Pale as the Dead

by Fiona Mountain

  Natasha remembered Adam’s directions in both the photo shoots. He was fascinated with death. She could understand that, in a way. So why did the realization make her feel a grip of panic?

  ‘I think that’s one of the reasons the Pre-Raphaelites are so popular still,’ Adam said. ‘They’ve got it all. Sex and death and drugs as well.’ He broke off, tapped the file which held the photograph. ‘You see, it’s accepted that Rossetti painted Beata Beatrix after Lizzie died, but Bethany’s grandmother told her he used Lizzie’s corpse as a model, which makes it a kind of mortuary painting.’ He looked at her. ‘It’s ironic really.’

  ‘What?’ That was a touch high-pitched. She tried again so he wouldn’t notice. ‘What is?’

  ‘If I had been able to tell the difference between real and pretend sleep, Bethany might be here now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She must have been pretending on the night she left, so she could slip out without me knowing. If only I hadn’t had the wine, I wouldn’t have slept so soundly.’

  She could see he was punishing himself. ‘I’m sure it’s quite easy to make someone believe you’re asleep when you’re not. I used to do it all the time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve always suffered from insomnia. My mother could never understand. It used to make her really cross. When she came up to my bedroom I used to pretend so I wouldn’t get told off.’

  ‘I bet it’s the loneliest thing in the world. Not being able to sleep.’

  ‘There’ve been times when I’d agree with you.’

  He opened the cabinet to put the file back inside. She craned to look what else was in there. It was full almost to bursting. She caught a glimpse of titles of the other files. Anne. Christine. Emma. Frances. More girls’ names, a dozen of them at least.

  Adam was saying something about sleep deprivation as a form of torture, but she wasn’t listening. She needed to see those other pictures, and to know what was in the other two cabinets.

  Before she knew quite what she was doing she’d inched back against the far door, leant against it with her hands behind her back, feeling around. Something cold, metal. She cupped her hand around the bolt, eased it silently back into her palm.

  Then she said she had to be going, and felt Adam’s fingers in the curve of her spine propelling her towards the exit.

  Coming up from the underground room was like waking up.

  It had been raining and the street was busy and bright. The glow of headlights and streetlamps and the light from windows reflected on the wet tarmac. A continuous flurry of people passed with umbrellas, dressed for the evening.

  ‘I wish you’d let me photograph you properly,’ Adam said, making even that sound suggestive.

  Natasha eased away from him, thinking of Bethany. ‘No way.’

  ‘Like the joke?’ He directed her eyes to the intercom. ‘Borrowed from Rossetti himself. PRB. Please ring bell.’

  PRB. She twigged. ‘Or Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.’

  For the first time, Natasha wondered if she was afraid of ghosts.

  Twenty-Three

  SHE DROVE AS far as the Pear Tree roundabout, then doubled back. Until she was heading into town again she hadn’t been entirely sure she was going to do it. Just what was she doing?

  Punters were milling outside the Playhouse, waiting for the doors to open. Lights were still on in the architects’ office, the girl in the blue trouser suit just visible through the slatted blinds, slaving over her computer screen which cast a blue glow over her face. The basement was in total darkness. Natasha gave the buzzer a press just to be sure. No reply.

  Back on the pavement, she rang the brass bell by the yellow door. The girl opened up, papers in one hand and stapler in the other, a distracted smile on her face.

  ‘Hi again.’ Natasha slipped into her best scatterbrain voice. ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve left my phone down in the studio. Adam seems to have locked up and gone. I don’t suppose there’s any way in from your floor.’

  ‘Not unless they’ve left the door to the backstairs unbolted.’

  ‘Do you mind if I have a try?’ The girl hesitated. ‘It’s just that, well, you know how it is, my life’s stored on the mobile. I feel completely lost without it.’

