‘It’s all right.’ Bryony’s tolerant look suggested that she was the adult here. She frowned, making a crease down the centre of her pale forehead, and Rowan saw James Greenwood again, as if Bryony’s face was a body of water, a river, and his had risen momentarily to the surface before sinking out of sight.
‘I’ll leave you to get on with your essay.’ Rowan gestured back at the school. ‘I went here, too, St Helena’s – it was where Mazz and I met.’
‘Really?’
She nodded, surprised: hadn’t Marianne told her? ‘You know Michael Cory was painting her portrait – still is? We were in the Upper Sixth when he painted Hanna Ferrara and there was that huge media furore.’ As she said it, however, she realised that Bryony would only have been three or four. ‘I said to your father, it feels so strange that we’d talked about him so much then, Marianne and I, and now here he is.’
Bryony said nothing. Oh, come on, thought Rowan, desperate; throw me a bone here. ‘Do you know him?’ she said, cringing inwardly at the transparency. ‘Through your father – or Marianne?’
Bryony shrugged. ‘I’ve met him, obviously, through Dad, and two or three times at Marianne’s, when I went over.’
‘What was he like?’
‘You’ve met him?’
Rowan calculated. ‘Yes.’
‘Then you know. He’s all right, a bit intense but not as much as the hype would have you believe.’
‘What kind of relationship did they have?’
Bryony’s stare was hard. ‘What are you saying? She was with my dad.’
‘No, no, no – sorry. All I meant was, did they get on? Were they on the same wavelength? Were they friends?’
The hostility level dropped but marginally. ‘I never heard them talk about anything that personal, it was mostly art – what they’d seen, what they’d liked. Styles, techniques, that kind of thing. A lot of it was over my head, to be honest. But yeah, they liked each other. They got on.’
Keeping off the Banbury Road for as long as possible to minimise the likelihood of bumping into Bryony’s friends, Rowan walked into Summertown and found a seat in the gloomy recesses at the back of Costa Coffee. When he’d called this morning, Cory had announced that he would come to the house at three but she didn’t trust him not to turn up whenever he felt like it and she needed to regroup first. Everything was spinning out of control. Seeking Bryony out had been a big gamble and she’d gleaned nothing she hadn’t already known. Without a doubt, the encounter would be related to Greenwood word for word.
But what choice had she had? In her efforts to stay a step ahead of Cory, she was running out of lines of inquiry. He was making one connection after another, sure-footedly picking his way towards the truth of what happened back then, while she was struggling to discover anything at all about what happened a month ago. Dead end after dead end, and the few times she’d felt as if she were homing in on something, getting closer, there had been a seismic shift and she’d been thrown sideways. When she stood up again, bruised, the landscape had been transfigured, leaving her not only without an answer but faced with a different question. A different set of questions.
When she was younger, she’d loved puzzles. She’d been a jigsaw fanatic as a child and, later on, one of her favourite Glass family traditions had been the pre-Christmas purchase of an enormous one – 3,000 pieces, 5,000 – which they set up in the dining room on Boxing Day and worked away at in the grey days before New Year’s Eve. They’d sat, talking or in companionable silence, coffee cups or wine glasses at their elbows, and slowly covered the table, all of them making self-deprecatory jokes about how uncool they were, all of them loving it. They’d loved cryptic crosswords, too, and whoever got to The Times first in the morning had to make photocopies for the others on the little Xerox machine in Seb’s office. When Rowan was there, they’d made her a copy, too, and she’d joined in the daily race to finish it. Adam was very good but Seb won most days; the one time she’d beaten him might still go down as her proudest intellectual achievement.