The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

Jan put her hand to her throat, which had turned pink. ‘It was the most exciting moment of my career, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘I had to beat the collectors off with a stick. And that’s collectors plural-not just one man buying the whole lot to publicise himself as much as anything else.’ Jan let out a heavy sigh. ‘I hate to think about it now.’

‘What went wrong?’ Charlie asked.

‘I rang the artist to tell him all the work was sold and the buyers were begging for more. He was thrilled, as you can imagine. Completely beyond his wildest dreams. Then I waited. And waited. I heard nothing from him. I called him-he didn’t return my calls. It took me a while to realise he was avoiding me. In a paranoid moment, I even wondered if he’d decided to dump me, buoyed up as he was by his success. Why should he pay commission to a gallery when he could keep all the money for himself? But it wasn’t that at all. When I finally tracked him down, he told me he’d stopped painting.’

‘What?’ Charlie hadn’t been expecting that.

‘He said he couldn’t do it any more. Every time he picked up a paintbrush, he froze. I tried to persuade him to get help, but he didn’t want to. All he wanted was to leave it behind. I couldn’t force him.’

‘Stupid idiot,’ Charlie said, before she could stop herself.

‘With approval come expectation and pressure.’ Jan looked sad. ‘Perhaps Mary’s approach is the sensible one. It’s still a tragedy, though-all those amazing paintings and no one’s seeing them, no one but her. She does the most wonderful portraits. Did you see any of those?’

‘A few,’ said Charlie. ‘Her neighbours.’

‘Hardly.’ Jan laughed. ‘Mary’s not interested in anyone who’s had it easy. She said to me once, “I only want to paint people who have really suffered.” She painted disadvantaged, deprived people. There was a particular estate, I can’t remember its name…’

‘The Winstanley estate?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Her neighbours,’ Charlie said again. ‘Mary lives on the Winstanley estate, on a semi-derelict cul-de-sac that you wouldn’t want to walk down on your own at night or even during the day. She lives side by side with…’ Charlie had been about to say, ‘the dregs of the dregs,’ but she stopped herself. She had a hunch Jan’s view of the underclass was somewhat rosier than her own.

‘But Mary’s…’ Jan looked flustered. ‘She’s… I always assumed she’d live somewhere… you know. I mean, what’s a Villiers girl doing living on a run-down estate?’

‘Villiers?’ Charlie had vaguely heard of it.

‘It’s a girls’ boarding school in Surrey. I’ve only heard of it because I happened to grow up in the next village,’ said Jan, a hint of apology in her voice. ‘Mary went to school with diamond heiresses and the daughters of film stars. Seriously.’

‘Her family are rich?’ Charlie pictured 15 Megson Crescent, its peeling wallpaper and blackened carpets.

Jan laughed. ‘They must be if they sent her to Villiers. She told me the fees were around fifteen grand a year when she went, and that was years ago. A lot of her friends were called “The Hon” this or that. Mary said most of them were thick, but then she never seemed to rate anyone’s intellect very highly.’

‘Did you ever see any of her other pictures, apart from the ones she brought in for you to frame? When I was at her house I saw some unframed ones she’d put up on the walls-of a family who used to live on the estate, I think.’

Jan looked puzzled. ‘Mary was obsessive about framing her work. She didn’t regard a picture as finished until it was framed. She used to hassle me mercilessly, wanting everything framed straight away. It was almost as if…’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. As if she didn’t think they were safe until they were behind glass, or something. Or as if she didn’t think they counted, somehow. Are you sure the unframed pictures you saw were hers?’

‘Positive.’

‘How odd.’ Jan rubbed her collarbone, thinking. ‘I’m not saying you’re wrong-Mary’s style’s unmistakeable-but I can’t understand it. It’s just not Mary to leave her work unframed.’ She peered into her empty mug. ‘Another tea?’

‘No, thanks,’ said Charlie. ‘I’d best be off in a minute.’ She didn’t know how to ask about the Access 2 Art fair without sounding as if she was trying to catch Jan out: I know someone who says you lied. ‘I take it you no longer frame for Mary,’ she said eventually. ‘What went wrong?’

‘Two things, and they happened in quick succession. Mary painted something I hated-something I objected to, actually-and I couldn’t pretend to feel otherwise about it. She took exception. I still framed it for her, but that wasn’t good enough. She was used to me raving about the brilliance of everything she did-the last thing she expected was disapproval, but I honestly couldn’t help it.’

‘How come?’

‘The picture was of a young woman who was… well, dead.’ Jan sounded apologetic. ‘I can’t remember her name, though I knew it at the time-it was the painting’s title. Not a neighbour this time-someone Mary had been at school with. Another Villiers girl. A writer. She only wrote one novel, though, before she hanged herself, tragically young. Not that there’s an age when suicide isn’t tragic. I wish I could remember her name.’

‘Maybe Mary was close to her,’ Charlie suggested, remembering what Mary had said about painting people you cared about. Like offering yourself an emotional breakdown.

‘Yes,’ said Jan. ‘She told me they were inseparable, that this woman had meant everything to her and nothing to me. As if that gave her every right, and I ought to shut up if I knew what was good for me.’ Noticing that Charlie looked puzzled, she added, ‘Sorry, I should have explained. Mary painted her dead, with the noose round her neck.’ She shuddered. ‘The full suicide scene, in all its vivid, gory, undignified detail. The picture was utterly grotesque. I can’t imagine I’d be more shocked if I saw a real dead body. I mean, the poor woman… oh, her name’s on the tip of my tongue, what is it? It’ll come to me.’ Jan looked angry. ‘I know she’s dead and it can’t hurt her, but still, her family… Even if Mary never shows the painting to anyone, even if all she does is stick it in the loft…’

Charlie’s thoughts drifted back to the forbidden zone: Ruth Bussey and the wall of newspaper cuttings. Jan would have understood why Charlie wanted it destroyed, even if Dominic Lund didn’t. The thought that it was there, that it existed, was unbearable, no matter who saw or didn’t see it. Charlie felt a deep coldness in the pit of her stomach.

‘… forced my true opinion out of me, then savaged me for it,’ Jan was saying. ‘She kept going on about murder, as if I’d accused her of it.’

‘Murder? I thought you said the woman killed herself?’

‘ “Anyone would think I murdered her,” “I’m an artist, not a murderer-I didn’t kill her, I only painted her.” That sort of thing. Yes, she did kill herself-when Mary started talking about murder, I got confused, so I asked again, to check.’

‘What did Mary say?’

‘She said, “She chose to die,” as if that choice gave Mary the right to paint the poor woman disfigured by death.’ Jan shrugged. ‘I disagreed. Choosing to die and choosing to have a portrait painted of your corpse are two very different things. Don’t you think?’

She chose to die. That didn’t necessarily mean the same thing as ‘She killed herself.’ It could mean ‘She chose to behave in a way that compelled me to kill her.’ In her former life as a detective, Charlie had heard countless versions of that justification. Always from murderers.

‘Mary wasn’t about to pardon what she saw as my betrayal,’ said Jan, ‘particularly where this picture was concerned. It was one that really mattered to her, I could tell. After that, things were stilted between us at best, and then the art fair debacle killed our relationship stone dead.’

‘What happened?’

‘The picture Mary brought in the first time she came-Abberton. That was another one that was desperately important to her-she had favourites, Mary. Most artists do, come to think of it. The essential paintings and the dispensable ones. I’d had Abberton framed but Mary didn’t like the frame I’d chosen. She brought it back in a few weeks later, said she wanted the wood stained green, so I had it stained green. What Mary wants, Mary gets. The picture was here, waiting to be collected-she said she’d pick it up