Charlie downed the rest of her tea and tried to look more sympathetic than she felt. If Charles Saatchi threw a few million in her direction, she wouldn’t care how many people slagged her off afterwards. She’d buy diamond-studded earplugs and go and lie on a beach in the Caribbean where the whining of jealous bastards wouldn’t reach her.
Jan’s eyes were wide and bright as she plucked another sorry tale from her repertoire. ‘I represented an artist once, years ago, who was out-of-this-world fantastic: talented, ambitious, absolutely guaranteed to succeed.’
‘Better than Mary Trelease?’ Charlie couldn’t resist asking.
Jan chewed her lip as she thought about it. ‘Different. No, not better. It’d be hard to say anyone was better than Mary. Mary’s a genius.’
‘And this other artist wasn’t?’
‘No, I think he was—in a very different way from Mary, much more muted. He had his first show with me. He wasn’t expecting much from it and neither was I—these things tend to build slowly if they build at all. I did my best to get publicity, but it’s never easy for a first show. The private view was reasonably well attended, nothing out of the ordinary. Only three of the pictures sold. But somehow, even though the first night had been nothing special, word got around. Quality will out, that’s what I always say. Within three days, all the pictures in the exhibition were sold—every last one, all to people who were eager to buy more as soon as more were available.’
Jan put her hand to her throat, which had turned pink. ‘It was the most exciting moment of my career, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘I had to beat the collectors off with a stick. And that’s collectors plural—not just one man buying the whole lot to publicise himself as much as anything else.’ Jan let out a heavy sigh. ‘I hate to think about it now.’
‘What went wrong?’ Charlie asked.
‘I rang the artist to tell him all the work was sold and the buyers were begging for more. He was thrilled, as you can imagine. Completely beyond his wildest dreams. Then I waited. And waited. I heard nothing from him. I called him—he didn’t return my calls. It took me a while to realise he was avoiding me. In a paranoid moment, I even wondered if he’d decided to dump me, buoyed up as he was by his success. Why should he pay commission to a gallery when he could keep all the money for himself? But it wasn’t that at all. When I finally tracked him down, he told me he’d stopped painting.’
‘What?’ Charlie hadn’t been expecting that.
‘He said he couldn’t do it any more. Every time he picked up a paintbrush, he froze. I tried to persuade him to get help, but he didn’t want to. All he wanted was to leave it behind. I couldn’t force him.’
‘Stupid idiot,’ Charlie said, before she could stop herself.
‘With approval come expectation and pressure.’ Jan looked sad. ‘Perhaps Mary’s approach is the sensible one. It’s still a tragedy, though—all those amazing paintings and no one’s seeing them, no one but her. She does the most wonderful portraits. Did you see any of those?’
‘A few,’ said Charlie. ‘Her neighbours.’
‘Hardly.’ Jan laughed. ‘Mary’s not interested in anyone who’s had it easy. She said to me once, “I only want to paint people who have really suffered.” She painted disadvantaged, deprived people. There was a particular estate, I can’t remember its name . . .’
‘The Winstanley estate?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Her neighbours,’ Charlie said again. ‘Mary lives on the Winstanley estate, on a semi-derelict cul-de-sac that you wouldn’t want to walk down on your own at night or even during the day. She lives side by side with . . .’ Charlie had been about to say, ‘the dregs of the dregs,’ but she stopped herself. She had a hunch Jan’s view of the underclass was somewhat rosier than her own.
‘But Mary’s . . .’ Jan looked flustered. ‘She’s . . . I always assumed she’d live somewhere . . . you know. I mean, what’s a Villiers girl doing living on a run-down estate?’
‘Villiers?’ Charlie had vaguely heard of it.
‘It’s a girls’ boarding school in Surrey. I’ve only heard of it because I happened to grow up in the next village,’ said Jan, a hint of apology in her voice. ‘Mary went to school with diamond heiresses and the daughters of film stars. Seriously.’
‘Her family are rich?’ Charlie pictured 15 Megson Crescent, its peeling wallpaper and blackened carpets.
Jan laughed. ‘They must be if they sent her to Villiers. She told me the fees were around fifteen grand a year when she went, and that was years ago. A lot of her friends were called “The Hon” this or that. Mary said most of them were thick, but then she never seemed to rate anyone’s intellect very highly.’
‘Did you ever see any of her other pictures, apart from the ones she brought in for you to frame? When I was at her house I saw some unframed ones she’d put up on the walls—of a family who used to live on the estate, I think.’
Jan looked puzzled. ‘Mary was obsessive about framing her work. She didn’t regard a picture as finished until it was framed. She used to hassle me mercilessly, wanting everything framed straight away. It was almost as if . . .’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. As if she didn’t think they were safe until they were behind glass, or something. Or as if she didn’t think they counted, somehow. Are you sure the unframed pictures you saw were hers?’
‘Positive.’
‘How odd.’ Jan rubbed her collarbone, thinking. ‘I’m not saying you’re wrong—Mary’s style’s unmistakeable—but I can’t understand it. It’s just not Mary to leave her work unframed.’ She peered into her empty mug. ‘Another tea?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Charlie. ‘I’d best be off in a minute.’ She didn’t know how to ask about the Access 2 Art fair without sounding as if she was trying to catch Jan out: I know someone who says you lied. ‘I take it you no longer frame for Mary,’ she said eventually. ‘What went wrong?’
