‘Different because Martha had finally given up on him?’ I say tentatively, knowing I will never give up on Aidan, though he might have given up on me a long time ago. I love him, no matter what he’s done.
‘Different because she hated him,’ says Mary crossly, as if I’m lagging behind. ‘She decided to destroy herself, and him, with one gesture: her suicide. Martha was a fan of the grand gesture. She invited Aidan here on the pretext of wanting to commission a picture from him. He said no at first—he worked from inspiration, didn’t do commissions, all the predictable shit she knew he’d come out with. She put a stop to it by promising him fifty grand. The noble artist was willing to take a bribe, it turned out, as long as the bribe was big enough. Martha sent him a cheque for fifty grand the next day, along with directions to this place—her little writing hideaway.’
I can’t disguise my shock. ‘Fifty grand? She had access to that kind of money?’
‘You haven’t got a clue, have you? For people like me and Martha—for your average Villiers girl—fifty grand isn’t “that kind of money”. It’s about the equivalent of what, I don’t know, maybe five hundred pounds would be to you.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound quite as patronising as it did.’
‘I can guess the rest,’ I say, wanting it to be over. ‘He came here, and she hanged herself in front of him.’
‘She had it all set up. She was standing on a table. She’d left the cottage’s front door open, put music on . . .’
‘ “Survivor,” ’ I murmur.
‘Right. So that he’d know she was in, so that he’d walk in and look for her. He found her in the dining room, on the table with a rope round her neck, attached to the light fitting. He didn’t say anything when he saw her like that, and she said only one thing to him: “You can keep the fifty grand. I won’t be needing it.” And then she jumped.’ Both of us shift suddenly as Mary says the last word, conscious of how it would feel to fall through the air, your fall broken only by a sharp jerk that snaps your neck.
‘Why were you there?’ I ask, trying to banish the creeping hollow sensation Mary’s story has left me with.
‘Martha and I were inseparable,’ she says, her eyes and voice flat.
‘Until she met Aidan?’
‘Even after that.’
‘So . . .’ I struggle to pin down what’s niggling at me. Was Mary in the room when Martha put the rope round her neck? Did she egg her on? Did she stand by and watch, saying nothing.
Aidan and Mary, the two people closest to Martha, both artists.
‘Did Aidan know you were a painter too?’ I ask.
‘I wasn’t. Before Martha died, I’d never painted anything in my life, apart from the bowls of fruit people put in front of me at school.’
Impossible, I want to say. ‘But . . .’
You’re too good for that to be true.
‘It’s true,’ says Mary. She kneels down in front of the dressing table mirror, lifts her chin and strokes her neck. ‘Aidan was the one who made me start painting. We . . . both of us were there, when she died. Neither of us saved her. Afterwards, we were both complete wrecks. We only had each other to talk to about what had happened. No one else would have understood. Aidan told me painting was what he’d always done to get rid of his pain. He didn’t say “pain”. He called it “all the shit that’s in my head”. There was shit in my head too, plenty of it, so I took his advice. He helped me, told me I was good, properly good. He said I was better than him.’
She breaks off. ‘There’s no excuse for the way I . . .
forgave
him everything he’d done to her. He told me what it had been like for him, and it sounded so different. Not at all like what Martha had told me. Even knowing how he’d treated her . . . As I said, there’s no excuse.’
‘Did you and Aidan . . .’
Mary snorts. ‘We became friends, nothing more. Or rather, I thought we were.’ She turns her head the other way, stares at her lined face, reflected. ‘So, now you see how selfish I am. I don’t hate Aidan for what he did to Martha. I like to tell myself I do, because it makes me feel better about myself, but it’s not true. I hate him for what he did to me.’
I haven’t got it in me to ask.
Mary rises to her feet. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I’ll show you.’
I follow her out of the bedroom. It’s less smoky on the landing, though some of the smell has drifted out. We go down the steep staircase into the large kitchen, through an open-plan lounge-cum-study with a beamed ceiling. This leads through to a narrow hall, at one end of which is a closed door. Mary reaches up for the key that’s balanced on top of the door frame. ‘I keep it locked,’ she says. ‘What’s inside is precious to me. No one’s seen it apart from Cecily, Aidan and the police.’
‘The police?’
