When I got back that afternoon, Raven How had acquired a new odour. Not candles this time, or chickpeas or Ruby’s aromatherapy, but a poignant, familiar, tarry smell that set my heart speeding: oils.
“Stinks, doesn’t it?” said Delilah, wrinkling her nose fastidiously. “I hate it when he does oil-painting. This place is going to smell for weeks now.”
“It’s better than your joss-sticks!” countered Ruby. “You know what I think of those. You shouldn’t have them in your room, not in an old building like this. They didn’t have fireproofing in the eighteenth century.”
“1778,” I said, remembering the date I’d spotted on the lintel during the art course. “So how old is Borrans Rigg Farm? It must be even older, mustn’t it, if the Staithwaites own this place?” That Wordsworth letter was still on my mind.
“They’re no worse than all your candles,” Delilah pointed out.
“Um, no, it’s Victorian,” said Ruby. “My candles serve a purpose.”
“The farm’s Victorian? How can it be?”
“What purpose?” said Delilah.
“This was the original farmhouse,” Ruby said. “Not good enough for the Victorians, apparently; they rebuilt it in a better position in the 1880s, to get the views, so Isaac told me, and used this place as a cow-shed.”
“At least joss-sticks smell nice!”
“So Borrans Rigg didn’t exist before then? Or was this place called Borrans Rigg?”
“What? No. It’s always been Raven How. It’s not just the smell I object to, Delilah.”
“I should hope not! It’s better than those oils!”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Ruby said.
I left them and walked slowly up the stairs, reflecting. The Wordsworth letter mentioned Borrans Rigg, which had not yet been built when Wordsworth was alive. The house was not the ancient stronghold I had thought it, but a substitute: a fake. Therefore the letter was also a fake.
And Isaac knew it was a fake. But since he knew the farm’s history, he wouldn’t have forged it himself. So who had?
Luke. Luke had “found” the letter, which he thought would make him rich, and showed it to his dad: who called him a liar. Isaac took the letter off him and hid it – along with all those MOT certificates, which according to my dad might well be evidence of another fiddle…
I shook my head in pity and exasperation. Luke’s get-rich schemes, which never worked out. He’d been desperate to be something more than just a farmer.
The pungent reek of oil-paint beckoned me down the corridor to the studio. Despite myself, I followed its trail and peeked in cautiously, breathing deep of that historic, heady odour. Russell had a whole new set of oily smears down his ridiculous smock. The squeezed, smudged tubes lay jumbled on a chair.
“May I look?” I asked warily. He didn’t shout, or throw anything: just grunted. So, leaving the door wide open, I tiptoed round to see.
It was the blackest yet. It was a sludgy, greasy, grimy, bedraggled landscape. At least I supposed it was a landscape. It was more a state of mind. His sun – was it the sun? – was stuck to the sky like an exhausted brown balloon. The lake was something Grendel might crawl out of, glistening with slime. The land was the stuff of nightmares, the kind that suck your feet down when you try to run away. It transfixed me: but it would never sell in Latrigg Galleries.
“It’s hopeless,” said Russell suddenly. “Bloody hopeless. What am I bothering for? I thought reverting to oils might make a difference. But it’s a disaster, isn’t it?”
It was the depiction of a disaster, certainly. It pulled me in. I couldn’t look away. “It’s not a happy painting,” I admitted.
“I can’t do this any more.” His voice grated. “Not just the courses, the whole damn thing. It’s vanished. Gone.”
“Your mojo?”
He glowered at the canvas. “My inspiration, motivation, what you will. The light’s gone out. But I’ve known that for nearly two years now. You can see it, can’t you?”
“Well...”
“Ruby can’t,” said Russell harshly. “Or she doesn’t want to know. She only sees what suits her.”
“What made the light go out, Russell?”
He rubbed viciously at the canvas with a piece of rag, leaving a long grey smear. At last the answer came rumbling out.
“At Carol’s funeral, Ruby cried. She couldn’t stop. Wept on and on.”
Carol’s death had changed everything for him: I recalled him saying that. Carol must have been ten years older than Russell. That was no reason why he wouldn’t grieve for her, of course... but I was confused. What exactly was it that changed everything? His grief, or Ruby’s?
I gazed at his soiled canvas: a slurry of disintegration, dirt and ruin. It scared me, and it held me. What on earth was in his mind? A crow flapped blackly in the corner, reminding me of Selena’s baggy coat. Selena had made her entrance at that funeral.
“I preferred your portraits to this, I think,” I said, exploratively. “Your portraits of Selena, for example. They were very good.”
