I move the painting to one side and see a small wooden door with a sloping top set into the wall. I pull it open, find myself staring into a little cupboard, nowhere near big enough to hide a man of Aidan’s size. I’m about to close the door when I spot something on the floor. A framed picture, face-down, with a printed label on the back.
I pull it out and nearly laugh with relief when I see that the name on the back isn’t Darville. It’s a woman’s name: Martha Wyers. I’m on the point of shoving the picture back in the cupboard when something stops me.
I turn it over, then drop it a second later, as if it’s burned my skin. It falls at my feet, picture-side up and I stare, horrified. A noise escapes from my lips. I feel as if I’ve lost all control over my life, as if I’ve been set down at the centre of somebody else’s carefully orchestrated nightmare, and am being pushed further in, a little bit at a time.
I’m looking at a painting of a woman with a rope knotted round her neck. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. It isn’t a dead body, only the image of one, but it makes no difference. Mary is too good a painter. I am in the presence of Martha Wyers, whoever she is.
Was.
I can see everything: the texture of the rope, the frayed parts. How it has cut into her flesh. The bulging eyes, the purple-grey hollows beneath them, the thick protruding tongue, livid bruises on the skin around her mouth, a white, crusty ridge along her lower lip . . .
I smell smoke. Closer than before.
Mary.
‘I see you’ve found Martha,’ she says.
The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was get through the court case, with Her staring at me as if she wanted to lunge across the court and gouge out my eyes, and Him determinedly looking down at his lap so that he wouldn’t see my face. Forcing myself to go to Mary Trelease’s house for the first time was the second hardest.
It’s possible to do anything, however difficult, if you can’t imagine how your life will go on otherwise. Aidan had said to me, ‘Bring me the picture,’ so I had no choice. After London, he would barely speak to me, apart from telling me constantly that he loved me, with a shadow behind his eyes, and I started to suspect he was using sex as a way of avoiding conversation. The comfort it offered soon ceased to have an effect, and I saw that we couldn’t go on as we were. Every time I pleaded with him to open up to me, he repeated what he’d said at Alexandra Palace: ‘Bring me the picture. Bring me
Abberton
.’
I thought that if I could only put the painting in front of him, with Mary Trelease’s name and the date on it, he would see that he hadn’t killed Mary, whatever else might have passed between them. I didn’t care if I never knew what that was; all I wanted was to be happy again, for Aidan to be happy. He’d moved into the lodge, as promised, as soon as we got back to Spilling after the art fair, and I was trying hard not to think of it as him making good his threat. I longed for him to trust me as he had before London, knowing it was down to me to make that happen.
On 2 January, after a desolate Christmas, I steeled myself and phoned Saul Hansard. ‘Ruth,’ he said, sounding thrilled to hear from me. I felt guilty for having cut him out of my life, but knew I would again as soon as I’d got the information I needed from him. The sound of his voice made my skin prickle with shame.
‘Mary Trelease,’ I said. ‘I need her address.’
I should have known this would worry him, but I was having trouble thinking beyond my own needs and fears, mine and Aidan’s. ‘Why?’ Saul asked gently. ‘Whatever you’re thinking of doing, I’m not sure it’s a good idea.’
‘I’m not going to cause any trouble,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to her, that’s all.’
Saul said he’d told Mary, seconds after I’d fled the gallery, that he wouldn’t be framing for her any more. He’d told me this before, in one of the many messages he’d left on my voicemail since that day in June, but it seemed important to him to say it again. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘She’s a scary woman, Ruth. I don’t need to tell you that.’
A panicky sensation started to flicker inside me. Our conversation was dragging me back to the past, the last place I wanted to go. ‘I won’t tell Mary I got the address from you,’ I said. ‘Please, Saul. It’s important.’
He agreed in the end, as I had known he would. Then he couldn’t find it, and told me he would have to dig it out later. When he phoned back that evening, Aidan was there, watching me from across the room as I wrote it down.
‘Well?’ he said.
I could have explained that I’d contacted Saul and asked for Mary’s address, but I didn’t. We’d got into the habit of saying the bare minimum. Fewer words seemed to mean less pain. ‘Fifteen Megson Crescent,’ I said. ‘Spilling.’