‘The various unlucky members of the Farnham constabulary who come round periodically, when I get paranoid, to check Aidan isn’t hiding in the house with an axe. Except the one last night, he didn’t ask to look inside. They’re so sick of me by now, they don’t check properly any more.’
She unlocks the door and pulls it open, standing aside so that I can see. The stench of paint fumes from the room is almost unbearable. At first I don’t know what I’m looking at. An enormous pile of something: rubbish.
As if a skip full of some kind of debris has been emptied onto the floor.
The mess looks fluffy in parts, like feathers from many different birds, none of them matching, but I can also see wood, cloth, every colour I can imagine, and pieces of . . . is it canvas?
Abberton.
Inside the outline of a person, this is what Mary stuck on to the picture: rags and rubble from this pile.
I see, all at once, dozens of tiny fragments: a painted smile, a fingernail, a patch of grey-blue sky, a patch of something flesh-coloured. A small chair, no more than a few centimetres high and wide, torn in half. ‘Pictures,’ I breathe. ‘These were paintings, canvases. And frames, sawn into pieces. How many . . .?’
The mound is nearly as high as I am. Over it, someone has splashed several tins of paint, maybe even dozens, so that it looks as if it’s been wrapped in multi-coloured string. Hard, dried pools of paint cover the floor.
As if someone stood next to the pile with a tin of paint and poured it in, so that it dripped all the way through and seeped out at the bottom.
The same colours have been splashed randomly over the cream and gold wallpaper, over the three large framed botanical prints on the walls: yellow, blue, red, white, green, black. At the back of the room there’s a dining table, which has been pushed up against the large sash window, with more tins of paint on it, as well as a portable telephone lying beside its base, an ashtray, three unopened tins of Heinz ravioli and a rusty tin-opener.
‘Pictures,’ Mary confirms. ‘Frames. And stretchers—the wooden structures you stretch canvas around. I like the way that word sounds medical, makes you think of emergencies. It seems appropriate. If it hadn’t been for an emergency, I’d never have picked up a paintbrush.’
I am transfixed by the size of the mountain of broken wood and shredded canvas, the glimpses I keep getting of landscapes and interiors, people’s faces and clothes: an earlobe, a necklace, a jacket pocket. It’s almost as if some pieces have been cut deliberately larger than the rest, to allow part of something to survive. I narrow my eyes, blur my focus, and it looks like a heap of multi-coloured precious stones. The pile stretches almost all the way across the room, leaving only a small gap on either side.
‘Whose paintings are . . . were they?’ I ask.
‘Mine,’ says Mary. ‘All mine, now. I got them back.’ She turns to me and smiles. ‘Welcome to my exhibition.’
20
5/3/08
Charlie found Simon where he’d said he would be, in the bar at King’s Cross station, surrounded by a large group of squaddies in uniform, all of whom looked younger than twenty and had foam moustaches from the pints they were not so much drinking as throwing at their faces. Simon was wedged into a small space between a table that looked sticky with weeks-old beer and a fruit machine that leaned to one side.
There was no second chair at the table, so Charlie pulled one over. She missed the days when pubs and bars were smoky. Devoid of the smell of cigarettes, they were life-size models, not the real thing. ‘No drink?’ she said.
Simon shook his head in irritation.
Shut up, I’m thinking.
Charlie knew the look well.
‘Mine’s a vodka and orange.’ She perched on the cleaner half of the chair she’d grabbed, wishing she’d chosen more carefully. When he didn’t move, she sighed and said, ‘I hate London cabbies. They never shut up. You’d have thought seeing me with my phone clamped to my ear . . .’
‘Who’ve you been talking to? I’ve been trying to ring you.’
‘To say?’
‘Gibbs phoned. He and Sellers were at Ruth Bussey’s place.’
Charlie pressed her eyes shut. ‘They saw the wall.’ She tried to tell herself nothing bad had happened, nothing new. Sellers and Gibbs had known already. Everybody knew already.
‘It’s not as bad as you feared,’ said Simon. ‘She’s not going to break into your house in the middle of the night and stab you. She admires you.’
‘Admires me?’
