With the receiver pressed hard to his ear, Zach stared at the Aubrey drawing in the catalog. It was of a young man with a faraway expression; straight, fair hair falling into his eyes, fine features, a sharp nose and chin. Wholesome, slightly raffish. A face that conjured up images of boys’ school cricket matches; mischief in the dorm room; pilfered sandwiches and midnight feasts. Dennis, it was called, and dated 1937. The third drawing of the young man Zach had seen by Aubrey, and with this one, more strongly than ever, he knew that something was wrong. It was like hearing a cracked bell chime. Something was off-key, flawed.
“How does that sound?” Zach echoed, clearing his throat. Impossible. Out of the question. He hadn’t even looked at his half-constructed manuscript, his reams of notes, for over six months.
“Yes, how does it sound? Are you all right, Zach?”
“I’m fine, yes… I’m…” He trailed into silence. He had abandoned the book-one more project that had petered to nothing-because it was turning out just like every other book about Aubrey he had ever read. He’d wanted to write something new about the man and his work, something that would show a unique insight, possibly the kind of insight only a relative, a secret grandson, would be able to give. Halfway through he’d realized he had no such insight. The text was predictable, and covered well-trodden ground. His love for Aubrey and his work was all too obvious, but that was not enough. He had all the knowledge, all the notes. He had his passion for the subject. But he didn’t have an angle. He should just tell David Fellows that and have done with it, he thought. Let this other Aubrey man get his book published. With a pang, Zach realized he’d probably have to pay back the publication advance, modest as it was. He wondered where on earth he might get that money back from, and almost laughed out loud.
But the picture on the page in front of him kept pulling at his attention. Dennis. What was that expression, on the young man’s face? It was so hard to pin down. One minute he looked wistful, the next mischievous, and then he looked sad, full of regret. It shifted like the light on a windy day, as if the artist couldn’t quite capture it, couldn’t quite commit the mood to paper. And that was what Charles Aubrey did, that was where his genius lay. He could pin an emotion to paper like nobody else; catch a fleeting thought, a personality. Portray it with such clarity and skill that his subjects came to life on the paper. And even when the expression was ambiguous, it was because the mood of the sitter had been the same. Ambiguity itself was something he could draw. But this was different. Wholly different. This looked as though the artist couldn’t decipher, couldn’t recapture the sitter’s mood. It seemed impossible to Zach that Charles Aubrey would produce such an incomplete picture, and yet the pencil strokes, the shading, were like a signature in themselves… But then there was the question of the date, as well. The date was all wrong.
“I’ll do it,” he said suddenly, startling himself. Tension made his voice abrupt.
“You will?” David Fellows sounded surprised, and not quite convinced.
“Yes. I’ll get it to you early next year. As soon as I can.”
“Right… great. Fantastic to hear, Zach. I’ll admit, I’d rather thought you’d hit a wall of some kind with it. You’d sounded so sure you had something really fresh on the subject, but then time started to tick along…”
“Yes, I know. Sorry. But I will finish it.”
“Well, all right then. Great stuff. I shall tell the powers that be that my faith in you was entirely justified,” said David, and behind the words Zach heard the slight misgiving, the gentle warning.
“Yes. It was,” Zach said, his mind churning furiously.
“Well then, I had better get on. And, if I may be so bold, so had you.”
In the lull after the call ended, Zach cleared his dry throat and listened to his mind racing, and almost laughed aloud again. Where on earth could he start? There was one obvious answer, and only one. He looked back at the catalog, and down the page to the provenance of the drawing of Dennis. From a private collection in Dorset. The seller with no name again, just as before. Three pictures of Dennis had now emerged from this mysterious collection, and two of Mitzy as well. All in the last six years. All apparently studies for final paintings that nobody had ever seen. And there was only one place in Dorset that Zach could think to start looking for the source of them. He got to his feet and went upstairs to pack.
CHAPTER TWO
In the bed that had been her mother’s, and still sagged where Valentina’s body had once lain, Dimity was visited. Since the night she saw Celeste, her dreams had been populous, bustling with the long gone, and the long dead. They waited for her to shut her eyes and then they edged closer, on silent feet, flitting out of distant hiding places and announcing themselves only with the hint of a scent, a murmured word, or an expression they often wore. Celeste’s fierce eyes; Charles’s hands, flecked with paint; the quizzical tilt of Delphine’s brows; Élodie stamping her foot. Valentina, breathing fire. And with them came feelings, each one washing over Dimity like a wave, making it hard to breathe. They towed her far from land, so she couldn’t put her feet down, couldn’t rest or be safe. Fighting not to drown. An enveloping sea of remembered faces and voices, swirling and surging so that she woke with her stomach churning and her head so full she couldn’t remember the time, or the place. They had questions for her, each and every one of them. Questions only Dimity could answer. They wanted the truth; they wanted her reasons; they wanted retribution.
And once her eyes were used to the dark, and could pick out the pale outlines of the window and the familiar furniture, the crescendo lulled a little and the foreboding came back. The feeling that somebody was coming, and that because of this stranger everyone Dimity had lost, and everyone she feared, would come to lurk in the dark corners of the house and wait, just out of sight, for the chance to make their demands. They would demand truths she had hidden for decades; hidden from everybody, sometimes even from herself. Their demands would get louder, Dimity realized. Panic quivered in her gut. They would get stronger, unless she found some way to hold them off. Wide awake she lay, humming softly so that she wouldn’t hear them, and strove to discern if the one who was coming would be friend to her, or foe.
The village of Blacknowle lay in a fold of the rolling Dorset coastline to the east of the villages of Kimmeridge and Tyneham-that strange ghost village appropriated by the War Office in 1943 as a training ground for troops and then never returned to its residents. Zach’s parents had taken him to the village when he was a child, as part of an August bank holiday break in the area. Zach most clearly remembered Lulworth Cove, because there’d been an ice cream-much hankered after but rarely had-and the beach’s perfect, round crescent had seemed so unreal, almost like something from another country. He’d filled his pockets with the smooth white pebbles until the lining split, and cried when his mother made him empty them out before getting back into the car. You can keep one, his dad had said, shooting his fractious mother a thunderous look. Now Zach wondered how he’d failed to realize how unhappy they were. In Blacknowle itself, his father had wandered the short streets with an expectant look on his face, as if he was sure of finding something, or someone. Whatever it was, by the end of the holiday the look was gone; replaced by a settled sadness and disappointment. There’d been disappointment of another kind on his mother’s face.