  The girl gave a weary shrug, in too much of a hurry to argue, then led the way through a smart office towards a wooden door marked Fire Exit leading down a short flight of concrete steps with heating ducts overhead. ‘It’s just down there on the right, if it’s open.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  * * *

  The girl had left the upper door ajar so there was just enough light for Natasha to get her bearings. She stuck her hands out, tripped over a chair leg, cursed under her breath, felt the cold metal of the filing cabinets, and came up against the desk. She felt for the lamp, switched it on. She planted her phone on one of the shelves. Just in case. Her heart was hammering.

  What am I doing here?

  There was an A4 size address book on the desk, with black and white computer generated spirals on the front. She flipped through the pages. Prop suppliers, galleries, marketing and sales departments for cosmetics companies, fashion houses. She closed it and opened one of the desk drawers. Paperclips, Sellotape, rubber bands. Second drawer. Another address book, smaller, bound in black leather, the pages silver edged. A little black book in other words. How imaginative! Girls names were listed under the initial letter of their christian rather than surnames. Just like the arrangement in the filing cabinet. But the index had no ‘B’. She ran her finger down the inside of the spine, felt a jagged edge. The page which would have had Bethany’s details had been ripped out.

  She grabbed a pencil, ran it carefully over the blank sheet which would have been beneath it. She hadn’t done that since she was a child playing Private Eye. She angled the book towards the light. She was mildly suprised to see the trick had worked. The word ‘Blackfriars’ was startlingly clear. But any words before or after, any telephone numbers, were obliterated.

  Blackfriars. Was that where Bethany was living? But Adam had said he didn’t know where she lived.

  She set to work on the computer, found the inbox, clicked on the menu bar to arrange the contents by recipient. No messages to Bethany. It was not here that she had retrieved the information Margaret Wood had sent to her.

  Natasha turned her attention to the filing cabinets, opened one at random. A girl standing in a long gown on castle ramparts. In another, she just about recognized the girl from upstairs. Christine. She was wearing a velvet dress, playing a lute. Beneath was a stunning one of the same girl standing in a circle of fire, her hair wild as a sorceress. The initials TR were in the corner of every frame.

  There was nothing sinister about any of it, though. The pictures were tasteful, beautiful in fact.

  She checked the other drawers. Paperwork in one, negatives in another. She held them up to the light. Pictures of gardens, an owl caught in mid-flight.

  In the next cabinet the bottom drawer was filled with negatives and prints of sports cars, parked on a beach, on top of a mountain, arty shots of bottles of wine, fizzy drinks. One of them had a printed sticker on the back, the name Jake Romilly. Another folder had prints of a stud in jeans on horseback. Same details on the sticker. She quickly tried the middle drawer. An assortment of black and white shots. A motorbike cutting up a beach with jets of sand, the spray of water over a statue in a fountain, bare footprints in snow.

  In the top drawer were more girls’ names. Same ones as before. Christine in a barge like the Lady Of Shalott, Diana standing beside a lake, appearing to float up out of the mist, draped in a tunic like a Greek goddess. Another of her standing hand on hip cradling an urn, then with her arms arched above her head, her hair drawn severely back from her face, a crown of roses with thorns.

  Natasha picked up the address book, found a biro and scribbled both Diana and Christine’s phone numbers on the back of her hand, since she’d met
them both, briefly. She would think of some pretence to call them.… She remembered Diana’s comment at the studio. ‘Jake’s told me what’s going on. I said nothing’s changed as far as I’m concerned.’ It would be interesting to know what she meant by that.

  Natasha looked back at the pictures. They were subtly different in style to the ones in the other cabinet, more direct and defined, less of the misted effect, but the subject matter and the overall feel of them was similar. Another photographer, same project. Plagiarism? If so you’d hardly store the copies alongside the original work, pleading to be found. What then? Adam hadn’t said he was exhibiting alone. Jake Romilly’s exhibition pieces?

  No stickers on any of them. TR in the corner again though. Adam had said it was just a code. For the show then?

  She pushed back the files to see the ones at the front. Beth. Bethany. The file was bulging, the cardboard cover ripped where the weight of the contents had pulled it away from the metal hanger which ran along the top.

