‘Definitely the next step,’ Saul said. ‘Shame about it, I loathe the police, but. Theft is definitely OK, but not bodily harm. That has to be punished.’
He moved towards the desk and lifted the phone. Di put her hand on his.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘No one goes to prison.’
Even in extremis, Di could see he was acting and oddly triumphant; that he considered her indestructible and already halfway in command of the situation before he arrived and besides, an extremely distasteful sight at the moment. He would examine her later as he might a wounded canvas. For the moment, she was functioning and Madame de Belleroche was still on the wall and that was all that mattered to him.
‘No one’s going to prison.’ Di said.
‘Oh, Di, how idiotic. Not even someone who’s tried to kill you?’
‘No one goes to prison,’ she repeated. ‘Especially not Patrick’s mother.’
‘Don’t you see, Di?’ Saul said eagerly, embracing the revised scenario. ‘It’s the perfect solution. That way, they’re absolutely, thoroughly compromised. Just think, convicted of violence, whoever’s going to believe any claim they make after they see what’s on the cameras? And you don’t even need to give them the paintings.’
He was suddenly excited by the idea, and in that moment, Di found him repellent.
‘You cunt,’ Edward said. ‘You shit.’
Saul nodded. ‘All of those. For God’s sake, Di, let me phone.’
Even now, he was teasing them. Di could see the old, familiar terror in Edward’s eyes. Gayle was weeping.
Di wiped her eyes again, and pinched her nose with two fingers, making the mess worse. It was difficult to see clearly, her head hurt and her knees were buckling. She looked towards Madame de Belleroche.
‘Do you think you’re safe to drive, Edward?’ she asked him over her shoulder.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you find what you came for? Whatever it was?’
He hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘Take Gayle home, then. And take whatever you want with you. It really doesn’t matter what it is. Just GO. Go out the way you came in, but just go. No one is going to call the police.’
Saul stepped aside and allowed the two of them to stumble past. Edward shouted at Gayle to go first. Without a backward glance, he picked up the paintings he had left in the corridor. Saul followed them downstairs. As a precaution he followed them out of the house, chatting amiably, as to departing guests.
‘I’ll send you the DVDs,’ he said. ‘And do let me help you sell the paintings. You’ll need a provenance and a legend to sell them highest and I am the best, you know, the very best.’
The rain had eased. The sky was calm and clear and a distant church clock struck the hour.
Saul walked back, closed the steel shutter firmly and went in the back door. Really, one could not get the staff these days, but all things considered, it had all worked out rather well. He went back upstairs. Must look after Di. That’s what Thomas would have wanted.
Di had righted the chair, and was sitting in it, with her head rested on her arms on the desk, making little snuffling sounds, almost like snoring. The back of her head was matted with blood. Better get her cleaned up, see the nature of the damage.
Things to do, people to see. Now they could really get on. But first he took advantage, and leaned over her to see what she had written.
Your mother Christina is behind that door in the cellar. That’s where she drowned.
Oh, fuck.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There was a picture in her mind. An abstract design of black stripes, with flames of red curling between them, like a vision of fire behind bars. She had woken, screaming that the house was on fire; a room was on fire and the cellar was in flood.
‘Oh, Di,’ Saul said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You wouldn’t have wanted to know.’
The morning after, and she was drowsing downstairs, sitting in Thomas’s chair in the snug, the chair with the life of its own, although she thought it still smelled of him and that made it the best place to be. The delirium had passed into calm: she was feeling safe and at the same time unbearably sad, clutching at the arms of the chair, wanting to consult Madame de Belleroche and instead looking at the nude on the wall and the smudge of a painting to the other side.
‘Was there a storm?’ she asked. ‘There should have been a storm.’
‘No storm,’ Saul said. ‘No fire or flood either.’
