Читать книгу Bleak Water - Danuta Reah - Страница 10

The silence of the museum closed around Eliza as she walked through the high, light corridors. These were the times she treasured at the Prado, the early mornings before the gallery got too busy when she could have the spaces and the paintings to herself.

Her interest in the early painters had brought her to the rooms where the sixteenth-century Flemish paintings hung. They had developed techniques that produced paintings with a clarity and depth, and a saturation of colour that has never been surpassed. The big attraction for visitors was The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s enigmatic depiction of heaven and hell. The colours, after all the centuries, were still vivid and clear. Eliza had spent a long time studying it.

But gradually she was drawn to a smaller panel that hung on the far wall. From a distance, it looked dark, but closer, the detail began to appear, a bleak coastline, a sluggish river, fires that cast a sombre glow across a landscape where death marched as an army. Brueghel’s masterpiece: The Triumph of Death.

The painting exercised a fascination over her. She was intrigued by the meticulous techniques that had kept the paint so fresh, the luminescence of the water and the incandescent glow that suffused the landscape. Brueghel had probably worked with tempera white heightening into the wet or on the dry imprimatura, beginning with the highlights of the flesh…It was a painting that drew the eye, as the army of death advanced across a desolate landscape, hunting down and slaughtering the living, men, women and children, with a pitiless dedication and terrifying cruelty.

‘Un cuadro interesante, no?’

She looked round. Two men were standing behind her, studying the Brueghel. They were both tall, casually dressed, one with Mediterranean-dark hair, the other with the fairer colouring of the north. Something about them said ‘artists’. The dark-haired one seemed familiar. He was the one who had spoken, and she realized he had been talking to her. She tried to frame a reply in her still rudimentary Spanish, when she recognized his accent as English. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I always think that this is the wrong place for it.’ Where had she seen him? Had he been in the café the night before?

‘Where else would it belong but among the Boschs?’ the other man said. Her artist’s eye analysed his face – tanned as though he spent most of his time outdoors, Slavic bones. His dark glasses reflected her gaze.

‘I mean the place,’ she said. She gestured at the high, clearly lit gallery. ‘It ought to be in the shadows, I don’t know, in a dark corner of an old church, and you’d come across it out of the blue. Or…’ She’d been thinking about this painting for weeks. ‘I know it’s medieval, its ideas, but there’s something…I’d put it in a current setting. A cityscape, industrial ruins, show people a modern triumph of death.’

The dark-haired man looked round the room. ‘That’s the problem with a place like this,’ he said. ‘It’s decontextualized. Stuck here, it’s history, superstition.’ He moved closer to the panel. ‘It’s a fifteenth-century video nasty,’ he said after a moment. ‘Someone’s cut that bloke’s eyes out. If it is a bloke.’

There was an element of the video nasty in the relish with which Brueghel had depicted torture and death. ‘They were into death, the apocalypse,’ she said. ‘Like we are now, I suppose. The end of days, all that stuff.’ In the foreground, a body lay in a coffin, its head resting on a bundle of straw. It reminded her of something she’d read recently. ‘“Do not apply any pink at all, because a dead person has no colour;…and mark out the outlines with dark sinoper and a little black…and manage the hair in the same way, but not so that it looks alive but dead…and so do every bone of a Christian, or of rational creatures…”’

‘Cennino Cennini,’ the other man said. The fifteenth-century artist whose manual of painting techniques illuminated the world of Renaissance art for later centuries. ‘How to paint dead flesh.’ Eliza was surprised he’d recognized it. He had taken off his sunglasses to look more closely at the picture and at her. He narrowed his eyes as though the light in the gallery was too bright. ‘Cennini. “A dead person has no colour…” He’s wrong, you know. The dead decay. We don’t see it in modern times, not in the so-called civilized places. They have colour. We never see that, it’s all hidden away, burned, buried…’

Eliza thought of Ellie in her bleak grave.

He slipped his glasses back on. ‘Someone should do an exhibition, isn’t that right, Daniel?’ He seemed amused.

Of course! She knew why the dark-haired man seemed familiar. ‘You’re Daniel Flynn, aren’t you?’ she said. He had had a show in London two years ago that had caused a sensation among the critics and an interesting scandal when a fellow artist accused him of plagiarism. He was attractive, bohemian and controversial. Since then, his name was everywhere, his photograph in the magazines and Sunday papers. She should have recognized him at once. ‘I didn’t know you were in Madrid.’

‘I got here a few days ago. I’m travelling, looking for what to do next. This is Ivan. Ivan Bakst.’ The name wasn’t familiar to Eliza. They shook hands.

