Charlie had stopped. In order not to miss anything, she’d had to hang back. Ruth was barely moving and had stopped shivering. She no longer seemed aware of the cold. ‘Has he ever threatened you? Approached you, or the house?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t it normal for people walking in the park to look at your house? It’s an unusual building. I’ve looked at it in the past and wondered who lived there.’
‘You sound like Aidan. He says everyone who walks in or out through the gates looks at the lodge on their way past. He’s right—nearly all of them do. But this man looks in a different way.’
Aidan Seed, the voice of reason, thought Charlie. Apart from the small matter of his belief that he murdered a living woman.
‘He wears a red woolly hat, the man, with a bobble on the top. Even in summer. That’s not normal.’
‘I’m not sure normal exists,’ said Charlie.
Certainly not in your vicinity
, she might have added.
Ruth stared into the distance, eyes wide. ‘He wears it because it looks stupid, comical. No one who wears a hat like that could be dangerous—that’s what he wants me to think.’
‘Ruth, how cold is it today? And you’re wearing flip-flops, no socks or tights, nothing. There you go: proof that a person can be inappropriately dressed and not stalking anyone!’ Charlie wasn’t angry, as she must have sounded, but a certain amount of force was necessary to stamp out irrationality. Was Ruth insane? Was Aidan Seed? If only the answer in both cases was ‘yes’, that would explain everything.
Apart from Mary Trelease’s behaviour.
‘Not me,’ she’d said, when Charlie had told her about Aidan’s claim that he’d killed her. Naturally, Charlie had asked her if she was implying Aidan had murdered someone else. Mary had denied it—‘I simply meant that I’m patently not dead’—but Charlie hadn’t felt good about it at all. The look on Mary’s face . . .
This man looks in a different way.
Charlie would have been lying if she’d told Ruth that a look in isolation could never be sufficient grounds for suspicion, though she doubted the man with the red bobble hat was anything to worry about.
‘I never wear socks,’ said Ruth. ‘My parents used to make me wear them every day, and a vest. They were obsessed with stopping heat escaping from their bodies. Our house was like a furnace, heating and gas fires on all year round.’ Her teeth started to chatter.
Charlie had to press the key-fob four times before her car’s lights flashed twice: unlocked. The battery was losing its power. She’d been meaning to buy a spare and put it in the glove compartment, but hadn’t got round to it. She opened the boot and handed Ruth her coat. ‘Maybe your man’s parents wouldn’t let him wear woolly hats, even in hailstorms,’ she said. Ruth didn’t smile.
Once they were in the car and driving, Charlie said, ‘Are you going to tell me why you had that piece about me from the paper in your coat pocket?’
‘You went through my pockets. I thought you would.’ Ruth seemed to shrink in her seat. ‘I’m sorry about . . . what happened to you. It must have been awful for you. You looked devastated in the photograph.’
‘We’re not going to talk about me,’ said Charlie firmly.
‘That’s why I waited for you on Friday. I was in such a state, I couldn’t have spoken to anyone else. After what you’d been through, I thought you’d be understanding.’
‘Sorry if I disappointed you.’ Charlie thought about the sequence of events: the article was printed in 2006, as were several hundred others, in every newspaper in the country, each gleefully raking over the minute details of the incident that, at the time, to Charlie, had felt like the end of her life. Aidan Seed told Ruth he’d killed Mary Trelease in December 2007. Did Ruth expect Charlie to believe she’d cut the piece out of the
Rawndesley and Spilling Telegraph
more than a year before she had any cause to go to the police, and kept it just in case, at some point in the future, she had need of a sensitive police officer? Charlie couldn’t ask, not without letting Ruth see how upset she was. She felt an urgent need to turn the conversation away from herself, even if that meant not knowing. She said gruffly, ‘I’m understanding about things I understand. Sorry to be the bearer of “challenging feedback”, as we say in the police service these days, but your and Aidan’s behaviour so far has made zero sense. It might even be into minus figures, on the Richter scale of unintelligibility.’
Ruth twisted her hands in her lap. She said nothing. They drove through the town centre. Elaborate Easter egg displays crowded shop windows along the High Street.
‘Has the story changed?’ Charlie asked. ‘What did you mean before—Aidan said he was going to kill Mary Trelease? I thought his angle was that he’d killed her already?’
