A Painted Doom (6 page)

Eventually Wesley managed to get away. Gerry Heffernan was a widower with nobody waiting for him in his cottage overlooking
the river on Baynard’s Quay. But Wesley had a wife and son waiting for him – and he was hungry.

When Pam Peterson heard her husband’s key in the door,
she wandered out into the hall to greet him. Her face looked pale and drawn as she stifled a yawn. ‘You’re late,’ she said,
without reproach. ‘I haven’t eaten yet. I started writing up my lesson plans for next week and I lost track of time.’

‘How was school?’ Wesley asked dutifully. The Easter holidays had been an oasis of peace in their otherwise hectic domestic
lives. Pam had read the books she had received for Christmas, played with baby Michael and made the arrangements for his first
birthday party; she had had a home-cooked dinner on the table every night, caught up with friends. But two days ago term had
started again and Michael had returned to his childminder. Things were back to normal, thought Wesley with regret.

‘Two days back and it feels like I’ve never been away. Some schools aren’t back till next Monday,’ she said with a touch of
envy. ‘And it’s my turn to do an assembly: I’m getting the little darlings to sing a couple of French songs – “Frère Jacques”
and “Sur le Pont d’Avignon” – should impress the parents if nothing else. What about you?’

Wesley put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. ‘Someone’s been shot dead at Derenham. Found in a field of cows.
That’s why I’m late.’

‘Accident?’ Mishaps with shotguns weren’t unknown in the countryside.

‘Doesn’t look like it. But we’ll know more tomorrow. Have you heard of a singer called Jonny Shellmer?’

‘Of course I have. My mother had all Rock Boat’s records – she was a big fan. Why do you ask?’

‘There’s been no formal identification yet but it’s possible that Jonny Shellmer might have been the victim of this shooting.’

This got Pam’s attention. ‘You mean he shot himself?’

Wesley shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, there was no gun found by the body so that usually rules out suicide. What do you know
about him?’ he asked tentatively. ‘What kind of rock star was he? Was he the wild, drug-crazed variety smashing up hotel rooms?
Or was he the caring type,
saving the rainforest and visiting African villages?’

Pam began to laugh. ‘You sound as if you’ve never heard of him.’

Wesley smiled sheepishly. ‘Jonny Shellmer was way before my time. And even if he had been around when I was of an age to be
interested in that sort of thing, you know what my parents are like: an unhealthy interest in pop stars wasn’t encouraged
in our house.’

‘You poor, deprived child,’ she said with a grin, planting a kiss on his cheek.

Wesley’s parents, having come over from Trinidad to study medicine in London, had been determined that their children should
succeed in their adopted country and had sent them to the best private schools and ensured that their musical experiences
were more in the line of piano lessons and church choirs than an enthusiasm for rock stars. Pam, raised by an ineffectual
father and a giddy mother blown by the winds of fashion, had a sneaking admiration for the Petersons’ dedication.

She thought for a moment, trying to sort Jonny Shellmer in her mind from her mother’s other enthusiasms. Wesley noticed how
pale she looked, the dark rings standing out beneath her eyes. She didn’t look well.

‘I don’t really know much about him. To me he was just some pop singer my mum liked in her youth.’

‘Gerry Heffernan reckoned he came from Liverpool,’ Wesley said, steering her towards the kitchen. They would make the supper
together – it would be quicker.

‘Gerry would, wouldn’t he,’ she said, making for the refrigerator. As she pulled out a packet of sausages she remembered that
she had something to tell Wesley. ‘I almost forgot – your mother rang. She’s coming down to Morbay on Saturday for a weekend
conference. I think she said it was some kind of drug company do when they get a load of doctors down to a posh hotel and
try and push the latest wonder drug. I said we’d meet her for lunch on Sunday. Is that okay?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said quickly, hoping that Shellmer’s death wouldn’t put paid to the family reunion.

The fact that he hadn’t seen his parents since Christmas was nagging on his conscience. They lived in London, where his father
was a consultant surgeon in one of the great teaching hospitals and his mother a family doctor. But the recent lack of contact
wasn’t through choice: they all lived busy lives and time passed so quickly. It was the way of the modern world.

