In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (49 page)

Barbara brought Sitwell quickly up to speed with regard to the death of Terry Cole: A young man—found dead in Derbyshire—had evidently kept a business card with Neil Sitwell's name on it among his belongings, she said. Would Mr. Sitwell have any idea why that was the case?

“He was something of an artist,” Barbara added helpfully. “A sculptor. He banged about with gardening tools and farming implements. For his sculptures, I mean. That's how you might have met him. P'rhaps at a show … Does this sound familiar?”

“Not in the least, I'm afraid,” Sitwell said. “I attend openings, naturally. One likes to keep abreast of what's current in the art world. It's rather like honing one's instincts for what will sell and what won't. But that's my avocation—following the latest trends—not my main line of work. Since we're an auction house and not a gallery, I'd've had no reason to give a young artist my business card.”

“Because you don't auction modern art, you mean?”

“Because we don't auction work by unestablished artists. For obvious reasons.”

Barbara mulled this over, wondering if Terry Cole had attempted to present himself as an established sculptor. This seemed unlikely. And while Cilia Thompson had claimed the sale of at least one of her rebarbative pieces, it didn't seem likely that an auction house would be trying to win her over by wooing her flatmate instead. “Could he have come here—or even met you elsewhere—for another reason, then?”

Sitwell steepled his fingertips beneath his chin. “We've been looking for a qualified picture restorer for the past three months. As he was an artist—”

“I'm using the word in its broadest sense,” Barbara cautioned the man.

“Right. I understand. Well, as he considered himself an artist, perhaps he knew something about restoring pictures and came here for an interview with me. Hang on.” He wrestled a black engagement diary from the top middle drawer of his desk. He began going back through the pages, running his index finger down the days as he examined the appointments listed for each. “No Cole, Terry or Terence, I'm afraid. No Cole at all.” He turned next to a dented metal box in which index cards were filed behind dog-eared alphabetical dividers. He explained that it was his habit to keep the names and addresses of individuals whose talents he'd deemed useful to Bowers in one way or another and perhaps Terence Cole was among those individuals …. But no. His name wasn't among those on the index cards either. He was terribly sorry, Neil Sitwell said, but it didn't appear that he was going to be able to assist the detective constable with her enquiry at all.

Barbara tried a last question. Was it possible, she asked, that Terry Cole had come across Mr. Sitwell's business card in another way? From what she'd learned from speaking to the boy's mother and sister, he had dreams of opening his own art gallery. So perhaps he'd run into Mr. Sitwell somewhere, got into a conversation with him, and found himself on the receiving end of one of Mr. Sitwell's cards with an invitation to call in sometime for a chat and some advice …

Barbara said it all encouragingly, without much hope of striking gold. But when she said the words “opening his own art gallery,” Sitwell held up an index finger as if a memory had been jarred loose in his brain.

“Yes. Yes. The art gallery. Of course. I remember. It was because you first said he was a sculptor, you see. The young man never identified himself as a sculptor when he came to see me. Or even an artist, for that matter. He only confided that he hoped—”

“You remember him?” Barbara broke in eagerly.

“It seemed like a rather dubious plan for someone who spoke so”—Sitwell glanced at her and quickly shifted gears—“well, who dressed so …” Sitwell hesitated altogether, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Clearly, he realised that he was bordering on giving offence. Barbara's accent betrayed her origins, which were very nearly identical to those of Terry Cole. And as to her manner of dress, she didn't need a full-length mirror to tell her she was no candidate for Vogue.

“Right. He wore black all the time and had a working-class accent,” Barbara said. “Goatee. Cropped hair. A black ponytail.”

Yes. That was the chap, Sitwell confirmed. He'd been at Bowers the previous week. He'd brought along a sample of something that he thought the house might wish to auction. The proceeds of such an auction, he'd confided, would help him fund the gallery that he wished to open.

A sample of something to auction? Barbara's first thought went to the box of call girl cards that she'd found beneath Terry Cole's bed. Stranger things had been sold to the public. But she wasn't sure she could name any of them.

“What was it? Not one of his sculptures?”

