The Dead Lie Down: A Novel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘I’m going,’ said the woman. ‘Tell Saul he needs a new business plan, one that knows the difference between being open and being closed.’ I was about to ask her name when she moved to pick up the canvas board, and I realised she was going to take it away.

  I nearly cried out. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Even if it’s not for sale, can you . . . could you tell me something about it? What made you paint it? Who’s Abberton?’

  She let out a long sigh. ‘He’s nobody, all right? Absolutely nobody at all.’

  He. So Abberton was a man. ‘Do you ever make prints from your originals?’ I asked ‘Sometimes artists . . .’

  ‘Not me,’ she said quickly. ‘You cannot buy this picture, Ruth Bussey.’ Her skin looked like paper that someone had screwed up, then flattened out to find all the creases still there. I didn’t like the way she’d said my name, particularly since she hadn’t told me hers. ‘Get over it. Buy another picture.’

  I thought she’d given me a glimmer of hope. ‘Have you got others I could look at, ones that are for sale?’

  Her lower jaw shot out and I saw a row of white, slightly uneven teeth. ‘I don’t mean buy one from me,’ she raised her voice. I should have stopped pushing it at that point, but it made no sense to me. She can’t be upset because I think she’s brilliant, I thought. I must be asking the wrong questions, putting it in the wrong way. No artist gets angry when you express an interest in buying their work—it simply doesn’t happen, I reassured myself. If I could only make this woman understand that I was serious, that I wasn’t just some airhead receptionist . . .

  She had seized the picture and marched off into the back again. I decided to have one last try. I walked through to Saul’s framing room, and gasped when I saw what she was doing. Another artist’s work was spread out on the table, and she was leaning on it, leaning on a watercolour landscape that someone had probably taken weeks if not months to paint, writing a note for Saul. She was using a biro, pressing it down angrily as if that would help her make her point more emphatically. ‘Don’t lean on that,’ I said, shocked.

  She stopped writing. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’s someone else’s picture!’

  ‘It’s someone else’s appalling picture. And now it has my rather apposite words superimposed upon it, which makes it a hundred times more interesting.’

  She’d done it deliberately. I read her words, the ones she planned to leave for Saul to find. Most of them were obscenities. If he didn’t take one look at that note and decide never to frame anything for this awful woman again, there was something wrong with him. I looked at the bottom of the scrap of paper for a signature, but there wasn’t one—I’d interrupted her before she’d had a chance to sign her letter.

  I decided I didn’t want to buy Abberton after all. It would have spoiled it for me, knowing the person who had painted it thought nothing of vandalising another artist’s work.

  I felt more upset than I could justify to myself. The picture I loved, even though I’d only seen it for the first time five minutes ago, had been ruined for me. More than that: it was as if art had been ruined, the thing that had started to cure the ache in my soul. Now it felt tainted. ‘Why do you want to destroy other people’s work?’ I asked, unable to stop myself. ‘Can’t you bear the idea of anyone having talent apart from you?’

  I turned round and walked back to the gallery area, shaking. A few seconds later my hair was yanked back, as if my ponytail had caught on something. I cried out in pain. It was her. She spun me round and pushed me against a wall, knocking me into a picture. It crashed to the floor and the glass broke, falling in pieces around my feet. She’s going to wreck the gallery, I thought—all our paintings, and it would be my fault. It’s always my fault. What would I tell Saul?

  One of her hands was flat against my chest, the other behind her back. That was when I started to get frightened. What was she holding? She’d been in Saul’s workshop, where there were knives. Saws. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please, don’t hurt me.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing. I just . . . I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me. Let me go!’ A storm began to rage in my mind. The same words again, the ones I’d said over and over to Her when she yanked the tape off my mouth: don’t hurt me, please, let me go. I was no longer aware of the woman with the grey-black hair, or the gallery. The present dissolved into the past; there could never be anything but Him and Her; that one attack would last for ever, in one guise or another.

