by Carl Goodman
‘A faulty batch,’ Chatham spat.
Eva faced him again. ‘Which reveals a manufacturing flaw in all the lenses.’
‘Bullshit!’ When Eva looked around she saw it was Garrick who had sworn at her. He had stepped into the room, fists clenched. Newton moved between him and Eva. ‘This is bullshit,’ Garrick yelled. ‘Where is this shit coming from?’
‘From the man who designed the lenses.’ Eva rose and stood beside Newton. ‘The resin capsule will become brittle with prolonged exposure to UV light. It will crumble over time, and when it does the lenses will break. Somebody in your company knew about this. Somebody wanted to cover it up to ensure the sale to Kleinmann goes through.’
‘You don’t have any proof,’ Chatham shouted.
‘We will have,’ Eva said. ‘We’re going to take samples of Bright Eyes and a forensic laboratory is going to subject them to ultraviolet light. They will be able to simulate ten years’ exposure in a matter of days. If at the end of the process the lens is intact, then Bright Eyes is off the hook and it’s only one faulty batch you need to worry about.’ She didn’t feel the need to elaborate on the other possible outcome.
Chatham ran his hand through his hair. Eyes wide, he gathered himself up and stood straight in front of her, righteous indignation painted across his face. ‘I am a surgeon,’ Chatham said, gathering his dignity about him like a cloak.
When she thought about it, when it came down to it, she found that she simply did not give a fuck. ‘Yes, Sir Robin,’ Eva agreed. ‘And I am an officer of the law.’
Newton and Chakrabati flanked her as they walked to the door of the Chatham Centre. A dozen or more employees had appeared. Most seemed bewildered. They looked like people who knew something was wrong, that something significant had happened, something that would affect their lives, but they didn’t know what. Confused, and now, as a consequence of Garrick’s shouts, slowly beginning to get angry.
Newton rolled when he walked, Eva noticed. His step was a little wider than usual, his shoulders were hunched slightly, his hands were not quite clenched into fists but they could be in a fraction of a second. Raj exuded the air of someone who would not back down. He was more compact than Newton, and she imagined he would hit low and hit hard. Not that they would be in it on their own, Eva vowed. She hadn’t spent the past two years pummelling bags in various gyms for nothing.
They shoved the doors open for her though, and when it came to it they left the Chatham Centre unmolested. Something stuck in the back of her throat then. A sudden awareness, a thought that hadn’t occurred to her before, and which forced her to take a sharp breath. This is my team, Eva realised as they climbed into the car. They’re with me.
* * *
Newton only started to relax once they had left the grounds of the Chatham Centre. The truth was it seemed unlikely that any of the staff would have become physically belligerent, but then again, Eva thought as she glanced in her rear-view mirror, people often behaved unpredictably under stress. She was glad Jamie and Raj had been with her.
‘Garrick has a temper on him,’ Newton noted as Eva drove along the winding road that would take them back to the dual carriageway. ‘He’s a surgeon too. He’s on the board of directors and he’s a shareholder in the Chatham Centre and Chatham Centre Holdings.’
‘Chatham isn’t much better,’ Raj added.
‘Robin Chatham couldn’t be the man who tried to kill Will Moresby. He just isn’t fit enough anymore,’ Eva said.
Newton glanced at her. ‘Could it have been Garrick?’
She thought back to the man dressed in black, the one who had split her ear open and briefly paralysed her arm with an electric-shock stun gun. Dressed in black with insectile lenses hiding his eyes, only his height, build and general athleticism had given any clue to his identity. ‘It could have been,’ Eva conceded. ‘I mean he ticks all the boxes, right?’
Neither of them disagreed. ‘Did you see Nicola Milne?’ Raj asked.
She had not. Eva spoke to her phone and told it to dial Will Moresby. ‘I need someone else picking up,’ she told him when he answered. ‘I think they might be at risk but I need it to be discreet.’
‘We’ve got the other two,’ Moresby told her, ‘Lucy Shapiro and Thomas Pearce. They’re both confused and more than a bit pissed off. I haven’t quite figured out how to break the news to them yet.’
