The Marlow Murder Club

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘Why’s he burning all those other paintings?’ Becks asked.

  Before anyone could offer an answer, they saw a police car pull up outside Elliot’s house and Tanika get out.

  ‘About bloody time!’ Suzie said, letting the curtains close as she turned to Brenda. ‘Thanks for the tip-off, Brenda. You’re the best.’

  Outside Elliot’s house, Tanika had no sooner pressed the entrance buzzer to the side of the gates than she saw Judith, Suzie and Becks bustle out of a nearby house and head towards her.

  ‘I could have guessed,’ she said as the women arrived.

  ‘It’s only because of us you know Elliot’s burning paintings in his garden,’ Judith said, a touch irritated at Tanika’s lack of a welcome.

  ‘Paintings?’ Tanika asked sharply. ‘You told me it was only one.’

  ‘We’ve been watching from my friend Brenda’s house,’ Suzie said.

  ‘Brenda?’

  Suzie pointed to where Brenda was looking down at them from a window in her house. She waved a friendly hello.

  ‘Although I’ve a bone to pick with you,’ Judith said to Tanika. ‘Why didn’t you tell me straight away that Stefan and Iqbal had been killed with an antique pistol?’

  ‘Because you’re not investigating the murders!’ Tanika said, unable to keep the frustration out of her voice.

  ‘But you’d get so much further if you kept us in the loop.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but you’re civilians. I’m not allowed to. It’s that simple.’

  ‘For example,’ Judith said, ignoring Tanika’s words, ‘I’d be able to tell you the significance of the phrase, “faith, hope and charity”.’

  ‘You know about that?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m guessing they’re the words on the bronze medallions you found at each of the murders.’

  ‘How can you possibly know that?’

  ‘Simple deduction. It was you who told me the word “Faith” was carved on the medallion attached to Stefan’s body, and I was able to see for myself that there was another medallion by Liz’s body. So, if you’re now asking about the phrase “faith, hope and charity”, it seems only logical to conclude that the words “faith”, “hope” and “charity” were found carved on three medallions you found with each body.’

  ‘She’s very clever,’ Suzie said, indicating Judith with her thumb for Tanika’s benefit.

  Judith beamed at the compliment.

  ‘Okay,’ Tanika said. ‘According to you, what does “faith, hope and charity” mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s from Corinthians, of course. But beyond that, any crossword compiler worth her salt would be able to tell you it’s also the motto of the Freemasons.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Or to be precise, they’re the three cardinal virtues of the Freemasons.’

  Tanika didn’t quite know what to say to that.

  ‘That is actually very useful,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So I suggest you find out who’s a Mason, because it’s somehow connected to the three murders.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. You could be right.’

  Judith turned to her two friends.

  ‘Come on,’ she said grandly. ‘We need to let Tanika get on with her work.’

  The three women turned and headed over to an old van that Tanika could see was parked illegally on the pavement. On the left of the trio was the perfect housewife with her flicky hair, jeggings and gilet; on the right, a solidly built oak of a woman who walked and dressed as if she were about to set sail with Long John Silver; and in between them, the eccentric aristo who wasn’t much taller than she was wide and who was wearing, as ever, her dark grey cape.

  A more motley trio it was hard to imagine, but Tanika couldn’t help but smile to herself as the women drove off in a belch of diesel fumes from Suzie’s vehicle.

  Still shaking her head in wonder, Tanika pressed the buzzer again. A woman’s voice came out of the speaker.

  ‘The Howard residence.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Tanika said into the machine. ‘My name’s Detective Sergeant Tanika Malik. May I come in?’

  Chapter 29

  Once Tanika was through the security gates, she passed a pair of gleaming BMWs. As she approached the front door, it was answered by Elliot’s wife, Daisy.

  ‘Good morning to you!’ the woman said. ‘My name’s Daisy Howard. How can I help you?’

