Angels of the Flood

by Joanna Hines

  He considered this. ‘Presumably you want to restore the picture as nearly as possible to its original state.’

  ‘There’s a lot of debate about that,’ she told him. ‘Some conservators think the retouching should be easily distinguishable from the original. The most famous example of that school of thought is the Cimabue crucifixion in Florence which was so badly damaged by the flood. Do you remember that? It was almost destroyed, and they decided not to try to retouch it at all, just coloured the damaged bits in a kind of neutral cross-hatching as a memorial to the destruction. Now a lot of people think that was too extreme. There’s no one right way of doing this job.’

  ‘Oh look,’ said David. ‘Here’s Marsyas.’ He’d found the painting on an easel to one side of the studio. Kate didn’t look up. She was searching through a box of slides. ‘Are you going to remove the animal graffiti?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re waiting for instructions from the owners.’

  ‘I thought you said they were anonymous.’

  ‘Yes, but we can communicate via the dealer who’s acting as go-between.’

  ‘You recognized the painting, didn’t you?’

  Kate froze. Something was squeezing her ribs, making it hard to breathe. She said, ‘I—don’t know.’

  ‘We both recognized it,’ David said firmly. He’d moved quietly across and was standing right in front of her. His bulk seemed to be sucking the air out of the room. He said, ‘It was at the—’

  ‘I really don’t remember where I saw it before,’ she interrupted him quickly.

  ‘The Villa Beatrice.’ He pronounced the words in the Italian way—Bay-ah-tree-chay. Kate recoiled. The Villa Beatrice. Extraordinary how just hearing the name of that place had the power to take her breath away even after all these years.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. There was some kind of constriction in her throat.

  ‘You know it was.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said again. Her fingers had been flicking through the slides. Now they stopped. She’d reached the ones she was looking for, but found she was reluctant to touch them, as though these particular slides were coated with poison. And, in a way, they were.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked David.

  ‘Just another picture.’

  ‘So?’

  She hesitated, then, ‘This one was altered as well.’

  ‘And then sent to you?’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘By the same person?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you think it is?’

  ‘Yes, probably.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘It’s not—’

  ‘I’d really like to have a look.’

  Gingerly, Kate took a slide from its cover and set it in the viewer, before passing it to David. He looked at it for a few moments, then said, ‘Explain, please.’

  She moved a little distance away and began picking the dry leaves off a geranium plant. They released their cool aromatic scent against her palms, astringent and calming, but her heart was still pounding. She said, ‘This is a canvas which was sent to my studio towards the end of last year. It’s anonymous, probably Italian. It’s an allegory entitled “Truth is the Daughter of Time”—Veritas Filia Temporis—you can see the inscription on the bottom right. The theme was a popular one at in those days. Basically the libidinous couple romping in the foreground are about to be exposed by Father Time—the old gentleman behind them. Highly moral and not all that subtle. Your crimes catch up with you in the end, is the obvious author’s message.’

  ‘So who’s Miss Furry Boots?’

  ‘The figure watching them on the right? That’s Deception. She has the face of a beautiful young woman but the body and soul of a monster.’

  ‘Ah yes, I know the type well,’ said David with a smile. ‘And this painting was changed too? How?’

  Kate hesitated. ‘It’s probably just a coincidence.’

  David looked up at her and raised his dark eyebrows, clearly not believing her statement for a minute. Kate sighed and pulled out another slide, replacing the one in the viewer without a word. He peered at the small screen and Kate saw him stiffen. ‘Oh my God,’ he said. He shifted his stance to get a better look. ‘It was like this when it was sent to you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She remembered the shock of opening the painting when it arrived in its wooden packaging that cool October morning. The image itself was horrific enough, but when she’d realized which detail had been added recently, she’d been tempted to send it straight back to Signor Barzini and refuse the commission. But at the same time there’d been a fascination, a ghoulish fascination perhaps, which persuaded her to see the job through.

  ‘So much blood,’ said David. ‘It’s grotesque—like a scene from a horror film.’

