The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori

by Robert Barnard

  “No-o-o.”

  “What exactly brings you together, motivates you?”

  Arnold Mellors pondered.

  “Well, of course we’ve all been interested in art, in different ways. And when we discovered Ranulph’s work we realized he was the great modern British artist, as far as we were concerned. When a cottage became vacant I was over the moon. It’s a privilege to live near him—we all feel that: to watch him making art, whether on a lower level or, as now, the finest, most creative level.”

  “Hmmm. You’re saying it’s a sort of residential cheer group, a very superior fan club.”

  Mellors’s face expressed distaste.

  “All right: mock us. I’d prefer to say we are a circle of appreciation.”

  But Oddie felt that neither of them had really got to the heart of the matter.

  • • •

  “What was I doing last weekend?” asked Jenny Birdsell. “Oh, gracious! If you asked me what I was doing yesterday I probably couldn’t give you a clear statement. But last weekend! Impossible! Do you remember, Mary Ann?”

  “I wasn’t here,” said Mary Ann, looking up from a book with bright pictures of men in white bathrobes in the Holy Land. “I was working in the bookshop in the morning and bearing witness in Keighley market in the afternoon.”

  “Oh, dear, I suppose you would have been.” She shot her a look, uncaught by her daughter, that was baleful to the point of dislike. “I wish you would do the normal things that other girls do—you know, like bringing home boyfriends instead of elderly men in peaked caps who bang drums and hand out hymn sheets. Oh, well—where was I?”

  “Saturday,” prompted Oddie. “Let’s start with last Saturday.”

  “If only I could. I just can’t remember. Unless I visited old Mrs. Young in Stanbury. In fact, I think I probably did.”

  “My mother tends people’s bodies,” said her daughter in her clear, fresh voice. “Bodies are within her scope, souls way outside it.”

  “I don’t tend them. It’s so long since I was a nurse I’m way out of date with medicines and techniques. But I do know enough to be able to bring them a bit of ease and comfort, and, of course, some of them never get a visitor from one week to the next. Do away with me if I ever get to that stage!”

  “When was this visit? Morning or afternoon?”

  “Oh, afternoon, I should think.”

  “And what did you do for the rest of the day?”

  “Pottered in the garden, I would imagine. Or pottered in the kitchen and around the house.”

  “You noticed nothing unusual around here either then, or when you went to and from Stanbury?”

  “Good heavens, no. I’m afraid I’m not the noticing type. Though I would register people. And really, I think you are on the wildest of wild-goose chases if you’re connecting this young man—who I gather is not Declan, as you originally thought—with Ranulph and the people at the house. Anyway, I saw nothing and nobody out of the ordinary.”

  “What about Sunday?”

  “Well, Mary Ann is always occupied with the Army’s church service in Keighley in the morning, but I try to make sure she has a good traditional Sunday dinner afterward.” She made it sound like a poultice on a wound. “I think I went out painting in the afternoon—probably Pennistone Hill, I think. I’m so vague. Anyway, if that was Sunday I came home as the light was fading, and I was exhausted as I often am after that sort of activity, and I went to bed with a book. I think I heard Mary Ann come in about nine, but that was all I did. After that I was out to the world.”

  “I see,” said Oddie. He turned to Mary Ann. “And you?”

  “In the afternoon I rested and played records. We have a small CD section in the shop, and I borrow them sometimes. Then I went to Bible discussion class in Stanbury in the evening.”

  “You didn’t see or hear anything unusual during the day, or later when you got back from Stanbury?”

  “Not what you’d call unusual. I heard Stephen come home just as I was going to bed.”

  “Good,” said Oddie, glad of the confirmation. “Do you remember when this was?”

  “It would be about ten, I think. I generally get home from Bible study around nine, but I had a cup of Ovaltine and listened to the radio after that.”

  “Are you sure it was Stephen you heard?”

  “I know the car. It wheezes and coughs.”

  “A car is not a person.”

  “Only Stephen and his mother drive it. And his mother was away that weekend.”

  Oddie thought. He turned back to her mother.

