Death in Leamington (20 page)

The beautiful late-registered Afro-American ‘architecture student’, a certain Miss D Troyte, ‘a distant relation’, who sat in the back row of his audience, was enjoying herself immensely. She slipped out at the end and returned to Leamington in the car that had been waiting for Mr Troyte, making some excuse that he had asked her to go ahead and would make his own way later.

Spenser,
The Faerie Queene

*

There were four players on the two tennis courts where Hugh and Bas were warming up. They had decamped from their normal Sunday real tennis game because of the ladies’ tournament and switched to play the modern game on the public courts. These courts were situated close to where lawn tennis was first played in the Manor House Hotel down the road. On the court next to them, two older gentlemen were playing a brisk and competitive game of singles. Hugh recognised Sir William Flyte and his near neighbour Richard Baxter – virtual brothers-in-law on account of Baxter’s long-term relationship with Sir William’s cousin Dottie. As they came to the net to spin for first serve, Bas pointed to the next court.

‘Isn’t that Claudia’s brother on the court next door with Sir William?’ asked Bas.

Hugh nodded. ‘Yes, and I’m amazed that Sir William’s here playing tennis given yesterday’s events.’

‘Indeed, amazed but not surprised. He’s a cool customer. Anyway, talking about cool, how did you get on with the ice maiden after you left the restaurant last night?

‘You really do have a one-track mind, don’t you? OK thanks but she is certainly hard work. Psychology and sculpture are a bit out of my league.’

‘What a waste with a body like that.’

‘It’s not all bad; she’s into sport as well.’

‘So are you seeing her again?’

‘She did say she wants to meet up again but I wasn’t convinced. I thought I might challenge her to a game of squash as she said she plays regularly.’

‘She’s certainly fit; if she’d warm up a little, she’d be perfect for you,’ he joked. ‘Sounds like you’d better do a bit of sculpture research though as well.’

Hugh smiled, he had been thinking about her all morning. During the next game he heard his mobile beep – unexpectedly it was a text from Claudia. He had sent a message earlier but was somewhat surprised that she had replied so quickly, and even more surprised that she had suggested he come over to the gallery where she worked that very afternoon. Her text mentioned she was preparing an upcoming exhibition there and could do with some male help.

‘Blimey, I think I’ve got a date,’ he said to Bas, showing him the phone.

‘Maybe but make sure you go prepared if she’s that keen,’ said Bas, ‘you know what these artists are like.’ Hugh screwed up his face at the comment.

‘Anyway, you’ve been unusally quiet about your own evening. How did you get on with Miss Taylor last night?’

‘Glad you asked. My, we had one hell of a hot party. After I got her on her own, she was all over me. Strange thing is I can only remember the half of it. I must have had more to drink than I thought. You know I’m normally a one-night stand sort of guy, but this time I can’t wait to see her again. I think I’ll call her hotel later and see if she’s up for a second round.’

During the succeeding points, Bas related the sordid details to Hugh in a staccato narrative, embellishing wherever his memory was strangely dimmed. For a big man, Hugh was very nimble around the courts, and with Bas strangely unable to move quickly himself, Hugh was soon serving for match point. His serve was returned by a wild volley from Bas that went soaring over the fence into the next court. Hugh opened the gate between the courts to ask the two older men if they could return the ball. As he collected it and closed the door, his interest was tweaked by the subject of their conversation.

‘You know that rogue Rohit that used to work for Nadia’s grandfather?’ Baxter was saying.

‘Only too well, he’s been bothering Nadia with texts for some time,’ replied Sir William.

‘Well, he’s one of my regular literature students. But on top of all the stuff going on in the street yesterday, he only went and half-inched one of my pistols. I’ve had to report it to the police: apparently he’s gone missing now as well.’

‘I’ve never trusted him so I’m not in the least surprised. That type is basically unreliable. That’s the kind of thanks you get for teaching him to write in your spare time.’

So that’s what Hunter was on about
, he thought.

As Hugh and Bas played out the second set, the two older men left the courts and were replaced ten minutes later by Delia and Julia. Bas suggested they abandon their singles game, which he was, in any case, losing badly and instead play a game of mixed doubles together. He partnered with Julia, while Hugh played with Delia.

