Devlin looked away, an unfamiliar weight in his chest. His arm, and all the other bruises, were aching. He’d been hit a lot harder than this, but his body didn’t cope so well any more. Not just his body. His bloody soul, too. Assuming he had one. Couldn’t take the punishment.
He rose, looking around Suzanne’s compact, cosy sitting room. There were books and papers, ornaments and pictures. Home, family, all that stuff. Over the mantle three small frames hung in a row. An exquisite series of studies of a child’s hand. Olivier Kessel’s work. And his daughter the model? The sight griped Devlin’s stomach. He was never going to be able to look at a Kessel canvas again without seeing blood.
A movement behind him made him turn.
‘This man, Luce, he murdered my brother?’ Suzanne’s grey eyes quizzed him. Her face was much thinner. She looked fine-boned and bleak, like a woman staring at a field of ice. She was waiting for his answer. He swallowed.
‘Yes, he did.’
She considered for a moment. ‘Then I believe I owe you a debt.’ She raised her hand to stop him speaking. He hadn’t been about to. Didn’t know what he could say. He’d never had a woman thanking him for … doing what he did. The whole world was coming apart at the fucking seams and his chest was tighter than ever. Suzanne inclined her head, like a queen accepting some sort of unspoken acknowledgement. Some of the pressure in his chest eased. She moved her gaze over to her daughter. ‘You want to know whether Oliver is capable of this?’ She cut to the heart of it. Unerringly. He watched Kaz’s mouth tremble as she nodded.
Suzanne’s face didn’t alter. ‘I’m afraid the answer is yes. Perfectly capable. There were incidents … ’ She stroked Kaz’s hair ‘I did my best to keep them from you, darling. Your father …’ She shook her head, swallowing. ‘What do you need from me?’
Devlin moved over and hooked Kaz into his good arm. Sooner he got rid of the cast, the happier he was going to be. But a lot of other stuff would be happening before then. Suzanne was looking at him, with what he hoped was approval, as he backed her daughter over to the couch, to sit beside him.
‘We need to know where we might find him.’
‘At the château. If he’s not there, then I don’t know where. The last time I spoke to him was August last year. He was here in London, at his lawyer’s office.’ Suzanne’s mouth curved. There wasn’t a lot of humour in it. ‘He was a tad annoyed with me, because I’d sold a small oil. It still irritates him when I dispose of his work without telling him first.’ She looked speculatively at the pictures over the mantle. ‘Maybe I’ll just burn the lot. When you find him, you can give him the ashes.’
‘Mum!’ Kaz stirred against Devlin shoulder.
‘It would be fitting. All Oliver has ever respected is his work. Respect is the wrong word,’ Suzanne corrected herself. ‘The work is his obsession. Everything else –’ She made an abrupt, expressive gesture.
Devlin was calculating. ‘If he was here last August, then he hadn’t dropped out of sight totally. Would you be able to get anything from the lawyer?’
‘Doubt it, but I will try. Kaz, darling.’ Suzanne reached out and touched her daughter’s hand. Devlin looked down at her strained face, and felt his bones constrict. He should have known, but he hadn’t got the hang of this emotional stuff yet. Kaz’s whole world view was shifting. She was composed on the outside, but underneath? What did he know?
All he was thinking of was how to find her father.
But then that’s what you do. She wants that, and you want to give it to her. You hunt, you bring back the kill, you lay it at her feet. Job done. Just like men have been doing for centuries. But there’s other stuff. Stuff you have to learn. Shit.
He eased round, adjusting his hold. Kaz’s attention was on her mother. She was the one with the information. His job here was physical comfort. Relief flickered through him. That he could do. Kaz’s arm was across his lap, hand clenched over the cast. From the look of her grip, if his wrist hadn’t already been broken she was having a damn good try at it. Anything of his she wanted to squeeze, it was fine by him. We live to serve.
He shook himself away from inappropriate thoughts and back to what was going on in the room. Kaz’s muscles were taut, to the point of quivering. He ran his hand up her spine, rubbed. Felt the tension give a little.
