Last Nocturne (8 page)

A little of the load lifted from her shoulders. She never doubted for one minute that Julian would manage this. In his calm, unhurried way he would take care of matters, as he had ever since she first met him. She picked up her bag, ready to go, but he waved her back into her seat. ‘Stay a moment or two, Isobel. I – er – take it you haven’t seen the newspapers today?’

‘I rarely read them before the evening, and then, only superficially. There’s little news to interest me here in London.’

‘Then, my dear, prepare yourself for a shock.’ He looked at her with concern. ‘I was afraid you couldn’t have heard.’ He told her in his quiet, dispassionate way about the suicide, the young man who had been found impaled on the railings in Camden Town the previous day, and then she understood the unusually abstracted air she’d sensed in him today.

Like most people when told of the death of someone they have known and liked, and especially when it had occurred in such a monstrous way, she couldn’t take it in at first.
Theo?

She saw him in her mind’s eye, running up the stairs of her apartment in the house on Silbergasse, bursting with the news that he had actually sold a painting. Sketching funny drawings for Sophie, or making shadow pictures on the walls, causing her stubborn, angry little face to break into reluctant smiles. From another corner of her mind sprang a memory of him with Bruno as they made their way up the narrow lane, laughing like crazy people the evening after the sale of that first – and only – painting he ever sold in Vienna. Theo, who rarely if ever drank, but was perhaps a little tipsy on that occasion, and Bruno who was certainly more than that, their arms around each other’s shoulders, comically lurching because Bruno stood half a head taller than Theo.

And then, that other Theo, the one she’d seen only occasionally since she’d come to London.

Julian watched the mixture of emotions crossing her face, a natural shock and disbelief at the death of a friend, bewilderment – and perhaps, yes perhaps, fear, a shrinking into herself. ‘Suicide?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Theo? But surely nothing could be less likely!’

‘You knew him far better than I. But Isobel, I happened to see him only a couple of weeks ago – at the Pontifex, in fact. I was looking at a watercolour they’d found for me and he’d brought in some of his paintings for the coming exhibition.’ He added gently, ‘And it was pretty obvious then that he was drinking seriously.’

‘What?’

‘Either that, or something else.’ She stared incredulously. ‘You know what goes on in artistic circles as well as I do. You’ve seen what stimulants do to those who believe them an aid to creativity, even though they know it can in the end lead to nothing but ruin.’

‘But not Theo.’ Never. Theo’s easy-going approach to life had always belied an underlying austerity. He rarely drank, never smoked, even ate sparingly. In his way, he’d been something of a Puritan. A product, he told her wryly, of a Nonconformist upbringing he couldn’t shake off. She guessed some part of him would have liked nothing better than to encompass the Bohemian way of life almost expected of an artist…but then, Theo had never been able to come up to his own expectations. The events at Silbergasse 7 had shaken him to the core, upset his innate belief in the goodness of human nature. But drink – stimulants?

Julian was looking at her pityingly. ‘Don’t take it too much to heart.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s been a long time since you visited me. Come again, soon – better still, there’s to be a Promenade Concert at the Albert Hall. Can’t I…can’t you be persuaded to come with me?’

For a moment she struggled. What he’d just told her had shocked her so much, reminding her of things she found difficulty in accepting. Then, though she thought she might later regret it, she took a deep breath and told him she’d go with him. His delight shamed her.

‘Dear Julian – always so kind.’

He bent his head and lifted her hand to his lips, an unexpected gesture for Julian. Too late, she realised how much her words – affectionate but nothing more – might have cut him to the quick. But when he looked up, he was smiling. Then he called her a hansom.

It wasn’t until she was on her way home that she wondered why she hadn’t told him of the letters she’d been receiving. But perhaps part of her half-hoped there would be no necessity for it. She wished she could believe that.

‘Seems to have been an artist of some sort, sir. Name of Theodore Benton. Aged about twenty-five, the landlady thinks.’

It was Detective Sergeant Cogan’s second appearance at Adelaide Crescent. His first had been the previous day, within half an hour of the body being found, his tasks then to oversee the necessary, sombre routines following any sudden death: taking note of the circumstances, interviewing witnesses, noting the estimated time of death, identifying the man the victim had been. Seeing the body decently taken away to the morgue for an autopsy, a routine affair in these parts where life was hard and chancy, though a mere formality in this case, since this one was an obvious suicide.

