A Darker Domain

by Val McDermid

  The owner had settled himself behind a leather-topped desk, obviously meant to look antique. Probably about as old as his car, Bel thought. She approached, plastering her least predatory smile on her face. ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘What a wonderful display of paintings. Anyone would be lucky to have these on their walls.’

  ‘We pride ourselves on the quality of our art works,’ he said without a flicker of irony.

  ‘Amazing. They make the landscape come alive. I wonder if you can help me?’

  He eyed her up from top to toe. She could see him pricing everything from her Harvey Nicks’ sundress to her market stall straw bag before deciding how much wattage to put into his own smile. He must have liked what he saw; she got the full benefit of his cosmetic dentistry. ‘It will be my pleasure,’ he said. ‘What is it that you are looking for?’ He stood up, adjusting his shirt to hide his extra pounds.

  Apologetic smile. ‘I’m not actually looking for a painting,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for a painter. I’m a journalist.’ Bel took her business card from the pocket in her dress and handed it over, ignoring the wintry look that had replaced the previous warmth. ‘I’m looking for a British landscape painter who’s been living over here, earning a living for the last twenty years or so. The difficult thing is that I don’t know his name. It begins with a D - David, Darren, Daniel. Something like that. He has a son in his early twenties, Gabriel.’ She’d made print-outs of Renata’s photos and she took them out of her bag. ‘This is the son, and this is the painter I want to track down. My editor thinks there’s a feature there.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I need to talk to him, find out what his story is.’

  He glanced at the photos. ‘I don’t know him,’ he said. ‘All my artists are Italian. Are you sure he’s a professional? There are a lot of amateurs who sell stuff on the pavements. A lot of them are foreigners.’

  ‘Oh no, he’s a professional all right. He’s represented here and in Siena.’ She spread her hands to take in the stuff on the walls. ‘Obviously not good enough for you, though.’ She took the photos back. ‘Thanks for your time.’ He had already turned away, heading for his comfy chair surrounded by his soulless paintings. No sale, no more conversation.

  There was, she knew, no shortage of galleries. Two more, then she’d have a coffee and a cigarette. Another three, then an ice-cream. Little treats to drag her through the work.

  She didn’t make it to the ice-cream. At the fifth gallery she tried, she hit gold. It was a light and airy space, paintings and sculptures spread out so they could be appreciated. Bel actually enjoyed walking through to the desk in the back. This time, it was a middle-aged woman behind a modern, functional desk piled with brochures and catalogues. She wore the crumpled linen uniform of the more relaxed class of Italian middle-class womanhood. She looked up from her computer and gave Bel a vague, slightly harassed look. ‘Can I help?’ she said, her words running into each other.

  Bel launched into her spiel. A few sentences in, the woman’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes widening in shock. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Daniel. You mean Daniel?’

  Bel pulled the prints out and showed them to the woman. She looked as if she might burst into tears. ‘That’s Daniel,’ she said. She reached out and touched Gabriel’s head with her fingertips. ‘And Gabe. Poor sweet Gabe.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Bel said. ‘Is there a problem?’

  The woman took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Daniel’s dead.’ She spread her hands in a gesture of sorrow. ‘He died back in April.’

  Now it was Bel’s turn to feel a jolt. ‘What happened?’

  The woman leaned back in her chair and ran a hand through her curly black hair. ‘Pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed just before Christmas. It was horrible.’ Tears sparkled in her eyes. ‘It shouldn’t have happened to him. He was…he was such a lovely man. Very gentle, very reserved. And he loved his boy so much. Gabe’s mother, she died giving birth. Daniel brought him up single-handed and he did a great job.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Bel said. At least the blood on the floor of the villa Totti wasn’t Daniel’s. ‘I had no idea. I’d just heard about this terrific British artist who’d been making a living out here for years. I wanted to do a feature about him.’

