maker had a few balls to spare and got carried away. I want to wrench the ugly, coarse spirals out of her scalp one by one. ‘Ruth,’ she says, clutching the door with both hands, clinging to it as she pulls it back to let me in. ‘You came back.’ She’s surprised. Was she counting on my being scared for ever?
‘Where is he?’ I ask.
‘He?’
I barge past her, pushing open doors. There’s no one in any of the downstairs rooms. Only me and Mary in the hall. And the people in the paintings on the walls, the small woman with doughy skin and pointed features all bunched up in the middle of her face. In one of the pictures she’s looking in a mirror and her reflection is staring straight at me. She looks mean, as if she wants to accuse me of something.
‘Ruth?’ Mary touches my arm. ‘What’s wrong? Who are you looking for?’
‘Aidan. Where is he?’ I start to climb the stairs.
‘Aidan Seed? The man the police keep asking me about?’ Mary follows me. ‘I don’t know him.’
‘You’re lying! He was here last night. He was here last weekend. ’
‘Calm down.’ She comes towards me on the landing, tries to take hold of me.
‘Get away from me!’
‘All right. Don’t worry, I won’t touch you. Can we sit down and talk about this? I don’t understand what’s happened or what you’re accusing me of, but I promise you, Aidan’s not here.’
I turn away from her and give the door behind me a hard shove, smacking it against a wall. The bathroom. Tiny. No Aidan. Above the lavatory there’s an airing cupboard. I start to pull out towels, sheets, pillowcases. Soon it’s empty.
Nothing.
‘Where is he?’ I say again.
‘He’s not here, Ruth. Let’s go downstairs and talk. I was hoping you might have brought me something.’ She mimes writing.
My eyes move to the next door, the one she’s blocking with her body. ‘Get out of the way. He’s in there, isn’t he? With all the paintings.’
Her smile dips, pulls into a tight line. ‘Your Aidan Seed isn’t here. I can see you’re not going to believe me until you’ve checked for yourself. Go ahead, be my guest. I’ll be downstairs, when you’re ready to talk.’
Once she’s gone, I start to search the rooms. In her bedroom, I empty drawers and a wardrobe, not bothering to put anything back. I look under the bed, behind the mould-spotted curtains. Aidan isn’t there. Nor are his clothes or any of his possessions.
A voice in my head whispers:
The second door won’t open all the way. The room is too full of Mary’s pictures. Carefully, I manoeuvre myself in. There’s a pounding sound coming from downstairs: music. I hear the word ‘survivor’ shouted once, twice. The smell of smoke drifts up to me. I know she’s in the kitchen with a cigarette in her hand, waiting for me to admit defeat.
If a person wanted to hide in this house, this is the place they’d pick. One by one, I drag the canvases through to the other room, Mary’s bedroom. She must be able to hear what I’m doing, but she doesn’t try to stop me. Before long, the room is full. Canvases are piled up on the bed, leaning against it on every side. I’ve used up every inch of space, yet the front bedroom is still far from empty. I’ll have to start putting things in the bathroom.
My arms ache, but I can’t allow myself to give up, even though I know by now that I won’t find Aidan here.
I stop when I see a word I recognise. It’s been written in black marker pen on the back of an unframed picture: BLANDFORD.
Hardly daring to touch it, I force myself to turn the canvas round. A chill spreads through me. It’s unfinished, but Mary has done enough work on it to make it instantly familiar. An outline of a person-again, one that could be male or female. Head and shoulders only this time, and nothing inside the black line, not yet. Behind the figure, part of the background has been painted in: a bedroom. This one, the one I’m standing in-Mary’s picture room. The curtains and wallpaper are the same, though there are no piles of pictures in the painted version. Instead, there’s a double bed with a chair next to it. On the chair, there’s a glass ashtray with a hand holding a cigarette over it, the ash waiting to drop.
…
Aidan was right.
My breaths come too quickly, making me feel dizzy. I tell myself there’s nothing to be afraid of: a mystery is only a mystery until you know the answer. I’ll ask Mary-I’ll make her tell me. There must be a reason why Aidan knew all the names.
I’m about to leave the room when I notice an iron handle next to the edge of a painting of a large stone building with a pointed roof and a square tower on one side. Without the windows, it might be a dark rocket, waiting for lift-off.
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.
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.
‘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
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
