Angels of the Flood (3 page)

She was about to concoct a story about a previous engagement for that evening when the first large drop of rain landed on her wrist. And then half a dozen more. All about them people were scattering to the edges of the park. Within seconds those first raindrops had turned into a deluge. Kate’s jacket was soaked almost before she’d hooked the collar over her head. David was only wearing a shirt and it was plastered to his shoulders and upper arms by the time they reached the gates.

The streets were deserted. Pedestrians huddled for shelter in doorways and peered out as water cascaded off awnings onto the pavement. The rain was so fierce it bounced up again, each drop a vigorous tick of water. The gutters were streaming. Cars swished by, their headlights sparkling in the sudden dark.

Kate and David stopped and looked at each other. ‘Do we take shelter too?’ he asked. His face was shining with wet.

She shook a halo of water from her hair. ‘What’s the point?’

They were both laughing as they hurried back to her house, then stood in the hallway and dripped generous puddles onto the mat.

‘Don’t move!’ said Kate. ‘I’ll throw you down a towel.’

She hurried up the stairs, found a couple of towels for David, then peeled off her jacket and skirt and roughly dried her hair. She pulled on a pair of loose trousers and a zippered top that were draped over the back of a chair in her bedroom. When she went back downstairs it was obvious that David’s towels weren’t having much impact on the rain damage. He followed her to the second bedroom where she found him a tracksuit of her son’s, which was too small, but dry at least, and he retired to the bathroom to change.

By the time he reappeared in her kitchen she’d poured two glasses of wine and was hunting through the fridge for the makings of a meal. ‘You’re in luck,’ she told him. ‘I can do you smoked salmon pasta and salad.’

‘Sounds good to me.’

The drama over the rain had caused a shift between them. Kate forgot she’d been planning to invent another engagement for the evening. Now that David was standing in her kitchen doorway wearing a pale blue tracksuit that was loose on her lanky son but stretched tight over his shoulders and chest, he was an altogether different proposition from the almost-stranger who’d been part of her audience a few hours before. It was weird seeing Luke’s clothes on a man who’d known her in the time before she was ever a mother, a man who knew nothing about the person she’d become. A man who, if he remembered her at all, knew a side to her that no one in her present life was aware of.

She nicked the skin of four tomatoes, put them into a small pan of boiling water, waited half a minute, then took them out with a slotted spoon and set them on the chopping board. David had moved silently on bare feet across the room: standing behind her he put one hand on her waist and rested his chin lightly on her shoulder. ‘Anything I can do?’ he asked.

Kate felt that tightness round her ribs again. She flexed her shoulders just enough to shrug him off and said without turning round, ‘You could try telling me what the hell’s going on.’

‘Hm.’ David went to the window and looked down at the garden. ‘It’s stopped raining,’ he said.

She began pulling the skins off the tomatoes even though they were still hot and their flesh scalded the tips of her fingers. ‘Why?’ she asked angrily. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. What’s the point of messing around with those pictures and then sending them to me? Who’s doing it? What do they want?’

She was chopping the tomatoes ferociously. She hadn’t meant to bring up the topic of the paintings again. ‘The Daughter of Time’ had been sent back to Florence three months ago. ‘Marsyas’ had sat for weeks in her studio; she’d hardly ever talked about them with her colleagues. But David was different: he’d been there. You couldn’t just pretend the whole thing was a long-forgotten nightmare when one of the actors in that particular nightmare was standing in bare feet in your kitchen wearing your son’s too-small pale blue tracksuit.

‘Which question first?’ asked David, pulling a metal chair away from the table and sitting down.

‘It’s like being stalked,’ said Kate, finally identifying the sensation that had been haunting her for months. ‘That’s what it is. Just knowing that someone is out there, some warped, obsessive crackpot, has got me in their sights. Someone’s looking at me and I can’t see them.’ She shuddered. ‘It’s… it’s horrible.’

David was silent for a few moments, considering. ‘You’re sure the pictures were sent to you deliberately? Not just to your workshop?’

‘My name was on the consignment note. The dealer said he was under strict instructions not to give out any information at all.’

‘Isn’t that unusual?’