  Tanika introduced herself, but was surprised that a man like Elliot should be married to someone who was so instantly warm and welcoming.

  ‘Could I have a word with your husband?’ Tanika asked.

  ‘Of course. Come on in.’

  Daisy led Tanika through a house that was effortlessly luxurious. There were thick cream carpets, cut flowers in modernist vases, and old oil paintings on the walls.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Daisy asked as they entered the marble and chrome kitchen.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’s such a hot day.’

  ‘If I could just have a word with your husband?’

  ‘Why do you want to see him?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s a police matter,’ Tanika said as kindly as she could.

  ‘Then you’ll find him in the garden. Setting fire to things. Typical man.’

  Daisy indicated the bifold doors that led from the kitchen onto a patio of old York flagstones. Stepping outside, the two women saw Elliot standing by a small bonfire at the bottom of the garden. They watched him in silence for a moment.

  ‘How did the two of you meet?’ Tanika asked.

  ‘At an art gallery in London. We both tried to buy the same painting.’ Daisy smiled at the memory. ‘And he was typically English. All pretend bluster. But I could see he was a kind man. Damaged. But kind.’

  ‘You think he’s damaged?’

  ‘He’s got an artist’s soul. He bruises easily. Whatever you’ve come to see him about today, it’s not his fault. Someone will have led him astray. He’s not as strong as he looks.’

  ‘You think he could be in trouble?’

  ‘The police never arrive to ask you the time of day.’

  Tanika looked at Daisy, and although she was still smiling, there was a hint of steel there as well.

  With a nod of thanks, Tanika entered the garden. As she got nearer to Elliot, she could see that Judith and her friends had been right. It looked like the fire was made up of wooden frames and colourful painted canvases.

  Elliot turned as she approached. Tanika had seen his photo on the auction house website and spoken to him twice on the phone, but she’d not met him in the flesh before. He seemed more subdued than she was expecting. A little less commanding, perhaps.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  As Tanika introduced herself, she saw that the fire was made up of half a dozen paintings, if not more. She started pulling them out to try and save them. And as she did so, she noted that they were all similar to the painting in Stefan’s house that had had its frame removed.

  Elliot just stood to one side and watched her, puzzled.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘A neighbour saw you setting fire to some paintings in your garden and called it in.’

  ‘Why’s that a police matter?’ Elliot said, turning to look at the clutch of houses that had windows overlooking his garden. ‘Bloody nosy parkers.’

  ‘It’s a police matter because we have reason to believe Stefan Dunwoody was killed in connection with a Rothko painting you sold to him in 1988,’ Tanika said as she pulled another painting from the fire and wiped the flames off it on the grass until it was only smouldering. A third of the painting hadn’t yet caught fire, and Tanika could see that it had originally been three bands of plain colour, each of them a different shade of orange.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Elliot said, superiority slipping back into his voice, but Tanika guessed it was false confidence. ‘You aren’t seriously suggesting I’ve just set fire to a bu
nch of Rothkos, are you? They’d be worth millions of pounds.’

  Tanika examined a charred batten of wood. It was made of modern pine and didn’t look as though it could have come from the frame around the Rothko in Stefan’s house. Stefan’s frames were all old, and most of them were gilt or ornate. In fact, as she removed the last burnt painting from the fire and smothered the flames on the grass, she realised that all of the wood she could see was cheap, such as would be used to make a modern canvas for a painting. Indeed, at the corners of each piece of wood she’d taken from the fire, she could see modern staples where the canvas had been attached to the frame.

  ‘These paintings look like Rothkos to me,’ Tanika said, not wanting to give any ground.

  ‘That’s very gratifying. It’s very much the effect I was going for.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I painted these. All of them.’

  ‘You did? When?’

  ‘In the last few months. It’s what I do in my spare time. Painting.’

  ‘Can you tell me about the Rothko that Stefan bought from you after your father died?’

  Elliot thought for a moment before replying.

