‘You think it was arson?’ Tansy kept her voice low out of consideration for any sensitive diners.
‘I just think there were two people who were trying to find that Vermeer, and now they’re both dead,’ Anna said, also in an undertone, as she pulled out a chair for her friend. ‘Shall we ask them to get you a towel?’ she added in her normal voice. ‘Maybe two towels? You’re drenched.’
Tansy shook her head, scattering tiny droplets. ‘I’ll live, unlike your poor David Fischer. I’ll dry myself on a table napkin when no-one’s looking!’ She’d materialised out of a violent rain storm like some long-legged Goddess of the Monsoon. Her dark curls, the back of her T-shirt, the hems of her jeans, even her eyelashes were wet.
Anna had managed to get them a table in Pierre Victoire, a popular French bistro in Little Clarendon Street. Too popular, she thought. She’d arrived, minutes before the heavens opened, to find a party of women exuberantly celebrating a friend’s fortieth. At the table next to Anna and Tansy’s, three elderly dons loudly rehashed a recent quarrel with their dean.
Tansy hitched her chair closer to Anna’s so they could hear themselves speak.
‘Did you see in the Mail they caught up with Lili’s ex? He didn’t kill her, Anna. He’s got witnesses who can vouch that he was nowhere near Mortmead Hall that night. In the Mail, it said the police were looking for “other leads”. But from what Liam’s told me, there are no other leads. Now the ex is out of the frame, they’ve got no one. You said she had some information about the painting. Do you think—?’
‘No, you daft mare, it’s only just beginning!’ a woman called out, to enthusiastic cheers and applause. ‘Forty’s where all the good stuff starts!’
‘She said she’d seen it,’ Anna said, ‘She’d emailed David to tell him and now they’re both dead.’
Death by fire. Anna couldn’t bear to imagine the horror: the tiny apartment filling with toxic smoke, the bookshop below turned into a roaring furnace, both sets of stairs ablaze. Anna hadn’t really known David or especially liked him, but she had recognised in him a lonely kindred spirit. He was what Anna had been in danger of becoming, she thought, if she hadn’t found Tansy and Isadora, friends she could call up and ask, ‘Can we talk? Can I run this by you? Tell me if you think this sounds crazy?’
‘Thanks for coming, Tansy,’ she said. ‘I’ve been going out of my mind the past twenty-four hours, but it’s not just me, is it? There’s something suspicious about all of this?’
‘I’d say so,’ Tansy said. ‘Liam thinks the same, with two unexplained deaths and the only connection between them being a painting that everyone but David and Lili swears no longer exists.’
‘A painting that everyone swears never existed,’ Anna said.
Their waiter arrived with two bowls of minted pea risotto, which Anna had already ordered on Tansy’s recommendation.
Shrieks of laughter floated in from the street. Tansy and Anna glanced out to see two half-drowned, female undergraduates wheeling their bikes through the puddles. Tansy tasted her risotto and gave an approving nod.
‘This is every bit as good as I remember.’ Then, in a typical Tansy segue, she said, ‘Liam said you didn’t get much out of Tallis?’
‘Tallis was vile,’ Anna said. ‘You know Isadora couldn’t go through with it?’
‘Liam said. He said Tallis remembered a painting being used as a bribe to bring some “poncey official” to the west, but he never came right out and said it was the Vermeer, did he?’
Anna shook her head. ‘Of course not. He’s into mind games.’
Tansy took a couple of sips of her mineral water. ‘How the hell would it have got to Russia anyway?’
Anna remembered the elusive trail of rumoured sightings and coded references, which David Fischer’s father had tracked from Innsbruck to Berlin and then to Soviet Russia.
‘Fischer’s father believed a Russian soldier spirited it out of Germany at the end of the war,’ she said. ‘After that it sounds like it got passed around like an elaborate game of pass the parcel, until it came into the possession of some high-ranking official.’
And then this painting, which may or may not have been the Vermeer, had allegedly arrived in Oxford, where, coincidentally, the wife of one of Tallis’s fellow agents, taught in one of the women’s colleges. Oxford, city of spies, and home to the Hopkins and Scott-Neville families. The painting’s journey was not a fairy-tale path, so much as an encircling maze. Anna shivered. In the Greek myth, the maze always had a monster at its heart.
‘This is really doing your head in, isn’t it?’ Tansy said sympathetically.
‘Yes, because just about everyone who knew the truth is dead!’ Seeing one of the elderly dons raise a shaggy white eyebrow, Anna belatedly lowered her voice.
