The Darkest Hour (2 page)

The studio was in darkness, the blinds pulled down over the north-facing skylight windows. The room ran the full depth of the house front to back and the front windows looked out over the street below. She pulled the blinds up allowing the clear north light to flood in at the back, and resolutely she faced the easel. Evelyn Lucas, if it was indeed her, had painted herself sitting perched on a farm gate. She was young, perhaps in her early twenties, and dressed in fawn jodhpurs with a blue sweater knotted round her shoulders over a blue and white gingham shirt, her honey-blond hair loose and wild in the wind. She had dark blue eyes which looked straight out of the portrait, eyes which were engaging, challenging even, daring the viewer to do, what?

At the corner of the painting, a patch of sky with torn grey clouds and fragments of blue behind her shoulder, there was a clean area where Laurence had started to remove some of the grime which covered the surface. Lucy moved closer and stared at the corner. There had to be something there he had spotted which had caught his attention and made him doubt the picture’s provenance. But what?

‘You OK?’ Robin’s voice behind her made her jump. He was standing in the doorway. She hadn’t heard him let himself into the gallery below.

She nodded. ‘Do you know what it was Larry saw here which made him think it wasn’t an Evelyn Lucas after all?’

Robin came to stand beside her. ‘No idea.’

They gazed at the painting in silence for several seconds. That it was of Evelyn had been almost beyond doubt. There were photos of her on the record and she certainly looked extraordinarily like them. Lawrence had picked up the painting at an auction only a few weeks before his death. It had been catalogued as ‘Portrait of Unknown Woman’, but when he brought it home in triumph he told Lucy that he suspected that it might be a missing Lucas from the early 1940s. It was being sold by the executors of an old lady who had died without close heirs and its past was, as far as he knew, a mystery. In Larry speak, he took a punt and bought it for a song.

Robin folded his arms and squinted at it. ‘Whoever painted it, I think it’s lovely.’

She smiled. ‘So do I.’

Robin glanced at her. ‘Sure you’re OK?’

‘Why go out if the professor has cancelled?’ she had begged. She hated it when he went away on his own. But he had insisted he had to go out. And he had refused to let her go with him.

When the police knocked on the door a few hours after he had left she didn’t believe them. What was he doing on a remote lane on the way to Petersfield? Why had he turned off the main road? Where had he been going?

They never found out exactly what had happened. He had skidded, that much was clear from the tyre tracks, and there was evidence that another car had been in collision with his, but the fire damage had been too great to discover much more. He had probably been killed by the impact with the first tree. No other vehicle had shown up on the database with damage which would correlate to the paint marks which had survived. It was black, and probably a Ford. How many black Fords were there in the south of England? Lucy did not care. No amount of forensic evidence would bring Larry back, her perfect, adored, talented husband.

She turned away from the painting and looked at Robin. Short, plump, slightly balding and with the biggest and best smile of anyone she had ever known, Robin Cassell had been her mainstay and her rock for the last three months. When Larry was alive he had come in to run the gallery two or three mornings a week to allow them some time in the studio and the freedom to go to auctions and on buying trips around the country. When the gallery reopened three weeks after Larry’s funeral it had been at Robin’s suggestion, and he had started coming in every day. ‘Just until you are back on your feet,’ he had said, giving her a hug.

Guessing at her cash flow problem – neither her parents, nor Larry’s were in a position to help her financially – and knowing Larry had made no will, he had refused to let her pay him. But that situation could not go on. However much he wanted to help her she could not let him continue to work for nothing. He didn’t need the money; he was, as he mockingly put it, a trust fund kid, which meant he had inherited a large house from his parents which had been sold for development. Besides that, he worked on and off with his life partner, Phil, who ran a bookshop in the centre of town, but even so, her conscience had been beginning to worry her. Until now.

‘I’ve got the grant, Robin,’ she said quietly. She turned back to the picture. ‘I had the letter this morning. What am I going to do?’

‘You are going to write the book, ducky.’ Robin smiled. ‘You owe that to Lol. And to our Evelyn here.’

‘I don’t know that I can. Not without him.’ She blinked back the sudden tears so close all the time, so near the surface.

‘You can. And you will. And it will be up to you to prove if this is a painting of her, by her, or not.’

‘Professor Solomon would tell us that.’

‘Maybe.’ Robin stood back, still staring at the picture. ‘Maybe not.’

‘Did you tell him not to come, Robin?’

‘I said we would be in touch when we were ready.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So, it’s up to you, Luce. Take the money and start researching. Leave the gallery to me, at least for a while. You know I love looking after it.’ Robin turned away and walked back into the kitchen. ‘Did you have any breakfast this morning?’ he called over his shoulder.

She followed him through and closed the door on the studio. ‘I wasn’t hungry.’

‘Well I am, so I am going to make us some toast with lashings of marmalade and some coffee and then you are going to start planning how you are going to approach your research. OK?’

She gave a wan smile. ‘Maybe,’ she echoed.

‘No maybe about it. You’ve got to start living again and this will gently lead you out into the world. You know Uncle Robin is right.’

She walked over and picked the letter up from the worktop where she had dropped it earlier. She read it through again and then she looked up at him. ‘I’ll think about it, OK?’

The evenings were the worst. When the sign on the gallery door had been turned over to read ‘Closed’ and Robin had gone home to Phil, and she was alone in the flat. At first there had been people around. Her family, friends, Larry’s family, they had all been there for her, but slowly their visits had become fewer and further between. Neither she nor Larry had brothers or sisters; her parents and Larry’s lived miles away and in some ways she had been glad of that. She needed time to be alone, to think and to grieve.

