The Girl in the Gallery

by Alice Castle

  ‘But what are we going to do? Sophia always tells us what the calorie count is. I don’t know if I’m allowed this snack,’ said Alexa McKinnon, her cheekbones so sharp they looked as though they might pierce her skin, her uniform jumper hanging off her in swathes. She had a carrot baton clutched in her scrawny hand.

  Miss Troughton noticed the whole band (what was the collective noun for anorexics? A diet, maybe, or a rattle, she thought with a silent snort) was huddling in sweaters, despite the warm day. It was partly, she knew, a technique to disguise their weight loss. It was also necessary, as extremely skinny girls felt the cold acutely, no matter how hot the weather. Indeed, if they continued to full-blown anorexia, they would start to grow long, downy hairs on their arms and legs as their bodies tried to conserve warmth. Their periods would stop. Their hair and teeth might fall out. It was ugly facts like this that Miss Troughton was constantly urging Miss Douglas to disseminate. No teenage girl wants to look like a gummy, wizened yeti. But making such announcements would acknowledge that there was a problem, the girls would tell their parents, the parents would tell their friends…

  Poor Angela. She couldn’t be the Head of a school with a major anorexia problem. She had so much to balance. Reputation, publicity, health… these silly children made Miss Troughton so angry. Why wouldn’t they just eat a slice of cake, for the love of God? Her own stomach was rumbling just at the thought of what these kids were not consuming. Even that carrot baton looked rather tasty. Oh, they were ridiculous. She took a big step forward, forgetting that stealth was her watchword. The girls looked up from their confab, startled. Their eyes, already rendered huge in their slender, starved faces, opened even wider. ‘What’s all this, girls? Shouldn’t you be in a class?’ thundered the Trout.

  Lizzy George, her long dark hair framing her oval face like a medieval Madonna – though no Van Eyck would have painted the Mother of God so urgently in need of a pie – spoke up. ‘Do you know what’s happened to Sophia? We need to talk to her… we were just wondering…’

  ‘Now, what would you need her for so urgently, hmmm?’ said Miss Troughton, scanning the pinched features of the little gathering. There was a slight shuffling as no-one met her eyes. ‘Desperately wanted to discuss your French homework, did you?’ This was Miss Troughton’s attempt at a joke, but the girls were too startled, too directionless without their leader, possibly even just too hungry, to realise.

  ‘Yes, about the homework…’ Lizzy nodded a head that looked much too large for her scrawny neck. Alexa McKinnon had hidden away the carrot stick. She had not, Miss Troughton surmised, eaten it.

  She looked once again round the half-starved circle. ‘Listen to me, girls, you do not need Sophia Jones-Creedy here, bossing you around and telling you what to do. Now go to your next class – and for goodness’ sake, have a snack!’

  At the mention of their leader, and maybe the word ‘snack’, the girls’ faces suddenly looked shuttered again, and they gathered their bags and moved off.

  Miss Troughton sighed, ‘Bloody girls,’ and made her way back to her classroom, where Year 10, hovering on the brink of GCSEs and therefore with fear making them a little more manageable, were murmuring while getting their books out of their overstuffed bags.

  ***

  Beth stood outside the Picture Gallery, hitching her bag from one shoulder to the next and looking at her watch. York was already five minutes late. It wasn’t like him. Though Ben had been picked up from school by Katie, and was thrilled to be spending a rare midweek supper with Charlie despite his friend’s hectic tutoring and piano practice schedule, Beth was on edge.

  A tiny bit of this was because Ben wasn’t the only guest tonight – Charlie had already had a playdate fixed up with the new boy in the class, Matteo. Beth had been surprised when Katie had said this, given that the tutoring routine was usually sacrosanct.

  Beth was also a bit wary. If Ben had a fault, it was that he could be possessive. He was used to having his mother all to himself, with no father to claim any of her attention. Beth knew he felt the same sense of entitlement to all his favourite people’s focus – and that included Charlie.

