I’d told Josh I was going to London for the day to do some shopping. He’d been a bit dubious about it but didn’t challenge me, instead offering to take me to the station on his way to work. I should have realized he’d track me rather than take my word for it. I put my panini down with a sigh and, for the first time in our relationship, I wonder what it would be like to be free. Free of someone always checking up on me. Free of having to justify myself. I wonder if Gareth is the same with Alison. Or Matt with Rachel? I know Josh’stext isn’t just an innocent question or idle curiosity. No, he’s always looking for signs that I could be cheating on him. Since inheriting the villa I can sense his insecurities and jealousies bubbling away, just under the surface. I should have turned off the tracking – or better still, my phone – although that might have made him even more suspicious. I’m just going to have to be honest.
I text back:
Decided on a whim to visit Dorothea’s agent.
I wait, watching my phone for signs he’s replying. There are no ellipses to suggest he’s typing. Then eventually the three dots pop up and I hold my breath.
Why?
And then another text follows immediately.
Are you with Harry? I know you’ve been texting him.
It’s like I’ve been punched. I inhale sharply. I pick up the phone and call Josh. He doesn’t answer. I call again. He sends me a text.STOP CALLING! I’M AT WORK!
My thumbs fly across my keyboard in frustration.
Of course I’m not with Harry. You dropped me at the station earlier. You saw I was alone.
I don’t trust him and neither should you. You know nothing about him, he replies.
Well, that much is true. I’ll talk to you about this later.
I call Rachel instead and give her the low-down on Gabe, trying to push Josh from my thoughts.
‘If he does suspect there is a sculpture that didn’t perish in the fire, he’s going to want to get his grubby little mitts on it,’ she says. ‘Especially if he’s in debt.’
‘I know.’ I take a sip of my coffee.
‘I wonder if he’s the one who has been prowling about your place,’ she muses. It sounds like she’s in the car and I hope there is nobody else with her who can hear this conversation.
‘Are you alone, Rach?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Good. I don’t want anyone else to know about the sculpture.’
‘Chill. You’ve already said, and I’m not going to go blabbing my mouth off. I’ll see what else I can dig up about Gabe, okay?’
I thank her and end the call. I down the rest of my coffee before heading back to Paddington. I sit in the quiet carriage on the train and look again through my photos of the sculpture. My eye goes to a tiny detail that I’d overlooked before. I take a sharp intake of breath right there in the carriage, loud enough for the woman sitting across from me to look up from her book. I notice for the first time that the cuffs of the wool jacket are lacy and there is a patch of denim with a set of three pink hearts on the breast pocket. I had that exact detail on the pocket of the jeans I wore that summer. In fact – I peer closer at the photo and zoom in – itisthe actual pocket of my jeans, the denim faded almost white. I lived in those jeans that summer and I’d left them behind when Mum went back to Dad because I’d ripped a hole in the knee and Dorothea promised to mend them. But then Mum died and Dorothea never gave them back to me.
I examine the photographs again, zooming in, trying to work out the significance, if there is any. The pocket could mean nothing. She might have found the jeans and thought it would be an interesting touch. But I don’t really believe that. She’s trying to tell me something – either that or she is hoping I’ll figure out this macabre riddle. I only wish I knew why she couldn’t have just spelled it out in a letter like normal people. For the first time I feel a burst of annoyance towards Dorothea. I recall what Dennis told me about the other sculptures he’d glimpsed in her studio. The one wearing that skeleton Halloween costume like my dad’s. Is Dorothea the magpie, stealing pieces of our lives to influence her macabre sculptures? I swipe away the photographs in frustration and put my phone face down on the table in front of me. I get outA Woman in Turmoil?instead and continue reading Chapter Six about Dorothea’s first job at a textiles factory in Clayton Rocks in Wiltshire. It’s a long and detailed chapter about the origins of the factory and the man who owned it interspersed with short snippets of interviews with colleagues who had worked with Dorothea. I resist the urge to skim-read in case I miss something important. My mind starts to drift until I get to the last line of the chapter, and I sit up in shock.
‘And it was only two months into her job as a seamstress that she caught the eye of the man who would later become her husband,’I read.‘His name was Robert Falkner.’
33
I close the biography as the train approaches Bath Spa station, my mind reeling.
Dorothea was famously single. How could she have had a husband that nobody knew about? I remember her telling me and my mum that she’d never been married when we stayed with her.
Robert Falkner. RF. Was the lighter his?
When I got on the train earlier I’d texted Josh to let him know I was on my way home, but there’s been no answer. It’s only 3 p.m. and he won’t be leaving work for another few hours, but I still expected him to reply. Although he can obviously see from Find My where I am.
An unwanted scene from my childhood suddenly pops into my memory. Me, in bed, trying and failing to block out the sound of my parents arguing downstairs after a night out with the neighbours. ‘It was the way you spoke to him,’ my dad ranted. ‘All flirty, like. All …’ He put on a high-pitched voice that was supposed to be an imitation of Mum, ‘Karl, you’re so funny. AndKarl, that’s such a good point. It’s obvious something’s going on between the two of you.’
My mum, pleading, telling him it’s not true, that he’s just the neighbour who happens to be married to Val. That it’s him she loves. Over and over again, his accusations, her denials. And then the inevitable sound of something being thrown and then a fist slamming the table, escalating to him using her as a punchbag. And me, hiding under the covers, not protecting her. Not doing anything to help or to stop it, even though I knew what was going on. A coward. I was a coward. And then I remember another conversation, in Dorothea’s studio, where I admitted to her how I felt I’d failed my mum and she had taken my hands in hers and assured me I wasn’t a coward, that I was just a scared little girl who had felt powerless. Dorothea was the one who built me up, gave me the confidence and the belief in myself. I spent years after that, fighting for justice, exposing corruption through my job, and now I owed it to Dorothea to do the same for her.
