He took a step closer to the image and noticed that although the children in the forefront were clearly taunting the girl, a few of the faces at the back looked uncomfortable – ill at ease. One girl standing nearby was extending her hand, with a shy smile on her face, but the other girl didn’t see it.
Wishing he could make the girl lift her head so she too could see the offer of friendship, wishing he could meet her eyes and tell her that things would get better, that only some of these kids were nasty, Gus jumped when he felt an arm on his shoulder. Alice!
‘She looks so sad … so scared, doesn’t she?’ Her voice was tinged with emotion.
Gus still couldn’t drag his eyes away from the image. ‘Despite the artist being so young, he encapsulated her pain so well. I wonder who she is.’
‘Em…’
Something in Alice’s tone made him turn to look at her. Over her shoulder Carlton watched them, a strange expression on his face. Sensing he was missing something important; Gus raked his eyes over Alice’s face, trying to read her expression. Was that pity? He shook his head as if to dispel the thought and splayed his hands before him, in an ‘out with it’ sort of gesture. ‘What?’
Before either Alice or Carlton had the chance to reply, Compo approached the group from behind, loudly chomping his lips together as he munched a Snickers bar. He waved the hand containing the half-wrapped chocolate in the vague direction of the sketch, sending a trail of peanut crumbs onto the floor. ‘Wow, that’s a brilliant drawing of your mum as a little girl, Gus.’
Gus started, his gaze drawn back to the tiny girl standing among a wave of hostility, the lifeline of friendship unseen. Heart contracting, his breath hitched as he saw what the other three had seen instantly. Berating himself for being so stupid, he allowed the pain emanating from the image to possess him. This was a side to his mother he’d never witnessed before. To him she’d always been larger than life, ultra-confident, slightly batty, and ferocious when it came to fighting for her own children or those she cared for in her job.
Only then as he saw her, skinny and downtrodden, did he realise that behind the mask of his own happy, supported childhood, his mother hid a far different one of her own. The silence following Compo’s words was palpable and yet Gus couldn’t think of a way to dispel it. Finally, Alice squeezed his arm and Carlton, wiping his glasses with a raggedy tissue, cleared his throat mumbling something about ‘cracking on’.
Despite wanting to be alone – needing the time to process what he’d just seen, Gus with a last glance at the image of his mum, forced himself to move onto the second sketch his mum had been sent – the one that had prompted her to reach out to some source in Scotland. This one was of a hanging woman. The artist had focussed on the woman’s feet and legs – the liquid rolling down her legs until it dripped onto the puddle beneath her. So observant was the artist that ripples grew in ever widening circles from the centre of the puddle giving the impression of constant movement.
The woman’s toes were painted red, yet the polish was cracked and spoiled as if it had been on her feet for a while. As Gus’s gaze moved up from her feet, he noticed that the liquid rolling down her legs was now tinged in pink pencil crayon. Had this woman been bleeding? The rest of the body was unfinished except for her eyes, which bulged from her face, wide and terrified, boring into the observer like a laser.
This was again in a childlike hand, but perhaps slightly more developed than the previous image had been. Had Rory been older when he drew this? Carlton had posted that very question on a Post-it, along with others asking, What is this child’s relation to the woman? Where had they seen this image? Real or imagined?
However old Rory had been then Gus was amazed by his skill. No wonder he’d become such a lauded artist.
The third image was a repeat of the first, but in an older more developed hand, with more detail. Beneath the woman, as well as the puddle was a sprig of lavender, so vibrantly drawn that Gus could almost smell it. It was the same scent as the candle at the crime scene.
One that Gus associated with old folk. And the nursery rhyme that had been left there resonated in his head again. ‘Lavender’s blue dilly dilly, Lavender’s green.’
The other item wasn’t quite so clearly drawn but on close inspection, it became clear it was a half-eaten chocolate covered digestive biscuit, complete with a sprinkle of crumbs around it. Again, Carlton had sprinkled his own Post-it crumbs around the image. Memory? Age of artist? Connection to woman? Same woman as before.? Psycho-sexual? Copycat? Misogyny? Oedipus Complex? Malicious Mother Syndrome? Parental Alienation Syndrome?
However, it was the image left at the scene that intrigued Gus the most. While being of the same basic scene as the last two sent to his mother, this had one big difference. The hanging woman was not the one from the previous images. Nor was she Miranda