‘It wasn’t a threat,’ said Ruth. ‘He asked if I thought it was possible to see the future. When I told him I was sure it wasn’t, he said it was the only explanation—everyone’s telling him Mary’s still alive, but his memory of killing her’s so vivid. If it’s not a memory, it must be a . . .’
‘A premonition?’ said Charlie wearily. ‘You’re not going to like this suggestion, but could Aidan be talking all this spooky crap to scare you? To drive you away? Premonitions, murders that never happened . . .’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m not sure he could fake the fear I saw. He was scared of what he might do. He told me to go to Mary’s house and persuade her to run away, somewhere he wouldn’t find her.’ Charlie felt Ruth’s eyes on her. Waiting, hoping, for an explanation Charlie was unable to provide.
Unless Ruth, not Aidan, was the one faking the fear.
‘At least it means he can’t be there with her.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I used to think you were right. Every time Aidan stayed away overnight, I wondered if he was with her, if the two of them were plotting to drive me mad, or something. I knew where she lived. I could have gone round, but I never did. I was too scared of finding Aidan there. He wouldn’t tell me to go to her house, would he, if that’s where he was going?’
Charlie closed her eyes, then opened them, remembering she was driving. How hard would it be to get some uniforms camped outside 15 Megson Crescent? Even if she succeeded, that level of protection would need to be justified on an hour-by-hour basis. Charlie reckoned she’d be granted a day, maximum. She wasn’t sure it was worth the hassle. What if Aidan Seed chose the next day to make good his promise, prediction, whatever?
Beside her, Ruth was crying. ‘I’m still scared,’ she said. ‘Scared something’s going to happen but I don’t know what. It’s nothing concrete—it’s not that I’m scared Aidan really has killed someone, or that he will, or that he’ll go to prison. I could live with those things.’
‘You’re telling me what you’re not scared of,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘What would be helpful is if I knew what you
are
scared of.’
Ruth picked at the skin around her fingernails. ‘Something so bad I’m not capable of imagining it. Not death. There are plenty of worse things.’
Charlie thought ‘plenty’ was an overstatement.
‘All I know is, there’s a danger and it’s . . . it’s closing in.’
‘Listen to me, Ruth. Don’t go to Mary’s. Is there anywhere you could go that’s . . .?’
‘Aidan told me something else, when he was talking about having visions of things that hadn’t happened yet. The picture Mary gave me, the one he said he gave to a charity shop—it’s called
Abberton
. That’s its title. Aidan said it was the first in a series. There were going to be nine, he said, but Mary hadn’t done them yet. He told me the names of the others: Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss. He said it to prove to me that he was seeing the future. ’
Charlie had no idea how to respond to this. Hearing Ruth say the names like that—an alphabetical list—had made her feel uneasy. Eight titles of paintings yet to be painted? What could it mean? It complicated things, took them beyond the level of a simple threat:
Tell her I’m going to kill her.
‘The man you’re engaged to,’ said Ruth. ‘Do you love him unconditionally? Would you forgive him no matter what he did?’
Charlie felt hounded. Why was everybody so keen to interrogate her about Simon today? First Mary, now Ruth.
‘I love Aidan so much, you’ve got no idea. If that love died, I’d have nothing. But that doesn’t mean it’s unconditional.’ Ruth turned to Charlie, breathing hard in her face. ‘When he told me he’d killed Mary, I . . . I didn’t react well.’
‘Who would?’ said Charlie. Unconditional? Yes. Forgive him? Not a chance, not for any misdemeanour, however small. ‘Loving someone doesn’t have to mean letting them off the hook,’ she said, pleased with her compromise position.
‘Yes, it does,’ Ruth said vehemently. ‘It does, and I don’t think I can do it. I’m scared of the truth, but without it I’ll only torment myself imagining the worst. What if I find out something so terrible it kills my love for Aidan? If that happens, I’ll know for sure that I’m not worth anything, that there’s not enough love in me to forgive or heal anyone. It’ll all be over—everything.’
Charlie almost smiled. If she hung around with this woman for much longer, she might start to think of herself as an irrepressible optimist by comparison.
Ruth closed her eyes, rubbed the back of her neck. ‘You asked me,’ she said in a voice that was barely audible. ‘That’s it. That’s what I’m frightened of.’
