Bleak Water. Danuta Reah

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      The thought depressed her and she returned to the gallery in a bad mood. The police had been and gone. The search of the gallery had revealed nothing, and Jonathan was preparing to leave for the meeting he’d been agitating about earlier. She showed him the paper and he scanned it in trepidation. ‘They mention the gallery,’ he said.

      ‘Well, they would.’ Eliza hung up her coat and pulled on the smock she used to protect her clothes when she was moving stuff around. ‘Cara lived here.’

      ‘She lived in the flats, Eliza. They’re nothing to do with the gallery.’ He rattled the paper irritably.

      ‘Yes, well…’ Eliza’s mind was moving between the events of yesterday and the work she still needed to do.

      ‘I knew it was a bad idea letting the flat to that child,’ he said. ‘And now we’re going to have all the pimps and kerb crawlers knocking on our door. It was bad enough when it was a kindergarten, but now we’re a fucking brothel.’

      ‘What other kind of brothel would there be?’ Eliza said wearily. ‘Shut up, Jonathan.’

      He looked a bit abashed. Eliza wasn’t really angry with him. He’d had a stressful day, the preparation for the opening disrupted by the visit from the police team. She supposed he was just dealing with it in his own way. He pulled his coat on. ‘I won’t be back today,’ he said. ‘Phone if anything urgent comes up.’

      ‘It won’t,’ Eliza reassured him. She made herself some coffee – instant, yuk – and took it upstairs so that she could get on with her work for Flynn’s exhibition. She was behind now. But the words ‘suspicious death’ kept resonating in her mind, and she kept thinking of feet moving silently through the gallery in the dark, in the night, a couple of floors below where she slept, coming to the stairs, beginning their stealthy climb…Stop it! ‘Drama queen!’ she said out loud. No one had come into the gallery. The police had checked. The paper said that Cara had gone out, gone working, leaving the baby alone in the flat.

      Cara had been in the flat during the night – Eliza had heard her. She must have gone out after that. She could remember the sound of crying. The crying had sounded almost hysterical, and then it had gradually faded into hiccuping sobs, and then into silence. Eliza stood still in the empty gallery, the light from the low winter sun casting long shadows across the floor. What had been going on, on the other side of the wall, in the dark, in the night, when she, Eliza, had been curled up in her chair, drinking cocoa, slipping away into dreams?

       Madrid

      Eliza’s eighteen months in Madrid slipped past her like a dream. Once Daniel Flynn had arrived, time seemed to kick into overdrive in a whirl of excitement, of art and books and travel and sex and wine.

      It was a month since they’d first met. Their relationship had taken off with a giddy speed that still made her uncertain about its status and durability. In her experience, a swift tumble into intimacy was usually followed by an equally – but less pleasant – tumble into indifference or enmity. His arrival in Madrid originally had been a random zag in an unplanned drift around Europe. But he’d prolonged his stay in Madrid, taking a summer rental. Ivan Bakst, the man he’d been travelling with had moved on, but Daniel had stayed. He’d started spending a lot of time at the Prado, his status as a rising young artist making him a welcome visitor, gaining him entry when the museum was closed, and giving him access to off-limits areas, such as the workshops where Eliza was now.

      She picked up her magnifying glass. The portrait on the easel in front of her was illuminated by a raking light, showing the brush strokes that a living artist had placed on the canvas almost five hundred years before. Portrait of Sophia. She moved the glass across the surface, studying the paint. The picture had been damaged at the bottom left. She could see the multi-layered structure of the red paint of the woman’s cuff. She made a note.

      Daniel would be upstairs in the Flemish rooms, studying the Brueghel. He was beginning to share her obsession. He was searching, he’d told her. He knew what he wanted his next work to be about, but he couldn’t decide on its form. He was an eclectic artist, prepared to use any materials that came to hand and seemingly competent in most traditional and non-traditional media. He found Eliza’s interest in Renaissance art hard to understand. ‘It’s gone, it’s past,’ he’d said once when they’d discussed it. But he was spending more and more time in front of The Triumph of Death, more and more time listening to her ideas about it.

      Later that morning, they met for coffee in one of the pavement cafés that abounded in the city. They sat in the sun as the waiter came over to fill their cups and take an order for churros, the sweet batter sticks that Eliza had developed an addiction for.

      His exhibition was starting to come together in his head, he told her. He wanted to focus on The Triumph of Death. ‘I want to put it in a current setting,’ he said. ‘A cityscape, industrial ruins. I want to show people a modern triumph of death.’ He had a small reproduction of the Brueghel, and he wanted to pick her brains about its background, the nature of its composition. The waiter put a plate down in front of her and he helped himself.

      ‘It’s heavily symbolic,’ Eliza said. She dipped her churros into her coffee, and let the crisp sweetness melt on her tongue as she thought about it. ‘It’s a series of tableaux that people would have recognized. You’d need some modern equivalents. Look here, for example –’ She pointed out the fallen woman about to be crushed under the wheels of the death cart. ‘She’s holding a spindle, and the scissors in her other hand are about to cut the thread. That’s Fate. When the thread of your life is cut, you die. I don’t know what that image would mean to a modern audience. Or here, the lovers.’ They were singing to each other, absorbed, close, doomed, as Death added his counterpoint to their duet.

       SIX

      Farnham’s summons came sooner than Tina expected. She’d gone back to the incident room and was sitting at her desk making a pretence of going over her notes. She just needed a few minutes. Her eyes were starting to close, and she jolted awake as Dave nudged her. ‘Get a grip,’ he muttered. Farnham was coming into the room.

      He looked at Dave. ‘There’s someone waiting for you in interview 2, West,’ he said. Dave vanished with alacrity.

      Farnham stayed where he was, looking at Tina. She felt a twist of nerves in her stomach, and swallowed. She could remember the way he’d looked at her as Eliza Eliot was leaving, a long, assessing look.

      He said. ‘My office. Five minutes.’ He went out through the double doors, towards his room.

      Tina took a deep breath. OK, better to have it out in the open. She went along the corridor and knocked on his door. He was sitting at his desk, a sheet of paper in his hands, a witness statement. He looked tired. ‘So, Tina,’ he said, his tone conversational. ‘You’re planning a move to Traffic?’

      ‘Sir?’

      He leant back in his chair. She shifted her feet nervously. The bastard was going to keep her standing. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘OK, I’ll tell you.’ He looked at her. ‘First briefing, late. Second briefing, late. A less charitable man might say hungover, as well. First interview – you not only don’t get the crucial detail, СКАЧАТЬ