‘What? Ruth!’
She’s patting my face. ‘I’m still here,’ I say. Reassuring her. She wants to hear the story. ‘Painting. You . . . took it away from Aidan. Made it yours. You were good at it. Better.’
‘Yes,’ Mary stresses the word. ‘I was better than him. He gave up. I never give up. You only need to look at our backgrounds to understand why. The shrink I saw, the one who told me to write my story in the third person—you know what else she told me?’
I try to shake my head, but it won’t move. My body is numb, detaching from the pain. I can’t feel anything but my thoughts: frail, flickering threads I’m trying hard to hold on to.
‘Ninety-five per cent of her work is undoing psychological damage done to people in childhood, by their parents. Ninety-five per cent.’ Mary sounds angry. ‘Can you believe that? I was in the other five per cent, the tiny minority. I started from a position of safety and happiness: an adoring mum and dad, before I disgraced them and brought suicide and madness to the family. Money, and the best education it could buy. I’ve always believed in my own talents and abilities. Aidan never has. His childhood was an eighteen-year prison sentence.’
‘Why?’ I fight to stay conscious.
‘I suppose it wasn’t so bad before his mum died. Even then, they were dirt poor and lived in a slum. You’ve seen the house—it’s a slum, right? You wouldn’t keep animals there, let alone use it to house human beings. Aidan’s stepfather, Len, the one in prison—he was drunk all the time, violent. The sort of person you’d expect to find on a council estate—all my Megson Crescent neighbours are versions of Len Smith, or his family.’ I hear her laugh. ‘Knock on any door and there’s someone waiting to sell you a gun and teach you how to use it. From the day Aidan was born, he was in danger from his surroundings. That’s why he gives up so easily. That’s why he’s dead and we’re not.’
‘No . . .’
‘He gave up as soon as Gemma Crowther let me into her flat. Saw me and gave up.’
‘You shot her. Not Aidan.’
‘She had my picture. He gave her my picture.’
I force my eyes open, aware that what I’ve just heard is an admission.
‘I’m afraid I forgot all about you when I saw it,’ says Mary. ‘You and her, I mean—the history. I remembered too late, once she was already dead, that she ought to have suffered, ideally, instead of dying straight away. You’d have preferred her to suffer, wouldn’t you?’
There are some punishments no one should have to endure, not even Gemma Crowther. Death. Torture. No one deserves those things. No one has the right to mete them out.
‘No?’ Mary sounds irritated. Her face is a blur; I can’t see her properly any more. ‘In that case, you’ll be relieved to hear that she didn’t feel a thing.’ She giggles, high-pitched, like a little girl. ‘I did my best for you, anyway,’ she says. ‘Or, rather, I gave Aidan instructions and saw to it that he complied. He’s the framer, not me.’ She laughs, a low, raw noise from deep in her throat. ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting and taking revenge. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Do you know what Cecily said? She and Martha had a huge row on the way home from Aidan’s private view, after Cecily had bought one of the paintings. Not that she got to keep it for long. It met with an unfortunate accident. Before Martha worked out how she was going to put a stop to Aidan’s success, she told Cecily she wanted him to fail. She wanted none of his pictures to sell, not a single one. She wanted him to fail more than she wanted to succeed herself. That’s the question the journalist from The Times should have asked, not life or work. Your own success or someone else’s failure. ’ In the short silence between ‘Survivor’ finishing and starting again, I hear the faint crackle of Mary’s cigarette as she inhales.
‘Cecily quoted some famous writer or other who’d said that writing well was the best revenge. “You’ve got your writing, Martha. Aidan’s talent doesn’t threaten yours. You don’t need him or his failure to prop you up. You can succeed without him.” That’s what she said. Have you ever heard anything so stupid? Writing well, the best revenge? What a load of shit! Is it a better revenge than killing someone, or fire-bombing their house? I don’t think so.’
Eighteen empty frames. Aidan made frames for the paintings he’d lost, the ones Mary destroyed. Why won’t she admit it?
‘I know why,’ I tell her.
