Unfinished Portrait (8 page)

‘That's kind of you.'

They sat down, and Naomi Harris beckoned a waitress, who took their order. Her eyes dropped momentarily to her clasped hands, then met Rona's with a smile.

‘I'm not sure where to start!' she said apologetically, and Rona warmed to her.

‘I believe there was a biography of your sister some ten years ago?' she prompted.

‘Yes, but it wasn't at all satisfactory. Elspeth was extremely uncooperative, refusing access to any letters, diaries or papers, and the poor man ended up rehashing what was already public knowledge. A waste of everyone's time.'

‘Am I likely to fare any better, since I won't even be able to meet her?'

‘Definitely,' Naomi Harris said firmly, ‘because without her breathing down my neck, I can tell you all you want to know from a close personal angle – about her childhood, her likes and dislikes, the start of her career and so on. And, of course, we're very much hoping you might discover why she left so suddenly – if she'd been planning it for some time, or it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I've looked through her diaries and letters, but your trained eye might pick up something I missed.'

Warning bells rang in Rona's head. ‘Mrs Harris, I'm sorry, but there's absolutely no way I could go through them.'

Naomi Harris stared at her. ‘But surely, if I give you permission—?'

Rona was shaking her head. ‘Unless and until there's proof of her death – which we all hope won't happen – her right to privacy stands, and any personal papers remain her “intellectual property”.'

Seeing Naomi's bewildered disappointment, she added, ‘I shall, of course, be anxious to look through files and papers that
aren't
private, and I'll be grateful for any personal memories you and your family can supply. But I must emphasize that my interest lies in her life and work, her place in British art, and so on; I'm neither qualified nor, frankly, willing, to look into her disappearance.'

Naomi Harris was looking crestfallen. ‘I appreciate that. But on the other hand, you've solved quite a few puzzles over the last few years, and we were hoping you might . . . add one more to your list. Though, of course, if you can't go through her papers . . .'

Coffee and butter-soaked crumpets arrived, and a brief silence ensued while cups were filled and crumpets distributed. Rona was grateful for it; but now the disappearance had been mentioned, she might as well get the facts. As Catherine had said, she'd need to cover it eventually.

So, as the waitress moved away, she asked, ‘When did you first realize she'd gone?'

‘The eleventh of May last year – my daughter's seventeenth birthday. She'd had a party for her friends on the Saturday, and the family celebration was the next day. Naturally, Elspeth was invited; she's Gillian's godmother as well as her aunt.'

She paused, toying with the crumpet on her plate. ‘But . . . she never came. We waited for a while, and phoned both her home and her mobile, without success. Then we started worrying she might have had an accident driving out to us.'

‘When had you last seen her?' Rona interrupted.

‘Earlier that week. My last words to her were, “See you on Sunday.”'

‘And she seemed all right then?'

Naomi hesitated. ‘It's difficult to say. She'd been . . . unpredictable for quite a while.'

Rona leaned forward, interested, despite her resolution. ‘Unpredictable how?'

‘Well, she'd been through a period of intense depression, worried that she'd lost her way, and couldn't paint any more.' Naomi Harris looked down, biting her lip. ‘But it wasn't only that, it was the body-clock thing. She was over forty, and she'd never even had a love affair – been too wrapped up in her work. She felt life was passing her by.'

‘Did she actually say so?'

Naomi smiled wryly. ‘She was as private with me as with everyone else, but I do remember her saying once, “I live a very narrow life, Naomi. To be a
great
artist, I need to experience it far more fully.”'

Rona stirred uneasily. Max had said Elspeth's work had fallen off; he also suspected she was dead. Severe depression, loneliness, loss of her talent – might they have led to an undiscovered suicide?

‘But then,' Naomi was continuing, ‘about three months before she left, she suddenly seemed to throw off her depression, became much brighter. I half-wondered if she'd met someone, but there was no hint of that and she refused to give any explanation, except to say she'd pulled herself together.'