‘Eliza,’ she said. ‘Eliza Eliot. I’m here on a temporary contract.’

The two men had met up in France, Flynn told her. ‘We knew each other in London,’ he said. ‘Years ago, when I was at art school.’ Bakst had been travelling the European waterways. He’d left his boat near Lyons, and the two of them had come down to Spain together.

‘Are you staying?’ Eliza said. They looked as though they would be interesting additions to the small expatriate community of artists that had assembled in Madrid that summer.

‘We’re going across to Morocco,’ Flynn said. ‘Tangier. And then further south, Tanzania, maybe, Ivory Coast.’

‘I’ve never been to Africa.’ Eliza and Flynn were drifting away from the painting now. Bakst remained studying it.

‘Spain’s almost there,’ Flynn said. ‘It’s easy to forget. The Moors occupied most of it. I don’t know, I might stay for a while.’

‘You could spend a year going round the galleries here,’ Eliza said. Not that she’d done as much gallery visiting as she’d planned. The social life in Madrid was too enticing.

‘Why bother? You might as well visit Lenin’s corpse,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘It’s what these galleries do to art. It isn’t allowed to die. It doesn’t go through the natural processes. A place like this is a mausoleum. Or a trophy hall. Dead art.’

Ivan Bakst had come up behind him as he was speaking. He gave Eliza a cool smile as though the two of them were sharing a joke. ‘You do well enough out of galleries, Daniel,’ he said.

Flynn laughed. ‘So I should turn them down? Look, the money lets me keep working.’ He looked at Eliza again. ‘We’ve just got here. Show us around. Have a drink with me. Tonight.’

She looked at him. His face was thin, long-jawed. Against his dark hair, his skin had the almost translucent fairness she associated with the west-coast Irish, the Spanish. His eyes were blue.

‘OK,’ she said.

The flats were a concrete cliff towering up into the sky above her. It was dark, but her eyes were straining upwards because she knew it was coming, soon, and she wasn’t going to be able to stop it. She tried to duck away from it, get out of sight, but it was coming now, hurtling down towards her and… The sudden ringing alarm jerked her out of the dream and she threw her arm up instinctively to protect herself and then she was awake, breathing fast, her heart hammering. She lay there staring at the ceiling. That dream again. Shit! Detective Constable Tina Barraclough rolled over and picked up the phone. ‘Yeah?’ Her voice sounded hoarse.

‘Tina? Where the fuck are you? You’re supposed to be here. Now.’

Dave West, her partner. She looked at the radio, and groaned. It was after seven. She’d forgotten to set the alarm – no, she could remember now, she’d come in after three and switched the alarm off. She didn’t want to be jolted out of sleep. And she was going to be late again. ‘Shit. Where…?’

‘Look, there’s been an incident down by the canal. We’re supposed to be there sorting out the house to house. I’ve covered for you – I said you were heading straight down – so you’d better be there.’

‘OK, OK. I’ll…’ As she was speaking she rolled out of bed on to the floor, where she lay for a minute, holding her head and trying to gather the pieces of the day around her. The remains of her dream fell apart inside her head. Something about falling…The phone was still talking at her. Dave, trying to tell her the details of the incident. ‘Yeah, yeah.’ She couldn’t get her head round it. She’d gone clubbing the night before.

She unravelled herself from the sheets and stood up, promising Dave she’d meet him at the canal basin in half an hour. She felt strung out and sick. It had seemed like a good idea at midnight, a bit of speed to get the party mood going. Now she wasn’t so sure. Ten minutes on the exercise bike might bring her round, but she couldn’t face that. She went through to the bathroom and turned on the shower, then she sat on the edge of the bath, holding her head. She was horribly aware of her stomach, her throat. A cold sweat was breaking out over her body, and she felt lightheaded and dizzy. She didn’t know how she was going to get through the day.

She toyed with the idea of calling in sick. But that wouldn’t be fair to Dave. He was covering her back, and she’d let him do that a bit too much lately. They’d both been involved in a not very successful investigation into some recent drug deaths. A batch of pure heroin had turned up on the streets and effectively culled three unwary users. The outcome had been the arrest of a few minor players, a slight shift in the hierarchy on the streets and a return to business as usual. The source of the heroin had not been established. It had been an uncomplicated case, but she hadn’t managed to get on top of it. Tina should have had her promotion by now, but her reputation as a good and reliable officer had taken a bit of a hammering recently. She had to get her act together, for what it was worth.