‘What? You know why what?’ I can feel her face close to mine, her breathing. I twist my mouth into a smile. I want to hurt her.
I can only say it in my head, not out loud. I can tell the story to myself. Mary’s painting might have been a way to get revenge on Aidan at first, to prove she could beat him at his own game, but it came to mean more to her than that. She was good at it—not just good; brilliant. It gave her something she recognised, even in her misery, as being valuable. After a while—maybe months, maybe years—cutting up painting after painting of Aidan and adding it to the pile wasn’t enough for her. She could see she was getting better. Painting wasn’t Aidan’s talent any more, it was hers. She stopped feeling as if she was attacking Aidan when she carved a canvas to pieces with a knife, or hacked at it with a pair of scissors; she was attacking herself, her own work. She didn’t want to do that any more. Something had to change.
She started to paint other pictures that weren’t of Aidan, ones she kept. The ones I saw in her house, of the family who used to live on her estate, and the Abberton series. Those might not have been of Aidan, but they were about him. About what she did to him. They mattered to her. They were the story of her life.
‘You . . . got scared.’ I stop, try to fill my lungs with the air I need to carry on. ‘You understood . . .’ I want to tell her I know how she felt.
‘What? What did I understand?’ She shakes me, and I let out a howl of pain. My body throws out a last spurt of energy to fight it. I use it to get more words out. ‘You understood . . . how it would feel to have your pictures . . . destroyed. The worst thing . . . what you’d done to Aidan. You felt guilty.’ That’s why you won’t admit it. The guilt, once you felt the full horror of what you’d done, was more than you could bear.
‘I don’t believe in guilt,’ says Mary quickly. ‘My therapist said it was an unproductive emotion.’
I see how it must have happened: her guilt and shame transmuted into paranoia, that Aidan would find out about her—where she was living, what she was doing. That he’d do to her what she’d done to him. She couldn’t risk it. The only way to make sure it never happened was never to sell any of her paintings, to maintain absolute control. She was terrified of what Aidan might do to her, of the punishment she felt, deep down, that she deserved from him. At the same time, she couldn’t resist the impulse to close in on him, once she knew where he was—to infiltrate his life, lurk on the edges of it, where he might just notice her.
She took her paintings to Saul to be framed, knowing Aidan had worked for Saul, that Saul had bought a picture from Aidan’s exhibition. Mary had to have whatever had been Aidan’s, including Saul’s support.
You’re not a shrink.
I could be. Easily. I don’t believe I’d need any training whatsoever. All I’d need is experience, which I’ve got, and a brain, which I’ve got.
I know I’m right. Mary set out to steal Aidan’s life as a punishment, because she believed he’d stolen Martha’s. She moved to the same town, lived in his old house, did the work he used to do, mixed with people who had been his, like Saul—all without him realising. It was about proximity as much as punishment; she wanted to be close to him. Her plan worked perfectly, until I ruined it, until Saul sent me to Aidan to ask for work. That was when the past and the present crashed into one another. She must have known they would, eventually.
What was supposed to happen? I want to ask her how she imagined her and Aidan’s story would end, before I came along and disrupted her plans, but my tongue has sunk to the floor of my mouth like a lead weight. Something else has changed, too. The song h
as stopped: ‘Survivor’. Stopped for good. It’s still playing inside me, the lyrics and music imprinted on the dark walls of my mind, like gold letters left on the night by sparklers.
How can it have stopped? Mary hasn’t left the room. She doesn’t seem to notice the silence.
‘Stand up slowly and raise your hands above your head.’
Stand? I can’t move at all. Then I realise it was a man’s voice I heard, not Mary’s. He was talking to her.
Help. He’s going to help me.
I drag my eyes open and at first see nothing but Mary’s hair spread across her back. She’s turned away from me. Then she growls and lunges and I see him crouched down in the corner of the room. He’s got the gun. He knocks Mary to the ground.
Waterhouse. DC Waterhouse. He speaks to me without taking his eyes off Mary. ‘It’s all right, Ruth. There’s an ambulance on the way. You’re going to be fine. Just hold on.’
