‘Have you spoken to Peter Turk about this?’
‘Of course not. You think I’m going to plough in and start spouting all these mad theories to her grieving friends?’
‘I’m going to.’ He took a step in the direction of the door, as if he were leaving to go and do it right away.
‘Stop,’ she said, too loudly. ‘Please – just stop.’
‘Why?’ He turned back, face alight with new interest.
‘He was here,’ she said slowly. ‘Turk was. On Saturday. He told me this story about wanting to find a pair of cufflinks he’d lent Marianne for a party but really he’d come to steal sketches.’ Despite all the unkind things he’d said, Rowan felt a pang of regret at betraying him to Cory. ‘He’s been selling them,’ she said. ‘He’s broke.’
Cory strode to the bottom of the stairs and sat down. Elbow planted on his knee, he put his fist to his mouth, The Thinker in jeans and a top coat. Several seconds passed. ‘Were you going to tell me this?’ he said.
‘Haven’t I just done that?’
‘Under duress.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘If you hadn’t shoved your way in here all guns blazing, I might have got round to it earlier.’
They faced each other off. Cory, to her satisfaction, looked away first. ‘Do you think he was blackmailing her? If he was broke, and if he knows something, maybe he was extorting money from Marianne, too.’
‘I thought about that,’ Rowan said. ‘I went through her financial paperwork yesterday, her bank statements, but there are no strange payments, no transfers or big cash withdrawals. I think we can discount the possibility that he was blackmailing her fifty pounds at a time.’
‘I still want to talk to him.’
‘Do it then but just wait a day or two. He’s . . . humiliated. He was so angry when I caught him – I’ve never seen that side of him before. Let him calm down and then talk to him. You’ll get more out of him.’
Cory put his fist back to his mouth and considered her. ‘Okay,’ he said eventually. ‘But I will talk to him – I’m not going to let it go. I’m starting to get close here, Rowan, I can feel it.’
Twenty-three
Rowan hadn’t known Lorna but she had met her. It had been mid-June, a week after she’d put down her pen for the last time and stepped blinking from the Exam Schools into the heat of the midday sun, her scholar’s gown billowing behind her like a final puff of infernal smoke. As she’d crossed Radcliffe Square the day of the party, the cobbles had sparkled with the glitter that people threw like confetti as their friends made their exhausted way to the pub. The sky was high and cloudless, the kind that arced over pine-covered hillsides on scorched Aegean islands, a harbinger, as it turned out, of the heat that late July and August would bring.
It was Seb’s fiftieth birthday. Demob happy after her graduation show and still in a state of ecstatic incredulity about the sales to Dorotea Perling, Marianne had driven up from London for the weekend. She’d phoned at nine that morning to ask if Rowan could come early to help. ‘It was supposed to be a sit-down lunch for sixteen,’ she said, ‘but Mum’s done her usual thing and invited everyone who’s crossed her path in the past fortnight. We managed to pin her down last night and it sounds like there might be ninety.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Maybe more, she says, if everyone brings partners. Pete’s asked his dad if we can borrow the Rotary Club barbecue and we’ve called the butcher with an emergency order.’
‘Emergency,’ Jacqueline scoffed in the background. ‘It’ll be fine. So dramatic, Marianne.’
The van from the off-licence pulled up just as Rowan arrived and she showed the driver the side gate so the wine could go directly to the garden. In the kitchen, Marianne was stirring pesto through a huge bowl of pasta, hair stuck to her neck with perspiration, while Jacqueline sat at the table sipping a cup of coffee and writing a letter. An old claw-footed bathtub with copper stains under the taps lurked in the shade on the patio. ‘The Dawsons have lent it to us for the drinks,’ Mazz said. ‘Ad’s taken the car to buy ice.’ She pointed at a sack of muddy new potatoes and grimaced. ‘Sorry. Online shopping – of course it had to be today they arrived filthy.’
The phone rang again and again with people asking what time to come until Seb, who was writing a piece for the following day’s Observer, thundered down the stairs, yanked it out of the wall and carried it away to his study. ‘You can have it back when I’m finished. It’s like trying to work in bloody Bedlam.’ The door slammed shut.