‘I interrupted you,' Rona apologized. ‘You were telling me about the dinner party?'

‘Yes. Well, as time went on and there was no sign of her, my parents in particular became more and more anxious, so Leonard, my husband, got the car out and went to look for her. He drove all the way to Buckford along the route she'd have taken, even knocked at her front door But the house was in darkness, so he came back again. We phoned the hospitals, but there was no record of her having been injured or anything. Then, later, when we went to the house, we found Gillian's birthday present, ready wrapped, in her sitting room. Surely that meant she'd intended to come?'

‘She hadn't told friends she was going away?'

‘Miss Parish, she had no friends. Not really. The only person she was close to, Chloë, had – died a year or so earlier.'

Rona frowned. ‘Died how?'

Naomi gave a little shudder. ‘Threw herself under a train, actually. It was all very distressing, and Elspeth was knocked sideways.'

‘That was when her depression started?'

‘No, actually; it had begun some months earlier.'

‘So who was this Chloë?'

‘Chloë Pyne. She was an artist, too, though not as successful as Elspeth. They met at secondary school, went on to university together, then the Royal College of Art. They were inseparable, really. Until a month or two before Chloë died.'

‘What happened then?'

Naomi Harris sighed. ‘The old story: a man entered the equation. He fell for Chloë, kept phoning her, sending flowers. It wasn't mutual, but Elspeth was . . . I suppose jealous is the only word for it. Anyway, there were heated exchanges, and when Chloë died, they'd not spoken for several weeks. Elspeth blamed herself for her unreasonable behaviour, and for not being there for Chloë.'

‘Who was this man?' Rona asked after a moment.

‘Yet another artist. Nathan Tait.'

‘Nathan Tait?' Rona repeated in surprise.

‘You know him?'

‘Not personally, but I've heard my husband speak of him.'

‘Of course – Max Allerdyce. I was forgetting. Did he ever meet Elspeth?'

Rona shook her head. ‘Unfortunately not.' She paused. ‘Who else was at that family dinner?'

‘My parents, as I said; my brother and his wife; Gillian, of course, and Toby, our son. The whole family, in fact.'

‘And there's been no contact since?'

Naomi's eyes dropped. ‘Actually, there's something I need to tell you.' She hesitated, her hands twisting in her lap. ‘Everything I've said so far is right: she was expected at the dinner, she didn't come, and we were all very worried. The next day, we reported it to the police, but to our amazement they weren't interested, maintaining she'd every right to disappear if she wanted to. And without their authorization, her bank refused to tell us whether or not she was still withdrawing money, using her credit card, and so on.'

Naomi paused to refill their coffee cups. ‘So it was left to us, and we set about organizing searches, persuading the press to run the story, and so on.' She sighed. ‘But it was a nine days' wonder; when there were no developments, everyone lost interest. Artists,' she added bitterly, ‘don't have the widespread appeal of pop stars.'

‘So then what happened?' Rona pressed.

Naomi looked up, steeling herself. ‘Toby, our son, came to us one evening, very red in the face and close to tears, saying he had a confession to make. The long and the short of it was that during the party the night before the birthday dinner, he'd deleted a message from the answer phone. I don't know about you, but in our house messages build up and are never cleared, and you have to wade through a whole lot of what you've already dealt with before coming to anything new. So we'd recently introduced a policy of deleting a message as soon as it had been played.

‘Well, as I said, the phone went in the middle of the party, he answered it – as it happened, a wrong number – and saw the red light flashing. And when he heard Elspeth begin to speak, he thought it was the message she'd left earlier in the week, so he deleted it, went back to the party, and never gave it a second thought, even when she failed to show up the next day. Fifteen-year-old boys, I'm afraid, aren't the most reliable of mortals. And by the time he
did
remember, we were all running round in circles, the story had appeared in the press, and basically he'd been too scared to come forward till his conscience got the better of him.