‘You … when I was growing up, after you’d left him … you never stopped him from seeing me, when he wanted to.’ The tension spasmed again. ‘You didn’t come between us. We were father and daughter, as much as Oliver was capable of that. I accepted what he was prepared to give. He was … is … a great man.’ There was the tiniest shade of accusation in her voice, but mostly she sounded … lost. ‘I think you need to tell me. Why did you leave him? It wasn’t about the Russian countess, was it?’
‘No.’ Suzanne sighed the word. ‘She came later. After I’d left. I used her as an excuse. I didn’t want to tell you the real reason.’ Suzanne shifted her position in the high-backed chair.
Another woman protecting Oliver Kessel’s sodding reputation, Devlin thought, as he watched.
‘I’d been getting bored and restless for a while, unhappy with the way Oliver lived. The château – most of the time it was like a zoo.’ Suzanne smiled again, reminiscently. ‘I had what I suppose you’d call an epiphany. Standing at the foot of your father’s bed.’
Chapter Forty-Three
‘He was in it at the time, along with a gallery owner from Paris. And her husband. When he invited me to join them, I suppose you might say scales fell from my eyes.’ Suzanne gave a shaky laugh. ‘For one thing they looked so stupid, sprawled all over that enormous four-poster. You remember it? It was supposed to have belonged to Eleanor of Aquitaine or someone. Oliver loved that kind of stuff. Anyhow, he and Pierre or Marcel or whoever he was – they were both stoned and giggling like a pair of schoolgirls. The woman was crawling about, looking for something to cover herself with. I remember, she had the most enormous boobs. They were flopping up and down, while she tried to grab one of the sheets. I suddenly had one of those what the hell are you doing here moments. I was the mother of a twelve-year-old girl. It was time to grow up. Take some responsibility. Oliver was never going to change … And what he was …
‘I’d packed our stuff and we were out of there in an hour. Oliver laughed when he saw the cases, and called me an uptight, narrow-minded bourgeoisie. He always expected me to go back to him.’ Suzanne’s eyes narrowed. ‘He was right on one thing. I was sufficiently bourgeois to have stored away all the paintings and sketches he’d given me, over the years. Two of them were enough to keep us going until the tenants left this house and I got the business started. We lived at the Ritz for three months. Do you remember, darling?’ she queried Kaz.
Devlin felt Kaz nod. Suzanne’s face had become dreamy with reminiscence. ‘You know how Oliver grumbles when I sell anything, but he’s never asked for any of it back. That was the one thing that stopped me from telling you what your father was really like. There was enough guilt in him to leave me the means to keep us both.’
And enough love or passion left, both ways, to keep that tie alive, Devlin saw, with a sudden flash of instinctive knowledge. A pile of canvases kept them together. While Suzanne still had the work, she still had Oliver, but when she sold a piece, a small part of that connection crumbled away. And maybe neither of them realised it. It all came back to the work.
Suzanne rubbed her eyes. ‘I should have left him a long time before I did. There were incidents … Flares of temper that went deeper than artistic tantrums. One of the girls – there were always girls – had a dog. It used to bark incessantly. It drove us all nuts, not just Oliver. Someone from the village found it, in a ditch, with its head bashed in. It could have been run over, but it wasn’t a very busy road. There were fights, sometimes fires.’ She put her hand to the back of her neck. ‘Once everyone but Oliver had the mo
st awful bout of food poisoning, that was never properly explained. He was punishing us for something. I’m not sure what. And I think …’ She was looking way into the past now, eyes a very deep grey. Devlin knew that look – a woman facing something she’d never faced, looking back at something horrible.
Kaz’s hand slid up Devlin’s arm. He kept her close, wanting the scent of her.
‘I think that when Jed drank that bleach, or whatever it was …’ Suzanne paused. ‘I’ve never been sure that it was an accident.’ Her voice broke. ‘How could I tell you these things? Oliver acknowledged you, when he didn’t need to. He did his best to be a father. I really didn’t think he’d ever hurt you.’
