When the knock came, it startled Jo out of heavy slumber. She fumbled about, forgetting she was on the sofa, and craned her neck to catch a glimpse of the clock. Was it Gwilym already, picking her up for dinner? The knock repeated. She should jump up and answer it, but the particular couch crevice in which she found herself seemed too good to endanger.
“It’s open,” she said.
“Why is it open, Jo?” asked . . . James MacAdams.
Jo rolled herself to sitting and blinked sleep out of her eyes. He was standing in her doorway in short sleeves. She’d never seen him in short sleeves and stared like he’d walked in naked.
“Well, I’m home and it’s daytime,” she started.
“And asleep. With the door unlocked.” He crossed the room and crouched to be at eye level. “You said you’d quit that.”
Jo wasn’t sure she’d promised, in fact. She got to her feet instead of answering and pointed to the kitchen. “Tea?”
“Yes. No—actually. I brought you something.” He held up a paper bag. “In thanks. For yesterday.”
Jo peered inside. A whiskey bottle. Caol Ila, it said. She wanted to say thank you. Did you thank you for a thank you? She blinked her eyes a few more times and decided she, at least, needed caffeine.
“How about coffee?” she asked, putting the whiskey on the kitchen counter. “How’s your head?”
“Fuzzy and tired,” he admitted, taking his usual seat in the wicker rocking chair.
“Mine, too.”
“Adrenaline leaving the system,” he suggested.
Jo ground beans and put the kettle on before trying to talk again. For some reason she was struggling with her mouth-words—so much so that MacAdams, of all people, took the lead.
“We are still looking for the Geordie van driver and his associates,” he said over the gentle creak of the rocker. “But I think we’ve sorted the vanishing hiker for you.”
“Really?” Jo wondered if she should tell him about the semihallucinated version, but decided to keep mum for the minute.
“Not hill-walkers at all,” he said. “Foley seems to have been selling stolen artifacts out of the vans. Using kids as couriers.”
Jo absorbed this while watching the French press timer, a minihourglass she’d bought at a curio shop. “If he had a van, why did he need couriers?”
“Small, local deliveries, we think,” MacAdams went on. “We picked up a youth, about sixteen. Blond, around your height.”
“That one’s not my hiker. Mine had dark hair. And a yellow raincoat. And she wasn’t carrying a pack or anything.”
“Well, we gather they used quite a lot of different people,” MacAdams assured her. She brought him a mug. No biscuits. After Foley, those felt like bad luck.
“So what’s next?” she asked, settling into the peacock-blue chaise.
“For the investigation? Going back to Newcastle tomorrow to follow some leads.” MacAdams tilted his head as though looking at her stairs. “Back to Hammersmith—see if the CEO recognizes a drawing of . . . Jo? Did you tell me that Foley took towels and soap?”
“Hand towels, a bath towel and all the soap. Why?”
MacAdams hovered the coffee halfway to his lips but was still looking up at the ceiling. Thinking of her “murder room,” she guessed.
“Have you used the sink up there since all this started?” he asked.
“No.” Jo already put her cup down, because she could see where this was going. “You want to check something?”
MacAdams was on his feet already. Jo led the way into the vaulted attic with its lovely afternoon light (watery light, given the weather). First, he investigated the little WC sink, then hovered over the roll-top bath, sliding a finger along the porcelain. Jo was suddenly grateful that her method of dealing with stress involved serious housekeeping.
“What are you looking for, exactly?” she asked. MacAdams sat down on the tub edge and leaned his arms upon his knees. After a moment, he gave an inward sort of chuckle.
“Ignore me. I just can’t turn it off, sometimes.”
“Oh God, I get it.”
“I came here to thank you, not chase up loose ends.” He ran a hand through his hair. “This case is a million tiny details that don’t add up, and I can’t tell which are important.”
“Such as?” Jo asked, pulling up the nearby chair.
“Soap residue. There isn’t any. Foley took soap and towels, but he didn’t wash up. What did he want them for? Where did they go?”
“Like the missing raincoat and towels and the question of the car,” Jo added. MacAdams gave her a weary smile.
“Exactly. Could add you to the CID. This case is all shoes and ice burn.” He’d started to get up, but Jo waved her hands at him.
“Whoa, whoa! You don’t just drop in things like that without an explanation. Shoes. And ice?”
“I shouldn’t have said.”
“You did, though.”
“Fair,” he sighed. First he explained the expensive shoes they found at Foley’s flat. The second bit was definitely stranger. “The body was packed in ice. We don’t know why.”
