Chapter 36
Kelly took a phone call from the SOCO at the Old Man Guesthouse later on Thursday night.
She was having dinner with Lizzie and Ted and excused herself to take the call. The SOCO had been at the hotel in Skelwith all day, and she told Kelly she’d sent over some drawings by email.
‘They were inside the suitcase, and they stood out; I thought you’d want to see them.’
Kelly opened her phone. There were six attachments.
‘Have you found her phone yet?’ she asked.
‘Negative. There’s a lot to get through,’ the SOCO said.
‘Sure. My office has checked her known number for a signal and the phone company has confirmed that it last pinged off a tower close by. Jamie phoned her several times on Monday, and it was still there.’
‘We’ll keep looking.’
They ended the call and Kelly opened the email.
Watercolour had been added here and there on the intricate sketches, making them rather beautiful. Kelly’s first thought was that these were blueprints for future projects. Didn’t some artists sketch out their ideas first before they composed the final piece?
They exuded mystery and romanticism like much of the Lakeland virtuosity. They couldn’t be placed in time but if she had to guess, Kelly would say they depicted images from hundreds of years ago. Renaissance perhaps. But she was no connoisseur.
Looking closer and zooming in, Kelly saw the initials AR in the corner.
Something stirred inside her and she appreciated the skill of the creator.
They already knew Angelina was a fine artist, and it was no surprise that she was drawn to the Lakes.
Artists had been lured here for centuries to draw, paint and craft the landscape into legend.
Angelina, it appeared, had done the same. It was probably what made her choose a house here to settle in. Her passion for the area stretched back at least to the Rydal Caves painting that hung in Hampton-Dent’s New York office, and the magazine told them the reveal party was three years ago.
Kelly examined the six drawings found in the suitcase in the walls of room 13.
One painting was of the Skelwith Bridge, and it re-imagined the legend Tommy had told her.
There was a horse and cart and inside, a black figure, hidden from view.
It felt as though there was movement in the paint as the carriage rushed across the bridge, presumably, away from Queen Elizabeth’s spies.
Next was a painting of the largest Rydal cave.
The cavern wasn’t natural, but carved from centuries of slate mining.
What was left was a cathedral-like structure which drew visitors in a steady stream all year round.
Kelly’s eyes were pulled to the stepping stones, the famous entrance to the cave.
Like the other visual, there was extraordinary movement in the piece.
A lone figure walked across the stones and was hidden from view like the stranger in the carriage, but this one carried something.
He or she wore a cape, placing the era long ago, and faced away from the painter.
Kelly smiled but she didn’t know why. It evoked something in her.
Wasn’t that what good art did? It was different to the grand painting in New York, it was simpler somehow, with a message.
The package under the figure’s arm looked like a pile of papers, just like the ones they’d pulled out of the mattress in Angelina’s room. But it could have been anything. Kelly’s romanticism and sense of drama was heightened the wearier she became, and it was late.
She refocused.
There was a similarity between them. A flow, as if they belonged together.
She opened the other attachments and studied the other four examples of Angelina’s work.
Then she saw it.
They made a pattern. They told a story.
The carriage on the Skelwith Bridge, the stepping stones in Rydal cave…
Kelly thought back to what Tommy had said about the legend of the spies who’d perished in the water.
The legend said there was one traveller left in room 13 and he’d hidden in the walls but had been discovered.
She flicked around the paintings and found one of what looked like the inside of room 13.
There were four beautiful flagstones on the floor.
Stone.
The walls were stone, the bridge was stone, the steps were stone…
She opened her MacBook and arranged them differently on the much larger screen.
The stone bridge had six flagstones on the roadway passing over the bridge. There were five stepping stones. Four stone slabs on the floor of room 13, three keystones in front of the carriage, two boulders at the entrance to the cave, and a single rock in the water.
Numbers 1 through to 6.
It meant something.
She rubbed her eyes and held her head in her hands.
Whatever it meant – if anything at all – she wasn’t going to piece it together tonight. Her head was too fuzzy.
She yawned as she googled the cave at Rydal, that Hampton-Dent was so taken with.
And she saw that the single stone in the final painting was exactly as it was when Angelina had painted it.
It was off to the left of the stepping stones, next to the hollowed-out wall of the cave, on its own, beckoning her somehow. Kelly zoomed in.
But her brain was blank.
She heard Ted playing with Lizzie and her daughter scream in delight.
She switched off the light and headed back to cold fish pie.