by Kate Helm
‘So you still went to work today?’
The memory of what happened outside the Bailey makes blood rush to my face, the humiliation as blunt as a cosh.
‘Yes. For the Beeb.’
He frowns. ‘You haven’t told Neena?’
My face burns hotter. I’ve humiliated her, as well as myself. As far as Neena is concerned, missing a deadline is on a par with murder.
‘I thought I could manage, just until I’d got my head together. But I screwed up. My sketch was laughable.’ I shudder. ‘I ran before I could see whether they used it on the lunchtime bulletin.’
‘It probably wasn’t that bad, you’ve always been your worst critic.’
‘Believe me, it was.’ I sigh. ‘Could you look, see if they did use it?’
‘If you’re sure . . .’
He takes out his iPhone and finds the BBC homepage. Chances are it’s OK. I can’t see the image having made it to air. So at least my shame will be restricted to my colleagues.
I watch his face as he searches.
He tuts, then puts the phone face down on the table.
‘What did you find?’
Oli opens his mouth but I can tell he’s reluctant to share.
‘Tell me, Oli, please, or I’ll imagine the worst.’
‘They did use it.’
‘Shit.’ I close my eyes. ‘Did you see the drawing?’
‘No, but . . . Look, it’ll pass. These things always do.’
‘What will pass?’
I pick up the phone and swipe the screen, but crying has made my vision even worse than usual and I can’t see the search results.
‘It’s on social media. A few keyboard warriors. Have they never had an off day at work?’
I find the controls to magnify the text.
Did you see the news at 1? Are the BBC getting the local infants school to do their drawings for them now?
Another has drawn their own court sketch, a stick man with a judge’s wig: my job application, reckon my chances are bloody good.
Already, people are retweeting with the hashtag #sketchfail, and adding more of their own drawings.
‘I’m sorry,’ Oli says.
‘What for? It was my mistake. To carry on, thinking I could hide the fact I’m a fucking dead loss.’
Oli reaches over to take the phone out of my hands, then adds a good slosh of brandy to my glass.
‘Will you be OK, Georgie?’
I shrug.
‘You’ll call me, won’t you? Any time. If there’s . . .’ He hesitates. ‘If you feel desperate. If you start thinking you might do something, um, drastic.’
I stare at him. ‘You mean, top myself?’ I shake my head. ‘I’m not the type.’
But my father was.
I close my eyes and see his venous blood, sticky as port, splashed across aqua bathroom tiles.
And then Daniel Fielding, lying in a cell, bleeding out from his skinny ankles.
And Sharon, falling backwards into a ravine – whether she jumped, or was pushed, the terror is unimaginable.
But maybe for the Fieldings, the fear of life was stronger than the relief of death.
Why?
He nods, reassured. ‘What will you do now?
‘Back to Brighton. The publisher is bound to see this and cancel the portrait.’
Oli says nothing.
‘I know you disapproved of my taking the commission, but it is . . . it was important to me.’ And to whoever it was that sent me those photographs, and the list of names from the home. ‘Oli, was there something else you came across on the case? Any suggestion at all that Jim was more than just a Jack the Lad?’
He turns away and pours a brandy for himself.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well, it’s not like you to try to stop me doing something.’
‘No, I learned the hard way that it never works.’ He turns back. ‘I didn’t trust him. The rest of the team adored him, knew what a great witness he’d make, so I never said it out loud, but I always felt he was holding things back.’
‘Just a feeling, or hard evidence?’
He shakes his head. ‘Georgia, it’s such a long time ago. You can’t expect me to remember every detail of all the cases I’ve worked on. I’m getting old. And the sleepless nights definitely don’t help.’
I groan. ‘Sorry. I never even asked about Millie. How is she?’
He smiles. And then he’s off, telling me how they’re coping, and what it’s like having the world’s youngest diva under their roof. Despite the moaning, I can tell he’s happier than he’s ever been.