‘My dad, his father, Ralph Scott-Neville, David Fischer’s dad – Michael Kirchmann – and now, David and Lili. There’s almost no one left to ask or no one who’ll give me truthful answers,’ she added thinking of her visit to her grandfather.
A waiter brought dessert menus. A young woman left the birthday party to pace between the tables, trying to hush her sobbing baby. She gave them an apologetic smile.
‘Overtired,’ she mouthed.
Anna didn’t plan to have children; she couldn’t begin to imagine how much courage it must take, to devote your every waking moment to protecting a small life. Yet, she couldn’t help wondering how it would feel to devote your energies to nurturing something or someone, instead of delving around in the dark and murk, trying to uncover the kind of secrets that got your fellow humans killed.
Instead of rushing to order her pudding, Tansy began to retie her pony tail, fiddling with her hair elastic and getting it to just the right degree of tautness, before she took a decisive breath.
‘I do know we’re not real detectives. I know we’re just like these irritating, dabbling, though obviously much younger and sexier, versions of Miss Marple.’
Anna was surprised into a laugh. ‘“Sexier than Miss Marple”. Why thank you for that rave review, Ms Lavelle!’
‘No, but listen,’ Tansy said earnestly. ‘We might not be real bona fide PIs, but, on the other hand, we were there, Anna, when Lili was found. David Fischer told you his story. In the end, he trusted you to do the right thing. On some level that makes them our responsibility, don’t you think? David, and Lili and the painting that never was?’
Anna stared at her, stunned. Tansy had put into words exactly how she’d been feeling when she called her at the gallery. She hadn’t said it, because it had seemed such a crazy thing to say. Now Tansy had stolen the words out of her mouth.
‘It certainly feels like my responsibility,’ she said, swallowing. ‘All the more so, because David Fischer believed my father had failed him.’
‘Ancestral guilt,’ Tansy said with a wise nod. ‘Ironic, really, because Julian wasn’t really your dad.’
Anna quickly shook her head. ‘He raised me. He didn’t have to, but he did. He was my dad.’
Tansy was instantly remorseful. ‘Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. But let’s just scroll back to the part about this being our responsibility.’
Not yours, Anna noticed gratefully, but ours.
‘Jake thinks the same as you,’ she said.
‘Does he?’ Tansy shifted in her chair. ‘But just to go back to—’
‘He referred me to the theory of cosmic ripples,’ Anna said with a grin. ‘I told him he’d been spending too much time with you!’
The baby had fallen asleep. The mother carefully lowered it into a bucket-shaped baby carrier and when the baby continued to slumber, Tansy gave her a friendly thumbs-up before turning back to Anna.
Some people are described as having faces like ‘an open book.’ But Tansy’s delicate features had all the transparency of an open sky, the fast-changing weather of her moods on view for anyone to see. Now her velvet brown eyes held an expression of intense urgency.
‘Anna, I’m trying to say something,’ she said earnestly, ‘so don’t keep interrupting, OK? Did you ever think that we might be approaching this from the wrong end? Suppose we could go right back to the beginning, where this whole Vermeer business kicked off?’
‘Great idea,’ Anna said wryly. ‘If either of us had access to a time machine.’
‘Not back in time! I meant back geographically, to Vienna or wherever this whole nightmare got started.’
‘Innsbruck,’ Anna corrected automatically, then did a mental double-take. Surely Tansy hadn’t just said what Anna thought she’d said?
‘Anna,’ Tansy said, eyes sparkling. ‘Why don’t we go? You and me?’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘I am deadly serious!’ Tansy undermined this solemn declaration by breaking into a wide grin. ‘Plus, we owe it to the dog-walking detectives, surely, to at least once do some detecting in another country!’
‘Yeah, but—’ Anna began
‘No, Anna, we do! Hercule Poirot is always setting off up the Nile or travelling on the Orient Express.’
‘But what about your job? What about Liam?’ Anna was torn between her sense that Tansy’s instincts were sound and her inbuilt dislike of being rushed into anything that wasn’t her own idea.
‘What about Liam?’ Tansy almost snapped. ‘We have our own lives, like you and Jake, as for my job …’ She stopped and took a calming breath. ‘Please, Anna,’ she said in her most coaxing voice, ‘let’s jump on a plane and see if we have any more luck in Innsbruck. I don’t deny this is partly selfish, but it feels weirdly right, doesn’t it? Ok, so we might not find anything out, but Lili and David are worth two cheap flights to Austria surely?’
It did feel weirdly right, Anna had to agree, especially given that all her attempts to get some definitive answers in this country had come up against dead ends.