  The wild-haired woman’s hand emerged from behind her back. I saw a canister: paint. Red. My body felt formless, as if it was breaking up. She held her weapon close to my face and sprayed. I screamed. It went in my mouth and eyes, and when I closed them, she carried on spraying. I felt a heavy wetness all over my face and neck, stinging, hardening. I tried to move, but I couldn’t.

  ‘What on earth . . .?’ Saul’s voice.

  I heard a splash, then something rolling, a metallic sound. I tried to open my eyes, saw thin red ropes in front of them where my lashes had been glued together. Her hand released me. I mumbled, ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Saul and the woman were shouting over one another, saying things I didn’t want to hear. I had to get to the door. I had to get out of there. I didn’t pick up my handbag or my jacket. I was free to move, so I ran.

  I didn’t stop running until I got home. I didn’t have my keys with me—they were in my bag—so I sat on the grass outside Blantyre Lodge in the rain, shaking, for what felt like hours. I could have sat in the porch but I wanted to get soaked, to wash everything away. At some point Saul appeared. He’d brought my things. He tried to talk to me, but I wouldn’t let him. I put my hands over my ears, hysterical, my face still covered in red paint that made my skin feel tight, like a mask. The downpour hadn’t shifted it. The paint that framers use to spray mouldings is thick, greasy; it doesn’t wash off easily. People hurrying out of the park, on their way to shelter from the sudden bad weather, stared at me, then turned away quickly. One little boy pointed and laughed, before his mother stopped him. I didn’t care. No one could get me here—the crazy artist couldn’t, Him and Her couldn’t. Not in the middle of a public park.

  Eventually Saul went away. I haven’t spoken to him since, though for weeks after that awful day he left me regular phone messages. He said he understood that I didn’t want to go back to the gallery, and why I didn’t want to speak to him or talk about what had happened, but he needed to phone me from time to time, he explained, even if I never answered. He wanted me to know that he hadn’t forgotten about me, that he still cared.

  The last message he left, early last August, was different. I heard that his voice had changed; he didn’t sound sad any more—he sounded determined. He gave me Aidan’s name and address, told me Aidan needed someone to work for him. ‘My loss will be his gain,’ he said. ‘And yours, I hope. Please, Ruth. Do this for my sake as well as yours. I don’t know what’s happened to you in the past—I’m not a fool, I know something must have. Maybe I should have asked . . . Anyway. I won’t let you ruin the rest of your life. Go and see Aidan. He’ll look after you.’

  I remember I laughed at this, sitting in the dark in my house, smoking yet another cigarette. Look after me, with so many people intent on doing me harm? Him and Her, the crazy artist with the silver-black hair whose name I didn’t know, with her can of red paint . . . Everyone knew I wasn’t worth looking after, because I was too pathetic and helpless to look after myself. Aidan Seed, I was certain, would be no exception.

  6

  3/3/08

  Simon was on the phone to Sam Kombothekra when he saw Aidan Seed’s car turn the corner from Demesne Avenue on to the Rawndesley Road. Seed was driving it, and he seemed to be alone. ‘Gotta go,’ Simon said curtly, tossing his mobile on to the passenger seat. He hadn’t been sure if Seed would make his trip on foot or in the dusty black Volvo estate that had been parked at a forty-five degree angle to the side of the workshop.

&nb
sp; ‘You’re not planning to wait, are you?’ Charlie had said. ‘He’s going nowhere. He lied to get rid of us.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she’d corrected him. ‘I’ve got to get back to my enthralling questionnaire. Give me a ring if something happens.’

  Simon was pleased Seed had opted to drive wherever he was going. It was easier to follow a person in a car. Behind the wheel, encased in his own private space, Seed would be less likely to look at anything but the road ahead.

  As he followed the Volvo along the Rawndesley Road, Simon thought about the lies he’d told Kombothekra, and felt something he didn’t often feel: proud of himself. His story had been a medley of all the things the sergeant wanted to hear: two hundred and seventy-six addresses divided into handy regional groups, a travel schedule, a brand new road atlas courtesy of the Snowman. Not a word of it true. Simon had thrown Proust’s tenner in the bin—perhaps his job along with it, but at the moment he didn’t care.