Water and aspirin was what she swallowed, and aspirin was good for the heart, she remembered that; good for maintaining the health of it and useless at mending a broken one. Saul had no heart, or maybe he did, but it lived in his eyes and sometimes in his fingers and Saul was ministering to her and it was such a strange sensation that she struggled not to resist it. There was nothing tactile about Saul, and yet the brusque deftness of his therapy was oddly moving and soothing, as if she was being stroked in the hairdresser’s with the same effect, leaving her calm and unusually submissive.
‘Titanium white,’ she said. ‘Without titanium. No strength. Why did we have to do it all over again, Thomas? Like being in a play,’ she said. As if last time it was a rehearsal. First it was Thomas, and then it was me. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
‘More like a farce than a play,’ Saul said. ‘You were hit with a phone and a rope. She didn’t even have a knife, wouldn’t have known what to do with a knife. Stupid bitch. She isn’t as mad as her mother. Christina was more dangerous than that.’
‘Yes. She was.’
Saul waited for her to move between silence and loquacity, the way she did. Her skin was raw with wounds, she was light headed and she was being soaked and sponged like an invalid, and this was wrong, too. It was she who was the nurse. Snip, snip, Saul was cutting off her hair, the better to bathe the scalp wound, the hair so thin already she really couldn’t care and she thought irrelevantly of paintings of women in hats. Thomas loved hats.
‘I’ll get a hat,’ she said.
Saul was so precise, snip, snip, snip with his scissors, careful with his applications of warm water, lavender, witch hazel, tiger balm; a panoply of benign disinfectants which he used with the care of a fastidious hypochondriac armed with his own arsenal of remedies. Saul was giving her the tender loving care she had given to Thomas, with the difference that he was administering it with the careful attention to detail of someone preserving a precious object without any personal attachment to it. So, first discover the extent of the damage by careful swabbing and wiping away; then retouch with care and if it was hardly the same as being loved, it served the same purpose for the moment. There was none of the anxiety in his touch as there had been in hers towards Thomas; none of the complications and clumsiness caused by fear of causing pain, although there was perhaps a small amount of genuine concern towards the canvas on which he was working. There was something liberating in that, if only she could stop gabbling, mimicking other people’s voices.
‘Christina was in here on the night of the storm,’ Di said. ‘She’d been here earlier, pleading for love and money and he’d told her, no. She was angry, she stormed off and then she came back after dark. She was going to set a fire in the cellar. It reeked of paraffin, I remember that. Thomas was upstairs, working, listening to music. She hit him and tied him to the chair and she was going to strangle him. She told him that if she couldn’t have what he had, he had to die, and his damn collection with him. That’s when I came in. I cut the rope on his hands.’
She began to weep.
‘Don’t do that,’ Jones said.
‘That you, Jones?’
‘Who the fuck else?’
The picture of the bars and the flames faded away, leaving instead the sight of Jones’s big worried face, and the comforting feel of the chair.
‘Was it just like you wrote?’ Jones said, coming in.
‘Yes. Thomas told me to go.
He didn’t want anyone else going up in flames. And then you all went and left him. And she’d gone down to the cellar to hide, and she fell and then the water came in. You shouldn’t have read what I wrote. You shouldn’t.’
‘I think I may have an alternative career as an embalmer,’ Saul muttered. ‘And, my dear, it would appear from what you wrote, that this woman in the near vicinity, Christina, could do with even more extreme cosmetic treatment than you. Her in the cellar, I mean, but it’ll be too late for all that, she must be a skeleton by now. Oh, my dear Di, all these years you knew she was dead down there. I do apologise, but I did read what you typed, it was there, and you do write well, you know. Admirably well taught.’
‘You shouldn’t have read it,’ she repeated, stubbornly.
‘Oh yes, we should. Somebody had to. And when we write, dear, we write it for someone to read, ultimately. Writing’s not secret. You wanted someone to know.’
‘And maybe Thomas did, too,’ Jones said.
Saul wanted her to go on, pressed the cotton wool against the wound on the back of her head, hard enough to prompt her. Be cruel to be kind; they needed to know, Jones and he.
‘You don’t know that Thomas didn’t kill her,’ Jones said.
