‘Hello.’ She stood and, before she could think, held out her hand to him. He hesitated then took it and gave her a strange sort of handshake. She had the idea that he had been taught how to do it: his grip was gentle – almost tender – but she could feel the power that he was holding in check. She introduced herself and Cory then turned to the drawing on the shelf. ‘Marianne drew you,’ she said. ‘It’s a very good likeness.’
The same momentary pause and Rowan had the horrible thought that maybe he wasn’t able to talk. Then, though, he said, ‘Yes. She got me – that’s what she said. She got me.’
‘She did.’ Rowan smiled. ‘How long ago did you sit for her?’
A trace of panic in his eyes, Martin looked at his mother.
‘About eighteen months,’ she said.
‘I went to her house, we had some chocolate cake and then she did my picture. She said I could keep it so I brought it home and we put it in a frame.’
‘You were friends?’
‘Yes, she was my friend. We always waved to each other.’ He said the last phrase slowly, as if the concept were tricky to negotiate. ‘I stood here and when she came up to her studio, she waved and I waved back.’
‘I’ve seen you in your window,’ Rowan said. ‘Here.’ She gestured at the expanse of glass. ‘At night. You must be almost as bad a sleeper as I am.’
‘Insomnia,’ he said, pronouncing each syllable carefully. ‘I don’t like the dark. I have tablets to go to sleep but I don’t like them. I don’t want to get …’ He looked at his mother again.
‘Addicted,’ she said.
At the door, Sarah Johnson moved closer to Rowan and lowered her voice. It seemed an unnecessary precaution: with the air of a teenager who had done his social duty, Martin had sloped off back to his room. Watching him go, Rowan thought suddenly that if Marianne had asked her to describe him, she’d have said he was like a child in the body of a Russian gymnast: the power and the simplicity together, the muscles and the pallor of his colouring, the light blue eyes.
‘Is he bothering you?’ his mother asked. ‘Looking over like that.’
‘No. I …’
‘It’s all right – you can say.’
‘Honestly, no. Now that I understand. I didn’t know about the … waving. I didn’t know they were friends. I’ve lived in London for a long time; I was out of touch with Marianne’s life, day to day. At night, sometimes, when I saw him …’ Rowan tried a laugh and shook her head to convey embarrassment. ‘Over-active imagination.’
Her eyes came to rest on the pair of bolts and, as if she’d seen and followed the chain of thought, Sarah said, ‘He’s not dangerous.’
‘No, of course not. I didn’t think … Now I know they were friends, it makes total sense.’ She glanced back towards the sitting room, making sure he hadn’t returned. She spoke quietly anyway. ‘Did he see Marianne’s body?’ she asked. ‘From the window, I mean. I didn’t like to ask him but …’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Not that night, he didn’t see the accident, thank God, but in the morning, when it got light enough to see the garden. He was … very upset.’
‘It must have been traumatic for him. For you both.’
‘Horrible. It was … horrible.’
‘We’re sorry to have bothered you,’ Cory said smoothly. ‘I hope we haven’t caused you any more distress. Because Marianne died there, I think you’ve been a little jumpier than usual, haven’t you, Rowan?’
She nodded. ‘A bit. It’s a big house if you’re there on your own.’
‘It was strange to me, that,’ said Sarah. ‘I never understood why she wanted to live on her own.’ She looked at Cory. ‘But I’m not an artist, so … Marianne was a lovely girl, wasn’t she? So generous. Not with money, I don’t mean,’ she said hurriedly, as if they might suspect her of freeloading. ‘But her time. When she wasn’t working all the hours that God sent, she used to take Martin out – mostly the cinema, lunch sometimes, or a gig – he likes his music. She never said it but I think she knew it was almost as nice for me as it was for him. A break, if you know what I’m saying.’
Twenty-seven
As soundlessly as possible, Rowan slid the little bolt across. If Cory should take it into his head to kick down a second door today, this one on the bathroom would put up no resistance at all but she needed the symbolism of it anyway, just a few minutes in a locked room, alone.