Why did you pack anything in ice? Jo thought, her brain doing a quick run through of freezer pops, ice cubes for watering orchids, ice baths for tightening skin, refrigeration against spoilage. The freezer had failed in their New York apartment while they were on holiday once. They didn’t need a fumigator; they’d needed an exorcist. Plus bodies—even freshly dead ones—had a funk all their own.
“Maybe to stop it smelling?” Jo offered. MacAdams had got halfway to his feet again, but again returned to sitting. He might never leave the tub at this point.
“That’s—Why would you say that?”
“Well, if I had a dead person in my trunk on a muggy, rainy night, I might consider some ice.” Jo twitched her nose. Did that sound callous? “Dead people don’t immediately decay or anything. But stuff happens when you die. Body fluids—let go. It’s not especially pleasant.”
“You edited a book on anatomy.”
“No, on body farms,” Jo corrected.
MacAdams made it to standing this time. And pacing. Walking his brain, as it was.
“All right; it’s warm and wet, and the victim has a considerable and bloody wound,” he said. “In a trunk, you said.”
“It’s a guess,” Jo admitted. “In a trunk, you could get away with just four or five bags of ice. You can’t pack ice in an open van or SUV. Or not as well. Also the body might flop around.”
“You’ve a way of putting things.” He said. “Okay, in a trunk. It’s messy. And there’s melting ice. And he still has to be dragged out again.”
Jo had been following the dance of wallpaper flowers as he spoke, but in her mind’s eye she was considering the problems of vehicular upholstery.
“I know it sounds extra complicated, but what if the murderer was fastidious? Someone that worried about the smell isn’t going to just put the body on the mats. If they use a tarpaulin, they could drag him out easier, too. Especially with a bit of rigor mortis,” she said. MacAdams was following, but waved the last bit away.
“Doubtful he’d been dead that long, as you saw him around eleven thirty, but all fair points. The murderer doesn’t want to spoil his car.”
“If it is his car,” Jo added.
“Why would you say that?” MacAdams asked. He’d stopped his circuit just in front of her. She instinctively put her hands on a pretend steering wheel, thinking of their drive back from Newcastle.
“Because you’d be a lot more careful if it was someone else’s. I was in yours.”
“Makes sense.” MacAdams extended her a hand and pulled her to standing. “At least, if it was someone you cared about.” He blushed and quickly added, “A boss, for example. There would be other eyes looking at it, someone else who would recognize a smell or a stain.” He backed away to let her out of the room and she returned to her coffee.
“Still doesn’t explain the raincoat, shoes or soap and towel thievery, though,” she said before drinking a good half cup at a go.
“Maybe the murderer came to the cottage for it so he could scrub down the car,” Jo added. She meant it as a joke, but MacAdams had just blanched gray enough to make her worry about concussion again.
“I’m kidding—I’m not serious.”
“Jo.” MacAdams walked across the living room to the front door and pushed it open. “The thing is, he could have.”
* * *
“That’s . . . wow,” Gwilym said over his vindaloo. “He thinks the murderer was actually here in the cottage, now?”
“It’s a theory, although I’m not sure why they wouldn’t also take Foley’s suitcase with him. Make it look like he really just ran off,” Jo said, pulling off a bite of naan. Gwilym had come bearing research and an invite to the India Palace. “And I got a lecture about locking up.”
“You really should do.”
“I know.” Jo winced. How had she gone from New York with ten dead bolts to North Yorkshire and an unlocked door? “I’ve just got used to leaving it unlocked during the day.”
“No offense, but you are supposed to have a photographic memory,” Gwilym reminded her.
Jo rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t work like that,” she protested (again). “You have the hippocampus, right? And you also have the frontal cortex. That’s your executive command center—”
“For people who have those,” Gwilym added.
“—and it’s how you sort the important memories from the not-important ones. And you have a neural matrix map for retrieving and rebuilding them, but not everything is episodic.”
“You’ve lost me.”
Jo waggled her fingers, then stuck another piece of bread in her mouth before answering. More slowly.
“You take a prescription, right?”
“Adderall.”
“You take it every day, in the same spot, at the same time. Your brain will compress all those memories of taking it into a single, long-running episode. Which is why it’s easy to forget whether you did it or not.”
“Which is why I have a Monday-through-Friday pillbox,” Gwilym said, nodding. “What does that have to do with your front door?”
“Memory isn’t stored; it’s re-created,” Jo said. That was partly what made it a fascinating study (and a very well received book in her once-upon-a-time back catalog). “You have bits and pieces, and you have to pull them together again to make a coherent picture. Usually with some embellishment from context.”
“Wait a sec, does that mean you make up stuff to fill in the gaps?” He frowned. “Don’t make me doubt you, Jo; it will upend my whole religion.”