‘I just hope this shooting doesn’t muck up our plans,’ he said, frowning. Things had been quiet recently: only a couple of
break-ins and some thefts from boats moored on the Trad. A few days back, Gerry Heffernan had joked that the villains were
taking their holidays before the tourist season started. Wesley had known it was too good to last.

A mournful wail drifted through the living room, and Pam thrust the sausages into Wesley’s hand. ‘I left Michael in his playpen.
You see to these.’

He could hear her singing softly to the baby: ‘Frère Jacques’. The tune must have been to Michael’s taste because the wailing
stopped immediately.

He looked down at the cold, unappetising things in his hand and wrinkled his nose. ‘I spotted Neil today,’ he called through.
‘He was standing outside some old barn, but I didn’t have a chance to stop and see what he was up to.’

There was no reply. Either Pam hadn’t heard or her silence indicated disapproval. Perhaps it was best that he hadn’t had time
to stop. Neil had a habit of drawing him into the puzzles of his profession, and Wesley had problems enough of his own to
be going on with.

But as he sat on the sofa that night drinking red wine and watching Pam’s eyelids close as her favourite TV detective, Inspector
Morgan, sprang via a series of impenetrable clues to some brilliant conclusion that left Wesley’s sleepy brain way behind,
he found himself looking at the telephone and
willing Neil to call and tell him just what he had been doing at that old barn in Derenham.

Neil Watson sat in the Red Bull at Derenham and thought about phoning his old friend. But then, he thought, if there had been
some major incident at that place near Terry Hoxworthy’s farm, Wesley would probably be busy interviewing suspects with the
aid of a few electrodes or whatever it was the police did down in those cells. Neil had held a dim view of policing ever since
a small incident involving a cannabis plant when he was a student.

He had been shaken when Wesley – the brightest student of his year on the archaeology course at Exeter University – had chosen
to join the police force rather than pursue an academic archaeological career. A less likely member of the forces of oppression
Neil couldn’t imagine. But Wesley had always claimed that he relished the challenge of detection rather than the chore of
everyday law enforcement. And he had risen rapidly in the Met’s CID, his special talents propelling him into the Arts and
Antique squad before he opted for a posting to the supposedly calmer waters of Tradmouth.

Neil, meanwhile, had settled into his own niche in the County Archaeological Unit. And now that he had almost completed his
PhD he would soon be able to call himself ‘Dr Watson’. That would tickle Wesley, he thought as he raised a glass of beer to
his lips – his friend had always been a great fan of Sherlock Holmes and his medical side-kick.

He glanced around the pub, low beamed and cosy with a roaring fire in the hearth. The locals he had talked to while working
on his excavations had told him that several celebrities had places in Derenham. A couple of television presenters, three
actors, including Jeremy Sedley – quite a household name – a TV chef, a bestselling author, Michael Burrows the weatherman,
and feared TV interviewer Jack Cromer all featured in the latest roll-call of famous inhabitants. But if
these august personages were resident in the village, they hadn’t chosen to drink in its pub tonight, although the place was
filling up nicely.

Neil looked at his watch. He had limited himself to one pint of bitter. He had to drive back to Exeter, so hanging around
for another drink might not be the wisest of options.

He resented the fact that he had to attend a meeting at his Exeter office first thing in the morning. He wanted to stay in
Derenham. The aerial photographs he had seen, the geophysics results and the finds they had already unearthed, all pointed
to something really exciting in Manor Field: something he was impatient to uncover.

Everything found so far dated from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and evidence of scorching on the low stone walls
suggested a building which had been destroyed by fire.

The skull – the village hall contractors’ original grisly find – was still a mystery. No other human bones had been found,
as yet, among the medieval foundations. Just the skull – a head buried on its own. Some sort of ritual, perhaps. Were the
inhabitants of the big house back in the Middle Ages involved in black magic?

Neil had already begun to delve in archives and consult local historians. Some deeds he had discovered in Tradmouth Museum
suggested that the foundations belonged to a lost manor house, the home of a family called Merrivale. All mention of the house
had ceased at the start of the sixteenth century, and later Tudor records made no mention of a family called Merrivale in
the village at all. Old tithe maps named the site of the excavation as Manor Field but gave no hint of any sort of building
there. In fact the field, although in a prime position in the village, hadn’t been built on since the Middle Ages, as far
as he could see.