  Three was never a good number on a playdate, but she could hardly complain, having foisted her son on Katie at a moment’s notice. She prayed this Matteo kid was nice and, though she didn’t like to admit it, she hoped that if anyone got left out of things – as inevitably happened with these eternal triangle relationships – it would not be her boy.

  And she was still feeling jittery, being back here. It wasn’t hard to guess the reason. There was still a bit of police tape attached to the Gallery entrance, and the other visitors were peering about them a lot more than usual. Either it was Beth’s imagination, or the place had a different, much less benign aura after the events of the morning.

  Though she felt distinctly wimpy admitting it, Beth wasn’t mad keen to go back inside the Gallery at all. Maybe she was being oversensitive, but every time she shut her eyes, that pale body floated across her consciousness, the feel of the girl’s cold, unresponsive hand, the blue veins under the white skin, the incongruously festive shimmer of her sequinned dress… This morning, the girl had reminded Beth of Millais’ Ophelia, but now the vision in her mind’s eye had changed and the girl was more like the Lady of Shalott, pale and bound for death, drifting downriver to Camelot with her dress and hair streaming free. They were not happy visions.

  Beth shivered and, despite the warmth of the day, wrapped her arms around herself. She was just wondering if she should go and sit in the café, safely in the concrete and glass extension abutting the Gallery itself, which was bound to be a lot less conducive to creepy visions, when she saw York striding towards her. Relief flooded through her. It took him seconds to cover the distance, and one searching glance seemed to tell him all he needed to know.

  ‘Bit spooked? Don’t worry, it won’t be as bad as you think. Let’s get it over with.’ He pushed open the heavy door to the Gallery with its ornate panelled and studded door, and held it with his shoulder, allowing in a couple of elderly ladies before ushering Beth through. She automatically started hunting through her uncooperative bag for her Friends’ pass, but York waved his warrant card at the ladies on the desk, leaving them muttering to each other in his wake. Tricia had, of course, seized the opportunity to go home and had probably spent the rest of the day spreading rumours far and wide from her sofa.

  ‘Look, we’ve not got much to go on, so I thought it would be helpful if we just went through exactly what happened this morning,’ said York, trying to keep his voice down discreetly. But his size, sense of purpose, and obvious lack of interest in the pictures had already drawn both disapproving and curious glances from the art lovers meandering though the rooms.

  ‘You mean she hasn’t woken up?’ Beth was shocked, eyes wide and anxious.

  York looked at her. ‘I wish I could tell you that she’s sitting up in bed, shovelling down a Full English, with roses in her cheeks. But…’ He shrugged unhappily.

  ‘The longer that goes on, the longer she stays unconscious…’ Beth didn’t finish the sentence, but her stricken face said it all.

  ‘The worse the prognosis is. That’s why we’ve got to try and find out what happened from this end,’ York said, purposeful again. ‘Now. When you came in this morning. Where exactly did you start?’

  Beth was back on safer ground now; with the paintings she’d loved since childhood. These canvases had seen it all in their time. They’d witnessed savage spats between lovers, family rows, bad behaviour of all possible types from the streams of visitors who stopped and bickered in front of them over the centuries. They’d seen her squabbling with her own brother often enough, when their mother had dragged them round on rainy childhood Saturdays. An attempted murder was, well – not nothing new, but something the pictures, at least, could take in their stride. They hung as peacefully as ever, reminders of the interests and obsessions of past centuries, not the lusts, wild angers, and rages dr
iving whoever had dumped the girl here.

  But dumped was not the right word to use, Beth corrected herself. The girl had been nothing if not carefully positioned, posed even, and by someone who had a curious sense of place or theatre.

  ‘Why here? That’s the question you need to answer,’ said Beth, turning to York. But he was distracted, poring over his phone.

  ‘Damn. I’ll just have to return this call,’ he said to Beth over his shoulder. He was already striding back toward the exit.

