The Other Half Lives

9

It’s four o’clock, and I’m finally ready.

I’ve spent the day going through every file and piece of paper at Seed Art Services. I started at six in the morning; I locked the door, pushed both bolts across and sat in the hall with the lights off, using a torch I’d brought from home, so that the workshop would appear empty to passers-by. There were a few knocks at the door, people calling my name and Aidan’s, but I hardly heard them.

Aidan keeps meticulous records, and once I was satisfied I had a full list, I phoned each of his business contacts and asked them if Aidan was with them, or had been yesterday evening and overnight. They all said no.

Aidan has two friends that I know of. One, Jim Mair, lives in Nottingham. Aidan told me he works for the Citizens Advice Bureau. The other is David Booth, Aidan’s best friend from school, whom I’ve met several times. He works at a brewery in Rawndesley. I believed him when he told me he hadn’t seen Aidan since a bit before Christmas last year.

It took me a while to track down Jim Mair. When I did, he sounded puzzled that I should even have thought to try him. He hadn’t seen Aidan for nearly ten years, he said.

Aidan’s parents are both dead, and he drifted out of touch with his stepfather a long time ago. He has a brother and a sister, seven and nine years older than him respectively, with whom he exchanges Christmas cards every year, though he speaks to neither of them. I found their details in his address book and rang both to ask if Aidan was with them. Both said no and sounded alarmed by the suggestion that he might be.

I am not disheartened. I knew I would find him in none of these places, with none of these people, and always expected that I would have to take the next step.

For the second time, I am about to set off to 15 Megson Crescent. I’m not scared any more, neither of Mary nor of finding Aidan there. It will be almost comforting to have my worst fears confirmed, as I know they will be. A conspiracy: the hardest thing of all to forgive; conspirators who don’t care if you forgive them because they don’t care about you and never did.

Because there’s only one way that any of this makes sense: if Aidan and Mary are working together to drive me out of my mind.

I lock the workshop. As I pull my car keys out of my pocket, a scrap of paper falls to the ground: Charlie Zailer’s mobile phone number. I asked her for it last night; she looked as if she was going to say no at first. I pick it up, feeling guilty for ignoring her advice: Don’t go to Mary’s house.

I drive along the Silsford road, under the overhanging trees that lean in on both sides to meet in the middle-a tunnel of lush foliage. Where I am now it’s beautiful, but soon the trees will thin out, the road surface will deteriorate, and I’ll see grimy squat houses that make my lodge house look enormous. A little further on I’ll pass the primary school that’s made of grey-green concrete and looks like a prison block, and Bob’s Bargain Centre on the corner of the street that leads to the Winstanley estate.

Last time, I drove so slowly I must have looked like a kerbcrawler-anything to put it off. Today I slam my foot down on the gas. I want to get it over with.

Her house hasn’t changed. Aidan’s car isn’t parked outside, or anywhere else on Megson Crescent. I bang on the door. ‘Open up!’

Mary looks worse than I remember. That scored crêpe skin, the horrible woolly hair, like a knitted doll whose maker had a few balls to spare and got carried away. I want to wrench the ugly, coarse spirals out of her scalp one by one. ‘Ruth,’ she says, clutching the door with both hands, clinging to it as she pulls it back to let me in. ‘You came back.’ She’s surprised. Was she counting on my being scared for ever?

‘Where is he?’ I ask.

‘He?’

I barge past her, pushing open doors. There’s no one in any of the downstairs rooms. Only me and Mary in the hall. And the people in the paintings on the walls, the small woman with doughy skin and pointed features all bunched up in the middle of her face. In one of the pictures she’s looking in a mirror and her reflection is staring straight at me. She looks mean, as if she wants to accuse me of something.

‘Ruth?’ Mary touches my arm. ‘What’s wrong? Who are you looking for?’

‘Aidan. Where is he?’ I start to climb the stairs.

‘Aidan Seed? The man the police keep asking me about?’ Mary follows me. ‘I don’t know him.’

‘You’re lying! He was here last night. He was here last weekend. ’

‘Calm down.’ She comes towards me on the landing, tries to take hold of me.

‘Get away from me!’

‘All right. Don’t worry, I won’t touch you. Can we sit down and talk about this? I don’t understand what’s happened or what you’re accusing me of, but I promise you, Aidan’s not here.’