How would you even start that conversation, Eva wondered? By the way, that eye surgery that you’re so pleased with was actually a disaster that will leave you blind and in agony inside a few years? She almost shuddered. ‘Leave that to the DCI,’ she told Moresby. ‘I need Nicola Milne from the Chatham Centre taking into custody too, but I’d like it if her colleagues didn’t see her being picked up by uniform.’
‘Believe it or not we can actually do discreet,’ Moresby said. ‘I’ll get her mobile number tracked. We’ll try to pick her up when she’s on her own, but she’ll have a couple of my lot keeping an eye on her from now on.’ That made her feel slightly happier at least.
After she hung up Raj leaned forward from the back seat. ‘We didn’t pick up a lens.’
‘Yeah,’ Eva admitted, ‘I lied. We were never going to. That’s down to the regulator and the DCI is dealing with them, because if we started that process we’d just have wound up in a legal minefield. With any luck we’ve at least prevented the next two murders. Now we need to find the bastard responsible for the others and send him down.’ She frowned then. ‘You had a point about Garrick ticking the boxes though, especially about being a surgeon. We’ve run financials on the rest of them. Can we go back over the histories of the shareholders to double-check for any medical training we didn’t spot last time?’
‘On it,’ Raj said, pulling out his phone and starting to type, ‘although most of them have some sort of medical background. I won’t do all the shareholders though, I’ll limit it to male and what, under forty-five? I’ll look for any surgical experience. That’ll speed things up.’
Eva turned onto the dual carriageway and pushed her foot to the floor. Traffic was light. She sped towards Guildford at just under a hundred miles an hour. When they approached the town she slowed, spoke to her phone again and told it to call Rebecca Flynn.
Flynn answered after four rings. ‘Where are you, Becks?’ Eva asked.
‘Outside New Thought,’ Flynn said. They all heard the hesitation in her voice. ‘Something’s not right.’
‘First make sure you’re safe,’ Eva snapped. ‘Then tell me what’s up.’
‘I’m okay, but the place is locked up. I thought they never locked up?’
‘Maybe Huss was just exaggerating. What else?’
‘The lights are on. Not the ordinary lights, the spotlights in the hall of the old building where the painting is. The thing is I can see it. All of it. There’s a small window by the door and I can look in. The scaffolding towers have been pulled back and it’s got lights shining on it now. It looks incredible. It’s like Harred said, it’s a gateway to another universe. I can see, Christ, I can barely describe it. It’s like an unending tunnel twisting away to infinity. It’s so bloody real. There’re stars and planets, and people everywhere. They all look like you could just go up and talk to them. I’m not close enough to see all the details, but even at this angle it’s mind-blowing. It fills the whole wall. It’s massive. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Becks?’ Even Newton seemed concerned at the note of awe in Flynn’s voice.
‘It makes you wonder though,’ Flynn said, ‘it really does.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Eva? Is this what you saw?’
‘Becks,’ Eva barked.
‘I’m okay,’ Flynn insisted. ‘I am, really. But there’s something you need to know.’ Eva waited. ‘The painting. It’s finished. It’s complete, it has to be. The lights are on it and everything. I thought Harred had a couple of years left to work on it, right?’
Eva pursed her lips when she spoke. ‘So did I.’
&
nbsp; ‘It’s amazing,’ Flynn continued. ‘It makes me wonder about something else too.’ In the car all three of them leaned towards the phone and waited for her to finish. ‘After you’ve done something like this, as incredible as this, after it’s over.’ They could hear the sound of her footsteps crunching on gravel as she tried to get a better view. ‘What else is there to do?’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
After she dropped Raj and Newton back at the station Eva turned her car into the one-way system, bullied her way through a red light, crossed Kingston Bridge and broke the speed limit all the way to Virginia Water.
