by Danuta Reah
It was some weeks now since the fire at the gallery. She still saw the hanging figure above her in the darkness, still felt the choking smoke in the night, but the memories were gradually being blunted by time. And now she was leaving. Her job was gone, she had two-months’ salary in her pocket, a ticket to Naples where she had the promise of work in a private gallery, and she had time. She had paintings to finish. She could have gone sooner, but there was one thing that had kept her lingering. Roy Farnham.
He had come to see her the morning after the fire, as she waited in the high ward of the hospital for the doctor to tell her she could leave. He pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ he said. Then he told her. Told her that the man who had been her employer and her mentor had killed Ellie those four years ago, spreading destruction through the lives of all the people the tragedy touched, Maggie, Mark Fraser, his family, now scattered and destroyed.
‘Mark Fraser,’ she said. ‘Maggie hated him for all those years…’ He was out of prison on bail, trying to reconstruct his shattered life. Stacy’s family had lost their daughter, and Briony Rose…She could still remember Cara tucking the shawl around the baby as she put her in the chair. Briony Rose would be adopted, but her mother was dead.
She knew that Bakst had been charged with the abduction of Kerry Fraser, and with the killings of Cara Hobson and Stacy McDonald. But it had been a month before Roy talked to her about it, a month in which Daniel had left, gone to recreate the now infamous Triumph, and to capitalize on the notoriety that the exhibition had acquired.
A few days before he left, Daniel had come to see Eliza at Laura’s, where she was staying while she decided what she was going to do. After some hesitant talk about her welfare, her future, he said, ‘I’m taking the Triumph to New York in the autumn.’ He looked out of the window. ‘You could come with me, if you wanted.’
‘I’ve got other plans,’ she said. Daniel Flynn was no part of her future. She still regretted the man she’d thought she had known, but that wasn’t Daniel Flynn. That man didn’t exist. There was nothing she wanted from the real Daniel.
‘I’ll miss you,’ he said.
She laughed, and he looked hurt.
He’d left Sheffield not long after that visit. She thought about him a couple of days later. She was with Roy. They were grabbing a few hours from Roy’s hectic schedule to spend some time together. ‘Daniel knows how to ride high on other people’s ideas,’ she said, as she ran that last meeting through her mind.
‘Mm.’ He didn’t really listen when she talked about art. He was half asleep, lying back against the pillow. Music was playing, something jazzy that she didn’t recognize, his choice.
‘My ideas, Bakst’s ideas.’
‘Mm,’ he said again. He was tired. He was working long hours, putting together the case against Ivan Bakst.
‘He still won’t talk to you?’ she asked.
‘Oh, he’ll talk,’ Roy said. His eyes were closed. ‘He says it was a work of art. And that’s all he’ll tell me. His brief is already pressing for psychiatric reports, hospital…It might not come to court, if he can play the insanity card. But that doesn’t explain Cara and Stacy.’ He wanted to see the killings as utilitarian, he wanted to see Bakst as an evil man, not as a mad man. He wanted someone to blame and someone to punish. And those deaths had been utilitarian, it was true, but they had also been material that had come Bakst’s way, material to be incorporated in his final piece. His triumph of death.
The madness of artists. She could understand. ‘The Triumph of Death was never Daniel Flynn’s. He came to Madrid with Bakst, but it was Bakst who’d come to see the Brueghel – I should have realized when I was talking to them. Bakst knew about it. Daniel didn’t. Everything that Daniel did was based on ideas that Bakst had given him, and some that I’d contributed. He told me, Bakst, that we had a lot in common. I didn’t realize what he meant.’
‘Bakst did all this in revenge for Flynn stealing his idea?’ Roy was fully awake now, listening to her.
Eliza shook her head. ‘No. But Bakst is obsessed with death. Everything of his I’ve seen is to do with death. I told you about those pots he made. And then…’ But she didn’t want to talk about Ellie. ‘I don’t know what his original idea was, but his Triumph would have been nothing like Daniel’s. He’d never have put all those paintings and photographs together like that. Then when Daniel stole the idea, that must have given him the shape he wanted for his own version. Bakst’s Triumph was the gallery. The fire – the derelict buildings, the canal, all those symbols of death lit up by the destruction of the gallery – fuelled by the kind of art he despised. A triumph.’
He was quiet after she’d finished speaking. ‘So that’s art,’ he said after a while.
But she had seen his expression change as she spoke, as he realized that she understood Bakst’s concepts, and she knew that she had stayed too long. It was time to go.
And now she had one last thing to attend to, here in this burial ground. The rain was getting heavier. She put her bag down beside her and got out the small shrub and the trowel she had bought. She didn’t know anything about planting things. The man at the garden centre had said that the shrub, a forsythia, was hardy. When she’d first consulted him, he’d talked about soil preparation and planting mix and pruning and things that had been a foreign language to Eliza’s ears. She’d explained what she wanted to do, and he’d looked embarrassed and suggested the forsythia. ‘It’ll flower every spring,’ he said.
She was having trouble now co-ordinating the umbrella, the plant, the trowel and the bag. She put the umbrella down. She had to kneel on the wet ground to get enough leverage to dig into the hard soil of Ellie’s grave.
She took the small package out of her bag, tissue paper, old, slightly discoloured. It contained the locks of hair and the infant tooth she had found at Maggie’s – Maggie’s last relics of her daughter. She left them wrapped in the paper and put them carefully in the ground. Then she tipped the plant out of its container, teasing the roots free as the man had advised her.
The rain was falling hard. She could feel tendrils of wet hair dripping down her neck. She put the plant firmly in the hole and pushed the soil in around it. The man had said something about watering, about wetting it thoroughly, but it looked as though nature was going to take care of that. She wished she had some religious belief so that she could say a prayer, something that would mark the moment, but she couldn’t find any words.
Roses are red, violets are blue…love is as strong as death is.
And love leads to the grave.
Acknowledgements
With many thanks to all the people who gave me help when I was writing this book: Steve Hicks for his advice on police procedure, Ken for all the discussions about the nature of art, Teresa for being a hard taskmaster, Julia for her rigorous editing (bad for the ego but good for the book), Sue and Colin for the use of their flat when I needed seclusion, and Penny and Sue for their valuable feedback on the manuscript.
Special thanks must go to Susan Sanderson Russell and Marjorie Lowe for championing my cause.
People who know Sheffield canal and the towpath will realize that I have taken a few liberties with the geography, and I hope they will forgive me.
Danuta Reah
Danuta Reah lives in Sheffield, England with her artist husband. She currently works as an educational consultant and a university lecturer in English language and Linguistics. She has taught writing for several years, and has published textbooks in linguistics as well as three previous crime novels: Only Darkness, Silent Playgrounds and Night Angels. Though she travels all round the country as part of her work, she sees herself as very much a South Yorkshire woman.
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Only Darkness
Silent Playgrounds
Night Angels
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br /> This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2002
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