by Kim Fleet
This wasn’t the feisty madam Eden had become accustomed to; this was a pallid mannequin with its strings cut.
‘The painting that was stolen eighteen months ago was a fake, and that fake was painted to replace the original about eight years ago.’
Rosalind glanced up sharply. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘I have friends on the wrong side of the law,’ Eden said, simply.
Rosalind pressed her fingertips into her eyes. Muffled, she said, ‘I wasn’t here when the original was sold and the replacement painted. That was my predecessor’s idea. I had no idea for quite some time, actually, and it was only a few years ago that she told me what she’d done. She was dying of cancer and felt the urge to confess.’ A humourless smile. ‘She said that they’d sold the painting for good reasons. The school needed new buildings, it didn’t have the money, parents were expecting more from the school but weren’t prepared to pay higher fees for improved facilities. So, they sold the painting and had a copy made.’
‘Why sell it on the black market? Why not take it to Sotheby’s or Christies?’
Rosalind’s mouth twisted. ‘The painting wasn’t the school’s to sell. It was gifted to us by a benefactor to hang in the school, but wasn’t ours to do with as we liked. That’s why there was a copy made, and the original was sold quietly.’ She barked a short laugh. ‘All we got from that painting was massive insurance bills and the need for state-of-the-art security. The privilege of hanging it on our walls cost us a fortune. Some benefactor. But the parents liked the kudos the painting lent the school, and by extension, them.’
She sucked in a deep breath and lolled her head back on her leather seat, as though weary of the whole thing. In a tired voice she continued, ‘The school did all right for a few years, then the same issues cropped up. New accommodation, parents demanding new classes, new labs, new sports facilities. You can’t just educate a child these days, stuff their brains with Latin conjugations and dates of battles, teach them how to do long division. They have to be fit and creative, have to do fencing and gymnastics and rowing and drama. We have to have facilities to do all of that on site: no sharing a stage with the local comprehensive. It all has to be here.’ She stared glumly out of the window where the diggers stood idle like frozen dinosaurs.
‘If these facilities ever get built, if people could stop digging up corpses every time they turn a sod, we might just have some new science labs by the next academic year.’
‘Paid for with the insurance on the stolen painting?’
‘By a squeak. We couldn’t increase the insurance on the painting because that would have meant having it valued, and any art expert trotting out here and taking one look at that painting would have known it was a copy. We got what it was valued at ten years ago: a fraction of what it was worth. It was just enough for the new building work.’
‘How much?’
‘Two million.’
Eden’s mind reeled. ‘Two million? That’s all?’
Rosalind shrugged. ‘It was a very competitive quote.’ She held Eden’s eye. ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I’m still making enquiries, but I’ll have to pass my findings on to the police.’
‘About the painting?’
‘What else?’
Rosalind swivelled her attention back to the window, to the churned up soil and incipient foundations of the new buildings and didn’t speak again. Eden saw herself out.
Back at her car, she called Janice, Paul Nelson’s PA. She’d worked for him for years, presumably she knew a thing or two about large building contract jobs. After a few preliminaries, she asked outright, ‘Ball park figure to build from scratch a science block and gymnasium.’
Janice sucked in a breath. ‘You’d need a specialist firm. You wouldn’t get Joe Blogs who does your conservatory for that.’
‘Can you give me a rough idea what Paul’s company would price it at?’
Janice harrumphed a couple of times while she thought. ‘Depends on how big and how quickly, but you wouldn’t get much change from five million pounds.’
Eden only stayed long enough in her flat to shower and change her clothes. Assassins lurked in every corner; when a floorboard creaked she jumped out of her skin. Even stepping out of the shower took courage; she was convinced that a hand was about to spring out and grab her by the throat. Fear coopered her chest; every breath was tight.
She needed warmth and companionship, and the kind of reassurance that could only be found in six feet of archaeologist. Aidan found her sitting on the doorstep to his flat when he came home from work.
