Hearts and Diamonds

by Justine Elyot

  And before all that . . . the article in The Times, which had been about to cause an almighty row between her and Jason, but was pre-empted by all the other stuff.

  ‘I thought I’d hear from you,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘You would have done. But things got very hectic around about then. Tabitha, why did you talk to the press about him? You knew we wanted to keep things quiet.’

  ‘I know you said you did, but, darling, you have the potential new star of the art world on your hands. Why would you really want to keep quiet about that? I didn’t think you could possibly mean it.’

  ‘I did mean it! And he was furious.’

  ‘Was he? I take it the mystery artist was this chap all the fuss was about? The one you were hiding in your home?’

  ‘Jason Watson. Yes. It was him. And we still haven’t discussed this . . .’

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to. I’ve had the most enormous amount of interest on the back of that article. An absolute deluge. Buyers, agents, experts, all clamouring to know who he is and get access to his work. I can’t fend them off much longer.’

  ‘Oh God, really?’

  ‘Absolutely. You must bring him down to London, darling. Everybody’s dying to meet him.’

  Jenna took the phone from her ear, needing to take a few breaths. Just as soon as one furore died down, it seemed that several more barged in to take its place. If it was too much for her, how on earth would Jason take it? The dream of a quiet summer spent alternately renovating the house and making love began to fade.

  ‘Look, I’ll talk to him,’ she said. ‘But that’s all I can promise. He wasn’t wild about the idea when I first broached it . . . but then, some of the reasons for that no longer exist.’

  ‘Legal reasons,’ said Tabitha, with a kind of gloating glee. ‘You couldn’t ask for a better launch for an artist. Really, what a story. He’s famous before he’s even exhibited. Marvellous.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ Jenna repeated. ‘It’ll be his decision. And please – no more press until you hear from me, or I’ll be approaching another gallery.’

  ‘Darling!’ Tabitha sounded stunned. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’m serious. This isn’t my client – not yet. I can’t make him do anything. But I’ll work on it. Anything that destroys the delicate balance of our relationship isn’t going to help, though – and that includes more publicity. So keep a lid on it.’

  ‘I’ll be silent as the grave. You can rely on me.’

  ‘I hope I can. I’ll be in touch.’

  She pressed the end call button and wandered down over the patio, past the police-taped cellar opening and away from all the horrible thoughts it called to her mind. This morning, she wanted to be in the weeds, smelling their pungent, milky aroma, feeling the strengthening warmth of the sun on her bare legs and feet.

  She was standing among the dandelions and cow parsley, suddenly feeling her lack of breakfast and morning coffee, when a pair of hands landed on her shoulders.

  She jumped.

  ‘I didn’t hear you creeping up on me. Don’t do that. This house isn’t the place for surprises. It’s got too many of its own.’

  ‘Horrors, more like. Harville House of Horror. Who was that on the phone?’

  She leant her head back into his chest.

  ‘Jason, I need to talk to you.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘WHY WOULD I want to do that? Mingling with a load of poncey bastards who’ll look down on me? Fuck it. No thanks.’

  Jenna sighed. This was exactly the reaction she’d been expecting.

  ‘Why would they look down on you? They’ll see your work. They won’t look down on that, believe me.’

  ‘Then why do I have to be there at all? Just stick a few paintings up on the wall and put the wedge in my bank account when some twat with more money than sense buys ’em. Everyone’s happy.’

  ‘No, everyone isn’t happy. Tabitha won’t be happy and the gallery visitors won’t be happy. They want to know the artist.’

  ‘Do they ’eck. They don’t want to know me. Nobody ever has done, so why would they start now?’

  ‘Jason.’ Jenna tried to keep the edge of impatience out of her voice. ‘Get that chip off your shoulder and start living your life. You aren’t the feral youth from the estate any more. You are a grown man with an exceptional talent, and the potential to build an international career and reputation. So stop being such a mardy arse.’

