The solicitor seemed happy enough to cooperate with the police. He deemed Nicola's death “a damnable tragedy for all concerned. She had tremendous potential in the legal field and I was more than satisfied with her performance for me this past summer.”
Lynley studied the man as Hanken gleaned the background information on the solicitor's relationship with the dead woman. Upman looked like a newsreader for the BBC: picture perfect and squeaky clean. His oak-brown hair was greying at the temples, giving him an air of trustworthiness that probably served him well in his profession. This general sense of reliability was enhanced by his voice, which was deep and sonorous. He was somewhere in his early forties, but his casual manner and his easy bearing suggested youth.
He answered Hanken's questions without the slightest indication that he might be uncomfortable with any of them. He'd known Nicola Maiden for most of the nine years that she and her family had lived in the Peak District. Her parents’ acquisition of the old Padley Gorge Lodge—now Maiden Hall—had brought them into contact with one of Upman's associates, who handled estate purchases. Through him, Will Upman had met the Maidens and their daughter.
“We've been given to understand that Mr. Maiden arranged for Nicola to work for you this summer,” Hanken said.
Upman confirmed this. He added, “It was no secret that Andy hoped Nicola would practise in Derbyshire when she'd completed her articles.” He'd been leaning against his desk as they spoke, having not offered either detective a chair. He seemed to realise this all at once, however, because he hurried on to say, “I'm completely forgetting my manners. Forgive me. Please. Sit. Can I offer you coffee? Or tea? Miss Snodgrass?”
This last he called in the direction of the open door. There, the secretary reappeared. She'd donned a pair of large-framed spectacles that gave her the appearance of a timid insect. “Mr. Upman?” She waited to do his bidding.
“Gentlemen?” he asked Lynley and Hanken.
They declined his offer of refreshment, and Miss Snodgrass was dismissed. Upman beamed upon the detectives as they took seats. Then he remained standing. Lynley noted this, raising his guard. In the delicate game of power and confrontation, the solicitor had just scored. And the manoeuvre had been so smoothly handled.
“How did you feel about Nicola becoming employed somewhere in Derbyshire?” he asked Upman.
The solicitor regarded him affably. “I don't think I felt anything at all.”
“Are you married?”
“Never have been. My line of work tends to give one cold feet when it comes to matrimony. I specialise in divorce law. That generally disabuses one of one's romantic ideals in rather short order.”
“Could that be why Nicola turned down Julian Britton's marriage proposal?” Lynley asked.
Upman looked surprised. “I'd no idea he'd made one.”
“She didn't tell you?”
“She worked for me, Inspector. I wasn't her confessor.”
“Were you her anything else?” Hanken put in, clearly annoyed at the tenor of Upman's last remark. “Aside from her employer, naturally.”
From his desk, Upman picked up a palm-size violin that apparently served as a paperweight. He ran his fingers along its strings and plucked at them as if testing their tuning. He said, “You must be asking if she and I had a personal relationship.”
“When a man and a woman work at close quarters on a regular basis,” Hanken said, “these things do happen.”
“They don't happen to me.”
“By which we can take it that you weren't involved with the Maiden girl?”
“That's what I'm saying.” Upman replaced the violin and took up a pencil holder. He began removing those pencils whose lead was too worn, laying them neatly next to his thigh, which continued to rest against the desk. He said, “Andy Maiden would have liked it had Nicola and I become involved. He'd hinted as much on more than one occasion, and whenever I was at the Hall for dinner and Nicola was home from college, he made a point of throwing us together. So I saw what he was hoping for, but I couldn't accommodate him.”
“Why not?” Hanken asked. “Something wrong with the girl?”
“She wasn't my type.”
“What type was she?” Lynley asked.
“I don't know. Look, what does it matter? I'm … Well, I'm rather involved with someone else.”
“‘Rather involved?’” This from Hanken.
“We have an understanding. I mean, we date. I handled her divorce two years ago, and … What does it matter anyway?” He looked flustered. Lynley wondered why.
Hanken appeared to notice this as well. He began to home in. “You found the Maiden girl attractive though.”
“Of course. I'm not blind. She was attractive.”
“And did your divorcee know about her?”
“She's not my divorcee. She's not my anything. We're seeing each other. That's all there is. And there was nothing for Joyce to know—”
“Joyce?” Lynley asked.
“His divorcee,” Hanken said blandly.
“And,” Upman repeated, “there was nothing for Joyce to know because there was nothing between us, between Nicola and me. Finding a woman attractive and becoming caught up in something that can't go anywhere are two different things.”
“Why couldn't it go anywhere?” Lynley asked.
“Because we were both involved elsewhere. I am, and she was. So even if I'd thought about trying my luck—which I hadn't, by the way—I'd have been signing up for a course in frustration.”
“But she'd turned down Julian,” Hanken interposed. “That suggests she wasn't as involved as you supposed, that perhaps she'd set her sights on someone else.”
“If so, they weren't set on me. And as for poor Britton, I'd wager that she turned him down because his income didn't suit her. My guess is that she'd got her eye on someone in London with a hefty bank balance.”
“What gave you that impression?” Lynley asked.
