by David Smith
‘OK, let me look – ah I see the problem. Then let’s try adding something else, perhaps the last phrase in the message header: “Blessings and Glory to God” might help, it looks about the right length?’ I wrote the extra phrase down.
‘Yes Sir that works exactly now, it’s just the right number of symbols.’
‘OK, so now try transcribing the letters that match the dancing men in the emails to the letters on the key you just wrote down.’ I worked away at this for a few minutes and then turned back towards Hunter to read out the result.
‘LIDR THIAB FOWDRG DGULTARAR,’ I said, somewhat crestfallen. ‘That’s gibberish isn’t it? It doesn’t make any sense at all.’ Hunter scratched his head and stared first at my pad and then one by one at the various hills we could see on the horizon, turning slowly through 360 degrees. I could see that he was hunting around for a further clue.
‘What’s she up to?’ he asked someone in the clouds.
Chapter Sixteen
A Case of Misidentity – (Allegro molto)
Sir Bernard Henry Spilsbury, the father of forensics, was born in Leamington. The case that brought Spilsbury to public attention was that of Hawley Harvey Crippen in 1910, where he gave forensic evidence as to the likely identity of the human remains found in Crippen’s house. The case that consolidated Spilsbury’s reputation as Britain’s foremost forensic pathologist was the ‘Brides in the Bath’ murder trial in 1915. Three women had died mysteriously in their baths; in each case, the death appeared to be an accident. George Joseph Smith was brought to trial for the murder of Bessie Mundy, one of these women. Spilsbury testified that since Mundy’s thigh showed evidence of goose skin and, since she was, in death, clutching a bar of soap, it was certain that she had died a violent death – in other words, had been murdered. Spilsbury was also involved in the Brighton trunk murder cases. Although the man accused of the second murder, Tony Mancini, was acquitted, he confessed to the killing just before his own death, many years later, and vindicating Spilsbury’s evidence.
Based on Wikipedia, Bernard Spilsbury
Following our little ramble, Hunter and I returned quickly to the office. We had already enquired by phone with the Holly Hotel about whether Miss Taylor had returned. The concierge told us that she had not but that that he expected her back shortly. He also confirmed that she had not as yet checked out although she had a taxi booked for 6pm and was due to check out that evening. The patrols had also had no luck finding her. Similarly the story from the gallery was that Mr Troyte had not yet finished his talk and certainly couldn’t be interrupted. I reminded the receptionist that I really needed to speak to him as soon as he was finished. It was proving remarkably difficult to track these two down.
While we waited, Hunter asked me to try and trace Pearl’s recent movements and conduct some further research into Troyte and Pearl’s background. I found that the Internet was full of reviews of Pearl’s musical appearances and there was quite a bit about her life history. It was therefore not too difficult to construct a timeline for her recent engagements. As regards to her personal life, despite a number of well-publicised relationships, she was steadfastly single and appeared to be itinerant with no permanent home, spending time in London and Zurich as well as at a holiday home in the South of France on the Cap d’Antibes. In fact, it did not sound like she was home too often; she seemed to spend most of her life travelling between engagements, permanently in demand at festivals, concerts and celebrity events. The details of her origins and earlier life were much sketchier. She had emerged as a young blues singer from a poor background in the States, propelled to fame by talent, beauty and a wondrous soulful voice. There was an intriguing piece in a magazine interview from the time her mother died, where she told the story for the first time about her search for her natural father.
As for Troyte, there seemed little remarkable about him. I found only the most basic details of his career on the Internet. An architect and a keen amateur chess player, he was still a partner in a Midwest firm although he seemed to have retired some years ago from active contract work. Twice married, he led a respectable but unexciting life, enlivened briefly by his earlier marriage to a famous cellist, the name of whom Hunter also recognised from a recording in his collection. She had died early and he had later remarried and had two grown-up children but he had been widowed again a few years ago. Before he finished his training as an architect he was drafted into the navy, working as a signalman during Vietnam, nothing really remarkable in that. The signalman piece piqued Hunter’s interest though.
When I phoned the gallery again after twenty minutes to ask if Mr Troyte had finished his lecture and if he might be available to talk to me, the administrator answered me circumspectly.
‘I’m terribly sorry, officer, but I’m afraid I can’t let you talk to him. Unfortunately he took quite a turn during his talk and the doctor has told him to rest. We’re to put him in a taxi later, so maybe you can talk with him when he gets back to Leamington?’ I pushed her, sensing that I had not been told the whole story and eventually got a reluctant account of what had happened during the presentation. I instructed the receptionist to let me know immediately when he was ready to speak again and certainly before he got back in the taxi.
‘It seems like our architect has some enemies,’ grimaced Hunter when I told him this story. ‘We’d better check this out properly. Even if it turns out to be a practical joke, we really can’t let someone’s little bit of fun confuse the investigation of the Nariman case.’
