Читать книгу The Darkest Hour - Barbara Erskine - Страница 15

The nights after her strange experience were hard for Lucy. Robin suggested he and Phil come and stay with her again but she refused. ‘I have to learn to be here on my own,’ she said stubbornly. ‘If you come again I will want you here every night. I have to face it. I was scared, but nothing happened. He was just a shadow. He wasn’t threatening. He was probably a dream or just my imagination.’ She looked straight at Robin and gave a faint smile.

Noticing the defiant challenge in her eyes he said nothing to contradict her. ‘Brave girl!’ he said.

What she hadn’t told him was that she couldn’t get the man’s face out of her head. His shadowy presence was in a way more real to her than the solid cheery figure in the painting. He had appeared for a reason. He was a link to Evelyn and he must have been trying to tell her something. Surely, if he had failed to get his message across wasn’t he likely to come again?

The gallery had been busy but she used the occasional pauses between customers to rough out the outline of the book she was going to write about Evelyn, filling in the very few details she had been able to scrounge from the information that was out there in catalogues and on the Net. A whole week had gone by since she had seen Michael Marston and still she had heard nothing from him. At first optimistic that he would get in touch she wondered now if he ever would. Had he promised to help just to get her out of the door? It increasingly felt as though that was exactly what he had done. But if he didn’t intend to help her, where did she go from here?

Putting her ghostly visitor firmly out of her mind she went over her meeting with Michael one more time in her head.

Had he given her any material she could work with, at least as a start? She went into the studio and stood in front of the picture. Michael had mentioned a farm where Evelyn had spent her childhood and he had implied that he would give her the address. There had to be some way of finding that out herself, but in the meantime, was there some way that she could identify it from the painting?

She dragged her eyes away from the faces in the portrait and this time concentrated instead on the landscape. The gate, the sky, the skyline. Was there a clue there which she could unravel, assuming it been painted on Evelyn’s parents’ farm? There was nothing to distinguish the gate. It was a five-barred wooden farm gate shaded with grey lichen and a mound of soft pale moss. No clue there. Nothing special. But the skyline? The silhouette of the Downs. Would she be able to find someone who recognised that? If it was a favourite place, a real place, then possibly; if it was imaginary then obviously it would mean nothing. But Evelyn painted real places. She painted the Downs she loved and the landscape around her home, that much one could tell from the paintings Lucy had seen in the catalogues, so there was a possibility that the place was identifiable.

What else had Michael said? He had mentioned Evelyn’s brother, Ralph, who was a fighter pilot.

She looked back at the face of the young man behind Evelyn in the portrait. She was sure her initial impression must be right, that this young man was a lover. The touch of his hand on the shoulder, the expression in his eyes, both were too tender, too intimate to be the love of a brother and sister. She squinted at the painting again. It was strange how the expressions of the two faces seemed to change from one moment to the next. Perhaps that was the sign of a great portrait. Or was it just the change of light?

Whoever it was, at least she had one name. Ralph Lucas. So she would start with Ralph.