She struggled to recapture the details of this new case that Dave had tried to tell her. A body in the canal. A murder. He’d said who was in charge, and she couldn’t remember. Shit, she needed to know that. She could phone…no, she’d remembered. DCI Farnham. Roy Farnham. That was the name Dave had said. Farnham had come across to Sheffield from Humberside, and he had a reputation as a high flier who didn’t suffer fools gladly.

A murder was a good, high-profile case to be involved in. So why did she feel the drag of depression as she thought about the things that the investigation might uncover. And the feeling, at the end, that you had done little, if any good. She thought about a tower block on a summer night, the cars, the lights, the voices shouting, and the flicker above her that became the figure plummeting down from that dizzy height…She shook her head. That had been three years ago. There was a murder case, she was on the team, and she needed to do a good job to try and get her stalled career moving again.

A few minutes under the shower revived her a bit, but when she looked in the mirror, she still resembled Dracula’s daughter. Fuck it! Why had she let herself get talked into the speed? It would have been OK, otherwise. Today, she needed some artificial aids. She took a small twist of paper out of her bag and opened it carefully. Better than she’d thought. There were still a good couple of lines there. She tipped a tiny bit out, cut it and breathed it in, her eyes watering as the numbness hit then a sharp pain deep inside her nose. Then she felt the magic start to work. Her head cleared and the cold, sick feeling retreated. Her energy was returning – she’d have to be careful not to go hyper when she got to the canal. They’d spot it.

She crammed her stuff into her bag and went down to the kitchen. Pauline, one of the women she shared the house with, was there, eating cereal and reading the paper. ‘There’s coffee,’ she said, without looking up.

Tina poured herself a cup. ‘Oh God, last night, I don’t know what I thought I was doing it was stupid crazy but hey there’s something going on down by the canal could be a good case for me so I really, really need to get…’

Pauline looked at her. ‘I’d come down a bit before you get there,’ she said.

‘Yeah, yeah, OK.’ Pauline was right. She’d need to watch herself. She gave the coffee a miss, forced down a slice of bread and marmalade and headed for her car, the energy suddenly singing in her veins. The rain stung her cheeks and she felt a great surge of optimism as though, after all this time, she’d found her real self, that relaxed, confident self that lived inside her and was so often – these days – inaccessible.

It was half an hour before she’d managed to force her way through the city traffic to get to the place where Cadman Street Bridge crossed the canal. She was aware of Dave’s reproachful glance as she arrived to be given her instructions for the day.

Eliza and Mel spent the first part of the morning moving the display boards around to get the angles right. ‘I want to make a link with the canal,’ Eliza explained to Mel. ‘Look at the water on the Brueghel. And the bridge. It’s just…I don’t want people to look at it and think, “Oh, old master,” I want them to look at it and look out of the window and think, “This is here. This is now.”’ She straightened the enlargement of the hanging man on the display board in front of her and stood back.

‘Is that what Daniel Flynn says?’ Mel asked. She brushed dust off her trousers.

‘No, those are my ideas,’ Eliza said.

Mel pulled a face and sat back on her heels. ‘Can we have a break? I’m tired. Shall I go and make some coffee?’

Eliza translated this as Mel wanting a chance to get away from the drudgery of setting up the exhibition space. Whatever Mel’s motives were, coffee was a good idea. ‘You’ll have to go to the café,’ she said. ‘We’re out of coffee here.’ She reached for her purse. ‘I’ll have a cappuccino.’ Mel was looking out of the window with interest, and Eliza remembered the activity she’d noticed earlier. ‘Maybe you can find out what’s happening,’ she added.

Mel gave her a bright smile. ‘Yes,’ she said. She went to get her coat.

While Eliza was waiting for Mel, she went downstairs to see if there were any messages for her and to see if Jonathan wanted her for anything. His door was ajar, and she could see him in front of his computer. She knocked, and pushed the door open. ‘Hi.’

He jumped and twisted round in his chair. ‘Don’t do that, Eliza. Get some shoes that make a noise.’

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘I didn’t train to spend all my days writing reports,’ he said. ‘Eliza, what was that about Cara?’

So he hadn’t missed her evasion. ‘It’ll keep. Anything new?’

He shook his shoulders irritably. ‘No. You could write this report for me…No. Let me know when Flynn gets here.’

There wasn’t too much of the morning left. She was beginning to think that Mel had got the message wrong. She checked her watch. It was almost half past.