Upman considered the question, but he appeared relieved to be himself let off the hook of a possible involvement with Nicola Maiden. “She had a pager that went off occasionally,” he finally said, “and once when it did, she asked me would I mind if she phoned London to give someone the number here to ring her back. And he did as much after that. Time and again.”
“Why would you conclude this was someone with money?” Lynley asked. “A few long distance phone calls aren't out of the question even for someone strapped for cash.”
“I know that. But Nicola had expensive tastes. Believe me, she couldn't have bought what she wore to work every day on what I was paying her. I'll lay twenty quid on it that if you trace her wardrobe, you'll find it came from Knightsbridge, where some poor sod's paying piles on an account that she was free to use. And that sod's not me.”
Very neat, Lynley thought. Upman had tied all the pieces together with an adroitness that was a credit to his profession. But there was something calculated in his presentation of the facts that made Lynley wary. It was as if he'd known what they would ask him and had already planned his answers, like any good lawyer. From Hanken's expression of mild dislike, it was clear that he'd reached the same conclusion about the solicitor.
“Are we talking about an affair?” Hanken asked. “Is this a married chap doing what he can to keep the mistress content?”
“I have no idea. I can only say that she was involved with someone, and I expect that someone's in London.”
“When was the last time you saw her alive?”
“Friday evening. We had dinner.”
“But you yourself had no personal relationship with her,” Hanken noted.
“I took her to dinner as a farewell, which is fairly common practice between employers and employees in our society, if I'm not mistaken. Why? Does this put me under suspicion? Because if I'd wanted to kill her—for whatever reason you might have in mind—why would I wait from Friday until Tuesday night to do it?”
Hanken pounced. “Ah. You seem to know wh
en she died.”
Upman wasn't rattled. “I did speak to someone at the Hall, Inspector.”
“So you said.” Hanken got to his feet. “You've been most helpful to our enquiries. If you can just give us the name of Friday night's restaurant, we'll be on our way.”
“The Chequers Inn,” Upman said. “In Calver. But look here, why do you need that? Am I under suspicion? Because if I am, I insist on—”
“There's no need for posturing at this point in the investigation,” Hanken said.
There was also no need, Lynley thought, to put the solicitor any more on the defensive. He intervened with, “Everyone who knew the murder victim is a suspect at first, Mr. Upman. DI Hanken and I are in the process of eliminating possibilities. Even as a solicitor, I expect you'd encourage a client to cooperate if he wanted to be crossed off the list.”
Upman didn't embrace the explanation, but he also didn't press the issue.
Lynley and Hanken took themselves out of his office and into the street, where Hanken immediately said, “What a snake,” as they walked to the car. “What a slimy bugger. Did you believe his story?”
“Which part of it?”
“Any of it. All of it. I don't care.”
“As a lawyer, naturally, everything he said was immediately suspect.”
This effected a reluctant smile in Hanken.
“But he gave us some useful information. I'd like to talk to the Maidens again and see if I can get anything out of them that will corroborate Upman's suspicions that Nicola was seeing someone in London. If there's another lover somewhere, there's another motive for murder.”
“For Britton,” Hanken acknowledged. He jerked his head in the direction of Upman's office. “But what about him? D'you plan to list him among your suspects?”
“Till we check him out, definitely.”
Hanken nodded. “I think I'm starting to like you,” he said.
Cilia Thompson was in residence at the studio when Barbara Havers tracked it down, three arches away from the dead end of Portslade Road. She had the two big front doors completely open, and she was in the midst of what looked like a creative fury, slashing at a canvas with paint as what sounded like African drums emanated rhythmically from a dusty CD player. The volume was high. Against her skin and in her sternum, Barbara could feel the pulsations.
“Cilia Thompson?” she shouted, wrestling her identification from her shoulder bag. “Can I have a word?”
Cilia read the warrant card and put her paint brush between her teeth. She punched a button on the CD player, choked off the drums, and returned to her work. She said, “Cyn Cole told me,” and continued to smother the canvas with paint. Barbara sidled round to have a look at her work: It was a gaping mouth out of which rose a motherly looking woman wielding a teapot decorated with snakes. Lovely, Barbara thought. The painter was definitely filling a vacuum in the art world.
“Terry's sister told you that he was murdered?”
“His mum phoned her from the North soon as she saw the body. Cyn phoned me. I thought something was up when she rang last night. Her voice wasn't right. You know what I mean. But I wouldn't have guessed … I mean, like, who would've wanted to snuff Terry Cole? He was a harmless little prick. A bit demented, considering his work, but harmless all the same.”
She said this last with a perfectly straight face, as if all round her were canvases by Peter Paul Rubens and not depictions of countless mouths regurgitating everything from oil slicks to motorway pile-ups.
The work of her compatriots wasn't much better from what Barbara could see. The other artists were sculptors like Terry. One used crushed rubbish bins as a medium. The other used rusting supermarket trolleys.
“Yeah. Right,” Barbara said. “But I s'pose it's all a matter of taste.”
Cilia rolled her eyes. “Not to someone who's educated in art.”
“Terry wasn't?”
“Terry was a poser, no offence. He wasn't educated in anything except lying. And he'd got like a first in that.”
