Altered Images

by Maxine Barry

  But could she really trust him? Even now? That old worm, suspicion, wriggled deep inside her. He knew that she’d heard him answer the phone. He’d gone out into the kitchen, fairly screaming the fact out loud that it was an important phone call. He very conveniently hadn’t been able to shut the door completely, because of the telephone cord. And he was clever enough to guess that she might be listening in. What if he was just laying the grounds to set up a false sense of security on her part? Was she being paranoid? Or was she just being realistic?

  Once again she was back in the realms of a nightmare. Was he a heartless seducer, a cunning, ruthless hunter? Or did he mean it when he said he loved her?

  ‘Hum, you might be right,’ Richard Braine agreed cautiously.

  Lorcan disguised a sigh of relief, and said casually, ‘Well, I’ll still keep my eyes open down here. Just in case.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Richard said dryly. Then, just as Lorcan was about to hang up asked softly, ‘Is she very beautiful Lorcan?’

  Lorcan went cold. He stared at the wall opposite him. Then he said quietly, ‘Yes, she is.’ And hung up.

  Frederica moved quickly back to the window. When Lorcan came back into the room and put the phone back in its place, she was standing exactly where he’d left her.

  ‘Frederica,’ he said softly. His breath caught as she turned to look at him. His heart melted as those dark velvety eyes met his. And he knew it would always be this way. He walked towards her, his arms coming out to hold her. Frederica panicked.

  ‘You said you had something you wanted to show me?’ she reminded him, taking a hasty step back. She needed to think. She needed time to recover, to try to make sense of all that had happened. If she let him hold her now, she’d be lost all over again.

  ‘What? Oh . . . yes,’ Lorcan tried to ignore the pain he felt as she moved determinedly away from him. Pretended it didn’t matter. Reassured himself that, in time, he’d win her over. After all, he’d just given up a very important part of his life for her. He knew without having to ask him, that Detective Inspector Richard Braine would never again ask him to help the police. He knew that he’d never again be able to meet his own reflection in the mirror without knowing, and acknowledging, that he had sacrificed a great part of himself for the sake of a woman who might not even love him. But it didn’t matter.

  He loved her. Such was the power of love. He smiled, suddenly glad that, no matter how things turned out, he hadn’t cheated himself. Hadn’t betrayed her. He knew, in a flash of illumination, that he’d never, ever, regret what he’d just done.

  Frederica saw an astonishing look cross his face, and wondered what had caused it. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d taken an instinctive step towards him. Something wonderful had just happened. She knew it. She felt it. But then she checked herself.

  She still didn’t dare trust him.

  ‘What I wanted to show you is over here,’ he said calmly, and walked to one corner of the room, where a plain-looking frame faced the wall. ‘I got it the other day, in a junk shop in Botley. What do you think?’

  He turned it around and showed her the vibrant, colourful, cartoon-like print of a Roy Liechtenstein. ‘Liechtenstein is the best known of the American pop artists, as you know. But what do you think this was doing in Botley of all places?’

  Frederica shook her head, but for once failed to be moved by a piece of art. She turned away from it, not even bothering to check to see whether it was one of the earlier prints. Lorcan put it back and said casually, ‘Of course, his work is very easily faked. Any competent cartoonist or magazine strip-cartoon artist could have a reasonable go at faking a Liechtenstein.’

  Now, Frederica thought. Now was the time to turn round and tell him that she was copying the Forbes-Wright, and more importantly, why. Now, Lorcan thought. She’s going to tell me now. But even as Frederica turned, even as she opened her mouth, even as she began to speak, something insisted she remain silent.

  Had that phone call been a set up, between him and his policeman friend? He’d invited her back to his house, he could have asked his buddy on the Art Fraud Squad to call at three o’clock on the dot. She didn’t want to believe it. She didn’t, even, really think it was true. But she didn’t know. And until she did, she’d just have to stick it out. Until the painting was finished, until she showed it to him in all its glory, in all its fine detail, and waited to see what he’d do? Would he call the police in, or tell her to destroy it? Until then, she was in limbo: that place between heaven and hell, not knowing which was to be her final destination. Her only consolation was that it wouldn’t be long. The painting was all but finished. She could hang on just that little while longer. She had to.

