Jo had lost her way.
She’d been walking for some time, through rabbit-hole alleyways and back streets, body on autopilot, mind in centrifuge. It had started with an opera cake.
“Marvelous, aren’t they?” Chen had said, ushering her into a musical little café near the Minster. “Layers of almond sponge in coffee syrup, coated in ganache. Bracing and beautiful.”
“But you aren’t having one?” Jo asked.
Chen had ordered tea with milk and sugar for both of them, then a large opera cake . . . for Jo.
“I’ll be talking. About your father.”
Jo dropped her fork. It fell to the floor and slid beneath a radiator.
“My father? Where is he—Who—”
Chen handed her a second fork. “Shush, shush, eat cake,” she said.
“But—” Jo began. Chen pointed at the dessert. Jo swallowed her question and took a bite. Then another.
“There’s a girl,” Chen said softly. “Sugar down those feelings. And don’t interrupt. I’m going to say some hard things now in a minute.”
Jo bit the fork to keep from interfering with the presentation. Chen took a deep breath and poured tea into her cup.
“Love. It’s messy. So damn messy,” she sighed. “That’s why I have to start far back. With your grandfather, I mean.”
Jo ate cake and listened to Chen, a breathy, soft, humming voice telling her the worst story she’d ever heard.
* * *
“Alfred Jones was a hard man. He’d spent a few years in service to queen and country, had been stationed with Americans and learned to hate them. But he didn’t care much for his fellow Brits, either. He loved very few things. Money was one. Order, another. An order he was sure existed in the past and not now, something lost in the generations since his father. Bought things with cash, like his house and his car, and—in 1973—Julia, daughter of the local barrister. The marriage dissolved. Not in divorce, but in a more literal sense. Unhappy for seven years, Julia drank herself to death, and Alfred locked himself into the routine he’d keep for the rest of his life. It might have been right enough, except by then there were two children to think of, a boy and a girl just a year apart. He trained them up on rigor and abstinence; never give in to drink or love or joy. Was a miserable, awful life, and Aiden and your mum clung to each other like babes in a storm.
“Now me, I knew myself by age six. Aiden took a little longer. Twelve years old he had his first crush on a boy, and he told the only person he thought he could trust—his sister, Caroline. Your mother.
“Caroline kept his secret a long time, because if Aldred knew, he’d disown the lad. This went on for another nine years; Aiden finished grammar school and had gone to Newcastle University. That’s where he met Thomas—Thomas Oliver Lofthouse. They were together a while, but Thomas couldn’t settle. Too pretty, you know. All the boys, and all the girls, too; who didn’t want to put hands through his red-gold curls or kiss the rosebud mouth? Does it sound like the portrait of Dylan Thomas? It should. Aiden compared him to it often; it’s why he took to Augustus John, as an artist. Aiden brought pretty Thomas home with him on holidays. Maybe he thought his flirting with your mum was cover, something to keep him in good with Aiden’s father. But Aiden didn’t know Thomas half so well as he thought.
“I don’t know when the affair began. It certainly went on for some time, Thomas courting brother and sister. But there’s a thing about being a woman, isn’t there, pet? Some things can’t stay hid. Caroline got pregnant, and she told Thomas, and Thomas told her he was engaged to be married to the lovely heiress of a packing plant fortune.
“He left Newcastle. He left Caroline. He left Aiden—but not before confessing what he’d done. They should have come together for comfort and solace. But love is painful and messy; it eats up your heart and much of your brains. Heartbroken, devastated and feeling doubly betrayed, Aiden told their father about her condition. As predicted, Alfred threw her out and Caroline fled to the cold welcome of her widowed aunt—but not before getting revenge in kind. She told Alfred that Aiden was gay.
“Alfred Jones never spoke to either of them again. When he died some ten years later, alone, as deserved, he left every penny of his hard-won money to a trust for ‘moral education’ so that his children could never touch it. Thomas went before him, in the ground before you were more than seven or eight. Pride, hurt, private shame—those are powerful things, especially when there’s none left to make a clean breast with. Your uncle and mum should have made amends . . .
“But they didn’t,” Chen finished.
“He—he tried.” Jo heard herself say the words, as if from a long way off. The feelings pent up upon receiving Aiden’s letters had not resurfaced; rather, they were the medium in which she was now drowning.
“I think that’s why he wanted me,” Chen said. “He couldn’t connect forward, so he wanted to connect backward. Try to find family that way. And when he saw the ruined painting, he knew it was an Augustus—and that the other two weren’t. Which meant there must’ve logically been something happened—a breaking point between the siblings.”
