The War Widow

by Lorna Gray

  It was a reminder of how much more of my past I’d shared with him than anyone else here; it was meant as a bit of tit-for-tat. I’d attempted to undermine his credibility and now he was assaulting mine. It was, I think, a warning that if I didn’t behave myself, his next step would be to bring me into his sights alongside Adam. It was a hint that he was prepared to prove I was the sort of person who would develop feelings for whosoever was the most dominant force at the time. Presumably he was then going to claim the reason I was unharmed was that I was blindly in love; and lay the foundations for proving that Adam had coaxed me into coming here today because he needed me to find this thing; and I hadn’t got the wit to perceive the true motives of a man who was a thief.

  What was worse for me than this blatant threat – and the fact he clearly didn’t know me well enough to know it would fail – was that there was something possessive about this first use of my name. It was like underneath it all he was trying to tell me he knew I would be hurt by this, and he was sorry for me.

  My lips burned but I said nothing. The desperate need for release was compounded when, at the heart of this crowd, Jim only said entirely unemotionally, “Well?”

  That single syllable was like a curb upon my heart. I turned my head. I saw that it was a moment before Adam realised the comment was addressed to him. Naturally he was bemused. It sent a jolt though me. This wasn’t what I’d been led to believe. The wall was cold at my back. Impossibly, it carried a single looming whisper of failure.

  Adam said a little haplessly, “Well, what?”

  Jim held up the photograph that he had retrieved from the floor. In a tone that was so orderly it was an affront, he said, “This is a photograph of you, Mr Hitchen. You’re in a crowd at a launch event and looking reasonably happy about it, against all the odds.”

  “Jim, no!”

  He didn’t hear the cry that was wrenched from me. Unbelievably, inexplicably, he persevered. In a voice that matched the granite in his core, the policeman asked Adam, “Perhaps you’d like to explain who that man is with you?”

  Chapter 33

  Adam wouldn’t look at me. He hadn’t met my eye since that first exchange of horror. In the one swift glance we’d shared, he’d betrayed a sickening combination of shock, revulsion and, less easily, a kind of shame.

  I thought I knew why.

  The first two emotions were easy enough to guess at. My failure to stop this; and the realisation that he’d been working so hard to save me when all the time his very participation had been leading him to this. The third feeling was harder to define.

  The photograph was one of those typically ambiguous images where the holder of the camera was so intimately engaged with the subject that she was almost part of the shot. I don’t mean that she was close to Adam; the second male in the scene was so close to the camera that he was partially blurred. His nose protruded into the photograph and part of his left eye. But he couldn’t obscure the fact that Christi had said something that had made Adam smile.

  It looked like they were all friends, very intimate friends. We could almost sense her body sashaying behind the lens. Now Adam didn’t know – he cannot have known – that I was the only other person in this room who recognised his response for what it was. His dry, automatic smile that meant he was aware he was being treated like an object of prey.

  The other man was very hard to make out. It was the sort of image that might keep the experts for the prosecution busy spending a good deal of time and money measuring the small hint of the man’s nose against photographs of the much sought middleman before ultimately concluding that this was the man and this was indeed the vital meeting. The other half of the experts, the ones for the defence, would undertake the same process in an attempt to prove precisely the opposite. It was, to be quite frank, a bewilderingly inconclusive piece of nothing.

  Today it made Detective Sergeant James Fleece certain he was about to snare his thief.

  Rhys was the first to break the silence. His unrelenting confidence seemed shrill now, fractured, delighted to have won. He told Adam, “You’ve spent all morning going through my papers. You were looking for this, weren’t you? You knew this was here and you were hoping you could find it before anyone else.”

  Rhys caught the drift of Jim’s eyes towards mine. The policeman was about to ask if this were true. Rhys didn’t want me to speak. From his place beside me, he gave a derisive snort. “Don’t expect her to sign his committal. My wife always did have an absurd inability to remember that my clients were only paying lip service to the idea of being her friends.”

  Aside from the insult of his prolonged effort to circumvent the truth, it was a very private, deeply ugly reference to the fantasy that Gregory had wanted me once, and by extension the delusion that Adam should still want me now. It made me angry in a way that might well have left me spewing the sort of hatred that would leave deeper scars in my mind than in his.

  Jim didn’t give me time to voice it. He broke across me as if I didn’t even count. He said to Rhys, “Don’t you mean your ex-wife?” And he began organising people into rooms.

  I found Jim had swiftly crossed the floor. His hand was suddenly firmly on my elbow. He turned us both round and led me through into the office as if I were a puppet. His brown eyes were grave. He told me, “It was no lie when we heard that Black hadn’t left any statements of proof. That scrap of paper was merely a promissory note of sorts, barely more than a library card. There isn’t enough yet to hold him for long. I need time to make a record of precisely what has been done here. I need you to stay with PC Downe and his colleague in this office …?” The instruction dwindled into a hesitation that came like a question before it was corrected with a decisive, “No. Upstairs.”

  I nodded. What else could I do?