*
On the way back from his tennis match to his flat in the Old Town, Hugh called in at the bookshop on Warwick Street. He was looking for a basic book on sculpture so that he did not come over as a total ignoramus when he met up with Claudia after lunch. He just had time to shower before he drove over.
When he got to the gallery, he asked for Claudia by name and was directed up a rather grand staircase toward a screened off exhibition room. He had to move one of the screens aside to enter the room. Sunlight flooded the gallery space from two great windows and he saw Claudia standing at the far end of the room. The light was shining through her clothes at such an angle that he couldn’t avoid noticing the closely defined silhouette of her body within. Bas was right about that aspect of her at least – for a woman in her late forties, she had a just about perfect, athletic physique. She called him over and he embraced her politely with an air kiss on each cheek. He noticed she wore little make up – but equally there was not so much as a blotch or wrinkle on her skin, just a few rather charming freckles and a prominent mole on her cheek. Her ash blonde hair had been swept up into a rough knot so that wisps of it delicately framed her face. She was wearing a silky pale blue top and a billowy darker blue skirt. He could smell her perfume, a very distinct rather musky scent, not at all flowery. He approved. She looked gorgeous.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said with an engaging friendliness. ‘I enjoyed last night.’ Hugh wondered about this change in her mood. Was she just feeling unwell last night?
‘So did I,’ he said. ‘Sorry I was such a lousy companion though. You must have been so bored all night, listening to us all chatter on.’
‘No I had a good time, really, especially listening to Pearl Taylor singing, that was truly amazing,’ she smiled. There was an inner radiance to her face that Hugh found irresistible.
‘Yes, she’s quite a woman isn’t she?’
He realised his eagerness to compliment Pearl could be misinterpreted and added quickly, ‘Of course nothing like as pretty as you.’ She blushed and brushed his arm with her hand in a reassuring gesture. In truth, her face was ageless; it could still be the face of a nineteen-year-old girl. How could a complexion like hers be described merely as beauty? Surely it is something deeper than that, he thought.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love
And made sweet moan.
Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci
‘You’ll do well if you keep that sort of flattery up. And sure in language strange she said – I love thee true,’ she then quoted and then seeing his blank face added, ‘Sorry, it’s from a Keats poem.’
The reference still went straight over Hugh’s head. Furthermore, he had become so enamoured with her that he felt awkward in her company and struggled with what to say next; his eventual question was only slightly less original than making a comment about the weather.
‘So this is where you work then? It’s quite a setting.’
‘Well yes, thank you. This is the room where we’re going to set up our next exhibition. It’s going to be built around a comparison of two works, one by Henry Moore and one by Auguste Rodin, trying to give fresh angles on familiar subjects.’
He smiled to himself, realising that he might need to finish the book if this relationship was ever going to happen.
‘Anyway, come on, let me show you round. I’ve got a small studio out the back, my ‘Elfin grot’ so to speak.’ Hugh wondered whether she was playing some elaborate game with him, teasing him with this new easiness, a game that he doubted he knew the rules of. He was unsure now whether her earlier coolness to him was just camouflage for shyness, or if she had indeed just been unwell. He was sensing a new openness to develop the chemistry between them. He found her intensely attractive but at the same time intimidating. He had never met such an intellectually superior woman before. What did Bas always say? Always talk to the most beautiful woman in the room, you may be surprised by the result – well this time it looked like he might have hit the jackpot.
They descended the staircase and Claudia talked for a few minutes to one of the women at the reception desk. They giggled together at something, the other woman making strange shapes with her fingers. Hugh wondered what their private joke could be.
‘Apparently we had a bit of excitement here this morning,’ Claudia explained. ‘We’ve got a convention of architects using the conference centre and one of the guest speakers was taken badly ill during his lecture. He’s still around the back in the medical office; he really took quite a turn. Apparently someone had doctored his presentation, and the result was both very funny and very rude. Unfortunately it seems he didn’t take the joke well and he collapsed towards the end of it. Luckily it appears it wasn’t too serious but the doctor has ordered him to rest here for a few hours.’
‘I didn’t realise architecture was so exciting,’ Hugh laughed.
They continued through several corridors to the back of the gallery. Her small studio turned out to be quite a large space leading off from some classrooms. There were unfinished projects spread haphazardly over the floor and tables – drawings, sketches, clay models and some unusual stone carvings. He was immediately impressed; even he could tell that this was much more than just an amateur’s work.
‘I’ve got a residency for a year,’ she explained. ‘Alongside assisting the curator with the main exhibitions I do some teaching for school kids and adult art classes as well.
‘I’m really impressed,’ he said. ‘I had no idea that you were so talented.’
‘Sorry if I’m not complying with the stereotype.’
‘OK I didn’t mean it to sound quite like that. So how long have you been doing this?’
‘I’ve been planning it forever in my mind, but for years I was too busy with my work as a psychologist, I never had the time. It’s always been there, trying to get out though.’