‘Watch out,’ whispered Delia to Hugh, ‘Julia never misses a backhand with that enchanted lance of hers; the secret is to return on her forehand.’

The first set went to service until they reached the tie-break. The points then followed serve again until Hugh smashed another loose lob return from Bas, a backhand right down the baseline onto Julia’s forehand. Her hurried return landed out and so Hugh and Delia won the set. Bas indicated he’d had enough. Delia hugged Hugh, while Julia took off her tennis cap and came to the net to shake his hand. The sweat was pouring off his face and she wiped his brow with her hand towel. Hugh realised again how pretty she was, the filaments of her golden curls forming a halo around her face against the bright September sunlight. He had seemingly not made any impression on her the previous night. Maybe he should have tried harder to make it work all those years ago when he had the chance. Remarkably, he had a sense that she was thinking exactly the same. Now he realised he really had a dilemma, in thrall to two beautiful women in one weekend.

*

After they got back from Snark hunting, Alice found a message on the answering machine. She had been called back to the hospital to help with an autopsy on the actress from the nursing home across the road. There were now suspicions about how she had come to be found dead in the bath last night and whether she did take an overdose or if she could have been drugged. She had been asked to go back in to the hospital to help out with the toxicology analysis.

*

Back in the police station, we did not have to wait too much longer for the next message to arrive on my computer. At about 1pm, I called Hunter over from his office to look at my screen.

‘Sir, take a look at this.’

‘Good, now that’s getting much more interesting. It’s a lot longer and might be enough to start a frequency analysis, but it would still be much quicker if we could find the key to read it.’ He rubbed his hand over his brow, as if trying to come up with a key for the code with his own intellect and concentration.

‘Sir, have you seen the message header? The wording is very strange: “WSW. Don’t take clues from Toposcope hounds, blessings and Glory to God!”’

‘Toposcope hounds?’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘My God, I hope this isn’t all about Miss Taylor playing some elaborate practical joke on us. Don’t you remember the words of that song she sang for me last night, the phrase that she drew your attention to?’

‘Not really sir.’

‘Well I remember it clearly as it’s one of my favourites from her last album; it includes the phrase ‘Horoscope Hounds’. ‘Toposcope Hounds’ is so close it’s got to be connected to what these messages mean. Get on to the hotel; we need to interview her as soon as possible.’

I called straightaway and spoke briefly to the receptionist before turning back to Hunter.

‘Sir, she’s not in, they think she’ll be out until late afternoon. Is she a suspect now?’

‘I don’t know, that’s a bit strong but get a message out to the patrols to pick her up and ask her to come into the station if they see her, it can’t be that difficult to find a woman like that in Leamington. The more I think about it the more I think we need to take this seriously.’

‘But why would a suspect deliberately give us a clue like that?’ I asked and he pondered on this question for a minute.

‘Do you know, you’re right, Penny, but then again she may be trying to tell us something. Do you possess walking boots?’

‘No, but I have some wellies in my locker, Sir.’

‘Well fetch them and meet me in the car park, we’re going for a quick hike up to the Beacon on Newbold Comyn.’ I raised my eyebrows in puzzlement, but seeing how fixed his expression was did not question his instructions.

*

‘Here we are,’ he said as we reached the top of the hill. He rested his hands on the newly installed plinth with its perspex cover protecting a metal plaque against the elements. ‘This plate is a representation of all the views that can be seen from the beacon,’ he said. ‘It’s a replica of an original, which was stolen and recently discovered in a car boot sale.’

‘But why are we here, what’s this got to do with the murders? I can only see a few hills in the distance.’

‘A hunch maybe,’ he said. ‘Look, read this,’ he added, pointing out the inscription affixed to the plinth.

‘This Toposcope is after the design of an original by Arthur Troyte Griffith, an architect from Malvern and a close friend of Edward Elgar,’ I read. ‘Arthur Troyte, isn’t that a bit of a coincidence?’ I asked

‘It’s a very big one. The original Arthur Troyte Griffith was indeed a close friend of Elgar’s – in fact he was variation number seven I think. His nickname was Ninepin.’

