She got out of the car, and walked up to the high street, stopping to look at the flower shop on the way. On an impulse, she bought herself a bunch of snowdrops, for no other reason than that, after the sombre episode of the funeral, she felt she deserved a treat. Then she came back, slowing her pace, and took the road that ran alongside the cathedral.
Jess had mixed feelings about Llandaff village. It wasn’t really separate from the city, but with its pretty shops and houses clustered on a hilltop around the twelfth-century cathedral, it had a distinct air of being a cut above. It was an expensive place to live, relative to the other neighbourhoods, housing well-heeled professionals, as well as a few of the local clergy attached to the cathedral. There was a private school nearby, which undertook the task of training choristers and future pillars of the establishment. All in all, one got the impression of a closed, rather old-fashioned microcosm, a world unto itself that was both attractive in its sedate Victorian values, and repellent in its sealed-off smugness.
When she saw Elinor’s house, she couldn’t help feeling envious: it was a white-fronted building with an elegant porch and arched windows overlooking an expansive front garden shaded by a large tree. There was a high, clipped hedge all the way around the garden, and a black iron gate leading into it. From where she stood, she could see that the stone path that led to the front door also ran round the sides of the house to the back, and that there was more garden behind the house.
She turned and crossed the road, walking down the steps to the cathedral. As she did, she saw a man come up to the gate of the house, open it, and go down the path. He was tall and broad-shouldered with dark hair. His collar was up, and he looked slightly surreptitious, as if he didn’t want anyone to notice him. She only caught a glimpse of his face, but she saw that he wore a frown, as if concentrating on some serious purpose. He didn’t notice her, intent as he was on his own business. She wondered who he was, and what he was doing. He didn’t look as if he was on a social call; rather, he had the air of a man on a mission. She turned away, aware that she had no business to be snooping, and cross with herself that she hadn’t understood her unconscious motive for coming here to the green.
She went on towards the cathedral, stopping for a moment to look up at the high steeple before she went down the steps to enter it. It always made her dizzy looking up at the weather-vane on the top, silhouetted against the sky. Today, there was a ladder attached to the side of the tiles – They must be repairing it, she thought – which added to the sense of vertigo. Crows flew in and out of the flying buttresses and in between the gargoyles at the top of the roof, cawing loudly as they went. She couldn’t imagine climbing up there. Or rather, she could, and it made her feel sick to think of it.
She glanced back at Elinor’s house. Only the top of the house was visible from where she stood. She saw a figure come to an upstairs window and close the curtain. She couldn’t be sure who it was, but it looked, from a distance, like the man she’d just seen at the gate. She wondered what he was doing drawing the curtains – it wasn’t dark yet. But she didn’t want to pry, so she walked on.
She entered the doorway of the cathedral, nodded at the old lady sitting by the postcard shop, walked down the aisle, and took a seat near the altar. There was nothing going on at present, she was relieved to find. She gazed upwards at the Jacob Epstein, the strangely elongated figure of Christ with its placid visage, suspended over the massive concrete arch erected in the sixties as part of the restoration of the building after the war that, for all its majesty, reminded her of a motorway bridge. She couldn’t get much sense of grace from either of them, so she closed her eyes.
There was no sound, except the soft echo of footfalls as a curate, or some such, moved around the choristers’ pews, engaged in an arcane ritual of preparation for a service. For a moment, the world seemed to slow down.
She whispered a prayer, to a God she didn’t believe in. She prayed that Bob would still remain close to the girls, would still be their father. She prayed that one day her sadness over the failure of her marriage would pass, that she would find someone else, or perhaps begin to savour life on her own, without the responsibility of a partner. She gave thanks that she still had her daughters to love, her patients to attend to, and good friends and family. That she was well established here, in this small, warm community. That she was important to people, and they were important to her. And she prayed that, for the time being at least, all this would be enough.
5
Jess was waiting for Elinor to arrive for her session. She was going over her notes, and looking over some further research she’d done on claustrophobia. It might be an idea, she thought as she read, for Elinor to have a further medical check-up: according to the latest neurological thinking, certain inner-ear infections and abnormalities in the nerve cells of the brain can result in the disorder, as in these instances sensory information may be misread, causing a panic response. That said, given that the claustrophobia had occurred since her mother’s death, it seemed more likely that the disorder was purely neurotic, with no physiological cause. And it also seemed clear that, for the time being, it wasn’t going to abate, since she was still under considerable emotional stress.
The door to the consulting room was open, and a few minutes past the appointed hour, Elinor walked in. She pushed the door to, but didn’t close it completely. Then she took off her mac, hung it up, and walked over to the couch, acknowledging Jess with a brief nod. As before, the window was open a crack. Elinor leaned over and opened it wider. Much wider.
Bad sign, thought Jess, as she went over to the armchair behind the couch and sat down.
Elinor settled herself on the couch and closed her eyes. She looked tense, Jess thought. Her face was white and drawn, and there were pale blue rings under her eyes.
Silence fell. Jess shivered. She wished she’d worn a thicker sweater, or turned up the heating a bit more before the session.
