‘Yeah, woke me up this morning, mewing at the back door. Greedy tyke. What d’you want?’ He backed reluctantly into his hallway as they followed him in.
‘When did you last see Betty?’ Brock asked.
Gilbey pondered, thought processes apparently sluggish. He cleared his throat with a rasping gurgle and Kathy caught a strong whiff of whisky along with the tar. ‘Yesterday evening. Brought me a pie she’d baked. We ate it together with a glass of vino. Why? What’s the matter?’
This unexpected glimpse of domestic harmony between the two neighbours surprised Kathy. ‘I thought you two didn’t get on,’ she said.
‘There was that big crowd in the square, all those weirdos. Made Betty nervous. Scared her cat. What’s it to you, anyway?’
‘I’m afraid we have bad news about Betty, Mr Gilbey. She’s been found dead.’
Gilbey stared at her, then at Brock, face blank.‘Dead?’ he said slowly, as if the word meant nothing to him. The cat sensed something and leaped abruptly from his arm. ‘Betty?’
‘Let’s sit down in the kitchen,’ Kathy said. She steered him towards the open door at the end of the hall where she could see a pine table and chairs. Along the way the cigarette dropped from his fingers and Brock, following behind, picked it up. He doused it in the kitchen sink, next to the remains of a home-baked cheese and onion pie and an empty bottle of wine, and ran a glass of water for the painter, who had removed his glasses to rub his eyes. The frames were old and worn, Kathy noticed, heavy plastic, like a museum piece from the 1960s. She wondered if Gilbey, presumably a successful and prosperous man, looked so resolutely down at heel by choice or through self-neglect.
‘How did she go?’ Gilbey grunted after taking a swallow of water, hand trembling.‘Was it her heart?’
‘We’re not sure at the moment exactly how she died.’
Gilbey picked up the evasion in Brock’s answer and said sharply,‘She didn’t hurt herself, did she?’
‘No, she…’
But before Kathy could go on, Gilbey interrupted. ‘Who found her then?’
‘A builder. She was found in the basement of one of the houses they’re doing up.’
Gilbey’s brow wrinkled in astonishment.
‘When did she leave you last night?’
‘I don’t know… ten, ten-thirty. When the crowd began to break up. But how…?’
‘Was there anything specific about the crowd that bothered her? Did she mention anything?’
‘Not really. They just made her nervous. When they began to drift away she said she’d go home and run a hot bath. How did she come to be in the building site, for God’s sake? It’s locked up at night, and she didn’t get on with any of those men.’
‘We’re not sure at the moment. Did you hear anything unusual last night, after she left?’
‘Well… yes, I did. Some time after midnight, getting on for one, I’d say, I was getting ready to turn in. Her bedroom is through the wall from mine. I heard a thump from next door, and I wondered about it. She could be a clumsy old cow, knocking things over. In the end I did nothing.’
‘You know the layout of her house then?’
‘Course I do, we’ve been neighbours for thirty-five years.’
Brock’s phone rang and he listened for a moment, then murmured, ‘Right, I’ll be over in a minute.’ He rang off and said,‘I’m going back to the scene, Kathy. You finish up here with Mr Gilbey, will you?’
He left by the back door while the old painter lit another cigarette with an unsteady hand.
‘Do you want to lie down, Reg?’ Kathy asked, wondering if she should get a doctor.
‘No, I’m all right.’
‘Is there anything else you can tell me that might help us?’
‘How did she die then?’ he asked.
‘It seems she was hanged.’
‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’
‘Can you think of anyone who’d want to do that?’
He shook his head distractedly. ‘She could be cantankerous, of course, accusing people of wanting to steal her things, stuff like that, but I never took it seriously.’
‘Did she have anything particularly valuable?’
He pondered, taking a faltering drag on his cigarette. ‘Never saw her wear jewellery, and she never had much cash. As far as I know, the only things of value that her husband left her apart from the house were his paintings. He’d been a bit of a collector, and his father before him.’
