Charlotte had said Aunt Vespasia thought his paintings a little muddy and highly priced, but that was no cause for personal dislike, far less murder. If one did not like paintings, one simply did not purchase them. And yet he had been popular and, if his house was anything to judge by, of very considerable means.
The house was the place to begin. Possibly it was where he had been murdered, and if that could be established, it was a point from which to pursue time and witnesses. At the very least he would discover the last occasion Godolphin Jones was there, if he was seen leaving, who had called upon him, and when. Servants frequent knew a great deal more about their masters than their masters would have chosen to believe. Discreet and well-judged questioning might elicit all sorts of information.
And, of course, a thorough search must be made of his belongings.
Pitt, in company with a constable, began the long task.
The bedroom yielded nothing. It was orderly, a little consciously dramatic for Pitt’s taste, but clean and unremarkable in every other way. It held all the usual effects: washstand, mirror, chests of drawers for underwear and socks. Suits and shirts were kept in a separate dressing room. There were several guest bedrooms, unoccupied and out of use.
Nor did any of the downstairs rooms offer anything unusual until they came to the studio. Pitt opened the door and stared inside. There was nothing posed or indulgent about this room; the floor was uncarpeted, the windows enormous and taking up the most part of two walls. There was a clutter of odd pieces of statuary in one corner, and what looked like a white garden chair. A Louis Quinze chair was half draped with a length of pink velvet, and an urn lay on its side on the floor. On the wall beside the door were shelves stacked with brushes, pigments, chemicals, linseed oil, spirits, and several bundles of rags. On the floor underneath were a number of canvases, and in the center of the room an easel with two palettes beside it and a half-worked canvas propped on the pegs. There was nothing else immediately visible, except a shabby rolltop desk and a hard-backed kitchen chair beside it.
“Artist,” the constable said obviously. “Reckon to find anything here?”
“I hope so.” Pitt walked in. “Otherwise there’s nothing left but questioning the servants. You start over there.” He pointed and began to go through the canvases himself.
“Yes, sir,” the constable replied, dutifully climbing over the urn to begin and knocking the chair off its balance. It fell over and rolled onto its side with a clatter, carrying a vase of dried flowers with it.
Pitt refrained from comment. He already knew the constable’s opinion of art and artists.
The canvases were mostly primed but unused. There were only two with paint on, one with background and outline of a woman’s head, the other almost completed. He sat them up and stepped back to consider them. They were, as Vespasia had said, a little muddy in color, as if he had used too many pigments in the mixing, but the balance was good and the composition pleasing. He did not recognize the almost completed one, nor the one on the easel, but probably the butler would know who they were, and no doubt Jones himself kept a record, for financial purposes if nothing else.
The constable knocked over a piece of pillar and swore under his breath. Pitt ignored him and turned to the desk. It was locked, and he was obliged to fiddle for several minutes with a wire before getting it open. There were few papers inside, mostly bills for artist’s supplies. The household accounts must be kept somewhere else, probably by the cook or the butler.
“There’s nothing ’ere, sir,” the constable said hopelessly. “Couldn’t rightly tell if there’s been a struggle in among this lot or not, seein’ as it’s such a mess, anyway. I suppose it’s bein’ a hartist, like?” He did not approve of art; it was not an occupation for a man. Men should do a job of work, and women should keep house, a neat and tidy house, if they were any good at it. “They all live like this?” He eyed the room with disdain.
“I’ve no idea,” Pitt replied. “See if you can find any blood. There was a hell of a bruise on his head. Whatever he hit it on is bound to have traces.” And he resumed his search of the desk, picking up a bundle of letters. He read through them quickly; they were of no interest that he could see, all to do with commissions for portraits, detailing poses desired, colors of gowns, dates for sittings that might be convenient.
Next, he came to a small notebook with a series of figures which could have been anything, and after each figure a tiny drawing, either an insect or a small reptile. There was a lizard, a fly, two kinds of beetle, a toad, a caterpillar, and several small hairy things with legs. All of them were repeated at least half a dozen times, except the toad, which appeared only twice and toward the end. Perhaps if Jones had lived, the toad would have continued?
“Found something?” The constable climbed over the urn and the chair and came across, his voice lifting hopefully.
“I don’t know,” Pitt answered. “It doesn’t look like much, but maybe if I understood it—”
The constable tried to lean over his shoulder, found it too high, and peered over his elbow instead.
“Well, I dunno,” he said after a minute. “Was ’e interested in them kind o’ things? Some gentlemen is—who don’t ’ave anythin’ better to do wiv their time. Though why anybody wants to know about spiders and flies is a mystery to me.”
“No.” Pitt shook his head, frowning. “They’re not naturalist drawings; they are all repeated at fairly regular intervals, and exactly the same. They are more like hieroglyphics, a sort of code.”
“What for?” The constable screwed up his face. “It ain’t a letter, or anything.”
“If I knew what for, I should know the next step,” Pitt said tartly. “These figures are set out in groups like either dates or money, or both.”
The constable lost interest. “Maybe that was ’is way of doin’ ’is accounts, to keep out nosy ’ousekeepers, or the like,” he suggested. “There’s nothing much over there, just a lot o’ things like you see in paintings, bits o’ plaster made up to look like stone, colored bits o’ cloth, things like that. Ain’t no blood. And they’re all in such a mess you can’t tell whether they been knocked like that, or ’e just threw ’em there, anyway. Seems like hartists is just naturally untidy. Looks as if ’e took photographs as well, as there’s one o’ them cameras over there.”
“A camera?” Pitt straightened up. “I haven’t seen any photographs, have you?”
“No, sir, now as you mention it, I ’aven’t. Do you think ’e sold them?”
“He would hardly sell all of them,” Pitt answered, puzzled. “And there weren’t any in the rest of the house. Now, I wonder where they are?”
“Maybe ’e never used it,” the constable suggested. “It’s in among all them things ’e put in ’is pictures; maybe that’s what it’s for, part of a picture.”
“Doesn’t seem the sort of thing you’d put in a picture.” Pitt climbed carefully over the chair and the urn and the pillars till he came to the black camera on its tripod. “And it’s far from new,” he observed. “So he hadn’t just bought it, unless he got it secondhand. But we can find out from his past clients if anyone had a portrait painted with a camera in it, or if anyone commissioned such a thing for the future.”
“It ain’t a pretty thing.” The constable caught his feet in a piece of the velvet cloth and swore vociferously. Then he noticed Pitt’s face. “Beg pardon, sir.” He coughed in a mixture of embarrassment and irritation. “But maybe ’e took photographs o’ people ’e was goin’ to paint, so ’e could know what they looked like when they wasn’t ’ere, like?”