Fell Purpose

wood-block floors, pale walls and lean, painfully modern furniture. There was a showpiece sofa covered in taupe suede – you’d have to be wearing freshly dry-cleaned clothes ever to sit on that, because it would show every mark, and getting them off would be the devil. There were modern art pictures on the walls, and some equally obscure bits of modern sculpture (or were they called ‘installations’ now?) on stands and shelves. The Markovs, Slider decided, must be doing all right. The place said taste, money and modernity. More importantly to Slider, it smelled nice – of cleanness and light furniture polish.

Markov led the way through to the balcony, which was the width of the sitting room and just deep enough to take chairs and a small round table. It looked out at the back over the gardens of this road and the next, which included some glorious big trees. Markov was evidently pleased with the view, because he turned at the railings and looked expectantly at Slider. ‘Nice, eh? It was one of the reasons we bought this place.’

‘Very nice,’ Slider said.

‘Can I get you something to drink? Tea, coffee – a glass of wine?’

‘That’s very kind of you, but no thank you. Nothing for me.’

‘Oh. Well, I’m going to have a glass of wine. It’ll be back to school for me next week, so I might as well make hay while the sun shines.’ He gave a little, unconvincing laugh. ‘Sure you won’t join me?’

‘No, really. Thanks all the same.’

The bottle was evidently open, for he was back in no time with a large glass of chilled white in his hand. He leaned against the railings, facing inwards, to sip it, so Slider was able to get a good look at him. He was tall and well-made, though not ostentatiously muscled – working out at the gym was obviously not one of his hobbies. He had thick, toffee-brown hair, expensively cut (Slider recognised the symptoms from Atherton) in a sort of floppy, public-school style, and shot with blonde streaks which were either the result of all those Italian holidays, or put in artfully for a hundred and sixty quid by a bloke called Adrian. He was wearing stone-coloured chinos and a denim- blue shirt, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up, showing tanned forearms. But the lean, classical face was neither as young nor as handsome as the photograph on the website had suggested. He had not shaved that morning, and his eyes looked bloodshot and pouchy, while his smile and debonair manner seemed effortful.

‘So, to what do I owe the honour of this visit?’ he asked at the end of a large-ish swig.

‘I wanted to talk to you about Zellah Wilding,’ Slider said.

The smile wavered, but stuck gallantly. ‘So I imagined. But I don’t know how I can help you. It’s school holidays and I haven’t seen her for a month. I have no idea where she was or what she was up to.’ He swigged again.

‘I didn’t suppose you had,’ Slider said. What was the man so nervous about? ‘I saw some drawings that she did, and they impressed me with their skill. I’m not an expert, of course, but they did seem to me to have something. I wanted to ask you your impression of her, as a person.’

‘Oh,’ he said, but didn’t immediately go on.

Slider thought he’d better prime him. ‘Your headmistress said you thought the world of her, and believed she had talent.’

‘Betty’s a mathematician,’ he said with a throw-away laugh. ‘She has no eye for the visual arts. Her idea of beauty is a quadratic equation.’

‘So, you didn’t think Zellah had talent?’

He seemed to pull himself up. ‘Oh – well – I didn’t say that. Yes, Zellah had talent. She was a very bright child all round. She could draw nicely, and had a good eye for line and colour. Whether it would have gone on to develop into anything more than that, one can’t say. Lots of girls can draw nicely, but they don’t all become artists. And her father wanted her to go into engineering. I doubt he’d have been happy with a painter in the family.’ His expression changed. ‘Anyway, we’ll never know, now, will we?’ He emptied the glass. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’

‘No, thank you.’

He went into the house, and returned quickly with the glass refilled. Slider was beginning to understand the eyes and the unshaven slackness of the face. Perhaps he was more upset by Zellah’s death than he wanted to show. If he had based his reputation on buccaneering good looks and insouciance, he might be unwilling to reveal a sentimental side, especially to another man, who might see it as weakness. Or perhaps he had other troubles in his life.

‘So, what were these pictures of Zellah’s that you saw?’ he asked when he had settled again. This time he sat on one of the wrought-iron chairs and crossed one leg over the other, resting the ankle on the knee in the classic Englishman-abroad pose.

‘I found a sketch pad of hers in her room at home, which she had gone to some trouble to hide. There were drawings of horses—’

‘God, yes, those horses! She was horse-mad, like all these girls!’

‘And some still-life things, and then some drawings of nude figures. Life studies, is that what you call them?’

The smile disappeared. ‘Yes. I arrange classes out of school hours for the girls who are serious about art. Teenage girls being what they are, it’s difficult to hold them in school time without a lot of sniggering idiots making a noise in the corridor and trying to look through the glass door panel. Prurient little beasts.’

‘Yes, I understand,’ Slider said.

‘Do you?’ He sounded unexpectedly annoyed. ‘It’s not even just the kids; it’s the parents, too. The human form is a thing of beauty: clothes are not. Just that. But the hoi polloi fasten on to the nudity aspect and make a vulgar song and dance about it. It’s ignorance, pure and simple.’

Slider forbore to mention that ‘hoi polloi’meant ‘the people’ and to say ‘the hoi polloi’ was a tautology and a mark of ignorance. This man had probably had to field a lot of complaints from parents over the years, and specialists often got annoyed with ordinary people who didn’t understand their specialism. You should hear policemen talking about the great General Public, he thought.

‘There’s a long and honourable tradition of painting the naked human form,’ he said soothingly.

‘I paid for the models myself, out of my own pocket,’ Markov concluded, with a steep descent into bathos. ‘I don’t know what they had to complain about.’

‘Look,’ Slider said encouragingly, ‘I’m not here to criticize your teaching techniques. I’m only saying I understand why Zellah hid her sketch pad from her parents.’

He looked relieved at the sympathetic approach. ‘God, yes! That philistine of a father of hers! I met him at parents’ meetings and school events and so on. Onward, Christian soldiers! He was an absolute ogre. No wonder Zellah was terrified of him.’

‘Was she? I’m trying to understand her, you see. Different people give me different accounts of what she was like. You obviously knew her better than her other teachers—’

‘Why do you say that?’ he interrupted.

‘Well, you saw her out of school hours, with your art classes.’

‘As a teacher.’

‘Quite. But I’m sure she revealed things about herself through her drawings. That’s what art is for, isn’t it?’

‘Oh – well, yes, I suppose so.’

‘So, how would you characterize her?’

He took another swig before answering, and stared thoughtfully at the middle distance. ‘She was a clever girl, as I’ve said. But a quiet one. It wasn’t easy to get anything out of her. She never talked about herself.’

‘Her friends say she was a bold spirit, defiant of convention,’ Slider said. ‘Sexually active, for one thing.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that.’ He glanced at Slider and away again. ‘You know how schoolgirls like to show off and exaggerate.’

‘You mean her friends are exaggerating about her? Or that she exaggerated about herself?’

He hesitated. ‘You saw her life-study drawings? What did you think of them?’

‘I thought they were very good,’ Slider said. ‘I thought they had a great deal of feeling, not just technical accuracy.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He paused, as though thinking something out. ‘Zellah did talk sometimes about boys, the way girls of that age do, but I always thought it was – well – a way of trying to fit in with the others. Because of her parents she was rather cut off from the other girls. I think she felt like an outsider. But those drawings showed the real Zellah.’