‘I’m familiar with the human anatomy,’ said Charlie. Obviously no penis protruding from the canvas, then, she thought.
‘I asked who Abberton was, and Mary refused to tell me. She . . . she got angry. I wanted to buy the picture and she didn’t want to sell it, and when I asked . . .’ Ruth put her mug down and covered her mouth with her hands. After a few seconds she said, ‘Sorry. When I asked if I could maybe buy another of her pictures, a different one, she said no.’
‘When was this?’ asked Charlie.
‘June last year. She attacked me, physically. I stormed out of the gallery and never went back. Then I changed jobs and—’
‘Hang on. You’ve seen Mary since, right? You’ve been to her house. Have you asked her again who Abberton is?’ What was the connection between the name Abberton and the eight other names Aidan had given Ruth? Nine people known to Aidan and Mary?
‘No.’ Ruth was trembling.
‘Why not? You’re on better terms now, presumably. She told me she was trying to persuade you to model for her.’
‘It’s none of my business. If you call a painting after a person and then depict them only as an outline, what does that mean?’ Charlie had the impression Ruth had asked herself this question many times. ‘Surely it has to mean there’s something painful or problematic associated with them in your mind, something you’d rather not remember.’
‘I didn’t see any outlines of people when I was looking at her pictures this morning,’ Charlie told her. ‘I saw people with faces and features.’
‘You mean up on the wall? The ones of the family?’
‘Mary’s family?’
‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘A family who used to live on her estate, I think.’
Charlie wondered why Mary had chosen to paint them so many times. She’d mentioned a compulsion to paint people she cared about.
Like offering yourself an emotional breakdown.
‘They’re brilliant, aren’t they?’ said Ruth. ‘Did you see the one of the boy writing in pen on the wall?’
‘No. Where was that one?’
Ruth frowned as if she was trying to remember. ‘In one of the downstairs rooms.’
Charlie had only seen the kitchen and the hall before going upstairs. ‘What was he writing? On the wall?’
‘ “Joy Division”. I don’t know what it means.’
‘ “Love Will Tear Us Apart”,’ said Charlie automatically.
‘What?’ Ruth sounded startled. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘It’s the title of Joy Division’s most famous song. Don’t ask me to sing it to you.’
Ruth said nothing. There was a trapped look on her face.
‘Joy Division are a band,’ Charlie told her, trying not to sound scornful. ‘You haven’t heard of them?’
‘I didn’t listen to pop music as a teenager. My school friends all watched
Top of the Pops
, but it was banned in our house, effectively.’
‘What do you mean “effectively”?’
Ruth sighed. ‘My parents never actually told me I couldn’t do anything. Their particular brand of mind-control was far too subtle for that. Somehow I just knew I had to pretend not to want to do the things they’d disapprove of.’ She looked up at Charlie. ‘Were your parents strict?’
‘I thought so at the time. They tried to stop me from pursuing my hobbies: smoking fags, getting hammered, taking boys I hardly knew up to my bedroom.’
Charlie didn’t want to talk about her teenage years, but there was an avid look in Ruth’s eyes. ‘Fights aplenty. My sister was the good one—didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t screw around. Never challenged the regime, thereby making it look fair, and shafting me in the process. Her greatest triumph was to defy medical science and single-handedly defeat ovarian cancer. I can’t even give up smoking.’
Ruth was nodding. Keep your fucking mouth shut, Charlie ordered herself. She felt an urgent need to take back some of the poison she’d released. ‘It’s horrible having to admit your parents were probably right,’ she said. ‘Without Mum and Dad’s interventions, I’d have been mainlining cheap cider and hosting orgies every night of the week, especially school nights.’
‘There were no rows in my house,’ said Ruth. ‘There was only ever one opinion. I never heard my mother and father disagree about anything.’
‘Well . . .’ Charlie cast about for something to say, feeling uncomfortable, wondering how they’d ended up here. She and Ruth weren’t friends, swapping confidences. What would Ruth expect in exchange for her unhappy childhood stories? No, that was the wrong way to look at it. What might Ruth offer in return, if Charlie showed herself willing to act as a sounding board? There were still a lot of questions she wanted to ask; it would help if Ruth was favourably disposed. ‘Whenever I catch a bit of those
Supernanny
-style programmes, that’s what they seem to advise,’ she said. ‘Parents need to back each other up, not undermine one another.’