  ‘Okay, the thing you have to know about Stefan Dunwoody is he was a crook.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘But I didn’t know that when my father died. Back in 1988. Which is why I got him to value Father’s paintings. And he did a good job, or so it seemed to me at the time. But he said that one of Father’s pictures was a fake, bought it for a pittance from me, and then, much later, got it reassigned as a Rothko. Which hurt, I can tell you. Rothko’s always been my specialism. I mean, look at my paintings. All these years later and I’m still obsessed with him.’

  ‘Then why have you set them on fire?’

  ‘I always destroy my work. After a time.’

  ‘Why?’

  Elliot stared into the dying embers rather than answer.

  ‘Why do you burn your paintings?’ Tanika asked again.

  ‘Because I’m no good,’ he said, and Elliot seemed to be talking more to the fire than to her.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘My work is worthless.’

  He said the words so quietly, Tanika wasn’t sure she’d heard them correctly.

  ‘You went to art college.’

  ‘Anyone can go to art college. You only need ability for that. And I always had ability. But I didn’t have “it”. The gift. That thing that says you’re different. Special. That you have something to say.’

  Tanika remembered how Judith had told her that Elliot had been awarded a place at art school when he was much younger, but his father had forbidden him from attending.

  ‘What about when you were younger? The first time you got into art college? Was your work special then?’

  Elliot finally looked up from the fire.

  ‘I’ll never know, will I?’

  For the first time, Tanika felt as though she were talking to the ‘real’ Elliot Howard. Not pompous, not superior at all in fact, he was more a little boy lost. Although, Tanika knew, ‘little boy losts’ were still capable of committing murder. And it was surely suspicious that he’d be painting and then burning Rothko-styled paintings after there’d been a Rothko-related theft from Stefan’s house, even if it was just the frame that had been taken.

  ‘Did you break into Stefan’s house after your argument with him at Henley?’ she asked.

  ‘No. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Then was it you who broke into his house last week?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. What break-in?’

  ‘Did you steal the frame from Mr Dunwoody’s Rothko?’

  ‘Seriously, this is the first I’ve heard of any of this. What frame?’

  Tanika could see that Elliot was apparently sincere in his answers. But if he hadn’t broken in and stolen the frame, then who had? And why was the frame so important in the first place?

  Daisy headed over, a phone in her hand.

  ‘Detective Sergeant?’ she called out, and Elliot and Tanika turned around. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

  ‘What’s that, darling?’ Elliot asked.

  ‘I’ve got our lawyer on the phone, and he says we don’t have to answer any questions. Not unless he’s present. And the police aren’t allowed on our property without a warrant.’

  ‘I’m just answering the detective sergeant’s questions.’

  ‘Well don’t,’ Daisy said firmly, before turning to face Tanika. ‘Now, if you’re not going to charge my husband with anything, and you don’t have a warrant, then you’ll have to leave at once.’

  Tanika knew that Daisy was right. Without the owner’s permission, she wasn’t allowed to stay on the property.

  She looked at Daisy, and could see a determination to her that brooked no disagreement.

  Tanika smiled tightly, made her excuses and left, but as she returned to the house, she paused briefly by the bifolds and glanced back at Elliot and his wife. It looked very much as though Daisy was reading the riot act to her husband.

  Now what was that about?

  Chapter 30

  The following day, a national newspaper splashed on its front page that a triple killer was on the loose in Marlow. By the evening, the story was being featured prominently on the TV news, and from that moment on, it felt as though the international media had taken over the town. There were news satellite vans parked outside the Assembly Rooms, and a seemingly endless supply of reporters from all over the world vox-popping residents, asking them how they coped with going about their day while a serial killer was at large.

  It was hugely unsettling for everyone, and local community leaders like the mayor and the Reverend Colin Starling were constantly being wheeled out to remind their residents and the wider world that Marlow was in fact a peaceful place where residents generally lived side by side in harmony.