It’s only after he’s taken me to the station, made sure I’m on the right train, and waved me goodbye, that I admit to myself that Oli was lying. He has a photographic memory. He’s known for it on the circuit.
So why pretend he can’t remember?
48
The BBC are terribly nice when they call to sack me. As I walk on the beach, the day after the debacle in London, my phone rings again and again.
Time to stop hiding.
‘Hello, Georgia,’ the executive producer says when I pick up, ‘how are you?’
The sounds of the newsroom fade. A door closes. He’s gone somewhere private for our last conversation.
‘I’m OK. Look, I’m sorry about yesterday, it’s—’
‘Please. Stop there. We’re worried about you. Though everything we know about social media tells us the feeding frenzy will blow over very soon.’
‘It’s fine. I don’t even have a Twitter account.’
‘Sensible woman. Now . . .’ I hear him take a breath. ‘We’ve been reviewing our court coverage, as I believe Neena might have mentioned. We’re cutting back on commissioning freelancers. Which I’m afraid means . . .’
‘You don’t have to dress it up, Phil. I understand why you don’t want to use me again.’
‘Well, we could possibly revisit the decision if things change,’ he says, dropping the pretence. ‘We’re no strangers to burnout in the news world. Perhaps you need a little time off.’
‘Yes,’ I say, wishing I could fix my life with a bloody mini-break.
‘You’ve done great work for us, Georgia. Seriously, your illustrations were some of the best I’ve ever seen. You had . . .’ He coughs, ‘You have a gift. You’ve got my mobile. Please do call me if there’s anything I can do.’
After he rings off, I stare at the phone until the screen goes blank. When I finally look up, a chattering crocodile of language students are coming in the opposite direction. It’s going to be a sunny day.
I lean against the turquoise railings to let them pass. One girl catches my eye: the others all wear hoodies and ripped jeans, but she’s dressed for a party, in a short denim skirt and a low-cut white vest that doesn’t quite cover the pink bra underneath.
If I were the tour leader, I’d have made her go back to change.
But as the group files past, the girl doesn’t, and nobody looks back to see where she is.
‘You’ll want to catch them up,’ I call out, though she may not understand English.
She doesn’t smile, or speak. She stares at me, and her long, blue-black hair is still despite the breeze.
Oh God.
As I watch, Charlie runs out from between the beach huts where he’d been playing hide-and-seek. He grins and races towards the girl in pink, and she crouches down to pick him up.
He’s too big to carry, really, his chubby arms thicker than her spindly ones, and as he rests his head against her flat chest, he puts his thumb in his mouth.
I blink and blink again, but the two of them are still there. The girl strokes Charlie’s hair and then sets him down. Her legs are pale, a few bruises blooming on her calves, and she totters, fawn-like, because her flimsy white heels are so high.
Might she be his sister? No, Charlie’s sister is younger than him.
His mother? No. They are not alike.
Maybe she’s
just someone my desperate brain has invented. Dr Nash said that’s as likely as hallucinations being based on a real person.
Except there is something familiar about her . . .
I walk back to my flat as fast as I dare, craning my neck this way and that to make sure I’m not about to collide with a bike or a running child. When I get inside, Jim’s painting stands on its easel in the bay, my unfinished business. I took the cover off this morning, trying to assess whether it’s OK. And whether the subject is good, evil, or somewhere in between.
I ignore it, and go to my laptop, pulling up the folder of images that was sent with the list of names from Copse View.
I click past the picture of the young Jim. I’ve looked at it often enough to know the girl I just saw on the prom is not the one from that photo. I scroll through the images, but none of them are right.
And then I see her.
She’s in the background of a shot taken indoors. I see the bra strap first, a blurry stripe of pink against a bony shoulder blade. The hair is a wild shock of black, and her face is in profile, as though she’s just turning, aware of the camera pointed in her direction.
She could have walked straight out of this photo, and onto the promenade, into my path.