  Beth, standing in the centre of the main gallery, realised this was what she had been dreading. Though there were knots of visitors here and there, admiring a picture or craning to read the little potted biographies beside each frame, she felt alone. It was the same as this morning – but so different. Then, she’d been perfectly content to have the place to herself, had even relished her little game of picking the day’s favourite to save from conflagration.

  Now, things had changed. Sir John Soane’s lavishly-hung walls suddenly seemed oppressively cluttered and the background colour the pictures were displayed on, easily identified by Beth and any other Dulwich resident as Farrow & Ball’s delicious Eating Room Red, now looked like nothing so much as congealed blood. She couldn’t help shuddering. She was close to the mausoleum now. Did she have the courage to retrace her steps?

  Chapter Five

  Beth was dithering as York walked into the gallery again. He paused as she made up her mind, and set off bravely to make the left turn that would take her to the forbidding stone annexe. He caught up with her in three strides, taking her by the arm.

  ‘Do you want to do this?’ No need to spell it out.

  Beth swallowed, and nodded.

  ‘Ok then,’ he smiled. They moved forward together.

  It was proof, for Beth, that things are never quite as awful as you imagine. The mausoleum, masterpiece of Georgian elegance and restraint, was always going to be forbidding. It was a frankly bleak place, designed to make the onlooker contemplate the eternal, and its involvement in this morning’s escapade did nothing to diminish its atmospheric power. But aside from the thin plastic yellow and black police tape, which York stepped over and Beth slipped under, there was nothing here to give any indication that the three bodies already lying here in state had had a recent visitor who’d been a little less moribund.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ York said, as they stood in the small round anteroom which led to the mausoleum proper.

  Beth looked up at him. Was it her imagination, or did he seem a little more purposeful, after that phone call? Something seemed to have shifted. There was a new sense of urgency and resolve about him. She responded to it. This puzzle must have a solution. Together, they could find it.

  ‘Well, it’s not a part of the gallery that I love. It’s always given me the heebie-jeebies,’ she said, peeping up at him for understanding, quickly enough to see him suppress a smile at her choice of words.

  He wiped it from his face, saying, ‘Go on.’

  ‘So, I wasn’t planning to go in at all, but as I passed by, I saw something. After what happened, at the school,’ she said, with an emphasis that told him she was referring to their blood-drenched first meeting, ‘I knew I wanted someone with me if I found um…anything again. So, I went back and got that intern, Tricia. Well, you saw what she’s like,’ said Beth, with a shrug. York grimaced. ‘I finally got her back here, for some moral support, and for a moment it was as though I’d imagined the whole thing. We stepped into that little round anteroom,’ said Beth, pointing, ‘And the relief was incredible. There was nothing sinister at all. I was just starting to feel really silly, and then – well, Tricia caught sight of something over my shoulder.’ She glanced at him for understanding. He nodded back.

  ‘It was like one of those scary films. I was just saying to Tricia, “Oh, it was nothing,” and feeling a bit of an idiot, frankly, when her face completely changed. She was standing there.’ Beth pointed to a spot right opposite the maroon marble sarcophagus that was now, again, the last resting place of Margaret Devereux alone. ‘And she saw… Well, she just froze. People talk about the colour draining out of your face. It really does happen. Then she was just… catatonic.’

  ‘The girl? Or Tricia?’ York asked.

  ‘Both,’ said Beth sadly. ‘That’s when I called you.’

  They were silent for a moment. Meanwhile, the cold orange light from the lantern above them was beginning to fade, and longer and longer shadows starting to stretch along the sides of the three sarcophagi.

  ‘Who was on the phone just now?’ Beth blurted, to break the stillness. Standing here, among the dead and with her discovery so fresh in her mind, was seriously creeping her out. ‘Was it to do with the case?’

  She knew it was none of her business, and she wasn’t expecting an answer. But York took her arm again and led her back out into the main gallery. It wasn’t until she took a huge heaving gasp that she realised she’d almost stopped breathing while they’d been in the mausoleum. His determined footsteps, as usual, had people jerking their heads round from their peaceful contemplation of the art.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, and towed her after him, making her take two steps to his every one. But Beth wasn’t complaining. The Picture Gallery had been her place of refuge for as long as she could remember. After this morning, all that had changed. She couldn’t wait to leave.

