The Art of Murder

quite accustomed to seeing extreme images, Francis.’ Pendragon stared into the young man’s eyes. ‘This is Mr Berrick, though I’m not sure you’ll recognise him.’ He removed a glossy from the folder and pushed it across the table. It spun round and stopped a few centimetres away from Arcade. It was a close-up of Kingsley Berrick’s disfigured head taken by the police photographer at the gallery on Wednesday morning.

Pendragon could just about discern a flicker of something in Arcade’s eyes, but was not sure what that something was.

‘Perhaps not as you remember him.’

Arcade slid the picture back. ‘You’re right, DCI Pendragon. I am accustomed to extreme images.’

Pendragon plucked the photograph from the table and replaced it in the folder. Then he removed two more glossy prints, turned each so that Arcade could see them and moved them across the table. The first one showed the flattened body of Noel Thursk, pensile over the tree branch in the cemetery. The second was a picture taken in the Path Lab from a camera placed high above the remains. With nothing else around it to offer perspective, the body looked like an amoeba under a microscope.

‘Recognise him?’

Arcade stared silently at the picture.

‘Looks a little peaky, I admit. But do you really not know who this poor fellow is? It’s your old friend Noel Thursk.’

Arcade looked up. His mouth moved as though he were about to say something, but he let it go. Then he gave a brief smile. ‘Quite something, Pendragon. I’d say you should be looking for someone with a dead Surrealist fixation.’

This time, Pendragon could see nothing slipping from behind Arcade’s mask, but he was sure it was a mask. ‘Very well,’ the Chief Inspector said calmly. ‘If that’s the way you want to play this, you give me no alternative but to place you under arrest. See if you still feel so relaxed after twenty-four hours in a cell. That’s how long I can hold you without charge. Meanwhile I’ll obtain a warrant. Shouldn’t take long. Then we’ll go through your studio with a fine-toothed comb.’

Arcade did not flinch.

Chapter 18

Friday, 7.30 p.m.

Pendragon’s mobile rang as he fumbled for the key to his flat. It was Turner. ‘Towers and Mackleby have just come back from Arcade’s studio,’ he said.

‘And?’

‘Nothing really, sir. The place is clean … a couple of joints, some rather ordinary porn, but nothing relevant.’

‘No tapes?’

‘Well, most cameras use memory sticks …’

‘Okay, Turner … no memory sticks?’

‘No, guv. Zilch.’

‘Turner? Why do you insist upon using such ridiculous … oh, never mind. So Towers and Mackleby have got nowhere?’

‘I didn’t say that, sir.’

Pendragon sighed.

‘When they found nothing at Arcade’s studio, they went straight to the gallery to see Jackson Price, see if he had the original of the film taken at the private view.’

‘That’s surprisingly enterprising. And?’

‘He did, and he was very co-operative, apparently.’

‘Well, that’s good,’ Pendragon said. ‘We’ll watch it first thing tomorrow. Get in early, Sergeant.’

He clicked shut the phone, slotted the key into the lock and pushed on the door.

He had moved into this two-roomed apartment over six months earlier with every intention of using it as a stopgap until he found somewhere better, but now the place was growing on him and he was finding himself less and less inclined to move.

He had come to London from his old job in Oxford where he had worked for the best part of two decades. His wife Jean had left him for another woman and he had departed the force for a short time, only to be lured back by the chance of returning to the place where he had grown up and which he had visited only occasionally since his early-twenties. Oxford had become his home, but he no longer wanted to live there; it was tainted for him. His and Jean’s daughter, Amanda, had disappeared five years earlier. She had been nine at the time, and simply vanished on her way home from school. Jack had not only suffered the horror of losing his daughter, he had had to endure the pain of professional impotence — a cop whose only daughter had been abducted. Amanda’s disappearance had been a major factor in the collapse of his marriage. His twenty-year-old son, Simon, was a post-grad Mathematics genius at the University. Pendragon saw little of him now but they were only fifty miles apart, a sixty-minute drive down the M40.

The flat was tatty and had been neglected, first by the landlord and more recently by Pendragon himself. But only a week earlier he had decided to decorate, buy some decent furniture. It was a form of acceptance, an acknowledgement that he had moved on, left Oxford behind, and that this place, Stepney, East London, where he had been born almost forty-seven years ago, was again his home.

And he really did feel at home now. After a shaky beginning, his colleagues and subordinates had accepted him and he had grown in confidence. It was a fresh start and he was out of the blocks. He had even enjoyed a brief romance since arriving at Brick Lane. He and Dr Sue Latimer, a psychologist, had been neighbours — she had rented a flat on the ground floor. They had got on well and Pendragon had even dared to imagine the relationship might actually lead somewhere when Sue had broken the news that she had accepted a job in Toronto. She had left six weeks ago, and he was still feeling sore from the loss.

The door to the flat swung inwards and he stepped across newspaper taped to the floor. When he flicked on the light, the room came alive — white ceiling, white skirting and doorframes, half-painted walls. Pendragon strode over to the kitchen worktop at one end of the room, tossed his briefcase and overcoat on to the Formica surface and leaned back to appraise the shade of light brown he had chosen. On the shade card it had been called something ridiculous like ‘elm bark brown’ and now it covered the top half of two walls. He was about to get on with the rest, but suddenly felt hungry. He opened the fridge door and sighed. A can of lager and a piece of old cheese sat there. Leaning on the door, he tried to decide what to do.

In a moment, he was pulling his coat back on and heading towards the hall outside the flat, checking he had some cash in his wallet. There was a half-decent deli around the corner and an off-licence a few yards beyond that. While the deli owner warmed up a panino, Pendragon went along to the off-licence. There was a queue and he was forced to spend ten boring minutes reading and re-reading labels on wine bottles and signs around the shop informing him of cut-price bulk buys. Leaving with a bottle of South Australian Shiraz, he picked up the panino and headed back to the flat.

At the kitchen worktop, he poured himself a generous glass of wine and surveyed the walls he had painted. Fifteen minutes later, the deli wrapper was in the kitchen bin and the wine glass recharged. Pendragon had changed into a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt, put his favourite Wes Montgomery LP, Smokin’ at the Half Note, on the stereo and had a roller in his right hand.

Painting was a mild anaesthetic, he decided. It seemed to guide the mind into a mellow groove whereby you could perform the physical process, but at the same time you could think about, well, anything. Whatever flooded in, flooded in. He had spent most of the afternoon poring over art books. The local library had a surprisingly good selection. While Turner Googled and searched through blogs and websites, Pendragon did one of the things he did best — he stared at ink on paper, just as he had done as a student at Oxford, just as he had done throughout most of his career. All the secrets of the world could be unravelled with ink on paper. He would always believe that. Although he had lost faith in many things, this was one principle he would never doubt.