  ‘Do you know his work?’ The woman got up and beckoned Bel to follow her. They ended up in a small room at the back of the gallery. On the wall were a series of vibrant triptychs, abstract representations of landscape and seascape. ‘He did watercolours as well,’ the woman said. ‘The water-colours were more figurative. He could sell more of them. But these were what he loved.’

  ‘They’re splendid,’ said Bel, meaning it. Really wishing she had met the man who had seen the world like this.

  ‘Yes. They are. I hate that there will be no more of them.’ She reached out and brushed the textured acrylic paint with her fingertips. ‘I miss him. He was a friend as well as a client.’

  ‘I wonder if you can put me in touch with his son?’ Bel said, not losing sight of why she was there. ‘Maybe I could still do that feature. A sort of tribute.’

  The woman smiled, a sad little curl of the lips. ‘Daniel always spurned publicity when he was alive. He had no interest in the cult of personality. He wanted his paintings to speak for him. But now…it would be good to see his work appreciated. Gabe might like it.’ She nodded slowly.

  ‘Can you give me his phone number? Or address?’ Bel said.

  The woman looked slightly shocked. ‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that. Daniel always insisted on privacy. Please, give me your card and I will contact Gabe. Ask him if he is willing to talk to you about his father.’

  ‘Is he still around, then?’

  ‘Where else would he be? Tuscany is the only home he’s ever known. His friends are all here. We’re taking turns to make sure he has at least one decent meal a week.’

  As they walked back to the desk, it dawned on Bel that she hadn’t discovered Daniel’s surname. ‘Have you got a brochure or a catalogue of his work?’ she asked.

  The woman nodded. ‘I’ll print it out for you.’

  Ten minutes later, Bel was back out on the street. At last she had something concrete to grab on to. The hunt was on.

  Coaltown of Wemyss

  The whitewashed cottages that lined the main street were spick and span, their porches supported by rustic tree trunks. They’d always been well maintained because they were what people saw when they travelled through the village. These days, the back streets looked just as smart. But Karen knew it hadn’t always been like that. The hovels of Plantation Row had been a notorious slum, ignored by their landlord because what no eye from polite society ever saw was not worth bothering with. But even from the doorstep of this particular cottage, Karen suspected that somehow, if Effie Reekie had found herself in a hellhole, she’d have turned it into a little paradise. The front door looked as if it had been washed down that morning, there wasn’t a dead head in the window boxes and the net curtains hung in perfect pleats. She wondered if Effie and her mother had possibly been twins separated at birth.

  ‘Are you going to knock or what?’ Phil said.

  ‘Sorry. I was just having a moment of déjà vu. Or something.’ Karen pressed the doorbell, feeling guilty for leaving her fingerprint on it.

  The door opened almost at once. The sense of being in a time warp continued. Karen hadn’t seen a woman with a scarf turbanning her head like that since her grandmother died. With her overall and rolled-up sleeves Effie Reekie resembled a pensioned-off version of Rosie the Riveter. She looked Karen up and down, as if gauging whether she was clean enough to be allowed across the doorstep. ‘Aye?’ she said. It wasn’t a welcome.

  Karen introduced herself and Phil. Effie frowned, apparently affronted to have police officers at her door. ‘I never saw anything or heard anything,’ she said abruptly. ‘That’s always been my policy.’

  ‘We need to talk to you,’ Karen said gently, sensing the fragility the elderly woman w
as desperately hiding.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Effie said.

  Phil stepped forward. ‘Mrs Reekie,’ he said, ‘even if you don’t have anything to say to us, I would be your pal for life if you could see your way to making us a cup of tea. I’ve a throat on me like the Sahara.’

  She hesitated, looking from one to the other with anxious eyes. Her face scrunched up with the wrestle of hospitality versus vulnerability. ‘You’d better come in, then,’ she said at last. ‘But I’ve got nothing to tell you.’

