Charlie was impressed. The paintings were too seedy to be conventionally appealing, but they had life in them, and seemed to create more energy in the hall than the shadeless bulb Mary had turned on as she passed. The colours were extraordinary—vivid without being in any way buoyant or heartening. The effect was one of grim cheerlessness exposed in the glare of a searchlight. ‘Are these yours?’ Charlie asked, guessing they must be.

Mary was halfway up the stairs. She made a noise that was hard to interpret. ‘I didn’t steal them, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘No, I meant . . .’

‘No. They’re not mine.’

So she hadn’t misunderstood. She’d been playing for time.

At the top of the stairs there was another picture, and a further two on the landing: the woman and the boy sitting at opposite ends of a lumpy yellow sofa with a torn cover, not looking at each other; the man standing next to a closed door, his hand raised to knock, his mouth open. The third painting featured two different people: a young man and woman, both dark with heavy eyebrows and square foreheads, both overweight, playing cards at the same table that was in the picture downstairs.

Mary pushed open one of the three doors on the landing, stood back and gestured for Charlie to go in ahead of her. The front bedroom. Aidan Seed had told Simon he’d killed Mary in here, left her body in the centre of the bed. Charlie’s throat felt tight as she walked in. I’m being ridiculous, she told herself. Would Mary be opening the door if there were a corpse behind it?

The room was full of pictures, so full that after a few steps Charlie had to stop. Many of them were obscured from view, either by other paintings, or because they were turned the wrong way. Charlie tried to take in as much as she could. There was a picture of a large stone building with a square tower, a lot of head-and-shoulders portraits, mainly of women, all of whom looked weary, defeated by life. Leaning against one wall were four or five big pinky-brown abstracts that looked like close-ups of scarred human flesh, with lots of intersecting lines and funny ridges. Like the paintings downstairs and on the landing, none of these was conventionally beautiful, but their power was undeniable. Charlie found herself needing to stare at them.

Like the paintings downstairs . . . Something else was undeniable, and yet Mary had denied it. ‘If you painted all these, then you painted the others as well,’ said Charlie, gesturing towards the door. ‘Even I can tell they’re all by the same artist.’

Mary looked put out. After a few seconds she said, ‘I painted them, yes. All of them.’

Charlie would have felt pedantic asking her why, in that case, she’d pretended she hadn’t. Was she embarrassed to have her own pictures up on the walls? She didn’t seem the sort of person who would give a toss about seeming vain. In this room, all the paintings were framed; the ones Charlie had seen on the walls had been hung unframed. Somehow, it seemed the wrong way round.