Fell Purpose

ELEVEN

Ars Longa, Vita Sackville-West

Markov, the art master, lived in a smart new block of six flats in Bravington Road, a run-down area now being renovated, which, being on the far side of the railway and the Harrow Road, came under the title of Kensal Town, though it was only a stone’s throw from Ladbroke Grove, and resembled it in style and demographic.

A quick bit of research on the St Margaret’s website – it still slightly amazed him that schools had websites – had armed Slider with the knowledge that Markov’s name was Alexander – Alex; he was thirty-eight, married to Stephanie, an intensive-care nurse manager at St Charles’s Hospital, and his hobbies were skiing, and holidays in Italy where he liked to sketch old masters in situ. A photograph showed him as handsome, smiling and debonair, and it was no surprise to Slider to read that his nickname among the girls was ‘Magic Markov’.

The three-storey block had replaced two large nineteenth-century houses, and the flats were of the sort termed ‘luxury’ by estate agents, because they had two bathrooms and the sort of street door you had to be buzzed in through. Where once there had been two front gardens, there was now a neat bit of paving with parking spaces marked off in brick. Only one was occupied – by a black Toyota, as Slider noticed automatically – so presumably everyone else was at work. He wondered briefly how much the parking habits of Londoners helped burglars in their trade.

He was duly buzzed in, and instructed to come up to the top floor, where Markov met him at the top of the stairs. ‘Just wanted to warn you we have to be quiet,’ he said in a low voice. ‘My wife’s a nurse and she’s on nights this week, which means she’s sleeping now, so I don’t want to wake her up. I hope you understand.’

‘Of course,’ Slider said. ‘It’s good of you to see me.’

‘Oh, no problem, no problem at all. I couldn’t be more shocked about poor little Zellah. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it on the television. But come in. If you don’t mind we’ll talk out on the balcony. We’re less likely to disturb Steph there.’

The flat, despite having developers’ proportions, was decorated in a modern and luxurious style, open-plan, wood-block floors, pale walls and lean, painfully modern furniture. There was a showpiece sofa covered in taupe suede – you’d have to be wearing freshly dry-cleaned clothes ever to sit on that, because it would show every mark, and getting them off would be the devil. There were modern art pictures on the walls, and some equally obscure bits of modern sculpture (or were they called ‘installations’ now?) on stands and shelves. The Markovs, Slider decided, must be doing all right. The place said taste, money and modernity. More importantly to Slider, it smelled nice – of cleanness and light furniture polish.

Markov led the way through to the balcony, which was the width of the sitting room and just deep enough to take chairs and a small round table. It looked out at the back over the gardens of this road and the next, which included some glorious big trees. Markov was evidently pleased with the view, because he turned at the railings and looked expectantly at Slider. ‘Nice, eh? It was one of the reasons we bought this place.’

‘Very nice,’ Slider said.

‘Can I get you something to drink? Tea, coffee – a glass of wine?’

‘That’s very kind of you, but no thank you. Nothing for me.’

‘Oh. Well, I’m going to have a glass of wine. It’ll be back to school for me next week, so I might as well make hay while the sun shines.’ He gave a little, unconvincing laugh. ‘Sure you won’t join me?’

‘No, really. Thanks all the same.’

The bottle was evidently open, for he was back in no time with a large glass of chilled white in his hand. He leaned against the railings, facing inwards, to sip it, so Slider was able to get a good look at him. He was tall and well-made, though not ostentatiously muscled – working out at the gym was obviously not one of his hobbies. He had thick, toffee-brown hair, expensively cut (Slider recognised the symptoms from Atherton) in a sort of floppy, public-school style, and shot with blonde streaks which were either the result of all those Italian holidays, or put in artfully for a hundred and sixty quid by a bloke called Adrian. He was wearing stone-coloured chinos and a denim-blue shirt, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up, showing tanned forearms. But the lean, classical face was neither as young nor as handsome as the photograph on the website had suggested. He had not shaved that morning, and his eyes looked bloodshot and pouchy, while his smile and debonair manner seemed effortful.

