The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (20 page)

Once in the room devoted to the second half of the twentieth century, Charlie stood for a moment to look around him. He didn't know what drew him to one particular picture, but he decided when he thought about it later that it was its violence. He went up close and saw that this violence—the impression it gave of having been painted in one bout of fury—had even spilled over onto the frame, making it part of the whole ferocious statement. The effect was of seeing something through a window—a smashed window that left glass everywhere. What it was he was seeing through the frame he could by no means pin down, but he thought there was broken glass, perhaps a hand, and certainly blood—blotches of red were everywhere, disfiguring the hand, the glass, something that could be some kind of seat, indeed everything that might after contemplation assume the shape of an object.

Underneath the caption read: “Ranulph Byatt (1920– ): ACCIDENT.”

“Very sharp,” came a voice at his elbow. “Cleverly identified, and without hesitation.”

Charlie turned and looked down into an elderly face
with something pixielike in its expression, a good deal of self-love, and a single brown tooth pointing outward, the sole remnant, at least to the eye, of a rabbity set that could never have been one of the face's better features.

“Mr. Briscott?”

“Bertie. Call me Bertie.” The man smiled ingratiatingly. He was clutching a very old hold-all and when he looked around the room he gave the impression that he owned the place. “Are you ready to come along and have our little chat? I've brought along my packet of sandwiches—‘sarnies,' people call them these days, don't they? So amusing.” He chortled through his nose. “I always used to enjoy my
sarnies
in the park on fine days when I worked here. Would you like to pick up a bun or something from the cafeteria?”

“I think I can last out,” said Charlie. Together they strolled back through the detritus of Britain's artistic heritage.

“So what did you think of the picture?” Bertie Briscott asked as they emerged into the sunlight.

“Very impressive, very powerful,” Charlie ventured, but nervously. There was an irritating little snigger in reply, as if any fool could see that.

“But what did you
see
in it, what did you get out of it?” the unappetizing little man persisted.

“Violence, fury, rage?” said Charlie in a slightly miffed voice.

“Yes, yes. All of those things.” Bertie Briscott selected his favorite seat and they sat down looking over toward a large old school. Briscott undid the greaseproof paper around his sandwich packet, revealing a stack of open sandwiches. The top one was egg mayonnaise. Charlie
thought the tooth could probably cope with that. He preferred to look away while it did so.

“That's one of the best paintings of his red period,” said Bertie Briscott, his voice muffled by eating. Charlie had the impossible impression that crumbs were spraying out of his nose. “One of a series of related paintings that really made his name. People talk as if that series came completely out of the blue, a total surprise. That's people who don't really know his output.” Charlie looked back, and saw a catlike expression of self-satisfaction on the man's face. “Before that he'd had a substantial reputation as a landscape painter in the British tradition—good, solid, painterly works. But there had also been other pictures in a more fractured, tormented, uncertain style—pictures that suggested he was struggling with something in himself he barely understood.”

“Abstracts?” asked Charlie, looking away again from the open mouth full of sandwich, through which could be glimpsed in a ring four or five isolated brown stumps, a sort of odontological Stonehenge.

“I'm not sure the term has much value,” Bertie Briscott said judiciously. “They had titles—‘Girl Weeping,' or ‘Child on Swing'—but one couldn't readily relate the title to the picture itself. Not uncommon, of course. And then came the red period, and the man's name was made.”

“When was this?”

“Early in the eighties. He was born in 1920, so you can see he wasn't young.”

“Was there anything that sparked this new phase?”

Bertie Briscott leaned back in his seat, and even rested his sandwich pack on his lap: this was the part he had been looking forward to telling.

“Oh, yes. There's not much doubt about that. Of course it wasn't general knowledge at the time, but over the years the facts have emerged.” He looked down, and Charlie had to wait while he selected a sandwich topped with thick roast pork. “It was the death of his daughter Catriona in a car accident. It was the day of her wedding, and she and her husband were killed together.”

