‘It was a stupid lie … but I wanted to get you on my side.’
‘I was already on your side. Leon was dead. I could imagine how that would hurt you. But lying to me? You lost my sympathy then, Gina. And my trust …’
She clenched her hands together, her face drawn.
‘I asked you why you came back. It wasn’t to talk about Leon,’ Ben went on. ‘So what was it?’
Her indecision confounded her. She hadn’t expected Ben to discover her lie about the baby and her confidence wavered. Any attempt at a hurried seduction of Ben Golding would only damn her further in his eyes. The plan fluttered like a torn banner … Silent, she stared at the floor under her feet. There were indentations in the dark wood, deep and polished shiny over the decades. She had asked Leon about them once and he had told her the story Detita had told him: that the indentations were the Devil’s footprints. Lucifer had come to look over the writer’s shoulder, dictating madness. And then he’d laughed and told her he was joking.
Her eyes remained fixed on the indentations as she thought of Gabino Ortega. How he had used her. How she had used him. How she had used Leon. How, throughout her life, Gina had manipulated men and been manipulated in return. She felt a sudden weariness at the thought of Gabino and wondered if his lifestyle, five years on, would prove as satisfying as it had once done. If the sex and duplicity would be bearable. If even his towering wealth would compensate for the dry ache of a woman who would soon be aged out of the market.
‘Gina …?’
Realising that Ben was talking to her, she blinked slowly.
‘Sorry, I was thinking about – Jesus, I don’t know what I was thinking about. It’s getting late. I should drive back to Madrid.’ She stood up, then paused. ‘Can I stay the night?’ her voice was businesslike, almost cold. ‘I can use the room Leon and I used to have. I’ll leave you alone to work.’
He could hardly refuse. ‘OK.’
Her gaze moved back to the notepads in front of Ben.
‘Did he do it? Oh, come on, you can tell me that! Did Leon solve the Black Paintings?’
Remembering what he had heard about Gina’s previous relationship with Gabino Ortega, he lied.
‘No.’
‘He told me he was close.’
‘Not close enough.’
‘Like the skull. Not close enough …’ Her tone was expressionless. ‘He gave it to you, didn’t he? I know Leon must have, otherwise he would have got it back from Madrid and the phantom specialist. Thinking back, I never saw the skull after you came to the house – which means that you took it to London. You did, didn’t you?’
He shook his head.
‘Leon had the skull. I don’t know what he did with it.’
‘He didn’t have it when we did the seance.’
Leaning forward, Ben held her gaze. ‘Why do you care about it so much?’
‘It mattered to Leon.’
‘And you’re going to fulfil his legacy, are you? Save his reputation?’ Ben asked, bitterness obvious. ‘If anyone should do that, it should be me. But the funny thing is, I don’t care about his work. I miss Leon. I’m only reading his notes on the Black Paintings now because he was my brother and it’s a way to feel close to him. No other reason. I don’t have the skull. Truly, I don’t.’
She wasn’t sure if he was lying or bluffing. ‘So where is it?’
‘God knows. It was lost for centuries, it’s lost again.’
For a long moment she was silent, then smiled faintly. ‘I’m glad.’
It was the answer Ben had least expected.
49
The following morning he woke and lay in bed, listening and wondering if Gina was still in the house. But all he could hear was the sound of the ancient plumbing and the cawing of rooks outside the bedroom window. Having taken all Leon’s papers upstairs with him Ben had still slept half-heartedly, wondering what Gina was doing in the house. Was she there for sentimental reasons or still trying to find out the whereabouts of the skull?
He found her too transparent to be clever, too clumsy to make a good liar. Obviously Gina didn’t know that he was privy to information about her past. That he had already guessed her tactics – that she was trying to obtain the skull for her ex-lover. Whether to effect a reconciliation or secure a big payoff was the only thing Ben wasn’t sure about … Pulling on his clothes, he moved out into the corridor, looking towards the bedroom where Gina had slept. The door was closed and as he walked downstairs he was surprised to see the door of Leon’s study open.
As he went in, Ben heard the muted tones of a news broadcaster and walked round the desk to find his brother’s old computer turned on. He looked at the headlines – a riot in India, the USA President taking a break at Camp David. Puzzled, he sat down, watching the tickertape strip of running news across the bottom of the screen.
… The skull of Francisco Goya has been found, and is now in the possession of the Feldenchrist collection in New York. This is the greatest art find for centuries …
A breath caught in his throat, his gaze moving towards a Post It note stuck on the nearby phone.
You were right – you didn’t have it.
Gina
Jumping up from his seat, Ben moved to the bottom of the stairs and called out for her.
‘Gina! Gina!’
But there was no answer, just the soft swell of dust and silence, and memory.
50
New York
Standing beside one of the newspaper booths, Ben gripped the magazine in his hand. The few people who passed him would never have believed who this anxious-looking man was. The composed surgeon Mr Benjamin Golding, FRCS, had been left behind in Madrid. Left at the farmhouse, written away in the letter to Abigail which said he was going away for a few days. That he would keep in touch. That she mustn’t worry.
That was the man he had left in Madrid.
This man was different. This man was obsessed, driven. For the first time Ben understood something of his brother’s sickness. Or maybe it wasn’t just Leon’s illness. After all, hadn’t Detita seen it in him too once, many years before? But Ben had cheated her out of her hopes of manipulation. Turning weakness into order and protecting his brother, he had swerved around his own mental potholes. But now his whole focus – and his hold on sanity – was fixed on finding his brother’s killer. The person who had stolen the Goya skull.
He stared at the magazine again, then smoothed it out on top of the paper booth. In all her callous triumph, Bobbie Feldenchrist stared out at him, the caption underneath reading:
GREATEST FIND IN ART HISTORY
GOYA’S SKULL IN
FELDENCHRIST COLLECTION
Ben didn’t know how it had arrived in the Feldenchrist Collection, and he knew that no one ever would. Its provenance would be sanitised, its sojourn in a London washing machine overlooked, its resurrection in Francis Asturias’s hands denied. It had come to rest in one of the wealthiest and most powerful collections in the world. In New York. The Spaniard’s head, so used to majas and hunting, would be gawped at by gum-chewing crowds and camera-punching tourists.
It was, Ben thought, so shabby. So out of place among the car horns and police sirens. It should have rested with the painter’s corpse, or within sound of the Manzanares and the river birds. Within sight of Madrid, not in New York. And if there had been any justice in the world, Leon should have been on the cover of the magazine, his alert, slightly nervous face stamped with his achievement.
‘Give it to me,’ Leon had said imperiously when they were boys. ‘I want it!’
It had been a summer, but overcast, the Spanish sun taking a day-long siesta. In the garden, an emerald lizard had shuffled its cool way across the lawn and from the kitchen had come the smell of herbs, cooking slowly in an earthenware pot.