AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ravensbourne’s phone rang. Either she had a strange sense of humour, or a wicked grandchild, but the ringtone was the B52s singing Love Shack. She looked at the phone and excused herself. Tom and Charlie grinned at each other, then Charlie remembered the wife and children again, and asked to see Vitruvious’s file.
“Hang on,” Tom said. He got a sheet of A4 out of his desk drawer and waved it at Charlie. “I got Ann to make me this crib sheet on how to get into the personnel files. I haven’t looked at them before. Eat the cake, this’ll take me a couple of minutes.”
Charlie ate the cake. It was on the dry side but still very welcome.
“This is weird,” Tom said. “Let me start again.” He began following the steps on his crib sheet, ticking them off with a pencil as he went. “Right, Vitruvious, enter …” He turned the laptop to face Charlie. “No file of that name exists,” read the text in the little box. “Please check and try again.”
“That was the third time,” Tom said. “The system is working. I’ve found my own file.” He turned the laptop back to face himself and clicked a few times before turning it back. “It’s even up to date.”
The screen had multiple boxes with text. The first one read: “Pennant, Tomos Dylan, Principal (Acting).”
“Tomos Dylan?” Charlie asked. “Really?”
“Do not go there. My father’s idea of a joke. I simply wanted you to see that it works. I’ve tried a couple of others, and they’re fine too. Only Vitruvious is missing. Let me ask Ann.” Tom went next door to the secretary’s office.
Charlie walked round the room, looking out of the window onto the courtyard and over the rooftops to the hills beyond. Then he examined the bookcases. There were a lot of glossy exhibition catalogues, thick and heavy with shiny covers and the sheen of expensive colour printing on each page. Most had their spines facing towards the room, but a few showed the front cover, and one of these caught his eye. He picked it up and carried it to the table: Habitatons: Tomos Pennant.
The image on the front cover was of a block of flats too tall for the page. The building itself was drawn in delicate black lines. Some of the windows were empty. Others contained tiny tableaux of ordinary life. There were families eating, single people watching TV, someone playing with a dog, two children fighting, lovers kissing. Each of the tableaux was coloured, but delicately. Charlie opened the book. A double page spread showed the same house on each page—a simple semi-detached house of which there must be millions in the UK. On the left, the outside of the house was rendered in the same delicate lines, an image of something mundane made beautiful. On the opposite page, the building was opened up like a dolls’ house, so that every room could be seen in all its detail. Inky colours glowed, trapped between delicate lines of drawing. On the next page was a thatched cottage, looking like a picture postcard, except for a single window through which a man could be seen sitting alone, drinking whisky. A book had fallen to the floor beside his chair, and there was a cat peering around a door in the back of the room. When Charlie saw the cat, he exclaimed, touching the image with his finger, as if to stroke its fur.
A voice came from close behind him. “Not the fucking cat. Please tell me you’re not looking at the cat.” Charlie looked up at Tom who was grimacing. “My daughter Ziggy asked for that cat, and fair play, it will pay her university fees with enough left over for her sister. But am I to go down in history as the man who drew a cat in a thatched cottage? Wallpaper, like Vitruvious says. Look.” Tom took the book and turned several pages. This time the images were of static caravans in rows, like the huge holiday parks on the coast. Some were empty, others had coloured images through the windows. Ordinary people, doing ordinary things. Charlie found it moving, in a way the cat hadn’t moved him. The cat was cute; these made him see the world differently.
“I don’t know what to say,” Charlie said. “I’ve never seen anything like them. I’m a bit stunned to be honest. Is this what you were doing in New York?”
“Some of it, some other things too. Drawing mostly. The prints would have come later. I’d be happy to show you. I could make dinner--he winked--“and then I could show you my etchings. Go on, I’d love to.”
Charlie thought that he would love to as well. Except that Tom had a family and even if he hadn’t, from what he had seen on the pages of the book, Tom was so far out of his league Charlie would need a rocket to get close. Anyway, there were crimes to deal with.
“Could your secretary find Vitruvious’s file,” he asked, his tone carefully neutral.
Tom’s brightness faded. “No,” he said.
Charlie didn’t know whether it was his own refusal to acknowledge Tom’s offer of dinner and etchings, or the missing Vitruvious file, but the big man slumped down into his chair, his shoulders hunched and his chin dropping towards his chest. The catalogue closed itself on the table in front of Charlie. Charlie noticed that the gallery where the exhibition had been held was one even he had heard of.
It was a shame, but there it was. He would love to talk more with Tom about the images, but there was no point in wishing for things that couldn’t happen. Charlie thought Tom looked sad, and had the urge to make it better. Whether he would have indulged the urge, he didn’t find out. The door opened to Ravensbourne. Molecules of fresh cigarette smoke entered the room first, followed by the untidy figure busily tucking her phone back into her trouser pocket.
“That was Hector Powell,” she said. “He’s the pathologist, does post-mortems. He’s very good,” she added to Tom. “We got lucky and he did the PM as soon as they got the body back. The victim didn’t die where we found him. Also no surprise that he’d been dead for between three and four days. As for what killed him, Hector was less sure. But he said that he’s going to test for every drug under the sun. The thing he wanted us to know was that the victim hadn’t eaten anything for several days before he died, and that the body showed signs of severe dehydration. It’s entirely possible that the dehydration was the cause of death.”
“Kaylan was dehydrated,” Charlie said. “He needed a day in hospital on an intravenous drip to recover. Is dehydration associated with memory loss?”
“Exactly what I asked Hector,” Ravensbourne said. “He said not, and that’s why he was testing for drugs like Rohypnol—which do cause memory loss.”
“We need to talk to Kaylan again,” Charlie said. “About this, and about whether he paid for his place here. Not that he’s been willing to tell us much, so far.”
“Can I help?” Tom’s voice was unexpected. “I could look at his application if you like, see if I think it would meet our admission criteria. I could look at both of them, Kaylan and Rico.”
Ravensbourne nodded. “Please,” she said. Tom went back to his laptop.
“I know how to access those records—we all have to evaluate a bunch of them every week. There’s no off-season when it comes to applying for a place here.” He clicked about with much more confidence than he had shown when looking for staff records, but after a while, the pace of his keystrokes slowed, and then stopped. He went back to the keyboard and clicked some more. Charlie sidled over, looking at as much of the screen as he could see. His best guess was that he was looking at a series of photographs of ceramic sculptures. Tom snatched up the desk phone.
“Peter, Tom Pennant,” he snapped, visibly irritated. “Why do I not have access to the admissions files for painting students?”
They all heard the reply. “You do have access. To all the admissions files.”
“Excellent. So perhaps you would like to come up here and demonstrate that. Because what I have on my screen is an irritating pop-up telling me that access is denied.”
There was silence from the other end, and then, “I don’t know what the problem is, Tom. I can’t get access either. I’ll get back to you as soon as.”
Charlie’s phone buzzed. Eddy.
