Michael White - The Art of Murder

‘One a.m.?’

‘Yes, Jack,’ she responded wearily and rolled her eyes. ‘I’m an artist. I don’t keep office hours.’

‘Duly noted,’ Pendragon replied lightly. ‘I’m a copper, I don’t do nine to five either. Go on.’

‘I didn’t hear anyone approach. Just felt this pain in my head and felt … I don’t know how to explain it … puzzled isn’t the right word. But, well, yeah, it’ll do. Puzzled. What could be hurting me … you know? That’s it. I woke up on a bed a bit like this one.’

‘I take it you were robbed too?’

‘Oh yes. Phone, cards, a bit of cash.’

‘Well, sorry to be predictable but I’ll have to be the first to say you should have caught a cab.’

‘Oh, you’re way too slow. The doctor has already said it.’

‘So you’re free to go now?’

‘I am.’

‘Well, the least I can do is to put you in a cab.’

‘All right,’ she responded. ‘But only on condition you let me make you a coffee at my place.’

Pendragon looked at his watch. ‘Ah …’

‘No deal then.’

Gemma Locke’s fourteenth-floor apartment was in an exclusive new block in Wapping. It was very modern, but softened by a female eye for comfort as well as practicality. Where many a successful thirty-something single man would have furnished the place with black leather and chrome, Gemma had gone for a more subtle, feminine palette of burnt umber, ivory and unpainted plaster. It worked well with the urban view through a massive window opening on to Docklands. Canary Wharf was just visible, and beyond that the long twisting coils of the grey Thames. Great black clouds hung low over the scene, threatening more snow.

‘I’m guessing you don’t work here,’ Pendragon said, surveying the beautiful space.

‘Er … no!’ Gemma replied. ‘I have a studio in Bermondsey. I like to keep home and work completely separate. Or else I’d always be working.’

Pendragon insisted he made the coffee while she lay on one of the large sofas in the main space. He found everything where he expected it and brought over a tray, placing it on a mother-of-pearl inlaid Indian coffee table. Gemma pulled herself up, bringing one hand to her bandaged head.

‘Hurting?’

‘Not as such,’ she replied. ‘They gave me something the doctor said would make a mugged elephant feel better. I’m not sure I appreciated the allusion.’

Pendragon laughed.

‘Do all coppers have such a good sense of humour?’ she asked with a faint upturning of the lips.

‘Some of them believe they do. My sergeant thinks he’s very funny.’

She nodded and took a sip of coffee. ‘Mmm … good.’

‘So, now that you have my full attention,’ Pendragon said. ‘Perhaps you’ll let me know some more about yourself. I Googled you.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘And you have an impressive website.’

‘Pretty much de rigueur these days.’

‘I imagine so. But they only scratch the surface.’

‘What do you want to know? Am I being questioned?’

Pendragon shook his head and smiled. ‘Strictly personal research,’ he said, and drank some coffee.

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ Gemma teased, eyeing him over her cup. ‘Oh, the interesting stuff is all on the website actually. My life only really started when I got to London as a twenty-one-year-old, fresh out of art college.’

‘You studied at the Berlin University of the Arts, I saw.’

‘Yes. Dad was a colonel in the British Army. We moved around a lot — Cyprus, Gibraltar, even a less than glamorous spell in Belfast. I was about fifteen when we moved to Germany. Dad’s regiment was stationed at Eberswalde, about thirty miles from Berlin. When I was seventeen, my father was offered a desk job and the family moved to Brussels. I stayed on in Berlin because I had just been given a place at BUA.’ Gemma looked serious. ‘Dad died a year ago, almost to the day.’

‘I’m sorry …’

‘No need to be. We were close when I was young, but we drifted apart. I’d hardly seen him during the two or three years before … maybe that makes it worse. Anyway …’ She drained her coffee cup and placed it on the tray.

‘So, your big break? That was …’

‘ Freeways and Blood .’

‘I have to confess, I didn’t really … well, get it. But it was undoubtedly clever,’ Pendragon replied. In truth, he had not understood the piece at all. It was a rectangular box about two metres tall and a metre wide, divided laterally in two. On one side a video loop showed an aerial night-time view of a ten-lane freeway somewhere in America, the headlights of hundreds of cars running in ordered streams. Down the length of the right half of the box ran another continuous video loop of a magnified image of blood, showing the individual corpuscles bobbing against each other in a seemingly random flow.

‘Oh, dear! Damned by faint praise.’

Pendragon held his hands up. ‘No, not at all. I’m afraid any shortcoming is mine. My tastes are a bit old-fashioned, I suppose.’

‘Oh, please! Don’t say the word “Monet”.’

Pendragon frowned. ‘Give me some credit!’

Gemma produced a small laugh, and winced.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said, standing up. ‘What am I doing, grilling you on art just after you get out of A and E?’

‘It’s okay …’ Gemma began, and then yawned. ‘Oops!’ She started to get up, reached halfway and swayed. Pendragon caught her and helped her back to the sofa.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, and let her eyes close. ‘Guess the doc was right about the elephant …’

‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said.

Pendragon was walking through the lobby of Gemma Locke’s apartment block when the call came through from Turner. The traffic was gridlocked on Commercial Road, which meant it took over half an hour for him to reach the hospital. At reception, the same woman Pendragon had seen earlier that day directed him to the Critical Care Wing on the third floor. Turner met him at the swing doors into the ward.

The hospital administrators had gone into overdrive. The other four patients in Intensive Care had been moved to another building, and a dozen others in neighbouring rooms had been shifted to any available space beyond the doors into the ward. This included two elderly men who were forced to share a tiny room usually reserved for doctors needing a quick nap between shifts.

‘Who else is here?’ Pendragon asked, noticing Sergeant Thatcher and Inspector Towers. The two policemen were questioning a small group of hospital staff huddled in the corridor close to a workstation.

‘Dr Jones has been delayed. But Colette Newman and an assistant are in the ICU.’

‘And what’s that smell?

‘I dunno, sir. I noticed it as soon as we got here. It’s like burned rubber.’

‘Yes, and something else … I can’t think what. Anyway, where’s the ICU?’

‘There.’ Turner pointed to a door on the left towards the far end of the corridor.

The single bed containing Gary Townsend’s body looked out of place alone in the room. Wires and leads hung from the wall at the other three bays. The machines still attached to Townsend stood mute. The monitor that had once recorded his shallow heartbeat now displayed a flat line. A plastic-suited forensics officer Pendragon did not recognise was dusting for prints along the rails and around the tubes on the far side of the bed. Dr Newman was crouching beside the bed, a test tube in one latex-gloved hand, a pair of tweezers in the other. She was wearing protective lab glasses and a paper mask over her mouth. Turning, she saw the two policemen approach, placed a stopper on the test tube, stood it in a rack inside a metal case on the floor beside the bed, and pulled the mask down to her chin.