April came in unseasonably warm—and very seasonably wet. The office was quiet, the hum of usual county CID activities. MacAdams checked his watch, tugged on the mackintosh and reached for his umbrella.
“An early day, Detective?”
MacAdams managed to stifle his surprise; Cora Clapham’s step had grown unusually quiet in the weeks since the case—from which she had to recuse herself.
“Ma’am?”
“I won’t keep you. May I walk you to your car?” She kept her hands laced carefully over stiff suit lapels. Black, no cardigan. She looked like she might be in mourning. MacAdams held the door for her and followed her out, but though she’d come with the pretense of talking, she said nothing until they were both outside in a hazy drizzle.
“You’re going to be recognized for your work on the Randles case,” she said, finally. “As you should be.” MacAdams unlocked his car.
“You didn’t come out in this weather to tell me that. Do you want to get in? It’s pissing rain.” He’d half expected a smart reproach. But Cora only gave him a wry smile and settled into the passenger seat.
“I don’t know exactly what will come of the investigation into Fleet—and my father,” she said. “But your surmise was correct. I asked Fleet to sort his papers because I suspected him.”
“And if he’d found something?”
“I was saved the trouble of moral dilemma, James. You know that already.” It was true; Fleet had looked, certainly, but hadn’t found. Cora sighed. “Imagine my relief—the irony of my relief. My father lied to me. And I let him lie.”
MacAdams had to respect her owning it. She didn’t say so, but MacAdams understood implicitly that this had been hard. He was, no doubt, her first trial.
“What now, Cora?” he asked.
“I must decide whether I’m weathering this storm as Chief—or not. And incidentally, I did come to tell you about your upcoming honorary. It’s not the King’s Police medal, mind. But it will be good for your career. If you want it to be.” She’d delivered all this in the same gravel-studded tones she used to give assignments, while simultaneously opening the car door. No rejoinder was apparently invited.
“I’m not applying to be Chief,” MacAdams said anyway. Cora nodded, lips pursed, but didn’t answer. She shut the car door against fattening raindrops.
“Enjoy your afternoon,” she said. MacAdams sat back in his seat; that was a fucking thing to do to a man late Friday afternoon, and she knew it. But he turned the key and put the car in gear; no time to think about it, now. He had an appointment to keep.
Jo rocked on her heels and tapped repetitively on the window glass. This did not make time move any faster, but it helped focus her thoughts.
It had been over a month since the fire, which felt like yesterday and a year ago all at once. In the weeks that followed, Jo had turned over the house’s remains and all of Jekyll gardens to the National Trust conservancy. Rupert was handling the transfer—it meant the elimination of Jo’s back taxes, and enough money to turn the cottage’s attic level into an actual holiday let. Of course, it would be months before either would be finished (or started, for that matter. Things seemed to move very slowly in Britain). She’d picked up an editing gig with a previous client to keep herself in butter—and borrowed against the future nest egg for the necessities. Like a new plaque for Grove Cottage, which she’d renamed Netherleigh—and a proper restoration of Evelyn’s painting. And that was what landed her here, at York Fine Arts, waiting for James MacAdams to turn up.
It had been a simple phone call. A message, rather, since Jo hadn’t answered. There’s something we think you should see. Could you come down to York? A reasonable person would have called back to find out what, exactly. Jo turned up in MacAdams’ office instead and asked him to come as her second pair of eyes. To his credit, he didn’t even ask why—fortuitous, since she’d have to manufacture a reason for the feeling in her guts.
“Still nothing conclusive on the remains,” MacAdams was saying as they took their seats in a cramped office that smelled faintly of paint thinner. “Age about twenty-five, general health good. No signs of disease.”
“Doesn’t that mean not a natural death, then?” Jo asked.
“As in death by childbirth? Or as in murder?” MacAdams asked—just in time for the art conservator to hear it. A woman in her early thirties, very tall, very thin, and looking suddenly extra interested.
“Ms. Jones?”
“Yes! Call me Jo. And this is Detective Chief Inspector James MacAdams. He solves murders.”
“But not regularly,” MacAdams added, shaking the woman’s hand. She affected a laugh.
“I’m Dr. Emily Strong. Good of you both to come—though I’m not sure it’s a police matter. Can you step into the studio?”
They had located the source of the odor. Jo breathed as shallow as she dared; between the fumes, the crush of extra canvas stands, and misshapen heaps of drop cloths, the place wasn’t just sensory overload; it was a fire hazard. And she’d had enough of those for a lifetime.
“When you told me this might be an Augustus John, I confess, I was very skeptical. But there are signs—” She lifted the drop cloth, and Jo gave an unexpected chirrup.
Evelyn, but as she’d never seen her. Her dress looked as though it might feel real to touch; all varnish cracks, lines, and grit banished. Around her, once faint flowers popped like brilliant stars: violets.
But Jo couldn’t miss the eyes.
“They’re so real!” Jo said, her voice suddenly thick. Deep brown wells, strange and sad, exactly as in the photograph but rendered in color. They seemed brighter, somehow, than the rest of the painting.