I turn away from her and give the door behind me a hard shove, smacking it against a wall. The bathroom. Tiny. No Aidan. Above the lavatory there’s an airing cupboard. I start to pull out towels, sheets, pillowcases. Soon it’s empty.

Nothing.

‘Where is he?’ I say again.

‘He’s not here, Ruth. Let’s go downstairs and talk. I was hoping you might have brought me something.’ She mimes writing.

My eyes move to the next door, the one she’s blocking with her body. ‘Get out of the way. He’s in there, isn’t he? With all the paintings.’

Her smile dips, pulls into a tight line. ‘Your Aidan Seed isn’t here. I can see you’re not going to believe me until you’ve checked for yourself. Go ahead, be my guest. I’ll be downstairs, when you’re ready to talk.’

Once she’s gone, I start to search the rooms. In her bedroom, I empty drawers and a wardrobe, not bothering to put anything back. I look under the bed, behind the mould-spotted curtains. Aidan isn’t there. Nor are his clothes or any of his possessions.

A voice in my head whispers: What if you’re wrong?

The second door won’t open all the way. The room is too full of Mary’s pictures. Carefully, I manoeuvre myself in. There’s a pounding sound coming from downstairs: music. I hear the word ‘survivor’ shouted once, twice. The smell of smoke drifts up to me. I know she’s in the kitchen with a cigarette in her hand, waiting for me to admit defeat.

If a person wanted to hide in this house, this is the place they’d pick. One by one, I drag the canvases through to the other room, Mary’s bedroom. She must be able to hear what I’m doing, but she doesn’t try to stop me. Before long, the room is full. Canvases are piled up on the bed, leaning against it on every side. I’ve used up every inch of space, yet the front bedroom is still far from empty. I’ll have to start putting things in the bathroom.

My arms ache, but I can’t allow myself to give up, even though I know by now that I won’t find Aidan here.

I stop when I see a word I recognise. It’s been written in black marker pen on the back of an unframed picture: BLANDFORD.

Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry…

Hardly daring to touch it, I force myself to turn the canvas round. A chill spreads through me. It’s unfinished, but Mary has done enough work on it to make it instantly familiar. An outline of a person-again, one that could be male or female. Head and shoulders only this time, and nothing inside the black line, not yet. Behind the figure, part of the background has been painted in: a bedroom. This one, the one I’m standing in-Mary’s picture room. The curtains and wallpaper are the same, though there are no piles of pictures in the painted version. Instead, there’s a double bed with a chair next to it. On the chair, there’s a glass ashtray with a hand holding a cigarette over it, the ash waiting to drop.

… Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss.

Aidan was right. Abberton was the first of a series. Blandford, though incomplete, is the second. I heave things out of the way, looking for other similar pictures, perhaps one that Mary’s only just started, but I find nothing. So far she’s got no further than the second of nine.

My breaths come too quickly, making me feel dizzy. I tell myself there’s nothing to be afraid of: a mystery is only a mystery until you know the answer. I’ll ask Mary-I’ll make her tell me. There must be a reason why Aidan knew all the names. Who are they, these nine people?

I’m about to leave the room when I notice an iron handle next to the edge of a painting of a large stone building with a pointed roof and a square tower on one side. Without the windows, it might be a dark rocket, waiting for lift-off.

I move the painting to one side and see a small wooden door with a sloping top set into the wall. I pull it open, find myself staring into a little cupboard, nowhere near big enough to hide a man of Aidan’s size. I’m about to close the door when I spot something on the floor. A framed picture, face-down, with a printed label on the back.

I pull it out and nearly laugh with relief when I see that the name on the back isn’t Darville. It’s a woman’s name: Martha Wyers. I’m on the point of shoving the picture back in the cupboard when something stops me.

I turn it over, then drop it a second later, as if it’s burned my skin. It falls at my feet, picture-side up and I stare, horrified. A noise escapes from my lips. I feel as if I’ve lost all control over my life, as if I’ve been set down at the centre of somebody else’s carefully orchestrated nightmare, and am being pushed further in, a little bit at a time.

I’m looking at a painting of a woman with a rope knotted round her neck. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. It isn’t a dead body, only the image of one, but it makes no difference. Mary is too good a painter. I am in the presence of Martha Wyers, whoever she is. Was.

