‘The woman came back?’ Charlie tried to sound as if she didn’t already know.
‘Yes, with a man in tow, but again, that was weird. It was as if he was pretending not to be with her, standing with his back to us, listening to our conversation. I didn’t realise he was with her, didn’t even notice him until he started walking away and she ran after him. She’d been shouting at me about how a picture by Mary Trelease had been on our stand that morning, and saying Ciara had lied to her about it. Course, I didn’t know what she was talking about. I told her she was mistaken. It didn’t take me long to work it out-I found Abberton hidden under a pile of prints under the table a few seconds later, but by that point the strange woman had gone.’
‘How did Mary find out?’ Charlie asked, guessing she must have.
Jan’s face crumpled in distress at the memory. ‘I told her. I had to. I didn’t believe the woman at the art fair was a spy, or anything so absurd, but it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that she knew Mary and would tell her. I thought I ought to do the decent thing and ’fess up.’
‘I assume it didn’t go down well.’
‘Mary slammed the phone down on me. The next day she came like a deaf-mute to collect the painting-wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t speak to me. I haven’t heard from her since. She wouldn’t take my calls and didn’t answer my letters. Eventually I gave up.’
‘And Ciara?’ Charlie was curious.
‘She left the week after the art fair,’ said Jan tersely.
Charlie read a sacking between the lines. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any photos of any of the pictures you framed for Mary?’ Charlie was growing more curious about Abberton the more she heard about it. She wanted to see what the fuss was about.
‘I did have,’ Jan lowered her voice, as if afraid to admit it. ‘It was one of the first things Mary made me promise-that I would never take a photograph of any of her paintings. When I promised, I intended to keep my word, but… once I’d framed Abberton, once I thought about Mary coming to take it away, I took a few photos. Not to show anyone, just to keep as a souvenir of something that had made such an impact on me, made me think about my work in a different way.
‘After the Ciara fiasco, after Mary slammed the phone down on me, I deleted the photographs of Abberton from my digital camera and my computer. I thought it was only fair-I shouldn’t have had them in the first place. I’d abused Mary’s trust. It was clear we weren’t going to have the relationship I’d hoped we would have.’
When Jan turned to face Charlie, her forehead was creased with anguish. ‘So, no,’ she said. ‘I have no photos of Abberton, nor anything else of Mary’s, and every day I ask myself if I made the right decision. It’ll sound ridiculous when I say this-no doubt I’ve led an extremely sheltered life-but pressing that delete button’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.’
9
Tuesday 4 March 2008
It’s four o’clock, and I’m finally ready.
I’ve spent the day going through every file and piece of paper at Seed Art Services. I started at six in the morning; I locked the door, pushed both bolts across and sat in the hall with the lights off, using a torch I’d brought from home, so that the workshop would appear empty to passers-by. There were a few knocks at the door, people calling my name and Aidan’s, but I hardly heard them.
Aidan keeps meticulous records, and once I was satisfied I had a full list, I phoned each of his business contacts and asked them if Aidan was with them, or had been yesterday evening and overnight. They all said no.
Aidan has two friends that I know of. One, Jim Mair, lives in Nottingham. Aidan told me he works for the Citizens Advice Bureau. The other is David Booth, Aidan’s best friend from school, whom I’ve met several times. He works at a brewery in Rawndesley. I believed him when he told me he hadn’t seen Aidan since a bit before Christmas last year.
It took me a while to track down Jim Mair. When I did, he sounded puzzled that I should even have thought to try him. He hadn’t seen Aidan for nearly ten years, he said.
Aidan’s parents are both dead, and he drifted out of touch with his stepfather a long time ago. He has a brother and a sister, seven and nine years older than him respectively, with whom he exchanges Christmas cards every year, though he speaks to neither of them. I found their details in his address book and rang both to ask if Aidan was with them. Both said no and sounded alarmed by the suggestion that he might be.
I am not disheartened. I knew I would find him in none of these places, with none of these people, and always expected that I would have to take the next step.