Blantyre Lodge’s lounge wasn’t small, but it looked it, overloaded as it was. While Ruth made tea in the kitchen, Charlie started to make an inventory. She wondered how big Ruth’s house in Lincoln had been, if it had housed all this comfortably: books, lamps, mirrors, candles, gardening magazines, six small Persian rugs, more exotic-looking plants than you’d expect to find in a botanical garden’s greenhouse. There was also an ironing board, stepladders, a clothes-drying rack. A small sofa had three throws draped over it and eight embroidered cushions piled on its seat. One was gold and had an image of two green shoes sewn on to it, with a cloth representation of a pink ankle protruding from each one. How peculiar, thought Charlie—the effort that must have gone into the embroidery, and the end result looked as if someone’s legs had been chopped off at the ankles.
Stuffed between a second sofa and the window was an old-fashioned dark wood desk with a computer on it, and, incongruously, a picnic bench of the sort one normally found in pub gardens, half unpainted wood and half dark green. For good measure, a bulky winged armchair had been crammed into the room as well. One whole wall was covered with wooden shelves that acted as a sort of display cabinet for pottery, carved stone figures, several different Russian doll sets, strange wooden blobs, heads of deer and lions and eagles made out of thin wire, some silver and some gold, an assortment of colourful plastic shapes, all of which were almost recognisable—as square, circle, triangle—but became more abstract at one end, as if they’d lost the will to be proper shapes and preferred not really being anything. There wasn’t a centimetre of space to spare, should Ruth Bussey decide she urgently needed to buy another metal model of a rabbit’s head. It was as if someone who had previously owned an eight-bedroom pile had downsized radically, without culling any of their possessions.
There were at least thirty paintings on the walls. Most of them were small, but one or two were huge, and ought, Charlie thought, to have been hanging over a marble fireplace in a ball-room. The largest picture was striking in its unpleasantness as well as its size. It had a rectangular gold-effect frame with four smaller rectangles protruding from it—one in each corner—and depicted a woman with long, dark hair wearing a white dress and a serene expression on her face. At the centre of the dress, there was a hole from which a distorted, grimacing face stared out, open-mouthed.
Charlie shuddered, turning her attention to a less disturbing picture of a large bull with a square body standing in front of a pink stone bell tower. Ruth came in carrying two cups of tea. Charlie would have preferred a double vodka. ‘That’s a ribbon-and-reed frame,’ said Ruth, seeing Charlie looking at the bull. ‘See the pattern on it? Aidan told me it’s based on the Roman symbol for government: reeds bound together by a ribbon. Individually weak but together strong. He said it was like him and me.’
‘Did Aidan buy you all these pictures?’ Charlie asked.
‘No. I bought them myself. Aidan framed them, though. Re-framed them, in some cases. He thinks most paintings aren’t framed as they should be.’ Ruth perched on the edge of one of the sofas.
Charlie didn’t want to sit. Ruth’s intensity was making her edgy, as was the thought that at some point she must ask again about the article. She sensed Ruth would tell her if pushed, and she dreaded the answer. The more she worried at it in her mind, the less likely it seemed that there was an entirely innocent, harmless reason why Ruth had had that article in her coat pocket. ‘Tell me about losing your job at the Spilling Gallery.’
‘Didn’t Mary tell you?’
‘Not really. She implied it was her fault.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘It was mine,’ she said unhappily. ‘If I’d . . .’ She stopped. ‘Do you ever wish you’d done almost everything differently?’
To someone else, Charlie might have said yes without missing a beat, but Ruth already had too much information about her. ‘Tell me the story,’ she said brusquely. ‘If you want my help, you’d better tell me everything you kept to yourself on Friday.’
Ruth lowered her eyes. For a second, Charlie thought she was going to refuse. Then she said, ‘Mary came in one day. To the gallery. I didn’t know her name at the time, and I didn’t find out that day. I didn’t find out until much later.’
‘Okay.’ It was a start.
‘She had a painting with her, one of her own, which she wanted Saul, my boss, to frame. It had ‘Abberton’ written on the back of it in capital letters. There was a . . . a sort of person in it, the shape of a person with no face. It was impossible to tell the sex. It was just an outline: a head, two arms . . .’