Bleak Water. Danuta Reah

with had moved on, but Daniel had stayed. He’d started spending a lot of time at the Prado, his status as a rising young artist making him a welcome visitor, gaining him entry when the museum was closed, and giving him access to off-limits areas, such as the workshops where Eliza was now.

      She picked up her magnifying glass. The portrait on the easel in front of her was illuminated by a raking light, showing the brush strokes that a living artist had placed on the canvas almost five hundred years before. Portrait of Sophia. She moved the glass across the surface, studying the paint. The picture had been damaged at the bottom left. She could see the multi-layered structure of the red paint of the woman’s cuff. She made a note.

      Daniel would be upstairs in the Flemish rooms, studying the Brueghel. He was beginning to share her obsession. He was searching, he’d told her. He knew what he wanted his next work to be about, but he couldn’t decide on its form. He was an eclectic artist, prepared to use any materials that came to hand and seemingly competent in most traditional and non-traditional media. He found Eliza’s interest in Renaissance art hard to understand. ‘It’s gone, it’s past,’ he’d said once when they’d discussed it. But he was spending more and more time in front of The Triumph of Death, more and more time listening to her ideas about it.

      Later that morning, they met for coffee in one of the pavement cafés that abounded in the city. They sat in the sun as the waiter came over to fill their cups and take an order for churros, the sweet batter sticks that Eliza had developed an addiction for.

      His exhibition was starting to come together in his head, he told her. He wanted to focus on The Triumph of Death. ‘I want to put it in a current setting,’ he said. ‘A cityscape, industrial ruins. I want to show people a modern triumph of death.’ He had a small reproduction of the Brueghel, and he wanted to pick her brains about its background, the nature of its composition. The waiter put a plate down in front of her and he helped himself.

      ‘It’s heavily symbolic,’ Eliza said. She dipped her churros into her coffee, and let the crisp sweetness melt on her tongue as she thought about it. ‘It’s a series of tableaux that people would have recognized. You’d need some modern equivalents. Look here, for example –’ She pointed out the fallen woman about to be crushed under the wheels of the death cart. ‘She’s holding a spindle, and the scissors in her other hand are about to cut the thread. That’s Fate. When the thread of your life is cut, you die. I don’t know what that image would mean to a modern audience. Or here, the lovers.’ They were singing to each other, absorbed, close, doomed, as Death added his counterpoint to their duet.

       SIX

      Farnham’s summons came sooner than Tina expected. She’d gone back to the incident room and was sitting at her desk making a pretence of going over her notes. She just needed a few minutes. Her eyes were starting to close, and she jolted awake as Dave nudged her. ‘Get a grip,’ he muttered. Farnham was coming into the room.

      He looked at Dave. ‘There’s someone waiting for you in interview 2, West,’ he said. Dave vanished with alacrity.

      Farnham stayed where he was, looking at Tina. She felt a twist of nerves in her stomach, and swallowed. She could remember the way he’d looked at her as Eliza Eliot was leaving, a long, assessing look.

      He said. ‘My office. Five minutes.’ He went out through the double doors, towards his room.

      Tina took a deep breath. OK, better to have it out in the open. She went along the corridor and knocked on his door. He was sitting at his desk, a sheet of paper in his hands, a witness statement. He looked tired. ‘So, Tina,’ he said, his tone conversational. ‘You’re planning a move to Traffic?’

      ‘Sir?’

      He leant back in his chair. She shifted her feet nervously. The bastard was going to keep her standing. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘OK, I’ll tell you.’ He looked at her. ‘First briefing, late. Second briefing, late. A less charitable man might say hungover, as well. First interview – you not only don’t get the crucial detail, you suggest a time to the witness. The wrong time, as well. Second interview, I come in and find you halfway through doing the same thing. We’ve got the correct times now, but Eliot changed her story – any defence lawyer could make hay with her in court.’

      ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said.

      ‘You could have chosen a worse way to muddy the waters,’ he said, ‘but I can’t offhand think of one. Cara Hobson – remember Cara Hobson, Tina? – Cara Hobson had been dead for at least six hours when she was found. Now, if the Eliot woman is right, and she heard someone in the flat at one – rather than midnight – then it wasn’t Cara Hobson.’

      Tina felt her face flush. She hadn’t thought of that – it was so blindingly obvious, and she hadn’t even thought about it. She saw Farnham register her response. He knew.

      ‘If you screw up again, you’re off the case, right? You’re still on it now because I’m short-staffed. Understood?’

      She nodded.

      He kept his eyes on her, tapping his pen on the desk. Then he relaxed slightly. ‘Anything in the stuff from Hobson’s flat?’

      The sudden switch of direction confused her for a moment, and she stammered as she tried to reorganize her thoughts. ‘There’s this,’ she said, holding out her notebook.

      He looked at her. ‘Yes?’

      She flushed. Get a grip, woman! ‘The flat,’ she said. ‘Cara’s flat.’ She told him what the woman from the Trust had said.

      He frowned. ‘So she was living there unofficially?’ he said.

      Tina nodded. ‘Like a squat,’ she said.

      He thought about it and shook his head slowly. ‘Doesn’t make sense. She’d need keys to the outer doors. Someone must have given her those.’ He balanced his pen between his hands. ‘I wonder why no one spotted it…OK,’ he said after a minute, ‘find out who had keys, who had access to them. She must have got them from somewhere. Anything else?’

      She showed him the reviews that West had found, with the scribbled note to ‘J’. Farnham read through them quickly and raised his eyebrows. ‘You know about this stuff, Barraclough,’ he said. ‘What’s all this death stuff got to do with anything?’ He looked irritated.

      Tina hadn’t thought of herself as an art expert. ‘It’s…they’ve always done work about death,’ she said. ‘This kind of thing is fashionable, I suppose. You know, Damien Hirst and dead cows and things like that.’ Full marks for erudition, Tina.

      ‘OK.’ Farnham rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He looked like a man with a bad headache. ‘If these are Massey’s, we need to know what they were doing in her flat.’

      Tina felt herself slump as she went back to the incident room. Her eyes felt heavy and her head felt full of cotton wool. She checked her watch. If she tried an artificial boost now, she probably wouldn’t be hit by the come-down too badly until she came off shift – only a couple of hours to go. She picked up her bag and headed for the ladies.

      

      The classroom was noisy and it smelled of chalk. Kerry laid her arm across the desk and rested her head on it. She was bored. She yawned and sucked her pen.

      ‘Are we keeping you awake, Kerry?’ Mr Nixon. There was a flurry of giggles around her.

      ‘Sorry, sir,’ Kerry said, sitting up again. He was looking at someone else now, so she slumped forward over her book. The electronic beep of a mobile phone penetrated the voices and the scraping chairs. Kerry jumped, and felt her face going red. She’d forgotten to turn her phone off. Mr Nixon looked round. ‘Whose was that?’ he said. ‘Come