Gone to Ground (41 page)

Ideas of voyeurism, pedophilia, and possible incest were mentioned in connection with the paintings, and although no direct links were made with Irene's own life and family, the dots were there for readers to link up if they wished.

Howard Prince shut himself away in his house in the south of France, leaving Lily in the care of the housekeeper, a rotation of nurses, and two security guards hired to keep the media at bay. One press photographer, even so, managed to snatch several long-lens shots of a distressed and bewildered Lily in the garden, before one of the nurses, none too gently, persuaded her back inside.

Natalie spoke volubly about her family's artistic legacy and what a thrill it was to be working with Woody Allen. There were new plans for a remake of
Shattered Glass
and rumours that she might take over the Juliette Lewis role in Sam Shepard's
Fool for Love.
It was at least a month since she'd fallen foul of nightclub bouncers or hurled abuse at the paparazzi; almost as long since she appeared in a half-drunken state in the pages of
Heat.

Prince's lawyer, Quentin Anstruther, contacted Will quite soon after Mark McKusick's arrest. Was it reasonable to assume that, now a suspect had been charged in connection with Stephen Bryan's murder, his client was no longer a suspect?

"Was he ever a suspect?" Will asked.

Anstruther made no reply.

"There are a few things I'd still like clarified," Will told him.

They met again in Anstruther's office, Prince less edgy than previously, more relaxed, the faint smell of a lunchtime drink or two on his breath.

"No one holding your hand this time," Prince observed.

"Sorry?"

"Your colleague—Walker, was it?"

"DS Walker, yes."

"Fine-looking woman. Sparky."

"She was injured," Will said. "Line of duty."

"Nothing too serious?"

"Serious enough."

"I'm sorry."

Will nodded.

"Well," Prince said, leaning back, "let's get on with it."

"This is just for the record," Will said. "Not even that, really. My own satisfaction. Loose ends, they trip you up sometimes."

"Fire away."

"That phone call to Bryan's home you denied making..."

"Denied?"

"Pretty emphatically, as I remember."

"Look, son..." Prince leaned energetically forward again, "...this was murder you were talking about. Some poor bastard as got his head bashed in. You think I'm going to utter a bloody word that's going to tie me into that?"

"You lied."

"Of course I bloody lied. You take me for a fool?"

Fool or liar, Will wondered, which was best? Prince, he thought, had made up his mind long ago.

"And the man seen outside the house, that was you as well?"

Prince glanced in the direction of his lawyer. "Quentin here allowed as how he didn't reckon the letter he'd sent was going to be worth the paper it was written on. Certainly not worth the fee I paid him to dictate it to his bloody secretary."

Anstruther chuckled.

"So I called round, just on the off chance, thought if I talked to him, face-to-face, explained a little, he'd see reason, back off. Course, he wasn't there."

"Either time?"

"There was only the one time."

"We had a witness, claimed to have seen you in a car, a Range Rover, just a few days later."

"Well, they were wrong."

"You do have a Range Rover."

"So what? So does half the fucking population. How else are they going to get their stuck-up brats to school?"

"I don't understand," Will said, "why, if you thought it was a good idea to talk to Bryan, you didn't try again?"

"Because," Prince said, with another glance toward Anstruther, "someone persuaded me it wasn't a good idea to get personally involved. And by the time I'd changed my mind about that and thought, to hell with it, I'll see him anyway, talk some sense into him, the poor bugger was dead."

He sat back heavily and waited.

There were other questions Will might have asked, what involvement Prince had with the attack on Lesley for one, but he knew he would only deny any connection out of hand. And without proof, it would just be so much empty air.

Down on the street, the two men shook hands and went their separate ways.

Helen came back to work ten days before the first article about Irene Bast appeared. Restless as she'd been at home, returning to the front line was stranger than she'd anticipated. People tended to go overboard about what had happened, some of them anyway, asking her eternally if she were okay, slowing down if she came alongside, even offering her, for Christ's sake, their chair when she came into the room; either that, or they ignored what had happened completely, which, while it was preferable, she found herself, nevertheless, resenting.