‘It sounds like you have found a vocation?’
‘Well yes, that’s a good description. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do full time and now I have the chance at last. In fact, the connection between psychology and sculpture is something that I am also interested in trying to capture in these pieces.’ She pointed to the unfinished stone works that Hugh had noticed a few minutes ago. They reminded him of those statues from the Easter Islands you see in books, he mentioned this to her.
‘Yes, you’re getting good at this. Have you ever thought how much our minds are like islands? We float alone in a tide of humanity, drawn on by our own ideas but who really knows what anyone else is thinking about most of the time?’
‘That’s especially true if you are a shy old introvert like me.’
‘You’re not so shy. But then we are all flawed communicators; we connect by common experience, but only fleetingly, in between the silences between words, the transient nature of thoughts. For introverts there is a whole world going on inside their heads that most of us would never even dream of, but even extroverts, the kind we would generally say wear their hearts on their sleeves, have complex secret narratives going on inside their heads most of the time. Our bodies, on the other hand, are much more accessible. Substantial, flesh and blood, skin and muscle stretched over distorted frames of bone and cartilage. This was the subject of most sculpture for centuries, in fact right back to the Greeks. Yet, even though most of our body language is actually involuntary, programmed, instinctive and easily readable, there’s still an infinite variation of form. We’re all the same at the core, we have the same needs, the same basic urges, but even so, the way we express ourselves can be totally different depending on our culture and own inner thoughts and fears. I’m trying to get to the heart of that, to the heart of self-will and self-belief, the connection of the soul and the body and how that inner personality expresses itself to the world. Capturing that complexity that lies beneath us in still life form is now my daily challenge.’
‘Wow, that’s pretty deep. I thought sculpture was about more obvious things like love and war and a whole lot of sexual innuendo,’ he said, somewhat taken aback by the forcefulness of her monologue.
‘Ah, then I’m afraid you make my point for me, you’ve just demonstrated again the vanity of male dominance,’ she said. ‘There is more to life than what we have been programmed to do or consume or in other words, it’s not all about the sex you know.’
‘Quite, well it was just a question.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not criticising. And you’re not unusual in those thoughts. Men have always wanted to remake women in their gaze as objects of desire; passive and agreeable, without desires of our own, increasingly it’s true the other way round as well. Remove the mask of cosmetics from most women and you get a much truer story of bad skin, freckles and blemishes. Remove the mask of language from most women, or men for that matter, and what do you get – deeply felt desires, common virtues, and common sins. That’s what I’m trying to capture here in these models, what is at the heart of it all when you strip away the pretence and time and words stop. What’s left, what’s there, what’s real, what’s fake. What’s alive and what’s dead. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat really, without the cat. It’s quite straightforward conceptually but horribly difficult to get right in the flesh, so to speak.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said, now beginning to feel completely out of his depth.
‘Ok, don’t worry, I can see I’m confusing you, it’s a lot to take in at once and I’ve been thinking about it for years. As I said, I trained as a psychologist, but that probably doesn’t surprise you.’
‘Indeed, now you remind me, it doesn’t.’
Erwin Schrödinger’s maternal family was from Leamington and maybe his cat too? A cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other. Or in other words, is the cat really dead or alive?
Based on Wikipedia – Schrödinger’s Cat
‘So maybe it’s about time I got to my point in inviting you,�
�� she said. ‘To keep it simple I might have brought you here under slightly false pretences. What I probably should have told you directly rather than all that psychobabble is that I’d really like you to model for me,’ she laughed, pointing to some clay life studies of male torsos, strangely distorted from the classical ideal. ‘I’m going to work all these up until they are ready to create bronzes for my own show next year and I need some new models – real flesh and blood men rather than willowy art students or over-blown body-builders. I thought you’d do for starters.’ He stood in silence for a moment, while she looked him up and down, sizing him up, apparently waiting for him to say something. ‘In fact, I think you’d be a great subject.’
He was certainly taken aback.
‘I don’t really think I’ve got the body shape to be a model,’ he said.
‘Rubbish. You have a nice body and more importantly you are 100 per cent real and honest rather than manufactured like most models.’
He hesitated still, despite the clear signals she was giving him.
‘OK,’ he said ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Well we’ll start with you showing me your stuff.’
‘What, here, now?’
‘Yes like this.’ She gently unbuttoned his shirt.
Christ, why hadn’t he seen this coming? Why was he always so self-controlled; why couldn’t he be more forward? Her mouth was for an instant deliciously close to his. He had hoped but had never imagined that something like this would happen. Maybe Bas was right about artists. His knees were shaking as if they wanted to sink to the floor, a place from where he felt he may never want to get up.
‘I think I love you,’ he whispered to himself but was then suddenly aware of another woman in the room, already beginning to take photographs as he stood there, stripped to the waist, looking up at the light playing on the ceiling.
‘Who’s this?’ he asked, confused.