She went to the basin and leaned forward until her forehead touched the mirror. The cold glass felt good and she tried to concentrate on the sensation, let it calm her whirling thoughts. Downstairs in the kitchen, Cory would be putting a neat cross next to Martin Johnson’s name, moving on to a new line of inquiry, but she had no idea what to do next. Unnerved as she had been by him, at least the man who watched at night had represented a potential way inside the puzzle. Now he’d become yet another dead-end.
Her breath clouded the mirror. How had she let herself get so very vulnerable? She gripped the edge of the basin until her hands hurt. She should have burned the drawing of the fire – why the hell hadn’t she? It would have been so easy. Here, in the basin: put it in, drop a match on top and watch it burn, flame eating flame. Run the tap and wash away the cinders.
Standing straight, she looked herself in the eye. She’d made a big mistake.
—
Cory had left the main light off, and the kitchen was lit instead by the series of lamps that Jacqueline had dotted around the room. Like her daughter, she’d disliked overhead lighting, and it was true that the room looked better like this, the corners softened, units half-hidden in shadow, the focus centred on the long table where Cory sat with his glass and the bottle of brandy. Seeing Rowan in the doorway, he looked up. ‘I was beginning to wonder if something had happened to you.’
She came to the table and sat down. ‘That was excruciating,’ she said, tipping her head in the direction of the flats. Despite the emptiness of the street, they’d walked back from Benson Place in silence.
‘Poor woman,’ he said.
‘Getting in there like that, saying we wanted to talk about Marianne, you standing out of the way until she’d opened the door …’
‘I know.’ He nodded. ‘But we had to; she wouldn’t have opened it otherwise.’ He reached for the pad of A4 again. ‘Can I?’
She shrugged. ‘Go ahead.’
‘You, I mean.’
‘What, draw me?’
‘Why not? Just while we talk.’
He took the pencil from his pocket again and she watched as he began to sketch out the first framing lines of her brow. There was something soothing about the motion of his hand over the paper, the apparent ease of it; she started to feel calmer almost immediately. He held the pencil loosely between his fingers, as if it decided where it needed to go and he merely provided the support, a medium at the Ouija board. Every few seconds he glanced up and looked at her face, appraising, before looking down again. The soft scratch of pencil on paper was lulling, almost hypnotic.
‘Can I talk?’ she said abruptly, puncturing the silence.
‘Of course. I’m just doodling, nothing serious.’
‘Do you think there’s a possibility we’re imagining all this? That it really was an accident.’
‘After what you told me earlier?’
‘But it all leads to nothing. Everything that seemed wrong or suspicious. He,’ she tipped her head at the window again, ‘was just her friend; Turk was stealing the sketches, and it looks like the only person who’s broken in here is you.’
He smiled at that but shook his head. ‘No. I’m more certain than ever that something happened. I – we – just have to keep going.’
Under the lip of the table, Rowan clenched her fists and she heard Marianne’s voice, low and urgent, as if she were whispering just behind her: I need to talk to you.
When Cory spoke again, his words seemed to come from a distance. ‘Are you all right, Rowan?’
‘How do I know it’s safe, what
I told you?’ she said, pulse drumming. ‘That I’m safe? How do I know that you won’t drag it all out into the open? If Marianne died because of Lorna, you won’t be able to help exposing the truth about what happened back then, even if you don’t mean to.’
‘I won’t do that. I promise.’
‘How can you? And why would I trust you, anyway? You kicked the door down, for fuck’s sake – you went through my things.’
Hands still, Cory kept his eyes fixed on the drawing for several seconds. She had the sense that he was making a decision. ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ he said finally, ‘for the same reason you never have.’
‘What?’
‘Because I loved her,’ he said. ‘No, that’s still not the whole story. I was in love with her.’
The words echoed. There was no question that he was telling anything other than the truth: it was written on his face. As if he knew it and was embarrassed, he looked down abruptly and went back to the sketch. Rowan was beginning to take shape on the paper before him. He’d drawn her almost in profile, one eye visible, the other nearly hidden. Now the soft pencil was shaping a corner of her mouth.
‘Did she know?’ Rowan asked.
