The sun was setting as Anna drove back up the M40, scrawling streaks and swirls of improbable colours across the sky, heightening her sense that at some point she’d crossed into a parallel world. Four plus hours of intense talk had left her exhausted yet completely wired.
In the dim lights of the strange bar they’d moved on to from the Mandarin Oriental, Dominic’s face had been a silvery blur, his eyes graphite, his voice low and raw with hurt: I’ve done terrible shameful things. Knowing that her face must be similarly leached of all familiarity by the eerie purplish lighting, Anna had felt as if she and Dominic had been exchanged for wiser, yet oddly impersonal, avatars of themselves. Her sense that none of this was quite real, but somehow occurring outside the normal laws of physics, had made the intensity of their encounter easier to bear. Until now …
Anna switched on her car radio, nervously flicking between music stations but could only hear Dominic’s voice, urgent, imploring: But I swear to you, Anna, I would never … She’d seen a sign. She was sure she’d seen a sign. Motorway Services 10 miles. She must have passed it without realising or she’d have surely reached it by now? Dominic’s right hand tightly imprisoning his left wrist as he talked and talked: Terrible shameful things. When he stopped to gulp his mineral water, she saw pressure marks printed on his flesh: Shameful things.
She opened the window. Needing air. Needing something, anything, real. She could smell diesel fumes, scorched rubber and a shocking, sweet whiff of wild honeysuckle: But I swear to you, Anna, I would never, I have never …
Anna saw the exit for Services at last and almost wept with relief. Being with Dominic after so many years, covering too much ground, too fast, too intensely in too short a time, had suddenly overwhelmed her; she wasn’t safe to drive: I swear to you, Anna, I would never …
She signalled, changed lanes, signalled again, turned off the motorway and found her way to the vast car park, doing everything as slowly and deliberately as if her old driving instructor was sitting beside her. She locked her car and walked unsteadily towards the stark, white lights of the service station, feeling as if she was floating, scarcely tethered to the earth.
Inside the single-storey building, fighting the urge to flee back to her car, she was assailed by confusing signage, fast food smells and the babble of strangers in transit. Eventually she spotted the familiar, Starbucks logo and somehow made her way to the counter, where she found herself queuing behind some young women, who were obviously returning from a hen party. With their elaborate hairdos slipping undone and gold and silver eye make-up running, they resembled exhausted mermaids bewildered at finding themselves washed ashore. Anna ordered a large coffee and, dimly conscious of her plummeting blood sugar, a piece of lemon drizzle cake. Feeling like a ghost trying to pass unconvincingly among the living, she found a table, numbly unwrapped the square of dry sponge cake: I swear to you, Anna …
A large Punjabi family had spread themselves over three tables at the Burger King concession opposite. An elderly Punjabi woman, wearing colours as improbably vivid as the sunset, distributed shocking pink and lime green sweets to a flock of dark-eyed, silk-clad little children.
I’ve done terrible things, shameful things but I swear to you, Anna, I would never, I have never killed another …
Glancing down, Anna was puzzled to see that she’d taken out her phone. Grief sliced through her as she realized who she’d wanted to call. It was the first time in sixteen years, if you discounted her weeks in the psych ward, that she’d even momentarily forgotten that her father was dead. The jolt of loss was chilling and final. Nothing and no one could ever make this better, except her diffident, painfully private dad, but Anna would never see, touch or talk to him again. She had thrown herself into a whirlwind of activity, jumping on planes, trains, changing countries, but Julian, Julia and Anna’s brothers and little sister were still dead. Anna still didn’t know why they’d been murdered or if it had anything at all to do with her father’s auction house or David Fischer’s Vermeer. All she knew was that she was no longer entitled to hate Dominic Scott-Neville. Hunching over her table, she desperately swallowed down sobs, waiting for the shockwave to pass. Dominic’s words replayed in her mind: When I got to Argentina I wrote you all these mad letters, Anna. I wanted to tell you how sorry, how bloody sorry …
Three of the little Punjabi children raced past shrieking, high on their own excitement and too much sugar. One little girl, a tiny princess in gold earrings and sequinned green silk pyjamas, tripped, fell sprawling and began to howl. Her father, a tall bearded Sikh, calmly went to her and swept her up in his arms. Anna had to clench her jaws against the pain. The yearning to be small again, to feel her own father’s arms around her again, was intolerable.
