Black Valley (6 page)

She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Her next session was coming up in half an hour. Perhaps she should have cancelled it, she thought, given herself a little time after the funeral.

A couple came up the road. They were young, in their twenties, and dressed in black. They were obviously late for the next funeral. As she passed, she saw that they were laughing. The woman was
clumping along in a pair of ridiculously high heels, and the man had his arm around her, trying to help her run. Neither of them noticed her as she went by. There was an air about them that
suggested a romance had just begun. Jess couldn’t help smiling when she saw them. Life still went on, didn’t it? Wearing stupid shoes, being late for appointments, falling in love . .
.

Quite unexpectedly, she began to cry. She pulled over to the side of the road as soon as she could, scrabbled in her bag for a tissue, and sat sobbing at the wheel. It wasn’t just about
Frank, she knew, though that had been the trigger. It was about Rose missing her father, and Nella skipping school, and Bob seeing this new woman, and the lack of time she had to process all these
changes in her life, what with the never-ending stream of clients passing through her consulting rooms. It was ridiculous, the schedule she was under; there wasn’t even time to sit by the
side of the road and shed a few tears after a funeral. The patients were beginning to feel like a burden; she was still receptive to their complex, volatile emotional demands, but the job was
taking its toll, because she herself no longer had a husband whose role it was to attend to her needs. There was no one to share her worries with when she came home, whether about work, or the
girls, or their finances, or where to go on holiday, or what colour to paint the bathroom. No one to laze around with on a Sunday morning, no one who told her she was beautiful, and wanted her, and
made love to her, and . . .

She blew her nose and dried her eyes, chiding herself. Clearly, she was upset because Bob had lost interest in her, that was the truth of it. Seeing the giggling young lovers in the cemetery had
sparked it off. She was behaving like a silly teenager, and like a teenager, she suspected she wasn’t crying because she truly loved Bob, genuinely wanted him back; it was simply because
he’d found someone else, and didn’t want her any more.

She glanced at the clock on the dashboard again, realizing that she’d have to get a move on if she was to get back to her office in time for her next patient. But just then, her phone gave
a cheery whistle. She glanced down at it. Text message. It was from Branwen, the receptionist, telling her that her next client had cancelled.

She felt a momentary sense of relief, followed by a pang of concern about her client, Maria. She’d have to call later and find out if she was all right, perhaps rearrange the session. But
for the moment, she had the luxury of an extra fifty minutes to kill.

She let in the clutch, and moved off into the traffic, heading towards the office. On the way, she decided to stop at Llandaff Cathedral. She wasn’t religious, but sometimes she found that
going into a church and simply sitting in a pew had a calming effect. It was something to do with the hush, the high ceilings, the stained windows, the air of otherworldliness that seemed both to
focus her on, and lift her out of, her preoccupations. Also – and this was a motive she only dimly acknowledged to herself as she drove on towards the cathedral – it just so happened
that Elinor’s house was nearby, on Llandaff Green, and she was curious to take a look at the scene of the crime.

The traffic was heavy around the M4, but otherwise the drive through north Cardiff was reasonably clear. When she got to Llandaff, she parked the car next to the statue on the green. Before she
got out, she looked up at it for a moment. She’d always liked this gaitered cleric with his pale green patina, who gazed out at the cathedral, surveying his little kingdom. He gave the
village a peaceful, settled air, as if it was being overseen by some beneficent presence from more sedate, unhurried days gone by.

She got out of the car, and walked up to the high street, stopping to look at the flower shop on the way. On an impulse, she bought herself a bunch of snowdrops, for no other reason than that,
after the sombre episode of the funeral, she felt she deserved a treat. Then she came back, slowing her pace, and took the road that ran alongside the cathedral.

Jess had mixed feelings about Llandaff village. It wasn’t really separate from the city, but with its pretty shops and houses clustered on a hilltop around the twelfth-century cathedral,
it had a distinct air of being a cut above. It was an expensive place to live, relative to the other neighbourhoods, housing well-heeled professionals, as well as a few of the local clergy attached
to the cathedral. There was a private school nearby, which undertook the task of training choristers and future pillars of the establishment. All in all, one got the impression of a closed, rather
old-fashioned microcosm, a world unto itself that was both attractive in its sedate Victorian values, and repellent in its sealed-off smugness.