I can see everything: the texture of the rope, the frayed parts. How it has cut into her flesh. The bulging eyes, the purple-grey hollows beneath them, the thick protruding tongue, livid bruises on the skin around her mouth, a white, crusty ridge along her lower lip…

I smell smoke. Closer than before. Mary.

‘I see you’ve found Martha,’ she says.

The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was get through the court case, with Her staring at me as if she wanted to lunge across the court and gouge out my eyes, and Him determinedly looking down at his lap so that he wouldn’t see my face. Forcing myself to go to Mary Trelease’s house for the first time was the second hardest.

It’s possible to do anything, however difficult, if you can’t imagine how your life will go on otherwise. Aidan had said to me, ‘Bring me the picture,’ so I had no choice. After London, he would barely speak to me, apart from telling me constantly that he loved me, with a shadow behind his eyes, and I started to suspect he was using sex as a way of avoiding conversation. The comfort it offered soon ceased to have an effect, and I saw that we couldn’t go on as we were. Every time I pleaded with him to open up to me, he repeated what he’d said at Alexandra Palace: ‘Bring me the picture. Bring me Abberton.’

I thought that if I could only put the painting in front of him, with Mary Trelease’s name and the date on it, he would see that he hadn’t killed Mary, whatever else might have passed between them. I didn’t care if I never knew what that was; all I wanted was to be happy again, for Aidan to be happy. He’d moved into the lodge, as promised, as soon as we got back to Spilling after the art fair, and I was trying hard not to think of it as him making good his threat. I longed for him to trust me as he had before London, knowing it was down to me to make that happen.

On 2 January, after a desolate Christmas, I steeled myself and phoned Saul Hansard. ‘Ruth,’ he said, sounding thrilled to hear from me. I felt guilty for having cut him out of my life, but knew I would again as soon as I’d got the information I needed from him. The sound of his voice made my skin prickle with shame.

‘Mary Trelease,’ I said. ‘I need her address.’

I should have known this would worry him, but I was having trouble thinking beyond my own needs and fears, mine and Aidan’s. ‘Why?’ Saul asked gently. ‘Whatever you’re thinking of doing, I’m not sure it’s a good idea.’

‘I’m not going to cause any trouble,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to her, that’s all.’

Saul said he’d told Mary, seconds after I’d fled the gallery, that he wouldn’t be framing for her any more. He’d told me this before, in one of the many messages he’d left on my voicemail since that day in June, but it seemed important to him to say it again. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘She’s a scary woman, Ruth. I don’t need to tell you that.’

A panicky sensation started to flicker inside me. Our conversation was dragging me back to the past, the last place I wanted to go. ‘I won’t tell Mary I got the address from you,’ I said. ‘Please, Saul. It’s important.’

He agreed in the end, as I had known he would. Then he couldn’t find it, and told me he would have to dig it out later. When he phoned back that evening, Aidan was there, watching me from across the room as I wrote it down.

‘Well?’ he said.

I could have explained that I’d contacted Saul and asked for Mary’s address, but I didn’t. We’d got into the habit of saying the bare minimum. Fewer words seemed to mean less pain. ‘Fifteen Megson Crescent,’ I said. ‘Spilling.’

Aidan’s face stiffened into a mask of shock. ‘The same house,’ he murmured. Something had blown open inside his head; some new horror had seized him. He stormed out of the room. I heard him crying in the hall as if he’d collapsed there, unable to get any further, and pressed my hands over my ears, feeling utterly helpless, thinking: the same as what-the house where he killed Mary?

Dead people didn’t move house… Was 15 Megson Crescent where Mary had lived when Aidan knew her? Where he had killed her? But she wasn’t dead. No matter how I tried to think about it, from whichever direction I approached it, nothing made sense.

The next day, I didn’t need to tell Aidan why I wasn’t going to work with him. I looked up the route in my A-Z and set off to the Winstanley estate. Impossible as it is to see the future, sometimes you can feel its presence ahead of you, dark and cloying, waiting to swallow you up. My face started to itch as I drove, the skin to feel tight as it had when Mary had sprayed me with red paint. I twisted the rear-view mirror towards me to check there was nothing there, although rationally I knew that my face would look perfectly ordinary. Red paint couldn’t reappear once it was washed off; it could hardly seep up through my pores and spill out after so many months.