Evelyn reminded him of Caroline, Jo said in the long hallway of her brain. The words never came out, though, and Chen carried on.
“I took on the work,” she explained, “and Aiden sat in a chair and watched me, just so. Said I should make sure the eyes were on him.”
This piece of information shook Jo out of herself, and she clambered desperately to the surface.
“He told you to set her eyes that way?”
“Aye, pet. You don’t think I’d do that on purpose, do you? The wrong angle, not by much, but it’s there. He told me all these things while I painted, and I think . . . maybe he just wanted someone to see him.”
Jo could envision her uncle, already ill and in treatment, hiding some of this even from Arthur, whom he loved. Aiden, telling Chen what he never told anyone else. Aiden, slipping away as Evelyn’s painting came to life.
“He went into care just as I finished the painting,” Chen said, and now her own voice grew husky and strained. “The last thing he told me was that, if he beat the cancer, he’d give me my painting back. He was done hiding. He’d marry Arthur and sell the York flat, make a clean breast of things.” A tear crested the wrinkles around her dark eyes and found its way to her chin. “Imagine. He didn’t need the talisman anymore. No more hiding.”
These had been the words that broke Jo.
And it told her, again, of a tragedy that somehow was Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations and Mill on the Floss all at once—cast-off children and divided siblings and hopes forever lost in the flood. But awful as it was, horrid as the tale was, what hurt the most was knowing her mother had made it so. Caroline was the one who didn’t reach back. She was the one who locked everything away, who kept all her secrets, and who—in doing so—stole them from her daughter.
Stole them. From me. Jo loved her mother. Loved and missed her and didn’t know how to also be angry. The feelings wouldn’t stay fast. She’d left the café; she’d wandered. Tears already streaked Jo’s cheeks, leaving them hot and wet, and a tremor had begun deep in her sinews. She needed to get back to the hotel. The ugly, squat, unappealing hotel, which—when she finally found it—offered itself like hope’s own beacon. She threw herself inside, navigating the stairs and feeling the final wave pressing, pressing. Fetal position. Please. And wracking sobs the likes of which she hadn’t experienced since she’d told Gwilym about her mother’s diary.
Thomas Oliver Lofthouse, her long-awaited father, had broken two hearts and then walked away. Married. Divorced. Dead.
Caroline Jones had been betrayed, responded by betraying. She gave birth to a daughter who always reminded her of it, and made sure that daughter would never, ever meet the source of her pain.
And then there was Aiden, who wanted to make amends, but made them much too late—dreaming of future happiness as the cancer ate him away.
And finally Jo herself, who had not managed to make it into her room, but was curled up in her black dress on the horrible hall carpet, sobbing for herself, the world and everything in it.
* * *
MacAdams wasn’t overfond of York Central Station—and tried to assure himself it wasn’t professional jealousy. Upon his spontaneous visit that day, however, he received a hero’s welcome from the staff—probably a consequence of keeping the department clear of wrongdoing in his last case.
“Tea? Or coffee—it’s one of those fancy machines,” said Superintendent Charles Fernsby. He hovered over a small black Nespresso knockoff, with its tiny tin pods. “I’m trying the espresso today.”
“I’ll follow your lead,” MacAdams said, mostly to be polite. He’d rather go for one of Ben’s hard-won creations on his brass-topped, ever-breaking-down device.
“I’m told this isn’t a social call,” Fernsby said, producing two demitasse cups and putting them on matching saucers. If it weren’t for the clearly spilled and forgotten sugar packets on the coffee cart, Fernsby’s neatness might approach the late, unlamented Jarvis Fleet.
“Murder case; Ronan Foley. And I’ve since discovered that he oversaw a development for Hammersmith here in town—a sort of galleria south of town,” MacAdams said. “I have some questions.”
“Yes, the defunct shopping center. As I said over the phone, I am only too happy to help. What would you like to know?”
“For a start, just how much trouble has the property been for the city? I’m told tensions were high, but how high?”
“As in, were they murderously high? I wouldn’t say so. We don’t get overinvolved in city disputes, but the Lord Mayor descended from on high to make sure we knew his feelings on the matter. So we did a bit of looking in.” Fernsby nudged his computer mouse to bring his screen to life. “All the permits are there, and things were off to a banging start. They finished the first three or four floors—then things started to slow.”