‘That’s why I came back to Oxford,’ she admitted. ‘I mean I came back to help nurse my grandmother, but I stayed on because it felt like I needed to reconnect with my old life or at least the place where I was living when the sky fell in on my old life. I suppose in a way this does feel a bit like that.’
Tansy clapped her hands. ‘Is that a yes?’
‘It’s a maybe,’ Anna said.
‘Oh, pooh, that’s just an introvert’s way of saying yes!’ Tansy pushed away her menu. ‘I’m too excited to have pudding now, aren’t you?’ Before Anna could respond she said breathlessly, ‘seriously, you don’t have to decide this minute. But when I get a chance, I’ll look up cheap flights. What do you reckon? Say leave on Thursday and back on Sunday?’
She turned to unhook her handbag from the back of her chair.
‘Anna, I so need to get away. If there was something I could do that would help Liam, but he won’t let me. You saw how he was when Isadora asked about his exams? I know men have to go into themselves while they figure what’s wrong, but it’s that much worse with Liam because of everything that happened, you know, when he was a kid.’
‘He was in care, wasn’t he?’ Anna remembered.
Tansy nodded. ‘Until Trishie and Jim became his full-time foster parents. Up till then he’d had never had anyone he could rely on.’ Her eyes clouded with distress. ‘So even now when something major upsets him, he kind of reverts to that time when he was all by himself. If I try to get him to talk it just makes him clam up even more. But if I’m there, Anna, I can’t help myself. I just go wading in and make everything ten times worse.’ She gave Anna a pleading look. ‘So, I really need not to be there.’
They paid their bill and walked back up Little Clarendon Street towards St Giles. The sun had come out and steam was rising from the wet pavements. As they walked, Tansy started checking travel info on her phone.
‘Anna, listen to this! The Orient Saxe-Barthelemy Express runs from Innsbruck to Paris! How cool would that be? Oops, maybe not, just seen the price!’
Anna was only half-listening. She was wondering what had prompted her father to take her mother to Innsbruck, if it was pure happenstance or if he’d gone there specifically to investigate David Fischer’s claims and what, if anything, he’d found out.
‘Your dad would be cheering you on,’ Chris had said. She’d be walking in her father’s footsteps. Following the trail of pebbles back to the source. Was that a weird thing to want to do? Thanks to her traumatic past, Anna never quite knew if she was being normal. Friends do go on foreign holidays, she reminded herself, though she wasn’t sure how many took advantage of Expedia City Breaks to investigate a double murder.
Beside her, Tansy was still checking various Orient Express options on her phone.
‘Do you think we’d get a discount for being the famous dog-walking detectives?’ She waggled her eyebrows. ‘Shall I give it a shot? Go on, dare me!’
‘I shan’t dare you to do any such thing, Tansy Lavelle! For one thing, we’re not going on the Orient Express and for another we’re not ten years old!’ Anna said, laughing, and collided with someone coming out of Taylor’s delicatessen.
‘Sorry,’ she said automatically.
A male voice said, ‘Anna?’
Even before she’d turned she knew.
It appalled her that she immediately recognised his voice, that it had been stored deep in her unconscious all this time.
‘Hello, Dominic,’ she managed. It was like those dreams where everything had already been decided by some malicious puppeteer and there was nothing she could do but numbly play her part.
‘How amazing!’ he said, half laughing. ‘Wow, this is just insane! After all these years!’
It confused her that he looked not just older, but taller and far more physically imposing than she remembered. His eyes, guileless green eyes clear as sea glass, that had once turned her knees to jelly, hadn’t changed. His hair was thick, blond and still fell forward boyishly over his brow.
Everything about him spoke of moneyed ease: the expensive charcoal jacket, the white shirt but no tie, the recent suntan and hand-made loafers without socks. But most of all, it was the confidence born of six hundred or more years of Scott-Neville power and privilege.
Dominic was openly looking her over now, as if checking her off against some remembered inventory.
‘You haven’t aged a day!’ he said in a wondering tone. ‘You’re exactly the same!’
She wanted to howl a protest. I’m not the same. How could I possibly be the same? But this was something else she remembered about Dominic; how quickly she’d lost herself around him. During their arguments, her words had instantly deserted her, scattering like frightened birds. Now, sixteen years on, she stood in the middle of St Giles and everything she’d ever wanted to say to him jammed up inside her, choking her like an invisible garrotte. Worse than that, she could feel this polite English smile plastered over her face. Tansy had been keeping a diplomatic, if puzzled, distance, but Dominic suddenly seemed to intuit that she and Anna were together.
