Terry Harper had been right. Alan was extraordinarily good. But Jude still got the impression he had the skills of a draughtsman rather than an artist. The nudes were immaculately executed, but by a detached observer, not by someone who engaged with them at an emotional level.
She moved on through the exhibition, adding to her detailed knowledge of Joke’s anatomy, and imagined how much James Lister would relish doing the same – particularly if he could convince Fiona it was in the name of art.
But in the drawings on the far wall the subject had changed. They were all still nudes, but these were of a variety of women. These were the ones which pre-dated Alan’s meeting with Joke.
One of the pictures showed a woman post-coitally splayed on rumpled sheets. She was blonde, trim-figured, late thirties perhaps. One of her hands suggestively caressed a wooden bedpost carved with the design of a climbing vine. The image of this woman glowed with all the sensuality the other drawings lacked. She oozed sex from every pore.
Jude could not claim to recognize the body from the mummified torso she had seen in the cellar of Pelling House, but, with the bedpost as a clue, she knew instinctively that the subject of the drawing had been Virginia Hargreaves.
“Enjoying the view?” asked a cold male voice behind her.
Jude turned to face Alan Burnethorpe, who was looking at her with undiluted suspicion.
He opened his mouth to speak, but a door behind him clattered open. “God,” Joke drawled as she came in, “it’s impossible to get a decent au pair these days!”
Thirty
The Durringtons’ house was a large Edwardian pile in Dauncey Street, which figured. Respected local doctor, pillar of the community, Donald Durrington’s natural habitat was Dauncey Street. As she followed her Art Crawl map towards the front door, Carole Seddon wished she knew more about him. Had he been a Fethering general practitioner, she would have got some feeling of his reputation, but all she had to go on in Fedborough was the impression he’d made on her at the Listers’ dinner party.
That impression had been of someone world-weary, disengaged and not as discreet about professional secrets as he should have been. If that last extrapolation were correct, then it could be good news for the cause of her investigation.
But she couldn’t get the ‘feeling on the street’ about the doctor, those little nuances of resentment and approbation. In every practice there’d be some patient who claimed a male doctor lingered unnecessarily long over a gynaecological examination, some mother complaining that he wouldn’t make a house call when her child was seriously ill, some bereaved relative bitterly resenting his diagnosis of what had been wrong with the deceased. Equally, there would be ecstatic wives praising triedoctor’s early recognition of their husband’s prostate cancer, mothers whose babies had been nurtured back from the edge of dehydration, patients with undying gratitude for the seriousness with which he had approached their Irritable Bowel Syndrome. But to know whether the balance of Donald Durrington’s local image was favourable or unfavourable Carole Seddon would have had to live in Fedborough for a while. So she was left to rely on her instincts.
When she entered the large hallway of the Dauncey Street house, she didn’t think those instincts were going to be much help to her. The girl who was acting as curator for the art exhibition Carole had never seen before. Late teens, she wore the scowl of bored resentment that went with her age. Along with the photocopied catalogue sheets on the table in front of her lay a magazine with the latest boyband on the front. Its disarray suggested the girl had read every last statistic of the members’ taste in fast food and quality of first snogs.
Carole felt disappointment for which she knew there was really no justification. What had she expected to find when she came into the house? Donald Durrington sitting waiting, ready with a filing cabinet full of medical records for her to riffle through at will? Was the smooth run of investigation that she and Jude had experienced in Fedborough about to come to an end?
This thought revived an earlier doubt. She remembered discussing with Jude how easy the first bit of their investigation had been, how ready people had been to talk to them. At that stage, endorsed by his transatlantic dash to clear his name, their suspicions had been moving towards Francis Carlton. And the police’s interest in him had been prompted by an anonymous letter. Carole reminded herself that they still hadn’t identified the sender of that letter. Debbie Carlton had seemed genuinely sceptical about its existence, but then if she actually was the sender, that’s how she would behave. The anonymous letter needed following through…
As she processed these thoughts, Carole decided she’d better maintain her cover story and look at the art on display in the Durringtons’ hall. She was, after all, meant to be a mere punter on the Art Crawl. But, so far as the teenage guardian of the art was concerned, Carole’s masquerade was wasted. The girl had shown no acknowledgment of, or interest in, her arrival.
The artist’s name was foreign, Polish perhaps, a jumble of letters which looked like an anagram. What he – or she – did wasn’t Carole’s kind of stuff. Whereas Andrew Wragg’s paintings had been troubling in their violence, these were equally troubling in their blandness. They were abstracts too, abstract to the point of being comatose. Pale washes of blue, grey and white lay lethargically across the canvases. Titles like Serenity VI, Tranquillity IX and Acquiescence XIII raised the unwelcome prospect that somewhere existed at least five more Serenities, eight more Tranquillities and twelve more Acquiescences. The paintings were the visual equivalent of musak.
Still, Carole did her stuff. She moved through to the dining room, where the exhibition continued. The Durringtons’ furniture, sideboard, large table and set of matching chairs was dull, but still more interesting than the paintings. These were so like the exhibits in the hail Carole wondered how even the artist himself – or perhaps herself – could tell them apart. The titles – Consent VIII, Satisfaction X and Wish-Fulfilment XIX – seemed to have been selected totally at random.
She was looking at the photographs on the mantelpiece, presumably of Durrington children, though of an age by now to have moved away from home, when she heard an interior door open into the hall.
“Can I go?” asked the teenager’s voice immediately. “You said three hours. It’s over that.”
“Have you had many people?” Joan Durrington’s voice was deeper and more assertive than it had been at the Listers’ dinner party.
“Hardly any. There’s some woman through there now, but she’s only about the third.”
“If you stay till six, I’ll give you another couple of pounds.”
“Hardly worth it,” the girl’s voice said. “‘Fixed to meet my boyfriend down the Stag half-five.”
“Oh. All right. Well, there’s the money we agreed.”
No thanks were expressed as the cash was presumably pocketed.
“Can you do tomorrow afternoon?”
“Don’t know that it’s really worth my while,” said the girl. “Ten quid for three hours. Do better than that picking down the mushroom farm. Anyway, it’s the weekend.”
“But I thought we agreed. Are you saying you won’t be back tomorrow?”
“That’s right. See you. Cheers!”
“You little bastard!” Joan Durrington’s voice called after the retreating girl. The front door slammed shut.