‘So, to what do I owe the honour of this visit?’ he asked at the end of a large-ish swig.

‘I wanted to talk to you about Zellah Wilding,’ Slider said.

The smile wavered, but stuck gallantly. ‘So I imagined. But I don’t know how I can help you. It’s school holidays and I haven’t seen her for a month. I have no idea where she was or what she was up to.’ He swigged again.

‘I didn’t suppose you had,’ Slider said. What was the man so nervous about? ‘I saw some drawings that she did, and they impressed me with their skill. I’m not an expert, of course, but they did seem to me to have something. I wanted to ask you your impression of her, as a person.’

‘Oh,’ he said, but didn’t immediately go on.

Slider thought he’d better prime him. ‘Your headmistress said you thought the world of her, and believed she had talent.’

‘Betty’s a mathematician,’ he said with a throw-away laugh. ‘She has no eye for the visual arts. Her idea of beauty is a quadratic equation.’

‘So, you didn’t think Zellah had talent?’

He seemed to pull himself up. ‘Oh – well – I didn’t say that. Yes, Zellah had talent. She was a very bright child all round. She could draw nicely, and had a good eye for line and colour. Whether it would have gone on to develop into anything more than that, one can’t say. Lots of girls can draw nicely, but they don’t all become artists. And her father wanted her to go into engineering. I doubt he’d have been happy with a painter in the family.’ His expression changed. ‘Anyway, we’ll never know, now, will we?’ He emptied the glass. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’

‘No, thank you.’

He went into the house, and returned quickly with the glass refilled. Slider was beginning to understand the eyes and the unshaven slackness of the face. Perhaps he was more upset by Zellah’s death than he wanted to show. If he had based his reputation on buccaneering good looks and insouciance, he might be unwilling to reveal a sentimental side, especially to another man, who might see it as weakness. Or perhaps he had other troubles in his life.

‘So, what were these pictures of Zellah’s that you saw?’ he asked when he had settled again. This time he sat on one of the wrought-iron chairs and crossed one leg over the other, resting the ankle on the knee in the classic Englishman-abroad pose.

‘I found a sketch pad of hers in her room at home, which she had gone to some trouble to hide. There were drawings of horses—’

‘God, yes, those horses! She was horse-mad, like all these girls!’

‘And some still-life things, and then some drawings of nude figures. Life studies, is that what you call them?’

The smile disappeared. ‘Yes. I arrange classes out of school hours for the girls who are serious about art. Teenage girls being what they are, it’s difficult to hold them in school time without a lot of sniggering idiots making a noise in the corridor and trying to look through the glass door panel. Prurient little beasts.’

‘Yes, I understand,’ Slider said.

‘Do you?’ He sounded unexpectedly annoyed. ‘It’s not even just the kids; it’s the parents, too. The human form is a thing of beauty: clothes are not. Just that. But the hoi polloi fasten on to the nudity aspect and make a vulgar song and dance about it. It’s ignorance, pure and simple.’

Slider forbore to mention that ‘hoi polloi’meant ‘the people’ and to say ‘the hoi polloi’ was a tautology and a mark of ignorance. This man had probably had to field a lot of complaints from parents over the years, and specialists often got annoyed with ordinary people who didn’t understand their specialism. You should hear policemen talking about the great General Public, he thought.

‘There’s a long and honourable tradition of painting the naked human form,’ he said soothingly.

‘I paid for the models myself, out of my own pocket,’ Markov concluded, with a steep descent into bathos. ‘I don’t know what they had to complain about.’

‘Look,’ Slider said encouragingly, ‘I’m not here to criticize your teaching techniques. I’m only saying I understand why Zellah hid her sketch pad from her parents.’

He looked relieved at the sympathetic approach. ‘God, yes! That philistine of a father of hers! I met him at parents’ meetings and school events and so on. Onward, Christian soldiers! He was an absolute ogre. No wonder Zellah was terrified of him.’

