Chapter Twelve
Darcy blinked. The lights were still on but a pervasive silence, inside and outside the house, gave her the distinct feeling it was the dead of night. She checked her phone with a gasp. One twenty-seven.
‘Oh my God,’ she gasped, sitting up and trying to orient herself. The botanical studies were still on the sofa cushions but several were creased from where her arm had fallen on them while she slept. She smoothed them as best she could. How long had she been asleep for? How could this have happened? She had to get home. She couldn’t be here .
And yet neither, she realized, could she simply just go.
Hurriedly she texted Jens and signed off the form, ready to hand over to him.
‘Please be quick,’ she said to the phone screen, cursing herself for having been so stupid as to fall asleep; an extra half-hour’s wait, being awake, was everything she didn’t need right now. She debated ordering an Uber but with Jens’ arrival time outside of her control, decided against it. Better to hold off until he was here.
She washed the glass, put her coat on and carried the archive box and the paper bag with her dinner boxes inside back downstairs, turning off the lights as she went. She sat on the bottom step and waited in the darkness of the all-black hall.
She waited and waited, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows on her knees. Her eyes kept closing, sleep wanting to claim her again. She just had to get home...
Had she drifted off again? She heard the sound of footsteps outside and stirred. ‘Thank God,’ she muttered to herself, standing up and lifting the box – just as she heard the sound of a key in the door.
There was no time to react. In the next instant, it opened and Max walked through.
If she looked stunned, he was even more so, and she saw him jolt on realizing someone was standing in the shadows at the bottom of his stairs. He was carrying a holdall and suit carrier, wearing a heavy overcoat and scarf.
‘Max, it’s me!’ she said quickly, worried he might mistake her for an intruder and run at her. Or something.
‘... Darcy? ’ he asked in disbelief.
Oh God. This scenario was everything she didn’t need.
‘I fell asleep working here. I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to. I’m just leaving. I’m waiting for Jens to take the file. He should be here any moment.’ The words came out in a rush, as if she was speaking in cursive.
He looked at the box in her arms and, without a word, put down his bags, walked over and took it from her. ‘I can deal with that.’
It was the first time she had seen him since their kiss and up close, she saw he looked tired too. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
She shrugged. The sooner she could leave, the better. ‘Okay, thanks.’ She moved past him, but he turned with her.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home?’
‘Darcy, it’s the middle of the night.’
‘Precisely. I need to go home. Like I said, I didn’t mean to still be here. I fell asleep.’
‘Darcy, I’m not letting you walk the streets at this time of night!’
Her eyebrows shot up. What was he, her dad? ‘I’m not walking. I’m about to order an Uber.’
He looked back at her with a sigh. ‘Well, wait in here till it comes, at least.’
‘No, I’m fine outside,’ she said dismissively, immediately making her way down the steps.
There was a silence as he watched her go.
‘...You have no right to be angry with me,’ he said, standing on the top step and watching as she ordered the cab, her back turned to him.
She half turned over her shoulder, incredulous. ‘I’m not angry at you,’ she said, feeling angry.
‘You’ve ignored me ever since Natalia came over.’
‘That’s funny – I don’t recall receiving a text from you afterwards that I could have ignored,’ she said tartly.
‘...I meant you ignored my message about the box.’
‘No. I responded to your text.’
‘Eventually. And only when I made plain I wouldn’t be here.’
She didn’t reply.
‘...Besides, you said you weren’t coming over. Yet here you are.’
She glanced back, wanting to tell him that coming here had been the last thing she wanted to do – but she couldn’t drop Viggo in it. ‘My plans changed last minute and it made sense to push through, seeing as you were away – okay? You’re supposed to be away!’
‘And I was. For two days. Monday. Tuesday.’
And now it was the early hours of Wednesday. She rolled her eyes, turning away again. What did it matter anyway? She checked her screen. The small circle was spinning. Looking for drivers . Hurry up!
‘...So you’d only come over if I wasn’t here?’
Darcy just shook her head. She was too tired to argue at this time of night.
‘So then you are angry.’
‘I’m not,’ she lied, because how could she admit to anything she was feeling? She wanted more from him than he was offering, that was the crux of it. She wasn’t the one who had wanted to keep things professional between them in the first place, and when they’d kissed, she’d felt all the things she’d been trying not to feel. It had felt so good, natural even, but that was the danger, she saw now: she was going to fall and he wasn’t.
