by Alex Connor
‘I don’t know,’ Ben said honestly. ‘But I wonder what it would have been like living with her, in that house. What Leon’s last weeks and days were like … The whole atmosphere was eerie there. Not just because Leon was dead – there was more to it than that.’
‘You’re tired, darling. Get some rest.’
‘I will, and I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, hurrying on. ‘But don’t come round to the house—’
‘I won’t, I promise. But you’re scaring me, Ben. If you’re in trouble, call the police.’
‘No, not yet,’ he replied. ‘I will if I have to. But not yet.’
He was lying to her and his conscience needled him. But what was the alternative? To tell her he had the skull at his home? The skull which had already cost two lives? And how could he risk telling her about Diego Martinez, the builder whose find had set the whole series of events into motion. Had he been killed because of the skull? And if so, why had he been murdered in London, not Madrid? Did the same person who had killed Martinez also kill Leon? Abigail was right about one thing, Ben thought. He would go to the police when he had proof, but not before. It was his brother who had been murdered and it was up to him to prove it.
Reaching for his coat, Ben walked out, locking the door of his consulting room behind him. Skirting the decorators’ ladders, he hurried towards the loggia, the glass windows and ceiling full of London greyness. In the distance he could hear a phone ringing, and as he approached the back entrance he saw an ambulance pull up, its light flashing.
Preoccupied, Ben walked to his car and got in, turning on the wipers to clear the rain off the windows. In the rear-view mirror he watched a stretcher being taken out of the ambulance and hurried into the A & E department, the ambulance men returning a moment later with the stretcher empty and folded. Sighing, Ben started the car and pulled out on to the Whitechapel Road, waiting at the first set of traffic lights and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Still weary, he rubbed his eyes and then moved on when the lights changed, making for home.
It was nearly half an hour later that Ben finally arrived back, finding a parking space opposite his house. Hurrying up the front steps, he fumbled with the lock, pushing open the door and walking in. The place seemed unwelcoming as he put down his overnight bag and flicked on the hall light. Picking up his post from the floor, he moved into his study, spotting a fax and scanning it.
FOR THE ATTENTION OF DR BEN GOLDING
He read on, skipping the formalities:
The autopsy findings on Mr Leon Golding are as follows …
Automatically Ben held his breath.
Conclusion: suicide.
Conclusion: suicide … Ben read the two words again, the image of his brother’s body flickering behind his eyes. Leon hanged. Leon dead. Leon killing himself … Exhaling, he put down the fax, not bothering to read any more of the report. He already knew that the Spanish coroner would have backed up his findings with the bald facts – that Leon Golding had tried to commit suicide twice before. That he had been unstable. That his life had always been only an inch away from death.
Pouring a drink, Ben sat down with his legs stretched out in front of him, promising himself that he would get drunk. And then, remembering that he was operating later, he put down the glass. Idly, he riffled through his post, and found to his surprise that his hands were shaking and he was fighting tears. Embarrassed, he walked into the kitchen and began to make himself something to eat. His actions were automatic, unconsidered: the cutting of the bread, the buttering, the slicing of the tomato and some cheese. He made the sandwich because he needed to eat, not because he cared what it would taste like, filling the kettle and setting it to boil.
His mind kept replaying images, like scenes viewed through a train window, passing fast and unfocused. Leon, Gina, Abigail, Francis, the hospital … His eyes aching from exhaustion, he began to eat. Slowly he chewed the food, making little saliva, forcing himself because he hadn’t eaten for hours. When he had finished the sandwich, he would sleep. But it was unappetising and Ben could only eat a little. Turning, he was about to put the plate on the draining board and paused.
Something was different, he could sense it. Slowly, he looked around the kitchen – and then realised that the door of the washing machine was ajar. Bending down, he felt around inside the machine frantically, then dragged out his clothes, his hands rummaging, panicked, around the back of the empty steel drum.
The skull was gone.
BOOK THREE
… I should like to know if you are elegant, distinguished or dishevelled, if you have grown a beard, if you have all your own teeth, if your nose has grown, if you wear glasses, walk with a stoop, if you have gone grey anywhere and if time has gone by for you as quickly as it has for me …
LETTER FROM GOYA TO MARTIN ZAPATER
Spain, 1821
Shuffling across the dry stretch of grass outside the Quinta del Sordo, the old man paused beside the fountain, plunging his face under the fall of water. The coolness shimmered against his skin, pumping the aged blood into the pores, making his pulse thump to the liquid sensation of cold. His mind wandered from the hot day back to the court, to the past. When he had dabbled with colour and women, mocking the majas while he slept with them. Taking a salary from the king while the ruler slept and hunted his days away, and his Minister in Chief, Godoy, ruled over Spain and the bed of the Queen Maria Luisa. Godoy, a suspected murderer. The man rumoured to have had the Duchess of Alba killed.