‘What’re you doing here?’ he said. ‘Pretending to be an orphan?’
‘Please can I come in, Aidan? I’m frightened.’
His face changed immediately, softening into concern. ‘Come on, you,’ he said, ushering her inside and up the winding stone staircase to his flat. She flung herself down on his settee. ‘What’s happened? God, Eden, you’re shaking!’
‘That phone message you heard the other day.’ The message from Miranda, telling her Little Jimmy was dead.
‘The spooky one?’ His hand was warm, holding hers as they sat side by side on the settee.
She nodded. ‘I got another one, threatening me. They mean it, and they can get to me, too. Especially now one of the gang’s been released.’
‘Shit.’
‘They’re trying to scare me, and it’s working.’
‘Oh, Eden.’ He wrapped his arms round her, pressing her face against his shoulder. He smelled of sandalwood and earth; his shirt was soft against her skin. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I can move, change identity again, and pray they don’t catch up with me,’ she said. ‘Or I can stick it out. They’re the sort that will be inside again before long. Hopefully they’ll manage to keep hold of them this time.’ She puffed out her cheeks, fighting exhausted tears. ‘They killed the man who saved my life.’
‘Saved your life? How?’
Disentangling herself, she unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it off her shoulders. ‘This scar here: where my spleen was removed. He stabbed me in the stomach and nicked it. Internal bleeding.’ She pointed to two faint lines across her arms. ‘Here is where he sliced across my arms before he stabbed me.’ She unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them to show the two scars across her thighs. ‘And he cut me here. Then they tied me up and threw me in the back of a lorry. The driver was ordered to dump me in the Thames.’
‘Bloody hell, Eden.’ His fingertips traced the scars and her skin prickled. ‘And I believed for so long that you fell through a window as a child.’
‘I could hardly tell you the truth, could I?’ she said. ‘One of the gang got away and raised the alarm. Had even memorised the registration number of the lorry, that’s how they got to me in time.’ Her voice cracked. ‘He was a thick little shit, but he did that for me. He took the whole gang down, and they killed him.’
‘And now they’re after you?’
Eden nodded. She reached for her jeans and started to pull them back on. Aidan reached across and held her wrist. ‘Not so fast,’ he said, gently.
He stood and wrapped her in his arms, his breath feathering her hair. ‘You’re not in this alone,’ he whispered. ‘If you want us to run away, we’ll run away.’
‘Us?’
‘Yes, us.’
Her heart contracted. It had been so long since anyone had cared for her like this. A long time since she’d felt this safe.
Aidan continued. ‘It’s the weekend, so I’m going to run you a bath, and even put in some of my favourite bath oil, and I’m going to bring you a glass of wine and hand feed you peanut M&M’s while you have a soak. OK?’
‘Sounds good.’ As he went towards the bathroom, she called after him, ‘Can I play with your rubber ducks?’
He laughed. ‘No. The ducks are off limits. You always put them back in the wrong order.’
The bath water came up to her chin: deliciously s
cented and just the right side of hot. Eden knocked the plastic ducks with her toe and poked them about on the waves. Aidan frowned and popped another chocolate in her mouth, then two in his own.
‘I like the fact you’re a chocoholic,’ Eden said. ‘Some men don’t see the point of chocolate.’
‘I’m not some men,’ he said. Tracing the line of the scar on her arm, he said, sombrely, ‘You must’ve been so scared.’
‘I thought my time was up,’ she said. ‘I died in the operating theatre – twice – apparently. They wouldn’t let me go.’
Her gaze met his. His eyes were dark and serious. ‘I’m glad they didn’t,’ he said. ‘Wash your hair?’
She dunked her head under the water and he poured shampoo into his palm and massaged it over her scalp, working it in behind her ears and soaping the length of her hair.
She studied his face as he washed and rinsed her hair: that tender dimple in his cheek when he smiled, the thick dark hair that he wore just slightly too short; and a surge of affection caught her unawares.
