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He’d left his jacket on the arm of the club chair. He found it and took his mobile out. She extended her hand and he gave her his phone, praying there was nothing too embarrassing on there. He told her his code and she read his messages with a blank expression on her face.
Then she returned the phone to him.
“Gloom was at the window at eight,” he said. “You said so yourself. You checked your watch and said, ‘eight on the dot.’ The messages were also at eight—”
“Relax, Brat,” she said. She took another drink of her whisky. “I just wanted to make sure you were telling him good things about me.”
The guards returned. David, the young guard, looked tense.
“Nobody around,” he said. He spoke quickly in a strong Northern accent. “Didn’t find anything and we searched every inch. No one’s taken the lift up here but us in the past hour. Nobody on the cams in the halls either.”
“No one on the cameras?” Regan repeated. “You’re absolutely certain?”
“Not a soul,” David said. “It was just the book, right? Nothing taken?”
“Not that I could tell,” she said, bunching her necklace nervously in her palm. “It’s only…it seemed like a threat or a message, you see. Arthur and I were discussing my pearl necklace in one room and in the other room, someone left a book open to a woman with a pearl necklace. It sounds mad when I say it out loud.” She gave a weak smile.
“You sure you didn’t knock it off accidentally? Or maybe the walls were shaking? From the wind maybe?”
It wasn’t windy and Arthur thought the guard deserved a raise for keeping a straight face when he asked that.
“Well, there’s nobody here but us, ma’am,” the young guard continued. “So if there was someone here, they either jumped off the terrace, or you got a ghost.”
Arthur glanced upstairs. Regan nodded, and dismissed the guards with thanks. They promised to check the perimeter and keep an eye on the cameras, even post a guard if she wanted. She didn’t want that. They left.
When they were gone and Arthur and Regan were alone again, she looked and him and said, “Tell me everything about that painting of Lord Malcolm. Now.”
* * *
Back in her bedroom,Regan stood at the fireplace while Arthur sat on the edge of the bed facing her. She still held the book in her arms, clutching it to her chest like a child, one finger in the page as a bookmark.
“I guess it starts twenty-five years ago, when my parents met,” he began. “My mother owned a gallery in New York in the nineties—The Red. The way she tells the story, she had a dream about a man with black hair and black eyes in a three-piece suit who told her to check the bed knobs in the brass bed in storage at the gallery. She did, and inside the bedposts were a few paintings. One Picasso, some sketches, but also Lord Malcolm’s official family portrait.”
They both glanced toward the portrait on the wall.
Arthur continued, “Finding a lost Picasso worth millions rolled up in the post of an old bed is the sort of thing that makes international news. My father saw the story in the paper. It included a photograph of Lord Malcolm’s portrait, too. Dad hopped on the first flight to New York. Mum refused to sell the painting to him. No matter how much he offered, she wouldn’t accept it. Said she’d never give the painting up. Where she went, it went—the end.
“She was young and beautiful, and he was, well, my father. He picked Mum up, threw her over his shoulder, and carried both her and the painting out to his car. He said he intended to marry her, and that everything she owned—including the painting—would be his, and all that was his would be hers. They eloped. Nine months later my sister was born.”
“What was Lord Malcolm to her?”
“She said she’d dreamed about him.”
Regan opened the book again to the page of the Cassatt pearl necklace painting. She shook her head, then slammed the book shut and tossed it onto the bed.
“I dreamed about David Cameron giving me a haircut once,” she said. “If I had a painting of him, I’dgiveit away. Why was she so attached to a painting of a dead lord she’d never met?”
“You’d have to ask her that.”
She pointed at him. “I’m asking you.”
Arthur thought about what to tell her that wouldn’t sound completely mad.
“Mum has nicknames for us all,” he said. “My father’s her Sun, my sister’s her Moon. That’s what she always called them, her Sun and her Moon. And me and Charlie are her Morning Star and Evening Star.”
“Very sweet. What’s your point?”
“I remember when I was little, and we were out star-gazing and she showed me the Evening Star. Then she showed me the North Star and I asked who that was? She said it was Lord Malcolm, but she didn’t say why.”