‘Yes, but not unprecedented. Owners of valuable works of art often don’t want their identity made public for fear of burglary.’

‘Valuable paintings? I thought you said the Marsyas was a copy.’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t stop it from being valuable. Titian made copies of his own work—or his assistants did. We don’t know for sure. You have to think back to a time when there was no other way of recording images. And plenty of other artists made copies of work that impressed them. Any painting by Rubens, say, or Sir Joshua Reynolds, is going to be extremely valuable, even if it is, technically speaking, a copy.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know who painted those two pictures, but I’m sure they’re worth a hell of a lot more than the insurance price.’

David seemed intrigued. ‘Let me get this straight. You’ve been sent two paintings by an anonymous owner and both are undervalued?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they’ve both been altered in a way that could relate to Francesca’s death.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And where is the dealer?’

‘Florence.’

The dark eyebrows shot up. ‘So that implies…?’

‘Well, obviously, it was someone who knew… how she died.’ Kate was melting butter in a shallow pan. She crushed two cloves of garlic into a smear of salt with the flat of her knife, then chopped it quickly into a paste. She was working faster, more intensely than her usual leisured style of cooking, all her nervous energy funnelled into the task.

‘There was an inquest, wasn’t there?’ asked David. ‘So the details would have been public knowledge.’

‘Then why drag it all up now?’ Kate tipped the garlic and tomatoes into the pan and pushed them around in the melted butter. She ground some black pepper over them, then crumbled in some feta cheese. ‘Why go to all the trouble of altering those pictures and then send them to me, just so I get to put them back how they were?’

‘Maybe it’s two different people,’ said David. He inhaled deeply. ‘Mm, that smells fantastic. Look, just suppose there’s one person who changes the paintings, and another person who doesn’t want them changed. That’s the person who sends them to you to have them put back how they were.’

‘Maybe.’ The tomatoes were melting into the butter and garlic, their delicate coral flesh marbled white with the feta. Kate remembered how Deceptions pale throat had been necklaced with acrylic blood. But it was the other picture, those two little creatures, superficially as innocent as characters from a cartoon, which haunted her most. What was their significance? Because there was a significance, she knew. The answer was inside her skull, hidden deep in her memory, but she didn’t know how to access it. More to the point, she wasn’t convinced she
wanted
to access it.

‘Once you know who’s been sending the paintings, my guess is you’ll have the answer to “why”.’

‘Maybe it’s best not to know.’ Kate emptied half a packet of penne into a pot of boiling water and stirred vigorously.

‘Do Francesca’s family still live at the Villa Beatrice?’

‘It’s been turned into some kind of foundation for the arts, apparently. The Bertoni family are connected with it, I think.’

‘Sounds like that would be the place to start asking questions, then.’

Kate turned to him, appalled. ‘You mean go back to the Villa Beatrice?’

‘Why not?’

She shook her head in disbelief, then went back to her cooking, tearing the smoked salmon into strips and mixing it with the tomatoes and feta. David made it sound like such a simple task:
why don’t you just go back to the Villa Beatrice and find out what’s going on?
Did he have any idea what he was suggesting? ‘I won’t go because I don’t like being manipulated,’ she said, ‘Just because some freak’s got nothing better to do with her time than stick graffiti on perfectly good paintings, then send them off to me, doesn’t mean I have to go charging halfway across Europe. Why should it bother me anyway? All I have to do is clean it up and send my bill.’

‘You said,
her time.’

‘Did I? It could be his.’

‘But you think it’s a her. Which implies you’ve got a hunch who’s doing it.’

Kate didn’t answer. She poured some cream onto the sauce, then got salad out of the fridge and put it in a bowl. ‘We can eat,’ she said.

‘Here, let me.’ David intercepted her, hefted the saucepan off the stove and began pouring the pasta into the colander in the sink. Thick steam rose up to fill the air between them. ‘So who do you think might be sending you the paintings?’ he asked.