‘I’m so sorry, what appalling manners!’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Dominic Scott-Neville.’ Tansy shot Anna a startled look, but recovered sufficiently to say, ‘Tansy Lavelle. Aren’t you an old friend of Anna’s?’
‘That’s right,’ Dominic said. ‘I’ve been away for a while, but I’ve recently moved back with my wife. What about you, Anna? Are you just visiting or …?’
‘No, I live here.’ Anna heard herself say gracelessly.
He abruptly looked at his watch, that splash of almost white blond hair falling over his brow in the way she’d once found sexy.
‘Dammit, I’ve got to go. I’m supposed to be meeting our solicitors.’ He produced a leather card holder and Anna saw Tansy’s eyes widen at the Cartier monogram. Dominic handed one of his cards to Anna with a smile.
‘Promise you’ll call me up soon so we can do lunch!’ He stooped to kiss her on both cheeks. Stricken, Anna watched him stride away, watched until the bright flaxen head disappeared into the crowds further down St Giles.
Tansy was talking to her, but Anna couldn’t hear her through the roar of white noise. Numb in every cell, she reached up to rub her T-shirt sleeve against her cheeks where he’d kissed her.
If you think I’m a monster …
Somehow, she got home, walked Bonnie, fed her and changed her water. Then she half fell on to her kitchen sofa and found she couldn’t move. After a while, Bonnie came to rest her chin on Anna’s knee, her dark-rimmed eyes watchful.
I’m in shock, Anna told herself.
No, I’m angry, she realized all at once.
How ordinary he’d seemed, not at all the Shakespearian villain who had stalked through her nightmares all these years. She hated herself for being so feeble and letting him take control of their encounter. His casually issued invitation – no, a command – to meet for lunch and those kisses. How dare he kiss me! Anna scrubbed furiously at her cheeks in the way she’d done as a child, when she’d been kissed by an especially unappealing relative.
You haven’t changed either, Dominic, she thought. You’re still an over-entitled, arrogant bastard. She hadn’t seen it as arrogance when she was sixteen of course. That was what had hooked her, not the money, the manor house or the aristocratic pedigree, but the effortless way he’d moved through the world, while she’d wanted to be anybody, anybody at all, except the miserable, mixed-up daughter of Julian and Julia Hopkins.
Naively, she’d hoped that if she hung around him and his friends long enough, some of it would rub off on her. In fact, the opposite was true. Once Dominic had successfully pulled her into his orbit, he’d changed, almost overnight. The fleeting interludes when he was funny and sweet were soon outnumbered by those other times when he was cold, or bored, or scathingly unkind. This was the price of admission to Dominic Scott-Neville’s charmed circle, the understanding that he, and he alone, was the golden-haired boy, and the rest of them merely unsatisfactory stand-ins for his real friends, those gorgeous, ideal lovers who had yet to show up in his life
That afternoon, transfixed in front of the delicatessen, with its window display of gourmet sandwiches and designer teas, she had morphed back into that voiceless, teenage girl.
We should have all hated his guts, she thought. Instead they’d hated themselves. When Dominic had tired of Natalie and started flirting with Anna instead, she’d been thrilled. She’d been chosen. Even Max Strauli had been grateful to be chosen by Dominic, though so far as she knew he and Dominic never had sex.
‘Stupid, stupid!’ she said aloud, and saw her White Shepherd’s eyes widen with worry. ‘No, Bonnie, not you sweetie! You’d have had far more sense than me!’ She knelt on the floor and wrapped her arms around her dog, inhaling her clean, sweet, peanut butter smell. Bonnie made the happy grumbling sounds she made whenever her humans made a fuss of her. Anna pressed her face against her dog’s warm muscular flank.
‘You’re the best dog in the world,’ she whispered. ‘You always know how to make everything better.’ Keeping one arm loosely around Bonnie’s neck, she reached for her phone and found a little flurry of text messages.
Jake had left a message to say he’d hoped to make it back to Oxford this weekend but now it turned out he had to go to Berlin for a couple of days. He signed off:
After she’d read all her messages Anna decided she could give herself a pat on the back for having survived her first encounter with Dominic Scott-Neville in God knows how many years. Now she needed to do something real, something sane. That’s what Miriam, her therapist, used to say: ‘Any time you feel yourself going into a downward spiral, do something real. Clean something. Cook yourself something you’ll enjoy eating.’
