They had met when Abigail had been admitted as a patient after a car accident badly disfigured the left side of her face. Having been a good-looking woman she was affected both physically and psychologically by the accident and therapy had been of little use. Withdrawing into herself, she resigned from her job as an advertising executive and began to work from home, her only forays into the outside world being to the Whitechapel Hospital, or to visit her family. Depression didn’t overtake Abigail but shyness did. The self-confidence she had once taken for granted disappeared with the accident, and she would keep her head averted if anyone spoke to her. It was not the first time Ben had seen a pretty woman lose her looks overnight, but Abigail was different. Her lack of anger surprised him; her composure unfathomable.
It took Ben many months to realise that what really affected Abigail was her loss of appeal, something she had taken for granted before. Believing herself repellent after the accident, she rejected the opposite sex. Ben was the only man she turned to, first as a doctor, then later as a friend. Much later still, when she had left the Whitechapel Hospital, as a lover.
Restless, Leon continued the scrutiny of his brother. ‘We have to talk—’
‘Later.’
Glancing down at the coffin again, Leon could hear the priest’s monotonous litany of prayers and began to jiggle his left foot as Ben gazed at him questioningly.
There were only a few people at the funeral; the widowed Detita had had no family apart from a daughter who had left Spain long ago. Detita had been wealthy once – although she had never fully explained her background – but bad luck and widowhood had overtaken her. Coming to work for the Goldings, she had appealed to their cultured sensibilities, her breeding obvious and unusual for a housekeeper. Her Spanish hauteur, coupled with her domestic competence, ensured that within weeks she was indispensable.
Soon Detita found herself courted by her employers, who were only too pleased to have her take care of their sons during their frequent absences. Reliable and regal as a duchess, by the end of the first year Detita lived only for the boys. Taken into Miriam Golding’s confidence, she slid, boneless, into the family. So when an air crash over the Atlantic killed the parents, it was no surprise that Detita had been nominated the brothers’ guardian.
She took on the role like a Spanish grandee, and over the years which followed leaked tantalising – but measured – information about her past, enough to incite curiosity but never enough to satisfy. Indomitable, she ran the old ramshackle farmhouse, intimidating the gardener and shadowing the cleaner. She was a bully with her own people but the equal of her charges. For two Jewish boys growing up in the predominantly Catholic Madrid, Detita managed to straddle the gap between the heat and suspicion of Spain and the cool learning of the boys’ Anglo-American parents.
Although the brothers had been sent to an English boarding school in term time, when they returned to Spain Detita continued their education. She taught them fluent Spanish and took them to lectures and museums, pounding culture into them like a cook over-stuffing a pair of quail.
Leon had loved Detita very much – perhaps a little too much – but even her death couldn’t stop the overheated excitement in his brain. As the service ended, he grabbed his brother’s arm, leading Ben over to his parked car. His face was a mirror image of his brother’s in all but tone. Leon was a watercolour study, Ben a masterwork in oil. One paper, the other tempered canvas.
‘They’ve found the skull.’
Slipping into the driver’s seat, Ben looked at his brother and wound down the window. ‘Whose skull?’
‘I was thinking that you could get someone – a specialist – to look at it,’ Leon hurried on, ignoring the question. ‘You’re a doctor. You know people who could reconstruct it, check out the measurements, teeth. Do whatever you have to do. Just find out how old it is—’
‘Whose head?’
‘Goya’s.’
Ben smiled and leaned back in his seat. A sudden gush of hot wind made the leaves flap and sent dust eddies shimmying around the bonnet of their car.
‘His skull’s been missing for over two centuries—’
‘Until now. Builders were digging up the foundations of a house in Madrid, somewhere Goya stayed for a while. They found the skull under the cement in the cellar. The foreman, Diego Martinez, brought it to me, knowing I’d be interested in the possibility that it might be the artist’s. You remember Diego – we knew him as a kid, when he used to come to the house with his father. You must remember him.’
Ben frowned. ‘I don’t.’
‘Carlos fixed the guttering and the pipework.’ Leon sighed, irritated. ‘Diego was always getting sunburnt.’
‘How much did he ask for the skull?’
‘He didn’t charge me for it!’ Leon snapped. His voice was picking up speed, but he wasn’t manic. Not yet. ‘Jesus, what’s the matter with you? I thought you’d be interested. We grew up near to where the Quinta del Sordo used to be, for Christ’s sake!’ He paused, his tone coaxing. ‘Think about what this could mean for me. If it is Goya’s skull it would be world news – and it would make my reputation.’
‘They thought they’d found the skull before. But it was a fake—’
Leon wasn’t listening. ‘There’s an exhibition of the Black Paintings this autumn. What a coup that would be – the genius’s skull found just in time to coincide with the show. I’d be the most famous art historian on the bloody planet.’
‘If it’s genuine,’ Ben said calmly. ‘If it isn’t you’ll look a moron.’
‘But it is Goya’s skull! Goya died in Bordeaux in 1828 and was buried there until the Spanish authorities brought him back home to Madrid and re-interred him in 1899. Seventy-one years later.’
Ben sighed. ‘I know the story, Leon. God knows how many times Detita told us that Goya’s head was missing. But all this is supposition, not fact …’
Pausing, Ben glanced out of the car window, his own composure rattled by memory. Detita had made certain that her charges understood Spain and Spanish art. In her eyes, Goya came next after God. Ben could almost see her alive again, sitting at the kitchen table. Automatically he loosened his collar, the heat swelling, her image filling the car.
‘… Goya’s home, the Quinta del Sordo, was only a little way from here …’ she would begin, sitting down in the kitchen, her back straight, her eyes unreadable. Overhead, the old house would creak, water pipes banging, the sound of wild geese coming, mournful, over the river. It had been nothing like their school in England, where the trees grew rich and straight. It had been another country. Another country of location. And of mind. ‘… Goya was one of the greatest artists who ever lived.’
‘What about Michelangelo?’
She had made a dismissive sound as she turned to Ben.
‘No fire. Goya knew the dark side. He lived in that big old house, near the river, near enough to see Madrid, far away enough not to be a part of the city. In that house Goya painted his private pictures, the Black Paintings. In them he left a message …’
Pausing there, she had reached for her books, turning over the pages slowly, grotesque images oozing off the paper.
It required no effort for Ben to remember the queasy unease which had wept from the reproductions.
‘Look,’ Detita had said, her white forefinger turning over the page to expose the Witches’ Sabbath. Not the earlier version, with its light blues and comic devilry – this was the image of Goya’s later years. After the Inquisition and the Spanish War of Independence, after the murder and torture. When the indigo power of Black Magic had been not merely a superstition, but a possibility. The Devil was no longer comic, but a shadow which had followed many Spaniards. The End of Reason in the Age of Enlightenment.