Playing with Fire (13 page)

 

Annie had been around enough artists in her time to recognize the type. Baz Hayward had adopted the persona of the suffering, world-weary, misunderstood, dissolute genius, justifying all his excesses and his total lack of talent and social graces by his devotion to art—right down to the beard, the ragged clothes and the body odor. Whether he really did have any talent or not, she didn't know. Some of the most obnoxious people she had ever known possessed immense talent, though many of them squandered it.

Hayward bade her wait for a moment while he finished off some essential brushstrokes to a painting he was working on. Smiling to herself over the pathetic arrogance of his need to seem important, Annie wandered over and looked out of the window. She knew she could play the heavy if she wanted, but luckily she was in a good mood because she was going to dinner with Phil tonight, all being well.

Hayward lived in a converted barn on the high road between Lyndgarth and Helmthorpe. It was an isolated spot with a spectacular view down the slope past the stubby ruins of Devraulx Abbey to the drizzle-darkened flagstone roofs of Fortford, where Phil's cottage was. Smoke from chimneys drifted slowly eastward on the faint breeze, bringing a hint of peat to the air. On the steeply rising slopes of the south daleside, beyond the clustered cottages of Mortsett and Relton, Annie could see the imposing symmetry of Swainsdale Hall.

It was odd to see the hall from this perspective, she realized. Only last summer, she had spent some time there, heading the search for a missing boy. Today, no smoke came from the high chimneys. Annie guessed that ex-footballer Martin Armitage was in Florida or the West Indies with his wife, ex-model Robin Fetherling. Well, good for them. There wasn't much left for them at Swainsdale Hall now.

Hayward's loft was chilly and Annie kept her greatcoat on. The cold didn't seem to bother Hayward himself, though, who was prancing around waving his paintbrush, wearing torn jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. If he'd been at the Turner reception, Annie didn't remember him.

She had been surprised to hear from Banks that Thomas McMahon had also been there, and when she cast her mind back, she thought she remembered a short, burly fellow with a glass of wine in his hand chatting to some of the center's committee members. It had been a crowded room, though, and she had been there partly to keep an eye on the painting in the adjoining room, so she could easily have missed both McMahon and Hayward.

Annie had met Phil Keane at the reception. He was there in his professional capacity as an art researcher to help authenticate the find. They hadn't talked much that evening, but Phil had phoned her a few weeks later and asked her out to dinner. She'd been busy—it wasn't an excuse—but he had phoned again a week later, as she suggested. That time, she accepted. They had seen each other only four or five times since then, because of the pressures of their work, but each time Annie found herself becoming more and more attracted to his charm, his consideration and his intellect—not to mention his graceful and finely honed body. She was also inordinately pleased to find that Phil had heard of her father's work.

Finally, she heard Hayward throw down the brush and play himself a brief fanfare. “Finished.”

“It's a wonderful view,” Annie said, gesturing toward the window.

“What?” Hayward looked confused. “Oh, yes,” he said, catching on, “I suppose it is, if you like that sort of thing. Personally I think landscapes are vastly overrated, and landscape painting died with the invention of the camera. It just hasn't had the decency to roll over and accept the fact. A good digital camera can do anything the Impressionists ever did.”

“That's an interesting way of looking at it,” said Annie, perching on the edge of the only uncluttered chair. Discarded clothes littered the floor and mold grew in a half-empty coffee cup on the low table. She was glad he didn't offer her tea or coffee. But it was the walls that disturbed Annie most of all. They were covered with what she could only assume to be Hayward's own sketches and paintings, all looking like Rorschach tests painted by Francis Bacon on drugs. The whole effect was dizzying and disturbing, and it made her vaguely queasy, though she wasn't at first sure why. Still, they must sell, she thought, or he wouldn't be able to afford this place.

“It is, isn't it?” said Hayward, waving his hand dismissively. “I try to break free from conventional ways of thinking and living. Anyway, it's the isolation I like. I keep the curtains closed most of the time.”

“Good idea,” said Annie. “Thomas McMahon. You were friends once. What happened?”

“Tom? Friends?” He ran his hand through his lank, greasy hair. “Yes, I suppose we were, in a way.”