She went to her fridge and took out: a sweet, red pepper, the remnant of a courgette, a potato, an onion and a slightly, over-the-hill carrot, found a sharp knife, a chopping board and began to chop everything into small dice for a frittata. She put a glug of olive oil in a pan and, while it was heating up, she beat some eggs in a bowl. As soon as the oil was hot, she threw in tiny cubes of potatoes and grated some pecorino cheese while the potatoes slowly started to turn crisp and golden brown.
When she heard her phone ring, she hastily moved the pan off the flame. This was the time when Jake often called if he was free. She frowned a little at the screen which showed an international number she didn’t recognise. Was he in Berlin already? She snatched up the phone. ‘Yes, you have reached the Park Town psych ward, how may I help you!’
‘Is this Anna Hopkins’ number?’ The caller sounded understandably cautious, his intonation faintly Germanic. ‘This is Thomas Kirchmann.’
She felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment. ‘Oh, Herr Kirchmann, yes, it’s Anna. I’m so sorry. I thought you were someone else.’
‘I apologise for phoning so late, but I’ve been meaning to get in touch. Alice told me you came into the office the other day.’
So much had happened since Thomas Kirchmann had swept her off for coffee and cake in Pfeffers, that it took her a moment to reorient herself. ‘And did Alice happen to mention why I came?’ Anna wished she hadn’t answered. She didn’t have the energy for this.
‘Alice didn’t go into details, but I gather it was something to do with my father, my biological father in Innsbruck?’
‘Yes, when I came, I was hoping to talk to you. I’d been to see David Fischer.’
She heard him sigh. ‘I wondered if you would do something like that.’
‘Yes, I know, you see, what it’s like to be labelled as the – the crazy person. I needed to hear his side of the story.’
‘And what did you find out?’ Herr Kirchmann sounded almost resigned.
‘I think you probably know what he had to say about your father.’
‘Ja, ja,’ he said wearily. ‘I think I have a very good idea but, Anna, my dear, nobody’s history is ever as black and white as we would like it to be.’
‘So, it’s true!’ Anna felt anger blaze up.
‘No. It is not, but if you had the choice of saving fifty percent of something or losing absolutely everything, wouldn’t you choose to save the fifty percent? Sometimes in this imperfect world, to save a little, you must sacrifice the rest.’
It was dawning on Anna that she had the most appalling, left-sided headache; the shock of seeing Dominic, the hornets’ nest of memories he’d let loose and now Thomas Kirchmann was talking in riddles.
‘Why won’t anyone ever give me a straight answer?’ She pressed the heel of her hand hard against her forehead, praying that she still had a couple of paracetamol in her bag.
‘My dear, I know you don’t think so, but you are still very young,’ Herr Kirchmann said in a sorrowful voice. ‘One day you will learn that sometimes there are no straight answers.’ Anna heard him murmur something in German to someone before he said, ‘I’ll be in London again next week. Come and see me and we can talk properly then. Alice will email you some dates.’
Closing her eyes against the pain, Anna said, ‘Could you answer me just one thing? Do you happen to know the Scott-Nevilles? Because I bumped into Dominic Scott-Neville earlier today and your name came up and he said his family does a lot of business with Hempels.’ The lie just jumped out, she couldn’t have explained even to herself why she did it.
There was a silence so total that Thomas Kirchmann didn’t seem to be breathing. When he finally replied, his voice was tight.
‘No, Anna. Ralph Scott-Neville is dead, therefore we no longer do business with those people. I have to go now. Gute Nacht.’
And he’d gone.
Anna stared blankly at her phone, but she was seeing the coolly speculative expression in Dominic’s eyes, as he looked her over like a foal he was considering buying. She saw David Fischer earnestly describing his father’s long search for the missing Vermeer as his pale knobbly hands stroked and soothed his cat.
Then she saw the scene she’d only heard described, Julian arriving at Chris Freemantle’s door straight from that hideous dinner at the Scott-Nevilles, not sure if he had the strength to go on living. Last of all, she saw her grandfather’s face, the way he’d looked that evening when he lied; frightened and old, silently begging her to leave it alone.
‘Dammit!’ she said aloud. ‘Dammit, dammit, dammit!’
First, she had to fix this headache. She went to hunt for some paracetamol found some in a drawer and swallowed two tablets with a gulp of water. Well, Jake McCaffrey, if the obstacle is the path, I must be bang on target, she thought. My path consists of nothing but bloody obstacles.
She picked up her phone and called up a number on speed dial.
‘My introvert’s “maybe” just became a “yes”,’ she said grimly. ‘I’m in. Book our flights for Thursday morning.’ And was deafened by Tansy’s screams.