  Seed drove at fifty miles an hour along the High Street, where the limit was thirty. It wasn’t long before Simon was having to do eighty on the dual carriageway to keep up with him. Why was he in such a hurry? Was his trip—news of which had evidently come as a surprise to Ruth Bussey—connected to Simon and Charlie having dropped in unexpectedly? Wherever he was going, it wasn’t Megson Crescent; that was in the opposite direction. Rawndesley, perhaps.

  In the absence of Proust, and the need to defend his gut feelings, Simon was scornful of what the voice in his head was telling him. Where did it come from, this conviction that if he didn’t act quickly something terrible would happen? The sense that Seed, Bussey and Mary Trelease were teetering on the edge of something horrendous, something only he could stop? Arrogant wanker, Charlie would have called him.

  At the Ruffers Well roundabout, Seed didn’t go straight over and on towards Rawndesley as Simon had expected him to. He took a right. Simon allowed a car to get in between them, then followed. Could Seed be heading for the A1? North or south? North, he guessed.

  South, it turned out. So much for gut feelings. As he followed Seed past exit after exit, it started to seem more and more likely to him that Seed was on his way to London. ‘Shit,’ Simon muttered under his breath. He was a good driver in every other town, city, village—in every other part of the country—apart from the capital. London was different; other drivers played by strange rules, if any. Simon had been involved in two car crashes since he’d passed his test at the age of seventeen; both had been in central London. Both times he’d been in pursuit of a suspect and both times he’d pranged his car and lost them. Something about London made him lose his cool. Not today, he told himself. He wouldn’t lose Aidan Seed.

  Less than an hour and a half later, he was seeing signs that said, ‘Highgate Wood’ and ‘West End’. It was five o’clock and starting to get dark. Great. Central London at rush hour. From a traffic point of view, it couldn’t have been worse. So resigned was Simon to his fate that he didn’t notice when Seed took a left turn ahead of him. He sped on past, then had to turn round. Seed had gone down a side street off Muswell Hill Road—something beginning with an ‘R’. Simon drove back past the entrance to Highgate Wood. Ruskington Road—that must have been it. He turned right. He’d got halfway down the road when he saw Seed walking towards him. He prepared to be seen—for the inevitable confrontation—but Seed didn’t notice him. He had his head down. Once he’d passed Simon’s car, Simon pulled in and watched Seed in his rear-view mirror. At the bottom of the street, Seed turned left.

  Why had he chosen Ruskington Road? Simon wondered. Olivia, Charlie’s sister, used to live round here. She moved after her downstairs neighbour—and, by extension, the house they shared—appeared on a tacky daytime property programme. Simon could see Seed’s car parked a few metres ahead on the other side of the road, in front of number 23, a white-painted four-storey terrace that was divided into flats. Simon saw a light glowing behind the curtains in the basement window and another in the highest dormer window.

  Did Seed know someone who lived in one of the flats? Or nearby?

  Simon got out of his car, locked it and ran towards Muswell Hill Road. He was afraid he’d be too late, but when he turned the corner, he saw Seed’s broad-shouldered outline walking down the hill some distance ahead. Simon ran to catch him up. It didn’t take long, and Simon didn’t allow himself to get too close. As Seed passed each lamppost, the shoulder-patches of his black jacket shone under the artificial light. Simon patted his pockets. He’d forgotten his phone, left it on the passenger seat. Damn. Charlie would try and call him within the next half hour, he reckoned. He’d started to be able to anticipate when she was going to ring. He liked that: knowing what she was going to do.

  Seed veered off the main road and down a footpath, also downhill. He wasn’t the only one. Most of the twenty-odd people between him and Simon went in that direction as well. It turned out to be a shortcut to Highgate tube station.

  Seed went to stand at the back of the ticket queue. Simon ducked behind a van that was selling coffee, milkshakes and fruit juices. Once Seed had passed through the barrier, Simon flashed his badge at the fluorescent-jacketed woman standing behind the gate and said, ‘CID. Quickly.’ She let him through, eyes wide. Probably worried about bombs on the tube, Simon thought, but he didn’t have time to stop and reassure her.

