Murder at the Mill

by M. B. Shaw

  Now it was Iris’s turn to smile. ‘Of course not. When am I ever happy with a portrait? Everything can always be better.’

  Everything could certainly be better now, thought Ian. He felt profoundly sad, suddenly. In this moment, so much of his life felt like a terrible, awful waste.

  Iris felt something similar as she headed for the door. The anger she’d brought into the room with her was completely gone now. Something had been healed by this brief encounter with Ian. There was a new mood in the air, a new calm. Not forgiveness, exactly. But perhaps acceptance.

  Cant knocked once on the door, a brisk, perfunctory rap, and walked in, swaggering like a silver-backed gorilla preparing to reclaim his territory. Behind him scuttled his sergeant, and an antsy Thomas James.

  ‘My sergeant will show you out, Ms Grey,’ Cant informed Iris imperiously.

  ‘No need for that,’ replied Iris, already halfway out the door. ‘I know where I’m going. You have my mobile, if you need me.’

  Cant opened his mouth to insist that he wouldn’t ‘need’ her, but Iris was already gone.

  The fact was that she needed this now, whatever the police or anyone else might think. She needed to know the truth, not just for Dom’s sake or even for Ian’s, but for her own. Unravelling the mystery of Dom Wetherby’s murder, and the web of secrets and lies at the Mill, had transformed Iris into a new person. A person with a purpose, and perhaps even a gift. It was the same gift that made her a great portrait painter, only now she was using it not just to create beautiful paintings but to reveal the truth, to make the truth matter, make it count for something. She would demand justice for Dom Wetherby. And this time, she would get it.

  It had taken an agonising divorce, not to mention a murder, for Iris to reach this point. But she was here now. She finally knew who she was.

  It felt good.

  * * *

  Graham Feeney lay back in Iris’s bed with his arm around her, staring up at the ceiling. It was bumpy and uneven, a symptom of Mill Cottage’s great age, the white plaster rolling in undulating waves above him. There were cobwebs in the corners, and tiny hairline cracks in the paintwork and beams. Graham found himself noticing everything suddenly, each tiny shadow or stain, his senses heightened to a quiveringly high pitch. He couldn’t easily place the emotions raging inside him. At times he felt something akin to panic, at other times elation. All he knew for sure was that being with Iris – talking to her, holding her, making love to her as he just had – had intensified everything, made him more alive and awake and present than he had been for many years. Not since before his brother’s death.

  ‘I’m so looking forward to Thursday night,’ he said, stroking Iris’s hair. ‘I can’t wait to be there at the portrait unveiling, by your side. Are you nervous?’

  ‘A bit,’ Iris admitted. ‘I told Ian yesterday I’m nervous and excited.’

  Rolling over, Graham shot her a wounded look. ‘You and Ian sound awfully cosy all of a sudden.’

  It was so petulant Iris stifled the urge to laugh. ‘Hardly. I went to visit him at the police station. It wasn’t a date.’

  ‘I don’t see why you had to go and see him,’ Graham grumbled.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Iris said gently. ‘No matter what’s happened between us, I can’t stand by and do nothing while the police fit him up for murder.’

  In fact, Ian had been released a few hours after Iris left the station yesterday. Evidently Cant didn’t have enough to charge him … yet. But Iris knew from experience that when the detective inspector had a suspect in his sights, he became like a pre-programmed drone. Totally focused on the target. First it had been Billy. Now it was Ian. Iris might not love Ian anymore, but she couldn’t allow the police to cobble together some cock-and-bull case against him.

  ‘DI Cant’s probably out there right now trying to find enough evidence to pin Dom’s killing on the wrong man,’ she told Graham. ‘You don’t want that to happen any more than I do.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ asked Graham.

  ‘Sure about what?’ said Iris. ‘You not supporting a miscarriage of justice? Or Cant’s total disregard for the truth when it doesn’t fit his prejudices? I’m pretty sure about both, to be honest.’

  ‘I meant, are you sure Ian’s the wrong man?’ said Graham.