Goya lifted his head out of the water, letting the heat dry the flutter of hair. Not bald, even past eighty, but deaf as a stone tomb. Inside his head the dull humming of blood beat in rhythm to the vibration of his footsteps as he made his way into the largest room of the house, on the left of the ground floor. Insects, plump with feeding, made trapeze movements over his head, a lizard basking on the window ledge outside. Once, many years before, he had lain on a bed with the Duchess of Alba, both of them watching a lime green lizard making its showy way across the bedroom floor …
She had been poisoned, taken from him, the motive unclear. Jealousy, greed, her fortune up for the taking after her death. Or maybe she had been killed because she was, in truth, most frightening. Too wild, too reckless, her reputation tainted by rumours of her dabbling in the occult.
Soon it would be dark … Sighing, Goya picked up a paintbrush. The handle was worn, smeared with grease and an echo of old paint. No one was paying him for his work. There was no sponsor, no collector, to please. The house and the walls were his, to do with as he chose.
Like the bulls he had admired so often in the ring, Goya sighted his target and moved towards it. The wall fell to the onslaught of darkness, figures emerging half-completed, half human, winding in a mad procession. Mouths gaped, eyes extended, insanity in the turn of bodies, a demented congregation smearing their ghoulish progress across the wall.
‘… I have painted these pictures to occupy my imagination, which is tormented by all the ills that afflict me …’
He had sent the confession to a friend, but knew he could not risk confiding the whole truth in words. Anything written could be retained and used as a weapon against him.
The written word had held danger before. Earlier in his life he had scrawled captions under his works, the most damning reserved for The Disasters of War, the eighty aquatints which he had never published. Under the drawings he had made comments like a war correspondent writing from the front:
One cannot look at this.
This is bad.
This is how it happened.
I saw it.
And this too.
Why?
He had charted the war atrocities and recorded them, but kept them secret. The reason was obvious. A famed liberal, Goya could not risk retaliation from the vicious Ferdinand VII. He was too old and too weak for political grandstanding. Too frightened to rebel publicly.
Staring at his work, Goya moved up to the belly of the wall, his breath warm
against the paint and plaster underneath. He knew the pictures wouldn’t survive in the Spanish climate. Oils mixed with white preparation of calcium sulphate, together with the adhesion of glue, would fade quickly in the heat and the damp from the nearby river. But that wasn’t important. He wasn’t creating the paintings to be admired, but to leave behind a testimony of what was happening to him.
His mind slipped backwards, losing its hold on the ratchet of memory. He was back in the summer of 1796, in Andalusia, at the country estate of the widowed Duchess of Alba. They were lovers, of course, and Goya ran the gauntlet of the Inquisition in return for her soft mouth and violence of nature. Resting his face against the wall, the old man felt the wetness of the paint and remembered leaning his head against his lover’s moist thigh. So extraordinary had she been, the Duchess’s image had repeated itself constantly in his work. Chief sorceress, witch of the heart.
Witches in the Spanish court, witchcraft in the Spanish court. Satanism a sop against the grinding control of Catholicism and the Inquisition. Where there was ignorance there was superstition, and he had painted it … Pushing back from the wall, Goya turned, facing another mural, startled by his own vision.
Slowly the day began to shift, dusk at the windows and the open door. Lighting the oil lamps, he turned back to his work. Blisters on his palms made his actions intermittently clumsy, the straining of weak eyes made his head throb, and the swelling of worn muscles ached in the heat.
But still he carried on.
37
London
The first soft rains of April had given way to a truculent temper of wind and early dark afternoons, spring taking her time. The previous night Ben had slept intermittently, troubled by noises and the image of his dead brother. When he woke he remembered that the skull had been stolen and sat on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. Who had broken into his house? And, more importantly, how had they known the skull was there?
The answer unnerved him.
They knew because they had been watching him.
They had followed the skull from Madrid to London. From Leon to Ben. From the hospital to the house. Someone out there wanted the skull badly – and they were determined to get it. Leon had not taken his own life. The skull was important enough for someone to kill for it. Leon hadn’t just been hearing noises and voices – he had been followed, robbed, hanged. And meanwhile, what had Gina been doing? Hadn’t she encouraged Leon to write about Goya? Brought Frederick Lincoln into his life? Confused Leon’s thoughts with mediums and the raising of the dead?
It would have been amusing to some, Ben thought. But not to Leon. Not to a man who had heard voices all his life. And then there were the Black Paintings. Pictures so disturbed they had confounded generations. Paintings which had spooked – and, some said, cursed – anyone who had tried to decipher them.
Getting to his feet, Ben moved into his study and reached behind the largest bookcase, his fingers scrabbling to catch hold of the edge of an over-stuffed envelope. Finally he pulled out Leon’s hidden testimony. To his relief all of his brother’s paperwork was intact, which meant that whoever wanted the skull either didn’t want the theory or didn’t know of its existence.
The phone rang suddenly, interrupting Ben’s thoughts. Roma Jaffe’s steady voice came down the line.
‘How are you? I was told you were back in London.’
How did she know that? Ben wondered.
‘I’m coping. How’s the Little Venice investigation going?’
‘Slowly.’
‘No leads?’
‘Nothing concrete,’ Roma replied. ‘We did a reconstruction, but no one recognised the victim.’
‘No one?’
‘No … Did you?’
Surprised, Ben took a moment to answer. ‘Why should I?’
