Lock 13

ONE

Should you ever wonder (though I don’t know why you would) what the average working day of a private detective looks like, try the following. Drive to a strange neighbourhood. Park up in the street. Pick any of the houses – let’s say that one over there: the one with the well-kept front garden behind the immaculate box hedge, the new Range Rover Sport in the drive and the two hanging baskets of ivy and ferns beside the north-facing front door. Now watch it. It’s not going anywhere, but watch it anyway. Is anyone entering the house? Then take a photograph. Is anyone coming out? Take a photograph. If no one goes in or comes out – just keep watching. Nothing but rubbish on the radio? Eaten all your sandwiches already? Drunk all the coffee in your Thermos? Well, that’s a pity because it’s only midday and you’ll have to sit there for at least another five hours before you could reasonably call it a day’s work.

Another day’s work might look like this. You get a call from Norfolk & Chance, solicitors, who offer you a quick forty-five pounds to serve a court summons on a person (soon to be a defendant) on behalf of the court. They can’t send the papers through the post because the person will simply put them in the bin and pretend they never received them. The papers have to be delivered into the hands of the person so there can be no pretence of not having received them. The papers are called a ‘process’ and the business of delivering them to the right addressee is called ‘process serving’. This means you are scraping the barrel, only to be resorted to if your private-eye cupboard is bare and you’re living on toast and quince jam. The problem with playing postie for solicitors and courts is that people will not be over the moon to see you when you arrive on their doorstep or their place of work. They won’t open the door. They will vault a fence. They will run away from you, jump into a car and disappear. They will threaten you. They will punch you. Your left eye will be swollen shut for a couple of days and then go through interesting colour changes for the next week or so. And you’ll still have to deliver the papers into the person’s hands, black eye notwithstanding. Mine is fading now, but so is the memory of the forty-five pounds.

One of the many differences between you and me: most of the questions you tend to ask yourself probably start with ‘what’ – what to do next, what shall we have for supper, what is that doing on the floor, what do I want, what will the future hold? Most of the questions I ask myself start with ‘why’. Why is a talented painter like Chris Honeysett (that’s me) wasting his time collecting black eyes or sitting in a classic – some would say decrepit – forty-year-old Citroën DS 21 (the one with the swivelly headlights), doing private-eye work when he should be out there painting atmospheric contemporary views of life in twenty-first-century Britain? Because despite having for many years pursued a successful career in the arts, he never managed to catch it. The few paintings I sell would simply not keep me alive, especially after Simon Paris of Simon Paris Fine Arts has grabbed his fifty-per-cent commission and I have paid the framers. And why on earth private-eye work? I could try to blame having watched too many black-and-white movies with corny dialogues and enigmatic dark-haired women as an impressionable teenager, but in truth I just sort of slithered into it after having, purely by accident, stumbled upon a missing meat inspector who was way past his sell-by date when I found him dangling from a meat hook. It’s a long story. It made the papers. After that, complete strangers offered me money to find other things, such as missing relatives (preferably alive but not always) or pets, like iguanas called Knut. And since the police no longer have the manpower to look for missing persons, who else are you going to ask but a middle-aged painter who is so broke he can’t afford to say no? After a few successful searches, I gave the thing a name: Aqua Investigation. I live in a rundown old mill house in a little valley to the north-east of Bath, and since I’m surrounded by water and Bath has hot springs, I thought it would be fitting to use Aqua as the name for a business that is mainly founded on hot air and pot luck. It also puts it first in the alphabetic listings. Mostly I work alone, but sometimes Annis helps out.

Annis is a painter, like me. Actually she’s a painter very unlike me. She’s better-looking for a start and Simon Paris finds her commissions from rich people. Annis turned up uninvited at Mill House a few years ago, when she was still an art student at Sion Hill, stuck her mop of red hair around the doorjamb of the old barn I used as a studio and then managed to insinuate the rest of herself into my life. I let her work in a corner of my studio, but after I kept finding her asleep in front of her easel I gave her a room in the house. And it all went from there. We now also share a bed, but over the years this has never been an exclusive arrangement. My woolly-haired friend Tim and I discovered after a while that we had been sharing Annis’s attentions. The fact that this odd and sometimes unnerving arrangement remained in place for so long is testimony to Annis’s persuasive charms.