He beckoned MacAdams to look at his screen, which boasted photographs of a rectangular building, finished with windows and all the trappings to floor four, but with a network of bare iron scaffolding above.
“That’s odd, isn’t it? Finishing as you go?”
“I’d think so, but the architects tell me differently. Apparently each finished floor level gets a concrete topping—a structural slab that more or less keeps everything below from being weathered on. Thing is, they use it for fast-track jobs, something they plan to complete well before any damage could occur.”
“But this job is behind schedule.” MacAdams took a cursory sip of espresso—found it better than expected and finished it off. “I don’t suppose you looked further afield? Any other jobs running behind?”
“We didn’t, no. But we did do an assessment of who was coming and going. Very minor surveillance, I suppose. Again, everything was aboveboard. Contractors were still turning up, machinery still rolling. Just at half speed for some reason. Another espresso?”
MacAdams didn’t trust himself to more caffeine at the moment—his brain was whirring fast enough.
“I need dates,” he said. “Job start, job slowdown, any protracted stalls.”
“Start was about a year and six months,” Fernsby said. “With the slowdown occurring in the last third.”
Which, MacAdams noted, would be when Burnhope gave the job over to Foley, perhaps as a last chance to prove himself? Burnhope claimed Foley was a bulldog, someone who knew what he wanted, a pushy job boss. Yet when his promotion was on the line, he utterly changed tack. Sold his house, spent time in the country with a (possibly now pregnant) lover, stopped doing the requisite work on the York property . . .
“Everything comes down to what happened six months ago,” MacAdams said out loud.
“And what’s that?” Fernsby asked.
MacAdams pushed his chair back. “I wish I knew,” he said. “It’s around when Foley got put on the job.”
* * *
MacAdams called Gridley on his way back to the hotel. No, no next of kin had turned up. No, they still didn’t have leads on Foley’s early years. One plus: they had tracked the other burner numbers Foley had contacted. Every last one had been disconnected, but they all lead back to Newcastle. They were still digging.
“Print the obit, send it to papers in Abington and Newcastle,” he told her. Someone must know the man more personally, and perhaps the girlfriend might even turn up. He tucked the phone back into his jacket before heading into the Astoria hotel. There still wasn’t a desk clerk, and the day had darkened such that the lobby looked somehow more forlorn than before. Jo had picked it, and perhaps he ought not to have let her; it looked exactly like the place people went to be murdered. And that was a professional opinion.
MacAdams climbed the stairs and stepped into the third-floor corridor. He expected the assault of red-and-salmon zigzag carpet. He didn’t expect to see Jo Jones sitting on it, just opposite the stairwell door.
He was going to ask if she’d been locked out. That was before she looked up at him. Eyes swollen from crying, pink stains down both cheeks, the look she gave him wasn’t misery so much as defeat. He’d never, ever seen her that way. Would have thought defeat alien to her nature, even. He wasn’t sure what had happened, or what to do, so he knelt down next to her on the same awful rug.
“Hi,” Jo said. “I look like I feel.”
“And how is that?”
“Not good.”
A fair assessment. He set aside his hat and coat. “Can I ask what happened?”
“I think so,” she said, but didn’t try to get up.
MacAdams sank down next to her, both of them with legs outstretched and backs to the wall.
“Okay. What happened?” he asked.
Jo took a deep breath, then another, like a swimmer before a dive. Then, instead of speaking, she handed him her phone. MacAdams looked down at an obituary for Thomas Oliver Lofthouse, born 1966, died 1994. From the somewhat sanitized account, he gathered there was a car accident.
“That’s my father,” Jo said. She sounded like she had a head cold; MacAdams hunted fruitlessly for a handkerchief.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He wasn’t sure if she heard him; her eyes stared into the far corner of the hallway.
“Car accident, officially. Unofficially, he drove at high speed into a literal brick wall.” Jo took her phone back and flipped to another search window. “That’s the rest of the story.”
This was not an obituary, but a series of police reports. “No surviving kin,” they read. Because they didn’t know. Thomas, it seemed, was troubled. Violent outbursts that sometimes landed him in prison—sometimes in psychiatric hospital—and sometimes put other people in hospital. Like his first wife, who was not, MacAdams now realized, Jo’s mother.
“Oh.”
“He wasn’t okay,” Jo said.
“No,” MacAdams agreed. “Did—did the artist tell you all of this?”