For the second time, I am about to set off to 15 Megson Crescent. I’m not scared any more, neither of Mary nor of finding Aidan there. It will be almost comforting to have my worst fears confirmed, as I know they will be. A conspiracy: the hardest thing of all to forgive; conspirators who don’t care if you forgive them because they don’t care about you and never did.
Because there’s only one way that any of this makes sense: if Aidan and Mary are working together to drive me out of my mind.
I lock the workshop. As I pull my car keys out of my pocket, a scrap of paper falls to the ground: Charlie Zailer’s mobile phone number. I asked her for it last night; she looked as if she was going to say no at first. I pick it up, feeling guilty for ignoring her advice: Don’t go to Mary’s house.
I drive along the Silsford road, under the overhanging trees that lean in on both sides to meet in the middle-a tunnel of lush foliage. Where I am now it’s beautiful, but soon the trees will thin out, the road surface will deteriorate, and I’ll see grimy squat houses that make my lodge house look enormous. A little further on I’ll pass the primary school that’s made of grey-green concrete and looks like a prison block, and Bob’s Bargain Centre on the corner of the street that leads to the Winstanley estate.
Last time, I drove so slowly I must have looked like a kerbcrawler-anything to put it off. Today I slam my foot down on the gas. I want to get it over with.
Her house hasn’t changed. Aidan’s car isn’t parked outside, or anywhere else on Megson Crescent. I bang on the door. ‘Open up!’
Mary looks worse than I remember. That scored crêpe skin, the horrible woolly hair, like a knitted doll whose maker had a few balls to spare and got carried away. I want to wrench the ugly, coarse spirals out of her scalp one by one. ‘Ruth,’ she says, clutching the door with both hands, clinging to it as she pulls it back to let me in. ‘You came back.’ She’s surprised. Was she counting on my being scared for ever?
‘Where is he?’ I ask.
‘He?’
I barge past her, pushing open doors. There’s no one in any of the downstairs rooms. Only me and Mary in the hall. And the people in the paintings on the walls, the small woman with doughy skin and pointed features all bunched up in the middle of her face. In one of the pictures she’s looking in a mirror and her reflection is staring straight at me. She looks mean, as if she wants to accuse me of something.
‘Ruth?’ Mary touches my arm. ‘What’s wrong? Who are you looking for?’
‘Aidan. Where is he?’ I start to climb the stairs.
‘Aidan Seed? The man the police keep asking me about?’ Mary follows me. ‘I don’t know him.’
‘You’re lying! He was here last night. He was here last weekend. ’
‘Calm down.’ She comes towards me on the landing, tries to take hold of me.
‘Get away from me!’
‘All right. Don’t worry, I won’t touch you. Can we sit down and talk about this? I don’t understand what’s happened or what you’re accusing me of, but I promise you, Aidan’s not here.’
I turn away from her and give the door behind me a hard shove, smacking it against a wall. The bathroom. Tiny. No Aidan. Above the lavatory there’s an airing cupboard. I start to pull out towels, sheets, pillowcases. Soon it’s empty.
Nothing.
‘Where is he?’ I say again.
‘
He’s not here, Ruth. Let’s go downstairs and talk. I was hoping you might have brought me something.’ She mimes writing.
My eyes move to the next door, the one she’s blocking with her body. ‘Get out of the way. He’s in there, isn’t he? With all the paintings.’
Her smile dips, pulls into a tight line. ‘Your Aidan Seed isn’t here. I can see you’re not going to believe me until you’ve checked for yourself. Go ahead, be my guest. I’ll be downstairs, when you’re ready to talk.’
Once she’s gone, I start to search the rooms. In her bedroom, I empty drawers and a wardrobe, not bothering to put anything back. I look under the bed, behind the mould-spotted curtains. Aidan isn’t there. Nor are his clothes or any of his possessions.
A voice in my head whispers: What if you’re wrong?
