The Girl in the Picture. Kerry Barrett
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into the washing machine. Mike yelled over the bannister, ‘Ella! Cupboard’s open.’
‘Fab,’ I said. Scooping up the puppy, I bounded up the stairs. All these steps would definitely help me keep fit. In the attic, Mike was standing at the open cupboard door, shaking his head.
‘Think I’ve just made a whole lot more work for you,’ he said.
I looked inside. The cupboard wasn’t empty, as I’d expected. Instead its wooden shelves were full of books and papers.
‘I can get someone from the office to come and clear all this out if you like,’ Mike said.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘No way. Look at all this stuff. It could belong to someone.’
‘Someone who didn’t want it,’ Mike pointed out.
‘Still,’ I said. ‘We can’t just dump it. I’ll go through it and see what’s here.’
The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. ‘I’ve heard stories about this house,’ I told Mike. ‘Stories about a mystery. Maybe this is linked. Perhaps the cupboard was painted shut for a reason.’
Mike gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Or perhaps some lazy so-and-so couldn’t be bothered to paint it properly,’ he said.
But I was undeterred. I reached into the cupboard and took out a stiff cardboard folder, full of paper and tied with cord. ‘I’m going to start with this,’ I said.
It was a while before I got to go through the folder, but much later, when the boys were bathed and in bed, and Ben had come home again, wolfed down some dinner, then gone out to an evening training session back over in Worthing, I settled down on the sofa, and opened the file.
It was actually something of a disappointment at first. Lots of crumbling, yellowing newspaper pages, mostly.
I took one from the top and read it.
Opinions are divided over the latest works by the self-titled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, I read. Mr Charles Dickens despises their work and has said the depiction of the Virgin Mary in Christ in the Home of his Parents by John Everett Millais is ‘horrible in her ugliness’. Others are lauding the bold use of colour and realism …
Long ago, I’d studied art history for A Level and I remembered bits and pieces about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Not much though, if I was completely honest, and I seemed to remember not being overly interested in them. I could google them, though, if I needed to, or better yet speak to my old university friend George, who was now a lecturer in art history at St Andrews.
I leafed through the cuttings, reading occasional articles and laughing at some of the writing. It seemed there was nothing here to suggest a mystery but it was still amazing to read genuine newspapers from so long ago. The papers that were dated all came from 1854 and 1855 – so after Harriet Hargreaves had died, I thought to myself – and I wasn’t sure I’d ever even touched anything so old before. Apart from the house itself of course.
At the back of the folder, I found another yellowing page. This one, though, was on different paper. It was soft with age and looked like it had been torn from a sketchbook, and on it was a pencil drawing of a young woman.
The woman in the picture looked to be in her late teens. She was wearing a long dress with a loose skirt, not the stiff crinolines I’d seen in the newspapers, and the fabric was printed with small flowers. Her hair was tied up but it was wavy and snaked down her cheeks as though it wouldn’t be contained. She had freckles and clear eyes and her lips were curved upwards in a joyful smile.
I smiled back at the girl – I couldn’t help myself. She looked so happy. Then, eager to see what else was in the folder, I went to put the picture to one side. But as I did, I noticed the background to the drawing – the girl was standing in between two long windows, and through the glass I could see the sea. She was in my study. In this house.
More interested now, I picked the picture up again and stared at it. Along the bottom, in beautiful copperplate writing was written: Self-portrait. June 1855.
‘Self-portrait of who?’ I said to the girl in the picture, working out with the help of my fingers that Violet Hargreaves would have been eighteen in 1855.’ Are you Violet? Is the mystery about you and not your poor dead mother?’
Holding the drawing in one hand, and the folder in another, I climbed the stairs to the attic and stood where the young woman must have stood to draw herself. The view from the windows was the same as it had been in 1855 and I felt another flicker of excitement.
On my whiteboard I’d written Tessa in Sussex and below it, some notes about the murder-that-wasn’t-a-murder. But now, spontaneously, I picked up a cloth and wiped off what I’d written.
Along the top of the newly clean board I wrote CLIFF HOUSE MYSTERY. Then I fixed the self-portrait to the middle of the board with a magnet and wrote underneath: Is this Violet Hargreaves?
I was determined to find out more.
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