What do I do now, Dad? She asked her dead father. What the hell do I do now? For sixteen plus years she’d had an enemy. A mission. A spar to cling to in the wreckage. A reason to keep living, to keep on hating. Sitting up at night trawling the net. Living for the next google alert. She’d told herself it was the drive to know, find answers and get justice for her parents and her siblings. But deep down she’d always been chasing the shadowy figure of Dominic Scott-Neville. A ghost chasing another ghost, she thought. That, essentially, had been her life until she’d got Bonnie.
Oh, God – Bonnie! Anna was guiltily startled back to her responsibilities. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten to call Tim! She quickly sent a text.
Tim’s reply popped up moments later.
Tim had apparently forgotten that she’d never known Rook when he was old and presumably slightly less bonkers. But Anna was surprised to discover fond memories of him as a mischievous puppy, a glossy, black, working cocker crossed with equally hyper-active Border collie. One day on the shore at Dunwich, Rook had rashly sampled seawater and gone racing up the pebble beach to some dismayed picnickers, where he had gulped down a small child’s orange squash in his desperation to rid himself of the taste. Anna’s brother – Dan – who, like Anna, had secretly longed for a dog of his own, had said: ‘I don’t see why they were so mad. I thought it was really smart of him!’
Anna’s phone pinged. A follow-up text from Tim.
She sent him a smiley face. The disturbing feeling of being out of her body was beginning to ebb away.
A small gang of boys and girls, Anna thought they were maybe aged seventeen or eighteen, came to take over a nearby table. The boys impossibly rosy-cheeked with floppy public school fringes, the girls repeatedly tossing back their silky hair like so many moorland ponies; and every single one of them secretly starring in their own private movie, Anna diagnosed ruefully. Just like her and Natalie and Max and Dom. They’d acted so confident, thought themselves so outrageously decadent. But they’d just been babies, clueless little babies.
‘God, I’m so sorry, Anna.’
Those were the first words Dominic said to her, after Thomas Kirchmann had tactfully remembered another engagement and left them alone together.
Inwardly panicking, unsure what exactly he was apologising for, since it was unlikely that he was confessing to murder, Anna had said in a strained voice, ‘Why are you sorry?’
‘For not getting in touch after what happened to your family,’ he explained. ‘Not to mention acting like a prat outside Taylors. But how do you apologise in the street to someone you haven’t seen for what feels like a hundred years? I just went to my default position which, thanks to my patrician upbringing, is banal, public school dick.’
Anna had startled herself by saying drily, ‘well, that’s certainly true,’ and he’d laughed. Then he’d said, ‘would you mind if we went somewhere else? Somewhere we can talk?’
They’d walked through the streets until they found the strange bar which, like the magic toy shop in a children’s story, Anna suspected she might never be able to find if she ever tried to return. And there, in the violet twilight, clamping his own wrist in a vice-like grip, Dominic had begun to talk: about his near-fatal overdose, about being bundled on to a plane by his father barely two weeks later and how, in his self-loathing, he had continued to court death. At his lowest ebb, he’d been picked up by the police in some nameless Argentinian town, been thrown in jail and later bailed out by his uncle and aunt on the condition he went into rehab.
‘In Argentina?’ she’d said, surprised.
He’d shaken his head. ‘Some fancy clinic in New York State. Snow everywhere. When I got off the plane, I thought I’d die of cold.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Not to mention heroin withdrawal.’
‘But you got clean?’
‘Eventually. Thanks to Ghislaine.’ Dominic had told her. ‘She saw something in me apparently.’ He gave a self-deprecating laugh. ‘Whatever it was, it had to be buried pretty deep!’
Ghislaine, former super-model and New York socialite, Anna remembered, who was now Dominic’s wife.
‘Where did you meet?’ Anna had expected him to name some glitzy location frequented by celebs.
He’d explained patiently, ‘I thought I’d told you – in rehab. Ghislaine was on her way out, having successfully completed the programme. I was on my way in, but secretly plotting to go over the wall and shoot up the first chance I got. She told me to call her as soon as I was well again and she’d come to fetch me. I didn’t believe – I didn’t dare to believe – she meant it. But in the end, I did call her and she really came.’ Shaking his head in apparent wonderment, Dominic had added casually, ‘I say Ghislaine saved me, but I should give God some credit for giving me a solid gold reason to get through the nightmare of rehab.’
