Bleak Water. Danuta Reah

the early mornings before the gallery got too busy when she could have the spaces and the paintings to herself.

      Her interest in the early painters had brought her to the rooms where the sixteenth-century Flemish paintings hung. They had developed techniques that produced paintings with a clarity and depth, and a saturation of colour that has never been surpassed. The big attraction for visitors was The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s enigmatic depiction of heaven and hell. The colours, after all the centuries, were still vivid and clear. Eliza had spent a long time studying it.

      But gradually she was drawn to a smaller panel that hung on the far wall. From a distance, it looked dark, but closer, the detail began to appear, a bleak coastline, a sluggish river, fires that cast a sombre glow across a landscape where death marched as an army. Brueghel’s masterpiece: The Triumph of Death.

      The painting exercised a fascination over her. She was intrigued by the meticulous techniques that had kept the paint so fresh, the luminescence of the water and the incandescent glow that suffused the landscape. Brueghel had probably worked with tempera white heightening into the wet or on the dry imprimatura, beginning with the highlights of the flesh…It was a painting that drew the eye, as the army of death advanced across a desolate landscape, hunting down and slaughtering the living, men, women and children, with a pitiless dedication and terrifying cruelty.

      ‘Un cuadro interesante, no?’

      She looked round. Two men were standing behind her, studying the Brueghel. They were both tall, casually dressed, one with Mediterranean-dark hair, the other with the fairer colouring of the north. Something about them said ‘artists’. The dark-haired one seemed familiar. He was the one who had spoken, and she realized he had been talking to her. She tried to frame a reply in her still rudimentary Spanish, when she recognized his accent as English. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I always think that this is the wrong place for it.’ Where had she seen him? Had he been in the café the night before?

      ‘Where else would it belong but among the Boschs?’ the other man said. Her artist’s eye analysed his face – tanned as though he spent most of his time outdoors, Slavic bones. His dark glasses reflected her gaze.

      ‘I mean the place,’ she said. She gestured at the high, clearly lit gallery. ‘It ought to be in the shadows, I don’t know, in a dark corner of an old church, and you’d come across it out of the blue. Or…’ She’d been thinking about this painting for weeks. ‘I know it’s medieval, its ideas, but there’s something…I’d put it in a current setting. A cityscape, industrial ruins, show people a modern triumph of death.’

      The dark-haired man looked round the room. ‘That’s the problem with a place like this,’ he said. ‘It’s decontextualized. Stuck here, it’s history, superstition.’ He moved closer to the panel. ‘It’s a fifteenth-century video nasty,’ he said after a moment. ‘Someone’s cut that bloke’s eyes out. If it is a bloke.’

      There was an element of the video nasty in the relish with which Brueghel had depicted torture and death. ‘They were into death, the apocalypse,’ she said. ‘Like we are now, I suppose. The end of days, all that stuff.’ In the foreground, a body lay in a coffin, its head resting on a bundle of straw. It reminded her of something she’d read recently. ‘“Do not apply any pink at all, because a dead person has no colour;…and mark out the outlines with dark sinoper and a little black…and manage the hair in the same way, but not so that it looks alive but dead…and so do every bone of a Christian, or of rational creatures…”’

      ‘Cennino Cennini,’ the other man said. The fifteenth-century artist whose manual of painting techniques illuminated the world of Renaissance art for later centuries. ‘How to paint dead flesh.’ Eliza was surprised he’d recognized it. He had taken off his sunglasses to look more closely at the picture and at her. He narrowed his eyes as though the light in the gallery was too bright. ‘Cennini. “A dead person has no colour…” He’s wrong, you know. The dead decay. We don’t see it in modern times, not in the so-called civilized places. They have colour. We never see that, it’s all hidden away, burned, buried…’

      Eliza thought of Ellie in her bleak grave.

      He slipped his glasses back on. ‘Someone should do an exhibition, isn’t that right, Daniel?’ He seemed amused.

      Of course! She knew why the dark-haired man seemed familiar. ‘You’re Daniel Flynn, aren’t you?’ she said. He had had a show in London two years ago that had caused a sensation among the critics and an interesting scandal when a fellow artist accused him of plagiarism. He was attractive, bohemian and controversial. Since then, his name was everywhere, his photograph in the magazines and Sunday papers. She should have recognized him at once. ‘I didn’t know you were in Madrid.’

      ‘I got here a few days ago. I’m travelling, looking for what to do next. This is Ivan. Ivan Bakst.’ The name wasn’t familiar to Eliza. They shook hands.

      ‘Eliza,’ she said. ‘Eliza Eliot. I’m here on a temporary contract.’

      The two men had met up in France, Flynn told her. ‘We knew each other in London,’ he said. ‘Years ago, when I was at art school.’ Bakst had been travelling the European waterways. He’d left his boat near Lyons, and the two of them had come down to Spain together.

      ‘Are you staying?’ Eliza said. They looked as though they would be interesting additions to the small expatriate community of artists that had assembled in Madrid that summer.

      ‘We’re going across to Morocco,’ Flynn said. ‘Tangier. And then further south, Tanzania, maybe, Ivory Coast.’

      ‘I’ve never been to Africa.’ Eliza and Flynn were drifting away from the painting now. Bakst remained studying it.

      ‘Spain’s almost there,’ Flynn said. ‘It’s easy to forget. The Moors occupied most of it. I don’t know, I might stay for a while.’

      ‘You could spend a year going round the galleries here,’ Eliza said. Not that she’d done as much gallery visiting as she’d planned. The social life in Madrid was too enticing.

      ‘Why bother? You might as well visit Lenin’s corpse,’ he said.

      ‘What?’

      ‘It’s what these galleries do to art. It isn’t allowed to die. It doesn’t go through the natural processes. A place like this is a mausoleum. Or a trophy hall. Dead art.’

      Ivan Bakst had come up behind him as he was speaking. He gave Eliza a cool smile as though the two of them were sharing a joke. ‘You do well enough out of galleries, Daniel,’ he said.

      Flynn laughed. ‘So I should turn them down? Look, the money lets me keep working.’ He looked at Eliza again. ‘We’ve just got here. Show us around. Have a drink with me. Tonight.’

      She looked at him. His face was thin, long-jawed. Against his dark hair, his skin had the almost translucent fairness she associated with the west-coast Irish, the Spanish. His eyes were blue.

      ‘OK,’ she said.

      

      The flats were a concrete cliff towering up into the sky above her. It was dark, but her eyes were straining upwards because she knew it was coming, soon, and she wasn’t going to be able to stop it. She tried to duck away from it, get out of sight, but it was coming now, hurtling down towards her and… The sudden ringing alarm jerked her out of the dream and she threw her arm up instinctively to protect herself and then she was awake, breathing fast, her heart hammering. She lay there staring at the ceiling. That dream again. Shit! Detective Constable Tina Barraclough rolled over and picked up the phone. ‘Yeah?’ Her voice sounded hoarse.

      ‘Tina? Where the fuck are you? You’re supposed to be here. Now.’

      Dave West, her partner. She looked at the radio, and groaned. It was after seven. She’d forgotten to set the alarm – no, she could remember now, she’d come in after three and switched the alarm