She wondered what was going on in Elinor’s mind. She sensed that there was something else troubling her besides her mother’s death, something she had not yet mentioned. Yet she knew better than to press her. Whatever it was, it would emerge sooner or later, whether directly or in some more oblique way.
Elinor’s eyes remained closed. Jess began to wonder, after a while, whether she’d fallen asleep. She’d had clients do that on the couch quite a few times, in the days when she was training. It was just another avoidance mechanism, along with all the others she’d learned to recognize.
As the minutes ticked by, she had the urge to tuck a blanket round Elinor’s outstretched form. She looked so thin and white lying there under the window, with the cold air streaming in from outside, her hair so fair and fine on the dark green pillow, like a sick child. Poor thing, thought Jess. Her mother dead. Her father, too. Orphaned. Her sister married. Living all alone in that great big house, her family gone . . .
‘You’d think they’d leave the relatives alone at a time like this.’ Elinor’s voice broke the silence at last. ‘But they won’t stop pestering us.’
Jess remembered the policewoman that Elinor had mentioned in the last session.
‘She came round again yesterday, saying she wanted to go down and look at the studio. I let her in, but I stayed outside in the garden.’ Elinor’s voice quavered. She was near to tears. ‘It made me so angry, having her snooping around looking through my things. It’s been four months since it happened. Surely they could leave me alone now. I can’t stand it any longer.’
Elinor began to sob.
Jess had an urge to reach forward and hug her, but she managed to maintain her professional composure. There was a box of tissues on a table beside the couch, so she leaned over and pushed it towards her.
Elinor sat up, took one, and dabbed at her eyes. Then she lay down again.
‘The problem is,’ she went on, the tears subsiding, ‘I don’t have an alibi. They’ve got me on CCTV when I was walking around Cardiff shopping, but there was no
one else there when I found Ma.’ She crumpled the tissue into a ball, kneading it in her fingers. ‘Isobel hasn’t got one either. She was in her house that day. She hadn’t gone in to the gallery because she had a cold.’
‘The gallery?’
‘She runs the gallery now. The one my father used to own.’ Once again, Elinor spoke as if Jess ought to know what she was talking about. ‘The Frederick Powell Gallery. You must know it. It’s the only decent contemporary art gallery in Cardiff. Or Wales, come to that.’
Jess murmured assent, in a noncommittal way.
‘And then there’s my brother-in-law, Blake.’ For a moment, Elinor hesitated. ‘He was apparently in London, in a meeting with Mia, his business partner. She runs a gallery in London, and he’s an art consultant, advising rich people on how to spend their money. Hedge fund managers and suchlike.’ Elinor’s tone lost its forlorn quality. ‘They’ll take any old rubbish, as long as Blake talks them into it.’ There was contempt in her voice as she spoke. ‘Anyway, that’s beside the point. Mia’s backed him up, says they were at her flat, going through catalogues. But I must say, I don’t altogether believe her. Or him.’
She stopped kneading the tissue and tucked it into her sleeve.
‘He’s a wheeler-dealer is Blake,’ she went on. ‘I think he married Isobel to get his hands on the gallery. And on the Powell name.’ She paused. ‘I’m not saying he was directly responsible for Ma’s death, of course – I don’t think he’d go that far. But he knew where the Gwen John was kept. And he knew how much it was worth.’
Jess was taken aback. She wondered whether Elinor’s distrust of Blake could be occasioned by jealousy of her sister. But perhaps that was the psychotherapist in her, always looking to the family dynamic for answers. Best not to jump to conclusions, she told herself, at this stage, anyway.
‘To be honest, I feel bloody furious with my mother,’ Elinor went on, abruptly changing the subject, which made Jess wonder whether her accusation against Blake had been serious. ‘If she hadn’t come round to see me that day, unannounced as usual, none of this would have happened.’
Jess pricked up her ears. This was what she’d been waiting for. At last, she hoped, Elinor was going to talk about the death of her mother.
Elinor tried to settle herself, wriggling her shoulders to get comfortable, but she seemed ill at ease.
‘That afternoon, I’d gone to buy some ink pens in this nice little arts and crafts shop in the Arcades. Once I’d got in there, I spent hours looking at the different kinds of nibs, and so on. They have whole books of them, tiny little nibs with different shapes. Like a butterfly album.’ She paused. ‘I bought several tiny ones, just to see what I could do with them – I haven’t used inks before – but actually, they weren’t that good, as it turned out. They were so delicate, they kept bending out of shape when you pressed them on the paper, and splattering ink everywhere.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘Perhaps I was using them in the wrong way.’
Come on, thought Jess. That’s enough about nibs. Get to the point.
‘Anyway,’ Elinor went on, realizing she was digressing, ‘while I was out, my mother came round. She was over from Italy. They’d moved out there about ten years ago, when my father got ill and retired, leaving me to look after the house on Llandaff Green for them. I was short of money, you see, so they let me live there rent free. By that time, Isobel was married to Blake, and they had a big place in the Vale, so she was fine.’ There was a note of bitterness in Elinor’s tone. ‘But when Pa died, Ma kept coming back. She normally stayed with Isobel and Blake when she was over, said she couldn’t bear to be back in the old house, that it held too many memories for her. But in actual fact, she was always popping round for one reason or another, usually without warning. It was one of the things I found rather . . .’ She hesitated. ‘. . . A little bit irritating about her. She was terribly lonely after my father died, though, so we tried to be patient with her. Isobel was better at it than I was.’
