The Painted Bride

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

The woman in the red dress. He called it the painted bride. Pippa showed the picture to her father and her father called the police. They had Jack in a room all yesterday and kept asking him about it. Now they're all trying to twist it by saying it means something." "What are they trying to say?" "That he must have seen her lying on the kitchen floor. That the rainbow means he saw her blood come out.

Release date: April 23, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 202

Sample

SHE DIDN’T look like a detective. Dark red hair, a sharp grey suit, a slash of lipstick. She pushed a photograph across the table and said, “Do you recognise any of these?”

Frank Tanner studied the picture. It showed various items of lingerie and outerwear spread across a table top. A ruler had been placed alongside them, for scale. He was aware that she was watching him closely.

“I don’t know,” he said. “If you say they’re hers, I can’t say you’re wrong.”

She reached into her file again and added a second photograph. “What about this?”

This one showed a dark jacket. Expensive-looking. Same ruler for scale, and this time there were smudges on the table around the material.

“Is that blood?” he said.

“Yes, it is.”

He could almost feel the heat of her gaze upon him. It was as if she was daring him to react.

He tried to speak, but for a moment he couldn’t.

The solicitor at his side said, “You can see you’re distressing Mister Tanner. Have you any justification for this?”

She shot him a glance. “I’m investigating a disappearance, Mister Elms.”

The lawyer said, “Frank’s been trying to get some action out of you since the day his wife went missing. You weren’t interested then. The first time you twitch into life is when you see a chance to make him look like a criminal.”

“I’m just asking a few questions.”

“With a very obvious agenda.” He turned to Tanner. “Frank, you say nothing.”

Frank’s eyes were on the photograph. Now he said, “She did have a jacket like that. Bought it on a day trip to London but she was never happy with it. She put it into a bag to pass along to her sister.”

“Shut up, Frank,” John Elms said. “You don’t have to tell her anything.”

“It’s all right, John,” Frank Tanner said. “I can see where this is going.”

The red-haired detective said, “And did she?”

“Did she what?”

“Pass the jacket on.”

“That, I don’t know. You tell me. Who gave it to you?”

She didn’t answer, and Frank could see her mind working. He looked at the tape recorder that she’d set running at the beginning of the interview and said, “Does that pick up everything we say?”

“Frank,” John Elms began in a warning voice, but Frank ignored him and leaned toward the microphone.

“For the record,” he said. “My wife’s sister is named Mary Gideon. She calls herself Molly. She’s a convicted thief and a heroin addict. We’ve had to keep her at arm’s length ever since the kids were born, and she’s always blamed me for that.”

The little lawyer was trying to protest further, but Frank went on speaking over him, raising his voice to be sure he’d be heard.

“She thinks I’m the one who drove her off,” he said. “Well, fine. I did. I don’t want my children to have a role model with a needle hanging out of her arm. If she doesn’t like it, that’s too bad. Nothing gives her the right to spread lies about me. Or to have the police drag me out of my own house with my children watching. What’s she trying to do to us? They’ve had a year in hell since their mother left them, and now they have to suffer this.”

He leaned back in his chair again. He looked the detective in the eye.

“Have you found Carol?” he said.

“No,” the detective said. “We haven’t found her.”

“Tell me the story behind this jacket of hers, then,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll be fascinating.”

And the detective said, “Excuse me for just one minute.”

She picked up the photographs and left the room.

HER NAME was Sandra Novak. Detective Inspector. Three years with the Serious Crime Support Unit, the last of them based in this old building. There weren’t many people around it at this time of an evening.

She went down a hallway with a waxed wood floor. Crossed the reception area to a heavy green door, and went through it without knocking.

“Molly,” she said.

Molly Gideon looked up. This was a waiting room rather than an interview room, with a dozen seats and a rack of crime prevention brochures and a couple of low tables with old motorcycle magazines. Molly was sitting alone.

Sandra Novak threw the photographs down before her and said, “That’s your own blood on a hand-me-down jacket. Isn’t it?”

She didn’t get a reply.

Molly Gideon was twenty-six years old and wearing an open-necked blouse, part of her work clothes. Her hair had grown out of its style, and she’d scraped it back. It was clear of her forehead and all awry behind. There were too many rings on her hands, none of them expensive-looking. Her skin was pale and clear, and there was a slight tic beating away at the corner of one eye.

Sandra Novak said, “How stupid do you think we are?”

“That would depend on how long it took you to work it out.”

“Don’t get smart with me,” Sandra Novak said. “You’re about this far from going back inside. Are you on methadone?”

“I’m on nothing. I’ve got a job and a flat.”

“Try getting a life.”

“You can’t have everything.”

“What did you think you were going to achieve?”

“He’s killed her. Why am I the only one who can see it?”

“If you’re the only one who can see it, that ought to tell you something.”

“Where is she, then? You tell me that.”

“I can’t.”

“Then you can’t say for sure that I’m wrong.”

“People run away. It happens. They run off with someone, or they just run. Sometimes they show up again. Lots of times they don’t. It’s sad and it hurts, but it happens.”

Molly looked at the floor, and pushed a stray piece of her hair back behind her ear.

“I suppose this means I don’t get to go home,” she said.

