by Clare Chase
I was glad that I hadn’t had to tell her about how Damien Newbold had deliberately double booked us, ensuring that I did cleaning I didn’t need to, whilst she had a wasted journey. Bad enough that he was showing her how little he cared by failing to tell her about my presence, worse still if she’d found she’d been deliberately set up like that.
‘I can’t believe it’s true,’ Tilly said. She looked at me with eyes still forced wide by shock, her face blank and white, and then at last she started to cry: large, silent tears.
It was some time before it seemed right to speak again. When she’d regained some control I said, ‘When did you start working for him?’
She blew her nose on a tissue. ‘Just after I’d been made redundant from TomorrowTech. You know that’s where he worked?’
I nodded.
‘Well, Damien sympathised with my situation and asked me out for a drink. He said then that he had some work in mind for me.’ She let out a rather bitter laugh. ‘To be honest, I thought he meant something to do with marketing. That’s what I’d done for the company. But it turned out he needed a cleaner. We …’ she paused and tears filled her eyes. ‘We had a bit of thing together at the time, and he said how nice it would be to have me around the place. We used to combine my visits with … well, with other things. Otherwise I’d have said no. But the job market’s been crap recently, and although I’ve got some freelance work since I left, I needed the extra cash.’
‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I was pretty sure you and he must have been close, at least at some point.’
Tilly looked up at me, a glimmer in her wet eyes. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Did he say something about me?’
The woman who does. Hell. I wondered what to do. ‘Well, it sounds as though you’re not aware of this,’ I said, wondering how best to put it, ‘but when I arrived, Maggie’s wasn’t the only nude image on Damien Newbold’s bedroom wall.’
She looked at me, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He’d put your painting up there too.’
‘My painting?’
I nodded.
‘I need to see.’
Which wasn’t ideal, given the other two I hadn’t yet mentioned. But Tilly was already making her way towards the hall, striding up the stairs.
We stood together in the doorway of the master bedroom as she took in the scene.
‘I had no idea,’ she said at last.
‘You didn’t sit for the portrait?’
She shook her head. ‘He did once take some photos of me. He must have had it done from one of them, but he never said, and when we were together …’ She paused, unable to go on for a moment. Eventually she managed to add, ‘When we were together, Maggie’s was the only nude portrait he had up here. He used to say I shouldn’t object to the presence of a beautiful image, and that it didn’t mean anything.’ She looked at me. ‘But I always knew that it did.’
So Damien Newbold had set up this little exhibition especially for me. My head swam for a moment. He’d engineered so much: my meeting with Maggie, the trail that led her to him, and now my meeting with Tilly. And had he envisaged this scene in his bedroom too?
‘Do you know who the other two women are?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen that one before,’ she said, pointing to the shy nude next to the wardrobe. ‘But there’s a photograph of that one downstairs.’ She indicated the painting of the joyous woman that faced Newbold’s bed and I noticed she was shivering.
‘You mean the one in the DVD cupboard?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘If there’s one there, then it’s another,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you the one I know about.’
And I followed her down the stairs and into Damien Newbold’s study. Tilly took me over to the wall opposite the door, which I now saw was rather damp. She leant behind a dark, mahogany chest and, as I peered over her shoulder, I could see a photograph frame, right down next to the skirting board, turned to face the wall.
‘I asked him why he’d left it like that, and he said she was out of favour. He was a bit weird that way.’ She shivered again. ‘I found it when I was cleaning, but he told me never to dust down there again. He wanted it left, he said, because she hated spiders, and he wanted as many cobwebs down there as possible.’
‘That’s sick.’
She nodded. ‘Even before I knew about that photo I was aware he could be obsessional.’ She looked at me as though willing me to understand. ‘But it was too late by then. I’d already fallen for him, hook, line and sinker. It seems awful, but when he showed me that photo I was just glad that it wasn’t me he was treating like that. I think for a while I stopped seeing things in the round.’
She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s nine o’clock. I guess the police’ll be with you soon. I’d better go.’ She swallowed. ‘I suppose they’ll want to talk to me too, especially with that painting hanging upstairs in Damien’s bedroom.’
I nodded and she got out a piece of paper, scribbling down her number. ‘Perhaps you could give them that,’ she said. ‘My number’s not in Damien’s address book. I made the mistake of looking once.’
After she left I went into the dining room to wait for the police to turn up, taking the photograph with me. There wasn’t much for them to look through in there – assuming they weren’t interested in Damien Newbold’s sideboard contents – so I should be safely out of the way if I kept to that room.
When I’d dusted off the glass that protected the photograph I could see clearly that the woman pictured was beautiful. Her hair fell in long, full waves over her shoulders and she was wearing a knitted dress with zigzag patterns on it in browns and orange. Her look was fashionably retro.
What was it all about? I glanced at the back of the frame, which had clips you could turn through ninety degrees to release the backing. Once I had it out, I could see the reverse of the photo. It was signed by the same artist who’d done the portrait. Nico. And once again he’d drawn that little hat symbol next to his name.
Inspiration suddenly struck and I fetched my laptop, pacing the room as I waited for it to boot up. If this Nico did photographs and portraits that he signed in that flamboyant way, maybe he was well known for his work.
