The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (25 page)

The subject matter of the picture was unusually clear, presented in realistic terms though with a degree of distortion. At the forefront was a face—empurpled, screaming or gagging, enlarged for impact, while behind it the small body was arching in an agony of pain and terror. It was clearly a picture of someone in their last throes, and in the most desperate torment. It was done without mercy—even, both men sensed, with a species of perverted pleasure.

“Who'd want a picture like that on their wall?” said Charlie.

“Not even the painter, apparently,” agreed Oddie, “considering the fact that he keeps it from the general gaze.”

“I think it's time I read up about Byatt's other significant ‘periods,'” said Charlie. “I would think this must be part of one of them.”

“You do that. Tonight. And I think it's time someone went to have a talk with Stephen Mates. You.”

“Me? Alone?”

“I think it would be best. Young men together.”

Charlie grimaced.

“He doesn't sound the sort I'd get along with. He sounds a snotty git, anxious to impress you with his own superiority.”

“Well, you've got enough evidence to kick the stuffing out of him. Get him frightened, and find out how much he knows.”

 • • • 

As he drove down to Oxford next day two subjects were warring in Charlie's mind: how to deal with a touchy and difficult young man, and the manuscript he had read the previous evening about the later paintings of Ranulph Byatt.

“The pictures that comprise his purple phase,” Briscott had written, “seem to have been painted late in 1984 and early in 1985, though they were not released on to the market until two years later. The pictures of this intensely concentrated phase are more abstract than the classic ‘red period' paintings,
with the horror more thoroughly assimilated. Here and there one may think one can discern a bulging eye, an empurpled tongue, even perhaps the outlines of a human form. But in general what impresses the viewer is the energy of execution, and how this energy conveys violence and terror even while it assumes no recognizable form or meaning.”

Did it make sense? Charlie would not have been able to put that sense into his own words, but after having seen the pictures in Byatt's studio it did. That last picture in the stack, he felt sure, was the realistic picture from which all the later, more abstract versions sprang.

What was worrying was that there was at least one other “phase” of remarkable pictures mentioned in the Briscott book, though he had fallen asleep before he had reached the details.

The dreaming spires may have looked like the New Jerusalem from a distance, but in among them, in the dust, noise, and fumes of the Oxford traffic system, they were more like a medieval Detroit. Charlie made it, with five wrong turns, to police headquarters in the city and there left his car. He made a courtesy call on the duty sergeant, picked up a map, and set off for Brasenose on foot.

The porter in the lodge at Brasenose was hunched over a computer, picking his nose. He was dismissive.

“Is that the bloke who turned up out of the blue one evening last week?” He pressed some keys on his computer. “Yeah, that's him. Said he'd come up early, and demanded a room cool as you like, as if we were a hotel. I
said, ‘Look, mate, the college is full of toffee and sweetmeat manufacturers'—their annual convention, it was, and we were bursting at the seams. I said, ‘This college can't afford to be empty during long vacation, or any other vacation, come to that.' I sent him off with a flea in his ear, but I gave him a printout of landladies who are willing to take young gentlemen—so-called—in the vacs.”

“Has he been back,” Charlie asked, as the man was turning away, “or told you he's got rooms?”

The man turned back reluctantly.

“I've seen him go through on the way to the library. Looked a bit at a loose end.” He sat down and pressed some more keys on his computer. “Yeah, he must have told the night porter. He's got a room at Thirty-one, Meadow Lane. Grotty, but close by. It'll be three weeks before he can have his room here.”

The porter sent him off on the first stage of his journey, and he consulted his map for the later ones. The lodgings were about ten minutes' walk away, a peeling Victorian terrace house with all the charm of a detention center. The only good thing about the landlady Charlie could think of to say was that she probably made no difference in her manner on account of his color: it was clear she was horrible to everyone.