‘That’s so wrong,’ Ruth said vehemently. ‘If a child never sees its parents disagree, how’s it supposed to learn that it’s okay to have your own mind? I grew up thinking that if I ever said, “I disagree with you”, the sky would fall down. My parents only ever read the Bible or biographies—ideally of Christian martyrs—so I had to pretend I did too. I hid my real books where they’d never find them. I used to be sick with envy when I heard my friends scream at their parents that they hated them, when I heard their mums and dads scream back, “As long as you’re under my roof, you’ll live by my rules.” At least my friends could be honest about what they
wanted
to do.’
Christians, thought Charlie: pure evil. The Romans had the right idea throwing them to the lions. What a pity she’d omitted that line from her engagement party speech. She’d barely skimmed the surface of controversial; Simon had massively overreacted.
‘I lied to you on Friday because I needed to,’ said Ruth. She picked up her tea and took a sip. ‘I don’t disapprove of lying. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it if there’s an unreasonable constraint in your life stopping you being the person you want to be.’
‘How’s your relationship with your parents now?’ Charlie asked.
‘I don’t see them, not any more. We haven’t spoken since I left Lincoln. After years of being too scared to do it, I finally broke their heart. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘that’s not what I did. I put myself out of harm’s way, that’s all. It’s up to them if they choose to allow their heart to break.’
Charlie noted the singular, used twice in rapid succession: heart, not hearts.
Ruth said, ‘Some people choose never to see themselves in the mirrors you hold up for them. That’s their choice. I assume it’s what my parents have chosen. I’ve got a PO box address—it was in the letter I sent them when I moved to Spilling. They’ve never used it.’
‘They live in Lincoln?’ Charlie asked. No wonder Ruth had got the hell out.
‘Nearby. Gainsborough.’
‘You gave up a lot when you moved. I Googled Green Haven Gardens this afternoon. Sounds like you had a thriving business. ’
Ruth’s body jerked, as if she’d been shot. Charlie wasn’t surprised. She knew all about feeling invaded, finding out that someone was more interested in you than they ought to be.
Interested enough to carry your story in their coat pocket.
She pushed the thought away. ‘Organic and chemical-free before it was fashionable,’ she said. ‘And you won three BALI awards.’
‘I won the main BALI award three years running,’ Ruth corrected her, her eyes full of suspicion.
‘I was only skim-reading,’ said Charlie. ‘I had two seconds between meetings. I might have missed some of the finer points.’
‘Why are you interested in Green Haven? That part of my life’s over.’
‘Why did you give it up?’
‘I didn’t want to do it any more.’
Charlie nodded. It was an answer and, at the same time, no answer. She hoped Ruth wasn’t regretting how much of herself she’d already given away.
‘Let me show you the tape,’ said Ruth, standing up. Charlie didn’t know what she meant at first. Then she remembered: the man in the red bobble hat. She rolled her eyes behind Ruth’s back, lacking the heart to point out that her watching footage of a man walking past a house and looking at it would achieve nothing. She followed Ruth out into the hall and saw what she’d missed on the way in. Above the front door with its unusual leaf-patterned glass panel was a shelf with a TV on it, a video player, and a row of cassettes numbered one to thirty-one. One for every day of the month?
While Ruth reached up to put a tape in the machine, Charlie surveyed the hall. Apart from the door to the lounge, there were three others: kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, presumably. Only one was ajar, and through it Charlie caught a glimpse of shiny maroon fabric and a pink cushion. That had to be the bedroom. Checking first that Ruth was still busy with the machine and the remote control, Charlie pushed the door gently to open it further.
Yes, this was Ruth’s bedroom, Ruth and Aidan’s, though the only evidence of a man’s presence was a bulky watch with a leather strap lying on the floor. The rest was over-the-top feminine: ornate perfume bottles lined up on the window-sill, a pink voile scarf draped across the bed, silk curtains, also pink, white lacy underwear strewn everywhere, a pink heart-shaped hot-water bottle. Even the paperbacks with creased spines in lopsided piles looked girly, with titles like
Hungry Women
and
Public Smiles, Private Tears
.