The sun had set on a cloudless sky. The moon had not yet risen. As she drove along a tree-lined road she glanced up and saw the constellation of Orion hanging low over the outline of rooftops. Rigel and Betelgeuse gleamed blue and red. The sight of the winter stars always brought with them a feeling of dread now. Eva felt the same gnawing sensation she remembered from two years before, as though something was trying to chew its way out of her gut. Some premonition. Flynn had sensed it too. It wasn’t simply that Huss had never left the country, nor that New Thought was locked and bolted. Something about the painting, Eva thought. Some connection that eluded her even though she knew it was there. Something hidden in plain sight.
She parked next to the church. The only other car in the car park belonged to Flynn. For a moment she couldn’t see her and the same unfathomable dread returned, but then Flynn stepped out of the shadows to meet her.
‘Still no sign of life?’ Eva said as she slammed her car door.
Even in the darkness she could see Flynn shaking her head. ‘Nothing. I’ve tried the bell, so if Harred is in then he doesn’t want to answer.’ She paused. Eva waited for her to continue. ‘Boss? You don’t think he could have topped himself do you?’
‘Why would you think that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Flynn said, ‘something about this place. It freaked me out the first time I was here. There’s just something about the painting. It’s incredible, it’s absolutely staggering but…’ she let her voice trail off.
‘But what? Come on Becks, don’t leave me hanging.’
‘It’s like it’s too good,’ Flynn admitted. ‘Like it’s too close to some truth we’re not supposed to know. Are we really meant to see this kind of stuff? What must have been going on inside Harred’s mind that let him paint something like that? No wonder he was fascinated by you. He must have thought you’d be able to point to it and say: yeah, that’s exactly how it is.’
Eva stomped back to her car and opened the boot. ‘So why would he top himself?’ she rummaged around in the back.
‘He’s spent at least five years working on it. Five years of absolute concentration, if Berta Nicholson is to be believed. It’s got to be the most significant thing he’ll ever work on; nothing else is going to come close. The downer when he realises that is going to be massive.’
She had a point, Eva thought as she dug under the space-saver tyre. What could Harred possibly do after this? Maybe another fresco, but even if it were as grand in scope it would never be the same as the first. ‘I think we need to take a close look at this bloody painting,’ she said as she stood back up. She showed the tyre lever to Flynn. ‘I don’t know much about picking locks so let’s just go with breaking and entering.’
Together they jammed the tyre lever into the sill of the door. Eva pulled on it. Flynn pushed. ‘Pretend you’re Moresby,’ Eva gasped as they struggled to prise the door open just above the lock.
‘He’d have just booted it,’ Flynn panted. It took them several minutes but eventually they heard the satisfying crack of splintering wood, and the door sprung open.
The hall at the front of the church was in darkness. Eva saw the glow of lights in the main hall seeping under doors, but that only made the shadows near them seem deeper. They both lit the flashlights on their phones and held them in front of them. Before they moved though, Flynn passed something to Eva. A small tube of pepper spray, she saw when she shone her light on it. ‘I carry a spare,’ Flynn said, holding another ahead of her along with her phone as they walked towards the light.
Eva had to stop when they opened the double doors that led to the main hall. For a second the glare of the spotlights blinded her, but after a few moments her eyes adjusted to the light. Then she gasped.
The scaffolding towers had been moved away and stacked against the wall on the same side as the door, like a row of polythene-wrapped siege engines. She had a clear view of the painting as Flynn had told her she would, but she understood then that even her viewpoint was being orchestrated. Instead of the flat floor they now stood at the beginning of a series of narrow metal walkways, raised above the rest of the ground by only a foot or so. Beneath the walkways the ground had been painted jet-black. Tiny LED lights had been scattered across its surface. Eva almost gasped again. When she looked down it was as if she were gazing out over an ocean of stars.
All of the walls were now hung in black fabric, and all of them had the same scattering of tiny LEDs, as did the ceiling. The far wall, all two hundred feet of it, was given over to the painting.