Anna stared at him. ‘God?’ She’d thought she’d misheard.
He’d laughed. ‘Didn’t I mention the finding God part? Oh, if you knew how hard I fought it, Anna! It was almost comical. If, you know, it wasn’t my life that was on the line! You see I knew how to self-destruct! I’d been doing it since I was twelve, but getting well, now that terrified me!’
‘Why do you say it was God?’ She’d asked. ‘And not – I don’t know – some other healthier part of you?’ Lulled by the smoky violet intimacy of the bar, by her sense that she and Dominic were not their normal daylight selves, Anna had forgotten that no one in their group had ever challenged Dominic’s version of events. She belatedly braced herself for the inevitable retaliation.
But he’d just shrugged. ‘Because, at that time, any part of me I could access would have immediately let me off the hook. God, on the other hand, asked me to do ten uncomfortable, sometimes frankly impossible, things a day and still does.’
‘So, would you say He was worth it, I mean, ultimately?’ Anna was the last person to kick away a drowning person’s life raft, but she couldn’t quite hide her scepticism.
He’d laughed. ‘You mean do I think I’ll get my heavenly reward? Anna, I don’t even care! Because God – or whatever you want to call a power greater than ourselves – showed me that I didn’t have to turn into a newer but equally disgusting version of my father. I was free to become my own person.’
‘Does Ghislaine feel like you?’ She really meant was; has Ghislaine been born again?
‘She does. We’ve both been given so much and, for our different reasons, our reaction was to piss it all away. Now we want to give something back. We’ve bought this monstrosity of a country house which we’re planning to turn into a women’s refuge.’ Dominic had left a long pause before he’d added quietly, ‘you see neither my mother or my grandmother ever had anywhere to go.’
Before they’d left the bar, before its twilight spell could wear off and she lost her courage, Anna had told Dominic, ‘a few months ago, on New Year’s Eve, a man killed himself. He tried to take me with him. He told me he was … somehow connected to your family.’
If you think I’m a monster, Dominic is the devil.
Dominic had steadily returned her gaze. ‘I think you’re talking about Alec Faber?’
‘Yes.’
He’d nodded soberly. ‘His brother was one of my godfathers. Alec was the black sheep of the Faber family. Did brilliantly at Oxford, but then lost his job at the Foreign Office; I never knew why. My dad always said he was a failed gambler, failure being the ultimate sin in my father’s eyes, next to getting caught. Alec’s family had disowned him. His fiancé had broken off their engagement. Years later my father and I were in London – I would have been in my early teens – and we passed Alec sitting on a bit of old blanket, with his dog on a piece of string.’ At this point, Dominic had interrupted his story. ‘I need to give you a bit of background. In the usual way, my father barely noticed me. But, once a month, we had this surreal father-son ritual, where he’d take me to London and we’d have an excruciatingly uncomfortable dinner at his club, where he’d interrogate me about my many failings. I suspect that my mother had asked him to make more of an effort with me and this was his bizarre solution. I was desperate to impress him, Anna, and at that age the only way I could think of was to be just like him. So, like I said, we saw Alec on the other side of the road, and my father reminded me that this was someone who’d got a first at Oxford and had once been a member of my dad’s club. “This is what happens to weaklings and failures. It will happen to you too, Dominic, if you don’t buckle down to your studies.” Then I did something unthinkable.
‘I interrupted my dad. I said, “I’d like to talk to him.” My father was appalled. Why bother with this piece of human detritus? But I told him, “I know what I’m doing, Dad.” We crossed the road and I was almost sick with excitement. I introduced myself to Alec and told him we were going to have dinner at his old club. If he could get hold of a tie somewhere, tidy himself up, he could join us as our guest. “We can feed you up, maybe help you out.” He must have been half insane with hunger, poor guy, because he glanced at my dad who hadn’t said a word, didn’t even acknowledge him, and I could actually see Alec’s desperation overruling his common sense. Maybe I was different to my dad and the other Scott-Nevilles? Maybe his luck had changed at last? I told him what time he should come and we walked away. My dad started to protest. “People like Alec are weak, they’re vermin.” “I know that, Dad!” I told him. “And after tonight, so will Alec, trust me!” And I saw my father’s eyes light up, as if he was thinking that maybe I wasn’t such a waste of space after all?