Jonathan’s window caught the sun. The room was light and airy. Eliza thought it would make a good seminar room when they managed to expand the educational side of the gallery. There were posters on the walls from exhibitions Jonathan had particularly admired, including his own big success from over ten years ago now, a photographic exploration of England’s industrial landscapes, abstract shapes against the wildernesses that were encroaching on the urban decay. Jonathan’s skill as a photographer, and the depth of ideas behind it, had attracted a lot of critical acclaim. But he’d never produced anything of a comparable quality.

‘About Cara…’ she said. Jonathan needed to know that Cara had got through the gallery alarm system.

He looked up from his work, his face expressing irritation. ‘What about Cara?’ he said.

‘She’d let herself into the gallery last night.’

He looked at her in silence. He didn’t seem surprised, more irritated and a bit anxious.

Eliza went through what had happened, her encounter with Cara, and Cara’s claim that she’d learnt how to work the alarm system by watching Jonathan. His face grew tense as he listened to her.

‘Rubbish,’ he exploded. ‘Bullshit.’

Eliza shrugged. ‘That’s what she said.’ He seemed more upset by that than anything else. Jonathan didn’t like to be seen as fallible. But now she thought about it, it did seem odd. When would Cara have watched Jonathan setting the alarms? ‘Anyway, I thought you needed to know,’ she said.

‘You should have told me sooner.’ His face was angry. It didn’t bode well for Cara. ‘I’m getting on to the Trust. We never agreed to this sort of thing.’

‘Do you want me to do it?’ Eliza thought she could soften the message a bit, get the Trust to impress on Cara the importance of the security systems without getting her into major bother.

‘No.’ Jonathan was adamant.

Oh well. He had a point. Eliza looked at her watch again. Mel was taking her time with the coffee. She ran back up the stairs and went in to the upper gallery, pleased that the placing of the display boards hadn’t diminished the sense of space and light. She crossed to the other side of the room, to look at it from a different angle. Good. And from here, she just had to turn her head and she was looking down into the dark waters of the canal.

Then she was aware that someone was standing behind her, and hands lightly touched her shoulders. ‘Un cuadro interesante, no?’

She spun round, her heart hammering, and Daniel was there, smiling at her a bit warily, a bit cautiously, as though he wasn’t sure of his reception. ‘Daniel!’ she said. Then, ‘You frightened me out of my wits!’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘There was no one downstairs.’

It was so long since she had seen him that she had been imagining him more and more like his publicity photograph, which portrayed him in chiaroscuro, brooding and shadowed. But without the photographer’s art, he was ordinary, the Daniel she had known in Madrid, with dark hair, blue eyes and a friendly smile which became less guarded as she smiled back at him.

‘It’s been a long time,’ she said. ‘How are you? What have you been doing?’

‘I’m OK,’ he said, still slightly careful. ‘I’ve been working. I left Madrid a few weeks after you – kind of lost its charm then.’

‘Where did you go?’ she said. She thought she knew the answer. Africa. Tanzania.

‘Whitby,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a flat on the coast there.’

Whitby. She wanted to laugh. ‘You should have come across,’ she said. ‘We could have – I don’t know, something.’ He’d been so close, and he hadn’t bothered to get in touch.

‘I was working,’ he said. He moved across to look out of the windows. ‘This canal,’ he said. ‘It’s like the Brueghel landscape – you’ve even got the arched bridges and the dead trees.’

‘They’re alive in summer,’ Eliza said.

‘Artistic licence.’ He looked at her. ‘I’ve never forgotten what you said that time we were looking at the Brueghel together.’ His gaze moved to the canal, and he was quiet for a moment as he looked out of the window, frowning slightly. ‘I like what you’ve done. I knew you’d understand this exhibition.’

The slight tension that had been inside her all morning relaxed. That was the one factor she had been unable to control. Daniel might have hated her ideas. ‘Good. I’d better tell Jonathan you’re here.’

He shook his head. ‘It’ll keep.’ He was leaning against the window frame, looking out at the canal side. ‘So how do you enjoy being a curator?’

‘I love it.’ That was true. Eliza enjoyed interpreting other people’s work, presenting it in ways that would make people look carefully, think about what they were seeing, think about art in its context, not as a series of isolated pieces stuck like relics in an exhibition.

‘What about the painting?’ he said. ‘Your own stuff?’

The Madrid painting that was on her easel upstairs. She had discussed it with Daniel months ago when it first began to form in her mind. She had wanted to do – a modern triumph, not of death but of life, something that would encapsulate what Madrid had come to mean to her. She had been brought up in the far north of England where shadows and light merged, where night and day segued one to the other in an indeterminate creep of time. Madrid was of the south – a place of hard shadow and saturated colour. That was what the painting would celebrate.

