Charlie closed her eyes, then opened them, remembering she was driving. How hard would it be to get some uniforms camped outside 15 Megson Crescent? Even if she succeeded, that level of protection would need to be justified on an hour-by-hour basis. Charlie reckoned she’d be granted a day, maximum. She wasn’t sure it was worth the hassle. What if Aidan Seed chose the next day to make good his promise, prediction, whatever?
Beside her, Ruth was crying. ‘I’m still scared,’ she said. ‘Scared something’s going to happen but I don’t know what. It’s nothing concrete—it’s not that I’m scared Aidan really has killed someone, or that he will, or that he’ll go to prison. I could live with those things.’
‘You’re telling me what you’re not scared of,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘What would be helpful is if I knew what you are scared of.’
Ruth picked at the skin around her fingernails. ‘Something so bad I’m not capable of imagining it. Not death. There are plenty of worse things.’
Charlie thought ‘plenty’ was an overstatement.
‘All I know is, there’s a danger and it’s . . . it’s closing in.’
‘Listen to me, Ruth. Don’t go to Mary’s. Is there anywhere you could go that’s . . .?’
‘Aidan told me something else, when he was talking about having visions of things that hadn’t happened yet. The picture Mary gave me, the one he said he gave to a charity shop—it’s called Abberton. That’s its title. Aidan said it was the first in a series. There were going to be nine, he said, but Mary hadn’t done them yet. He told me the names of the others: Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss. He said it to prove to me that he was seeing the future. ’
Charlie had no idea how to respond to this. Hearing Ruth say the names like that—an alphabetical list—had made her feel uneasy. Eight titles of paintings yet to be painted? What could it mean? It complicated things, took them beyond the level of a simple threat: Tell her I’m going to kill her.
‘The man you’re engaged to,’ said Ruth. ‘Do you love him unconditionally? Would you forgive him no matter what he did?’
Charlie felt hounded. Why was everybody so keen to interrogate her about Simon today? First Mary, now Ruth.
‘I love Aidan so much, you’ve got no idea. If that love died, I’d have nothing. But that doesn’t mean it’s unconditional.’ Ruth turned to Charlie, breathing hard in her face. ‘When he told me he’d killed Mary, I . . . I didn’t react well.’
‘Who would?’ said Charlie. Unconditional? Yes. Forgive him? Not a chance, not for any misdemeanour, however small. ‘Loving someone doesn’t have to mean letting them off the hook,’ she said, pleased with her compromise position.
‘Yes, it does,’ Ruth said vehemently. ‘It does, and I don’t think I can do it. I’m scared of the truth, but without it I’ll only torment myself imagining the worst. What if I find out something so terrible it kills my love for Aidan? If that happens, I’ll know for sure that I’m not worth anything, that there’s not enough love in me to forgive or heal anyone. It’ll all be over—everything.’
Charlie almost smiled. If she hung around with this woman for much longer, she might start to think of herself as an irrepressible optimist by comparison.
Ruth closed her eyes, rubbed the back of her neck. ‘You asked me,’ she said in a voice that was barely audible. ‘That’s it. That’s what I’m frightened of.’
Blantyre Lodge’s lounge wasn’t small, but it looked it, overloaded as it was. While Ruth made tea in the kitchen, Charlie started to make an inventory. She wondered how big Ruth’s house in Lincoln had been, if it had housed all this comfortably: books, lamps, mirrors, candles, gardening magazines, six small Persian rugs, more exotic-looking plants than you’d expect to find in a botanical garden’s greenhouse. There was also an ironing board, stepladders, a clothes-drying rack. A small sofa had three throws draped over it and eight embroidered cushions piled on its seat. One was gold and had an image of two green shoes sewn on to it, with a cloth representation of a pink ankle protruding from each one. How peculiar, thought Charlie—the effort that must have gone into the embroidery, and the end result looked as if someone’s legs had been chopped off at the ankles.