I stood in Mary’s untended front yard, my whole body a screaming knot of tension, and knocked on the door. When she opened it and saw me, she let out a loud breath and looked at me with some emotion on her face that I couldn’t identify. ‘Ruth Bussey,’ she said slowly. ‘Come to inspect my hovel and feel superior. ’

I didn’t know what she was talking about. The idea of my feeling superior to anybody was so laughable that I couldn’t think of anything to say in response.

‘Saul Hansard as good as threw me out on the street after our spat at the gallery. It must be nice to have a gallant hero to protect you.’

Strange equations filled my mind: sarcasm equals aggression equals attack. I clenched my hands into fists, turned, ran. ‘Wait, don’t go,’ Mary called after me. I collided with a wall, too frightened to think about which way I was going, and felt something sharp spike my skin through my shirt. I looked down. There was a small red dot on the cotton.

‘I’ll get you a plaster to put on it,’ said Mary. ‘There are some in the bathroom cabinet, if they haven’t crumbled to dust by now. They’ve been there since I moved in. So’s that killer weed.’ She beckoned me towards her.

I couldn’t believe she was inviting me inside. To mask my confusion, I muttered, ‘It’s not a weed.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Nothing.’

Mary walked over to where I was standing and stroked the plant that had pricked me. ‘You know what this is?’

I nodded, not looking at her. I’d seen hundreds. Never one sharp enough to pierce skin, though, until now. I was trembling, unable to keep still.

‘Tell me.’

It seemed easier than talking about what I was doing at her house. ‘It’s called a sempervivum. It’s been planted there, to grow out of the wall.’ I felt idiotic, after injuring myself so clumsily, and expected her to burst out laughing.

‘In that case, I’d better not yank it out,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Come on, if you’re coming.’ She took it for granted that I would follow her. I did, round the back of the house and into her kitchen, which was horrible and falling apart. ‘You’re shocked by the state of the place,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘I’ve done nothing to it since I moved in.’ She said something then about the charm of a found object, but I wasn’t fully listening. How was I going to get Abberton? Why hadn’t I foreseen how impossible it would be? I considered telling the truth, then rejected the idea. My boyfriend thinks he killed you years ago-would you mind giving me the picture you refused to sell me last June, so that I can prove to him that you’re alive?

Mary told me to wait in the kitchen while she went to fetch a plaster. I didn’t need one-my wound was a pinprick, almost non-existent-but I didn’t want to risk antagonising her. As soon as she was out of sight, I felt trapped in the room, even though the door was open. Frantically, I itemised objects I could see to calm myself: kettle, microwave, a tea towel with ‘Villiers’ printed on it beside a picture of what looked like a big stone castle, four boxes of Twinings Peppermint tea, stacked one on top of the other…

I couldn’t concentrate or keep still. I went out into the hall, which was small, narrow and smelled of a mixture of noxious substances: smoke, gas, grease. There was another open door to my left, through which I could see, above a gas fire with bent bars and ropes of dust clinging to it like grey tinsel that had lost its shine, a painting of a boy with a pen in his hand. He had written the words ‘Joy Division’ on the wall and was standing back to survey his work. His face wasn’t visible, only the back of his head. Instantly, I recognised the picture as Mary’s handiwork. Something about the boy’s posture made it look as if he might turn round any second and catch me spying on him. I found the painting disconcerting; it made me want to lower my eyes. How did she do that? How could she take a brush and some paints and produce something as extraordinary as this?

Mary leaped down the stairs, landing beside me, making me cry out in alarm. ‘Here we go. Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.’ She was holding a plaster in her hand. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t still angry with me, why she cared that I was bleeding.

I put out my hand to take the plaster, but Mary was already ripping the paper tabs off it. Once they were gone, she put the plaster between her teeth and pulled up my shirt. I hadn’t been expecting it, and I recoiled. My back hit the wall. It was too late. She’d seen the scar, the thick pink line that divides my stomach in half. She must have seen my bra, too, having pulled my shirt up higher than she needed to.

She wasn’t interested in that, though. I could see where her eyes had landed, on my damaged skin. After the operation, I’d heard a nurse who thought I was asleep say, ‘Better hope she never puts on any weight. That stomach ever gets fat, it’ll look like an arse.’ A male nurse had laughed and called her a catty bitch.

Mary was fascinated by my scar. She stared unashamedly. I itched to yank my shirt ends out of her hand and cover myself, but I was afraid to give my own wishes precedence over hers. She wanted to look, and I knew what happened when I displeased her.

