its head resting on a bundle of straw. It reminded her of something she’d read recently. ‘“Do not apply any pink at all, because a dead person has no colour;…and mark out the outlines with dark sinoper and a little black…and manage the hair in the same way, but not so that it looks alive but dead…and so do every bone of a Christian, or of rational creatures…”’
‘Cennino Cennini,’ the other man said. The fifteenth-century artist whose manual of painting techniques illuminated the world of Renaissance art for later centuries. ‘How to paint dead flesh.’ Eliza was surprised he’d recognized it. He had taken off his sunglasses to look more closely at the picture and at her. He narrowed his eyes as though the light in the gallery was too bright. ‘Cennini. “A dead person has no colour…” He’s wrong, you know. The dead decay. We don’t see it in modern times, not in the so-called civilized places. They have colour. We never see that, it’s all hidden away, burned, buried…’
Eliza thought of Ellie in her bleak grave.
He slipped his glasses back on. ‘Someone should do an exhibition, isn’t that right, Daniel?’ He seemed amused.
Of course! She knew why the dark-haired man seemed familiar. ‘You’re Daniel Flynn, aren’t you?’ she said. He had had a show in London two years ago that had caused a sensation among the critics and an interesting scandal when a fellow artist accused him of plagiarism. He was attractive, bohemian and controversial. Since then, his name was everywhere, his photograph in the magazines and Sunday papers. She should have recognized him at once. ‘I didn’t know you were in Madrid.’
‘I got here a few days ago. I’m travelling, looking for what to do next. This is Ivan. Ivan Bakst.’ The name wasn’t familiar to Eliza. They shook hands.
‘Eliza,’ she said. ‘Eliza Eliot. I’m here on a temporary contract.’
The two men had met up in France, Flynn told her. ‘We knew each other in London,’ he said. ‘Years ago, when I was at art school.’ Bakst had been travelling the European waterways. He’d left his boat near Lyons, and the two of them had come down to Spain together.
‘Are you staying?’ Eliza said. They looked as though they would be interesting additions to the small expatriate community of artists that had assembled in Madrid that summer.
‘We’re going across to Morocco,’ Flynn said. ‘Tangier. And then further south, Tanzania, maybe, Ivory Coast.’
‘I’ve never been to Africa.’ Eliza and Flynn were drifting away from the painting now. Bakst remained studying it.
‘Spain’s almost there,’ Flynn said. ‘It’s easy to forget. The Moors occupied most of it. I don’t know, I might stay for a while.’
‘You could spend a year going round the galleries here,’ Eliza said. Not that she’d done as much gallery visiting as she’d planned. The social life in Madrid was too enticing.
‘Why bother? You might as well visit Lenin’s corpse,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘It’s what these galleries do to art. It isn’t allowed to die. It doesn’t go through the natural processes. A place like this is a mausoleum. Or a trophy hall. Dead art.’
Ivan Bakst had come up behind him as he was speaking. He gave Eliza a cool smile as though the two of them were sharing a joke. ‘You do well enough out of galleries, Daniel,’ he said.
Flynn laughed. ‘So I should turn them down? Look, the money lets me keep working.’ He looked at Eliza again. ‘We’ve just got here. Show us around. Have a drink with me. Tonight.’
She looked at him. His face was thin, long-jawed. Against his dark hair, his skin had the almost translucent fairness she associated with the west-coast Irish, the Spanish. His eyes were blue.
‘OK,’ she said.
The flats were a concrete cliff towering up into the sky above her. It was dark, but her eyes were straining upwards because she knew it was coming, soon, and she wasn’t going to be able to stop it. She tried to duck away from it, get out of sight, but it was coming now, hurtling down towards her and… The sudden ringing alarm jerked her out of the dream and she threw her arm up instinctively to protect herself and then she was awake, breathing fast, her heart hammering. She lay there staring at the ceiling. That dream again. Shit! Detective Constable Tina Barraclough rolled over and picked up the phone. ‘Yeah?’ Her voice sounded hoarse.
‘Tina? Where the fuck are you? You’re supposed to be here. Now.’
Dave West, her partner. She looked at the radio, and groaned. It was after seven. She’d forgotten to set the alarm – no, she could remember now, she’d come in after three and switched the alarm off. She didn’t want to be jolted out of sleep. And she was going to be late again. ‘Shit. Where…?’
‘Look, there’s been an incident down by the canal. We’re supposed to be there sorting out the house to house. I’ve covered for you – I said you were heading straight down – so you’d better be there.’
‘OK, OK. I’ll…’ As she was speaking she rolled out of bed on to the floor, where she lay for a minute, holding her head and trying to gather the pieces of the day around her. The remains of her dream fell apart inside her head. Something about falling…The phone was still talking at her. Dave, trying to tell her the details of the incident. ‘Yeah, yeah.’ She couldn’t get her head round it. She’d gone clubbing the night before.
She unravelled herself from the sheets and stood up, promising Dave she’d meet him at the canal basin in half an hour. She felt strung out and sick. It had seemed like a good idea at midnight, a bit of speed to get the party mood going. Now she wasn’t so sure. Ten minutes on the exercise bike might bring her round, but she couldn’t face that. She went through to the bathroom and turned on the shower, then she sat on the edge of the bath, holding her head. She was horribly aware of her stomach, her throat. A cold sweat was breaking out over her body, and she felt lightheaded and dizzy. She didn’t know how she was going to get through the day.
She toyed with the idea of calling in sick. But that wouldn’t be fair to Dave. He was covering her back, and she’d let him do that a bit too much lately. They’d both been involved in a not very successful investigation into some recent drug deaths. A batch of pure heroin had turned up on the streets and effectively culled three unwary users. The outcome had been the arrest of a few minor players, a slight shift in the hierarchy on the streets and a return to business as usual. The source of the heroin had not been established. It had been an uncomplicated case, but she hadn’t managed to get on top of it. Tina should have had her promotion by now, but her reputation as a good and reliable officer had taken a bit of a hammering recently. She had to get her act together, for what it was worth.
She struggled to recapture the details of this new case that Dave had tried to tell her. A body in the canal. A murder. He’d said who was in charge, and she couldn’t remember. Shit, she needed to know that. She could phone…no, she’d remembered. DCI Farnham. Roy Farnham. That was the name Dave had said. Farnham had come across to Sheffield from Humberside, and he had a reputation as a high flier who didn’t suffer fools gladly.
A murder was a good, high-profile case to be involved in. So why did she feel the drag of depression as she thought about the things that the investigation might uncover. And the feeling, at the end, that you
