A Study in Gold

by Annie Dalton

  Anna hammered at the locked door until her knuckles were bloody, then she ran to each of the three windows in turn, tugging at the bars with all her strength, in the futile hope that she might be able to shake or prise them loose. Nothing budged. There was a sudden roar and she jumped back, as blue-green flames came leaping up at the bars.

  Bonnie began to bark, an urgent, astonishingly resonant sound that escalated to full-throated, blood-curdling howling and baying, as she hurled herself at the door.

  ‘Bonnie, stop, stop! It’s no use!’ Sobbing, Anna tried to pull her away, but the White Shepherd frantically redoubled her efforts, repeatedly slamming her entire 80 lbs body weight into the door, as she let out howl after howl. Such heart-breaking courage made Anna want to howl herself, as the rotten petrol-soaked building properly caught fire with a ferocious crackling and spitting. They were trapped and there was nothing they or Bonnie could do.

  The inside of the folly was suddenly suffocating and airless. Woolly wisps of smoke came lazily drifting and curling in through the gaps in the badly-fitting windows and walls. Anna and Tim both started to cough. Anna heard an ominous creaking and rending as beams shifted overhead and a piece of glowing red timber came crashing to the ground.

  Half-blinded by tears from the smoke, increasingly woozy from the tremendous heat and noxious fumes, Anna crawled to Tim. Wordlessly, they put their arms around each other as if they were children again. Since she couldn’t save her brother, Anna desperately tried to think up something silly and jokey to say before they died. It’s supposed to be the wicked witch who ends up in the oven, she was going to say. Not Hansel and bloody Gretel.

  But all at once everything seemed too far away. Bonnie’s strangely distant howls were joined by sudden yelling and a tremendous noise of crashing and splintering, which Anna groggily decided was a crucial roof beam finally giving way. A pair of strong arms went around her, lifting her up off the floor. She must have mumbled something about her brother because a familiar male voice said, ‘we’ve got Tim, Anna, don’t worry.’

  Then she blacked out.

  Much later – after Tim had been taken to hospital and Anna had been checked over by the paramedics, and given oxygen – Anna and Liam sat in his police car outside Mortmead Hall waiting for Tansy and Isadora to arrive.

  Even with all the windows open, Liam’s car stank overwhelmingly of bonfires. Anna had caught one horrifying glimpse of her demonic, sooty, red-eyed reflection in the driver’s mirror and hastily looked away.

  Liam had told her not to try to talk. Talking set her off coughing; her throat and lungs were excruciatingly raw. Anna leaned back against the headrest, her eyes closed, letting the fresh breeze cool her sore eyelids, as Liam calmly passed on all essential information via the ruse of explaining everything soothingly to Bonnie.

  ‘What a clever dog making so much noise! Me and the guys could hear you from the road! I think that merits a big, juicy steak, don’t you? I’ve told Jake to buy one on his way back from the airport, though he might need to give you a bath before you eat it. And thank God, Anna had the good sense to text Tansy to tell her where she was going!’

  Anna’s dog listened spellbound from the foot-well, her eyes raptly fixed on Liam and her nose resting on Anna’s knees. She’d performed her magic trick of folding herself into a space smaller than you’d think possible for 80 lbs of White Shepherd. Like Anna, Bonnie was filthy and reeked of smoke, but the kindly medic, who’d given her a quick once-over, had said she was essentially OK.

  Anna abruptly opened her eyes. ‘Liam,’ she croaked, ‘what happened to Alice?’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself about her.’ Liam’s voice was suddenly steely.

  ‘She confessed,’ Anna said. ‘Just before she set fire to the folly, she admitted she’d killed David and Lili. But Liam—’ she had to stop to cough. ‘Alice was just a pawn in all of this. It’s the people she’s been working for you need to catch.’

  He blew out his breath, frustrated. ‘Alice’s bosses are like the old, robber barons. Virtually untouchable. Protected by the very people who are supposed to be protecting us.’ He shook his head. ‘But the Alices of this world, the little cogs in the big machine, they’re the ones that take the fall.’

  Anna heard Alice say: Kids like me were disposable.

  ‘I handed in my resignation this morning,’ Liam added in an apparent segue. To Anna’s surprise he laughed. ‘Who knew I’d be going out on such a high?’

