‘Stop right there. I am not having this conversation.’
‘Fair enough.’
There was another shuffling sound, then silence. It took her a moment or two to realize that Mandy’d hung up. She pressed play and leant in to the speaker, listening to their voices. ‘I want this thing with Misty’s body sorted.’
‘This thing with what? With whom?’
Mandy was clever. One clever bitch.
A knock at the door. Wellard was there. Worried.
‘You OK?’
She quickly hit erase on the phone and swivelled the chair to face him. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
He shrugged. ‘Just your – you know.’
She touched her face gingerly. ‘This?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It’s nothing. Cut myself shaving.’
He tried to smile. Failed. ‘No banana bread? Thought maybe we’d upset you?’
She looked at him for a long time. Dear, dear Wellard. The dear men who worked for her and never questioned what she said. Decent, decent people.
She got up and found her sunglasses and keys in the top drawer. ‘Hold the fort for me, will you? Just hold it for a couple of hours?’
‘Where you going?’
‘I’m going to the bank, Wellard. I’ve got to see a man about a dog.’
45
Mahoney had agreed to bring the studio key to Lucy’s home. He said it would take him two hours to get there and not to come any earlier. Caffery wasn’t surprised to find him already at the maisonette when he arrived ten minutes early.
He met Caffery at the front door. They didn’t waste time with greetings.
‘Is the studio open?’
‘Yes.’
He led Caffery inside and went up the stairs, his footsteps heavy. He stopped at the studio door. ‘I’ve left it just as it was. Haven’t touched a thing.’
‘I’m sure you haven’t.’
‘Anything in here is Lucy’s choice. Things she chose. You see?’
Mahoney unlocked the door and held it open. He didn’t make eye-contact as Caffery passed but followed him in and stood in the corner, arms folded, not speaking.
The room was large – it must have been intended as the master bedroom. Caffery recognized it as the place Lucy had been filmed in on the second video. The walls were painted in metallics and canvases hung everywhere. She’d divided the area into two with a painted Oriental screen. The half of the room nearest the door was fulclass="underline" almost twenty canvases leant against the wall, four more on easels facing the window. He went to the other side of the screen, away from the window, and stood for a while with his hands in his pockets, looking at what was there.
Pooley had been right. Lucy’d had unusual tastes. Dominating the room was a three-quarter life-sized bronze of a naked woman. She was bending over, buttocks in the air, showing every inch and fold of flesh between her legs. Beyond her, a row of smaller wooden sculptures were probably modelled from the Kama Sutra or something like it. On the wall there were several paintings of nudes, men and women, some alone, some together. Those looked amateur so Lucy had probably done them. On a small table in the corner there was a box like the one at the Emporium. A velvet-lined display case with crystal penises and pewter nipple clamps. It was just as Pooley had said.
He didn’t say a word. He walked calmly back to the other side of the screen. Went into the area where the other paintings were lined up. He didn’t look at Mahoney, but peered into a stack of paintbrushes nose down in a jar of turps. Idly he pushed them around with his fingertips as if there was nothing much on his mind, then wandered around the canvases. They were mostly sky-scapes: clouds, birds, a kite. All were painted in a shade of blue that reminded him of something. One of his exes in London had been an artist and she used to talk in terms of colours being saturated or clean, and of hues being at the blue or red end of the spectrum. Caffery had never fully understood, and he didn’t have the words to describe this blue. Or to explain why it felt familiar to him.
‘They’re all the same colour,’ he said levelly.
‘She loved it.’ Mahoney still hadn’t made eye-contact. He was looking at his feet. ‘Mixed it herself. Said it was her signature.’
Caffery was still for a moment. He stood among the paintings and studied Mahoney’s grey suit.
‘Colin, I never asked. What do you do? For a living?’
‘Me? I’m a certified financial planner.’
‘What? Like an insurance salesman?’
‘I advise on indemnities.’
‘You’re an insurance salesman, then?’
‘These days, we’re more likely to call it a liabilities consultant. Or a risk-management agent.’
‘But you’re an insurance salesman.’
Mahoney raised his eyes and looked at him. Then he pulled out a canvas and held it up. It was only about two feet square and it showed a girl’s face, very close. She wore a ribbon in her blonde hair. The same blue again. ‘This was the first painting she did of Daisy.’
‘Nice.’ Caffery pulled out the photo of Susan Hopkins, held it up to Mahoney’s face. ‘Do you know who that is?’
Mahoney turned his head away from the photo as if it had a bad smell. ‘There’s no need to hold it so close.’
‘I said, do you know who she is?’
‘No, I’ve never seen her.’
‘Know the name Susan Hopkins?’
‘You already asked me on the phone, remember? I said no.’
‘This is serious now. Really serious. Look at it.’
Mahoney put down the canvas, took the photo and peered at it. He shook his head and handed it back. ‘No. Seriously. What’s this about?’
Caffery put the photo in his jacket pocket. ‘The case has been reclassified. I’ve been back to Lucy’s friends. I know what they say about her past. About you.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What on earth have they been saying?’
‘That you’ve got a stick up your arse so high it’ll choke you. That you left her. But not because you didn’t love her any more. Because you couldn’t handle what she was doing. Collecting all that stuff in there. Doing those paintings. Why didn’t you tell me about it?’
‘I didn’t think it was appropriate.’
‘Not appropriate – not appropriate? Stop using that expression, you pompous git. Don’t you know how important something like this could be?’
‘How could it be important? It was just her hobby. Just another of the things she collected. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.’
‘She could have been a prostitute. Don’t you know how often hookers get killed?
Mahoney’s face went a hard red. ‘She wasn’t a prostitute. She wasn’t like that. This is just a hobby.’
Caffery put his hands on the windowsill and stood for a moment, getting his temper back. Out of the window the clouds and mists swirled around the base of Glastonbury Tor, a lonely island on the drained Somerset levels, like an upturned pudding on the horizon. ‘You’re right. She wasn’t a hooker. But that’s not the point. You should have told me. She could have got involved with someone and they might be the one she was blackmailing.’ He gestured to the other side of the screen. ‘Is that why you got custody of Daisy? Did you use all that against her? See, I look at you and I can just picture the words “gross moral turpitude, your honour” coming out of your mouth. You’re the type.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. There was never any argument about where Daisy would go. None whatsoever.’
‘Seems strange for the mother not to get custody.’
‘It’s not strange at all. I’m her father. I let Lucy see her, but she had no legal rights. She’d never adopted Daisy. Lucy was completely reasonable about it.’