Kate didn’t speak. David had stretched out his arms stiffly and drawn back his head to avoid the steam as the boiling water sloshed from the pan. For a moment his upper body almost disappeared behind dense vapour. Kate was seized with a plummeting sense of dread, a memory of figures seen through glass but obscured by a veil of—of what? Mist? Spray? Dust? There was a sense of movement, and the half-seen figures were scurrying about in panic, the way ants do when their nest is disturbed. And all the time the terror was growing.
All the horror lies ahead.
But what horror? What was it that lay ahead?

She forced herself back into the present. There must be some way to empty her mind of these half-remembered fragments.

‘Let’s eat, shall we?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

K
ATE COULDN’T SAY SHE
hadn’t been warned.

Denied the chance to talk about the altered paintings, David fell back on the topic that he’d already admitted was his current obsession. Kate tried to give him her full attention as he told her his story, the tale of a clever young man who, on his return from Florence at the age of nineteen, had taken the easy route and slipped into a job with the family firm. This happened to be a chain of dry cleaners, but could just as easily have been car dealers or food shops or whatever: the money was good and the work was undemanding. The young man had thought he could play the game and take the money and live comfortably while he waited to discover what he really wanted to do with his life, until gradually he’d realized it wasn’t a game any more and hadn’t been for years. He was head of the firm, people depended on him, he had a wife and three children, and it was far, far too late to change direction.

So the no-longer young man had softened the edges of boredom with drink and meaningless affairs, waiting for the moment when he’d make a break for freedom and kick-start his real life. Then suddenly, a couple of years ago, the decision had been taken out of his hands. The family firm was swallowed up by a national conglomerate, his wife turned into a walking cliche and ran off with her fitness coach, and he found himself middle-aged and marooned, looking across the empty half of their bed at a photograph of a laughing young couple he no longer even recognized.

Kate tried to listen to his story, but her mind kept skittering away. She was irritated at the way the Marsyas picture had almost derailed her talk that afternoon, and some of her irritation was spilling over to include David. She tugged a grape from the bunch heaped up on the celadon plate in the centre of the table and examined the delicate grey bloom on its ruby skin, the way it absorbed the light. Her mind kept returning to the questions that nagged at her: who had sent those pictures and why?

‘Kate? Am I boring you?’

‘What? Of course not… I… well, it’s been a long day.’ With any luck, he’d take the hint and go. Maybe if she was left alone, she could forget about the whole business.

‘Not that long,’ said David tersely. And, then, ‘You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?’

‘Of course not.’ Kate stood up suddenly and began clearing away the plates. She yawned ostentatiously. ‘Coffee before you go?’

‘Not for me.’ His black eyebrows slewed towards each other in a frown. ‘There has to be some way to figure out what the pictures mean.’ He just wouldn’t let the problem alone. After all, there can’t be that many people who know how you and Francesca were connected. Try to think, Kate. If you don’t get to the bottom of it, you’re just going to be sitting here waiting for the next one to come and that’s—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop going on about it!’ Suddenly Kate was shaking with anger. ‘I’m sick of thinking about the bloody pictures. Why don’t you just go! They don’t matter, can’t you understand that?’

‘Kate, I’m sorry, but—’

‘And it’s got nothing to do with you! You only make it worse. Just because you were there, you think you’ve got some kind of inside track, but you couldn’t be more wrong. You know nothing about it, absolutely nothing!’

‘Okay, okay.’ David stood up and picked up the bowl of grapes.

‘Keep out of this!’ said Kate furiously, reaching to snatch the bowl from his hands, but it slipped from her grasp just as he released his hold on it and fell to the floor with a crash. Pale green shards of china and red grapes lay scattered on the floor between them. ‘Oh, no!’ As Kate stared down at the wreckage, a sob rose to her throat, all the tension of the day releasing in a wail of dismay. ‘Damn, damn,
damn!’
She dropped to her knees, frantically gathering up the jagged fragments. An edge sliced her finger and a pearl of blood appeared just below the tip.

‘Kate, stop it.’ David crouched down beside her. ‘There’s no point, I’ll clear it up for you.’

‘No! I’ll fix it!’ Frantically she scrabbled in the mess.

‘You can’t, Kate. Not even you. It’s broken into a million pieces.’ He reached out to put his arms round her but she pushed him away angrily. He drew back. ‘I’m sorry, Kate.’