Local Artist

by Paul Trembling

  I went up to it and gave the door an experimental tug. It barely moved.

  Well, there was no going any further. I wasn’t skilled in breaking and entering. And in any case, whatever was in there was all going to be “evidence”.

  I dug into my handbag, pulled out my mobile, and started scrolling through the speed-dial page, looking for David Macrae’s number.

  “Don’t bother with that, Mrs Deeson. You won’t be making any phone calls.”

  I glanced up, surprised. The street had been deserted a moment ago.

  A short, rotund man. Red face under a black hat. He also wore a strange expression, a sort of calm fury. As if it was something he was used to keeping suppressed, but was now leaking out.

  Seeing him out of his normal context, it took a moment before I could remember his name.

  “Mr… Ferrers-Manton! But – what are you doing here?”

  “The same as you, of course!” He smiled. It looked more like a snarl. “Looking for an artist. Or rather, their ‘atelier’. Their studio, that is.”

  “Yes, I know. But I still don’t understand how you found this place at the same time I did,” I said, puzzling it out as I spoke. “Unless… you weren’t following me, were you?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing so primitive, I assure you. Nobody follows anyone nowadays! Not when these things are so easy to obtain.”

  He fished in the pockets of his trademark coat, and produced a small black box. “The word these days is ‘track’. I’ve been tracking you for a few days. Stuck this on your car while you were sleeping in it, outside the library! I’m afraid I’d quite run out of ideas, and I couldn’t let the police find it first – but I had some hopes for you, with your skill in following clues! Not to mention your stubborn persistence. And it seems that I was right.”

  He tipped back his hat a little to gaze up at the building. “I must admit, I never would have thought of looking here. On Arthur’s old street, of all places! Of course, it can’t be just a coincidence. I wonder if we’ll ever know the story behind that, eh?”

  I shook my head in confusion. Too much sudden strangeness. My brain was racing to catch up. “No. I mean – why? Why were you following me? Tracking me. Why –”

  “Too many questions!” he interrupted me, and now the anger was much clearer. “Always too many questions with you, Deeson! Just open the door. We’re not having this discussion out in the open.”

  “But it’s locked…” I began, but he’d put the tracker away and pulled out a key instead. He tossed it at me, and I caught it automatically.

  A big key. The sort that might fit a big padlock.

  I looked at him. “Go on,” he said. “Try it.”

  My phone was still in my other hand. “I need to phone someone first,” I said.

  “No you don’t. In fact, it would be better if you gave that to me.” He held out a hand.

  “What? No!” I shook my head. “Look, Mr Ferrers-Manton, I really don’t understand what’s going on here, but investigating this place is a matter for the police and I’m phoning them now.”

  “I don’t think so!” he snapped. He reached inside his coat and produced a gun. A large black automatic pistol. It looked huge in his pudgy little hand, but he held it very steadily, and it was pointing at me. “Now, throw your mobile to me.”

  “You’ve got a gun,” I said. Not the brightest observation ever, but I was in shock.

  He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Mrs Deeson, I have a gun, and I will use it if you don’t do as I tell you! Now give me your phone and open that door!”

  I looked at the gun. It’s true what they say: the muzzle looks huge when it’s pointed at you. But I clung to my phone. It was my only chance of getting help.

  “Someone will hear a shot,” I told him.

  “Someone might, but round here I doubt if anyone will do anything. And you’ll be dead anyway! Last chance – give it me or I’ll put a bullet between your eyes now!”

  I tossed the phone at him. He made no attempt to catch it, just let it land on the ground then stamped down on it. Glass fragments scattered.

  “That’s better. Now, the door if you please?”

  I stepped over to the door, finding it hard to take my eyes off his pistol. The key fitted smoothly into the lock, which opened with a well-oiled click. I took the padlock off, and turned around.

  “Drop it on the floor.”