A strange quiet hung over the street today, even the ever-present traffic noise from the Hampstead Road seemed muted. Now that there was nothing to see, lace curtains which had yesterday been twitched aside all day long once more hung as they should. The excitement had petered out and no one wanted to be reminded of the nasty happening of the day before. The duty doctor with his black bag had gone, as had the photographer with his tripod and magnesium flash, the police sketcher with pad and pencil, the constables standing on guard or taking measurements. All that remained was a chalk mark drawn in as near an approximation as possible of where the body had fallen awkwardly and horribly onto the railings.

Chief Inspector Philip Lamb stepped back a little, the better to study the frontage of the tall, narrow house, and looked up at the window from which a young man had plummeted to a premature and unnecessary death. Some of the residences in Adelaide Crescent were well looked after, some had seen better days, and this house was definitely one of the latter: not prepossessing, with dingy curtains, an unpolished doorknocker and a sign in the front window advertising rooms to let. ‘Curious time to choose, to do away with himself,’ he remarked.

‘The doctor thinks it happened in the early hours. He was found about six o’clock.’

‘Well, the darkest hour before the dawn, and all that, optimum time for suicide…but that’s not quite what I meant. I was wondering why a young man at the very height of his success, a painter with a growing reputation, should decide to end it all. Did you know he was showing some of his work at that modern art exhibition running at the Pontifex Gallery?’

‘Oh, one of them, sir, was he?’ The corners of Cogan’s mouth turned down.

‘That’s no mean achievement, you know. The exhibition’s been causing a bit of a stir, one way and another. A few brickbats, of course, but that’s to be expected.’

More cautiously, Cogan asked, ‘Admire that sort of thing, do you, sir? This modern stuff?’

Lamb smiled slightly. ‘Not much, to tell you the truth. I only happened to know about the showing at all, and about Theo, because I know his family a little.’

‘That so?’

The Cockney sergeant was still slightly wary of Lamb, though they’d established a tentative relationship that was growing easier and more friendly as they began to understand each other. One of the newer breed of policeman, middle class, Lamb had left the family business to take on a job in the police (though Gawd knows why, it was a thankless enough job, thought Cogan, who would actually have faced a firing squad rather than admit he secretly enjoyed his work and couldn’t imagine what he was going to do with himself in his looming retirement). It was taking time to become used to working with a younger man, not above thirty-five or six, who’d come straight into the detective branch without having had any experience on the streets: in Cogan’s time in the Force, promotion had generally come through seniority or stepping into dead men’s shoes. Lamb was generally regarded among the rank and file as a toff, a swell who was slumming it, but Cogan had found he was prepared to put in the same hours as any overworked bobby on the beat and wasn’t averse to getting stuck in either. On the whole, they got along pretty well, Cogan throwing in the weight of his own experience to balance what he thought of as Lamb’s occasionally airy-fairy theories.

All the same, he’d been mildly surprised when Lamb had chosen to visit the scene here. A suicide was commonplace enough. Violent death, including murder in most of its sordid forms, occupied the overworked police to a monotonous extent in the seedier parts of Camden Town and its environs, but it didn’t normally call for the intervention of a chief inspector. Lamb’s interest was explained now.

Cogan digested the implications, somewhat revising his opinion of the dead young man who’d occupied one room in this house: a disreputable top floor room the landlady called a studio, full of the sort of mess artists created around themselves, with an unmade bed in one corner and a sink in the other. It didn’t accord with the sort of background he would have associated with someone known to the chief, though young folks today…well, who could tell? Coming from all walks of life, taking up with anything and anyone. ‘Rum lot, artists,’ he ventured.

‘As you say, Cogan. Tell me what else you’ve found out, then we’ll go inside the house and take a look.’