  ‘Yes.’ It had taken Kate weeks of patient work to clean away the blood. No wonder the owner wanted to remain anonymous. Some brainless vandal had overpainted Deception’s neck with gore, as though her throat had been cut. There was blood pouring over her shoulders, saturating her gown and making scarlet pools on the ground. And still Deception’s beautiful face bore that sweet, untroubled smile, so disconnected from her ravaged flesh. Kate had worked obsessively on the picture, refusing to allow any of her assistants to help. Returning the image to its original state had become a labour of love, almost an act of penance, as though by restoring it she might somehow restore the life that had been destroyed.

  David straightened up and looked at her very directly. ‘Remind me again how Francesca died,’ he said quietly.

  Kate winced. Francesca. It was years since she’d heard the name spoken out loud. She said, as briefly as she could, ‘It was a car crash.’

  ‘Yes, but… I remember now. Wasn’t she on one of those scooter things? A Vespa? And she was in a collision with a little Fiat? And the way she fell—’

  ‘That’s right,’ Kate intervened quickly. ‘The way she fell—on the windscreen or the car mirror—it went through her neck and—and…’ She stopped. And she was almost decapitated. Even now Kate found herself choking on the words.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate. That was insensitive of me. I’d forgotten you were there.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t remember any of it. I was knocked out by the collision.’

  ‘And you weren’t driving.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kate, are you okay?’

  ‘I could use some air.’

  ‘Fine. We’ll go out for a bit and talk about something else.’ He smiled grimly. ‘We’ll stick to neutral topics like the situation in the Middle East or euthanasia or fox hunting. Good idea?’

  She nodded. Anything to get away from those hideous images.

  And it was a good idea, at least to begin with. They walked up onto Primrose Hill and looked out over London. Huge patches of the city were sparkling in the sunshine while other parts were shrouded by grey veils of rain. While they wandered the paths they stuck to the normal births, marriages and deaths topics two people talk about who haven’t seen each other in years. Kate told him briefly about her first marriage, to Martin, who was an architecture student. That had broken up soon after the birth of their son, Luke. ‘Martin couldn’t really deal with being a father,’ she told him, ‘though he and Luke have got closer recently.’ Her second marriage, to a civil servant called Ben Lumins, had ended three years ago. Tara, the daughter from that marriage, was currently at art school.

  ‘And since then?’

  ‘Since then I’ve rather enjoyed being single. How about you?’

  David stared out over the city. ‘Three kids, married twenty-five years, divorced eighteen months. But I’d rather not talk about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, Kate. You misunderstand me. Recently the whole subject has become pretty much of an obsession. I’ve lived and breathed and probably talked about my chaotic private life non-stop. I expect I qualified for great bores of today ten times over. But since your lecture this afternoon I haven�
�t thought about it at all. And that’s a relief, believe me.’

  Kate looked at him to see if he was teasing her. She’d never known the topic of Conservator as Detective have such a profound impact on any member of an audience before. But so far as she could tell, he meant what he said. She wondered briefly if he had expectations of more than a bottle of wine and a meal when they went back to her house. She hoped not. Distracting someone who was still raw and bruised from a recent divorce was not part of her plans for the evening. Especially not when the recently divorced someone kept reminding her of a time and place she’d long ago made it her business to forget.

  She was about to concoct a story about a previous engagement for that evening when the first large drop of rain landed on her wrist. And then half a dozen more. All about them people were scattering to the edges of the park. Within seconds those first raindrops had turned into a deluge. Kate’s jacket was soaked almost before she’d hooked the collar over her head. David was only wearing a shirt and it was plastered to his shoulders and upper arms by the time they reached the gates.

  The streets were deserted. Pedestrians huddled for shelter in doorways and peered out as water cascaded off awnings onto the pavement. The rain was so fierce it bounced up again, each drop a vigorous tick of water. The gutters were streaming. Cars swished by, their headlights sparkling in the sudden dark.