“Those? They’re rubbish too. I can’t reach the heart of her. If she has one. I can’t do her justice. She’s extremely beautiful.”
“Yes. She does have a remarkable–”
“She’s a witch,” said Russell.
“She’s a what?”
“She’s a witch. Or a whore, or something.”
“She’s not a thing,” I said stiffly.
“She’s not human, though, is she? With those eyes.” Furiously he dabbed his brush in a murky red-brown mixture and applied it to the horizon, fringing it with congealed blood. “She’s just pretending to be human. I didn’t see it straight away. I was entranced. But she’s a shape-shifter. A liar, like all women. They all lie, don’t they?”
By now I was bristling. “No, they don’t!”
“You too,” he said. “Those paintings of yours: they’re dishonest. A big pretence for tourists.”
“Is that why you ripped them up?”
“Nothing but lies,” he rasped. He stabbed the canvas viciously with his brush. “She wasn’t faithful to Luke, you know. She had another man.”
“Selena did? Who was it?”
“God knows. I saw them kissing in the road outside the farm one evening. I heard her laugh. It was dark. Some guy she’d picked up I imagine. Bloody witch.”
One kiss, I thought, did not make a witch; except in the eyes of a very jealous man. “I thought you liked Selena,” I said coldly.
“I did, at first. I let myself be captivated by her beauty because I needed a muse: mine had gone, destroyed itself, imploded. But it didn’t take me long to see Selena was no better. She’s nothing but a pretty shell, rotten underneath.”
I was about to remonstrate, when something in his face made me shut up.
“Like all the women I have had the misfortune to entangle myself with.” His voice grated. “But I saw through it all – through everything. The whole fucking pantomime.”
“Pantomime?”
“Their marriage! Selena was just living off Luke. She didn’t give a shit about him. She used him because that’s all she knows. And as for Ruby and her so-called friendship– hah! You believe that?” He swept all his tubes, lidless or not, off the chair into a box. Some of them missed.
“I have not the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” I said, as evenly as I could. “Are you complaining about Ruby or Selena? I’m getting quite confused.”
“Both of them! Ask Ruby. Ask Ruby how she betrayed her best and oldest friend! Friend? Worst enemy,” said Russell. “Jesus, when I think of what she did to Carol, the two-faced hypocrite… and then cried at her funeral! That did it for me. Why do I stay here any longer? I must be mad. I am mad. I may as well give it all up now.” He plucked the canvas from the easel and flung it on the table with a clatter.
“Russell–”
“Get out of my way,” said Russell roughly. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. He was in my way. I was tr
apped. Next he picked the easel up and tried, furiously and unsuccessfully, to collapse it, wrenching its legs backwards and finally hurling the whole dislocated lot against the wall. It made a terrible racket.
Ruby burst into the studio. “What the hell is going on?”
“I’ve had it,” declared Russell. He began to tear off his smock. It got stuck half-way over his head and he bellowed through it as he tried to fight it off. “I’ve had it up to here with this place, with your candles and your fucking crystals, with the whole lot!” He emerged, red-faced. “The whole fraudulent shebang!”
“Don’t be so melodramatic!” said Ruby, exasperated. “We’ve got another course to run next weekend! You can’t just walk out now.”
“Can’t I? Watch me.” The smock’s sleeves were stuck: with a struggle, he tore them off his arms and threw it down.
“Don’t be ridiculous! Where do you think you’re going?”
“Anywhere at all,” snarled Russell, “as long as it’s away from here! Before I run amok. Anywhere away from you, you self-satisfied bitch!”
His voice was rising again, and I was still trapped. Ruby’s hands were on her hips; her mouth opened, ready to let rip. I braced myself for the outburst – for paints and candlesticks to start flying through the air again.
The outburst never came. Instead, sharp and unmistakable, a new sound smacked across the room: a single gunshot. Ruby stopped with her mouth wide open.
“Christ!” said Russell. “What was that?”
Ruby blinked, trying to gather herself. “That’ll be the Aireys, shooting rooks.”
“Rooks?” he said derisively. “That came from Borrans Rigg.”
“Well, you’d better go and see, then!”
“I’m not going over there!”
“This is the man of the house speaking, is it?” said Ruby acidly.
“Fuck off! You want to interfere, feel free. You’re the one who practically moved in there, after all.”
I said, “I’ll go over to the farm and check.” I pushed past them both and ran downstairs, my mind racing even faster than my legs.
Pictures danced through my head. Selena kissing another man, betraying Luke… Well, if that was true, perhaps it came as no great shock. But Ruby doing the same, betraying Carol: that made me feel sick and hollow. And I’d imagined Isaac must be lonely…
Disillusionment was bitter in my mouth. How long had it gone on? I’d been blind. I should have known it from the start: from that first visit to the farm when she’d been up in his bedroom. She’d only been mending curtains: but how had she known they needed mending in the first place? Ruby wasn’t good enough for him.
