Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Then I know this house.’

‘Which is it?’ asked May.

‘Number 43. The House of Conflagration belongs to Tamsin and Oliver Wilton. I think we should get Bimsley around there right now.’

‘Why?’

‘The fire at the hostel failed to take Tate’s life. We don’t have the arson tests back yet, but let’s suppose for a moment that Tate is behind the whole thing. He knew he was being watched, could have switched clothes and set the hostel alight, escaping in the confusion. But this wouldn’t have been part of his original plan.’

‘Then what’s his plan?’

‘The street is flooding again. When this has happened in the past, strange crimes have occurred. What if he’s taken it into his head to repeat the past? Suppose the House Curs’d By All Water is where Ruth Singh died. This House of Conflagration would have nothing to do with the hostel, but it could well place the Wiltons in danger. Tate may well have burned down one building. Suppose he’s about to do it again?’

‘I don’t understand why he would do such a thing. But you’re right, we can’t afford to take any chances.’ May called in Longbright and briefed her. ‘Make a reduced copy of this, would you?’ He handed her the map. ‘Then I want you to take Mangeshkar and Bimsley with you back to Balaklava Street.’

Bimsley arrived before the others. The rain was heavier than ever now. Water flooded across the cobbles in a swathe, frothing over the congested drains. The front walls of the houses were sodden from their roofs to their bedroom windows, soaking the shoulders of the terrace. Bimsley jumped the steps and hammered on the Wiltons’ door knocker, but no one stirred inside. He tipped back his baseball cap and looked up at the dim windows. ‘There’s no response,’ he told Longbright. ‘Can you try their mobiles?’

Bimsley closed his phone and stepped back. He looked about the street. Further down, someone was standing in the bushes on the waste ground, watching him. It was hard to see in the rain, but it looked like Tate. As they saw each other, the onlooker turned and limped off.

‘You’re not getting away this time,’ said Bimsley, breaking into a run.

‘Blimey, a rare sighting of the lesser-fancied detective, Homunculus Senex Investigatorus, ’ said Peregrine Summerfield, scratching his face through his wild ginger beard. ‘Come in before the neighbours see you. Excuse the pyjamas, I prefer to paint in them because of the mess.’ He waved Bryant in with a flick of his paintbrush, dabbing the wall turquoise. Bryant noticed that there was vermilion paint on the ceiling. ‘How the devil did you find me?’

‘Lilian told me you were living up here now,’ Bryant explained. ‘I bumped into her a few weeks ago.’

‘I hope you were driving a bulldozer. She’s been a proper cow since she walked out. I only own one painting, a small and rather sickly Wols that looks like a regurgitated prawn biriani, but Bauhaus stock is higher than ever and now she’s demanding it in the divorce settlement.’

‘I had no idea you liked German abstract art. I don’t suppose there are any clean cups.’ Bryant wandered into the kitchen and ran a kettle under the tap. Every piece of crockery on the draining board was covered with brushes and half-dried blobs of acrylic paint.

‘I use plastic ones now, saves on the washing up. Well, you can look upon me and despair. How the once mighty art lecturer has fallen, Ozymandias in Stoke Newington. I haven’t seen you since that business of the vandalized Pre-Raphaelite at the National. You only bloody call on me when you want something.’ Summerfield wiped a brush out on his striped pyjama shirt. ‘What is it this time?’

‘I need some information on an artist. At least you’ve started painting again.’

‘Well, after Countess Dracula left I packed up the classes and stopped going out for a while, until my pupils came around one day and accused me of giving up on them. What could I do? I couldn’t mope about for ever. Besides, there’s good light in here. I can sit around all day in my underpants flicking paint at the walls if I want to. It feels like a proper home. I still teach art two days a week, but I’m selling my paintings down the Bayswater Road at weekends. Frightful rubbish, sunsets and puppies for tourists with no taste, but I’m making a living wage for once. Who are you after?’

‘Did you ever hear of an artist called Gilbert Kingdom?’ asked Bryant.

Summerfield fondled his beard ruminatively. ‘Not for a very long time,’ he said finally.

‘So you do know of him?’

‘Of course. A great enigma, something of a bête noir . He was a disciple of Stanley Spencer, perhaps a more formidable talent.’

‘Then why have I never heard of him?’

‘Because he never fulfilled his potential. But he’s known to most fine-art historians worth their salt. Kingdom suffered the fate of so many geniuses. Showed great promise as a student at the Slade-Spencer went there, of course-then he underwent some kind of epiphany in much the same way as Spencer had done. Kingdom took a more pagan approach to understanding the world, dividing it into elemental spirits of fire and water. He wasn’t interested in knocking out gilt-framed portraits for punters, he was preoccupied with linking pagan rituals directly to the land. All the talent in the world can’t save a man born out of fashion. Eventually he went barking mad and died in poverty. There are hardly any books on him.’

‘I have one.’ Bryant removed the volume from a scuffed leather briefcase. ‘Unfortunately, the section on his work has been removed.’

‘Ah, I’ve got that book,’ said Summerfield with obvious pleasure. ‘I think it’s pretty much the only place where I’ve ever seen his work reprinted. Let me see if I can find it for you.’

Bryant drank his tea and listened while the art master rooted about in his lounge.

‘I’m afraid the cover’s torn off, but it’s the same edition.’ His rough, paint-stained fingers ploughed through the volume until he came to the pages missing from Tate’s copy. He passed it to Bryant.

‘All we have is a tantalizing glimpse of the man’s brilliance, two paintings now both in California, a few studies and sketches. Just as Spencer painted Cookham, Kingdom painted London. He broke the city down into four distinct colour palettes, densities and timescales.’

‘How did he do that?’

‘Well, there’s London of the Great Fire, and later, during the industrial revolution, a city of steely flame, a man-made inferno of pumping pistons and belching boilers. Then there’s the city of swirling unhealthy fogs, mists and windswept hills, a place of mystery, disease and danger. Then the city of water, crossed by a great meandering river and a hundred tributaries, a landscape of waterwheels and mills, of rain and floods. And finally, the city of rich clay earth, wherein one could find the bones of plague victims, the soul and soil in which its residents take root like the Hydra’s teeth.’

‘The four elements, in fact.’

‘Exactly so. Such thinking was unfashionable at a time when postwar modernism was gaining so much ground. He failed to find a patron, and was eventually kicked to death in the gutter by children, somewhere around your neck of the woods.’

Bryant examined the paintings, the half-finished outpourings of an extraordinary mind, ragged deities commanding the earth and sky while cowering acolytes toiled in tiny brick houses. The colours and detailing were extraordinary. Bryant was reminded of Victorian faerie paintings, reproduced on an epic canvas.

‘And this is all he painted?’

‘Ah, there’s the paradox. Those whose abilities set them ahead of their time are often rewarded posthumously, but failure hides them from sight. The more they forge ahead beyond the spirit of the age, the more the world is intent on burying them. It was said that Kingdom created other pieces, but all of them were destroyed. Nobody knows for sure.’