‘So, that evening, my dad and I are sitting at our usual table when the maître d’ comes over to tell me that the person I’d warned him about had showed up and was asking to see us. I said grandly, “Show him in.”
‘I could see that Alec had made a pitiful attempt to tidy himself up. He’d managed to acquire a tie and combed the tangles out of his hair, though he was still smelly and unshaven. He gave me a pathetically grateful smile, went to pull out a chair and, quick as a flash, I said, “you didn’t seriously think we’d invited you to dine at our club?” As you can imagine, the dining room suddenly went deathly silent as everyone watched this little drama play out. I said, “What I meant was, if you go around to the bins at the back, I’m sure you’d find the kitchen staff quite charitable.”’
When Dominic reached this part of his story, he’d forced himself to look Anna in the eye. ‘Then I saw Alec’s humiliated face and almost threw up with shame. I’ve done some shabby things in my life, but that moment will stay with me until I die.’
Anna hadn’t known what to say. It was a horrible story and she absolutely believed it had happened exactly the way Dominic said.
‘Oh, it gets worse,’ Dominic told her. ‘Some of the diners started to snigger. Alec went stumbling from the dining room, knocking into a waiter on his way out and sending a tray of drinks flying. Then my father did something unprecedented. “Nicely done, my boy!” he said, with real pride. “Well done! Never show weakness!” And he slapped me on the back.’
After that final humiliation, Alec Faber had clearly been left with nothing to cling to but thoughts of revenge. Even as he’d prepared to plunge to his death, he’d felt compelled to pass on that last drop of poison. If you think I’m a monster … and because it had fitted her narrative, her version of Dominic Scott-Neville, Anna had swallowed the lie.
She drove back to Abingdon, with Bob Marley turned down low, still trying to process her thoughts about her evening.
Did she believe Dominic had found God? Anna didn’t really think that was any of her concern. To quote Isadora Salzman, quoting John Lennon; ‘Whatever gets you through the night.’ Did she believe Dominic was genuinely trying to make amends for past mistakes?
Yes, she thought. Yes, I do.
But despite all these revelations, she was no nearer to knowing who had killed Lili Rossetti or if David Fischer had been murdered. She no longer believed that Thomas Kirchmann was involved, but suspected that neither he nor Alexei Lenkov had told her what was really going on at the auction house. ‘Things have not felt right at Hempels.’ He’d said. ‘Alexei and I are doing our best to get to the root of it.’ Alexei’s explanation for firing Alice Jinks didn’t ring true. Though Alice had arrived on her doorstep in – for Alice – a dishevelled state and in obvious distress, there had been a distinct element of performance. Like Anna, Alice Jinks was first and foremost a survivor, but she was also a strategist. Anna simply couldn’t imagine the cool, calculating Alice stepping out of her perfectly polished role as Kirchmann’s PA so far as to start insulting clients unless, Anna thought, she felt spectacularly threatened in some way.
Shivering with tiredness, Anna turned into Tim’s badly-lit estate, peering at street names and wondering irritably why they’d all been given the names of ridiculously obscure wild flowers, when she thought of something else to add to her catalogue of failures. She had never asked either Kirchmann or Alexei Lenkov what had really happened to Alice’s grandfather, Lionel Rosser.
Next morning, Anna was awake at 5.30 a.m. To Bonnie’s delight, she immediately sat up and went downstairs in her PJs to make herself a pot of tea. The feeling she’d had last night with Dominic that normal reality had been suspended, of being under some mysterious yet kindly dispensation, an alternate, more complete version of herself, still lingered.
When she’d arrived at Tim’s, Anjali had been upstairs giving Edie her last bottle of the day. She’d briefly come down in a pretty, cotton kimono, to say hi, holding her sleepy baby in her arms, before disappearing off to bed. Anna had intended to leave then, but she and Tim had both found a mysterious second wind. They’d stayed up reminiscing for almost two hours, about Rook, their childhoods and her brothers. She’d given him a shortened version of her conversation with Dominic. Second wind or not, Anna had been aware that underneath they were both exhausted, to the point that they’d become slightly giggly and trippy, but it had felt – to both of them, Anna thought – that this opportunity to recapture their old easy dynamic, was too precious to waste.