Stuffed between a second sofa and the window was an old-fashioned dark wood desk with a computer on it, and, incongruously, a picnic bench of the sort one normally found in pub gardens, half unpainted wood and half dark green. For good measure, a bulky winged armchair had been crammed into the room as well. One whole wall was covered with wooden shelves that acted as a sort of display cabinet for pottery, carved stone figures, several different Russian doll sets, strange wooden blobs, heads of deer and lions and eagles made out of thin wire, some silver and some gold, an assortment of colourful plastic shapes, all of which were almost recognisable—as square, circle, triangle—but became more abstract at one end, as if they’d lost the will to be proper shapes and preferred not really being anything. There wasn’t a centimetre of space to spare, should Ruth Bussey decide she urgently needed to buy another metal model of a rabbit’s head. It was as if someone who had previously owned an eight-bedroom pile had downsized radically, without culling any of their possessions.
There were at least thirty paintings on the walls. Most of them were small, but one or two were huge, and ought, Charlie thought, to have been hanging over a marble fireplace in a ball-room. The largest picture was striking in its unpleasantness as well as its size. It had a rectangular gold-effect frame with four smaller rectangles protruding from it—one in each corner—and depicted a woman with long, dark hair wearing a white dress and a serene expression on her face. At the centre of the dress, there was a hole from which a distorted, grimacing face stared out, open-mouthed.
Charlie shuddered, turning her attention to a less disturbing picture of a large bull with a square body standing in front of a pink stone bell tower. Ruth came in carrying two cups of tea. Charlie would have preferred a double vodka. ‘That’s a ribbon-and-reed frame,’ said Ruth, seeing Charlie looking at the bull. ‘See the pattern on it? Aidan told me it’s based on the Roman symbol for government: reeds bound together by a ribbon. Individually weak but together strong. He said it was like him and me.’
‘Did Aidan buy you all these pictures?’ Charlie asked.
‘No. I bought them myself. Aidan framed them, though. Re-framed them, in some cases. He thinks most paintings aren’t framed as they should be.’ Ruth perched on the edge of one of the sofas.
Charlie didn’t want to sit. Ruth’s intensity was making her edgy, as was the thought that at some point she must ask again about the article. She sensed Ruth would tell her if pushed, and she dreaded the answer. The more she worried at it in her mind, the less likely it seemed that there was an entirely innocent, harmless reason why Ruth had had that article in her coat pocket. ‘Tell me about losing your job at the Spilling Gallery.’
‘Didn’t Mary tell you?’
‘Not really. She implied it was her fault.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘It was mine,’ she said unhappily. ‘If I’d . . .’ She stopped. ‘Do you ever wish you’d done almost everything differently?’
To someone else, Charlie might have said yes without missing a beat, but Ruth already had too much information about her. ‘Tell me the story,’ she said brusquely. ‘If you want my help, you’d better tell me everything you kept to yourself on Friday.’
Ruth lowered her eyes. For a second, Charlie thought she was going to refuse. Then she said, ‘Mary came in one day. To the gallery. I didn’t know her name at the time, and I didn’t find out that day. I didn’t find out until much later.’
‘Okay.’ It was a start.
‘She had a painting with her, one of her own, which she wanted Saul, my boss, to frame. It had ‘Abberton’ written on the back of it in capital letters. There was a . . . a sort of person in it, the shape of a person with no face. It was impossible to tell the sex. It was just an outline: a head, two arms . . .’
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br /> ‘I’m familiar with the human anatomy,’ said Charlie. Obviously no penis protruding from the canvas, then, she thought.
‘I asked who Abberton was, and Mary refused to tell me. She . . . she got angry. I wanted to buy the picture and she didn’t want to sell it, and when I asked . . .’ Ruth put her mug down and covered her mouth with her hands. After a few seconds she said, ‘Sorry. When I asked if I could maybe buy another of her pictures, a different one, she said no.’
‘When was this?’ asked Charlie.
‘June last year. She attacked me, physically. I stormed out of the gallery and never went back. Then I changed jobs and—’
‘Hang on. You’ve seen Mary since, right? You’ve been to her house. Have you asked her again who Abberton is?’ What was the connection between the name Abberton and the eight other names Aidan had given Ruth? Nine people known to Aidan and Mary?