  And so she smiled merrily at him. Took a step towards him, and held out her hand. ‘Want to go punting on the river?’ she asked softly.

  Lorcan swallowed hard. Once. Felt something deaden and crumple inside of him. Then he nodded. ‘If that’s what you want,’ he agreed, his voice as bleak as a winter wind.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Detective Inspector Richard Braine didn’t look happy as he boarded the train to Oxford. In his pocket he had a search warrant for Frederica Delacroix’s room in St Bede’s, and another one for her work area at the Ruskin School of Fine Art. He stared at the passing scenery morosely. He wanted his suspicions to be wrong. Dead wrong. What he most definitely didn’t want, was to find out that Lorcan Greene, a man he’d always trusted, had lied to him.

  * * *

  At four-thirty on the dot, the conference goers at St Bede’s began to assemble for afternoon tea, the impressive College Butler and several scouts beginning to circulate with delicious meringues and trays of dainty cucumber sandwiches and pots and pots of tea.

  Carl Struthers, the owner of a large and successful non-fiction publishing company, was a thin, dark, intense looking man, who rarely smiled. He had only one ruling passion, and it wasn’t publishing. His eyes flickered around the room restlessly, and he glanced, more than once, at his watch.

  ‘Do you have to salivate whenever she walks by?’ Gerry hissed loudly at her ‘husband’ John Hendrix.

  ‘Oh don’t start . . .’ John snapped back. And as the conference goers quietened down to watch the next instalment, Reeve moved slowly across the room, careful not to interfere with John, Gerry and Julie’s big husband-wife-mistress love triangle.

  ‘Looks like things are going well,’ Reeve murmured to Annis, as Gerry scornfully asked her errant spouse why he had to rub her nose in it by bringing his mistress to Oxford?

  Reeve gently took Annis’s hand. ‘Come on. We’re not needed for this scene.’ He put a hand on her elbow and began to move towards the door.

  ‘No!’ Annis hissed desperately, but Reeve was firm.

  ‘Come on, I want to talk to you.’ His grip on her elbow became more insistent, and, knowing she couldn’t make a scene, steered her quietly and unobtrusively out of the door.

  Once inside Webster’s main hall, however, she yanked her arm free. ‘Now look here . . .’ she began mutinously.

  ‘No, you look! Oh, let’s take a walk,’ he said, exasperatedly. ‘I’ve found a walled garden that looks pretty deserted to me.’

  Annis felt her heart pound, and knew that the last thing she needed was to be alone with him. Pity it wasn’t the last thing she wanted, too! As they stepped into Wallace Quad and headed towards Becket Arch, she shot him a quick, anxious look. What, exactly, was all this leading up to?

  He led her diagonally across the lawns to where a square walled garden shimmered in the afternoon haze. A single, wrought-iron gate allowed access. On it was a white plaque. PRIVATE Fellows’ Garden—No Students Allowed.

  ‘We can’t go in there,’ Annis whispered.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re not Fellows,’ she muttered, but he was already opening the iron gate, which creaked protestingly. Inside, they stood and looked around, admiring the tall hollyhocks, lushly blooming borders, and the neat
square cut of lawn.

  ‘Over here,’ Reeve said, pointing to one shady corner, where he sprawled on the grass. Dressed only in a lightweight dark green shirt and black slacks, he looked dark and dangerous. He patted the grass next to him. ‘Come on. I won’t bite. Not unless you want me to.’

  Annis snarled. ‘You just try it!’ she warned him, then collapsed bonelessly to the ground beside him.

  ‘Good faint,’ he said admiringly. ‘Learn it on stage?’

  ‘For a small TV bit part, actually,’ she corrected. Looking up at him, her amber eyes glowed sleepily in the mellow afternoon heat. ‘I was one of those housemaids who find a body, scream and pass out.’ She stretched luxuriously. She was wearing a simple blue cotton summer dress, her long legs were bare and her loose black hair spread across the grass.

  ‘How nice for you,’ Reeve agreed. ‘Now, I want to know what that crack you made in the hot tub was supposed to mean,’ he added blandly. Annis shot upright. Her amber eyes narrowed.

