She double-clicked.
It was a pap shot. He’d been coming out of what looked like a New York deli, the collar of a long dark coat up around his ears, a dusty black fedora pulled down on his forehead. Between his fingers was a packet of cigarettes. As he’d turned to look at the photographer – hearing his name called, she guessed – his expression was both startled and furious, his eyes wide, mouth half-open.
Rowan experienced a jolt of realization: she’d seen him herself, in the flesh. The man at the funeral who’d caught her eye in the mirror and looked at her so frankly had been Michael Cory.
Immediately her mind flooded with questions: how well had he and Marianne known each other? Were they friends? Why hadn’t she, Rowan, recognised him?
Movement at the corner of her eye: the waitress with her omelette. Distracted, Rowan thanked her and shifted the laptop to make room.
‘Can I bring you anything else? Ketchup?’
‘Sorry? Oh – no. Thanks.’
To have come to the funeral, Cory must surely have been more than an acquaintance. Opening another window, she searched for the show of his photographs at the gallery when, if Emma’s testimony was reliable, Marianne had talked to him. October 2013: fifteen months ago.
It was understandable, at least, Rowan thought if she hadn’t recognised him at the funeral: in every one of the scant recent photos, his face was partially hidden. He wore a hat in most, and in the few older ones where he didn’t, he’d had a lot more hair. She went back to the deli picture. Under the coat he wore a wrinkled denim shirt with a conspicuous coffee stain, and one leg of his jeans was caught in the top of his boot, but even dishevelled and caught off guard, he projected the physical confidence she’d felt, the aura of someone with no doubt about his value and position in the world.
Clicking back to the gallery’s website, she read the short bio. Forty-six, born and brought up in Chicago, he’d done his degree at the California Institute of the Arts and then moved to New York. A list of prestigious museums and awards, and then finally: Cory has lived in London since last year.
Wikipedia told her that his father owned a company importing Turkish carpets and his mother had been a good amateur water colourist. He had twin sons, now nine or ten, from a brief marriage to a folk singer called Jessa McKenzie but there were no details of his current personal life.
What if he and Marianne had been having an affair? What if she loved him and he’d ended it? Or maybe Greenwood had found out. Elbows on the table, Rowan pressed her fingers to her lips.
At a light touch on her shoulder, she jumped. ‘Sorry.’ The waitress again, smiling. ‘I just wanted to say: we close at ten so . . .’ She looked at the untouched omelette.
‘Okay. Thanks.’ The clock at the top of the screen said 21.44. Rowan picked up her fork then opened a new window and searched for ‘Michael Cory profile’. 218,000 results.
Into the silence of the kitchen at Fyfield Road, the bells of St Giles struck midnight, every note coming crisp through the freezing air. Eight, nine, ten. Marianne loved bells, they gave her a sense of continuity and order, she said, history, but Rowan could never hear the tolling of the hour without thinking about mortality, the counting off of time. Another hour gone, another day. Eleven, twelve. The stroke lingered then died. She pressed her fingers against her eyelids and resisted the urge to rub.
The next link took her to a New York Times piece from 2009, when Cory had had a new show at Saul Hander. The article was long, likely a full page in the paper, but in contrast with the ten or twelve she’d already read, it handled the Hanna Ferrara business only briefly. It focused instead on the new work, a series of portraits of his mother that Cory had made in the five years before her death of cancer in 2008.