The Girl in the Picture

by Kerry Barrett

  ‘Ella,’ Ben called from outside. ‘Ella?’

  ‘Ben,’ I said. ‘You have got to see this.’

  ‘I’ll never get my shoulders through that gap,’ he said.

  I snorted. ‘If I can get my arse through, your shoulders will be a breeze,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  There was a thump and a grunt and Ben’s head appeared. He inched through, complaining and swearing the whole time, then he stood up, staring at the wall.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘That’s Violet.’

  ‘It’s Violet in here,’ I said. ‘Violet trapped in this tiny room. I’ve been thinking that she ran away from Edwin Forrest that night. Do you think she ran and hid here in this cell?’

  Ben gazed around him. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Though I can’t imagine anyone choosing to be in here.’

  I went to the corner where I’d seen a few boxes and rolled-up canvases. ‘These are art supplies,’ I said, pulling out one of the paintings and examining the roll. ‘I’m not going to unroll this because I think it will crack but it definitely looks like Violet’s work. Perhaps this place wasn’t a hiding place. Maybe it was just a kind of studio for her – a sanctuary.’

  But Ben was shaking his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He pointed at the wall opposite – above the hole we’d made – where, in wobbly writing, was painted Violet Hargreaves. There was also the name Edwin, with a thick black line scored through it, and finally, at the bottom, Sorry Frances.

  I put my hand to my mouth. ‘Oh God,’ I said.

  Ben had gone to the other corner, where a pile of rags lay, stiff and discoloured with age. He crouched down next to them and pulled the top layer back. I jumped myself as he recoiled violently, swore, and dropped the cloth.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, but I knew really. All my worst fears – my most awful theories – were coming true. ‘Is it Violet? Is Violet here?’

  Ben put his arms round me. I could feel him trembling. ‘I think so,’ he said.

  ‘I want to see,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to see her.’

  Ben knew when he was beaten. Together we went to the corner and crouched by the pile of cloth.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  I nodded, clenching my hands into fists to stop them shaking.

  Ben pulled away the top rag. Underneath was just bones of course. They were surprisingly small and curled up in a foetal position.

  ‘Oh,’ I breathed. ‘Oh, poor girl.’

  ‘We mustn’t touch,’ Ben warned. ‘I suppose this is a crime scene, of sorts.’

  I put the cloth back over Violet’s remains.

  ‘We’ve found you,’ I said to the room. ‘And we are going to look after you.’

  ‘Come on,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s get out of here. And I think you’d better call Priya. She’ll know what to do next.’

  He squeezed back through the panel, and I followed.

  ‘I can’t believe she’s been here this whole time,’ I said with a shiver as we walked downstairs. ‘Do you think she was trapped by mistake? She must have been. How utterly terrifying to be stuck in a tiny space like that and not be able to get out.’

  ‘Maybe she couldn’t get the little door open,’ Ben said. He looked pale and shaky and I imagined I looked the same. ‘Or maybe Edwin Forrest locked her up.’

  I felt sick. ‘Poor Violet,’ I breathed. ‘And poor Marcus. Why oh why didn’t he check the house before he shut it up?’

  ‘He probably did,’ Ben said. ‘But even if he looked in all the rooms for her, there was no reason for him to check inside cupboards. And if it was a few days – or even weeks – after she disappeared, she’d probably have been dead already.’

  I grimaced. Real life was truly stranger – and crueller – than fiction ever could be. ‘All that searching and she was right here all along,’ I said.

  The boys were eating their dinner in the kitchen with Margaret, who raised an eyebrow at our dusty appearance. I mouthed ‘explain in a minute’ over the kids’ heads, then I picked up my phone and headed into the hall out of the range of little ears, scrolling through the numbers until I found Priya’s.

  ‘I’ve found her,’ I said when she answered. ‘I’ve found Violet.’