  Talk about being ambushed! ‘What do you mean?’ she asked warily.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, meeting her eyes boldly. ‘Do you really just see me as a roll in the hay for the duration of our visit to Oxford. Or were you just blowing bubbles?’

  He’d had time to think, since she’d caught him so unawares that time, just after leaving the tub, And for a sophisticated woman who just wanted a casual fling, she was behaving very oddly indeed. Avoiding him. Keeping him at arm’s-length. Looking as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. Hardly the picture of a carefree woman out for a bit of harmless fun—which had given him at least some hope. He tried to ignore the cold clammy feeling that washed over him as he realised how easily this could all backfire on him. If he’d read her wrong.

  ‘Now just a minute,’ Annis huffed. ‘I meant every damned word I said,’ she angled her chin up. Just who did he think he was?

  ‘You don’t love me then?’ he asked quietly.

  Her heart stalled. ‘Hah!’ she forced herself to snort scornfully. ‘Fancy yourself, don’t you?’

  ‘You don’t want to see me again when we leave Oxford?’

  She licked painfully dry lips. She managed a magnificently nonchalant shrug. ‘I don’t suppose that it will matter, one way or the other.’

  ‘So what happened the other afternoon meant nothing?’ he persisted, struggling to control his elation, because he was beginning to see right through her.

  Annis blushed. ‘Oh that.’ She turned to tweak a blade of grass. ‘It was nice of course,’ she murmured.

  ‘Nice?’ Reeve protested and Annis grinned. She couldn’t help it. Now that had hit home, hadn’t it? She turned to him, mischief glimmering amongst the gold flecks in her eyes. ‘That’s rather a shame,’ Reeve said, seeing her smile falter. ‘Because that afternoon with you meant a hell of a lot to me.’

  Annis frowned. ‘It did?’ Careful she thought. He’s an actor, remember. He can do ‘sincere’ standing on his head.

  ‘Yes. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather like to keep on seeing you, when we get back to London.’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘Yes. So, what do you say?’

  ‘About what?’

  Reeve growled. The sound rumbled from his throat like the warning from a wild animal before it leaped upon its helpless prey.

  ‘Annis—it’s time to quit stalling. Admit all that talk in the tub was just so much hot air—and come here!’

  A bee, drowsy and full of pollen, backed out of a foxglove, buzzed loudly around his dark curly head before heading for a Californian poppy. Annis watched it, then, slowly, looked up into his dark-blue eyes.

  ‘All right,’ she said. She could take a gamble as well as the next girl, when she had to. ‘So I was feeling a bit defensive. But look at it from my point of view. You’re the great super-stud, so-handsome-he-hurts-your-teeth Reeve Morgan. You’d just seduced me in the hot tub.’

  ‘I seduced you?’ he exclaimed. ‘I like that! You were the one who dropped your robe and waltzed down into the tub—like Cleopatra with “attitude”. And, it was your foot, I seem to remember, that had trouble keeping itself to itself!’

  Annis waved a hand vaguely in the air. ‘Whatever,’ she said off-handedly. ‘The fact was, I felt as though I was just another notch on your belt. So, the last thing I wanted to hear, was all the usual stuff men dish out at times like that. About how commitment was over-rated, etc.,’ she added grimly, her eyes troubled and just a little hurt.

  Reeve felt all sense of levity drain away. ‘So you thought you’d get it in first, hmm?’ he queried. And in a way, it made sense. ‘But if you’d just kept that lovely mouth of yours shut for a few seconds longer,’ he continued, ignoring the way her eyes flashed and her chin jutted out, ‘You’d have heard me tell you that, unbelievable as it may seem, I’ve fallen head over heels in love with you.’

  Annis felt the ground beneath her shift. She felt the elbow on which she was leaning, give way, half-tipping her back on to the grass. She straightened her arm again. She’d gone very pale. ‘Head . . . ?’ she whispered.

  ‘. . . Over heels,’ Reeve finished, helpfully. ‘So you see, if it’s all the same to you . . .’

  Annis squealed and launched herself at him, pressing him back against the grass, knocking the breath out of him.