‘Are you going to have a baby with your ex?’ she asked.
He put down the cup he was using to rinse her hair and knelt beside the bath, his face close to hers. ‘No.’
‘You said you’d think about it.’
‘I’m an idiot. I didn’t know what to say. She caught me completely by surprise. What should I have said?’
Eden shrugged. ‘Depends on whether you want to be a father or not.’
‘Do you? Want kids?’
Her heart thumped, she saw her skin jerking beneath the water. ‘I had one, once.’
The blood drained out of his face. ‘What? You have a child? Eden, how come …’
She cut him off. ‘I lost her.’
He slumped against the bath, his shirt spotting dark blue with water.
‘I was pregnant, had the scan, knew I was expecting a girl. We called her Molly. She died when I was six months gone. The hospital induced me, and we held her for hours. She was tiny and beautiful, and like a wax flower.’
‘We?’
‘I was married. Nick. Nice man.’
‘What happened?’
‘He hated my work, said he worried about me, that it was dangerous. It wasn’t: I met scumbags but I wasn’t doing the really hardcore undercover work then. He blamed me for Molly’s death, found someone else, and we got divorced.’
‘When was this?’
‘Molly died six years ago.’ She brushed away a tear. ‘After she’d gone and Nick had gone, I went into undercover work, living full time with the gang.’ She glanced up at Aidan and saw his face was seared with pain. ‘I dream about Molly.’
‘Are you still in touch with Nick?’
‘No. I don’t exist anymore, remember? He was told the same thing as my parents: that I died. I am dead.’
Aidan rubbed away her tears with his thumbs. ‘I don’t know anything about you,’ he said, despair crackling in his voice. ‘All this time, I didn’t know a thing.’
‘It had to be like that, for my safety.’ The water sloshed on to the floor as she sat up and reached for the soap. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Where you were born, where you grew up, went to school. Everything. You said you went to university in London, was that true?’
‘Yes, I did go there. But I went to Oxford first, then Edinburgh for my MA, and did my PhD in London.’
Aidan’s mouth hung open. ‘You’ve got a PhD?’
She flicked water at him. ‘You’re not the only one, you know.’
‘What in?’
‘First degree in Psychology, MA in Forensic Psychology, then a PhD in Criminology. It tied in with work.’
‘You worked and did a PhD?’ Admiration shone in his voice. ‘I studied full time for mine and whinged about how hard it was.’
‘I enjoyed it.’ She shrugged and began to soap her arms. The hot water transformed her scars into bright red welts.
Aidan posted more chocolate into her mouth. ‘So you’re Dr Grey?’
‘No, Eden Grey doesn’t have a PhD. The woman who did all of those things is dead now, remember?’
He rang for takeaway while she dried herself and dressed.
‘Thai meal for two on its way. Will be about forty minutes.’
‘Lovely, I’m starving.’
He took the towel from her hands and sat behind her and rubbed her hair dry. As she knelt there, between his feet, she looked round the room, at his books in colour order, at the precise distances between the candlesticks on the mantelpiece, the perfectly straight pictures on the walls, the symmetry to everything in the room.
‘You’re good at puzzles, aren’t you?’ she said. Dragging her bag over to her, she dug out the paper she’d uncovered in Donna Small’s house: her ‘insurance’, the list of dates and names and yes/no. ‘What do you make of this?’
He scanned the piece of paper, flipped it over and read the other side. ‘What is it?’
‘Don’t know, except it’s valuable to someone. Anything jump out at you?’
‘All the dates listed are a Monday,’ he said.
She snatched the paper from him. ‘How do you know that?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Check if you like.’
She foraged her diary out of her bag and started to check the dates. He was right: they were all Mondays.
‘Anything else?’
‘I recognise some of these names. Keble’s a developer. So’s Osbourne. Might be a coincidence. Not sure about the others. Have you run them through a search engine?’
‘Er, no.’