  Once they were back outside in the reassuringly normal surroundings of the gardens, with the usual queue of people waiting for tables outside the café and a group of children playing tag around the mulberry tree, Beth felt a lot better.

  ‘We could sit over there, on the bench,’ she said, indicating a spot a little way away from the rest of the visitors.

  ‘Good idea. I’ll get us a coffee. Or a tea?’ York cocked his head.

  ‘Tea would be great. There’s a stall, just past the café. It’s much quicker, and they do takeaways.’ York smiled at the tip, and set off again.

  He always seemed to be in motion, thought Beth, feeling so much better as she settled on the bench, her back against the warm slats of wood, not worrying overmuch about the effect of the lichen-coated seat on her worn jeans. It had been a while, now, since she’d dressed up for work. Though the teachers at Wyatt’s always looked like corporate apparatchiks, who could easily have doubled as lawyers or city whiz kids, no-one looked askance any more at her own distinctly casual take on work wear. At first, she’d been able to justify jeans and simple tops because she was leafing through dusty old documents. Now, people had just grown used to her look. They saw what they expected to see.

  With a jolt, Beth wondered if that was why the girl had been left in the Gallery. Where would you hide a body? With other bodies, surely? Though there was no question that she was going to be found, and found quickly, there was a certain logic and tidiness to the thinking that, she had to admit, appealed at a bizarre level to her own OCD leanings. Plus, Margaret Devereux’s tomb made a perfect platform. Even the slightly pitched lid of the tomb had only helped to emphasise the position of the girl’s hands – the most disturbing aspect of her pose, as they had so obviously been placed, by a third party, in that mock-pious cross on her chest.

  It made Beth wonder if the person behind it all was really another teenager – in many ways, it seemed the most likely scenario – or whether it was actually someone closer to the thirty-stone Milwaukee truck driver paedophile, after all. Would a teenager have enough background knowledge these days to know that crossed hands were such a motif, from crusaders’ tombs to kings and queens lying in state?

  The two pictures that the girl had reminded Beth of – the Millais Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott – didn’t feature the hand motif at all. Ophelia’s hands were apart, breaking the surface of the waters she’d drowned in, seeming to be supplicating, begging the world to save her, rather than praying or making the sign of the cross. John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott, meanwhile, was holding her boat’s cha
in in one hand, showing that she had set herself adrift, while the other hand lay uselessly in her lap, failing to steer her course.

  One of her favourite poems, Philip Larkin’s Arundel Tomb, suddenly popped into her head, in the way that poetry quietly invades a contemplative mind. She remembered the knight and his lady lying peacefully entombed in a country church. To Larkin, the shocking twist was that their stone hands are clasped together over the centuries, not crossed meekly at their breasts at all.

  Where had this person, who’d left the girl in the Gallery for her to find, got the idea of the crossed hands from? Beth sat and frowned, barely conscious of York until he’d almost reached the bench, carrying two tall cups of tea. It surprised her, until she realised that the clipped sound of his usual determined stride had been muffled by the grass.

  One look at his set face pushed the thoughts of hands and history from her head. She took the tea, plus one of those stirrer sticks and a handful of sachets of sugar, before she asked, ‘What’s happened? That call that you took just now in the Gallery, it was important, wasn’t it?’

  York looked at her, the usual bland evasion dished out to members of the public on his lips. Then he shook his head slightly. Beth knew he was weighing up what to say to her. She seemed to be developing a lamentable knack of getting herself involved in these things, which she knew drove him mad, and which she wasn’t too thrilled about herself. But on the other hand, her information could be crucial, to identify the girl – and find whoever had done this to her, before it was too late. Find the culprit, find the mix of drugs that had been administered, and they had a chance of saving her life. But the clock was ticking. She sensed that, in these circumstances, York would take any help going.