  He smirked at the local epithet.

  ‘Mardy arse yerself,’ he said.

  ‘All I’m asking,’ she said, more calmly, ‘is for you to come down to London and meet Tabitha. No press previews, no champagne receptions, no nothing unless you want it. Just a meeting.’

  He tugged at a dandelion root, pulling it clear of the ground. Jenna watched as he gazed contemplatively at its fluffy head then blew on it, sending the seeds afloat on the warm air.

  ‘I’ve never been to London,’ he said.

  ‘What, never?’ Jenna knew, of course, that Bledburn had a high proportion of people who had never left the county. Some had never left the town. It still surprised her, though.

  ‘Never. There was a school trip once, to some gallery. The Tate, I think. But Mum couldn’t afford it.’ He threw the dandelion stalk aside. ‘Apparently Kieran Manning set off the sprinkler system. I wish I’d seen that.’

  ‘Well, you can go to the Tate. And every gallery in town, if you like. Don’t set off the sprinklers though.’

  ‘Could do with ’em today.’ He looked up at the sky where the sun was boiling away already, only halfway up to its zenith. ‘OK. I’ll come to London. No guarantees, though. But I’ll listen to what your mate has to say, at least.’

  ‘That’s all I ask.’

  She laid her head on his shoulder and they stood together, held in each other’s arms, swaying gently among the waist-high weeds, until the familiar intrusion of a helicopter sent them back indoors.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ Jenna shouted at it from the patio door. ‘The police have all gone. Go and pick on some other Z lister.’

  ‘You aren’t a Z lister,’ said Jason, laughing and pulling her inside. ‘You’re a lot nearer the beginning of the alphabet, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. All this controversy is keeping my name in the papers, but that isn’t what I wanted. I wanted peace.’

  ‘You should have bought a desert island instead of this place. Couldn’t you do that? Go on. Buy somewhere nice and hot in the middle of the sea and I’ll come and be your Robinson Crusoe. Sleep in a hammock and live on coconuts. Reckon I could handle that.’

  ‘It’s a nice thought, but . . .’

  She sighed as her ‘important contacts’ phone rang again. This time it was the police.

  Jason watched her, his head on one side, as she nodded and made non-committal noises into it. Halfway through, he got bored and started tinkering with the cafetière, making a fresh pot after the burnt offering.

  ‘Not your mate again?’

  ‘No, it was the police.’

  He always tensed when she mentioned the police – she supposed it was hardly surprising, after what he had been through.

  ‘It’s all right, they aren’t after you.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, giving her a wry smile. ‘I always get that feeling, you know, that they’re going to get me for something else, something I don’t even know about. I can’t shake it. I don’t feel as if it’s over yet.’

  ‘They’ve got the right people this time. You’re in the clear. Anyway, it wasn’t about that. It was about the bones in the cellar. The forensic anthropologist had a look at them.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Human, female, older than twenty but younger than forty, no obvious cause of death, probably died somewhere around the end of the nineteenth century.’

  ‘Right.’ Jason shrugged and shook his head. ‘Poor cow,’ he said. ‘So, what are they going to do?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean
, what can they do? They can’t go around looking into centuries-old cases, can they? They’ll just shut up the cellar again and do . . . whatever it is they do . . . with the bones.’

  ‘Shouldn’t they have a decent burial? After being hidden down there all these years.’

  ‘What’s her name, though? How can you have a funeral for an anonymous skeleton?’

  ‘We could try and find out,’ he suggested. ‘Bet Harville would know something about it. It’s probably some great grandma of his.’

  ‘No, the forensic people said she’d never given birth.’

  ‘Probably one of their maids. Them Harvilles probably treated them like dirt and chucked their bodies into the cellar once they’d worked ’em to death.’

  Jenna took some cups from the cupboard.