Sandra Novak started to say something, but stopped herself. Molly Gideon was looking young and vulnerable, newly scrubbed-clean. By day she worked on a cosmetics counter of a local department store. All the sales girls made up heavily and wore white coats, like hookers pretending to be doctors.

But this was no normal kid, however innocent she might look. She must have drawn off a terrifying amount of her own blood to contaminate the clothing. She’d brought it to them with a story about finding it in one of Tanner’s rented garages. It must have taken her days, or even weeks to set up.

Never trust a junkie, Sandra Novak had to remind herself. And don’t ever feel sorry for one, either.

She said, “I’m not arresting you. But I am reporting you for wasting police time. Go on, get out.”

Molly didn’t move.

“Go on.”

“Can somebody take me?”

“We don’t run a taxi service. You’ll have to call someone.”

“I haven’t got anyone,” she said.

FRANK DIDN’T expect to get an apology, and his expectations were met.

John Elms had left his car at the rear of the police building. There was a broken-up concrete alleyway back there that led into a little ragbag estate of old stables, garages and workshops. Back in the old days, a number of seaside variety acts had stored their props here in the off-season. Elms’ car was a five-year-old Mercedes. Frank Tanner had sold it to him.

“I’m serious,” Frank said as they moved toward the car. “I want her crucified.”

“They took that one off the statute book,” John Elms said as he pointed his key fob and the Mercedes lit up and unlocked itself.

“I always knew she was ill,” Frank said. “I can make allowances for that. But she’s vicious, with it.”

“Come on, Frank,” John Elms said, getting in. “You’re all wound-up and it’s late.”

The daylight was all but gone when they reached Frank’s house, about half an hour’s drive down the coast.

It wasn’t beach country. This part of the coastline consisted of salt marshes and sandflats around a great, treacherous bay that had swallowed villages whole. No one had ever worked out a way to make money from such unstable land, so it had mostly been left to birdwatchers and oil pipelines. When the Tanner house had been built, property was so cheap that acres of gorse and woodland could be included in the deal. It stood on a lane that went on for another quarter of a mile and then dead-ended at a gate. Beyond the gate, the lane became a track that very quickly petered out on the shore with a view of the bay’s nuclear power plant on the far horizon.

Every one of the house lights seemed to be on, but none of the curtains was closed. It made the place look open, vulnerable. John Elms let him out at the end of the driveway and then turned the car around.

Frank had left his keys behind, and had to ring his own bell. Through the obscured glass in the door, he could see the babysitter descending the stairs to answer.

“It’s okay, Pippa, it’s me,” he called through the door when he saw her hesitate before opening it.

She stepped back as he moved into the hallway. He felt tense, he felt tired. His house felt both familiar and strange, an imperfect copy of what he knew, the way that a place could seem after a long, long journey.

Philippa stared awkwardly at the floor. He felt a surge of tenderness toward her, as if she were one of his own.

“So where are they?” he said.

Philippa indicated upstairs, in the direction of Louise’s room.

“I tried to keep them busy,” she said.

“Were they scared?”

“They were very good,” Philippa said. Which of course was not the same thing.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, but she looked teary and close to the edge. She’d answered the door to the police when they’d come for Frank. She’d watched them invade the house and take him away, leaving her alone with the children. That was hours ago.

Frank put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her, briefly. “Call for a taxi,” he said. “I’ll pay for it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He left her, and went upstairs.

The two children were together in Louise’s room, on her bed in a nest of big cushions. Louise was holding open one of the picture books that she’d passed on to Jack. Jack was staring unhappily at the page.

Frank had never known the two of them sit down and read together before. Louise liked to read alone, and Jack’s only use for books was to build them into high stacks until the stacks toppled over.

Kits, cats, sacks and wives,

How many were going to St Ives?

Both looked up at him, apprehensively.

“Everything’s fine,” he said.

Louise said, “Has mum died?”

For a moment, he thought his heart might have stopped. Then he said, “Who told you that?”

“No-one,” she said. “I just wondered.”

He sat Jack on his knee and put his other arm around Louise and he hugged both of them to him, tightly. They pressed themselves close to their father, their heads laid against his chest, and said nothing.

Frank said, “It’s scary and it’s unfair. We don’t deserve it. I don’t know why she left us and I don’t know where she is. But the police don’t know anything either, so don’t listen to them.”

“Do you think she’s dead?” Louise said, her voice muffled by the folds of his clothing.

“I don’t think so, Lulu,” Frank said. “I think she just decided to go. She took all her jewellery with her. It was worth a lot of money.”

“How much is a lot?”

“Enough to run away on.”

And Jack said, “I need to pee.”

“Go on, then,” Frank said, and released the boy.

As Jack wriggled free, Frank said, “I wish she’d stayed with us too. And wherever she is, I hope she’s happier than we are. Because I wouldn’t wish this for anyone.”

Jack’s feet hit the floor with a thump and Louise’s soft toys scattered as he pounded through them and out toward the bathroom.

While Jack peed noisily with the bathroom door wide open, Frank looked down at Louise and said, “There’s nothing to say that your mother’s dead. That was just a cruel joke her sister played on us. I don’t know why she does these things. She’s not well. That’s why we’ve always avoided her. Do you understand?”

Louise nodded.

“They went all through my stuff,” she said.

Frank went into his office. Everything had been moved, but nothing had be. . .