“Sort of.” Jo rubbed at her nose. “Arthur told me some. Arthur gave me letters that were my uncle’s. And I realized I could have met him. And that hurts like fuck.”
MacAdams didn’t say anything. And Jo didn’t say more. So they sat in the hallway in silence for another ten minutes.
“It’s really an awful design,” MacAdams said at length.
“The stripes don’t even line up,” Jo said. “I’ve been counting them.”
“All of them?”
“Just the pink ones. There are 341.” She paused. “I do that. Counting. Especially when I have an emotion hangover.”
MacAdams nodded, hid head bobbing against the paneled wall. He wasn’t very good at comforting people; his job usually benefited from the opposite treatment. You wouldn’t call him a shoulder to cry on, certainly. But there were a few things he understood pretty well.
“Is it even remotely close to the way one feels after signing divorce papers?” he asked. Jo turned her head to look at him for the first time.
“Yeah, kind of.”
“Then I might know a good place for a cure,” he said, returning the glance. “At least, it’s where I went after signing mine. Italian. Greasy pizza and cheap beer.”
“True Italian pizza isn’t actually greasy,” Jo said, wiping her nose. “It originates in Naples and was just an easy way to eat tomatoes and cheese on flatbread.”
“Is that a no, then?” MacAdams asked.
“It’s a yes,” she said.
* * *
Jo had changed back into jeans and T-shirt, washed her face and was feeling a bit more like herself by the time they returned to the hotel car park. The restaurant, MacAdams explained, was a little out of the way, on the outskirts where York looked less York-like. This meant the buildings weren’t a thousand years old and pitching in every direction like plate tectonics, something Jo enjoyed for obvious charm, but which also made her just the tiniest bit anxious.
“The proprietor’s name is Allen. But he’ll insist you call him Giuseppe,” MacAdams said.
“He’s Italian?”
“He is not.”
He wasn’t American, either, but upon entry, Jo had the uncanny feeling of placement slip. Exposed-brick walls, multicolored lamp shades, the smell of deep dish and—ironically—black-and-white photographs of New York. Tables sported red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths, shakers of dry parm and red pepper flakes, and she could almost imagine they were somewhere in south Brooklyn.
“James!” shouted Giuseppe-not-Allen. “Haven’t seen you in ages! Light or dark?”
“He means the beer,” MacAdams explained.
“Dark?” Jo suggested, and a pitcher followed them to their table.
MacAdams rolled his sleeves and poured them each a glass.
“I never lived in York myself,” he said. “Found this by mistake while searching for a pub. Came back weekly for a while, despite the distance. Treating the—the emotion hangover, I suppose. Getting used to being single.”
“I never had a chance, really,” Jo admitted, sipping through beer foam. After her own divorce, Jo had moved to Chicago middivorce to help her ailing mother. “Or at least, taking care of the dying is not the best way to do it.”
MacAdams leaned his elbows on the table and gave her a thoughtful look. “I have seen a lot of death. But never the dying. My mother’s still with us; my dad had a killing heart attack while I was in training.”
“You couldn’t see him before he went?”
“No time. He was there. Then he wasn’t. But I think that might be a blessing, frankly. We hadn’t any scores to settle, my da and I. Good terms.” Jo felt a little shiver run across her synapse. It occurred to her that he was telling her personal things, and she wasn’t sure he’d ever done that before.
“I had all sorts of unanswered things to settle,” she said. “But eight months of hospice didn’t actually solve it. So I’m inclined to agree.” Jo was testing herself, like testing thin ice. But she’d managed to speak of her mum and not fall through, so she walked a little bolder. “I know what she was hiding now. I even know why. But that hasn’t actually solved my mystery for me.”
“You mean about Evelyn,” MacAdams guessed. Jo wondered if she should clap like Chen did. Instead, she ordered a bacon-sausage-hot-pepper slice.
“Evelyn, why her painting was done by a different artist, how and why it was destroyed. Her death. And—and her missing baby,” Jo explained. “Aiden knew. Had to have known. At least, I think so. I might be making big leaps.”
“Little stories based on clues, isn’t that what you called it?” MacAdams asked. “Try me.” He’d ordered a far less flamboyant pepperoni, and both slices were now ready to hand. Jo took one very cheesy, wonderful, awful bite before continuing. To be honest, she preferred it to opera cake.
“You ever read Wuthering Heights?” she asked.
“Heathcliffe and Catherine. Actually, I saw one of the movies.”
