Art of Murder (4 page)

Before she put the card into her robe pocket, she glanced at it: the only thing on it was a phone number. It might be a mobile.

Gertrude's office was small, with white walls and no windows. Despite this, to Clara it seemed as if it had started to rain outside. There was, at least, a muffled impression of rain. The two men were staring at her, as if waiting for her to say something. So she replied:

‘I
don't like accepting offers I know nothing about.'

'You don't need to know anything. You are the work of art. The only one who needs to know is the artist.'

'Well then, at least tell me the name of the artist who wants to paint me.'

'That's something we can't reveal.'

She accepted this refusal without protest. She knew the man was telling the truth. The great painters never revealed their identity to the canvas until their work had started: it was their way of maintaining an element of secrecy about the painting they were going to do.

The door opened and Gertrude appeared.

'I'm sorry, but I'm going out to lunch and I need to shut the gallery.'

'Don't worry, we've just finished.' The two men picked up the catalogues and walked out without another word.

While she was on show that afternoon, Clara's breasts moved up and down with her breathing. She was so nervous that a state of quiescence was much more difficult to achieve than usual. But daydreaming helped her to stay still, because when dreaming one can move without moving. The time went by and nobody came down to see her, but she wasn't concerned, because she had her fantasies to keep her company

The toughest and most risky. The most important and difficult.

Her greatest desire was to be painted by a genius. Various names sprang to mind, but she hardly dared speculate that it might be one of them. She didn't want to raise her hopes up too high, so as not to be disappointed. She kept in her pose in the silent whiteness of the room until Gertrude told her it was time to close.

Outside it really was raining: a violent summer shower that had been forecast on TV. On other occasions she would have run to the car park entrance, but today she preferred to walk slowly in the downpour, with her make-up bag slung over her shoulder. She realised her tracksuit was clinging to her like a wet sheet, and the beret was dripping on to her face, but it wasn't an unpleasant sensation. In fact, she welcomed it. Cold diamonds of water showering down upon her.

The toughest and most risky. The most important and difficult.

What if it was a trap? It had been known. You were contracted - supposedly on behalf of a great maestro - taken out of the country and forced to take part in porno art. But she didn't think this was anything like that. And even if it were, she would take the risk. Being a work of art meant accepting all the risks, all the sacrifices. She was more scared of being disappointed than of facing danger. She could accept falling into any trap except that of mediocrity.

The toughest and most risky. The
most
important and
...

All at once she felt as though her body was melting. She felt fluid, at one with the rain. She looked down at her feet and saw what was happening. She had forgotten she was still painted, and the raindrops were washing off all the white paint. As she walked along, she was leaving a trail behind her, a curving milky stream that flowed from her tracksuit on to the pavement of the Calle Velazquez, only to be quickly blotted out by the rain, as sharp and precise as a Pointillist painter. White, white, white.

Little by little, as the water cleansed her, Clara grew darker.

2

Red. Red was the overwhelming colour. Red like a huge mass of crushed poppies. Miss Wood took off her glasses to examine the photos.

'We found her early this morning in a wooded part of the Wienerwald,' the policeman said, 'about an hour's drive from Vienna. Two birdwatchers who had been studying the cries of owls raised the alarm. Well, in fact they told the uniformed police, and lieutenant-colonel Huddle called us in. That's what usually happens.'

As the policeman spoke, Bosch passed the photos to Miss Wood one by one. They showed a grassy clearing, with beech trees and flowers, and the surprising presence of a flycatcher on the grass next to the pink blouse that had been torn to shreds. But everything was covered in red, including the slipper shaped like a teddy bear lying behind a tree trunk. There was a broad smile on the bear's face.

'All these things scattered around
...'
said Miss Wood.

It was an enormous table and the policeman sitting opposite Miss Wood could not see what she was pointing at, but he knew exactly what she meant.

'Her clothing.'

'Why is it so torn and bloodstained?'

'You're right, it is strange. It was the first thing that we noticed. Then we found bits of material stuck in her wounds, so we concluded that he cut her up with her clothes on, and tore them off later.'

'Why would he do that?'

The policeman wafted his hand in the air.

'Sexual abuse, perhaps. So far we haven't found any evidence, but we're waiting for the forensic expert's final report. And anyway, people like that don't always behave logically'

'It's as if
...
it were on show, isn't it? All draped around for photos to be taken of it.'

'Is this how she was found?' Bosch asked the policeman.

'Yes, on her back with her arms and legs spread out.'

'He left her labels on,' Bosch pointed out to Miss Wood.

'So I see’
said Miss Wood. 'The labels are hard to get off, but whatever he used to make this kind of wound would have cut through them like paper. Has the tool been identified?'

'It was electronic, whatever it was,' the policeman replied. 'We think it might have been a scalpel or some kind of electric saw. Each wound is a deep single cut.' He stretched his hand out across the table and tapped one of the photos closest to him with a pencil. 'There are ten of them altogether: two in the face, two in the chest, two in the stomach, one in each thigh, and two in her back. Eight of them forming crosses, so four crosses altogether. The two in the thighs are vertical. And don't ask me the reason for that either.'

'Did she die from the wounds?'