  Kate and David stopped and looked at each other. ‘Do we take shelter too?’ he asked. His face was shining with wet.

  She shook a halo of water from her hair. ‘What’s the point?’

  They were both laughing as they hurried back to her house, then stood in the hallway and dripped generous puddles onto the mat.

  ‘Don’t move!’ said Kate. ‘I’ll throw you down a towel.’

  She hurried up the stairs, found a couple of towels for David, then peeled off her jacket and skirt and roughly dried her hair. She pulled on a pair of loose trousers and a zippered top that were draped over the back of a chair in her bedroom. When she went back downstairs it was obvious that David’s towels weren’t having much impact on the rain damage. He followed her to the second bedroom where she found him a tracksuit of her son’s, which was too small, but dry at least, and he retired to the bathroom to change.

  By the time he reappeared in her kitchen she’d poured two glasses of wine and was hunting through the fridge for the makings of a meal. ‘You’re in luck,’ she told him. ‘I can do you smoked salmon pasta and salad.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  The drama over the rain had caused a shift between them. Kate forgot she’d been planning to invent another engagement for the evening. Now that David was standing in her kitchen doorway wearing a pale blue tracksuit that was loose on her lanky son but stretched tight over his shoulders and chest, he was an altogether different proposition from the almost-stranger who’d been part of her audience a few hours before. It was weird seeing Luke’s clothes on a man who’d known her in the time before she was ever a mother, a man who knew nothing about the person she’d become. A man who, if he remembered her at all, knew a side to her that no one in her present life was aware of.

  She nicked the skin of four tomatoes, put them into a small pan of boiling water, waited half a minute, then took them out with a slotted spoon and set them on the chopping board. David had moved silently on bare feet across the room: standing behind her he put one hand on her waist and rested his chin lightly on her shoulder. ‘Anything I can do?’ he asked.

  Kate felt that tightness round her ribs again. She flexed her shoulders just enough to shrug him off and said without turning round, ‘You could try telling me what the hell’s going on.’

  ‘Hm.’ David went to the window and looked down at the garden. ‘It’s stopped raining,’ he said.

  She began pulling the skins off the tomatoes even though they were still hot and their flesh scalded the tips of her fingers. ‘Why?’ she asked angrily. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. What’s the point of messing around with those pictures and then sending them to me? Who’s doing it? What do they want?’

  She was chopping the tomatoes ferociously. She hadn’t meant to bring up the topic of the paintings again. ‘The Daughter of Time’ had been sent back to Florence three months ago. ‘Marsyas’ had sat for weeks in her studio; she’d hardly ever talked about them with her colleagues. But David was different: he’d been there. You couldn’t just pretend the whole thing was a long-forgotten nightmare when one of the actors in that particular nightmare was standing in bare feet in your kitchen wearing your son’s too-small pale blue tracksuit.

  ‘Which question first?’ asked David, pulling a metal chair away from the table and sitting down.

  ‘It’s like being stalked,’ said Kate, finally identifying the sensation that had been haunting her for months. ‘That’s what it is. Just knowing that someone is out there, some warped, obsessive crackpot, has got me in their sights. Someone’s looking at me and I can’t see them.’ She shuddered. ‘It’s… it’s horrible.’

  David was silent for a few moments, considering. ‘You’re sure the pictures were sent to you deliberately? Not just to your workshop?’

  ‘My name was on the consignment note. The dealer said he was under strict instructions not to give out any information at all.’

  ‘Isn’t that unusual?’

  ‘Yes, but not unprecedented. Owners of valuable works of art often don’t want their identity made public for fear of burglary.’

  ‘Valuable paintings? I thought you said the Marsyas was a copy.’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t stop it from being valuable. Titian made copies of his own work—or his assistants did. We don’t know for sure. You have to think back to a time when there was no other way of recording images. And plenty of other artists made copies of work that impressed them. Any painting by Rubens, say, or Sir Joshua Reynolds, is going to be extremely valuable, even if it is, technically speaking, a copy.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know who painted those two pictures, but I’m sure they’re worth a hell of a lot more than the insurance price.’