The thought made Anna smile to herself, as she poured tea into her midnight-blue mug. She looked out through her open French doors into the garden, where Bonnie was nosing about in the silver-grey light of dawn. The early-morning air felt cool and fresh.
Initially, her conversation with Dominic had left Anna feeling that she’d been scattered into a million tiny drifting pieces, her very last certainty stripped away. But today she felt, she felt … on the cusp of something new, a new way of being in the world. It’s time, she thought. I can do it. I think I can really do it now. She hurried out into the garden to find Bonnie.
‘I need company,’ she told her.
Still holding her mug of tea, Anna ran upstairs to her study, her bare feet leaving damp prints on the polished wood. Bonnie bounded after her, catching her excitement.
She opened the door and hesitated. For a moment, the room was haunted by the memory of Alice Jinks: ‘I was trying to be your friend. To look out for you, because of us both being Hempels girls.’ Anna set down her cup, took the key from the desk drawer, unlocked the double doors of her armoire and recoiled as if she’d come up against an electric fence.
Chaos. Madness. Not her own private, far superior version of a police investigation room. Just a cupboard crammed with agony that had nowhere else to go. She forced herself to walk into that appalling force-field, until she was close enough to see every photograph, every word on every news clipping, police report or witness statement, all held together with a cat’s cradle of criss-crossed tapes. Thick black scribbles added whenever traumatic memories overwhelmed her:
The words scrawled across fuzzy photos of Dominic and her subsequent boyfriend, Max Strauli.
Anna’s eyes stung with pity for her broken younger self. How ill she’d been. How lost. Not any more, she thought.
She grabbed her waste paper bin, desperate to be rid of this evidence of the futile years of pain. She reached up to rip out the floor-plan of the room, where her little sister, Lottie, had been butchered in her bed.
But as she went to touch the brittle and yellowed paper, her hand jerked back, it seemed, of its own volition. It would be like a betrayal, like giving up ever knowing what had happened to her family that night.
Her heart still thumping with unused adrenalin, Anna closed the cupboard doors, relocked them and left the room followed by a puzzled Bonnie.
‘I’m not ready,’ Anna said aloud at the top of the stairs, and had to fight back tears. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.’
That afternoon, Anna went to meet Isadora and Tansy at the Randolph, where Isadora had booked them a table for high tea.
‘It’ll be an opportunity to catch up on everything that’s been happening,’ she’d added, when she’d phoned Anna to remind her.
Anna arrived to find her friends already seated in front of a glorious teatime spread in the hotel’s opulent drawing-room. Taking in the crystal chandeliers and gilt-framed paintings, Anna said, ‘I can see luxury is getting to be a habit for the dog-walking detectives!’
Tansy patted one of the squashy, russet-upholstered chairs so Anna could sit down.
‘I was just telling Isadora that I’m suffering from serious dog envy,’ she said earnestly. ‘I’m not a real dog-walking detective now am I? Though Buster was only borrowed and, to be honest,’ she added, ‘I wouldn’t actually choose him for my doggie soulmate.’
‘What kind of dog would you choose?’ Isadora asked.
‘A rascally mutt,’ Tansy said at once. ‘With a slipping down sock and an eye patch.’
‘Sounds like a cross between Just William and Captain Hook,’ Isadora commented.
‘You could go to a rescue shelter,’ Anna suggested. ‘You never know. You might find rascally, little William waiting for you?’
Tansy shook her head. ‘Maybe one day, when things feel more settled.’ She quickly changed the subject. ‘Isadora says you talked to Dominic.’
‘We talked for hours,’ Anna said.
‘So, we can conclude she didn’t hate him,’ Isadora said drily. She helped herself to a miniature smoked salmon sandwich.
‘This is lovely of you,’ Anna gestured at the tea table with its array of sandwiches, scones, tiny cakes and tartlets.
‘Well, when I initially booked this, it was to compensate me and Tansy for missing out on coffee and cake at Pfeffers,’ Isadora explained.