“That’s just what I want to tell you about,” Emily said. “I want you—both—to take a step back. Further yet, there! Now look again, slightly at angle.”
Jo and MacAdams had rather awkwardly bumbled backward together, standing as though on a viewing deck, about a dozen steps away.
“What am I looking for?” he asked—but Jo had already spotted it.
Or rather, she’d noticed on the very first day, in the little room above the library. It had been there, in her memories, even in her dreams about it. Something tugging at the edges but not quite fully realized. A sudden hot tremor ran up her spine, and she found herself fumbling with her phone.
“Look at the eyes in the photograph,” Jo said, showing him the photo. “Hold it up and really look.”
“Perfect. They’re exactly the same,” he said. Jo bounced on her toes.
“Exactly!” she said. “But she’s sitting at the opposite angle in the painting!”
“Well done!” Emily said, waving them back to their chairs. “And do you know why? This painting has been restored before. Recently, I’d say in the last ten years. Two things alerted me—first, the angle. But second, the varnish over the eyes and upper bridge of the nose was of a different kind and quality from the varnish on the rest of the painting. We decided to do some forensics.”
Jo saw MacAdams perk up.
“As you would for fraud?” he asked.
“Something like that,” Emily agreed. “Usually we can tell by style, or under magnification. But looking at damage required a bit of ultraviolet and infrared.” Jo managed to keep herself from adding because paint layers fluoresce to different colors in favor of more important questions:
“Damage? Where? What kind?”
Emily traced a long rectangle across the canvas.
“Something corrosive was thrown onto the original. The canvas remained intact, but the original eyes and a bit of the nose had been destroyed.”
Jo had ceased to breathe.
“And yet, you say it was restored,” she heard MacAdams say. “By whom? And what does that have to do with Augustus John?” Jo bounced her foot in excitement. That’s why she invited him; one of them needed to ask relevant questions.
“Ah. Let me start with your last question. Ms. Jones, I think it’s very possible, even likely, that the painting may have been an original work by Augustus John. We would need an expert on his catalog to see it, and additional analysis.” Emily had resumed her seat and a more businesslike manner. “The damage will decrease the value, of course. But the restoration itself is excellent. A professional, certainly. There are a few artists that could probably have done the work. It’s just a matter of research to find out which, and who employed them.”
“I think I know,” Jo said, feeling the internal shiver again. She turned to MacAdams. “I told you about the little framed photo? It had been with my uncle’s things, sent on to the museum and then auctioned.”
Jo turned back to the painting, to the eyes that seemed too bright, too real, and not quite the right angle.
“Whoever he hired must have used it as a model.”
“Sensible,” MacAdams agreed. “But how was it damaged in the first place? The eyes—that seems intentional. Especially as it’s valuable.”
Emily was replying, but Jo’s attention had shifted internally. Three paintings, but only Evelyn’s by a master. Her haunting, faraway eyes destroyed; it felt like the erasure of identity. An unnamed painting, all but forgotten. Like Evelyn herself, buried beneath the house.
MacAdams agreed to be part of Evelyn’s homecoming. For one, Jo needed help getting her in and out of the car; she certainly wouldn’t be able to hang it herself. It took some doing, even with both of them, but Evelyn at last presided over the sitting room. MacAdams, who had divested himself of both jacket and tie by this point, stuck hands into rumpled pockets.
“I feel like I owe you an apology,” he said.
“You have apologized an awful lot, already,” Jo reminded him. He’d done almost nothing else in the scant few times she’d seen him since the estate fire.
“This is a new one,” he insisted. “I’m sorry I didn’t take the theft of this painting seriously. I should have listened to you.”
“Okay, that’s your best one yet.”
“Thank you. It was painful.” MacAdams picked up his coat from the rocking chair. “How goes the new garden?”
“Noisy,” Jo said, opening the front door to the distant cacophony of machinery. “Until they get the house completely cleared away, I can almost pretend I’m in Brooklyn again.”
MacAdams didn’t answer; he was looking up the lane that led to Ardemore. A man was coming down it, and quickly.
“Ma’am?” He looked uncertainly at Jo, then with some relief at MacAdams. “Glad you’re here, sir. It might need police. We—we found something buried.”
A buzzing had started in Jo’s ears, a fuzzy numb feeling that tingled in her fingertips. Something. Buried.
“It might not mean that,” Macadams was saying at her shoulder. It was hard to know what impressed her more, that he knew what she was thinking, or that he’d caught up with her mad-dash run toward the garden wall.
The ground wept puddles in loamy soil. Just past the gash where the house used to be, a knot of workmen waved them over. Jo wandered among yellow slickers and heavy boots.
“We weren’t sure if we should move it,” said the foreman. “Seeing how there was the murder here, and everything. But it’s just a little box, after all, buried under the jump-ups.”
“Oh God,” Jo panted. Two men were walking up, now, carrying a clay-covered box. They rested in on the ground between them.