She licked her finger, wiped a spot of blood from my skin and rubbed the plaster on, her knuckle moving back and forth across the material. She’s insane, I thought as she smiled at me. It occurred to me that this so-called help might be a subtle form of attack. If her aim was to humiliate me, she’d succeeded again.

‘What do you think of it?’ she asked, nodding at the Joy Division picture through the open door. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Yes.’

She looked puzzled. ‘What, that’s it? I thought you loved my work. So much that you couldn’t wait to get your hands on it.’

‘It’s… it’s good. They’re all good.’ Two more of her paintings were up in the hall, one of a man, a woman and a boy sitting round a table, the other of the same man and woman, her looking in a mirror, him behind her, lying on the bed. Her face was visible only in the glass, reflected; her gaze seemed to taunt me, and I turned away. Against the drab wallpaper, Mary’s paintings stood out, vibrant and mesmerising, like diamonds shining out from a bed of sludge. The sight jarred; these pictures looked wrong here, violently out of kilter, yet without them the house would have had nothing. I had a powerful sense-one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever had-that 15 Megson Crescent needed Mary’s paintings.

‘I know-you wouldn’t want them on your wall,’ she said, mistaking my awe for distaste. ‘A pretty scabby family, all things considered, but that’s life on the Winstanley estate. You’re brave to risk a visit. That lot don’t live here any more, but there are more of the same, and even worse.’

‘I’m not brave,’ I told her. Couldn’t she see I was petrified? Was she mocking me?

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘I owe you an apology for what happened last June. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

Talk about something else. Please, change the subject. I’d clamped my mouth shut and my jaw was starting to ache.

‘I was frightened. Selfishly, I didn’t think…’ She left the sentence unfinished. ‘It still bothers you, doesn’t it? What happened at the gallery.’

How dared she expect confirmation from me? Rage began to blister inside me, but I tried to nod as if I felt fine. My natural reaction to anger: bury it before it’s used against me. Deny it an outlet. It was practically the first thing I learned as a child in my parents’ house: I wasn’t entitled to my natural responses, especially the more ‘un-Christian’ ones. I was allowed to manifest only those states of mind that would please my mother and father, make them proud of me. Anger, particularly anger directed at them, didn’t qualify.

‘Why does it still bother you?’ Mary waited for an answer I had no intention of giving her. ‘Do you blame yourself, is that it? Why do we do that? Human beings, I mean. Why do we take each mishap that strikes us, and twist it until it loses its randomness and becomes a big black arrow pointing at us, proving our worthlessness?’

Her words, so unexpected, went all the way through me. I knew I wouldn’t forget them for a long time.

‘When I lost it with you, it reminded you of something else, didn’t it? You’ve been attacked before. I’m right, aren’t I? Your reaction that day was pretty extreme-I can’t believe that was all down to me. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’

I stood rooted to the spot, my eyes fixed on the smear of blood on my shirt.

‘The way I behaved that day had nothing to do with you, what you said or did,’ said Mary. ‘No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It’s the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he loathes. He or she.’

Try telling that to the victim, I thought.

‘I don’t sell my work. I never do. I don’t even like people seeing it, unless they’re people I trust, and I trust nobody. I’m a coward. You were a strange woman demanding to buy my painting-I felt threatened. Exposed.’ She lit a cigarette.

‘Why?’ I asked. My turn to wait for an answer.

Mary didn’t seem bothered by the long silence. It was a while before she said, ‘Is there anything in your life that’s… in your past, I mean, anything that’s too painful to talk about?’

How could she know? I told myself she couldn’t.

‘I think there is.’ She pointed to my stomach. ‘The scar. The story that goes with it. It’s all right, I’m not asking you to tell me.’

The moment for denial came and went. I’d as good as admitted she was right.

‘Has it ever occurred to you to write it down? Your story, I mean. I saw a therapist for years. I stopped when I realised there was no fixing the broken bits. That’s okay-I can live with it, if you can call my half-life in this shit-hole living. Because that’s what it’s like, isn’t it? I know you know, Ruth. When your world falls apart and everything’s ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives.’

I tried hard to hide the effect her words were having on me.