“Ahhh.” Charlie breathed out. Bertie Briscott appeared delighted to have made such an effect, and Charlie had to watch, fascinated, while a large piece of pork sandwich, apparently unchewed, made its way down the man's throat like a rodent swallowed by a snake. “And did he actually . . .
see
?”

“Yes, he did. Apparently the pair left the reception, at Stamford, where they then lived, and drove off for their honeymoon in Scotland. Soon afterward Byatt and his wife drove off up to Yorkshire for their first look at Ashworth, which they had just been left by an admirer. They passed the accident on the motorway, recognized their new son-in-law's car, and stopped. Yes, they saw everything.”

“And were you going to deal with this in your book about Byatt?”

“Oh, yes. There was no objection to that.”

“But there was objection to something else?”

Bertie Briscott gave a nervous little giggle, screwed up the empty sandwich packet, and stuffed it into his holdall. He seemed to be considering the question.

“It's very difficult to say, really,” he said at last. “Cooperation had in any case been spasmodic. I hadn't been granted an interview. If I wrote to him I might or might not get a reply, but in any case there was nothing that
could be described as an exchange of letters, or regular answers to my questions. Then at one point when the biographical part was getting toward the present day, I had a note that just said: ‘I don't see any point in talking about recent stuff. Too close. Leave that to the historians.' He never doubted that art historians would be interested in him, you notice. Anyway, after that—nothing.”

“You wrote to him?”

“Oh, yes. Gently disagreeing with him. Then further questions. But I never got a reply.”

“Was that why you gave up the book?”

“To be honest, not entirely.” He discovered a stray crust that had dropped onto the seat, and he popped it in his mouth on the principle of “waste not, want not.” “I wanted to earn an honest penny to buy a few home comforts in my retirement. I wasn't writing for fun, or to increase the sum of human knowledge. Byatt had several bursts of splendid creativity after his red period masterpieces, but frankly, in the last few years it's been downhill all the way. The grapevine has it that he has suffered a bad decline physically.”

“He certainly is crippled with arthritis, or something similar.”

The little man swiveled around in his seat.

“Oh, you have been allowed to meet him? Talk to him? You are honored—or very persistent. I suppose policemen have ways of insisting. Anyway, because of the poor quality of the recent stuff, public interest in him at the moment is frankly not high. The publisher I had lined up began to have doubts. I began to have doubts myself. An extra publication on your CV is not much use to you when you are retired. I thought about it and decided that Francis
Bacon was much more likely to turn an honest penny for me.”

“I'm afraid I thought Francis Bacon was a writer.”

“He was. Also a modern British painter. Specializing in painting popes.”

“Popes?” said Charlie, surprised. “You wouldn't get much work painting popes, would you? The present one seems to have been around forever.”

Bertie Briscott burst into a paroxysm of nasal chuckling.

“Not living popes,
dead
ones.
One
dead pope in particular. He was quite obsessive on the subject.” A thought struck him and he went suddenly silent. Charlie let him think on, looking over the rolling green lawns of Cartwright Hall. “Not unlike Ranulph Byatt and his car accident, now one comes to think of it. Though Bacon's obsession lasted longer. . . . You don't think I could
team
them, do you? Put them in tandem and write a book linking them?” Charlie did not think the question was addressed to him, so he saw no reason to reply. “I wonder, do you think as a result of this murder there might be increased interest in Ranulph Byatt?”

His face was tilted toward Charlie, the tone beseeching. In other words, Charlie thought, is Byatt likely to be hauled away in handcuffs? He always found that official jargon was immensely useful in such circumstances.

“Our investigations are at an early stage,” he replied robotically. “We're not yet sure of the precise connection between the dead man and Byatt's circle.”

The bromide acted as a rebuke, and Bertie Briscott looked chastened.

“Oh, really? I thought . . . I wondered, you know,
whether it would be of any help to you to have a copy of my manuscript, so far as it went.”

