“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 announced, 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.