  Chapter 63

  I couldn’t stop shaking, and I felt close to tears as I told Priya what we’d found. But I also felt a strange sense of satisfaction. It was awful to think that poor Violet had been lying there, just behind a wall, for one hundred and fifty years, but I was pleased and relieved that we’d found her.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Priya said. ‘Why couldn’t you have found her before I’d had these two imps? I’m stuck to the sofa, here.’

  I managed a brief chuckle. ‘You’d never have fitted through the hole in the wall,’ I said. ‘Can you ring someone though? Do the police have to come?’

  ‘Fraid so,’ said Priya. ‘Don’t move anything yet. I’ll sort it out and someone will be there soon.’ She paused. ‘Can you take some pictures?’

  ‘You ghoul,’ I said. ‘But yes, we probably should. I’ll send Ben to do it.’

  Ben headed back upstairs and took lots of photos, while I filled Margaret in on what had happened.

  ‘She was there the whole time?’ she said in wonder. ‘How awful.’

  ‘I’m just so pleased we’ve found her now,’ I said.

  She took the boys into the lounge to finish watching their film as Ben and I paced the kitchen and waited for the police to arrive.

  ‘Okay?’ he asked and I nodded.

  ‘Surprisingly, yes,’ I said. ‘As long as I don’t think about how scared she must have been.’

  Ben made a face. ‘So scared,’ he agreed. ‘I just hope she went in there of her own accord, and she wasn’t locked in by Edwin.’

  I thought about the writing on the wall of Violet’s prison, the way she’d written Edwin, then crossed out his name, and I couldn’t help thinking whoever had killed him – Frances, I thought for sure now – he’d probably deserved it.

  I had been slightly nervous about how the police would deal with what we’d found. But as soon as they arrived, they put my mind at rest. There were two of them – and older man with greying hair and a twinkle in his eye, and a young enthusiastic PC called Joely.

  ‘So you’ve lived here about ten minutes and you’ve solved a crime that locals have been wondering about for one hundred and fifty years,’ the young one said, smiling over her shoulder at me as we climbed the stairs to the attic. ‘Trev here has been filling me in on all the stories.’

  ‘It was our son, Oscar, who found her really,’ I said. ‘Oscar and his bad temper.’

  I showed them the hole in the wall and Trev nodded.

  ‘Did you touch anything?’

  ‘We just moved the rags covering the remains,’ I said. ‘We put them back.’

  I found I didn’t want to go into the cell again, so Ben crawled through with the police officers behind him. They weren’t there for long.

  ‘Well it’s obviously a very old body,’ Joely said as she crawled backwards out of the hole in the wall. ‘I don’t think we need to take you in for questioning.’

  Instead she phoned the coroner – an efficient, smartly dressed woman called Maeve Gregory, who arrived within an hour.

  While we were waiting for Maeve to swing up the road in her white BMW, I phoned Dad and explained what had happened, Margaret went home for her own dinner, and Ben made tea for the police.

  ‘Good heavens,’ Dad said. ‘She was there all along?’

  ‘It’s so sad,’ I said. ‘This whole time she was just the other side of the wall.’

  ‘So is it chaos down there?’ Dad said. ‘Do you need help?’

  ‘Oh would you?’ I said. I felt as though detectives and coroners and bodies didn’t mix with two small boys watching Christmas films.

  Dad and Barb agreed to drive down to ours and take the boys back to their house for the night. I was pleased the k
ids would be away from the house soon. I didn’t want them to be there when the police – would it be the police? Or an undertaker perhaps? – took Violet’s body away. Stan was thrilled at the prospect of a night at Granddad’s but Oscar was more subdued.

  ‘Is this because of the lady in the picture?’ he asked. I was startled and, not for the first time, impressed at just how much he paid attention to what was going on around him even though he gave the impression of not taking anything in at all.

  ‘Sort of,’ I admitted. ‘But it’s nothing to worry about. She used to live in our house a long time ago and she did some paintings on the walls.’

  Oscar studied me carefully. ‘Did something bad happen to her?’

  I pulled him in for a cuddle and stroked his hair. ‘She died,’ I told him. ‘And no one knew she’d died. They always wondered where she’d gone. But now we know and we are going to make sure that everyone knows about her now.’