‘No.’ Ruth was trembling.
‘Why not? You’re on better terms now, presumably. She told me she was trying to persuade you to model for her.’
‘It’s none of my business. If you call a painting after a person and then depict them only as an outline, what does that mean?’ Charlie had the impression Ruth had asked herself this question many times. ‘Surely it has to mean there’s something painful or problematic associated with them in your mind, something you’d rather not remember.’
‘I didn’t see any outlines of people when I was looking at her pictures this morning,’ Charlie told her. ‘I saw people with faces and features.’
‘You mean up on the wall? The ones of the family?’
‘Mary’s family?’
‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘A family who used to live on her estate, I think.’
Charlie wondered why Mary had chosen to paint them so many times. She’d mentioned a compulsion to paint people she cared about. Like offering yourself an emotional breakdown.
‘They’re brilliant, aren’t they?’ said Ruth. ‘Did you see the one of the boy writing in pen on the wall?’
‘No. Where was that one?’
Ruth frowned as if she was trying to remember. ‘In one of the downstairs rooms.’
Charlie had only seen the kitchen and the hall before going upstairs. ‘What was he writing? On the wall?’
‘ “Joy Division”. I don’t know what it means.’
‘ “Love Will Tear Us Apart”,’ said Charlie automatically.
‘What?’ Ruth sounded startled. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘It’s the title of Joy Division’s most famous song. Don’t ask me to sing it to you.’
Ruth said nothing. There was a trapped look on her face.
‘Joy Division are a band,’ Charlie told her, trying not to sound scornful. ‘You haven’t heard of them?’
‘I didn’t listen to pop music as a teenager. My school friends all watched Top of the Pops, but it was banned in our house, effectively.’
‘What do you mean “effectively”?’
Ruth sighed. ‘My parents never actually told me I couldn’t do anything. Their particular brand of mind-control was far too subtle for that. Somehow I just knew I had to pretend not to want to do the things they’d disapprove of.’ She looked up at Charlie. ‘Were your parents strict?’
‘I thought so at the time. They tried to stop me from pursuing my hobbies: smoking fags, getting hammered, taking boys I hardly knew up to my bedroom.’
Charlie didn’t want to talk about her teenage years, but there was an avid look in Ruth’s eyes. ‘Fights aplenty. My sister was the good one—didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t screw around. Never challenged the regime, thereby making it look fair, and shafting me in the process. Her greatest triumph was to defy medical science and single-handedly defeat ovarian cancer. I can’t even give up smoking.’
Ruth was nodding. Keep your fucking mouth shut, Charlie ordered herself. She felt an urgent need to take back some of the poison she’d released. ‘It’s horrible having to admit your parents were probably right,’ she said. ‘Without Mum and Dad’s interventions, I’d have been mainlining cheap cider and hosting orgies every night of the week, especially school nights.’
‘There were no rows in my house,’ said Ruth. ‘There was only ever one opinion. I never heard my mother and father disagree about anything.’
‘Well . . .’ Charlie cast about for something to say, feeling uncomfortable, wondering how they’d ended up here. She and Ruth weren’t friends, swapping confidences. What would Ruth expect in exchange for her unhappy childhood stories? No, that was the wrong way to look at it. What might Ruth offer in return, if Charlie showed herself willing to act as a sounding board? There were still a lot of questions she wanted to ask; it would help if Ruth was favourably disposed. ‘Whenever I catch a bit of those Supernanny-style programmes, that’s what they seem to advise,’ she said. ‘Parents need to back each other up, not undermine one another.’
‘That’s so wrong,’ Ruth said vehemently. ‘If a child never sees its parents disagree, how’s it supposed to learn that it’s okay to have your own mind? I grew up thinking that if I ever said, “I disagree with you”, the sky would fall down. My parents only ever read the Bible or biographies—ideally of Christian martyrs—so I had to pretend I did too. I hid my real books where they’d never find them. I used to be sick with envy when I heard my friends scream at their parents that they hated them, when I heard their mums and dads scream back, “As long as you’re under my roof, you’ll live by my rules.” At least my friends could be honest about what they wanted to do.’