‘Two things, and they happened in quick succession. Mary painted something I hated—something I objected to, actually—and I couldn’t pretend to feel otherwise about it. She took exception. I still framed it for her, but that wasn’t good enough. She was used to me raving about the brilliance of everything she did—the last thing she expected was disapproval, but I honestly couldn’t help it.’
‘How come?’
‘The picture was of a young woman who was . . . well, dead.’ Jan sounded apologetic. ‘I can’t remember her name, though I knew it at the time—it was the painting’s title. Not a neighbour this time—someone Mary had been at school with. Another Villiers girl. A writer. She only wrote one novel, though, before she hanged herself, tragically young. Not that there’s an age when suicide isn’t tragic. I wish I could remember her name.’
‘Maybe Mary was close to her,’ Charlie suggested, remembering what Mary had said about painting people you cared about. Like offering yourself an emotional breakdown.
‘Yes,’ said Jan. ‘She told me they were inseparable, that this woman had meant everything to her and nothing to me. As if that gave her every right, and I ought to shut up if I knew what was good for me.’ Noticing that Charlie looked puzzled, she added, ‘Sorry, I should have explained. Mary painted her dead, with the noose round her neck.’ She shuddered. ‘The full suicide scene, in all its vivid, gory, undignified detail. The picture was utterly grotesque. I can’t imagine I’d be more shocked if I saw a real dead body. I mean, the poor woman . . . oh, her name’s on the tip of my tongue, what is it? It’ll come to me.’ Jan looked angry. ‘I know she’s dead and it can’t hurt her, but still, her family . . . Even if Mary never shows the painting to anyone, even if all she does is stick it in the loft . . .’
Charlie’s thoughts drifted back to the forbidden zone: Ruth Bussey and the wall of newspaper cuttings. Jan would have understood why Charlie wanted it destroyed, even if Dominic Lund didn’t. The thought that it was there, that it existed, was unbearable, no matter who saw or didn’t see it.
Charlie felt a deep coldness in the pit of her stomach.
‘. . . forced my true opinion out of me, then savaged me for it,’ Jan was saying. ‘She kept going on about murder, as if I’d accused her of it.’
‘Murder? I thought you said the woman killed herself?’
‘ “Anyone would think I murdered her,” “I’m an artist, not a murderer—I didn’t kill her, I only painted her.” That sort of thing. Yes, she did kill herself—when Mary started talking about murder, I got confused, so I asked again, to check.’
‘What did Mary say?’
‘She said, “She chose to die,” as if that choice gave Mary the right to paint the poor woman disfigured by death.’ Jan shrugged. ‘I disagreed. Choosing to die and choosing to have a portrait painted of your corpse are two very different things. Don’t you think?’
She chose to die. That didn’t necessarily mean the same thing as ‘She killed herself.’ It could mean ‘She chose to behave in a way that compelled me to kill her.’ In her former life as a detective, Charlie had heard countless versions of that justification. Always from murderers.
‘Mary wasn’t about to pardon what she saw as my betrayal,’ said Jan, ‘particularly where this picture was concerned. It was one that really mattered to her, I could tell. After that, things were stilted between us at best, and then the art fair debacle killed our relationship stone dead.’
‘What happened?’
‘The picture Mary brought in the first time she came—Abberton. That was another one that was desperately important to her—she had favourites, Mary. Most artists do, come to think of it. The essential paintings and the dispensable ones. I’d had Abberton framed but Mary didn’t like the frame I’d chosen. She brought it back in a few weeks later, said she wanted the wood stained green, so I had it stained green. What Mary wants, Mary gets. The picture was here, waiting to be collected—she said she’d pick it up as soon as she’d finished what she was working on. She hates to be interrupted if she’s got a painting on the go.’
Jan’s expression darkened and when she spoke again, her words were clipped. ‘My then assistant, Ciara, took it upon herself to slip Abberton into a pile of stuff we were taking to an art fair, even though I’d expressly told her it wasn’t to be exhibited. She ignored me—she told me later she hadn’t heard me say it, but I knew she was lying. I think she decided—rightly—that it was the best thing we had and would attract people to our stand if we displayed it prominently.’
Charlie could tell from her tone that this still bothered Jan. She hadn’t yet put it behind her, as that wank-head Lund would doubtless have advised.
‘I should never have trusted Ciara to set up alone. She didn’t think very far ahead, because pretty soon a woman was demanding to buy Abberton and she dug herself in deeper by pretending it was sold. Apparently the woman started to behave oddly, seemed not to believe her. She insisted that if she couldn’t buy this picture then she wanted to buy another one by the same artist. I think Ciara got genuinely scared then—she thought the woman might be a spy, sent by Mary to catch us out.’
‘Unlikely,’ said Charlie.
‘You didn’t see this woman,’ said Jan. ‘She seemed a little bit unhinged. The first I knew of any of this was when I turned up at lunchtime to take over from Ciara. There was no sign of Mary’s picture; by that point it had been hidden, and I had no idea it had ever been at the fair. As far as I knew it was in my workroom, waiting to be picked up by Mary.’
‘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 hi
m 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?
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