“No, 'e's not in,” she said, standing as if barring the way of an invading army. “I don't encourage them to stay in. ‘You didn't come up early in order to sit in your room reading,' I says. ‘You get out and study in one of them liberies. 'Nuff of them around,' I says. I'd never be able to call me 'ome me own if I let 'em stop in all day. Oh, Gawd, there 'e is.”

Slouching along the road, scuffing his feet, was a tall,
saturnine young man in a deep green shirt and light slacks, both of which looked expensive. The expression on his face showed he was neither confident nor happy. He stopped at the gate.

“Mr. Mates?”

“Yes?” The manner said “So what?” or “What's it to you?” As with the landlady it was a manner that seemed habitual rather than racist. Charlie flashed his ID at him.

“DC Peace, West Yorkshire Police. Could we talk somewhere?”

Stephen swallowed. The landlady looked implacable.

“Best not here,” he said. “You can see why. We could walk. Or go to a pub.”

“Not a pub. Is there any park nearby, or place where we could sit down?”

“Magdalen hasn't got a conference on at the moment. I suppose we could go there.”

As they walked toward the bridge Stephen said, “How did you find me?”

“No great feat of detection. I asked the Brasenose porter. Why? You're not in hiding, are you?”

“
No
.” He swallowed again. “Though it's sometimes seemed like I'm in exile. There's no one up at all. Nothing but conferences and conventions. Not a soul worth talking to.”

“Tough,” said Charlie, his word being accepted at face value. “I believe you're getting your reading done early.”

“Oh, yes, there's that. But I had hoped to make a few contacts as well.” They turned into Magdalen, and Charlie found they had to pay for the privilege of entry. Stephen Mates gazed at the sky, and with a sigh Charlie felt in his pocket. “Now, this is a college!” breathed Stephen.

“Brasenose not up to scratch?” inquired Charlie, keeping his voice neutral. This time Stephen shot him a glance.

“Above my level,” he admitted. “Well above. I only got in because my father was there.”

“Useful,” said Charlie.

“Even then it was touch-and-go. I've been to introduce myself to the principal, who was up when Dad was up. He says his main interests were practical jokes and fast cars. He obviously wasn't impressed at all. I think it was Grandfather who tipped the scales: his money, his picture, and his name.”

The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable. By now they were in the largest quad, New Buildings lawn, which was almost deserted. Just what Charlie had hoped for. He nodded at a park bench, and they sat down, one at each end.

“You've been in touch with Ashworth?” Charlie asked.

“I spoke to Mother a couple of days ago. She was away when I left. She said you were investigating Declan's disappearance—if he
has
disappeared.”

Charlie let that ride.

“You were in the house at the time. Did you hear him take off during the night?”

“No.”

The boy veered between confidentiality and truculence. He had had a week to decide on his attitude, but he hadn't picked one. It didn't seem to Charlie that he was a fast learner. He also seemed strangely unformed, as a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old will often be, but as a nineteen-year-old should not be. Charlie guessed it sprang from growing up in a household with two dominant personalities in it. He
hoped it meant that the young man might still choose a fruitful rather than a self-destructive path for his life.

“What about the other arrivals at the farmhouse that weekend?”

“Other arrivals? There weren't any other arrivals.”

“There was one, at any rate. The boy whose body you disposed of in the car park behind the Haworth Tandoori.”

“I didn't! You can't prove anything like that!”

The voice was raised, but a note of panic could not be disguised.

“Oh, but we can,” said Charlie, hoping he was right. “Our forensic team is probably going over the car and the stable at this moment. If the body was in the boot, traces will be in the boot. And with your mother away, you were the only one who drove.”

“That's not true. Plenty of people at Ashworth can drive. They just don't because Granddad disapproves of cars. Isn't that a joke, when he's the only one who's got one?”