It was in the nature of a peace offering, and Charlie accepted it as such.

“That would be very useful indeed, depending, of course, on whether there is a connection with Ashworth in this case.”

“Of course.” Briscott dived into the hold-all. “I took the liberty of making a photocopy on the Hall's machine before you came. You know, this has been a most interesting conversation. The idea of there being a connection between Bacon and Byatt hadn't occurred to me before our talk. But I wonder—the sadomasochistic vision in both their oeuvres. That could be a very strong sel—a very strong line of argument, drawing comparisons between the two. Otherwise the sexual line of comparison between them doesn't seem very strong, with Byatt being heterosexual and apparently largely monogamous. You would say that he and his wife were devoted, wouldn't you?”

“Apparently so,” agreed Charlie.

“That's the accepted view, that she's been his muse, his helpmeet, his manager, the linchpin of his life, and that by and large he's been unusually faithful, for an artist. Whereas Bacon, of course . . . just any bloke he could manage to pick up. You wouldn't say the community at Ashworth were a sort of seraglio for Byatt, then?”

“I didn't get that impression.”

“No-o-o. Pity. From the point of view of selling the book, of course. Well, if there's nothing else you want to know, I mustn't hold you up.”

Charlie watched the self-important little man trotting in the direction of the hall, and wondered if he was ever
going to write anything good enough or market satisfying enough to net himself a nest egg of reasonable proportion from any publisher. Somehow he suspected that the bottom would have dropped out of the Francis Bacon market before he had a manuscript to hawk. He stood up and got on the phone to Mike.

“What next, Mike? I've done all I could here.”

“Well, I've just had a list from the police at Keighley of all the people at Ashworth, and a bit about their records. Not much there, apart from this Ivor Aston, who you know about. I think we could look a bit further into that. Mrs. Mates's husband took off in 1983, but no one ever thought there were suspicious circumstances. I think it's inevitably Ashworth next, if only to test your ideas.”

“Thanks for that. Can I meet you there?”

“Yes, say in forty minutes' time, and we'll meet up by the gate.”

“With all eyes on us.”

“No bad thing. See you there.”

Charlie took the back road, through Thornton and the little villages around Haworth. As he drove through Haworth itself he wondered if there was anything more to be done there with the new information they now had, but he decided not: if Patrick had been there, done anything to make an impression there, it would surely have come out in his painstaking questioning up and down Main Street—particularly as it would have been fresh in people's minds. He was willing to bet that Patrick had not gone near Haworth. In fact he could have taken the train from Manchester to Colne, then hitched a lift across the moors, getting put off at Stanbury before reaching Haworth.

He parked the car on the edge of a ditch just outside the Ashworth gate, and leaned on it, waiting for Mike to arrive. This time nobody came out anxious to share confidences with him. It was probably fancifulness, but this time he sensed apprehension: they were back, he imagined people thinking, and this time they might have new evidence. Well, they had that, and with a vengeance, and Charlie hoped he was right that this new evidence pinned the case unquestionably on the Ashworth community, rather than diverting suspicion elsewhere.

Ten minutes later Oddie drew up behind him, got out of the car, and joined him at the gate.

“Where do we start?” Charlie asked.

“At the top. The Forensics boys and girls are going to be here in an hour's time. It's the farmhouse and stables they'll need to start with. We'll have to prepare the people there, and give them the news of whose murder it is we're investigating now.”

“As a surprise?”

“Most definitely as a surprise. That we're onto it, though whether it will be a surprise the boy is Patrick is another matter.”

“I'll leave it to you.”

“You have a watching brief. Definitely watching.” Charlie nodded. Silent watching was something Charlie was good at.

Oddie swung open the gate and they walked purposefully up to the front door of the old farmhouse and rang the bell. The door was opened by Mrs. Max.

“Oh, it's you again.”

“I'm afraid it is,” said Charlie. “This is Superintendent Oddie. He's in charge of the case. Is everybody in?”