Page 38 of The Missing Page
“Can’t say she was specific about that,” said Carrow.
Leo strongly doubted this. There would hardly have been any point in claiming to know Carrow’s true identity without saying what that identity was. Unless Madame—Gladys, whoever she was—was just taking potshots.
“Did she want anything from you?” Leo asked.
“No,” said Carrow without elaboration.
“Did she say who she was? I mean, did she introduce herself as anything other than Madame Fournier?”
“As Gladys Button, you mean?” Carrow shook his head. “Gladys Button,” he repeated, seemingly to himself. “No, she did not.”
“What kind of accent did she have?”
“Accent? Oh, I see what you mean. Inside, she came over all foreign. But no, she sounded normal when she talked to me.”
Gathering that he wasn’t going to get any more from this vein of questioning, Leo sat back in his seat and took a long pull from his beer. “How long have you and Mrs. Carrow lived here?”
“Two years this past October.”
“Why Cornwall?”
“It’s as good a place as any.”
“Better than most, I should think. My flat was bombed while I was overseas,” said Leo, lying through his teeth. Strictly speaking, he hadn’t kept a flat in London so much as he occasionally stored luggage at one of the vacant flats owned by the agency. That had, in fact, been bombed. “And it turns out that this country is filled with people who’ve been bombed out of their homes and I couldn’t find anywhere to stay, so now I live in James’s spare room.”
“He’s a doctor, isn’t he?”
“Yes, in a village at the edge of the Cotswolds in Worcestershire. Wychcomb St. Mary. Disgustingly quaint. I grew up in Bristol,” Leo said, again resorting to a half-truth. He had started out life in an orphanage on the border between France and Belgium, then been sent to live with his sister in Bristol, and then lived on the streets of that fair city after his sister died. Shortly thereafter, his old handler had found him and that was that. “So all that picture-postcard Beatrix Potter stuff is a shock to the system.”
This was where Carrow ought to volunteer where he grew up, but instead he opened his mouth, shut it, then collected their empty beer bottles and put them aside. Leo knew he was being dismissed.
“I’d like to buy one of your paintings,” Leo said to Mrs. Carrow, “if you’ll let me.”
Manifesting only a little surprise, Mrs. Carrow said that of course she would be glad to sell him a painting, and led him to the studio. Canvases leaned against two of the walls and an easel was set up in the middle of the room. In addition to the large windows on the north side, there was a skylight, dark now, but which in the daylight must make the room bright and almost cheerful.
“The watercolors go for a guinea apiece,” she said, gesturing at a row of pretty landscapes. They were neither so small as to seem insignificant nor too large to fit in a suitcase, and were painted in colors that wouldn’t look offensively out of place in most homes.
“And what about the oil paintings?” he asked, nodding at a different series of canvases.
“I don’t usually sell those.”
Leo could see why. These paintings weren’t pretty in the least. Some were beautiful—there was a painting of what looked like Dartmoor, and another of an empty airfield. But they weren’t the sort of thing you’d hang over the sofa in the front parlor.
There was also a painting of Blackthorn, its absurd Victorian dollhouse aesthetic twisted around so that it seemed to erupt from the ground like a mushroom. It was not a flattering view of the house, there was no question. But it was also somehow…friendly, perhaps? It was not painted by a person who hated the place.
It was painted by a person who saw Blackthorn for what it was—tacky and overwrought but on a domestic scale. It was a home. This was the first time Leo had really thought of the place in that way. People had lived and died there; children had grown up there. Cold and barren as it now was, it might once have been something else.
For a moment, he thought that maybe it was also painted by a person who knew Blackthorn’s secrets.
“That’s Miriam’s haunted house,” said Carrow.
Leo raised an eyebrow. “Does Blackthorn have a ghost?”
“No, it’s not nearly old enough for that. But Miriam made it look flat spooky.”
“You have an overactive imagination,” Mrs. Carrow said fondly.
Tacked up on the wall above the painting of Blackthorn was a charcoal sketch, the only portrait Leo had seen in the studio. It was of Carrow in three-quarters profile. Well, it was an attempt at Carrow in three-quarters profile—even in the sketch, it was obvious that the man wanted to turn to see his wife. His lips were slightly parted, as if he were just about to speak and had been hastily silenced by the artist just before he broke the pose. It was a portrait of a man who was dying to look at the woman he loved, and was only holding off out of fondness for her.
