Читать книгу The Girl in the Picture - Kerry Barrett - Страница 20

Chapter 13

Present day

Ella

The puppy was called Dumbledore. Stan had pushed hard for his name to be Batman but when Oscar suggested Dumbledore, the puppy bounced around the lawn and we all agreed he’d chosen his own name.

He was sitting on my lap in the kitchen a few days later when Priya came round. Mike was mending the back door, which was sticking, and we were chatting about not much as he worked.

When the doorbell rang, Dumbledore stirred slightly in my lap. Gently I picked him up – he was still just a little bundle of fluff and too-long ears – and put him in his basket where he burrowed into the blanket and went back to sleep. Then I ran to the front door.

For as long as I’d been writing my thrillers, I’d wanted a massive whiteboard so I could scrawl ideas for my twisty-turny plots and check everything made sense. I pictured it like the incident boards I’d seen in CID offices, only with fictional incidents recorded instead of real-life crimes. So I was absolutely delighted to see Priya in our drive wrestling the very thing I’d imagined out of the boot of her mud-splattered car.

‘We’re moving offices so we’re having a clear-out,’ she said. ‘Thought you could probably make use of this.’

I was speechless with delight.

‘God it’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘Can I give you something for it?’

Priya shook her head. ‘Honestly, it was heading for a skip.’

‘Cup of tea at least?’

She shook her head again.

‘Midwife,’ she said, pointing to her bump, which seemed to have got bigger in the few days since I’d last seen her.

‘Later?’ I asked.

‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘Or, come and see me at work one day this week? I want to know more about this mystery of yours so I can do some digging.’

‘Deal,’ I said.

Mike helped me carry the board up to the attic, and lent me his drill so I could fix it to the wall. I put it on the far side of the room – on the wall with the extra window, or air vent. I half expected – or hoped perhaps – the drill to go right through and prove the wall was just plywood but it didn’t. The wall was definitely brick – the dust drifting down onto the floor proved that. Slightly disappointed that our mysterious window was simply for ventilation after all, I shoved rawl plugs into the holes I’d drilled, and with Mike’s help, screwed the board to the wall.

‘Not bad,’ I said, standing back to admire my work.

‘Dead straight,’ Mike agreed. ‘What are you going to use it for?’

‘Plotting,’ I said with a grin.

After Mike had gone, I checked on the puppy, then I took a cup of tea, some biscuits, and feeling faintly ridiculous, Stan’s old baby monitor so I could hear if Dumbledore woke up, upstairs. My heroine, Tessa Gilroy, was a private investigator. She mostly worked on divorces but occasionally – and usually reluctantly and inadvertently – got involved in something more dangerous. I was well aware my sort of writing was enjoying its moment in the sun right now, and I knew my next book had to be good enough to appeal to readers on its own merits, rather than being just another thriller.

I’d been collecting cuttings about crimes and mysteries, and jotting notes about stories Reg had told me for months, and started sketching out an idea involving a woman being set up for something. Probably a murder, I thought, but the alleged victim would still be alive. I thought the ‘murderer’ would contact Tessa from prison and ask for her help in proving the victim was still breathing …

I pulled out the whiteboard pens Priya had brought with her and wrote a few ideas on the board, feeling the rusty cogs in my mind beginning to whir. But all the time I was writing, at the back of my mind, was the stuff I’d heard about our house, and the story of the Hargreaves family and poor motherless Violet.

‘How’s it going?’ Ben said as he peeked round the door of the study an hour or so later.

I was hunched over my laptop trying to write a synopsis. I jumped, not expecting Ben to be home.

‘I’m going back to the training ground in a minute,’ he said. ‘I just had to go and pick up some equipment in Brighton, so I thought I’d pop in and say hello. You look engrossed. Is it going well?’

‘Not bad,’ I said, reluctant as always to discuss a book while I was still thrashing out the plot.

‘I thought you’d like a cup of tea,’ Ben said. He came over to my desk, put a mug down next to my coaster, and peered at the screen of my laptop.

Pointedly I moved the mug on to the coaster and shut my screen.

‘Don’t look,’ I said. ‘I’m not ready for you to read it yet.’

Ben chuckled. ‘What’s it about?’

I looked up at him. ‘Tessa’s working in Sussex,’ I said. ‘That’s all you need to know for now.’

Ben grinned at me. ‘So you’re writing?’

I nodded then made a face. ‘It’s words,’ I said. ‘But I’m not convinced they’re quite right yet.’

‘It looks better in here,’ Ben said. ‘Like you’ve settled in.’

‘I have,’ I said in satisfaction, looking round at the room. ‘But I want to open that cupboard. It would be good to stash some books and stuff in there.’