  With sudden energy, he began moving through the disordered rooms. He finally gave Gregory permission to telephone his doctor with the instruction to wait afterwards in the exhibition room with the remaining constables. He moved Adam aside without so much as a word. Rhys had followed his wife into the office and stood there in the heart of this place, not even looking triumphant any more and instead a watchful barrier between me and the room, eyes following the policeman and trying to engage anyone who would listen in some kind of formless debate on the price of lies.

  Then Jim made a short silencing gesture that cut him off in mid ramble and turned at last to Adam. “Upstairs please.” He was still being very orderly.

  I saw Adam turn his head and meet Jim’s gaze. We were all strangers to Adam now. The past minutes had worn his face to grey. Jim’s expression did nothing whatsoever to invite discussion. But still, under the policeman’s unfriendly stare, Adam said in a voice that was so desperate that it came out as exasperated amusement, “Jim – Detective Sergeant Fleece – earlier you separated me from my little girl; surely I shouldn’t have been worrying about when you’d let me see her again?”

  Jim placed a hand on his shoulder. It had a decisive air about it. Then he barked again, “Hitchen. Upstairs.”

  And he encouraged Adam on his way with a meaningful push.

  ---

  The bedroom was just as we had left it. Adam eased himself down on the edge of the bare mattress in the light cast from the window. He looked utterly numbed. Withdrawn. It had begun the moment his name had first been mentioned as a suspect and become fixed when I’d obeyed Jim’s command not to speak. It made me do what I had never done before. I reached out and touched him. I mean, I initiated it. Previously, all those precious moments of contact, all the gestures of comfort had originated with him. The only time I’d voluntarily extended my hand towards him before now had been the one act of impulsive violence I would dearly like to forget. This was the absolute reverse.

  Very tenderly, my palm met the corner of his jaw. I was already crouching before him. I felt him jump a little as he registered the contact. He’d been thoroughly lost in the abstraction of his own thoughts. I felt him lean a little int
o the warmth of my hand. The act brought his forehead very close to mine. I shut my eyes. I think he had too. I said on the merest breath, “I’m so sorry for bringing you here, Adam.”

  Then I turned away. I had to. He’d put his hand up automatically to cover mine but it was listless and didn’t resist when I slipped my fingers clear. His gesture felt horribly like a farewell. A parting of ways. An echo of what Rhys had said. A necessary acknowledgement of the strain that had been placed on him in my name and proof that even the threat of a renewed separation from his daughter – given everything I knew of the years they’d been apart during the war – must leave an injury too deep for forgiveness. A line had to be drawn somewhere and I thought it was here.

  I knelt down on the floor beside the box that had first attracted my interest earlier and got to work. My ankle complained – the one that had been bruised in that collision with a postcard seller in Aberystwyth – but I ignored it. The unnamed policeman settled to wait in the window. PC Downe joined me on the floor. He extracted the photograph Jim had given him from its envelope and set first the envelope down on the floor and then the photograph upon it. Downstairs there was a metallic ting as Gregory reset the telephone receiver back upon its stand. Seconds before he’d been exchanging charming nothings with the lady who staffed the office at the other end.

  Most of the disordered photographs in the box were old contact sheets and useless. Some were images I had taken. Some were launch events from his newer projects that had been conceived after I’d left. These images were taken by Christi but I discarded them on the principle that these projects could have no connection to me.

  A pattern emerged in these records of past parties. Gregory featured often. Adam never. Rhys featured in the series that covered the period before the war. I set them neatly to one side and started on the next handful.

  This set contained more by Christi’s hand. Hers had more character than mine. She managed to capture people in the midst of a delightful party that oozed laughter. In one I could distinguish the artwork that hung on the walls. This was the launch event for that comeback exhibition; the event in October last year that had been attended by Adam, as Christi had been so keen to remind us of when we’d first stepped through the front door. I began laying them out into a grid.

  “Kate.”

  The flat tone of my name made my heart kick. I twisted to peer round at him. I had presumed Adam had been observing what I was doing but I was wrong of course. He had stayed there on the edge of the bed, illuminated by the grimy glow from the window. He had his elbows resting upon his knees and his hands clasped between them. He’d been sitting with his head down, staring at the brown pair of abandoned gentleman’s shoes on the floor. They were Rhys’s; taken off when he’d heard his first unwelcome visitor step in from the street and he’d needed to pad silently about his house and into his bath. It was only now that I realised Rhys had passed the entire interview downstairs in his socks.

  “I’m not responsible for this.” Adam’s voice was expressionless, spiritless. It sounded like the last pathetic excuse of a criminal. I should have had more appreciation for the reduced powers of intuition in a person experiencing a state of shock. I should have known he wasn’t blaming me. This was something else.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Or rather no, of course not.”

  Silence for a moment, then, “You know?” Then, with a little kick of realisation that made me somehow desperately sad, “Of course you do.”

  I withdrew the next bundle from the box.

  And a little later after that, very roughly indeed, “What are you doing?”

  He had regained a little colour. He moved closer to the end of the bed so that his knee was suddenly beside my shoulder. The bed creaked as he settled. I didn’t pause again in laying out my photographs.