  “You didn’t hear him arrive home?”

  “I hoped you wouldn’t ask me that. Now Mary Ann has mentioned it I have a slight feeling that I heard the car, and then footsteps, but you really mustn’t rely on anything I say, because it could have been the night before or the night afterward.”

  “The night afterward Stephen had left,” Oddie said. He turned back to Mary Ann. “As I said before, the car is not a person. Did you hear footsteps too?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did. Man’s footsteps. But now Mother’s mentioned it I heard them later too. When I’d gone off to sleep. I’m sure I half woke up and heard someone going back to the stables.”

  “Were they the same footsteps as you heard earlier?”

  “Yes, I think so. Stephen’s footsteps. But it’s just an impression, nothing more. And I wouldn’t want to stand up in court and say it was Stephen. After all, can you identify someone’s footsteps, particularly when they’re just walking down an earth lane?”

  “When I lived in Bournemouth, in the nurses’ home,” said Mrs. Birdsell, “we used to lie in bed and identify the footsteps of nurses coming home or going on shift, and we were right eighty percent of the time. But of course they were women. Men aren’t at all as individual. Their shoes are very similar, for one thing. Even earlier, I wouldn’t dream of saying the footsteps I heard coming home were Stephen’s.”

  No, no, thought Charlie, who had listened in uncongenial silence, but he did wonder what precisely was Jenny Birdsell’s game. Because he couldn’t accept that she was vague to the point of imbecility, which was obviously her match plan at the start of the interview. Yet as soon as her daughter had mentioned hearing Stephen’s footsteps—obviously the first she’d heard of the matter, since apparently they did not communicate—she’d felt obliged to go along with it and give it what identification she could consistent with the pose of vagueness she’d assumed.

  Which didn’t alter the fact that both Mary Ann and Mrs. Max had heard Stephen that night, and Mary Ann had thought she had heard him later on after she’d gone to sleep. Charlie thought it was about time someone had a talk with Stephen.

  17

  AFTER THE FACT

  They paused outside the gate of Mrs. Birdsell’s cottage but then, since her garden was as bijou as her cottage, looked at each other and moved farther away.

  “Only Colonel Chesney to go,” said Oddie.

  “I’ve talked to him,” said Charlie, “but not about what he may have seen last weekend.”

  “Do you know, I’m beginning to discern a pattern,” said Mike. “And I have a strong suspicion that Colonel Chesney will have seen nothing last weekend.”

  “Good detection,” said Charlie, “sound reasoning.”

  They were interrupted by a bleep on Oddie’s phone.

  “From Mrs. O’Hearn?” he said, after identifying himself. “To tell you the truth I wasn’t expecting to get much sense out of her yet, poor woman. . . . I see. . . . A painting?

  Well, we can’t know till we’ve looked into it, can we?”

  As Oddie tucked his phone back into his pocket, Charlie asked, “What was all that about?”

  “Mrs. O’Hearn has talked with her other children, back home in Donclody. I don’t know how relevant this is, seeing the victim was Patrick, not Declan, but apparently Patrick got a letter from Declan only a few days before he took off for England. Still fairly happy about being par
t of the Byatt household, and happy about helping the old man paint. But there was a proviso this time, a nagging doubt. He’d seen a painting that made him unhappy. Said all the usual things about not knowing anything about art, but he said he was worried about the mind behind it.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. I’d like to talk to the O’Hearn children—still more, see the letter, if it was kept.”

  “As the next best thing we can look at the pictures,” said Charlie. “It’s probably one he saw in the house, and there’s a chance it may still be around.”

  “If he was sensible he wouldn’t have voiced his worries,” agreed Oddie.

  “He’s still around, remember.”

  “Of course. We ought to be talking to him before long if our description was halfway accurate. It was Patrick that was killed, and he hardly had time enough here to start making an issue of pictures. I see Patrick as a very different kettle of fish from his brother. If he arrived here he may have been in an aggressive mood, and he died because he picked a quarrel.”

  “He was garroted,” said Charlie, for at least the second time. Mike nodded in agreement.