‘So is that why we’re here, a British architect with the same name as the American architect?’

‘Not intentionally, but it’s certainly adding to the puzzle. No, we’ve come here to search for the key to your code, Penny. Can you read the inscription for me?’ He was looking up at the sky as if waiting for inspiration. I found the words a little hard to read through the condensation under the perspex, but eventually made out most of the letters and filled in the gaps.

‘The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,’ I read.

‘Ah yes of course, that’s Psalm 24, King James Version I believe – the first part of our key perhaps – I believe it continues something like ‘the world and they that dwell therein’ doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, it does, Sir. So do I just match the flag men up with the letters in the inscription?’

‘Hopefully it might be as simple as that.’

After a few minutes transcribing the inscription onto my notepad, I had matched up the letters from the Psalm on the Toposcope in order to the symbols of the dancing men on the longer message.

‘There are far more symbols than letters in the quotation from the Psalm.’

‘OK, let me look – ah I see the problem. Then let’s try adding something else, perhaps the last phrase in the message header: “Blessings and Glory to God” might help, it looks about the right length?’ I wrote the extra phrase down.

‘Yes Sir that works exactly now, it’s just the right number of symbols.’

‘OK, so now try transcribing the letters that match the dancing men in the emails to the letters on the key you just wrote down.’ I worked away at this for a few minutes and then turned back towards Hunter to read out the result.

‘LIDR THIAB FOWDRG DGULTARAR,’ I said, somewhat crestfallen. ‘That’s gibberish isn’t it? It doesn’t make any sense at all.’ Hunter scratched his head and stared first at my pad and then one by one at the various hills we could see on the horizon, turning slowly through 360 degrees. I could see that he was hunting around for a further clue.

‘What’s she up to?’ he asked someone in the clouds.

Based on Wikipedia,
Bernard Spilsbury

Following our little ramble, Hunter and I returned quickly to the office. We had already enquired by phone with the Holly Hotel about whether Miss Taylor had returned. The concierge told us that she had not but that that he expected her back shortly. He also confirmed that she had not as yet checked out although she had a taxi booked for 6pm and was due to check out that evening. The patrols had also had no luck finding her. Similarly the story from the gallery was that Mr Troyte had not yet finished his talk and certainly couldn’t be interrupted. I reminded the receptionist that I really needed to speak to him as soon as he was finished. It was proving remarkably difficult to track these two down.

While we waited, Hunter asked me to try and trace Pearl’s recent movements and conduct some further research into Troyte and Pearl’s background. I found that the Internet was full of reviews of Pearl’s musical appearances and there was quite a bit about her life history. It was therefore not too difficult to construct a timeline for her recent engagements. As regards to her personal life, despite a number of well-publicised relationships, she was steadfastly single and appeared to be itinerant with no permanent home, spending time in London and Zurich as well as at a holiday home in the South of France on the Cap d’Antibes. In fact, it did not sound like she was home too often; she seemed to spend most of her life travelling between engagements, permanently in demand at festivals, concerts and celebrity events. The details of her origins and earlier life were much sketchier. She had emerged as a young blues singer from a poor background in the States, propelled to fame by talent, beauty and a wondrous soulful voice. There was an intriguing piece in a magazine interview from the time her mother died, where she told the story for the first time about her search for her natural father.

As for Troyte, there seemed little remarkable about him. I found only the most basic details of his career on the Internet. An architect and a keen amateur chess player, he was still a partner in a Midwest firm although he seemed to have retired some years ago from active contract work. Twice married, he led a respectable but unexciting life, enlivened briefly by his earlier marriage to a famous cellist, the name of whom Hunter also recognised from a recording in his collection. She had died early and he had later remarried and had two grown-up children but he had been widowed again a few years ago. Before he finished his training as an architect he was drafted into the navy, working as a signalman during Vietnam, nothing really remarkable in that. The signalman piece piqued Hunter’s interest though.

When I phoned the gallery again after twenty minutes to ask if Mr Troyte had finished his lecture and if he might be available to talk to me, the administrator answered me circumspectly.

