The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

the table with a rope round her neck, attached to the light fitting. He didn’t say anything when he saw her like that, and she said only one thing to him: “You can keep the fifty grand. I won’t be needing it.” And then she jumped.’ Both of us shift suddenly as Mary says the last word, conscious of how it would feel to fall through the air, your fall broken only by a sharp jerk that snaps your neck.

‘Why were you there?’ I ask, trying to banish the creeping hollow sensation Mary’s story has left me with.

‘Martha and I were inseparable,’ she says, her eyes and voice flat.

‘Until she met Aidan?’

‘Even after that.’

‘So…’ I struggle to pin down what’s niggling at me. Was Mary in the room when Martha put the rope round her neck? Did she egg her on? Did she stand by and watch, saying nothing. Aidan and Mary, the two people closest to Martha, both artists. ‘Did Aidan know you were a painter too?’ I ask.

‘I wasn’t. Before Martha died, I’d never painted anything in my life, apart from the bowls of fruit people put in front of me at school.’

Impossible, I want to say. ‘But…’ You’re too good for that to be true.

‘It’s true,’ says Mary. She kneels down in front of the dressing table mirror, lifts her chin and strokes her neck. ‘Aidan was the one who made me start painting. We… both of us were there, when she died. Neither of us saved her. Afterwards, we were both complete wrecks. We only had each other to talk to about what had happened. No one else would have understood. Aidan told me painting was what he’d always done to get rid of his pain. He didn’t say “pain”. He called it “all the shit that’s in my head”. There was shit in my head too, plenty of it, so I took his advice. He helped me, told me I was good, properly good. He said I was better than him.’

She breaks off. ‘There’s no excuse for the way I… forgave him everything he’d done to her. He told me what it had been like for him, and it sounded so different. Not at all like what Martha had told me. Even knowing how he’d treated her… As I said, there’s no excuse.’

‘Did you and Aidan…’

Mary snorts. ‘We became friends, nothing more. Or rather, I thought we were.’ She turns her head the other way, stares at her lined face, reflected. ‘So, now you see how selfish I am. I don’t hate Aidan for what he did to Martha. I like to tell myself I do, because it makes me feel better about myself, but it’s not true. I hate him for what he did to me.’

I haven’t got it in me to ask.

Mary rises to her feet. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I’ll show you.’

I follow her out of the bedroom. It’s less smoky on the landing, though some of the smell has drifted out. We go down the steep staircase into the large kitchen, through an open-plan lounge-cum-study with a beamed ceiling. This leads through to a narrow hall, at one end of which is a closed door. Mary reaches up for the key that’s balanced on top of the door frame. ‘I keep it locked,’ she says. ‘What’s inside is precious to me. No one’s seen it apart from Cecily, Aidan and the police.’

‘The police?’

‘The various unlucky members of the Farnham constabulary who come round periodically, when I get paranoid, to check Aidan isn’t hiding in the house with an axe. Except the one last night, he didn’t ask to look inside. They’re so sick of me by now, they don’t check properly any more.’

She unlocks the door and pulls it open, standing aside so that I can see. The stench of paint fumes from the room is almost unbearable. At first I don’t know what I’m looking at. An enormous pile of something: rubbish. As if a skip full of some kind of debris has been emptied onto the floor. The mess looks fluffy in parts, like feathers from many different birds, none of them matching, but I can also see wood, cloth, every colour I can imagine, and pieces of… is it canvas?

Abberton. Inside the outline of a person, this is what Mary stuck on to the picture: rags and rubble from this pile.

I see, all at once, dozens of tiny fragments: a painted smile, a fingernail, a patch of grey-blue sky, a patch of something flesh-coloured. A small chair, no more than a few centimetres high and wide, torn in half. ‘Pictures,’ I breathe. ‘These were paintings, canvases. And frames, sawn into pieces. How many…?’

The mound is nearly as high as I am. Over it, someone has splashed several tins of paint, maybe even dozens, so that it looks as if it’s been wrapped in multi-coloured string. Hard, dried pools of paint cover the floor. As if someone stood next to the pile with a tin of paint and poured it in, so that it dripped all the way through and seeped out at the bottom. The same colours have been splashed randomly over the cream and gold wallpaper, over the three large framed botanical prints on the walls: yellow, blue, red, white, green, black. At the back of the room there’s a dining table, which has been pushed up against the large sash window, with more tins of paint on it, as well as a portable telephone lying beside its base, an ashtray, three unopened tins of Heinz ravioli and a rusty tin-opener.

‘Pictures,’ Mary confirms. ‘Frames. And stretchers-the wooden structures you stretch canvas around. I like the way that word sounds medical, makes you think of emergencies. It seems appropriate. If it hadn’t been for an emergency, I’d never have picked up a paintbrush.’

I am transfixed by the size of the mountain of broken wood and shredded canvas, the glimpses I keep getting of landscapes and interiors, people’s faces and clothes: an earlobe, a necklace, a jacket pocket. It’s almost as if some pieces have been cut deliberately larger than the rest, to allow part of something to survive. I narrow my eyes, blur my focus, and it looks like a heap of multi-coloured precious stones. The pile stretches almost all the way across the room, leaving only a small gap on either side.

‘Whose paintings are… were they?’ I ask.

‘Mine,’ says Mary. ‘All mine, now. I got them back.’ She turns to me and smiles. ‘Welcome to my exhibition.’

20

5/3/08

Charlie found Simon where he’d said he would be, in the bar at King’s Cross station, surrounded by a large group of squaddies in uniform, all of whom looked younger than twenty and had foam moustaches from the pints they were not so much drinking as throwing at their faces. Simon was wedged into a small space between a table that looked sticky with weeks-old beer and a fruit machine that leaned to one side.

There was no second chair at the table, so Charlie pulled one over. She missed the days when pubs and bars were smoky. Devoid of the smell of cigarettes, they were life-size models, not the real thing. ‘No drink?’ she said.

Simon shook his head in irritation. Shut up, I’m thinking. Charlie knew the look well.

‘Mine’s a vodka and orange.’ She perched on the cleaner half of the chair she’d grabbed, wishing she’d chosen more carefully. When he didn’t move, she sighed and said, ‘I hate London cabbies. They never shut up. You’d have thought seeing me with my phone clamped to my ear…’

‘Who’ve you been talking to? I’ve been trying to ring you.’

‘To say?’

‘Gibbs phoned. He and Sellers were at Ruth Bussey’s place.’

Charlie pressed her eyes shut. ‘They saw the wall.’ She tried to tell herself nothing bad had happened, nothing new. Sellers and Gibbs had known already. Everybody knew already.

‘It’s not as bad as you feared,’ said Simon. ‘She’s not going to break into your house in the middle of the night and stab you. She admires you.’

‘Admires me?’

‘She collects self-help books. One of them’s about building up self-esteem-I can’t remember the title. I was in with Milward when Gibbs rang me. He said the book’s got exercises in it, things you’re supposed to do if you want to learn to love yourself. Techniques and tasks and stuff. Homework, I suppose you could call it. One of them’s to identify someone you admire who’s been through a tough time and come out stronger and wiser.’ Simon shrugged.