  ‘I know we all love the Harvilles,’ she said. ‘But we shouldn’t go making assumptions. I wish I did know though. Lawrence did mention something about a tragic first wife somewhere in the family tree who committed suicide. It could be her, couldn’t it? I mean, the vicar would have refused to bury her in consecrated ground. Perhaps they just couldn’t think of anything better to do with her.’

  Jason snorted. ‘They’ve got a bloody huge garden. Might have been better than leaving her down there with the rats.’

  ‘True. It does smack of something that they wanted to hide. Whoever “they” might be. Oh God, I hate mysteries. I’m not sure I can cope with this one. I want to know who she is.’

  ‘Perhaps darling Lawrence could help,’ said Jason with a sniff.

  ‘Er, I don’t think he’s going to have a lot to say to me, not now. Why don’t we go down into the cellar again? See if there are any other clues in there.’

  ‘Don’t you think those forensic guys will have done that already?’

  ‘No, and they aren’t coming back. The body’s been found to be too old for them to pursue it. I mean, we’ve all heard of cold cases, but this one is bloody freezing. They’ll leave it to amateur detectives like us rather than waste their own resources.’

  ‘Speak for yourself. When did I ever claim to be an amateur detective?’ Jason folded his arms, apparently displeased with the entire affair.

  ‘I’ll go down by myself, then,’ said Jenna, misgivings striking her as soon as she spoke the words. Did she really want to do that?

  He raised his eyebrows at her but said nothing.

  She swallowed. This had become a challenge.

  ‘Seriously,’ she said, but her voice faltered. ‘Unless . . . you want to come with me?’

  He laughed. ‘No, no, sweetheart. This is your baby. I’ll be upstairs finishing off my frescoes.’

  ‘Right. I’ll, ah, go and get changed then. Into something I can get cobwebs all over without caring.’

  She turned and marched up the stairs.

  ‘Hope there’s nothing worse than cobwebs,’ he called after her. ‘Maybe some tough gloves in case of rat bites.’

  She almost vomited on the step but managed to keep her gorge down. It was a good point, though, and she put on her toughest jeans, thickest socks and a pair of leather driving gloves, just in case. She covered her head with a scarf to avoid getting too much dirt in her hair, and put on a dust mask, thankful for the decorating supplies she had in the house.

  Jason, happily, had gone by the time she emerged from the room, dressed for combat. He would have laughed at her, she was sure.

  But when she came out to the kitchen patio, she felt his absence with a pang. It would have been good to have a companion for this task. Even though the bones were gone, she couldn’t help feeling that there would be a disturbing vibe down there. It could be a murder scene, for all she knew.

  Her skin crawled with dread as she crouched to tug at the iron ring in the floor. It was no longer locked, as it had been since she moved into the house. Now its darkest secret had been given up, there didn’t seem much point in keeping it secure. Jenna hadn’t given the remaining contents of the cellar much attention after the bones had made themselves so horribly evident, but she had a vague sense of lots of boxes and shelves, mainly containing paper and old books.

  The slab took its time coming up, Jenna making sure she kept her spine straight and knees bent as she tugged. Jason had made it look easy, but then there was deceptive strength in that wiry frame. She thought about how impossible it was to escape from him when he had her pinned against the wall and the pleasurable memory did a little to dispel the scalp-tingling horror.

  At last the paving slab eased up and Jenna was able to remove it. Seeing the black maw beneath it, she doubted herself all over again. Could she really go down into that gloom by herself? She activated the torch app on her phone, which reminded her of the time she’d done it last, going up into the attic and finding Jason.

  What a moment that had been. She should have been scared then – after all, a living, breathing fugitive in your loft space was surely more frightening and definitely potentially more dangerous than a few dusty old notebooks and some mice. Yet she couldn’t see it that way. Jason in the attic should have been alarming, yet it wasn’t anywhere near as creepy as this subterranean vault.

