I took the stairs two at a time, relieved not to set off a fusillade of creaks. The landing was small and narrow. There was a bathroom in front of me, built over the houseward half of the extension. Through a window I could see the shuttered skylights of the studio. The bedrooms were to left and right. The one on the left had been given over to storage: a desk and filing cabinet marooned in a sea of tea chests, packing cases and yet more canvases. From the one on the right came a faint draught. Henley must have opened the window, in an attempt to blow away the memory as well as the mustiness. I walked in, hurrying to forestall any sense that what I was doing was better not done.
But there was nothing to see. A bare room, with white walls and no paintings. One wardrobe, its doors closed. A large double bed, stripped to the mattress, its pillows, sheets and blankets all gone. Absurdly feminine flower-patterned curtains stirring languidly. And a huge gilt-framed mirror on the wall facing the bed, smashed in one corner, cracks radiating to all sides, fracturing the reflection of the room into random triangles. When had it been smashed? I wondered. At what moment? Before? Or after? I shivered and looked at the bed. It was impossible to imagine, too awful to want to imagine. The breath straining, the wire tearing, the flesh yielding. So much agony. So much revulsion. Too much of everything. And now, as its antithesis, a vacuum, a space waiting to be filled. The room was drained, as the house was drained, exhausted by the violence that had briefly filled it. The night of July 17 wasn’t there any more. Even the impression it had left had been removed, on strips of tape and forensic slides, in sterile bags and sealed envelopes. In its place was an empty tomb.
By the time I returned to the sitting-room, Henley Bantock’s general amiability had refined itself into a drooling eagerness for Bella’s company: I knew the signs well enough. Forgetting his earlier determination to “sort things out” and apparently oblivious of my brief absence, he proposed we go out to lunch together. Bella not yet having ceased to find him amusing, we went. To the Harp at Old Radnor, a hilltop hamlet a few miles north-west of Kington, just off the road to Gladestry. It was a charmingly well-preserved old inn, with picnic benches set up on a bank outside, where a vast panorama of Radnor Forest was added gratis to the menu.
Henley had gone there with his uncle several times, apparently, during periodic visits with his wife, Muriel. She hadn’t been able to come this time and Henley was clearly enjoying being off the leash. They both worked as administrators for one of the London Boroughs. Havering, I think. Or Hounslow. Henley spoke so casually of Oscar that I couldn’t help suspecting the visits had been designed more to safeguard his inheritance than check on the old boy’s well-being. Muriel probably hadn’t considered it necessary to accompany him now Whistler’s Cot and an entire Expressionist oeuvre were in the bag. She might have changed her mind, of course, if she’d known her husband was going to spend half the day ogling my sister-in-law over a ploughman’s lunch.
I listened distractedly to his autobiographical insights into the character of Oscar Bantock, which grew less and less complimentary as the shandy flowed. “He might have looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Captain Bird’s Eye but there was a streak of cruelty in him. Call it an artistic temperament if you like, but I saw it differently. He lived with us most of the time I was growing up and coping with him as well as a sick husband was what took my mother to an early grave in my opinion.” While he waxed resentful, my eyes drifted north to the hills I’d crossed ten days before on the path from Knighton. If I’d accepted Louise Paxton’s offer of a lift that evening, we might have stopped here for a drink. Then, at the very least, she might have arrived at Whistler’s Cot a crucial hour later. Life, in Henley Bantock’s self-pitying account, wasn’t fair. But death, it seemed, had an artistic temperament.
“What little he made from painting he spent twice over. Not on us, of course. Not even on anything as useful as brushes and canvases. Most of it went on whisky. Only the finest malts would do for Uncle Oscar. And then there were his women. He had a better eye for the ladies than for art, I can’t deny. You’d certainly not have left Whistler’s Cot in his day without a pinched bottom to remember him by at the very least, Miss Timariot, believe you me. But then, as I say, he did have good taste in that regard if in no other.”
This contrived compliment, risqué as Henley no doubt thought it, was followed by an outburst of chortling and the appearance in Bella’s eyes of the steely boredom I’d often seen before. It seemed like the cue I’d been waiting for. “You don’t make your uncle sound like a natural candidate for burglary, Mr. Bantock.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He was probably splashing money around in some pub. Spending the price agreed for Black Widow before he’d actually been paid it. That would be his style. Some ne’er-do-well from London on a housebreaking tour of the provinces takes note and follows him home. Then things turn nasty. Uncle Oscar wouldn’t have backed down from a fight, especially not with drink on board.”
“That’s how you see it, is it?”
“That’s how the police see it. So I understand, anyway. He must have been out when Lady Paxton first called. Probably forgot the time they’d fixed to meet. It would have been unlike him not to. That would explain why she left home at lunchtime. Set on buying the picture, she went back later, I suppose. And walked straight into… well, something quite frightful.”
“You think it’s open and shut?”
“Presumably. The police must have had good reason to arrest this man Naylor. They seem certain he did it. I assume there’s clinching forensic evidence. What more is there to say? Apart from the acute distress Lady Paxton’s family must have suffered, of course. Identifying my uncle’s body was upsetting enough for me. What it can have been like for Lady Paxton’s daughter-a girl not yet out of her teens, I believe-to see her mother, well, in the state she must have been in, in a mortuary, in the middle of the night…” He shook his head, briefly sobered by the contemplation of such an experience.
“Is she the daughter you’re seeing this afternoon?”
“No, no. The elder daughter’s coming. Sarah, I think she said her name was. I’m not quite sure what she hopes to accomplish, but…” A point suddenly occurred to him. His nose quivered as it registered. “Are you acquainted with the girls, Mr. Timariot?”
“No. I only ever met their mother.”
“You knew her well?”
I could sense Bella watching me as I replied. “I felt I did, yes. We… understood each other. So I thought.”
“You shared her interest in Expressionism?”
“We never discussed it.”
“Never?”
“We only met once, you see. Just once. Before the end.”
“But… I thought you said…” He frowned at me, his mouth forming a suspicious pout. “When exactly did you meet her, Mr. Timariot?”
“The early evening of July seventeenth.”
“When?”
“The day she died. Just a few hours before, as a matter of fact.”
“But… I understood you to say… you were a friend of hers.”
“No. I didn’t say that. You assumed it.”
“You’re splitting hairs. You let me think…” He glared round at Bella. “You both let me think…”
Bella glanced irritably at me, then laid a calming hand on Henley’s elbow and smiled sweetly at him. “When’s your appointment with Miss Paxton, Mr. Bantock?”
“What? Oh, three o’clock. But-”
“We’d better get you back, then, hadn’t we? We wouldn’t want her to be stood up.”
It was half past two when we drove away from Whistler’s Cot. I’d assured Henley that the police knew all about my meeting with Louise Paxton, but I still reckoned he’d be on the phone to them before we reached the bottom of the lane. His wasn’t a trusting nature. Nor a grieving one, for that matter.