  ‘You’ve caught Alice?’

  Liam nodded. ‘But it’s not just that.’ He shot her a boyish grin just as Tansy tapped on the window.

  ‘Anna, oh, God Anna, the state of you.’ Tansy turned furiously on Liam. ‘She should be in hospital, Liam Goodhart. What are you thinking?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Liam said. ‘Believe me; she wouldn’t want to miss this. Quick, get in the back before my boss gets here.’

  Disapproving and obviously puzzled, Isadora and Tansy reluctantly did as he said. The instant they’d closed the car doors Liam took something out of his glove compartment. ‘I wanted you girls to see this before it gets whisked off to some high-security vault.’

  He didn’t sound like someone who’d wrecked his chances of making inspector, Anna noticed. He sounded like an excited little kid on Christmas morning.

  Anna felt her heart give a wild flutter as she recognised Alice’s cardboard envelope, minus its plastic wrapping.

  At first glance, the flat rectangular object that Liam slid out looked like a piece of antique wooden panelling. He turned it over, went to place it in Anna’s hands, saw that they were filthy and bloody, and just held it up triumphantly for her and the other women to see.

  Tansy instantly craned forward. Isadora put on her glasses, then drew a sharp breath. Anna started to shake. She couldn’t believe that she was safe and sound in a police car with Liam and her friends, looking at a forgotten artwork so rare and precious that two people – at least – had been murdered because of it. She and Tim had very nearly been added to the statistics.

  Anna had no idea if A Study in Gold was a work of genius, she only knew that, unlike the Vermeer prints in her psych ward, it moved her in some way that she didn’t know how to express.

  The painting showed an everyday scene from the seventeenth century. The Dutch merchant was in his counting house; his maid sweeping in a doorway. Nothing extraordinary, Anna thought, except that Johannes Vermeer had somehow discovered how to turn paint and pigment into light. Light picked out the furred edges of the merchant’s sombre robe, glinted on his orderly piles of gold, silver and copper coins, and found hidden fire in the brass weighing-scales and in the ornamental iron studs on a large, oak chest. The same soft, vivifying light bloomed across the intense, little face of the maid, as she swept the tiled floor.

  Quietly, yet irresistibly, the painting drew Anna’s eyes from the preoccupied merchant, past the maid sweeping in her faded blue dress, through a painted doorway where they finally came to rest at an open window, where the honey-gold light of a long-ago summer’s afternoon came streaming, like a benediction from a vanished world.

  EPILOGUE

  Midsummer, the following year.

  Anna stood in front of the long mirror. She rarely wore dresses and – even though Tansy and Isadora had been with her to help her choose it and gone into raptures as soon as she’d tried it on – she felt oddly naked and vulnerable, under the antique, rose-coloured silk. Her hand went up to touch the perfect blush rose, which Tansy had carefully fastened in her hair. Lottie would have approved of her strapless, bias-cut dress, and she’d have loved the rose. Lottie was always putting flowers in her hair. Anna had a sudden vivid memory of helping her dad lift her soundly sleeping little sister into her bed, still wearing her wilting, daisy crown.

  Downstairs in her kitchen, the caterers were chatting quietly to Anjali. Anna could hear Edie’s imperious little voice insisting, ‘Mama, mama!’ A soft buzz of talk came floating in from her garden and the first t
hrilling sounds of the string quartet tuning up.

  Her home was a bustling hive of activity, yet this room felt perfectly still, as if it was holding its breath, as if, for just this moment, Anna stood in her own oasis of peace.

  ‘You look lovely!’ Tansy came in, did a graceful twirl, then said anxiously, ‘Will I do?’

  Anna had already seen Tansy’s midi-length dress by Ghost, in what was described as Boudoir Pink, but seeing her now, poised and slender as a dancer, she caught her breath.

  ‘You look so perfect,’ Anna said, when she felt able to speak, ‘that it makes me want to cry!’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ Tansy said sternly, ‘or we’ll have to redo your makeup!’ She fanned herself with her hand. ‘Gosh, I’m nervous! Are you nervous? I don’t know why I should be nervous, it’s not my big day! What’s that saying? Twice a bridesmaid never a bride? Three times a bridesmaid? And breathe, Tansy!’ she added laughing.

  There was a discreet knock at the bedroom door.