  I did as I was told. “The only people who would have had keys to that lock were Emily and the Artist,” I said. “So you must have…”

  I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Yes, I did,” he confirmed. “I’ll tell you all about it if you like. When we’re inside.” He nodded at the door again.

  I lifted the handle and pulled. Like the lock, everything was well oiled. Emily, I thought. She was always so efficient.

  Inside was very dark.

  “Go on,” said Ferrers-Manton.

  I stepped forward. The sunshine through the doorway illuminated bare floorboards, worn by the human traffic of nearly two hundred years. I suddenly wondered if that was the last sunlight I would ever see, and began to tremble.

  There was a strong smell of damp. Damp and rot and decay. With faint overtones of petrol and old food and – turpentine?

  “Light switch. On the wall to your left.” Ferrers-Manton’s voice came from close behind.

  I reached out and pressed the switch, not expecting anything, the mains electricity had been cut off here years ago, but several low-energy bulbs glowed into life, and I looked around as the shadows faded out.

  When the money for rebuilding had run out, the council had settled for refurbishing. Originally, the little ground-floor room – barely ten feet square in Delford’s houses – would have been a kitchen and scullery. Above it was another room the same size, and another above that with a low ceiling. Plus an attic space which often got pressed into service. The council had expanded things a little by knocking out intervening walls, making two houses into one, with three larger rooms. Then, later on, doorways had been made through into the house behind, so that four of the original houses had become one, with finally a decent amount of room for a family, and luxuries like gas, electricity, and water supplied.

  Of course, by that time the ancient buildings were dilapidated and crumbling. It cost so much to shore them up that it would have been cheaper to demolish and rebuild after all.

  This enlarged room was mostly empty, though. To judge by the black mould creeping up the walls, this was where the smell of damp and rot originated.

  “Charming.” Ferrers-Manton pushed me further into the room with the pistol, then shut the door behind us. “Do keep walking, Mrs Deeson. We want to see the rest, don’t we?”

  A doorway – no door – led into a back room. Also empty, though one end was curtained off. A strong chemical smell overlaying something less pleasant emanated from that direction. Toilet facilities, I surmised.

  Another doorway, this time with a door, took us to a set of stairs. As we went up, the damp odour was left behind and the other smells became stronger.

  We emerged into grimy daylight, the windows dirty but intact. The back room was in use as a storage space. Over on one side, unused canvases and paper were stacked and ready. On the other side, paints and oils and brushes and other art supplies were organized into neat piles. Under the boarded-up window on my left were several rows of car batteries, which explained where the electricity came from. There was even a portable generator with them, ready to charge them up. Hence the petrol smell.

  “My, this is a nice set-up,” said Ferrers-Manton. He went over to the generator and sniffed. “I wonder if this is leaking?”

  He crouched down next to it, keeping the gun pointing at me while he twisted the cap on the petrol tank. “Well, look at that. Not fitted properly! That’s a fire hazard.”

  “Well, shouldn’t you put it back on, then?” I asked.

  He looked up at me, his face shadowed under the brim of
his hat, but his eyes gleaming. “Oh, I don’t think so. I think the more petrol vapour round here the better. I think that after I’ve left, there might be a bit of a fire. What do you think, Mrs Deeson? This place would make quite a bonfire, wouldn’t it?”

  I glanced round, remembering the fireball that had burst into our living room, and shuddered involuntarily. In this place it would be much, much worse.

  “Oh, does that bring back bad memories?” Ferrers-Manton chuckled. “Sorry about that.” He didn’t sound sorry at all.

  At the front of the house were the living quarters. A camp bed with a sleeping bag. A motley collection of chairs with a rickety table. A portable TV in one corner, and a gas camping cooker in another. Shelves with food cans and packets. There was even a sofa. I wondered how they’d got it up there. Presumably it must come apart.

  There were paintings on the walls. Prints of some famous artists, including a lot of portraits. Templeton portraits.