  Iris propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him with astonishment.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I am, actually. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be him,’ Graham replied calmly. ‘Look, I was with you on Billy – you know I was. I never believed he was capable of killing anyone, let alone his father. But your husband’s different.’

  ‘How?’ said Iris.

  ‘Because he’s shown himself to be violent and vengeful,’ Graham replied. ‘He’s also highly intelligent and an accomplished liar. He terrorised you and threatened Dom, physically as well as verbally, if Cant’s witnesses are to be believed. And let’s face it, they’ve no obvious reason to lie.’

  Iris shook her head. ‘You’re wrong. I know Ian. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Not murder. You don’t know him like I do.’

  ‘Well, that’s true,’ admitted Graham, kissing her tenderly on the forehead. ‘I don’t. But perhaps that makes me more objective. Me and the police. You have to give Cant credit where it’s due, Iris.’

  ‘Give Cant credit? For what?’

  ‘He got hold of those emails to Dom,’ said Graham, counting off the detective’s achievements on his fingers one by one and sounding more like a lawyer than ever. ‘He tracked down Ian’s rental car and his B&B, blowing apart his alibi, and he found those witnesses to the fight with Dom, all while we assumed he was sitting on his arse waiting for Billy to crack and confess.’

  Iris’s frown deepened. This was all true. And yet she didn’t want to credit Cant, or to suspect Ian. She just didn’t.

  ‘Perhaps we’ve misjudged the detective inspector,’ suggested Graham.

  ‘Yes, and perhaps we haven’t,’ Iris snapped. ‘Those emails must have been on Dom’s computer for months, so he should have found them ages ago. The fact it took him this long is sloppy detective work, if you ask me.’

  Graham smiled wryly. ‘You’re even more lovely when you’re angry. Has anyone ever told you that?’

  Iris blushed and swatted him away.

  ‘By the way, did I mention Ariadne’s decided to attend on Thursday night?’ Graham threw in casually.

  Iris’s face fell. Ariadne had been giving her distinctly mixed messages recently, continuing to strongly hint that Iris’s time at Mill Cottage might be up.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Graham.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ Iris rolled over. ‘I don’t entirely trust her, that’s all. I don’t think she likes me.’

  Graham looked surprised. ‘Well, she sent me a very kind note about you yesterday, saying what a great job you’d done on the painting and how happy she is that you and I found each other.’

  ‘Really?’ Iris found this hard to believe. How odd of Ariadne to be so kind and complimentary to Graham and simultaneously so cold to her. The woman’s moods were more changeable than the eddying waters of the Itchen.

  ‘Really,’ said Graham, kissing her.

  After lying in companionable silence for a few minutes, Iris suddenly turned to him and asked, ‘You remember when your brother and Dom were up at Oxford together?’

  ‘Yes.’ Graham frowned, disconcerted by the non sequitur.

  ‘Did you ever go and visit him?’

  ‘Once or twice, I think,’ said Graham. ‘It was a long time ago. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason,’ said Iris. ‘I was just wondering what Dom was like in those days. I can’t really imagine him as a young man. I mean, it must have been a hugely creative period, being around so much talent and inspiration. I know it was for me, in my own small way. But for Dom, writing the first Grimshaw book, conceiving the character that was going to change his entire life—’

  ‘I bare
ly remember him,’ Graham said curtly, cutting her off, and wondering why, exactly, the conversation had gone off on this tangent. ‘When I think of those days, all I remember is Marcus. His youth. His promise. His creativity.’

  Realising she’d hit a nerve, Iris reached up and touched Graham’s cheek.

  ‘That was insensitive of me. Sorry. I wasn’t trying to bring up painful memories.’

  Graham covered her hand with his and consciously took two deep breaths.

  ‘You didn’t,’ he assured her. ‘And I’m the one who should be sorry. The memories – those memories, anyway – are mostly good ones. Marcus loved Oxford. He used to tell me hilarious stories about Professor Nevers turning up drunk for tutorials, and him and Dom trying to convince the old boy that he’d lost their essays, when in fact they hadn’t bothered to write one.’

  Iris laughed.

  ‘That reminds me of my own Oxford days. Except for the fact that I was sleeping with my tutor and ended up marrying him!’