But as Sheffield had closed around her, the dark winter, the solitary life she seemed to have chosen here, as though she didn’t want to commit herself to this place for longer than was necessary, didn’t want to make the ties that might hold her here, the painting had changed. The shadows of the north began to creep around the edges, the colours began to fade, and she realized that the painting was growing under her hands, turning into something different from what she had originally planned.

But she didn’t want to talk to Daniel about it, she realized. They had discussed everything in Madrid. But this wasn’t Madrid, and Daniel was different now.

She shrugged. ‘It’s easy to get distracted,’ she said ambiguously.

He pushed himself upright. ‘But you are still painting?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Show me what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘Show me what you’re working on at the moment.’

For a second, she thought he meant now, but he was looking round the gallery again. ‘I need to spend some time with this,’ he said.

‘I’ll leave you to it for a while, shall I?’ she said.

‘No. Walk me round it. Tell me your ideas for the rest. Then we’ll do the official welcome bit, OK?’

Eliza felt her slight depression lift. She got out her notes, and they went through the exhibition together, talking through problems, sharing ideas, disagreeing once or twice. Eliza saw Mel in the doorway at one point, looking a query. Eliza shook her head, wondering what had taken Mel so long, and she disappeared.

It was getting on for midday before they had covered everything. They had spent the time walking round the gallery, sorting through the pictures, experimenting with different arrangements on the walls and display boards. They had fallen back into the swift exchange of ideas that had marked their relationship. They talked about the things they missed, the people they’d been friendly with. ‘Do you remember…?’ they each kept saying, and then laughed as they thought about the places they’d gone to, the things they’d seen, the things they’d done. ‘It’s Madrid comes to Sheffield time,’ he said. She looked at him. ‘Ivan,’ he said. ‘He’s been in touch. He’s coming through South Yorkshire in a couple of days. He’ll be here for the show.’ He smiled at her.

Ivan Bakst. She couldn’t share Daniel’s enthusiasm.

Then he stopped abruptly and looked away from her, out of the window towards the canal. The sun had gone in and the light had faded. ‘I think that’s it,’ he said. She had the feeling that his attention was elsewhere. The words seemed to die in the air between them.

The upstairs gallery was very quiet. She had expected Jonathan to come up to see Daniel – Mel would have told him that Flynn was here – and she had half expected Cara to appear, drifting into the gallery from her flat, eager for company and conversation, but there was no sign of her. Eliza remembered the crying in the night. Suddenly, she felt tired and had to suppress a yawn. He noticed and said, ‘You’ve been working all morning without a break. You should have said something.’

Eliza shook her head. ‘Bad night,’ she said.

They were at the entrance to the gallery now, at the reception desk. Jonathan’s office was to their right. ‘Look.’ He checked the time. ‘I’m running late. I’ll get off now – I’ll give Massey a ring later. Tell him everything’s fine, just go ahead as we agreed, right?’

Eliza was surprised. She didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh. Yes, all right.’ She’d expected him to suggest some kind of further meeting, a drink, something. She wanted to talk about Madrid, put some kind of closure on their relationship, the closure it had never properly had. ‘When…?’

‘I’m going back to the east coast today,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back for the do, don’t worry.’

Today. ‘OK, fine.’ She watched him as he left the gallery. He stopped once he was outside, as though he was getting his bearings, then he turned away from town, towards the road that crossed the canal over Bacon Lane Bridge. There was a route on to the towpath there, she remembered. She shook her head, confused. She’d better go and see Jonathan.

He wasn’t in his own room, he was in the general office talking to Mel, who looked up with alacrity as Eliza came in. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s gone. He was in a hurry. Jonathan…’ She could hear her voice sounding flat.

Jonathan shrugged. ‘He’s known for it,’ he said. ‘Lots of enthusiasm, lots of How wonderful you all are, then he loses interest and fucks off.’ She was surprised at the hostility in his voice. ‘He’s OK with what you’re doing?’

‘Yeah.’ Eliza sagged. ‘He thinks it’s wonderful.’ She looked at both of them. ‘Well, haven’t I earned a coffee?’

Mel looked back at the gallery entrance, where Daniel had disappeared. Jonathan shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said again. ‘Look, I’ve got a meeting in town. Tell me about it later.’ He looked tired and edgy, Eliza noticed, as he left. He seemed more and more weighted down with admin – meetings, reports, more meetings.

‘What happened to you?’ she said to Mel after Jonathan had gone. The canal basin was only ten minutes from the gallery, but it had been almost an hour before Mel had come back with the coffee.