  It must be to do with the unknown, she decided. After all, once she had seen Jason, she knew the worst. It was the not knowing . . . but even that didn’t make sense, because they’d been down there once before, when they found the bones. They’d seen the worst of the cellar too. Or had they?

  She thought of the little message they had uncovered beneath the bedroom wallpaper while they were stripping it. ‘Help me’. Something or someone in this house had driven somebody to scrawl those words. And what about the noises Jason said he had heard during the night? Sobbing sounds, coming from somewhere lower down, under the floors.

  If an unquiet spirit haunted the house, perhaps the removal of those bones might have satisfied it. Perhaps it would all be all right now.

  What are you thinking, Jenna? Ghosts, unquiet spirits. You don’t believe in any of that stuff.

  Perhaps this place had turned her head. Life had certainly been overwhelming since she had come back to Bledburn. She was fatally disorientated. And people thought LA was the place that led to disconnection from reality. No way. To her, it was a place of substance, almost mundane compared to this drab little ex-mining community on the borders of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire.

  It was Bledburn that was making her go gaga, not LaLa.

  She took a deep breath, shone her torch into the inky depths and located the top rung of the iron ladder set into the narrow brick chute leading to the cellar.

  She lowered one foot in its hi-top Converse sneaker and waggled it around until it landed on the narrow metal. OK. She had taken the first step. Now she just had to keep on going.

  She clipped her phone to her belt so that the torch continued to shine downwards and made slow, painstaking progress down the ladder. It was a matter of no more than about half a dozen rungs and she soon stood on the cellar floor, its flagstones disturbingly uneven and crunchy underfoot. She supposed it might be mouse bones or beetle shells – she didn’t particularly want to check, so she shone the beam upwards, where boxes and trunks stood stacked against the slimy walls.

  She tried not to focus on the spot where the bones had been found, but it was still cordoned off with police tape, so it was difficult to ignore. She edged around it, grateful for her dust mask which kept the worst of the thick, musty air from clogging her throat. She lifted one of the boxes from the top of the pile and noticed an index card inside a little gilt frame on the side:

  ‘Harville Hall: Bills etc. 2006–2008.’

  Inside appeared to be a number of photocopies and originals of paperwork, mostly dealing with finances and legal issues. It was dull enough but in good condition despite mouldering down here for so long. There were many such boxes, and Jenna decided to look at each one. Most were, like the first one, full of official correspondence. Jenna shuddered at the thought that somebody had brought the boxes down here
and walked past those bones – in absolute plain sight – in order to stack them. What did these archivists think of their resident skeleton? Had no member of the successive generations thought it might be a nice idea to remove the bones and give them a decent burial?

  ‘Bloody Harvilles,’ she said out loud. ‘Bad to the bone. Bad to the bones.’ Her little giggle at this silly piece of word play sounded deeply inappropriate and she apologised under her breath to who knew whom. And after all, she only did it to try and keep her dwindling stocks of bravado going. It was so dark down there, and so horrible. She could never be a subterranean dweller.

  Box after box of printed matter was examined and discarded, the pile slowly diminishing until she came to very old documents. 1960s . . . 1950s . . . 1940s . . . on and on she went, occasionally taking off a lid to see inside, but never investigating much further than that. What she wanted was material dating to the time when the owner of those poor bones had died. Something must yield a clue – and if she found nothing, then she would laboriously and painstakingly sift through all these other boxes of more recent date, to find a reference, however oblique or obscure, to what must have happened here.

  1930s . . . 1920s . . . 1910s . . . and now she felt her pulse quickening as she drew closer to the kind of time frame in which the death must have occurred. The final few boxes went very far back indeed, and contained the original documents relating to the building of the Hall. She picked up the oldest of the boxes, intent on taking it up with her to perform a detailed analysis of the contents. But perhaps she should get somebody from the Bledburn Museum to help – after all, she was no expert when it came to old documents. She might be ruining valuable artefacts. She would take the box upstairs, ring the museum and then . . .