  ‘Are you girls decent?’ Anna’s grandfather asked.

  ‘Yes, don’t worry, Grandpa, it’s quite safe to come in!’

  ‘Doesn’t Anna look breath-taking!’ Tansy said at once.

  ‘You both look exquisite, like two Botticelli nymphs,’ he said a little shyly. He held up his tie, dangling loosely from his hand. ‘I was wondering, could one of you help me with this? I seem to have lost the knack!’

  ‘Let me,’ Tansy said at once. ‘You look wonderful in your suit, Mr Ottaway.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he told her. ‘And your young man scrubs up well,’ he added to Anna.

  ‘You’ve seen Jake in his new suit?’ Anna had only seen it on the hanger.

  ‘Yes, I told him he looks very nearly as handsome as me.’ Her grandfather gave her a mischievous grin.

  ‘Oh, my God! Look at the time!’ Tansy said in dismay. ‘I’m supposed to be keeping everyone on schedule.’

  ‘I’ll see you out there, darling,’ Anna’s grandfather told her.

  Tansy and Anna hurried next door to Anna’s bedroom, where their friend had been closeted for the past twenty minutes.

  ‘Hope she hasn’t done a runner,’ Tansy hissed. ‘She was looking worryingly jittery earlier.’

  ‘I thought she might do a runner last night,’ Anna said.

  ‘You and me both!’

  In the end, she and Tansy had sat up with their friend, making endless cups of tea and sharing their more scurrilous life stories until first light.

  ‘Keeping vigil,’ Isadora had commented with a nervous laugh. ‘Like the knights of old.’

  Tansy knocked on the closed door and they went in without waiting for an answer.

  Isadora had been looking out of the window. She swung around when she heard them come in.

  ‘I look ridiculous!’ She glared at them over her half-empty champagne glass. ‘Mutton dressed up as lamb!’ She plucked agitatedly at her intricately beaded, vintage dress, as if she intended to rip it off.

  Anna gently turned her to face the mirror. ‘Look, Isadora. Just look at yourself. You are going to be the most beautiful bride ever.’

  Isadora flung up her hand, warding off the sight of her own reflection. ‘I’m too old to be beautiful!’

  ‘You look stunningly beautiful, also dangerously minxy,’ Tansy told her.

  Anna shot her an impressed look. Isadora couldn’t fail to identify with ‘dangerously minxy’. For a moment, Isadora seemed reassured then she let out a despairing wail.

  ‘I don’t even know why I’m letting you girls put me through such an archaic and demeaning ritual!’

  ‘I’ll tell you why, Isadora Salzman,’ Tansy said in a threatening voice. ‘It’s because you and Valentin sneaked off to the registry office without telling us! And me and Anna weren’t going to let you cheat us out of a proper wedding!’

  Isadora collapsed on to Anna’s bed making Anna fear for the fragile little beads on her dress.

  ‘Everything just happened so fast! I finally let Valentin wear me down and agree to meet him in London for a drink for old time’s sake and, a fortnight later, we’re engaged.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if it was a fortnight or forty-eight hours,’ Anna told her quietly. ‘This marriage was decades in the making. You always knew Valentin was the one.’

  Isadora suddenly calmed down.

  ‘Yes, I did. You’re right. I just – I suppose I’m still in shock. I’d just accepted that I’d have to go through the rest of my life alone. I was happy, perfectly happy, with my little dog and my friends, writing my book. But then I saw Valentin waiting at Paddington station and I felt – I didn’t feel like a dizzy teenager again. It was more like …’

  ‘Coming home,’ Anna said softly.

  Isadora’s expression was suddenly soft. ‘Yes. That’s exactly what it was like.’

  Tansy clapped her hands. ‘Come on, you two! As the official maid of honour, I’m officially telling you guys it’s time to get this show on the road!’

  ‘You know, I’d heard of Bridezilla,’ Isadora said laughing. ‘But no-one warned me of her equally scary sister, Bridesmaidzilla!’

  In Anna’s garden, Isadora’s bridegroom was waiting under a billowing, white canopy, the chuppah. Anna saw the woman rabbi – a friend of Isadora’s, who had agreed to perform the blessing – lay a reassuring hand on Valentin’s wrist, as though she feared that he too might decide to bolt. If possible, he looked more nervous than Isadora. But as the musicians began to play and he saw his old lover walking smilingly towards him, white gardenias woven into her hair, his face lit up with love and relief.