It had astonished her before. Now, uncluttered by scaffolding and polythene, lit by hidden spotlights and with her view controlled by the carefully positioned walkways, it was completely overwhelming. Like standing at the gateway of some bridge to infinity. Eva looked up. High above she could see herself dressed as Pallas Athena, spear in hand. She saw Kelly Gibson, Olivia Russell and Grace Lloyd contemplating their scroll. When she looked more closely she saw another woman had joined them. Alicia Khan. Together they stood on the disc of an island covered in trees, floating like some miraculous asteroid in orbit around a red star that in turn drifted close to the walls of the tunnel universe. There had to be close to two hundred other figures in the painting, each one as real as a photograph.
‘I can’t believe the colours,’ Flynn whispered. ‘It’s like they’re brighter than real life, brighter than anything I’ve ever seen before.’
‘It’s the lighting,’ Eva said. ‘And the paint.’ She squinted a little. ‘It’s almost like it’s a tiny bit fluorescent. I wonder if Harred mixed something in with it?’ Five years, she thought as she too stared, captivated. Even so, Harred must have worked on it day and night.
‘Where’s Berta Nicholson?’
Flynn’s question broke her from her reverie. Eva scanned the wall. It took her almost a minute to locate Nicholson and Lily Yu. When she did she had to move closer.
They sat, naked, by the side of a turquoise lake and basked in the light of an alien sun, blissful expressions painted on their faces. A tree with leaves like some sharp-fronded palm grew nearby and cast long, keen shadows over them. The shadows drew themselves in straight lines across their faces and down their bodies. The shadows hid their eyes from view.
Eva stared. After a moment she lifted her phone, opened the contacts list and dialled.
‘Boss,’ Flynn said, her eyes locked onto the two figures.
‘I know.’ She waited for several seconds. ‘Berta’s not answering,’ Eva said.
* * *
They drew up in front of Nicholson’s house. Moments later a car carrying two uniformed officers slowed to a halt, blue beacons flaring in the darkness. The gates to the drive were closed. Eva leaned on the intercom button but even after a minute there was no reply. ‘We need to get in,’ she told the two officers she had called for backup. ‘I’m concerned the occupants may be at risk.’
They looked at the gate. One of the officers went to the back of the car and took out a hand-held battering ram. When he returned he stood in front of the wrought iron while the other officer shone a torch on the mechanism, then he slammed the battering ram into it. After five blows the mechanism slipped and the gate jumped out of its track. Together the two officers dragged one half far enough open to get a car through.
‘We’ll go first,’ the older of the uniformed officers told Eva. She didn’t argue. When
they reached the front door Eva let them lean on the bell for a few seconds while she trotted around to the side of the house. Bright lights lit the lawn. Through a hedgerow she could see the reflection of caustics playing over grass. Eva ran back to the front door.
‘The pool lights are on,’ she told them. ‘Maybe they’ve just gone for a swim.’ Even as she spoke the words a feeling in her gut told her otherwise.
‘Is that what you think?’ one of the uniforms asked.
In the darkness Eva shook her head. ‘No.’ She nodded at the door. ‘I really am concerned about their safety. Break it down.’
They didn’t need to be told twice. The battering ram slammed into the door. The door burst open. ‘Police,’ one of them bellowed as they entered the house, ‘is anyone home?’
Flynn started turning on lights. Eva went to walk through the hall towards the pool but the older of the two policemen barked at her. ‘Hey,’ he snapped, ‘we go first. This is our job,’ he told her.
They moved quickly, batons held ready in front of them. When they reached the pool though, they stopped. The reflection of lights danced on the ceiling, the slap of their footsteps echoed slightly in the empty room. Eva looked around. Nothing, she thought as she stared into the darkness beyond the glass. There was nothing here, nothing and nobody. Then she looked into the pool and realised how wrong she had been.
Barely a ripple broke its surface. The water had settled; not even the filter had disturbed it recently. She saw them at the centre of the pool. Berta Nicholson and Lily Yu, naked like their portraits in the painting, on their backs and stretched out on the bottom as peacefully as if they had been sunbathing.
Eva clenched her fists. The feeling of rage that threatened to overcome her made her want to scream, to bellow her fury at the sheer bloody pointlessness of it. She couldn’t keep it in. ‘They never hurt anyone,’ she seethed. ‘Berta went out of her way to make sure everyone was safe. What a fucking waste.’