‘You’re avoiding me, even though the thing with Natalia was before I met you and...it’s not like you and I are—’
She whirled around, knowing exactly what they weren’t. She wanted him, even though she knew she would just be another conquest. Natalia’s arrival had merely confronted her with that fact and given her a...firebreak. Freja had been right from the start: she had to stay away from him, even if she didn’t want to.
‘I know, Max, it’s strictly professional between us. You’ve gone to great pains to make that clear. I have got the point!...And I’m not avoiding you, I just don’t know you. We’re not friends.’
He frowned. ‘You don’t know me? You just spent the weekend in my house!’
‘No, I sat on your sofa and worked. But it could just as easily have been a park bench. Or a desk in the library.’
He came down a step. ‘We had breakfast and lunch together!’
She gave a small guffaw. ‘That was not breakfast and lunch.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘That was some stylized version of it.’
He looked exasperated – and very tired. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’
‘It means that you live your life like it has a filter on it!’ she burst out. ‘Nothing’s real in your world. Everything’s perfect. You’re perfect! Your girlfriends are models! You live in a showho—’ She stopped herself, but it was far too late. She’d said too much.
There was a silence and she could see he was taken aback by her outburst.
‘Hello?’ They both looked along the road to see a figure coming along the pavement. Jens was walking towards them at a brisk march, but his pace visibly slowed as he approached, looking between them with concern. It was the middle of the night and they were raising their voices. There was no way he hadn’t heard them.
‘Oh Jens, great, you’re here,’ Darcy said weakly. ‘Max has...he’s got the box.’
‘You worked late,’ Jens said to her, as Max came down the steps and handed him the box with a mutinous look. ‘I was expecting to hear from you hours ago.’
‘Yes. I never intended to be here this long,’ she said again, for Max’s benefit. ‘I accidentally fell asleep. But Max has only just got back and he said he’d hand it over to you so I could get home...If my Uber would ever get here,’ she muttered through clenched teeth as she looked down the street again.
‘Ah.’ Jens looked between them again, reading the tension. Neither she nor Max was capable of hiding it at this time of the night. ‘...And shall we deliver the next one tomorrow?’
‘No,’ she said quickly, drawing a sharp look from Max. ‘No, that won’t be necessary...Thank you, though.’
‘Okay,’ he said, stepping back with an awkward expression. ‘Well, good night then.’
Neither Darcy nor Max spoke as Jens headed back towards the gallery. He was in his mid-fifties and overweight, wearing a dark grey uniform with a baton in his belt, but no further weapons; if someone were to launch a raid on the museum, it would be the dog alone stopping them. It seemed strange that the insurers considered Jens an adequate last line of defence for the Foundation’s treasures.
Darcy looked at her phone again. The search session had timed out. She lifted her arm and checked the signal here – three bars – and put in a fresh request. ‘Just go inside, Max. It’s cold and it’s late and this isn’t your problem,’ she said, turning away.
There was a pause, but a moment later she heard his feet on the steps and the door closing sharply behind him. The sound of it made her wince; she knew she was face-spiting again, but she couldn’t help it. She hated how it was all nothing to him when it was everything to her.
She sighed, pulling her coat closer to her and shivering as she waited; it had to be minus five, six. Every few moments she checked her phone. A car had been found. Eleven minutes away.
Eleven? At this time of night? She groaned.
She sat on the kerb and waited, hugging her arms around her body, her chin tucked into her coat collar as if she was a roosting pigeon. A light fell onto the ground, over and around her, and she glanced back to see the lights on in one of the rooms on the second floor. His bedroom?
She quickly turned away, not wanting to be caught looking. Let him go to bed. He had looked tired, a heavy stubble on his jaw making him appear less AI-generated than usual. A chink in the armour.
The coldness from the ground was chilling, seeping through her coat and numbing her bottom as she sat there, waiting for the minutes to tick past. She would have watched the map showing the car’s progress, but it was too cold to keep her hands out. Instead, she huddled as best she could, tucked into her own layers.
Eight minutes passed.
Nine...
She was shivering constantly. This was ridiculous. It was gone two in the morning and she was sitting on the pavement in sub-zero temperatures. She was supposed to be in the gallery again in five hours. She would have been better off walking home after all; she’d be halfway there by now and at least she’d be generating some heat.
