deliberately positioning yourself as the prime suspect. Why?’

  The young man shrugged and sta
red fixedly at a point on the wall behind Pendragon.

  ‘I think I know what you’re up to. This is all about publicity, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hah! You sound like Berrick,’ Arcade exclaimed. ‘That’s the sort of shit he was so concerned about.The oxygen of publicity,’ he added in a pompous tone.

  ‘But it makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Pendragon moved a hand across the space between their faces. ‘“Failed Artist Seizes Opportunity to Get Noticed”. Perfect.’

  ‘You surprise me, Chief Inspector. I was beginning to think you weren’t quite as thick as some of the other pigs.’

  Pendragon paused for thirty seconds, letting the silence grow uncomfortable. Then he placed the plastic folder upright on his lap and opened it so that Arcade could not see the contents. ‘I imagine, as an artist, you are quite accustomed to seeing extreme images, Francis.’ Pendragon stared into the young man’s eyes. ‘This is Mr Berrick, though I’m not sure you’ll recognise him.’ He removed a glossy from the folder and pushed it across the table. It spun round and stopped a few centimetres away from Arcade. It was a close-up of Kingsley Berrick’s disfigured head taken by the police photographer at the gallery on Wednesday morning.

  Pendragon could just about discern a flicker of something in Arcade’s eyes, but was not sure what that something was.

  ‘Perhaps not as you remember him.’

  Arcade slid the picture back. ‘You’re right, DCI Pendragon. I am accustomed to extreme images.’

  Pendragon plucked the photograph from the table and replaced it in the folder. Then he removed two more glossy prints, turned each so that Arcade could see them and moved them across the table. The first one showed the flattened body of Noel Thursk, pensile over the tree branch in the cemetery. The second was a picture taken in the Path Lab from a camera placed high above the remains. With nothing else around it to offer perspective, the body looked like an amoeba under a microscope.

  ‘Recognise him?’

  Arcade stared silently at the picture.

  ‘Looks a little peaky, I admit. But do you really not know who this poor fellow is? It’s your old friend Noel Thursk.’

  Arcade looked up. His mouth moved as though he were about to say something, but he let it go. Then he gave a brief smile. ‘Quite something, Pendragon. I’d say you should be looking for someone with a dead Surrealist fixation.’

  This time, Pendragon could see nothing slipping from behind Arcade’s mask, but he was sure it was a mask. ‘Very well,’ the Chief Inspector said calmly. ‘If that’s the way you want to play this, you give me no alternative but to place you under arrest. See if you still feel so relaxed after twenty-four hours in a cell. That’s how long I can hold you without charge. Meanwhile I’ll obtain a warrant. Shouldn’t take long. Then we’ll go through your studio with a fine-toothed comb.’

  Arcade did not flinch.

  Chapter 18

  Friday, 7.30 p.m.

  Pendragon’s mobile rang as he fumbled for the key to his flat. It was Turner. ‘Towers and Mackleby have just come back from Arcade’s studio,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing really, sir. The place is clean … a couple of joints, some rather ordinary porn, but nothing relevant.’

  ‘No tapes?’

  ‘Well, most cameras use memory sticks …’

  ‘Okay, Turner … no memory sticks?’

  ‘No, guv. Zilch.’

  ‘Turner? Why do you insist upon using such ridiculous … oh, never mind. So Towers and Mackleby have got nowhere?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, sir.’

  Pendragon sighed.

  ‘When they found nothing at Arcade’s studio, they went straight to the gallery to see Jackson Price, see if he had the original of the film taken at the private view.’

  ‘That’s surprisingly enterprising. And?’

  ‘He did, and he was very co-operative, apparently.’

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ Pendragon said. ‘We’ll watch it first thing tomorrow. Get in early, Sergeant.’

  He clicked shut the phone, slotted the key into the lock and pushed on the door.

  He had moved into this two-roomed apartment over six months earlier with every intention of using it as a stopgap until he found somewhere better, but now the place was growing on him and he was finding himself less and less inclined to move.

  He had come to London from his old job in Oxford where he had worked for the best part of two decades. His wife Jean had left him for another woman and he had departed the force for a short time, only to be lured back by the chance of returning to the place where he had grown up and which he had visited only occasionally since his early-twenties. Oxford had become his home, but he no longer wanted to live there; it was tainted for him. His and Jean’s daughter, Amanda, had disappeared five years earlier. She had been nine at the time, and simply vanished on her way home from school. Jack had not only suffered the horror of losing his daughter, he had had to endure the pain of professional impotence — a cop whose only daughter had been abducted. Amanda’s disappearance had been a major factor in the collapse of his marriage. His twenty-year-old son, Simon, was a post-grad Mathematics genius at the University. Pendragon saw little of him now but they were only fifty miles apart, a sixty-minute drive down the M40.