  The kitchen was immaculate. River could have conducted an autopsy on the table without risk of contamination. Karen was pleased to see she’d guessed right. Like her mother, Effie Reekie viewed every available surface as a depository for ornaments and knick-knacks. It was, Karen thought, a desperate waste of the planet’s resources. She tried not to think of all the crap she’d brought home from school trips. ‘You’ve got a lovely home,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve always tried to keep it nice,’ Effie said as she busied herself with the kettle. ‘I would never let Ben smoke in the house. That was my man, Ben. He’s been dead now five years, but he was somebody round these parts. Everybody knew Ben Reekie. There wouldn’t be the bother there is in this street these days if my Ben was still alive. No, siree. There would not.’

  ‘It’s Ben we need to talk to you about, Mrs Reekie,’ Karen said.

  She swung round, eyes wide, rabbit in the headlights. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. He’s been dead these five years. Cancer, it was. Lung cancer. Years of smoking. Years of branch committee meetings, all of them smoking like chimneys.’

  ‘He was the branch secretary, wasn’t he?’ Phil asked. He was studying a group of decorative plates mounted on the wall. They represented various milestones in trade union history. ‘A big job, especially during the strike.’

  ‘He loved the men,’ Effie said vehemently. ‘He’d have done anything for his men. It broke his heart to see the way that bitch Thatcher brought them down. And Scargill.’ She brought their tea to the table with a clatter of china. ‘I never had any time for King Arthur. Into the valley of death, that’s where he led them. It would have been a different story if it had been Mick McGahey running the show. A very different story. He had respect for the men. Like my Ben. He had respect for his men.’ She gave Karen a look that bordered on the desperate.

  ‘I understand that, Mrs Reekie. But it’s time now to set the record straight.’ Karen knew she was chancing her arm. Mick Prentice could have been mistaken. Ben Reekie might have kept his own counsel. And Effie Reekie might be determined not to think about the way her husband had breached the trust of the men he professed to love.

  Effie’s whole body seemed to clench. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ It was a shrill denial, its deceit obvious.

  ‘I think you do, Effie,’ Phil said, joining the two women at the table. ‘I think it’s been eating away at you for a long time.’

  Effie covered her face with her hands. ‘Go away,’ she said, her words muffled. She was shivering now, like a sheep that had just been sheared.

  Karen sighed. ‘It can’t have been easy for you. Seeing how hard everybody else had it, when you were doing all right.’

  Effie grew still and took her hands away from her face. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said. ‘You surely don’t think he took it for himself?’ Affront had given her strength. That or made her careless.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. Karen realized she had completely misjudged the situation. But if she had, so could others. Others like Mick Prentice. Mick Prentice whose best friend had been a union official. Who might even have been complicit in what Ben Reekie was doing. Thoughts racing, she pulled herself back into the conversation.

  ‘Of course we don’t think that,’ Phil said. ‘Karen just meant the fact that you still had a wage coming in.’

  Effie looked uncertainly at them both. ‘He only did it after they started sequestering the union funds,’ she said. The words spilled out as if it was a relief to let them loose. ‘He said, what was the point in passing money through to the branch when they’d just hand it on to Head Office. He said money raised locally should go to support local miners, not be shuffled off to Buffalo.’ She managed a piteous smile. ‘That’s what he always used to say. “Not be shuffled off to Buffalo.” He just took some here and there, not enough for the high-ups to notice. And he was very discreet about passing it out. He got Andy Kerr to go through the welfare request letters and he’d hand it out where it was most needed.’

  ‘Did anybody find out?’ Phil asked. ‘Anybody catch him at it?’

  ‘What do you think? They’d have strung him up first and asked questions afterwards. The union was sacred round here. He’d never have walked away in one piece if anybody had so much as suspected.’

  ‘But Andy knew.’ Karen wasn’t ready to give up yet.

  ‘No, no, he never knew. Ben never said he was giving them money. He just asked Andy to prioritize them, supposedly for branch relief. Except there wasn’t any branch relief by then because all the funds were going to national level.’ Effie rubbed her hands as if they hurt. ‘He knew he couldn’t trust anybody with that. You see, even if they’d believed he was doing it for the men and their families, they’d still have seen it as treason. Everybody was supposed to put the union first, especially officials. What he did, it would have been unforgivable. And he knew it.’

