The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

As we pulled in through the school’s large sculpted iron gates, the police car was ahead of us. Claire Draisey, who turned out to be Villiers’ Director of Boarding, was waiting for us next to the side door of Garstead Cottage, taking shelter from the drizzle in a partially covered wooden outbuilding that was attached to the house. In it were two old bicycles, a watering can and a large cardboard cut-out of a cow in profile, a cow wearing a yellow earring. I didn’t register the oddness of this until later; at the time, it seemed one of the less odd aspects of the situation.

Claire Draisey’s manner was brisk, impatient. ‘This has to be the last time, Mary,’ she said. She was wearing a red dressing-gown and slippers, and looked exhausted. I’d warned Mary that everyone at the school might be asleep, but she’d dismissed my concern. ‘They get woken up all the time,’ she said. ‘It’s a boarding school-goes with the territory. The staff who are soft enough to need to rest don’t live on site. In exchange for their beauty sleep, they’re frowned upon and overlooked for promotion. ’

Strangest of all was what Claire Draisey didn’t say: she didn’t ask Mary what or who she was worried about, why she wanted the police to check the house. The policeman who was there didn’t ask either. He and Draisey had a familiar manner around one another, as though they’d done this many times before. He checked that all the doors and windows were secure. He and Mary went into the cottage together and checked for intruders. Mary asked him if he’d wait outside in his car until it was light, but Claire Draisey said, ‘Don’t be silly, Mary. Of course he can’t.’

‘This time there’s been an actual threat,’ Mary told her. ‘It’s not only myself I’m worried about.’ She indicated me. It made me feel flustered. So does the breakfast and tea on a tray. I don’t want to like Mary, not after what she did to me at Saul’s gallery. If she can attack me and still be a good person, what does that say about me?

What does it say about Stephen Elton and Gemma Crowther?

‘I can say their names,’ I tell her as she puts the sandwich into my hands. ‘The people who lived at Cherub Cottage. I’ve called them Him and Her for years. I couldn’t write their names when I wrote you the letter. But now that you know the story, I can say them. He was called Stephen Elton. She was called Gemma Crowther.’

‘Was?’

‘Is.’

Mary nods. ‘I know.’

‘What?’ The air around me thins out. I feel dizzy, as if I’ve been deprived of oxygen.

‘There’s a lot I need to tell you.’

‘You can’t know their names. It’s not possible.’

‘You’d better sit down,’ she says, bending to pick something up. The sandwich. I didn’t realise I’d dropped it. I stay on my feet.

‘After that day at Saul Hansard’s gallery, when you tried to force me to sell you my painting, I was scared. You were too keen. I didn’t trust you. I thought you-’ She breaks off, tuts at her inability to say what needs to be said. ‘I convinced myself that you meant me harm. I… I had to know who you were, who’d put you up to it. As far as I could see, it could only be one person.’

‘Aidan?’ I guess.

‘Aidan.’

‘But…’

‘It won’t make any sense to you, not yet. Not until I show you what he did to me.’ Mary sits down on the bed, pulls her cigarettes and lighter out of her pocket. ‘I told Saul I wanted to write to you and apologise. He wouldn’t give me your address, but he told me your name, said I could write to you care of the gallery. I was sorry, or rather, I was prepared to be, if it turned out…’

‘What?’ I say.

‘I had to know why you wanted that picture so much. It was unnatural, the way you latched on to it, as if you had to have it. Have you heard of First Call?’

‘No.’

Mary lights a cigarette, inhales. ‘They’re a firm of private investigators in Rawndesley. Someone I used to know works there. I paid him to find out about you. Your background, everything-as much as there was to know about you, I wanted to know it.’

‘The man with the red bobble hat and the dog.’

‘You saw him?’

‘He kept walking past my house. Looking in at the windows.’

‘You were suspicious of him even with the hat and the dog?’ She almost smiles. ‘I’ll have to tell him he’s wrong. He thinks they make him look innocuous. He’s a bit of a clown, but he got the job done, gave me the information I wanted. From him, I found out about your religious background, your award-winning garden design business.’ She pauses, as if reluctant to state the obvious. ‘And what happened to you in April 2000. Gemma Crowther and Stephen Elton, the court case.’

My skin feels as if tiny bugs are crawling over every inch of it. A stranger watching me, reporting back to Mary…

‘I’ve hired him before, successfully. I knew he could dredge up anything of interest. First Call mainly work for insurance and credit card companies, on fraud cases, but they’ve got one or two people who specialise in what they call “matters that require complete discretion”. He’s one of them.’

She shrugs. ‘What can I say? I’m sorry. He followed you for a few weeks-weeks during which, by all accounts, you hardly left the house. When he told me that, I felt terrible. It was never my intention to drive you out of your job and turn you into a recluse. There was no way I could have known what had happened to you in Lincoln.’ Mary bites her lip. ‘I’m sure my impassioned self-justification speech is the last thing you want to hear. Anyway… I had him keep an eye on you long enough to satisfy me that you had no connection, past or present, to Aidan Seed, and then I called him off.’

‘I saw him on Sunday. And Monday,’ I tell her.

Her expression hardens. ‘When a cop turned up on Friday asking about Aidan, I panicked. I’d thought things were stable; clearly they weren’t. I needed to know what had changed. And then Charlie Zailer came round on Monday morning to tell me you were Aidan’s girlfriend. About fifteen minutes after she left my house, I got a call from First Call telling me the same thing.’

‘I didn’t know Aidan last June,’ I say, aware I’m not the one in need of a defence. ‘I met him later, in August. I needed a job, and Saul told me Aidan needed an assistant.’

‘How perfectly ironic,’ says Mary. ‘It was my fault you met him. One more thing to feel bad about.’

I want to tell her that meeting Aidan’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, but I can’t say it and mean it, not without knowing what he’s done. Not unconditionally.

‘Did you know Aidan used to work for Saul, before he set up on his own?’ Mary asks.

I shake my head.

‘That’s another reason I thought he had to be pulling your strings-the Saul connection. It seemed too much of a coincidence. ’ Anguish flares in her eyes. ‘I thought you wanted the painting so that you could give it to him.’

I look away. I’m not brave enough to tell her that was exactly what happened, only later. Not in June last year, but after Christmas, when I went to Megson Crescent for that very reason: to get Abberton because Aidan wanted it. Needed it.

Mary sucks hard on her cigarette. ‘When I told Saul I’d been thrown by how pushy you were, he said you were always like that about pictures you fell in love with. That’s how you met him, right? He told me the story: you wanted a painting that was in his window and told him you’d pay any price for it, however high. I realised then that you weren’t trying to work me-you really did fall in love with Abberton.’

‘Yesterday, at your house, I found another canvas. It was unfinished, but it looked a bit like Abberton. There was a different name on the back: Blandford.’

‘What about it?’ Mary flicks ash on the carpet, rubs it in with her bare foot.

‘Is it… are the two pictures part of a series?’

‘Why do you want to know? Yes, part of a series,’ she says quickly. ‘Why?’

‘A series of how many?’

She lifts her chin: a defensive stance, designed to keep me at a distance. ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll see how far I get before I run out of steam.’

I’ve got no choice, not if I want to find out the truth. ‘Nine,’ I say. ‘Abberton,