  The flat was tatty and had been neglected, first by the landlord and more recently by Pendragon himself. But only a week earlier he had decided to decorate, buy some decent furniture. It was a form of acceptance, an acknowledgement that he had moved on, left Oxford behind, and that this place, Stepney, East London, where he had been born almost forty-seven years ago, was again his home.

  And he really did feel at home now. After a shaky beginning, his colleagues and subordinates had accepted him and he had grown in confidence. It was a fresh start and he was out of the blocks. He had even enjoyed a brief romance since arriving at Brick Lane. He and Dr Sue Latimer, a psychologist, had been neighbours — she had rented a flat on the ground floor. They had got on well and Pendragon had even dared to imagine the relationship might actually lead somewhere when Sue had broken the news that she had accepted a job in Toronto. She had left six weeks ago, and he was still feeling sore from the loss.

  The door to the flat swung inwards and he stepped across newspaper taped to the floor. When he flicked on the light, the room came alive — white ceiling, white skirting and doorframes, half-painted walls. Pendragon strode over to the kitchen worktop at one end of the room, tossed his briefcase and overcoat on to the Formica surface and leaned back to appraise the shade of light brown he had chosen. On the shade card it had been called something ridiculous like ‘elm bark brown’ and now it covered the top half of two walls. He was about to get on with the rest, but suddenly felt hungry. He opened the fridge door and sighed. A can of lager and a piece of old cheese sat there. Leaning on the door, he tried to decide what to do.

  In a moment, he was pulling his coat back on and heading towards the hall outside the flat, checking he had some cash in his wallet. There was a half-decent deli around the corner and an off-licence a few yards beyond that. While the deli owner warmed up a panino, Pendragon went along to the off-licence. There was a queue and he was forced to spend ten boring minutes reading and re-reading labels on wine bottles and signs around the shop informing him of cut-price bulk buys. Leaving with a bottle of South Australian Shiraz, he picked up the panino and headed back to the flat.

  At the kitchen worktop, he poured himself a generous glass of wine and surveyed the walls he had painted. Fifteen minutes later, the deli wrapper was in the kitchen bin and the wine glass recharged. Pendragon had changed into a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt, put his favourite Wes Montgomery LP, Smokin’ at the Half Note, on the stereo and had a roller in his right hand.

  Painting was a mild anaesthetic, he decided. It seemed to guide the mind into a mellow groove whereby you could perform the physical process, but at the same time you could think about, well, anything. Whatever flooded in, flooded in. He h
ad spent most of the afternoon poring over art books. The local library had a surprisingly good selection. While Turner Googled and searched through blogs and websites, Pendragon did one of the things he did best — he stared at ink on paper, just as he had done as a student at Oxford, just as he had done throughout most of his career. All the secrets of the world could be unravelled with ink on paper. He would always believe that. Although he had lost faith in many things, this was one principle he would never doubt.

  ‘So, what do we have?’ he said aloud to the empty room as he prised open a fresh tin of paint. ‘Rene Magritte: Surrealist artist, born Lessines, Belgium, 1898. Came to prominence in the late twenties, early thirties. Creator of a style defined as Magic Realism in which he used ordinary objects but placed in unreal situations and juxtapositions. His work exhibited a great sense of humour, a certain contrived and deliberate dislocation from perceived reality.

  ‘And Salvador Dali: a close contemporary of Magritte’s, six years younger. Born in Figueres, Spain, May 1904. Named after a brother who died nine months before the painter’s birth, he was told by his parents that he was the reincarnation of his dead sibling. Rose to prominence at about the same time as Magritte. The two men knew each other and spent time together first in Paris in the late-twenties and then at Dali’s Spanish home in the thirties.’ He paused for a moment and lowered the roller into the paint tray, watching the sponge soak up the paint.

  ‘Any other associations? Each man lost his mother when he was young. Magritte was fourteen, Dali seventeen. Anything connecting the two painters to the two murders — other than the fact that in each case the body was set up in a pose reminiscent of their most famous work?’

  Pendragon picked up the roller. ‘No,’ he said aloud. ‘No connection that I can see.’ Perhaps Francis Arcade had been on the money when he remarked that they should look for someone with a dead Surrealist fixation. There seemed to be nothing to connect the murders other than the painting style of the two artists whose work had been travestied.