Michael White - The Art of Murder

‘Townsend?’

Gemma Locke shrugged. ‘Yes, I was annoyed when that one went wrong.’ She sighed and looked down at the parquet floor for a moment before meeting Pendragon’s eye. ‘I had it all so carefully planned too. You’ve probably worked it out, Jack. I drugged Hickle. He could still walk. He was just, well, a little confused! I managed to slip out of a back entrance to his apartment block. Later, I met up with Townsend at the unit. I had convinced him to show by telling him I had a juicy story for his rag. But then his ditzy girlfriend followed him. I got away but I had to figure out a way to get to him in the hospital and divert any suspicion from myself. I faked the mugging, killed the bastard, and got you to come and see how poorly I was. Quite a performance, I thought. Especially the bit where I pretended to pass out at my apartment. You were so sweet.’

‘What has your father’s library got to do with any of this?’ Turner asked.

‘Oh, I found something there that changed my life, Sergeant. A journal. Well, a collection of letters really. I started to read them, and was astonished when I learned that they had been written by Jack the Ripper.’ She stopped for a second. ‘Don’t believe me, Inspector? No, well, that’s understandable. Anyway, it’s irrelevant whether or not you accept what I say. The letters were an inspiration to me. They revealed that The Ripper had been a very talented artist who had chosen his victims to create a masterwork. The series of murders was the work.

‘I was transformed by my discovery, though my first effort to apply the Ripper’s concept did not work as well as I had hoped. As you know, I attacked our gardener, Macintyre. I was pleased with the piece — Jack, you should have seen his face. That combination of red and blackened flesh with a dash of brittle white bone … it was truly beautiful. But it landed me in a lot of trouble, and nobody seemed to understand what I was doing.’

‘You attacked the man so you could paint him afterwards?’ Turner asked.

Gemma Locke’s eyes widened. ‘Your sergeant’s a little slow, isn’t he, Jack?’ She giggled.

Pendragon said nothing.

‘The act itself was the work of art, Sergeant. I didn’t do anything so crude as to paint the scene. I had moved way beyond such a commonplace approach. But, as I said, it didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. I ended up in Riverwell. They drugged me, shocked me with their ECT and for a while it changed me. I never stopped wanting to get out of there, but the therapy quashed my artistic drive. So I faked my own death in Maldon. A nurse, Nick Compton, was besotted with me … a state of mind I had assiduously nurtured. He was complicit in the set-up on the seafront. I hid under the rafters of the pier, then crawled out and slipped away while the hospital staff panicked.’

‘But the dead girl they identified?’

‘Nick and I had killed her. He got me out of the hospital the night before the trip to Maldon. She was a young prostitute from Southend. Nick had a little dinghy. We dumped the body in the sea just off Maldon. We knew she would be washed up by the tide, but we weren’t sure how quickly — that was the dodgiest bit of the plan, actually. But it all worked a treat. My father was too traumatised to make the ID at the morgue, and so his brother Lionel went along. But it was an irrelevance anyway. North Sea fish are fond of human flesh.’ She smiled.

‘And later you killed Nick Compton?’ Pendragon asked.

‘Yes. He knew too much and I was losing my grip on him.’

‘Then you vanished.’

‘I think of it more as a transformation. I went into a dormant phase, a chrysalis if you like. I was able to steal money from my father’s accounts. I figured it would one day be my inheritance, I was just taking it early. I went to the States, underwent plastic surgery, bought some coloured contact lenses, several fake IDs … oh, and I had the tattoo removed.’ She touched the side of her neck and smiled. ‘I moved to London late in 1998 and gradually rebuilt my career under a new name. I wanted to prove to myself that I could succeed as a conventional artist. That if I had not had my original career stolen from me, I would be famous. Perhaps the most famous artist of our time. I knew I was that good.’

‘But many years later something went wrong. Something recently led you back to the path of murder.’

‘I don’t consider it as “going wrong”,’ Gemma Locke said, matter-of-factly. ‘No, two things coincided, Inspector. First, I began to doubt myself. That was Townsend’s fault. The young journalist who had been writing for a local paper in Chelmsford was now the Arts Editor of a big national daily. He had no idea Gemma Locke had once been Juliette Kinnear, and he probably could not even remember giving the young Juliette a bad review for her fledgling exhibition in a lousy church hall. But he slammed my last show at the White Cube and it began a chain reaction in my mind.

‘I started to wander into a different mental state, one I had experienced before. It was a joyous liberation. I felt free again, filled with creative energy and self-belief. I was so grateful I could almost have spared the bastard.’ She produced a shrill laugh and looked from Pendragon to Turner. ‘Oh, come on, guys. Don’t you see the funny side? No? Okay … well, that’s the truth of it. If it had been just that one bad review I might not have started a new masterpiece inspired by my old mentor, The Ripper. But then I discovered that silly little man Noel Thursk had unearthed some facts I would have preferred to be kept buried. I had known about his ridiculous book for years, but hadn’t taken him seriously until then.’ She threw her arms out and slapped her palms against her sides. ‘Well, it was obviously a sign!’

‘But why the others?’ Pendragon asked, aware he needed to humour her until he could make a move.

‘That’s a good question,’ she replied, warming to the subject. ‘And one I want to explain at length to the media. From an artistic point of view, I wanted six tableaux. It’s a matter of symmetry. Taken as one great piece, it’s a beautiful composition. But the subjects were all on my personal hit-list anyway.’ She lifted a hand and began to tick them off. ‘Kingsley Berrick. That man did everything he could to keep me down and to promote other, far lesser, talents ahead of me.’

‘Like Chrissy Chapman?’

‘Precisely.’ Gemma Locke beamed. ‘My oldest, bestest friend. It wasn’t Chrissy’s fault that Berrick made her his poster girl over me. But it was her fault that she was on the verge of marrying him .’ And she tossed her head towards the pitiful maimed figure tied to the chair. ‘So, I thought I’d set up dear Chrissy in a way that would be in keeping with the others … and humorous as well.’

‘Oh, I’m sure Chrissy Chapman’s family are laughing their arses off,’ Turner said, glaring at Gemma.

‘Hah! You were right the other day, Inspector. Your sergeant does think he’s funny.’

‘And how did you manage to set up Ms Chapman in the way you did?’ he replied keeping his tone even.

‘Oh, it wasn’t easy, I can assure you of that. But then, no great art comes easily. I trained as a sculptor under the Russian master Korentikoff when he lived in London during the early noughties. I also studied reconstructive surgery techniques privately. The internet is a wonderful thing. Anyway, Chrissy … I brought her here soon after Hickle left for his run. It was under the pretext that I had a surprise for her. I certainly didn’t lie! I killed her quickly — the same way as the others. Then I drained her of blood, smashed the bones in her face, and with liberal amounts of glue, spray-on skin and quick-setting plaster, was able to sculpt back her face to my liking.’