disappeared to. Calvi, it turned out, was also in Corsica. It seemed like a sign of some kind, or more likely one of those coincidences that just happen.
Pip said, ‘Shall I give this to Bren?’
‘No, leave it with me. We don’t want to confuse things. Thanks.’ She gave Pip a little smile and she grinned back.
‘Sure, boss.’
As Kathy was getting ready to leave for the night, she decided to ring Donald Fotheringham to see how he was getting on with Tina.
‘Like a house on fire, Inspector.’
‘Really?’ Kathy tried to imagine it. They seemed the most unlikely of companions. ‘That’s good.’
‘Aye. She’s an interesting lassie, and a good friend to Marion. I was afraid at first that we wouldnae hit it off. I spoke to her flatmate, a girl called Jummai, who seemed to feel that we wouldn’t, but all went well after I explained to Tina that I just wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to Marion. After that she agreed to let me help her.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Well, she believes that Marion’s death has something to do with the work she was doing for her thesis.’
‘Did she explain how? It doesn’t seem very likely, surely?’
‘Aye, that was my feeling too, and she didn’t really explain, but I went along with it, because I wanted to learn more about Marion’s life down here. And to tell you the truth, I’ve been finding it all very interesting.’
‘What have you been doing?’
‘We’ve been at the British Library, following the trail of Marion’s book requests. Tina has Marion’s reader’s card, and seems to be able to access her records.’
Kathy wondered where she’d got that from.
‘When we get the books we work together, reading, looking for references that might mean something. She has a list of key words.’
He sounded so enthusiastic that she wondered if he’d been looking for an excuse not to go back home. Well, Kathy thought, at least it’ll keep them both out of trouble. She couldn’t imagine Keith Rafferty having much problem with what they were doing. ‘And did you find anything?’
‘We only started today, and to be perfectly honest I can’t see where it will lead, but at least it gives me a chance to chat to her about Marion.’ He paused, and his voice took on a more loaded tone. Kathy thought the Scottish word for it would have been canny. ‘She mentioned that you had shown her Marion’s new home, Inspector. Very nice, she said, in a pricey part of town. I wondered how she could have afforded it.’
‘We’ve been wondering the same thing, Donald. Apparently the estate agent believed she had come into an inheritance, from a Scottish relative with business interests in Switzerland.
‘Switzerland!’ Fotheringham snorted. ‘The only Swiss interest in the family that I’m aware of is Bessie’s cuckoo clock. I’ll check with Bessie when I call her tonight, but I hadn’t heard of a death in the family lately, and if there had been I’d be very surprised if there was any money involved.’
•
Kathy caught the tube back to Finchley Central and walked through darkened suburban streets towards her home. There had been rain, and water dripped from branches overhanging the pavement and hissed beneath the tyres of passing cars. She hesitated as her block came into view, scanning the shadows for the shape of a human figure. When she reached the light of the front door to the lobby, she checked back over her shoulder before turning her key in the lock. There was a single envelope waiting in her scrubbed-out mailbox, with Jock’s handwritten scrawl of her name on the front. Inside were sets of keys, a note from the locksmith explaining what they’d done, and a bill.
She caught herself holding her breath as she stood in the lift waiting for the doors to close, as if half expecting someone to leap in at the last moment. The same when the doors slid open at her floor. There were two new locks on her door, and she fiddled with the keys, feeling like a gaoler. She went into the silent flat, checking it quickly, then took off her clothes and had a shower.
Afterwards, feeling a little easier, she boiled some pasta and added a jar of sauce from the fridge.
Brock was protecting her, she told herself, not from Rafferty but from herself. He was still convinced that she was identifying with Marion in a way that was disturbing her judgement. But their stories weren’t the same. Unlike Marion, whose early life had been disrupted, poverty-stricken and possibly abused, she had grown up in a perfectly happy, protected middle-class family in the London suburbs. It was only at the age of twelve that things had veered dramatically off-course. On a hot summer’s afternoon her father, that proud, rather distant and intimidating figure, had driven his car into the support structure of a bridge on the M1. The ensuing investigation revealed that he had not only corruptly abused his civil service position to aid property developers, but had also invested everything the family owned in a failed business deal. Abruptly Kathy’s childhood, seen now as a golden haze of lost innocence, was over. Her mother, affectionate but weak, was unable to cope. Together they moved up to Sheffield to live with Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom by the steelworks in Attercliffe.
It was the failing mother/rescuing aunt part that had struck Brock, Kathy supposed, that and her escaping back to London at the first opportunity. But otherwise their stories were quite different. Her own mother had barely survived the move and died soon after, and her own school career in Sheffield had been less than glorious, her escape route the police force rather than university.
All the same… She stared at Marion’s picture on the wall. Perhaps the differences between them made it impossible for Kathy to get inside that other mind. The academic stuff, for instance, the historical research that Tina seemed to think so important, what chance did Kathy have of finding her way through that? Tina must have da Silva in mind, she thought. Could da Silva, the pompous, opinionated tutor with whom Marion had apparently quarrelled, have been her lover?
Kathy had added a few more trophies to her wall alongside the images from the previous night. A picture of the unknown Victorian woman was there now, taken from the SOCO pictures, and another of Montpellier cistus, though what these images meant, and how they were related, wasn’t clear to her.
But Donald Fotheringham had mentioned Tina’s list of key words, and it occurred to her that it might help her too to navigate Marion’s mind. She searched through a pile of papers on her table and found it again, a list of seventeen items, the first ten of which were people’s names. Some of the names were up there on the enlarged photograph of Marion’s pinboard, and with the help of Tony da Silva’s biography of Rossetti, Kathy was able to work up a few notes on their stories and relationships to the central figure of Rossetti.
Lizzie Siddal was his sickly wife, the model for Millais’ Ophelia ; Rossetti married her in 1860 after a protracted relationship when it appeared that she was on the point of death. She had survived another couple of years before taking the fatal dose of laudanum.
Janey Morris, nee Burden, the wife of William Morris, was the great love of Rossetti’s life, with whom he was infatuated for about twenty years until they broke off their affair in 1877. She was also a model for the Pre- Raphaelites, painted over a hundred times by Rossetti.
Fanny Cornforth was another of Rossetti’s models and his mistress, and he was reputed to have also had a ‘flirtation’ with Annie Miller, who posed for Holman Hunt’s painting The Awakening Conscience. This painting, reproduced in da Silva’s book, showed Annie as a Victorian woman caught rising from the lap of a gentleman visitor in a living room furnished in plush Victorian style, rather, Kathy thought, like Marion’s own back room. Most striking was a large mirror on the wall behind the guilty couple, reflecting their awkward pose from behind. It had a gilt frame, very similar to the one in Marion’s bedroom, almost as if she’d composed her own interior to reflect Holman Hunt’s scene of adulterous temptation.
All of these names could be found on Marion’s pinboard, connected by a web of scarlet threads, as well as many others: Edward Burne-Jones linked with Georgiana Burne-Jones as well as Maria Zambaco; Holman Hunt with Annie Miller and also Fanny Waugh and Edith Waugh. Kathy began to see the board as a map of the complicated amorous entanglements of the group-some legitimate, others secret and adulterous.
But the other names on Tina’s checklist, the Wardles, Smiths and Haverlock, were not on Marion’s pinboard, although small images of all three of the paintings on the list were there.
Kathy referred again to the extensive index at the back of da Silva’s book and found Wardle, George. She turned to the reference and read: George Wardle was associated with William Morris between 1865 and 1889, becoming manager of Morris and Company and acting as a steadying influence on Morris’s business ventures. He