On the first occasion the possibility of putting herself in physical danger presented itself—the arrest of a drug dealer who was known to be desperate and likely to be armed with a knife—she had to fight back a feeling of intense nausea.

And at night, sometimes, and always when she was least prepared, she would find herself catapulted back there, the fists flying all around her, the angry shouts, the boots, the knife.

"You are okay, aren't you?" Will said, around day three.

"Yeah, fine. Why?"

"Because you look like shit," Will said, and laughed.

Helen punched him, none too gently, on the upper arm. "At least I've got an excuse."

When the exhibition opened, Lesley accepted an invitation to the private view. Somehow, in the crowded gallery, Irene Bast's paintings looked less like personal confessions, more like what they were, works of art. By the same token, Irene herself looked less like the wicked witch of the north, and more like a serious artist, pleasantly surprised if confounded at the attention she was getting.

Natalie arrived late, half out of her head on something or other, wearing a pair of tight-fitting black and white hounds-tooth shorts, a beaded vermillion top, and a pair of thigh-length boots that would suit her if she ever played principal boy at the Hackney Empire.

She embraced Irene, kissed Lesley on the mouth, drank two glasses of champagne and a bottle of Dos Equis, enthused loudly about the fucking brilliant paintings, then fell asleep in the toilet and had to be carried to a taxi and transported back to Primrose Hill.

Lesley, after several conversations with her late brother's erstwhile publisher, was toying with the idea of writing the biography Stephen had started, and wondering, none too idly, which of Irene's paintings would look best on the cover. Perhaps now that everything was out in the open, Prince's objections would be more muted.

Uneasy spring became early summer. The nights started to shorten and now Will could run most mornings without having to wear a fluorescent vest. Lorraine had settled into her job well enough, though despite his willingness to help, with the hours Will worked she found herself struggling to squeeze more and more into less and less.

She found time, though, to take Jake swimming and loved his spluttering, feverish attempts to keep himself afloat, the glee with which he punched water with his pudgy fists, splashing all and sundry. Susie was into everything now that she could crawl, pulling books and CDs from shelves, dragging sheets and cushions to the floor, digging her fingers into the dark garden dirt and then poking them in her mouth and ears.

Things between herself and Will had leveled out into an easy come and go, any tension between them soon released by a quick laugh or a child's need. Most nights they lay close but barely touching, but when, by accident or design, hand or arm fell against breast or thigh and they woke, they made love with an urgency they had rarely known since the early days of their marriage and before.

She really did love him, she realized, safe and a little alarmed by the strength of her feeling.

She was in the kitchen readying Jake's tea, radio playing in the background, when she heard the news: the body of a woman had been recovered from a drainage ditch in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Will heard the same bulletin on his way home, away early for once and thankful for it. He switched from the local to the national wavelength and back again, but there were no more details, beyond the fact that the woman had drowned.

By the time the main television news came on at ten, it was the second item, squeezed between rising tensions in the Middle East and England's preparations for the World Cup. "The body of the woman found drowned in a roadside ditch in fenland between Ely and Isleham, has been identified as that of fifty-year-old Lily Prince, mother of the actor, Natalie Prince." A photograph of Lily, taken some years before, came on the screen, superimposed over what looked like library footage of the Fens. "By some macabre coincidence," the voice continued, "the dead woman's aunt and grandfather were killed in an accident on the same stretch of road a little over twenty years ago, when the car in which they were traveling went off the road and into the drainage ditch that runs alongside."

"That's incredible," Lorraine said.

"The deceased's husband," the news reader said, "the businessman and property developer, Howard Prince, who was out of the country when the incident occurred, is believed to be flying back to England from the couple's holiday home in France. A statement issued by Mr. Prince's solicitor said that Mrs. Prince had been beset by medical problems for some years and was undergoing treatment at the time of her death."