The second door won’t open all the way. The room is too full of Mary’s pictures. Carefully, I manoeuvre myself in. There’s a pounding sound coming from downstairs: music. I hear the word ‘survivor’ shouted once, twice. The smell of smoke drifts up to me. I know she’s in the kitchen with a cigarette in her hand, waiting for me to admit defeat.
If a person wanted to hide in this house, this is the place they’d pick. One by one, I drag the canvases through to the other room, Mary’s bedroom. She must be able to hear what I’m doing, but she doesn’t try to stop me. Before long, the room is full. Canvases are piled up on the bed, leaning against it on every side. I’ve used up every inch of space, yet the front bedroom is still far from empty. I’ll have to start putting things in the bathroom.
My arms ache, but I can’t allow myself to give up, even though I know by now that I won’t find Aidan here.
I stop when I see a word I recognise. It’s been written in black marker pen on the back of an unframed picture: BLANDFORD.
Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry…
Hardly daring to touch it, I force myself to turn the canvas round. A chill spreads through me. It’s unfinished, but Mary has done enough work on it to make it instantly familiar. An outline of a person-again, one that could be male or female. Head and shoulders only this time, and nothing inside the black line, not yet. Behind the figure, part of the background has been painted in: a bedroom. This one, the one I’m standing in-Mary’s picture room. The curtains and wallpaper are the same, though there are no piles of pictures in the painted version. Instead, there’s a double bed with a chair next to it. On the chair, there’s a glass ashtray with a hand holding a cigarette over it, the ash waiting to drop.
… Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss.
Aidan was right. Abberton was the first of a series. Blandford, though incomplete, is the second. I heave things out of the way, looking for other similar pictures, perhaps one that Mary’s only just started, but I find nothing. So far she’s got no further than the second of nine.
My breaths come too quickly, making me feel dizzy. I tell myself there’s nothing to be afraid of: a mystery is only a mystery until you know the answer. I’ll ask Mary-I’ll make her tell me. There must be a reason why Aidan knew all the names. Who are they, these nine people?
I’m about to leave the room when I notice an iron handle next to the edge of a painting of a large stone building with a pointed roof and a square tower on one side. Without the windows, it might be a dark rocket, waiting for lift-off.
I move the painting to one side and see a small wooden door with a sloping top set into the wall. I pull it open, find myself staring into a little cupboard, nowhere near big enough to hide a man of Aidan’s size. I’m about to close the door when I spot something on the floor. A framed picture, face-down, with a printed label on the back.
I pull it out and nearly laugh with relief when I see that the name on the back isn’t Darville. It’s a woman’s name: Martha Wyers. I’m on the point of shoving the picture back in the cupboard when something stops me.
I turn it over, then drop it a second later, as if it’s burned my skin. It falls at my feet, picture-side up and I stare, horrified. A noise escapes from my lips. I feel as if I’ve lost all control over my life, as if I’ve been set down at the centre of somebody else’s carefully orchestrated nightmare, and am being pushed further in, a little bit at a time.
I’m looking at a painting of a woman with a rope knotted round her neck. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. It isn’t a dead body, only the image of one, but it makes no difference. Mary is too good a painter. I am in the presence of Martha Wyers, whoever she is. Was.
I can see everything: the texture of the rope, the frayed parts. How it has cut into her flesh. The bulging eyes, the purple-grey hollows beneath them, the thick protruding tongue, livid bruises on the skin around her mouth, a white, crusty ridge along her lower lip…
I smell smoke. Closer than before. Mary.
‘I see you’ve found Martha,’ she says.
The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was get through the court case, with Her staring at me as if she wanted to lunge across the court and gouge out my eyes, and Him determinedly looking down at his lap so that he wouldn’t see my face. Forcing myself to go to Mary Trelease’s house for the first time was the second hardest.
It’s possible to do anything, however difficult, if you can’t imagine how your life will go on otherwise. Aidan had said to me, ‘Bring me the picture,’ so I had no choice. After London, he would barely speak to me, apart from telling me constantly that he loved me, with a shadow behind his eyes, and I started to suspect he was using sex as a way of avoiding conversation. The comfort it offered soon ceased to have an effect, and I saw that we couldn’t go on as we were. Every time I pleaded with him to open up to me, he repeated what he’d said at Alexandra Palace: ‘Bring me the picture. Bring me Abberton.’