When she saw Elinor’s house, she couldn’t help feeling envious: it was a white-fronted building with an elegant porch and arched windows overlooking an expansive front garden shaded
by a large tree. There was a high, clipped hedge all the way around the garden, and a black iron gate leading into it. From where she stood, she could see that the stone path that led to the front
door also ran round the sides of the house to the back, and that there was more garden behind the house.

She turned and crossed the road, walking down the steps to the cathedral. As she did, she saw a man come up to the gate of the house, open it, and go down the path. He was tall and
broad-shouldered with dark hair. His collar was up, and he looked slightly surreptitious, as if he didn’t want anyone to notice him. She only caught a glimpse of his face, but she saw that he
wore a frown, as if concentrating on some serious purpose. He didn’t notice her, intent as he was on his own business. She wondered who he was, and what he was doing. He didn’t look as
if he was on a social call; rather, he had the air of a man on a mission. She turned away, aware that she had no business to be snooping, and cross with herself that she hadn’t understood her
unconscious motive for coming here to the green.

She went on towards the cathedral, stopping for a moment to look up at the high steeple before she went down the steps to enter it. It always made her dizzy looking up at the weather-vane on the
top, silhouetted against the sky. Today, there was a ladder attached to the side of the tiles – They must be repairing it, she thought – which added to the sense of vertigo. Crows flew
in and out of the flying buttresses and in between the gargoyles at the top of the roof, cawing loudly as they went. She couldn’t imagine climbing up there. Or rather, she could, and it made
her feel sick to think of it.

She glanced back at Elinor’s house. Only the top of the house was visible from where she stood. She saw a figure come to an upstairs window and close the curtain. She couldn’t be
sure who it was, but it looked, from a distance, like the man she’d just seen at the gate. She wondered what he was doing drawing the curtains – it wasn’t dark yet. But she
didn’t want to pry, so she walked on.

She entered the doorway of the cathedral, nodded at the old lady sitting by the postcard shop, walked down the aisle, and took a seat near the altar. There was nothing going on at present, she
was relieved to find. She gazed upwards at the Jacob Epstein, the strangely elongated figure of Christ with its placid visage, suspended over the massive concrete arch erected in the sixties as
part of the restoration of the building after the war that, for all its majesty, reminded her of a motorway bridge. She couldn’t get much sense of grace from either of them, so she closed her
eyes.

There was no sound, except the soft echo of footfalls as a curate, or some such, moved around the choristers’ pews, engaged in an arcane ritual of preparation for a service. For a moment,
the world seemed to slow down.

She whispered a prayer, to a God she didn’t believe in. She prayed that Bob would still remain close to the girls, would still be their father. She prayed that one day her sadness over the
failure of her marriage would pass, that she would find someone else, or perhaps begin to savour life on her own, without the responsibility of a partner. She gave thanks that she still had her
daughters to love, her patients to attend to, and good friends and family. That she was well established here, in this small, warm community. That she was important to people, and they were
important to her. And she prayed that, for the time being at least, all this would be enough.

Jess was waiting for Elinor to arrive for her session. She was going over her notes, and looking over some further research she’d done on claustrophobia. It might be an
idea, she thought as she read, for Elinor to have a further medical check-up: according to the latest neurological thinking, certain inner-ear infections and abnormalities in the nerve cells of the
brain can result in the disorder, as in these instances sensory information may be misread, causing a panic response. That said, given that the claustrophobia had occurred since her mother’s
death, it seemed more likely that the disorder was purely neurotic, with no physiological cause. And it also seemed clear that, for the time being, it wasn’t going to abate, since she was
still under considerable emotional stress.

The door to the consulting room was open, and a few minutes past the appointed hour, Elinor walked in. She pushed the door to, but didn’t close it completely. Then she took off her mac,
hung it up, and walked over to the couch, acknowledging Jess with a brief nod. As before, the window was open a crack. Elinor leaned over and opened it wider. Much wider.