But the skull and the sudden disappearance of the manor house weren’t the only secrets kept by the pretty riverside village.
There was the strange painting in the old barn: a huge semicircular wooden panel covered with bizarre
painted scenes which seemed tantalisingly old. At some point in its existence it had been shoved up in the old hayloft, face
to the wall and out of sight behind the hay bales – but then it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone would keep around for decoration.
Neil had seen medieval wall paintings in a similar style, but he hardly liked to speculate about what it could be until it
had been examined by experts.

He had the uneasy feeling that perhaps he had let his enthusiasm run away with him and raised Terry Hoxworthy’s hopes too
much; that it might be some lurid and worthless nineteenth-century daub after all, a gross fantasy in oils produced by some
sexually repressed Victorian amateur artist. But the thing did look old – and Neil was an optimist by nature.

Just as he was thinking of Terry Hoxworthy, the man himself appeared in the doorway of the long, low-beamed pub. Now was his
opportunity to convince the farmer that bringing in experts to examine his barn and his strange painting would bring no end
of nameless benefits.

He was about to call Hoxworthy over and offer him a drink to oil the wheels of co-operation, but he saw that the farmer looked
secretive, preoccupied, and sensed that it wouldn’t be a good time to broach the subject of history. Terry Hoxworthy obviously
had other things on his mind.

A woman walked into the bar. She wore a long, hooded black coat which billowed behind her as she moved. She looked around,
searching for a face among the drinkers. Neil watched as she removed the coat to reveal a shapeless black dress which covered
a small skinny body. Her shoulder-length dark hair was peppered with grey, and it was obvious to Neil that she had been pretty
once, maybe even beautiful. But now her movements were mouselike, quick and anxious to avoid attention. Her great dark eyes
looked from left to right, scanning each face in the bar. She caught Neil’s eye and quickly looked away.

At last she spotted her quarry, and Neil watched as she
scurried over to the corner of the bar and sat down next to Terry Hoxworthy, who looked about him as though afraid that someone
would overhear.

Neil drained his glass and walked quickly out of the pub and into the damp night air. His instincts told him that it wasn’t
a good idea to hang around. From the woman’s obvious unease and Hoxworthy’s furtive manner, he guessed that he had unwittingly
stumbled on an extramarital affair. Terry Hoxworthy, he thought to himself with an inward smile, was a man with something
to hide.

Detective Sergeant Rachel Tracey was still relishing her brand-new rank. Men, she thought as she strolled through Derenham
village early the next morning, weren’t worth it: she would concentrate on her career from now on. She had to put up with
her mother’s worried looks and the jibes of her three brothers about her continued single status, but she didn’t let them
worry her. She was making plans to move away from her family’s farm and into a flat of her own anyway. She would put the past
and all its associated pain and embarrassment behind her and begin again, start afresh.

She looked at her companion, a good-looking dark-haired man in his twenties; a snappy dresser with a brown leather jacket
that must have cost him a couple of weeks’ salary. Detective Constable Steve Carstairs walked beside her, hands in pockets.
They didn’t make conversation. It was hard to think of anything to say to Steve Carstairs that wouldn’t be twisted and taken
the wrong way. It was best to stick to professional matters.

‘What’s next on the list?’ she asked.

Steve consulted the sheet of paper in his hand. ‘The boss wants us to visit the houses along the lane. There’s a big place
called the Old Vicarage, but I don’t think the vicar lives there – and there’s a cottage near its gates. Someone called yesterday
but there was no answer. Then he wants us to go to Hoxworthy’s farm again. The uniforms talked to
Mrs Hoxworthy yesterday but the boss wants us to pay another visit. You can see the field from their farmhouse, so someone
might have spotted something suspicious.’ He looked at Rachel, slightly wary. ‘Okay, er … Sarge?’

Rachel smiled. She knew the title ‘Sarge’ stuck in Steve’s throat. For one thing they had joined CID at around the same time
and he remained a detective constable – and for another thing, she was female. But Steve, she told herself, had only himself
to blame: he hadn’t even attempted his sergeant’s exam, so what did he expect? In this life you reaped what you sowed.