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.”