His studio contained everything you’d expect: easel, palette, brushes, canvas. A zinc-topped table sat in the corner, draped in bloodstained velvet. Beside it an upright fridge-freezer. It contained human hands in plastic bags. Eleven in a row. All right. Three fingers had been cut off each one; only the indexes and thumbs remained, each labelled with their victim’s name and that of a flower.
On a lower shelf lay two more hands, labelled Jackie Hay and Lisa Shine. Their fingers had not been removed.
A tongue in a cellophane bag lay on the bottom shelf: a dog’s.
His wallet was in a chest of drawers. It contained scalpels of various sizes and the protractor he’d used on Gemma. The surgical saw was in the next drawer along with an album full of photographs of his victims, taken after he’d finished with them. A camera sat next to them.
A second album, of newspaper clippings and magazine articles, confirmed that he was Picasso.
All the paintings in the gallery were of girls. One had had her arms and legs removed and rearranged like spiders’ legs around her upright torso. Another had Medusa’s head, only with fingers instead of snakes. All the girls’ heads were slightly bowed to the side. Several wore nuns’ veils. Others wore Christian Brothers’ belts, complete with crucifixes tucked into them. Every girl had a flower on her chest. One a rose, the next one a carnation and so on. Eleven singles, plus one double – a portrait of two girls. It hung in the centre of the main wall: Duet.
None was signed. Each had been stamped with a handprint, before the oil had dried. Of the singles, Gemma would have made twelve. He had been carving a flower into her chest.
Below Duet stood a leather-bound lectern. On it sat a journal. It contained the names of the girls, addresses and personal details, the nights they’d been abducted, how they’d been abducted. Girls who had been killed but not painted had the words ‘unsatisfactory models’ written beside their names.
He had portrayed them all as ugly, grotesque and distorted. All except Medusa. She had two faces, one of a beautiful nun, the other – on the back of her head – of Medusa herself, reflected in a mirror in the background, in which was yet another reflection, of Jesus holding the hand of a frightened boy with blond hair, much like Picasso’s own. The boy had gone to Jesus for protection, but the nun’s Medusa face was turning Jesus into a statue of stone.
The different flowers on the girls’ chests represented the months of the year, according to the journal. The girls in Duet, portrayed limbless, who sat facing each other kissing, arms and legs plaited and briered to form a girdle of thorns around their waists, were friends of Gemma’s. Jackie Hay and Lisa Shine. They’d disappeared while walking their Labrador.
You may guess how the paintings affected me. Viewing them in a public gallery would be one thing, but when you’re condemned to be in one of them, well … I had seen how he had used his scalpels on Gemma while she was still alive, how he would use them on me. I had seen how I would be represented in death.
I’d come to understand my role in this. My hand would lie next to the others. It would be labelled and that label would carry my name and the name of a flower he would carve in my chest.
I was to be December.
‘Hello, Lucille.’
Picasso was back.