I keyed ‘Nico’, ‘artist’, ‘photographer’ and ‘hat’ into Google. If I could track him down, I might possibly be able to identify his subject.
It was surprisingly easy. Wikipedia came up with the top link and provided the information I needed in its first summary paragraph. Nicholas ‘Nico’ Sidorov. Russian-born artist and photographer, sought after by society and celebrity clients during the late 1960s and 1970s. Born June 1939. Died of pancreatic cancer, November 1981.
Chapter Twelve
I felt the hairs lift on my arms. What an idiot I’d been, thinking the photos were arty and retro. Of course they weren’t, they were genuine period pieces. I thought back to the image in the DVD cupboard: the wide-brimmed hat and the Carole King hair. Transparently 1970s if I’d had the eyes to look. Only I hadn’t seen it because I’d been convinced that all of the women in Damien Newbold’s paintings were recent lovers.
I looked again at the photograph Tilly had found for me. How old would its subject have been there? Somewhere in her late thirties, maybe? And that meant that now she would be – I counted in tens on my fingers – somewhere around seventy, depending on the exact dates. And that put rather a different complexion on things. If she wasn’t a lover …
I walked back through to the drawing room. I knew what I was looking for now, and I’d seen them, that second night when I’d been looking for the piano music. I remembered them being somewhere on the bottom shelf.
I crouched down to scan the row of albums, running my fingers along them in turn. When might Damien Newbold have been born? I’d put him in his late forties. The albums were labelled by date, so I pulled one out that had ‘’61 to ‘65’ written on a label, stuck onto its spine.
The first pages were mainly ho
liday photos: clear white sunlight in exotic locations, whitewashed, flat-roofed buildings with ornate arches. North Africa? Morocco, perhaps? A younger version of the woman I was interested in appeared in many of them on her own, smiling at the camera. She looked happy here too, but perhaps a little bit less relaxed. Maybe that easy joy was something that came with the passing of years; it spoke of some kind of inner confidence. After a couple of pages there was a picture of the woman with a man. He looked older than her; attractive, dark glasses, his arm around her shoulders. Just behind them was a camel being held by a man in long robes, and the woman was laughing, but with an edge of nervousness showing in her eyes. Perhaps they were about to have a ride and she was feeling anxious.
I carried on turning the heavy pages of the album and was about halfway through when I found what I was looking for. A photograph of the woman holding a baby. After this there were lots of photographs of the woman on home territory, and at this point someone had begun to add captions to the images. Neat ink italics on pale blue squares of paper. It was an indication of the obsessive joy and interest that overwhelms new parents, I guessed. I could empathise; I was sure I’d be the same. The thought tugged at my heartstrings.
The first annotated photograph was labelled: ‘Bella with Damien, November 1964.’
His mother. It had suddenly seemed like the most likely option, once I’d understood the dates. I’d written about men with odd relationships with their mothers, although none as odd as this appeared to be, admittedly.
I scanned the rest of the album, which included many more baby pictures. There was an image of what must have been Damien’s first Christmas. He was surrounded by family, thumping a thick rug with a wooden hammer. Then there was one taken in February 1965, with him engulfed by a traditional christening gown, held tight by his mother. A pretty snow-covered church stood in the background. The man I assumed must be his father – Harry, according to the caption – hovered nearby. The following spring he was pictured lying on a rug in the sunshine and by August 1965 he was sitting up, laughing, on a sandy beach next to a sophisticated castle someone else must have constructed. And yet in the end he had been screwed up, dysfunctional and destined to die before his time.
What could Damien’s mother have done to make him despise her so? And where was she now?
I glanced at my watch. The police were sure to be here soon. It was nine-twenty already. I probably didn’t have much time, and a sense of urgency overwhelmed me. There was clearly more to find out, and I didn’t want to be deprived of the chance to investigate. What if the police wanted to take away personal items like the photograph albums? I pulled out the 1966 to 1970 instalment. Everything I saw there spoke of a happy childhood. At the very end of that book another baby arrived, Samson in May 1970.
I pushed that album back and reached for 1971 to 1975.
There were two things that struck me about that batch. Firstly Damien’s father, Harry, only featured in a few photographs, right at the beginning. After that he disappeared until one brief appearance in February 1974. The other was that there were far fewer photographs of Samson than of Damien, though of course Damien was almost six years older than his brother. He was bound to be more actively involved in proceedings. Where a third-party had taken a photograph of Damien and his mother they still looked close. Often they seemed to be catching one another’s eye, and they each shared the same mischievous, conspiratorial grin.
I had my hand on 1976 to 1980 when the door knocker went.
Chapter Thirteen
The lead officers that came to look over the house were both men: a DI Johnson, greying and tall with hollow cheeks, and a DS Brookes, who was stocky with red hair and looked disconcertingly like my old biology teacher.
Although I’d imagined simply keeping out of their way as they went through Damien Newbold’s stuff, it was soon clear it was me they wanted to focus on first, whilst some of their colleagues took care of searching for other evidence.
It was too grotty to take them into the drawing room, with its folding bed, and the kitchen felt unsuitably informal, so I led them back to the dining room.
