Hadley sat alongside the detective superintendent at a hastily arranged press conference, saying very little herself, content to let McKeon voice the usual platitudes, dole out assurances, the residue of a Belfast accent lending his words the taint of gritty sensibility.
Both the BBC and Channel 4 News had their crime correspondents doing OBs from outside the entrance to the police station on Holmes Road, oiks from one or other of the local primary schools delighting in dashing across in the background, fingers raised.
The swell of journalists of all stripes meant the queues outside Franco Manca were longer than usual.
Obituaries in the broadsheet press testified to Winter’s place amongst those artists who had made a sometimes unfashionable stand against abstraction on the one hand and conceptual art on the other. Richard Cork appeared on Newsnight, cementing Winter’s place amongst a pantheon of British representational painters which ran from Stanley Spencer and Frank Auerbach to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
Feminist critics railed on social media and in the pages of the Guardian about the misogyny at the heart of Winter’s work and the tyranny of the male gaze. Rachel printed out the choicest of these and presented them to Hadley along with her granola at breakfast.
‘You think one of these could be responsible?’ Hadley asked. ‘The feminist mafia?’
‘I wouldn’t discount it. I was at this conference once, I remember. “Psychotherapy and the Visual Arts”, something along those lines. This woman came along as guest lecturer, professor in art history from Leeds or somewhere, red hair and red boots up to here. Scared the shit out of me, I don’t mind telling you.’
The image stuck with Hadley right up to the start of the team meeting, red boots and red hair, wondering if being seen through a female gaze made it any more acceptable.
The interactive whiteboard was busy but as yet uncluttered. A head-and-shoulders shot of Winter; photographs of the body, in situ, close-ups of the injuries sustained. A detailed map showed the position of the studio, the surrounding streets and buildings. Off to one side a photograph of Frank Elder, blurry and somewhat out of date, and below that, a photo of his daughter, Katherine, both snatched from the Internet.
The report from the Coroner’s Office was inconclusive; the post-mortem had been set for that day and then put into abeyance due to personnel issues; still no definite pronouncement as to time of death, somewhere between midnight and 2 a.m. on the Sunday morning seeming the most likely.
A search of Winter’s flat had found an iMac computer and two phones, one landline, one mobile. After the necessary authorisations had been obtained, the Telephone Intelligence Unit had begun logging Winter’s calls, starting with the forty-eight hours before his death, examining his emails.
SOCO, perhaps not surprisingly, had garnered a host of prints from Winter’s studio, half a dozen of those recurring a number of times – Winter’s own, of course, the others in the process of being identified. More specifically, Terry Mitchell said, there were three sets of prints on the manacles and chain, two of those only partial, the one most clearly identifiable belonging to Winter himself.
‘Howie,’ Hadley said, moving things along, ‘where are we with regards to CCTV?’
Howard Dean moved forward to the map.
‘Four cameras, boss, for our purposes none of them ideal. Two traffic cameras on the main road, here and here, pointing in different directions. Then there’s one camera at the front of this new building – flats and offices – which covers the main entrance and a section of pavement leading to this path, alley, call it what you will, that leads down to the studio. What it doesn’t show is the pavement on the other side, so anyone approaching from that direction – east instead of west – wouldn’t get picked up at all.’
‘And this path leading to the studio, that’s the only way in?’
‘Unless you climb over three metres of chain fence with a barbed-wire topping, separating the studio from this builder’s yard, yes.’
‘You said four cameras,’ Hadley said. ‘That’s only three.’
‘The fourth,’ said Dean, indicating on the map, ‘is here, on this stanchion between these two sections of fence. The intention being, I imagine, to discourage anyone from cutting their way through the fence and making off with the equipment kept in the yard overnight.
‘It looks to be pointing along the path to the studio, and when it’s in neutral position, shall we say, that’s what it does. But it’s motion-sensitive so all it needs is for a fox to start foraging through these bins at the back of the flats, or for there to be some kind of movement in the yard itself, and it changes direction. Which means it’s not focused on the path at all times. Anyone knowing it’s there and not wanting to be seen approaching could watch and wait and choose their moment. Added to which, the quality of the image is such that any barrister worth his or her salt would have a good chance, where identification’s concerned, of rubbishing it out of court. Like I say, boss, less than ideal.’
Nightmare, Hadley thought, that’s what it was.
‘How far have you got,’ she asked, ‘viewing all this?’
Dean shook his head. ‘There’s hours and hours of the stuff, boss. Without another pair of eyes, one at least, preferably more, be this time next week before we’ve seen everything.’
‘I’ll do what I can. Talk to McKeon, see if we can’t muster up some help.’ She looked across the room. ‘Mark, Winter’s background. Any skeletons in that particular cupboard?’
‘None so far, boss, not that I can see. He was married to a Susannah Fielding from nineteen eighty-nine till they divorced ten years later. She’s an artist, too. A painter. Lives in Letchworth, Letchworth Garden City. Two children, Matthew and Melissa, born in nineteen ninety-two and ninety-four respectively. There seems to have been only one significant relationship since the divorce, one that I’ve been able to track down: another artist, Adriana Borrell. Sculptor, apparently. And that seems to have been a good ten years back if not more.’
‘Do we have an address for her?’
‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’
‘Okay, keep working on it. You never know, it might be useful, maybe not. But good work. Good work, everyone. Chris is down in Cornwall talking to this man, Frank Elder, about the incident at the gallery, and Alice and I are off to Dalston to talk to the daughter. We’ll reconvene tomorrow. Meantime, anything especially significant, groundbreaking, I want to know almost as soon as you know yourselves.’