‘Was she? I’m trying to understand her, you see. Different people give me different accounts of what she was like. You obviously knew her better than her other teachers—’

‘Why do you say that?’ he interrupted.

‘Well, you saw her out of school hours, with your art classes.’

‘As a teacher.’

‘Quite. But I’m sure she revealed things about herself through her drawings. That’s what art is for, isn’t it?’

‘Oh – well, yes, I suppose so.’

‘So, how would you characterize her?’

He took another swig before answering, and stared thoughtfully at the middle distance. ‘She was a clever girl, as I’ve said. But a quiet one. It wasn’t easy to get anything out of her. She never talked about herself.’

‘Her friends say she was a bold spirit, defiant of convention,’ Slider said. ‘Sexually active, for one thing.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that.’ He glanced at Slider and away again. ‘You know how schoolgirls like to show off and exaggerate.’

‘You mean her friends are exaggerating about her? Or that she exaggerated about herself?’

He hesitated. ‘You saw her life-study drawings? What did you think of them?’

‘I thought they were very good,’ Slider said. ‘I thought they had a great deal of feeling, not just technical accuracy.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He paused, as though thinking something out. ‘Zellah did talk sometimes about boys, the way girls of that age do, but I always thought it was – well – a way of trying to fit in with the others. Because of her parents she was rather cut off from the other girls. I think she felt like an outsider. But those drawings showed the real Zellah.’

‘Meaning . . . what exactly?’

‘Meaning I think she was attracted to other women,’ he said, returning his gaze almost reluctantly to Slider, and surveying his face as if for reaction.

‘You think she was a lesbian?’ This was a new turn.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t know, but I would guess that she was still a virgin. But young people of that age are often puzzled and confused about their sexuality, especially if they’ve had few chances to experiment. Perhaps she was just beginning to feel these feelings – finding women attractive – and worried about being different from other girls. So she joined in the girl talk and the boasting with her friends, to hide her real self from them. But in her drawings she could only be honest. That’s where the real Zellah came out.’

Slider pondered this for a moment. It made sense in its own psychological terms, all right; but he knew Zellah had not been a virgin, so whatever she may or may not have felt about it, she had certainly put her money where her mouth was. But those lyrical drawings of females nudes – was that what they were saying? He had thought the nakedness was in direct line of descent from the naked horses; that the freedom from clothes represented a greater, spiritual freedom – the freedom denied to the caged thrush. Though of course, longing for spiritual freedom and a suppressed attraction to women were not mutually exclusive ideas.

After a moment he asked, ‘Did you think her a happy person, at the bottom?’

Markov looked grave. ‘No, I thought her very unhappy. In fact . . .’ A hesitation. ‘In fact when I first heard she was dead, just for a second it flitted through my mind that she might have committed suicide. But from what the media seem to be saying that wasn’t the case.’ He finished on what was almost a wistful note, as if he hoped that somehow or other Slider could tell him it was suicide after all.

‘I’m afraid it wasn’t suicide,’ Slider said.

Markov sighed. ‘But you’ve caught the man, anyway, haven’t you?’ he went on, more briskly. ‘It was on the news last night. Some ghastly serial killer, who picked on her at random. Dreadful thing – awful. But at least there’s no mystery about it, is there?’

‘No,’ Slider said. ‘There’s no mystery about Ronnie Oates. What we don’t know is what Zellah was doing in that place at that time.’

‘Walking home from the fair, probably. No buses that time of night. Taking a short-cut.’

‘How do you know she was at the fair?’ Slider asked.

He blinked. ‘Well, there’s nothing else around there. And it said on the news report that’s where the murderer – this Oates man – had been. So I just assumed.’ He stared at Slider an instant and then laughed loudly. ‘That wasn’t one of those Columbo questions, was it? “But I never mentioned what the murder weapon was, sir.” Oh dear, you can’t possibly think I did it! What possible reason could I have for wanting to kill poor little Zellah?’

‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ Slider said calmly. ‘It was a simple question, nothing more.’

