Last Nocturne (9 page)

A young housemaid carrying a shopping basket emerged from the basement kitchen of a house a few doors along and stepped briskly towards them, her decent jacket buttoned tight, her black straw hat firmly skewered to her bun with an outsize hatpin and her chin determinedly up. But when Lamb and Cogan raised their hats and stood aside to let her go by, though she acknowledged their greetings with a duck of the head, she stepped off the pavement into the road, and avoided looking at the place where the body had been found.

Cogan watched the girl as she disappeared along the street, passing a handkerchief across his brow and wiping the sweat from the leather band inside his bowler before replacing it. ‘That’s the maid, Janey Hutchens, who first noticed the body – her and the milkman.’ The trembling girl had still been standing beside the pool of milk with the broken remains of the pitcher at her feet and the arms of the husky young milkman around her when, having been nearby, Cogan had arrived within minutes of getting the call.

‘Did she, by Jove? Enough to give a young woman nightmares.’

‘Want to talk to her, do you, sir? I’ve already had a word.’

‘Then I don’t imagine it will be necessary to trouble her again.’ Cogan was one of his best officers, able and conscientious, rarely missing a trick.

They made an unlikely pair, he and his detective sergeant, as they stood conferring on the pavement. Cogan, every inch of his six-foot-two frame a policeman, solid and red-faced in his brown serge suit, with fists like hams and a pair of small, intelligent eyes; and Lamb himself, slight and of middle height. He’d come straight from a meeting with one of the top brass and wore his best suit and a smooth broadcloth coat of that indeterminate colour between grey and brown known as taupe. He carried a tightly furled umbrella with a polished wooden handle, and also wore pale grey suede gloves and black shoes whose shine beggared comparison. Such clothes were bound to be regarded with suspicion at the station, and though he was a boxing blue and had proved he could hold his own in an encounter with any Saturday night drunk, he was inevitably known, to his knowledge though not to his face, as the Baa-Lamb.

He replaced his own bowler and kept his emotions in check as he once more surveyed the spot where the body had landed, its descent to the area below interrupted by the spikes of the railings. He glanced up once more at the window from where Benton had fallen, and rubbed his chin. ‘Bit hit and miss, wouldn’t you think?’

‘On the contrary, direct hit, sir, I’d say.’

Lamb gave a wry smile. ‘All the same, a fall from two storeys isn’t necessarily going to be fatal, even if you were to end up right down in the area. Nor could you be sure you’d miss those railings – and I seriously question whether anyone would disregard the risk of impaling himself like that. A more than chancy death, not to say a singularly unpleasant one.’

‘Either way, you’d need more than vinegar-and-brown-paper, eh, sir? But I doubt if he could’ve accidentally fallen from the window all the same. I’ve been inside, and the sill’s more than waist high. Not as if he could have overbalanced.’ The sergeant chewed his lip reflectively. ‘But then, maybe he didn’t really intend to die when he jumped. They don’t always, do they, these suicides? More a call for attention, like.’

‘That’s a very philosophical statement, Cogan.’

‘No, sir, just experience – though it’s not a risk I’d like to take, myself. Quite likely to damage yourself for life, put yourself in a worse position than ever. All the same, this one must have meant it. Poor devil, what a way to end your life!’

‘It might all depend on how insupportable that life had become.’ A silence fell. ‘However…let’s proceed.’

They went into the house, where the landlady, Mrs Kitteridge, was waiting. She was not pleased to see them. She’d been hoping for a restful day with her feet up after the exertions and disturbances of the previous day, and told them they were welcome to see the room, as long as they didn’t expect her to go up with them. ‘It’s me legs, see.’ She was grossly fat, not very clean, and the row of buttons on her grimy blouse strained ominously; but her hugely swollen legs ended in surprisingly neat little feet in fashionable and well polished buttoned boots. We all have our little vanities, thought Lamb, pocketing his pale grey gloves as he looked at the banister rail. She remarked that her lodger had been a polite young man with decent habits – for an artist. ‘Mind you, he weren’t partickler. Me daughter helps me with the cleaning and she went up there sometimes when he come at first to give the room a once-over, like, but it got the better of her. It was all “
Don’t touch this, leave that alone – what’s a bit o’ dust?”’