‘Nice photograph,’ DI Johnson said, wandering over to peer at Bella’s image.
‘Damien Newbold’s mother,’ I said, picking it up and putting it on the sideboard. ‘I was just wondering if she was still alive.’ I found myself raising a hand to cover my eyes for a moment. ‘Unbearable, the thought of her having to deal with the news about her son.’
DI Johnson looked up at me. ‘Our information is that the next of kin is a brother.’
‘Can I get you some tea?’ I asked, and went off to the kitchen with their orders. I already felt I’d kept something from them by not explaining Damien Newbold’s weird relationship with his mother, but then what bearing could it possibly have on his murder? In the next-door room they were strangely quiet and when they did speak it was in voices so low that I couldn’t make out the words. For some reason butterflies were flitting round my stomach as though they were on speed. What must it be like for a guilty person? I tried to steady my hand as I poured milk into both teas, but managed to knock the teaspoon against the side of the mug as I added sugar. The work surface was scattered with spilt grains, but that would have to wait until later.
Back in the dining room DS Brookes was standing near my laptop. ‘You wanted to find out more about Mr Newbold?’ he said, accepting his mug with a nod of thanks and a smile.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I was judging by the browser tabs you’ve got open on your laptop.’
I glanced at my computer. Was he allowed to just look at what I’d been doing like that? Then again, he was a detective, and I had left my computer just sitting there. I supposed in fact it was probably in his job description. Still, I was convinced he must have deliberately knocked the glide pad. Otherwise the screensaver would have been on.
Into the pause DS Brookes said, ‘I see you found the same technology blog we did.’
I nodded. ‘The one that mentions the rumour about some whizzy new discovery Damien Newbold was supposed to have made? Yes, I did. It all seemed a bit hazy though.’
‘True. You took a look at his company website as well?’
That tab was still open too, labelled TomorrowTech Newsroom, at the top, so he could see full well that I had. Anyway, it wasn’t a secret.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was wondering about him, what his background might be and so on. It’s quite odd, living in someone else’s house. You get immersed in their environment, yet you know very little about them.’ Look, I’m just a nosy parker, please don’t make me babble on like this.
‘And so you looked to see if the company had made any announcement about the rumoured discovery,’ DS Brookes finished for me, homing in on how specific my enquiries had become.
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Well, presumably that’s what you were checking for, if you went to the section for press releases,’ DS Brookes said. ‘We did exactly the same thing ourselves as soon as we started to look into Mr Newbold’s background.’
The obvious difference between us being that I wasn’t a police officer, so why had I been looking? I knew he was waiting for me to comment.
Again he spoke into the gap I’d left: ‘People do acquire a certain notoriety when they’ve died a violent death, of course. Cambridge will be full of people Googling Damien Newbold to find out more as soon as the news breaks.’
‘I wasn’t Googling out of some kind of morbid interest,’ I said, realising as my voice rose that DS Brookes was playing me like a fiddle. ‘I looked at those sites several days ago now.’ Which was just the information he’d wanted to elicit. ‘When I put my computer away at night I tend to hibernate it, rather than shutting it down, so any web pages I have up stay up, unless I deliberately close them.’
Both officers were sipping their tea and waiting for me to go on.
‘I started looking into Damien Newbold because of the situation I found myself in.
I was minding his house, plonked down in the middle of all his physical stuff, of course, but increasingly getting drawn in to his everyday dealings and all the …’ I couldn’t think quite how to put it ‘… all the entanglements he seemed to have. It was a disconcerting feeling, and it made me want to know what kind of person he was.’ My throat felt rather dry, and I took a sip of tea. ‘I was interested when I saw the piece about how successful he was at work, because some other aspects of his life seemed …’ I paused again ‘… well, a bit dysfunctional. Truth to tell, I haven’t done this sort of job before. I’d imagined it would be a bit like staying in some impersonal holiday flat, when in fact it’s been like setting up an uncomfortable tent next to a nest full of angry wasps.’ This last bit came out in a rush and I felt myself blushing. A nest full of angry wasps? Talk about a drama queen. Damien Newbold had just been murdered and here I was, getting a bit hysterical over having to deal with the odd abandoned girlfriend.
DI Johnson was talking again now. ‘I’d heard that this was your first house-sitting job. My understanding is that Mr Bastable, who runs the business, normally hires people with some kind of security or police training. You’re the first contractor he’s used who doesn’t match that profile. Could you explain to us how you came to take on the role?’
And so, of course, I had to go into details about my circumstances, and how Steph was Nate’s cousin and had put me forward for the job. Naturally, I knew that Nate was well aware of the entire story, thanks to Steph, and so presumably he had already related it to the police during his interview too.
‘And Mr Bastable didn’t express any reservations about taking you on?’ DI Johnson said.
I thought of the words I’d overheard. He’d had reservations all right. ‘Steph had vouched for me.’
‘He must have a lot of faith in his cousin’s judgement,’ Johnson said. ‘Well founded, I’m sure,’ he added, smiling at me. But in spite of his friendly tone, and my innocence, I could tell he thought the situation was odd.