‘I’m terribly sorry, officer, but I’m afraid I can’t let you talk to him. Unfortunately he took quite a turn during his talk and the doctor has told him to rest. We’re to put him in a taxi later, so maybe you can talk with him when he gets back to Leamington?’ I pushed her, sensing that I had not been told the whole story and eventually got a reluctant account of what had happened during the presentation. I instructed the receptionist to let me know immediately when he was ready to speak again and certainly before he got back in the taxi.

‘It seems like our architect has some enemies,’ grimaced Hunter when I told him this story. ‘We’d better check this out properly. Even if it turns out to be a practical joke, we really can’t let someone’s little bit of fun confuse the investigation of the Nariman case.’

*

On the way back from his tennis match to his flat in the Old Town, Hugh called in at the bookshop on Warwick Street. He was looking for a basic book on sculpture so that he did not come over as a total ignoramus when he met up with Claudia after lunch. He just had time to shower before he drove over.

When he got to the gallery, he asked for Claudia by name and was directed up a rather grand staircase toward a screened off exhibition room. He had to move one of the screens aside to enter the room. Sunlight flooded the gallery space from two great windows and he saw Claudia standing at the far end of the room. The light was shining through her clothes at such an angle that he couldn’t avoid noticing the closely defined silhouette of her body within. Bas was right about that aspect of her at least – for a woman in her late forties, she had a just about perfect, athletic physique. She called him over and he embraced her politely with an air kiss on each cheek. He noticed she wore little make up – but equally there was not so much as a blotch or wrinkle on her skin, just a few rather charming freckles and a prominent mole on her cheek. Her ash blonde hair had been swept up into a rough knot so that wisps of it delicately framed her face. She was wearing a silky pale blue top and a billowy darker blue skirt. He could smell her perfume, a very distinct rather musky scent, not at all flowery. He approved. She looked gorgeous.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said with an engaging friendliness. ‘I enjoyed last night.’ Hugh wondered about this change in her mood. Was she just feeling unwell last night?

‘So did I,’ he said. ‘Sorry I was such a lousy companion though. You must have been so bored all night, listening to us all chatter on.’

‘No I had a good time, really, especially listening to Pearl Taylor singing, that was truly amazing,’ she smiled. There was an inner radiance to her face that Hugh found irresistible.

‘Yes, she’s quite a woman isn’t she?’

He realised his eagerness to compliment Pearl could be misinterpreted and added quickly, ‘Of course nothing like as pretty as you.’ She blushed and brushed his arm with her hand in a reassuring gesture. In truth, her face was ageless; it could still be the face of a nineteen-year-old girl. How could a complexion like hers be described merely as beauty?
Surely it is something deeper than that
, he thought.

Keats,
La Belle Dame sans Merci

‘You’ll do well if you keep that sort of flattery up.
And sure in language strange she said – I love thee true,
’ she then quoted and then seeing his blank face added, ‘Sorry, it’s from a Keats poem.’

The reference still went straight over Hugh’s head. Furthermore, he had become so enamoured with her that he felt awkward in her company and struggled with what to say next; his eventual question was only slightly less original than making a comment about the weather.

‘So this is where you work then? It’s quite a setting.’

‘Well yes, thank you. This is the room where we’re going to set up our next exhibition. It’s going to be built around a comparison of two works, one by Henry Moore and one by Auguste Rodin, trying to give fresh angles on familiar subjects.’

He smiled to himself, realising that he might need to finish the book if this relationship was ever going to happen.

‘Anyway, come on, let me show you round. I’ve got a small studio out the back, my ‘Elfin grot’ so to speak.’ Hugh wondered whether she was playing some elaborate game with him, teasing him with this new easiness, a game that he doubted he knew the rules of. He was unsure now whether her earlier coolness to him was just camouflage for shyness, or if she had indeed just been unwell. He was sensing a new openness to develop the chemistry between them. He found her intensely attractive but at the same time intimidating. He had never met such an intellectually superior woman before. What did Bas always say? Always talk to the most beautiful woman in the room, you may be surprised by the result – well this time it looked like he might have hit the jackpot.

They descended the staircase and Claudia talked for a few minutes to one of the women at the reception desk. They giggled together at something, the other woman making strange shapes with her fingers. Hugh wondered what their private joke could be.