  The abundance of them was what first struck her, and the replication. The setting and costume identical in a succession of frames which differed only by an alteration, sometimes very slight, in Bethany’s pose and expression. It was unsettling seeing the same face in dozens of varied attitudes and guises. Her face reflected in an oval mirror, the impression of somewhere cloistered, a room in a tower. Another sequence: Backlit. The fragile lines of her body silhouetted. The last set: At the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford.

  Was Jake Romilly obsessed with Bethany? Was it him who’d called to say Bethany didn’t want to be with Adam? And if so, was that a dangerous delusion or the truth?

  Male voices outside the studio, footsteps. She quickly stuffed the pictures back inside the folder, pushed it in the drawer and gave a shove. She grabbed her phone just as the door opened.

  Jake Romilly was with another young man in biker gear with short cropped dirty blond hair. Jake was holding a bottle of uncorked Jack Daniels. Even from this distance she could smell it on his breath.

  He looked Natasha up and down, then gave her a wide smile, folded his arms across his chest, crossed one foot in front of the other, waiting to hear what she had to say.

  ‘I forgot my phone.’ She brandished it at them, the excuse sounding lame even to her.

  ‘Did you now? Been here with Adam I suppose? You seem to be seeing rather a lot of each other.’

  ‘I’m a friend of Bethany’s.’ She knew she was pushing her luck.

  ‘Yeah?’ He took a swig of Jack Daniels. ‘Only met her a couple of times.’

  A direct lie, if the photographs were anything to go by. ‘Oh, when was that?’

  A beat of silence. ‘Last time was just before Christmas.’

  She had the feeling she’d unnerved him a fraction, got him wondering what Bethany might have been saying about him.

  ‘I’ll be off then.’

  ‘You’re more than welcome to join the party.’ He waved the bottle. ‘Stay and have some.’

  ‘I’ll pass this time, thanks.’

  She’d reached the exit to the studio when he said, without looking at her. ‘Nosy little cat, aren’t you? Remember what curiosity did?’

  Back at the cottage, Natasha took a novel up to bed, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. She tried to read for a while but couldn’t concentrate. She switched the light off, lay back and stared at the ceiling. She turned on her side to try to sleep.

  She thought of the picture of Bethany, lying flat on her back. Who actually slept in that position, with their arms crossed on their chests? Had Adam moved her, adjusted her limbs for effect, or was she really only pretending to sleep? Wanting him to photograph her that way for some reason, before she left.

  Sleeping Beauty. Another Pre-Raphaelite motif.

  Lizzie Siddal again, her grave, hidden behind a tangle of ivy. A tragic, twisted fairytale. For she was not roused with a lover’s kiss but by a lover’s greed.

  She pulled a jumper on, tramped downstairs, turned all the lights on and put a pan of milk on the range. She found she was shivering. That was the trouble with old houses, drafts crept in all over the place, and you could never tell quite where they came from. For good measure, she added whisky, watching the golden drop seep into the white, like caramelised sugar.

  She cradled the warm mug, wandering through to the living room, saw the Pre-Raphaelite Dream lying on the floor where she’d left it. She looked at the pictures of Lizzie Siddal painted by Deverell, Millais, Rossetti.

  Perhaps there was nothing unusual about Adam’s group of friends sharing the same models.

  She closed the book. On the cover was Janey Morris, Rossetti’s second muse, who inspired him after Lizzie’s death, and married one of Rossetti’s best friends, in order, according to accepted legend, to ‘keep her in the family’.

  Suddenly the whisky and milk made Natasha feel a little sick. Rossetti and Morris hadn’t just shared Jane as a model. Did Adam and his friends share Diana and Christine and Bethany in other ways?

  Did that have something to do with her disappearance? Was Bethany not the only model Adam had been sleeping with? What a strange phrase that was. Sleep not just a euphemism for death, but for sex as well.

  She wished there was someone she could talk to, someone who wouldn’t mind her ringing at two in the morning. Would Marcus be in Vancouver yet? It might be a perfectly civilised time over there. Once that wouldn’t have mattered. Marcus had never minded her calling him in the middle of the night.

  She heard the soft tap of Boris’s claws descending the wooden stairs, coming to find her. ‘Hello, boy,’ she said as he plonked down close beside her.