  As for Judith, she vanished for the next couple of days, which allowed Becks and Suzie to catch up with their lives. But then, on the Monday morning, both women got a call from her. They were to drop everything and go to her house at once. She’d made a breakthrough.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Suzie said as she and Becks stood in wonder in Judith’s sitting room.

  In front of them, on the green baize table, were the shredded pieces of paper Suzie had stolen from Andy Bishop’s office, but they’d been separated and straightened as best as Judith could into strips a couple of millimetres wide, and all aligned so they recreated the original sheet of A4 paper.

  ‘You put it back together?’ Becks said, as amazed as Suzie.

  ‘I told you I’d do it,’ Judith said.

  ‘But there must be hundreds of pieces here!’ Suzie said.

  ‘There are. But it’s like a jigsaw. Each piece you place correctly isn’t just a piece that’s now in the right place, it’s also a piece that’s no longer in among the mess of unplaced pieces. It’s very much a zero-sum game.’

  ‘I take my hat off to you,’ Becks said as she looked at the document. ‘I never thought you’d be able to do it.’

  ‘So go on, then,’ Suzie said eagerly. ‘What’s so important that Andy Bishop had to shred it the moment you’d left the room?’

  ‘It’s a page from the Borlasian.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s the magazine for the old boys and girls of William Borlase’s Grammar School.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Becks said. ‘Why would Andy Bishop need to shred a page from an old school magazine?’

  ‘Have a look and you’ll see.’

  Suzie and Becks bent down and peered at the thin strips of paper on the table.

  ‘I don’t want to get too near,’ Becks said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Judith said. ‘I bought some cellophane and glue. I wasn’t having a gust of wind ruin all of the hours of work I’d put into this. I’ve glued each shredded piece of paper to the cellophane, so you can pick it up an
d look at both sides of the page. In fact, you’ll need to look at both sides.’

  To demonstrate, Judith picked up the document and handed it to Becks and Suzie. They pored over it, but enlightenment still eluded them.

  ‘It’s a report on last year’s school hockey team,’ Suzie said.

  She was correct. The page covered the exploits of the girls’ and boys’ first XI teams during the previous season.

  ‘As I say, that’s not the interesting side. Turn it over,’ Judith said.

  The other side of the reconstructed paper was a page dedicated to the old boys and old girls of the school. There was a message from the president of the association, news of a fund-raising drive, and a list of names of old pupils who’d died in the past year. Again, it was entirely innocuous.

  ‘Okay,’ Suzie said. ‘Either I’m going mad, or this is just school guff.’

  ‘Where did he even get it from?’ Becks asked.

  ‘Good question,’ Judith said. ‘At first I thought it was his copy of the magazine. You see, I looked Andy Bishop up on his company website. He went to Borlase’s Grammar School back when he was a child. So he’d get the school magazine sent to him every year.’

  ‘But you don’t think it’s his?’ Suzie asked.

  ‘Keep looking,’ Judith said, and the other two women could see that she was enjoying herself tremendously.

  ‘There’s nothing here. I can’t see Ezra Harrington’s name mentioned. Or Iqbal Kassam. Or Stefan Dunwoody, or Andy Bishop for that matter. It’s got nothing to do with anything or anyone.’

  ‘And that’s where you’re wrong!’ Judith said as she went over to her sideboard, returning moments later with her copy of Ezra’s will. ‘Because I was like you to start off with. I couldn’t work out why Andy Bishop would have wanted to shred this one page from a school magazine. But the thing is, he did shred it. So there had to be a reason. I just had to puzzle it out. Work at it from all angles. And it was when I looked at our copy of Ezra’s will that I realised what was going on. Have a look at the names of the two people who witnessed it.’

  Judith opened Ezra’s will so the others could see the signatures at the end of the document. The two witnesses were listed as Spencer Chapman and Faye Kerr. Their addresses and occupations, a horse breeder and teacher respectively, were also listed.