  San Gimignano

  Bel finally found a bar that wasn’t crammed with tourists. Tucked away in a back street, the only patrons were half a dozen old men playing cards and drinking small glasses of dark purple wine. She ordered an espresso and a water and sat down by the back door which was open on to a tiny cobbled yard.

  She spent a few minutes looking at the catalogue she’d picked up at the gallery. Daniel Porteous had been an artist whose work she’d have happily lived with. But who the hell had he been? What was his background? And had his path truly crossed Cat’s, or was Bel making bricks without straw? Just because Daniel Porteous was an artist and he had a loose connection to the place where the posters had been found didn’t mean he was involved with the kidnapping. Maybe she was looking at the wrong man. Maybe the link was Matthias, the man who designed the puppets and their stage sets. The man who might either be a killer or a victim.

  Still looking at the reproductions of Porteous’s work, she called her work experience student Jonathan on her mobile.

  ‘I tried to get hold of you last night,’ he said. ‘But your mobile was switched off. So I rang the ice maiden at Rotheswell and she said you were unavailable.’

  Bel laughed. ‘She does like to make herself important, doesn’t she? Sorry I missed you last night. I was at a party.’

  ‘A party? I thought you were supposed to be being Nancy Drew?’

  Part of her thought Jonathan’s cheeky flirtatiousness was marginally inappropriate. But its absurdity amused her so she let him play. ‘I am. The party was in Italy.’

  ‘In Italy? You’re in Italy?’

  Bel quickly brought Jonathan up to speed. ‘So now you have the inside track,’ she wound up.

  ‘Wow,’ Jonathan said. ‘Who knew this was going to be so exciting? None of my mates are having an internship like this. It’s like Woodward and Bernstein, hot on the trail of Watergate.’

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ Bel protested.

  ‘Of course it is. You told me there was blood on the villa floor. People generally don’t run from household accidents or suicide, so that rather suggests that somebody was killed. And in a situation that ties in with murder and kidnap going back twenty-two years. Bel, there is at least one very unpleasant person out there and you are definitely hot on his trail.’

  ‘At the moment, Jonathan, what I’m on the trail of is a young man who’s just lost his father. How scary can that be?’ Bel said, her tone light and easy.

  Suddenly serious, Jonathan said, ‘Bel, they’re not all as charming and harmless as me. We can be savages.
You’ve done enough stories about rape and murder to have no illusions about that. Stop treating me like a child. This isn’t a game. Promise me you’ll take it seriously.’

  Bel sighed. ‘When I get to something that looks serious, I will take it seriously, Jonathan. I promise. Now, meanwhile, I need you to do something for me.’

  ‘Of course, whatever you need. I don’t suppose it involves a visit to Tuscany?’

  ‘It involves a visit to the Family Records Centre in Islington to find out what you can about a man called Daniel Porteous. He’d be late forties, early fifties. He died in April in Italy, but I’m not sure where exactly. And besides, Italian death certificates have almost no information on them. So I’m looking for his birth certificate, maybe a marriage certificate. Can you do that for me?’

  ‘I’m on it. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve got anything. Thanks, Bel. It’s great being involved in something as meaty as this.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Bel said to emptiness. She sipped her espresso and thought. She wasn’t convinced the gallery owner would come up trumps as far as Gabriel Porteous was concerned. She was going to have to do some serious digging herself. The records would be in the provincial capital, Siena. There was no point in heading over there now. By the time she made it, everyone would have disappeared for the day. Afternoons and Italian bureaucracy were unhappy bedfellows.

  There was nothing else for it. She was going to have to go back to Campora and lie by Grazia’s pool. Maybe call Vivianne, catch up on family life. Sometimes life was just too, too hard.