Michael White - The Art of Murder

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.

‘So, what do we have?’ he said aloud to the empty room as he prised open a fresh tin of paint. ‘Rene Magritte: Surrealist artist, born Lessines, Belgium, 1898. Came to prominence in the late twenties, early thirties. Creator of a style defined as Magic Realism in which he used ordinary objects but placed in unreal situations and juxtapositions. His work exhibited a great sense of humour, a certain contrived and deliberate dislocation from perceived reality.

‘And Salvador Dali: a close contemporary of Magritte’s, six years younger. Born in Figueres, Spain, May 1904. Named after a brother who died nine months before the painter’s birth, he was told by his parents that he was the reincarnation of his dead sibling. Rose to prominence at about the same time as Magritte. The two men knew each other and spent time together first in Paris in the late-twenties and then at Dali’s Spanish home in the thirties.’ He paused for a moment and lowered the roller into the paint tray, watching the sponge soak up the paint.

‘Any other associations? Each man lost his mother when he was young. Magritte was fourteen, Dali seventeen. Anything connecting the two painters to the two murders — other than the fact that in each case the body was set up in a pose reminiscent of their most famous work?’

Pendragon picked up the roller. ‘No,’ he said aloud. ‘No connection that I can see.’ Perhaps Francis Arcade had been on the money when he remarked that they should look for someone with a dead Surrealist fixation. There seemed to be nothing to connect the murders other than the painting style of the two artists whose work had been travestied.

‘Okay,’ he went on, and pushed the roller back into the paint tray. In the background, Wes Montgomery was playing sweetly, an elaborate riff in B-flat minor. ‘Obviously the killer is trying to tell us something. But what? Are they a frustrated artist, ignored and angry? In other words, just like Arcade? Or is it someone who is setting up the murders to make us think the murderer is a frustrated artist? Is the killer someone in the arts community … or are they trying to make us think along those lines, to throw us off the scent?’

The door buzzer went and Pendragon placed the roller carefully on the rim of the paint tray, walked over to the door and depressed the switch on the intercom.

‘Yes?’

‘Sir? It’s Turner. Can I pop up for a minute?’

Surprised, Pendragon pushed the button to open the front door. Thirty seconds later the sergeant had reached the top of the stairs, slightly out of breath. He had a leather satchel slung over his left shoulder. ‘Evening, guv. I’m sorry to disturb you.’ He couldn’t resist a half-smile, seeing DCI Pendragon in jeans.

‘Come in, Turner. It’d better be something very interesting.’

‘Doing a spot of DIY then, sir? Looks good.’ Turner went over to the kitchen worktop and off-loaded the shoulder bag, placing it carefully on the Formica top. ‘It’s to do with Noel Thursk,’ he said, unzipping the bag and pulling out a laptop.

‘What about him?’

‘Thatcher got back with this just after you left.’ He nodded towards the laptop. ‘It’s Thursk’s. It didn’t take long to get into it.’ He looked at Pendragon for approval. ‘Password was peanuts to figure out. Ninety-nine per cent of people do the bleedin’ obvious, even though they’re always being told not to.’

‘The obvious?’

‘NT0658.’

‘Initials, then month and year of his birth?’

‘Correct. It was the second attempt because some people use the day of the birth month. Anyway … I’ve gone through the machine. Nothing. I’ve searched every disk and every USB drive in Thursk’s flat. Nothing on those either. No notes, no rough drafts. The only thing on there is the original proposal, which the publisher has anyway — a ten-page outline that gives the bare bones of the book.’ He brought it up on the computer. Pendragon read from the screen and scrolled down. It told him very little, merely making reference to Thursk’s long and close association with key players in the London art world. As the publisher, Lewis Fanshaw, was an old friend of his, he would have needed little convincing of Thursk’s credentials.

‘Not a great help.’

‘No, sir. But I dunno, I had a sense something wasn’t quite right. Just an instinct, I s’pose. So I ran a piece of software through it called Re-Search. It scans the computer and can find traces of files that were once on the hard drive and have since been deleted. It’s to do with binary markers that …’

‘Yes, all right, Sergeant. Get to the point.’

‘The point is, Thursk deleted a whole load of files from the hard drive very recently. You can see here.’ He pointed towards the screen. A list of processor files appeared. Six of them had been greyed-out. ‘I checked all the disks and external drives and found the same thing on one of the USBs.’