She didn’t hear the car approach – it was electric – and the first she knew of it was when the beam of the headlights appeared on the road in front of her. She looked up with relief.
‘Oh, thank God,’ she whispered, getting up stiffly.
She opened the passenger door and went to climb in, just as she heard another door open. She glanced back.
Max was standing in his doorway, his mouth open as if he’d just said something – or was about to. He was wearing tartan pyjama bottoms and a white t-shirt. Bare feet. Private Max.
He closed his mouth again as Darcy slid onto the back seat. The car door shut with a thunk and she dropped her head back, looking away from him as the cab slunk into the night.
‘I was getting worried,’ Viggo said as she came down the stairs. It was almost nine and the gallery staff were busy upstairs, preparing to open.
‘Sorry, I overslept.’
‘Yes, Jens said you had a late night.’
Darcy swallowed, wondering what else the security man had said as he clocked off from his night shift. Had he relayed her arguing with Max on the steps in the moonlight? ‘I fell asleep on the sofa. My bad.’ She shrugged off her coat, grateful for the cosy, stable temperatures down here. She was still chilled from last night; the cold had got into her bones. ‘How was chess?’
‘Well, I didn’t disgrace myself. I took his bishops, rooks and queen, before he stole a march on my king.’
‘Sounds...tricky,’ Darcy nodded, her mind still snagged on last night’s showdown.
‘Yes. But more importantly, all was well with the box?’
‘Absolutely fine. The housekeeper hadn’t even been in.’
‘That is a relief,’ he sighed. ‘I can’t believe I forgot something so important. I think my memory...’
‘Viggo, your memory is fine. It was an oversight; it happens to everyone...But I do think these “security concerns” are overblown,’ she said, taking the opportunity to push back again. ‘The chances of some sort of mishap are incredibly low.’ She looked at him meaningfully. Could they not come to a private arrangement? Max Lorensen and the insurers didn’t even need to be involved. She could take a box back with her to her apartment and who needed to know? Surely Viggo trusted her?
‘Now don’t look at me like that,’ he said, wagging a finger at her. ‘Max Lorensen’s position is clear.’
Darcy frowned. ‘...Max’s? You mean the insurers, surely?’
Viggo hesitated. ‘Exactly.’
‘But you just said Max.’
‘He’s the one liaising with them.’
‘I thought you were?’
‘Me and him. We both are.’
Darcy’s frown deepened – why didn’t she believe him? – but the archivist got up and made his usual trek to the kettle.
‘So was last night’s shift another dead end?’ he asked.
‘Yes...and no,’ she said, thinking back.
‘Oh? A development?’
She watched as he spooned instant coffee into their mugs. ‘Viggo, there isn’t any way someone else’s work could have ended up in Johan Trier’s files, is there?’
Viggo straightened up with the sharpness of a man fifty years his junior. ‘Absolutely not. Harald Morgensen arranged the files when the Foundation was created and he was an utterly scrupulous man. To the point of obsession.’
‘Right,’ she sighed.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘It’s just that there’s a handful of watercolour studies in there that don’t fit Trier’s MO. I was just wondering if they belonged to another artist and were accidentally misfiled? I mean, that must happen occasionally, surely?’
‘Never. Only two people have ever filed these archives: Harald and myself.’ He fixed her with a stern look, as if his integrity had been called into question.
‘Well, then I wouldn’t doubt either of you.’ She received her morning coffee with a smile, sliding her hands around the mug for warmth, and gave a little shiver.
‘Cold?’
‘A little chilled.’
‘If there’s one thing I can assure you of,’ Viggo said, taking his seat again, ‘it’s that no mistakes have been made down here. Everything is where it should be. If those watercolours were in his file, they’re his. Why do you feel they’re not?’
‘Because I’ve never seen any other botanical studies by him, for one thing. Nor watercolours.’
He considered these points. ‘You’re right – neither are his metier. Perhaps he experimented with them and felt he couldn’t achieve the level he wanted in those fields?’
‘Mm; they were accomplished, though. It wouldn’t have been for lack of talent he abandoned that path.’
‘Lack of interest, then? Did you come across anything more encouraging?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Sadly not,’ she sighed, already weary even though the day had barely begun. ‘The more I dig, the further away I feel I’m getting. You know that game kids play when they’re looking for something and the closer they get, you shout “hotter”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m approaching freezing.’