“You were heard coming home, then going out again.” Charlie decided to come clean with what he suspected to have been the order of events. “I don't think you had anything to do with the murder, Stephen. But I do think you agreed to dispose of the body.” He waited, and a flicker appeared in the boy's eyes. “If you're going to keep out of jail, which I don't promise, and if you're ever going to make anything of yourself at Oxford, you're going to need all the goodwill from the police you can muster. Do you want time to think about it? I can take a turn around the quad if it would help you make up your mind.”

After a second Stephen shook his head.

“No. I don't need time.”

“Right, then. Let's get back to my earlier question. When did Declan's brother arrive at Ashworth?”

Stephen's dark eyes were set into reminiscence.

“It was the Saturday afternoon. We'd had lunch, and Mrs. Max had gone. I was upstairs in my little darkroom, doing some developing. I heard the doorbell, laid down the print I was working on to dry, then went out onto the landing. By then, though, Melanie had got to the front door, so I didn't bother to go down.”

“So you didn't meet or see him then?”

“No, it was later, a lot later. I went out, walked to Stanbury to get some cigarettes at the pub. On the way out I heard Melanie and a man laughing and talking in the drawing room. By the time I got back they were upstairs with Ranulph, still laughing and talking. The voice sounded like Declan's—same brogue, same quality—and I thought he was back, so I went into Granddad's bedroom.”

He paused.

“You weren't welcome?”

“The talking and the laughter stopped. Then Melanie introduced me, explained who I was and who the visitor was. I made some small talk to him for a minute or two, said I was sorry he'd missed his brother, that sort of thing. Then I sensed they wanted me to be off. I went along to my bedroom, opened and shut the door, but I stayed on the landing, listening.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. . . . I felt they were up to something.”

“And did you hear anything that told you what it was?”

“No. Not really.” Stephen screwed up his face. “But
they were being so nice to him. Even Granddad. They were
making up
to him. Do you understand?”

Charlie nodded encouragingly.

“I think so. Were they being so nice it seemed they were trying to entrap him, hold him there?”

“Something like that. But nothing you could pin down. The only thing I really remember was Granddad saying, ‘Declan was a nice boy, a lovely lad. A bit straitlaced, though. You're a young man who's seen a bit more of the world.' Granddad never soft-soaps people as a rule. But it was mainly their friendliness, their welcoming him. Granddad's not like that, nor Melanie, by nature.”

“How much more of Patrick did you see?”

Stephen shook his head.

“Hardly anything. I saw him taking a tray up to Granddad's room, saw him and Melanie talking in the kitchen.”

“You didn't talk to him again?”

“No. I was out, mostly.”

“Why?”

“
Why?
Well, I was going to pubs. I drove to Hebden Bridge—”

“You're not telling me
why
you were out so much,” Charlie pressed him. “Did you not want to be at home?”

After a moment's hesitation, Stephen nodded.

“I suppose not. It felt all
wrong
, somehow.”

“Did you ever have suspicions about your father's disappearance?”

“
What?
My father's?” He had almost jumped when the surprise question was sprung on him. There was shock in his voice and eyes, but there was something else too: was it surprise at its being brought out into the open for the
first time? Was the mere question a revelation of things in his mind he had never acknowledged. “I never had suspicions. I just wondered—wondered what happened to him. I thought it odd, his going out of our lives so entirely.”

“Do you think your mother has suspicions? Is that why she's using a private detective?”

“I never thought of that!” He seemed dumbstruck. Charlie felt sorry for him. He was really not very bright, even about his own situation. “I suppose you could be right. Do you mean she wants confirmation that he left her, but she really fears he was . . . murdered?”

“Yes.”

“Poor woman. My poor, bloody mother. And everybody there looks down on her, thinks her next thing to an idiot.” He shook his head. “God, what a household! I've always said it. That, at any rate, isn't something I've just woken up to.”

It was like a silly boast. It was pathetic. Again he seemed to Charlie more boy than man.

“What happened on the Sunday night?”

“I got back from a pub in Cullingworth. I wasn't drunk. I'd just been spinning out the time, hoping they'd be in bed when I got back. But they weren't. They were waiting for me.”