“Did you have a falling-out?”

“I disagreed with his artistic direction, or lack of one—the kind of abstract effects he was working on went out with the Cubists, and then there were those dreadful landscapes he churned out for the tourist trade.”

“To pay the rent?”

“I suppose so. But rent's not that important in the grand scheme of things, is it?”

Annie felt glad she wasn't Hayward's landlord. “When did you last see him?”

“Must have been four, five years ago.”

“Not since?”

“No. He just sort of dropped out of the scene. What scene there is.” Hayward scratched his crotch. “I saw less of him. He became more distant and moody. In the end, I didn't even know where he was living. I thought he'd left town.”

“You didn't bump into him at the Turner reception last summer, then?”

Hayward pulled a face. “Do me a favor.
Turner?
You think I'd waste my time with that sort of tripe?”

“Of course,” Annie said. “Forgive me. I should have known. Despite the fact that you didn't approve of McMahon's art, did you have any sort of personal falling-out?”

“No. We were always on good terms. Polite terms, at any rate. And whatever it was he did, it wasn't art.”

“But you've no idea what he was up to more recently?”

“None at all.”

“His work hasn't appeared anywhere?”

“Thank God, no.”

“Would it surprise you to hear that we think he was squatting on a boat on the canal, a boat that was set on fire on Thursday night, killing him and the girl on the neighboring boat?”

If Annie had any hopes of shocking Hayward into some sort of decent human reaction, they were soon dashed. “No,” he said. “Nothing really surprises me anymore. Except art. And even that doesn't surprise me as often as it used to. As Diaghilev said to Jean Cocteau,
‘Étonne moi.'
Ha! If only.”

“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to kill Tom McMahon?”

“For painting bad pictures?”

“Mr. Hayward.”

Hayward grinned. “A bit too brutal for you, that, was it? Too close to the bone?”

“You seem to be very aware of the effects you're striving for,” Annie said. “I'd be careful that it doesn't give a sort of stiff, wooden aspect to your art. That kind of arrogant, straining self-consciousness can be quite counterproductive, you know.”

“What would you know about it?”

“Nothing. Just an opinion.”

“Uninformed opinion is about as interesting as a Constable landscape.”

“Ah,” said Annie, who thought Constable landscapes quite interesting. More interesting than what was on Hayward's walls, anyway. She was getting nowhere here, and Hayward was clearly far too wrapped up in himself to be capable of noticing anyone else's existence, let alone killing anyone. It was time to go.

“Look,” said Hayward, when Annie got up to walk to the door, “I'm sorry I can't be of more help to you, but I really haven't seen Tom in years, and I've no idea what he did with his life. He just wasn't a very original painter, that's all.”

“That's okay,” said Annie. “Thanks for your time.”

Hayward stood in the doorway, leaning on the jamb and blocking the exit. “Maybe your visit wasn't entirely wasted, though,” he said.

Annie felt her breath tighten in her throat. “Oh?” she said.

“No. I mean, there are often other purposes, aren't there? Hidden purposes. You do something for one reason, at least on the surface, but it turns out there's an underlying, deeper reason you just weren't conscious of. A more important reason. Fate, perhaps.”

“Speak English, Baz. And get out of my way.”

Hayward stood his ground. “I'd like to paint you,” he an
nounced, beaming, as if offering her a place on the Queen's honors list.

“Paint me?”

“Yes. We could start now, if you like. Perhaps some preliminary sketches?”

Annie looked around at the walls. She knew now what it was that disturbed her about the artwork hanging there. Every piece, either charcoal sketch or color painting, was of a gaping vagina. It was hardly an original idea—the flower-like symmetry and individuality of female genitals had excited artists for years—and Annie was open-minded as far as most things were concerned. But being in this room, surrounded by garish paintings of them, and knowing that the odious Baz Hayward was now quite openly staring at the inverted V of her jeans between her legs, where her greatcoat gaped open, gave her the creeps.

She grabbed his wrist so quickly he had no time to stop her, twisted his arm behind his back and pushed him into the room. He stumbled into the easel, knocking the painting he had been working on to the floor. Then Annie pulled her coat tight around her waist, fastened the belt, said, “Fuck off, Baz,” and left.