“A piece of sheet music,” Sitwell replied. “He said he'd read about someone selling a handwritten Lennon and McCartney song—or a notebook of lyrics, something like that—and he'd hoped to sell a packet of music he had in his possession. The sheet he showed me was part of that packet.”

“Lennon and McCartney music, d'you mean?”

“No. This was a piece by Michael Chandler. The boy told me he'd got a dozen more and was hoping for an auction. I expect he was imagining a scene in which several thousand fans of musical theatre queue up for hours, hoping for the chance to pay twenty thousand pounds for a sheet of paper on which a dead man once made a few pencil smudges.” Sitwell smiled, offering Barbara the sort of expression he must have offered Terry: one of tolerant and paternalistic derision. She itched to smack him. She restrained herself.

“So the music was worthless?” Barbara asked.

“Not at all.” Sitwell went on to explain that the music might have been worth a fortune, but it made no difference because it belonged to the Chandler estate no matter how it happened to come into Terry Cole's possession. So Bowers couldn't auction it off unless the Chandler estate authorised a sale. In which case, the money would go to the surviving Chandlers anyway.

“So how did the music come to be in his possession?”

“Oxfam? Jumble sale? I don't know. People sometimes throw out valuable belongings without realising, don't they? Or they shove them away in a suitcase or a cardboard box and the suitcase or box falls into someone else's hands. At any rate, the boy didn't say and I didn't ask. I did offer to track down the solicitors for the Chandler estate and turn the music over to them, to pass on to the widow and children. But Cole preferred to do that himself, hoping—he said—that there'd be a reward, at least, for handing over found property.”

“Found property?”

“That's what he called it.”

The only question the boy had at the end of their meeting was to enquire how best to find the Chandler solicitors. Sitwell had directed him to King-Ryder Productions since—as everyone who'd been even moderately conscious for the last two decades knew—Michael Chandler and David King-Ryder had been partners until Michael Chandler's untimely death. “I suppose I should have pointed him towards the King-Ryder estate as well, come to think of it,” Sitwell said contemplatively, adding “Poor sod,” in apparent reference to David King-Ryder's suicide earlier that summer. “But as the production company's still up and running, I thought it made sense to start with them.”

What, Barbara thought, an intriguing wrinkle. She wondered if it was on the blanket of the murder or part of another bed entirely.

Into her silence, Sitwell waxed apologetic. He was sorry he couldn't be more helpful. There'd been nothing sinister about the boy's visit. Nothing exceptional about it either. Sitwell had forgotten altogether that he'd ever met him and he still couldn't say how Terry Cole had come to have his business card because he still couldn't recall ever handing him one.

“He took one,” Barbara said, and indicated a card holder on Sitwell's desk with a nod of her head.

“Oh. I see. I don't remember him doing so, but I suppose he might have. I wonder why.”

“For his chewing gum,” she told him, thinking, And thank God for that.

She made her way back out to the street. There, she dug out of her bag the roster of employees that Dick Long had given her at 31-32 Soho Square. The list was alphabetical by employee surname. It included the office telephone number of the person in question, the home address and phone number, and the organisation for which each individual worked.

Barbara scanned the list till she'd come up with what she was looking for.

King-Ryder Productions, she read next to the tenth name down.

Bingo, she thought.

Security was non-existent at Shelly Platt's address. She lived not far from Earl's Court Station, in a conversion that had once been protected by the sort of door whose lock could be released by a resident pushing a buzzer from within an individual flat. Now, however, the door stood open. When, in an automatic response to seeing it ajar, Lynley paused to examine its locking mechanism, he saw that while the door itself had the requisite parts, the jamb that surrounded it had been destroyed sometime in the past. The door was still capable of swinging shut, but it caught upon nothing. Burgle at Will could have been the building's epigraph.

There was no lift, so Lynley and Nkata headed for the stairs at the far end of the corridor. Shelly lived on the fourth floor, which gave both men an opportunity to assess their physical condition. Nkata's was better, Lynley discovered. His lips had never so much as tasted tobacco. That abstinence—not to mention the man's insufferable youth—showed. But Nkata was considerate enough to mention neither. Although the blasted man did pretend to pause on the second floor mezzanine to admire what passed for a view and to give Lynley a breather, which he would have been damned before taking in front of his subordinate.

