Mary had copied the pictures from Aidan’s exhibition. No, they’re not mine. That’s what she’d said. Then, only moments later, she’d admitted to painting them. Now Charlie understood. Mary had repainted Aidan’s pictures herself, the exact same scenes, though the paintings couldn’t have been more different from Aidan’s muted, painstakingly realistic ones. Charlie smacked the steering wheel in triumph as she realised she had the answer to another question: the copies, Mary’s versions of Aidan’s pictures, were unframed because they had to be. The people who framed for Mary—Saul Hansard and, later, Jan Garner—had seen Aidan’s exhibition; they’d have spotted what Mary was doing if she took her copies in to be framed, and she didn’t want them to know.

Why? Why paint someone else’s pictures?

Charlie lit a cigarette, her brain on overdrive. The nine buyers: Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell and Winduss. Their addresses didn’t exist and neither did they. Ruth Margerison of Garstead Cottage didn’t exist. Garstead Cottage belonged to Villiers, Mary’s old school.

And Martha’s. Martha Wyers had also been a Villiers girl.

An unpleasant sensation, like the brush of cold fingers, crept up Charlie’s spine. What sort of person was she dealing with here? What sort of mind? Could it be that Mary had bought all the pictures from Aidan’s exhibition, using false names? Apart from the three paintings bought by Saul Hansard, Cecily Wyers and Kerry Gatti, and Charlie knew that at least two of those had been sold on to Maurice Blandford shortly afterwards.

The story, when Charlie told it to herself, seemed too outlandish to be possible. Mary Trelease was killed at 15 Megson Crescent in 1982. In 2008, another woman, also called Mary Trelease, lives in the very same house. That alone was chilling enough. Not everyone, thought Charlie, would be capable of first dreaming that up and then putting it into practice. Everybody enjoyed a good scary story; hardly anyone knew how to bring one to life.