‘I had to go round by the road,’ Mel said. ‘The towpath’s closed off.’

‘Closed off?’ Eliza switched the kettle on. ‘Do you want some?’ She’d have to make do with instant.

‘Yeah. It’s all police and things.’ Mel started digging in her bag and pulled out her magazine. For her, coffee meant a cessation of work. ‘I started walking and before I got to Cadman Street Bridge, there was tape across the path and a couple of policemen.’

‘What’s happened?’ Eliza had forgotten the activity she’d noticed from the window earlier that morning.

‘Well, I stopped and talked to them,’ Mel said. She was an incorrigible talker, an incorrigible flirt, and the men watching the path would have been more than happy to oblige her, Eliza was sure.

‘So what did you get them to tell you?’ she said.

Mel smiled, pleased. ‘Well, not much,’ she admitted. ‘One of them said he might drop in later. But they said’ – her voice dropped and her eyes gleamed – ‘that they’d found a body in the canal.’ She shivered with manufactured excitement.

‘Drowned?’ Eliza said. She thought about the still, dark waters. They might be still, but they were cold and dangerous. People had drowned there before, and would again, but she, like Mel, was more intrigued than horrified by the idea of disaster and death on the towpath, close to where they lived and worked.

‘He didn’t know,’ Mel said. She dismissed the subject. ‘Can we have lunch now? I got a sandwich.’

Eliza looked at her watch. It was after one. ‘OK,’ she said. She had a Marks and Spencer salad in the fridge from yesterday. They could take half an hour.

Mel settled down with her magazine as Eliza made coffee. ‘Where’s he staying?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ Eliza poured water into the cups. The sour smell of the coffee made her slightly queasy.

‘Daniel Flynn,’ Mel said impatiently. ‘He looks really sexy in the photograph.’ She gave Eliza a speculative look.

Eliza concentrated on her coffee. ‘He’s OK,’ she said, keeping her voice neutral. She listened to Mel as she talked about Daniel, the things she’d read about him, the things she’d heard, his involvement with this famous beauty or that famous beauty, things that Eliza would really have preferred not to hear about, but of course Mel didn’t know, and Eliza had no intention of letting her find out. She tuned out the sound of Mel’s voice, responding with an occasional ‘Mm’, and let her mind drift.

And she kept coming back to Daniel. She’d managed to push him out of her thoughts for a while, but during the next few days, that was going to be hard. She’d need to keep herself focused on the work. She thought about the pictures and photo-montages that had surrounded her all morning. Daniel had liked her idea of using the Brueghel as a focus, drawing the viewer in through the greys and blacks and blues of some of the images to the centre of incandescence where strange winged creatures flew above a river of fire and screaming children fled a napalm hell. Suddenly, she was impatient to get back to work.

‘OK,’ she said, finishing her salad. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

Mel, silenced in mid sentence, looked put out. ‘Jonathan wanted me to…’ she began.

‘And I want you to help me get the room set up,’ Eliza said. She had just about had enough of Mel, and for once, Mel shut up.

They worked until late in the afternoon, then Mel said, ‘Eliza…?’

Eliza was angling a display board. ‘Yes?’

‘Jonathan said I could finish early today. I’m going to the concert. He said it was OK with him if it’s OK with you.’ Her voice was unaccustomedly diffident.

Eliza nodded. She’d worked her bad temper off, and she had no reason to keep Mel. They’d made good progress. ‘Fine. I think we’ve done as much as we can. I’ll go on for a bit. See you tomorrow. Make sure the door’s locked.’

She listened as Mel’s footsteps faded down the stairs. She was glad to be by herself now. She could walk round, absorb the design that they’d carefully set up, note places where it needed refinement or alteration, begin to get the feel of the exhibition as a whole. Flynn would be back on Friday for the private view, and Saturday, they were opening. She needed to check the arrangements for the private view again, check with the caterers, see if there were any last-minute invitations to be sent out.

She was holding up another of the enlargements from Brueghel’s original painting, the depiction of death on a red horse, this one taken from the centre of the painting where all the reenactments of death took place in the orange glow from the fires that suffused the dead landscape, when something made her jump – Too much time with the old masters – and she realized that there were two people, a man and a woman, standing in the doorway watching her. Mel must have left the door unlocked. She sighed. ‘The gallery’s closed now,’ she said. ‘We open at ten.’

The woman looked at the painting Eliza was holding. ‘Death on a red horse,’ she said. ‘I thought it was a pale horse.’ She moved round until she could see the picture more clearly. ‘“And behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death,”’ she said.