‘Oh, no, now I feel terrible,’ Tansy said. ‘Because I don’t think we can ever compensate you for missing out on the Orient Express!’
‘You can’t!’ Isadora said crisply, but her eyes held a teasing glint. ‘Here’s the thing – I’m about to do something that I almost never do.’ She flashed them another of her playful smiles. ‘I was wrong. Not for playing devil’s advocate but for not trusting your instincts. And now we’ve all forgiven each other,’ she added swiftly, ‘let’s get down to business! Thomas Kirchmann has convinced Anna – and me – that he was in no way involved with the stolen Vermeer. So where does that leave us? Assuming Lili and David were both murdered because of their connection with this painting, who could have done it? Who had a motive?’
Tansy was spreading clotted cream on her scone. ‘My money is on the bad Russian,’ she said cheerfully.
‘Bad Russian?’ Anna said.
‘Alexei, isn’t that his name? The man who always remembers to buy strudel for his wife.’
Isadora laughed. ‘Not the “bad Russian” trope, darling, that’s been done to death!’
Tansy bit into her scone and closed her eyes with pleasure.
‘I’d love to know what happened to the Vermeer after Kirchmann saw it in the Scott-Neville’s library,’ Isadora mused.
‘Yes, well,’ Anna said, thinking about her own life and her own mysteries. ‘It’s possible we’ll never know. Not for sure.’
Isadora shot her a searching look, seeming to understand that Anna wasn’t just talking about the Vermeer. ‘And could you live with that, darling?’
‘You don’t always get a choice,’ Anna said quietly. She’d become aware of her mobile vibrating inside her bag. She took it out and said, surprised, ‘It’s Dominic. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take this.’ She took her phone into the hotel lobby with its view over the Ashmolean. ‘Dominic?’
‘Sorry, Anna, this is going to be a big information dump.’ Today Dominic sounded like a clipped, public schoolboy to the point of self-parody. It’s his default setting, she remembered, when he was under stress.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked.
‘Kirchmann told me you’d asked him about a Vermeer?’
‘That’s right, but—’
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said, ‘but the police are on their way to take me in for questioning about Lili’s murder. My solicitor is here. In fact, he’s standing right beside me hissing at me to hurry up. Don’t worry,’ he said, before Anna could react. ‘I didn’t kill her. I even have an alibi. It’s something to do with emails I supposedly sent to her. It’s all rather confused. But there’s some stuff I need to tell you as a matter of urgency.’ He took a breath. ‘I – knew about A Study in Gold, Ok? In fact, as part of my belated attempt to atone for centuries of the Scott-Nevilles’ wrongs, I tried to reunite David Fischer with his Vermeer.’
Anna was clutching her phone so tightly against her ear by this time that her fingers had gone slightly numb.
‘I should have told you last night, but I thought … to be honest I didn’t know how you’d react. I know you had your – not entirely unfounded – concerns about me and my family, but it was the first time we’d talked in over a decade and I didn’t want that to muddy the waters, if that makes sense?’
Anna knew exactly why he’d think that and it made her feel completely torn. She could feel all her old Pavlovian suspicions kicking in. He knew about the painting. What else did he know? She was like an amputee, she thought, plagued by unreal sensations in a phantom limb.
She forced herself to focus on Dominic’s voice explaining how he and Lili had come to meet at a fund-raiser at the National Gallery. In passing, she’d mentioned that she was working on art restitution. He’d liked and trusted Lili, and suddenly felt guided.
‘I realize that makes me sound like a religious nut, Anna, but that’s what happened,’ he confided.
‘You knew where it was?’
‘I knew exactly where it was. After Kirchmann spotted the Vermeer in our library, my father hid it behind an amateur, not to say terrible, watercolour painting of our folly painted by my mother.’
Anna vaguely remembered the Scott-Nevilles’ folly, a Victorian take on a timeless romantic ruin.
‘My old man was a perverse bastard, as you know, and the idea of this lost masterpiece hanging on his wall, for all intense and purposes in plain sight, really got his juices going. But then, when he knew he was dying, he wrote to me revealing the truth, like he’d perpetrated some wonderful practical joke. He signed off with his usual wit and charm, saying he was having it auctioned off and that as his touchy-feely Christian son, I wouldn’t see a penny from it.