Tim is the third and extremely part-time member of Aqua Investigations. He now works as an IT consultant for Bath University. Tim is an ex-burglar and safebreaker who has gone straight. Or so he says. How he can afford to live in a Georgian flat in Northampton Street and drive a brand-new Audi every two years on what he earns is one mystery I have never been tempted to investigate. While Annis lends her brains when mine give out, Tim is the expert in opening doors and anything to do with computers, surveillance cameras and generally all the gubbins I like using but don’t understand. He did teach me how to defeat a locked door, but even with the tools he gave me I always have to make sure I’ve brought enough sandwiches for the job.

It was the first week of September and it was raining. I didn’t mind since I was sitting warm and dry at the Roman Baths in the Pump Room, buttering a scone as the rain ran down the window panes, while the Pump Room Trio played a piece by Haydn I could hum but not name. I was waiting for Giles Haarbottle of Griffins, the insurance company. Over the years Haarbottle has put quite a bit of work my way, probably because it means he gets to leave Griffins’ hideous Bristol offices and come to Bath to meet me in places like this one. Aqua Investigations does not have (i.e. cannot afford) an office in town. It’s really just a website and phone number, which means I get to meet clients in the coffee house of their choice. Sometimes their choices can be quite revealing; I have met clients in a Michelin-star restaurant and I have met them at Pizza Hut. I have never met a client in a greasy spoon; Bath isn’t that kind of place. Haarbottle chose the Pump Room because it reminded him what civilization looked like and I happily obliged. He was late. I had just snaffled my first scone when I spotted him weaving between the tables towards me. Six foot four of hunched middle-aged greyness with enough static in his synthetic clothes to make your hair stand on end when he comes close.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said as he took off his swishy raincoat and set down his leatherette briefcase. ‘The train stopped in the middle of nowhere for twenty minutes.’

‘You came by train?’

‘Have you tried parking in Bath?’

‘Good point. I struggled myself today. I usually use the Norton when I come into town; only it’s being mended.’

‘And what is a Norton when it’s at home?’ he asked, taking a seat and signalling a waitress.

‘A Norton, whether it’s at home or not, is a classic British motorcycle which is so old you can ride it tax-free and you can park it anywhere. My partner, Annis, owns one and lets me borrow it.’

‘Is it insured with us?’ he asked painfully.

‘No.’

‘Good, good.’ He ordered a pot of Earl Grey and a cinnamon bun and looked more happily about him at the décor, the Georgian columns and the chandelier, ignoring me and my scone until the waitress delivered his tea. ‘How’s the painting going?’ he eventually asked out of politeness, not having the slightest interest in it.

‘Going well enough to keep me in part-time jobs.’

‘I’m always happy to put some your way,’ he said through a mouthful of crumbs. Eventually, he had gulped enough tea and sufficiently decimated his bun to open his scuffed briefcase. He extracted a thin, crumpled magazine from it and handed it over. It was a copy of The Angler. From the cover a grinning man in a baseball cap was looking up, holding a net full of fish. Catch More Bream, the caption exhorted me.

‘I’m not going fishing with you, Haarbottle.’

‘Page twenty-three.’

I turned to the page. He tapped a small red-circled photograph with a long cinnamon finger. ‘That’s the one. Second chap along – the one with his top off.’

The picture showed two men standing by the water’s edge, fishing from a green river bank or lake shore with their rods. It looked as if the weather was hot; bright sunlight shimmered on the rippled water. The topless man was hauling out a rainbow trout. ‘Let me guess … illegal trout fishing?’

‘No.’

‘Uninsured trout fishing?’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘A dispute over trout fishing?’

‘No, you’ve had your three guesses. The bloke with the top off is Henry Blinkhorn and he’s dead.’

I turned to the cover; it was this month’s issue. ‘Recently deceased?’ I asked.

‘Six years ago; died age forty. Drowned on a fishing trip when his boat overturned in bad weather in the Severn estuary.’

‘Should have stayed on land. Did well there, by the looks of it.’

‘Too well for someone who is supposed to be dead. That picture was taken this year here in Somerset and used purely as an illustration of trout fishing. Someone who remembered the case sent this to us and pointed out that it looks surprisingly like the missing, presumed dead, Blinkhorn.’

‘Where exactly was the picture taken?’

‘Rainbow Lodge Fisheries, not ten miles from here.’

‘You want me to find this chap? We can ask the people at the fishery to tell us if he turns up again, give them the picture …’

‘They went into liquidation – failed business.’

‘We can try other fisheries. Lakes. Ponds, rivers, canals. You do realize there are thousands of miles of rivers and lake shores from where he could be dangling his rod in Somerset alone?’