‘She collects self-help books. One of them’s about building up self-esteem—I can’t remember the title. I was in with Milward when Gibbs rang me. He said the book’s got exercises in it, things you’re supposed to do if you want to learn to love yourself. Techniques and tasks and stuff. Homework, I suppose you could call it. One of them’s to identify someone you admire who’s been through a tough time and come out stronger and wiser.’ Simon shrugged. ‘You get the idea. Oh—the book said it should be someone famous, so that you can collect stuff from newspapers and magazines about them. A celebrity.’
‘You’re making this up,’ Charlie breathed.
‘Does it sound like the sort of thing I’d make up? There was a receipt in the book—Bussey bought it from Word in September 2006.’
‘Exactly when I was newsworthy,’ said Charlie, trying to make light of it.
‘Exactly when you thought the whole country wanted you dead, yeah. You were wrong. At least one person didn’t. If she admired the way you—’
‘Move on,’ Charlie warned him. ‘My self-esteem issues are my business—not yours and not Ruth Bussey’s.’ A sudden surge of emotion made it difficult for her to breathe. She looked down at her hands, picking at her fingernails. ‘Did the book say to cover an
entire wall
with character assassinations of your chosen celebrity?’ she asked. But there had been other articles stuck up alongside the hatchet jobs, she remembered—harmless ones about her community work, and pictures of her in uniform, smiling. Yes, there definitely had. Somewhere along the way Charlie had allowed herself to forget that because it didn’t tally with her worst case scenario: that Ruth Bussey was revelling in her suffering, that the bedroom wall display was there for no other reason than to humiliate her all over again.
‘Talk to Sellers or Gibbs if you want the details,’ said Simon wearily. ‘At first, yes, you put up everything you can find on whoever you choose, positive and negative write-ups, pictures of them looking their best and pictures of them looking like shit, all together. You look at it every day, if you haven’t got anything else to occupy your time, and you . . .’ Seeing Charlie’s stunned expression, Simon snapped, ‘Look, don’t blame me if it sounds way-out. I’m only telling you what Gibbs told me.’
‘Go on,’ said Charlie. She wondered if Ruth had drawn up a shortlist. Which other disgraced celebrities had made headlines in September 2006? Not that Charlie was a celebrity. Still, she was curious to know if she’d had competition. ‘You look at it every day, and?’
‘You focus on how whoever you’ve chosen hasn’t allowed their mistakes to defeat them, how they’ve bounced back, that sort of thing. The rest’s predictable: you realise no one’s perfect, everyone has their ups and downs, including you. Once you’ve got that straight in your head, you’re allowed to take down anything that shows the person you admire in a bad light. In place of what you’ve taken down, you put up some of your favourite photographs of yourself, and there’s your finished product: a wall-mounted display of you and the person you admire, both looking your best, having triumphed over all things nasty. I might have got a couple of details wrong, but that’s the essence of it. The book even specifies that it ought to be a bedroom wall, so you can see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night.’
‘Outrageous,’ said Charlie. Still, she felt a little better. The idea of somebody thinking her admirable . . . Now she knew beyond doubt that Ruth Bussey was nuts.
‘Bussey had scribbled your name on the relevant page and put a big fat tick next to it,’ said Simon. ‘You should be flattered. ’
‘Is she okay?’ Charlie felt guilty for caring more now than she had before. So that’s why Ruth had come to her last Friday. If the person you most admire works for the police, and your boyfriend’s scaring you out of your wits saying he murdered someone, the next step is obvious, surely—almost meant to be.
And when you see that the object of your admiration doesn’t have a clue how to help you, what do you think then?
‘No one knows where Bussey is, Gibbs said. Same with Seed and Trelease.’
‘She hadn’t put any pictures of herself up,’ Charlie said quietly. She looked at Simon. ‘On the wall. Did the book say you’re supposed to put up your
favourite
photos of yourself?’
‘I think that’s what Gibbs said, yeah.’
Charlie knew why Ruth hadn’t got that far with the exercise: eighteen months after wasting her money on a self-esteem manual, she still didn’t like any pictures of herself. Flattering or unflattering, it didn’t matter; all images of her were images of a victim, someone to be reviled or pitied depending on your point of view.
Takes one to know one.
‘What? What are you thinking?’
‘Nothing.’
Simon looked stumped. Charlie guessed he was wondering how hard he ought to try to make her talk about her feelings, and hoping that the answer was not at all.