‘Well, if the next question is, “where was I that night?”’ he went on, still laughing, ‘I was here at home, painting. But I’m afraid as my wife was working I can’t call on her for an alibi. So you’ll just have to take my word for it. I can produce the painting I was doing, if you want to see that.’

‘That won’t be necessary, sir,’ Slider said. He thought the laughter was rather overdone, but the man was down the bottom of the second large glass, and he doubted they had been the first two of the morning. He stood up. ‘By the way, the car outside, parked on the hardstanding – is that yours?’

‘I don’t own a car,’ he said. ‘It’s hardly worth it in London, with the cost of parking and everything. One of the reasons we bought this flat is it’s so handy for both our places of work. My wife can cycle to the hospital from here. She works at St Charles’s. Why do you ask?’

‘No reason in particular. I’m just interested in cars. Well, thank you for giving me your time, and your opinion of Zellah. It was very helpful. One of the hardest things about an investigation like this is that one never gets to meet the victim. And there’s something about Zellah that haunts me, I don’t know why.’

‘She was a sweet kid,’ Markov said seriously. ‘And I must say it’s refreshing to hear you talk like that. One somehow assumes that you policemen all get so hardened to stuff like this that it doesn’t affect you any more.’

‘It affects us,’ Slider said. ‘You learn to cope with it, but you never stop feeling it.’

Atherton was being regaled with tea and biscuits by the Wildings’ next-door neighbour, who was plainly thrilled to bits with the whole affair and couldn’t wait to be asked her opinion. She was a woman in her sixties, thin, with a tight perm. Her face – so wrinkled it looked like a dry river bed – was thick with foundation and powder; she wore crimson lipstick, and the strong lenses of her glasses emphasized that she was wearing not only eye-shadow but mascara. Done up like a Christmas turkey, Atherton thought, in case there was any chance of getting on the telly or in the papers.

But the media pack had mostly dispersed. When he arrived there were only two of them left, a weedy youth with an adenoidal look who was from the East Acton Times – a lowly subsidiary of the Acton Gazette – and a very young, plump girl with a camera whom he didn’t recognize, and took for a freelance. They were beguiling their lonely vigil by chatting to each other, and getting on so well they barely glanced up as Atherton drew up in front of a house two doors down. Mind you, neither did the policeman on duty, who seemed too sunk in lethargy to care about movements outside his own immediate line of sight.

So it was balm to the Barretts’ souls when Atherton introduced himself and asked if he could ask them questions. Or rather to Mrs B’s soul – she practically abducted him into the over-furnished, over-stuffed sitting room, barking out an order to Mr B, neat and over-dressed in suit and tie and highly polished shoes, to fetch the tea. The kettle must have been on the boil and the tray already laid, for it all arrived in double-quick time, after which Mr B subsided in one of the armchairs and sat mute, stroking the black-and-white cat which ambled in from the garden and jumped on to his lap.

Apart from appealing to her husband from time to time for confirmation, which she never waited for, Mrs Barrett ignored him. She had stuff to say and she was going to say it.

‘I never liked them,’ she said, ‘and I never trusted him. Thought himself so superior, that Mr Wilding! Thought himself better than everybody else, that’s the truth of it.’

Atherton got it: the greatest damnation you could offer in this present age. To think yourself better than other people was the sin of sins.

‘I suppose he was educated,’ Mrs Barrett conceded with the deepest reluctance, ‘but so were other people. My husband was an accountant, you know – weren’t you, Gordon? Well, a bookkeeper, which is the same thing. Double entry. Forty years with the Co-op – they’d have been lost without him. They gave him a plaque when he retired. Anyway, if Mr Wilding was such a great businessman, how come he lost his business? Everyone knew Wildings. Up Telford Way, it was. My sister worked there at one time, and my niece, and one of my cousins was a machine operator. I never worked, of course. My hubby couldn’t do with a wife at work, could you, Gordon? And I was married straight from school. That’s another thing – she didn’t have anything to brag about, that Mrs Wilding. Just a typist, she was, though she called herself a secretary. And he was already married when she got her hooks into him. Ramshackle business that was, whichever way you look at it. But I was sorry for her, if you want to know. I wouldn’t have wanted to be married to that man. Something very sinister about him, that’s what I always said, didn’t I, Gordon?’

