‘I like to paint,’ he said. ‘I’m not doing it for the fame or the fortune.’
‘Certainly not the fortune,’ muttered Seawoll.
His dad lived in a small brick two-up, two-down terrace in the mini-suburb of Dinting, within view of the famous viaduct. The one Seawoll had told us about in his story of foolishly alighting passengers falling to their death. From the valley floor it was even more impressive, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be first on the scene at that particular fatal accident.
This wasn’t Seawoll’s ancestral seat. That had been further up the road in Glossop proper, but his dad had downsized ten years earlier, after Seawoll’s mum had died of ovarian cancer. This was all news to us lower ranks who, while we’d theoretically known Seawoll had parents, had always assumed that he’d been assembled in a factory somewhere outside Wakefield. I was making sure I remembered details, because Guleed and Stephanopoulos were bound to want to know.
Half the small back garden was occupied by Seawoll’s dad’s studio/man shed. His dad slept on the couch in that, Seawoll got his dad’s room, Danni the spare, and I got the sofa in the living room downstairs. Since this not only opened directly onto the street but also the kitchen and the stairs, there was no chance of me sleeping through Seawoll and his father arguing about the best way to fry bacon.
Looking at Seawoll’s dad, you could see where his son had got his height. But he himself was rake-thin. Age had shrunk him further, until the cuffs on his denim shirt had to be rolled up to stop them slipping down his arms. He had a big forehead, thinning grey hair and a stubborn chin which jutted out when he fought with his son.
They were still arguing – this time about whether a collective should be allowed to win the Turner Prize – when I came down from my turn in the bathroom. Danni joined in the discussion over breakfast – Seawoll had warned us that police work was not to be discussed under his father’s roof.
Seawoll father and son were civil, but there was a definite coolness. From my long experience dealing with the internecine conflicts within my mum’s vast extended family, it was clear that some deadly past grievance had not been so much resolved as locked in a box and then walled up – never to be spoken of again.
My therapist says that repressing such feelings is counterproductive, but she probably hasn’t seen as many family fights as me.
While the others discussed whether sticking a tree outside a petrol station really constituted a work of art, I wrote up my notes on my encounter with Lesley. She’d been commissioned to steal an item, but it had been damaged during the theft and ‘something’ had escaped. A something that Lesley believed was responsible for the murders of Preston Carmichael and David Moore. A something that was probably the Angel of the Burning Spear that I’d run into on Middlesex Street.
For something that had been stuck in a lamp, she’d looked pretty solid to me. And, more importantly, she’d showed up on CCTV … so what kind of container could she have been trapped in?
We knew that there were other dimensions of existence – what one of Nightingale’s old school friends had labelled allokosmoi. I’d even spent time in one, the land of Faerie, twice now. We also knew that they brushed up against our world and created weird boundary effects like invisible unicorns and localised private weather systems. The genii locorum seemed to be able to attract them to a locality – the suddenly uncluttered airfield of the previous night was an example, as was my beloved’s ability to swim like a dolphin in a river that’s less than a half a metre deep.
However, I would be reluctant to suggest that the stolen lamp may have been a bit like a Tardis even in the confidential Folly files, let alone on CRIMINT.
Still, if we could narrow down the date and time of Lesley’s lamp theft, then we might be able to track Our Lady of the Weirdly Glowing Halo from Glossop to London. The more we learnt about her and her origins, the easier she would be to deal with … this chain of reasoning being bloody optimistic even by my standards.
Disputes over the role of the individual artist aside – the breakfast was delicious.
After eating, we threw our overnight bags back in the Ford Escort and Seawoll headed back towards the address Glossop Brook had given me. This was across town and off the A57 on a turn-off I’d walked past in the darkness on the way back down from the beacons.
‘This goes up to the quarry,’ said Seawoll, wrenching the Escort’s steering wheel round and revving it up the slope. ‘I didn’t know there was anything else up here.’
‘Down there,’ said Danni who was navigating – pointing down a narrow lane completely overshadowed by old trees. We rounded a curve, following the contour of the hill, and suddenly we were pulling up in front of a gleaming white modernist tower. It was built into the hillside so that the drive terminated in a sunken entrance/garage with vertical concrete revetments rising diagonally with the slope. Mature trees overshadowed the approach, the damp green canopies dripping onto us as we climbed out of the car.
‘Fuck me,’ said Seawoll, looking up. ‘How long the fuck has this been here?’
Three more storeys rose above the ground floor, all the same blank white plastered masonry finish, with picture windows running the full width – bisected by the railings of a purely decorative balcony. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it would have a flat roof with a parapet to ensure rainwater pooled and caused it to need replacing every ten years. It was a poem of volume and geometry without humanity – a little bit of Swiss megalomania come to the North.
As Bev says, I have views about the International Style.
The front door was made of frosted glass in a brushed aluminium frame and the doorbell was a palm-sized rectangle of pale blue plastic. When I pressed it we heard a low musical chime from somewhere above.
We waited a bit and then I rang again – three times.
Nothing – and it started to rain heavily again.
I was about to press again when we heard a strange breathy, hissing sound and footsteps getting closer. A tall shape loomed behind the frosted glass and then the door opened.
A very tall East African woman stood there, with her hair in convenience twists above big brown eyes and a crooked smile. She was dressed in a black cashmere jumper that looked very expensive, despite the definite animal hairs on her arms and shoulders.
‘Hello, Peter,’ she said in a low murmur. ‘This is awkward.’
‘Hello, Caroline,’ I said, and would have said more except Caroline shushed me.
‘You have to be quiet,’ she whispered, ‘or they’ll wake up.’
I lowered my voice.
‘Who will wake up?’ I asked, but Caroline ignored me and turned to Seawoll.
‘You I remember,’ she said, and then, nodding to Danni, ‘You’re new. Is this an official visit?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Folly official or Old Bill official?’
‘Yes,’ I said, because you can’t show weakness to posh people or they’ll mercilessly take advantage. I think it’s something they learn at school in between conversational French and practical condescension. Lady Caroline Elizabeth Louise Linden-Limmer may have been adopted into the gentry, but she’d picked up the attitude from an early age.
Seawoll obviously remembered her, too, so I introduced her, quietly, to Danni.
‘You’d better come in, but keep it down,’ she said. ‘If you wake them up you can sing them back to sleep yourself.’
Inside was a cool white hallway with a floor of red terracotta tiles and a side door that, presumably, opened into the garage. At the far end was that most beloved of modernist deathtraps – a spiral staircase. This took us up, the steps creaking slightly under Seawoll’s weight, to an open-plan lounge, dining room and kitchen which seemed to be furnished entirely with enormous beanbags in a variety of pastel shades – blue, pink and purple. There was a strange smell, and I saw that people were curled up asleep on the beanbags. One was close enough to the stairs for us to get a good look and I heard Danni stifle a ‘Fuck’.