I pointed at the cupboard nestled under the eaves in the corner of the room. The one with the door painted shut.

‘Mike’s still downstairs,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll get him to have a look at it if you like?’

‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘It probably just needs a good yank.’

It took a bit more than that, but Mike got the cupboard open in the end. He gouged out paint from the edge of the door, and wiped the edges with paint stripper and eventually, it opened.

I was downstairs by then, trying to put on some laundry without Dumbledore jumping into the washing machine. Mike yelled over the bannister, ‘Ella! Cupboard’s open.’

‘Fab,’ I said. Scooping up the puppy, I bounded up the stairs. All these steps would definitely help me keep fit. In the attic, Mike was standing at the open cupboard door, shaking his head.

‘Think I’ve just made a whole lot more work for you,’ he said.

I looked inside. The cupboard wasn’t empty, as I’d expected. Instead its wooden shelves were full of books and papers.

‘I can get someone from the office to come and clear all this out if you like,’ Mike said.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘No way. Look at all this stuff. It could belong to someone.’

‘Someone who didn’t want it,’ Mike pointed out.

‘Still,’ I said. ‘We can’t just dump it. I’ll go through it and see what’s here.’

The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. ‘I’ve heard stories about this house,’ I told Mike. ‘Stories about a mystery. Maybe this is linked. Perhaps the cupboard was painted shut for a reason.’

Mike gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Or perhaps some lazy so-and-so couldn’t be bothered to paint it properly,’ he said.

But I was undeterred. I reached into the cupboard and took out a stiff cardboard folder, full of paper and tied with cord. ‘I’m going to start with this,’ I said.

It was a while before I got to go through the folder, but much later, when the boys were bathed and in bed, and Ben had come home again, wolfed down some dinner, then gone out to an evening training session back over in Worthing, I settled down on the sofa, and opened the file.

It was actually something of a disappointment at first. Lots of crumbling, yellowing newspaper pages, mostly.

I took one from the top and read it.

Opinions are divided over the latest works by the self-titled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, I read. Mr Charles Dickens despises their work and has said the depiction of the Virgin Mary in Christ in the Home of his Parents by John Everett Millais is ‘horrible in her ugliness’. Others are lauding the bold use of colour and realism …

Long ago, I’d studied art history for A Level and I remembered bits and pieces about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Not much though, if I was completely honest, and I seemed to remember not being overly interested in them. I could google them, though, if I needed to, or better yet speak to my old university friend George, who was now a lecturer in art history at St Andrews.

I leafed through the cuttings, reading occasional articles and laughing at some of the writing. It seemed there was nothing here to suggest a mystery but it was still amazing to read genuine newspapers from so long ago. The papers that were dated all came from 1854 and 1855 – so after Harriet Hargreaves had died, I thought to myself – and I wasn’t sure I’d ever even touched anything so old before. Apart from the house itself of course.

At the back of the folder, I found another yellowing page. This one, though, was on different paper. It was soft with age and looked like it had been torn from a sketchbook, and on it was a pencil drawing of a young woman.

The woman in the picture looked to be in her late teens. She was wearing a long dress with a loose skirt, not the stiff crinolines I’d seen in the newspapers, and the fabric was printed with small flowers. Her hair was tied up but it was wavy and snaked down her cheeks as though it wouldn’t be contained. She had freckles and clear eyes and her lips were curved upwards in a joyful smile.

I smiled back at the girl – I couldn’t help myself. She looked so happy. Then, eager to see what else was in the folder, I went to put the picture to one side. But as I did, I noticed the background to the drawing – the girl was standing in between two long windows, and through the glass I could see the sea. She was in my study. In this house.

More interested now, I picked the picture up again and stared at it. Along the bottom, in beautiful copperplate writing was written: Self-portrait. June 1855.

‘Self-portrait of who?’ I said to the girl in the picture, working out with the help of my fingers that Violet Hargreaves would have been eighteen in 1855.’ Are you Violet? Is the mystery about you and not your poor dead mother?’

Holding the drawing in one hand, and the folder in another, I climbed the stairs to the attic and stood where the young woman must have stood to draw herself. The view from the windows was the same as it had been in 1855 and I felt another flicker of excitement.

On my whiteboard I’d written Tessa in Sussex and below it, some notes about the murder-that-wasn’t-a-murder. But now, spontaneously, I picked up a cloth and wiped off what I’d written.

Along the top of the newly clean board I wrote CLIFF HOUSE MYSTERY. Then I fixed the self-portrait to the middle of the board with a magnet and wrote underneath: Is this Violet Hargreaves?

I was determined to find out more.