  “OK, OK. Let’s forget Chesney and have a look at the pictures.”

  The ground floor of the farmhouse was a hive of activity, and when they started upstairs they realized that the first floor was too. As they reached the landing they were stopped short by a bellow from Ranulph Byatt’s bedroom.

  “Who’s that, then? More of you? How many do you need?”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows at Mike and went to the door.

  “Hello, Mr. Byatt. Do you remember me?”

  He was rewarded by a sulfurous glare.

  “Don’t talk to me as if I were an idiot. I’m old, not retarded. Of course I remember you. Do you think you don’t stick out?”

  “This is Superintendent Oddie, who’s leading the investigation.”

  “Ah. Well, I hope you know whose death you’re investigating this time.”

  “The body was found to be that of Patrick O’Hearn,” said Oddie. “Declan’s brother.”

  “Hmmm. Well, he never was here. Your people, who are infesting this place, won’t find any traces of him.”

  “Well, if we find that’s so we’ll relieve you of our presence. Because modern forensic science is so accurate and meticulous that if he has been here he’ll leave a trace for our boffins to identify. We don’t need threads caught on nails these days, Mr. Byatt.”

  For a moment his eyes showed disconcertment. Then he growled, “Well, they won’t find traces here, unless they plant them themselves.”

  In the corridor Oddie sighed.

  “If only coppers who plant evidence on suspects realized what a legacy they leave for other coppers investigating other cases. . . . Hello—what have you got there?”

  A fresh-faced, young constable had come up, one of the forensic team, holding in his plastic-gloved hand a wodge of black-and-white photographs. He put his finger to his lips, and moved some way away from the door of Byatt’s bedroom, over to an ancient and dusty trunk. He spread the photographs across the top, and said in a low voice, “Thought you’d like to see them—not for evidence, just for background, like.”

  Oddie and Charlie bent close. The pictures showed the Ashworth people at some kind of party. In several of them a painting on a easel appeared.

  “The viewing of the new painting,” said Charlie. “Ivor Aston had a private one, but there was a general one as well.”

  They looked at the faces. The intention of the photographer had clearly been satirical. He had aimed to catch the expressions and body attitudes of a group of devotees—of fawners and flatterers, anyway. But the devotion did seem genuine, even if exaggerated. Jenny Birdsell gaped, Ivor Aston was smug in his previous knowledge of the picture, Arnold Mellors was judicious but openly admiring.

  “We found them in the young man’s darkroom,” said the boffin. “Stephen Mates, his name is. I thought they might be of interest.”

  There were three photographs of a group that included Declan O’Hearn. They picked out Jenny Birdsell, still looking breathless and yet watchful. In the background they made out Martha, looking suspicious yet uncertain. In the foreground was Melanie, talking to Declan. All three pictures had been taken from different vantage points, seemingly within a few seconds of one another. Melanie in one was looking at Declan out of the corner of her eye. Testing him, Charlie guessed. Probing. Declan’s attitude was courteous, self-deprecating. Then in the third picture his face had changed. A shutter had come down. It was not so much blank as defensive.

  “A suggestion has been made,” said Charlie.

  “A suggestion? Something specific?”

  “I don’t think so. I think Melanie was circling round a subject, and when she got close Declan told her flatly that there were things he wouldn’t do.”

  “Right. I wonder if there were things that Declan wouldn’t do but that his brother might do. I rather think there might have been. Now, where are these paintings?”

  They found the studio without difficulty, and Charlie switched on the lights. There was no picture on the easel, which intrigued him. Perhaps Arnold Mellors had already taken charge of the new one. His eyes roamed around the spacious double room, and eventually lighted on a stack of framed pictures leaning against the wall in a dusty corner.

  “Let’s have a look at those,” said Oddie, whose eyes had followed Charlie’s. “If Declan’s duties were mainly here, helping with the process of painting, then those seem the most likely ones.”

  Slowly, in the less-than-perfect light, Charlie displayed the paintings one after another. Landscape after landscape—accomplished, not unattractive, but lacking in energy, not very much superior to the sort of thing that any technically well-equipped painter could produce.

