Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground

‘You notice that there’s no kind of private space,’ said Huber as he led me through the labyrinth of partitions. ‘We want everyone to see everyone else’s work. There’s no point coming to college and then locking yourself away in a room somewhere.’

Weirdly, it was like stepping back into the art room at school. The same splashes of paint, rolls of paper, jam jars half full of dirty water and brushes. Unfinished sketches on the walls and the faintly rancid smell of linseed oil. Only this was on a grander scale. Hundreds of polyps made of carefully folded coloured paper were arranged on one partition wall. What I thought was a display cabinet with old-fashioned VCR/TVs stored on it turned out to be a half-completed installation.

Most of what we passed, at least the bits that I could identify, were done in the abstract, or part sculpture, or installations made from found objects. So it was a surprise to arrive at James Gallagher’s corner of the studio to find it full of paintings. Nice paintings. The ones back home in his room in Notting Hill had been his own work.

‘This is a bit different,’ I said.

‘Contrary to expectations,’ said Huber, ‘we do not shun the figurative.’

The paintings were of London streets, places like Camden Lock, St Paul’s, the Mall, Well Walk in Hampstead, all on sunny days with happy people in colourful clothes. I don’t know about figurative but it looked suspiciously like the sort of stuff that got flogged in dodgy antique shops next to pictures of clowns or dogs in hats.

I asked him if it wasn’t a bit touristy.

‘I’ll be honest. When he made his application we did think his work was ah… naive, but you have to look beyond his subject matter and see how beautiful his technique is,’ said Huber.

And it can’t have hurt that he was a foreign student paying the full whack, and then some, for the privilege.

‘By the way, what has happened to James?’ asked Huber. His tone had become hesitant, cautious.

‘All I can say is that he was found dead this morning and we’re treating it as suspicious.’ It was the standard formula for these things, although a dead body at Baker Street Station was going to come in a close second to ‘commuter anger as snow shuts down London’ on the lunchtime news. Assuming the media didn’t find a way to link both stories.

‘Was it suicide?’

Interesting. ‘Do you have some reason to think it might have been?’ I asked.

‘The tone of his work had begun to progress,’ said Huber. ‘To become more conceptually challenging.’ He stepped over to the corner where a large flat leather art case was propped up against the wall. He snapped it open, flicked through the contents and selected a painting. I could see it was different before it was fully out of the case. The colours were dark, angry. Huber turned and held it across his chest so I could get a good look.

Curves of purple and blue suggesting the curved roof of a tunnel while emerging, as if from the shadows, was an elongated inhuman figure sketched with long bold strokes of black and grey paint. Unlike the faces of the people in his earlier work this figure’s face was full of expression, a large mouth twisted into a gaping leer, eyes like saucers under a sleek hairless dome of a head.

‘As you can see,’ said Huber. ‘His work has much improved of late.’

I looked back to the painting of a sun-dappled windowsill – all it was missing was a cat.

‘When did his style change?’ I asked.

‘Oh, his style didn’t change,’ said Huber. ‘The actual technique is remarkably similar to his previous work. What we’re seeing here is much more profound. It’s a radical shift in, I want to say the subject, but I think it goes deeper than that. You only have to look at it – there is emotion, passion even, in that painting that you just don’t see in his earlier work. And not just that he was looking beyond his comfort in terms of technique-’

Huber trailed off.

‘It’s happened before,’ he said. ‘You get these young people and you think they’re showing you one thing and then they take their own lives and you realise what you thought was progress was quite the opposite.’

I’m not totally heartless, so I told him we thought suicide was unlikely. He was so relieved that he didn’t ask me what had happened – which is a square on the suspicious behaviour bingo card in and of itself.

‘You said he was looking beyond his comfort zone,’ I said. ‘What did you mean?’

‘He was asking about new materials,’ said Huber. ‘He was interested in ceramics, which was a bit unfortunate.’

I asked why and Huber explained that they’d had to stop using their onsite kiln.

‘Every firing is expensive, you’ve got to be producing quite a large amount of work to justify running it,’ he said, obviously embarrassed that economic reality had crept into the college.

I was thinking of the shard of pottery that had been used as the murder weapon. I asked whether they had a kiln at the new campus and could James Gallagher have been using that?

‘No,’ said Huber. ‘I’d have organised that, had he asked, but he didn’t.’ He frowned and picked up one of the ‘later’ paintings. A woman’s face, pale, big-eyed, surrounded by purple and black shadow. Huber studied it, sighed and carefully replaced it with the others.

‘Mind you,’ he said. ‘He was certainly spending time elsewhere-’ He trailed off again. I waited a moment to see if there was more, but there wasn’t, before asking whether James Gallagher had a locker.

‘This way,’ said Huber. ‘It’s at the back.’

One of the bank of grey metal boxes was secured with a cheap padlock which I knocked off with a chisel I borrowed from a nearby studio. Huber winced as the padlock hit the floor but I think he was more worried about the chisel than the locker. I pulled on my latex gloves and had a look inside. I found two pencil cases, a brush wallet with half the brushes missing, a paperback with an Oxfam price sticker called The Eye of the Pyramid and an AtoZ. Inside the AtoZ was a flyer for an exhibition at the Tate Modern by an artist called Ryan Carroll. Sure enough the flyer had marked the appropriate page in the AtoZ with a pencil circle around the Tate Modern in Southwark.

Definitely planning to go, I thought – the grand opening of the show was listed for the next day. I made a note of the times, dates and names before bagging and tagging the locker contents. Then I used masking tape to secure the locker, gave my card to Mr Huber and headed for home.

I had to clear three centimetres of snow off my windscreen before I could do the twenty-minute drive back to the Folly and put the Asbo back in the safety of the garage. I braved the icy outside staircase to the upper floor of the coach house where I stash my TV, decent stereo, laptop and all the other accoutrements of the twenty-first century that rely on a connection to the outside world. This was because the Folly proper was imbued with mystical defences, not my terminology, that apparently would be weakened by running a decent cable in from the outside. I didn’t suggest a wifi network because I have my own problems with signal security and besides I like having somewhere mostly to myself.

I lit the paraffin heater that I’d found in the Folly’s basement after my electric fan heater blew out the coach house’s antique fusebox for the third time. Then I raided the emergency snack locker, made a mental note to buy some food for it and likewise either clean my small fridge or give up and declare it a biohazard. There was still coffee and half a packet of M &S genuinely biscuit-flavoured biscuits so I decided to finish off my paperwork before hitting Molly’s kitchen.