“Well, the book is like a—a mirror. No, better; like those nested Russian dolls. Things keep duplicating, but the repeat is a smaller, less impressive version than the first. Anyway, there are two Catherines a generation apart. One of them comes to a bad end.” She waited to see that he was following. Between pizza bites and beer swigs, he seemed to be. “Evelyn is Catherine the first. She gets pregnant; now we know it was an illicit affair with her brother-in-law. We don’t know what happened to her, or her baby, but being buried under a house is a pretty sticky end.”
“I think we can agree on that,” MacAdams said.
“Right? So my mum is Catherine the second. At least, to Aiden. Pregnant out of wedlock, forced out of the family home. Lost, in her own way. He told Chen that he would ‘take Evelyn home.’ Like finding his sister, again, I think.”
“But he doesn’t end up doing that,” MacAdams pointed out.
Jo sighed. “No. He died. Chen wasn’t even sure what happened to the painting till I told her. There was a lot of damage to the painting. Chen worked on it for six whole months.”
MacAdams had a new slice halfway to his mouth and stopped cold.
“Six months,” he said. “I’m beginning to hate this unit of time.”
“Because of the Foley murder?” Jo asked. It was a shot in the dark, but a good one, as MacAdams was technically here to investigate.
“Six months ago, his life altered. We have been told that he may have been on thin ice at his job, but that seems consequence rather than cause. What would you think if a man sold his house, dyed his hair, began—or continued—seeing a young lady and made a sow’s ear of his job?”
“That he was having a midlife crisis,” Jo said. Because, without meaning to, he’d just described Tony. “My ex was turning fifty-five. Got a gym membership, started vitamin supplements, managed to sell out the publishing house from under me. And, of course, step out with a twenty-eight-year-old publishing employee on the fast track.”
“I see the similarities,” MacAdams said, but Jo frowned.
“The thing is, I met him, right? And this doesn’t sound like him at all. I mean, it’s not . . .” She was trying hard to avoid saying vibe or aura. Her sense of people was actually a lot more like instinct or some subconscious recognition of pheromones. “He didn’t feel like a Tony.”
In fact, she could almost see him now: disheveled, surprised. On recovery, more like a guy in a hurry. He certainly wasn’t smarmy or creepy, didn’t act like the big man or try to push her around. And he liked Jammie Dodgers, which somehow seemed the antithesis of Tony-ness.
“I try not to discredit your feelings,” MacAdams said. “Anymore.” He’d dispensed with the tie earlier, and with his jacket off, looked almost like not a policeman. Jo noticed he also had marinara on his chin.
“Actually, you’ve been really kind about my feelings today,” she said, feeling an embarrassed blush starting at her neckline. This was an improvement. She’d been too exhausted to feel embarrassed earlier. “I really appreciate it.”
“You . . . are welcome.” He seemed to be weighing something in his mind. After a moment, he brought out his phone. “You understand that I am not asking you to get involved. But what do you make of this?”
He’d shown her a police-style photograph, white background with a ruler for scale. A golden earring featured in the center, ornate and curiously wrought.
“It’s not like anything I’ve seen,” she admitted.
“That might be because it’s a thousand years old. Or at least pretending to be.”
“It’s from the case?” Jo asked, realizing that this was a moment of surprising trust.
MacAdams nodded and took the phone back. “We found it near the body. I don’t suppose Gwilym would know anything about it?”
“Can you send it to me?” Jo asked, because even if Gwilym didn’t the two of them could certainly find out.
MacAdams compressed his upper lip to a fine seam. “I—could,” he said. “You aren’t to share it.”
“Except with Gwilym.”
“A natural exception,” MacAdams said, sending the image through. He looked up as her own phone registered the message, and seemed about to say something else—but his phone began triple buzzing on the table. He glanced at the number, then snapped it up in a hurry. “Now? . . . On site? . . . No—no tell them to circle back. I don’t want to spook whoever it is.” MacAdams motioned to Giuseppe for the bill. “I’ll be there.” Hanging up, he turned back to Jo. “I have to go.”
“We. We have to go. What’s going on?”
“I just need to check on a property,” he said, half out of his chair already. “Someone’s there.”
“The property?”
“Yes, stay here—or, I’ll call you a cab.” He handed over his credit card and signed.
“I’m coming with,” Jo said, getting to her feet and heading for the door. MacAdams was still admonishing her from the table . . . where he was now also checking pockets for his keys.
“In fact,” she said, jingling the prize in one hand, “I’ll even drive.”