‘And you phoned each other frequently?’
He stared at Kathy for a moment, and she wondered if he was going to deny it. Then he said, ‘Well, yes, if she had a query about something in her work, or I had to change a meeting, that kind of thing.’
His reply was guarded, and Kathy sensed he wasn’t being completely open. ‘Have you been to her home?’
‘No. I don’t know where she lived, to be honest. I suppose the office will have the address.’
‘You don’t know if she shared with someone?’
‘Sorry, no idea.’
‘What about her friends, other people she went around with?’
‘No, I couldn’t say.’
‘I’ve just been speaking to Dr Ringland.’ Kathy saw the surprise register briefly. ‘He told me about Marion’s interest in arsenic poisoning. Can you enlarge on that for me?’
‘Oh… yes, of course. That is rather strange, isn’t it, in the light of what’s happened?’ He paused, as if debating how to go on. ‘She was studying the Pre-Raphaelites for her PhD. How much do you know about them?’
‘They were a group of nineteenth-century English painters, weren’t they?’
‘And poets, yes. The 1840s and ’50s, the first avant-garde movement in art, something of a sensation at the time-young men breaking the mould, that kind of thing. Their program was to reform art by going back to the fifteenth century, before it was corrupted, hence their name.’ He was interrupted by his phone ringing. ‘Excuse me.’ He picked it up. ‘Hello? Colin, hi, we were just talking about you. I’m sitting here with Inspector Kolla now… Yes, sure… You still on for tonight?… Great. I’ll call you back later. Bye.’
He smiled at Kathy. ‘Sorry about that. Where were we?’
‘The Pre-Raphaelites.’
‘Oh yes. Well, they and their circle-wives, lovers, models-were a fairly sickly lot. I don’t know if they were more so than the average Londoners of that period, but it’s a striking feature of their story. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Lizzie Siddal was a chronic invalid; she died of an overdose of the laudanum she was medicating herself with. His lover Janey, William Morris’s wife, was also sickly, and Rossetti himself eventually went barking mad, sharing his house in Chelsea with a menagerie of kangaroos, wombats and armadillos.’
He was more relaxed now, slipping into the familiar account he might have entertained students or dinner guests with many times before.
‘Now, it’s conceivable that arsenic had something to do with all that. One of the revolutionary things about the Pre-Raphaelite painters-Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt and the others-was their use of the vivid new pigments that the chemical industry had recently developed, especially a brilliant green called Emerald Green, or Paris Green, made from arsenic. People were shocked by the blazing colour of their paintings, made possible by these new pigments-later the Impressionists used the same colours to achieve their dazzling effects-but they were quite dangerous. The painters absorbed the pigment through their skin, they breathed its fumes and held paintbrushes loaded with it in their mouths. It’s said that arsenic poisoning from Emerald Green was the cause of Monet’s blindness and Van Gogh’s madness. It was Cezanne’s favourite colour, and he developed severe diabetes, a symptom of chronic arsenic poisoning.’
It was developing into a lecture, and Kathy interrupted. ‘How does Marion fit in?’
‘Ah, well, yes. Marion found all this rather fascinating. Too fascinating, really.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It seems a little churlish to criticise her scholarship at a time like this.’
‘I’d appreciate a frank opinion; I believe you’re the world expert on this subject.’
Da Silva chuckled, letting her know he recognised outrageous flattery when he heard it, and didn’t mind in the least.
‘Marion was one of the brightest doctoral students I’ve ever had. She was extremely serious about her work, applied herself very diligently. She was quite passionate about her ideas. Rather too much so. It is a classic trap for a scholar to become too attached to a pet theory before all the evidence is in. Marion could be quite headstrong, and ambitious too, desperate to break new ground, achieve new insights. It sometimes made her rather extravagant in her formulations. I had to keep trying to rein her in.’
‘Can you tell me what her particular ideas about arsenic were?’
‘Oh…’ He flapped a hand, his sigh almost a groan. ‘She tried to extend what was probably just their ignorance about the dangers of paint pigments into a whole philosophy. She speculated that the Pre-Raphaelites cultivated a fascination with death, especially tragic, premature death, and that this was mixed up with their notions of romantic love and sexual freedom. Well, they certainly did have tangled sex lives, but Marion blew it out of all proportion. She was obsessed.’
‘It does sound ambitious.’
‘Quite impossible. Absurdly broad for a doctoral thesis.’ He leaned forward, punching the point home with his index finger, and Kathy saw another side to him, pugnacious and domineering. ‘She was wandering off into areas in which she had no expertise-forensic medicine, psychology, chemistry, you name it.’ He gave a snort. ‘The provisional title of her thesis was Sex and Death: A Pre-Raphaelite Discourse. You see what I mean?’ He spread his hands. ‘Somewhat melodramatic.’
‘But they were pretty melodramatic, the Pre-Raphaelites, weren’t they?’
He smiled at Kathy indulgently. ‘Well, yes, but Marion was writing an academic treatise, not a novel. That was our compromise title. Her first efforts were even more lurid-“lust” figured prominently, if I remember rightly.’
‘Was there much lust in Marion’s life, would you say?’
He held Kathy’s eye for a moment, then said, very deliberately, ‘I have absolutely no idea. She never talked about her private life.’
‘Did she have a job, apart from her studies? Some source of income?’
Again, he couldn’t say, and his mood changed, becoming impatient and bored. He checked his watch.
‘What were your movements last Tuesday, Dr da Silva?’
He frowned. ‘I was working at home. I’m preparing a paper for a conference in the States, and the deadline is coming up. There are too many interruptions here, so I stayed at home to get it finished.’
‘Was anyone with you?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ nine
T he phone went as Kathy slid behind the wheel. Her heart sank as she recognised Nicole’s voice. ‘Oh, hi.’
‘You didn’t ring me back. How did it go this morning?’
‘Not too well, I’m afraid. It didn’t work out as I’d hoped.’
‘You sound harassed.’
‘Sorry, I’ve been flat out with this murder case, that woman who was poisoned in St James’s Square.’
‘Oh, is that what you’re on?’
‘It’s my first murder since I made inspector, Nicole. I’ve got to get it right.’
‘And you will, but you’re not giving up on this weekend.’
‘It’s impossible. I’m really sorry. I was looking forward to it.’
‘Sounds like you need a break, Kathy. Anyway, maybe you’ll have cracked it by tonight.’
Kathy sighed. ‘No way. Cases either crack in the first day or they go on for weeks. We’ve passed the golden hour; it’s all hard slog now.’
She rang off, and immediately the phone rang again, this time with the librarian Gael Rayner on the line.
‘Oh, Inspector, we’re under siege here!’ She sounded excited.
‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s a contingent of foreign press outside, trying to get pictures and interviews about Marion’s death. We’ve had to bar them from coming in. I try to tell them this is the London Library, for goodness’ sake, not CSI Miami.’
‘Do you want me to talk to the local coppers?’
‘Oh no, it’s all right. They’re rather dishy, actually. I probably will let them in to shoot a bit of film, but I just don’t want them to turn us into the London Dungeon or something. No, it was another thing I thought I should mention to you.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I’m really not sure if it’s relevant. It concerns one of our readers. It may be nothing at all, and I’d hate to make trouble unnecessarily.’