Near the door were some artefacts Carole and Jude recognized – the photograph-covered gun and the framed pieces which had recently been returned from the Cornelian Gallery. They had been piled up higgledy-piggledy, almost as if the artist had lost interest in them.
In the centre of the warehouse was what appeared to be a fully functional fork-lift truck, though whether that was there to move about the other junk or destined to form part of an artwork in its own right neither Carole nor Jude could guess.
As they took in the warehouse’s bizarre contents, they realized that the space was no longer uninhabited. On the floor at one end lay a life-size painted wooden crucifix into which a shaven-headed young man was banging galvanized nails. Laid out on the floor the other end was a giant poster of President Obama over which a young woman was laying a painstaking trelliswork formed by strips of Christmas Sellotape. There was no sign of Denzil Willoughby.
Neither of what were presumably his assistants took any notice of the new arrivals, but continued with the work of realizing their master’s ‘concepts’. Carole couldn’t somehow see a direct line in what she was witnessing back to the studios of the Old Masters, where eager helpers were allowed to do limbs and draperies while the boss took over to do the clever stuff like the faces.
She cleared her throat to draw attention to their presence, but neither of the assistants looked up from their toil. Then Jude announced, ‘Good morning. We’ve taken up the invitation on the website to come and have a look at the “Artist at Work”.’
‘That’s cool,’ said the girl, her eyes still fixed one her parallel lines of Santa-decorated tape.
Carole moved across to the young man with the crucifix. ‘And what are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘I’m banging nails into the bloody thing,’ he replied, as it talking to someone educationally subnormal.
‘Yes, but why?’
‘What do you mean, “why”?’
‘Why are you doing it?’
‘Well, because Denzil told me to.’ Again he sounded as though he couldn’t believe the stupidity of her question.
‘And because Denzil’s told you to do it, does that make it art?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ said the young man. ‘If you want to call it art, fine.’
‘I definitely don’t want to call it art.’
‘Still fine.’
‘Does Denzil think it’s art?’
‘Denzil doesn’t care. He does what he does. He’s not bothered by definitions. If people want to call it art, he’s not about to contradict them.’
‘And if people want to buy it?’
‘He won’t try and put them off,’ said the young man, banging a galvanized nail into the wound where the soldier had pierced Christ’s side.
‘Is Denzil around?’ Jude asked the girl.
‘He may be,’ she replied gnomically.
‘Are you expecting him?’
‘Usually. Sometimes.’ An answer which wasn’t a lot more helpful than the previous one. The girl, Jude noticed, was slight and dressed in black, perhaps rather like Bonita Green might have looked when she was twenty. And though she wore no make-up and seemed to have made no effort with her appearance, the assistant breathed an undeniable sexuality. Jude wondered whether Denzil Willoughby claimed the same droit de seigneur over his female assistants that artists are traditionally reputed to exercise over their models.
Since the person they had come to visit wasn’t there, Jude could see no reason not to try and get some information out of his staff, so she asked, ‘Did you know that Denzil had recently had an exhibition in Fethering.’
‘Where?’
‘Fethering. The Cornelian Gallery.’
‘Oh, I heard the name of the gallery, yes. Didn’t know where it was.’
‘Except, of course, the exhibition didn’t run its full course.’
‘So?’
As interrogations went, this one hadn’t got off to a very good start. And it didn’t get any further, because at that moment Denzil Willoughby’s feet in their toe-curled cowboy boots appeared at the top of the spiral staircase, quickly followed by the rest of his body as he descended. His dreadlocks looked more than ever like knotted string, and he was dressed in jeans and T-shirt. He stopped halfway down as he saw Carole and Jude. ‘Good God,’ he exclaimed. ‘Ladies of Fethering.’
Carole was surprised that he’d even registered their presence at the Private View.
‘Good morning,’ said Jude.
‘And to what do I owe this pleasure?’ The sneer was still there, but the mock-formality took his voice back to its public school origins.
‘We saw on your website that anyone is free to come and watch the “Artist at Work”.’
As Denzil Willoughby reached ground level, he gestured around his workshop. ‘Well, here you see it. The “Artist at Work”.’
‘We haven’t yet seen much evidence of you doing anything,’ Carole observed tartly.
He looked at her pityingly. ‘You just don’t get it, do you, Carole?’ Again she was surprised that he knew her name. ‘You still think art is one guy sitting there with his pots of paint and brushes, “painting things that look like things”.’
That was even more of a shock, Denzil quoting her own lines back at her. It raised the possibility that he had been talking about them to someone else, a possibility that was both intriguing and mildly disturbing.
‘God, my brain’s not working yet,’ the artist announced to the workshop at large. ‘I need coffee.’
The girl immediately rose from her Obama poster and walked towards one of the doors at the back of the warehouse. In the alternative world of Denzil Willoughby, it seemed, male chauvinism still ruled. The other assistant hadn’t looked up from his re-crucifixion of Christ.
‘Make a cafetière,’ Denzil called after the girl. ‘My visitors may want some too. And bring it out on to the terrace.’
No ‘pleases’, no blandishments of that kind. He crossed towards the other door at the back, gesturing Carole and Jude to follow him.
They found themselves in a surprisingly well-tended yard, whose red-brick walls were animated by colourful pot plants and hanging baskets. A wrought-iron spiral staircase led to the upper storey. White-painted Victorian cast-iron chairs stood around an equally white circular cast-iron pub table with Britannia designs on the legs.
Denzil indicated that they should sit down, and he joined them. Beneath his customary sneering manner, Jude could detect tension. And his next words explained the reason for that tension. ‘Presumably,’ he said, ‘you’ve come to talk about Fennel Whittaker’s death.’
TWENTY-ONE
‘What makes you think that?’ said Carole.
‘Because Giles Green had told me all about you,’ Denzil Willoughby replied.
‘Oh. I wasn’t aware he knew anything about us.’
‘He’s heard it from his mother. Apparently Bonita knows everything that goes on in Fethering.’
‘So what has Giles told you about us?’ asked Jude.
‘That you’re nosey, like most people down there.’
Jude spread her hands wide in a gesture of mock-innocence. ‘So little happens in a place like Fethering. The only growth industry in a village is gossip.’