  She put her arm around him and he glanced up, checking she was all right. Sometimes, Natasha thought he was the only one who came close to understanding her, the only one who would love her no matter what. She’d found him at the rescue centre, a little puppy sitting forlornly in the corner of his pen. ‘Abandoned on the roadside,’ the woman who ran the kennel told Natasha, and she’d bent down to stroke him, and whispered into his ear, ‘We’re both in the same boat then.’

  She buried her cheek in the velvety fur on top of his head.

  Twenty-Four

  NATASHA HAD BEEN at her desk most of the morning catching up on phone calls, e-mails, typing up reports and notes, liaising with a contact in the States. She rang another client, a middle-aged man expecting his first grandchild. As so often happened, the birth of a new generation had triggered his interest in the ones who’d gone before. Natasha told him she’d tracked down distant cousins in Alice Springs.

  ‘You’ve really made my day,’ he told her. ‘I can start planning my holidays now. Always fancied a trip Down Under but it seemed such a long way away. If you’ve got family it makes the world of difference, doesn’t it?’

  The call brightened her morning. She took a leisurely break to have lunch in Broadway with an old flatmate from London who was passing through on her way to visit her parents in Worcester. They went to a café, giggled a lot and pigged out on omelette and chips followed by sponge pudding and custard. It was one of the few occasions she’d taken time out from work since the business with Bethany started. It made her realise how much it was preoccupying her. She wondered if she’d lost her perspective. Finding Bethany had become a kind of personal quest. As if a successful resolution could in some way restore a balance, make up for events of the past, prove that people couldn’t just vanish into thin air.

  * * *

  Natasha had tried the model Diana’s number in the morning. She dialled it now for the third time and got an answer.

  ‘Hi. It’s Natasha Blake. We met, almost, at Adam Mason’s studio.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Adam’s asked me to pose for some pictures too. It sounds fun but I’ve never done it before. I wondered if you’d give me some tips.’

  ‘Nothing to it.’

  ‘Do all the girls find it so easy?’

  ‘You’d have to ask them.’

&
nbsp; ‘Adam showed me the photos of Bethany. They’re so lovely.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You said you know her. What’s she like?’

  ‘Dunno really. She kept herself to herself.’

  ‘Have you modelled for Jake as well?’

  Diana hesitated. ‘Lots of times,’ she said, guarded. ‘The more practice I get the better.’

  ‘You think I should say yes, then?’

  ‘Depends on the question.’

  Which left Natasha none the wiser.

  * * *

  The party was to be at Will’s flat, opposite Montpellier Gardens in Cheltenham. Natasha wondered who else would be there. Emily for sure, other ex-colleagues from Generations. It would be good to see them.

  It was nearly seven by the time she’d showered and decided what to wear. In the end she went for the copper-beech dress and the shawl, both still hanging on the wardrobe door from New Year’s Eve. She was going to be late, at least forty minutes. No point altering the habits of a lifetime.

  She drove out towards Toddington, put her foot down once she was through Winchcombe.

  There’d been warnings of black ice on the roads and patches of mist. Perhaps this was why the red Celica had been hugging her rear all the way, basking in her tail lights. It was beginning to bug her. If she had to brake hard he’d bang into her.

  Natasha didn’t mind driving in bad conditions. It made her feel alive, in touch with the elements. She pressed down on the pedal, felt the plucky engine, nearly a decade older than herself, gearing itself for the challenge, proximity to the ground increasing the pure adrenaline rush of speed. She felt the tyres slip and right themselves. There was a bend up ahead and she eased back, took a firm grip of the narrow wooden steering wheel.

  The bloody Celica was still on her tail.

  She hit the outskirts of town, indicated right to turn off onto Prestbury Road. The Celica did the same. She accelerated ahead again, put another car between them for a while, then it was back in her rear view mirror, the driver behind the windscreen inscrutable in the glare of the lights. She spotted an off licence next to a chip shop. She left it deliberately late to pull into the kerb, and watched the Celica shoot past.