"Poor woman," Lorraine said, and reached for Will's hand.

At Howard Prince's request, Will met him some ten days later. More loose ends causing him the occasional stumble, a succession of broken nights. They walked from the house by the back lanes toward the fen, a gray, featureless day on which the sky seemed to press low against the land.

"This is the way she must have come," Prince said. "She'd never managed to get quite so far before."

Mist rose patchily from the deep water as they approached. The earth immediately above the ditch was slippery underfoot, the exact edge partly hidden among the russet reeds rising up from the bank. It would be easy for a person to lose their balance, slip and fall. Even though Will doubted that was what had happened.

"They had instructions," Prince said, "never to let her stray too far." Sighing, he turned up the collar of his coat. "I should never had gone away, not then, not with all the publicity."

"She saw the papers?" Will said.

"I tried to keep things from her," Prince said. "Protect her. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do."

Will looked back along the line of the ditch, cleaving straight as a die toward the far field end.

"Is this where the car came off the road?" he asked.

"More or less. Some fifty yards back along."

"What happened?" Will said.

Prince shook his head. "All of it, I'm not sure. Stella, she'd arranged to visit her sister months before. Friends she was going to see over in Norfolk, and she was going to call in here. That was fine. Only Adam, he always was a contrary son of a bitch, for some reason he took it into his head to come with her. I never could stand the bastard and he never could stand me. Two bull stags, I suppose, always needing to lock horns. I kept out of their way as much as I could.

"As the time wore on, they started to argue, pick scabs the way families will. Lily said something about Irene, I think, how her mother never bothered to visit, didn't as much as phone to see how she was, whereas Stella, who was only her aunt, was always so good about staying in touch. And that was when Stella told her. I don't think she'd intended to, I think it just came out, and when it did, the whole sorry story came with it.

"Lily was sick, physically sick, started screaming at them they had to leave. I came down to see what the hell was going on and got into something with Adam; Stella, meantime, she was trying to comfort Lily, but Lily wasn't having any. In the end they left, the pair of them, and within minutes Lily went running out into the yard, jumped into her car and went off after them." His heel pressed deeper and deeper into the damp soil. "I thought she'd changed her mind, wanted them to come back, smooth things over." Prince looked into Will's eyes, then away. "That wasn't what happened. By the time Lily got back and I raised the alarm, it was too late. I watched them hauling the car out of the ditch, water streaming off the top and sides. Dead faces pressed up against the glass."

He looked away as, with a booming call, a bittern rose up from the far side of the reeds.

"Did she say what happened?" Will asked.

Prince shook his head. "Other than that they'd gone off the road, no. But I looked at the car. Lily's car. There were scratch marks at the front and a small dent. The glass on the offside front light was cracked. When I asked her about it, she said she panicked driving home, veered into a tree." He opened his arms wide. "Can you see a fucking tree?"

There were a few, Will saw, not many; the chances of hitting one by mistake high but not impossible.

"I couldn't get her to say any more. I made sure the car was out of the way before the police arrived. Had the bodywork knocked out, resprayed. Told Lily to keep her mouth shut. There was an inquest, of course, and when the coroner came down with a verdict of accidental death, I thought that was the end of it." His breath was raw on the misted air. "It wasn't, of course. Lily, she'd not been well before and after that she just, I don't know, closed in on herself. Sometimes I don't even think she knew who I was."

A sort of smile came to his face. "When we were first married, not right off, but after the first year or so, I played away all the fucking time. Fucked anything with a hole between its fucking legs. Didn't care if Lily knew or not. But after this, after she went strange, I never strayed, not the once. Couldn't somehow. I don't know, I don't understand it myself, except I loved her, I suppose. I suppose that's what it was."

Prince looked down at the water, dark between the reeds.

"Now fucking this."