Michael White - The Art of Murder

Arcade returned Pendragon’s intense gaze. ‘Michael Spillman, a friend.’

‘We might need to talk to him.’

‘I wouldn’t bother. He flew to New York early Wednesday evening. Besides, he was just doing me a favour. Made a copy of the videotape and emailed it over. Berrick and Price had commissioned a recording of the evening. It was all above board. Ask your mate Jackson.’

‘It’s a rather obvious message, isn’t it?’

‘A few days ago these two men were alive and well. Now they cannot speak or move, and soon they’ll be ash. Haven’t you ever wondered at recordings of someone who has since died? Are they really still alive? Were they always dead? I sometimes wonder if isolated tribes who have no understanding of the camera are right to fear it. Perhaps it does leach away our souls. But then, perhaps it’s good that it does, for how else may we be kept alive when memory fails?’

‘Very profound. Very Damien Hirst,’ Pendragon replied tonelessly. ‘Where’s the artistic merit to it?’

‘I thought this was a murder investigation. Why are you so interested?’

Pendragon shrugged. ‘Humour me.’

Arcade gave a wan smile. ‘I don’t spare a moment’s thought for artistic merit and nor should you, Chief Inspector. But … if you want me to humour you.’ He tilted his head to one side for a second. ‘It’s about intent. My friend supplied the material just like an art shop provides paints and canvases. I edited the film. But much, much more important is the intent behind the work. The conceptualisation, if you like. In this case, the mystery of the after-image. The only possible form of Life After Death.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m an artist. That’s what I do.’

‘Oh, come on! That’s a glib remark and you know it, Francis.’ Pendragon allowed a look of disappointment to flicker across his face.

‘It’s the truth.’

‘It’s boring.’

Arcade could not hide his surprise.

‘You’re provoking us, deliberately positioning yourself as the prime suspect. Why?’

The young man shrugged and stared fixedly at a point on the wall behind Pendragon.

‘I think I know what you’re up to. This is all about publicity, isn’t it?’

‘Hah! You sound like Berrick,’ Arcade exclaimed. ‘That’s the sort of shit he was so concerned about. The oxygen of publicity ,’ he added in a pompous tone.

‘But it makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Pendragon moved a hand across the space between their faces. ‘“Failed Artist Seizes Opportunity to Get Noticed”. Perfect.’

‘You surprise me, Chief Inspector. I was beginning to think you weren’t quite as thick as some of the other pigs.’

Pendragon paused for thirty seconds, letting the silence grow uncomfortable. Then he placed the plastic folder upright on his lap and opened it so that Arcade could not see the contents. ‘I imagine, as an artist, you are 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.

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.