Gone to Ground (39 page)

When the taxi drew up, she was in her front garden, stooping to weed out some stranger from the profusion of flowers. She straightened at the sound of the car doors closing and stood, a severe figure in black, arms folded low across her chest, as Natalie stepped toward her, Lesley following several paces behind.

Natalie stopped at the wooden gate, tried a smile that was not returned, slipped the latch and went through.

"You look like her, well enough," Irene said. "I always thought you would."

Her eyes were bright but dark, cheekbones threatening to pierce the parchment of her skin; her jaw was strong and full, her mouth a line drawn hard across her face. Mrs. Danvers, Lesley thought, in the film of
Rebecca,
but with paint at her finger ends.

"You'd best to come inside," she said.

The cottages had been knocked into one: one half was where she lived, the other her studio.

Natalie introduced Lesley; her grandmother looked at the journalist for several seconds, nodded, and then busied herself with a kettle, making tea.

"Lesley's brother was writing a book about Stella," Natalie said. "Before he died."

Irene said nothing in reply. From an old circular tin, she took oatcakes and from the larder, butter, cheese and jam. Lesley and Natalie sat in high-sided armchairs, the patterns of the upholstery faded, the edges worn and frayed. The tea was black and strong and the yellow-looking milk turned it the colour of brown buttery cream.

Natalie gestured toward the mantelpiece. "I see you got my card."

"I'm surprised to see you all the same."

"I said I would come."

Irene sliced her knife through a wedge of cheese. "What's said is not always what's done. Besides, if it was me you wanted to see, you could have done that anytime in this past dozen years. How old were you when I saw you last? Thirteen?"

"Around there."

"And already a little wildness in your eyes."

Natalie started to say something but thought better of it. There was little sound save for the older woman's slightly laboured breathing and the distant breaking of the sea back in the bay. Conversation, Lesley thought, did not come to her easily at all.

"I was wondering," Lesley said, "why, after not exhibiting for such a long time, you've decided to do so now."

"Because I've got something to show," Irene said. She lifted her cup from its saucer and then put it back down. "You'd better come and see. After traveling all that way."

Standing, Irene pulled aside the curtain separating the studio from the remainder of the building. Skylights had been let into the roof to give extra light. Numerous canvases stood against the walls in twos and threes, some of them already wrapped and covered, ready for shipment. More paintings hung above them, filling almost every available space.

At the centre of the room a large canvas rested on an easel, unframed and unfinished. An adolescent girl lies on a stone floor that is scattered here and there with mud and straw; her ribs are clearly visible through her pallid skin and blood sprays dark across her unformed breasts. Behind her, on the walls, hang an assortment of old farming tools, bridles and whips, the curved edge of a scythe catching the light. The girl's mouth is open in a scream, a cry for help: her eyes, open, dark, imploring.

"Margaret," Irene said. "The Maid of Norway. She was on her way to marry Prince Edward, Edward II, and be Queen of Scotland. This is where she died. The village is named after her. St. Margaret's Hope."

"What happened to her?" Natalie asked. "I mean, how did she die?"

"There are stories," Irene said. "Something she said or did to offend the villagers. A jealous rival. Nobody knows for sure. It is left to us to imagine."

"Is this her, here?" Lesley said, moving toward one of the paintings on the left hand wall.

"Yes. Her coronation."

Surrounded by a raggle-taggle mixture of soldiers and villagers, Margaret stands at the head of an open grave, a trickle of blood running down the inside of her leg, naked save for a crown of thorns.

Only when they had stepped clear of the unfinished work on its easel, did they see fully the painting that, spot lit, dominated the end wall.

Natalie alongside her, Lesley took half a dozen paces toward it and stopped, open mouthed.

A young girl, slender, no more than eight or nine—a younger version of the girl in the reproduction Lesley had seen on the plane—was kneeling on the sagging mattress of an iron bed, while the figure of the half-man, half-bear penetrated her from behind. At the head of the bed, another girl stood weeping, looking on. The face of the girl on the bed, even though her body was tensed with pain, showed only pleasure, a kind of joy lighting up the face, which so closely resembled Natalie's as to be her double.