Di’s speech was slower, more painful and considered until she shifted in her seat where everything was uncomfortable again and she was squinting at the light through swollen eyes. Saw the nude, and smiled at it. Thomas loved that painting, as well as that smudge on the wall.
‘Course not. I knew that because of what Thomas was like and because of what I remembered. I saw him hurt – sick, weak and hurt and telling me to go when he should have been screaming for help for himself. Then there was the cellar, when I came in. She was already upstairs, hitting him, taunting him about the fire, throttling him before she heard me come in and she ran. She’d piled up stuff to start the fire, poured paraffin; I remembered the paraffin smell as soon as I crawled through. I saw the kindling, smelt it. And then,’ Di touched her own throat, felt the outline of her mouth as if to prove it was there, swallowed hard. ‘And because I knew about that kind of storm. Because I’d been down that cellar when I was a kid, and I know, when you get the northeast wind and the freak high tide, they can flood so fast, you couldn’t run from it. And she’d be hiding in a corner, and then … ’
‘It’s like the sea coming in from beneath and the rain from above combine and make a geyser, and the drains explode,’ Jones said. He spoke as if he could see it and feel it. ‘Seconds, not minutes.If she panicked and ran to hide, and stumbled … You can drown in two inches of water. There would have been three feet of it. That quick.’
‘Even if I hadn’t seen, I knew Thomas didn’t kill her.’
Di’s voice was clear. Saul’s voice was dulcet and persuasive, pressing on, still needing to know.
‘After you freed him and the police took you, he was left alone. C’mon, Di, what might he have done? You don’t know. You don’t know what he might have done.’
‘Nothing,’ Jones muttered.
Di concentrated on the ceiling, spoke slower, talking solely to him.
‘I know what he did. The last time you saw him that night, he was weaker than I am now. If last night was a farce, ten years ago, it was a tragedy. Thomas didn’t do anger. Sorrow, yes, anger, no. He thought she’d got out and run, he didn’t go down there until the morning, found her face down in sand. He tidied her up; he made the coffin himself and laid her to rest. Then he built the wall; he got someone from outside town to help, there was a lot of rebuilding going on after the floods, no one noticed. It took a week. He left a door, because he always wanted someone to know. As long as it wasn’t her children who knew.’
Jones was leaning over her. Such a big, stupid, kind face it was; as big as the moon.
‘I’ve fucking got it, kid. Isn’t that why you waited for two hours after he died? In case he might say it? Say where she was? Say she was still down there?’
Di closed her eyes; tired, so tired.
‘Yes.’ she said. ‘Yes, yes, YES.’ She paused. ‘It weighed on his mind in the last weeks. Yes, I thought that if they revived him from the dead, he might have said something, because it was always on his mind, and if he had said something, well, he’d be famous for nothing else, would he? Not for being a good man, only for being a man who drowned his wife.’
Her head lolled.
‘Do you get it? Thomas Porteous, pervert, who kept his wife in the cellar for a decade. Roll up, roll up, roll up. Bugger the pictures, bugger what he wanted to do. But I promise you, Jones, that wasn’t the only reason why I waited, I wanted him to go with his dignity. And I wanted to sit in this chair with him for as long as I could.’
She touched her mouth again, then her forehead, all swollen. Made another image in her head to displace what she could see. When was the time we painted the shells? We’ll do them in ink, better than paint, more translucent. They’ll look like jewels. Jones’s big, rough, kind face loomed above her, his heavy chin dark with stubble.
‘Peg,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Peg.’
‘Going to be OK, Di. Getting bail tomorrow. Sleep now.’
‘Peg likes maps,’ she said.
There were noises off. She could remember the geese flying overhead and the painting of the shells.
‘As for your dad, Di,’ Jones said to her dreaming form and her ugly grazed face, ‘Monica might have been right. Maybe he did just want to help.’
The men went upstairs.
‘If it was you shopped Peg, Saul, I’ll knock your block off,’ Jones said.
‘More likely a friend of yours, isn’t it?’