Likely this dutiful daughter hadn’t tried very hard. Housework didn’t seem to be her forte. Dust had solidified in the corners of the oil-cloth covered stairs, cobwebs swung from the ceiling; the house smelt of damp, mice, old frying fat and a faint overlay of gas fumes.

She gave him breakfast, which he came downstairs for, Mrs Kitteridge went on, but as to his other meals, he took his dinners out. He went to the school sometimes and worked in his room otherwise. And there was no hanky-panky, she didn’t allow no women up there – nor ladies neither, come to that; nowadays you couldn’t be sure who was prepared to take their clothes off to do what they called artistic poses. What he painted when he was at that school or studio or whatever it was supposed to be was no business of hers.

‘School?’

‘That place in Fitzroy Street where he worked.’

Lamb and Cogan exchanged a look, and climbed the unappetising stairs.

It was a third floor front attic bedroom Benton had rented, now euphemistically called a studio, perhaps on account of its large window and the skylight in the sloping ceiling, through which the bright April sunlight poured. Cogan hadn’t exaggerated when he said the room was in a mess, but at least the cleaner odours of turpentine, raw linseed and oil paint, though sharp and acrid, were a great deal pleasanter than those in the rest of the house. The bed was rumpled and unmade, sporting only a tatty coverlet and a pillow in stained, striped black and white ticking, without a case. A small gas ring stood by the sink in the corner, a blackened kettle, a chipped enamel coffee-pot and several unsavoury tin mugs beside it, but the bundles of brushes bristling from the stone jars near the huge easel which took up a great deal of the space in the room, were spotless, and oil paints in tubes on the wooden table beside it were in orderly array. The wallpaper curled spectacularly away from the wall at ceiling height (where it hadn’t been fastened up with drawing pins), there were no curtains at the window; several of the fireclay bars in the little gas fire were broken, and the tiles forming its hearth were littered with cigarette stubs, as though someone had forgotten it was not an open fire in which rubbish could be burnt. An empty brandy bottle lay on the floor beside the bed.

‘Tch-tch, how can anybody live like this?’ Cogan asked primly, wrinkling his nose, though he’d seen much worse.

There were people – especially young men – who should never have left their mothers. They simply didn’t know how to cope without someone to look after them and see to their needs. And Benton was an artist, entitled to believe himself entitled to ignore the mess.

Unframed canvases hung from nails in the walls, and dozens of curling, yellowed sketches in crayon or pen-and-ink. Two or three rows of canvases were stacked against the wall, one against the other, many of them appearing only half-completed. Cogan flipped through them. ‘Had a dekko at these yesterday…wonderful, aren’t they? I don’t think.’

Lamb also found himself at a loss with them. They weren’t the sort of pictures he was used to, nothing he understood. Today’s art seemed to be a rejection of anything that was beautiful, familiar, or even recognisable: no inspiring landscapes, or portraits, or even beautiful studies of the naked human form. Instead, sleazy street corners and alleys, stable yards, views across rooftops, humble working class interiors. Work-worn servants, pipe-smoking men with beer bellies and women with missing teeth and wrinkles, old before their time. Humanity as seen through Theo’s eyes was obviously undistinguished, plain and, in its naked state, often gross.

But amongst this miscellany he then came across a collection of small paintings which, to his admittedly untutored eye, stood out from the rest, notwithstanding they were dim, some of them almost to the point of obscurity. Moody, evening scenes: a dusk-filled tumbledown street; gaslight glimmering eerily through the fog onto creatures huddled in doorways; the wreck of a barge under the dying light on a stretch of river, after the style of that notorious fellow Whistler, who had a lot to answer for, if this was what he’d spawned. Theo had called these small paintings nocturnes, too, as he had. Yet…depressing and baffling as they were to Lamb, the more he was compelled to look, his eyes drawn to the lighter blur evident somewhere at the edges of each picture – nothing as substantial as a shape, more a shadow, an indistinct formation in the general murkiness. A hint of mystery in this veiled, sombre work, perhaps, deliberately meant to intrigue? Or did it reveal a disturbing, unsuspected facet of Theo’s personality? Lamb didn’t know what Theo had become over the last years.

‘I think you should take a look at this, sir.’ Cogan was lifting the cloth over the current work, the one still on the easel. ‘Saw it yesterday. Makes you wonder, don’t it?’

