Free A Painted Doom by Kate Ellis Page A

cottage was dark in the gloom of the dull spring day. Wesley flicked a switch and the long,
     low room was immediately bathed in light. There was a faint whiff of cigarette smoke in the air, and a full ashtray stood
     on the dark wooden coffee table in the middle of the room.
    ‘It’s not really what I expected,’ Wesley said, looking around.
    Heffernan stood, arms folded, in the centre of the room. ‘I don’t know why but I thought all pop stars lived in pads covered
     in leopard skin with sunken Jacuzzis and wall-to-wall blondes.’
    Wesley could tell that his boss was mildly disappointed in Shellmer’s whitewashed walls and velvet curtains. The pair of plain
     claret-coloured sofas and the Victorian cast-iron fireplace hardly shrieked out drug-induced decadence. But it was a rented
     place, a temporary stop hardly worth stamping the personality on. And Shellmer had probably left his wild days behind. Like
     most people, he had, no doubt, mellowed with age.
    The only clues to Shellmer’s past were four framed gold discs propped up on the mantelpiece and an electric guitar resting
     against the arm of one of the sofas. If Wesley’s parents had been less inclined to keep him on the straight and narrow path
     of worthy education and classical music, he might have recognised it as a Gibson Les Paul. Gerry Heffernan, who hadn’t had
     Wesley’s advantages in life, picked the instrument up lovingly, like a mother with a new baby.
    ‘Beautiful,’ he purred. ‘What I wouldn’t have given for one of these little beauties when I was in my group.’
    ‘You were in a group?’ Wesley had a sudden mental picture of the overweight chief inspector in studded vest and skin-tight
     leather trousers caressing the neck of a gleaming electric guitar as he cavorted across a spotlit stage.
    ‘Don’t sound so surprised, Wes. I’ve had me moments, you know.’
    Wesley smiled to himself. ‘We’d better search the place, I suppose,’ he said, focusing his mind on the task in hand. ‘Let’s
     face it, we don’t know much about Jonny Shellmer. We don’t even know where to find his next of kin.’
    ‘The old dears next door mentioned a blonde woman whoappeared at weekends and another visitor who had a small blue car. Do we assume that Shellmer didn’t have a wife or – what
     do they call it these days – a partner in tow?’
    ‘There doesn’t seem to be any sign of one.’ Wesley thought for a moment. ‘Pam’s mother used to be a fan of his at one time.’
    ‘How is your mother-in-law, by the way?’
    Wesley raised his eyes to heaven. ‘No change, unfortunately.’ He looked around the room, planning his campaign: he liked to
     be well organised. ‘We’d better make a start. If you do in here, I’ll take the bedrooms.’
    Heffernan nodded. It seemed that Wesley had everything under control. A good education was a wonderful thing. So was delegation.
    The perfunctory search didn’t tell them a lot about the dead man. There wasn’t much in the way of personal possessions in
     his rented cottage, just the bare basics needed for a comfortable existence. Wesley strongly suspected the furniture wasn’t
     Shellmer’s style, and deduced that most of his stuff might be in storage somewhere.
    There were two bedrooms. The smaller was obviously used as a spare and had the neat, empty look of a hotel room. The larger,
     the one occupied by Shellmer, contained the usual assortment of personal items – clothes, toiletries, a couple of paperback
     thrillers, passport, credit cards, the stuff of everyday life.
    Wesley opened the top drawer of the dressing table and found a card lying on top of a collection of snowy-white T-shirts:
     on the front was a picture of an angel painted in delicate medieval colours. For a few seconds Wesley stared at the picture’s
     unearthly beauty, then he turned it over to discover that the artist was Botticelli. He opened the card. Written inside in
     gold pen were the words ‘To Jonny from