‘But he remembered that as he pressed the delete button, he heard her say, “I want you to tell everyone, while you're all together, that I'm going—” And that was it. Well, we were frantic, as you can imagine. Elspeth obviously thought we all knew what she was planning, but we'd no idea where she was or how long she'd be away, and to add to our worries, her mobile account had been closed the day after she left. There was absolutely no way to contact her.

‘After a lot of discussion, to spare Toby's blushes, and also, admittedly, because we'd look foolish, we decided not to make it public, but just let the story die down. No one seemed very interested, anyway.'

‘But surely you've heard from her since?'

‘That's just it! We expected her back in a week or two, or at least some kind of contact – a postcard or phone call. But all we've received is a Christmas card – seven months, mind you, after she left –wishing us well and saying she was fine. It was posted in London, but there was no address and no hint of when she was coming home. And this is where I owe you an apology, because I thought that if you agreed to write her biography, she might hear of it and be annoyed, which would bring her out of the woodwork.'

‘Well, thanks!' Rona said.

‘Oh God, that came out quite wrong! I'm sorry! I
do
want you to do it, and so do my parents, though I have to tell you Richard and Marcia are totally against it.'

‘Are they prepared to speak to me?'

‘I don't know, to be honest. But it would be worth seeing them if you can, because Elspeth was always closer to Richard than to the rest of us.'

‘I'll need their address, then, and also those of anyone else who knew her. Did she have help in the house, for instance?'

‘Yes, Mary Strong. She still goes in once a week to dust around, open windows, and so on, and her husband keeps the garden tidy. I'll look up their address for you.'

‘Thank you.' Rona hesitated. ‘What about Chloë's family? Do you think they would see me?'

Naomi looked surprised. ‘I really don't know. You could try.'

‘You're not in touch with them?'

Naomi shook her head. ‘I only met them briefly at her funeral. Elspeth had begged me to go with her, and it was all pretty harrowing, as you'd imagine. Her father's disabled in some way – he was in a wheelchair.'

‘Was Nathan Tait there?'

‘Yes, but keeping a low profile, and he didn't go back to the house.' She glanced at Rona's empty cup. ‘If you're ready, shall we go?'

Naomi's car was on a meter in a road just off the square, and they drove to an area on the outskirts of town, where the houses were widely spaced, hidden behind high walls or hedges. Having parked, Naomi pushed open a gate to reveal, to Rona's surprise, not a substantial house but an attractive-looking cottage dating, she judged, from the eighteenth century.

‘It's a listed building,' Naomi said over her shoulder, as she opened the front door, ‘but thankfully the plumbing's twenty-first century. Hang on a minute, while I switch off the alarm.'

The door opened on to a small square hall, with the staircase straight ahead, and it was clear any necessary modernizing had not destroyed the character of the place; the doorways were low – Max would need to stoop to go through them – the windows mullioned, and the rooms small by today's standards, but the overall effect was enchanting.

‘It's a little gem, isn't it?' Naomi said. ‘I came with Elspeth to view it, years ago, and we both fell for it at once. But it will be the studio that interests you, I imagine, and that's in the back garden.'

Rona turned in surprise, and Naomi laughed.

‘She couldn't put extra windows in the house, but an additional selling point was a stone building outside, not visible from the road, which she could modernize to her heart's content. Come and see.'

At the back of the hall was a small but fully equipped kitchen, and through its window Rona had her first sight of the studio.

‘It's larger than I was expecting,' she said. ‘Are there two storeys?'

‘Yes, you go up a ladder-cum-staircase to the studio itself.'

The garden, mainly laid to lawn but bordered by beds of peonies and dahlias, was neat and tidy, testament, Rona presumed, to Mary Strong's husband, and only a few recently fallen beech leaves lay scattered on the grass.

Naomi unlocked the sturdy wooden door, and the air that met them was unexpectedly warm.

‘Central heating,' she said briefly. ‘It comes on twice a day at a low temperature, to keep the place aired. We can't risk damp canvases.'