The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [24]
Madeleine was stunning. She was dressed in a long coat and trousers with a black cloche hat pulled over her head. Her face was turned towards the camera and the definition of every feature was extraordinary. Her perfect teeth showed in the sort of triangular smile that American pageant queens practise for hours, but to me it looked genuine, reaching to eyes that danced with mischief. I came to understand why Jess didn’t like her—there was no contest between Madeleine’s Venus and Jess’s Mars—but it was a mystery why Peter Coleman had turned her down.
I had no idea at that stage that Madeleine had been responsible for preparing Barton House for letting, but I do remember thinking that whoever owned the place had a very low opinion of tenants. It could have been so imposing—commanding ten times what I was paying—but instead it was hideously tacky. Every room showed evidence of cheaper, smaller furniture taking the place of something grander. Mean, narrow wardrobes had the imprint of a larger brother on the wall behind them, and indentations in the carpets showed where great beds and heavy dressing-tables had stood before their flimsier replacements had been imported.
To anyone with an ounce of creativity, the house screamed for a makeover. Given freedom, I’d have taken it back to its eighteenth-century origins, stripping the walls of their twentieth-century coverings and removing the fussy curtains to show, and use, the panelled shutters. Simplicity would have suited it, where frills, furbelows and vulgar furniture made it look like an ageing tart with thick make-up covering the blemishes. I discovered later that it was as it was because Madeleine refused to allow Lily’s solicitor to squander her inheritance on improvements, but it did set me wondering about the owner. It seemed so obvious to me that any money spent now would pay for itself again and again through higher rent.
I was most puzzled by the sketches and oil paintings that hung in every room. They were a mish-mash of styles—abstracts, life drawings, eccentric representations of buildings with roots anchoring them to the ground and foliage growing from their windows—but they were all signed by the same artist, Nathaniel Harrison. Some were originals and some—the sketches—were prints, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would collect so much of a single artist’s work simply to hang it in a rented house.
When I asked Jess about it, her mouth twisted into a cynical smile. “I expect they’re only there to hide the damp.”
“But who’s Nathaniel Harrison? How come Lily bought so much of his work?”
“She didn’t. Madeleine must have imported them after she stripped the house of her mother’s paintings. It would have been cheaper than having the house redecorated.”
“How did Madeleine get them?”
“The way she gets everything,” she said caustically. “Sex.”
Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16–19/05/04”
…I can’t separate specific events anymore. I’m not sure if I’ve shut my memory down or if I was too disorientated for it to function properly. Everything’s fused into time inside the cage and time out of it. I described the cage to Dan and the police, and I said it was in a cellar, but the rest…
…The police thought I was being deliberately evasive when I said I couldn’t tell them anything else. But it was the truth. When Dan asked me what happened, I couldn’t tell him either. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway. The police weren’t going to arrest a man on the evidence of smell. What sort of identification is that?
…The artist Paul Gauguin once said, “Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.” I dream of revenge. All the time.
7
THE ONLY INFORMATION Jess gave me about the Aga was that the oil tank was