He pulled a pained face. ‘I’m aware of it. It could be a long job. Prove he’s alive. He has been declared dead two years early because his boat capsized in bad weather and that, the widow’s lawyers argued, makes it a natural disaster. Especially for us since his life insurance cover amounts to a million and a half.’

I would have given an impressed whistle had I known how. ‘Will you pay out?’

‘Already had before the magazine arrived.’

‘Did you show this to the police?’ I scrutinized the photograph. The camera had focused on the angler in front and the topless man was slightly blurred.

‘We did.’

‘And they told you it’s too blurred, you would need more to go on?’

He nodded. ‘Almost word for word.’

‘I’ve heard them talk.’

‘They said the case would not be reopened and we were clutching at straws.’

‘And I’m that straw.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Clutch away, by all means. Standard clutching rates apply. But what makes you so sure it’s him?’

Haarbottle drained his cup. ‘See that rectangular patch on his chest above his left nipple?’

I squinted at the picture. There was a pale pink rectangle standing out from his sun-reddened chest. ‘What is that?’

‘We think that is a big plaster. Henry Blinkhorn has a tattoo in that place – some kind of fish. He’s obviously covering it up with a plaster because it could identify him.’

‘What did this guy do before he disappeared?’

‘He ran a lucrative repair and servicing business for office machines. Nationwide. Did very well for a long time but then it went downhill. There’s less and less machinery, and businesses just upgrade instead of repairing the old.’

‘Who’s the beneficiary?’

‘His wife, Janette Blinkhorn, age forty-four. No children. Still lives in their well-appointed home here in Bath, one and a half million pounds better off.’

‘OK. So the business isn’t going well and he wants to spend more time fishing anyway. He arranges to go out in bad weather, fakes his own death and lies low until the payout. That’s definitely a long-term scheme. But a million and a half is worth waiting for, I suppose, even if you have to share with Janette, age forty-four, no children. I will get the standard one per cent?’

‘If you like.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s actually two per cent.’ Haarbottle pulled a slim, bright yellow folder with the Griffins logo from his briefcase, handed it to me and snapped the case shut. ‘You’ll find all the necessary details in there.’ He rose. ‘Stay in touch; I want regular progress reports.’ He walked off, recovered his umbrella from the stand near the till and walked out into the rain without paying for his bun. I checked my watch. I had several hours still before starting my other part-time job, teaching a life-drawing class back at Mill House. I waved over the waitress and ordered another coffee. If I found that Henry Blinkhorn was alive and fishing, then two per cent of the payout would net me thirty thousand pounds. Surely I could afford another couple of scones? ‘Blackcurrant jam this time, please, and some more clotted cream would be nice, too.’

TWO

I always dreaded having to teach a class, mainly because of the tedium of it. There were usually about eight or ten students of mixed experience and talent, ranging from those who went to art college thirty years ago to those who, with the best will in the world, would never get into one. Some came for the social side of it, some for something to do between six and nine, some came for the tea and cake provided during the break and only one or two took it seriously. None, of course, took it as seriously as me who had to teach this mixed bag, or Annis who baked the cakes for them, or Verity, the life model, who had to sit shivering between two rattling blow-heaters in our draughty studio.

Mill House lies near the damp bottom of the valley; you reach it via a rutted dirt track that branches off the single lane road that bisects it. At the bottom of the track you turn into the potholed yard of what was once a large grain mill. The mill pond still feeds the stream that runs past the house, but the mill wheel is long gone, mouldering under grass somewhere in the overgrown three acres that surround the house. The courtyard, framed by dilapidated outbuildings and open sheds full of defunct gardening machinery, was once cobbled but now has only one small island of cobbles left; the rest consists of bare earth, patches of perished concrete and weeds. We no longer have any need for gardening machinery; we simply borrow a few of my neighbour’s black-faced sheep to keep the grass down. Annis’s collection of dents and scrapes that she was fond of calling a classic 1960s Land Rover was parked on the cobbled bit; Verity was also here already, as attested by her minimalist bicycle that had neither brakes nor lights or even hand grips on the handle bars; if it became any more minimalist, it would have to make do with fewer wheels. Perhaps I wasn’t paying her enough, I thought as I made my way to the kitchen where I knew I would find the two.