‘In what way, sinister?’ Atherton managed to ask. The armchair was so old and soft he had sunk almost to the floor, and his knees were in danger of banging his chin whenever he moved. There was no way he could get his teacup to his lips, so he went without. Shame, because he was thirsty. It was a hot day outside, and while the room was on the shady side of the house, it was absolutely airless and smelled faintly of dust. It was like being trapped inside a Hoover bag.

Mrs Barrett bridled and touched her hair. ‘Too good to be true! That’s what I always said. What was he hiding? All that do-gooding and churchiness. And High Church at that! Bells and smells and bowing and scraping. I can’t be doing with all that mumbo jumbo. Plain vanilla, that’s how we like our religion, don’t we, Gordon? Next door to Catholics, his lot. All that fancy dress, robes and hats and gold embroidery. Hypocrisy, that’s what I call it. Sheer hypocrisy. If I want to worship my God, I can do it naked in a field, that’s what I always say.’

Atherton tried not to imagine this. ‘So you think he wasn’t really a Christian?’

‘Well . . . I don’t say that,’ she said with the air of one determined to be fair at all costs. ‘He may have been a Christian. But he thought himself better than us, and that’s not a very Christian attitude, is it? Refused our invitations – our Christmas drinks party, Gordon’s birthday, any number of things. Barely gave you the time of day when you passed on the street. And the way he treated that girl of his! Wouldn’t let her join in anything! When my nieces were staying, I always asked her to come over, because it must have been lonely for her, being the only child. But he wouldn’t let her. My nieces weren’t good enough for his daughter, oh no! Wouldn’t let her go anywhere or do anything. Watched and spied on, she was, all the time, which isn’t natural for a girl. No wonder she got into trouble.’

‘Did she?’

Mrs Barrett was short-circuited for a moment, and then resumed indignantly. ‘Well, if you don’t call getting murdered by a sex-fiend “getting into trouble”, I don’t know what is! I wouldn’t have liked one of my nieces to be seen in public dressed like that. Ida Sharp on the corner said she spoke to someone who knows someone who was there when she was found. That Zellah Wilding was dressed like a tramp, she said, with a skirt so short it left nothing to the imagination. And what was she doing there at that time of night, that’s what I want to know? So the Wildings have got nothing to be snooty about. My nieces would have known better than that, wouldn’t they, Gordon?’

‘Now, dear,’ Mr Barrett began in mild reproof.

But she was off again. ‘And what does he do in that shed of his all night, night after night? Charity work my foot! There’s something suspicious going on in there, you mark my words. Night after night I see the light on, and his shadow moving about, two in the morning sometimes. Built it right down the bottom of the garden, so no one could see in – and he’d no right to that land. Calls himself a Christian but he’s not above breaking the law when it suits him. I had a word with him about it when he took down the fence – or Gordon did, didn’t you, Gordon? And he said he had to do it because the weeds were invading his garden. As if his garden’s any better than anyone else’s! And complaining about our poor Lucky every time he sets foot in it. Chased him with a garden hose, he did once. I’d a good mind to report him to the RSPCA. Mrs Delancey on the other side lost her cat, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he hadn’t killed it and buried it somewhere. Always digging in his vegetable patch. I said as much to Mrs Delancey, and she agreed with me. She never liked him either. He shouted at her once about her Sooty – a poor old lady like her! You could hear him right across the garden. He had a temper on him all right, despite claiming to be a Christian.’

‘Was he violent towards his wife and daughter?’

‘Well,’ she hesitated. ‘I can’t say for sure if he was violent, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve heard him shout at them many a time. And the life he made that poor girl lead, with no friends and no fun, that was tantamount to abuse, wasn’t it? No, there’s something queer about him, that’s for sure.’