Eliza recognized the words. ‘Revelation,’ she said. The fading light fell on the woman. She was a Goya portrait, with full lips and dark eyes, her oval face framed by black hair. She looked pale and tired – a Goya with a hangover, Eliza diagnosed with the expertise of experience. ‘I don’t think Brueghel was painting Death specifically. I think they’re all deaths, if you see what I mean.’

The woman nodded, still eyeing the painting. ‘It’s…striking,’ she said. Her tone changed. ‘You’re Ms Eliot, Eliza Eliot?’ Eliza nodded. The woman took something out of her pocket and held it up for Eliza to see. ‘Detective Constable Barraclough, South Yorkshire Police,’ she said. She looked too exotic to be a policewoman. ‘And this is DC West.’ The second officer nodded at Eliza.

‘We’re investigating an incident on the canal bank last night,’ DC Barraclough said. ‘You live in the flat upstairs, don’t you?’ Eliza remembered Mel’s story of the closed-off towpath, the body in the water. ‘We’re trying to put together a picture of what happened. Did you notice anything unusual last night?’

‘Unusual?’ Eliza shook her head. ‘How do you mean, “unusual”?’ An incident. A feeling of unease was beginning to stir inside her. What, exactly, had happened on the towpath last night?

‘Anything that sounded like trouble, a fight? Even kids messing around?’

Eliza shook her head again. She couldn’t remember anything like that. She remembered the noise of the storm.

‘Do you get a lot of people along the towpath at night?’ DC Barraclough said.

‘Boats go by sometimes. Kids occasionally. It’s usually pretty quiet.’

‘But you didn’t hear anything like that last night?’

‘It was very stormy, so that kept me awake. But…’ Eliza shrugged. The sound of bad weather wasn’t what this woman was looking for. ‘Have you asked at the other flat?’ she said.

DC Barraclough looked surprised and checked her notebook. ‘The other flat?’ she said.

‘There are two flats,’ Eliza said. So much for efficiency.

‘Who lives there?’ It was the man this time. DC Barraclough was flicking through her notebook, frowning.

‘Cara…’ Eliza realized she didn’t know Cara’s second name. ‘A young woman and her baby,’ she amended. ‘She’s called Cara. I don’t know her…’

She was aware of a beat of silence, then DC Barraclough said, ‘There’s a baby?’

‘Yes.’ Eliza saw the two police officers look at each other. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Have you seen her today?’ the other woman said. ‘This Cara?’

Eliza shook her head, suddenly feeling uneasy. She remembered wondering why Cara hadn’t come wandering into the gallery the way she normally did. She remembered Mel sitting back on her heels, her eyes bright with excitement as she talked about the police on the towpath and the body in the canal.

DC Barraclough didn’t answer her. She was talking on her radio.

The Second Site Gallery wasn’t far from police HQ. Roy Farnham was there within fifteen minutes of getting the call. He pulled into the car park in front of the old warehouse, aware, with part of his mind, of the beauty of the old brickwork, the elegant arch on the windows and doors.

One of the officers was waiting for him. He’d noticed her before, the DC who always looked as if she had just got out of someone else’s bed. Tina Barraclough. What was it he had heard about Barraclough? Some kind of crack-up after a case that went bad a couple of years ago? There had been something about a suicide, a young man had jumped from a tower block…He couldn’t quite remember. He noticed that she looked rather ill and ragged as she came over and told him quickly about the young woman, known only as ‘Cara’, who lived in a flat above the gallery with a baby, and who hadn’t been seen that day.

‘Can we get access?’ he said.

Barraclough shook her head. ‘Dave West’s been up.’ She indicated the blocked-in stairway running up the outside of the building. ‘The bottom door was open, but the one into the building is locked.’

Farnham could hear the pathologist’s voice from early that morning. There’s a baby somewhere. This girl had a baby not so long ago. ‘We need to get in.’ As he spoke he was aware of someone coming from the gallery, a woman. He recognized her as she looked up. It was Eliza Eliot, the woman he’d met at the Chapman funeral – he’d forgotten for the moment that she worked at the gallery. He’d hoped if he saw her again it might be in a less formal setting. A funeral and a murder inquiry. Christ, Farnham, you know how to show a girl a good time. ‘Miss Eliot,’ he said. He saw recognition in her eyes. ‘You told my officers you haven’t seen the woman who lives upstairs all day. Is that unusual?’

‘Yes.’ She rubbed her arms against the cold. ‘Yes, it is. She usually drops into the gallery at some time. She’s a bit lonely, I think…’

‘Is there another way into the flats?’