‘He didn’t.’ Kaz’s voice was very soft. ‘Until I had something that he wanted and I wouldn’t give it to him.’
Abruptly Devlin felt the tension leach out of Kaz. She moulded into his side. ‘We have to go to the château.’
‘It’s a place to start,’ Devlin agreed.
‘Darling, do you really think …’
‘Yes, Mum. I do need to see him. If I can. And Devlin will take care of me.’
He felt the shock go through her body at the same time as the finger prodded into his heart. Confidence. She trusted him to take care of her. Mouth had got there before her brain. And he wasn’t giving her the chance to back out.
‘I’ll look after your daughter.’ He hauled himself to his feet, bringing Kaz with him, and held out his hand, cast and all. Suzanne rose and took it. Now it was a done deal. A mother/daughter/lover triangle. Kaz couldn’t go back on her admission, because now he’d promised her mother. Worked for him
They stood for a moment. Devlin looked from one drawn, beautiful face to the other, drinking them in.
Two women, protecting the reputation of a murdering bastard who didn’t deserve it. And now the whole thing was unravelling. This was on his shoulders now, and he wasn’t about to put it down.
Chapter Forty-Four
Kaz stood at the long window, staring down. The tops of the trees were moving in a hot, dry wind. They were bigger. Seventeen years bigger. She could barely see the ruined tower that was all that was left of the original building on the site.
Oliver had never changed the locks. Suzanne’s ornate key, to the even more ornate front door, had turned easily. She almost hadn’t brought it, but Suzanne had pressed it on her. ‘Just in case.’
It had been clear, even as they approached the building, that it was uninhabited. A walk through silent spaces had confirmed it.
She turned abruptly. The room behind her was empty, bare walls, bare floorboards. Darker patches showed on the walls and floor, where paintings and rugs had been removed. She shivered, remembering cold. In the winter the place had been icy. There had never been much furniture, but what there had been was gone. Even Eleanor of Aquitaine’s monstrous bed. Wherever Oliver was, he wasn’t here.
Kaz ran her finger along the wall. The wallpaper, faded blue with a strange silver sheen, was coming away, showing patches of plaster underneath. This suite of rooms faced north. They felt damp, even in the summer heat. Tall and echoing. She’d expected that to be a trick of childhood memory, making them seem bigger than they were. The height swallowed everything, warmth and sound. She’d lived here for three years of her childhood, in this place of half-furnished rooms and endless corridors.
She stood still and shut her eyes. Scent came first. Patchouli and joss and other things she’d been too young to recognise, and under it a heady, pervasive smell of linseed oil. From Oliver’s studio, at the top of the building. She teetered on the edge of memory. There had always been that sense of things happening in other rooms, snatches of loud music and conversation, laughter behind closed doors.
You never belonged here.
She’d been a child in an adult world. She’d probably seen and heard things that she shouldn’t have, though she didn’t remember now. And over and behind it all was Oliver. The man who could make lines and splashes of colour sing, who could catch a bird on paper with a few quick strokes, who’d tried to teach her.
He’d offered her all he could. His art, the closest thing he had to love.
Failure tasted bitter in her mouth. She could still remember those breathless evenings, when her father had sat with her on the terrace, drawing endlessly in those cheap exercise books, trying to will her to see what he could see. She’d treasured those times. The scent of cigarettes and oil, which always clung to him, and the quick movements of paint-stained hands. But it had always been about the drawing, the siren call of the paint, when what she’d really wanted was to walk with him in the garden and the woods. To look at butterflies and lizards and the colour of the old roses, climbing over half-ruined walls.
Her father had always been there and always been just out of reach.
‘Kaz?’
She turned. Devlin was standing in the doorway. Light from the corridor silhouetted him. Big, solid and awkward in the plaster cast. There.
She didn’t have to ask him to take care of her when she needed it. He just did it. Why hadn’t she known that?
Her blunder the other night, in her mother’s sitting room, that she’d covered up by completely ignoring, had been the truth. Devlin would take care of her. It wasn’t a matter of her being clinging, or needy. It was Devlin. He was taking care of her now, concern in his face. It was the easiest thing in the world to step into his arms.