Mary crawls across the room like a spider, grabs the hammer that’s lying near Aidan. I blink at Waterhouse, my eyes watering until I can hardly see.
‘What are you planning to do with that hammer, Mary?’ He sounds calm. I like hearing his voice. ‘Put it down.’
‘No.’
‘If you try to use it on anybody, I’ll shoot. Without hestitation. ’
A few seconds later I hear a crunch of bone. All I can see is greyness.
‘There. I used it on myself, and you haven’t shot me. You were lying. Shall I carry on? I’ve got nine other fingers: Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Windus.’ She giggles hysterically.
‘Try to accept that it’s over, Mary,’ says Waterhouse.
I hear footsteps, too heavy to be Mary’s, then her voice. ‘I wouldn’t bother. If he’s got a pulse now, he won’t have for long.’
My mind clears in a flash. Why did she say that? She told me Aidan was dead. Was she lying?
I wait for Waterhouse to say the words I’m desperate to hear, but he says nothing, and I’m too weak to ask.
If he’s alive, then he’s about to die. Mary thinks he’ll die. This might be my last chance.
I don’t blame you for not trusting me, Aidan. I don’t deserve your trust.
If I pretend he and I are the only people left in the world and force my words into his mind, maybe he’ll hear me.
In London, when you told me about Mary Trelease, I didn’t say what you needed to hear. I didn’t say I loved you no matter what, even though you’d said it to me. And then the next day, when I told you I’d seen the picture: Abberton, by Mary Trelease, dated 2007 . . . I told you you couldn’t have killed her. I’d met her. I described her, described Martha Wyers. You recognised the description—the hair, the birthmark under her mouth—and you knew. In that instant, you must have seen it all: that Martha had assumed the name of the woman you’d killed. It had to mean she knew what you’d done. She knew, and she was in Spilling, she’d been to Saul’s gallery. She was moving in closer. You thought I might be hers, not yours—I might have been part of her plan. Another trick. Like your sell-out exhibition, the success you’d believed in until she showed you the truth.
You’d seen the lengths she’d go to in order to destroy you. What if she went to the police? And now you’d confessed to me—someone you no longer trusted. What if, between us, she and I could send you to prison for murder?
It won’t have taken you long to see the problem with that theory: it was too simple. Mary hadn’t gone to the police, not so far. She couldn’t have—the police had shown no interest in you. I didn’t go to them either, after what you told me in London, not straight away. And I loved you: you could see I loved you. You could feel it. You started to hope that maybe it wasn’t an act, maybe I was telling the truth. Was it a test, sending me to her house for the painting? If I was innocent, if I wasn’t conspiring with her against you, then surely I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on it—was that what you thought? When I came back with Abberton, what did you think then? That it all seemed a bit too easy: the artist who’d refused to sell me her painting suddenly decides to give it to me as a gift? Even then, you couldn’t bring yourself to believe I was on her side, because you loved me.
Was it revenge you had in mind at first? Do what she’d done to you? Did you want to get your hands on her picture so that you could obliterate it? Or did you only want to see it? You hadn’t known she was a painter until I told you. Did you want to see her work, see what it was like? Whether she was any good? Did you fantasise about killing her when you heard she’d called her painting Abberton? She was taunting you. You knew that, Mary being Mary—being Martha—she’d see it through to the end, that Abberton would be followed by Blandford, Darville , Elstow and the rest: the buyers who’d never existed and never bought your work, named after the boarding houses at her school.
What you said to me at the workshop after Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer left, about seeing the future: that if you hadn’t killed Mary Trelease already then maybe you were going to—was that the threat Mary took it for? Did you want me to tell her you’d called her a bitch and said she should get out of Spilling, go somewhere you wouldn’t find her? No, it was more than that, even if that was part of it. Waterhouse had just told me how the real Mary Trelease died—strangled, naked, in a bed. You never wanted me to know the terrible details of what you’d done. I think that was the moment you realised: if I stuck around, if we stayed together, I’d end up finding out the whole truth. You wanted to protect me. You knew I’d be terrified if you started talking about seeing the future—you wanted to drive me away so that I wouldn’t be sullied by you or your past crime. And maybe you wanted to frighten me because you were angry, too. I didn’t trust you enough to tell you the full truth about so many things. I told you I went to the police, but I didn’t mention that it was Charlie Zailer I’d spoken to, the woman whose face is all over my bedroom wall. I never told you why I stopped working for Saul, not really.