Who are you?
And what do you want me to know?
49
I pull out everything I have on the Fielding case – my original courtroom sketches, the cuttings, and my work from the sittings with Jim – and lay the materials out on the parquet floor. I print out each of the photographs to A4 size and do the same with the shots of Copse View and the house at Cherry Blossom Lane I download from the internet.
I can’t change my own past, or my future. But something went wrong at Ashdean. Maybe I can still expose that. All these years I’ve wanted to make the guilty pay – this is my chance.
Jim’s half-finished portrait looms over me, just as he lords it over that strange town. I tack together four sheets of A2 paper to create a canvas as large as a picnic rug and kneel next to it on the floor. And then I begin to draw . . .
Dusk comes, then darkness, as I work furiously, propelled by frustration. No. Anger. Most of it has nothing to do with Ashdean – I’m not so stupid. But all the fury around my own past, and my loss of vision, might now serve a purpose in the present. The meaning the counsellor wanted me to find.
The sheets fill up: with Daniel, now and then; his sister; his mother – a cipher sketch based on a fuzzy image of her in a press report.
Next to them, I put the O’Neill kids and as I begin to draw Charlie, he appears in my armchair.
‘Is this what you’ve been trying to get me to do all along?’ I whisper.
He smiles back, and when I’ve finished sketching him, he’s gone. Next to him, I draw in little Jodie, and a figure, based on my vague memory from Jim’s engagement party, of their mother, Emma.
And right in the centre, a silhouette to represent Robert O’Neill. Jim’s best mate.
And his victim?
I move the pictures and documents around, trying to get the timing clear in my head. In the photo I was sent, Jim is fifteen at most. It must have been taken before he was arrested and jailed for joyriding and nicking some cigarettes.
Why did Jim take all the blame? It’s a pretty enormous favour to do someone you end up hating. Did Robert promise to help him after he was released? Because they stayed friends for years, according to Jim’s nosy neighbour.
I move the note that came with the photos:
I GOT NOWHERE. MAYBE YOU CAN DO BETTER. PLEASE TRY FOR THEIR SAKES.
Whoever sent this feels as I do, that there is unfinished business here. What did Daniel say? ‘There was a woman copper saw through him too, she got bloody nowhere.’
It must be the same woman. I write who is she? in big letters next to the note. Underneath I write, and how did she find me?
Tracking down an anonymous policewoman isn’t going to be easy. I daren’t make too many waves in Ashdean, because whoever I talk to there might report straight back to Jim. The girls on the list are the key, not the person who sent it. If I could only find one of those ex-residents, I might be able to get somewhere. I did try searching for them on the night the photos arrived, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough.
I finish laying out the evidence I have: adding the boxy shape of the burned-out house at Cherry Blossom Lane. Then a photo of Tessa on her wedding day.
I scramble to my feet and survey what I’ve done, looking for connections. Everything leads back to Jim. But I struggle to connect what he might have done in his teens to the deaths of his wives.
Sharon lived at Copse View, of course. Perhaps she knew what Jim did, was going to blow the whistle. But why would she do that so far into a marriage that produced two children?
I remember the poisonous neighbour’s hints that Jim was playing away, might even have fathered little Jodie. Could he have wanted his damaged first wife out of the way? And, having got away with it the first time, could he have tired of poor Tessa even sooner, and done it again?
I think of what Oli said about disliking Jim. And what he didn’t say. I saw Jim as a victim of awful circumstances, but perhaps that’s only because he wanted me to see him that way. He charmed me, but kept an eye on me too – keeping tabs on where I went and who I spoke to in Ashdean.
Did he only agree to the sittings to check how much I knew? If he did harm Robert, perhaps he thought my portrait commission was a ruse to dig deeper into his background. Maybe he knows the policewoman, whoever she was, still hasn’t given up.
I stare at the old photo of Jim aged, what, fourteen or fifteen? Handsome, powerful. Hard to resist.
