The Darkest Hour. Barbara Erskine

told her why, that he would like a second opinion on its authenticity. He had contacted Professor David Solomon at the Royal Academy and arranged to take the picture up to London on that fateful day at the end of March. Two hours before he was due to leave the professor’s secretary had phoned to say David Solomon had flu and they had postponed the meeting.

      So why had he gone out anyway? She remembered his smile, his mysterious wink as he tapped his nose, his last words ‘I won’t be long’. He hadn’t taken the painting with him after all, and obviously he wasn’t going to meet David Solomon, so where was he going? The question had circled endlessly round in her head. For a while she had wondered if he had gone to buy her birthday present. That might have explained the wink. But that would have meant he had died on a trip to do something for her and she couldn’t live with that thought. Her birthday had come and gone only days after the crash and she had tried to put the idea out of her head. She would never know now.

      The professor had written to her several weeks later with his condolences and had suggested that one day, when she was ready, perhaps he could come down and view the portrait here at the gallery. She had not replied, though she suspected Robin had.

      Dear Robin. She must start taking control of her life again. It had to go on. And she had to face the fact that almost certainly she could no longer afford him; probably no longer afford to go on running the gallery even with the bursary to back up her income. Glancing into the mirror on the wall by the door she sighed. She had lost a lot of weight over the last three months. Her face, always thin with high angular cheekbones, was positively haggard, her dark eyes enormous in contrast to her pale skin. She had raked her long straight dark brown hair back into an unflattering ponytail which Larry would have hated.

      The studio was in darkness, the blinds pulled down over the north-facing skylight windows. The room ran the full depth of the house front to back and the front windows looked out over the street below. She pulled the blinds up allowing the clear north light to flood in at the back, and resolutely she faced the easel. Evelyn Lucas, if it was indeed her, had painted herself sitting perched on a farm gate. She was young, perhaps in her early twenties, and dressed in fawn jodhpurs with a blue sweater knotted round her shoulders over a blue and white gingham shirt, her honey-blond hair loose and wild in the wind. She had dark blue eyes which looked straight out of the portrait, eyes which were engaging, challenging even, daring the viewer to do, what?

      At the corner of the painting, a patch of sky with torn grey clouds and fragments of blue behind her shoulder, there was a clean area where Laurence had started to remove some of the grime which covered the surface. Lucy moved closer and stared at the corner. There had to be something there he had spotted which had caught his attention and made him doubt the picture’s provenance. But what?

      ‘You OK?’ Robin’s voice behind her made her jump. He was standing in the doorway. She hadn’t heard him let himself into the gallery below.

      She nodded. ‘Do you know what it was Larry saw here which made him think it wasn’t an Evelyn Lucas after all?’

      Robin came to stand beside her. ‘No idea.’

      They gazed at the painting in silence for several seconds. That it was of Evelyn had been almost beyond doubt. There were photos of her on the record and she certainly looked extraordinarily like them. Lawrence had picked up the painting at an auction only a few weeks before his death. It had been catalogued as ‘Portrait of Unknown Woman’, but when he brought it home in triumph he told Lucy that he suspected that it might be a missing Lucas from the early 1940s. It was being sold by the executors of an old lady who had died without close heirs and its past was, as far as he knew, a mystery. In Larry speak, he took a punt and bought it for a song.

      Robin folded his arms and squinted at it. ‘Whoever painted it, I think it’s lovely.’

      She smiled. ‘So do I.’

      Robin glanced at her. ‘Sure you’re OK?’

       ‘Why go out if the professor has cancelled?’ she had begged. She hated it when he went away on his own. But he had insisted he had to go out. And he had refused to let her go with him.

       When the police knocked on the door a few hours after he had left she didn’t believe them. What was he doing on a remote lane on the way to Petersfield? Why had he turned off the main road? Where had he been going?

      They never found out exactly what had happened. He had skidded, that much was clear from the tyre tracks, and there was evidence that another car had been in collision with his, but the fire damage had been too great to discover much more. He had probably been killed by the impact with the first tree. No other vehicle had shown up on the database with damage which would correlate to the paint marks which had survived. It was black, and probably a Ford. How many black Fords were there in the south of England? Lucy did not care. No amount of forensic evidence would bring Larry back, her perfect, adored, talented husband.

      She turned away from the painting and looked at Robin. Short, plump, slightly balding and with the biggest and best smile of anyone she had ever known, Robin Cassell had been her mainstay and her rock for the last three months. When Larry was alive he had come in to run the gallery two or three mornings a week to allow them some time in the studio and the freedom to go to auctions and on buying trips around the country. When the gallery reopened three weeks after Larry’s funeral it had been at Robin’s suggestion, and he had started coming in every day. ‘Just until you are back on your feet,’ he had said, giving her a hug.

      Guessing at her cash flow problem – neither her parents, nor Larry’s were in a position to help her financially – and knowing Larry had made no will, he had refused to let her pay him. But that situation could not go on. However much he wanted to help her she could not let him continue to work for nothing. He didn’t need the money; he was, as he mockingly put it, a trust fund kid, which meant he had inherited a large house from his parents which had been sold for development. Besides that, he worked on and off with his life partner, Phil, who ran a bookshop in the centre of town, but even so, her conscience had been beginning to worry her. Until now.

      ‘I’ve got the grant, Robin,’ she said quietly. She turned back to the picture. ‘I had the letter this morning. What am I going to do?’

      ‘You are going to write the book, ducky.’ Robin smiled. ‘You owe that to Lol. And to our Evelyn here.’

      ‘I don’t know that I can. Not without him.’ She blinked back the sudden tears so close all the time, so near the surface.

      ‘You can. And you will. And it will be up to you to prove if this is a painting of her, by her, or not.’

      ‘Professor Solomon would tell us that.’

      ‘Maybe.’ Robin stood back, still staring at the picture. ‘Maybe not.’

      ‘Did you tell him not to come, Robin?’

      ‘I said we would be in touch when we were ready.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      ‘So, it’s up to you, Luce. Take the money and start researching. Leave the gallery to me, at least for a while. You know I love looking after it.’ Robin turned away and walked back into the kitchen. ‘Did you have any breakfast this morning?’ he called over his shoulder.

      She followed him through and closed the door on the studio. ‘I wasn’t hungry.’

      ‘Well I am, so I am going to make us some toast with lashings of marmalade and some coffee and then you are going to start planning how you are going to approach your research. OK?’

      She gave a wan smile. ‘Maybe,’ she echoed.

      ‘No maybe about it. You’ve got to start living again and this will gently lead you out into the world. You know Uncle Robin is right.’

      She walked over and picked the letter up from the worktop where she had dropped it earlier. She read it through again and then she looked up at him. ‘I’ll think about it, OK?’

      The evenings were the worst. When the sign on the gallery