Aidan’s face stiffened into a mask of shock. ‘The same house,’ he murmured. Something had blown open inside his head; some new horror had seized him. He stormed out of the room. I heard him crying in the hall as if he’d collapsed there, unable to get any further, and pressed my hands over my ears, feeling utterly helpless, thinking: the same as what—the house where he killed Mary?
Dead people didn’t move house . . . Was 15 Megson Crescent where Mary had lived when Aidan knew her?
Where he had killed her?
But she wasn’t dead. No matter how I tried to think about it, from whichever direction I approached it, nothing made sense.
The next day, I didn’t need to tell Aidan why I wasn’t going to work with him. I looked up the route in my A-Z and set off to the Winstanley estate. Impossible as it is to see the future, sometimes you can feel its presence ahead of you, dark and cloying, waiting to swallow you up. My face started to itch as I drove, the skin to feel tight as it had when Mary had sprayed me with red paint. I twisted the rear-view mirror towards me to check there was nothing there, although rationally I knew that my face would look perfectly ordinary. Red paint couldn’t reappear once it was washed off; it could hardly seep up through my pores and spill out after so many months.
I stood in Mary’s untended front yard, my whole body a screaming knot of tension, and knocked on the door. When she opened it and saw me, she let out a loud breath and looked at me with some emotion on her face that I couldn’t identify. ‘Ruth Bussey,’ she said slowly. ‘Come to inspect my hovel and feel superior. ’
I didn’t know what she was talking about. The idea of my feeling superior to anybody was so laughable that I couldn’t think of anything to say in response.
‘Saul Hansard as good as threw me out on the street after our spat at the gallery. It must be nice to have a gallant hero to protect you.’
Strange equations filled my mind: sarcasm equals aggression equals attack. I clenched my hands into fists, turned, ran. ‘Wait, don’t go,’ Mary called after me. I collided with a wall, too frightened to think about which way I was going, and felt something sharp spike my skin through my shirt. I looked down. There was a small red dot on the cotton.
‘I’ll get you a plaster to put on it,’ said Mary. ‘There are some in the bathroom cabinet, if they haven’t crumbled to dust by now. They’ve been there since I moved in. So’s that killer weed.’ She beckoned me towards her.
I couldn’t believe she was inviting me inside. To mask my confusion, I muttered, ‘It’s not a weed.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing.’
Mary walked over to where I was standing and stroked the plant that had pricked me. ‘You know what this is?’
I nodded, not looking at her. I’d seen hundreds. Never one sharp enough to pierce skin, though, until now. I was trembling, unable to keep still.
‘Tell me.’
It seemed easier than talking about what I was doing at her house. ‘It’s called a sempervivum. It’s been planted there, to grow out of the wall.’ I felt idiotic, after injuring myself so clumsily, and expected her to burst out laughing.
‘In that case, I’d better not yank it out,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Come on, if you’re coming.’ She took it for granted that I would follow her. I did, round the back of the house and into her kitchen, which was horrible and falling apart. ‘You’re shocked by the state of the place,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘I’ve done nothing to it since I moved in.’ She said something then about the charm of a found object, but I wasn’t fully listening. How was I going to get
Abberton
? Why hadn’t I foreseen how impossible it would be? I considered telling the truth, then rejected the idea.
My boyfriend thinks he killed you years ago—would you mind giving me the picture you refused to sell me last June, so that I can prove to him that you’re alive?
Mary told me to wait in the kitchen while she went to fetch a plaster. I didn’t need one—my wound was a pinprick, almost non-existent—but I didn’t want to risk antagonising her. As soon as she was out of sight, I felt trapped in the room, even though the door was open. Frantically, I itemised objects I could see to calm myself: kettle, microwave, a tea towel with ‘Villiers’ printed on it beside a picture of what looked like a big stone castle, four boxes of Twinings Peppermint tea, stacked one on top of the other . . .