Bad sign
, thought Jess, as she went over to the armchair behind the couch and sat down.

Elinor settled herself on the couch and closed her eyes. She looked tense, Jess thought. Her face was white and drawn, and there were pale blue rings under her eyes.

Silence fell. Jess shivered. She wished she’d worn a thicker sweater, or turned up the heating a bit more before the session.

She wondered what was going on in Elinor’s mind. She sensed that there was something else troubling her besides her mother’s death, something she had not yet mentioned. Yet she knew
better than to press her. Whatever it was, it would emerge sooner or later, whether directly or in some more oblique way.

Elinor’s eyes remained closed. Jess began to wonder, after a while, whether she’d fallen asleep. She’d had clients do that on the couch quite a few times, in the days when she
was training. It was just another avoidance mechanism, along with all the others she’d learned to recognize.

As the minutes ticked by, she had the urge to tuck a blanket round Elinor’s outstretched form. She looked so thin and white lying there under the window, with the cold air streaming in
from outside, her hair so fair and fine on the dark green pillow, like a sick child. Poor thing, thought Jess. Her mother dead. Her father, too. Orphaned. Her sister married. Living all alone in
that great big house, her family gone . . .

‘You’d think they’d leave the relatives alone at a time like this.’ Elinor’s voice broke the silence at last. ‘But they won’t stop pestering
us.’

Jess remembered the policewoman that Elinor had mentioned in the last session.

‘She came round again yesterday, saying she wanted to go down and look at the studio. I let her in, but I stayed outside in the garden.’ Elinor’s voice quavered. She was near
to tears. ‘It made me so angry, having her snooping around looking through my things. It’s been four months since it happened. Surely they could leave me alone now. I can’t stand
it any longer.’

Elinor began to sob.

Jess had an urge to reach forward and hug her, but she managed to maintain her professional composure. There was a box of tissues on a table beside the couch, so she leaned over and pushed it
towards her.

Elinor sat up, took one, and dabbed at her eyes. Then she lay down again.

‘The problem is,’ she went on, the tears subsiding, ‘I don’t have an alibi. They’ve got me on CCTV when I was walking around Cardiff shopping, but there was no one
else there when I found Ma.’ She crumpled the tissue into a ball, kneading it in her fingers. ‘Isobel hasn’t got one either. She was in her house that day. She hadn’t gone
in to the gallery because she had a cold.’

‘The gallery?’

‘She runs the gallery now. The one my father used to own.’ Once again, Elinor spoke as if Jess ought to know what she was talking about. ‘The Frederick Powell Gallery. You must
know it. It’s the only decent contemporary art gallery in Cardiff. Or Wales, come to that.’

Jess murmured assent, in a noncommittal way.

‘And then there’s my brother-in-law, Blake.’ For a moment, Elinor hesitated. ‘He was apparently in London, in a meeting with Mia, his business partner. She runs a gallery
in London, and he’s an art consultant, advising rich people on how to spend their money. Hedge fund managers and suchlike.’ Elinor’s tone lost its forlorn quality.
‘They’ll take any old rubbish, as long as Blake talks them into it.’ There was contempt in her voice as she spoke. ‘Anyway, that’s beside the point. Mia’s backed
him up, says they were at her flat, going through catalogues. But I must say, I don’t altogether believe her. Or him.’

She stopped kneading the tissue and tucked it into her sleeve.

‘He’s a wheeler-dealer is Blake,’ she went on. ‘I think he married Isobel to get his hands on the gallery. And on the Powell name.’ She paused. ‘I’m not
saying he was directly responsible for Ma’s death, of course – I don’t think he’d go that far. But he knew where the Gwen John was kept. And he knew how much it was
worth.’

Jess was taken aback. She wondered whether Elinor’s distrust of Blake could be occasioned by jealousy of her sister. But perhaps that was the psychotherapist in her, always looking to the
family dynamic for answers. Best not to jump to conclusions, she told herself, at this stage, anyway.