‘What?’ He pulled her into his chest, holding her in place as he stroked her hair. She was trembling. She hadn’t noticed. And her legs would barely hold her, but it didn’t matter.
‘I thought he loved me, because I loved him. Or tried to.’ Her voice sounded thin, swallowed by the room. ‘I wanted him to be proud of me, to notice me. I never understood.’
Devlin’s face, above her, seemed to be distorted, misty at the edges. Her eyes were swimming with tears. ‘He didn’t see me at all. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t good enough. He had nothing to give that a small girl could use. We barely breathed the same air. It was all about the painting. The groupies and the parties and the busted hotel rooms, those were only trappings. He couldn’t love me, because he didn’t have room. If I couldn’t share what obsessed him, there wasn’t any space for anything else. It ate him, from the inside. Everything he did, he did because of his art.’
She took a small, hitching breath. ‘All the capacity to love that he had, he gave to my mother, and that wasn’t much. But she was part of the painting. His muse. He has no morals, no scruples, no conscience. He never has had them. He isn’t like other people. Genius walks past all the rules. Why did I never see it?’
Realisation lifted her voice. Now she could say it out loud. ‘I don’t have to try any more. I’m never going to get his attention, but it doesn’t matter. What I am has nothing to do with him.’
Pain was bubbling up and out, freeing her, making her feel light-headed. ‘And because he doesn’t care about anyone else, that bastard stole my daughter.’ It came out as a wail.
Then the dam broke. She gave up trying to contain the tears and burrowed into Devlin’s chest, sobbing.
Chapter Forty-Five
He didn’t really know how he should handle this, but the hair stroking thing seemed to be working, so he went with that. Kaz was making the front of his shirt wet. He’d never in his life had a woman cry in his arms, until Katarina Elmore. This made twice now. His mind shied away from an early morning in a hospital car park. That had been …
This time it felt … incredibly good. Not that Kaz was crying, but that she was letting him hold her while she did it. A tiny, hope-shaped spark, had lit, very gingerly, in his chest. It was in unfamiliar territory and it knew it. If Kaz …
Shit. Not the time, not the place. Not the man?
‘Better now?’ When she got to the hiccupping and rubbing her nose stage he ease
d back, brushing hair out of her face.
‘Mmm. Sorry.’ She was scrubbing the damp patch on his shirt. Now that was starting another response entirely. Huh!
He covered her hand. Would it be too much to bring it to his lips? He decided regretfully that it was. Guaranteed to bring the shutters down. He studied her face. No shutters. She wasn’t blocking him out. Her nose was a bit red and there was a trace of pink across her cheekbones, but that was all. Devlin had a sudden desire to kiss her until she was pink all over, and then get her naked, just to make sure. It sounded like a plan. Later.
‘There’s nothing here.’ His voice was raspier than he expected. Not enough blood to the vocal cords. She was shaking her head slowly. ‘Doesn’t look like it. There’s just one more place.’ She stepped away from him, to lead the way.
The staircase was behind a door. From the outside it looked like the entrance to another room or a closet. Narrow, dark-varnished treads rose steeply.
‘Oliver’s studio,’ he queried.
‘Closest he could get to the sky, and away from the rest of the house.’
Kaz went first. Devlin tried not to be distracted by the rear view as she climbed. The space stretched the entire expanse of one side of the building. Huge skylights let in a steady northern light. The floor was scarred and stained with paint splotches. The smell of linseed still hung heavy in the air. One wall was defaced by a wide blue stain. Whatever had made the mark it had hit the bricks hard.
‘That’s it.’ Devlin detected a tiny tremor in Kaz’s voice. ‘Very few people ever came up here, but it was still the heart of the house. If there’s nothing here, then Oliver is gone.’ She was turning slowly, surveying the walls as if they might have a message.
‘We can ask in the village. Moving furniture would have taken a while and more than one truck. Someone might have seen something.’
Never Coming Home Page 23