Ruth was busy rewinding a tape. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The remote’s bust. I have to keep my finger pressed down on it to make it work. It takes ages.’
‘No problem,’ said Charlie. She leaned into the bedroom to get a look at what was behind the door, and nearly cried out in shock, lurching back out into the hall. She’d seen it only for a split second, but it was enough.
What the fuck . . .?
Her mind reeled. It was absurd, the sort of thing you might have an anxiety dream about—too extreme and too ludicrous to happen in real life. But this was real; Charlie knew what she’d seen.
Nearly a whole wall in Ruth’s bedroom was covered with newspaper cuttings about her, Charlie.
She pulled the door to, her heart juddering, the full range of headlines pulsing in her brain, phrases that had haunted her for two years, that she struggled every day not to think about: colourfully worded assaults on her character, selected by hacks for their shock value or alliterative appeal.
Headlines that Ruth had collected and stuck up on the wall beside her bed.
Why?
More recent articles too, Charlie could swear—though she had no intention of looking again to check—about her return to work, the forum she’d set up to tackle business crime in the area. No, she hadn’t imagined it. As well as the many photographs of her crying at the press conference in 2006, there had been one or two of her in uniform, after her transfer out of CID, wearing her polished I’m-so-proud-of-what-I’ve-done-for-the-community smile. She felt sick.
‘Here we go,’ said Ruth.
Charlie knew she didn’t have long to compose herself if concealment was her preferred option, and all her instincts were screaming at her to conceal, withdraw, hide herself away. To demand an on-the-spot explanation from Ruth would constitute exposure on a level that, in her state of shock, she couldn’t even contemplate. No, she must avoid a confrontation at all costs, or something disastrous would happen: she’d end up attacking Ruth physically, or become hysterical.
Later. Deal with it later.
She blinked furiously to banish the tears that had sprung up out of nowhere, and tried to focus on the white bookshelves on the opposite wall that sagged slightly in the middle and made the hallway half as wide as it would otherwise have been. Ruth was evidently a collector of self-help books as well as the self-appointed archivist of Charlie’s disgrace. In a better mood, Charlie would have found these titles amusing:
What if Everything Goes Right?
,
The Power of Now
,
What You Think of Me Is None of My Business.
She didn’t know what she thought. All she knew was that her insides had liquefied, she felt as if she might throw up and she wanted desperately to leave this house.
‘I asked my landlord to install CCTV when I first noticed the man hanging around,’ said Ruth. ‘He thought I was making a fuss about nothing, but in the end he agreed. Some rowdy lads had colonised the park at night, and I managed to persuade Malcolm that we could kill two birds with one stone. By the time the cameras were in, the man had stopped walking past. I didn’t get him on tape until yesterday.’
Charlie wondered if Ruth had videotapes of her from two years ago, old news reports, the press conference she’d given, the extended interview she’d agreed to at the insistence of the press office, when public opinion was still violently against her three months after the scandal had broken.
Later. Not now.
There were other things to think about, like fighting back: finding out everything she could about Ruth Bussey and using it to devastate her sad, inadequate little life. At the moment, Charlie told herself, the advantage was hers; Ruth didn’t know she knew.
She watched the grainy image on the screen change, saw a man in a woolly hat approach the park gates with a black dog. ‘Has Aidan seen this?’ she asked. If by some remote chance Bobble Hat was spying on Ruth, did Aidan know about it? Did he know who the man was?
Spying on someone who spied on others, who broke into their private pain and . . .
‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘Only Malcolm’s seen it, apart from me, and now you. Aidan and I haven’t spoken properly for months.’ She looked bereft. ‘I thought if Malcolm knew what the man looked like, he could look out for him. He’s often here when I’m not—bit of a guardian angel, really. He keeps an eye on things for me. There, look, you can see the man’s face.’
Malcolm. He must have seen the display wall in the bedroom. No wonder he’d reacted oddly when Charlie had turned up in person.
Clearly Ruth’s made herself known to you . . . She didn’t tell me she was going to make contact.
Did Malcolm Fenton know why Ruth was obsessed with Charlie? Did Aidan Seed? He had to, surely, if he shared Ruth’s bed. What possible reason could there be? How many other people had seen the wall? Had the men from Winchelsea Combi Boilers seen it? Had they also recognised Charlie this morning?