  Graham forced himself to smile at this latest allusion to Ian. He mustn’t come across as jealous. Women didn’t like that. But deep down he felt aggrieved by how many of his and Iris’s recent conversations seemed to circle back to her poisonous, abusive ex. Almost ex.

  Perhaps sensing his discomfort, Iris snuggled in closer.

  ‘I’m looking forward to Thursday too,’ she told him. ‘It means so much to me, you being there.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Graham, exhaling. Turning off the bedside light, he held her until she fell asleep.

  Then, in the darkness, he watched.

  Iris Grey, he thought, gazing at her sleeping form in wonder. Even her name felt special, melodic and lovely, like a poem.

  How lovely you are, my Iris. How beautiful and smart and perceptive.

  Too perceptive.

  Marcus would have loved Iris.

  Marcus would have loved a lot of things, had he lived.

  At last Graham fell into a fractured and shallow sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Tucked away on St Martin’s Place behind Trafalgar Square, hiding in the petticoats of the larger and grander National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery was easily the most prestigious venue in Europe for portrait artists. Behind its grey, classical façade, dominated by the busts of its three founders, Stanhope, Macaulay and Carlyle, the NPG housed collections incorporating everything from Tudor oil paintings to modern digital photographs. There were portraits of monarchs and generals and movie stars, alongside many depicting ordinary people, their essence captured in one moment, one expression that the artist had somehow distilled and preserved, in that alchemy that was portraiture. The NPG was a celebration of fine art, but it was also, uniquely, a celebration of humanity. Of the human spirit, revealed through faces and bodies and reimagined through the brush or the lens.

  For Iris, it had always been a Mecca, ever since her first visit as an A-level art student all those years ago. Tonight, though, it was not at its best. Renovations to the pillared portico had left the front of the building covered in ugly scaffolding, like a teenager’s braces, and a relentless grey drizzle added to the depressing first impression.

  Worse than the weather were the scrum of reporters huddled along the railings like wet rats, drawn to Iris’s big night not for any love of art but because they smelled the rotten flesh of scandal. As if Dom Wetherby’s gruesome death weren’t salacious enough already, his portrait painter’s husband had just been arrested on suspicion of his murder! True, Ian McBride had since been released without charge. But the story was still a tabloid editor’s wet dream, especially as the portrait artist in question turned out to be properly attractive: another of Wetherby’s conquests, perhaps? His last?

  The jostling and shouted questions began the moment Iris arrived, bundled up in a trench coat and clutching Graham Feeney’s arm for dear life.

  ‘Have you seen your husband, Iris, since his arrest?’

  ‘Why was Ian arrested? Do you think he might have done it?’

  ‘Is Dom Wetherby the reason the two of you got divorced?’

  ‘Is this your new boyfriend, Iris? What’s his name?’

  By the time they finally got inside and handed their coats in at the cloakroom, Iris felt close to a total panic attack.

  ‘I can’t do it!’ she panted at Graham, doubled over in an attempt to calm her raging pulse and erratic breathing. ‘I can’t go in there and stand up in front of all those people with everyone thinking about Ian and Dom and what might have happened. I wanted tonight to be about the portrait.’

  ‘It is about the portrait,’ said Graham, rubbing a soothing hand in circular motions over Iris’s back, the way one might calm a colicky baby. She’d reverted to her instinctively quirky look tonight, in a scarlet ankle-length dress with geometric cut-outs in the back teamed with a pair of 1970s platform boots in clashing burnt orange. It looked a bit bizarre, from Graham’s conservative perspective, but at the same time it suited her. When he picked her up earlier, Graham had interpreted Iris’s vibrant outfit choice as a sign of confidence. Perhaps it had been. But whatever positivity she’d been feeling back at Graham’s London house had evaporated the moment the paparazzi descended.

  ‘Those morons outside might be here for the soap opera, but everyone in that room is here for your art. People are excited: the critics, the family, everybody. Including me, I might add. I can’t believe I still haven’t seen the finished article yet.’

  ‘I know,’ Iris said weakly, straightening up and attempting to breathe more normally. ‘I really hope you like it. Thank you so much for setting this up, Graham. I hope you don’t think I’m ungrateful. I’m just nervous.’

