Nicola Upson - An Expert in Murder

Elliott must have either intercepted it or found it in Arthur’s things after he died. The next time I came across it was in the hospital that my husband sent me to. There it was on somebody’s bed, a published book with Elliott Vintner’s name plastered all over the cover. All that fuss he made and everything he put you through, and it was never his to lay claim to, never his privilege to feel wronged.’

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I had no proof. The manuscript was long gone and anyway, I had no fight left in me. I was so afraid of him, Josephine. I never wanted to marry him, but outwardly he was the perfect match –

wealthy, a little older than me, an academic – and my parents took it for granted that I’d accept him. I was too young and too naive to argue. He turned out to be very different behind closed doors, of course.’

‘Did he hurt you?’ Josephine asked.

Marta gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh yes, but not by doing anything as straightforward as hitting me. No, he was far too clever to do anything that I could talk about without being ashamed. He was hateful in bed – truly hateful. He used to pride himself on thinking up new and inventive ways to humiliate me. One day, he found a stash of short stories I’d written, and he was so scornful about his little writer wife. After that, whenever he’d finished with me in bed

– and he was insatiable in his cruelty – he’d make me write about what we’d done and read it out to him. I had to relive the shame of it over and over again. It was his bid for immortality, I think, and he knew it kept him in my head when he couldn’t be inside my body. He used to give me marks out of ten for the prose.’

Josephine was shocked. ‘No wonder you turned to Arthur,’ she said. ‘It’s a miracle you could be with anyone after that.’

‘Yes, but Elliott knew exactly how to destroy me for what I’d done, and the world made it easy for him. Women like me – pregnant with a child that wasn’t my husband’s – were outcasts, fallen and in need of salvation. What’s terrible is that you start to believe 266

it yourself when you’ve been in there for a while, and the people who ran that place went to great lengths to keep you ignorant of the fact that things might be changing a little for the better in the world outside. The worst thing was the way that they stamped on any solidarity between the women; it would have been bearable if we could have helped each other through it, but we were constantly separated and played off against one another, and God help you if you got into what they so charmingly called a “particular friendship”.’ She took a cigarette out of the case in her bag.

Josephine lit it for her and waited as she used the distraction to rein in her emotions. ‘I was lucky, I suppose,’ she continued at last.

‘Some people spent decades there, detained for life. You could always tell which ones they were because they were obsessed with sin and religion; it didn’t matter if they were prostitutes, victims of incest or rape, or just feeble-minded – they’d all been taught to despise themselves.’

‘And you were there until Rafe came to find you? You must have been desperate to get out for years.’

‘Yes and no. Arthur had died and both my children had been taken away from me, so there didn’t seem much to get out for.

Depression is the cruellest of things, you know. It deadens everything – there’s no pleasure left in life, no colour or sensual enjoyment. Just an absence. I don’t think I’d have felt any different if I’d been in a place I loved, seeing things that used to bring me joy every day. In fact, that probably would have been worse, so I welcomed being somewhere that turned me into no one.’ The cigarette had been smoked quickly, and she threw the end down onto the track. ‘Elliott took everything from me – my children, my book, my creativity in every sense of the word.’

‘And your talent for happiness.’

Marta nodded. ‘Exactly. It’s hard to put into words how that felt. I remember being with Arthur in Cambridge just after Elliott had gone to war. He took me to a museum, just along the road from where he worked at the Botanic Gardens, because it had a collection of paintings that he loved. There was a whole wall of Impressionists and we stood for ages looking at an extraordinary 267

Renoir landscape – it was so sensual that I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Next to it were two smaller paintings of women, one dancing and one playing a guitar. I was surprised at how awful they were by comparison – you could hardly believe they were by the same artist – but Arthur said that, if anything, he liked them better because they’d been painted late in Renoir’s life when his hands were crippled with arthritis, and he thought there was something very noble about someone being so determined to create beauty in spite of the pain. I’ve never forgotten that, and I suppose it’s how I felt, emotionally. I knew there was still so much that was beautiful in the world and I wanted so badly to write about it but, after Arthur died and I lost everything, I just couldn’t. Books and art –

they should all have a beauty about them, even if they begin with a scream, but it was as though someone had put a pen in my hand and frozen it. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes, it does,’ Josephine said. ‘More than you could know.’

Marta looked questioningly at her but there was no time to go into her own darkness as well as Marta’s; even from this distance, she imagined she could feel Archie’s growing impatience.

‘Then Rafe turned up and suddenly there was a glimmer of hope,’ Marta continued. ‘How does that speech of Lydia’s go in your play? “When joy is killed it dies forever, but happiness one can grow again.” I always loved that line because it’s exactly how I felt.

I knew the joy had gone with Arthur, but I thought if I could get my children back, I might at least be able to rediscover the happiness. I would have done anything to make up for those lost years.’ She fell silent and Josephine resisted the temptation to prompt her, sensing there was more to come. ‘I knew that what he was suggesting was evil, of course I did, but at the time I didn’t care. And yes, I did hate you but never because I thought you’d stolen my work. It was more complicated than that. You see, the only thing that kept me alive in that place was the thought that I might one day be able to have revenge on Elliott, to hurt him so badly for what he’d done to me.

But you beat me to it. You won that court case and drove him to take his own life before I could make him suffer, and you’ve no idea how much I resented you for that.’

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Josephine did not contradict her, but asked instead, ‘Did you really intend to kill Aubrey?’

‘Yes, at first. I had no idea he was related to Arthur, of course.

I was in such a state on Friday. When you turned up at the taxi with Lydia, I realised what a mistake I’d made in pointing out the wrong person. I went to see Rafe at Wyndham’s as soon as Lydia was on stage, and when he told me he’d gone through with it I was horrified. Then he said that Aubrey suspected something and was on to us, and I panicked. I knew I’d never be with my children again if we were caught, and that was all I wanted. Rafe assured me that we could salvage things if we acted quickly, and at first I went along with what he suggested. But when the moment came I just couldn’t go through with it. Aubrey didn’t know anything, though, did he? Rafe just used that to get me to do his dirty work.’

‘He knew something, Marta,’ Josephine said quietly. ‘But not who you were or what you’d done.’ Marta listened in disbelief as she repeated Alice Simmons’s account of Arthur’s murder and Walter’s pact with Vintner, and Josephine wished that it had not fallen to her to shatter this woman’s world all over again. ‘So Vintner’s suicide had nothing to do with Richard of Bordeaux or the court case,’ she added. ‘He killed himself because he was about to be exposed as a murderer. Arthur’s murderer.’