But Isaac wasn’t good enough either. If it had been after Carol’s death, that would be different. But it had happened when Carol was alive, mortally sick and in great pain. Russell was right: Ruby was a two-faced traitor.
And I was an idiot. I’d rashly made an idol out of Isaac when I didn’t even know him. Why should it hurt so much to look down and see the feet of clay?
Delilah, worried, stood at the kitchen door peering out. “Eden? I think I heard a gun!”
“It’s probably the Aireys. You stay here. I’m just going over to the farm to make sure everything’s all right,” I said; and as I sprinted outside, threw Delilah into the mix swirling round my mind. Who did she remind me of? That patient, self-sufficient air… Anyone in particular?
There was no time to ponder it. I sped across the field, fell over the stile, rounded the corner into the farmyard and skidded to a stop.
Selena stood there with her oversized coat hanging almost to her ankles, a hostile silhouette against the evening sun. The shotgun lay across her arm. She might have been the sheriff in a western waiting for the villain to arrive.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Selena, will you put that thing down?”
And then I saw Bryony. She was crouching on her hands and knees by the farmhouse door. “Bryony? Christ, Bryony! Are you okay?”
Bryony raised her head. Her face was drawn and dismayed.
“She shot the dog,” she said. “She shot Tag Lad.” Beneath her hands was a collapsed heap of fur, black, white and red, the old dog slumped across the doorstep like a discarded rug. The top of his head was gone.
I fought down the upthrust of nausea and turned furiously to Selena. “What did you do that for?”
“He was old.” The beautiful eyes were pitiless and hard.
“He wasn’t that old!” cried Bryony.
“He was a horrible dribbly old thing,” said Selena coldly, “slobbering all over me.”
“There was no need to shoot him for that!” Bryony’s voice broke.
“Put the gun down now, Selena,” I said. It was pointing at the wall, but I would have much preferred it not to point at anything.
In answer, she slowly raised the shotgun until it was pointing straight at me.
“Just put it down,” I said, amazed at how steady my voice sounded.
“You messed me up,” she said, icily hostile. “You told that policeman all about me. I’m not married properly any more. You screwed me right up. He’s not happy. I’m not happy.”
“Put the gun down, Selena!” said Bryony hoarsely. “It’s not yours! You don’t have a licence.”
“Well, it should be mine!” Selena flared up. “It would be mine if she hadn’t stuck her nose in! Luke showed me how to use it, he meant it to be mine, like his house, like all his things! They’re all mine. Or they would be if she hadn’t grassed me up!”
“You’ll get into real trouble,” warned Bryony.
“Why should I? I need this gun! I need it for protection.”
“Protection from who?” demanded Bryony. “No-one’s going to hurt you.”
“They might! Whoever came for Isaac might come back for me!”
The gun was still pointing at me, and now Selena was shouting. Play-acting? It felt like it: but the old dog’s corpse told a different story. If she was playing a game, it was a deadly one. I stood frozen.
“Nobody came for Isaac,” said Bryony, pleading. “Isaac fell. He hit his head. It was an accident. You don’t need a gun.”
“How do you know? What if they come for me too?”
“He won’t come for you,” I said. “I promise. Now put the gun down, Selena.”
She stared at me. “You promise he won’t come?”
“I swear.” I held my breath, until she lowered the gun at last. Bryony caught it by the barrel, and Selena, seeming to lose interest in it, let it go.
“I’m locking this away,” said Bryony. Stepping over the dog’s corpse, she carried it inside. I breathed more easily, although Selena was still staring at me, unblinking and unfriendly.
“You know who came for Isaac, then?” she said.
“No, not really.”
She pounced. “But you just said He! You promised He won’t come for you! So you do know. Who did you mean?”
I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. “I meant nobody, Selena.”
“Yes, you did! Isaac didn’t die by accident, did he? It was murder – you just said so! Who is it? If you know, you’ve got to tell me! Have you told the police yet?” Her eyes were wide with horror. The cold manner had turned feverish with fear.
“No, not yet.”
“Well, why not?”
In my mind’s eye, Russell hurled the easel to the ground, berating Ruby, accusing her of betrayal; his onetime muse, destroyed and rotten. Russell had been jealous of Isaac. He was jealous of everybody, eaten up with resentment and frustration; at the end of his tether.