There were two flats on the fourth floor, one facing the street and one overlooking what lay behind the building. Shelly Platt lived in this latter accommodation, which proved to be a small bed-sit.

They had to rap on the door several times to get a response from within. When it was finally opened the length of an insubstantial security chain, a squinting face with sleep-modified orange hair peered out at them.

“Wha'? Oh. Two of you, is it? No offence, luv. I don't do black. Not prejudiced, mind you. Jus’ a 'rangement I got with a three-way girl who's getting on in years. I c'n give you her number if you want.” The girl had the distinctly adenoidal accent of a woman who'd spent her formative years just north of the Mersey.

“Miss Platt?” Lynley asked.

“When I'm conscious.” She grinned. Her teeth were grey. “Don't get your type round here much. Wha'd'you have in mind?”

“Conversation.” Lynley produced his warrant card and reacted quickly with his foot when she sought to slam the door. “CID,” he told her. “We'd like a word, Miss Platt.”

“You lot woke me up.” She was suddenly aggrieved. “You c'n come back later, when I've had me kip.”

“I doubt you want us to do that,” Lynley told her. “Especially if you're in the midst of an engagement later. That could put a damper on business. Let us in, please.”

She said, “Oh fook it,” then slid the chain off the door. She left them to open it for themselves.

Lynley pushed it inward to reveal a single room with a transom window covered by the sort of beaded curtain one usually found in doorways. Beneath this window, a mattress on the floor served as a bed, and Shelly Platt shuffled to this on bare feet and then walked across it to a heap of denim that turned out to be a pair of dungarees. These she pulled on over what little she was wearing: an extremely faded T-shirt printed with the instantly recognisable face of the Les Misérables street urchin. She scooped up a pair of moccasins and slid her feet into them. The moccasins had been beaded at one time, but what was left of their decoration consisted of tiny turquoise baubles that trailed along behind her on strings when she walked The bed was unmade, its counterpane an Indian bedspread of yellow and orange, its single blanket a striped affair of purple and pink with a well-frayed satin border. Shelly left this behind and walked across the room to a wash basin, where she filled a pan. This she set on one of the burners of a hot plate that stood atop a scarred chest of drawers.

There was only a single seat in the room: a black futon marked with stains, which were all of a similar grey hue. Like clouds, these took a variety of shapes. One could use the imagination and see in them everything from unicorns to seals. Shelly nodded towards the futon as she padded back to the bed. “You c'n park it there if you want,” she said indifferently. “One of you'll have to stand.”

Neither of them moved towards the grubby bit of furniture. She said, “Suit yourselfs, then,” and plopped down on the mattress, snatching up one of its two pillows, which she cradled against her stomach. She kicked out of the way another heap of clothing—a red PVC mini-skirt, black net stockings still attached to a suspender belt, and a green top that appeared to carry stains of a colour similar to those on the futon. She observed Lynley and Nkata emotionlessly, from eyes that were notable for their lifelessness, as well as for the skin beneath them, which gave her the unappealing addicted-to-heroin look that fashion magazines had been featuring in their models lately. “Well? What d'you lot want? You said CID, not vice. So this i'n't nothing to do with business, is it?”

Lynley removed from his jacket pocket the anonymous letter that Vi Nevin had shown them earlier in the day. He handed it over. Shelly made much of giving it a thorough perusal, sucking in on her lower lip and pinching it between her teeth thoughtfully.

As she did so, Nkata flipped open his notebook and adjusted the lead in his propelling pencil while Lynley gathered information by allowing his glance the freedom of wandering round the room. It possessed two notable features, aside from the unmistakable odour of sexual intercourse, which was barely covered by the scent of jasmine incense recently burned. One was an old traveling trunk that was open upon its contents of black leather garments, manacles, masks, whips, and the like. The other was a collection of photographs that were pinned to the walls. These were of two subjects only: a youngish lout usually pictured with an electric guitar slung somewhere about his person and Vi Nevin in a variety of poses from seductive to playful: childlike of body and coy of face.