Sergeant Cooper chuckled. "Or vice versa."
Jack's eyes gleamed. "Precisely. I don't set out to flatter anyone. As long as you understand that, we can probably do business."
"And presumably, sir, you need the money at the moment. Would your terms be cash in advance, by any chance?"
Jack bared his teeth in a grin. "Of course. At that price you could hardly expect anything else."
"And what guarantee would I have that the portrait would ever be finished?"
"My word. As a man of honour." .
"I'm a policeman, Mr. Blakeney. I never take anyone's word for anything." He turned to Sarah. "You're a truthful woman, Doctor. Is your husband a man of honour?"
She looked at Jack. "That's a very unfair question."
"Sounds fair to me," said Jack. "We're talking two thousand pounds here. The Sergeant's entitled to cover himself. Give him an answer."
Sarah shrugged. "All right. If you're asking me: will he take your money and run? Then, no, he won't. He'll paint your picture for you, and he'll do it well."
"But?" prompted Jack.
"You're not a man of honour. You're far too thoughtless and inconsiderate. You respect no one's opinion but your own, you're disloyal, and you're insensitive. In fact," she gave him a twisted smile, "you're a shit about everything but your art."
Jack tipped a finger to the policeman. "So, do I have a commission, Sergeant, or were you simply working on my wife's susceptibilities to get her to spill the beans about me?"
Cooper pulled forward a chair and offered it to Sarah, She shook her head so he sat in it himself with a faint sigh of relief. He was getting too old to stand when there was a seat available. "I'll be honest with you, sir, I can't commission anything from you at the moment."
"I knew it," said Jack contemptuously. "You're just like that slimeball Matthews." He aped the vicar's singsong Welsh accent. "I do love your work, Jack, and no mistake, but I'm a poor man as you know." He slammed his fist into his palm. "So I offered him one of my early ones for a couple of thousand, and the bastard tried to negotiate me down to three miserable hundred. Jesus wept!" he growled. "He gets paid more than that for a few lousy sermons." He glared at the Sergeant. "Why do you all expect something for nothing? I don't see you taking a pay cut," he flicked a glance at Sarah, "or my wife either for that matter. But then the state pays you while I have to graft for myself."
It was on the tip of Cooper's tongue to point out that Blakeney had chosen the path he was following, and had not been forced down it. But he refrained. He had had too many bruising arguments with his children on the very same subject to want to repeat them with a stranger. In any case, the man had misunderstood him. Deliberately, he suspected. "I am not in a position to commission anything from you at the moment, sir," he said with careful emphasis, "because you were closely connected with a woman who may or may not have been murdered. Were I to give you money, for whatever reason, it would be extremely prejudicial to your chances in court if you were unfortunate enough to appear there. It will be a different matter entirely when our investigations are concluded."
Jack eyed him with sudden fondness. "If I paid you two thousand, you might have a point, but not the other way round. It's your position you're safeguarding, not mine."
Cooper chuckled again. "Do you blame me? It's probably empty optimism, but I haven't quite given up on promotion, and back-handers to murder suspects would go down like a lead balloon with my governor. The future looks a lot brighter if you make Inspector."
Jack studied him intently for several seconds, then crossed his arms over his tatty jumper. He found himself warming to this rotund, rather untypical detective with his jolly smile. "So what was your question? Why did Mathilda sit for me with the scold's bridle on her head?" He looked at the portrait. "Because she said it represented the essence of her personality. She was right, too." His eyes narrowed in recollection. "I suppose the easy way to describe her is to say she was repressed, but the repression worked both ways." He smiled faintly. "Perhaps it always does. She was abused as a child and grew up incapable of feeling or expressing love, so became an abuser herself. And the symbol of her abuse, both active and passive, was the bridle. It was strapped to her and she strapped it to her daughter."
His eyes flickered towards his wife. "The irony is that it was also a symbol of her love, I think, or those cessations from hostility that passed for love in Mathilda's life. She called Sarah her scold's bridle and she meant it as a compliment. She said Sarah was the only person she had ever met who came to her without prejudice and took her as she was." He grinned amiably. "I tried to explain that that was hardly something to applaud-Sarah has many weaknesses, but the worst in my view is her naive willingness to accept everyone at his or her own valuation-but Mathilda wouldn't have a word spoken against her. And that's all I know," he finished ingenuously.
DS Cooper decided privately that Jack Blakeney was probably one of the least ingenuous men he had ever met, but he played along with him for disingenuous reasons of his own. "That's very helpful, sir. I never knew Mrs. Gillespie myself, and it's important for me to understand her character. Would you say she was the type to commit suicide?"
"Without a doubt. And she'd do it with a Stanley knife, too. She found as much enjoyment in making an exit as she did in making an entrance. Possibly more. If she's looking at the three of us now, picking over the bones of her demise, she'll be hugging herself with delight. She was talked about in life because she was a bitch, but that's nothing to the way she's being talked about in death. She'd love every cliff-hanging moment of it."
Cooper frowned at Sarah. "Do you agree, Dr. Blakeney?"
"It has an absurd sort of logic, you know. She was like that." She thought for a moment or two. "But she didn't believe in an afterlife, or only the maggot variety which means we're all cannibals." She smiled at Cooper's expression of distaste. "A man dies and is eaten by maggots, the maggots are eaten by birds, the birds are eaten by cats, the cats defecate on the vegetables and we eat the vegetables. Or any permutation you like." She smiled again. "I'm sorry, but that was Mathilda's view of death. Why would she waste her last, great exit? I honestly believe she would have prolonged it for all it was worth and, in the process, made as many people wriggle as she could. Take that video, for example. Why did she want music and credits added if it was only to be shown after she was dead? She was going to watch it herself, and if someone walked in while she was doing it, then so much the better. She meant to use it as a stick to beat Joanna and Ruth with. I'm right, aren't I, Jack?"
"Probably. You usually are." He spoke without irony. "Which video are we talking about?"
She had forgotten he hadn't seen it. "Mathilda's posthumous message to her family," she said, with a shake of her head. "You'd have loved it, by the way. She looked rather like Cruella De Vil out of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Dyed black wings on either side of a white streak, nose like a beak, and mouth a thin line. Very paintable." She frowned. "Why didn't you tell me you knew her?"
"You'd have interfered."
"How?"
"You'd have found a way," he said. "I can't paint them when you bleat your interpretations of them into my ear." He spoke in a mocking falsetto. "But I like her, Jack. She's really very nice. She's not half as bad as everyone says. She's a softy at heart."
"I never talk like that," said Sarah dismissively.
"You should listen to yourself once in a while. The dark side of people scares you, so you close your eyes to it."