‘This therapist-she said I wouldn’t be able to move on for as long as I was determined to apportion blame. She told me to write it like a story in the third person, describe how all the characters felt, not only me. It’s a way of showing that everyone involved has a point of view, or some such crap.’ Mary stubbed her cigarette out on the wall. Immediately, she lit another. ‘I didn’t do it. Didn’t want to see anything from anyone else’s point of view. You know?’

I watched the pain rampaging across her face as she spoke, and wondered if my face sometimes looked like that.

Mary laughed quietly. ‘I digress,’ she said. ‘That’s what happens when you don’t talk to a soul from one week to the next. Can I paint you?’

‘No,’ I said, hating the idea, not sure if she was serious.

‘Why not? Your face is perfect-like a fairy’s or an angel’s. Not that I’ve seen either.’ A cunning look came into her eyes. ‘I won’t forget what you look like. You can’t stop me painting you if I want to.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘Some people get no say in the matter.’ She gestured at the pictures on the walls.

‘I don’t want to be painted,’ I told her. ‘If I did, you’d be the person I’d choose to paint me.’ I was pleased with this answer: firm but generous. She couldn’t fault me.

‘Why’s that, then?’ she asked.

‘Of all the artists whose work I’ve seen, you’re the best.’

She rattled off a list of names in a bored voice. ‘Rembrandt, Picasso, Klimt, Kandinsky, Hockney, Hirst-better than all of them?’

‘I’ve never seen their work,’ I said. ‘Only pictures of it.’

Some emotion-triumph?-flared in Mary’s eyes. When she next spoke, her voice was hoarse. ‘Ruth,’ she said. I looked up in time to see her mouthing my name several more times, soundlessly. ‘Wait.’ She stood up.

I was waiting already, to see what she would say next. She’d said my name for the sake of saying it, it seemed, not as the precursor to anything. She went upstairs again. When she came down she was holding Abberton. My heart started to race when I saw it. In my mind, all this time, it had represented that terrible day at Saul’s gallery; I tried not to think about it, but when I did it made me feel disorientated, out of control. Now that I had faced Mary, now that she’d apologised to me, it was different. Something had shifted.

‘If you still want it, it’s yours,’ said Mary. ‘Gratis.’

‘What? But…’

‘I didn’t trust you before. I do now.’ She looked embarrassed, tried to smile. ‘Anyone who knows they haven’t seen a painting unless they’ve seen the original is all right in my book. You’d be amazed how many people put a poster of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus on their wall and imagine they’ve got Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus on their wall.’

I felt terrible, as if I was cheating her somehow. I’d come here to get Abberton for Aidan, not for myself. His proof: Mary’s name and the date at the bottom. She knew nothing of my ulterior motive. I tried to persuade myself I was doing nothing wrong, imagined opening my mouth and saying Aidan’s name to see how she would react. Impossible.

I didn’t want her to know his name, or that he was my boyfriend. I wanted her to know nothing about us. I despised myself, knowing that no matter what Mary said or did, I would never trust her.

She held up her hands and made a frame shape in front of my face with her fingers and thumbs. ‘What’s your story, Ruth Bussey? Before I paint a person, I need to know their story. What happened to you? How did you get that scar?’ This time she didn’t say that I didn’t have to tell her if I didn’t want to, so I said it to myself. ‘You think it makes you strong, suffering in silence, bearing the burden alone? So what if it does? What’s the advantage of being strong? Do you know what happens to strong people? I do. Weak people attack them. Why do you think I went for you in the gallery that day?’

I stiffened. How long before I could escape?

‘You seemed so strong, and I felt so weak. Weak people always attack strong people-it’s safer. It’s weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Strong people can walk away-no repercussions, you see, if you attack a strong person. Want to know how I ended up so weak?’

‘No, I… no.’ I picked up Abberton, afraid she’d change her mind and take it back. ‘I’ve got to go.’

Mary grabbed my hand. ‘Tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine.’

I tried not to panic, said again that I needed to leave. I’d opened the front door and was almost out, with Abberton under my arm. ‘You’ll tell me one day,’ she said as she released her grip.

I ran to my car, gulping in fresh air as if I’d been trapped underwater. I didn’t look back at the house. I knew I would see Mary in the doorway, watching, waiting. As I drove away, uncertain as I was about everything else, I became convinced of one thing: Aidan’s insane belief centred around a woman who was every bit as insane as the things he’d said about her.

I didn’t know what that meant, but it had to mean something.