Indeed it did. A huge cross had been slashed viciously from corner to corner across the canvas in thick red paint, though it was still possible to see most of the painting. A sober palette revealing a seedy room, an iron bedstead with a half-dressed middle-aged woman sitting on it, regarding her less than perfect self in a square of looking glass on the wall. Apart from the fact that the room in the picture had a floral wallpaper and a flimsy curtain strung up across the window, it could have been this one. Maybe it was, and the wallpaper and curtains were simply artistic licence. Maybe there
had
been women up here to sit for Benton. How could the landlady have been certain there were none? It wouldn’t be difficult to dodge her, and she’d admitted she never mounted the stairs.

Lamb reached out a tentative finger. The red paint was still very slightly tacky.

‘Hmm. Evidently not very happy with it, was he?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought it bad enough for him to commit suicide, though,’ Cogan answered drily.

‘Remind you of anything, does it? What you can see of it?’

Cogan scratched his chin. ‘It does, but I can’t think what.’

Lamb left it for the moment and thoughtfully turned over some pencil sketches which lay on the table beside the jars of brushes. ‘So he was good – at any rate, good enough to exhibit – and to be working at that studio in Fitzroy Street.’

‘So he was.’ Suddenly, Cogan slapped the heel of his huge hand to his forehead, as if squashing a fly. ‘That’s it! Fitzroy Street and that chap Sickert. Blow me if that’s not what some of these pictures remind me of…his pictures. In a sort of way. You too, sir?’

‘Quite. And we’re already well acquainted with Mr Sickert, are we not?’

‘That we are.’

Walter Sickert’s was a name fashionably bandied about among the cognoscenti, those who professed to be in the know about art. A well-known artist, a flamboyant character, he had apparently always been something of a headache somewhere along the line, long before he had become even more of a headache to the Metropolitan Police. An odd, perverse character, clever, likeable, witty and amusing though he was, mixing in the ‘right’ circles, he’d always been given to outrageous and provocative statements, intended to amuse and mostly received in that way – but not always. He’d often given offence.

But he’d really overstepped the mark following the particularly unsavoury murder of a prostitute named Emily Dimmock, and the sensational acquittal of the accused murderer a couple of years or so ago. Sickert had afterwards seen fit to paint or re-title a number of his squalid and sexually explicit paintings as The Camden Town Murder Series, showing mutilated and naked women, and finally one evidently lying dead on her bed. Why he should have chosen to do this was seemingly inexplicable. Lamb thought it a deliberately provocative act, designed as a very clever piece of publicity, for needless to say, it had caused a furore: not only was the act of choosing to name his paintings as such in execrable taste – it had been mooted that since the last one showed precisely the circumstances as those in which Emily Dimmock had been found, in every gory and unblushing detail, Sickert must have at the very least known the identity of the real murderer. The accusations had never been taken up seriously, but Lamb didn’t relish the idea of any involvement with him again, though it might be necessary, since young Theo had evidently been associated with him. ‘He’s supposed to be a brilliant teacher. And his own art is highly regarded.’

‘If you like that sort of thing.’

‘A good many people are learning to like it.’

‘Emperor’s new clothes?’

Lamb let that pass, since it was more or less what he thought himself, and turned to the rest of the unframed paintings. There were no more sprawling nudes,
à la
Sickert, but he found one, a scene from the music hall, which he knew to be another favourite Sickert subject. Its crude subject and the raw, violent colours at first made him doubt whether this was actually one of Theo’s works, but it bore his signature.

‘Well, I’m partial to a good variety turn myself,’ acknowledged Cogan, revealing a hitherto unsuspected aspect of his somewhat strait-laced character as he looked at it, ‘and I reckon this is Miss Tilly Tremayne. Way too saucy for my tastes, mind,’ he hastened to add. ‘Not the sort of act I’d take Mrs Cogan to see, at any rate. And that’s not the sort of picture I’d like her to see, either.’

A young woman was depicted dancing on a spotlit stage, high-kicking in black stockings and a short scarlet dress held high enough to create the suggestion that her underwear might be inadequate. And yet, it was not the dancer who drew the eye, but the way Theo had caught the salacious expressions on the faces of the audience in the foreground. He had, it seemed, had tried his hand at everything, Lamb thought as he turned the last canvas, which had been facing the wall. ‘And what have we here, then?’