Hearing the title jolted something at the back of Charlie’s brain. She breathed in sharply and turned off the stereo. Six Green Bottles—that was the name of a painting in Aidan’s TiqTaq exhibition. Surely . . . no. If it was true, it would be crazy. She forgot to steer, and drifted halfway into the next lane as, suddenly, several other things clicked in her mind, then swerved to get herself back on track, ignoring irate beeps from other drivers. It was crazy, no doubt about that, but she was right. She had to be.

She’d seen several unframed paintings on the walls at Mary’s house. One was of a man, woman and boy sitting round a table covered with empty wine bottles. Green bottles. Charlie hadn’t counted, but she was willing to bet there were six of them. She’d also seen a picture of a woman looking in a mirror, the same woman from the bottles picture. And from the photographs in Kerry Gatti’s file. That’s why Charlie had recognised the face—she’d seen it before, on Mary’s walls. The first Mary Trelease, the one who died in 1982. A woman looking in a mirror . . . Another of the titles Charlie had seen on Aidan’s TiqTaq sales list was Who’s the Fairest? Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?

And the picture Ruth Bussey had described to her that had been in one of the downstairs rooms at 15 Megson Crescent, of a boy writing ‘Joy Division’ on a wall—that had to be Routine Bites Hard, another of Aidan’s titles. The first line of Joy Divison’s best known song, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, a song Charlie had heard thousands of times, contained those words, that phrase. She sang it under her breath, trying to assemble the bizarre chain of events in her mind.

In 1982, Len Smith had killed his partner, Mary Trelease, according to the official version of events. In 2000, Aidan’s first exhibition at TiqTaq had been a huge success, after which, unusually, he’d decided to give up painting. Charlie thought of the photograph Jan Garner had shown her of his Supply and Demand , the picture that had been reproduced in the exhibition catalogue: a woman at the top of the stairs, looking down at a boy. Charlie hadn’t focused on their faces, but she knew they were the same woman and boy she’d seen in the unframed pictures on Mary’s walls: the first Mary Trelease and . . . it had to be the young Aidan. And the older man—Aidan’s stepfather, Len Smith? Smith had two other stepchildren, Aidan’s brother and sister—could it be them in the painting Charlie had seen upstairs at Megson Crescent, the fat, dark pair with eyebrows that dominated their faces? Yes—had to be. Thinking about it, there was a resemblance between them and Aidan.