‘I’ll get my key…’ she began, then said, ‘There are stairs in the gallery. It’s quicker that way.’ He followed her into the gallery, past an empty reception desk and through a turnstile. The gallery was empty, the long downstairs room in darkness. He could see the shapes of pictures on the wall, objects standing on the floor space, making odd, shadowy shapes in the fading light. Eliza Eliot led them to the back of the gallery and through a door that opened on to a staircase. She ran ahead and opened a heavy door at the top of the stairs.

Farnham found himself in a long, straight corridor. There were two entrances on the corridor, open lobbies that led into the individual flats. The door that led to the external staircase was at the far end.

‘That’s Cara’s,’ Eliza Eliot said, pointing to the first door.

Barraclough looked at Farnham, then knocked on the door. There was silence. She knocked again. ‘You heard her in the night?’ Farnham said to Eliza.

Eliza nodded. ‘She was seeing to the baby. It was crying.’

Barraclough’s face was tense as she listened. ‘There’s no one there,’ she said, addressing herself to the other officer.

Farnham nodded to West, who stepped back and kicked the door over the lock. It gave a bit. He kicked it again and it flew open. The small entrance lobby was dark. Farnham heard the click of a light switch, but nothing happened, then Barraclough’s voice said, ‘The light isn’t working,’ then, louder, ‘Cara? Police. Are you all right?’ He shone a torch at the ceiling. There was a bare bulb hanging from the light fitting. He went ahead and pushed open the door into the flat. The room was dark apart from the flicker of a candle. Heavy curtains were pulled across the window. It was icy cold. He pressed the light switch, but again, nothing happened.

West was over by the window, tugging at the curtains. They fell away, landing on the floor with a thump, releasing the smell of dust. They were just old blankets hooked over the curtain rail. In the dim light, it was like being in a child’s room, the nursery print on the bedspread, the teddy bear and the doll propped on the floor by the bed, the sheets and pillows disarranged, a rocking horse pushed against the wall at one side. There were the remains of a sliced loaf on the worktop, a mug, an open milk carton, a baby’s bottle, unwashed. There was a cupboard on one side of the room, the doors hanging open, and beside it a chest of drawers, the drawers pulled out, stuff scattered over the floor.

He heard Barraclough’s exclamation. She was leaning over a cot that was pushed close to the window. Farnham felt his heart sink as he saw the motionless shawl-wrapped bundle. He was already speaking into the radio as Barraclough began to run her hands over the infant. He saw Eliza Eliot standing by the door, her hands pressed over her mouth, her eyes shocked. He nodded sharply at West, who began to usher her back, back towards the door of the flat, the landing.

Then Eliza was outside the flat, and the young man was looking down at her. He was holding a photograph. Eliza noticed that he held it carefully, protecting it from his fingers with a tissue. ‘Is this her? The woman who lives here? Cara?’

Eliza looked at the photo. Cara smiled bewilderedly back, a very new baby held awkwardly in her arms. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Look, what’s…?’

Roy Farnham came out, still talking on the radio. His voice sounded brisk and efficient, and somehow this was more reassuring than shouting and urgency and exclamations. He looked at her. ‘We’ll need to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Would you wait downstairs?’

She shook her head. She found herself persuaded, firmly and inexorably back down the stairs to the gallery, back into the office where she sat down heavily. The sound of a siren was already audible in the distance, coming nearer and nearer. She was shaking. She looked wordlessly at the young officer. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. ‘I don’t know,’ she kept saying. ‘I don’t know…’ She tried to listen to what was happening two storeys above her, heard the sound of feet running on the outside staircase and silence again.

Cara. Cara’s baby. She had a sudden vision of Ellie as a tiny bundle in Maggie’s arms, of Cara putting the baby down on the chair in her flat in response to Eliza’s clumsy invitation. ‘I’ve got to…’ she said, and stood up. She went to the gallery entrance, ignoring the efforts of the young man to keep her back.

Two paramedics came down the stairs at speed, one of them carrying the tiny bundle that must be Briony Rose. The siren was still sounding as the ambulance drove away. Like a sleepwalker, Eliza went up the stairs to the exhibition space, and stood in front of the reproduction of the Brueghel that formed a centrepiece to the exhibition. ‘Miss Eliot?’ She heard the officer’s voice behind her.

A river flowed across the scene, a bloated corpse drifting on the oily surface, another sinking beneath the water under an arched bridge. A burning tower dominated the landscape and the armies of the dead pressed forward.