You didn’t need to try to scare Mary, if that was your intention. She was afraid of you anyway, obsessively so. She called the police to Garstead Cottage regularly, made them check you weren’t hiding in there, waiting to take your revenge. She couldn’t believe retribution wasn’t lying in wait for her, couldn’t conceive of a world in which a person might get away with a crime as serious as hers. She doesn’t care two hoots about what she did to Gemma Crowther—that, in her eyes, was justice. It’s what she did to your paintings that she can’t bear. That’s why she can’t stand to hear me say the nine names, why my asking ‘Who’s Abberton?’ at Saul’s gallery had the effect on her that it did.
At the art fair, at your insistence, I described the picture I’d seen on TiqTaq’s stand: the outline of a person, not recognisable as male or female, stuffed with what looked like scraps of painted cloth. Pieces of your pictures: that’s what she used to fill in the human form. Did you want me to get Abberton for you to prove I wasn’t lying about having seen it, or because it had those pieces in it and you wanted your pictures back, even in shreds? Maybe both. I think you wanted to have the scraps of your work rather than let her keep them.
I hear another bone-splitting crunch.
‘Don’t do that,’ says Waterhouse. ‘How can you do that to yourself?’
‘Easy. I don’t paint with my left hand.’
When I told you Saul had given me Mary’s address, the look on your face . . . you hadn’t realised until then that she was living in your old house, where you killed the real Mary Trelease. You must have been able to see that I was telling the truth, that the address meant nothing to me, but it’s hard to banish doubt once it’s crept in. You didn’t believe my love for you was unconditional, not after the way I’d reacted to your confession. And Mary—Martha—knew what you’d done. You knew that eventually she’d use that knowledge, use the power she had over you.
‘Hold on for the ambulance, Ruth. It should be here any minute.’ Waterhouse is talking to me. All I want is to know if Aidan�
��s alive or not. Why won’t he tell me that?
‘You’re not as clever as you think you are,’ I hear Mary say.
‘How clever is that?’
‘I followed you to London. You were following Aidan. You didn’t see me, did you? You took me straight to Gemma Crowther’s flat.’
‘You killed her,’ says Waterhouse.
‘Not me. Aidan.’ She knows I’m too weak to contradict her. She’s enjoying it: lying in front of me, knowing I can’t stop her.
‘You’re holding the hammer you used to knock her teeth out and hammer nails into her gums,’ says Waterhouse.
‘Aidan did those things. Why would I kill her? He wanted revenge for what she did to Ruth. Anyone would.’
‘If he was the one holding the gun on Monday night, how come he ended up getting shot?’ There’s a pause. ‘You’ve got no answer for that, have you?’
‘I’m not saying I didn’t shoot him. I’m saying I didn’t shoot Gemma.’ He’s made her angry. ‘You’re no Sherlock Holmes, are you? It’s okay, you don’t need to be. I can tell you what happened. ’
‘Go on.’
‘Where do you want me to start? Aidan had to find out about Gemma and Stephen for himself. Ruth told him nothing—can you believe that? No communication whatsoever. A relationship like that can’t last. If Ruth didn’t want him to know, she shouldn’t have kept so many trauma keepsakes. That’s very common, to do that. Did you know that?’
‘No.’
I feel as if I’m hearing the conversation from a distance. It’s like listening to a far-away radio. I could so easily drift out of the range of the voices.
‘Aidan found a box full of souvenirs under her bed, everything she’d kept from Gemma’s trial.’
When? I want to ask. I can guess the answer: after the art fair, after he moved in with me. He searched my house, looking for evidence that Mary and I were in league against him.
The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Page 46