‘He had your card in his pocket.’
‘That doesn’t mean I knew him. As I said before, there could have been a dozen reasons why he had my card.’
‘But why was there nothing on his body apart from your card?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s a mystery,’ she said slowly. ‘You couldn’t identify the facial surgery either, could you?’
‘No. I just know I didn’t do it.’
There was a stilted pause before she spoke again.
‘I’m very sorry about your brother. It must have been a terrible shock. Duncan said that you didn’t think he’d killed himself, and that you wanted to prove it.’
Closing his eyes momentarily, Ben regretted his uncharacteristic outburst and tried to mend the damage.
‘I was very upset when I spoke to your colleague. I’d just found Leon’s body.’
There was another swinging pause.
‘What were the findings of your brother’s autopsy?’
‘They said it was suicide.’
‘But you don’t think so … So that means you must think that someone murdered him? Who?’
‘I don’t know.’
Even over the phone Roma could sense that he was holding back. ‘Do you know why your brother was killed?’
Detita was standing by the stove, stirring something in a pot. Behind her, at the kitchen table, sat the young Ben and Leon arguing good-naturedly over a book. Finally, Ben let go of the book and Leon leant back in his chair, holding the volume triumphantly to his chest. In the distance came the angry sound of a dog barking, the wind clapping in the trees outside. The atmosphere changed in an instant, from homely to threatening.
‘You hear that noise?’ Detita asked, turning to the brothers. ‘That’s Goya. The old man’s come back. He’s looking for his head …’
Snorting, Ben laughed, but Leon glanced over to the window, unnerved.
‘Someone came to see the old painter at the Quinta del Sordo. Goya knew them, knew what they wanted to do …’ She paused, making sure the words were leaving an imprint on the cloying air as she pointed beyond the window, the outside lamp shuddering in a late summer wind, Leon transfixed. ‘He heard devils passing his house at night, on horseback—’
The firelight caught in her eyes for a heartbeat, yellow darts of flame in the blackness of her pupils. And behind that, somewhere Ben had never gone, was the place where she had taken Leon a long, long time before.
‘Mr Golding?’ Roma said, raising her voice slightly over the phone. ‘Do you know why your brother was killed?’
‘No.’
He was lying, she could sense it, and she fired a volley into the dark.
‘Why were you asking about the Little Venice murder?’
He fielded the shot. ‘Why wouldn’t I be interested, since I’m involved in the case?’
‘But Duncan said you were talking about your brother being killed, and then you asked about the murder. And you’ve just asked me about it too.’ She pressed him. ‘I wondered if you thought there was a connection between this killing and your brother’s death?’
‘How could there be?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
There was a temptation for him to confide, to tell her that someone had broken into his house. But then she would ask what they had stolen and somehow Ben wasn’t ready to talk about the skull, or his suspicions. Because they would sound absurd, and because she might write him off as a hysteric. Certainly she would exclude him from being involved in the Little Venice murder investigation – and he couldn’t have that. He needed to know as much as he could about Diego Martinez. In case his death held a clue to Leon’s.
So he didn’t confide. He lied. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you.’
‘Really? You don’t know anything?’
‘No,’ he said, his tone final. ‘Nothing at all.’
38
Fiddling restlessly with his house keys, Carlos Martinez sat outside Roma’s office, waiting to be seen. He had been at the police station for half an hour, his gaze constantly moving over to the wall where there was poster of the reconstruction. Underneath were the words:
&
nbsp; DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?
He had seen it for the first time coming out of the Underground. Had stopped, taken aback, trying to work out if the face was who he thought it was. The eye colour was wrong, so was the styling of the hair, but he knew who it was. When he saw the second poster he found himself shaking, the eyes of the reconstruction looking blankly at him, not as they had done in life. But then again, this wasn’t life, was it?
He hadn’t gone home. Instead he had walked to the police station and told the desk sergeant that he wanted to see a detective. After showing them the photograph of Diego that he carried in his wallet it was clear that his son was indeed the face in the poster.
Leading the shaken man into her office, Roma closed the door behind them and showed him to a seat.
‘I’m Inspector Roma Jaffe. I’ll be handling your son’s case, Mr Martinez. I’m very sorry for your loss …’
He nodded, started fiddling with his keys again, his head down.
‘Can I ask you when you last saw your son?’
‘A week ago,’ the old man said, lifting his gaze, his eyes blurry with cataracts. ‘He’d come to London to visit me. He did twice a year, and we’d promised to meet up again last night. But Diego didn’t call or come to my place, and I was worried. It wasn’t like him.’
‘You said he was visiting London?’ Roma prompted him. ‘Where did he live?’
‘Madrid.’
The word took a swing at her. ‘Madrid … Did he work in Madrid?’
‘He took over my business there.’ The old man went on, his voice dropping then hurrying on, the accent obvious. ‘He wasn’t making a lot of money, but he’d kept it ticking over. You know, times are hard everywhere …’
She nodded.
‘Diego was my only child. He grew up with me, but when he was in his twenties I met someone and I moved over to London to be with her.’
‘And your son stayed in Madrid?’