‘Not much of a place, sir. The owner’s a widow, a Mrs Kitteridge. Rents out rooms by the month. Benton had lodged with her about eight or nine months – been working abroad before then, it seems. She says he was no trouble, not compared with some.’ A look of disapproval settled on his heavy features. ‘Not averse to a drop or two, though, seemingly.’ A strong reek of spirits had still been emanating from the corpse when Cogan had first seen it, a smell which had been equally strong in the room the young man had so recently vacated. ‘Unless it was a bit of Dutch courage he needed, before he jumped.’

Lamb listened with a certain detachment while Cogan went on to make him further privy to what information had already been gathered, thinking about Theo Benton, whom he had only once met, maybe six or seven years ago, having escorted his sister to the engagement party of Theo’s sister. Good-natured, not long out of school, with a brilliant and unexpected smile and expressive dark eyes. A beautiful boy. He would soon have women falling at his feet, but at that time his interest had been entirely centred on the ambition to make his mark as an artist, in the face of all-round disapproval from his seniors. He and Lamb had had a short conversation, along the lines of ‘What are you hoping to do with your life now?’ in the garden where Lamb had gone to smoke a cigarette, and the boy to kick his heels. An odd exchange, it had been, utterly certain on Theo’s part, reluctantly admiring on Lamb’s, despite his feeling that the boy was wrong and the older generation probably right in regard to what Theo could expect through this rejection of everything that had been expected of him. Unless he was a genius, he’d have a hard time overcoming the obstacles towards making his name – still less his living – in the much misunderstood and underpaid art world. Very likely this last had been the main cause of the disagreement with his self-made father. Whatever the case, it was causing a great deal of discord, and though not yet amounting to outright war, Benton senior had apparently been threatening to cut his son off without a penny if he persisted in his reckless aims.

Perhaps because he’d sensed a certain sympathy in Lamb that night, a willingness to listen he hadn’t found in those close to him, Theo had opened up more than he might otherwise have done, and Lamb had ended by being much impressed. He was young and vehement and at that moment hotly indignant at the opposition to his ambition, but it was obvious that his desire to express in paint something important about life as he saw it was genuine. Lamb sensed that he might be walking into disaster – almost certainly was – on the other hand, who could foretell the future? Sincerely, he had wished him luck.

It had to be said that a great deal of Lamb’s sympathy with Theo was based on fellow feeling. He’d once vaguely gone along with the expectation that he would enter his father’s law practice after graduating from Oxford, mainly because no other option had presented itself, although the prospect of further years burying himself in dusty law books didn’t particularly appeal. It might still have turned out that way had he not, one evening when he was bored, casually attended a lecture on the new scientific and psychological approaches to dealing with the investigation of crime now being employed by certain enlightened police forces. Listening to the lecturer, a German professor of criminology, the idea came to him that he might think of entering the Metropolitan Police when he left university. He’d made the move, being taken directly into the detective branch, and in the event he’d never regretted his decision, despite his father’s violent reaction.

A choleric man, the elder Lamb chose to see his son’s unaccountable change of direction as a deliberately provocative act. ‘The police? What sort of a damned career do you call that?’ He poured scorn on the idea that any son of his, Oxford educated or not, could believe that detecting crime scientifically could improve what he regarded as a ruffianly police force. It was no use to tell him that times were changing, and the police with them – though this Lamb knew to be true. New ideas and methods of detecting crime were gaining credence and being disseminated, not just in England but in Europe as well. There were still men like Cogan, of course, men of the old school, who formed the backbone of the force and saw the role of the police in a very different light, and Lamb wouldn’t have been without them. He had a great respect for Cogan’s dogged persistence, his native knowledge of the patch where he worked, his reliance on old-fashioned policing. It was a source of gratification to Lamb that his father, somewhat mollified by his success, had been more or less reconciled to his unorthodox choice of career before he died.

He’d forgotten all about that conversation in the garden, but it had come back to him vividly when he’d seen, firstly, Theo Benton’s name in connection with the Pontifex Gallery exhibition, followed by the shocking news of his suicide yesterday. Inappropriate as his personal intervention might be, Lamb fully intended to keep abreast of everything connected with Theo’s death. He’d made time from other duties to come here, feeling the need to see how things had been for himself, morally bound to do this, if only for Theo’s parents’ sake. He didn’t in any case expect the investigation to be a lengthy one.