He grinned at her. ‘And you with a PhD. Elementary, my dear Doctor.’
She thumped his arm playfully. ‘Can I use your computer, please?’
He powered up his laptop and balanced it on his knee. ‘Read out the names.’
Cross-legged beside him on the settee, she read out the names from the paper and he ran a search on each one in turn.
‘Property developers.’
Eden scrubbed at her face with the palms of her hands. ‘What’s all of this about, Aidan? My client, Paul, who was a property developer, was poisoned some time between Saturday evening and Tuesday morning.’
‘Poisoned?’
‘Yes, some sort of bean.’ She scrabbled through pages of notes to find the name. ‘According to the coroner’s office it was lucky bean or love bean.’
‘Not that lucky.’
‘Or loving. He’d been dating Donna Small until a few weeks ago, and she turned up dead on Thursday morning. They were both members of the same singles club. Donna was PA to the planning committee at the council.’ She stopped. ‘Hang on, the planning meeting is always on a Monday. Coincidence?’
‘How did you get this paper?’
‘Donna hid it and told her son she had “insurance” in case anything happened to her.’
‘Which it did.’
Eden nibbled a bit of dead skin round her thumbnail. ‘Maybe the two deaths aren’t related. Maybe Paul was poisoned by his ex-wife, or by Donna. We know she hated him.’
‘So who killed Donna?’
Eden shrugged. ‘Her son, Wayne, had a fight with her and then ran away. And she had an affair with her boss: maybe his wife did her in.’
Aidan traced his finger along her jawline. ‘What a job you do. Poisonings and jealous spouses and people being done in.’
‘Normally it’s divorce work and proving adultery, or people fiddling insurance claims,’ Eden said, stroking his face in return, tracing the outline of his lips. ‘Which reminds me. The Cheltenham Park School is into something dodgy, too.’
She told him about the sale of the real Constable and the theft of the fake. ‘It was to pay for the new buildings they’re doing there, where you dug up your skeletons,’ she said. ‘But the whole project is only costing them two million quid. I asked someone in the business how much a project like that would normally cost and they said about five million. So how is the school able to get that so
rt of building done at such a discount?’
‘A parent in the building trade, willing to tender at a low price?’
‘Could be. Paul tipped me off about the painting. He’d spotted there was something wrong with it because he’d seen the original. Maybe he confronted Rosalind Mortimer and she fed him a love bean.’
The doorbell buzzed and she froze.
‘That’ll be the takeaway,’ Aidan said. ‘I’ll buzz them up.’
‘No, go down and open the street door,’ she said. ‘I’ll watch from the landing.’
He frowned at her. ‘It’s only a Thai meal for two.’
‘You don’t know that, Aidan. Go on, I’ll stay out of sight, but I’ll be able to suss them out.’
‘You don’t really think that they know about us, that they know where I live and have turned up with a shotgun in a takeaway bag?’
She fixed him with a look. ‘Don’t underestimate Hammond,’ she said, quietly. He hesitated, and the doorbell rang again. ‘Go on.’
Aidan trudged downstairs. As he reached the bottom, he glanced up at the stone staircase, his eyes searching for her. Eden waved him on, then slid behind the curve of the wall and watched as he opened the door, got out his wallet, and handed over cash.
‘Thanks,’ he called, too loudly, as the delivery man went back to his car. He carried the plastic bag back upstairs and brandished it aloft. ‘Hungry?’
‘Always.’ She took the bag from him and started sorting out plates and spoons in the tiny kitchen. ‘Aidan?’
‘Hm?’
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s only a takeaway.’
‘Not just this. For everything.’
Saturday, 28 February 2015
08:01 hours
Pale light filtered through the curtains and played across her face. She flopped on to her side and bumped up against Aidan’s back. Curving her arm round his waist, she kissed the tender spot between his shoulder blades, peppering tiny kisses up his spine to the nape of his neck and back down again. His fingers entwined with hers.
‘Sleep OK?’ he mumbled.