  “I see what that Mellors man meant,” said Oddie, “when he talked about genius in remission.”

  The picture, when it was finally reached, well down in the pile, jumped out at them. It seized attention by the ferocity of its attack. It seemed not just from another period, but from another world. Charlie noted its place, then took it over and put it on the easel, so as to scan it in the best possible light.

  “It must be from the same phase as the one I saw in Bradford,” he said. “The red period.”

  The red predominated in the lower right side of the picture, but gradually the men took in other aspects—the outflow of the picture onto the frame, the bluish white of splintered glass, the gradually emerging dead face. It was like a tormented shriek, and yet the energy of the painting gave it something of the quality of a triumphant war cry.

  “Remember that motorway crash?” asked Oddie. “The only reason the Byatts got on our computer? That’s what this picture puts me in mind of.”

  “Funny no one’s mentioned the accident,” said Charlie. Then he added, after thinking, “If it was the basis of this picture, of the one in Bradford, maybe of others in the red period—maybe all the pictures in that period—then it is funny no one at Ashworth has mentioned it.”

  Oddie looked dissatisfied.

  “Sometimes people don’t mention things because they’re known,” he said. “For all we know it may be a cliché of art criticism: ‘Inspired by the horrible death of his daughter and her bridegroom in a smash on the MI after their wedding, the paintings of the red period . . .’ and so on.”

  “Could be,” said Charlie. “I’ll read the typescript of the book I got from the little gnome in Bradford. That should tell me. I can still see this picture coming as a big shock to young Declan.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Because there’s a sort of . . . relish of the horror of it. I wonder if he knew about the motorway smash. Either way, after those landscapes this picture must have come as a shock.”

  Leaving the picture on the easel, Charlie strolled over to the collection of pictures stacked face out to the room. The red period picture had been nearly, but not quite, at the
end of the stack—five more pictures to go, in fact. He began leafing through them: landscape, landscape, a chalk picture of Melanie, landscape, and then—

  The last picture of all. Charlie saw at once it would have to be taken out and looked at closely. Even in dim light its power, the hideous punch it packed, almost unnerved him. He took it from the stack and brought it over to the light. Together, and in silence, they looked at it.

  The subject matter of the picture was unusually clear, presented in realistic terms though with a degree of distortion. At the forefront was a face—empurpled, screaming or gagging, enlarged for impact, while behind it the small body was arching in an agony of pain and terror. It was clearly a picture of someone in their last throes, and in the most desperate torment. It was done without mercy—even, both men sensed, with a species of perverted pleasure.

  “Who’d want a picture like that on their wall?” said Charlie.

  “Not even the painter, apparently,” agreed Oddie, “considering the fact that he keeps it from the general gaze.”

  “I think it’s time I read up about Byatt’s other significant ‘periods,’” said Charlie. “I would think this must be part of one of them.”

  “You do that. Tonight. And I think it’s time someone went to have a talk with Stephen Mates. You.”

  “Me? Alone?”

  “I think it would be best. Young men together.”

  Charlie grimaced.

  “He doesn’t sound the sort I’d get along with. He sounds a snotty git, anxious to impress you with his own superiority.”

  “Well, you’ve got enough evidence to kick the stuffing out of him. Get him frightened, and find out how much he knows.”

  • • •

  As he drove down to Oxford next day two subjects were warring in Charlie’s mind: how to deal with a touchy and difficult young man, and the manuscript he had read the previous evening about the later paintings of Ranulph Byatt.

  “The pictures that comprise his purple phase,” Briscott had written, “seem to have been painted late in 1984 and early in 1985, though they were not released on to the market until two years later. The pictures of this intensely concentrated phase are more abstract than the classic ‘red period’ paintings, with the horror more thoroughly assimilated. Here and there one may think one can discern a bulging eye, an empurpled tongue, even perhaps the outlines of a human form. But in general what impresses the viewer is the energy of execution, and how this energy conveys violence and terror even while it assumes no recognizable form or meaning.”