  Ferrers-Manton sneered at them. “Very cosy.” He stared up at one of the Templetons. “Oh, yes. That’s the famous portrait of Duke… whatever.”

  The hat brim obscured his vision as he looked around the walls, and he swept it off impatiently, tossed it onto a chair. Its absence revealed a shiny bald head with a fringe of long greying hair.

  “This arty-farty persona I’ve been using has worked very well. People expect an artist to be a bit eccentric. But it’s starting to irritate me now. Perhaps it’s time for a change.”

  He seemed to be intent on the pictures. I glanced at the doorway and the stairs beyond, wondering if I could make a run for it. But when I looked back he was watching me. Amused.

  “Don’t even consider it, Mrs Deeson. Come on. There’s nothing of any value or interest here. Up we go!”

  There was no door this time, just an open staircase. At the top we found that the entire floor had been made into one room. Pillars had been fitted in place of load-bearing walls, and the bricks had been whitewashed. Even the windows had been cleaned. Light flooded in from both sides.

  “Ah! This is what we were looking for.” Ferrers-Manton came up the stairs behind me and looked around. “Impressive, isn’t it? They must have got someone in to do this – amazing what a bit of money can do, even in the Mills. And my, wasn’t he prolific?”

  The room was full of paintings. They hung or leaned against every wall, they were mounted on easels and propped up on tables – a riot of colour and shape compressed into dozens of canvases in different sizes.

  I stepped out into the room, still very conscious of the gun pointing at me, still unable to understand what was going on, but momentarily distracted by what we’d found.

  My mind began to make sense of what I was seeing, sorting it into order. There were about half a dozen distinct sections of different paintings round the room, all following different themes. An easel formed the centrepiece of each section, usually with a work in progress mounted on it, while paintings and sketches of that work or something related were collected around it.

  To my left, as I stepped off the un-railed staircase, were flowers. Charcoal and pencil, acrylics and watercolours, and oils and mixtures. Most of them were shown as withered and dead, but a few – including the almost-completed one on the easel – were bursting with light and colour.

  Next to them was a collection of studies of a room. A room I knew all too well – the room in the farmhouse. Nearly all these were charcoal, or painted in dark shades.

  There was another room depicted in the next station – which I also recognized, both from the painting sent to Sir Arthur and from my own visit to Coren Hall: the room where I had enjoyed a cream tea. That same room, in all its contrasting incarnations of dull decay or colourful restoration.

  “Why, I do believe that it’s Sir Arthur’s classroom!” Ferrers-Manton peered over my shoulder, nudging me with the gun barrel as he did so. “The place where I first learned to daub paint! I would hardly have recognized it.”

  The place where the Artist had discovered his talent, I realized, and another part of the story slid into place.

  At the end of the room, beneath and alongside the windows, were stacked completed paintings of various other subjects – buildings, landscapes, portraits – none of which I recognized. A stepladder stood by itself in the corner. Then, as I moved around the room, another workstation. This time, the subject was faces. Young faces, mostly, boys and girls. Sometimes full face, sometimes seen from the side. Sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, or in a row. All looking upwards, with expressions of shock or horror or utter terror.

  “Ah. Now we’re getting to the good bit!” Ferrers-Manton had been following me round, looking where I looked. He sounded almost jovial.

  The next set was a hanging man. The hanging man. The one I had found all those years ago.

  Not so much a man as a youth. I could see that better in the paintings than I had in real life. There was more light, the detail was sharper, clearer. And horrific.

  He was depicted from several angles, but one predominated – looking up from below and in front. Not very different from the view I’d had after I’d fallen, turned over, and looked back.

  In my head, I heard again the creaking of the rope. I turned away from the pictures, rubbing at my eyes.

  “No, no, you should take a proper look! They’re really good – such an excellent likeness. You might almost say lifelike!” He laughed. “Except that’s not totally accurate, is it?”

  I shook my head, not looking. “I don’t need to see them. I was there.”