There’s movement in the room. The girl with the vest top is standing in front of me. She’s in perfect focus, a reminder that everything else is soft around the edges. I don’t flinch. She seems to belong.
‘Which one of these are you?’ I ask, gesturing to the list of names, but knowing she cannot answer. ‘Jackie? Or Andrea?’
None of the names seem quite right, but I do want to name her.
‘I can’t share my house with someone I don’t know. So I will call you . . .’
Her vest falls off her shoulder, revealing the bright bra strap again. It makes her look so young, so vulnerable.
‘I will call you Pink.’
50
My phone wakes me; I’m slumped in my chair, the laptop still open. I scrabble on the table for it and see an unknown London number before answering.
‘Georgia, hi, it’s Benjamin.’
The publisher. Shit. I immediately regret not letting it go to voicemail.
‘Oh, hi.’
‘Hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time – are those seagulls I can hear in the background?’
I’m racking my brains to find an excuse to get off the phone.
‘I’m . . . in bed. With a fever.’
‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘Sorry to hear that. I promise I won’t keep you long. I just wanted to check in, see how the Jim Fielding portrait is going.’
I sit up, feeling sick, and not only because of drinking that entire bottle of wine. Benjamin must have seen the #sketchfail stuff on social media.
‘Almost done with it, actually. I’ve been waiting for a good time for the last sitting. He’s a fascinating character.’
‘Great, great. And you . . .? Everything is all right with you, Georgia?’
The girl – Pink – is sitting on my bedroom chair. She looks as wrecked as I feel, her mascara clotted, her lipstick partly bitten away.
‘You’ve been on Twitter, haven’t you?’ I say.
A gull swoops down onto my windowsill, screaming like a child.
‘Yes, I have seen the . . . hashtag thing. Look, I’m not worried about your work at all. And we really want the Fielding case in the book. But I don’t want it to be an extra pressure. So I was wondering if you might want to, I don’t know, collaborate with another artist?’
‘Don’t tell me. With Maureen?’
I can’t let him do this – not now I’ve seen Pink, now there’s another lead to follow.
‘Well, she would be the obvious choice, but—’
‘This was her idea, wasn’t it?’
‘She just phoned to let me know she’d finished her commission, and mentioned you appeared to be under stress. I’d hate the deadline to make it worse for you. I have a moral responsibility to my contributors.’
Fuck her. Fuck Maureen and her scheming and her greed.
I don’t know where all this anger is coming from, but I use it.
‘What would be far more stressful, Benjamin, would be to think you’re not behind me. Especially after all the things you said about how much more talented I am than Maureen. Still, I suppose if we got together, she and I could compare notes on the book. And on our meetings with you.’
I let the implications of a tête-à-tête between his two court artists sink in. If both of us pull out, there’s no one else for him to call on in the whole country. We are it. The benefits of practising a dying art.
Pink is smiling at me.
‘Um . . . OK. Maybe it’s not time for that yet,’ Benjamin says. ‘I’d feel more comfortable, though, if we could make sure we’re both on the same page, image-wise?’
‘You want to see what I’ve done so far?’
‘Yes.’
I could go straight into the living room, snap the portrait-in-progress, and be put out of my misery before lunch . . .
I’m too chicken, and this is too important, especially now.
‘All right. But after I’ve done my next sitting.’
He sighs. ‘Georgia, we can’t cover any more expenses until we know we’re getting something usable.’
I remember how slick and sycophantic he was at that meeting in the riverside boardroom. This is how quickly the world can turn.
‘Fine. I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve got something to show—’
‘But—’
‘Goodbye, Benjamin.’
I cut the call and then, without giving myself the chance to lose my nerve, I text Jim. As I type, my fingers slowly tracing out the words, I am imagining two versions of him: the charismatic, haunted man I’ve been sketching, and the murderous version his son believes him to be.