A Half Forgotten Song Read Online Free PDF

sitter’s mood. It seemed impossible to Zach that Charles Aubrey would produce such an incomplete picture, and yet the pencil strokes, the shading, were like a signature in themselves . . . But then there was the question of the date, as well. The date was all wrong.
    “I’ll do it,” he said suddenly, startling himself. Tension made his voice abrupt.
    “You will?” David Fellows sounded surprised, and not quite convinced.
    “Yes. I’ll get it to you early next year. As soon as I can.”
    “Right . . . great. Fantastic to hear, Zach. I’ll admit, I’d rather thought you’d hit a wall of some kind with it. You’d sounded so sure you had something really fresh on the subject, but then time started to tick along . . .”
    “Yes, I know. Sorry. But I will finish it.”
    “Well, all right then. Great stuff. I shall tell the powers that be that my faith in you was entirely justified,” said David, and behind the words Zach heard the slight misgiving, the gentle warning.
    “Yes. It was,” Zach said, his mind churning furiously.
    “Well then, I had better get on. And, if I may be so bold, so had you.”
    In the lull after the call ended, Zach cleared his dry throat and listened to his mind racing, and almost laughed aloud again. Where on earth could he start? There was one obvious answer, and only one. He looked back at the catalog, and down the page to the provenance of the drawing of Dennis. From a private collection in Dorset. The seller with no name again, just as before. Three pictures of Dennis had now emerged from this mysterious collection, and two of Mitzy as well. All in the last six years. All apparently studies for final paintings that nobody had ever seen. And there was only one place in Dorset that Zach could think to start looking for the source of them. He got to his feet and went upstairs to pack.

CHAPTER TWO
    I n the bed that had been her mother’s, and still sagged where Valentina’s body had once lain, Dimity was visited. Since the night she saw Celeste, her dreams had been populous, bustling with the long gone, and the long dead. They waited for her to shut her eyes and then they edged closer, on silent feet, flitting out of distant hiding places and announcing themselves only with the hint of a scent, a murmured word, or an expression they often wore. Celeste’s fierce eyes; Charles’s hands, flecked with paint; the quizzical tilt of Delphine’s brows; Élodie stamping her foot. Valentina, breathing fire. And with them came feelings, each one washing over Dimity like a wave, making it hard to breathe. They towed her far from land, so she couldn’t put her feet down, couldn’t rest or be safe. Fighting not to drown. An enveloping sea of remembered faces and voices, swirling and surging so that she woke with her stomach churning and her head so full she couldn’t remember the time, or the place. They had questions for her, each and every one of them. Questions only Dimity could answer. They wanted the truth; they wanted her reasons; they wanted retribution.
    And once her eyes were used to the dark, and could pick out the pale outlines of the window and the familiar furniture, the crescendo lulled a little and the foreboding came back. The feeling that somebody was coming, and that because of this stranger everyone Dimity had lost, and everyone she feared, would come to lurk in the dark corners of the house and wait, just out of sight, for the chance to make their demands. They would demand truths she had hidden for decades; hidden from everybody, sometimes even from herself. Their demands would get louder, Dimity realized. Panic quivered in her gut. They would get stronger, unless she found some way to hold them off. Wide awake she lay, humming softly so that she wouldn’t hear them, and strove to discern if the one who was coming would be friend to her, or foe.
    T he village of Blacknowle lay in a fold of the rolling Dorset coastline to the east of the villages of Kimmeridge and