‘Sure enough, when I came back with Ghislaine to take over the estate, something even my father couldn’t prevent, my mother’s watercolour was no longer on the wall. I told Lili all this. The last time I heard from her she was lit up with excitement. She said she’d been called in by Hempels to advise on a completely unrelated painting and, as she was passing someone’s office, the door opened and she saw what she believed might be my mother’s watercolour hanging on the wall. I don’t know what happened after that, but my gut-feeling is that Lili was so angry about how David Fischer had been treated that she went back later and attempted to retrieve it.’
‘Dominic, you absolutely have to tell this to the police!’ Anna said.
He gave a short laugh. ‘I did! It turns out that babbling about stolen Vermeers and Nazi gold is a sure-fire way of getting yourself evicted from a police station.’ Anna heard agitated voices in the background. ‘I’ve got to go, but as soon as I’m done, I’ll call you, Ok?’
‘Yes, please. And Dominic, good luck. I’m so sorry you’ve got to go through this.’
She went back to the tea-room, where Isadora and Tansy were chatting quietly as they started in on the cakes.
‘You could go back to college, darling,’ Isadora was saying. ‘You are so smart and you’re still so young. You could do anything you like, even in these strangely blighting times.’
Anna resumed her seat and quickly drained her tea cup.
‘Are you Ok?’ Isadora asked her. ‘You’ve gone awfully pale.’
‘I’m a bit shocked,’ Anna said. ‘The police want to question Dominic about Lili’s murder. There are some incriminating emails, or something. He wasn’t very clear.’
‘Has he got an alibi?’ Tansy said.
Anna gave a tight nod. ‘But even so.’
‘How worrying,’ Isadora said, ‘but I am going to pour us all some more tea and I hope you will help us dispose of some of these divine little cakes?’
‘I’m sure I can manage that!’ Anna said, trying to smile.
She drove home, but instead of getting out of her car, Anna sat staring at her phone. She’d braved Herr Kirchmann and survived a life-changing conversation with her nemesis Dominic Scott-Neville, so why was she still avoiding talking to her grandfather? She hadn’t been to visit him since her trip to Innsbruck. They’d spoken on the phone, stilted exchanges that left her feeling wrong-footed and oddly guilty.
Call him again, before you lose your nerve, she thought. Ask him what’s wrong.
He answered on the third ring.
‘Hello Grandpa. How are you?’ she said.
‘I’m fine, darling, how are you?’ Her grandfather sounded tired and, to her dismay, slightly wary.
She’d done this to him, Anna thought with a pang. It was up to her to put it right. She drew a breath. ‘Things haven’t been right between us, not since I asked if my dad had ever talked to you about a Vermeer. It’s my fault, for not saying something earlier but I can’t bear to go on pretending nothing’s changed, when it has.’
He didn’t immediately respond; she could just hear him breathing on the end of the phone.
‘I hate us not being friends,’ she went on, ‘and I know really that you’d never lie to me, but I have this feeling that I’m not getting the whole story from you.’
‘I’m so sorry, I just couldn’t!’ he burst out. She heard his voice break. ‘I was so ashamed. If I’d listened to your father, if I’d taken him seriously when he came to ask my advice about that painting then … I know it’s stupid, but all these years I couldn’t help thinking, he might still—’ he let out a wrenching sob. ‘Your father might still be alive. They might all be alive.’
‘Oh, Grandpa, don’t. Please don’t be upset.’ Anna felt her eyes filling in sympathy.
‘Rationally, I know that might not be why he died. But we’d only talked such a short while before it happened. Julian needed someone to turn to and I let him down. I was no better than that loathsome snob Charles. You must know I’d never deliberately hurt you, Anna. I love you far too much for that.’
‘I love you too,’ she told him tearfully.
Her grandfather hadn’t lied. He was not hiding a dark secret. He’d been evasive because he’d felt desperately guilty; something she might have recognised sooner, Anna thought, ashamed, if she hadn’t been caught up in her own dramas. They talked until they were both feeling calmer, then she said, ‘I’ll come over at the weekend. We’ll go out to lunch somewhere nice and we can have a proper talk.’
