nudes, a man’s face in three-quarter profile-all the sort of preliminary studies an artist does before setting out upon a new work. But instead of acting as rough ideas for a finished product that was also on display, beneath them leaned a score of incomplete canvases, project after project begun and discarded. A large worktable held a mass of artistic paraphernalia: coffee tins fi lled with clean, dry brushes like camel-hair fl owers; bottles of turps, linseed oil, and Damar varnish; a box of unused dry pastels; more than a dozen hand-labelled tubes of paint. It should have been a chaotic mess, with daubs of paint on the table and smudgy fi ngerprints on the bottles and tins, and squeeze-points on the tubes. Instead, everything was arranged as neatly and precisely as if it were on display in a Castle Museum exhibit devoted to a fanciful day-in-the-life-of presentation.
The air held no odour of paint or turpentine. No sketches piled here and there on the floor to make the suggestion of rapid artistic inspiration and equally rapid artistic rejection. No finished paintings stood waiting for the varnish that would complete them. It was apparent that someone cleaned the room regularly, for the bleached oak floor shone as if it were under glass and nowhere was there the slightest sign of dust or dirt. Just signs of disuse, and they were everywhere. Only a single easel holding a canvas stood covered with a paint-splodged cloth beneath one of the skylights, and even it looked as if it hadn’t been touched in ages.
“This was once the centre of my world,” Sarah Gordon said with simple resignation. “Can you understand, Inspector? I wanted it to be the centre again.”
Sergeant Havers, Lynley saw, had wandered to one side of the room where above a work top had been built a series of storage shelves.
These held cartons of carousels for photographic slides, dog-eared sketch pads, fresh containers of pastels, a large roll of canvas, and a variety of tools-from a set of palette knives to a pair of stretching pliers. The work top itself was covered by a large sheet of plate glass with a roughened surface to which Sergeant Havers touched her fi ngertips tentatively, a question on her face.
“Grinding colours,” Sarah Gordon told her. “That’s what it’s for. I used to grind my own colours.”
“You’re a purist then,” Lynley said.
She smiled with much the same resignation as he had heard in her voice. “When I fi rst began to paint-this was years ago-I wanted to own each part of the finished piece. I wanted to
“You lost that purity?”
“Success taints everything. In the long run.”
“And you had success.” Lynley went to the wall where her large charcoal sketches were hanging, one on top of the other. He began to browse through them. An arm, a hand, the line of jaw, a face. He was reminded of the Queen’s collection of Da Vinci’s studies. She was very talented.
“After a fashion. Yes. I had success. But that meant less to me than peace of mind. And ultimately peace of mind was what I was seeking yesterday morning.”
“Finding Elena Weaver put an end to that,” Sergeant Havers remarked.
As Lynley was looking through her sketches, Sarah had gone to stand near the covered easel. She had raised a hand to adjust its linen shroud-perhaps with the hope of keeping them from seeing how far the quality of her work had disintegrated-but she stopped and said without looking in their direction: “Elena Weaver?” Her voice sounded oddly uncertain.
“The dead girl,” Lynley said. “Elena Weaver. Did you know her?”
She turned to them. Her lips worked without making any sound. After a moment, she whispered, “Oh no.”
“Miss Gordon?”
“Her father. Anthony Weaver. I know her father.” She felt for the tall stool at one side of the easel and sat upon it. She said, “Oh my God. My poor Tony.” And as if answering a question which no one had spoken, she gestured round the room. “He was one of my students. Until early last spring when he began all the politicking for the Penford Chair, he was one of my students.”
“Students?”
“I offered classes locally for a number of years. I don’t any longer, but Tony…Dr. Weaver took most of them. He was a private student of mine as well. So I knew him. For a time we were close.” Her eyes filled. She blinked the tears away quickly.
“And did you know his daughter?”
“After a fashion. I met her several times- early last Michaelmas term-when he brought her with him to act as a model for a life-drawing class.”
“But you didn’t recognise her yesterday?”
“How could I? I didn’t even see her face.” She lowered her head, raised a hand quickly, and brushed it over her eyes. “This is going to destroy him. She was everything to him. Have you talked to him yet? Is he…? But of course you’ve talked to him. What am I asking?” She raised her head. “Is Tony all right?”
“No one takes well the death of a child.”
“But Elena was more than a child to him. He used to say that she was his hope of redemption.” She looked round the room, her expression fi lling with self-contempt. “And here I’ve been-poor little Sarah-wondering if I can begin to draw again, wondering if I’ll ever create another piece of art, wondering… while all the while Tony…How could I possibly be any more selfi sh?”
“You’re not to blame for trying to get your career back on track.”
It was, he thought, the most rational of desires. He reflected on the work he had seen hanging in her sitting room. It was crisp and clean. One somehow expected that of a lithograph, but to achieve such purity of line and detail in oil seemed remarkable. Each image-a child playing with a dog, a weary chestnut seller warming himself over his metal-drum brazier, a bicyclist pumping along in the rain-spoke of assurance in every stroke of the brush. What would it be like, Lynley wondered, to believe one had lost the ability to produce work so palpably excellent? And how could a desire to recapture that ability ever be construed as an act of selfi shness?
It seemed odd to him that she would even consider it so, and as she led them back to the front of the house, Lynley became aware of a vague disquiet in his evaluation of her, the same sort of disquiet he had felt when confronted with Anthony Weaver’s reaction to his daughter’s death. There was something about her, something in her manner and her words, that gave him pause. He couldn’t put his fi nger on what it was about her that nagged at his subconscious, yet he knew intuitively that something was there, like a reaction that was too much planned in advance. A moment later, she gave him the answer.
As Sarah Gordon opened the front door for them, Flame leaped out of his basket, began to bark, and came tearing along the passage, intent upon a gambol in the outdoors. Sarah leaned forward, grabbed onto his collar. As she did so, the towel fell from her head, and damp curling hair the rich colour of coffee streamed round her shoulders.
Lynley stared at the image of her, caught in the doorway. It was the hair and the profi le, but mostly the hair. She was the woman he had seen last night in Ivy Court.
Sarah headed for the lavatory the moment after she closed and locked the front door. With a gasp of urgency, she hurried through the sitting room, through the kitchen beyond it, and barely made it to the toilet. She vomited. Her stomach seemed to twist as previously sweet cocoa, hot and sour now, burned in her throat. It shot up towards her nose when she attempted to breathe. She coughed, gagged, and continued to vomit. Cold sweat broke out on her forehead. The floor seemed to dip, the walls to sway. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Behind her, she heard a soft whimper of sympathy. A nudge on her leg followed it. Then a head rested on one of her extended arms, and warm breath wafted against her cheek.
“It’s all right, Flame,” she said. “I’m all right. Don’t worry. Have you brought Silk with you?”
Sarah chuckled weakly at the thought of the cat’s developing a sudden change in personality. Cats were so like people. Compassion and empathy were not exactly in their line. But dogs were different.
Blindly, she reached for the mongrel and turned her face towards him. She heard his tail thump against the wall. He licked her nose. She was struck by the thought that it didn’t matter to Flame who she was, what she’d done, what she’d managed to create, or whether she made a single lasting contribution to life at all. It didn’t matter to Flame if she never put brush to canvas again. And there was comfort in that. She wanted to feel it. She tried to believe that there was nothing more in her life which she had to do.
The last spasm passed. Her stomach settled uneasily. She got to her feet and went to the basin where she rinsed her mouth, raised her head, and caught sight of her reflection in the mirror.
She raised a hand to her face, traced the lines on her forehead, the incipient creases from her nose to her