  ‘Of course you are, my darling.’ Stooping down, he kissed her tenderly on the collarbone, an unexpectedly intimate gesture in such a public place. ‘Having one’s work shown here is a big deal, a huge honour. You’d have been nervous anyway. And it has been quite a week.’

  ‘Iris! There you are. The woman of the hour. Do come through.’

  Lena Carrington, this year’s president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, was a warm, encouraging, generously curvaceous woman from Newcastle, with the sort of broad Geordie accent that had Americans reaching for the subtitle button on their televisions. Lena’s own portraits, though technically brilliant, had never been to Iris’s taste. All her subjects looked angular and reduced, somehow, as if in art Lena felt compelled to strip away the fleshy, human softness she struggled to control in life. But like everybody else, Iris adored Lena as a person, and was in awe of her immense energy and passion, as well as her generosity towards other artists.

  ‘And you must be Graham?’ Lena said, enveloping both of them in a waft of gardenia scent from beneath her soft cashmere poncho. ‘“Here’s our Graham with a quick reminder.” Always makes me think of Cilla Black, that name.’

  Graham looked blank, but Iris got the Blind Date reference and smiled as she allowed Lena to sweep them through the double doors into the Wolfson Gallery.

  ‘David Bone tells me we have you to thank for showcasing the Wetherby portrait here?’ Lena turned to Graham. ‘Not that he needed much convincing. David loves Iris. We all do.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t he?’ said Graham, taking Iris’s hand in his and feeling a warm glow run through him as they walked into a room already packed to the rafters with buyers, critics and fellow artists, as well as Wetherby family friends and supporters. Tonight marked the ‘coming out’ of Iris and Graham as a couple. But it was also a professional triumph for Iris, and one he felt delighted in which to have played a small part.

  ‘I’m going to “ding, ding, ding” and give my little speech in a minute,’ Lena informed Iris. ‘Then I’ll unveil the picture. And you can either do an official Q&A if you want to or just get pissed and mill about a bit, basking in the glow.’ She chuckled. ‘Cheer up, pet! You’ve done well. Have a drink and enjoy yourself.’

  Taking Lena’s advice, Iris swiped two flutes of c
hampagne from the first passing tray and, handing one to Graham, downed hers almost at once. Feeling better, despite the stream of bubbles threatening to pour out of her nose, she helped herself to a sausage roll and a second drink, and had just started to scan the room for familiar faces when Lena took up her position next to the covered portrait and cleared her throat.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,’ she began, to a wave of drunkenly enthusiastic applause. ‘I won’t take up too much of your time. I know none of you came here to listen to me rambling on. You’re here to see a tremendous, important piece of work by one of our very best British portrait painters, the lovely Ms Iris Grey.’

  Another ripple of applause as various eyes turned to seek out Iris, who wasn’t difficult to find in her red cut-out dress and boots.

  Graham stepped back slightly, to allow Iris her moment in the spotlight alone as the RSPP president continued extolling her virtues.

  Glancing around the room, he honed in on a handful of familiar faces, observing their reactions to both the speech and one another. Some he’d expected to be here. Marcus and Jenna Wetherby seemed happier in each other’s company. He looked like he’d come straight from work – crumpled suit, loosened tie – but Jenna had clearly made an effort in a bottle-green cocktail dress and heels, and was leaning back against him in a way that suggested intimacy or at least calm. They’ve called a truce, thought Graham. That’s good.

  On the other side of the room, just a few feet to the left of Lena and the portrait, Ariadne stood with Lorcan, holding hands. That was a more jarring pairing: Ariadne, in a pale pink kaftan and strings of beads, looking positively yogi-like and radiating peace, beside Lorcan, stiff and awkward in his sports jacket and chinos, and visibly distressed to be there.

  Why did she bring him? Graham found himself thinking, almost angrily. Why put him through this, poor kid? But then it occurred to him that perhaps there was no one with whom Lorcan could be safely left. Ever since Dom’s death, the boy’s separation anxiety had become acute, and focused relentlessly on his mother.