The Fethering Mysteries 12; Bones Under The Beach Hut

“I don’t look while I’m painting. I look before I paint. I memorize, I store the image within my mental gallery. For me the act of composition is always an act of recollection.”

Carole hadn’t liked the lie that had brought them into Gray Czesky’s studio, but she reckoned it was time to play along with the subterfuge. “So have you ever memorized Fethering Beach?”

“No. Why should I have done?”

“Oh, of course Sonja Zentner didn’t mention the subject of the commission I’m thinking of. I’m looking for someone to do me a watercolour of Fethering Beach.”

“Ah. Well, no, I haven’t memorized Fethering Beach, but it would be a matter of moments for me to do so. I could go along with my camera any day.”

“Oh, so you take photographs of the views you’re going to paint and work from them? Is that what you mean by ‘memorizing’?” asked Jude.

This did rather dilute the magic of the creative process that the artist had described, and Gray Czesky seemed to acknowledge that he’d lost ground as he mumbled a yes.

“Well, I’ve seen examples of your work, which I like a lot,” Carole lied, “so the question really is: how much would I have to pay to commission you?”

Now it came to money, Gray Czesky was suddenly a lot less airy-fairy. He reeled out a list of prices which seemed to vary according to the size of the picture required. And the smallest option would cost over two thousand pounds.

Carole disguised her real feelings – that if she had a spare two thousand pounds she could think of many things she’d rather spend it on – and said she’d have to mull over her next move. “I will be checking out the rates of some other artists.”

“Other artists? Other so-called artists, I think you mean. I know the work of most of the so-called artists in the area, and there are few who aspire to being above competent draughtsmen. If you are looking for a mere wallcovering, you would do better to buy a poster or a reproduction than one of their efforts. If you want your wall to have a work of art hanging on it, then you need to commission Gray Czesky.”

Jude saw an opportunity to move the conversation in the direction of their investigation. “You say you know all the local artists. Do you know Mark Dennis?”

“Yes, of course I do. Good bloke, Mark. Not much talent as an artist, I’m afraid, but still a good bloke. He didn’t buy into all the bourgeois crap you get in a place like Smalting any more than I do.”

“I gather he’s left Smalting,” said Carole.

An expression of crafty caution came into Gray Czesky’s face as he responded, “Yes, I’d heard that.”

“We know Philly, his girlfriend,” said Jude. “She’s terribly cut up about Mark leaving.”

The artist shrugged. “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Can’t be tied down by bourgeois morality if you’re an artist.”

Carole bit back her instinctive response to that remark, instead asking, “I don’t suppose you have any idea where he went?”

Gray Czesky grinned roguishly. “There is a kind of freemasonry among men, you know. We support our mates, but we don’t get involved in their love lives. If a bloke splits up with a girlfriend, not our problem. Doesn’t matter whether we like the girl or not, we know where our duty lies. We’ll support him, go out for a few drinks, help him forget, but we won’t offer advice or comment. He’s done what he wants to do, he no doubt had good reasons for doing it, it’s his business.”

“You’re saying you don’t know why Mark walked out on Philly?”

Another shrug. “Presumably he didn’t want to stay with her any more.”

“You don’t know if he’d met someone else…or gone back to someone?” asked Jude.

“No. And if I did know I wouldn’t tell you. As I say, there’s a freemasonry among blokes about that kind of thing. We leave the Mills and Boon stuff to the gentler sex. Me and Mark were just good drinking mates. We got healthily smashed from time to time and we didn’t talk about relationships.” He put a heavy, doom-laden emphasis on the word.

“And you haven’t seen Mark Dennis since he left Smalting?”

“That’s another of those things where if I had I wouldn’t tell you.”

It didn’t seem as though their information gathering was going to progress much further. Carole rose to her feet and said, “Thank you very much for your time, Mr Czesky. I’ll make my decision about the commission very soon and get back to you either way. Do you have a card with your phone number on it?”

“Helga’s got some downstairs.”

“I’ll ask her as we go out.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll see you down. Don’t feel ready to go straight back to the coalface of my art.” This was so melodramatically pronounced that Jude looked to see if Gray Czesky was actually sending himself up. But there was no gleam of humour in his eye. When it came to the subject of himself, he was a man incapable of irony.

He led the two women out on to the landing, and once again they were struck by the contrast between the manufactured squalor of the artist’s workplace and the middle-class neatness of the rest of the house. Just as Jude started down the stairs, Carole suddenly said, “Oh, will you excuse me? I just want to have one more look at one of the watercolours – to help me make up my mind,” and slipped back into the studio.

Gray Czesky shrugged and followed Jude down to the hall. He called to his wife as though she were a servant, asking her to bring one of his cards. Moments later Carole joined them.

“Thank you again, Mr Czesky.” She smiled at Helga. “And Mrs Czesky.”

“No point in thanking her,” said the woman’s gracious husband. “She didn’t do anything. Never do much, do you, Hel? Except get under my feet and stop me concentrating on my art.”

Carole and Jude waited for the explosion they reckoned those words must have detonated in any twenty- first-century woman, but none came. Instead, Helga Czesky giggled. And then her husband giggled too. Clearly his insulting of her was some kind of love ritual that seemed to turn them both on.

Helga was the first to recover her powers of speech. She grinned mischievously at the two women and said, “I am very lucky, aren’t I, to be married to a genius – no?”

No, thought Carole and Jude in unison.

¦

Outside Sanditon, Carole became very mysterious, hurrying back to where she had parked the Renault. Jude kept asking what was happening, but she got no reply till they were both inside the car.

Then, milking the drama from her revelation, Carole announced, “When I went back into the studio just now, it wasn’t to take another look at the water-colours.”

“Oh?”

“It was to pick up this.”

“What?” asked Jude, playing along with her neighbour’s narrative style.

Carole unclasped the handbag on her lap and produced from it a paint-spattered scrap of cloth. Jude’s close inspection revealed it to be a strip of an old tea towel with a design of ponies on it.

“This,” Carole declared, “is an exact match to one of the pieces of cloth that was used to set fire to Quiet Harbour.”

? Bones Under The Beach Hut ?

Eighteen

“So where do you reckon we stand now?” asked Jude. They had got a takeaway baguette lunch from The Copper Kettle and were sitting outside Fowey eating it. Although gathering clouds suggested that they’d had the best of the day, Jude had nonetheless stripped down to her bikini. Gulliver lay panting on the sand, having accepted there was no point in complaining further about being chained to a beach hut.

“I’m not quite sure,” Carole replied. “But although he wouldn’t tell us, I did get the strong impression that Gray Czesky had seen Mark quite recently.”

“As recently as the early hours of last Tuesday morning?”

“Hm, it’d be nice if we could prove that, wouldn’t it? Be nice also if we could confirm that the woman with