Christians, thought Charlie: pure evil. The Romans had the right idea throwing them to the lions. What a pity she’d omitted that line from her engagement party speech. She’d barely skimmed the surface of controversial; Simon had massively overreacted.
‘I lied to you on Friday because I needed to,’ said Ruth. She picked up her tea and took a sip. ‘I don’t disapprove of lying. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it if there’s an unreasonable constraint in your life stopping you being the person you want to be.’
‘How’s your relationship with your parents now?’ Charlie asked.
‘I don’t see them, not any more. We haven’t spoken since I left Lincoln. After years of being too scared to do it, I finally broke their heart. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘that’s not what I did. I put myself out of harm’s way, that’s all. It’s up to them if they choose to allow their heart to break.’
Charlie noted the singular, used twice in rapid succession: heart, not hearts.
Ruth said, ‘Some people choose never to see themselves in the mirrors you hold up for them. That’s their choice. I assume it’s what my parents have chosen. I’ve got a PO box address—it was in the letter I sent them when I moved to Spilling. They’ve never used it.’
‘They live in Lincoln?’ Charlie asked. No wonder Ruth had got the hell out.
‘Nearby. Gainsborough.’
‘You gave up a lot when you moved. I Googled Green Haven Gardens this afternoon. Sounds like you had a thriving business. ’
Ruth’s body jerked, as if she’d been shot. Charlie wasn’t surprised. She knew all about feeling invaded, finding out that someone was more interested in you than they ought to be. Interested enough to carry your story in their coat pocket. She pushed the thought away. ‘Organic and chemical-free before it was fashionable,’ she said. ‘And you won three BALI awards.’
‘I won the main BALI award three years running,’ Ruth corrected her, her eyes full of suspicion.
‘I was only skim-reading,’ said Charlie. ‘I had two seconds between meetings. I might have missed some of the finer points.’
‘Why are you interested in Green Haven? That part of my life’s over.’
‘Why did you give it up?’
‘I didn’t want to do it any more.’
Charlie nodded. It was an answer and, at the same time, no answer. She hoped Ruth wasn’t regretting how much of herself she’d already given away.
> ‘Let me show you the tape,’ said Ruth, standing up. Charlie didn’t know what she meant at first. Then she remembered: the man in the red bobble hat. She rolled her eyes behind Ruth’s back, lacking the heart to point out that her watching footage of a man walking past a house and looking at it would achieve nothing. She followed Ruth out into the hall and saw what she’d missed on the way in. Above the front door with its unusual leaf-patterned glass panel was a shelf with a TV on it, a video player, and a row of cassettes numbered one to thirty-one. One for every day of the month?
While Ruth reached up to put a tape in the machine, Charlie surveyed the hall. Apart from the door to the lounge, there were three others: kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, presumably. Only one was ajar, and through it Charlie caught a glimpse of shiny maroon fabric and a pink cushion. That had to be the bedroom. Checking first that Ruth was still busy with the machine and the remote control, Charlie pushed the door gently to open it further.
Yes, this was Ruth’s bedroom, Ruth and Aidan’s, though the only evidence of a man’s presence was a bulky watch with a leather strap lying on the floor. The rest was over-the-top feminine: ornate perfume bottles lined up on the window-sill, a pink voile scarf draped across the bed, silk curtains, also pink, white lacy underwear strewn everywhere, a pink heart-shaped hot-water bottle. Even the paperbacks with creased spines in lopsided piles looked girly, with titles like Hungry Women and Public Smiles, Private Tears.
Ruth was busy rewinding a tape. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The remote’s bust. I have to keep my finger pressed down on it to make it work. It takes ages.’
‘No problem,’ said Charlie. She leaned into the bedroom to get a look at what was behind the door, and nearly cried out in shock, lurching back out into the hall. She’d seen it only for a split second, but it was enough. What the fuck . . .? Her mind reeled. It was absurd, the sort of thing you might have an anxiety dream about—too extreme and too ludicrous to happen in real life. But this was real; Charlie knew what she’d seen.
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