The day outside was fresh but overcast, a cold silver sun trying to penetrate the cloud. Having returned her holdall to the parked Land Rover, she headed on foot toward the Royal Pump Rooms, which housed the gallery where Satchwell’s exhibition was about to open. To her left lay the ornamental Jephson Gardens, and a fountain of pinkish stone that might have been the model for one of Crowley’s tarot cards. Four scallop-patterned basins sat at the top.
… a certain weakness, an abandonment to desire…
You’re getting like Talbot, Robin told herself crossly. Speeding up, she arrived at the Pump Rooms with time to spare.
The building had just been opened; a young woman in black was walking away from the glass doors, holding a bunch of keys. Robin entered, to find little trace of the Regency pump rooms left inside: the floor was covered in modern gray tiles, the ceiling supported by metal columns. A café took up one wing of the open-plan space, a shop another. The gallery, Robin saw, lay across opposite, through more glass doors.
It comprised one long room, brick-walled and wooden-floored, which had been temporarily given over to an exhibition of local artists. There were only three people inside: a stocky, gray-bobbed woman in an Alice band, a small man with a hang-dog air whom Robin suspected was her husband, and another young woman in black, who she assumed worked there. The gray-haired woman’s voice was echoing around the room as though it was a gymnasium.
“I told Shona that Long Itchington needs an accent light! You can barely see it, this corner’s so dark!”
Robin walked slowly around, looking at canvases and sketches. Five local artists had been given space for the temporary exhibition, but she identified Paul Satchwell’s work without difficulty: it had been given a prominent position and stood out boldly among the studies of local landmarks, portraits of pallid Britons standing at bus stops, and still lifes.
Naked figures twisted and cavorted in scenes from Greek mythology. Persephone struggled in the arms of Hades as he carried her down into the underworld; Andromeda strained against chains binding her to rock as a dragonish creature rose from the waves to devour her; Leda lay supine in bulrushes as Zeus, in the form of a swan, impregnated her.
Two lines of Joni Mitchell floated back to Robin as she looked at the paintings: “When I first saw your gallery, I liked the ones of ladies…”
Except that Robin wasn’t sure she liked the paintings. The female figures were all black-haired, olive-skinned, heavy-breasted and partially or entirely naked. The paintings were accomplished, but Robin found them slightly lascivious. Each of the women wore a similar expression of vacant abandon, and Satchwell seemed to have a definite preference for those myths that featured bondage, rape or abduction.
“Striking, aren’t they?” said the meek-faced husband of the angry painter of Long Itchington, appearing at Robin’s side to contemplate a picture of a totally naked Io, whose hair streamed behind her and whose breasts gleamed with sweat as she fled a bull with a gargantuan erection.
“Mm,” said Robin. “I was wondering whether he was going to come to the exhibition. Paul Satchwell, I mean.”
“I think he said he’s going to pop back in,” said the man.
“Back—? You mean he’s here? In England?”
“Well, yes,” said the man, looking somewhat surprised. “He was here yesterday, anyway. Came to see them hung.”
“Visiting family, I think he said,” said the young woman in black, who seemed glad of a reason to talk to somebody other than the fuming artist in the hairband.
“You haven’t got contact details for him, have you?” asked Robin. “Maybe the address of where he’s staying?”
“No,” said the young woman, now looking intrigued. Evidently local artists didn’t usually engender this much excitement. “You can leave your name and address, though, if you like, and I’ll tell him you want to speak to him if he drops by?”
So Robin accompanied the young woman back to the reception area, where she scribbled her name and phone number onto a piece of paper and then, her heart still beating fast in excitement, went to the café, bought herself a cappuccino and positioned herself beside a long window looking out onto the Pump Room Gardens, where she had a good view of people entering the building.
Should she book back into the Premier Inn and wait here in Leamington Spa until Satchwell showed himself? Would Strike think it worth neglecting their other cases to remain here in the hope of Satchwell turning up? It was Joan’s funeral today: she couldn’t burden him with the question.
She wondered what her partner was doing now. Perhaps already dressing for the service. Robin had only ever attended two funerals. Her maternal grandfather had died just before she dropped out of university: she’d gone home for the funeral and never gone back. She remembered very little of the occasion: it had taken everything she’d had to preserve a fragile façade of well-being, and she remembered the strange sense of disembodiment that underlay the eggshell brittleness with which she’d met the half-scared inquiries of family members who knew what had happened to her. She remembered, too, Matthew’s hand around hers. He hadn’t once dropped it, skipping lectures and an important rugby game to come and be with her.
The only other funeral she’d attended had been four years previously, when she and Strike had attended the cremation of a murdered girl in the course of their first murder investigation, standing together at the back of the sparsely populated, impersonal crematorium. That had been before Strike had agreed to take her on permanently,
