Sarah appeared to evaluate the comment gravely for its merit. She sat as if she held the cat in her lap, slightly bent forward, her hands on her thighs. It was a particularly self-protective position. “Yesterday morning,” she said.
“If you will,” Lynley said.
She went through the facts quickly, adding very little to what Lynley had read in the police report. Unable to sleep, she had risen at a quarter past five. She had dressed, eaten a bowl of cereal. She had read most of the previous day’s paper. She had sorted through and gathered up her equipment. She had arrived at Fen Causeway shortly before seven. She had gone onto the island to do some sketches of Crusoe’s Bridge. She had found the body.
“I stepped on her,” she said. “I…It’s awful to think about. I realise now that I should have wanted to help her. I should have tried to see if she was still alive. But I didn’t.”
“Where was she exactly?”
“At the side of a small clearing, towards the south end of the island.”
“You didn’t notice her at once?”
She reached for her cocoa and cradled the mug between her hands. “No. I’d gone there to do some sketching, and I was intent upon getting something done. I’d not worked-no, let me be truthful for once, I’d not produced anything of possible merit-in a number of months. I felt inadequate and paralysed, and I’d been harbouring a tremendous fear that I’d lost it altogether.”
“It?”
“Talent, Inspector. Creativity. Passion. Inspiration. What you will. Over time, I’d grown to believe it was gone. So I decided a number of weeks ago to stop procrastinating. I was determined to put an end to busying myself with projects round the house-being afraid of failure, really-and to start working again. I chose yesterday as the day.” She appeared to anticipate Lynley’s next question, for she went on with, “It was just an arbitrary choice of days, actually. I felt if I marked the calendar, I’d be making a commitment. I thought if I chose the date in advance, I could begin again without any further false starts. It was important to me.”
Lynley looked round the room again, more carefully this time, studying the collection of lithographs and oils. He couldn’t help comparing them to the watercolours he had seen in Anthony Weaver’s house. Those had been clever, nicely executed, safe. These were a challenge, both in colour and design.
“This is all your work,” he said, a statement, not a question, for it was obvious that everything had been created by the same gifted hand.
She used her cocoa mug to point towards one of the walls. “This is all my work, yes. None of it recent. But all of it mine.”
Lynley allowed himself to revel in an instant’s gratification which rose from the knowledge that he couldn’t have been handed a better potential witness. Artists were trained observers. They couldn’t create without observation. If there had been something to see on the island, an object out of kilter, a shadow worth noticing, Sarah Gordon would have seen it. Leaning forward, he said:
“Tell me what you recall about the island itself.”
Sarah looked into her cocoa as if replaying the scene there. “Well. It was foggy, very wet. Tree leaves were actually dripping. The boat repair sheds were closed. The bridge had been repainted. I remember noticing that because of the way it caught the light. And there was…” She hesitated, her expression thoughtful. “Near the gate, it was quite muddy, and the mud was…churned up. I’d call it furrowed, actually.”
“As if a body had been dragged through it? Heels to the ground?”
“I suppose. And there was rubbish on the ground by a fallen branch. And…” She looked up. “I think I saw the remains of a fire as well.”
“There by the branch?”
“In front of it, yes.”
“And on the ground, what sort of rubbish?”
“Cigarette packs, mostly. A few newspapers. A large wine bottle. A sack? Yes, there was an orange sack from Peter Dominic. I remember that. Could someone have spent some time waiting for the girl?”
He ignored the question, saying, “Anything else?”
“The lights from the Peterhouse lantern cupola. I could see them from the island.”
“Anything that you heard?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. Birds. A dog, I think, somewhere in the fen. It all seemed perfectly normal to me. Except that the fog was heavy, but you’ll have been told that.”
“You heard no sound from the river?”
“Like a boat? Someone rowing away? No. I’m sorry.” Her shoulders sagged a bit. “I wish I could give you something more. I feel monumentally egocentric. When I was on the island, I was thinking only of my drawing. I’m still thinking mostly of my drawing, in fact. What an ugly little item in my personal make-up.”
“Unusual to go sketching in the fog,” Havers noted. She had been writing rapidly, but now she looked up, addressing their prime interest in coming to speak to the woman: What sort of artist goes sketching in the fog?
Sarah didn’t disagree. “It was more than unusual. It was a little bit mad. And anything I might have managed to create wouldn’t exactly be like the rest of my work, would it?”
There was truth in this. In addition to the use of bright, crisp, sun-inspired colours, Sarah Gordon’s images all were clearly defined, from a group of Pakistani children sitting on the worn front steps of a paint-peeling tenement to a nude woman reclining beneath a yellow umbrella. Not one of them featured the gauzy absence of definition or the lack of hue that drawing in the morning fog suggested. Not one of them, additionally, depicted a landscape.
“Were you attempting a change in style?” Lynley asked.
“From The Potato Eaters to Sunflowers?” Sarah got to her feet and went to the bar where she poured herself more cocoa. Flame and Silk looked up from their respective positions, alert to the possibility of a treat. She went to the dog, squatted next to him, ran her fi ngers across his head. His tail thumped appreciatively, and he settled his chin back onto his paws. She sat on the floor next to his basket, cross-legged, facing Lynley and Havers.
She said, “I was willing to try just about anything. I don’t know if you can understand what it feels like to believe you may have lost the ability and the will to create. Yes”-as if she expected disagreement-“the will, because it is an act of will. It’s more than being called upon by some convenient artistic muse. It’s making a decision to offer up a bit of one’s essence to the judgement of others. As an artist, I’d told myself that I didn’t care how my work was evaluated. I’d told myself that the creative act-and not how it was received or what anyone did with the finished product-was absolutely paramount. But somewhere along the line, I stopped believing in that. And when one stops believing that the act itself is superior to anyone’s analysis of it, then one becomes immobilised. That’s what happened to me.”
“Shades of Ruskin and Whistler, as I recall their story,” Lynley said.
For some reason, she flinched at the allusion. “Ah, yes. The critic and his victim. But at least Whistler had his day in court, didn’t he. He did have that much.” Her eyes went from one piece of art to another, slowly, as if with the need to convince herself that she indeed had been their creator. “I’d lost it: the passion. And without that, what you have is only mass, the objects themselves. Paint, canvas, clay, wax, stone. Only passion gives them life. Otherwise, they’re inert. Oh, you may draw or paint or sculpt something, anyway. People do it all the time. But what you draw or paint or sculpt without passion is an exercise in competence and nothing more. It’s not an expression of self. And that’s what I wanted back-the willingness to be vulnerable, the power to feel, the ability to risk. If it meant a change in technique, an alteration in style, a shift in media, I was more than willing to try it. I was willing to try anything.”