"Oh, Jesus!" Lesley whispered, as, beside her, Natalie turned aside and, head bent, vomited on the floor.

Irene made more tea and from somewhere produced a bottle of brandy. Natalie sat with a borrowed shawl around her shoulders, shaking as if from a fever. She had not seen the rest of the paintings, but Lesley had. More than a dozen of them reworked the same theme: the two young girls, one forced to watch the other's pleasure and pain; the humanized bear.

In some ways she was reminded of a film she'd seen about Robert Crumb, an American artist whose comic strips were full of salacious schoolgirls and salivating older men, but those were comic grotesques, absurd; these paintings, for all their elements of fantasy, were real. Undeniably real.

Leaning forward, Irene straightened the shawl around Natalie's shoulders, then, easing back a little, took hold of both of her hands. "I should have warned you."

There was a tenderness in her voice that had not been there before.

"It's okay," Natalie said, little more than a whisper.

Irene held her hands tighter. "It started after my seventh birthday. He came to me when everyone else was in bed and said he had this special present for me."

For a moment, Lesley looked away. Bile caught at the back of Natalie's throat.

"After that, he came to my room two or three times a week. And when he didn't come, I thought I had done something wrong. Something to make him mad at me. Then when he came back again, it was all right. But then, one year, after Christmas—I was nearly nine—he stopped coming for a long, long time and that was when I realized he was going into Stella's room instead. And I could see it in her face, at breakfast the next morning, after she'd been with him, that look of triumph in her eyes."

Natalie pulled her hands free and grabbed hold of Lesley's arm instead.

"When we grew up, went off to grammar school, I thought it had stopped, Stella and our father, but it hadn't. It didn't even stop when she was old enough to have boyfriends of her own. And sometimes they would scarcely try to hide it, what was happening, as if they were taunting us, the rest of us. As if they didn't care.

"And then Stella got pregnant. She tried to pretend it was that actor she was working with, but that was never the truth. In the end she came to me and told me, asked me to take the child when it was born and bring it up as my own. Keep it in the family, that's what she said. Keep it in the family."

"How could you?" Natalie shrieked. "How the fuck could you?"

Irene sighed. "If I hadn't agreed, Stella would have had an abortion. The child would have died."

Tears began to roll down Natalie's cheeks.

"All those years," Irene said, "I'd been jealous. Whatever else I'd been—disgusted, ashamed—I'd been jealous that what they'd had had lasted for so long. And I loved him. I still loved him, in a way. No matter how much I hated him too. And this was his child. I would be having his child."

"Oh, God!" Natalie said.

"That child was Lily. Your mother."

A sound broke, harsh, from Natalie's mouth and she covered her face with her hands. Lesley tried to put an arm around her, but Natalie pushed her away.

"Let her cry," Irene said. "Leave her be." She got up slowly and went back into the studio, leaving the two younger women together.

When Natalie had stopped crying, she wiped her face on the sleeve of her dress and went outside. After several moments, Lesley followed and together they walked, not speaking, down to the bay and stood, looking out across the sound toward Bur-ray and the Gairn Head.

By the time they got back to the cottage, the light had started to fade.

Irene was in her garden once more, staring at the reddening sky. She seemed older than she had an hour before; older and, somehow, calmer too.

"Why now?" Natalie said. "Why now, after all this time?"

Irene looked at her for some moments before she replied. "Because it was stifling me. More and more. I couldn't breathe. I'd kept it all here for so long." She struck her breast. "I had to let it go before I die."

"No matter what? No matter who it hurt?"

"Yes, no matter what."

There were tears again in Natalie's eyes. "And my mother, Lily, does she know?"

"I don't think she did for a long time. But then, when Stella and our father went to see her together, I think they told her then."

"The time their car went off the road?"

"Yes."

It was becoming difficult to see the features of Irene's face in the fading light.

71.

INT. DRAWING ROOM. NIGHT.

The two sisters alone in the room. At the centre, ALMA is pale, distraught, her makeup is smeared and she has clearly been crying. RUBY stands near the fireplace, haughty, distanced, smoking a cigarette.