  “Yes, you were, weren’t you? Interfering cow!” The humour had entirely gone from his voice. “Well, you can look anyway!”

  He grabbed my hair, pushed the pistol against my head, and forced me to turn back towards the hanging man.

  “How long did you spend trying to find out who he was? Eh? Well, this is your happy day, because now you can get your answer at last! Just ask me!”

  “But…”

  “Ask me!” He ground the muzzle painfully into the side of my head.

  “Who? Who was he?” I gasped out.

  “That’s better…” He took the gun away, let go of my hair, and stepped back. “Malcolm Eridni, that was his name. Or Eradnu, something weird like that. Pretty Malcolm. Except he didn’t look so pretty hanging up there, did he?”

  “How do you know that?” I couldn’t grasp the link between Claude Ferrers-Manton and the farmhouse. I knew it should be obvious, but my mind was still whirling with fear and shock.

  “Still haven’t worked it out? Really, Mrs Deeson, I thought you’d be quicker on the uptake. But, to be fair, no one else did either. Not even Terry. Not until it was too late. All that money I spent on plastic surgery turned out to be a good investment, eh?”

  “Terry? Who’s Terry?”

  He sighed. “Do try to keep up, Mrs Deeson. Terry. The Artist. We’re in his studio, for goodness’ sake! Terrance Naylor.”

  “T – N. His initials on the paintings!” I said to myself.

  “He initialled his paintings? I hadn’t noticed. Well, I didn’t spend time studying them. Once I realized what they were – and to be honest, I hadn’t recognized Terry until I saw the paintings – my first concern was to get rid of them. And him, of course.”

  “So you killed him.”

  “Oh, yes.” A savage look came across his face. Savage – and gleeful. “With the library’s fire extinguisher. I hadn’t gone prepared. I just wanted to see who this hotshot painter was that Carr was pushing me out of the way for. I asked when I could see him and his work, and Emily said, ‘Tomorrow, at the exhibition.’ She intimated that she was helping him bring the paintings over that night. So I came back after you closed up, hung around, and when they arrived, I followed them in. Emily had gone up to the office, so I caught little Terry on his own, setting up his paintings. Imagine my surprise when I saw what they were!”

  He indicated the next group of paintings.

  Here, the artist – Terr
y – had started putting the various elements together. The room in the farmhouse. The frightened kids sitting on the floor in a circle, staring up at the hanging man.

  At Malcolm.

  There were several different versions, different angles, different mediums. All of them, however, had one extra element in them.

  Just outside the circle there was another figure. Bigger, older than the rest. A young man, heavily built with powerful features, and an expression of… pleasure.

  “His exhibition pieces were a selection from some of these groups.”

  He waved his arm around the room. “One of the kids’ faces, one of Malcolm, one of all of us together. I thought he might have some more pictures stashed away, and it seems I was right – though I hadn’t realized how many versions he’d done of each one! Good thing we managed to track them down, eh?”

  “There was space for four pictures in the exhibition,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Terry included a self-portrait.” Ferrers-Manton indicated one of the children in the circle. “That’s him there. Quite a good likeness, actually. But of course, you wouldn’t know. I made quite a mess of his face.”

  I shuddered, remembering. He smiled. And although the features were different, I recognized the expression.

  “That was you at the farmhouse! You. You hung that person. Malcolm. You…”

  “Ah! Now, at last, you’re starting to get it.”

  There was another memory trying to come forward. Another time I had seen that expression.

  “And he was – you were – at the gate that day. At Coren Hall. With the dogs – and the older man…”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you remember that? You got off lightly. I didn’t want to give you any warnings, just set the dogs on you. But Father wouldn’t let me. He was angry enough to do it, but he was scared as well. After all the trouble you’d already caused, he thought it would stir things up too much if you disappeared. That was always his problem. Never wanted to go the full distance, did old Nigel. Left that sort of thing to me. Should have left it to me then.”