Free The Rembrandt Secret by Alex Connor

for you, and yet you could still ruin him.’ She stood up, smoothing down her skirt. ‘I’m leaving you—’
    ‘Don’t be bloody silly! Because of Owen Zeigler?’
    ‘No,’ she replied, walking to the door. ‘Because if his death didn’t matter, I’d be as bad as you.’

7
    ‘He never liked these places,’ Marshall said, without turning round. He had heard the door open and had recognised the footsteps and the slight pressure of her hand on his shoulder. ‘He’d have said that I should just have put him in a box – one of those earth-friendly things that break down naturally – and buried him in a field somewhere.’
    ‘I’m so sorry.’
    He turned and looked at his ex-wife. ‘Aren’t you going to say something funny?’
    ‘It wouldn’t be the right place.’
    ‘That’s why it would be funny. You always said the wrong thing in the wrong place,’ Marshall replied affectionately, his voice low, as he reached for her hand.
    Georgia pulled up a chair next to him, both of them sitting beside Owen’s coffin in the Chapel of Rest. She didn’t look at her ex-father-in-law’s face. Couldn’t bring herself to – not yet. As soon as she had heard about Owen Zeigler’s death she phoned Marshall, and been there forhim – on and off – over the next forty-eight hours. Talking, but mostly listening.
    Taking the scarf from around her neck, Georgia flicked her long curly hair from her face. Lying hair, Marshall used to call it. Always changing. Chestnut in the morning, fire-red in fluorescent light and amber coated in sunshine. But her eyes were constant, dark and steady, always alert.
    ‘They patched him up,’ Marshall went on. ‘He doesn’t look too bad now.’
    Slowly Georgia turned from Marshall and looked into the dead face of Owen Zeigler. The scalp wound had been closed, leaving only a faint scar line running vertically down his forehead. Puzzled, she then realised that the ochre tinge to Owen’s skin came from make-up, applied thickly to cover the wound and the bruising. Steadily she studied his closed eyelids, the long line of his nose, his mouth. Unrecognisable, fixed into an undertaker’s idea of a beatific smile.
    ‘It’s not like him.’
    ‘No,’ Marshall agreed. ‘Someone said that they always make the dead smile so that they’re less frightening, but that grimace looks odd, sinister. My father would’ve hated it.’
    He reached out, then realising that he couldn’t change his father’s expression, he withdrew his hand. Marshall stared at the red carnation in Owen’s buttonhole, taking in the light grey suit and the white shirt which he had brought into the undertakers the previous night after his father’s body had been released to the Chapel ofRest; after the pathologist and the police had done with it; after Owen Zeigler’s scalp had been stitched together again …
    ‘How long have you been here?’ Georgia asked.
    ‘All morning.’
    ‘Have you eaten?’
    Marshall shrugged. ‘I’m not interested in food.’
    ‘You have to eat. I’ll take you for some lunch.’
    He didn’t move. ‘People have been coming and going all morning.’
    ‘Your father was popular—’
    ‘Not with his killer.’
    Her hand tightened over his. In the corner of the small, clean room candles burned, a stained glass window depicting a Biblical scene. The glass was thick, and coloured darkly enough to prevent anyone from seeing in – or out. Georgia looked at the dead man, noticing minute, pointless details. Like the pristine way the pale blue silk lining of the coffin was pleated; was this a grim echo of birth, she wondered? Blue for a boy, pink for a girl?
    ‘The funeral’s tomorrow. I’m burying him in the church near Thurstons,’ said Marshall, quietly. ‘Only a few people will travel that far, but the reception in London will be for everyone else. My father would have preferred that, I think … I don’t know, he never said. I don’t know what he would have wanted. He didn’t