Angels of the Flood Read Online Free

doorway wearing a pale blue tracksuit that was loose on her lanky son but stretched tight over his shoulders and chest, he was an altogether different proposition from the almost-stranger who’d been part of her audience a few hours before. It was weird seeing Luke’s clothes on a man who’d known her in the time before she was ever a mother, a man who knew nothing about the person she’d become. A man who, if he remembered her at all, knew a side to her that no one in her present life was aware of.
    She nicked the skin of four tomatoes, put them into a small pan of boiling water, waited half a minute, then took them out with a slotted spoon and set them on the chopping board. David had moved silently on bare feet across the room: standing behind her he put one hand on her waist and rested his chin lightly on her shoulder. ‘Anything I can do?’ he asked.
    Kate felt that tightness round her ribs again. She flexed her shoulders just enough to shrug him off and said without turning round, ‘You could try telling me what the hell’s going on.’
    ‘Hm.’ David went to the window and looked down at the garden. ‘It’s stopped raining,’ he said.
    She began pulling the skins off the tomatoes even though they were still hot and their flesh scalded the tips of her fingers. ‘Why?’ she asked angrily. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. What’s the point of messing around with those pictures and then sending them to me? Who’s doing it? What do they want?’
    She was chopping the tomatoes ferociously. She hadn’t meant to bring up the topic of the paintings again. ‘The Daughter of Time’ had been sent back to Florence three months ago. ‘Marsyas’ had sat for weeks in her studio; she’d hardly ever talked about them with her colleagues. But David was different: he’d been there. You couldn’t just pretend the whole thing was a long-forgotten nightmare when one of the actors in that particular nightmare was standing in bare feet in your kitchen wearing your son’s too-small pale blue tracksuit.
    ‘Which question first?’ asked David, pulling a metal chair away from the table and sitting down.
    ‘It’s like being stalked,’ said Kate, finally identifying the sensation that had been haunting her for months. ‘That’s what it is. Just knowing that someone is out there, some warped, obsessive crackpot, has got me in their sights. Someone’s looking at me and I can’t see them.’ She shuddered. ‘It’s… it’s horrible.’
    David was silent for a few moments, considering. ‘You’re sure the pictures were sent to you deliberately? Not just to your workshop?’
    ‘My name was on the consignment note. The dealer said he was under strict instructions not to give out any information at all.’
    ‘Isn’t that unusual?’
    ‘Yes, but not unprecedented. Owners of valuable works of art often don’t want their identity made public for fear of burglary.’
    ‘Valuable paintings? I thought you said the Marsyas was a copy.’
    ‘Yes, but that doesn’t stop it from being valuable. Titian made copies of his own work—or his assistants did. We don’t know for sure. You have to think back to a time when there was no other way of recording images. And plenty of other artists made copies of work that impressed them. Any painting by Rubens, say, or Sir Joshua Reynolds, is going to be extremely valuable, even if it is, technically speaking, a copy.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know who painted those two pictures, but I’m sure they’re worth a hell of a lot more than the insurance price.’
    David seemed intrigued. ‘Let me get this straight. You’ve been sent two paintings by an anonymous owner and both are undervalued?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And they’ve both been altered in a way that could relate to Francesca’s death.’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘And where is the dealer?’
    ‘Florence.’
    The dark eyebrows shot up. ‘So that implies…?’
    ‘Well, obviously, it was someone who knew… how she