Jo laughed and assaulted the samosas with knife and fork.
“I don’t have the same static and emotional clutter that most people do. I tend to remember details for themselves. But I still use association. Ronan Foley, for instance, is a surprised pigeon in a raincoat.” She had to pause long enough for Gwilym to stop laughing before adding, “He didn’t look like a pigeon. But he had wide eyes which looked that much wider for being heavy-lidded, and stared at me like he’d just hit a window.”
“I’m suddenly frightened to inquire what I remind you of,” Gwilym said, rubbing his eyes.
“Well, don’t get murdered and I won’t need to make a statement. Anyway, they found out who he was without my help.”
“I want to see his picture, now. Can I?” Gwilym asked.
Jo shrugged. “I’ve not seen it. Apparently, they printed his obit. You can probably look it up. But not now!” she added, watching him reach for his phone. “Actually, though, I have a photo to show you. It’s an earring.”
Jo pulled out her phone and called up the image. “Care to comment?”
Gwilym starred at it a moment, turning the phone around and around.
“It’s not an earring,” he said. “It’s a nose ring. Like the ones they found in the Upper Euphrates. You know, Kish? Tell Ingharra?”
“What.”
“Tell Ingharra! It’s a famous archeological site, third millennium BC.”
Jo choked, reached for water and sputtered through a half swallow.
“As in three thousand years before year one? What the hell?”
“So, the site kind of spans the period, so it might not be exactly as old as that. I mean, that sort of filigree design is all over ancient Egypt, too. And nose rings were pretty popular.” He leaned forward suddenly. “Did I just tell you something you didn’t know?”
“Yes, a lot.”
“Sexy, isn’t it?” he asked.
Jo tossed a napkin at him. “How about you tell me things I don’t know regarding Augustus John. Like why Augustus did Evelyn’s painting and not the others.”
“Right, right.” Gwilym reached down to retrieve a file from his satchel. “We’re gonna have some name confusion, so I’ll deal with that first. Evelyn’s sister was Gwen Ardemore, right? Well, Augustus had an older sister, too, also named Gwen.”
“That part I knew, actually. Chen told me—I saw some of her paintings in York.”
Gwilym deflated slightly. “So you know he was a famous painter from the Slade School of Art in London, too?”
“I do. But carry on!” she encouraged.
Gwilym slurped up a bit more vindaloo, then pulled out a reproduction daguerreotype showing a beautiful young woman in soft silver light.
“Augustus lived in Paris with Gwen and some other artists, and he meets this lovely lady: Ida Nettleship. They got married and had a kid, so Augustus suddenly needed a real job. He gets one working as an art teacher in Liverpool.”
More photos escaped Gwilym’s bag. Most were copies of Augustus’s early art; red chalk drawings, Moses and the brazen serpent. Jo had seen several of the originals in York.
“His career doesn’t really take off, though, until he meets the Signorina Estella Dolores Cerutti in 1900 and starts painting her. Estella was an Italian pianist who lived downstairs from Augustus’s flat—and here she is!” Gwilym took out a color print-off, and Jo caught her breath. Three-quarter length and in full left-side profile was a dark eyed beauty. She was dressed in cream satin with delicate folds, her hands clasped together at the waist. She did not look like Evelyn, but the portraits lived in the same orbit.
“Gorgeous isn’t it?” Gwilym asked. “The way the light falls just so, the softness of her hair. Apparently, Ida was jealous and made herself a whole new set of clothes to compete.”
Jo could kind of see her point. Estella was majestic.
“Anyway, the portrait helped make his name. At least in artistic circles. William Ardemore would surely have heard of him,” Gwilym said, taking a break to finish his platter.
Jo pushed away the remains of her curry and drew little circles on the tablecloth.
“William and Gwen marry in 1906. They have their portraits done that year—or the next. But Augustus John isn’t the artist for those.” The records kept by her solicitor, Rupert Selkirk, listed a relatively well known and accomplished regional artist, a man in high fashion at the time. “Evelyn comes to them sometime in 1906 or 1907, and William has her sit for someone just making his mark? Is it just because he enjoyed the one of signorina?”
“Maybe. You can see how similar to Evelyn’s it is.”
“Okay, but then why would Augustus not take credit for it or sign the painting? He’s trying to make it in the world, and this is the guy who argued a painter has more rights than the sitter or the owner.”
“Ah! I saved the best bit,” Gwilym said. He pushed his dish away, cracked his knuckles and prepared to talk with his hands. “In 1903, Mr. John meets an artist model named Dorelia McNeill. Unsurprisingly, she becomes his lover. But it gets better; she was originally his sister Gwen’s model—and also her lover. She even introduced them.”
