Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“I know that. But Nicola had expensive tastes. Believe me, she couldn't have bought what she wore to work every day on what I was paying her. I'll lay twenty quid on it that if you trace her wardrobe, you'll find it came from Knightsbridge, where some poor sod's paying piles on an account that she was free to use. And that sod's not me.”

Very neat, Lynley thought. Upman had tied all the pieces together with an adroitness that was a credit to his profession. But there was something calculated in his presentation of the facts that made Lynley wary. It was as if he'd known what they would ask him and had already planned his answers, like any good lawyer. From Hanken's expression of mild dislike, it was clear that he'd reached the same conclusion about the solicitor.

“Are we talking about an affair?” Hanken asked. “Is this a married chap doing what he can to keep the mistress content?”

“I have no idea. I can only say that she was involved with someone, and I expect that someone's in London.”

“When was the last time you saw her alive?”

“Friday evening. We had dinner.”

“But you yourself had no personal relationship with her,” Hanken noted.

“I took her to dinner as a farewell, which is fairly common practice between employers and employees in our society, if I'm not mistaken. Why? Does this put me under suspicion? Because if I'd wanted to kill her-for whatever reason you might have in mind-why would I wait from Friday until Tuesday night to do it?”

Hanken pounced. “Ah. You seem to know when she died.”

Upman wasn't rattled. “I did speak to someone at the Hall, Inspector.”

“So you said.” Hanken got to his feet. “You've been most helpful to our enquiries. If you can just give us the name of Friday night's restaurant, we'll be on our way.”

“The Chequers Inn,” Upman said. “In Calver. But look here, why do you need that? Am I under suspicion? Because if I am, I insist on-”

“There's no need for posturing at this point in the investigation,” Hanken said.

There was also no need, Lynley thought, to put the solicitor any more on the defensive. He intervened with, “Everyone who knew the murder victim is a suspect at first, Mr. Upman. DI Hanken and I are in the process of eliminating possibilities. Even as a solicitor, I expect you'd encourage a client to cooperate if he wanted to be crossed off the list.”

Upman didn't embrace the explanation, but he also didn't press the issue.

Lynley and Hanken took themselves out of his office and into the street, where Hanken immediately said, “What a snake,” as they walked to the car. “What a slimy bugger. Did you believe his story?”

“Which part of it?”

“Any of it. All of it. I don't care.”

“As a lawyer, naturally, everything he said was immediately suspect.”

This effected a reluctant smile in Hanken.

“But he gave us some useful information. I'd like to talk to the Maidens again and see if I can get anything out of them that will corroborate Upman's suspicions that Nicola was seeing someone in London. If there's another lover somewhere, there's another motive for murder.”

“For Britton,” Hanken acknowledged. He jerked his head in the direction of Upman's office. “But what about him? D'you plan to list him among your suspects?”

“Till we check him out, definitely.”

Hanken nodded. “I think I'm starting to like you,” he said.

Cilia Thompson was in residence at the studio when Barbara Havers tracked it down, three arches away from the dead end of Portslade Road. She had the two big front doors completely open, and she was in the midst of what looked like a creative fury, slashing at a canvas with paint as what sounded like African drums emanated rhythmically from a dusty CD player. The volume was high. Against her skin and in her sternum, Barbara could feel the pulsations.

“Cilia Thompson?” she shouted, wrestling her identification from her shoulder bag. “Can I have a word?”

Cilia read the warrant card and put her paint brush between her teeth. She punched a button on the CD player, choked off the drums, and returned to her work. She said, “Cyn Cole told me,” and continued to smother the canvas with paint. Barbara sidled round to have a look at her work: It was a gaping mouth out of which rose a motherly looking woman wielding a teapot decorated with snakes. Lovely, Barbara thought. The painter was definitely filling a vacuum in the art world.

“Terry's sister told you that he was murdered?”

“His mum phoned her from the North soon as she saw the body. Cyn phoned me. I thought something was up when she rang last night. Her voice wasn't right. You know what I mean. But I wouldn't have guessed… I mean, like, who would've wanted to snuff Terry Cole? He was a harmless little prick. A bit demented, considering his work, but harmless all the same.”

She said this last with a perfectly straight face, as if all round her were canvases by Peter Paul Rubens and not depictions of countless mouths regurgitating everything from oil slicks to motorway pile-ups.

The work of her compatriots wasn't much better from what Barbara could see. The other artists were sculptors like Terry. One used crushed rubbish bins as a medium. The other used rusting supermarket trolleys.

“Yeah. Right,” Barbara said. “But I s'pose it's all a matter of taste.”

Cilia rolled her eyes. “Not to someone who's educated in art.”

“Terry wasn't?”

“Terry was a poser, no offence. He wasn't educated in anything except lying. And he'd got like a first in that.”

“His mum said he was working on a big commission,” Barbara said. “Can you tell me about it?”

“For Paul McCartney, I have no doubt” was Cilia's dry reply. “Depending on what day of the week you happened to have a chat with him, Terry was working on a project that would bring him millions, or getting ready to sue Pete Townshend for not telling the world he had a bastard son-that's Terry, mind you-or stumbling on some secret documents that he planned to sell to the tabloids, or having lunch with the director of the Royal Academy Or opening a topflight gallery where he'd sell his sculptures for twenty thousand a pop.”

“So there was no commission?”

“That's a safe bet.” Cilia stepped back from her canvas to study it. She applied a smear of red to the mouth's lower lip. She followed with a smear of white, saying, “Ah. Yes,” in apparent reference to the effect she'd attained.

“You're coping quite well with Terry's death,” Barbara noted. “For having just heard about it, that is.”

Cilia read the statement for what it was: implied criticism. Catching up another brush and dipping it into a glob of purple on her palette, she said, “Terry and I shared a flat. We shared this studio. We sometimes had a meal together or went to the pub. But we weren't real mates. We were people who served a purpose for each other: sharing expenses so we, like, didn't have to work where we lived.”

Considering the size of Terry's sculptures and the nature of Cilia's paintings, this arrangement made sense. But it also reminded Barbara of a remark that Mrs. Baden had made. “How did your boyfriend feel about the deal, then?”

“You've been talking to Prune-face, I see. She's been waiting for Dan to cut up rough with someone ever since she saw him. Talk about judging a bloke on appearances.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And has he ever? Cut up rough, that is. With Terry. It's not your everyday situation, is it, when one bloke's girlfriend is living with another bloke.”

“Like I said, we aren't-weren't-living with like in living with. Most of the time we didn't even see each other. We didn't hang out with the same group even. Terry had his mates and I have mine.”