 

When Banks walked down the front steps of Eastvale General Infirmary, it was already dark, and the drizzle had turned into a late-afternoon mist that blurred the shop lights on King Street. For some reason, he was overcome with a vivid memory of a similar afternoon when he was fifteen or sixteen, when he'd been upstairs on a bus coming home from town, a copy of the
Fresh Cream
album and the latest
Melody Maker
tucked under his arm. Looking out at the yellow halos of the streetlights and the hazy neon signs, he had lit a cigarette and it had tasted magnificent, by far the best cigarette he had ever smoked. He could taste it now, and he automatically reached
in his pocket. Of course, there were no cigarettes in his pocket. He looked across King Street at the light in the newsagent's window, bleary in the late-afternoon mist, strongly tempted to dash over and buy a packet. Just ten. He'd smoke only the ten and then no more. But he got a grip on himself, turned his collar up and trudged up the hill to the station.

Christine Aspern's body had been in far better shape than Tom McMahon's. In fact, the skin that had been covered by the sleeping bag was not charred, but pale and waxy, like that of most corpses. It was only her face and hands, where she had suffered second-degree burns, that had been at all blackened or blistered by the fire. The blisters were also a sign, Dr. Glendenning said, that the victim was probably alive when the fire began, though a small amount of blistering can occur after death. Given the other evidence, though, he would surmise that the blistering in Tina's case was postmortem.

Dr. Glendenning had approached the autopsy with his usual concern for detail and confirmed that, pending toxicology results that probably wouldn't be in until Monday afternoon at the earliest, this being the weekend, she had died, like Thomas McMahon, of asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation, and most likely not from a heroin overdose.

As in the case of McMahon, Glendenning had also found thermal injury to the mouth and nose but not lower down, in the tracheal area. He had found only trace amounts of soot below the larynx, indicating that Christine was most likely unconscious when the fire started.

There was always the chance that Danny Boy's heroin had been unusually pure and that she had died of an overdose before or during the fire, but Banks was willing to bet she was probably just on the nod. Mark had already told him that she had injected herself that evening. She wouldn't have been the first junkie to lie there in the cocoon of safety and emptiness she had created for herself while the flames consumed her
flesh. Either way, there was no evidence of foul play other than the starting of the fire itself, and going by the splash patterns and accelerant tests Geoff Hamilton had carried out, the arsonist had probably not even set foot on Mark and Christine's boat.

It was late Saturday afternoon and the duty constables were bringing in a couple of drunken Eastvale United supporters when Banks got to the station. Eastvale was hardly a premier-division team, but that didn't stop some fans from acting as if they were at a Leeds versus Manchester United match. Banks edged around the wobbly group and headed upstairs to the relative peace of his office, grabbing the handful of completed actions from his pigeonhole on the way. He slipped off his raincoat, kicked the heater to get it started and turned on his radio to a Radio 3 special about Bud Powell on
Jazz Line Up
.

As he listened to “A Night in Tunisia,” he flipped through the actions and found only one of immediate interest.

According to her ex-employer Sam Prescott, Heather Burnett, the girl from the art supplies shop who had left Thomas McMahon for Jake Harley, had later left Harley himself for an American installation specialist called Nate Ulrich, and they now lived in Palo Alto, California. Well, it had been a long shot in the first place, Banks thought.

Because it was the weekend, things were slow. Banks didn't expect any preliminary forensic results, including analysis of clothing samples and toxicology, until early Tuesday. He still needed to know who had owned the boats, but as yet DC Templeton hadn't got very far with his inquiries. There was a good chance he might have to wait until Monday or later to find someone who knew, maybe someone from British Waterways.

Then there was the car to consider, the dark blue Jeep Cherokee, or Range Rover, whatever it was, that had been seen parked in the lay-by nearest the boats. It was probably a
waste of time, as there would be so many of them to check out, but Banks issued the actions anyway. He also ordered a survey of all the car-rental agencies in the area. There was a good chance that if someone was out to break the law, he might not want to use his own car when visiting McMahon in case he was spotted. Also, if he knew the roads in the immediate area of the boats, he would know that a Jeep was a much better option than an ordinary car, especially in winter.