‘Apparently we had a bit of excitement here this morning,’ Claudia explained. ‘We’ve got a convention of architects using the conference centre and one of the guest speakers was taken badly ill during his lecture. He’s still around the back in the medical office; he really took quite a turn. Apparently someone had doctored his presentation, and the result was both very funny and very rude. Unfortunately it seems he didn’t take the joke well and he collapsed towards the end of it. Luckily it appears it wasn’t too serious but the doctor has ordered him to rest here for a few hours.’

‘I didn’t realise architecture was so exciting,’ Hugh laughed.

They continued through several corridors to the back of the gallery. Her small studio turned out to be quite a large space leading off from some classrooms. There were unfinished projects spread haphazardly over the floor and tables – drawings, sketches, clay models and some unusual stone carvings. He was immediately impressed; even he could tell that this was much more than just an amateur’s work.

‘I’ve got a residency for a year,’ she explained. ‘Alongside assisting the curator with the main exhibitions I do some teaching for school kids and adult art classes as well.

‘I’m really impressed,’ he said. ‘I had no idea that you were so talented.’

‘Sorry if I’m not complying with the stereotype.’

‘OK I didn’t mean it to sound quite like that. So how long have you been doing this?’

‘I’ve been planning it forever in my mind, but for years I was too busy with my work as a psychologist, I never had the time. It’s always been there, trying to get out though.’

‘It sounds like you have found a vocation?’

‘Well yes, that’s a good description. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do full time and now I have the chance at last. In fact, the connection between psychology and sculpture is something that I am also interested in trying to capture in these pieces.’ She pointed to the unfinished stone works that Hugh had noticed a few minutes ago. They reminded him of those statues from the Easter Islands you see in books, he mentioned this to her.

‘Yes, you’re getting good at this. Have you ever thought how much our minds are like islands? We float alone in a tide of humanity, drawn on by our own ideas but who really knows what anyone else is thinking about most of the time?’

‘That’s especially true if you are a shy old introvert like me.’

‘You’re not so shy. But then we are all flawed communicators; we connect by common experience, but only fleetingly, in between the silences between words, the transient nature of thoughts. For introverts there is a whole world going on inside their heads that most of us would never even dream of, but even extroverts, the kind we would generally say wear their hearts on their sleeves, have complex secret narratives going on inside their heads most of the time. Our bodies, on the other hand, are much more accessible. Substantial, flesh and blood, skin and muscle stretched over distorted frames of bone and cartilage. This was the subject of most sculpture for centuries, in fact right back to the Greeks. Yet, even though most of our body language is actually involuntary, programmed, instinctive and easily readable, there’s still an infinite variation of form. We’re all the same at the core, we have the same needs, the same basic urges, but even so, the way we express ourselves can be totally different depending on our culture and own inner thoughts and fears. I’m trying to get to the heart of that, to the heart of self-will and self-belief, the connection of the soul and the body and how that inner personality expresses itself to the world. Capturing that complexity that lies beneath us in still life form is now my daily challenge.’

‘Wow, that’s pretty deep. I thought sculpture was about more obvious things like love and war and a whole lot of sexual innuendo,’ he said, somewhat taken aback by the forcefulness of her monologue.

‘Ah, then I’m afraid you make my point for me, you’ve just demonstrated again the vanity of male dominance,’ she said. ‘There is more to life than what we have been programmed to do or consume or in other words, it’s not all about the sex you know.’

‘Quite, well it was just a question.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not criticising. And you’re not unusual in those thoughts. Men have always wanted to remake women in their gaze as objects of desire; passive and agreeable, without desires of our own, increasingly it’s true the other way round as well. Remove the mask of cosmetics from most women and you get a much truer story of bad skin, freckles and blemishes. Remove the mask of language from most women, or men for that matter, and what do you get – deeply felt desires, common virtues, and common sins. That’s what I’m trying to capture here in these models, what is at the heart of it all when you strip away the pretence and time and words stop. What’s left, what’s there, what’s real, what’s fake. What’s alive and what’s dead. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat really, without the cat. It’s quite straightforward conceptually but horribly difficult to get right in the flesh, so to speak.’