With a yelp the photographer wrenched his head and shoulders round and started spewing obscenities into Ken’s upturned face. This sudden violent movement shifted the statue. It made a slow grating sound like a large stone being dragged from a wall.
There was a concerted intake of breath as, open-mouthed and breathless, people watched the fixedly smiling figure shiver. Then it tilted forwards, but slowly, the main mass of it still balanced safely on its axis. Still able to rock safely back into position if only its dangling necklace of human flesh were removed.
Ave uttered a piercing cry. ‘Terry - let go!’
Terry was panting, face made grimly triumphant by the fact that he was still hanging on in there. Then he made the mistake of turning outwards to see how all this derring-do was being received. This unwise redistribution of body weight caused the statue to tip still further, this time past the point of no return.
It fell to the floor with a deafening crash. Terry, twisting in mid-descent, landed inches from its powerful skull. Ken was not so lucky.
THROUGH THE MAGIC LANTERN
Chapter 12
Troy came in bright-eyed, crisp as a nut, the baby having slept right through. He smelled of Players High Tar and Brusque, the plebeian’s two fingers at Chanel Pour l’Homme. He hung up his jacket, stared at Barnaby who was gazing out of the window and said: ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m studying for the priesthood, Sergeant. What does it look as if I’m doing?’
Oh dear. A sarky day. A sarky day spent looking at a face like a slapped arse. Not the day to bring out the new pictures of Talisa Leanne standing up all by herself apart from hanging onto the back of Maureen’s chair. To be fair to the chief, he was not looking at all smart.
‘You OK, sir?’
‘So so. I didn’t sleep too well.’
‘That a fact?’ Newly refreshed, Troy was not really sympathetic. He was one of those people who, offspring permitting, could sleep hanging by a toenail from a clothes-line. He went over to look, for the umpteenth time, at the blow-up and said, ‘I’ve been thinking.’
This was a process Troy used sparingly. Too much thinking, it seemed to him, just got you overheated. He observed, he listened, he made neat notes. He was scrupulously accurate and sometimes intuitive. What he did not go in for were long periods of rigorous introspection plus a precisely argued follow-through.
Barnaby said, ‘Uh huh,’ and waited.
‘This Tim, look where he’s sitting.’ The chief inspector had no need to look. He knew the positions by heart. ‘Actually kneeling at Craigie’s feet.’
‘So?’
‘Now see where the Gamelin girl is, on Craigie’s left. The three of them in fact make an upended triangle. All Tim has to do is jump up and turn and he’d be facing them both - right?’ Barnaby agreed. ‘I think that might be what he did. And in the semi-darkness, plus all the confusion with the old dingbat going it on the quilt, he stabbed the wrong person.’
‘You mean he was trying to kill Sylvia Gamelin? But why?’
‘By all accounts he worshipped old Obi. This man was his sun, moon, stars and the last bus home. But what has the lad got to offer in return? Total devotion, that’s it. Well, you can get that from a dog can’t you? Now here comes this girl, young, beautiful, all her marbles, plus she’s about to offer the community a whacking great hand-out. Might Riley not see this as a moment of threat? Believe she’s trying to buy her way into the Master’s affections and push him out?’
Barnaby frowned. Troy continued, ‘Probably seem an overreaction to you and me, but don’t forget he’s mental. He won’t reason logically.’
‘It’s slight but just about feasible. In a state of extreme jealousy he might panic and react in the manner you describe.’
Troy flushed and tugged at his shirt cuffs: a habit when he was pleased or embarrassed. ‘That might explain his wild reaction to the death, Chief. And why he said it was an accident.’
‘Mm. The whole matter of emotional relationships is one we haven’t even started to go into. These enclosed communities can be like pressure cookers, especially the spiritually orientated places where showing antagonism is frowned on.’ If Barnaby sounded irked it was because he resented people who purported to have annexed goodness to themselves. ‘And it’s not unusual for a leader with exceptional charismatic gifts to be adored in a physical as well as an emotional way.’
‘You mean he was knocking somebody off?’
Barnaby winced. ‘Not necessarily. I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that because we never met him when he was alive we can’t appreciate - no matter what his followers say - quite how dynamic his personality really was. Or how strong his influence might have been.’
‘True. Didn’t look much lying on his back with his toes turned up. I still don’t see though ...’ Troy abandoned the diagram and sat down facing the desk. ‘D’you mean he might have been influencing someone in the wrong way?’
‘Perhaps.’ The truth was that Barnaby did not know what he meant. He was simply cogitating aloud. Positing ideas, throwing them away, playing with others. Guessing at unseen connections, maybe guessing wrong. When he was younger this had been the stage in a murder inquiry that had alarmed him most. The dreadful malleability of the whole thing. Grasping at a conversation here, a suspected motive there, a physical clue (that could surely be proven and pinned down), only to find them all evaporating under closer scrutiny.
Each setback would further knot him into apprehension. He sensed, not always in his imagination, disappointment in his performance and increasing pressure to get his finger out, from his immediate superiors. He never forgot the first case that he brought to a successful conclusion. His feelings of exhilaration qualified immediately by a disturbing sense that there had been no ‘spare’ to fall back on. That he had made it mainly through luck and by the skin of his teeth. And that the success might never be repeated.
Now he was somewhat more at ease with ambiguity and had enough confidence not to panic, believing that sooner or later deliverance, in the shape of a newly discovered fact or freshly made connection or slip of a suspect tongue, was at hand. Occasionally they were not and failure was the result. Not the end of the world as he had once thought, but meaning simply that he was no different from other men.
At the present moment the case was barely two days old and he was waiting on many things. Firstly for the PM report and information from the lab on the fibres of a coarse apron and several towels removed from the Windhorse yesterday. He was niggled about this thread. Not knowing its origins or how it came to be there meant not knowing its importance. It might be of no moment; it might be crucial.
Then someone was trying to chase up the real Christopher Wainwright and George Bullard should be ringing back on the subject of Jim Carter’s medication. There were a couple more Arthur Craigie soundalikes on the way although Barnaby had little faith in this conviction of Troy’s, springing as it did merely from Gamelin’s hardly unbiased description and a false hairpiece. Attempts were being made to check on Andrew Carter’s story but so picaresque were his meanderings (if truthfully described), that it was going to be far from easy. Barnaby had also obtained a copy of the coroner’s report and inquest on the boy’s uncle and could see that re-opening the investigation might prove problematical. All members of the community were provably elsewhere at the time of Carter’s death but the letter and scrap of conversation could not be ignored. Trixie Channing was not on the computer so she had not, as Barnaby had previously suspected, skipped bail. This meant a composite had to be built up and circulated, all of which took time. Barnaby was by no means as convinced as Andrew Carter that ‘nothing sinister’ had occurred just because all the girl’s gear had disappeared when she did. Trixie had been scared of something at the time of her interview and Barnaby now regretted he had not pushed harder to find out what it was.