2
He hadn’t changed the lock, perhaps in the hope that she’d come back one night and slip into bed beside him. But as she entered the house she couldn’t shake the feeling of being a burglar. It was gloomy outside, and she switched on all the lights, but the rooms seemed to resist illumination, as though the smell of spoiled food, which was pungent, was thickening the air. She braved the kitchen in search of something to drink before she began her packing, and found plates of rotting food stacked on every surface, most of them barely picked at. She opened first a window and then the refrigerator, where there were further rancid goods. There was also ice and water. She put both into a clean glass, and set about her work.
There was as much disarray upstairs as down. Estabrook had apparently lived in squalor since her departure, the bed they’d shared a swamp of filthy sheets, the floor littered with soiled linen. There was no sign of any of her clothes amongst these heaps however, and when she went through to the adjacent dressing room she found them all hanging in place, untouched. Determined to be done with this distasteful business in as short a time as possible she found herself a set of suitcases, and proceeded to pack. It didn’t take long. With that labour performed she emptied her belongings from the drawers, and packed those. Her jewellery was in the safe downstairs, and it was there she went once she’d finished in the bedroom, leaving the cases by the front door to be picked up as she left. Though she knew where Estabrook kept the key to the safe, she’d never opened it herself. It was a ritual he’d demanded be rigorously observed that on a night when she was to wear one of the pieces he’d given her he’d first ask her which she favoured, then go and get it from the safe and put it around her neck, or wrist, or slip it through the lobe of her ear himself. With hindsight, a blatant piece of power-play. She wondered what kind of fugue state she’d been in when sharing his company, that she’d endured such idiocies for so long. Certainly the luxuries he’d bestowed upon her had been pleasurable, but why had she played his game so passively? It was grotesque.
The key to the safe was where she’d expected it to be, secreted at the back of the desk drawer in his study. The safe itself was behind an architectural drawing on the study wall, several elevations of a pseudo-classical folly the artist had simply marked as the Retreat. It was far more elaborately framed than its merit deserved, and she had some difficulty lifting it. But she eventually succeeded and got into the safe it had concealed.
There were two shelves, the lower crammed with papers, the upper with small parcels, amongst which she assumed she would find her belongings. She took everything out, and laid it all on the desk, curiosity overtaking the desire to have what was hers and be gone. Two of the packages clearly contained her jewellery, but the other three were far more intriguing, not least because they were wrapped in a fabric as fine as silk, and smelt not of the safe’s must, but of a sweet, almost sickly, spice. She opened the largest of them first. It contained a manuscript, made up of vellum pages sewn together with an elaborate stitch. It had no cover to speak of, but seemed to be an arbitrarily arrayed collection of sheets, their subject an anatomical treatise, or at least so she first assumed. On second glance she realized it was not a surgeon’s manual at all, but a pillow book, depicting love-making positions and techniques. Leafing through it she sincerely hoped the artist was locked up where he could not attempt to put these fantasies into practice. Human flesh was neither malleable nor protean enough to recreate what his brush and ink had set on the pages. There were couples intertwined like quarrelling squid; others who seemed to have been blessed (or cursed) with organs and orifices of such strangeness and in such profusion they were barely recognizable as human.
She flicked back and forth through the sheets, her interest returning her to the double page of illustration at the centre, which was laid out sequentially. The first picture showed a naked man and woman of perfectly normal appearance, the woman lying with her head on a pillow while the man knelt between her legs, applying his tongue to the underside of her foot. From that innocent beginning, a cannibalistic union ensued, the male beginning to devour the woman, starting with her legs, while his partner obliged him with the same act of devotion. Their antics defied both physics and physique, of course, but the artist had succeeded in rendering the act without grotesquerie, but rather in the manner of instructions for some extraordinary magical illusion. It was only when she closed the book, and found the images lingering in her head, that they distressed her, and to sluice them out she turned her distress into a righteous rage that Estabrook would not only purchase such bizarrities but hide them from her. Another reason to be well out of his company.
The rest of the packages contained a much more innocent item: what appeared to be a fragment of statuary the size of her fist. One facet had been crudely marked with what could have been a weeping eye, a lactating nipple or a bud seeping sap. The other facets revealed the structure of the block from which the image had been carved. It was predominantly a milky blue, but shot through with fine seams of black and red. She liked the feel of it in her hand, and only reluctantly put it down to pick up the third parcel. The contents of this were the prettiest find: half a dozen pea-sized beads, which had been obsessively carved. She’d seen oriental ivories worked with this level of care, but they’d always been behind museum glass. She took one of them to the window to study it more closely. The artist had carved the bead to give the impression that it was in fact a ball of gossamer thread, wound upon itself. Curious, and oddly inviting. As she turned it over in her fingers, and over, and over, she found her concentration narrowing, focusing on the exquisite interweaving of threads, almost as though there was an end to be found in the ball, and if she could only grasp it with her mind she might unravel it and discover some mystery inside. She had to force herself to look away, or she was certain the bead’s will would have overwhelmed her own, and she’d have ended up staring at its detail until she collapsed.
She returned to the desk and put the bead back amongst its fellows. Staring at it so intently had upset her equilibrium somewhat. She felt slightly dizzy, the litter she’d left on the desk slipping out of focus as she rifled through it. Her hands knew what she wanted, however, even if her conscious thought didn’t. One of them picked up the fragment of blue stone, while her other strayed back to the bead she’d relinquished. Two souvenirs: why not? A piece of stone and a bead. Who could blame her for dispossessing Estabrook of such minor items when he’d intended her so much harm? She pocketed them both without further hesitation, and set about wrapping up the book and the remaining beads and returning them to the safe. Then she picked up the cloth in which the fragment had been wrapped, pocketed that, took the jewellery, and returned to the front door, turning off the lights as she went. At the door she remembered she’d opened the kitchen window, and headed back to close it. She didn’t want the place burgled in her absence. There was only one thief who had right of trespass here, and that was her.
3
She felt well satisfied with the morning’s work, and treated herself to a glass of wine with her spartan lunch, then started unpacking her loot. As she laid her hostage clothes out on the bed her thoughts returned to the pillow book. She regretted leaving it now; it would have been the perfect gift for Gentle, who doubtless imagined he’d indulged every physical excess known to man. No matter. She’d find an opportunity to describe its contents to him one of these days, and astonish him with her memory for depravity.
A call from Clem interrupted her work. He spoke so softly she had to strain to hear. The news was grim. Taylor was at death’s door, he said, having two days before succumbed to another sudden bout of pneumonia. He refused to be hospitalized, however. His last wish, he’d said, was to die where he had lived.
‘He keeps asking for Gentle,’ Clem explained. ‘And I’ve tried to telephone him but he doesn’t answer. Do you know if he’s gone away?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I haven’t spoken to him since Christmas Night.’
‘Could you try and find him for me? Or rather for Taylor. If you could maybe go round to the studio, and rouse him? I’d go myself but I daren’t leave the house. I’m afraid as soon as