‘I don’t know. Yes, I think so.’
‘Was there ever … ?’
‘Nothing happened,’ he said, fierce again. ‘Ever. All right? Not that it’s anyone’s business.’
Except perhaps James Greenwood’s, she thought, but she kept her mouth shut.
‘I didn’t plan it,’ he said. ‘She was in a relationship and I wasn’t looking for anything like that. I had a girlfriend in New York and it ended very badly. She left me – crushed me, actually, if you want to know. I thought we’d get married, have kids, but as it turned out, she didn’t. It was one of the reasons I decided to come here. The trigger, anyway – I couldn’t be in that apartment any more. Even the city. I needed to be somewhere I wasn’t reminded of her every time I turned a corner.’
‘So why choose Marianne for a subject? Forgive me for saying so but you seem to have form when it comes to getting involved with the women you paint.’
‘No. The other way round. I’ve painted the women I’ve been involved with.’
‘Subtle distinction.’
‘Not really.’ He gave her a hard look and she struggled not to snap at him. Why did he talk to her as if she were an idiot? Why did she feel like an idiot around him?
He went back to the sketch and, with a series of tiny strokes, hatched in an area of shadow below her lower lip. A pout.
‘Marianne,’ he said, ‘she was subtle. She was a will-o’-the-wisp – I couldn’t get a hold on her. She fascinated me – the more she told me, the less I seemed to know, and I wanted all of it. I wanted to know everything.’
For all her annoyance, Rowan felt a pang of envy. How would it feel to be described like that by a man like Cory? To be able to captivate someone like him?
‘Don’t you feel differently now?’ she asked. ‘Now that you do know.’
He held the pencil at both ends and turned it slowly between his fingers, watching it as if it, too, suddenly fascinated him. ‘I’m not sure yet,’ he said.
‘Here.’ He took a final look at the sketch then planted his fingertips on it, hand spider-like, and spun it across the table so that it reached her the right way up. It had taken him ten minutes, less even, but he’d caught her. There she was, not the version of herself she liked, the best-angle, soft-focus Rowan, but her knowing, thinking, hard-eyed avatar, Rowan the survivor, the one who had to do everything on her own. The version of herself that, in the privacy of her mind, she knew was the real one.
‘What do you think?’
‘You got me,’ she said.
‘Will you be okay?’ he asked on the doorstep. ‘I feel bad leaving you with the door like that overnight. I’ll find a carpenter first thing tomorrow, pay whatever it takes to get it fixed right away.’
‘I’ll be fine. Two breakins in a day would be unlucky even by my standards.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘At least you know Martin only wants to wave to you now. I’ll call tomorrow morning when I’ve got a carpenter.’
She stood inside the doorway and listened to his footsteps. Once he reached the pavement, they faded quickly and silence engulfed the house again. Did she feel comforted, knowing the truth about Martin? No. It wasn’t just the way they’d got in there that had left a bad taste in her mouth. It was unkind, she knew she should feel sympathy for him and she did, but at the same time, she admitted to herself, he’d made her uncomfortable. The juxtaposition of the childish mind with his ultra-adult body, the developed muscles – perhaps he’d started weight training as part of his physiotherapy and got hooked on it. She thought about his broad chest and ham-hock arms. With the damage to his leg, of course, that inward-turned foot, he wouldn’t be able to run easily.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Martin was the man in the window, yes, but he couldn’t be the one in the garden. That man had been slight and nimble: there had been nothing awkward about the way he’d moved.
Waves of cold ran down her back. Shit: the door. In daylight, with Cory here, the arrangement with the chair had felt secure enough, but not at night, alone in the house. She needed to make a real barricade, pile furniture in the doorway so that even if someone did try their luck – even if they got in – there’d be noise, advance warning …
But just as she reached the kitchen, the phone rang in the hallway overhead, startlingly loud. She turned then stopped. Was it a trick? Was someone watching the house? Had they seen Cory leave and now they were calling her away so that they could force the door, get in on the ground floor before she blocked it properly? She wavered, paralysed by indecision, then pulled herself together: was he a mind-reader, this guy? Had he known about the barricade the moment she’d had the idea? For God’s sake.
