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“How do you take it?”
“Strong, please. Just enough milk to color it. No sugar, I’m trying to give it up.”
As he spoke, my mind drifted—wondering what he was doing here, and if I should be nervous.
His manner was so genial it was hard not to feel safe. Besides, there was nothing that could trip me up, was there?
I switched on the kettle and turned to face him.
“So, Inspector? What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Well, about Mr. Martin, mainly.”
“Jean-Felix? Really?” That surprised me. “What about him?”
“Well, he came to the Grove to collect Alicia’s art materials, and we got talking about one thing
and another. Interesting man, Mr. Martin. He’s planning a retrospective of Alicia’s work. He seems to think now is a good time to reevaluate her as an artist. Given all the publicity, I daresay he’s right.” Allen gave me an appraising look. “You might want to write about her, sir. I’m sure there’ll be interest in a book, or something like that.”
“I hadn’t considered it.... What exactly has Jean-Felix’s retrospective got to do with me, Inspector?”
“Well, Mr. Martin was particularly excited to see the new painting—he didn’t seem concerned that Elif defaced it. He said it added a special quality to it—I can’t remember the exact words he used—I don’t know much about art myself. Do you?”
“Not really.” I wondered how long it was going to take the inspector to get to the point, and why I was feeling increasingly uneasy.
“Anyway, Mr. Martin was admiring the picture. And he picked it up to look at it more closely, and there it was.”
“What was?”
“This.”
The inspector pulled out something from inside his jacket. I recognized it at once.
The diary.
The kettle boiled and a shriek filled the air. I switched it off and poured some boiling water into
the mug. I stirred it and noticed my hand was trembling slightly.
“Oh, good. I wondered where it was.”
“Wedged in the back of the painting, in the top-left corner of the frame. It was jammed in tight.”
So that’s where she hid it, I thought. The back of the painting that I hated. The one place I didn’t
look.
The inspector stroked the creased, faded black cover and smiled. He opened it and looked through
the pages. “Fascinating. The arrows, the confusion.”
I nodded. “A portrait of a disturbed mind.”
Inspector Allen flicked through the pages to the end. He started reading from it aloud:
“‘... he was scared—of the sound of my voice.... He grabbed my wrist and stuck a needle in my
vein.’”
I felt a sudden rising panic. I didn’t know those words. I hadn’t read that entry. It was the
incriminating evidence I had been looking for—and it was in the wrong hands. I wanted to snatch the