  ‘Stop!’ Reeve laughed, but then her mouth was on his, her legs tangling with his, her hands finding their way inside his shirt, and allowing her fingertips to roam over his chest—and suddenly he didn’t want her to ‘stop’ after all.

  * * *

  When the train from Paddington pulled in at a few minutes past five, Frederica was sitting in a silent and deserted Ruskin, staring at her canvas, ‘Post-Millennium Home.’ She’d walked down from Magdalen Bridge on her own, having said goodbye to Lorcan after a quiet and emotional hour on the river. He’d seemed distant. Mad that his ploy hadn’t worked? Or really hurt that she hadn’t trusted him? She sighed and continued to stare at her paintings for a long, long time.

  Which was why she wasn’t in her room when Richard Braine tapped on her door. Receiving no answer, he tried the handle, found it open, and stepped inside. He went straight to the canvas on the easel and yanked the sheet away.

  An almost completed painting looked back at him. It was exquisite—one of the best forgeries he’d ever come across.

  The Mill had no conservatory.

  ‘Oh Lorcan,’ Richard said sadly. ‘You idiot!’

  * * *

  Back in the JCR at St Bede’s, Gerry stormed off, threatening a divorce and slamming the door behind her. Julie burst into tears. John tried to comfort her. The rest of the conference delegates, forgetting it was supposed to be an inter-active game, burst into spontaneous applause. Ray Verney filtered out with the rest of the group, watching Carl Struthers linger behind to inspect one of the paintings—a brace of pheasants, painted by a competent enough, but uncollectable, artist. He frowned.

  He didn’t like having Struthers around. Not when he was this close to making the switch. Sighing, and fighting back a tingling sense of fear and anticipation, Ray made his way to the Bursar’s office and knocked.

  The Bursar, a grey-haired and distinguished man, looked up with watery blue eyes that blinked at Ray from behind tortoiseshell-framed glasses.

  ‘Oh, yes, Mr Verney isn’t it? How’s the whodunit coming along?’

  Ray beamed. ‘Splendidly. That’s why I’m here. You remember you agreed to help our plot along by removing one of the paintings from Hall for us, and keeping it in your safe?’ he prompted, looking around the room vaguely. The safe was a concealed one, but Ray had no trouble guessing that it was housed in the fake cupboard set flush against one wall.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the Bursar rose. ‘So it’s time is it?’

  Ray could hardly believe it was all working out so easily, but within minutes they’d collected the Principal and were trooping into Hall.

  It didn’t take long to carefully remove the painting
by Hogarth from the wall. Ray, being so close to it now, was practically trembling, but that didn’t stop him from helping them to carry it back to the Bursar’s office. The Bursar, something of an antiquarian, very competently set about removing it from its frame. It was, of course, to reside in the safe during the course of the play—something insisted upon by the insurers.

  Ray let himself be steered tactfully out by the Principal, beamed at him, thanked him profusely yet again for helping out their little production in this way, and trotted off, the image of the gorgeous Hogarth still imprinted on the back of his greedy eyes.

  Soon, now. Soon.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Dinner in Hall went well. Next day, at lunch, the Bursar would exclaim in horror over the missing painting, pointing out its ‘theft’. Those who had failed to notice it missing over dinner tonight, would be kicking themselves then.

  Ray, eating his avocado starter, glanced nervously at Carl Struthers. To Ray, it was obvious how much the reclusive, anti-social millionaire coveted the Hogarth. He’d done nothing but stare at it every time they’d been in Hall. Luckily, though, no one else seemed to have noticed his preoccupation with it.

  Ray leaned back in his chair and wondered, idly, if he should change his plans and make the switch tonight. But no. He’d already decided when and how to do it. Changing plans at the last minute was always dangerous. He could wait.

  * * *

  When Lorcan pulled up in front of his house the sun was just developing a reddish tint. A blackbird sang in a cherry tree, its melodious song filling the evening air. But he was in no mood for anything beautiful. He was reaching for his key when something moved behind him. He spun round, the key pointing outwards, ready to attack any drug-crazed mugger or his associates.

  Richard Braine grinned, took a backward step, and held up both his hands. ‘Don’t shoot,’ he drawled.