  Ten, twelve photographs lay out in a grid before us. Another and then another was added. All showed variations of the same crowded room and most were illustrative of a very good night being had by all. Beside me, PC Downe commented softly, “He’s not here, you know.”

  “No,” I said. And since Adam drew breath to ask, supplied, “This middleman they’re all convinced came here to be introduced to the art thief.”

  I reached out a finger and lightly tapped a photograph that showed Adam from a different angle. He was talking to a man with a very fine nose. This man happened to be Lord Alfred Warren, one of Rhys’s other old patrons.

  Adam remarked, “I told you I’d never met the man.”

  The images petered out at a count of about seventeen. With an allowance for the number Detective Constable Black had disappeared with, which were presumably the best for illustrating his point, the rest were a singularly uninformative set. I could identify all the usual characters and not one of them stood out. Gregory was in some of them, a year younger but still wearing his favourite blazer. Christi was there too of course, by virtue of being behind the camera. But none of that meant anything without proof that this dead middleman everyone was getting so excited about had even attended.

  Adam reached a hand past my shoulder and pointed at the stack of contact prints. I lifted them and handed them to him. After a few minutes while PC Downe and I stared intently at the photographs laid out before us, Adam passed a single sheet back.

  It was the contact print of the negatives for the launch. We peered at it. We identified which photographs we had and therefore which photographs had disappeared with Black. None of them contained this missing link. The face that would close Jim’s case for him really hadn’t been there.

  I sat back abruptly with the hard edge of the bed frame against my back. I knew that downstairs Jim was going through the process of taking statements because he didn’t dare let anyone leave. But of the photographs Black had taken, only half of them contained the faces of the people who were presently downstairs. It was impossible to explain what it was about these images that might have made a policeman in disguise suddenly so excited or why, subsequently, an art thief should have felt so much in danger that his only means of escape was to make this evidence disappear.

  I looked again. It was then that I finally acknowledged the one other presence at the launch party. The artwork on the wall. Just as the collaboration with Black masquerading as a journalist had focused on sport, Rhys’s comeback exhibition had featured the personal acquaintances of one of the foremost athletes in the country. Gregory’s contacts had been extensive and clearly inspiring. The work was a triumph even by Rhys’s usual standard. The best by far of the pieces on show here in these images was the largest of them all. It had dominated the gallery wall that bore the door into the office and it had been a painfully beautiful portrayal of a notable sprinter’s failure: the man in second place crossing the line.

  Distantly my ears caught the sound of a rap at a door. It was a sharp knock that cut through the general noise outside the window of people going about their shopping and traffic squeezing past.

  I sat back on my heels. The weight of knowing the truth was crushing. No wonder Black had been asking that day at the racecourse about the scale of research the artist habitually undertook for any project. Jim’s dead middleman hadn’t any need to come to the launch party to meet his thief. He could have walked in through the door on any given day of the week right up to the launch of Rhys’s first spectacular peacetime project. And the thief knew I was capable of proving that.

  It was all so painfully simple, except…

  I lifted my face to the constable’s. “Why on earth did he come here today?”

  This new visitor was at the courtyard door. From the command Jim gave from the depths of the exhibition room below us to one of his constables, he thought it was the long-awaited inspector. Jim sounded relieved. I watched our own constables climb to their feet. One from the floor beside me, the other from the window. They both went to the stairwell. A small amiable man and one slightly taller and greyer. PC Downe was tasked with relaying our findings to Jim. I heard the visitor ent
er. He was speaking to Rhys.

  Adam felt the bolt run through me. Beside me he said, “Kate, who is it?”

  I was on my feet and so was Adam. PC Downe had shot down the stairs at a run. I was standing there shaking and my hand was on Adam’s arm, half clinging and half wanting him far away from this and it got worse when I heard Jim’s shout through the floorboards as he too recognised the newcomer’s voice. He bellowed, “Reed?”

  And then half a dozen policemen stampeded through the ground floor and out into the courtyard after him.

  Now it made even less sense that the thief had come here today. He can’t have known that I’d find these things. He hadn’t even known what they were, otherwise there would never have been any need to hunt them and me across the country. He certainly can’t have hoped that he would get a quiet moment to retrieve these images today beneath the very noses of the men who were trying to uncover him. The very act of trying would be a more conclusive betrayal than these images could ever be. I was scrabbling all of the photographs together. Adam dropped down to help me. His hands were steadier than mine. The distant sounds of pursuit grew louder as Reed dived out on the street below our window. He must have charged away through one of our neighbouring shops. That must have been how he had reached the courtyard in the first place. I didn’t know what the policemen who had been posted there had been doing. It barely mattered. Adam was crouching beside me and now he was sliding the prints into the envelope. The unnamed policeman was still on the stairs. I didn’t have a right to be so scared.

  My ears were straining to build a picture of who was left down there. I didn’t get very far. The house had a hollow sound of desertion. But perhaps that was just what I was feeling. I heard the clump as our unnamed constable tramped down the stairs. Rhys’s voice rose up the stairwell to drown him out. Rhys was bellowing at PC Downe to go and recall Jim. I think PC Downe wasn’t moving quickly enough for him.