“The sister and brother shared the same lover?” Jo asked. Somewhat loudly, having temporarily forgotten they were in a public restaurant.
“So Augustus and Ida and Dorelia all set up house together, and he fathers kids by both of them.”
Jo put her hands out as if to stop the train wreck that surely must have been.
“So he is living with both women, the same way William is living with Gwen and Evelyn?”
“Kinda yeah?” Gwilym said. “And it wasn’t a secret or anything. So William Ardemore probably knew about the arrangement.”
“Meaning?” Jo asked.
“Common ground? I dunno. Maybe Ardemore wanted the same thing. You know, not leaving Gwen—”
“And her money,” Jo added.
“—and instead figured they could have their own little family unit. With Evelyn being the, um, bearer of heirs.” Gwilym cleared his throat over this last bit, but it didn’t keep Jo from hearing chattel.
“I really hope he wasn’t keeping her around as his baby-maker,” she said, grimacing in distaste. “And I’m still not sure how this explains why Augustus John didn’t make it plain that was his masterwork.”
“True. Though the guy was also broke at the time of painting. He lived in a traveling caravan with an expanding tribe of children, and two women. Maybe more women. Did you happen to look up his bio online? Under children, it just says various.” Gwilym scooped up the various photos and started tucking them back into his envelop. “Just saying, William and Gwen were rich, and a little money goes along way for Bohemian painters who keep fathering everybody’s kids.”
Jo puffed air, sending a loose strand of hair dancing.
“By 1908, Evelyn is dead, the painting presumably ruined, so maybe he just never got the chance to promote it. Plus, Gwen and William disappeared from society shortly after Evelyn’s death, so maybe an Ardemore portrait was no longer high profile to help his career. Who knows.” Jo hunted the menu for ras malai, little white discs swimming in cardamom milk. They looked like spider egg sacs. She liked them anyway. “Chen said my uncle blamed Gwen Ardemore.”
“For damaging the painting?”
“Someone threw acid on the eyes,” Jo said.
“The windows to the soul,” Gwilym added.
“Exactly. It’s a psychological portrait of a woman in love.”
“And Gwen couldn’t live with it? I guess she didn’t go in for polyamory.” Gwilym hovered over the dessert menu. “Actually, I’m not sure Ida was all that into it, either. Some accounts say she felt like a drudge, looking after all the kids while Dorelia continued to model.”
Jo ordered, then sat back thoughtfully. Two women, one adored, the other rejected. Like the Bible story about Jacob’s wives, Leah and Rachel. Was it motive for murder? Was Gwen’s jealousy and heartbreak bitter enough to lead to bloodshed? She wouldn’t, Jo thought. Would she?
“I wonder what would have happened if they had lived all together,” she said. “Happily, I mean. Or at least openly, like the artists.”
“Artists can get away with that a lot better than lords, I think,” Gwilym suggested. “Marriages of convenience and secret trysts for king and country.”
Secrets. There shouldn’t have to be secrets—Jo hated them. Look what they did to her mother . . . to her relationship with her mother, too. Look what had happened to Aiden, and then to Arthur, since he couldn’t bring himself to come out of the closet. Look at how the world crushed and squeezed anyone who was different for the sake of “society says.”
“You’ve gone quiet,” Gwilym said. Jo blinked at him. Dessert had come and she’d been staring into space.
“Sorry. It’s just—you know, my uncle was going to propose to Arthur. I don’t think Arthur knows. Chen said he was tired of hiding. Told her he’d even give up the Hiding painting—”
Jo’s brain ground gears. He was going to give the painting back. More importantly, he was going to take Evelyn home. Jo jumped out of her seat, remembered they were in a restaurant and forced herself to sit back down.
“Okay. So we all notice that Evelyn appears to be looking the wrong way. It’s subtle. Takes you a minute to see it.”
“Yeah, because it was repaired, so they looked at a photograph instead of the real thing. And because you said Uncle Aiden wanted Evelyn’s eyes to be looking at him.”
“I know, that’s what we decided. But what if—what if—it’s more intentional than that? What if it’s a clue?” Jo almost squeaked the last word out.
“How do you mean?” Gwilym asked, half standing himself now.
“I have an idea. We need to take Evelyn to Arthur’s flat,” she said, digging out her phone. “I want Chen to be there, too. Are you busy?”
“Selling antiques out of my by-appointment-only in Swansea?” Gwilym asked, twirling his mustache. “Not likely.”
Jo hadn’t really thought so. She raised her hand as if in primary school to catch the waiter’s attention, thumb typing texts to Chen and Arthur with the other.
“We’re going to Newcastle first thing tomorrow.”