'Probably. I've already told you, we're waiting for the report from—'

'Do we have an estimated time of death?

'Taking into account the state of the body, we think it must have happened on Wednesday night, a few hours after she was driven away in the van.'

Miss Wood was holding her glasses between the fingers of her left hand. She used them to gently tap Bosch's arm:

'I'd say there isn't that much blood in the photos. Do you agree?'

'I was thinking the same.’

'It's true,' the policeman said. 'He didn't kill her in the wood. Perhaps he cut her up in the van. Maybe he used some sort of sedative, because the body showed no signs of a struggle or of having been bound. Afterwards, he dragged her to the clearing and left her on the grass.'

'Then spent his time tearing off her clothes in the open air,' Miss Wood chimed in, 'ignoring the risk that those amateur birdwatchers might have decided to study their owls a night earlier.'

'Yes, that's odd, isn't it? But as I already said, these people behave—'

‘I
understand,' said the woman, interrupting him as she put her glasses back on. They were dark Ray-Bans with gold frames. The policeman thought it must be impossible for Miss Wood to see anything in the red-tinged gloom of this office. Reflected in the glasses, the red curve of the desk formed two pools of blood. 'Could we hear the recording now?'

'Of course.'

The detective bent over to reach into a leather briefcase. When he straightened up, he was holding a portable cassette recorder. He placed it on the desk next to the photos, as if it were just another souvenir of a tourist trip.

'We found it at the feet of the corpse. A two-hour chrome-coloured cassette with no writing or marks on it. It seems to have been recorded on a good machine.'

He jabbed at the start button. The sudden roar led Bosch to raise his eyebrows. The policeman quickly lowered the volume.

'Sorry, it's very loud,' he said.

A pause. A whirring sound. Then it started.

At first there was heavy breathing, Then the crackling sound of a fire. Like a bird enveloped in flames. Then a hesitant breath, and the first word. It sounded like a complaint, or a moan. Then it came again, and this time it was audible:
Art.
More anxious breathing, then the first tentative phrase. The voice was nasal, interrupted by panting, the sound of paper, microphone hiss. It was an adolescent's voice, speaking in English:

'Art is also destruc
...
destruction
...
in the past that's all it
...
was. In the caves they painted what .
..
what they wanted to sa
...
sacri
...
sacri...'

Whirring sounds. A brief silence. The policeman pressed the pause button.

'He stopped recording here, probably to make her repeat the phrase.'

The next part was clearer. Each word was pronounced slowly and clearly. What came over from this new declaration was a desperate attempt by the speake
r not to get it wrong. But some
thing else, that could well have been terror, broke through the icy pauses:

the caves they painted only what they wanted to sacrifice . . . Egyptian art was funerary art
...
Everything was dedicated to death
...
The artist is saying: I have created you to hunt and destroy you, and the meaning of your creation is your final sacrifice
...
The artist is saying: I have created you to honour death
...
Because the art that survives is the art that has died
...
where beings die, w
orks endure...

The policeman switched off the recorder.

'That's all there is. We're analysing it in the laboratory, of course. We think he did it in the van with the windows closed, because there's not much background noise. It was probably a written text they forced her to read.'

An intense silence followed these words. It's as if by hearing her, hearing her voice, we've finally understood the horror of it all, thought Bosch. He was not surprised at this reaction. The photos had impressed him, of course, but to some extent it was easy to keep your distance from a photo. In his days as a member of the Dutch police, Lothar Bosch had developed an unexpected coldness when confronted with the ghastly red phantoms that appeared in the darkroom. But hearing a voice is very different. Behind the words lay a human being who had died a horrible death. The figure of the violin player appears more clearly when we hear the violin.

To Bosch's eyes, accustomed to seeing her posing in the open air or inside rooms and museums, naked or semi-naked and painted in many different colours, she had never been a 'little girl' as the policeman had called her. Except once, two years earlier. A Colombian collector called Cardenas with a somewhat obscure past had bought her in
The Garland
by Jacob Stein. Bosch had been concerned what might happen to her in that hacienda on the outskirts of Bogota while she was posing eight hours a day for her owner wearing only the tiniest of velvet ribbons round her waist. He had decided to give her extra protection, and summoned her to his offices in the New Studio in Amsterdam to tell her this. He still had a clear memory of it: the work of art came into his office dressed in
T
-shirt and jeans, her skin primed and eyebrows shaved off. She was wearing the customary three yellow labels, but apart from that had not been painted at all. She held out her hand: 'Mr Bosch,' she said.

It was the same voice as the girl in the recording. The same Dutch accent, the same smooth quality.

Mr Bosch.

With a simple gesture and these few words, the canvas had been transformed into a twelve-year-old girl right before his eyes. It happened in a flash. Bosch's mind was flooded with images of his own niece, Danielle, who was four years younger than Annek. All of a sudden he realised he was allowing a 'little girl' to go and work more or less naked in the house of an adult male with a criminal record. But the giddiness soon subsided, and he became neutral and level-headed once more. She's not a girl, she's a canvas, of course, he told himself. As it turned out, nothing had happened to the work of art in the Bogota hacienda. Now though, someone had cut her to pieces in a Viennese wood.