Back in her kitchen with no one to distract her from her thoughts, Anna was flooded with fresh anxiety for Dominic. She knew how it felt to come under suspicion. After her family’s murders the police had subjected Anna to lengthy questioning about her and Max’s dodgier associates. They hadn’t suspected her of direct involvement with her family’s deaths, but for a time they’d seemed to believe she could lead them to the killers. The bad daughter, Anna thought. The mad, bad daughter.
Inevitably, her thoughts circled back to her own toxic legacy. Forget family baggage, Anna had an entire armoire. She imagined herself dragging it with her into the future. Setting off with Jake to make a fresh start; Oh, I’ll be bringing my murder cupboard with me, if that’s Ok?
She remembered her evening with Tim. The sweet childhood memories they’d shared. Those were the images she wanted to hold on to, not the bloody horror she’d stumbled over that terrifying, summer’s night.
‘That’s it!’ she told Bonnie. ‘I’m getting rid of it right now! You can be my witness.’
Anna ran upstairs, Bonnie following eagerly at her heels. She threw open the door and plugged in her shredder, weirdly elated. She was finally going to be free. She unlocked the armoire, flung back the double doors and made a wild grab for the nearest piece of paper.
And found herself physically unable to let it go.
Anna let out a scream of frustration and rage. She kicked her waste bin, sending it hurtling across the study, crashing into her running machine with a metallic bong.
Bonnie stared at her in alarm. She sidled up to Anna, tail drooping, doing her anxious grin. Anna dropped to her haunches, instantly contrite.
‘I’m not mad with you, you lovely dog. I’m mad with me. What is wrong with me!’ Bonnie regarded her owner for a moment as if she was wondering how best to handle this new crisis, then she very firmly and deliberately pressed her forehead against Anna’s, remaining in that mutually uncomfortable position without moving a muscle, until Anna reluctantly let out a rueful giggle.
‘Ok, Wonder Dog! I’m cured. You can stop my therapy now!’
Anna and her dog went back down to the kitchen. She found Bonnie one of her favourite crunchy treats and made herself a pot of Doctor Chillout’s tea, with lavender and camomile. She had bought it for just such a mental health emergency, but it turned out to be so foul that she made herself a cup of strong coffee instead. She needed to eat, she thought, but she couldn’t face cooking, plus her fridge was almost empty. Maybe she’d order a takeout?
Her phone lit up. Jake had sent her a text.
Anna shook her head amazed. She texted back.
She heard a ping from her laptop. Anjali had sent her links to the photos taken by High Table’s photographer at the VE Night ball. To Anna’s dismay there were over 200. She decided the photos could wait until she’d ordered and eaten her takeout.
By the time she’d eaten and stashed her plate in the dishwasher, she could hear a steady rain falling outside. She opened her laptop and began working her way through the photos. She had no serious hopes she’d find anything since the police had already been through them. As she clicked on photo after photo, Anna found herself feeling almost nostalgic for their murder mystery weekend. Looking at these slickly professional photos she could see why they’d all, herself included, gradually fallen under Anjali’s 1940s spell. The clothes, the hairstyles, the hectic VE Night atmosphere came across as utterly authentic. Anna recognised the man in the kilt, importuning some unknown female. A beautiful shot of Isadora, waltzing with her air-force pilot could have been a still from a 1940s movie. There was a breath-taking photo of several, wildly jitterbugging couples, who must have come with one of the re-enactment groups. As she continued to trawl through group photos, Anna was surprised to spot herself with Tansy and Isadora, looking unexpectedly glamorous in her evening dress and almost relaxed! She scribbled down the serial number thinking she might get copies for herself and her friends.
Then some nagging awareness that Anna couldn’t quite explain, made her go back to the photo of the jitterbugging dancers. This time she took special note of the gilt-framed mirror just off to the side, where the photographer had captured a passing reflection.
Anna zoomed in closer and her mouth was suddenly as dry as cotton wool. Even magnified, the reflected figure, a shadowy profile, was indistinct. But Anna knew who it was: I came to warn you. Don’t trust anybody.
‘Alice Jinks,’ she whispered and felt her heart jump, warning her of a danger she couldn’t yet define.
Moments later, she heard a thunderous banging at her front door.