“His mum said he was working on a big commission,” Barbara said. “Can you tell me about it?”
“For Paul McCartney, I have no doubt” was Cilia's dry reply. “Depending on what day of the week you happened to have a chat with him, Terry was working on a project that would bring him millions, or getting ready to sue Pete Townshend for not telling the world he had a bastard son—that's Terry, mind you—or stumbling on some secret documents that he planned to sell to the tabloids, or having lunch with the director of the Royal Academy Or opening a topflight gallery where he'd sell his sculptures for twenty thousand a pop.”
“So there was no commission?”
“That's a safe bet.” Cilia stepped back from her canvas to study it. She applied a smear of red to the mouth's lower lip. She followed with a smear of white, saying, “Ah. Yes,” in apparent reference to the effect she'd attained.
“You're coping quite well with Terry's death,” Barbara noted. “For having just heard about it, that is.”
Cilia read the statement for what it was: implied criticism. Catching up another brush and dipping it into a glob of purple on her palette, she said, “Terry and I shared a flat. We shared this studio. We sometimes had a meal together or went to the pub. But we weren't real mates. We were people who served a purpose for each other: sharing expenses so we, like, didn't have to work where we lived.”
Considering the size of Terry's sculptures and the nature of Cilia's paintings, this arrangement made sense. But it also reminded Barbara of a remark that Mrs. Baden had made. “How did your boyfriend feel about the deal, then?”
“You've been talking to Prune-face, I see. She's been waiting for Dan to cut up rough with someone ever since she saw him. Talk about judging a bloke on appearances.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And has he ever? Cut up rough, that is. With Terry. It's not your everyday situation, is it, when one bloke's girlfriend is living with another bloke.”
“Like I said, we aren't—weren't—living with like in living with. Most of the time we didn't even see each other. We didn't hang out with the same group even. Terry had his mates and I have mine.”
“Did you know his mates?”
The purple paint went into the hair of the mouth-sprung woman who was holding the teapot in Cilia's painting. She applied it in a thick curving line then used the palm of her hand to smear it, after which she wiped her palm on the front of her dungarees. The effect on the canvas was disconcerting. It rather looked as if Mother had holes in her head. Cilia took up grey next and advanced on Mother's nose. Barbara stepped to one side, not wishing to see what the artist intended.
“He didn't bring them round,” Cilia said. “It was mostly phone chat and they were mostly women. And they phoned him. Not the other way round.”
“Did he have a girlfriend? A special woman, I mean.”
“He didn't do women. Not that I ever knew.”
“Gay?”
“Asexual. He didn't do anything. Except toss off. And even that's a real maybe.”
“His world was his art?” Barbara offered.
Cilia whooped. “Such as it was.” She stepped back from her canvas and evaluated it. “Yes,” she said, and turned it round to face Barbara. “Voila. Now, that tells a proper tale, doesn't it?”
Mother's nose was excreting an unsavoury substance. Barbara decided that Cilia couldn't possibly have spoken words more true about her painting. She murmured her assent. Cilia carried her masterwork to a ledge along which half a dozen other paintings rested. From among them she selected an unfinished canvas and carried it to the easel to continue with her work.
She dragged a stool to the right of her easel. She rustled in a cardboard box and brought forth a mousetrap with its victim still in place. She set this on a stool and made its companions a moth-eaten, taxidermic cat and ajar of pasta cheese. She shuffled these objects this way and that until she had the composition she required. Then she
set upon the unfinished canvas, where the lower lip of a mouth had been harpooned by a hook and a tongue protruded.
“Can I assume Terry didn't sell much?” Barbara asked her.
“He sold sod all,” Cilia said cheerfully. “But then he wasn't, like, ever willing to put enough of himself into it, was he? And if you don't give your all to your art, your art isn't going to give anything back to you. I put my guts right onto the canvas and the canvas rewards me.”
“Artistic satisfaction,” Barbara said solemnly.
“Hey, I sell. A real gent bought a piece off me not two days ago. Walked in here, took one look, said he had to have his own Cilia Thompson straightaway, and brought out the chequebook.”
Right, Barbara thought. The woman had quite an imagination. “So if he never sold a sculpture, where did Terry get the beans to pay for everything? The flat. This studio …” Not to mention the gardening tools that he appeared to have amassed by the gross, she thought.
“He said his money was a payoff from his dad. He had enough of it, mind you.”
“Payoff?” Now, here was something that could lead them somewhere. “Was he blackmailing someone?”
“Sure,” Cilia said. “His dad. Pete Townshend, like I said. As long as old Pete kept the lolly rolling in, Terry wouldn't go to the papers crying, ‘Dad's floating in it and I've got sod all.’ Ha. As if Terry Cole had the slightest hope of convincing anyone he wasn't what he really was: a scam man out for the easy life.”
This wasn't too far from Mrs. Baden's description of Terry Cole, albeit spoken with far less affection. But if Terry Cole had been into a scam, what had it been? And who had been its victim?
There had to be evidence of something somewhere. And there seemed to be only one place where that evidence might be. She needed to have a look through the flat, Barbara explained. Would Cilia be willing to cooperate?