‘And they were valuable?’
‘The best English artists of the time: Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Sutherland, several Henry Moore drawings- stuff like that, all very solid, bought through reputable galleries. I know she’s sold a few of them over the years. I’m not sure what’s left.’
‘Later on, when the scientific people have finished, I’d like you to come next door with me and have a look to see if you can spot anything missing.’
He shrugged.‘If you want.’
‘So you’ve known Betty a long time?’
He seemed lost in thought for a while, then he stubbed out his cigarette and got stiffly to his feet. ‘Come on, I’ll show you something.’
He led her along the hall and began climbing the stairs, using the banister to help haul himself up. Kathy followed him up to the studio she’d visited before, recognising the smells of oil and pigment that seemed to impregnate the walls. Gilbey was searching through a rack of unframed canvases set up in a corner of the room. Finding the one he was after, he pulled it out, turning it towards the light for her to see. It was a large painting of a young nude woman, sitting in front of a window. Gilbey propped it up on a chair and stepped back, his eyes fixed on the face of the model. As she came closer, Kathy thought she recognised the large eyes and angular features, the central parting of long thick hair, jet black. The style of painting, with the paint densely applied in scoops and whorls of browns and white and black, was very different from the portrait of the judge standing nearby on its easel. Kathy assumed it must have been the work of another artist, but then she recognised the windows behind the seated model as those of the corner bay in this same room, with the trees of the central park beyond.
As if answering her unspoken question, Gilbey said, ‘I painted differently then.’ He gently touched the corrugated surface of the pigment with his fingertips.‘Laid it on thick, squeezed straight from the tube. I wanted to show the force of the material thing, the energy of its presence in the world, just as it was, without frills and tricks. The Kitchen Sink school, they called us in the fifties.’
In the corner of the painting Kathy noticed lettering, blunt and square: GILBEY 1969.
‘Later I moved on. I became less interested in the material presence and more in the spirit of what lay behind it.’ He sounded nostalgic, regretful, as if the texture of the paint against his hand had reminded him of an old friend. ‘The paint became thinner, more calculated, as I tried to show the soul… but it’s so bloody hard. I did this in one session, ten hours, and I knew I’d finished when I ran out of paint. Now…’ He looked over his shoulder at the judge’s portrait, ‘Well, I’ve been doing that for eight months now, maybe seventy or eighty sessions, layer upon layer, and I still haven’t captured the old goat, not really. I may never finish it.’
Comparing the two paintings, Kathy suddenly understood what he meant. The girl in the window had a real presence, but was flat and stylised, like a Byzantine icon, whereas the judge seemed to emerge out of the canvas as a human character in full, a man of judgement, intelligence and authority, yes, but also something else; crafty, predatory even, dangerous.
‘She was the one who made me want to change,’ Gilbey went on, and seeing the query on Kathy’s face he explained, ‘She was the first model I had who talked. Couldn’t shut her up. Told me more than I wanted to know about her life, and Harry. Harry was her husband, owned the house next door. I wanted quiet to concentrate on the paint, but she had to talk, and gradually I came to realise that the person that the talking revealed was more interesting than the body I was trying to represent. Took me a long time to come to terms with that.’ He turned back to examine the old painting, lost in memories.‘Resisted it until I began to see that my work was becoming just decorative, pattern-making. Then I had to start again, with sitters who would talk about themselves. And most of them will, with a bit of encouragement.’ He nodded his head, thinking, talking more to himself than to Kathy.‘Reckon it’s something to do with having to hold the same position all the time-frees the mind, like the psychiatrist’s couch. The judge is a great talker, oh yes.’ Gilbey gave a snort that sounded like contempt. ‘Well, I knew his reputation, of course. A man of fine words and firm moral judgement. But why was he so strict with certain types of criminals; the sex offenders, the rapists and pederasts? Was it because he felt so deeply for their victims? Or was it because he understood what drives them only too well? Now how do you show that in a portrait?’