Jones nodded.
‘Women,’ he said. ‘Fucking women.’
They began to tidy up the mess of the gallery room.
‘Those daughters were entitled to the paintings,’ Jones said. ‘They earned them fair and square. Fucking lousy thieves, that’s all. Ever heard of agent provocateur? They were fucking set up, that’s what they were. Tricked into crime by being given bait. Can’t expect them not to do it, can you? Shouldn’t have hit her, though, fucking out of order.’
‘And thus they learn what they are,’ Saul said, smoothly. ‘Thieves. They’ll still be quids in for something if they keep their heads. All perfectly honourable, better than they deserve. And Gayle caught on camera, beating up her father’s little wife while her husband vandalises. They can’t claim now. We’ve got them.’
‘I got to tell you something,’ Jones said, heavily. ‘Half the cameras didn’t work.’
‘So? They don’t know that, do they?’
Di touched the back of her head and felt damp, short hair and a crusted lump and the dull ache that was nothing to do with headache pain and more to do with the heart which aspirin could not cure. Saul would never understand about the cellar. She could not count how many people had found refuge in it over the years of her residence, let alone the years before. The wall was built for shelter as much as subterfuge. The cellar was always safe. A picture came to mind: that beautiful woman in the blowing pink skirt, trying to keep her hat on in a brisk breeze on the beach. Thought of how to keep the cellar open and yet keep it closed, thought of Peg and Patrick, thought ahead and thought of her father coming into the room.
I only want to help.
Maybe she could bury Thomas now.
Thomas, my love: Did I really know you? I feel a hundred years old.
The collection matters more than anything, doesn’t it? Gayle must let Patrick come back. Gayle deserved better. Gayle was the child you loved best, the oldest, the one who remembered most. Gayle was the one who lost the most because her mother lied.
Let me sleep.
Jones and Paul paced the gallery room, tidying up. A pink sky loomed through the windows. They were drunk with fatigue, and for all that, it was thin Saul who led the way, with Jones plodding behind him, prodding him with comments. They were armed with black bin liners and sprays, cleaners to the manner born, divi
ding the tasks without argument. Saul did the wiping down, Jones the collection.
‘And another thing,’ Jones said. ‘We’re destroying evidence. Look at it.’
Saul looked at a piece of bloodied rope. ‘My, my,’ he said admiringly. ‘Fancy her chewing her way through that. Put it in the big bag, will you? You know Di wants the evidence destroyed. She’d never have anyone put on trial, but they won’t know that.’
The room was tidy and almost normal. The screen was clean. The bloodstained carpet was rolled against the wall.
‘The difference is that no one else came in, this time,’ Jones said.
Saul hesitated.
‘When I was standing on the pier,’ he said, ‘Watching the front door and realising something was wrong, I thought I saw a man, framed in the light. He waited a little while, and then he went away. That’s all I saw.’
Jones nodded. Saul touched the rope and winced at the feel of it, vicious and ineffectual, like the woman who wielded it. He was wondering at the same time, how long or short it would be before Di started defending her.
The pink light through the windows sank and turned grey and winter day unrolled. They worked on, yawning.
Saul leant against the desk. Soon it would be as if no one had been here at all, the room back to its former glory.
‘Why did you get me to stick a camera in this room? When they were never going to come into the house?’
‘For posterity,’ Saul said, airily. ‘Precaution, just in case.’
‘Bollocks,’ Jones said. ‘You’re a fucking bastard, Saul.’
‘Bones,’ Saul said, suddenly. ‘Old bones, we have to get rid of old bones. I do want to use that space, potentially magnificent. So we’ve got to knock down the wall and get rid of the bones.’
Jones considered. ‘I know of a man,’ he said, slowly. ‘But he’s the last we could ask.’
‘Fed to the fishes, in whole or in part? Burial at sea? Any ideas?’ Saul rattled on.
‘What Di says, goes. It’s Di’s house,’ Jones said. ‘Don’t you ever forget it. This is her house. Always has been.’
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