‘How does he do that?’ said Verity who was sitting at the table. She was a straw-blonde, almost pretty girl with the kind of body that doesn’t mind being stared at for hours on end by a dozen people because it knows it has nothing to hide. ‘He always turns up the moment the kettle is boiling.’

Annis was standing at the Rayburn, splashing boiling water from the kettle into a cafetière, filling the room with Blue Mountain aromas. ‘He’s had years of practice.’ I lifted the napkin from a large oval dish on the table. Two dozen pieces of lemon drizzle cake smiled sunnily up at me. ‘Hands off! Not until breaktime,’ warned Annis. ‘Verity can have some; she needs sustenance for her forthcoming modelling stint.’

‘I find sitting still much easier with some cake inside me,’ she agreed and helped herself to a slice, wafting it with an evil smile under my nose on the way to her mouth.

I had poached Verity from a fellow painter who himself had found her in a pub in Larkhall, cadging drinks and scrounging cigarettes (Verity, not the painter) and, seeing that she was obviously broke, paid her to sit for him. She was still obviously broke and I suspected that the four hours of modelling a week, though generously remunerated, were her only income, because I had never before witnessed any girl as thin as Verity eat everything offered to her with such voracious enthusiasm. I suspected that most of her money was not spent on food. I wondered where her parents lived and if they approved of her lifestyle.

‘Are you actually from Bath?’ I asked her.

‘Frome,’ she said through a mouthful of crumbs.

‘Do your parents still live there?’

She shook her head. ‘Died in a coach crash in Italy. Three years ago.’

‘I’m so sorry to hear that. Any other relatives?’

Verity swallowed down the cake and stood up to go. ‘One aunt. My dad’s older sister. She’s an ugly old spinster and lives somewhere in Belgium. Haven’t spoken to her since I was little. And have no desire to.’ She experimentally stretched out a hand towards the dish of lemon cake to see if anyone would protest and, when neither of us did, swiped a slice and with a big grin skipped through the door.

One by one the students arrived and made their way up the meadow to the barn. I called them ‘students’, Annis called them ‘artists’, Verity ‘punters’. All but one of them were women. I settled them in, made sure each of them had paper and charcoal and an easel to work from, then Verity came, changed in the cubicle I had bodged up for her from lengths of two-by-two and canvas, and the session got under way. We had a full house, the cake and tea during the break were much appreciated and it was a happy bunch of artists, punters, students and model who left Mill House at dusk that night.

So far so good.

The next morning I taught another class at Mill House, this time watercolour. The class consisted of five women and me painting views of Mill House in its setting or of Ridge Farm up the road. In inclement weather we stayed in the studio and did colour theory, colour mixing, wet-in-wet techniques (the roof leaks) and single-point perspective. It had been quite a wet summer so far and by now they knew everything I did. Clouds rolled in from the north but the weather held and another six versions of Mill House were painted, discussed and admired. Two of my older students were so good at watercolour painting that I was convinced they came purely for Annis’s baking. Once they had all driven off again in their sensible cars, I got behind the wheel of my utterly impractical DS 21 and drove across to the north side of town.

The grieving widow of Henry Blinkhorn was consoling herself with her £1.5 million payout in the six-bedroom house in Charlcombe Lane where they had lived together until his disappearance five years earlier. It was a large nineteenth-century house built of freestone and called The Chestnuts, of which there were plenty around. The original wall that enclosed the property had been partly removed to allow for a wider gate and a drive to a carport, built far more recently but in a sympathetic style. At the moment it harboured a small but perfectly expensive silver-grey Mercedes. Charlcombe Lane ran along the northern edge of the little valley, and its substantial houses looked disdainfully down on the suburban developments of Fairfield Park in the valley far below. The lane was shaded by overhanging trees and so narrow that passing places were needed to allow cars to squeeze past each other. This meant that parking up in the road was impossible. My sinister black Citroën was noticeable enough in a busy street; here it would attract immediate attention and block the traffic. I parked it in nearby Richmond Road. Fortunately, I never go far without my folding camping chair and my sketching tools – paint box, collapsible water cup, watercolour sketchbook and travel brushes. What could be less suspicious than a middle-aged watercolourist on a folding chair, squinting and daubing? I had used this disguise before and no one gave me a second glance. (NB: This may be less successful on a rundown council estate.)

I set myself up by the side of the lane with my back to a tree. From here I could just see up the drive of the house and keep an eye on the front door and the car. Several tall trees towering higher than the house made me suspect that a substantial garden lay behind it. I would paint slowly. Very slowly. It goes much against my