“Jo—” MacAdams cautioned from behind, but she’d already dropped to the muddy ground beside it. The lid was caked shut, but the latches had long fallen away. She lifted it against a crumbling hinge.
She expected to see bones. A tiny, curled infant skeleton. There wasn’t one. Jo rested her hand, instead, upon soft cloth.
“Baby clothes,” she whispered. A tiny embroidered infant’s dress. The clay sealed them in, but rot had eaten the fabric like lace. She dreamt of a child, too feeble to walk, who cried in her arms. “It’s a hope chest.”
“A what?” MacAdams was kneeling next to her, now, both of them bent over the contents.
“My aunt had one. Unmarried women used to store things inside for marriage—kids. The future.” Jo lifted away a quilted blanket to find delicately embroidered silk. “Look, E + G. Just like on the rafters. And—oh my God. Letters.”
Two bundles of aged and yellowing papers. They were fragile, too fragile to open without damaging, but the first lines still visible:
Dearest Evelyn,
I assure you that I have never meant to hurt Gwen. I know you never meant it, either. But I did not know love until you came...
I’ll come to you on Thursday. You know where.
Love letters. Not between Evelyn and an unknown admirer. Not between Gwen and William. These were the intimate confessions of a tryst between Evelyn—and her brother-in-law. Between Evelyn and William. E + G; not Gwen, not another lover, but...
William. Gwilym. It was Welsh. And neither she—nor her own Welsh Gwilym—had spotted it.
Jo untied the bundle, eager for more, only to watch a single pressed violet drift from between the pages. It landed on the wet ground, absorbing water and changing to a deep purple.
“Where did you say you found this box?” she asked. The foreman pointed.
“Under the jump-ups, ma’am—little blue flowers?”
MacAdams, already standing, had been offering Jo a hand for a good minute. Now she took it and got to her feet.
“Violets,” she said. “They stand for delicate, especially for delicate love.” Jo closed her eyes, reeling back her rolodex of words and their associations. Leigh, English given name meaning delicate.
“The painting told us the whole time,” she said. “Netherleigh. It means beneath the violets. William wanted to leave something of their affair, for someone to find it. About how much she meant.”
“Well,” said MacAdams, not to Jo but to the fire she’d started in the grate to knock off the night’s chill.
“Yes,” Jo agreed. Then they lapsed once again into silence. They’d been doing that for an hour; testing single words and phrases—and whisky—while staring at Jo’s hearth.
“I am not sure how to feel,” Jo said, finally. The investigation into Evelyn’s remains had been inconclusive. They would be, though, after so long. No bones had been broken before death, no violent end. Jo squeezed her eyes shut, trying to imagine the Gwen Davies who wrote so feelingly to her doctor about childlessness as a cold-blooded killer. She couldn’t quite do it. Partly, because Gwen and Evelyn now wore the faces of her aunt and mother.
Then again, Jo’s mother had kept secrets, too.
“She may still have died in childbirth, as you originally thought,” MacAdams suggested.
“I suppose,” Jo said. “But then, why try to destroy her painting. Why bury her under the house. And that’s not the biggest mystery, anyway.”
“You need more of them?” MacAdams asked.
“It’s about the baby,” Jo reminded him. “They should be buried together, you know? Only we don’t know where to find it, and not knowing makes me crazy. It’s haunting.”
MacAdams wasn’t looking at Jo. But he was ruminating.
“I think Fleet was haunted,” he said. “I think Elsie should be. And you don’t know her, but Cora Clapham is going to be haunted, too, for the rest of her life.”
There was a lot going on here, Jo realized.
“What about you?” she asked. “Are you haunted.”
“Yes. I’m divorced.”
Jo spat whisky, but MacAdams self-deprecated.
“I didn’t mean it like that! Annie is precious to me. But that’s the point, I suppose. You don’t get ghosts from a past you don’t care about.”
Jo lifted her glass to the oval face and its hooded eyes.
“I can live with that,” she said. “To Evelyn.”
MacAdams raised his glass, too, but not to the painting.
“To Jo Jones,” he said. “It’s not everyone who finds what they’re looking for.” Jo wondered if she was ever going to manage a drink with this man without blushing. Possibly, he hadn’t noticed. Following the formal libations, he went for his coat and hat.
“Do you think you’ll stay in Abington?” he asked.
“How could I leave, now? They aren’t even finished with the garden!”
“Ah yes, of course,” he agreed. “Do you think you’ll stay out of trouble?”
“That I can’t promise.”
MacAdams stood in the doorway, squeezing his hat brim in both hands. It would be an uncomfortable silence, except he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Evelyn, in state on the chimneypiece.
“Yes, well,” he said. “Good night.”
Jo shut the door behind him and settled by the fire. Then she typed Aiden Jones in her search bar. What had he known about Evelyn? For how long? Someone, somewhere, knew something. And they’d be no match for Jo Jones.
“We’ll get there, Evelyn,” she said, scrolling through ten thousand Google hits, “It’s just gonna take a while.”