She came to a halt. There was a touch of resentment in her tone, but it passed as she continued.
‘Ursula – my mother – had a set of keys to the house. She wasn’t supposed to let herself in any time she felt like it, but she often did. Anyway, that day she came round, and when she found nobody there, she went down to the studio in the garden.’ Elinor’s brow furrowed. ‘That was odd, I thought. She didn’t usually go anywhere near the studio. She didn’t like to see me working in all that clutter, she said.’ She paused. ‘It was a bit of a mess, I suppose. There wasn’t much space in there. But it went deeper than that, I think.’
‘Deeper?’ Elinor didn’t seem to need much prompting now, but occasionally Jess echoed a word, just to let her know she was following her story.
Elinor nodded. ‘You see, she’d given up painting when she got married and had us. It was never quite clear why. I mean, obviously, when we were little, it wasn’t easy to fit it in, but later, she had plenty of time. And Pa always encouraged her. But for some reason, she never took it up again. I think that made her restless and . . .’ She hesitated again. ‘A little bit jealous, perhaps. Of me.’
Elinor spoke the words tentatively, as if voicing something she’d known for a long time, but never expressed before.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, after a pause, ‘for whatever reason, Ma went down to the studio. I don’t know what she was doing, possibly looking for something, but when she got in, she found someone already there.’
Elinor spoke as if willing herself to continue.
‘The man – I suppose it was a man – must have crept down the side path from the front of the house to the studio. It was locked, but he broke in.’ A look of renewed anguish came over her face. ‘I wish I hadn’t kept that painting in there.’
‘The Gwen John?’
Elinor nodded.
There was a silence.
‘We don’t know exactly what happened when she came in the door, but she must have disturbed him because he attacked her. Hit her with something big and heavy. The police didn’t find a weapon. He must have taken it with him.’ She paused, as if steeling herself to continue. ‘Anyway, he beat her round the head, on the right-hand side.’ Her tone became flat and unemotional. ‘The autopsy said the impact to the head caused her brain to move inside the skull. A coup-contrecoup effect, they call it. She died of a massive brain haemorrhage.’
There was another silence, this time a longer one.
‘When I arrived home and found her, it was a terrible shock, of course. I came into the house and went down to the studio. I wanted to try out my new nibs. I found the door unlocked, which I thought was strange. I turned the lights on and saw her there, lying on the floor. My first thought was that she’d had a heart attack. I rushed over to her, and then I saw the bruise on the right-hand side of her head. At first I didn’t think it looked that bad, just a purple blotch on her temple. I thought perhaps she’d fallen over and banged it, that she was just concussed. Her skin was still warm to the touch. She was a terrible colour, though, very pale. Then I saw this clear liquid coming out of her nose and mouth. I pushed her hair back and saw it was coming out of her ears as well. That’s when I knew something terrible had happened.’
Elinor shifted her head on the cushion, as if her neck was hurting her.
‘I phoned the ambulance right away. I still didn’t believe she was dead. While I waited, I did what I could. I laid a blanket over her, to try and keep her warm. I thought about pushing on her chest, you know, the Heimlich manoeuvre or whatever it’s called, but I decided it was best not to move her. I wondered about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but I didn’t have a clue how to do it. So I ended up just sitting beside her, holding her hand, as it grew colder and colder in mine.’
She came to a halt. Elinor let the silence surround them for a moment, as if to honour the gravity of what had happened.
‘The paramedics examined her. They confirmed that she was dead.’ Elinor’s voice shook slightly as she said the word. ‘Th
ey said I’d done all the right things, not moving her, keeping her warm. That I couldn’t have resuscitated her, whatever I’d tried to do. That was important to me.’
Jess nodded silently. She’d heard that paramedics were now being given training as to how to deal with relatives when a death occurs. She was glad that, in this case, it had benefited Elinor.
Elinor took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out again. She seemed more comfortable now, relieved that she’d got near the end of her story.
‘After that,’ she went on, ‘everything started to happen at once. The studio seemed to be full of people. The police were called, and the coroner, and the undertaker, who took away the body. I was in a daze. The police started questioning me, asking if anything in the studio had been taken. It was only then that I realized the painting wasn’t on the wall. I hadn’t noticed it up to that point.’ She paused. ‘The funny thing was, although it had been my prize possession, I wasn’t really bothered. I felt a sense of relief that it was gone, actually.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘But then they asked me if anything else was missing, so I went over to my desk at the window, and saw that my paints and brushes had been meddled with. In particular, there was a phial of ochre that had been spilled. When I saw that, I suddenly felt absolutely furious. I couldn’t understand it. My mother had just been murdered, and all I seemed to care about was the fact that someone had been mucking about with my paints.’
‘That’s quite a common reaction, you know.’ Jess spoke quietly. ‘It’s a kind of displacement. When someone’s had a shock they often find something insignificant to focus their emotion on.’
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