I couldn’t concentrate or keep still. I went out into the hall, which was small, narrow and smelled of a mixture of noxious substances: smoke, gas, grease. There was another open door to my left, through which I could see, above a gas fire with bent bars and ropes of dust clinging to it like grey tinsel that had lost its shine, a painting of a boy with a pen in his hand. He had written the words ‘Joy Division’ on the wall and was standing back to survey his work. His face wasn’t visible, only the back of his head. Instantly, I recognised the picture as Mary’s handiwork. Something about the boy’s posture made it look as if he might turn round any second and catch me spying on him. I found the painting disconcerting; it made me want to lower my eyes. How did she do that? How could she take a brush and some paints and produce something as extraordinary as this?
Mary leaped down the stairs, landing beside me, making me cry out in alarm. ‘Here we go. Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.’ She was holding a plaster in her hand. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t still angry with me, why she cared that I was bleeding.
I put out my hand to take the plaster, but Mary was already ripping the paper tabs off it. Once they were gone, she put the plaster between her teeth and pulled up my shirt. I hadn’t been expecting it, and I recoiled. My back hit the wall. It was too late. She’d seen the scar, the thick pink line that divides my stomach in half. She must have seen my bra, too, having pulled my shirt up higher than she needed to.
She wasn’t interested in that, though. I could see where her eyes had landed, on my damaged skin. After the operation, I’d heard a nurse who thought I was asleep say, ‘Better hope she never puts on any weight. That stomach ever gets fat, it’ll look like an arse.’ A male nurse had laughed and called her a catty bitch.
Mary was fascinated by my scar. She stared unashamedly. I itched to yank my shirt ends out of her hand and cover myself, but I was afraid to give my own wishes precedence over hers. She wanted to look, and I knew what happened when I displeased her.
She licked her finger, wiped a spot of blood from my skin and rubbed the plaster on, her knuckle moving back and forth across the material. She’s insane, I thought as she smiled at me. It occurred to me that this so-called help might be a subtle form of attack. If her aim was to humiliate me, she’d succeeded again.
‘What do you think of it?’ she asked, nodding at the Joy Division picture through the open door. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Yes.’
She looked puzzled. ‘What, that’s it? I thought you loved my work. So much that you couldn’t wait to get your hands on it.’
‘It’s . . . it’s good. They’re all good.’ Two more of her paintings were up in the hall, one of a man, a woman and a boy sitting round a table, the other of the same man and woman, her looking in a mirror, him behind her, lying on the bed. Her face was visible only in the glass, reflected; her gaze seemed to taunt me, and I turned away. Against the drab wallpaper, Mary’s paintings stood out, vibrant and mesmerising, like diamonds shining out from a bed of sludge. The sight jarred; these pictures looked wrong here, violently out of kilter, yet without them the house would have had nothing. I had a powerful sense—one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever had—that 15 Megson Crescent needed Mary’s paintings.
‘I know—you wouldn’t want them on your wall,’ she said, mistaking my awe for distaste. ‘A pretty scabby family, all things considered, but that’s life on the Winstanley estate. You’re brave to risk a visit. That lot don’t live here any more, but there are more of the same, and even worse.’
‘I’m not brave,’ I told her. Couldn’t she see I was petrified? Was she mocking me?
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘I owe you an apology for what happened last June. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
Talk about something else. Please, change the subject.
I’d clamped my mouth shut and my jaw was starting to ache.
‘
I
was frightened. Selfishly, I didn’t think . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished. ‘It still bothers you, doesn’t it? What happened at the gallery.’
How dared she expect confirmation from me? Rage began to blister inside me, but I tried to nod as if I felt fine. My natural reaction to anger: bury it before it’s used against me. Deny it an outlet. It was practically the first thing I learned as a child in my parents’ house: I wasn’t entitled to my natural responses, especially the more ‘un-Christian’ ones. I was allowed to manifest only those states of mind that would please my mother and father, make them proud of me. Anger, particularly anger directed at them, didn’t qualify.
‘Why
does
it still bother you?’ Mary waited for an answer I had no intention of giving her. ‘Do you blame yourself, is that it? Why do we do that? Human beings, I mean. Why do we take each mishap that strikes us, and twist it until it loses its randomness and becomes a big black arrow pointing at us, proving our worthlessness?’