  Once the boys had gone, and Maeve had inspected the body, things happened very quickly.

  ‘Can we knock the wall down a bit more?’ one of the police officers asked.

  I winced at the thought of the mess, but I knew it would make getting Violet – and her paintings – out of her cell much easier.

  I cleared away my notebooks and computer so they wouldn’t get covered in brick dust. More police officers arrived, along with some guys who weren’t in uniform but who brought some big sledge hammers with them and we watched as they knocked a bigger hole in the wall so a specialist team from Sussex university – called by Maeve – could fit in.

  When they eventually pulled up – as darkness was falling and I was drooping with tiredness – they turned out to be less of a team and more of a trio. A forensic anthropologist called Dr Davies, who was like Louis Theroux’s younger, geekier, Welsher brother and two over-excited PHD students.

  They were beside themselves at the discovery and spent more than an hour in the cell, taking photographs and samples of the rags Violet was wrapped in. Eventually they gently put her on to a board, and put the board into a bag, and took her out through the hole and down the stairs.

  ‘Be careful with her,’ I said as they pushed the board into the back of their small van.

  Dr Davies smiled at me, and pushed his floppy hair out of his eyes. ‘We always are,’ he said.

  I believed him.

  And suddenly there was just Ben and me in the house: no detectives, no children, and no Violet. Feeling a bit shell-shocked, we sat on the sofa and watched the news – I half expected to see our story reported but of course it wasn’t.

  ‘Not yet,’ Ben said. ‘But people will be interested. You have to write this story, Ella.’

  So I did.

  Chapter 64

  Present day – six months later

  Ella

  I stared out to sea, enjoying the warmth of the spring sunshine on my shoulders after what seemed like months of winter. My hair blew in the breeze and I tucked a stray strand behind my ear, then smoothed my billowing dress over my stomach. I was getting quite a bump now halfway through my pregnancy and despite being very surprised when I first discovered I was unexpectedly expecting, I had quickly come round to the idea of us being a family of five. Just last week Ben and I had discovered our new arrival would be a little girl and I wanted to name her Violet.

  I smiled to myself, as I felt the baby fluttering inside. ‘Hello, little Violet,’ I whispered. ‘You will be named after a very special lady.’

  I glanced at my watch. There were still a few minutes before we had to leave. Today was a celebration of sorts though it didn’t seem that way on paper. Today we were laying Violet to rest in the village churchyard, next to where her parents, and her baby brother, were buried.

  It had taken a while for the experts to confirm it was Violet who we’d found in the stony cell in our attic.

  Dr Davies and his enthusiastic students had done lots of tests on the remains. They tested the DNA and they tested the bones, and they agreed the age of the remains was consistent with Violet’s disappearance in 1855. And nestled inside Violet’s tummy they found tiny, tiny bones that told them Violet had been pregnant, as I’d suspected, but hoped wasn’t the case. It made the whole story even sadder, I thought.

  While Dr Davies was doing his thing, Dad got the bit between his teeth and traced some living relatives, several generations removed from Violet’s aunt – the one who’d looked after her for a while when she first lost her mother. Then Barb got on the case, and tracked them down. It turned out Violet’s closest relations were a family who were living in Australia.

  Barb rang one of them, and I had breathed a sigh of relief when the relative turned out to be an enthusiastic schoolteacher called Karl Rivers, who had a love of everything British and a passion for history.

  He’d agreed immediately to have his DNA tested and had gone to his local police station the very next day to give his sample. The Aussie police sent it to Priya, she passed it on to Dr Davies, and we waited. It took weeks for the results to come back, but eventually it had been confirmed that the body in the attic was Violet.

  I had been worried that we would never have official word that it was Violet – even though Ben and I were convinced – so I was really grateful for everyone’s efforts. I emailed Karl pictures of Violet’s paintings and told him what we knew about the mystery of her disappearance. He’d emailed me a link to an article in the local paper, over in Darwin, all about his British ancestor and his part in her discovery. He couldn’t make it to the UK for today’s service as it was the middle of the school term in Oz, but I had promised to write and tell him all about it.