  Anna had seen a faded photo of Isadora’s lost love several months before she’d met him in person. But this was an older, wiser Valentin: grizzled yet distinguished, funny, kind and every bit as complicated and passionate as his bride.

  The air smelled of sun-warmed roses. Anna felt herself relax as Isadora and Valentin finally came face-to-face under the canopy, which she and Tansy had decorated with roses, delphiniums and gerberas from her garden. The simple ceremony began; the unfamiliar, Hebrew words seemed to pierce right through Anna, rhythmic and compelling as a song. Looking along the rows of guests, she picked out familiar faces: Isadora’s few close friends, her son Gabriel, his wife Nicky and her unofficial granddaughter, Sabina, who had Isadora’s little dog sitting, surprisingly docilely, on her knee.

  Anna’s grandfather was seated between Tim and Anjali and Chris and Jane, holding fifteen-month old Edie on his knee. He whispered something to her and the little girl gazed at him, round-eyed. Anna had finally risked telling him about her mother’s affair with Tim’s father and discovered what she should perhaps have guessed; that he’d suspected all along that Anna was not Julian’s child.

  ‘Secrets are so stupid!’ she’d said. ‘And criminally time-wasting. Let’s promise we won’t have any more secrets between us ever!’

  Liam caught her eye and winked. He’d left Thames Valley Police a few weeks after arresting Alice Jinks and recovering the stolen Vermeer. After the wedding, he and Tansy were going on holiday to Vietnam, after which they planned to spend several months working their way around the world.

  ‘We’ve got a lot of adventuring to fit in before we hit thirty,’ he’d told Anna.

  Jake was sitting at the end of a row. He looked like some aloof, handsome stranger in his Hugo Boss morning suit, until he gave her his sweet here-and-gone again smile and she felt herself irresistibly smiling back. And there, sitting alertly at Jake’s feet, was the fairy-tale wolf, who had begun it all. In honour of Isadora’s wedding, Jake had given Bonnie a bath and her white coat was almost too dazzling in the sun.

  Though Jake was in the process of setting up on his own, as a security consultant; he’d stayed in touch with the ex-soldier who had founded a charity to rescue dogs from war zones and hoped to eventually work for them part time. In a similar spirit, Anna had begun to work as a volunteer for Dominic and Ghislaine’s women’s refuge, until she fin
ally figured out what she wanted to do. The important thing was that the three of them, Anna, Jake and Bonnie, were together.

  The ceremony ended with the rabbi placing the ritual glass, in its blue, cloth wrapping, on the ground, so that Valentin could crush it dramatically under his heel, which he did with great enthusiasm and satisfyingly audible, splintering sounds.

  There were cries of ‘Mazel tov!’ Everybody clapped and cheered.

  ‘May you both always be even happier than you are at this moment!’ someone called out.

  ‘Impossible!’ Isadora called back, laughing, as Valentin pulled her into his embrace.

  They were quickly surrounded by their friends and, for a few moments, Anna could hear the couple being warmly congratulated in several different languages.

  But then somehow, as if these were steps in a practiced dance, Anna, Isadora and Tansy found themselves holding each other’s hands as everyone else milled around them.

  Isadora gazed into her friends’ faces with immense affection.

  ‘Thank you, my darling girls, for bullying me into keeping my nerve. This has been the best day, probably, of my whole life.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And, as you know, I’ve had quite a few best days!’

  ‘Does Valentin know about Mick Jagger?’ Tansy whispered.

  ‘Hush!’ Isadora gave one of her wicked hoots of laughter. ‘I’m a married woman now, remember!’

  At that moment, Sabina released Hero, who came rushing towards Isadora, barking excitedly, then Bonnie too came bounding up, but for some reason both dogs stopped before they reached their owners and, it seemed to Anna, exchanged glances as if arriving at some mutual decision.

  The three women watched as the, normally impeccably behaved, White Shepherd and Isadora’s famously grumpy, little, black dog, took off running, ears and tails flying, pink tongues lolling, racing in exuberant circles round the chuppah, between the chairs, to the bottom of the garden and back, and finally looping back around their humans in a mad figure of eight, like the physical embodiment of joy.