“So where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
Lydia shifts to glare at Alex, the leather of his passenger seat squeaking beneath her. “I don’t like surprises.”
“You didn’t like your present?” he asks, nonchalantly.
“Yeah, thanks for the nightmares.”
Alex glances at her, his face a mixture of hurt and disbelief. “I thought that’s what you wanted.”
Lydia doesn’t answer. She’s still mad at him for not checking in with her last night, mad at herself for slightly caring, and to top it all off that dull thump has started up in her head again.
“You alright?” he asks. “Not still hungover, are you?” Lydia closes her eyes and presses her fingertips to her forehead. “Damn, you must be getting old.” He sees her expression. “I mean we, we must be getting…” Lydia stares daggers at him. “Nothing. I didn’t mean anything.”
The car slows, and Alex pulls over to park outside a large, concrete building. Lydia cranes her neck to peer through the driver’s side window, and sees a large, bronze plaque fixed to the front of it.
DECANTEN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
“Really?” she looks at him doubtfully.
“Yeah,” Alex replied, uncertainly. “Why, you don’t like art?”
“Do you?”
“Sure,” he unfastens his seatbelt, “I come here all the time.” Lydia’s eyebrows almost disappear up into her blonde locks. “Alright, fine. I’ve never been here before in my life. Are you happy?”
“A little bit, yeah.” Lydia smirks. “Are you trying to impress me?”
“Na, I just heard the restaurant here did a decent chili.”
“Well in that case,” Lydia unfastens her own belt and reaches for the door handle, “we’d better walk around a bit, so I can work up an appetite.”
Inside the building is a series of vast, open rooms with high ceilings and polished wooden floors. The walls and fixtures, Lydia can tell, were once a crisp, clean white, but time and mild neglect have seen them fade to a slightly sour cream. There aren’t many people here, but that might not be so strange. She has no idea what the average footfall of a place like this must be.
“What do you think of this?” Alex asks, standing in front of a large canvas. Lydia joins him and takes a moment to consider the mess of coloured shapes.
“I think their mother must be very proud,” she says finally.
“You don’t see anything of value in this picture at all?”
She peers up at him, trying to figure out if he’s messing with her or not, and is surprised to find that he appears quite sincere. “What do you see?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, but someone did take the time to paint it; they must have been thinking about something when they did.” He points to a bold, bright red brushstroke. “Maybe that represents anger. And that blue area there is like… a sea of sorrow, or something.” He catches Lydia’s eye, and she bursts out laughing. The sound fills the huge space, bouncing back on itself so that it sounds like there’s a whole room full of women laughing. “Or not.” Alex blushes. “Whatever.”
“A sea of sorrow?” Lydia tries to control her cackling, but she just can’t help herself.
“Hey,” Alex holds his hands up, “it’s not my fault if you’re dead inside.”
“I am not.”
“If you say so.” He moves along to the next painting, leaving Lydia behind.
“Hang on,” she chases after him, “just because I don’t see a web of deep and meaningful emotions in some childish painting, that means I’m dead inside?”
“I guess I just expected more from one of the world’s foremost experts on the human mind.” He looks at the painting straight ahead, a cacophony of black blots and splashes, and determinedly not at Lydia, which she interprets as a deliberate attempt to wind her up.
“I’m a psychologist,” she replies flatly, “not an art critic.”
“Evidently.”
Lydia shoves him hard, and Alex is so surprised that he almost falls onto the painting. “Hey!” He spins his arms in the air to steady himself. “Watch it.”
“Sorry,” Lydia replies, her nose in the air. “I didn’t realise you were so weak.”
“If I’d damaged that, you would have been paying for it.”
“Do you want me to buy you a picture?” she asks, stepping slowly along to the next one, a harlequin pattern of metallic blue and silver. “Something to remember me by, after I’ve gone?”
“There’s no need to be mean.”
“You can look at it while you drown in oceans of sorrow because I’m not here.”
“Stop.” Alex nudges her gently, his hands in his pockets. “You’ll make me cry.”
“You’re a sensitive soul.” She looks up at him.
“More than you know,” he replies, gazing right back. The softness of his eyes is disarming, making Lydia forget the snappy comeback she had already.
“Let’s move along,” she says briskly, snapping out of it, “I’m getting hungry.” She heads through the doorway into the next room, then stops so suddenly that Alex walks straight into the back of her.
“What’s wrong?” He looks past Lydia into a smaller room with only three giant paintings, one on each wall. They’re all of the same theme: irregular black borders fading inward through dark shades wine-red, to crimson, to scarlet, to glimmers of palest pink, almost white. Lydia doesn’t answer. She’s staring at the painting straight-ahead, and starts to approach it in a kind of trance, as though drawn forward by some invisible force.
Closer up, she can see the thousands of individual strokes, meticulously placed, a flick here, a swirl there, a flurry of movements designed, she can see as clearly as she has ever seen anything in her life, to create the impression of blood, rushing to escape a fresh wound from the inside out. But that isn’t why Lydia’s own blood has suddenly run cold.
“This is it,” she whispers.
“Huh?” Alex stands at her shoulder.
“Don’t you recognise it?”
“What are you talking about?” He looks the painting up and down. “It just looks like—”
“Blood.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He shrugs. “So what?”
“It’s just like the painting Jason did,” she hisses through gritted teeth, trying to suppress the sickness rising within her again, “on that girl. The student. Alice.”
Alex’s jaw falls, his eyes wide as he stares at the canvas. “Jesus Christ…”
“Who painted this?” They both dash towards a small sign hung to the right of the blood painting.
“It doesn’t say.” Alex frowns, scanning the words printed on it. “Don’t they usually say?”
“By a local artist,” Lydia reads. “It doesn’t even say when.” She turns to him. “How many people saw what happened to that girl?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head, confused. “Not many. The teacher who found her, the first officers on the scene, the detectives who worked the case…” He swallows. “Her family.”
“Oh my god,” Lydia mutters under her breath.
“Look, I’m sure this is just a coincidence.” Lydia shoots him a warning look. “Lyd, Devere’s been locked up for years. If he had painted these before then, how on earth would they have got here?”
“I don’t know,” she breathes, taking one last look at the monstrous image before turning and heading for the door. “But I know who will.”