Before the phone could ring out, she ran upstairs and picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ She tried to sound calm but the anxiety in her voice was unmistakable.
‘Rowan?’ said a man’s voice.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Adam.’
Twenty-eight
At the northern point of the narrow island made by the two prongs of Magdalen Street stood the Martyrs’ Memorial. It was a monstrosity, spitefully Gothic, an intensely carved spike blackened with soot that, whenever she saw it, put Rowan in mind of the charred, skyward-pointing finger-bone of one of the men it commemorated, burned at the stake around the corner on Broad Street.
A flight of shallow steps, incongruously plain, had been built around the base. She crossed the road and climbed them. She was four or five feet above the pavement, if that, but it was enough to give her a view across Magdalen Street and in through the lit windows of the Randolph Hotel’s formal dining room.
At the end of her first year at university, when she called to tell him she’d got a First in the Mods exams, her father, just back from an extended stint in South America, said he wanted to take her out to lunch. To celebrate, he’d said.
Punctuality had always been a big deal with him and when she’d arrived, stepping in out of the dazzling sunshine from a pavement already starting to radiate the day’s heat, he was waiting for her at the desk in the lamp-lit reception area, the heavy staircases climbing away Escher-style over his head, illuminated – as much as they ever were – by pointed Gothic windows. The carpet was blood red, enhancing her impression of finding herself suddenly, Jonah-like, on the inside of an enormous beast.
‘You look well.’ He’d pressed his cheek briefly against hers. ‘I expected you to be white as a sheet after all that studying.’
‘I finished three weeks ago,’ she said and, hearing how he might infer criticism or resentment, quickly added, ‘The weather’s been great so I’ve spent a lot of time outside since.’
‘That’s good. Nothing worse than being cooped up in libraries.’
She’d refrained from saying that actually, that was how she
planned to spend the rest of her life, if possible, and instead smiled and let him usher her down the hall to the dining room. It was at the corner of the building with windows on both sides, those on Beaumont Street looking out towards the grandeur of the Ashmolean Museum, the others this way, towards the Memorial and Balliol College beyond. By contrast with reception, it was filled with light, and the glass and silverware glinted on stiff white linen. Wood panelling, oil paintings. From the window table that her father requested, she had a view of the room and the three other parties of early eaters already ensconced, a trio of businessmen all wearing grey suits, and two couples in their seventies, the nearest pair sipping sherry while they perused the menu. The weekday lunch, she thought, preserve of those on pensions or expenses, and those consciously or otherwise avoiding the intimacy of dinner with its candlelight and greater likelihood of drinking too much truth serum.
To her surprise, however, her father immediately ordered two glasses of champagne. ‘To you,’ he said, chiming his glass gently against hers, ‘and your double first.’
‘God, no pressure.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘no pressure. But you’ll do it.’ He took a sip. ‘Your mother would have been proud of you today, Rowan.’
She had been startled: he never talked about her mother. When she was younger, she’d resented it, wanting – needing – information, but as she’d grown older, she’d understood and even come to appreciate his silence. It was too painful, she’d thought; for him, the memories; for her, the lack of them. Blood aside, loss was what they had in common. She’d felt an intense pang of longing for her mother then, a void yawning at her centre like a hole burned all the way through. In recognition of what it must have cost him to say it, she stifled the questions that came afterwards: Are you proud, Dad? Could you tell me?
Their elderly neighbours had taken delivery of salmon mousses and, glancing over, Rowan caught the woman’s eye. She wondered if they shared the habit of analysing fellow diners, working out their relationships and situations, and if so, what this woman made of the girl and the man entertaining her. Their colouring said they were family, his genes had dominated her mother’s timid ones, but given their formality with one another, she could be excused for guessing they were niece and arm’s-length uncle. Her father was making an effort, though, she had to admit, and as they ate, they carried on a polite trade in information. She told him about the papers she’d sat and the ballot for rooms in college in the autumn; he talked about Rio and Santiago and a new cancer drug in which Stern Rizer was investing a huge amount of research funding.
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