  David seemed intrigued. ‘Let me get this straight. You’ve been sent two paintings by an anonymous owner and both are undervalued?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they’ve both been altered in a way that could relate to Francesca’s death.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And where is the dealer?’

  ‘Florence.’

  The dark eyebrows shot up. ‘So that implies…?’

  ‘Well, obviously, it was someone who knew… how she died.’ Kate was melting butter in a shallow pan. She crushed two cloves of garlic into a smear of salt with the flat of her knife, then chopped it quickly into a paste. She was working faster, more intensely than her usual leisured style of cooking, all her nervous energy funnelled into the task.

  ‘There was an inquest, wasn’t there?’ asked David. ‘So the details would have been public knowledge.’

  ‘Then why drag it all up now?’ Kate tipped the garlic and tomatoes into the pan and pushed them around in the melted butter. She ground some black pepper over them, then crumbled in some feta cheese. ‘Why go to all the trouble of altering those pictures and then send them to me, just so I get to put them back how they were?’

  ‘Maybe it’s two different people,’ said David. He inhaled deeply. ‘Mm, that smells fantastic. Look, just suppose there’s one person who changes the paintings, and another person who doesn’t want them changed. That’s the person who sends them to you to have them put back how they were.’

  ‘Maybe.’ The tomatoes were melting into the butter and garlic, their delicate coral flesh marbled white with the feta. Kate remembered how Deceptions pale throat had been necklaced with acrylic blood. But it was the other picture, those two little creatures, superficially as innocent as characters from a cartoon, which haunted her most. What was their significance? Because there was a significance, she knew. The answer was inside her skull, hidden deep in her me
mory, but she didn’t know how to access it. More to the point, she wasn’t convinced she wanted to access it.

  ‘Once you know who’s been sending the paintings, my guess is you’ll have the answer to “why”.’

  ‘Maybe it’s best not to know.’ Kate emptied half a packet of penne into a pot of boiling water and stirred vigorously.

  ‘Do Francesca’s family still live at the Villa Beatrice?’

  ‘It’s been turned into some kind of foundation for the arts, apparently. The Bertoni family are connected with it, I think.’

  ‘Sounds like that would be the place to start asking questions, then.’

  Kate turned to him, appalled. ‘You mean go back to the Villa Beatrice?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She shook her head in disbelief, then went back to her cooking, tearing the smoked salmon into strips and mixing it with the tomatoes and feta. David made it sound like such a simple task: why don’t you just go back to the Villa Beatrice and find out what’s going on? Did he have any idea what he was suggesting? ‘I won’t go because I don’t like being manipulated,’ she said, ‘Just because some freak’s got nothing better to do with her time than stick graffiti on perfectly good paintings, then send them off to me, doesn’t mean I have to go charging halfway across Europe. Why should it bother me anyway? All I have to do is clean it up and send my bill.’

  ‘You said, her time.’

  ‘Did I? It could be his.’

  ‘But you think it’s a her. Which implies you’ve got a hunch who’s doing it.’

  Kate didn’t answer. She poured some cream onto the sauce, then got salad out of the fridge and put it in a bowl. ‘We can eat,’ she said.

  ‘Here, let me.’ David intercepted her, hefted the saucepan off the stove and began pouring the pasta into the colander in the sink. Thick steam rose up to fill the air between them. ‘So who do you think might be sending you the paintings?’ he asked.

  Kate didn’t speak. David had stretched out his arms stiffly and drawn back his head to avoid the steam as the boiling water sloshed from the pan. For a moment his upper body almost disappeared behind dense vapour. Kate was seized with a plummeting sense of dread, a memory of figures seen through glass but obscured by a veil of—of what? Mist? Spray? Dust? There was a sense of movement, and the half-seen figures were scurrying about in panic, the way ants do when their nest is disturbed. And all the time the terror was growing. All the horror lies ahead. But what horror? What was it that lay ahead?