Before I run amok, he’d said… but what if he already had? I could readily imagine him confronting Isaac, pushing him like a collapsing easel. As for the picture, he could have picked that up in Freddie’s shop. He would have enjoyed flinging it down into the mud. It all fitted.
But Russell had an alibi. Ruby. Could Ruby really dissemble so well? Could she live with a murderer? She might have had an aff
air with Isaac, but she regarded herself as a moral person.
And what evidence did I really have? Torn paintings weren’t evidence. Jealousy wasn’t evidence.
“I’m not totally sure,” I admitted. “Not a hundred per cent. ”
“But will you tell the police?”
“The police station’s closed now,” I said. It was a feeble excuse. The truth was, I needed to work out exactly what to say, because I didn’t think I would get a whole lot of sympathy from the police: the first suspect trying to finger someone else.
And as for Hunter… I inhaled deeply. “I’ll call them tomorrow.”
“Why not tonight?”
“I’m looking after Griff this evening.”
“That old man?” She made an expression of disgust. “What about me? I’m on my own! Why can’t you stay? I wanted you here. Stay here.”
“For crying out loud,” I said, my patience thin, “You’re not alone, Selena. Bryony’s with you. If you get worried, ring the Aireys.”
Bryony reappeared at the doorway with a blanket over her arm. “The gun’s locked in its case. I’ll keep the key.” She showed it to us, dull and squat on a chain around her neck, before pushing it under her shirt. “We shouldn’t have that shotgun in the house any more. You go inside, Selena: go and watch TV. I’m going to bury the dog.”
“All right,” said Selena, suddenly meek, and she went in. I watched her with misgiving.
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” I asked.
“I’ll keep an eye on her. I might give the doctor a ring tomorrow. God knows what possessed her: poor old Tag Lad only came up to her wanting a bit of attention, and she just went crazy. Started screaming at him. Poor old thing. He didn’t need putting down just yet.”
Bryony unfolded the blanket and gently loaded the limp body of the dog onto it. She gathered the corners together and heaved it up. “Bring the spade out of the barn,” she said.
So I had to venture into the warm, rank darkness of the bull’s shed, smelling that smell of death again, hearing the bull’s uneasy shuffle of misfortune and disaster. There were the bull tongs, which I had failed to find that fateful day, lying on their shelf. I’d been useless all round. I took the spade and escaped to follow Bryony.
Carrying the blanket across the corner of the in-bye field, past the staggering, bleating lambs, she laid it down against the wall.
“Poor Tag Lad,” she said softly. “He missed Isaac so much.”
“Here? Shall I dig?” I began to attack the earth, which once I got through the grass roots was wet enough to come up fairly easily, in heavy slabs. I dug a narrow trough and stopped to rest. Bryony hadn’t offered to help. When I looked up at her, she was crying.
I dropped the spade and hugged her as I had before; this time she felt more truly like my sister. Eventually she pulled herself back, blew her nose and said unsteadily, “It’s not just Tag Lad.”
“I know.”
“It’s not just Isaac either. Or Luke. Well, it is Luke. But there’s something else: there’s another reason. I’ve not told anybody, I couldn’t – but, the thing is, Luke wasn’t the last of the line.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was pregnant. Until the day before Isaac died. Fifteen weeks. I felt bad all weekend, that’s why I didn’t go to the dinner party. And then…” She swallowed. “That’s why I spent all Monday at the doctor’s and then at Kendal hospital. They confirmed it there. I’d had a miscarriage.”
“Oh, Bryony!” I took her hand, small and cold. “I’m so sorry. But you should have said! You shouldn’t have been working all this time!”
“Someone had to do it. And it took my mind off things. You think I wanted to be lying in bed, just thinking about it? It goes round and round inside my head. If Luke had known, he might not have turned against me at the end, he might not have tried to kill himself. Oh, I know that doesn’t work, I was only just pregnant and I didn’t know myself for weeks, but still.”
“So you and Luke...”
“When he came to me those last few days,” she said softly, “I wasn’t prepared, I didn’t think, I just wanted to comfort him. I know it was wrong... but Selena didn’t make him happy. He was wretched. I just wanted to help.” She gave a sad half-smile. “It didn’t help, though, in the end, did it? It didn’t save him. I couldn’t keep him here. I couldn’t even keep his baby safe.”
There was nothing I could say. Bryony knelt down by the old sheepdog and stroked its fur. “Goodbye, Tag Lad,” she whispered, and I knew that she was saying goodbye to more than just the dog.
Together we laid the limp body in the trench. The evening sun spread a crimson cloak upon the grave. Then I began to shovel back the heavy, sodden turves, shutting him in the dark alone, underground for ever.
Chapter Twenty-seven