‘Now, dear—’

She turned on him. ‘What about his night wanderings, then? What’s a decent man got to do with roaming around the streets at night? If he wasn’t in his shed, he was out in his car. Picking up prostitutes, as like as not. It’s always those churchy sorts that are the worst.’

She had gone too far for her husband. He must have tensed, for the cat shot off his lap as he said with surprising sternness, ‘Now, Ruby, that’s enough!’

Not as far as Atherton was concerned. ‘What’s that about roaming the streets?’

She turned to him with relief, glad to have the chance to justify herself. ‘He goes out in his car at night. Sneaks out straight from his shed – I’ll swear his wife doesn’t know he’s gone, because she never stirs once she’s in front of the telly. He goes down the shed of an evening, and then as like as not he creeps out and down the path to the side gate, and when I look out of the front window the car’s gone.’

‘Perhaps he has evening engagements,’ Atherton said mildly. ‘Social engagements.’

‘Not him. Refuses everything he’s invited to. Besides, when it’s one of his committee meetings or whatever, he goes out the front door like a Christian. No, this sneaking out he does is something shady, you mark my words.’

‘Now, Ruby—’

‘You don’t see it,’ she turned on him. ‘You wouldn’t notice anything if it was right in front of your face! But I’ve been watching him. Sneaked out on Sunday night, didn’t he? Down to the shed he went, but he wasn’t in there more than ten minutes when he sneaked out again, got in his car and drove off.’

‘Did he?’ Atherton said with interest. This was good – this was gold! ‘You wouldn’t know what time that was, would you?’

‘I don’t know,’ she frowned. ‘I suppose it might have been about half past five, that sort of time.’

‘And did you see what time he came back?’

‘No,’ she said with reluctance. ‘I was watching television in here – wasn’t I, Gordon? I looked out at about ten o’clock when I went to make a cup of tea, and his car wasn’t there then. And it wasn’t there when we went up to bed, which would be about half-past eleven. I said as much to you, didn’t I, Gordon? I said he was out again, on the prowl, didn’t I?’

‘Did you, dear?’

‘The car was back the next morning, but he could have been out all night for all I know, and it wouldn’t be the first time. Up to no good, you mark my words. Well, now they’ve gone, and good riddance to them, that’s what I say.’

‘Gone?’ Atherton said, trying to sit up and failing entirely.

‘Yes, left this morning, early. With bags. Gone to stay with her sister in Basingtoke, I wouldn’t wonder. That’s the only family I’ve ever heard her talk about. But it’s good riddance to bad rubbish as far as I’m concerned. I don’t care if they never come back.’

Skipped, by God, Atherton thought.

Outside, he realized the Wildings’ dark-blue Focus was not in its accustomed place and cursed himself for not having noticed that when he arrived. It was the unfortunately named PC Organ on duty on the door. It was a muggy day, and sweat was rolling round his neck under his chin, and a trickle was easing down his cheek from under his helmet. Atherton stood in front of him, to mask any possible reaction from the press – their interest in each other still seemed to be greater than in the possibility of a story, but you could never depend on the press to remain indifferent when you wanted them to.

‘What’s this about the Wildings leaving this morning?’ he asked, low but urgent.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Organ. ‘Went off about eight o’clock. I’ve got the key, though, if you want to go in. Mrs Wilding left it with me in case.’

‘In case of what?’

‘She didn’t say, sir. Just in case.’

‘And when are they coming back?’

‘She didn’t say.’

‘And where have they gone?’

‘She didn’t say. But they had overnight bags with them.’

Atherton rolled his eyes. ‘It didn’t occur to you to stop them, then?’

‘No, sir.’ He looked wounded. ‘I was here to keep the press from bothering them. I wasn’t told to stop them going out if they wanted.’

‘And it didn’t occur to you to let anyone know they’d gone?’

He looked even more wounded. ‘No, sir. Why should it? They’re the victim’s parents, not suspects.’

Atherton turned away.

‘Sir,’ Organ called after him. ‘Do I still have to stay on the door, now they’re gone? No one’s said anything.’

‘I think you might be on duty here a while longer, Constable,’ Atherton said.