  There was only the Northern line, direction north or south. It had to be south, Simon thought, otherwise Seed would have driven all the way to his eventual destination. It was presumably as easy to park in High Barnet or Finchley as it was in the Highgate/Muswell Hill area. Simon couldn’t see Seed any more, so he had to hope he’d guessed right. Instead of going to stand on the southbound platform, he hung back, waiting for a train to come. When he heard one pulling in, he moved forward and walked briskly up the platform.

  He spotted Seed in a huddle of people by one of the sets of doors. He knew the risk he was taking: Seed could turn round and see him at any moment, but so what? There was no law against going to London. Seed didn’t have to tell Simon what he was doing there and vice versa.

  Each time the train stopped, Simon leaned out to see who got off. Seed didn’t alight at Archway, Tufnell Park or Kentish Town, as far as Simon could tell, though the mass of moving bodies was such that he couldn’t be sure. Camden Town: no. Mornington Crescent: no. Leicester Square, Simon guessed. People who came into London for the evening usually headed to the West End. What did Proust think, that Simon was some kind of bumpkin who started to hyperventilate if he went any further than the ‘Welcome to Spilling’ sign outside the Queen’s Hall? Fucking wanker.

  Simon had to move fast when he stuck his head out at Euston and saw Seed walking along the platform, following the ‘Way Out’ signs. He jumped off the train and went after him. Euston, he thought. What was at Euston? He swore at himself, impatient with guessing and being wrong.

  He followed Seed up the escalator to Euston station proper. The place was heaving. In the middle of the concourse, an un-moving crowd of hundreds stood and stared up at the boards overhead. Around this still mass, another several hundred bodies swirled—those who already knew where to find their trains, those dashing in and out of shops. Simon kept his eyes fixed on the shiny shoulder patches of Seed’s jacket and made sure to stay out of his line of sight.

  Seed went into WHSmith and bought something. From his vantage point, Simon saw that it was a newspaper, but not which one. Where next? Across the station concourse. Seed walked fast, like a man who knew exactly where he was going. He wasn’t ambling, drifting in and out of shops aimlessly like some of the people Simon could see. He had a purpose. He’s done this before. But done what? Simon wasn’t sure.

  He watched as Seed went into the station’s food court and approached one of the counters. After a brief exchange with a woman wearing a red uniform and a red cap, Seed went to the till to pay—for nothing, apparently—then sat down at
a small table that was unoccupied, his back towards Simon. He opened his newspaper. Simon moved closer and saw that it was the Independent . About five minutes later, the woman in the red uniform brought a plate of food to Seed’s table.

  Simon wished he’d remembered to pick up his phone. He could have phoned Charlie. And said what? That Aidan Seed had come to Euston station for his tea? She’d have pissed herself laughing.

  Seed had to be going on somewhere. No one came all the way from Spilling to London to have their dinner in a train station food court. Yeah, Charlie would say, just like no one confesses to murdering women who aren’t dead.

  Simon was freezing, having left his coat in the car, and getting hungrier by the second. He groaned when Seed got up to buy more food. Two doughnuts and a coffee. Greedy bastard. Seed sat down again. He seemed in no hurry at all.

  Finally, at twenty-five past six, he stood and stretched. He left the food court without picking up his newspaper and made for the station exit. Simon followed him out on to the Euston Road, to a crossing. He hung back, but there was no need. There were so many people pushing along the pavement in both directions that Seed would have had a job spotting him even if he’d been looking.

  Simon crossed the road and kept his eye on the shiny black shoulder patches ahead. A woman coming in the opposite direction banged his arm with hers. Simon mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ but the woman said nothing, though their collision had been her fault. He couldn’t believe how rude some people were. Aware that his mind had drifted, he pushed the thought away.

  The black jacket was gone. How could Seed have disappeared so quickly? The pavement was busy but not that busy. It wasn’t possible that Simon had lost him in the split second he’d spent thinking about that sodding woman.

  Two people walking ahead, a man and a woman, turned right and went round the side of a wide building with large windows symmetrically spaced across its faμade. Simon looked because it was the only other option. If Seed wasn’t ahead, behind or across the road . . .