Tonight was different. She waved Robin out of the door and locked up behind him then she climbed the stairs back to the flat and went straight into the studio.

She stood for a long time staring at the picture, taking in the detail of the composition, the position of the young woman, just a girl, really, in the landscape, the detail of the countryside around her, then of Evelyn herself, if it was Evelyn, her clothes, her eyes and hair, her expression. It was strange. The more one looked at it, the more hostile that expression seemed to become. She was good-looking – beautiful even, but there was a rawness about her, a violence in the brushstrokes which was unsettling. Robin was right. The painting contained a mystery of some sort. And surely it was a mystery Larry would want her to solve. She shivered. Were it not for the fact that the professor in London had cancelled the meeting the painting would have been in the car with Larry. It would have been destroyed. Perhaps providence had saved it for a reason.

She moved over to the table and switched on the lamp. No doubt Larry had thousands of digital photos of the painting on line, but he had also made several prints, much enlarged, pinned to a board on the wall. She stared at the close-ups of the paint textures, then she turned back to the painting. Scrabbling round in the tray on the table beside the easel she picked up Larry’s magnifying glass. Ignoring the sudden pain which swept over her as she took it in her hand and realised that he had been the last person to touch it, she held it up to the area of the picture which he had started to clean and scrutinised the paint. She could see nothing special. Just sky and clouds. Shaking her head she put down the magnifying glass and surveyed the selection of bottles of liquids and gels on his tray. Conservation liquids, solvents, acetone, turps, they were all there. Hesitantly she picked up one of the bottles of cleaning emulsion. Pulling up the high stool on which Larry perched when he was working at the easel, and reaching for a cotton bud, she dipped it into the fluid and gently stroked the edge of the clean patch where Larry had made his first tentative efforts. The cotton came away covered in dirt. And paint. She frowned. Paint? She felt a moment of panic. If this was an Evelyn Lucas it was potentially very valuable. Perhaps valuable enough to solve her money problems forever should she ever sell it. She must not damage it. She looked at the picture again and then she saw it, so obvious when you looked closely. A section of the sky had been over-painted. It had been done skilfully, but obviously at some point after the original paint had dried. She moved closer and worked on another small section, her tongue protruding slightly between her teeth, removing the newer paint, acutely aware that Larry would be furious with her; that working on the painting was something for a trained expert like him, not for a rank amateur, but she couldn’t stop. The over-painting was resinous and smooth. It was coming off relatively easily leaving the texture beneath it untouched.

Suddenly she caught her breath in excitement. Something was emerging from the clouds. Behind Evelyn, if it was Evelyn, on the far side of the gate on which she was perched, there was another figure, a figure which had been completely obliterated, a figure in the uniform of the Royal Air Force, a young man with fair hair and bright blue eyes.

Lucy let out a whistle. ‘So, Evelyn. You had an admirer.’ She put down her swabs and the bottle and sat back, staring at the canvas. ‘And you didn’t want anyone to know about him.’

She had been sitting there working for two hours and she was stiff when at last she screwed the lids back on the bottles on the work table and stood up, pushing back the stool. The silence of the room had become oppressive and for the first time that evening she became aware once more of how empty the place was. The daylight had faded and beyond the circle of the spotlights the room was growing shadowy. Somewhere outside she heard a small aircraft flying low over the rooftops. The deep throb of its engine grew louder. She glanced towards the window, then back at the easel.

In the painting the figure of the young airman was clear now, standing behind Evelyn, his hand on her shoulder, his eyes gazing past her out of the picture. Who were they looking at? Not someone they welcomed, surely. Both looked angry and defensive. Only the touch of his fingers on her sweater was gentle. Lucy could sense the reassurance there. And the love.

By next morning her excitement had returned and she showed the painting to Robin.

‘That is extraordinary,’ he said. ‘We had no idea he was there. Do you think Lol had spotted him? Do you know if he had the painting X-rayed?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘I think that must be what he was going to discuss with Professor Solomon. He took lots of photos, some in close-up. He must have sensed something because there was no sign of it. None at all. I looked with the magnifying glass. It was only when I began to clean it that I spotted something underneath.’ She turned to face him and for the first time in ages he saw the spark of excitement in her eyes.

‘I’ve made my mind up, Robin. I’m going to try and find out more. I owe it to Larry, you’re right, and I owe it to Evelyn as well. I want to know who this young man was and why he was painted out.’

The cottage where Evelyn Lucas had spent the last years of her life stood on a bank above a narrow lane. The hedges were thick and verdant, hazel and dogwoods threaded through with honeysuckle and wild roses. Lucy stood for a moment looking up at the front of the cottage. It was like a painting by Helen Allingham. The ancient peg-tiled roof was furred with moss and lichen above flint walls and windows with small diamond-shaped leaded panes; the wooden porch was covered with clematis. Pushing open the gate Lucy climbed the steps to the front door and reached for the bell pull. She heard a chime somewhere deep in the house.

Carrying on her shoulder a bag containing a notebook, a camera, and a small digital audio recorder, she had left her car in a lay-by just outside the village and walked down the lane, timing her arrival perfectly for four o’clock. It had taken quite a bit of detective work to find the location of the cottage and even more to trace a contact number but she had in the end managed to speak to Evelyn’s former housekeeper. The cottage was to her delight still owned by a member of the family.

As she stood waiting for a response a thrush burst into song somewhere in the garden behind a lavender hedge to her right. To the left a sloping lawn led up towards a hedge of myrtle behind which she saw the roof of the building she was pretty certain must be the studio. Beyond the studio the Downs sloped up towards the intense blue of the sky. She could see the swallows darting and swooping over the fields.