The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

‘We were right,’ says Charlie. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock, but you had to see it. I couldn’t not show it to you. We were right, and my boss was wrong. Ex-boss,’ she corrects herself.

‘The Murder of Mary Trelease,’ I say. ‘So she did do a copy. But… how did it get to be…?’

‘She visited Smith in prison,’ says Charlie. ‘It occurred to me on the way here that she might have. Why wouldn’t she? She wanted to get close to Aidan in any way she could, as long as it wasn’t too risky. She knew Aidan didn’t see Smith or have any contact with him. She couldn’t resist.’

‘You mean… you asked Len Smith…?’

Charlie shakes her head. ‘Sam and Aidan are with him. I haven’t seen him. No, I asked one of the wardens if I could see a list of Smith’s visitors. There was a Martha Heathcote on the list. Heathcote was her house at Villiers. I checked. The warden I asked was very helpful. He remembered Smith being extremely distressed after the visit. It’s the only visit he’s had since he’s been here-everyone thought he’d be delighted but he wasn’t. The opposite. Ms Heathcote brought him two presents, both of which he wanted nothing to do with. He told the prison staff to burn them. One was this picture. The other was a book.’

‘Ice on the Sun,’ I murmur.

‘Yes. Which is now in the prison library,’ says Charlie. ‘Resources are finite, here like everywhere else. They weren’t about to throw away a book that could go in the prison library or a painting they could stick on the wall.’

‘It’s not signed,’ I say, staring at the picture. Aidan has described it to me, but seeing it-or rather, seeing Martha’s replica-is something altogether different. The painting is of a bedroom at night. The room’s dark, but some light’s coming in through the curtains. It looks as if it might be the early hours of the morning. There are three people in the bed: an older man, asleep, wearing a sweat-stained vest, turned on his side, a yellowing pillow beneath his head, a dribble stain by his mouth. Then there’s a naked woman in the middle of the bed. Her eyes are wide open and there are faint bruises on her neck. I’m not sure anyone would say with certainty that she was dead unless they knew. On her other side, there’s a young man, or an old boy, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, sitting up, hugging his knees and crying, looking at the person looking at the picture. Aidan. She’s captured him perfectly: how he must have looked, how he must have felt.

‘He needs to see this,’ I say. ‘Can he use it to prove what happened if… if his stepfather won’t…’

Charlie’s shaking her head. ‘He won’t need to, though. Smith will do what Aidan wants him to do. It’ll be okay, you’ll see.’

‘It will,’ Saul echoes, squeezing my arm.

‘Even if she’d put the right title on it…’ says Charlie.

‘What do you mean, the right title?’ I look carefully, but can’t see a title anywhere. There’s no writing at all on the picture.

‘I thought she’d have called it The Murder of Mary Trelease,’ says Charlie. ‘I can’t understand why she didn’t. It’s as if she hasn’t quite got the courage of her convictions.’

‘What did she call it?’ asks Saul, leaning in close to the wall to look at the back of the picture. Of course: that’s where the title would be, if it were anywhere.

Carefully, with both hands, Charlie lifts the painting off the wall and turns it round so that Saul and I can read the label on the back. Tears spring to my eyes as I read Mary’s handwritten words, words that make no sense to Charlie or to Saul, and won’t to Aidan either.

Words that make sense only to me. Four, in total.

The Other Half Lives.

Acknowledgements

During the writing of this book, I received a lot of help and inspiration from the following people: Lisanne Radice, Jenny Hewson, Anneberth Lux, Mark and Cal Pannone, Guy Mart-land, Tom Palmer, James Nash, Steve Mosby, Wendy Wootton, Dan Jones, Jenny, Adele and Norman Geras, Susan Richardson, Suzie Crookes, Aimee Jacques, Katie Hill, Dominic Gregory and Rosanna Keefe, Nicky Holdsworth, Vikki Massarano, Chris Tulley, David Welsh, Anthony, Susan and Ben Rae, Jo Colley, Rebecca Hossack, Ana Finel Honigman, Fiona Harrold, Jill Birch, Christine Parsons, Morgan White, John Silver, Nicholas Van Der Vliet, Alison Steven, Nat Jansz, Anne Grey, Debra Craine, Adrian Searle, Neil Winn, Tony Weir, Swithun Cooper, Paula Cuddy, Hannah Pescod, Will Peterson.

I am particularly grateful to my superb agent Peter Straus, and my fantastic and lovely publishers, Hodder and Stoughton, especially Carolyn Mays, Kate Howard and Karen Geary, without whose expertise and support I hope never to find myself, and Alasdair Oliver whose jacket designs are to my books what Gok Wan is to frumpy women.

Finally, I’d like to thank all the readers who have written to me-your letters, more than any other inducement, keep me motivated to write the next book.

The ‘Future Famous Five’ article took its inspiration from a real newspaper feature with the same title written by Imogen Edwards-Jones and published in The Times in 1999.

Sophie Hannah

SOPHIE HANNAH is a bestselling crime fiction writer and poet. Her psychological thrillers, including Little Face and The Wrong Mother, have been published in ten countries. Sophie lives in Yorkshire, England, with her husband and two children.

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