I thought that if I could only put the painting in front of him, with Mary Trelease’s name and the date on it, he would see that he hadn’t killed Mary, whatever else might have passed between them. I didn’t care if I never knew what that was; all I wanted was to be happy again, for Aidan to be happy. He’d moved into the lodge, as promised, as soon as we got back to Spilling after the art fair, and I was trying hard not to think of it as him making good his threat. I longed for him to trust me as he had before London, knowing it was down to me to make that happen.
On 2 January, after a desolate Christmas, I steeled myself and phoned Saul Hansard. ‘Ruth,’ he said, sounding thrilled to hear from me. I felt guilty for having cut him out of my life, but knew I would again as soon as I’d got the information I needed from him. The sound of his voice made my skin prickle with shame.
‘Mary Trelease,’ I said. ‘I need her address.’
I should have known this would worry him, but I was having trouble thinking beyond my own needs and fears, mine and Aidan’s. ‘Why?’ Saul asked gently. ‘Whatever you’re thinking of doing, I’m not sure it’s a good idea.’
‘I’m not going to cause any trouble,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to her, that’s all.’
Saul said he’d told Mary, seconds after I’d fled the gallery, that he wouldn’t be framing for her any more. He’d told me this before, in one of the many messages he’d left on my voicemail since that day in June, but it seemed important to him to say it again. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘She’s a scary woman, Ruth. I don’t need to tell you that.’
A panicky sensation started to flicker inside me. Our conversation was dragging me back to the past, the last place I wanted to go. ‘I won’t tell Mary I got the address from you,’ I said. ‘Please, Saul. It’s important.’
He agreed in the end, as I had known he would. Then he couldn’t find it, and told me he would have to dig it out later. When he phoned back that evening, Aidan was there, watching me from across the room as I wrote it down.
‘Well?’ he said.
I could have explained that I’d contacted Saul and asked for Mary’s address, but I didn’t. We’d got into the habit of saying the bare minimum. Fewer words seemed to
mean less pain. ‘Fifteen Megson Crescent,’ I said. ‘Spilling.’
Aidan’s face stiffened into a mask of shock. ‘The same house,’ he murmured. Something had blown open inside his head; some new horror had seized him. He stormed out of the room. I heard him crying in the hall as if he’d collapsed there, unable to get any further, and pressed my hands over my ears, feeling utterly helpless, thinking: the same as what-the house where he killed Mary?
Dead people didn’t move house… Was 15 Megson Crescent where Mary had lived when Aidan knew her? Where he had killed her? But she wasn’t dead. No matter how I tried to think about it, from whichever direction I approached it, nothing made sense.
The next day, I didn’t need to tell Aidan why I wasn’t going to work with him. I looked up the route in my A-Z and set off to the Winstanley estate. Impossible as it is to see the future, sometimes you can feel its presence ahead of you, dark and cloying, waiting to swallow you up. My face started to itch as I drove, the skin to feel tight as it had when Mary had sprayed me with red paint. I twisted the rear-view mirror towards me to check there was nothing there, although rationally I knew that my face would look perfectly ordinary. Red paint couldn’t reappear once it was washed off; it could hardly seep up through my pores and spill out after so many months.
I stood in Mary’s untended front yard, my whole body a screaming knot of tension, and knocked on the door. When she opened it and saw me, she let out a loud breath and looked at me with some emotion on her face that I couldn’t identify. ‘Ruth Bussey,’ she said slowly. ‘Come to inspect my hovel and feel superior. ’
I didn’t know what she was talking about. The idea of my feeling superior to anybody was so laughable that I couldn’t think of anything to say in response.
‘Saul Hansard as good as threw me out on the street after our spat at the gallery. It must be nice to have a gallant hero to protect you.’
The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down Page 23