The next barn was much bigger, and housed a large stack of hay bales and an ancient piece of farm machinery with vicious-looking spikes and wheels and moving parts. It was rusty and festooned with cobwebs. The wind moaned through a hole in the roof, and beneath that bright patch of watching sky, nettles and chickweed were growing in a patch of moldy straw. Behind the sound of the wind was a silence that Zach suddenly found unnerving. Even the far-off cry of a sheep couldn’t change the fact that the place felt dead, forgotten, like the relic of something been and gone.
“I help you?” A man’s voice behind him made Zach jump.
“Jesus! You scared the hell out of me!” he said. He smiled, but the man standing behind him didn’t return the expression. He examined Zach with a steady, measuring gaze that put him on his guard.
“This is private,” said the man, with a wave of his hand to indicate the barn. He was medium height, shorter than Zach but stockier, with burly shoulders. His face was drawn, the cheeks a little hollow, but Zach still thought the man might be slightly younger than he was, maybe in his early thirties. Black eyes watched from beneath a fringe of straight black hair. His skin was dark, dark enough that Zach would have guessed him to be foreign, perhaps Mediterranean, even if he hadn’t spoken with such a thick, guttural accent.
“Yes, I know-sorry. I didn’t mean to… I was looking for the eggs. The eggs for sale?” said Zach, struggling to regain his composure in the face of such open suspicion. The man studied him a moment longer, then nodded and turned to walk away. Zach supposed he was expected to follow.
They crossed the ridged concrete yard to a low building, stone built with a wooden stable door that was black with age and bitumen paint. Inside, the cobbled floor had been scrubbed and a shop counter had been improvised at one end-a trestle table with a metal strongbox and a thick ledger upon it. There was also a large cardboard tray for eggs, in which five were sitting. The man eyed the tray with a look of irritation.
“There are more. Not picked yet. How many?” he said.
“Six, please,” said Zach. The dark-eyed man gazed at him with a neutral expression, and Zach fought the urge to smile. “Five is fine, actually,” he relented, but the man shrugged.
“I get it. Wait.” He left Zach alone in the small room, which Zach guessed had once been a stable. As the sun leaped momentarily out from behind a cloud, the whitewashed walls shone brightly. There were little pictures hanging all around, the biggest no more than twelve inches wide and eight high. A mixture of landscapes and sheep portraits, done in chalks on different-colored papers. Modest prices had been stickered onto their simple pine frames-sixty pounds for the biggest one, a flat-backed sheep standing in silhouette on a near horizon, against a sky aglow with a pink dawn. They were good, all of them. A local artist, Zach assumed. He couldn’t help thinking they’d have more luck in a small gallery in Swanage than here, in a farm shop that had five eggs for sale and no customers other than him.
He stood and looked at them, and wondered who the dark-haired man might be. Hannah Brock’s husband? Her boyfriend? Or just somebody who worked at the farm? The latter seemed unlikely-the farm hardly looked as though it would support one person, let alone an employee as well. That only left husband or boyfriend, though, and he found he didn’t like either idea. There were footsteps behind him and he turned, expecting to see the man return, but it was Hannah Brock who came into the stable. She pulled up short when she saw him, and he smiled as casually as he could.
“Good morning,” he said. “We meet again.”
“Yes, fancy that,” she said drily. She crossed to stand behind the table and flipped open the ledger, gazing down at it with a distracted frown. “Can I help you with something?”
“No, no. Your… that is… the man who was here…”
“Ilir?”
“Yes, Ilir. He’s just fetching me some eggs. Well, one extra egg, to be exact.” He gestured at the five already in the tray.
“Eggs?” She glanced up at him with half a smile. “Aren’t you staying at the pub?”
“Yes. They’re for… They’re for Dimity.” He smiled at her, and watched her reaction carefully.
“Mitzy has half a dozen hens of her own out the back. All of them good layers, as far as I know.”
“Yes. Well.” Zach shrugged. Hannah eyed him and seemed in no rush to speak, and Zach found the silence hard to bear. “Mitzy. So, you know who she is, then?” he said.
“And I’m guessing from your barely contained curiosity that you do, too,” Hannah replied.
“I’m an expert on Charles Aubrey. Well, when I say an expert… what I mean is, I know a lot about him. About his work and his life…”
“You don’t know anything compared to what Mitzy knows,” Hannah said quietly, with a shake of her head. She seemed to regret her words at once, and scowled.
“Exactly. I mean, it’s incredible that nobody has come to interview her before. The stories she must have about him… the insights into all the drawings-”
“Interview her?” Hannah interrupted. “What do you mean, interview her? Interview her for what?”
“I’m… well, I’m writing a book about him. About Charles Aubrey.” Hannah raised an eyebrow skeptically. “It’s coming out to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective, next summer,” he said, with a touch of defiance.
“And you’ve told Mitzy that, and she’s happy to help you?”
“I may not have mentioned the book, actually. I said I was interested in Aubrey, and she seemed really keen to talk about him…” He trailed off under Hannah’s ferocious glare.
“Going back up there soon, are you? So am I. And if you’ve not told her about the book, then I will. Clear? It changes everything, and you know it.”
“Of course I’ll tell her. I meant to. Look, you seem to have got the wrong impression of me. I’m not some kind of…” He waved his hand in the air, searching for the word.
“Snoop?” Hannah supplied for him. She folded her arms; an aggressive pose undermined by another blaze of sunshine, pouring through the window and setting her dark curls alight with shades of deep red. She waited for his reply.
“Right. I’m not a snoop, or some predator out to trick her. I’m a genuine Aubrey fan. I just want to get some kind of new insight into his life and work…”
“Well, maybe that insight isn’t yours to get. Mitzy’s memories are her own. There’s no reason she should have to share them with you, after what she suffered…”
“What she suffered? What do you mean?”
“She-” Hannah broke off, seemed to change her mind about what she was about to say. “Look, she loved him, okay? She’s still grieving for him…”
“After seventy-odd years?”
“Yes, after seventy-odd years! If she’s spoken to you about him already I’m sure you noticed how… fresh the memories of her time with him are. She’s very easy to upset.”
“I’m not trying to upset her, and of course her memories are her own. But if she’s happy to share them with me, then I don’t see that I’m doing anything wrong. And Aubrey is a public figure. He’s one of our greatest modern artists-his work is in public galleries all over the country… people have a right to know…”
“No, they don’t. They don’t have a right to know everything. I hate that idea,” Hannah muttered.