ALMA
You had to, didn't you? The only
person, the only man I've ever
loved, and who loved me, and
you had to take him from me.
Didn't you? Didn't you?

RUBY looks at her scornfully.

ALMA
Why? Why?

RUBY
(carelessly)
Because I could.

RASTRICK HAD ESCHEWED HIS NORMAL SOMBRE SUITS for a navy blazer and a pair of mustard-coloured cavalry twill trousers that had last seen active service somewhere deep in the last century. A pair of highly polished brown brogues completed the outfit, together with a somewhat crumpled shirt and green-and-blue-striped tie. Whatever had possessed him to make this sartorial switch on this particular morning of all mornings—intuition or mere coincidence—it afforded him the opportunity to strut, peacock fashion, about the building, colour, for once, flush on his normally sallow cheeks, his eyes agleam.

"This," he announced, pushing open the door to Will Grayson's office, "will have the ACC struggling so hard to swallow his own words he'll end up with a hernia of the fucking esophagus. Threatening to hang me out to fucking dry, the bastard. Bottle of Scotch on my desk by the day's end, I'd not be surprised, and some sniveling little billet-doux to go with it."

Continued pressure on the lads from Newmarket and their counterparts in Heanor had paid off. By lunchtime on the preceding day, they had been so anxious to pass off blame on to one another, they had scarcely noticed, some of them, that they were miring themselves with the same dirty business. Early that morning, a series of coordinated raids on addresses in Cambridgeshire and southeast Derbyshire had resulted in no fewer than fourteen arrests, including those of the presumed ringleaders.

"Congratulations, Malcolm," Will said. "Job well done."

"How're things going your end?" Rastrick asked.

Will made a face.

"Here, then," Rastrick said, taking a couple of folded sheets of computer paper from the inside pocket of his blazer. "Take a look at this. Sandridge finally made a match from one of the prints on that bit of wood we took from the river."

Will opened out the paper on his desk, looked, and shook his head.

"Jesus," he said in wonder. "Jesus H. Christ!"

"Amen to that," Rastrick said, and left chuckling.

Mark McKusick was also in especially good humour that morning. Confirmation had come through of his holiday to Tangier, and one of his customers had agreed to purchase an upgraded Living Control sound server, so as to store in excess of 1,000 CDs without the compression, and consequent loss of sound quality, that comes from using MP3 files. Another twenty minutes or so and he would slip out for a coffee, a chance to glance at the paper, relax.

Will took Nick Moyles with him, a squad car with three officers outside; he wasn't expecting trouble, but you could never be quite certain. Keep your arse covered, a good motto in this job as in many another.

McKusick recognized him, of course, the moment he came into the room, and with only a slight hesitation, he stepped forward and, smile in place, held out his hand. "Inspector. What can I do for you this morning?"

Ignoring McKusick's outstretched hand, Will took hold of him, firmly but not roughly, by the upper arm. "Mark McKusick," he said, "under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, I am arresting you for the murder of Stephen Makepeace Bryan..."

McKusick's upper body tensed and as he pulled his hand away Will slowly released the grip on his arm. Moyles moved a shade closer, watching for any sudden move toward the door.

"You do not have to say anything," Will continued, "but it may harm your defense if you do not mention now something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

McKusick's face was suffused with surprise and barely concealed rage.

"Is there anything," Will said, "you want to say at this time?"

"Fuck you!" McKusick said.

"Make a note of that, Nick," Will said, "then see him to the car."

Within the hour, McKusick had been informed of his rights by the custody officer, shown a written notice confirming these, read and signed the custody record, and telephoned his solicitor.

McKusick's tie was taken from him, as were the laces to his shoes; his wallet had been surrendered, tagged, and locked away, along with his small change and his keys. Officers were already searching the apartment where he lived.

The cell in which he was put before interview was small and basic, the smell of disinfectant sharp on the stale air. McKusick accepted water and refused either a warm drink or any food. When he spoke, his voice was low and dull and without emotion.