  I felt the baby move again, stirring me from my daydreams. ‘Come on then,’ I said to my belly. ‘Let’s go.’

  Violet’s memorial service – could it be considered a funeral so long after her death? I thought so, because that’s what it was – was both the end of the story and the beginning, I mused as I wandered back towards the house. Violet was gone, but her reputation as an artist was just beginning to grow.

  The day after Dr Davies and his team had taken Violet away, Ben and I had sat in the attic room and carefully unrolled the paintings that had been left in the cell. There were many – not as wonderful as the huge ‘Mariana’ – but each told its own story.

  ‘You can see how much she improved, the more she painted,’ I had pointed out to Ben. ‘Think how amazing she would have been if she’d carried on.’

  We went back into the cell, the entrance now much bigger, and gazed at the mural on the wall.

  ‘It’s breathtaking,’ I said. ‘What will happen to it?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the police,’ Ben said. ‘I guess it will just stay here.’

  But I wanted it seen. I couldn’t bear to think of Violet’s work being ignored for a moment longer, having been hidden for so long. So I photographed the paintings, and the mural, then emailed them to George. He arrived on virtually the next plane, sweating with the effort of travelling and desperate to see.

  ‘This is astonishing,’ he said, as I proudly showed him Violet’s work. ‘Astonishing.’

  He touched the wall, ever so gently. ‘We’ve been fortunate with the conditions in the room,’ he said. ‘There’s very little environmental damage.’

  ‘What can we do with it?’ I asked. ‘Can we save it?’

  George looked at me over his shoulder. ‘I think we have to,’ he said.

  It hadn’t been easy especially as I’d been feeling sick then, as we tried to work out how to get the painting out of the house, but I’d thought it was just the excitement and stress. It was another couple of weeks before I found out I was pregnant.

  Meanwhile, from St Andrews, George was working hard. He was contacting every Victorian art specialist he knew, and reading everything he could about the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers. He wrote a feature on Violet for an art journal and the photographer came to the house and snapped away at the mural and the crumbling wal
l that still hadn’t been touched. We were all amazed and thrilled at how well it was received.

  Then the Curator of Victorian Art from an art gallery in London came to visit. She was much younger than I had imagined, with a neat dark bob and nice shoes. Her eyes shone when I took her upstairs.

  ‘Oh,’ she breathed. ‘Oh my.’

  I imagined she was seeing her future mapped out as the person who discovered Violet Hargreaves.

  ‘Can we move it?’ I said, more abruptly than I’d meant to. ‘I want people to see. I want them to know about her.’

  ‘We can,’ the curator said. ‘We most certainly can.’

  It had taken a team of restoration experts, artists, and builders working together a full week to carefully take down the wall. They wrapped it in thick cords, then winched it down to the ground with the help of a crane and strong cables. The boys watched, fascinated, as the lorry churned up the lawn and men in fluorescent jackets called to each other while the wall edged its way down from the top of the house, leaving the hole covered in a tarpaulin that flapped dolefully in the sea wind. Thankfully the Tate covered the cost of rebuilding the attic wall, or it would have been a very cold winter.

  Violet’s exhibition would open at the Tate in September. The BBC were already recording a documentary about her and they were coming down to Sussex next week to film in the house. I had been writing faster than I’d ever written before and I’d delivered my delighted agent the manuscript for my version of Violet’s story. It was being rushed out to coincide with the opening of the exhibition and already there was talk of the book being adapted for television. It would rival Downton, my agent had said when he came to see the house.

  ‘This is the big one, Ella,’ he’d said, gazing at my photos of ‘Mariana’, then looking at the rebuilt attic wall. ‘This is huge. We’ll push for someone fabulous to play Violet. That redhead from Doctor Who, she’d be perfect.’

  But really, I thought, even though the big advance was desperately needed, and the boost to my career most welcome, really it was all about me, Ben, the boys, the new baby, and Violet.